A Pipe and a Keyboard

For a few days now, I have been meaning to update this.  However The Fog has descended and that makes writing difficult.

The Fog is a constant menace for anyone who has CFS/fibromyalgia/whatever-it-is and is difficult to describe.

One way for a healthy person to experience The Fog is to stay awake for about 48 hours (an no napping allowed) – the effect on the brain is similar.  It is like a car where the battery is nearly run flat – enough juice to turn the engine over, but not enough to start it.

I have had quite a few ideas for posts, but every time I start to think the post through, the brain stalls and descends into the realm of random disconnected thoughts.  Some may say this is what I normally write anyway?

I am not sure whether the Fog is directly attributable to the CFS, or whether it is down to medication.  Alternatively it could be due to lack of sleep which is another of the occasional little joys of the ailment.

One way or another, I hope it will pass soon.

Normal service will be resumed then…..

Filed under: CFS on March 1st, 2010 | 24 Comments »

I have been running this little site for some time.

It gets very few hits, but it never occurred to me to investigate the reason.  In the grand scheme of things, I supposed that people just weren’t interested in some rather boring musings or little technical gems that I had picked up along the way.

The other day, I did a check to see what keywords people were using to find the site.  I ran off a list for the last year.

It was empty.

No search engines are seeing the site. 

The site is search engine friendly in that it has all the recommended robots.txt and other files.  I have a plugin (Google XML Sitemaps) that generates the required sitemap files for search engines.  I also have the ‘All in one SEO pack’ installed.  All in all, it should provide a feeding frenzy for searches.

I went into my Google account to see if I could find any error messages. 

There are a few errors, including a complaint that ‘robots.txt’ is unreachable, which it isn’t.  It also complains that my ‘sitemap.xml‘ file is an HTML file, which it isn’t.

According to the stats page, the site has been crawled, on an average of 11 times per day so Google is aware of it’s existence, yet if I do a search for ‘the other fellow’ there is no sign of the site (when it should be near or at the top of the results?).

I am baffled.

Anyone any ideas?

Filed under: Tech stuff on February 23rd, 2010 | 19 Comments »

One of life’s little irritations is the Caps Lock key.

It is a hangover from the old days of the typewriter, where you would press the shift key right down and then press the lock to hold it down.  Of course, in the world of computers, it’s a simple toggle switch that is very easily tapped, and THE NEXT THING YOU KNOW, YOU HAVE WRITTEN EVERYTHING IN UPPERCASE, which is a right pain.

I have a habit of accidentally striking the Caps Lock, and I find it really irritating.  What’s worse, there is little requirement for the key these days, especially with the style of writing I use.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could disable it?

I had a search around, and my prayers have been answered.

I found a very small, very elegant little program that sits quietly monitoring the Caps key and which toggles it back to normal instantly if it is tapped.  In effect, The Caps Lock key on my keyboard now does nothing. 

Suppose though I want to use all uppercase?  Then all I have to do is tap Alt + Caps Lock and my keyboard is back to normal.  It is simple, quick and efficient.  It also counts the number of times the Caps key is struck, and so far it has saved me eleven times.

If you suffer the same slings and arrows of the redundant key then you might like to try installing the program.

It is available here.  It is a mere 17Kb zip file, including licence and Readme.

It claims to work on all Windows systems up to XP, but you can take it from me that it works in Vista too.  I can’t speak for Windows 7, but maybe someone would like to try it and let me know?

Of course, it’s many thanks to the developers.  They are going to save me a lot of hair tearing.

Filed under: Tech stuff on February 22nd, 2010 | 2 Comments »