back up!

i've been having an issue with my mouse. first of all u have to know that i don't buy top of the line when it comes to this stuff because sooner or later its gonna blow and i'll be out a wad and will be faced with buying another one. now having said that, i have bluetooth on my laptop for a mouse, so i bought a bluetooth mouse. and its white like my laptop, so it matches (like that is really important in the whole grand scheme of things). but its not from apple -- its from idk who - but it cost me like $20 compared to what apple charges (and we won't even go there).

now as mice go, i am pretty hard on them -- or at least the ppl in this house r hard on them. the last bluetooth one i had went belly up because my daughter spilled juice all over it (and tried to hide the fact, but i'm smarter than she thinks i am and knew it and just waited to see if she would ever own up to it -- which she eventually did and was totally surprised that i knew it was her fault). but even the ordinary every day kind of mice i tend to squash like a -- well -- mouse. so this is like the third one for this particular laptop -- which i've had for two years come june. so u kinda get the picture -- right?

so this mouse doesn't want to click right any more -- and i don't mean right-click -- i mean it just refuses to click sometimes even though its right on what its supposed to click on. and i just have to keep punching the clicker till it makes up its mind to do it. which is pretty annoying, if i do say so myself coz it just slows down the whole "click here" process. and at first i thought it was because the batteries were dying but then i went through a whole string of new batteries and its still doing it, so i'm thinking its probably gonna go belly up soon and i'll have to pony up some cash for one. but it won't be high on the priority list as i need to have the snow tires removed on my car and get the oil changed, etc.

but this morning i was working away uploading stuff to etsy and getting really frustrated with the whole "i'm not going to click now" issue, when suddenly i started hearing this clicking noise coming from the lower left hand section of my laptop. which, if any of u have ever had a hard drive die -- u know this could potentially be the click of death in HD terms. i went into panic mode and decided i needed to back up everything. in the world of bina -- that means like 8,000 photos, and 5,000 bits of music in itunes and a gazillion other bits of information (including all the quicken files, letters to everybody and his brother, all the chats worth saving, and all my blogs and writings). this process is cumbersome and slow and honestly, i'd rather have my teeth drilled without novacaine than do it, but its necessary in the world of computers.

so i did it and we won't talk about how much space i eradicated from my handy-dandy little firelite smarkdisk 100GB pocket drive. but let's just suffice to say that it doesn't even begin to include all the shareware that is on my computer -- and over an hour and a half later we're still copying bits of music and idk what else. when i started the process i still had 80GB left on the drive, now i have 25GB -- so that should tell u something!!

now i've had hard drives fail in the past. we had several fail on the three PC computers we had in our store and backing stuff up is really important and we should all do it often -- but i haven't done it in full since may of 2008 right before i bought my current computer. so u can well imagine just how much additional information i've added in that amount of time. and part of my problem with stuff on my computer is pretty much like stuff that comes into my apartment -- idk when to stop or how or what to get rid of and when. so whatever is on there, just gets transferred and who wants to go through all that stuff anyhow???

i keep thinking about this show that's become popular called "hoarders". could i be considered a hoarder when it comes to my computer??? oh dear ....

good ol' days r gone ....

so remember i said a couple of days ago that my facebook fan page had disappeared along with all my facebook notes? well they never reappeared and so i had to reconstruct the fan page. which is fine.... but in the process i decided to reactivate my twitter account and then link the two and basically, i have decided that technology is just way too frustrating.

many years ago when i had a sewing business i was a beta tester for my local internet provider for websites. they wanted ordinary joes (or janes) like me to build their own websites. so i did. and it was quite nice and successful but it never had a shopping cart or a place to enter credit card info. however, it didn't need it because ppl could just email me from the clickable email link and lmk what they wanted and then send me their info. i'm sure it was frustrating to them -- maybe not so much -- idk. i could never do another website from scratch like that. i had an HTML Bible that i used to help me write the correct code for doing things like links, etc. and i've retained a bit of that and still own the book, so occasionally i can go back to research something i need to do on the blog. i really haven't used it much because the technology of places like facebook, twitter, and blogspot really doesn't require a whole lot of it.

but sometimes i want to do something and can't and its frustrating and makes me wish i'd taken a class at school or something. only they never offered this kind of stuff when i was in school because i went to school in the middle ages -- ha ha...

no really, i mean when i learned to touch type (now some of u r sitting there scratching ur heads wondering what touch typing is -- it is exactly as it sounds) we had typewriters (anyone remember those) and they weren't even electric (probably explains y i have carpel tunnel issues). one of the first jobs i had working as a secretary involved typing up psychological reports on an IBM magcard typewriter. "cutting and pasting" meant "programming" a stop in one card, so that it would eject the card at the right place so that u could insert the next card to put the "pasted" item on, then programming that card to eject so that u could put the first card back in and continue the printing out process. and heaven forbid if u mixed up the cards. it was not fun. prior to this technology, though, cutting and pasting truly meant -- cutting it out of one place and taping it into another and hoping when u went to the copy machine that the place where u taped it didn't leave a line on the copy. or it meant retyping the entire paper from beginning to end just to make sure things were in the right places. making "corrections" required u to either retype it, white it out with white-out (omygosh what was in that stuff) and basically, it was a pain.

the first "computer" i ever worked on was back in 1980 and it was an IBM displaywriter (would NOT be considered a computer by today's standards). the first computer i ever owned was a very very early Mac (see above photo of something similar to what i owned) that didn't even have a hard drive (don't ask). they make fish tanks out of them now and i believe there is one in the Smithsonian... when i moved to NH (eons ago) i worked at darmouth college and they were in the "computer age" but not what u would consider the computer age now, and u had to know certain code in order to get things to print out, move stuff around, etc., and we worked on machines called Diablos (u do know that's the word for devil in spanish don't u???). i'm sure they were aptly named because honestly, there were times when i truly felt like the devil was running the entire operation and i had no control over what was printed out. they did eventually move into the era of Macs and wasn't i a happy camper.

now we have computers that can print out DVDs and play music and make movies and mess around with photos and isn't it all so wonderful how easy we've made it? ha ha ....

i am pretty sure that in the grand scheme of things some things r easier to do than others, but some things r just more frustration than is necessary. gone r the days of taking a photo on a SLR film (what's that -- u can't even buy that stuff locally anymore) camera and taking it to the local photo shop (huh??) and having them process and print ur photos. coming home with a packet full of pictures and a sleeve full of negatives (what???) and if u needed more prints in different sizes u had to take the negatives back to the shop and wait for them to be printed (usually a couple of days to a week). now u take a photo with a digital camera, plug it into ur computer and bam u have instant pictures that u can print in all sorts of sizes and u get to print only the ones u like!! who'd have thunk it! but on one level its more frustrating because then u have to make sure u have a printer that has archival quality inks and papers and yeah let's not even go down this road.

sometimes i think we've just made more stress for ourselves by the continual upgrading of our technology. things that we thought would make our lives easier have just increased the need to "know more" about the technology behind it. and who has time for that -- idk. maybe i'm just waxing nostalgic for a simpler time ....