The previous post took around 30 minutes to write, mainly because I was also doing a few other things at the same time. Having written the post, I hit the Publish button, and moved onto to clear down the work required on a few dozen other FireFox tabs, intending to return to the WordPress tab a little later.
For some reason I checked back on it before that. Lucky really – the post was lost, with a 406 error, I believe. Some issue with a suitable request not being issued or found… Anyway, simply returning back to the previous page just presented me with an EMPTY post page, with all my work missing. OK, so I’ve had similar problems before, clicked forward, and then F5ed, and the data has been re-posted correctly. So I tried this approach, unfortunately the same error returned. Before looking into this much further, I opened up Internet Explorer, and checked I could publish a test post there. (Didn’t want to do this within FireFox in case I cleared some sort of internal cache, and therefore lose all hope of recovering the work.) This new test post appeared fine.
I now had a choice, spend perhaps 10 minutes re-writing a post, as I still had the basic outline in my head, or… decide the PC was trying to annoy me on purpose, and rise to the challenge & beat the issue into submission.
Friends will not be greatly surprised to hear that I took the second route – and some twenty minutes later, recovered a version of the text, by sniffing the outgoing packets that were sent whenever I hit F5. Unfortunately the software I had installed to do this was rather rudimentary, with no filtering options, and as I had a lot of other pages loading and data being sent, it took a while to track down the right packets to analyse. Once I had searched for, and replaced, the silly codes (ASCII escape codes??), I had the post back again. OK, so it would have been simpler to just retype the thing, rather than start sniffing network packets, but it had been a while, and you can never tell when it might be useful 🙂
Then before this post was finished, we had a power cut. Luckily we have already replaced the last UPS we had, so I had enough time to hibernate the PC. The power came back 5 minutes later, the PC booted up, then decided it wanted to hibernate before it had finished booting. It hung for 5 minutes, before I hit restart. T.F. for FireFox’s ability to restore sessions when it senses your PC has become fubarred 🙂 Even our washing machine didn’t lose its programming, which was lucky, as I am doing some last minute washing, drying and ironing to get ready for Amsterdam and Britain. I’d already been delayed on that front by a few hours when our hot water went all orange again! Then Kara decided it was time to rid the shirt I am wearing of those evil adornments – buttons.
However, none of the above is going to bug me, I’m on my way to get severely relaxed, meet friends and family after a break of some 9 months, so I shall take it all in without getting too stressed. Oh, and Steve, a good friend from my Uni days back at Bournemouth has just got in contact through Facebook, my beautiful wife has just kissed me before going to bed, and I may even be in bed myself before dawns breaks, so the world could be in such a worse state for me right now 🙂
