Kick It

Since McGee, Garcia and Chloe are still not available to me, I had to resort to more primitive methods to fix today's computer problem.  Essentially I kicked it (virtual kicking = turning completely off).

I don't really understand what happened.  I went to call up a file on WordPerfect and discovered that only a small number of my real files were there.  They all seemed to be from a couple of years ago.

Now I should explain that I have the C drive, which is, of course, the CPU.  Then I have two external drives.  The E drive has, in addition to the Word Perfect documents, all of the files for Funny the World.  The F drive has my database files, and other things.  Both E and F are back-ups of each other.

I checked my file for letters to Brianna, which are nicely organized into folders by year, and a file for things sent to her. But none of the folders were there, only the letters from 2016.  Nothing new.

When I checked the PC I discovered that what had been the E drive was now the F drive, and what was now the E drive listed files from a flash drive I had put in earlier that day with files from our trip to Santa Barbara.  There was no sign of the contents of what had been the F drive.  

What gives?

That's when I kicked it.  I turned off the computer and went and rented the movie Lion from X-finity to give the computer two hours to decide what it wanted to do.

When I turned it on again, everything was back, but the E drive was still F and the F drive was still E.  All of my WordPerfect documents were back.  

The first thing I did was to do back-ups of the major files I did not want to lose (like my list of all the entries of Funny the World and all of the books I've read over the last 7 years!).  In addition to being backed up on the two hard drives, they are also backed up on a flash drive.

So that crisis was averted.

But I keep getting messages from the cloud saying that my storage is filling up and asking if I want to buy additional storage.

Now, I need to say that there was a time when I read computer books for fun.  When I was learning my various programs, learning how to code in HTML (before there were programs like FrontPage) I would read manuals in the car for fun.  I took a real joy in the discovery of all the things I could do.

But these damn programmers keep inventing new things that require new programs and first of all new programs (and the upgraded computers to run them) cost money.  When I would read what the upgrades did, and I realized that I had no need for any of the fancy new bells and whistles they offered, I kind of lost interest in reading manuals.

I should add parenthetically, that I don't know how the people I was running around with at the time could afford a new computer every six months or so!  Or a new version of an expensive program like PhotoShop every time a new one came out.  No wonder people run up bills of thousands of dollars on credit cards!

So anyway, technology has left me in the dust, but I'm happy.  I have my PC, I have WordPerfect (very, very old version because I don't need the bells and whistles that came with the expensive "suite" that Word Perfect morphed into).  I have Front Page on which I have written this journal for most of its existence (in the beginning, I wrote my own HTML), and I have a copy of PhotoShop that I found at an incredible sale on Amazon many years ago.  It's CS3, which is so terribly outdated, but it does all I want it to do, so why do I need to upgrade to the latest version, which would cost >$1,000?

When I got this new computer, none of these programs were supposed to work on it, but my guru managed to get each working and now I live in fear of having to replace the computer, as I fear having to replace my laptop for the same reason.

So, I am aware that there is something called the cloud that apparently has been storing things for me, but I don't have a clue how to access the cloud or what is actually stored there.

I decided it was time to check the cloud and find out what it was storing.  Did it have all those files I thought I lost?  Only I had no idea how to find my cloud file.  I went to Facebook for help.

"You know people write jokes about people like you," my grammar school friend Lois wrote on Facebook after several posts of mine about trying to find my iCloud account.  "Sigh.  I know," I answered her.  Feel free to make up your own jokes...

I learned that I had to download iCloud to my PC, so apparently whatever is on my cloud is only from my iPhone, I think, but now that I was into learning about the cloud, it sounded like a good idea to have on the PC too.

So I signed up.  And I went through all the questions.  I knew my log in, I knew my password, and when I logged out and logged back in again, it didn't recognize either.  You know, there is nothing like a computer to make you feel really stupid!

Somehow -- I still don't know how -- I managed to get logged into the cloud but then I tried to find the files that are apparently filling it up.  Do you think I could find anything?  No.  I didn't find anywhere to view stored files.  I can only assume that I have a separate cloud file for the iPhone...and there is nothing on the phone that I care about losing if my cloud account fills up.

Then I found a very long document about how to link your PC documents up to the cloud, at which point I gave up.  I'll just do better about backing up.  The cloud is entirely too complicated for my brain to comprehend.