Last Friday I arrived in my office about 8:30 AM, ready to tackle several small projects, and get them sent off to clients. Full of motivation and caffeine, nothing could stop me. Nothing, that is, except a dead Internet connection. The first clue was MailWasher, lying on its back with its paws in the air. No email was coming in or going out.
Excellent! I couldn’t get to YouSendIt and upload or download client files. A client asked me to check some files on their network, but Citrix doesn’t work either, if you can’t connect to it.
So, the first hour of the workday was spent muttering, assuming the connection would be back up shortly. That didn’t happen, so I spent 1/2 hour on the phone with the ISP’s tech support, diagnosing and fixing the problem.
Apparently my static IP had become a little too static, and that was fixed by unplugging the modem for five minutes. I’ve made a note in my ISP manual, beside the tech support phone number, so I’ll remember to try that next time, before wasting my time on the phone.
Finally back in action, I managed to complete most of my to-do list. I’ll be travelling with my laptop this week, and hope it all goes smoothly. (What could possibly go wrong?)
Browser Tip
And speaking of the Internet, how have I been using the it for all these years, without knowing this trick?
- In a web browser, press the space bar on your keyboard, to scroll down a page.
- Shift and the space bar will scroll up a page.
Debra, how did you discover that tip? That takes me back to the old DOS days of the command line. I’m sure that you are far too young to remember that. 🙂
Anyway, we used to page through output that way. If you do a dir /p command, it will “paginate” the results. I just tried it using the command line in Vista, and I guess you can press the “any” key (where is that one?), but I seem to recall pressing the space bar to show the next page of results.
Deb, I discovered that space bar scrolling trick back in 2005:
http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/firefox_scrolling/
It changed my life.
Here’s my favorite IE trick:
My company has a custom homepage, which they force everyone’s browser to go to when you load your browser. Here’s how you change it (in IE): press Alt-M and select “Add or Change Home Page”
Thx,
JP
Great tip! No you weren’t the only one who didn’t know about that!
Tim, I’m on the road, and don’t remember where I found that tip. I’ve never heard of this DOS thing though. Must be before my time. 😉
John, you’re always ahead of the rest of us. But that explains the change.
JP, thanks for sharing that tip.
Blayne, glad to know I’m not alone. I guess you didn’t read John’s blog post in 2005 either!