In the last week - I’ve started getting crashes from ShockWave in FireFox, and it’s getting steadily worse. Sometimes, it seems it’s leading to system crashed.

Shockwave Flash. The plugin performed an illegal operation. You are stongly advised to restart Navigator.

Reinstalling Shockwave does not help.

This thread seems to indicate others are having the same problem.-

My login page still says half the sites are waiting for validation and no data is available for any of them.

Nevertheless, reports are actually there. I’d been checking for that every day anyway, so they must have got populated today sometime.

After six days - I still have no data results on any of my sites, and now it refuses to let any more sites be added. One might have though that Google would have anticipated the high demend for this service.

Google Analytics full for the time being

I went into the cellar this evening, and see I’ve had a minor flood. I can only assume the leak from last night came in through some crack in the wall. It could have been leaking for several hours outside, built up a pool and seeped in.

With the amount of cellar floods I’ve had this year, I might start a hydroponic garden.

I woke up in the middle of the night and the water pressure was very low, barely a trickle out of the tap. It struck me that maybe the outside lines had frozen, though it did not seem that cold. Ran down to the cellar and shut off the outside supply, and the pressure is back.

This morning, it’s above freezing, but I just don’t want to look at what kind of broken pipe mess I have to deal with.

Google Analytics has just been made available as a free service. Offering site statistics formerly offered by Urchin (whom Google acquired earlier this year) - the service is now free, as opposed to paying montlhy fees that were out of line for small businesses.

Unfortunately Goolge seems to have jumped in a little too fast. With Gmail, Goolge seemed to take forever to phase it in. With this, they seem to have let everyone in at once, causing massive overloading. The first sites I added took over 12 hours to validate, 48 hours later I’m still waiting for data. This whole process is supposed to take a couple of hours. However, today, new sites I added, seem to have been validated in under two hours, but I’m still waiting for data from the sites I added two days ago.

Many, many years ago, when I was trying to find good accounting software, I went through a lot of the stuff, trying to find something good. These were the days of DOS, no Quicken, no Microsoft Money. The only software around was designed for accountants, and simulated doing things on paper. All the software was very ridgid and unsuitable for a small business owner. I was totally disapointed by what I could find until I ran into something called NewViews. It was relatively cheap, and very flexible, if even let you write scripts for repetitive task, and to customize it. I was hooked, and have used it ever since. Everything else I use is Windows based, but I’ve never found anything as fast, since the customization allows me to make to make common entries as single function key hits. It’s reporting ias a bit archaic, but I can live with that.

The only think is that there is a bug that sometims cause it to go into a loop gnerating empty transactions. Many years ago, Q.W.Page - the company that designed NewViews, offered a deal, for $100 I would get a year support and a free update to the next version of NewViews. The only thing is that tech support never could solve my bug, and the upgrade required Windows 95 - which had only just been released, and I was not planning on upgrading. So I felt a bit ripped off.

I eventually installed Win95, then I installed Win 98, then I installed Win XP, and I’m was left waiting for the upgrade. It seems they were always still working on it and a couple of time a year I woudl check and it was still coming soon.

Well today once more NewViews went into it’s loop, and before I could stop it it created 65377 invalid null entries. Surprise - I checked the web site and they finally came out with the new version. I guess they forgot about my free upgrade.

The real problem is that even though I’ve gone back and deleted those entries it still is stuck, it’s refused to let me enter anything more, and says I’ve the system ledger limit of 65,520 ledger items. Maybe I’tll try compacting the database.

And do I really want to upgrade? It seems the entire scripting language has been changed, and I would have to rewrite everything.

Today my weekly grocery shopping went totally overtime.

I’ve got things organized to automate the procedure as much as possible. I have the list stored on my desktop using (the freeware application) RatShopper and once a week just tick off what’s needed, then sync to my Palm, which transfers the list into the (absolutely free application) HandyShopper and take the handheld to the supermarket. The list is displayed by aisle, and I just go up and down the aisle dropping things into the basket. But this week my wife added a bunch of new items.

The store I go to is gigantic, I’ve yet to see it all, and finding anything is next to impossible. I’ve given up asking, the employees know even less about the store than I, and will lead me on a gentle hike trying to find things in the wrong place. It strikes me that if I’m so organized, why can’t the store be the same? There should be a computer screen at the end of each aisle so I can look up any item and locate it. But maybe they want me to walk around in a mindless daze continuing to buy things I don’t need.

I bid on something on eBay a few days and failed to win it. Nothing that important, it was just an afterthough after winning a couple of other items. I was surprised to get Second Chance offer. What’s this I ask — is this legal? It turns out this is just fine with eBay Making a Second Chance Offer Ok, that was just dandy, since it was just $2.00 - I figure with postage it will be less than $10 - great.

Great until I get this email from the seller:

Shipping and handling is $9.00 plus taxes (state tax = $3.00 and USA export tax = 9.00
so the grand total is 9 + 9 + 3 = $21 US$
Plus for a bonus I will send you xxxxx, to help ofset the expense of the taxes and the potstage and handling fees.

Well that’s either the funniest email I got this month, or the seller needs a kick into reality. Shipping at $9 is excessive (should be around $5 but I could live with that. However I’m not in the USA, so state tax does not apply, and USA export tax seems to be something he invented. I bring in packages from the US all the time and I’ve never paid it, (or any state taxes). Nice to throw in the free itesm, but that’s pretty lame.

So what do you do with a seller like this? I’m not planning on paying, yet I have a perfect eBay rating, and don’t want to risk it. I was advised to report him to eBay - so I did. The reporting is weird, it just asks for the seller and no explantion of what he’s doing wrong. Now we wait and see.

My eBay activity this week is not going too well.

For the moment I decided to bid on an MP3 player on eBay. It arrived today, it was supposed to be a Creative MuVo 256meg, but it turns out to be 128Meg. Open box, no software, but not a bad price if it had been a 256. Now I’ve got to go through the annoyance of arranging an exchange. Luckily the seller is not far from where I live, and is selling a lot of these.

eBay is good when it works, but in cases like this the postage can cancel any savings.