Coffee heat rising

Computers

122 Unread Messages…

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Ugh! MacMail reports that 122 unread e-mail messages reside on the server. Actually, only about 30 of those are significant. But then there’s all the stuff sitting on the Canvas server, from 20 students in one course and 30 in the other.

Ugh, ugh, ugh!!!!!

Sitting in front of the computer causes physical pain. Not sitting in front of it alleviates said pain. Day before yesterday and yesterday I managed to avoid the desktop. What little, absolutely unavoidably necessary work that got done happened on the laptop, in a relatively low-pain chair — hence 122+ unanswered e-mails — and by yesterday afternoon the back and hip didn’t hurt too much.

This subjective discovery, it develops, is objectively true: one study showed just 90 minutes of sitting in front of a computer induced hypersensitivity to pain in deep tissues. Ninety minutes, eh? I’ve been known to sit mesmerized in front of this thing for eleven hours straight, getting up only briefly to grab a few bites to eat and go to the bathroom.

That tends to confirm my growing suspicion that if I’m  ever going to get over this — unlikely, after two years of unremitting pain — I’ve got to get away from the computer.

How exactly to accomplish such a thing baffles me. I make my living on the computer. Really: at this age I can’t be depending solely on Social Security and drawdowns from savings to live…that will pretty much ensure that I run out of money before I die.

On the other hand, I suppose, one could accelerate that latter proposition. There’s hardly any point in living when you’re in agony all the time. And another 15 or 20 years in the present state strikes one as less than desirable.

Oh well.

At the end of the semester, I think I’m going to engineer a two-week break from blogging, writing, editing, indexing, bookkeeping, and anything else that requires extended periods of sitting and staring at a screen. I’ll probably resurrect a dozen “best of Funny” posts to keep the blog alive.

If anyone would like to contribute the occasional guest post, that would be welcome.

Fast One from Apple

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Comes in the e-mail from Apple Corp this little notice:

As a thank you for being a former MobileMe member, you received a 20 GB complimentary storage upgrade when you moved to iCloud. Your upgrade has expired.

Your iCloud storage has been automatically adjusted to the free 5 GB plan. You are currently using 1 GB of storage.

For more information, see this article.

The iCloud Team

Heh. Isn’t that cute?

What happened was that when they created the rather useless iCloud (if you want to store your photos there, I’m sure it’s very nice — but I don’t) (want to, that is), they took away the free storage space that came with MacMail.

Naturally, no one was interested in paying Apple for e-mail space when Google gives wads of it away for free. So to entice people to join up, they made a “complimentary” offer of free space. Then they urged everyone to automatically store all their iPhoto images in this space. Those of us who use Apple’s word processor and spreadsheet could also store those files there — the thing isn’t compatible, though, with the industry standard, Microsoft.

While 20 gigs sounds like a lot, it’s not as much as you might think if you don’t clean out your e-mail in-box fairly often — especially if you have friends who insist on sending you forwarded-forwarded-forwarded junk containing images, no matter how many times you ask them to quit it. My Mac mail, which also fields messages from three g-mail accounts, is set to automatically route messages come from Facebook, the neighborhood association, a Linked-in discussion group, Amazon Associates, and various businesses and individuals that keep spamming me directly into the trash.

Sixty unread messages are in the trash this morning; four on the Mac account. When you open a message on the Mac server, it doesn’t affect the incoming on the Copyeditor’s Desk partition, so you have to manually go in there and delete those — doubling your pointing and clicking for that task, to say nothing of doubling the number of  judgment calls about which messages really should be saved. Seventy unread messages reside there. MacMail doesn’t count “sent” messages, but since those date back to the beginning of May, I’d guess it’s probably several hundred.

Because of this steady, rather rapid accumulation, I actually have come up against that 20 gig ceiling. When that happens, Apple freezes your e-mail. Cute, eh?

And  5 gigs is only a quarter of 20 gigs… Right now, according to Apple, I’m 3.94 gigabytes remain of the 5 gigs.

One reason for the build-up is that I often need to find past e-mails, especially ones that I’ve sent to clients, and so I tend not to delete items from the “Sent” folder until I absolutely have to. And because of my innate laziness, I tend to forget to throw out the trash, too.

So this means I’m going to have to stay on top of cleaning out the mailboxes.

I figured the “complimentary” 20 gigs was a maneuver to get people to load images and documents on Apple’s server and then put them behind the barrel: pay up or lose your data. So I ignored their generous offer of “free” space for all my iPhoto images. As a result, the only thing that matters is my e-mail account: no photos, videos, or valued documents are up there.

 Still. Even though I won’t be seriously harmed if they jam up my e-mail — as long as the hang-up is temporary — something about it I don’t like. It just seems…sleazy.

 

 

MacJunketing

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Yesterday KJG invited me to join her in a quest to buy a new computer. Or, more to the point, a Mac.

She’s had an iPhone for a while, likes it, and in the course of using it has grown accustomed to some of the Macinoid ways of doing things. Her laptop PC having arrived at its last legs (or whatever PCs have), she had pretty much decided she wanted to at least seriously consider a Mac.

So we presented ourselves at the Arrowhead Mall Apple store at 10:00 a.m., the moment it opened to the general public.

That was when we met the most amazing man. His name is Stan, and he and his yellow lab are employed full-time as sales reps for Apple computers. What a remarkable guy! He’s stone blind. Using Apple’s voice function plus an amazing tactile memory and about the quickest mind any of us have ever had the privilege to meet, he had no problem demonstrating how the various choices of products work, how they compare, and what the various choices (for example, of memory) mean in the context of the two businesses KJG and Mr. KJG operate.

The hound had recently had surgery and so spent most of his time resting. No matter. Stan had no problem navigating the store and all its products on his own, all the while operating as an engaging salesman.

He sold me a cool little Bluetooth keyboard tricked out as a cover for the iPad. It works like one of those expensive and useless little fold-up covers you can buy, in that it will put the iPad to sleep when you “close” it. But it gives you a small keyboard with actual keys that actually work, unlike the endlessly annoying virtual keyboard that pops up whenever you need to type something into an e-mail or a web page. This infuses enough usability into the iPad to make the gadget a practical device, something that I haven’t found to be true since I bought the thing.

And I learned that Pages, which only costs a few bucks and which now will manipulate Word documents, can be downloaded into an iPad as a fully functional app. So can Numbers, a spreadsheet with power comparable to Excel’s.

Hot dang!

I’ve wanted a spreadsheet app that would allow me to enter, say, a budgeted amount for Costco, so that I could carry the iPad into a store with me and keep a running tab of what I’ve spent. This would simplify life considerably. But the spreadsheet apps I’ve found so far leave a lot to be desired…like, say, usability.

The new keyboard gadget, Numbers, and Pages will hugely improve the iPad’s functionality. Too bad the thing doesn’t come already loaded with these things — it’s only taken, what? two years to figure this out.

KJG wanted some time to think about all she’d learned before deciding on a purchase, so from there we wandered to a shoe store — decided that the new Mephistos are surprisingly uncomfortable — and through several wonderful stores for teenyboppers and twenty-somethings (imagine! once we could wear stuff like that), and into a Coldwater Creek (this is what we have to wear now????), and over to the food court, and finally back to the Apple store.

Finally she decided on a 13-inch MacBook with a mid-range of memory. The staff there walked her through setting it up, and when last heard from, she was e-mailing messages from the little guy. 🙂

So that was fun. And productive, too.

Evernote and the Enterprising Hacker: When Dinosaurhood Isn’t Such a Bad Thing…

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ApatosaurusNice little flap going on over the Evernote hack: 50 million customers asked to reset passwords.

Evernote is a cool program, and if you used it to its fullest, a hacker could do a lot of damage. It allows you to save notes on every topic the human mind can conceive, nab e-mail pages, synch your stuff between computers, and share said stuff to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and your email. And, evidently, to share stuff with the occasional hacker.

iphonesThe Evernote app is installed on my iPad. But between the nuisance factor of having to haul a machine around everywhere you go and the never-ending learning curve — I grow more averse to climbing learning curves as I age — I’ve hardly used it…just put a few grocery notes in there, and that’s about it.

Minimal use notwithstanding, the latest flap spurred me to change the password, even though I haven’t even looked at the program in months. This required me to dig out the coded hard-copy list of passwords, hidden under stacks of debris in the office, and then try to figure out which dummy e-mail account I used to deflect the nuisance messages one expects to get from outfits that demand an e-mail address, go to another list to find and decode the password for that, get into G-mail to click on the link Evernote sent to that account, then jump through the hoops to change the password. And then click “deactivate account.” ’Bye!

I find trying to type on the iPad to be exceptionally nuisancey. My fingertips apparently don’t generate whatever static electric charge is needed to make the iPad register my presence, and so I have to tap over and over and over or else dig out the stylus thing to make it work; then you have to keep shifting keyboard “views,” as it were, to get numbers and punctuation. Who on earth has time for that? Translate that time-consumption to a broad note-taking & communication program and…well. 🙄

Soon after I’d installed the Evernote app, it dawned on me that a notepad and a pencil magneted to the fridge are a lot faster and a lot easier and one heckuva lot more convenient than poking messages, character by character, into an iPad. And it’s a heckuva lot easier to tear a shopping list off the notepad and stick it in your pocket than it is to haul a tiny computer to the grocery store and fiddle with an app to see what you need to buy this week.

At least, it is for a dinosaur.

And if somebody steals your scrap of paper, at least the thief doesn’t have the secret codes to half-a-dozen other applications, some of them a great deal more private than a grocery list.

Images:
Funny in her callow youth: Public domain.
Original iPhone 8GB, iPhone 3GS 16GB and iPhone Purple 800 32GB: Yutaka Tsutano. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.