The Burrow

I'm trying.  I really am trying.  I'm just not having very much success. I took many lovely pictures of my weekend in Santa Monica.  I walked the depth of the beach, from the boardwalk  to the ocean.   I saw the original Hotel California and Muscle Beach and the Boardwalk.  I'd love to share more of the photographs, but technology is getting in my way.   Lenore the Lenovo Laptop served me admirably on my trip.  She was perfect for blogging in a comfy chair along the staircase at my hotel. Now that I am home and trying to do more than email, now I am having issues.    The salesman in Best Buy told me that Lenovo was IBM in the way that Acer swallowed up what was the remains of Gateway.  I took a moment while he was ringing up my purchase to mourn the demise of those cow boxes, and then moved on.  There was some minor instruction about shifting the screens and revealing other screens but ...

I just spoke to a wonderful young man. Wes is his name, and dispute resolution's his game. Say what you will about Kobe or LeBron, Wes is the best player at his position in America today. If you've been following the saga of my computer from hell, you know that I wasn't asking for much. All I wanted was a device which would recognize the peripherals and not annoy me. A machine which promised reliability in the simplest of operations : turning on and off. A machine which didn't thwart my every attempt to cut-and-paste in a document (in fairness, this may have been a Vista issue) and which would allow me to download the driver for my printer from the manufacturer's website and to install that driver efficiently. Without 3 different downloads, each resulting in a different error message/help window. Without random demands to save a document I only wanted to print and then not letting me save it once I'd given up and decided to go along to get along with the damn t...

Computer problems put me in a place unlike any other. I whine. I can't concentrate on anything else. The angst permeates every piece of every day. I'm not exaggerating. The Cuters know to steer clear, but that only makes it worse. I ought to be the grown-up. I ought to be able to fix it. It's not my fault that this new Dell won't recognize my Nikon or my Ipod or my GPS. How could it possibly be my fault? The machine was delivered. I unpacked it. I plugged in the cables and connectors correctly. It turned on (which was somewhat of a miracle since the unit it was replacing never did turn on -- even after I spent 2 hours dissassembling the green boards in the back of it with the tech guy urging me on from somewhere in southern Asia). I uploaded the necessary software - the newest iterations, which came directly from the products' websites. When the first USB port didn't work, I tried another. And another. I plugged the keyboard into the offending por...