Photography

A Walk in the Country

Shelly

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Interior of silo

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Barn door next to silo

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Driftwood

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Wood anemone

I went to Muncie over the weekend, and went for a walk in the country with my mom and brother. There’s an old grain silo on the property that used to be used for singing and drumming. There is still a circle of chairs and the remains of candles and old light sticks inside, but because the silo is no longer stable, it’s not used anymore.

Crankypantsing

Dyscalculia

Shelly

I joke about being bad at math (really, truly, spectacularly bad) and about being generally no good with numbers. Usually, it works against me, so on the rare occasion when it turns out in my favor, I like to savor the moment.

I’m in the process of setting up my old computer for my mom. Her ancient iMac is limping along on its last leg, and though my old desktop is not as spiffy as it could be, there’s a lot of good life left in it. Job #1 was upgrading the RAM. That turned out to be easier said than done. The first time I ordered it, I got the wrong kind and had to send it back (I read PC4200 as PC3200). The second time I ordered, I tried to be more careful, but when I got the shipping confirmation, I noticed that I’d ordered 240 pin RAM, instead of 184 pin. Yikes! It was too late to do anything about it, so I was resigned to sending yet another shipment back.

It arrived today, and I thought I would at least look at it, to see if it would fit. Guess what? I had originally written down the size incorrectly, so when I ordered the “incorrect” size, it was actually exactly what I needed.

Oops.

So now I’m in the process of uninstalling programs my mom doesn’t need and installing stuff she does. That, I should be able to manage without too many math errors, though I did have a moment of panic when my Windows license code didn’t work, because I’d transposed two numbers.

Crankypantsing

Adventures in Shopping

Shelly

I went to Target, looking for fold top sandwich bags, a wall mounted paper towel holder, and cheap, plastic food storage containers. Big fail! They had nothing but Ziploc baggies, nothing but counter top paper towel dispensers (what is the purpose of those?), and their plastic food storage containers were not cheap enough.

So I went next-door to Kmart. Still no fold top sandwich bags, but I got a great deal on Ziploc containers (two packages for $5 plus $1 off coupon for each). I also found a paper towel holder, but when I got home and took it out of the box, it was obvious that it had not only been used, but thoroughly abused. So now I have to take it back. Hrmf.

I did finally find baggies, at the grocery store. Third time’s a charm, yes?

Crankypantsing

“My Google Changed”

Shelly

I wonder sometimes how the people I work with manage to dress themselves in the mornings. Over the weekend, LIT pushed down an update for Firefox. No problem for those of us who use Firefox instead of IE, nor for those who are moderately clueful about software. And by moderately clueful, I mean, they know what a web browser is. Apparently some of my coworkers do not.

Now, I realize that there are plenty of folks who manage to find their way around a computer without overstuffing their brains with information they don’t really need to have on tap. So if I asked my mom what a web browser is, she is unlikely to know what the hell I’m talking about. That’s fine. My coworkers, though? We all had to go through a web 2.0 workshop, so they ought to bloody well know what a web browser is, right?

Twice now, I’ve had someone come to my cubicle to tell me, “My Google changed.” Now, I had no idea how to unpack that statement. What the hell were they talking about? Knowing about the Firefox update, I asked which web browser they were using. “What’s a web browser?” Uh-oh. I asked if they were using Firefox or IE, and coworker A said, “I’m using Google.” Um, no. I explained that they had to be using either Firefox or IE (there are no other options on our workstations). “Oh, definitely IE, then, because I never use Firefox.” (Any guesses as to which browser was open when I went to their workstations?) Lordy!

Apparently, when the new Firefox update was pushed down, it made itself king of the mountain (“All ur shortcuts R belong to us!”). Folks who usually use IE as the default browser now found that Firefox was the default. Some folks–including coworkers A and B–litter their desktops with shortcuts to websites, instead of bookmarking them. Because of the update, clicking on any of those shortcuts launched Firefox, not IE. Folks realized that things looked a little different, but couldn’t figure out why, so their explanation was that Google–which LIT has automatically set as the default homepage in both IE and Firefox–had changed.

If I wanted to hold people’s hands and help them sort out their lives, I’d work in tech support. But I don’t, so I don’t.