With a Little Help from My Friends

People are so wonderful.  When I got home from the book store today, I found this:

They are from a friend here in town, who writes: "A reminder that you are always much beloved."

I am assuming this is in response to the note about my bad day the other day.  This woman is such a sweetheart.  A couple of years ago I wrote something about not having a waffle iron, and next thing I knew one showed up on my doorstep, in a box from Amazon.  It has been used frequently since then. She is so incredibly thoughtful.

But I guess I should report that everything is fine now.  I had a couple of wonderfully supportive phone calls from people who read what I wrote and the person I had the difficulty with seems to be better now and we are back where we were before everything happened.

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A couple of days ago I mentioned that I was trying to figure out how to download a video from You Tube to my iPad.  A wonderful reader named Elaine Normandy wrote on my guestbook and posted a link to an app called McTube which comes in both a free version and a $1.99 version.  I downloaded the app and then tried to figure out how it works.  I ultimately did, and my video downloaded without problem.  I took the iPad to the book store today, where I cannot connect to wifi, just to make sure that I really had downloaded it and that I wasn't just accessing it from YouTube.

It worked.  Thank you so much, Elaine!

But trying to figure the app out makes me realize that the biggest frustration with these apps that you can download is trying to figure out how to use them.  There are no manuals and if you're an old poop like me, where things are not as intuitive as they may be to some geeky whippersnappers, it can be frustrating.  (After having tried to play Angry Birds for literally 2 years now, I suddenly discover that there are tricks, and there are videos showing you those tricks.  I swear Brianna can do better at Angry Birds than I can!!)

But what is even more frustrating is that when you search for help in how an app works, you find videos that people have recorded to help folks like me figure out their app.  That is very nice of people to take the time to make a video so that everybody can get the most out of their apps.

HOWEVER, so far every app I've checked, not only for this one but for other apps I was trying to get help on is that the guy (so far it's always guys, no girls) recording the video starts cold and decides he's just going to show you what he does.  But they almost all end up with his trying to figure out what to do, and why it isn't doing what he thought it was going to do, and a lot of time spent going to different screens and muttering to himself trying to hit his stride. ("Hmmm...I wonder why this isn't...wait a minute...let me try...now it should...no that's not right," etc.)

Now why someone would POST this sort of video is beyond me.  Why not have a rehearsal so you know that your app is going to do what you think it's going to do.   And if you start videotaping and things go haywire and you can't figure out what went wrong, don't continue recording and then post that video!  Stop recording your video.  Erase your video, practice a bit more and then when you have a recording that actually HELPS someone, post that to You Tube.

But that's maybe just an old poop being entirely too logical for young geeky whippersnappers.

iPad Hair

I knew the iPad would be a great toy for me, but I had no idea all the ways it would change my life.  I certainly never expected that it would have such an impact on my hair.

As I approach my 70th birthday, in 2 months, I have come to the realization that you expect parts of the body to slow down, but there are signs of aging that I never really expected.  For one thing, my typing speed has probably been cut in half, partly due to the numb fingers on my right hand that nobody seems to be able to do anything about and partly because though at one time I could type 135 words per minute with few-to-no errors, now I sometimes make 3 errors in one word, if it's a long word.   At first it was annoying, now I just accept it and am glad that I don't have a kind of condition (yet) which would prevent me from being  able to type at all.

Another aging thing that I have discovered over the years is that my hair has changed.  For so long, my haircuts at Supercuts always went the same way.   They'd ask how I want it cut, I'd give them some vague instruction and laugh that my hair always does what it wants to do anyway due to the wave in it, they start cutting and midway through the cut invariably the cutter comments on what nice, thick hair I have.

A few years ago, I began to wonder if I was losing my hair.  Oh, it didn't fall out in clumps, but there always seemed to be more hair in the drain after a shower than I remembered before and it seemed that the hair on top of my head was not as thick as it used to be.

At the same time, the cutters stopped telling me what great hair I had and last time someone actually asked me if I wanted some product that would give it more oomph.  

Who knew I'd been oomphless all these years?

The last few cuts didn't suit me either.  My hair was still doing what it wanted, but it wasn't what I wanted any more.  I seemed to be developing cowlicks where I'd never had them before.  Fortunately, I'm not particularly vain (for good reason), so I've just gone with however I can make it look OK so I can go out in public and not scare the horses.

But then I got the iPad.  I knew that I would love playing with an iPad, but I didn't realize how it could do about 80% of what I do on the desktop.   I can't write my journal on it because I use software that can't be installed.   And there are some other things that are better/easier to do on the desktop, but pretty much for all other intents and purposes, the iPad, especially now that it has a great keyboard, is my computer of choice.

It means that I can do all of the stuff I normally do on the desktop from the comfort of my recliner, instead of sitting on a hard chair at my desk.

At night, as I have often said, I start the sleep cycle on the couch in the living room, but wake up at some point and move to the recliner, where I finish out the night--or not, depending on whether my body has decided to have insomnia or not.

Because I know I will be waking up at the end of my sleep night in the recliner, I keep the iPad on the table next to the recliner.  It means that I can do all the normal things in the morning--check e-mail on both Google and my DCN account, check "That's My Answer," check Facebok and Twitter, see what the day's headlines are, etc., all with barely any perceptible movement on my part, so that dogs don't realize I'm awake and aren't immediatly there demanding food.

But THAT means that my head rests on the recliner for hours on end as I work on the iPad and by the time I get up, my hair has settled into a day's style that somewhat resembles Einstein's on a bad day.

It stands up, it flies off in odd directions, and the back looks like a rat's nest.  I try to smooth it down with water on a brush and that works until the hair dries and then it starts to creep off in its own direction again.

The only thing that really helps is to wash it, but that only lasts until I sit in the recliner with the iPad again and begin to work once more.

I truly never realized that iPad Hair would be a problem adding the new gadget to my life, but it certainly seems to be.  However, the trade-off in the convenience of being able to use the iPad in the warm family room while the dogs don't know I'm awake seems a reasonable one to make.

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We will be starting the new year with our friends from the old Davis Comic Opera Company, as we have done every year for the past five or six years.  We rarely see any of these people throughout the year, unless there is a funeral to attend, so  I am looking forward to having home made soup, maybe playing the name game, but mostly laughing and getting caught up.  At midnight we will have our champagne, kiss everybody, and head home, and probably be asleep by 12:30 a.m.

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Thanks again to Richard and Jennipurr for another year of Holidailies! I look forward to participating again next year!

The Seven Deadly Sins

Now that I'm getting a handle on "gluttony" (again), I engaged in another of the 7 deadly sins today:  sloth.  But when you pair the 7 deadly sins with the 7 virtues that the Catholic church teaches, what is paired with sloth is "diligence" and I suppose I engaged in that too. Maybe more diligence than sloth, actually.

Today I bonded with my new iPad.  I am learning how to tame it.   By the middle of the afternoon, when the battery was at about 50% (how nice it supposedly has a 10 hour battery life), I had done the following:

• installed many apps...and played several new games
• set up Facebook
• figured out how to create albums in "Photos"
• retrieved a photo from my computer and managed to get it ointo the iPad to use for wallpaper
• edited (cropped) a great photo of Lizzie that I took with the iPad camera
• watched a 1 hour TV show from Lifetime
• figured out bookmarks in the Safari browser
• downloaded the iPad manual from iBooks and flipped thru most of it
• learned about file folders and bookmarks on the home screen (a great find!)
• found a way to get my DCN mail on the iPod (gmail was easy, DCN is a bit more tricky)
• set up a notebook page to record all my passwords, so I can remember them without having to come into the office and check the desktop
• installed the Kindle app so that I can have the same books on my actual Kindle and on the iPad, so I can read at night in the car, and downloaded the book I am currently reading on the Kindle.
• I'm trying to get a handle on Flipbook (which my sister-in-law Olivia swears by), and seem to be doing it
• set up "Pocket" to save web pages to read off line (haven't quite mastered that yet)
• accessed my Pinterest account
• set up my browser to auto-fill in email and passwords, so I don't have to keep typing them over and over and over again.

I felt like God did on the 7th day -- I was ready to rest!

About the time the 49er game was about to start, I was ready to call a halt and plugged the iPad in to recharge while I got out my poor neglected Kindle to read during commercials.

Not a bad day for a new computer-ish thing.  The nice thing about the iPad is that it's not a computer, so I don't have to worry about doing the thing I hate most about a new computer--configuring all the software I use on the old computer.  I can't write a blog entry on the iPad (not the way I write them), I can't use Word Perfect.  

I told Walt that we were very smart not to get a 3G enabled iPad.   It is so easy to get caught up in what I am doing that if I were not on a wifi connection, I could rack up hundreds of dollars in charges without even blinking.

We watched the 49er game, after which Walt got a text from Tom saying he was exhausted.  Not surprising.  That second half was a nail biter from start to finish!

Then I watched the 2 hour finale of Survivor, one of my guilty pleasures.   Each year about the third week into it, I ask myself why I'm watching this stupid show, but by the end, I'm all eager to find out who gets the $1 million.  I usually have a favorite, but this year, I was happy with the 3 finalists and would have been happy whoever won.  The two who did not win seemed to be genuinely gracious about the winner and no hard feelings all around.

Then I watched the finale of Homeland, one of the best shows on TV.   You could tell from the peace and calm and quiet of the first half that the second half was going to have some sort of event that would blow you away, to end the first season.

And boy did it ever.  Don't know how long we have to wait before we see where things go from here, but it will be interesting.

I still have to get through the 2 hour Royal Pains wedding, but as it is already pushing 1 a.m., that may have to wait for tomorrow.

So I'm not sure if today was a day of diligence or a day of sloth...or maybe a healthy combination of the two. which is probably the best way of looking at it.

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The bad news is that Bob may be taken back to the hospital tomorrow.  He has developed a fever, which I hope is something minor and is not going to be a set-back for him.

Mittens

In one of the funniest movies ever made, W.C. Fields' short, The Fatal Glass of Beer, he is sitting in a cabin in Alaska, the snow swirling around the house, and blowing inside the house ('tain't a fit night out for man nor beast).   He's sitting there with the local constable, who asks him to play something on his dulcimer.  

Fields, asks, "You won't consider me rude if I play with my mittens on, will you?"

I don't think anybody would consider me rude if I typed with my mittens on, because first of all, I can't type with mittens on, and second, even if I did, you wouldn't see it.  But lord do I long for mittens today.  We keep our house on the cool side in winter and warm side in summer, but even with the air conditioning or heater going to make the rest of the house comfortable, this office does not benefit from most of the temperature control.

Not only does the air vent seem ineffectual for blowing in either warm or cool air, in the winter especially, there is a dog door which opens about 4 feet from my desk.  It has a cover, of course, but it is not air tight and ... it's bloody cold in here.

To write this entry, I am taking breaks every few paragraphs and going out to the kitchen to stick my hands in the open oven, which is set at a low temperature, to warm the fingers up so I can come back in here and type a bit more.

I've tried putting heaters in here, but there are too many horror stories of heaters causing house fires and this office is just cluttered enough and I am just careless enough that I fear I am ripe for that happening.  But also, the ones I've tried heat up just fine, but within a short period of time it's blazing hot in here, so I'm constantly turning them off and on.  So I just deal with the cold however I have to.

(Why am I suddenly thinking of poor Bob Cratchit huddled over his tiny candle, trying to warm his hands while Scrooge sits in his office hoarding the supply of coal?)

With the arrival of winter and the cold weather, the time was right for Walt to present me with my Christmas present!!!  Some time ago, I added an iPod to my Amazon wish list, never thinking in a million years that he would get one for me, but by golly he started to think about it.  Add to that a little "encouragement" by Char, who has been telling me I need one for the past year, ever since our Rhine trip, and he asked if I was busy today and if not, would I like to go buy an iPad.

First, he had errands to run, and I had a nap to take, and we had our Christmas oranges to put away...

(A small portion of our $40 box of oranges that we get each year)

By the time we finally left, it was nearly dark and raining, but we went anyway.  Instead of going all the way to Sacramento, in the rain, on the second to last Saturday before Christmas to shop at the Apple store, we stopped at the local Target, where they had one iPad 2 (the model I'd decided I wanted) in stock.   

I now have an iPad!!!!!

The evening has been spent trying to get it set up, a both exciting and frustrating task.  I'm trying to get all the programs and games I use most on the thing but first of all, you have to enter an ID for every. single. app. that you download and mine is basykes@dcn.davis.ca.us ...which does not roll trippingly off the fingers, especially after you've done it a dozen times.  Secondly, everybody wants long passwords for security now.  I have about 3 that I use for most places, each between 15-20 characters long.  Sometimes I use caps and sometimes I use punctuation and 99% of the time I can't remember which I've used.   Fortunately years ago, before I started losing my mind, I had the smarts to create a file on which most of my passwords are stored, all coded so I can tell what they are, but the criminals who are going to break into my house and steal my Flickr password will never be able to decipher from "MT99" what the 15 word password is, or what "the usual" means.

So I've been running in here to the office to check passwords and for the sites where I never wrote down the password, setting up new ones.  End result (so far) is that I have most of the programs I want set up and all of the passwords are now recorded on my backup file and I'm in good shape to go to sleep, once I thaw my fingers once again and finish this  entry.

I even downloaded a Kindle app for the iPad because you can read on the iPad at night, but can't on the Kindle, so I can read in the car going and coming from wherever we are driving, since I can have the same book on both machines.

I finished almost everything I needed to do to allow me to work on the iPad instead of the desktop unless I need to use the printer or design a journal page, which means my hands can stay WARM thru the winter!

For now I am using the box the iPad came in as a protective cover because Char has bought me a wonderful cover/keyboard (the final straw in convincing Walt to actually buy this...she told him he had to because she'd already purchased the keyboard for me!).  She is a pearl beyond price.

And...hey...guess what... I have an iPad!!!