Technophobia

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

I bought my subscription to Glenn Beck‘s Insider yesterday.

Day One of listening to the mp3 of Beck’s show on my computer started yesterday at home. It was great - commercial free and I could pause when I needed to leave the room.

Day Two so far is successful and enjoyable. I downloaded the three hours of his show to my thumb drive (since I don’t think I should download it to my laptop) about an hour ago. I’m now about halfway through the second hour. It’s fantastic.

Well worth the money, which is only about $5/month.

[UPDATE]: Each “hour” is really only about 35 minutes of actual content. Yowzah. So that’s probably 5-8 minutes of news and the rest is commercials. Sickening. Definitely worth the $5/month to save 90 minutes of wasted listening time.

Monday, January 07, 2008

I’m still pretty ticked off about the whole Glenn Beck radio situation here in the DC area. There’s a radio station in Frederick, MD, that carries his show from 3-6pm, but I can’t tune it in at work. There’s a station in Fredericksburg, VA, that carries his show live (9am-12pm) but again I can’t get it tuned in at work and that is the up against the Laura Ingraham show, which I love and also listen to.

So my solution? I’ve ponied up the dough for Beck’s Insider. This way I can listen whenever I want. My plan is to listen to his show On Demand when working at home. If I had an IPod, I could take it with me wherever. As it is, I’ll download it and may record it to CD to take to work on occasion. I’ll work on this as I figure out what works best.

By hook or by crook I’m going to listen to Beck’s radio show because it’s hilarious.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

My license for Expression Engine renews this month and I’m thinking about making the switch to WordPress instead of ponying up the dough for EE again. But then I think of the monumental hassle that making the switch will be and I’m reminded that if I can’t summon up the energy to upgrade EE to the latest version, how on earth do I expect to summon up the energy (and time) to do a complete overhaul to new blogware?

Anyone done it? How hard was it? How much did you lose in the process?

Gah, I’m tired just posting this.

Anyone want to do the technical stuff for me?

[UPDATE 3pm]: Nevermind. Looks like too much work to migrate. Don’t want to lose anything. I will need to upgrade to the latest version of EE, though. That is long overdue.

Thursday, December 06, 2007

I was about 2 minutes from home this morning when I realized that I needed to nag Beau about making sure to put not just a coat on Jesse when they take Annie to the groomer, but also a hat. So I called the house and we had a short conversation about that because we realized that we’re not sure where his winter hats are after the move, so a baseball cap will do. Yadda yadda yadda and we hung up.

And then my phone started “Call to the Post,” which told me that I had voice mail. Thinking that my boss must have called during my chat with Beau, I dialed into voice mail but the message I got was a recording of Beau’s side of the whole conversation that we just completed.

It cracked me up at the time (I never realized how many times he said OK - I’ll try to transcribe it later), but with further thought I’m a little freaked out about how it happened.

Anyone nerdy enough to know?

Friday, November 30, 2007

Brad Thor has the best website of any author I’ve visited so far. The link requires Flash.

Normally that kind of intro would annoy me, but I was so impressed with the quality that I watched the whole thing.

Anyone read his novels? I’m thinking of giving him a looksee.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

And it probably came from me. Please accept my apologies, it was not my intent.

Early this morning I was online, checking for possible sales in my shop, and decided to check out Stumble Upon as a possible marketing tool for the business. So I was going to email a few strategic people (like my mother) to let them know of this resource and instead I inadvertently sent the email to my entire Gmail contacts list.

Here’s what happened - I was at the page where you can send an info email to folks and I signed into my Gmail account. On the page that came up there were two sections of people. The top section only had about a dozen people, all checked. I clicked the “Check All” box to uncheck all of them and then rechecked the three people that I wanted to send it to.

And then Beau came to remind me that it was time to get in the shower and in my hurry I clicked on the Send or Submit button before I noticed that the bottom section was all still checked. Turns out that the button doesn’t just send for that section but for the whole list. I figured that out when my email binged that I had a new message and I saw a message from myself. And my Gmail notifier started working as I got auto-replies from my utility companies and other such responses. That’s when the realization dawned of what just happened.

I had a good chuckle about in the shower later when I starting thinking of the hundreds of contacts in that list. I haven’t open my Gmail yet to see what’s in there.

[UPDATE 2:30pm]: Just logged into SU to find that people actually signed up in response to my spam. Hilarious!

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Anyone else having problems with Firefox locking up when you’re in the new version of Gmail? For the past week I’ve had lock up after lock up when just going through my email. Fortunately, I’m able to restore my session after shutting down the browser, but it’s a major PITA.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

There’s something wrong with your page, fellas. For the past several days anytime I try to open your page while at work, it locks up IE and shuts it all down.

I don’t know what you’ve got going on over there, but please fix it. I miss you!

Thursday, November 01, 2007

After a second attempt to get the Blackberry working I have again returned service to my trusty regular, old school cell phone. My boss attempted to give me a different Blackberry and I said, “No, thanks.”

Total amount of wasted time? I’m guessing about 4 hours.

Nice.

Friday, October 26, 2007

So.

I called to activate the Blackberry that I was given. I should start by saying that while we have 6 shiny new Blackberry units sitting in our vault, my boss gave me a used unit. Nice, huh? Admins don’t rank new things, apparently.

Anyway, I let it charge up before calling to switch from my phone to the Blackberry. Got that taken care of in no time and then I spent a few frustrating minutes trying to make a simple phone call. No go. I was getting these weird messages about Emergency Calls Only! when attempting to call home. So I clicked around the menu to check things out and see if there was something I needed to do to get the phone part working and got to a menu that showed the battery status (it was at 90%). But I still couldn’t figure out how to get things working right and decided to “reboot.” I powered the phone off and pushed the button to turn it back on and got no response. Nothing happened. She’s dead, Jim.

Now I had two useless phones and it was late and I had to get home. So I brought both home with me to try again this morning. The Blackberry still won’t power on. And since I need to have a cell phone, I called to reactivate my old phone that works just fine, thank you.

I emailed my boss to see about getting a different unit. We’ll see if he breaks out one of those new ones in the vault for me.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

The afternoon has been more of the same from this morning, but slightly different and slightly better.

I’m getting ready to get a Crackberry. I have no plans to set up the email function. I know. You say, “Why bother then?” I want the other functions.

I am wondering how long I’ll withstand the siren call of email on my phone, though.

Anyone want to put in a guess?

So the frustration this afternoon has been my attempts to create an online account with Nextel/Sprint (a phone call to customer support was required and the techie even had troubles) in order to upload my address book from my current cell phone so that I can download it to my new phone when the time comes. So far all I get is this funky welcome screen. I cannot get into any sort of account page at all. I either get this other sign up page or logged out. After wasting 30 minutes I gave up. I’m going to try again at home because I think our network is part of the problem.

If I can’t get anything uploaded, then I’m going to have to write all of my contacts down. How old school.

Harrumph.

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Making progress on business things:

1. I’ve finally gotten the BoaW blog going. With much technical support from Jaynee, I must add. I decided to go with BlueHost for my hosting and WordPress for the content management. So far I’m pleased with both, although the WP installation was a challenge - hence the tech support from my sister.

2. I have over 100 inventory items made. I plan to list a few more today in my Etsy shop, which will get me over the 100 mark there. But don’t let that stop you from shopping! [UPDATE 3:00pm] - I’m back down to 97 items in the shop - a faithful shopper bought some stuff! Thanks, friend.

3. We’re just three weeks away from the craft show in South Carolina! There’s still so much to do to prep, but I plan to work on that today with intensity. I haven’t started to tag my stuff yet and that’s the most time consuming thing to do. My time with Mom to plot out our booth was fruitful. We have a plan in our heads anyway.

Friday, September 07, 2007

The Cooties gave us the video baby monitor that they used for both CootieGirl and CootieBoy. Since their kids are now toddlers, they didn’t need it. We have been grateful to have it as well as the traditional audio monitor we got.

We have the video monitor in the kitchen and too often Beau and I spend an entire meal watching Jesse sleep or play or whatever he’s doing in the crib, if he’s in the crib while we’re eating. We laughed about that last week when we realized that almost from the time we started eating to the end of the meal we barely spoke a word to each other because we were engrossed in The Jesse Show.

Imagine our dismay when the video crapped out the other day. The audio still works perfectly, but the picture no longer works. We figure we burned out the tube.

So a-hunting I’ve gone - checked Craig’s List first, but there are no video monitors listed in our area. Then I went to Ebay and hit pay dirt. I’ve got the winning bid (currently) on the exact same system at $20. However, I know that with 4 days left I may have to bid higher. I’m willing to shell out more - they’re not cheap brand new. But it’ll be nice to get it for under $50. We’ll see how that goes.

Because we need our Jesse TV.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Last night I managed to post a recent picture of Jesse and a longish video over at Whiny Complaints. However, I think there’s a problem with video because YouTube isn’t showing it’s active yet. Unfortunately, I’m blocked out of YouTube at the office, so I can’t fix the problem until I get home tonight. This really means that I may not get to it until about 9pm tonight after Jesse has gone to bed.

But the picture is cute, imho.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

My first call to Comcast to check on the status of our internet ended in disconnection when the technician (a woman) remotely rebooted our modem.

My second call ended satisfactorily after the technician (a woman) confirmed that the problem was resolved and stayed on the line with me while we worked out the problem I was having logging into my account with them.

I’m still not impressed that it took 6 days to resolve whatever the problem was.

In the meantime, the cable signal in the kitchen crapped out on Sunday night. That box is the regular digital converter. We have an HD/DVR converter on the main TV in the basement that is working fine. Anyway, I called yesterday morning to ask about the lost signal and was assured that there was a problem in our area with certain boxes and that we should be back up “momentarily.” Apparently, “momentarily” is at least two days because this morning we still have no signal with that box.

Yesterday afternoon I moved that box to the bedroom where I hooked it up to this tiny TV/radio that my mother gave us that used to hang under a cabinet in her kitchen. Since I have the Tivo in the kitchen, I’m just running the cable directly through that - it meant resetting the Tivo, but it’s working fine.

My next call to Comcast is to request a credit to our account for the loss of service. We’ll see how far I get with that.

Oh, and the router still isn’t working for some reason. I think it’s the dynamic IP that Comcast uses - it wants a static IP. I’m emailing my Dad for help on this one before I call Linksys.

We’re more than a little frustrated.

[UPDATE 11:30am]: Beau emailed me from his computer to say that he got the router working. Woo!

[LATER]: One more thing, my friend MD told me about this article that she had seen about Comcast and arbitration. She opted out. I just opted out as well.