Not Dying.

Earlier this month, I wrote up a post with my goals on it for the next 30 days in a forum I frequent and I literally wrote as one of my goals “To not die.” Seriously. The past, oh, year has been particularly rough, not just because of the pandemic, but because of severe sleep deprivation. Things just aren’t going well in dreamland, and I have been feeling like crap — and my overall functioning hasn’t been 100%. Obvi. But to add insult to injury, technology has, once again, given me the finger. My phone, which is a fairly new iPhone 12 Mini, began inexplicably not returning to my home network after I was out and about. We ended up running through a whopping 75% of our data plan and got a text about it — gee, thanks AT&T — and finally I figured out the problem. Because I was the culprit, and we’d had a power outage recently, and yes, I had been checking my email (for business purposes!), but not that much. Sheesh. So I figured out that after coming home from the vet and finding myself still on cellular and not on Wi-Fi. Many hours later. Ugh. An update fixed that. But not after struggling with it for weeks. Then my battery started draining extremely quickly. I mean, lightning fast. That’s still kind of happening? A bit. It’s improved after the update, but I still feel like it’s not in keeping with my usage. And my battery…

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Technology Hates Me

A year or so ago I talked about the perils of technology. And eerily, I posted that on November 22, 2016. This particular week in November must be my personal bad-luck week or something. So, I’ve been working on a secret project for almost two years. The release date has been delayed so many times due to factors beyond my control. I finally finished the final edits on it last week. I was starting to get excited because I realized I could maybe swing a release before Christmas. Last night, I also realized that I needed to make a few tweaks before sending it to the proofreader (first time hiring a proofreader; usually my editing is done in-house by one of our marvelous editors). This project is independent of TDP so yeah, I had to hire one. 🙂 Anyway, I was supposed to get it to her yesterday and thought I could do the tweaks and send it off. I should really know better by now. Maybe my excitement has made me forget all the other times that technology screwed me over. So, before I get into the story, you need to know the backstory. I am obsessive about backups. An incident in college where I lost an 8-page paper right before it was due because of a rogue Macintosh made me realize just how easy files can be sucked up into the ether with no hope of return. So, since then, I have made no less than four backups…

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The Perils of Technology

Every year I do a post on thankfulness, but after the day I’ve had today, I’ve decided to do something a bit different. I am a lover of technology. I got my first computer in 1998 (and that was late), a Compaq Presario laptop with a 13″ screen, 32MB of RAM, and a 2GB hard drive. $1,500. I did so much on that thing. Designed my first website (with the now-defunct Geocities — stop laughing), did a ton of digital photography using a very old version of Photoshop, wrote countless poems, and more. I loved that little laptop and believe it or not, I could turn it on today and it would still run (but not go online, obviously). It was my first leap into the computing world, and it opened up so much more for me. Those were the days. I’ve had 10 computers since. I went to desktops for a bit, then decided they were too bulky and took up too much space, so I switched back to laptops. I had the fun experience of Windows ME. I spent $1,700 on a Toshiba laptop with a special graphics card and 1GB of RAM (which was a lot back in 2006) for gaming purposes (now? I can’t even run it. Sad). My computer prior to the one I’m using now had a monitor failure 2 years in that completely sucked patootie. And this one had a fan malfunction and was gone for 11 days and I nearly went nuts…

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