<- Click hereAs you can see below, I'd not expected to post tonight. But I hate to break a tradition just because of some silly excuse like... THE INTERNET!!! GRUMBLE....
Um, anywayzzzz... Last night I posted an image, actually multiple images, of Bubba's master. If Mick Ranck was host of his annual family Fourth of July picnic to which hundreds are invited in Strasburg, then Bubba is the host dog. Everyone knows him. Has for years. His long time grizzled presence is a sign that something important about the world has been revealed. So... in this week of portraits in the Ranck Fourth of July Gallery rooms, it seems important to include this guy and his personality. Frankly, he was easier to capture in one image than Mick was last night.
NOTE: Below this line -------------- is a rant. It was all I expected to post tonight. I call it...
WITCHCRAFT
"A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from witchcraft!" Those are the words of sci fi writer Ray Bradbury.
In the past two weeks I have spent almost eleven hours on the phone with either Verizon or with Apple attempting to make my Airport Express/Airport Extreme wireless WiFi network work throughout the house. It operated perfectly for about two years. Then abruptly last week my wife found she could not send email. Nine hours later... after an early misdirection from a Verizon cretin... everything appeared fixed. By everything, the various tinkerings by a parade of telephone technicians resulted in not only the wireless system crashing, but also my hard wired interconnect here in my office.
Then tonight at dinner, my wife said, "I can't get my mail." What I uttered was one, smelly, expletive.
Now three hours later, after Apple again disabling everything and rebuilding it... we are partially working. However, until I trash some of Rita's preference files, and reboot her machine... all will not be stable. Unfortunately she has lost her sys admin password for her machine... and if I trash those preference files we will be polled for that PW upon reboot.
There is a workaround. It involves reloading certain elements of the system for her iMac from the original discs. Okay... except, she has this odd notion that all of this should act like a utility. You know, you set it up, pay your money, and use it from that point on. Like telephones, electricity, water, gas... a utility. How quaint. She expects that it is supposed to just work!!!!
So of course she does not carefully file her sys discs like the rest of us who are geeky enough to understand that ... well this is witchcraft. In order to make this thing operate we need to know exactly how far to leap off of the ground while twisting in the air and spitting...
What all of this means is that I am off to find the sys discs (along with incense,crystals, and an Asian guy with long needles)... then to get the instructions which Apple promised to send to my email account... then to print them out... then to go into Rita's office and follow those instructions to reboot in a manner that allows me to change the password. Which I shall etch into her desk with an X-acto blade.
It also means that there will be no image posted tonight since I have been otherwise occupied. Life should not intrude upon my hobbies. But even worse... neither should the internet. At the moment we seem to be gridlocked on the internet highway. And all I can do is honk. Check back tomorrow... okay?
Thanks for visiting...
Grumble &^&%$$$!!
Ted
8 comments:
Smiles...first of all Bubba is way cute!!! Second I am a MAC owner as well and we have four in the house not to mention ipods etc etc.. We have that firewire thing too and when it goes it goes for us all! LOL... so I hear you send you patience and humor as well as a smile. I hope you find the equipment needed to get 'er done and thank gawwd your not Pc owner! smirks...
Ted, that image of Bubba is just priceless. He looks like he's just about to jump up and give each viewer a big slurpy kiss :-)
I have a similar Verizon wireless fiop netword here. To which my son's pc laptop and my Apple MacBook Pro laptop are connected.
My son's pc crashed 4 months after he'd bought it. So he had to reinstall and reboot and re-whatever else.
Thenh we started getting knocked off the network and the router wasn't transmitting. So Bob spent some time on the phone with a Verizon techie, who was able to make the router behave itself.
And then after a couple of uneventful weeks, my laptop started losing its wireless connection. The only way I could get it to work was to turn off the wireless, then turn it back on - this is by clicking on the icon along the top bar.
Another week uneventful week and then my laptop started giving me the pop-up that says that my internet connection isn't working, blah, blah, blah. So I'd go thru all the prompts and eventually it'd start working.
This went on at least twice a week for me, but my son has had no further problems. It was Apple's bug.
Now I still get that pop-up, but I just ignore it and pull down the bookmarks menu, select a website and click and I'm good to go.
So basically, our first problem was Verizon's and my subsequent problems have been totally Apple's, which I can over-ride, thank goodness. (knock on wood)
Hope you're now back online :-)
Flo (from RV)
Arthur C. Clarke :)
Andreas
(Andreas) You are correct Sir. I stand corrected. Hmmm... maybe to help me stand corrected, I should purchase support hose?
(pnf) The mail application went down again this evening. Of course I mumbled something I will not type here. But it turned out this time it was a partial collapse of Mac's entire mail system. It's back now. But YIPES!
(Flo) Bubba's a grizzled gentleman. Sadly, his sister died last year, so this is the first time he's had to do dog-hosting alone.
As for your Verizon mess... I received a bunch of emails from folks with the same reports. It's apparently growing increasingly difficult in our present full-employment economy to find good help. It's sort of scary though that the virtual highway is both fragile and that the pot-holes are getting tended to by folks who barely understand the essence of either pot or hole.
I wonder if this was what eventually happpened to the Appian Way?
Thanks for sharing everyone. And for tolerating my rant.
Ted, No solution suggestions from me, I use windows. But... Do you remember way back when.... Early computer use was relagated to the high priests in white lab coats and ordinary people could not enter their world. Now 40 years later the computer is a commodity and anyone can despoil its operation. I am amazed at how so many laymen do not accept that a computer is a percise and exact system but they also will relagate their car maintenance to a specialist. To tinker or not to tinker, hmmmmm....
On a more positive note, I have admired you work for some time and I look forward to each new posting. Thank you.
(trub) Yeah... you are right. It's astonishing that we get annoyed when a webpage is slow in loading. Just think about how much witchery has to go on to bring the guts of the information from who-knows-where to us here - in full color - graphically perfect - and a multi second delay makes us as unhumble in the face of all of that massive science as ... as... Paris Hilton is to the power of a court. Um... as Paris Hilton was.
But even though I can admit all of that. I'd still like to have Wi-Fi run as dependably as my garbage disposal. I am a greedy-needy-sucker.
As for your second point... now that' makes me truly humble. Thanks a tremendous amount. Nice words and good thoughts are the currency of this blogsite. You've just paid a lot of bills.
Ted
"...after an early misdirection from a Verizon cretin."
HaHa!
I'm one of those cretins! Or at least I used to be. I've been involved in tech support for so long that I have become the old guy that cleans up all the young "cretins" misdirections. Of course, in my office (and it is an internal office) your'e often lucky to get the really whack and oddball issues properly looked at the first day out.
One of our more typical prescriptions is to have you reboot your computer and call us back if your still having trouble.
And if you do have to call back, we'll give you sympathetic and endearing look not unlike Bubba's... we mean well. We really do.
Great image, great story.
Nice to hear, that those magic moments are not the sole privilege of PC-Users... Who then are usually comforted either with "Ha, you should go for a real OS, just run Linux!" or "Hy, you should go for a real computer, buy a Mac!"
So, welcome to the party Ted. Let's dance a bit around the altar of technology...
Oh, shall I start ranting a bit about my new cellphone...? I'm going back to smoke signals soon!
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