January 4, 2014

Good afternoon! Let's talk about purchases. When you buy something, you expect it to work, right? I mean things wear out, but you don't buy something to OWN it & then expect the company to sabotage it, do you? If you bought a car, how would you feel if you suddenly got an e-mail from the manufacturer saying "You've had your car too long, so we've planted a self-destruct button in it that will blow up the motor & trans in 30 days. Please visit your nearest dealer & buy a brand NEW car if you wish to continue driving anywhere."? No, no one

would accept that. So why do we accept that from software companies? Today, Intuit did that to me. I opened Quicken to do my bi-weekly reconciliation & bill paying & 1st the program crashed during opening. The 2nd time I opened it, I got a pop-up message saying that I needed to buy Quicken 2014. How much? On SALE for $60. Why? Because soon my software will no longer connect with my bank accounts &

download my recent transactions, making the program USELESS to me. I don't mind being asked to upgrade to the latest version, but I don't like being forced. In fact, my response was to uninstall Quicken, NOT upgrade to the latest version, & blacklist Intuit, meaning that I will never send them another dime. After that whole fiasco, I went ahead & paid my bills & then tried to read something in Kindle. A couple

days ago while trying to read something in Kindle, the app suddenly started malfunctioning. I could no longer turn the page, & after repeated attempts the calculator app that I have on there (the iPad Mini didn't come with a calculator, I had to download one & it's a pain in my ass ... it has pop-up ads that interrupt what I'm doing & keeps wanting me to buy the paid version) ... anyway, the calculator popped

up, with a pop-up ad, and a notice to purchase the full version if I want to get rid of the pop-ups. Uhhh ... I was trying to READ something in Kindle! WTF?! I ended up having to reboot my iPad. Well, it did it again this morning & this time a reboot didn't help. My son walks in, asked what was up & I explained the problem. He picks it up & it works perfectly fine for him. Story of my life. My PC does the same

thing. It will crash HARD & not even find the hard drive on attempted re-boot. Hubby comes home & it works perfectly. I have Kindle on my phone, but the screen is a little small to work off of. I either need a magnifying glass to see the tiny print on the screen, or I have to zoom in & then scroll all over the place to read a single line of text. Next step ... find a Kindle reader for my laptop. I keep seeing ads

from Amazon about how you can read Kindle books on ANY device. I went to Amazon & couldn't find it anywhere. I did a search & still nothing. I did a Google search & STILL nothing except a link back to Amazon which listed anything but Kindle for PC. I ended up going way down in Google to about the 12th hit & finally came across with a thread about the whole thing & in there was a link to what I was looking

for. Why didn't Amazon make this easier? The link went to Amazon, yet if you search from within Amazon, nothing. I got the reader installed on my laptop & when I opened it all my purchases instantly showed up. YAY! I was able to read what I needed on a larger screen, while working on my desktop PC. Perfect! Now it's mid-afternoon already. So much for a productive day. Sheesh! At least yesterday

was a good & productive day. :) In Minecraft I built a Windmill & Brickwork Home (see pics). I had Bran Flakes for breakfast, cleaned the house, sent out the grocery list, took the dogs out, had a Frito Pie for lunch, shopped for an anniversary gift but ended up buying myself a new PC chair instead. Oops. I checked out Pinterest, catalog shopped but there was nothing at all I was interested in & that's

after going through a huge stack of catalogs. Yesterday's Sims game was Modern Condo & I even got some game time in on that. Pork chops w/ stuffing for dinner & then our nighttime routine. I would have gone to bed earlier, but I was determined to get ANY texture pack or mod to work in Minecraft. By 4:a I gave up & none of it worked. I just don't get it. Everyone keeps saying how great mods & texture packs are,

but I can't get any of them to work. If they're that damn difficult to use, then they're not that great in my opinion. I could understand if I were really bad at computers, but I'm not. Someone like me should be easily able to install a mod or a texture pack. Someone like me should at least be able to get one to work after several hours of attempts. It's not like I'm one of the people who barely knows how to check their e-mail. I guess I'm lucky that I like playing the game in Vanilla. There was ONE texture pack that looked really nice & would have been fun to play, but oh well. There's one mod that I would have loved to have, but I guess I can do without it. Well, hopefully what's left of today will be better than how it started out. :)

Don’t be afraid of history. Take all of it you can get.

Just keep your head above, swim.

We're going to stumble, make mistakes ... I'm sure more than a few before we find our footing. But we're going to learn from those mistakes. That's what being human is all about.