Wednesday, July 17, 2013

When Your Toys Don't Work

Part of the frustration and busyness of the past week has been the result of technology failures.  We've had a series of problems with different items in the house.  And I just get so frustrated when my toys don't work.

First was our TV.  Our old one died so we replaced it.  I was amazed at how much better the picture was and for several days we just stared in amazement at the TV, weather it was showing a commercial, a news show or a National Geographic special, commenting on the great picture.  The TV also has some "smart" features including the ability to be operated by voice or by hand movements.  I went through the tutorials to "introduce" myself to "TV".  I never could get it to understand my hand gestures (tempting me to make another hand gesture that nice girls don't use). But we did seem to come to an understanding on the voice control.  It turned out to be a feature that has a lot of cool factor and little practicality so it went unused.  I guess Mr. T.V. was feeling left out because every so often in the middle of a show with no hands on any remote it would go into voice mode, mute the TV sound and demand that we use one of the voice commands.  A call to the store finally resulting in disabling that feature on the options menu.  So for now it seems that problem is solved.  Although it makes me wonder why we have features that we can't use....but there IS that GREAT picture.  That counts for a lot.

Then the embroidery function on my sewing machine had a hiccup.  The machine works great but it doesn't want to read any files from a USB stick or from a laptop.  This isn't something that I do often, but I had decided to work on the Craftsy class on Machine Embroidered Quilting and was actually making some progress when the machine decided that it didn't want to play nice with outside technologies. Finally after trying a variety of things for about an hour I called my local store who called tech support who said that it sounds like a loose connection but it needs to be checked by a technician.  So it's at the sewing machine doctor getting fixed.

And then....what really made me lose my blogging mojo was Blogger itself.  I wrote this nice post about my neighborhood and pets and social media but Blogger coughed somewhere in the middle of my composing and the entire post was lost in cyberspace somewhere.  The only part saved as a draft was a first sentence.  It was one of those posts that is difficult to recapture once you've put the thoughts down initially.  Maybe one day I'll try those thoughts again, but not just now.

So, to balance out the techy failures and provide a bit of eye candy - here are some successes of nature from our yard:


 
 

5 comments:

  1. We are so dependent on our electronics! Your new TV sounds dreamy - hope you figure out the VC problem!
    I found your new Etsy shop and 'favorited' it, and pinned your cute little (underpriced!)wallhanging.

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  2. Some days ... sigh ... little tip from someone whose computer occasionally 'gets possessed', I now save after every paragraph I write. Not always foolproof but it woks for me :)

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  3. Works not woks .... bloomin' computers LOL x

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  4. I am right there with you! Technology! Can't live with it! Can't live without it!

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  5. I never really understood a love/hate relationship until I had a computer! And I agree with you, why do they add so many features to modern appliances that you're never going to use?

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