Phone Annoyances

My work phone is an iPhone 8. Yes, I said 8. It's actually a miracle I still have it because when the pandemic hit, the company was talking about taking away all our mobile devices. That's when I went out and bought my own iPhone. The iPhone 11.

My iPhone 11 is awesome! The only issue is battery life, but it's more than two years old, so I read that's to be expected.

The iPhone 8? That's another story.

Every time I update it, the cellular update fails. Then I have to follow a bunch of instructions that involve hooking it up to the computer, using iTunes, and forcing an update. The last time I did this, it didn't work and it involved three hours of Googling and messing around on my MacBook Pro. The MacBook is not my primary computer. I have it for some writing-related programs that don't run on the PC.

When the latest update came out, I put off updating, but when I called our IT help desk recently, they had an option for company mobile phones. I thought, okay, I'll update while I'm at work and if it fails, I'll call the help desk.

I should have known better.

The update failed. I called the help desk. They told me to call Apple. Really?

So I brought the phone home and I now have it hooked up to my PC laptop and forced the update via iTunes. Right now, I'm hoping that I don't have to fire up the MacBook and try to find the instructions I used last time.

Adventures With Technology

I've always skated through Mercury Retrogrades without any issues. I heard an astrologer say that a person born when a planet is retrograde doesn't have to deal with the issues that others do and I was like, okay, that makes sense. It explains why I just pretty much have zero problems when Mercury goes retrograde.

Until this past week.

Mercury Retrograde: Sep 27 through Oct 18, but Mercury is in its shadow on either side, so the dates can be a little fluid as far as the issues go.

Anyway, I'm gloriously sailing through Mercury Retrograde with zero problems--just like always--until last Friday.

I overslept. Like really overslept.

I'd only had about 2.5 hours of sleep the night before, so I assumed I was so tired that I'd just slept through the alarm. But Saturday morning told me the issue is bigger than that. I heard it go off, I hit the snooze, and then it stayed silent. I lifted the phone, it showed the alarm was going off, but nothing. It was dead quiet. This isn't good. I rely on my phone to wake me up for work.

An online search showed I wasn't the only one with this issue, but I didn't find any good solutions. So even though I wasn't ready to update to iOS 15, I hit the button to download it. I'm hoping that this solves the problem. I'm writing this on Saturday and will test it out on Sunday.

Normally, I wouldn't worry about updating my phone during Mercury Retrograde, but my technology woes didn't stop with the alarm issue.

When I got home from errands on Saturday, I went to Joann to buy some super cute Halloween fabric. I never thought making a purchase could be so frustrating. I'm all but screaming at the website: Take my money, please!

First, I wanted to order four yards of each of the fabrics. That worked for 3 of the 4 fabrics. I tried every permutation I could think of to get four yards, but nope, three yards only. Okay, I probably don't need four yards anyway. I'm planning to use the fabric to make some Japanese knot bags and maybe some bowl cozies. Maybe I'll try the project (pillows) that they were advertising, but those aren't my decor thing. Anyway, three yards. I can live with it.

Then I tried to check out using PayPal. Rejection. Something isn't verifying with my PayPal. I kept getting the error no matter what I did. Finally, as I muttered curse words, I thought: Fine, I'll use a credit card. I prefer not to enter it, but whatever.

Joann's said I didn't have an email address with my payment method. I look. My email address is there. I try and try to get my order in. Joann's refuses to believe I have entered an email.

If the fabric wasn't so cute and limited to Halloween, I would have given up then and there, but I really wanted it. I opened a different browser, signed in, and checked out the cart on my credit card without a single problem. I even had an app from that browser find a coupon code that got me an extra 20% off.

But the past two days have been so frustrating and it revolves around technology which is Mercury's bailiwick, so I'm chalking it up to retrograde.

I'm hoping the last 36 hours are all I have to deal with because I'm done with it. I guess I'm pretty spoiled, but I don't like this.

EDITED TO ADD: Joann's just emailed me. The fabric it was only letting me buy three yards of is out of stock and there's another fabric I can only have half of what I ordered. Grrr!

One Phone Does it All

The other week, while I was trying to clean my office (a never-ending struggle), I found my old digital camera and my Flip video camera. I was like, huh. Wow. That's right. I used to need to carry both of these with me if I wanted a picture or a video.

Then I thought about my iPod. It doesn't seem as if it was that long ago that I hauled that with me everywhere I went when I wanted music.

That actually wasn't a bad thing. At that time, all my music was loaded to the iPod and I could wheel to anything I wanted to listen to. I use my phone now and some of my music was purchased at Apple, some at Amazon, but the big problem is all the CDs I own that I ripped to iTunes.

BTW, I still own all those CDs and I only ripped a copy of them for personal use. I'm a big believer in honoring copyright.

But there isn't room on my phone to load all the music, so I usually only listen to what I can hear on Apple Music or Amazon Prime music--in addition to my purchased tunes.

It's kind of amazing how my iPhone replaced everything. It's so much more convenient to have music, camera, and video all in one place. Lighter, too, since I don't have to haul so many devices with me and I don't have to worry about losing multiple devices.

Technology is an amazing thing.

Characters and Technology

Last week I talked about pop culture references in fiction and one of the things that came up as I wrote about it was how characters interact with technology. That's something I wanted to delve into a little more deeply.

Technology is part of our everyday lives, woven deeply into the fabric of our worlds. I see people all the time in real life who are surgically attached to their cell phones. This seems to be more usual than my extreme aversion to the telephone in all its forms. :-) Although, if I had a smart phone, I'd readily be addicted to the internet portion of the phone. I just hate the talking part.

Anyway, with paranormal romance, I feel like I have a bit more leeway. My Blood Feud stories have featured vampires and demons mostly and not very many humans. I have no problem with a 500-year-old vampire not having a cell phone, but in stories like my Light Warrior books, these characters are magical people who are living human lives. They have cell phones. And other technology.

Which leads to the question I asked last week: How can a writer keep references she/he makes in their story to technology or other pop culture things from dating the story?

It colors characterization, too. I have a hero who is ex-Special Forces. I actually had to find out why he doesn't play video games. That he doesn't goes all the way back to his childhood, but this isn't a subject I normally quiz my characters about. But everyone plays video games now, so I need to know why he didn't. At least I don't have to worry about his choice of games or gaming systems dating the story!

I also have that same hero receive a voice mail from his heroine on his cell phone. I spent time thinking about why she called him instead of texting him because she didn't want to talk to him live and had planned to roll to his voice mail.

It could be worse. There are authors who've been around a lot longer than ten years and they're talking about old books they wrote where the entire plot would fall apart if the character had a cell phone. Some of them talked about putting a note up front to tell readers the story was written before phones were everywhere.

One of the things that was so hard when I wrote one of my futuristics was computers. In the research I'd done, there'd been speculation on where keyboards were going. There were a lot of different options to pick from and I deliberately stayed very, very vague about how my heroine accessed the computer system. And even making that choice, I had to revise the text more than once to take out a stray reference to typing.

I have an idea for a story involving computers and a heroine who works in the field. Now granted, it's an idea that's down on the To Do List a ways, but I'm already worrying about the technology and how fast the story would be out of date.

The other day, I read a story about Generation Y (AKA the Millennials) and how so many of them don't own cars! That they're buying houses, renting apartments on subway lines or bicycling into work. Of course, geography plays a role in this. I'm guessing Los Angeles is still auto focused and in Atlanta, you'd take your life into your hands riding a bike to work down here, but now this is another factor to consider in stories. Characters and cars and that a lot of 26-year-old men and women don't own cars.

I'm not sure it ever ends--the things writers need to know and worry about--because it's all about making the characters real and that means knowing what music they listen to and how they get around town. But these very things put a book solidly into a time frame.

So basically I haven't figured out how to balance grounding a story and making it and the characters real versus dating it quickly as being from a certain time period. I hate being in a quandary like this.

OS Agnostic

I am a hopeless technology geek and I hope you'll indulge me as I vent a little.

The release of Windows 8 is coming Oct 26th and this has led to pitched battles online. Every article I've read about the new Operating System (OS) has been deluged with comments. Yes, I know better than to read them--I fear for humanity every time I slip--but sometimes I can't help myself.

Battle lines are drawn. If you don't like something in Windows 8, you're either a Luddite or an Apple fan boy or To Stupid to Live (TSTL). Apparently, you're not allowed to just not like it or something about it. Allow me to say right now that I haven't used Win 8 and have no opinion one way or the other on its functionality. I do, however, find it aesthetically unappealing from photos and videos that I've seen online.

This is just the latest battleground, BTW. I've also read the same level of ferocity in reviews for the iPhone and other Apple products as well as Android releases.

It's a mindset I don't understand. How do you get to be a fan boy of an OS like Windows or OS X or iOS or even Linux? If you don't work for one of the companies and have a bonus riding on the outcome, what does it matter?

I am an OS and device agnostic. I have Macs, I have PCs, I have an Android device. I don't care who makes it or what OS it's running as long as it does what I want it to do. You see, the bottom line for me is does it fulfill the need for which I bought it? If the answer is yes, that's all that matters.

For me, the device is a tool, nothing more. But these men online (and they are nearly all men from their names/handles that they post under) seem to take the mildest criticism personally. The comments sections are filled with insults.

As an example, I read a review on CNet of Windows 8--that's what prompted this blog post--and the writer of the piece was 99% complimentary about the system with one mild con. Most reviews try to say here's the good, here's the bad, and here's the bottom line. That's pretty standard, so for the con to be as light as it was pretty much made the review glowing.

Comments included accusations that CNet is an Apple stooge and that the reviewer was stupid because he thought the learning curve was high. People who commented that they'd tried the test release versions and didn't like it were hammered pretty unmercifully as being Luddites, people afraid of technological change. These were IT professionals for the most part because few ordinary people are running early versions of Win 8. These people were also accused of being Apple fan boys because they didn't love the Microsoft OS.

I'm sitting there going WTH? If it doesn't work for the way someone uses their computer, how does this make them stupid or a covert agent for a rival like Apple?

It also makes me wonder how anyone gets so rabid about an OS. Chill out, dudes and just use what works for you. If it doesn't work for someone else, it's not an attack on your manhood. Just relax already.