It's 10:30 PM, Sunday I think. At 4:00 PM, all of a sudden this www.ewin.com showed up in Firefox as "File cannot be found at a/." Well, ewin.com is a far cry from a/. I suspected Spyware Doctor which I had just upgraded two days ago, and as is my usual folly, I removed the program and then reinstalled. That did nothing.
I ran the antivirus program. That did nothing. I rebooted. That did something: it allowed me to brew a pot of coffee.
I unloaded all the junk in the Startup which is great except that no one knows what any of those files and extensions stand for. First you make a copy. That's the first rule of everything even if buying a new computer system would be faster. Still, those efforts did nothing. Firefox still said that it couldn't find my site. But it was playing favorites: it found and nicely displayed the NY Times, SF Gate, Amazon, WSJ, and the London Times which, truth be told, is just for show.
I removed Firefox and reinstalled. Nothing.
Went to Mozilla. Found no support under "Support." Went to Spyware Doctor. Finally, I did what anyone with a corporate account with Dell does even though it's a software problem. Normally, Dell in Nashville has a clue. Not tonight. Two calls and still nothing. No one had heard of such a problem.
On a whim, I Googled me. I clicked on one of me, and the page came up, sans graphics. "Why?"I asked? "I dunno," I answered. I do a lot of that, almost always with the same response.
But I went back to Mozilla, and under "Support," I found a buried paragraph about what to do if the page shows, but the graphics don't load. It said, "Hit Ctrl, Shift, R" to reload the page. It didn't say why that's better than just hitting "Reload." Whatever. Six hours and 14 minutes of diddling, and my site and all its pages were back. Of course, I lost all my passwords but fortunately not yours.
A sign of maturity: I didn't hit anything. In fact, I called Dell which I know has a database of quirky things. I patted the dog in my lap. I had a feeling of satisfaction though I don't know what went wrong. And I finally realized that sometimes just getting something to work is much more important than to know why it stopped working in the first place. This pertains only to machinery and dogs. Employees tend to talk back and look for others to blame, and right now I don't feel that patting them on their heads is appropriate. Probably end up with a harassment suit anyway...
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