Last night I wanted to watch the World Series. We get our TV via satellite dish. Between the wind and the rain, however, the signal kept on getting dropped, to the point where it wasn't any fun to watch. I wonder how many other viewers were in the same boat.
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One of my favorite features of the New York Times online is the word look up function. Select the word by dragging across it with the mouse and a question mark pops up that you can click to get a dictionary definition. Well done! Alas, the technology is not enabled for the Times blogs, such as this Linda Greenhouse Opinionator column. She challenges my feeble vocabulary with words like "protean." I duly go through the routine, but then nada.
So my request for the Times is first, enable the look up technology for the entire Web site, or if that is not possible then second, make Greenhouse an Op-Ed columnist. She deserves it and what she is writing about is incredibly important.
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It's hard for me to tell sometimes what is a virus, spyware, or simply an annoying program. Over the last two or three weeks, with some regularity, a dialog screen pops up that looks like some sort of music playing software, and it wants me to select a language to install. It doesn't say the name of the software or why I should do this. It is as if this is step two or step three in an install process, but I don't recall it ever going through step one. I click cancel and get a temporary fix, but it is not a solution. I don't know how to go about finding a real solution.
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I have a Sony Vaio flatscreen with the processor in the monitor as my home computer. Mostly it works reasonably well, but on occasion it temporarily loses association with the wireless mouse. The first couple of times this happened I panicked. But now I've gotten used to it and if you wait a bit, the association is restored. I've gone through the routine of replacing the batteries more than once, finally concluding the problem isn't with the mouse, but either some hardware or software issue with the Vaio itself. Live by the sword...
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The campus VPN software is very important. For example, when I'm surfing and find a published article I'm interesting in looking at, if I'm logged into the VPN and the campus Library has a subscription to the database where the Library is located, I automatically get access. That is wunderbar! However, sometimes even when I'm connected to the Internet but not yet using the VPN, when I try to establish a VPN connection there is a little red X and a message that says you need an active connection to the Internet. This is discouraging. You can access the Library content via a different form of authentication, but then you have to go find the article through their online catalog/interface. Sometimes that's only a couple of more steps and then is not a big deal. Other times it takes longer and when that happens sometimes I give up before getting the article I want to access.
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For certain programming on TV, like baseball, I like to have my iPad with me while I'm watching. Sometimes I do Web surfing that is related to the game. Other times, I'm doing my digital immigrant version of multi-processing. I recently changed my ATT subscription for the iPad. I had the unlimited and reduced that to a quota, cutting the monthly fee in half. It seemed to me mostly I was using it on Wifi, so why pay in addition? When I'm in our sitting area/living room reading on the iPad, the wireless network in the house works great. The TV room is adjacent and the house isn't that big to where this is a long distance from the router. But in the TV room sometimes the wireless signal gets dropped. Other times it works fine.
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Every one in the family now uses the exercise room we have in the basement to do the treadmill and lift light weights. We've got a TV in there hooked to the satellite dish and also connected to a DVD player. Mostly, I watch DVDs, the distraction keeps me at the activity for a while. The treadmill, however, makes a fair amount of noise. So my son has taken to having the caption play on the DVD. I didn't really want that, but I couldn't figure out how to turn them off. He's not around when I exercise. So I watch with them on.
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We think of technology as empowering. And it is. But it also presents a variety of little obstacles that each of us must deal with in our own way. For me, it's a lesson in humility, accepting what is doled out. Having not that long ago held the title, CIO, it should be that I am the captain of my fate. Alas, it's more like I'm a buck private, awaiting new marching orders.
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