I’m back, here at my author blog, and able to post again. Computer problems have prevented me from doing that for a while. It’s a combination of three things actually, or maybe four. I’ll chronicle them for you.

First, back sometime in the second half of 2013, our old laptop died. We’d had it since October 2004. It was a faithful friend, needing little attention. Whatever happened to it, it was gone. That left us with the other laptop and the desktop in The Dungeon. Lynda has her “office” on a card table in the living room, so I let her have the laptop. I have always done the bulk of my writing on the desktop, so I continued to do that. I just didn’t have a computer (excepting my Nook) to use upstairs.

I’ve been looking around towards replacing it. We’ve had Dells for years, so I’ll probably stick with them. We’ve been happy with their products, except for a certain shipping mistake that it took a couple of years to get right. That was in part my fault for abandoning the process rather than pressing the issue. Once I found the right person to talk with they made it right by the next FedEx shipment. But the need to research what’s available, the possibility of leasing rather than buying, and of using cloud-based software has caused me to hesitate. Those reasons, plus wanting to make sure finances are ok to make the purchase. So far I haven’t, but I think I’m getting closer to that time.

Then, shortly before we left for our May trip to Boston, I was suddenly unable to log in to this website and make changes. On the login page I got 17 error messages, all related to specific lines of code or needing to enable cookies. But cookies were enabled. Talking with a couple of people in an on-line writers group, I learned that it appeared that the theme I had selected, Erudite, had been abandoned by the creator. Some change in WordPress, perhaps, hadn’t been upgraded on the theme. I went to the theme message board and left a message. So far as I can tell there’s been no answer.

Finally, a Facebook acquaintance, John Doppler Schiff (that’s what he goes by), said he could go into the code and bypass the Erudite theme and get me up and running with a default theme, after which I could do business as normal and pick a new theme. That was delayed for the thing I’ll mention in a later paragraph, but now it’s done. He said it took him all of five minutes, perhaps less. Next week I’ll go about looking for and installing a new theme. I think that’s fairly easy to do.

Then, the day we left for Boston, I couldn’t get on a browser on the laptop. We were rushing to get things together and get on the road, so I didn’t worry about it, thinking it might be a temporary glitch. Alas, when we got home I found out it wasn’t. Still no browser. I could connect to the Internet, because I was able to save files to Dropbox.  I took it to the shop, and learned that the problem was related to the XP operating system, now no longer supported by Microsoft. But the computer was licensed for Vista, so they were able to upgrade with no software charge. That was great. The week they had it, not so much. Or the fact that the second monitor no longer works.

Then came the big one. On Tuesday, while I was speaking at a lunch meeting of a professional group, a text came in. When I was done speaking I saw it was from a nephew, who wrote, “You aren’t in Turkey, are you? Think your e-mail was hacked.” I got back to the office to find it was true. It’s happened twice before, and changing the password was sufficient to recover. But this time the hackers were malicious. They changed my password, deleted my stored e-mails, and changed the primary e-mail address so that security notifications would go to them. Then they set up a mimic e-mail account but with aol.com as the ending, and began firing off e-mails that looked like they came from me.

I’ll make this short. Over a period of five hours I was able to get it all changed back. That included an hour and a half on hold waiting to talk with Yahoo. An hour of that would have been unnecessary if a certain webpage of theirs worked. It didn’t, so I had to call them. But I’m not upset with Yahoo. They were able to restore the deleted e-mails (I may have lost two hour’s worth, at most). I alerted aol about the bad guys, though I don’t expect them to do anything. No harm done except to the nerves. If any security e-mails went out to the aol address, I suppose the bad guys might have more information than I’d like. I’ll have to see if anything happens.

So, except for replacing the second laptop, I’m up and running again. For the last month or two I’d been pretty regular in my posts to this blog, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Hopefully I’ll return to that with no problem.