I have been traveling, roughly along US Hwy 20 for sixty days. I am currently in Valentine NE getting ready to go to the Cherry County Fair and Rodeo this evening. It has been a wonderful adventure so far in every way except being able to keep up my blog, for several reasons. First, the computer crash. Microsoft/Toshiba has cleverly disguised the blue screen of death with an error message and a frowny face. The net result is the same. I can't use the computer.
After trying for a week plus to recover it with only the computer's system backup, I eventually gave up and bought a nice reliable, low-end HP. I had a full backup of all my files, so getting them up on the new computer wasn't much of a problem. That's when my camera battery went dead and I couldn't find the charger. Not to worry. I have both a cell phone and a tablet computer. I started taking pictures on my tablet, accessing my websites, and getting things recorded, but didn't yet have access to blogger for updates. I still had to get my Microsoft products on my computer and without disks, my only alternative was to subscribe to Microsoft 360 online. So they're hitting me up for ten bucks a month to have Word and Excel and Outlook. But at least Expression Web is a free app now so I could start editing the web pages for the story I've produced.
Before I got around to tracking down my Adobe products so I could do photo editing and publishing, I started getting messages from Verizon that I was at the limit of my 20 gigabytes of data usage. First time I'd ever managed that. I gave it a rest until July when I figured I'd be able to download my apps. No such luck. By mid-month I was receiving warnings about my data usage. When I finally figured out the problem, I was paying an extra $15 a gigabyte to Verizon.
The problem? Microsoft's "service" to users of automatically backing up everything I did on the new computer and on my tablet to OneDrive so it was safe "in the cloud." That included uploading every single picture at full resolution taken on my tablet. Goodbye data usage allotment. I managed to get all my settings changed and hopefully am completely disconnected from the abomination of OneDrive!
Sadly, that wasn't the end of the problems. I finally got to my Adobe account to discover that their entire site is devoted to their own "cloud" applications. I just wanted to download my three little desktop apps, Photoshop, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro. I finally managed to get connected on a chat session with support and Tobassum was very helpful, getting applications that did not transfer when I updated my account information last January and sending me links to my download site and serial numbers. It took a while and I've probably used at least a quarter of my data usage for the month today just downloading the 5 gigabytes of InDesign, but I finally have those applications loaded and am editing photo images to suitable resolution for posting. I hope to begin posting things retroactively to the dates they occurred. For now, I'll try to keep up.
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