The Curmudgeonly Professor

How My New Computer Got from Shanghai China to St. George UT

The tracking details provided by HP gave me some idea about the complex logistics involved in shipping one laptop computer from Shanghai China to St. George UT, all timed to the exact minute:

Feb 18 2013 Monday

6:58 a.m. shipment information sent to FedEx

9:30 p.m. Left Fed Ex origin facility

Feb. 19 2013 Tuesday

Apparently my computer rested at the local FedEx facility in Shanghai

Wednesday Feb 20 2013 was a busy, busy day in the new life of my new computer, to wit:

1:24 am international shipment import release

1:38 am in transit  Shanghai CN

9:35am in transit Narita JP

12:46 p.m. arrived at Fed Ex location Anchorage AK

2:17pm international shipment import release Anchorage AK

2:53pm in transit Incheon KR.  Are you kidding? How did we get from Anchorage AK to Korea?

4:47pm departed FedEx location Anchorage AK

8:48pm in transit Shenzhen CN    How does China get back in the loop from Anchorage?

9:41pm arrived at FedEx location Oakland CA

Today Thursday Feb 21 2013

2:08 am Depart Fed Ex location Oakland CA

3:08am at destination sort facility Las Vegas NV

10:00 am at local FedEx facility St. George UT

10:34 on FedEx vehicle for delivery

Holy cow!  How much extra does outsourcing cost in extra cost of transport?

Hallelujah!  Just as I typed the above sentence the doorbell rang and here was the FedEx guy with my Shanghai computer.  Now to open the box and realize I am way over my head on Microsoft Word 2013, Windows 8, and a zillion new doodads.  But it should be fun.  Now I have 3 laptops lined up side by side until I get things straightened out.  Wish me luck.  Maybe I'm too old for this stuff and should go back to a Baby Brownie camera and a yellow pad and pencil.  But here goes.

 

 

In My Eighty-First Year: My New Life with an iPad is Terrific, and the Evolution of Modern Technology

I have always tried to keep up with emerging technological trends.  In grade school, we used stick pens with pen points dipped in an ink bottle and made numerous trips to the pencil sharpener.  Then I went through a series of wonderful Parker 51 pens.  Then some genius invented the ball point pen and life was never the same.  As years went by, ball point pens got cheaper and cheaper until they became freebies.  The best free ball point pens at any doctor's office in Utah are at my wife's nephrologist's office in St. George, bar none.

When I was in high school, I spent my hard earned sugar beet hoeing money on a Royal portable, the pride of my life.  I used the case one Christmas to stick under my long sock, which I had cut a hole in, so I could maximize Santa's bounteous stocking gifts.  I was rewarded with a typing case lid full of coal.  What a mean Santa!  Then, eventually, my wife and I graduated to a gleaming, magnificent, perfect Selectric II IBM typewriter on which we typed my doctoral dissertation, numerous times as it turned out since you couldn't make a correction on page 25 without retyping the entire blankety-blank 300 pages once more, unlike today's coddled and spoiled students who simply plink the computer screen for a correction and then go drink a caffeinated Diet Coke.

Then we used IBM punch cards and a forest of keypunches and card sorters and hauled boxes of punched cards across the U of Michigan campus to the IBM 650 computer which took up an entire sacred fortress in a building far removed from where I worked.  And then, one night, lightning struck the computer at 4:00 a.m. and I had to start my string of calculations for 30 variable multiple regression equation solutions all over again.  Next was the mag card typewriter.  Then next was the itty-bitty Apple computer with a toenail's worth of storage, and then the matrix dot printer, and then the beached-whale sized computer monitor, and, eventually, my MacBook Pro, now years out of date.

But then, oh blessed day, my family took pity on me on my 80th birthday and came up with a brand spanking new, top-of-the line iPad and my life has not been the same since.  I thought my first generation Kindle was cool several years ago when I bought it for my wife, who read one book on it, chucked it aside, and opined "I'd rather read a real book."  Then I bought the new Kindle Fire on pre-order when it first came out, a sucker for new stuff and full well-knowing a new version would be coming out shortly.  I love the Kindle Fire.  But, oh my gosh, the iPad.  I will never do another moment's vacuuming, cooking, or cleaning because it will take me approximately 10 years to download all the aps and photos I can crowd on to this little sweetie.  The ease of reading email, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news, etc., is incredible.  The only complaints I have are (1) the screen is a bit too sensitive for midguided finger touches and swishes around a bit too freely, and (2) I am not a proficient typist on a small keyboard, though I know you can buy another keyboard for the iPad to make it easier.  So now, I lean back in my new recliner my wife just bought me since the old one was defunct, press on the iPad, and I am lost for an infinite period of time.

I just wonder when they will bring out the new iPad and what features and advantages it will have over the new one I have.  But at least I have a better iPad than any of my kids for the moment and I no longer have to watch Matlock reruns.

White Cactus on May 3 2012

How to Become a Computer Techie

For several weeks, I was afraid my mouse was dieing, becoming deceased.  I expected I would have to order a new mouse.  I read all the repair stuff on the internet to no avail.  The mouse continued to freeze the cursor so I could no longer post wisdom on the internet to annoy people.  I started looking up the cost of a new mouse.  Then, on a hunch, I took a ball point pen and dug in the hole for the laser, pulled out a wad of lint, and the mouse was summarily revived, happy and fully functioning.  Just in case you ever suffer from the same problem, no charge for my advice.

Living in Password Hell

Don't bother to tell the Curmudgeonly Professor that there are ways to organize and download or upload or whatever the plethora of passwords that provide entry into the glorious world of the internet and beyond.  I must look into these more efficient methods one of these first days if I ever get around to it.  For now, I have six 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of plain white paper with passwords scrawled in all directions, corrected, redlined, x'd out, written sideways, upside down, in a half dozen colors of ball point ink.  These pages are now battered, covered with grease spots, soaked with wrinkles from spilled soda pop.  When some inconsiderate website which has provided unrestricted entry for awhile pops up with a "enter password" command, I usually try the two or three most common combinations to see if something will work.  The computer imperiously tells me "you are stupid.  We have no record of this combination of user name, password, and ID, and furthermore we will block your entry until you shape up and apply for a new magic word."  Then I begin searching through my six pages of notes, trying to decide which of several passwords and user names I might have for, say, Yahoo, Facebook, Windows Live, Amazon, or whatever.  If I have not crossed out the defunct passwords, I continue to work my way through them in sequence until something works.  Or, if it doesn't, I send in a whine to the site and ask to reset my password.  I usually reset it to the same one I had before.

Of course, passwords are no laughing matter.  Some idiot hacked my MSN email account two years ago and I have never recovered.  Who knows how many people kept emailing me at that address, wondering if I were deceased or had just chucked my computer in a fit of anger in the Santa Clara River to watch it float down to Lake Mead.  At least it saved me answering a lot of emails and my life has seemed to continue on in the same confused state in which it originally reposed.

I really do plan to sort out and rewrite my six pages of passwords into some coherent list.  But then I am overwhelmed with the thought that I will just have to change many of them as time goes along and the new list won't look any better than the last one.  Meanwhile, I dwell in Password Hell.

Why Computers are a Royal Pain

The Curmudgeonly Professor is especially grouchy this morning.  Affecting his grouchiness and curmudgeonliness are the following instigators:

• I subscribed to MobileMe for one year for a wasted $99 and just canceled it.  MobileMe replaced the dotMac feature on Apple, which I liked.  Now I get a half dozen popups every few minutes from "file sync agent" telling me my MobileMe account has expired.  Idiots!  I have searched the internet to try and expunge this worthless piece of trash.
• When I post photos on typepad.com on my PC and then add narrative, I get a flickering cursor.  The only way I can get rid of it is to restart.  Then I have to open on my Mac to add the narrative.  Who is responsible for this stupidity?
• I can't post live links on typepad on my PC.  I have to do it on my Mac.
• Stupid wireless on PC keeps turning from blue to red, turning itself off.  Moron!

If there are any geeks out there who wish to sympathize with the Curmudgeonly Professor and provide clues about what to do in re: computer glitches, kindly let me know.  Thank you.

Watching a Computer Gag, Evade Life Support, and Die an Agonizing Death

I'm not sure how many years ago I bought my wife an Inspiron 5100 Dell computer since she certainly was entitled to have her own computer to pay bills, write letters, and surf the internet.  For all these years I have congratulated myself on the durability of this durable piece of electronic gadgetry.  No longer.

One day, my wife yelled, "My computer won't work!"  I am supposed to be a techie, which I am not.  I last had access to innumerable 18 year old techies at BYU who came running every time a computer illiterate needed help.  Our life depended on teen age kids who somehow had learned computers from birth while we, who had been working on computers since their inception, knew squat about how the things worked.  Just as our lives depend on teen agers when we go to McDonald's.  But I digress.

I went into the other room and, sure enough, the computer had the blue kiss-of-death blue crash screen telling me the computer had encountered an egregious and unbelievably stupid error caused by the lack of proper attention.  After spending hours, trying to resurrect this clunker of a computer dinosaur, I encountered an astonishing variety of entertaining screens.  "Your computer has encountered a serious error."  "Hard disc error." "Restart your computer with Alt-Ctr-Del."  Joke from Dell, actually.  Why can't the computer say simply "You're computer is now officially a POC, no longer a PC, and it has outlived it's designated cyber life by five years already and if you had any brains you would not try to start this neanderthal piece of junk but buy the newest, latest, greatest electronic marvel which will, in its turn, become an antiquated and worthless POC in approximately six months--or less."

I let the computer sit for three days.  I turned it on not expecting anything to happen.  Miracle of miracles, it started up!  I got on the internet!  I opened files!  I was consoled through my weeping as I read the encouraging words "You're computer has recovered from a serious error."  No kidding.  But, hold on.  Moments later, and you guessed it: Darth Vader and the evil forces of computer obsolescence and the genius writers of crash screens turned out in force.  One ingenious disaster screen after another.  The old and faithful Inspiron began its final death throes and agonies, choking and gagging, and telling me that this was an old POC and that everything in the world was wrong with it.

As I recall, I paid about $1100 for this wondrous machine.  I checked the properties key and discovered the ancient denizen of computer trash piles had a magnificent 30G hard drive.  Imagine!  Thirty G!   A miracle compared to the 54 MB Apple I once had on my desk with not enough room to write a letter.  So I shopped and I shopped and I checked computer coupons and I looked at WalMart and Costco and Office Depot and Office Max and Staples and HP and Dell sites and studied reviews and ratings.  I settled on a new HP for $550 with, get this, 350G hard drive, enough room so my wife could save every bit of information for 10 years and still not fill it up.  The new computer will arrive on June 22, Amazon tells me, then I will have a couple of day's work ahead of me to get the thing up and running.  Amazon, by the way, was cheaper than HP for the same model.

So, who knows?  If one is to live in the age of technology, one must endure the humiliations and frustrations of blue screens and a plethora of astonishing crashes and death throes and then cheerfully go forth and Twitter, Tweet, Facebook, blog, surf, email, and whatever else comes along tomorrow.  Life was simpler when we listened to Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy on an old beat up radio and that was the extent of our technology. 

Computer Geeks, Help Me! How Do You Get Rid of A Blinking Cursor on a PC?

Every once in awhile a get a blinking cursor while I am trying to post on typepad.  Some times the hour glass is blinking with the arrow cursor, some times with the four-way cross.  I have to shut down and restart on my PC to get rid of it, and even then it comes back part of the time.  Not a problem on the Mac.  Can find nothing in Windows help anywhere about this issue.  Help!

A Persistent Nagger to Get Me To Learn PhotoShop: Do You Ever, Ever Finish Reading a Book or Learn Computer Software?

I'll say one thing for David Peters:  He is a persistent, unrelenting nagger.  He wants you to learn PhotoShop.  I got his "Photoshop for Newbies" but have delayed watching the tutorials since I have been working on QuickMats4 and my ability to multitask in learning software is limited, to say the least.  Read through the following list and see how many of these examples describe your own personal lives.  From David Peters:

I've just been reading some AMAZING statistics produced by
Gunter and Amazon.com

They are very eye opening. Here's a few samples...

1. 64% of people who buy a book NEVER even open it

2. 57% of people who buy software NEVER use it

3. 42% of people who buy music only listen to it ONCE

4. 79% of people who start to read a book NEVER finish it

5. 83% of people who start to use new software NEVER use it
again (the main reason being insufficient knowledge about
and training on the application)

6. 94% of people NEVER read the software users manual (no
surprise there)

What does all this mean to us?

Simply put it means that statistically only 7% of people who
buy software (especially software as complex as Photoshop)
will ever learn to use it.

Or put another way...

"Statistically there is a 93% probability you will NEVER
learn Photoshop"

My wife and I had two bookstores in a previous incarnation.  We were a dealer for LDS (Mormon) books, besides carrying a full line of paperbacks and limited hardback fiction and nonfiction.  One result was immediately apparent:  women bought most of the church books to give to their husbands, hoping, I am sure, their husbands would shape up.  But few husbands ever read the books, from their own accounts, and I'm sure most of them made few self improvements.  Thus, buying books for gifts is problematic unless you know the recipient is a devoted reader since the temptation is always great, two years later, to ask, "Did you read that book I gave you in 1997?"  To which, the answer is, "Well, I started on it [i.e., I looked at the title page], but haven't quite got around to finishing it."  All of this discussion confirms the message ringing in my ears all my life from an elementary school teacher:  "Dwight starts lots of things but he rarely ever finishes anything."  So there you have it.

Nine Things I Hate about My Mac Computer

By and large, I have loved my three year old MacBook Pro.  Except for when I hated it. Here are seven things I hate about my Mac:

1. I can't increase the hard drive space and I have run out of Gs.
2. The stupid CD-DVD disc drive doesn't have the nice little PC button to open it and get rid of the disc.  I've wasted all kinds of time trying to get the stupid thing to eject. 
3. My lovely MacBook Pro wiped out 5000 photos last spring, never to be retrieved, even with expert help. 
4. My ignorant MacBook Pro glitched about 20,000 Aperture photos with red blotches and I got zero sympathy from the Apple Care *(Care?) people.  Eventually the blotches went away, but I still don't trust it not to return.
5. Apple invented something called Parallels which supposedly was supposed to run Windows along with Apple programs, but I never thought it worked well enough to use, and I didn't have enough hard drive space anyway. 
6. Apple wasn't about to install drivers for my Canon 7550 printer, which was only a couple of years old. 
7. The MacBook Pro is way too expensive for the features you get. 
8. The whirling colored beach ball of death, which goes around, and around, and around whenever the computer gets constipated or doesn't like what you told it to do.  Stuff freezes up way too often.
9. The idea that the 5% of the computer using population that uses Macs is somehow superior to the 95% of the clods using PCs.  Am I missing something here?   

 So, as I have reported earlier, I relegated my Mac to the back burner and am  happily using my new HP with 400G and various other goodies for $1000 less than a replacement Mac would have cost. I'll speak kindly about the HP until it crashes.  Then woe, woe unto it.

The Advantages of Having Two Computers Running Side by Side

When the hard drive on my Mac about choked on my 20,000 plus photos, I found it was cheaper to buy a new PC with 400G so I bought a nice HP.  Rather than put my Mac in the closet, I started running it side-by-side with my new PC.  Best computer idea I ever had.  Now I can go back and forth between computers, look up stuff on one computer while posting on the other, look at old blog posts to see what is already there, and do many other things.  Flat panel second monitors are now cheap also, but this procedure saved me having to buy one, although the large screen would be a lot of fun.  Now both computers are on most of the time when I am working on one or the other. 

Another Day in Tech Support Hell

Ever since we arrived in St. George, I have been trying to get a wireless router to function so both my wife and I can have access to the internet.  My original router was acting up, so I spent two hours one day and five hours another day in tech support hell, finally getting Linksys to agree to send a replacement router.  The replacement router finally arrived and it didn't work either, bouncing us off the internet about as soon as we were able to get on it.  So this morning, I got brave and entered tech support hell one more time.  One tech support person kept telling me she was going to charge me for diagnosing the reason their new router would not work.  She finally disappeared and left me hanging.  I called again and, blessedly, for the first time in more than seven or eight times, I got a lucid and competent tech support person who knew what she was doing.  After confirming that my replacement router didn't work, she agreed to send me another replacement router.  Perhaps by June I can get our router working so we can both be on the internet.  Welcome to the modern technological age.  As you recall, Blood's Law of Modern Technology runs thusly: Nothing ever works.  If it quits working, no one can fix it.  What a wonderful age we live in.

The Computer Gremlin Strikes Again

Yesterday, the evil computer gremlin struck again. I was happily plinking away writing immortal prose and sorting photos when this insidiously wicked monster struck. My screen suddenly enlarged and began floating all over the place. The entire desktop screen was unstable. Just moving a thumb across the thumbpad caused the screen to dance vigorously in all directions. So I began searching. I clicked on everything I could find to click and found nothing. I appealed for help on my blog. I learned before that asking the Mac store got me nothing but rebuffed so I wasn't about to go there. Then on page 347 of David Pogue's massive manual Mac OSX Leopard: The Missing Manual I found a likely culprit--the vision impaired options dialogue box. That's got to be it, thought I. I turned off the Zoom option on the option list for this evil site, turned on my computer again, and behold! The screen remained normal size, locked into place, and behaved itself nicely.

Since I am a computer idiot, finding this cure was no less than spectacular. Pogue's crystal-clear computer manuals are a godsend. They are all titled "The Missing Manual" because Mac, for all of its engineering prowess and brilliance, writes skimpy manuals at the grade school level. All it took was about seven hours of hit-and-miss diagnostics to solve this dilemma. And how, may I ask, did the Zoom on the hearing impaired dialogue box get turned on? I've never looked at this site in my life. What evil was lurking in my computer's innards that signaled to this box "Turn on the zoom. That'll fix this computer idiot for a few hours."

Of course, every time I have a crisis like this, I swear I'll never turn the blasted thing on again. I'll never make another blog entry again. I'll never raise my blood pressure again from trying 10,000 options before stumbling on the cure. Instead, I'll go clean out the garage. I'll assemble another book shelf to accommodate my year's surplus books stacked in piles all over the house. I'll sort out my closet and donate some of my 10 dozen polo shirts to charity, a task my wife has been bugging me about for approximately 20 years. At least once a week. I'll clean up the week's newspapers strewn about in various stages of completed reading that remain in creatively and strategically located areas around the living room and kitchen. I like that word: "strategic." Politicians use it a lot. They think they always need to have a "strategy", which is shorthand for saying they can't see their nose in front of their face. I'll sort out my den. I'll see what's in the box I hauled up to SLC six months ago from St. George that I have not needed to examine during this intervening time. I'll repent of any possibility of improper language and rude behavior.

On the other hand, I think I'll stay glued to the computer for just a little while longer and see what happens. Maybe the computer gods will be kind to me for a while longer. I hope. Anything looks better than cleaning out the garage. Believe me. But my intentions were briefly good ones.

Memo to Lazy and Procrastinating Computer Users: Back up your Hard Drive! Now! Not tomorrow!

According to David Pogue, prolific author of intelligent and readable computer manuals (which, of course, never come with computers), only about four percent of computer users have a "complete, current, automated backup" (Pogue, Mac OSX Leopard: the Missing Manual, p. 233) In other words, "Everyone else is flying without a net . . . Despite a thousand warnings, articles, and cautionary tales a year . . ."

I thought I had an adequate backup on a Maxtor 2G hard drive, but I failed to see that if something disappeared from the main computer that this stuff would also die on the Maxtor unless it was locked in some where on it. Thus, when I lost over 5,000 photos on my Mac, they were also gone on my Maxtor. What I was too stupid to do was to activate the wonderful internal backup that comes with Leopard OSX called Time Machine, which backs up everything continually on an external drive. Don't ask me why Mac calls its new operating system Leopard. The old one was Tiger, and who knows what the next one will be. Ocelot? Lynx? Cougar? Who knows.

So after spending a week cleaning up my mess and restoring the 15,000 photos I did have safely backed up, and getting the two photo programs I have on the Mac, Aperture and iPhoto, restored, the next thing I did was go out and buy a new 500G Maxtor for $100. Storage is dirt cheap, folks. The other two Maxtors I have look like clunkers by comparison with the streamlined little new Maxtor super-duper drive. I paid $170 for my last Maxtor, a 200G, two years ago. You can buy a 1000G Maxtor for $200. Only a few external drives hook up to Macs with a fire wire, so I was limited to Maxtor. Then I hooked up my new technological wonder to my Mac, turned on Time Machine, and presto, two hours later all 90G of my hard drive was in never-never land. Now every new squiggle and dot is instantly backed up. If I had taken a few minutes to hook up Time Machine before, instead of stupidly thinking my occasional hap-hazard backing up procedure was reliable, I never would have had this disaster.

There are, of course, no wholly reliable back up methods since even external drives can crash, computers can crash, demons from radio talk channels can possess your computer, computers can be dropped, floods, rains, mud slides, lightening, electrical outages, and a thousand and one other disasters can occur. I think the key is to use multiple backup methods. First and most obvious is to have a large-capacity external drive, like the Maxtor 500G I just bought, and make sure everything is on there. If you are really paranoid, buy another one and back it up also and then put it in a safe place. Like in a vault on the top of Mount Nebo. Second, get a CD-DVD burner if you don't have one. These are relatively cheap now also. Burn your photo, document, and other valuable files at regular intervals, and put the discs in another safe place where even if your house ends up floating down the Virgin River in St. George in a flood you will still have your files. A big argument recently centered on burning gold discs which presumably would not corrupt over time, but lately no one pays that much attention to that argument since no one has really come up with evidence that even cheapo discs ever turn rotten. The key is to burn multiple discs, give copies to various people, and keep burning them. Since technology ten years from now will be vastly different than technology today, that means keeping up with changes and transferring data and files to any new medium that comes along.

My sister Ann, who knows stuff, cautions that flash drives are not the most reliable media storage device since any magnetic field will erase them. Besides, even an 8G flash drive, which is now very cheap, can hold only a limited amount of files. Ann uses Carbonite (Go to Carbonite.com) for backup, which for $49.95 per year, backs up unlimited amounts of PC files on external servers. Sorry, doesn't work for enlightened Mac users who are continually discriminated against.

I need to do a bit more research on backing up my blogs. The Curmudgeonly Professor is backed up on the TypePad external drives so, as long as I continue coughing up $149 per year, will always be there, at least as long as TypePad is in existence. The two Blogspot blogs, I need to figure out. My sister Ann has backed up and printed the Penrose Mornings blog, but that leaves Summer Mornings hanging out there.

I can promise you that life is much easier, your disposition is much sunnier, and you will waste precious little time fussing over your important files, photos, videos and other stuff if you take this little blog post to heart and do something about it. Today. What is the first thing that people say when they return to their flood-destroyed or fire-destroyed house? They mourn their photo books. Photos are our deeply-felt connections to who we are, to our past, to our families. We can rebuild our homes. We cannot restore our destroyed computer files or photograph albums. Please stop procrastinating. Save your valuable stuff. Today.

Ten Things to Get Irritated About

Please do not advise the Curmudgeonly Professor to get a life, get over it, deal with it, or forget about it. Curmudgeonly people, by nature, are gripers, and they would not be living up to their reputation if they never acted irritated about stuff. So here are ten things to be irritated about today:
1. Getting used dental floss off of wet fingers.
2. Aggressive shopping cart shovers who are simultaneously yapping on cell phones and barging their way through the store aisles jeopardizing the life and limbs of others.
3. People who turn on their cell phone screens, text message, take camera phone photos, and have their flashing screen lights annoy everyone around them in concerts, at the movies or in any groups.
4. People who go through pre-packaged produce, like strawberries, and pick the best berries (or other fruit) out of other packages to put in their own.
5. Sports announcers who persist in carrying on trivial conversations among themselves or laughing boisterously at inside jokes and forget they were hired to call the game. Call the game, bozos, or find another job! We have raised this issue before.
6. People who wait until their $300 order at Costco or Wal*Mart is rung up and then say, oh, by the way, here is a fistful of coupons. So you wait another ten or fifteen minutes.
7. Mommies with ten kids who frequent the free food sample stands at the stores and wipe out everything before you can get your fair share.
8. Obnoxious television ads that continue to bombard viewers over and over and over.
9. Television ads that interrupt an occasional good program every few minutes.
10. Ads attached to the Sunday funnies. Sacrilegious.

If we work at it, we can actually get irritated about nearly everything, but this list should remind you of a few irritations that you can complain about.