Category Archives: Computers & Software

Do they have a clue

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

What should not be surprising in this day and age is that cross stitch and knitting, like many other hobbies, have dedicated software programs. These programs are usually on the design end, but may also include those that provide progress tracking or databasing of “stash.”

I mention this because I have owned several over the years including programs that support knitting – both design and tracking as well as programs for machine embroidery and cross stitch. It is this last that started today’s day of “I really don’t believe it.” I will also say that in general, I have gotten excellent support from various program companies,

Not so – apparently – with PCStitch. I do have a small WIN based laptop which was purchased after I completely gave up on playing any kind of games on my MAC. The iOS updates rendered all the previous games useless. Most of  the game sites make their money off selling new games and almost never update old ones. I am not looking for fancy, rather Match-3, card games, and the occasional puzzle/hidden object.

All of that is background to the following: since I had the PC, why not get the software that would let me skin some of the hard copy cross stitch patterns so that I can more easily stitch them with tablet based tracking software. It seemed like a good idea anyway. The MAC design software I have, while great on many things, doesn’t make this task very easy.

So I downloaded the software a couple of weeks ago and played with it. The cost was more than reasonable, so went back today and purchased it. I was sent a registration key. It didn’t work. Not once or twice, but it bounced three times.  I emailed the folks. The answer I got was “check the version number” which I did. And checked the update key – current version.

So, after talking to Jill in Australia tonight – I once again downloaded the software. It is now version 11. It opened without problems, but I couldn’t find anywhere to enter the registration key. Jill checked hers. It was registered, but not to her. I checked my copy, it also came up as registered, but to someone I had never heard of, and not the same person as Jill

Then I received an answer: You own version 11 and can download it from our website. This is not an answer. I actually prefer the interface from version 10 and I really would prefer it if my software was registered to me. I am waiting to see what I get for a new answer. Meanwhile – I will learn how to use both Version 10 and Version 11. New is not always better…

Those improvements

Holly Doyne Posted on by 2

When I went to start this note – I found “another improvement” in my software. Well, actually in the software on my iPad. The great idea? A Split keyboard. Now, perhaps this innovation was greeted with cries of enthusiasm by some mobile device users. I did mention I was on my iPad, didn’t I. Hello? I don’t type with my thumbs, I actually type the way I was taught way back in typing class. Back in the 1960s on a typewriter which would put it long before any of the bright bulbs who came up with this idea were born.

In fact, for a long time there was a syndrome called “Blackberry Thumb” which was caused by gripping a Blackberry (the original smart communication device, preceding the touch screen smart phone by years and years) and using thumbs to press those tiny keys. I skipped the Blackberries, the cost and inconvenience was too great and most of the people with whom I worked didn’t have them anyway.  The  US Army certainly wasn’t going to shell out the money needed for them. (If you want the history which started in the late 1990s and more information about the Canadian parent company – go here on Wikipedia)

Meanwhile, it is late, I am irritated and finally figure out that it would be wise just to check the settings in my iPad. Sure enough, I can kill off the split keyboard. Done.

*If the above software improvement didn’t happen to you, then you aren’t using iOS.

 

But then I started thinking about winter of 1972 and driving with some friends while on school break out to Washington DC. It was cold and getting really snowy by the time we hit the Pennsylvania Turnpike. There were signs which said “Another Pennsylvania Turnpike improvement for your safety and convenience.

The punchline? The next set of signs said “No guard rails for the next 32 miles…..”

 

they don’t want to come out

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

Gwen is doing better. I will keep you posted.

Just for general reference – there is really only one major provider of cable in my area. You now have a choice when it comes to internet but not your basic cable service. Obviously, there are alternatives, to include playing games with Apple, streaming from apps (phone, iPad, tablet, laptop etc) or probably Amazon. But your basic cable box with a bajillion (note, this word is now in the dictionary) stations and nothing worth watching is Comcast/Xfinity in my area.

And, when the system is not working, i.e. the screen except for the Chinese new station is totally and completely pixelated you get to attempt to get the problem fixed over the phone. This involves multiple phone calls, different responders each time, and the same questions over and over. Yes, we have reset it several times (hello, reboot? Of course!) We have checked the connections to insure that they aren’t lose and wiggling (duh!). No, we haven’t checked with our other TV, we don’t have a second TV (queue startled silence here). We didn’t bother to tell them that we have had this one for only a few months.

Of course, the Xfinity app is working just fine, but this is a U.S. Sunday and the whole purpose of buying the huge bloody screen was so that someone could watch sports on a screen large enough to identify the players, much less see the ball.

I think it was about five reboots on their ends, several superstitious resets on our but the system was finally working again. What was obvious was that multiple phone calls over the day with repeats of the same non-useful suggestions meant that Comcast didn’t have to visit the house. People on the phone are cheaper than house calls for Comcast. Priority is setting up new suckers, not supporting systems already in place. I am wondering about dampness given all the rain.

I am not holding my breath that it will stay fixed. Neither, apparently was George.


In other bits of notable neighborhood news – the Monkey has a hat

and we have had enough rain that there are mushrooms.

 

 

Other than a hike down to Peet’s and back, I spent the day ignoring the TV issues and put in a total of about 1200 stitches strewn across five projects (well, really four since it was only 12 stitches into the one). I will do an actual listing later this week (so that all you cruisers can just ignore……

And the saga continues

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

Yes, I know that I am whining. And that the inconvenience of dealing with a new phone is a first world problem. I get all that. What I also get is that I have the financial and intellectual ability to deal with the royal PTIA involved.

The last time I made a phone switch, the backup worked flawlessly. This time? Not so much. All the new improvements in the software mean that every last flipping location wants me to sign in. Again. I don’t know about you – but passwords are not me. Yes, I have most of them buried in m browser software, but spending the time is driving me nuts. 

 I will survive – even if someone very unkindly mentioned that old Badger meme yesterday which means I now have an ear worm singing badger, badger, badger … mushroom, snake. Yes, that was 2003 with multiple updates since them. Go google. Or listen to Tom Smith’s version…. to be found on Bandcamp…

Me? I think I am going to spend the rest of the evening blowing up things on computer games….

Replacing the phone

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

For those of you who don’t remember/weren’t around a few years ago – I had a six month period in which me and phones did not have a good relationship.  Other than the fact that I still put my phone down, then can’t immediately bring it to hand (AppleWatches – drive me nuts, can’t find my phone without it) – I normally don’t have huge issues.

But there was that time when first – I lost my phone down a waterfall in Iceland. It wasn’t that I planned on doing that -it was that it slipped out of my pocket while I was taking pictures. I got the pictures – but my phone, in the case with all sorts of important ID and the rest, was permanently lost. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of a fellow traveler (you know who you are) the rest of that trip would have really sucked.

So, after going through the pain of a phone replacement on return to home, I was fine till the replacement disappeared between one moment and the next while in a hotel in Kathmandu. At this point, I was kind of numb to the idea of losing things – wasn’t using my phone for internet or calls or…. in fact, come to think about it – I am not sure why I had it with me. So that was replacement #2.

The third was when I realized that the replacement phone that my dear husband picked up for me had 16gig of storage. Being someone who has been known to read books, listen to audiobooks and otherwise entertain myself – dropping from 128 -> 16 didn’t work.

Today I took the plunge and replaced my phone. For the last year, I have had serious battery issues. Having to recharge one’s phone every 3-4 hours isn’t great. In fact, it becomes a matter of always traveling with an external charger/solo charger. Not fun in the least but necessary. The new phone took a bite out of my wallet, but I had budgeted for it.

The Apple store is being careful and restricting the number of people inside. The other new policy is to not leave customers unattended for long. That means that my lovely sales person got to hang out and talk to me while we set up my new phone including updating the operating system and starting the backup to load all the information from my previous phone.

Which left having to reset passwords on all my email accounts when I got home since I didn’t remember them all. I don’t think most of us know all our passwords – depending on either a software program or other computer mechanism for tracking them. I just checked. my phone is charged, a new case ordered, email downloaded and it is back to stitching….

stitching –

 

Fifty-one minutes

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

of a support call to Apple and I finally was able to resolve the computer glitch that had been driving me nuts since earlier this month.

What should have been simple turned out to be a bit more complex than either the supervisor or I had thought. The starting problem was simple – you remember that I was complaining about not being able to use Air Drop to move photos from my phone to the laptop? No, well, half the time the phone didn’t “see” the laptop and the other ½, well, my laptop didn’t want to deal with accepting anything.

From there we progressed to “hard drive full” please …… no more than 10-15 minutes into trying to get anything done.  Several days of this was driving me nuts. There is a limit to how many times I care to hard reboot my system.

When I looked at what I had on the computer – I could account for less than 200GIG of my 499+GIG hard drive. So what the heck? It wasn’t in any of the files, folders, or system. But there was this category called “other” which had LOTS in it – ranging from 350-400Gig. What the??

.The lovely supervisor tech and I walked through location after location on my hard drive. We went into all the systems files & containers & libraries. It took about fifty minutes, but we located the issue. Believe it or not, apparently one of my dozens of Zoom sessions had been recorded, then stuffed in an archive where I had neither access or clue. This sucker was huge. Just deleting it solved the problem.

I took notes…

(and Apple care has just paid for itself. My other option – of course, would have been to wipe the hard drive and start over…..

Drop it again

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

Not.

After being totally accepting of snapping the occasional photo with my phone, AirDrop decided not to work. Not from my phone to my laptop anyway.

Sneaking up on it from either side didn’t accomplish anything, nor did rebooting both devices. My laptop could “see” George’s phone. For that matter, it was also registering Alex’s from downstairs.  Several days into this, I checked for updates. Nada.

Makes trying to update project pages, send emails with pictures, or, for that matter add anything bright and cheerful to this post.

Day 3 – Liberty

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

in which I attempt to draft a couple more pages, discover that I have left some important information at home and find that my computer doesn’t want to do audio. Since neither the speakers or headphones seem to respond to anything on a reliable basis, I am down to using my phone for both FaceTime and YouTube.

Oh, wah. Not. There are much worse fates than not having computer based connections.

There is a second side

Holly Doyne Posted on by 4

Pat brought up a point in response to my post about friends around the world that I really think merits further thought. So many people have become dependent on social media for their relationships that we forget that social media is not always a bad thing, that it may not serve to isolate rather than bring together. It can be a way for those who are isolated, house-bound, disabled to be able to connect with others.

If you haven’t read Tom Standage’s “The Victorian Internet”* I might suggest you borrow it from your local public library and peruse it. He makes the point that our methods of written communication have changed, but Western Society as a whole had a long standing history of communicating in written format. For anyone who reads any fiction at all set in Edwardian, Georgian, or Victorian England, sending notes and letters was just as common a task as managing household accounts. Because of distance, most wrote letters. Your friend from school? You communicated by letter with them over holidays and vacation periods. Announcements? They went by post. Invitations? The same.

We seem to have a natural inclination to want to share thoughts, feelings, and knowledge with others. Mostly by the written word, as it isn’t time dependent on reaching the other person at the exact moment we have the thought. It will be there, waiting for them when they have time. But that element of time has changed as well. When communication was routinely by letter and post, unless you lived city center in a major metropolis (read NYC, London, Rome, Paris, Frankfurt) you did not expect a reply back the same day. If the distances were greater, you automatically added in round trip postal transport time for your letter.

Now? It seems like everyone wants an instant response to whatever method of communication is attempted. Rarely, anymore does anyone pick up the phone. Rather, send off a text or email. I am discounting snapchat, twitter, instagram and Facebook for the moment since those are “toss it out there and see if anyone responds” methods of attempting communication. Personally, I don’t view those as communication methods since they are not really targeted and an answer is optional.

All those years of radio and television which occupied the intervening years between the development of more instant methods of communication and the present did change everyone’s mind set. Rather than actively controlling one’s time, increasingly people became passive consumers of whatever was put out. Watching is not the same as reading. Seeing is not the same as creating character voices and actions in one’s own mind when reading Agatha Christie vs. watching a BBC production.

But those intervening years were hard on those home bound. Yes, entertainment came to them via radio and TV, but it did not come with human interaction. People would pick up a telephone rather than send a note or an invitation. At first this change could be viewed simply as an economic barrier, but it rapidly expanded to the point where, if you could not communicate on a phone, you were going to be excluded. Think of everyone with hearing or speaking impairment, those with mobility challenges such that reaching that phone in a reasonable time was not an achievable accomplishment.

Fast forward (see, a VCR term) to today. There are those who are unable to handle direct human interactions and might well have functioned much better in a society with strict structural behavior norms and codes. But I honestly believe that those individuals are a rarity. Rather, the modern, although occasionally annoyingly immediate forms of electronic communication, while perhaps bombarding us to the point of overload, also provide for some individuals in our society, their only window on the world. The only method by which they may become a productive and self-valued member of society. Amazon (Amazon, Audible) no matter some of their faults, provides a significant amount of customer service through individuals, who by working out of their homes, can have gainful employment. You don’t have to hear to be able to answer a chat, resolve a request for a return of an electronic book or audiobook.

So Pat’s point is well taken. The same methodologies which bombard us with trivia and may push people into superficial relationships also offer others a chance to have friends, to connect, and to live full lives even without the ability to leave home, drive a car, or travel the world.

 

*I referenced a book of his about this time last year when I went on a rant about lawyers, and the total misappropriation of words and misuse in the English Language. Should you be a native speaker of a different language, I am sure that you would be able to find parallels. Not sure why you would try, but there it is

Friends around the world

Holly Doyne Posted on by 14

For those of us who travel and are at all sociable, you collect friends around the world. If you don’t travel, but have professional interests–likely the same. For all the fiber fanatics, there is Ravelry, so again, communications with other people who share your interest around the world.

Thinking back, I first started “collecting” people who I knew only over the internet in about 1995 with the original Knitlist. Hosted on a university server somewhere, it wasn’t one of the alt.knit.whatever discussion groups. Rather, it was a traditional group list just slightly advanced from the original bulletin boards of Fidonet. It was how I got to know Pat in Michigan, Cat in Australia, Isobel in New Hampshire, and Mary who lived in upstate New York at the time. Not all that long after, the deployments to the Balkans started which added Kris from Washington State and Val from the reserves. Shamash, the Reconstructionist list added in Ira in Boston, Steven in Los Angeles, and Steve in Rochester.

My first serious, organized attempt at staying connected started in 1998 with my deployment to the Balkans. That email list has continued to the present day with additions and deletions as time and interest dictated. Some included are people who I have known since college, others are those who I have gotten to know in the last couple of years. Two are adults, but I first met when I delivered them back in the days when I was doing OB. I have added those with whom I have served, from both the German and UK military.

I mention this now as I think of one German reserve officer who I first met in 1999 while attached to the German Military. A very junior sergeant then, Christian was looking to attempt the US Army’s Expert Field Medical Badge. We are now 20 years down the line, he is a fire department Capt, works search and rescue and is an officer in the Reserves. Or one of the most brilliant medical corps officers I have ever met – Beverly is now retired from the UK and, after earning a PhD, continues serving by researching veteran’s health in Scotland.

There are those I know from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France, Israel – military, former military, families, friends, average people working to improve the lives of others.  I would like at times to believe that I make a contribution, but perhaps the most important part is to simply stay connected and remember.

Do you really need that?

Holly Doyne Posted on by 18

I really appreciate my new MacBook Pro. Except for two things. The latest software update has eliminated all support for 32-bit software. Now for most people, the response is Huh? What is a bit, as apposed to a byte, as apposed to wallaby? But for me, it turns out that the only difference it makes is significant and probably for the better. Big Fish Games (yes, those folks) don’t have 64-bit Mac games. All the games I have wasted time with over the years are 32-bit. I have emailed them, they say they are “working” on getting the games updated.

I don’t believe it for an instant. There is no money in updating old games. It is not likely to sell most of them. Far better to continue to produce new ones. The problem, of course, is that everything in the pipeline is 32-bit. It is saving me money, so that is probably a good thing. However it leaves me with only one game (free from the Apple store) with which to waste my time. Back to the iPad I guess.

The much more irritating change is Apple’s desire to require 2 step identification. On the surface it seems like a good idea, make your device more secure and less likely to be jacked, should it be lost or stolen. But, tell me please, exactly WHY I should have either my face or fingerprint on file with Apple? Especially the fingerprint.

I know that I have fingerprints on file, that is what you have when you spend 33 years in the US military. No sweat. I don’t care if those fingerprints are in law enforcement databases or the FBI because of contributing to the US military. But, I really, really don’t see why a commercial entity such as Apple needs to have my fingerprint. And if any of you really believe that Apple (altho better than FB, Twit, SnpCt, Instawhatever) is not going to use your information, I have beach front property in Scottsdale to sell you.

No photos

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

Ok, I thought I had the system beaten. It doe take sending out 2-3 emails rather than one, but it looks like I can possibly get group emails through the “new improvements” of Gmail. But then, things started bouncing today.

What was different? Oh, yes, photos. It looks like no attachments if it is a group email. Or rather, no included code. Ok, I can work around that – and can attempt to attach pictures? Or provide a link in the text which would go directly to the photo on my website. That might just work. But then I will have to figure out how many are allowed and if there are any special limits that gmail has placed without bothering to tell me.

I feel truly sorry for anyone who is trying to use GMAIL for business. No longer able to send out newsletters, for example. I have resisted switching back to yahoo.groups or google.groups because that would give them a permanent list of who I am sending to. That is just none of their business. The same for any of the emailing services. For me to do a group mail, I would have to upload a list of email addresses. Like I would do that?

All of which leave me with the question of a mailing list that has been running for 20 years. Since I am not on Facebook, nothing is there. Twitter? 140 characters. Not words, not paragraphs, characters. Enough said. Most days I actually want complete sentences maybe sprinkled with punctuation.  I am not egotistical enough to think that everyone is going to wander over to my webpage every day just to see if I have come up with something new. That puts the burden on you, rather than having me reach out.

What I will also be watching over the next few days is whether there are some particular systems which are more likely to sputter when an email from me arrives. At least then I could place all those poor souls (pour soles – got to love spellcheck) onto one of the three groups that now exist.

Meanwhile, I survived another run to SF for class this morning, managed to forget my vest in one of the faculty offices, and BARTed to Berkeley where I will spend the next couple of hours immersed in Public Health. Now, I just need to figure out how to access the course materials on line…

Stealing our words

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

there are certain words which have definite meanings to us children of the 60s. Those of us who grew up with mainframes, set vocabularies and a sense of humor about the Jaberwok. Not so these modern children who think nothing of co-opting a perfectly well defined term or phrase and standing it on its head.

Tom Standage, in his Writing on the Wall, 2000 Years of Social Media
————->-8 ——–
(did you see what just happened? Rather than just assert something, I went and found a reference that backs up my point in order to give in emphasis and decrease the chance that someone might question it. After all, if someone else said it, it must be true. Meanwhile, I have been totally and completely corrupted. Do NOT under ANY circumstances have anything to do with lawyers, how they think or how they write. You will find yourself totally ruined by the experience. Trust me.)
————->-8 ——–
discusses social opinion, commentary and how opinions change. It is a fun book. But what I am discussing is something slightly different. It is the total and complete stealing of a term of art and changing it beyond recognition.

My disgust and anger today revolve around the degeneration in the use of “HACK.” This is a word that we all know. Whether it is from sports or a glancing familiarity with with axes or hatchets. I understand “hack” and it means to break in, by unauthorized means, through a computer software code or into someone’s computer (mainframe in the era where I started).

Some fool in the 1990s decided to combine two otherwise useful words – HACK and MARATHON into Hackathon. This poor bastard of a word implies a session where a bunch of computer geeks race their bleeding fingers in the pursuit of a software solution against a time clock (and others). Right from the start, there are several problems with this analogy: the first is that a marathon is an INDIVIDUAL (caps intended) race, not a collaboration; the second is that a marathon is a sporting event with specific rules. Back to hacking: the only rules in hacking are that you don’t give away your tricks in cracking into places that your are not supposed to be and you don’t rat out your fellow hacker. Seriously, comparing a group of nerds (present party included) who traditionally fuel on caffeine and Cheetos with seriously physically fit athletes is ludicrous.

So now we have “hackathons” most of which should be much more properly named “brainstorming sessions.” It isn’t computer people any more, the term has become wide spread and used by just about any group that wants a catchy idea for its symposium. All of this leads to what set me off in the first place.

A group of lawyers. Seriously, a group of lawyers – the field isn’t relevant but it was NOT related to tech or software – had a Hackathon in the student lounge at Hastings. They are sitting there in rows listening to various speakers, nodding their heads (those that weren’t taking notes or busy with their smart phones). There is not work-group space in sight.

Brainstorming? Conference? Working group? (well if a group has over a hundred participants). And, I repeat LAWYERS! who normally are extremely precise about their word usage. But there they sit, happily holding a hackathon.

I rest my case.

But I don’t want Bing

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

For whatever reason, one of my browsers has decided to default to BING regardless of which engine is in change when I start the search.

I am neither amused or pleased. The list I have generated pops up, followed by a hijack of the page to the new search engine. It is only Chrome, not Safari which means, more than likely that I will be stuck completely the use of the native Apple browser. Blocking Bing hasn’t worked. Deleting it multiple times doesn’t work and I challenge any but the most game worth of opponents to be able to beat out the millisecond or so where my preferred page with link appears before blinking away.

Perhaps this is another one of those “another improvement for your safety and convenience” improvements? Kind of like the signs along the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the mid-70s where the next sign would say “No Guard Rails for the next 25 miles?”

in other words, we think it will be better, somehow, some way and perhaps some day, but proceed at your own risk.

Email delays

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

As it turns out this evening all my good efforts yesterday were rewarded by gmail. Not. At exactly 1947 I started receiving message after message stating that there were mail delays and that they would continue an attempt to deliver yesterday’s email for another 47 hours.

Oh really?

I can understand one or two emails bouncing. That happens all the time especially since I know a significant number of people who travel and might have a full mailbox. But think about it – it is really, really hard to fill a mailbox anymore. At least for anyone who doesn’t use AOL.

But anyway – everything bounced – to include the cc: to my own non-gmail accounts. Go figure. Any who – it wasn’t the highlight of my day. That was rounding up good friends at SFO Airport and bringing them home for a couple of nights.

We will not talk about the traffic on the way home. Bay Bridge construction during the day? Oh, please – thrill us all by closing a couple of lanes before the last SF exit. At least the traffic early in the morning when I drop off Dani and the dog isn’t anything at all.

And now to see what happens with this email…..

Updates

Holly Doyne Posted on by 1

As I found out again, the WordPress App on my iPad just spins forever but doesn’t seem able to upload a post.

Happily humming along, I think I have been updating the blog.

Nope – the post is written and 30 minutes later it is still saying “Uploading” Thank goodness I can take a screenshot and save the post. Most of the words are visible and it isn’t extremely difficult to fill in the blanks covered by the box claiming it was working…. not that it was.

Otherwise it was a quiet day. George had board meetings, I worked on a couple of projects. We took Noah out to dinner at the end of the day before leaving him in New Haven and heading back to the hotel.

Frozen Phone

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

Did I mention that my phone had an accident that involved water on Saturday?

I initially thought it was going to be fine. There were a few quirks – like taking a dozen screen shots related to nothing when it wanted to and not taking screen shots when I attempted the same task. But I was hoping that all was recoverable. I thought it would be happy spending all day yesterday and part of today in a bag of rice.

Oh, not so as I sadly found out. Charging the phone was not an option and nothing was working quite right.

So….. after we spent a couple of hours with our architect redesigning the kitchen from your standard apartment ugly to something everyone could live with (and adding a bit of lighting while we were at it) I went to the Apple Store.

The bad news? Phone might make it, but probably not. I could wait and see, but that would leave me in New York this coming weekend potentially without a phone. The Good News? George had purchased the Apple Care plan for my phone. It didn’t cost me all that much to just replace it, get a new screen cover and load the backup. (It is here where I remind you once again that if you are not good about automatic backups, please, please, please set them up so that they happen with frequent regularity on auto-pilot).

And when I arrived home? My new phone cover had been delivered. I am back to the wrist strap in hopes that it will help…..

Not that I needed this or anything –

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

Ok – the good news up front – A’s 7: Cleveland 3. Getting back and forth on the BART worked.

the rest? Meh –

 

These are screen shots that my phone chose to take.

That is right – it just fired off on its own. Along with changing channels on the radio, deleting email and otherwise driving me up the wall.

It could be because it got wet yesterday, but that would make it my fault and I would never want to own that expensive little errors. It will spend another night with rice since I elected to go to the game today rather than to the Apple store….

No clue

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

what happened to my original post for today but have a feeling that the WordPress App needs some serious updating. At least my plan was to write in the app and upload it (in a few of my 60 free minutes that I get for my level of Latitudes membership).  Thinking about all the complaints since Royal changed from the 1 or 2 or x hours free to the 1 day/2 day whatever free – I have decided that having a whole day free is much better than attempting to check in for a few minutes a day. In reality, it takes normally about five minutes to get logged in and then if you get dropped carrier, the minutes have been known to continue to run.

In any case, I wound up attempting to use the app. It didn’t work. Of course, my Tylenol isn’t working all that great either. There is a lovely cafe not that far from where the ship docked where Noah and I stopped and checked email. Then we stopped at Walmart. I picked up some more paracetamol, he found sun glasses. We spent almost nothing. This is perhaps the favorite stop on the run for the crew (chance to stock up for cheap and find internet for very little).

I headed back to the ship for my second (or was it third) nap of the day.

Honestly, If I start feeling a little more human and less like chopped liver I’ll try to do a better job of describing the ship, the eats, the crew and the trip.

Down memory lane

Holly Doyne Posted on by  

last night I finally downloaded the 2007-2015 content from proseknitic.de in preparation for cancelling the site.  Should I bother to tell you how many spam comments I had to kill. I found them, of course after I had done the import so I am hoping that most fell outside the import windows.

Then I took a look at comments from way back when and started following links from all the knitters.

Should I not have been surprised to find most of the blogs inactive for years or that I have lost track of a number of people? Part of it makes sense. The blog[s] drifted away from pretty solidly knitting content only to being more about travel with the occasional opinion rant more than fiber. In other cases, I think various people found that Ravelry was easier to use than posting on a blog where few people ever commented. Feedback is important unless your soul is basically that of a writer, in which case you just need to express yourself and the h* with anyone who can’t take a joke.

Thinking back – April 1998-March 2007 – email list. March 2007 (ten years – that is quite scary in some ways) to the present with more or less consistency running both the blog and an email list that varies in size depending on the subject, the year and the drop of those not interested. The last has been balanced by the gain of new friends.

 
My first mailing lists actually went out from my laptop but through a military server. Use of that server lasted till ~2000 when it finally quit tossing outside emails and implemented some security procedures. After that it was min.net for 10 years till the guys got bored and went out of business. Then there was YahooGroups which I think lasted almost until the UK. At some point the restriction on number of addresses was lifted and I went back to emailing straight. Now? Gmail doesn’t have a problem with a serious number of addressees and cross posting from the blog is pretty much cut and paste along with the occasional editing.
 

At the end of my session with the computer I verified that those pictures which were still on the old blog transferred to the new. Those which seem to have disappeared off that site won’t be found till I dig through my photo archives at home. I knew there was a reason that I backed up everything. I’ll finish PDFing the archives and pages just to have them before pulling the plug on the last three sites hosted in Germany.

 

Clock Fractal

I am making progress

15 March 2017