Despite getting my flu shot early this year I seem to have contracted it. Oh well, maybe it’ll be shorter and milder than it otherwise would’ve been: think positive, Greg! Being sick I’ve little inspiration to write so OctPoWriMo may be over for me. But, when my head isn’t pounding, I can try to catch up on some of my favorite blogs, maybe even discover some new ones (still trying to be in a glass-half-full mindset).
{As a side note, the positive thinking must’ve helped; my fever broke late this evening. As you might’ve guessed, I worked off and on on this ramble – I don’t rant – all day today.}
I started to read through some of the posts from OctPoWriMo that I’d missed yesterday and found some lovely ones. I also found one from Bastet that made me shake my head in technology-induced frustration: a lovely trimeric. I emphasized the form’s name because it’s one I have recently learned, have written several poems using it, and really like. It is also one that autocorrect “fixed” for me a dozen or so times to “trimetric”! I’ve spent – off and on – a couple of hours finding and fixing autocorrect’s help on that one word between yesterday and today; I think I found and fixed them all, though I’m not positive of that. Why did it take so long, you ask? Well, that’s including the the umpteen times I typed and overrode autocorrect on the word trimeric, hoping to teach my iOS device that I want to spell it that way! It is still fighting me, if you happen to be interested …
I then began to think of all the times my iOS devices have “helped” me that I know of: they love to switch up certain words and I often don’t catch it because when I proof (I know, it doesn’t look like it but I do proof read – usually) I read what I think should be there, not what is there wrongly. I wonder how many times it’s “helped” that I’m oblivious to? (In case you’re wondering, I do the majority of my writing, for various reasons, on my mobile devices.) I have thought that one of these days I might like to change my laptop, down the road a few more years, to an Apple and abandon the Windows/Microsoft platform altogether. Since it’s a long way away from happening, I suppose the point is, well, pointless, but these incidents do make me ponder upon if that’s really a good idea.
Yesterday, despite not feeling at all like it, I had other things that had to be done, all PC/tablet related stuff. And I had dozens of pages that needed to be printed. Last Black Friday I finally scored a deal on a printer that is air print-compatible and prints wirelessly from the laptop; I have to tell you, I was stoked to finally have this ability! The first thing out of the gate the laptop needed to update and reboot – a mere 29 critical updates. I think Microsoft somehow “watches” me and they know when this is going to be the absolute most inconvenient time to automatically do it; usually it’s Sunday morning when I need to load or print a lesson/outline. I almost teared up as I realized what was happening, the computer counting fiendishly down with no way for me to stop the update.
When I finally finished all the update/restart cycles, I just wanted to get on with what needed done. The wireless card then decided to take a nap: “No internet connection for you!” a very soup-nazi sounding voice said. No, really; I heard it. A few troubleshooting-checks later and finally – connection! Then the printer decided to play along, “I’m off line and you can’t do anything about it! Nah, nah, nah!”, it taunted me. The printer and laptop conspire this way a lot.
I devised a rather devilish scheme to trick the printer: I’ll save my work to the cloud and then print it from the iPad; the iOS always fools the printer into working! I felt like a genius because it actually worked. Of course that feeling was short lived when I realized I’d been helped by the spellchecker on the laptop, too, and needed to edit the documents on it, up load them – again – and switch back to the iPad to finally print them. Talk about a real, honest-to-goodness headache, I had one! But, after way too long, I pevailed; I outsmarted the “machines” and got the work done.
As I began to power down the laptop I heard a familiar clunking-whir sound; the printer began spitting out documents – in duplicate – of what I’d asked of it hours ago.
Sometimes I truly do hate technology.
Potholes in the Road of Life 