Quite a busy day, in some respects – and I learnt two new things about Word Press and the blog! Remember how I told you that I’d finally figured out the difference between a Page (which you can add to your menu) and a post (which you can’t)? And that it was all very well adding Pages to your menu, but how did you get back to the blog bit afterwards? It’s all quite simple, really – once someone tells you (why aren’t these things documented?!)(well, they probably are – it’s just that I never thought to go looking for them anywhere 
) I suppose that all of you readers already knew how to do it – but I didn’t! “Have you tried clicking on the header?” said Mr. Know-it-All Julian… “what good would that do?”, says simpleton Winter, “it’s not linked to anything, it’s just a head…. OH!” as she clicked on it anyway, and went straight back to the blog bit. So there you go! You can read the other items on the menu, and get back here just by clicking on the header! Who’d a thunk it?! Anyway, I’ve added another couple of items to said menu – “About this site…”, which was the old and pretty defunct “Home” page – and it’s probably worth your while to go back and read it again, now that I’ve re-done it and up-dated it. The “About me…” Page hasn’t changed. I must re-read it myself and see if it needs updating too (which it probably will!) “Reading…” I already told you about, “As seen on…” is also new, but all I’ve written there so far is the blurb which tells you briefly what it’s for. “Listening to…”, ditto! And lastly, “Cats…” is pretty old now, and probably also needs updating. And “they” say that you can’t teach an old…. er… dog (?) new tricks! 😉 *pause* I just noticed something… This does seem to be my week for noticing things, doesn’t it! Maybe my brain doesn’t weigh as much these days, so I’m noticing things more… but I don’t think so 🙂 I was just thinking, how much a question mark (“?”) looks like… a raised eyebrow! No, really! I mean, doesn’t it! It’s like a smiley – raised eyebrow on top, the curved bit, then an ordinary “straight” eyebrow underneath, making a single eyebrow, like Ernie, on Sesame Street! Then a dot underneath all of that, representing an eye… And don’t a lot of people slightly raise one eyebrow when they ask a question? I think it’s brilliant! Whoever “invented” the question mark obviously had a sense of humour! 🙂
I actually started off Rifting this morning – everything was going swimmingly, and then it was night-time in Telara, and especially in Gloamwood. which is dank and gloomy even at high noon! I really hate fighting in the dark – I can’t see what I’m hitting properly, so I logged off to wait for morning. In the meantime, I Googled flowers – images, photos, pictures – of flowers. I’d been getting quite frustrated making different styles for different graphics, and I remembered that – way back when I was just starting out in graphics, and using Paint Shop Pro – I used to make great use of my Kaleidoscope filter on pictures of things – mostly flowers, but other things as well. They made lovely seamless patterns that I used as borders, fills, and special effects. And what I needed most for my styles were… more patterns! Colourful and pretty patterns! So I downloaded some flower pictures, selected a section of each, ran them through my trusty Kaleidoscope filter, and now I have about 20 new and colourful seamless patterns that I can use for just about anything – from blog backgrounds to header borders 🙂
Phew! Am I relieved or what! I just got to the last sentence above… and a blue and white message flashed onto my screen telling me that the machine was shutting down in 14 minutes (and some few odd seconds) because of some sort of upgrades and that the machine needed to reboot. Well, actually it told me yesterday, right when I was in the middle of writing yesterday’s blog, but I told it “Later” (meaning to re-boot it last night before I went to bed) and promptly forgot about it. This afternoon I wasn’t given a choice! I quickly scraped and copied what I’d just written, and dumped it in my little “blog short cuts” file wot I always have open, and I also clicked on the “Save Draft” option in the blog editor… then I crossed all my fingers, hit the “restart” button, and went for my evening Stair Walk while I was waiting. Julian was wondering what had happened – we run this handy little utility called LAN Messenger, which allows us to send messages between our two computers here in the Den, and also between his machine in the Library, and mine in the Den. So I don’t have to yell if I want him, and he has no more excuses that he was so busy/wrapped up in what he was doing, that he “didn’t hear me” 😉 Anyway, so Julian saw a message come up on his LAN Messenger saying “Winter has gone offline” – he’d wondered what was going on and was about to come down to ask me, when I turned up in the kitchen instead, on my way out to the fire escape, and I filled him in before I left. I was a bit worried that what I’d written might get a bit jangled by the rude interruption – but no, the “Save Draft” function worked just as it should have, and everything was just the way I’d left it 🙂 Thank heavens! 🙂 I’d have hated to have had to start over!
Weigh-in this morning. I told you! I went up two points, from 91.4kg back to 91.6kg. I’ll probably stay the same tomorrow… or go up again…
We did manage to get some Rifting in this afternoon, which was good. When we finished off yesterday, we’d failed a quest, so we wanted to go back and do it again. The thing is, this particular quest is very buggy – lots of people apparently have no end of trouble with it. You have to “escort” a guy into a long, narrow cave – take him to one of the Big Bad Guys (not quite a “Boss” character, but close enough!) and help the guy kill him. However, when you’re on any sort of escort quest, you can’t get too far away from the character you’re escorting, or you’ll fail the quest. Where this particular quest starts getting buggy is that this particular character insists on cheering and doing a little victory dance every time you kill a mob (and there are an awful lot of mobs you have to kill in this little cave!) and of course your first instinct after you’ve killed something is to move along fairly quickly – which of course gets you further away from the guy you’re escorting. To make matters even worse, this brainless AI you’re escorting, after doing his little victory dance, then runs back to where he was standing when the fight first started – taking him even further away from you – which is how we failed the quest yesterday. Today, we read up on it first, and worked out how to manage it. Except for one thing. We couldn’t find the quest giver! This is the second part of the bug in this quest! When you fail a quest, you’re supposed to abandon it, go back to the quest giver, and re-acquire it. Well, we did that – but then we couldn’t find the quest giver – apparently he often “disappears” when you abandon the quest (like you’re supposed to do if you fail it) We eventually found him, re-acquired the quest, and this time completed it successfully, but we wasted about three-quarters of an hour running around in circles, and getting frustrated first! Not good, Trion!
So that was my day today – tonight we’re recording a “Father Brown” murder mystery, followed by another detective show, “DCI Banks” (we like ABC1 – no ads! 😉 ) though I’m hoping we might be able to watch another episode of “Elementary” first, then watch “Father Brown”, and save DCI Banks for another night… We’ll see. Tomorrow, of course, the kids will be over for “afternoon tea”, but we should be able to get a bit of our Rifting in in the morning. Still, whether we do or not, there’ll be lots to fill you in on tomorrow night, so I hope to see you all again then! In the meantime, remember to bee good, don’t let the bed bugs bite tonight, but above all… stay safe! 🙂 ciao, all! 🙂
My Word! 