Hunkering Down Again

Hello Friends!

Well, here we go again, less than 36 hours after we see the tail end of Storm Eowyn, here comes Storm Herminia {named by the Spanish weather forecasters} I am sitting in my living room, in the silence that is broken by the wind that is already howling about the corners of my cottage.

No rest for us in the coming week, this is today's forecast and although the wind speed is considerably lighter it is still damaging and will be like this most of the time between now and Thursday.

Any time we see the black circles we know we're up for another blow.  Time for a hot drink  . . . 

. . . ahh, that's better.  A mug of freshly brewed, hot tea, the panacea to all that ails . . . 

I use social media. I enjoy it, but I have to admit my days on various platforms are now probably numbered because of AI.

In recent weeks I have encountered numerous problems on different platforms. The first time anything started showing up was on Instagram. Every time I logged into my account, I would get a pop up saying that suspicious activity was detected on my account. There was no suspicious activity. It was me. I have two separate accounts and from time to time I log out of one and into the other. Then I switch back. Unfortunately, if I do this too frequently, Instagram logs it as suspicious activity. This has also happened to a few of my friends, several of whom have lost their Instagram accounts. Some have been fortunate and able to reclaim them. Others not so.

One day I was on Facebook, and all of a sudden up pops a message informing me that my latest post has been deleted because it is obvious that it is written by a spam bot.  SPAMBOT!!!! Moi?!  Trust me, the irony of being told by AI that it has identified me as a spambot was not lost on me.  This went on for weeks with me sending screaming messages to FB but in reality I was wasting my time as there was only an AI on the other end not a real person.  Eventually, it let up, until . . . .

 . . . last week on the site I share photos to for publication in the local paper suddenly refused to share my submissions on the FB page.   I contacted the page admins immediately and they didn't even know I had submitted anything much less had it declined!  FB and AI were making the decision for them.  I am getting too old for this malarkey.

Mind, I've not had anything picked for weeks now.  Not that it matters, au contraries, but all the photos being selected now {there's a new person in charge} are heavily post edited, something I am not into doing on my photos.  I don't object to removing blemishes or telegraph poles but do draw the line at changing colours, for example.

Well, that's it for now. I've just discovered I haven't got water. I guess I'd better phone Dwr Cymru to see what they have to say.  We've been having a lot of time where there's been low water pressure recently, but it isn't often we are without water completely as we are now.

until next time, stay safe.

Debbie.