I don’t eat any gas-causing foods 2 hours before a massage. I also shower and then lotion my feet so they won’t be chapped and gross during their few minutes of attention. The timing of a restroom visit beforehand is key, too. The way I see it, if you want a good massage, why not make the experience as pleasant as possible for all parties involved? I’m considerate that way. A tad uptight, but considerate. Continue reading »
So I’m third in a four-person line to get my groceries scanned at Ralphs grocery store in Beverly Hills.
“Put it down, put your stuff down, it’s ready,” a woman yelled behind me. She had jolted me from my peaceful study of candy bars and gift cards. I turned to see. She was old, scarfed, hunched-over and white. (Her color is pertinent later.) Everyone within 30 feet turned to see.
The clerk had scanned a six-pack of Heineken from it for the guy at the front of the line triggering eight inches of new conveyor belt. Continue reading »
Don’t read the rest of this Note if you’re feeling vulnerable. A few weeks ago, I posted the following status update:
Just unfriended 6 people -some for useless political spewing and others for excruciating inanity on my news feed . And I’m only to letter “i”. Try it. Purge a few. I feel so much lighter.
I was surprised by the anxious responses I got to this. Most were from worried friends whom I wouldn’t consider unfriending. I felt both flattered and bad because the people who were concerned were never at risk. They made it seem like being my friend had become some sort of contest. Ha, I should be so lucky.
Eventually, my friend Curt Harris posted Continue reading »
Dire Means is now available in multiple e-formats on Smashwords. Get it for your Nook, Apple iPad, Sony e-reader, Amazon Kindle, Palm doc reader, Stanza reader, PDF and on-screen javascript reader. A generous 50% free sample is downloadable and e-pricing by the publisher for the whole ebook is $2.99. Thanks to everyone who has read this book so far. I have appreciated all the great feedback. More reviews of Dire Means can be found on its Amazon page.
Dear Facebook,
I was OK with our relationship. YOU were the one that got bored. I had really hoped things would get back to normal for us -honestly. I did my part by giving you at least a few minutes of undivided attention almost every day. On a few days we spent an entire afternoon just sharing, laughing, reconnecting and getting caught up. I bragged about you. I told people how lucky I was to have found you. I used to wish all my friends in the world could have what we had. Baby, I thought we were special. Continue reading »
People seem to want details about my earpiece mishap. Here are the details.
I suppose a Bluetooth earpiece shouldn’t have emotional value, but mine did. My earpiece was special because I have unusually small ears. Continue reading »
I don’t often call myself an idiot. I work hard to avoid regret and usually feel enough paranoia while working on computers to be more careful than I need to be. However, I do remember a few times when I got myself into a ridiculous, avoidable jam on a computer and muttered some colorful things to myself about my own lack of wisdom. Continue reading »
“It’s not a ridiculous notion to think that something might actually live in there,” Joe, said. We took turns pressing our heads against the wall to peer down into the darkness that was behind his desk.
It was as though someone had taken a huge platter of giant black spaghetti, plopped it onto his desk and then pushed it off the back to wedge on the floor between his desk and wall. I reached in and tugged on one of the looser stray cables and the whole clump reacted. I half expected something to run out. Continue reading »
In 2005, I joined the growing ranks of identity theft victims. Fortunately, the damage I suffered totaled only a few thousand dollars. After filing a police report, conducting a three month letter writing campaign and calling creditor after creditor, I was able to restore my credit. I was lucky; Recovery is a much, longer, more costly and grueling process for many victims. Continue reading »
I’m driving down the freeway fumbling my free hand below the driver’s seat, searching for my sunglasses. The only items I find are an empty water bottle and a gum wrapper -neither of which can offer any relief for my squinting eyes on this bright, sunny day. I give up and put both hands on the steering wheel again. Continue reading »
“I’m sorry, I just don’t feel comfortable doing this,” I said to Ashley, my client. We were alone in her office and I had just finished cleaning a virus from her computer. As I prepared to leave she asked me to do a risky favor for her. It was a favor that I had done only a few times for other “Ashley’s” years ago. And each of those times, I had lived to regret it. Continue reading »
Lynette had over 14,000 emails in her Inbox. Her email program was sluggish and she wasn’t happy about it. I suggested she archive and/or delete some of her email. She winced and said, “But what if I need one of them?” I knew I was dealing with a serious case of pack rat-itis that I wasn’t going to cure. Filing that many emails would take her weeks of work she didn’t want to do. Continue reading »
It took a few moments to absorb and reconcile the image in my mind. The car ahead of me was clearly a BMW. It had all the markings – the tail light design, the shape, the wheels. A more-conspicuous-than-usual logo was centered on the trunk. It wasn’t the expected blue and white checkered quadrants of BMW logo. It was the unmistakable tri-spoke circle of a Mercedes Benz logo. When it hit me, I laughed. Continue reading »
The teacher, Mr. Gepford, led my seventh grade class in one of the silliest assignments I had ever seen or heard. I might have understood the purpose if all my classmates had suffered from laryngitis on that day. Or perhaps if we got to build a working telegraph beforehand then the exercise would have been more fun. Instead we sat there, drumming our fingers on our desks and hoping to be understood. Continue reading »
I’m confident in my ability to change a light bulb. But cutting drywall to move and rewire a junction box is a task I probably wouldn’t take on myself. I’d call an electrician for help because the risk of damage to property or me is too high.
I can change a flat tire on my car. But changing the timing belt is a task I wouldn’t even attempt. I have neither the tools, nor the skill to do it. Continue reading »
I avoid house calls to fix computers. Yes, some big-name computer support companies do service home computers, but ask any independent IT consultant and he’ll tell you that fixing a home computer is risky. You’ll likely have to fix any future problem that computer may have -for free -because the home user will erroneously see new problems as related to your fix of the first. For some reason, perception of IT work is different (and more accurate) in a business environment. Continue reading »
I drove around the block twice, hunting for a parking spot during lunch hour traffic. When I succeeded, I fished through my car’s ashtray for a couple of quarters to feed the meter. I plopped one in and then did an anger-managing breathing exercise when I saw that it rented me only 15 minutes. “What a rip,” I mumbled, kneeling on my passenger seat to sift through more coins. I found two more quarters and squandered them in the meter too -just to get a full hour. Continue reading »
I got my first and only AOL account in 1995. At that time, AOL charged an hourly fee for connecting me to the Internet at a speed over 300x slower than the full-time connection I now use in my home. I had to be careful not to use up my allotment of paid minutes in the first few days of the month. To save precious minutes, I would write my emails offline in MS Word, and then paste them into my AOL composition window to send them (Shhh! Don’t tell!) I wanted to make sure I had plenty of time to surf what I thought was “the web” on my blazing 14.4 kbs modem. Continue reading »
A couple decades ago, Grandma and Grandpa received a cool new color TV as a gift for Christmas. It was one of those TV/VCR combos that didn’t require any cabling “know-how” or technical expertise to set up. At first they were tickled to
own such a new-fangled piece of technology. They complimented the crisp, clear picture and went on and on about how the compact design of the combo unit saved them precious space in their small apartment.
Soon, however, I received an increasing number of phone calls for help. The TV/VCR combo was great, but the two-devices-in-one came with a more-complex-than-usual remote control that intimidated them to no end. In fact, the bottom of the remote had a special door that slid open, exposing more confusing buttons. (If polled, they’d say that their garage door remote had the perfect number of buttons.)
They would call me and say that they had accidentally changed a setting on the TV while using the remote and as a result, the TV screen was blank. Or they had played a video and claimed that none of the buttons would eject the tape. I lived nearby so it wasn’t a problem to stop by and help. On more than one occasion I showed up to find the remote control placed on top of the TV while my grandparents sat comfortably on the opposite side of the room. They no doubt endured shows that they didn’t really want to watch because they were afraid to work with a remote that, to them, looked like a hand-held 747 cockpit console. No amount of patient tutoring seemed to help. They wanted to learn it and like it, but mastering the “convenience” that this technology was supposed to bring was beyond their ability. Computers, PDA’s, iPods, cell phones and other new technological conveniences are often challenging to seniors.
Last holiday season I helped a client prepare a high-tech gift for her parents who lived far away. It was a digital photo frame that could display hundreds of stored photos. It had a small memory card slot in the side. We copied her photos directly from her digital camera to the memory card and her photos began to play in a slide show in the frame. “I’ll mail Mom and Dad new photo cards regularly and all they’ll have to do it slide the card into the side of the frame to enjoy the latest pictures of their grandchildren.” The gift was perfect for any technophobe who loves photos of his or her loved ones.
Digital photo frames take cutting edge technology and deliver it in a foolproof, simple device that eliminates intimidating remote controls. Some models offer Wi-Fi connectivity so that photos can be transferred directly from a home computer or even over the Internet. You can find reviews of various digital photo frames at cnet.com.
My grandparents passed away, but if they were still with me I would buy them one. They’d be thrilled that the box was missing a remote control.
“I waited too long,” my friend Brad told me on the phone. I recognized the distinct strain of regret in his voice -I’ve known him since I was a young boy.
When I went back East a few months ago to visit, he showed me a fantastic collection of historic photos of the town where we grew up. He and his wife had also acquired an unusually large library of digital photos of family and friends.
His old computer became sluggish in the following weeks and he tried to back it up. I later discovered
that he was trying to use a flash drive that couldn’t come close to storing his thousands of images, word processing and financial files stored on his hard drive.
Eventually, he asked me if I’d be willing to spec out a new computer for him and include a good all-in-one backup system.
I choose a Dell, logged onto dell.com and placed a new computer in a shopping cart for him to purchase. He said he would order it in a few days.
As Murphy’s Law would have it, Brad’s old computer failed just before he purchased the new computer. No matter what he tried the old computer would not start up. He took it to a local computer repair shop and they told him his data was gone. By the time he called me, his hope of ever getting his photo collection back was all but extinguished.
In a desperate attempt to help, I convinced him to buy the new computer and ship it to me along with the old computer.
I received them and removed the hard drive from the old computer. I plugged into my computer with a shuttle, but before I turned it on, I prayed for smooth noise. I wanted to hear a hum without any clicks. I didn’t want a silent, dead drive because data recovery, in that case, could cost thousands. The drive revved up and I was tentatively relieved.
Unfortunately, none of the data was accessible on the drive. My many utilities reported failure after failure when trying to read it.
Only one program pulled off a miracle. The aptly named GetDataBack ($79) program was a Godsend. This program read every sector on the drive, regenerated a master file table and file system, and after a few hours of intensive restoration, it gave me a window showing all of Brad’s files and allowed me to drag and drop them to the undamaged hard drive of his new computer.
One of the best things about GetDataBack is its user-friendliness. You don’t have to understand its technology to use it. A series of easy-to-understand prompts can guide a computer novice through a successful recovery of a seemingly-lost hard drive. There is no risk of making a mistake while using the program because it is read-only, meaning it doesn’t write any data to the drive you want to recover.
Thanks to this technology triumph, Brad is supplementing his large photo collection instead of rebuilding it from scratch.
Pieces of Minds