More technology woes

So this week I haven't posted. I've been fighting a horribly slow internet. So much so that I asked my FB friends how to diagnose if it's my laptop, my modem or router, or my ISP. I got a few good suggestions, and it has improved, but not fixed entirely. But I can deal with that.

At the same time, my printer died. It thinks it has a paper jam, but it was actually something being physically broken in the feeder. You know when you stick your stack of blank paper in the printer, there's a little stop it rests against? Yeah, that stop seemed gone, so I could push nearly the entire stack of paper too far up into the feed mechanism, instead of just one sheet at a time being fed in. Now, I don't mind inexpensive printers in general, but it's pretty ridiculous that you can buy a new, better, faster printer for less than the cost to even diagnose repairing the old one. I totally despise being part of the "throw-away" economy, but I needed a printer/copier right away. So I bought a new one last night.

So far, NOT happy with it. I'm going to give it until Friday to settle in and figure out how to operate itself, but I'm most likely going to be taking it back. It had a very hard time installing itself, and now when it prints something, let's call it a one-page Word document... it fails to print successfully about 3-4 times. It'll print about half the page, wait five minutes, then spit the sheet out half-printed. It'll try again and again until it finally gets a whole page out. So you waste about 3-4 sheets of paper... but if you've dared print a 4 page document like I did this morning, the error only happens on the last page printed.... so it tries that same 3-4 times, but now you've wasted a good dozen sheets.  But, it's still an improvement over the attempted install where it would copy, but any document only printed out garbage gibberish. (oh, but it was still printing multiple copies of the gibberish). The initial setup ink alignment sheet never printed in all of the colors.

Sigh. If only I didn't need it so badly to make worksheet copies. The copies are great, crystal clear and colorful.

And the beat goes on...

So one day (oh, maybe a month or so ago) I noticed that I wasn't getting my emails from my homeschooling support group any more. Technically, I'm on two lists, but one is a subsidiary branch of the other, and they both were no longer getting through. It took me quite a while to notice they were gone, because for the hectic summer that this household went through, I confess that I completely ignored most of the mails.

So when it finally occurred to me to notice they weren't coming, I dug through my emails to see when my membership in this group lapsed. All I could find was a single email from March saying it was "due soon." I'd heard rumors of subscriptions getting crossed up, renewals not always processed, and the email list not necessarily reflecting reality. I assumed the worst, of course, and that I was no longer a member, dropped without follow-up emails, because I certainly wasn't organized enough to remember to renew off of email. I even found a blank membership form in my "big ol' pile of papers to sort and file" so it was obvious I'd never sent it in. So I did last month. About 2 weeks later, I get it back in the mail. I had indeed renewed. Apparently. Great! But why was my email off the list? She had no idea, it all looked fine to her.

Long story short (heh) the Yahoo group has pretty tight bounce controls, it just takes a very few bounces from a list to get yourself automatically unsubscribed. It took me about an hour to figure out what happened and fix it.

Just in time, too. In today's email was an opportunity of the type that a lot of the homeschool moms forward to the list. "Hey, my kid's in this great group for dance/choir/drama/music/sports lessons and they have openings, thought someone else might be interested..." This one was for Irish Dancing. Shannon adores dance. I thought it might be right up her alley. But, when I broached the subject to her on the way to ballet in the car this afternoon, she pooh-poohed the thought. She does enough dance during the week. It doesn't sound very fun. She wouldn't be interested in the competitive side. "OK," I said. "But remind me to show you a sample of what Irish Dancing is on YouTube when we get home, it's hard to judge based on my description."

Can I get a 'Mom Was Right?' I showed her everything from 5-7 year old beginners at a recital to the flashy Lord of the Dance to the World Championships for 17-21 year olds. She fell in LOVE. That's just what she wants to do. Wow.

So, an email has been sent to the admissions guy for the school I was first pointed to. We'll see how it goes. Just what we need, right? Yet one more hour of dancing a week? ;) Yup. Can't hurt to try.

Technology woes

It figures, doesn't it, that as soon as I make the mental commitment to blog more that my laptop would break down? Indeed, my hard drive on my main laptop has crashed. I have a friend trying to recover all that is saveable, but I'm most likely to end up reformatting or replacing the drive there. Ah, well. There go all my bookmarks, I've saved a LOT over the years.

During this, I had a really bad run of technology luck. I was sans computer for several days, but at least I could read email on my phone. I even set up my "other" account, the one that I use for more official things like girl scouts and just about anything else that really doesn't need to know I use "helltygr" as an alias. ;) But then, of course, my phone suddenly decided to stop syncing my email. I can browse the internet, use the Facebook app, read the news, but no more email. Then Sean brings his laptop home for me to use, and I crashed it. Luckily, it wasn't really crashed but out of battery due to miscommunication on where to plug it in, so that crisis was averted, but I thought it was serious. So I'm currently using the backup computer from his work. It's only about 7 or 8 years old, running Windows XP, and faster than my "real" laptop. I should have clued in months ago how slowly my computer was running. Ah, well!