Back it up, and Back it up Good

Within the past two months, I’ve experienced the following technical malfunctions:

1. My hard drive at work got a virus. To clean it up, our tech guy had to rebuild it. The process of rebuilding, however, erases all the previously stored data. So, I’ve spent the last couple of months reloading software and searching for documents that I can capture from email, etc. Pain in the ass, but nothing at work is all that important. I don’t really care if I lose everything there. So what. Go forward.
2. My home laptop hard drive crashed. A pain and an expense. I paid $130, and the genius at the Apple store installed my new hard drive right there on the spot. Love, love, love Apple Store. I was out the door in a flash. However, I was out the door with an empty computer. Fortunately, I back up to an external hard drive what I always considered my really important stuff. Until now, I didn’t realize that all that music on my iTunes library would feel so important. I don’t have an extensive music library,  but those are the songs I turn to when I need music, you know? No problem, I told myself…I have all that stuff on my iPhone and which syncs to my laptop.
3. Then, I lost my iPhone and had to replace it with another iPhone. However, I hadn’t yet synced my old iPhone to my new laptop, so all of my contact information and all of my music disappeared with my old phone.

I’ve already re-entered my go-to people and their contact information on my new phone, but I haven’t figured out a way to get my music loaded. I’ll be working on that throughout the day today. One bright note: I don’t clean up my computers very often, and these cleansings have given me sort of a fresh start. I feel lighter. But nostalgic.

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Better than the Moon

You wonder what I’ll remember about last night’s total lunar eclipse, don’t you, Reader? The one that occurred on the day of the winter solstice. The first one to occur on the winter solstice since the 1600s and the last until 2094 when we will all be dead.

This is what I will remember: that before my alarm went off, I woke up and went out alone and could not find the moon. I wandered around until I realized clouds had covered the moon and all the stars. I’ll remember that one by one people appeared out in the courtyard of my parents’ home: Deb, niece, brother, mother, father, nephew. And we all sat looking at a 2:00 AM pink sky and visiting. My niece’s friend saw the eclipse in her town and posted a 2:00AM photo of it on Facebook, so we passed the iPhone image around and held it up to the sky where we thought the eclipsing moon should be, and one by one we all drifted back to our beds.

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An Apple Can Fall from the Tree, but the iPhone 4 Cannot

Did I tell you that I broke the screen on my new iPhone 4? Yep. Dropped it on the way up the basement stairs and it bounced to the bottom and hit the concrete floor. Hairline fracture across the screen.

I went immediately to the Apple store (fortunately, I could easily walk there if necessary) where the nice young hip kid with the gelled hairdo said they were sorry and replaced it right away.

Yesterday—less than 48 hours after I fractured the first screen—I was changing my clothes at work, and my replacement iPhone 4 fell out of my pocket and landed on some tile. I heard it shatter. I knew it was toast before I even looked at it. Sure enough…the screen looked like a store window after a rock goes through it. I mean, seriously, this thing fell a whopping total of 12 inches.

I marched back up to the Apple store where they said they were sorry. I told them I don’t want this phone anymore. I want the old model. I want my old iPhone 3G (mine, of course, has been sold in an Ebay fiasco). But to request the old model as a free replacement for this ridiculously sensitive-screened model, I have to go through AT&T…all Apple can do for free is replace the iPhone 4 with another iPhone 4. But AT&T doesn’t have any 3G on hand…they have to order it and have it shipped to me. So, I took another new iPhone 4 from the very wonderful people at Apple. This is my third iPhone 4 in 8 days.

What can I do, I asked the tattooed Apple boy, to keep this fucker from breaking every time it touches the ground? Buy a case for it, he said in a very understanding way. Okay, sell me a case for it, I said, smiling. Cases for the iPhone 4 are backordered until December, he said, smiling back. Then it looks like I’ll probably be seeing you again tomorrow, I said.

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Cell-Phone Ghetto

Selling an iPhone on Ebay sucks. Actually, Ebay sucks. No more Ebay. Is Meg Whitman still in charge over there? Whatever you do, do not vote for Meg Whitman for Governor of California. And don’t try to sell your iPhone on Ebay, either.

UPDATE: Things worked out. I got paid. Perhaps I overreacted.

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Top 15 iPhone Apps…Make that Top 14

So last night I ate dinner at Dewey’s (for the second night in a row!) with some friends I don’t know very well….well, Suzanne and Karen were there, and I know them, but they were further down the table. The friends at my end of the table all have iPhones, and two people jumped immediately into comparing apps. They had downloaded apps like crazy—apps that count calories of meals ordered from restaurants, apps that read bar codes at Kroger, etc. If one person had an app the other person didn’t yet have, the other person downloaded it right away, and vice versa.

I, of course, have only a few apps on my iPhone…I use only two or three of them regularly. As a matter of fact, sometimes I download an app because it seems to me I might use it. Then, I find that I don’t use it. So, I eventually remove it from my phone. I don’t like my iPhone cluttered up with things I don’t use. For every app those two loaded last night, I was compelled to remove one.

Here are my apps:

1. Facebook (I am so irritated by FB lately that I only check this when I’m bored out of my mind);
2. Scrabble (I still use this one);
3. Lexulous (a Scrabble variant. I haven’t used it in a long time, but it cost $5, so I haven’t removed it yet)
4. WordPress (I use this when I want to blog from my iPhone. Which usually occurs only when I don’t have anything else going on);
5. Wooo! Button (my nephew Grayson downloaded this one, and kids love it, so I leave it on there for Heidi and Cathy’s kids)
6. Fart for Free (again, this was loaded by Grayson, and it makes me a kid magnet. It’s hilarious to watch them play with this one)
7. NPR News (I use this only when I travel. I travel once in a blue moon. It helps me locate local NPR stations on the radio, or I can listen to the news or other programs on my iPhone. Which I never do)
8. Flixter (I don’t use the paper to figure out which movies are playing where or when or to give me a synopsis. I love this one and use it every week).
9. Just Light (that’s it. It’s just a light. Again, I use it when I’m in a dark and unfamiliar place and need to find something. Yeah, like that happens a lot. Maybe I should get rid of this one. Nah. All it is is white)
10. The Weather Channel (yeah, I check the weather quite a bit. Not obsessively, but occasionally. You can check weather anywhere, but I don’t really care about the weather most places)
11. MyWireless (This gives me an accounting of my iPhone bill every day. I used to check this to makes sure I wasn’t going over any limits…but I never come anywhere near my limits, so now I don’t check it at all)
12. Shazam (I hold this up to a recorded piece of music and learn the song title, the artist, the record label, etc. Never use it, but it’s so amazing that I keep it)
13. iTunes (I can’t remember if this came preloaded or not. I seldom download music or videos or podcasts anymore, but I did download Steve Martin’s “The Crow”…an album of banjo and vocal duets. I heard Vince Gill and Dolly Partin sing “Pretty Flowers” with Martin’s banjo and loved it loved it loved it. So I got it)
14. Three different blogs
15. I just this second deleted the “Google” app. You can speak into an iPhone using this app and ask it a question and Google will look it up. I don’t think I’ve ever used it for real. When I fiddled with it at first, it never understood me correctly. Screw it. It’s gone.

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Although I Do Love Flipping the Page on the First of Each Month

We still don’t have a 2010 calendar. Suzanne went to our pantry yesterday (which is where we hang the calendar) and found the ones from 2008 and 2009. She asked why we still have both of those. I told her I like to see what happened.

I keep all my appointments…what few there are…on my iPhone. I don’t think Deb has much of a system other than little slips of paper at various places. Which is one reason she sometimes misses things. I think she thinks that missing things is a small price to pay for the freedom of not being ruled by a calendar. And, let me tell you—she will not miss a golf lesson or a tee time.

So, 2010 may be a breakthrough year—the year when no calendar hangs on the pantry door.

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Will Podcasts Eventually Rot if You Don’t Listen to Them?

I’m syncing my iPhone. Every now and then—about once a week—I plug the iPhone into the laptop and something in it shoots everything over there to iTunes and everything syncs. This means that things from the iPhone (the calendar, the contacts, the photographs, etc) are uploaded to the computer (for backup), and things from iTunes that I want (podcasts, new music…if I were to have any music on my iPhone, which I do not) are uploaded to the iPhone. 

I’m now 27 podcasts behind. This means that 27 radio shows that I like and have chosen have been saved for me somewhere in the universe, and I can now listen to them at my leisure. And I do occasionally listen to them (I just spent about 45 seconds trying to figure out how to spell “occasionally.” It’s one of those words that I will misspell for the rest of my life). I love some of these radio shows—especially “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” which makes me laugh right out loud.  And “The News from Lake Woebegone.” And now I also love “Story Corps;” “Story Corps” makes me cry every time I hear it. Just cry like a baby right there on the lawn mower. 

But more and more often, I choose not to listen to my podcasts. Or the car radio. Or the music stored on my iPod. Or the anythings. After about 16 hours of driving last week, Deb flipped on the car radio for the news and I looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. I don’t know. It all seems sort of insulting to my ears anymore. So now the podcasts are piling up like all those homegrown tomatoes my neighbor keeps bringing me.

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Let’s Put Some Hard Miles on This Old Car

We are practically out the door for the UP. The car is loaded with camping equipment, but we’ve decided not to take the bicycles this trip. I guess we’ll stick with hiking and fishing. And we’ve decided to change the small matter of our eating habits this week. On our 4-hour drive to and from Indiana on Friday we consumed the most God-awful junk food…on the way there we ate Long John Silver’s lobster bites (gross) and hush puppies (yummy). On the way home I ate a Dairy Queen hamburger, french fries, Blizzard, and a diet Coke; Deb ate a chili cheese dog and a vanilla ice cream cone dipped in chocolate sauce. Delicious, but sort of sickening, too, you know.

So, yesterday Deb headed off to Fresh Market and made some wiser choices for us. This is what she chose as car food for today:

• a large bag of Movie Theater Popcorn (does this surprise you, Reader? Not if you know Deb. This woman thinks about popcorn more than anyone I’ve ever met)
• vegetable chips (this does not sound good to me. And it looks odd)
• 100% freeze-dried pears called “Crispy Pears”
• a little bitty bag of fresh trail mix including all the most wonderful nuts and dried fruits
• a small bag of baby carrots
• grapes
• 2 plums
• 3 bananas
• yogurt
• a fresh loaf of multi-grain bread (gorgeous! can’t wait!)
• 1/4 lb. hard salami (love it)
• 1/4 lb. Havarti cheese
• 1/2 lb. smoked cheddar (I can smell it from here)
• 4 bottles of fruit punch Vitaminwater

We’re off to a good start, don’t you agree? Now, I’ll have my iPhone with me, but as you can imagine, I’m not at all sure we’ll have any internet or AT&T access in the UP, so don’t expect any posts this week. I may surprise you with a line or two or a photograph, but don’t count on it. We’ll be home next Saturday fresher and healthier and sweeter.

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Quirky Is Important

What you don’t know is that I’ve been having a helluva time uploading some pictures to this blog. Apparently there’s a little glitchipoo in communication between Apple (this laptop), the iPhone (my camera), and WordPress (this blog software). But our hero (and nephew) Jerod stopped by for dinner yesterday, and after dinner he FIXED IT! I am so happy. Sometimes it takes a computer genius to get us rolling again. 

Jerod is the genius who will also get the Two Honey’s website kicking butt, too…once those bees get us some honey. 

Don’t forget…you’re looking for something awesome to put on my badge bar. Keep your eyes peeled. Pay what you have to, and I’ll reimburse you. I envision a rotating display of quirky.

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My Badges Are Better Than Your Badges

Yes, Reader, I rode my scooter in the rain. One thing I’ve learned is that if I cancel a ride because it looks like rain, then I miss an awful lot of great rides in the rain.

Below are pictures of our blinged-out scoots…mine is the white one, and Jim’s is the orange one.

Once we finished installing the badge bar and the badges, Jim slipped into his back room and emerged with that cool old red “Yeh Man” sign and drilled some holes in it and put that sweet sucker on his scooter. Now we’re in the thick of a badge war. He started it, but I do love a good game of one-upping. So, Reader, if in your travels you should come across an eye-catching thingy that might look spiffy on my scooter, please get it to me. I want it.

P.S. I wrote this entire post—including uploading the pictures—from my iPhone. Sweet.

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