I’m trying to avoid making this sound like a desperate plea for friends, but… please be my friend!

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I swear that I’m losing it.

I’ve been on a diet since August and since I’d been doing so well this week and last, I decided to treat myself to Shakeaway which is my favourite milkshake place. I looked on the website for Shakeaway Croydon which is the closest Shakeaway to my place since the one in Islington has closed down. It said that they were open until 6:30pm.

So I left work today at 5:15pm, took the 45 minute journey to West Croydon, getting there at 6, but… it was closed!!! Oh no! The main door was mostly closed but I managed to speak to a woman inside the shop. She said that the shop closes at 5:30. “But it says 6:30 on your website”, I said. She said “no that can’t be right”. So I said “sorry, I must have got it wrong” but inside I was thinking “grr, why don’t you update the website you annoying woman”. I was sure I was right because I’m always good with details, and, they’ve previously got their opening hours wrong before on their website – see this post where they claimed to be open on Boxing Day on their website but they weren’t.

But, when I got home, I checked the website and it indeed did say 5:30… she was right after all! Barring the unlikely possibility that the woman changed it herself on the website in the 45 minutes it took me to get home, I had got it wrong. Oh my. Now I’ve never claimed that I’m always right, but I thought I was always right with small details. I always know bank account numbers, opening hours, car registrations, dates, spellings, that sort of thing. People often tell me how great my sense of direction is and how easily I can get around places after only having visited them once before.

But this got me thinking about other stupid things I’ve done recently. All the doors on our street to the identical blocks of flats look exactly the same (despite huge different street numbers), and on Friday I spent 60 seconds trying to get into the block of flats before mine, before realising I was in the wrong place. Then on Monday, I did exactly the same thing but with the block of flats after mine! And the amount of times I look at a piece of software code at work that doesn’t work and think “I’m sure I fixed that already!”. I know there are other stupid things I’ve done recently, and if I remember them, I’ll add them here – but remember I’m losing it, so I probably won’t remember them!

I can’t work out if the reason for all this forgetfulness is because I’m just getting old, or because I’ve been on quite a strict diet and the lack of sugar is getting to me.

Okay, so I was trying to build my website on IIS (Microsoft’s Internet Information Services) and I kept getting Access denied by ACL on resource at a certain point. Every single google search result said “check the permissions on your folder”, and there was never a follow-up post. Needless to say, it didn’t work for me. I spent hours trying to fiddle with the permissions, and eventually I compared the permissions to that of a folder that did not have the problem, and they were completely identical. So I did some thinking.

What solved the problem for me is that I had a folder called “xyz.com” – the same as the name of the website. As soon as I renamed the folder and took the “.com” off the folder name (I renamed the folder to “xyz”), it suddenly worked!

I suspect that IIS was reading the “.com” ending of the name and thinking it was an executable – in windows, .COM and .EXE are executable files… but to the best of my knowledge, this doesn’t apply to directories! Stupid IIS!

I hope this helps someone else out there in the IIS world. Please leave a comment if it helped you!