Monthly Archives: June 2015

And Now, A Word From Your Unintentional Tech Support Lady.

Every once in a while, I’ll have some thing that I’m doing where I can’t figure it out, but then it becomes A THING that I am convinced I can make work on my own. I call these situations “personal challenge” because I WILL CONQUER THE SEEMINGLY IMPOSSIBLE. This happens from anything to riding a shuttle train at the airport that rocks all over the place, where I refuse to hold on to the railing and instead stand in the middle of the car and “surf” the motion without falling (so far with great success), to having something wrong with technology that I am determined to figure out without one of those “Genius Bar” people helping me. This was the case yesterday when I turned on my iPad for the first time in about 3 years.

After letting the thing charge for an hour because BOY, was that battery dead, I was able to turn on the power. I’ve never used this thing for much (as you can tell by the fact that it just sat for 3 years) but we’re going on a trip tomorrow and I wanted to rent some movies to put on it and have games to play. I noticed some old pictures in the photo section that I wanted to be sure to save (pictures of our pups and a bunch from when Wil and I went to Australia 3 years ago) so first, I connected it to my desktop to move the photos there in case something went horribly wrong and I accidentally deleted them. (Did I mention I’m not very good at the technologies? Because deleting something important is somehow one of my Super Powers.)

The first thing that popped up on the iPad after transferring the photos was to log in to iCloud. On my phone, desktop, and laptop, I had long ago changed the email associated with my iCloud account and updated the password. The email that kept popping up for iCloud on my iPad was an old Yahoo! account that I got rid of close to three years ago. This is where the problems started. I couldn’t remember the password so I couldn’t get into it to change the email or even sign out of iCloud. I couldn’t use the “I forgot my password” link because the options were to send it to the email it was associated with (according to my iPad, the old Yahoo! address) and when I tried to recover the password by answering the security questions which started with my birthdate, it kept telling me that wasn’t my birthday and it didn’t match their records, so no bueno. Not those exact words, but close. After multiple attempts to figure this out, I asked people on Twitter if they knew how to fix this. I had tons of suggestions but nothing was working. I even had someone who used to work at the Genius Bar at Apple try to walk me through accessing this without success. She sent me a link to steps you can take via changing the email address on FaceTime and the messages part which should then update it in iCloud. It allowed me to do this for the other two but wouldn’t do that for iCloud. ARGH!! I tried stupid things like turning it off and then back on again, and even blowing in the connector like an Atari cartridge to make it work. NOTHING. Wil tried to help me fix it and when that didn’t work, he Googled ways to do this, all still without success. And that’s when this became PERSONAL CHALLENGE.

I logged on to the iCloud website to manage my account. There, it showed that my home computers, my cell phone, and my iPad were all connected to my iCloud account. It also showed my correct email address and password. I tried changing my password in the hopes that it would update on all of the devices which worked for the others BUT NOT ON MY IPAD. On the site, it gives the option to remove a device, so I clicked on the iPad icon and it should have removed it from iCloud. According to the account on their site it was removed, but according to the iPad, it was still connected to it by my DAMN YAHOO! ACCOUNT. I even did the “restore/recovery” thing which basically is like a force quit when your device is being funky. I did that THREE times while it was connected to my desktop, as I was instructed to do. NOTHING. It was restored (as in reset) but it still had the same old Yahoo! account attached to it. After three hours of dealing with this thing without success (and nearly wanting to drop kick it into a fire pit) I walked away from it, accepting defeat on my personal challenge, with the plan to take it to the goddamn “Genius Bar” at Apple so they could do one tiny thing and proclaim “Fixed!” while I stand there and scowl at my iPad, which is surely laughing at my failure.

With all the suggestions being sent to me, somehow at least one of them had to work. I had tried them all individually without success. I was taking a shower when I thought “maybe a combination of all of these suggestions being done at the same time is the solution.” I jumped out of the shower, raced into my office, turned off the power on my iPad (which I had already done multiple times) and connected the iPad to my desktop again while holding down the “home” button on the iPad (which, like I said, had been working like a force quit restore option the last 3 times I did this.) While still holding that button down, I logged onto the iCloud site on my desktop. There, for whatever reason, it again showed my iPad attached to my account so I deleted it yet another time but this time, it allowed me to go through steps to wipe out the entire iPad and start new. YAAASSSSS. I don’t know why it wasn’t allowing me to do that before and just kept treating it like it was restoring everything while keeping all of my info and apps, but this time it worked!

I get that these things are in place for security reasons and that one of the ways to maintain the security is that connecting the iPad to my computer told it that it was my device. The only thing I could think was maybe because it sat for so long, it was just a little slow to catch up to what I was trying to do with it. Whatever the reason, I got it to do what I wanted it to do, and that felt pretty damn good.

PERSONAL CHALLENGE: COMPLETE.

Faith In Humanity Restored

Over the past several weeks, I have felt like there are tons of people online that are showing up just to say something shitty to a person they don’t even know. I see it happening to friends, and it’s been happening to me and to Wil a lot. Around this time last year, Wil observed that it may have to do with the fact that school is out, so there are a bunch of bored, unsupervised kids trolling the internet who don’t make the connection that there’s a real person on the other side of the shitty comments they’re spewing at all of us. It’s probably the case again now, but it still has been bumming me out and as a result, I haven’t been inspired to write anything new here for a month, and I’ve had large chunks of time where I don’t even look at Twitter. In fact, over this last week I had been considering just removing myself permanently from all social media just so I didn’t have to see this stuff. It isn’t as bad as it was back in April when I was attacked relentlessly after Calgary Expo,** but that experience soured me on humanity so much that even the smallest shitty comment was making me feel like I just wanted to get the hell outta dodge.

When I looked at Twitter yesterday morning, my timeline was filled with friends who were attending E3, a gaming expo that will be going on this entire week. I loved how excited they were to see the things they love (and again bothered by seeing shitty comments that were being sent to them when they posted things they were happy about) but the reality is I don’t play any of these video games so I have no idea what they are talking about. I decided it would be fun to create my own “online conference” in the form of adorable pictures of pets who would be attending and called it EEEEE3, because every time I see a ridiculously cute animal, my voice goes up 5 octaves and I squeal “EEEEEE!!!” I posted pictures of my own animals attending my made-up conference and tagged it with #EEEEE3 so if other people posted pictures, they could all be seen under the one hashtag. My timeline went from video game tech posts to HUNDREDS of the cutest pet pictures I have ever seen in one afternoon. This made me so happy, and was a great reminder of why I do anything online to begin with; to meet people who have similar interests as me, and to have a place to share silly stories, talk about something I love, and even talk about things that have been a struggle in my life.

After an afternoon of having my faith in humanity restored, I was thinking back on the last three years of being on social media and having a blog, and why I would miss it if I bailed on the whole thing. This last week, it was a great way to let people know about our friend, Stepto, who became gravely ill and was (and still is) in the hospital (doing much better everyday, thank gods) and that his family needed help in being able to be with him during this horrific ordeal. It has also been the place where I once wrote about living with someone with depression and still get emails and meet people who tell me how much that post helped them and/or someone they love who hadn’t yet gotten treatment for themselves. It’s been the place where I’ve been an ambassador for Women’s Health Week and have had a couple of women tell me that because of my post encouraging them to get annual screenings, they found breast cancer and are getting the treatment they otherwise wouldn’t have known they needed. I hear from single parents who’ve read about my own struggles as one, couples who invite us to their wedding because they feel a connection to us and the relationship Wil and I have worked so hard to build and maintain for nearly 20 years, and on top of all that, it’s the countless stories from other rescue pet owners who share my passion for helping animals in need that fills my heart beyond words.

In any situation in life, your experience is what you make of it. We can’t always steer clear of the bad that comes our way, but we can definitely navigate toward the things that we love and the things that matter to us. I like that I found that path again. Thanks for being the unsuspecting guide.

 

**Since Calgary Expo, I changed the ability for just anyone to post comments on my blog because I knew it would be another platform for people to show up and be horrible. You can still comment, you just have to register to do it so it verifies who you are to avoid throw-away accounts from asshats. Thank you for understanding.