Tuesday, November 18, 2008

I Love Tom Sims

I don't often go public with statements like this, but midway through the day, I had to admit to myself that I am madly in love with Tom Sims.

Tom is a guy I "met" on line years and years ago, when my only interaction with the Internet was through CompuServe. Tom and I were both in the same discussion forum, run by Georgia Griffith. I met him once, a very long time ago, when Georgia came to San Francisco and hosted a dinner for all of her friends in the area. I don't remember that we spoke much, but he seemed like a very nice guy and we got along well.

I haven't thought about Tom in the intervening years. A few weeks ago, when I was searching for people I might know on Facebook, I came across Tom's name and added him as a Facebook friend. He confirmed my request to be friends and again, I haven't heard from him, nor have I contacted him.

As I wrote yesterday, I had terrible problems with Yahoo. I didn't worry about it until morning, because I assumed there was some horrendous glitch with the Yahoo servers, but when I got up in the morning and there was still no Yahoo--and what'smore there were no blaring headlines anywhere about it--I began to suspect that maybe it wasn't what I thought it was.

I posted messages to Facebook and to Twitter, and I asked whether or not people could access Yahoo. It was a big problem to me because Yahoo hosts this web site. I could get the stuff that has already been posted, but I couldn't get to the page I need in order to upload new stuff.

I also couldn't get ANY Yahoo site, not even http://www.yahoo.com. That meant no Yahoo maps, no Yahoo groups, no Yahoo mail. Nothing that had "yahoo" connected to it would come up for me.

I began getting notes from people that they could get Yahoo. Then I thought maybe it was a local problem of some sort, so I contacted my friend Joan, who lives just a couple of blocks away. She, too, could get Yahoo.

I decided to fire up the laptop and see if I could connect to Yahoo on that. I could. I was able to post my journal entry for yesterday, but that only confirmed that the problem was my desktop computer. And I didn't have a clue how to begin troubleshooting.

I sent off a message to my computer guru, who never responded.

The wonderful thing about the internet is how generous people are with advice and how they will bend over backwards to try to help you solve your problem. David Howell over on Twitter, suggested that I flush my DNS cache by going to a command window and typing in a command he gave me. (Problem was that I didn't know how to get to a command window, but I didn't want to admit that!)

Ron left a note in my guestbook letting me know how to get to the command line (thanks, Ron!)

Someone suggested it might be a virus and so I ran my virus checker again, the the machine came up clean.

Joan suggested using ctrl-alt-del to delete any programs that might be interfering, and said that happened to her occasionally. But there were no other programs running.

Paul Zawilsky, from the Lamplighters, gave me several useful suggestions, but they didn't work either.

Roy Spicer told me how to delete cookies and I did that, but when I did that, it knocked me out of Flickr and since Flickr is now owned by Yahoo, I couldn't get back in again because it wouldn't let me access its log-in screen.

Swell--the two websites I use most every single day and those are the two I couldn't get to.

I had forgotten that I could do a system restore in Windows XP, so I tried a system restore and set it back to November 1, certain that would cure the problem, since it almost always has in the past cured any oddball thing that is going on with the computer, but it didn't.

And then I got a note from Tom Sims. He directed me to a freeware program called CC Cleaner. which removes unused files from your system, and cleans up the registry.

I downloaded that, ran it, rebooted the computer, and, with fear and trepidation, tried to log onto Yahoo.

EUREKA! I'd done it! Well...Tom had done it. And so I'm sitting here feeling like I love Tom Sims and I'm not embarrassed to say it. Thank you, Tom, for your help. Thanks EVERYONE for their helpful suggestions. I should keep a list of all of them in case something odd happens again! But it sure feels good to be back in business again!


Another weird thing that happened happened on Facebook. I've been discovering a whole bunch of people I used to know lately, one of whom is Paul's old girlfriend Sue. She was the girl he turned to the night David died, but he married someone else, and so did she. Now here she was on Facebook and I added her as a friend. Then this morning, I get a note from Ned's godmother's daughter, expressing surprise at seeing Sue's name in my list of friends and asking how I knew Sue and explaining how she knew her. When Sue updated her status she said she was still amazed to discover that "her father-in-law's girlfriend's son's wife's mother is her ex-boyfriend's brother's godmother."

That is six degrees of separation, Facebook style!!!

No comments: