White Screen of Doom

My blog is finally up and running again, thanks to Stephen, who is about the third person to try and fix it, but was the only one who could.

Many thanks also to Susan, who also offered up her husband’s assistance, but I felt that since my son’s “friends” were already working on it, it would be hard to start all over and may have been unethical, if you know what I mean, and that white screen terrified me! I was sure that I had lost everything – all my blog posts, friend comments etc. forever.

We migrated hosts last Friday and all of the posts on the front page weren’t working, and all of the back end stuff wasn’t working. You could see it, but it wouldn’t work because it had all of the old user names throughout the code and also in the data base prefixes. Then my son deleted that account and created another one with the same user name as the old account and one of my sons’ freelancers migrated it all over again. While we were changing hosts, I couldn’t even publish your comments because they wouldn’t have been there when we updated hosts.

AAArgh! Floods of tears! Everything was working but there was a white screen of doom when we tried to log in to the admin page. This afternoon Stephen came to the rescue and it’s all fixed – I’m not changing servers ever again!

Backup to External Flash Drive – Thank You, Ruby

What have I been doing today, you might ask??? Well, a little while ago, a friend of mine lost all of her files on her computer, but fortunately had most of them backed up on disks. This served as a HUGE warning to me, and I have spent all afternoon backing up our “C” drive onto an external 320GB flash hard drive, which we purchased for $119.00.

I would just like to say thank you, dear Ruby for the incentive to actually “just do it”! I have been procrastinating over backing up our hard drive for ages, but this afternoon I went to the Windows site and actually read how to do it. It took about two hours to backup to external flash HDD, but it will be well worth the effort if our computer crashes.

New Blog Coming Soon

My son has been working on a new blog for me, as a late birthday present, and the image (above) is just a teaser of better things to come. At the moment, it is being coded, but I absolutely love the theme and the name. My son has done an excellent job of designing this new blog, as I knew what I wanted, but communicating that to my son was so difficult, as he is not a woman, and he likes different design themes than I do.

The name has also changed, but I think that this is a reflection of how much deeper my relationship with God has become, and how much I have matured over the last couple of years. 

Computers – Don’t they make You Want to Tear your Hair Out???

Typing

Typing has been one subject that I believe children need in these days of computerisation. Our children started typing about four years ago, and now they can both type competently – my fifteen year old son at 61.8 wpm with 100% accuracy, and my twelve year old daughter 61.6 wpm, also with 100% accuracy.

When we first started, we were using Typing Instructor Deluxe, and this was so much fun to use. There are games such as Cliffhanger, Gone Fishin’ and Diamond Glider. There are lessons, plans tests, voice typing and there is a place for saved results so that you can keep track of where your children are in respect to their typing skills. Typing Instructor also have a 30 minute FREE trial.

Next we used Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing Deluxe, and this was just as good, and there were also games with this product, such as Gumball Gambit, Chameleon Picnic and Undersea Karaoke among many others. There is a lesson area and a practice area, as well as a custom lesson designer. Improving accuracy is so important in typing and there is also an area looking at this. Mavis Beacon also has a FREE to try download (3-use trial).

When we started studying with Australian Christian College, the product that they recommend is Typequick Professional, and while it is excellent, there are no games with the product, and my daughter says, “It is boring, dull and there are better products on the market.” Regardless of what our children think, their skills quickly improved using this product, especially their accuracy – perhaps because they were concentrating on their typing rather than the games.

Our children have passed their typing for year 10 with Australian Christian College, but it is so important that they keep up their skills and daily practice is essential in order to achieve this. How important do you think typing is to your children’s education, and what product do you use?