New discoveries

Not too far from the city of Fier in Albania, there is a jewel of an archaeological site named Apollonia, which dates back to Illyrian times. I visited and enjoyed the place with some Italian friends as per my post dated May 2nd, 2009, but did not go back since then because I heard it was temporarily closed to the public.

Now am happy to read that new exiting findings are taking place in this ancient city as per current CBS News and AFT reports.

With the development of tourism in Albania and the increase of visitors to the country, there is also an incremental interest in historical places and ancient grounds, which have been studied in the past, but continue to attract curiosity and new digging projects, also on the part of some American universities and their students. One of them I know is currently involved in this type of work at the site of Butrint (in southern Albania) as part of her curriculum, and I look forward to hearing about her experiences upon her return.

With her I shared an old report and pictures taken by one of my paternal uncles, when he did a study on that site in the early 1930's. He had archaeology and photography as hobbies and the following couple of pictures are an example of what he dealt with then, and I hope that these artifacts are now hopefully and properly stored somewhere.

Back in business

Pleasantly surprised, I received back my fixed desktop computer way ahead of schedule, and, naturally, I eagerly began to restore all my applications and data. Within 24 hours I am back in business on this machine and so far everything I loaded works like a charm.

As expected, the manufacturer returned the unit reloaded with the operating system (Windows Vista) that was originally furnished when I purchased it one year ago. Before adding my additional programs, and reconfiguring the peripheral equipment, I thus proceeded to update this OS, and was amazed to find that it needed to apply more than 100 updates to become current (all these changes in one year time!!). I ended up spending more time doing these updates (that require also many reboots) than reloading all the other applications I normally use. My data, thank goodness, remains readily available on my other offset media, where I usually store it.

Bottom line: all is well that ends well, and there is always a silver lining behind every cloud. In every situation such as this, and I've had a few in the past 20 years or so, there is always something new and interesting to learn. The unfortunate part is that one must have patience and time to convince suppliers that there is actually a problem, which requires their attention and it's their responsibility to fix it.

Hardware problem

My desktop computer began to misbehave since early July. It would freeze and shut down intermittently and I had to do extensive testing. This is not what I had planned to spend time on this summer because I had a few other projects to take care online, but I had no choice and had to succumb to boring troubleshooting instead.

After several, and long telephone sessions with the manufacturer's tech support, located half way around the world, I finally convinced the U. S. company to take back my machine for fixing. Fortunately, it 's under warranty for another year, but I miss it terribly.

It's funny that even tracking the repair order, or getting acknowledgment and input from the manufacturer is always handled through email, instead of by phone. The implication is that one should always have a backup system at hand, to avoid going out to use a public one, which may not be nearby or readily available elsewhere.

To write this and briefly handle email during this time, I resorted to revive an old laptop that I still had around. I had cleaned it up and stripped of all programs since it was destined to be eventually discarded, but it's a life saver for now.

It will take time before I can go back to use my desktop again. After the repair is completed, and the computer travels back to me, I'll have to spend a few hours restoring all my applications to get back the functionality of the system I'm accustomed to. I forecast that all this will probably take until the end of this month to complete. Meantime I decided to dedicate myself to another boring task : cleaning up old paperwork and files that I can never see the end of........but this, thanks goodness, can be accomplished in the comfort of my air conditioned place during this unusually hot and steamy NY summer!