A regular subject on this blog recently has been my computer and the various problems it has given me. Most of the stress has been confined to uploading the podcast and the fact that my Internet connection kept dropping out without warning. Last night I ran a disc clean and defrag (I call it 'disc clean Fraggle Rock' because I am a child), moved a load of things that were saved on the desktop to a USB stick and emptied the recycling bin to free things up a little and hopefully get things moving. All seemed to be going well until some time later when the Internet page disappeared and an anti-virus scan started. I recieved a warning that my laptop had a virus, and that I should click the button to add anti-virus software costing seventy five American dollars. I'm not daft enough to click on something like that and it astounds me that there might be people that are in this day and age, that's the sort of thing that people fell for in the 1990s version of the Internet. Maybe these are the same people that actually gave their bank details in good faith expecting to receive a share of a multi-million cash transfer from the son of a Nigerian prince. Of course the warning about a virus was actually the virus, we all know that. This is the Internet version of going into a shop and asking for £50 weekly fire insurance and if they refuse to pay you set fire to the shop.

My laptop has on it the software I use for recording the podcast and my audio books, so losing access to the computer is annoying. However, I can use my phone for emails, Facebook, and Twitter and for the things you can't do on a phone such as my blog I can use Mandi's laptop. I have been deep in depression for the last few days and with regards to my career this is the slide down the snake that inevitably happens after I've gone up the ladder a rung or two. A week after The Sunday Alternative achieved its highest listening figures of all time, I will now need to take a break from it while I get another computer and go round my friend Daniel's house to have the recording software re-added. Luckily the only thing saved on the old laptop was an episode of the podcast that I hadn't got round to adding onto a CD, I can easily download it from the Internet Archive (and so can you) so it isn't the end of the world. I still haven't found the time to replace the radio shows that were lost when I had a previous laptop casualty, but this is an ongoing job.

Given that I was in a depressive episode prior to this incident, I stayed remarkably calm and didn't slide any further into the black moods as a result. If anything this has lifted some of the pressure from me, as if someone opened a valve in my brain and let some of the stress out. I will go looking for a new laptop at the weekend, but I anticipate a new problem arising; a new laptop will be too new for me. Mandi's laptop is only a couple of weeks old and as such everything is different and I don't like it. I reluctantly started using Google Chrome on my laptop because it was quicker than Internet Explorer, however it took a long time to get used to because it didn't have many of the features of Explorer. The control panel on Mandi's laptop is different (you now have to move the mouse randomly in the corner of the screen, there is no Microsoft Word (I wrote my blog in Word first using 'Calibri' font before copying it to Blogger, the lack of Word on Mandi's laptop is the reason for the change in font), and has a bonkers version of Windows that is totally different to the one I'm used to. Another feature I can't get my head around is the keyboard, Mandi's laptop has a 'computer' keyboard rather than a laptop one, with a panel of numbers on the right hand side so whenever I think I'm pressing the Enter button I am in fact pressing something useless that shouldn't be there. 

Weirdest of all is something that only I will struggle with seeing as it was down to a fault on my old laptop that I simply got used to; the @ symbol on my laptop was on the number 2 button but you wouldn't know from looking at it. The " and @ were the wrong way round, the hashtag was on the 3 button and there was no pound sign. Now I have to get used to using the correct buttons for things.

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This week’s edition of The Sunday Alternative is here.