At the Destinations travel show in Earls Court today, The Bookworm and I saw BBC world affairs editor John Simpson talk about his experiences from 44 years at The Beeb, from being punched in the stomach by Prime Minister Harold Wilson to coming under fire in war zones and the way the independence of the BBC is under threat whichever government is in place after the next election.

He was candid and funny and fascinating and when it was finished we wandered around the stands some more, ending up at a book shop area where we looked up from the piles of great travel writing to see him quietly signing his books for a small queue of people in the corner. We quickly joined on the end, getting personalised signed copies of News From No Man’s Land. I can’t wait to start reading it when I finish Reading L0lita* in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, about which all I can say is, if I read something better this year I’m in for a real treat.

*how funny, that word is apparently blocked by my web host

So, having lost a ton of video files and recovered my corrupted user/logon profile, last Thursday (at the beginning of a long weekend to use up my final two days of holiday time from work), my laptop greeted me with the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD — it even gets its own acronym) and firmly refused to boot up, not even in safe mode.

Cue much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.

This was unacceptable — I haven’t been without a home computer since 1999.

I used my smartphone to Google the ominous “fatal system error” code and found the advice was along the lines of ‘your hard drive may have been killed by a Microsoft update and even if it isn’t completely dead you’ll need to reinstall Windows.’ Crap. However, after considering walking into the Apple Store and making a salesperson’s day, on further searching, I learned that Recovery Console is your friend in situations like this. The problem being that my Dell is one of those shipped with a separate partition containing an image of the original factory settings, meaning it came without an XP disc. And because I couldn’t even get into Safe Mode I couldn’t run System Restore.

I considered just starting again with the full reset, because clearly my system has issues, but the idea that I could recover all my programs and settings was too enticing. So on Wednesday I borrowed a disc from work, ran Check Disk from Recovery Console, and rebooted, problem solved (for now, I’m guessing). I uninstalled a few things, ran a long overdue defrag, and here I am.

Over the weekend, I had pulled out my old Windows 98 IBM, which seemed a bit confused about being dusted off and switched on at first but managed to start up fine. I’d momentarily forgotten because it’s so old it doesn’t even have an Ethernet port, and with no wireless card either there was no way for it to connect to the Internet.

But while I was looking through old documents I’ve never gotten around to transferring, I came across the hilarious Windows haiku that did the rounds years ago, which made me laugh and relieved my stress levels. Here are my favourites:

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that.

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

Stay the patient course
Of little worth is your ire
The network is down.

A crash reduces
your expensive computer
to a simple stone.

The Web site you seek
cannot be located but
endless others exist.

First snow, then silence.
This thousand dollar screen dies
so beautifully.

With searching comes loss
and the presence of absence:
“My Novel” not found.

Having been erased,
The document you’re seeking
Must now be retyped.

Aborted effort:
Close all that you have.
You ask way too much.

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

The full list is here, in the depths of the Salon.com archives.

Time for a food post.

Lately I’ve been fixated on lasagne, which has always been one of my favourite dishes. Now, you might ask, how can you possibly make an endometriosis-diet-friendly wheat-free, vegan, soya-free lasagne (that’s edible)? The answer is you can’t…not quite. What you can do if you’re up for the occasional treat is this: skip the lumpy fake cheese sauce and simply layer in grated goat’s cheese.

This takes a while to prepare, but I promise it’s worth it.

• Peel and dice some butternut squash, aubergine, carrots, and an onion. Add a chopped bell pepper, some courgette, and throw in a few peeled garlic cloves.

• Toss the lot in a large bowl with plenty of olive oil, dried mixed herbs, paprika, salt, black pepper, and whatever other seasoning you like.
• Spread the veggies out on a baking tray and/or roasting tin (in my teeny oven I use two shelves) and roast on a moderate heat for 35 mins.
• Savour the delicious smell.
• With about 10 mins to go, grate a block of hard goat’s cheese (e.g. 240g St Helen’s Farm), put aside, and boil several handfuls of fresh spinach until the leaves are wilted, 2 or 3 mins.
• Remove the veggies from the oven and assemble the lasagne in your preferred baking tin or dish — cover the base with pasta sauce (Tesco’s Spicy Pepper Pasta Sauce is a staple in my cupboard) to prevent sticking. Then layer on gluten-free pasta sheets, spread sauce on the pasta, followed by the roasted veg, spinach and grated cheese. Repeat the layers until all the veg is used. Top with another layer of pasta, sauce and sprinkle on the last of the cheese.

  Because there’s no cheese sauce, be generous with the tomato sauce and make sure the pasta is well covered.

• Cook for 40 mins at 180C or according to the pasta directions.
• Savour the even more delicious smell and find a distraction so the time passes faster (a watched pot never boils and all that…).

Enjoy with a simple side salad or all on it’s own!

There’s a reason the Ani DiFranco song Lag Time is one of my theme songs — I can be a bit slow on the uptake.

Case in point: In the office the other day we all received letters, which I assumed was some form of confirmation of the recent round of annual appraisals, to the effect that, as the boss joked, we’re “not sacked yet”. I threw it in my bag and carried on with my day. I have a habit of not opening letters when I know what’s in them — bank statements, bills I pay online, direct debits.

It wasn’t until a couple of days later, in the middle of the night when once again I couldn’t sleep, that I remembered the envelope and thought maybe I should open it in case it was something else.

Two lines informed me of a pay rise effective immediately.

That will make dealing with those financial issues easier. It’ll also teach me not to toss aside envelopes unopened.

I purposely haven’t written about the earthquake in Haiti because … there are no words. I’ve been glued to the news on TV and online every day trying to get my brain around it, to in some way comprehend … and I can’t. But I just had to post the video of Jennifer Hudson belting out her cover of The Beatles’ Let it Be at the Hope For Haiti Now telethon last night. It’s spine-chilling, tear-jerking in a good way:

Okay, so it’s officially Saturday, but I’m wide awake so to me it’s still Friday…



I’d been feeling left out seeing BBC New’s “Frozen Britain” reporting, then on Wednesday morning central London woke up to more than a little dusting. Kensington Gardens was eerily pretty.



More on my Flickr account.

As if losing most of my video files on Saturday wasn’t bad enough, on Tuesday my Windows user profile, aka documents and settings, was corrupted and I’ve only just managed to get it restored.

I have a sneaking suspicion that it is not a coincidence there was an automatic Windows update on Tuesday, judging by the fact that my frantic Google searches from the temporary profile Windows created suggested it wouldn’t be the first time a reboot after a Windows XP patch caused a bit of a meltdown.

After spending hours trying to figure out how to restore my local profile without losing all my settings, it turns out that the first time the computer automatically ran Check Disk on reboot it wasn’t set to repair errors.

So, if you ever receive this dreaded message on booting up: “Windows cannot find the local profile and is logging you on with a temporary profile. Changes you make to this profile will be lost when you log off,” here’s what you do:

Before following all the advice to run system restore or create a new user profile and copy your documents and settings files over — which I tried to do before I realised my laptop drive isn’t big enough — run Check Disk because it may just be that your ntuser.dat file is corrupt.

• In My Computer, right-click the main hard disk.
  
• Click Properties, and then Tools.
  
• Under Error-checking, click Check Now, which brings up a dialog box titled Check disk options.
  
• Select both the “Automatically fix file system errors” and the “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” check boxes, then click Start.
  
• If it asks if you want to restart, click Yes and do so to run the scan.

Simple as that. Wish I knew it three days ago. At least now I have fully backed up my settings on my external hard drive rather than just certain documents. Silver lining.

I’ve spent a large part of the weekend re-downloading video files after my entire 70GB worth was wiped out.

That’s what I get for my bright idea at 6am Saturday, when I randomly found myself wide awake, that if I’m going to convert the Rachel Zoe Project episodes I have in avi format to DVD I need new software, since the program I used to use is several years old. All seemed to be going well as I installed a new program and queued up the first episode for conversion. I went back to sleep and a couple of hours later went to check on the result. There was an error message. And when I went into the folder on my external hard drive, where I keep all my videos because my laptop drive is full, it was empty. The program had written an empty folder over the lot. The available space on the drive was 70GB larger.

Crap.

My only consolation is that most of the files were episodes of TV shows, including Rachel Zoe, which I now need to download all over again. Almost all my Hillary Rodham Clinton videos — speeches, interviews, etc — are safe because I keep those on my laptop drive as well, in my paranoia that the external drive might crash or something. I have lost a couple of her Secretary of State speeches. But there were some figure skating and Barbra Streisand files that are gone forever.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda used the software I already had, which doesn’t overwrite files.

Argh.

As well as getting my financial house in order I also want to start 2010 getting my literal house in order, namely my wardrobe.

The other day, as once again clothes tumbled out of the bottom, stopping the doors from closing, I realised that aside from a couple of jumpers I rarely wear, I couldn’t actually remember what was down there. Which meant clearly I would never miss the stuff if I got rid of it. So I’ve finally tackled the pile, sorting out what to take to the local clothing recycling bin and what to attempt to list on eBay (although those things too might end up in the bin to get them out of my way).

A few of the things I had snatched back the last time I had a clear-out, and they’d been sitting there in the bottom of the wardrobe untouched ever since.

There’s still a handful of other items I really should part with because I need the space, but I’m not quite ready to let them go. Baby steps.

What I also need to do is come up with some new outfit combinations to refresh my look as something of a consolation for not hitting the sales. I’ve been meaning to join StyleDiary for ages. Maybe something to think about for the new year.

*One of the signs I watched way too much Rachel Zoe Project over the holidays — I’ve started thinking in terms of “options”, “editing” and “pulling” clothes… Another sign — my desperate desire to go shopping for a vintage fur coat .

One of the things I’ve been doing over the last few months instead of blogging is staring at my financial profile on Wesabe. Although the staring doesn’t change the numbers (sadly), it does strengthen my resolve to take action to change them. 2009 was an expensive year for me, what with all the travel and giving money to my mother (whose ongoing unemployment saga gives me a headache). But at the same time I laid a foundation for getting on top of my debt.

An online money management tool like Wesabe works for me because I’m a geek and I love the tagging and bar graphs and pie charts and the novelty never wears off, unlike my brief flirtation with a paper budget book.

Once I started tracking my spending on Wesabe, I set up a simple budget spreadsheet breaking down my fixed and variable monthly expenses that I update throughout the month as money leaves my bank account. That way I can see how much money I really have left until pay day, rather than looking at my balance and ignoring the fact that various bill payments have yet to come out. I also downloaded a credit card snowball calculator spreadsheet to keep me motivated to hit my targets for getting the balances down each month.

Seeing my current account, credit card, and savings balances totalled up was a great motivator, and not only to deal with my debt. My small emergency fund had been sitting in a regular savings account, which had slashed its interest rate to practically zero. But having taken control of my finances, I moved it to an ISA with a better rate (if there is such a thing in these times of historic lows). The transfer took less than 5 minutes and the reward is there each month when I receive pounds rather than pennies in interest.

So one of my goals for 2010 is to continue what I started in 2009. It’s a real challenge this month, with the sales beckoning to treat myself. But the thing with treating yourself again and again is that at some point you have to pay for it. That time is now.