A grinding halt

DearREADERS,
Traveling with a laptop is the anticipated norm these days. Ol' Myrt has been away nearly a month, but for the past week I've been haggling with Dell over my six month old laptop, which decided to have a motherboard malfunction.

Accessing the Internet was possible through local library computers - but I need my files, my email address book, my calendar.

Accessing my home computer using www.GoToMyPC.com would have provided nearly seamless access to my home computer IF said computer hadn't decided to hiccup while rebooting after an automatic antivirus update. What was required was to ask one of my daughters to go and reboot the computer.

THEN, I'd have access to my email address book.

THEN, I'd have access to the original banner ads Ol' Myrt here needs to distribute to new advertising partners.

THEN, I'd have access to files necessary to work my blogs.

ALTHOUGH I THOUGHT I'd done enough by providing a copy of all documents and backup of email to my laptop, the fact that the laptop died at the same time as my home computer acted up provided an interesting challenge.

IS THE ANSWER to leave everything online? Rely on online email service? Rely on online file storage in uncompressed format? Then am I not at the mercy of the computers used by those online services? I guess nothing is perfect -- Gmail users had no access to mail or calendars for most of a day in early May, bringing their productivity to a grinding halt.

Ol' MYRT HERE thinks we have forgotten our roots.

Things weren't always perfect back on the farm. Farm machinery broke down for our ancestors. The prize winning bull succumbs to an unanticipated illness. The chickens stop laying eggs, and tornadoes destroyed crops.

For Ol' Myrt as well as her ancestors, it is all a matter of picking one's self up, dusting one's self off and starting all over again. (Isn't there a song about that?)

Downtime is apparently something we're not willing to endure in the 21st century, myself included.

But a new computer later -- Ol' Myrt here is looking forward to a good week of blogging interaction with my DearREADERS. Write to me and let me know what important genealogy news I've missed this week.

Happy family tree climbing!
Myrt :)
DearMYRTLE,
Your friend in genealogy.
Myrt@DearMYRTLE.com