As I sit in front of my twin 32-Inch displays, I contemplate the meaning of life. I enjoy looking at the blank monitors adorned with a picture of my wife almost buck naked except for a thong and red and white striped thigh-high socks. She’s holding a baby cougar that is hiding her naughty bits to keep WordPress happy. Of course, my copy does not have their identities obscured with redacted blocks over the eyes to protect the guilty.
In our travels, we’ve met many strange and interesting people. One of which is a couple who trains exotic animals for movies and television. The young cougar is currently an overgrown tabby who will grow up to stalk you in the night, but for now, he’s just a cuddly cat.
One of the things about living on the fringe of society is that you meet other folks who only exist in the gray shadows at the edge of your peripheral vision. About a year ago, my wife lost an older close friend to cancer. But at least it was relatively quick, as dying from cancer is often a painful and difficult path.
Foxy received a call from her son asking for pictures that we might have of his mother. Now my wife is struggling to collect photos from our file server as dealing with an iPhone is almost overwhelming to her. One of the few things we exchange angry words about is when I’m trying to help her understand electronic devices. As an engineer, I struggle to help someone who feels that explaining brain surgery can be done in one sentence or less.
My wife’s friend’s son doesn’t have any idea of the things his mother was into and one of Foxy’s concerns is making sure all the images are G-rated and don’t give a clue to their location or what was going on.
Until recently, I abhorred Apple products as being inspired by the devil. Foxy has always been a fan of the iPhone culture against my love of Android and Windows products. Several years ago, frustrated by the fact that most Windows laptops do not have a workable touchpad, I bought a MacBook Air and fell in love.
Unlike my various Windows computers, the MBA was a tool that I used to write smut stories on and never tried to tear it apart or learn any more about it beyond word processing. Fast forward to today, and I’m helping Wifey search through the backups of files I took from her various iPhones and computers, which are stored on our network file server.
Long ago, I gave up trying to explain how things work and would simply take her phone du jour and copy all of the files to our NAS drive. As a result, I’ve got numerous folders under her name with images from her phones and various digital cameras. It’s an unsorted and unorganized mess, but I didn’t want to try and figure out where everything should go as Foxy tends to live for the here and now and forget about tomorrow or yesterday.
My day of reckoning was yesterday as I struggled to show her how to search through folders for pictures with my new MacBook Pro. This was complicated by the fact we were both sitting in the same extra wide recliner, dealing with large images over our Wi-Fi connection to my server.
“Can I Air Drop these to my phone?” she asked.
“Air Drop?” I questioned as I’d heard the term bandied about by people on an airplane sharing their intimate pictures with the other passengers. “I have no idea if my Mac has Air Drop?” I asked. “All I use it for is writing stories and reading my emails.” I appreciate my wife’s faith in my know-how, but contrary to popular belief, I don’t know everything.
Discovering that my Mac has Air Drop and getting it to work are two completely different things. I finally figured out how to text message photos to her phone, which temporarily placated her. Not having an iPhone makes it difficult for me to figure out why it doesn’t work, but life moves on. I live in fear for the time she sits down in front of her desktop computer and asks me to show her how to view her stored photos on the server. I’m thinking of marking all the files on the server as read-only to protect them from the impatient finger poking the [Delete] key in frustration. I haven’t shared the network password with her for that reason.
Her current desktop is a Windows machine, and I bought her an iMac so that all of her computers and phones would be of the Apple hierarchy. But I haven’t gotten the courage to remove her current desktop and replace it with an iMac. I might have to take a week’s vacation to overcome that hurdle.
On top of everything else, I’ve been seduced by the incessant ads for a folding phone and have spent close to two grand on a new ZFold 4. It’s pretty cool for a fat phone which takes great videos, but when you send them to someone else, they end up as a pixelated mess. But I guess that’s progress?
So far, I like the folding phone, except for the fact that all of my apps need to be reregistered to work. And you don’t find out until you try to use the app. Sam’s Club, the evil spawn of Walmart sells gas in Las Vegas for typically fifty cents a gallon cheaper plus the five percent rebate you get with their plus card. The downside is that everyone knows that fact, and the lines at the gas pump are often a block long, winding through the parking lot. I get to the pumps at 5:30 AM to beat the line and wait until 6 AM when the pumps open.
By six, there is a significant line of pissed-off people who’ve been waiting to buy gas. Last Friday, I was standing in front of the pump with my new phone in hand, waiting for the pump to turn on. Being the smart person I was, I had already reentered my username and password. Typically, what you do is scan the QR code, and the phone handles everything else. So, I see the QR code (block of squiggly lines) and scanned it with my phone. As I grabbed the gas nozzle, my phone beeps and asks for the security code on the back of my Sam’s credit card. WTF, I thought, “Why now?”
Not knowing the security code by heart, I had to put my phone back in my pocket and dig for my credit card. I then switched to using the card as the guy behind me drummed his steering wheel with his fingers.
But I guess all in all, things aren’t that bad. California is not trying to annex Nevada as Russia is trying with Ukraine. The forest fires can’t make it across the desert and if the water drops another fifty feet in Lake Mead, it will be too low to go through Hover Dam. Then all the water will be ours when we reach dead pool!
Tourists still come to Vegas and are distracted by my wife’s tits while she scarfs up their poker chips. Warning do not play poker against any tall braless brunette with curly, big hair and long legs. Trust me, your wallet will thank you.
I’m Larry Archer, a simple writer of smut stories in both print and electronic format. Foxy and I are swingers in real life, and I write about the things we do and see. While the Lifestyle is not for everyone, it’s been fun for us. My smut is explicit and hardcore but with a somewhat plot. My porn stories are generally positive and fun as this reflects how enjoyable swinging has been to us. If you’re interested in checking out my stories, I publish at all the typical outlets.
Larry Archer's World (LarryArcher.blog) 
How did you not know that your Mac does AirDrop? I knew that… and I’ve never owned a Mac. Shame on you. But, yeah, I understand the… predicament. I was once asked to speak at a woman’s funeral by her husband and I had to rack my brain to think of decent things I knew about her because what I did know was that she was a hellion in bed and defined being a freak in the sheets… but he didn’t know that. Could’ve been messy and the only thing that saved me was having to go on a business trip days before her funeral.
So many of us live in that gray area and take those secrets to the grave with us…
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For me, the Mac has simply been writing and emailing. While knowing how to tear apart a Windows machine, the most I’ve ever done to a Mac is replace the battery or hard drive. I typically don’t do pictures or anything with it beyond the basics.
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I get it but you always consider what a machine/OS can do even if you never use that functionality. My iPhone and iPad does AirDrop but I’ve only used it once because it’s not how I use either device. I just wish I could have seen your face when Foxy hit you with AirDrop…
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“As an engineer, I struggle to help someone who feels that explaining brain surgery can be done in one sentence or less.”
Hmmmmm…. the advantages of having a physics degree, while working as an engineer.
I went to UCONN in the late 70’s and physics majors were required to serve as tutors for the department.
My Freshman year I was horrible at it, because I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t understand. For me it was 1+1=2 and I just couldn’t grasp how they couldn’t understand that.
Then one of my professors told me something, that I later learned was attributed to Richard Feynman:
“If you truly understand something, you can explain it to a three year old.”
Even if that three year old requires single sentences. You have to phrase those sentences so you’re dangling something they want to know, and will want a second sentence, kinda like Scheherazade.
Once I understood what the professor said, I was much better, since it shifted my perspective from “what is wrong with this dumbass for not understanding what I just said.” to “Hmmmm… I’ve got to try something else to make it clear to them.”
After a while, I got better at reading the other student and figuring out an analogy that would get through.
So, don’t give up, accept that the problem explaining things may be partially on your side, and look for an analogy that works for Foxy, et al.
Unless, Foxy’s grasp of electronics is similar to my wife.
Her limit with electronics is using a Kenner Close n’ Play.
Oh and if you want to automatically back up Foxy’s iPhone to a PC, you can do it using OneCloud.
See here.
https://www.intowindows.com/how-to-automatically-backup-iphone-photos-to-windows-10-pc/
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Yeah, I pay the extra for the iCloud to back up all her stuff. I go behind her and back it up myself but let hers back up to the cloud just in case.
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I forgot, you could also put iCloud for Windows on her PC
https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud-windows/what-is-icloud-for-windows-icwd3c1cca5e/icloud
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I want to transition her over to an iMac as Apple stuff works best together. I just have to figure out how to transfer some stuff she uses to a Mac equivalent. I’ve got her on a MacBook Air, and besides trying to use it as a touch screen, she’s doing reasonably well.
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You can always set up a virtual machine on her Mac to run Windows programs.
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Mark – I don’t want to make it too complicated, and teaching her about a virtual machine may be pushing my luck. 🙂
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Yeah, some of this reminds me of my mom and getting her used to computers and devices. I remember she broke her computer because she was messing around in the files, saw some she somehow didn’t think belonged there and deleted them – but I only found this out after almost four hours of trying to figure out why the damned thing wasn’t working and, yeah, I wish I could have locked her out of her own computer.
I used to not be a fan of anything Apple but, today, I have both an iPhone and iPad… and a woman who does shit to hers then asks me what’s wrong with them. Man, being the resident tech support person can be an unpleasant pain in the ass…
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I feel your pain Kdaddy.
My Mom’s 97 and trying to keep her PC running is an on going battle.
Keeping my wife’s iPhone working is another challenge.
Every time I look at it, there are more standard icon’s missing from the screen.
She has Parkinson’s and I think she keeps her finger on any given icon too long and gets the phone to shift to the adjust icon mode. She then inadvertently hit’s the “x” on the icon to delete it.
Luckily, I’ve got the steps to restoring the default icon layout down pat so I can fix it quickly.
Of course, she manages to get the TV and cable box in some pretty weird states too.
She’s inadvertently turned on closed captioning, the descriptive service, and SAP language more times than I can count. Again, I’ve learned where to go to turn that stuff off as well.
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I feel your pain, too, Larry. Like you, I know Windows like I know the back of my hand; iOS? Not so much and I often get flummoxed when my lady expects her Samsung tablet to behave like her iPad does and… where’s the Tylenol?
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“I appreciate my wife’s faith in my know-how, but contrary to popular belief, I don’t know everything.”
Snicker.
Are you having fun yet?
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Every day it’s a new battle. The last one was learning AirDrop, which scares the hell out of me. I can just see myself sharing my folder of dirty pictures with everybody in Jack in the Box!
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Kdaddy,
Yeah, it took me a bit to adjust to the iOS “App based” architecture, as opposed to Windows “file based” setup.
By that I mean in Windows, files are files, and you can open them with any app that has the ability to read the file structure.
In iOS, any given file is locked into a single app, and even if you have an app that could also open it, it can’t see it.
I bought an iPad about 10 years ago, because I was traveling a lot more for work at that time. I got an iPad because my wife had an iPhone, and I could get some of her apps, and coworkers had iPad’s and showed me a bunch of nice apps I could get for it.
I always read on plane flights and I got tired of having to carry multiple books, if the one I was reading at the time, had 30 odd pages left in it.
I also figured I could surf the web, stream videos, etc. with it.
I quickly became frustrated trying to figure out what frickin reading app had any given book, and decided to settle on iBooks.
I bought a program that let’s me rip the DRM off any ebook format, and load them into Calibre on my PC. I use that to convert them all to epub format.
Of course, Apple in their infinite wisdom, took books out of iTunes some time ago, so I’ve kept the last version that supported books (12.6 or so) on my PC because I’ve got 2,000 odd books on my iPad, and I don’t want to recreate that library.
The other nice thing I did with it was to put Plex on it, and my PC and Roku.
I’ve got multiple TB’s of movies, TV shows, and music, on my NAS’s and with Plex I can get it on my iPad, iPhone, or Roku anytime, anyplace, well anyplace with an internet connection.
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Calibre is a great program for converting file formats. I use Aldiko for reading on my Android devices.
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It’s also a great program for organizing your library.
I’ve got ~26K books in mine.
Also, I recall seeing an on-line article somewhere, some time ago, that when you “buy” a book on Amazon, you’re really just “renting” it, and they reserve the right to deny you access to it if they see fit.
Not sure what would trigger them doing that, but I’m old enough to want to “own” my media, so I don’t do any streaming music crap, I play the TB’s of music I’ve got on my PC.
I’ve found a boatload of stuff on YouTube, and have another program to download it, and convert it to MP3 (Free Studio).
That’s actually a very nice program suite. it can convert just about anything (video, audio, etc.) to anything. Has programs to let you download from YouTube, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Dailymotion, etc.
Sound and video editing modules, Screen video recorder, etc.
I’ve got a 64 GB stick in my car, that’s 75% full to have music there.
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More and more software is “rented” and not “owned,” which pisses me off. I use LightRoom to edit photos, and the new “rented” versions are required to open the RAW files from new cameras. If you stop paying, you lose access, and that’s not right. Even CorelDraw is now an annual fee, and I’ve decided to stop buying it and keep the copy I own. You can buy Microsoft Office now, yet they push the annual version.
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Larry,
Regarding “rented” software, I’m not surprised most vendors have moved to that model. And it’s not so they can make more money.
It’s actually a better solution for corporate users, which make up a major part of their revenue.
I had an interesting talk with an IT guy at my company about this and he summed it up nicely.
Before the “rental” model, they had a site license for a specific version of the software and were limited to x copies of it.
So they had to keep track of all the employees PC’s and who had what software on it. If someone left, they had to go into their database and delete their ID’s for any given software program.
If they hired more people, then they might have to go back and modify their site license.
When updates came out (OS or program), they had to do testing to make sure it wouldn’t cause problems, which would take time, thus delaying the roll out of the upgrades, leaving systems vulnerable longer than they had to be.
Microsquish, et. al., had no motivation to help them handle this since they’d already bought a site license and so no additional revenue would come in until they bought an upgraded version of the software suite.
With the “rental model, that all goes away.
The rental system keeps track of how many PC’s have the software, and when someone leaves, it is handled by them.
Since the software is “rented” it is their obligation to make sure any updates work properly. If they don’t, the company has standing to say “whiskey tango foxtrot! fix this shiite!” and if it is a Microsquish software package, it’s even easier since it’s likely their OS it’s running on, so they should know if there are any issues before they roll out the update.
Yeah, it sucks for the home consumer, since you no longer have the option of simply sticking with a program you bought once, but that also has issues.
There are bound to be security issues that crop up with legacy software, and one could leave themselves vulnerable if they don’t upgrade their software.
Another factor that’s influenced this is smart phones, tablets, and streaming media.
People have gotten used to spending a fixed amount a month to get a certain “something”. Also, they expect their apps to update regularly, at no “obvious” cost to them. So a “rental” agreement is closer to that than the old buy a version model.
Of course, as the saying goes, “if the product is free, you are the product”, but that’s another story.
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A lot of software I use has been around for a long time and most new versions only add incremental changes. Personally, I liked Word 2003 best of all. I hate the fact that the menus change depending on what you’re doing. With 2003, the menus were fixed, and once you learned where something was, it was always there.
With CorelDraw, it hasn’t changed much in all the years I’ve owned various versions of the software and could actually stick with a 10-year-old copy, but I’m a sucker for bright new shiny things and the perfect consumer.
At my day job, we use Office 365 and are always a few versions back as our IT group has to bless a version before they let it out. I’m lucky in that since I do programming, I have local admin rights, which allows me to install most software and not have to get on my knees and beg IT. Of course, I have to be careful and not install everything I’d like. It’s a fight with our corporate culture and a big change when I was self-employed.
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Yeah, I liked Word 2003 a lot.
One of the features I loved was that you could make your own icons for any given command/function.
I made a boatload of them. The ones I used the most were Style commands. I had icons for Heading 1-7. I then made styles text 1-7, that lined up just under the text of the heading. Styles bullet 1-7 and number 1-7, again lining up perfectly under the heading text.
I had a bunch of other icons that I don’t honestly know where the command was to implement them (subscript and superscript, to name two).
The sweet part was that all these custom icons were stored in the normal.dot template, so when I imported that template to later versions of Word that eliminated the ability to create these custom icons (2007 and later?), a new tab appeared called “Add ins” and low and behold, there were all my custom icons.
As a representative of the end user for the computer based NDE systems my company makes, I always push back against the software engineers when they want to change something with a very simple question: Why? Why is this change better?
This question is two-fold.
First is to determine if there actually is a good reason to make the change other than:
a) I can.
b) I don’t like the way the previous guy did it.
c) I was bored and had to do something.
The second, and from my perspective most important, is to understand the justification for the change, assuming there is a good one, so I can explain it to our end users who are going to complain about the change.
Users don’t like shiite changing, and their not going to complain to the software engineer, they’re going to complain to me, so I want to have a good explanation before I have to stand tall before the man.
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Another reason for them to make changes is so they can sell you a new version. If nothing changed, you would have no reason to buy a new copy. It’s like computers. They have gotten to the point there is no reason to upgrade as the new models are not much faster. The only thing now is the new security chip which doesn’t let you upgrade to Windows 11 on most older machines. Forced obsolescence.
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Which is why I prefer desktop/towers for my home machine so I can easily upgrade components (video cards, more HD’s, etc.) if I need to.
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