Finding little things to make me smile is a bit of a hobby of mine but sometimes the little things turn out to be big things. At the end of July 2012 something happened that didn’t just make me smile, it made me run around the room jumping with joy. It had been a tough time. The Madhouse office was closing, we were all being made redundant. Ok so it was a job I hated but I loved the people and I was seriously worried about not having a job. There had been an interview for a job I didn’t really want at a letting agent but the real prize was a job I really, really did want for a prestigious cruise company in a PA role. My good friend Gigi worked there and had told me about it. She said she thought I’d be perfect so I applied. Continue reading big things to make me smile – First published JULY 14, 2012
With so much work to do at home on the blog salvage project it was hard to drag myself away and do some paid work on Wednesday morning. Actually I was feeling a little grumpy. It was one of those horrible drizzly, misty mornings and I set off with my iPod playing cheery music to try to lift my mood. When I got to the boardwalk though I saw something that did the job so much better. Continue reading The pleasures of autumn
It wasn’t the greatest start to 2014. There I was, redundant again, ever so slightly depressed and feeling lost and bewildered. What I needed was something to motivate me, maybe something like a New Year’s Resolution. Of course I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions but promises and challenges, well they’re a different matter. This post was the birth of a personal challenge to walk one hundred miles a month in 2014. Continue reading A promise not a resolution – First published 5 January 2014
This blog is called I walk Alone and all I appear to have done so far is sit in front of a computer crying. On Tuesday I thought it was probably time to actually go outside and do some of the aforesaid walking alone. The fact it was raining didn’t exactly endear me to the idea but then I began to think of the trades description act and being sued for false advertising. Obviously I didn’t want to go too far in the rain but reading through some of my old blog posts gave me an idea. How about revisiting some of those walks? Continue reading Finally, some walking
The old Fatgirslimblog is gone forever but I have been able to salvage some of it. The backups I made a couple of weeks age have saved all the text and, with the help of my techy friend at LCN, I have managed to rescue many of the photos. Of course that’s just half the story because putting the two together again is going to be a long, slow, labour intensive process. Some things will be lost forever. Anyone who has followed me for any length of time may experience a few flashes of deja vu as I pop in the odd old post. Now it’s a matter of deciding what to save and what to discard. So, let’s start at the very beginning with my very first post. Continue reading Let’s start at the very beginning – first published 8 July 2012
For the first time in the history of the world there was no walk on Sunday morning. Instead, there I was again, looking for a non-existent email from the techy bods. As I ate my granola my mind lingered on the photos I’d lost for good. Moonwalks, Itchen Navigation walks, Race For Life’s, Commando’s marathons, Netley Abbey, views from the penthouse, holidays… the longer I thought the longer the list got. What was the point in dwelling on it though? What’s gone is gone right? Continue reading Phoenix rising from the ashes
On Friday night I had two major problems and a zillion minor ones. Major problem number one was that I still couldn’t get onto my blog to reset it even if I knew how. Major problem number two was that my email was slowly filling up with non delivery notifications for emails I hadn’t sent, hundreds of them. It didn’t take a genius to realise the two things were connected. For once Googling got me nowhere. In the end I rang LCN, the blog hosts to ask for help. Continue reading Boulevard of broken dreams
Wednesday was a stormy day in more ways than one. Despite heavy rain when I got up I somehow managed to dodge the showers on my way to work. Foolishly, I’d promised to start at eight all week which meant it was a very long day. Thirteen hours later I finally walked back through the door.
Once I’d had a coffee, because I can’t walk through the door and not have a coffee, I thought I’d multitask and proofread the blog post I’d prepared for Wednesday evening while I ate my pasta, simple eh?
As it turned out, not so much. When I tried to log onto my blog all I got was a white page with
Linux10+bd5e5eb049f3907175f54f5a571ba6b9fdea36ab.
Scary! A prickle of panic ran up my spine. I tried closing everything down and starting again but the same thing happened. I tried logging in through the WordPress My Blogs page. The same thing. I even tried Googling my blog but that came up with the same result. It was gone, all of it. The one teeny tiny saving grace in all this was that, less than a week before, I’d backed it up on my Mac but, if I couldn’t get onto it, I couldn’t restore it.
There was a rather fraught and panicked email to the LCN help team who host my blog and then half an hour of checking my emails for a reply that didn’t come. I went to bed feeling worried. More than two years of my work, all the lovely people who comment and read, gone just like that. Ok so it wasn’t the end of the world. No one died. Even so, I wasn’t exactly a happy bunny.
There was a tiny hope that order would be restored in my blog world at some point in the future. But this is also a cautionary tale. Back up! Back up regularly. Back up every day! Do not take the techy geeks for granted. They make the wheels in the background go round so the writers and dreamers don’t have to worry about all that code and clever stuff. Let’s face it, if I had to worry about that there would never have been a blog in the first place.
Thursday morning I was up bright and early and one of the first things I did was check my emails and my blog. Nothing had changed. The techy bods had not replied, the blog was still AWOL. It wasn’t the best of starts to the day. When I left for work, just after seven, my mind was whirling with the thought that the blog really could be gone for good. What would I do? Could I bear to start over when I’d come so far. What about the people who read it, they’d be seeing the same message when they tried to look at it. Would they wonder what had happened? Would they really care? After all there are thousands of other blogs just as good as mine, better even. Would my little offering even be missed?
Walking along the boardwalk I had a swift and beautiful reminder of the important things in life. The most amazing sunrise across the water, all crepuscular rays and clouds lined with gold. There was a swan at the water’s edge and gulls in the air. As I walked the sun slowly rose through the clouds. Photos were taken, of course. There was still a tiny hope that I would be able to share them at some point. Tiny.
It was another long, manic day, filled with lost property and bus disasters, not to mention a man who may or may not have been attacked on a bus, he wasn’t entirely sure. Despite the glorious sunrise there were showers so heavy the world outside the window disappeared from time to time. In the afternoon the sky was lit up by lightning and the air rent with thunder. It was hard to concentrate with all the noise and flashes going on.
At home, tired and still worried, I checked my emails again. There was a reply from the helpteam geeks, well one of them anyway.
I have raised your issue up to our 2nd Line Support team. Once I have more information on this I’ll contact you with an update.
It wasn’t exactly hopeful. With fingers firmly crossed I checked the blog again. Maybe the second line geeks had worked a miracle since the email was sent. Sadly, they hadn’t. Nothing had changed. The tiny bit of hope that it would ever be fixed shrank. It was now a microscopic thing, too small to be seen by the human eye. If you ever read this it will be a triumph of hope over expectation.
On Friday I got an email from LCN.
Our engineers have looked into this thoroughly for you and unfortunately it would appear that your WordPress installation was hacked and malicious code inserted into many of the files. Unfortunately, this is going to require a complete reinstall. Normally we would be able to restore the data for you however the only snapshot with your site available already has the malicious code present.
So that was it. All gone! At that moment I could have wept. Of course I still had the backup but did I dare use it? What if the malicious code was in there too? Would it even work? Let’s face it I am about as techy as a two year old. Scrub that, a two year old probably understands more about this stuff than me. Ok, so I studied Computer Science at college. I could write BASIC programmes. Does anyone even use that stuff any more? These days it’s all well beyond my poor little frazzled brain.
So basically, here I am starting again.
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