Today’s post was going to be all about the best thing I knit last year, but this morning when I sat down to do it there was a complication.
Joe objects to the state of my laptop. He has a passionate belief that I have too many photos on my computer, he also believes that this number of pictures slows down my computer, and that I would be happier without these pictures. I disagreed, but the man, who has not a single photo on his computer, believes that when one has a great many images of yarn and knitting, that there is no real reason to keep any but the most current. I’ve tried to explain to him that he’s dead wrong. That a knitblogger has excellent cause to have a great many pictures of yarn and sweaters and socks, and I tried to explain that a few years worth wasn’t too much at all. I told him I liked my pictures, and even if I did have too many, I liked having too many…and that it wasn’t slowing down the computer, and even if it was, that was perfectly okay with me because I think I even like my computer running sort of slow.
Joe, in his infinite and annoying wisdom, pointed out that actually he has seen me throw myself face-first into the unyielding surface of my desk several times a day, fists clenched and knuckles white with fury while screaming “THIS FOUL COMPUTER SLOWNESS IS SUCKING UP MY LIFE FORCE”, and that he had actually taken this to mean that maybe I did mind the slowness a little, and moreover, that when I had followed the daily screeching about the slowness with “YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SOME KIND OF GEEK WHY DON’T YOU DO SOMETHING” – that he had assumed, for some reason…that I was requesting assistance with correcting the slowness.
“No.” I said. “I like things the way they are.”
Now, that was a total lie, but the thing is that every time Joe decides there’s a problem with the way the technology works around here, we all enter a terrible phase on the path to correction. Like when he decided Amanda didn’t have a good wireless signal in her room. Amanda thought her signal was fine, but Joe had to go improving it, and he did too… After a two week learning phase in which almost everything to do with wireless in the house was disassembled and non-functional….the wireless signal was better. Admittedly, this would have meant more to Amanda if she had been bothered by the signal in the first place, but that’s not the way things roll around here. Same thing with the backup system or the routers or….I don’t know. A hundred things. Joe’s a brilliant man and he can figure anything out….but it can take a while, and the process of the improvements and upgrades are hard to take, especially if you’re sort of an idiot like me. I can barely work things the way they are now, never mind if they are changed. I hate learning new tech-stuff, I respond bitterly and viciously to having to learn a new system, and most of the time this means that I’ll use a terrible system that totally sucks for years rather than learn a new one. I think I’ve got software on this computer that cavemen had installed on their macs. It’s practically Pong.
So I lied, but Joe saw right through me, and the next thing I knew he had taken all of my pictures and put them onto some thingie drive that he swore, SWORE would be the perfect place to keep them because I could still get one of them if I wanted to, but they wouldn’t be taking up room on my computer, and the computer would go faster. It would be, he said…perfect. So I agreed (which seemed like the best thing to do considering that he had already done it) and my computer did go faster (which I think is because he put in a faster drive thingie, but he says it’s because he took all my pictures away. I think he is just anti-picture, but that’s an argument for another day.)
Today, I got up, and just as I predicted, I needed a picture that was gone. I tactfully reminded Joe that this day would come, and asked him to please ask the drive thingie to cough up said photos. Joe asked the drive thingie to do just that, and what happened? What? NOTHING. The drive thingie won’t talk to my computer, because Joe fixed some network thing with a router, and then he was talking about the DNS whatsit, and renewing a lease dhcp guy something happened with the home network, and then he told me that my IP was static (which doesn’t sound like a problem to me) and that I shouldn’t have taken an icon of of my desktop (which I didn’t, it was under another file because he didn’t look right) and then he said he had to leave and he would have to spend some time later figuring out “What I had done to it.”
What I have done to it? You know what I have done to it? NOTHING. I don’t even know what the *&^%$#@!! it is, so I don’t know how I could have possibly broken it? I didn’t move his stinking icon either, he just looked for it the way that he looks for everything else. That icon thing is just like when he’s all “have you seen my blue book” and then I say “It’s on your dresser” and he says “no it’s not” and I say “JUST LOOK” and he says “I did look” and then I go all the way upstairs and go over to his dresser and pick up a magazine and the blue book is right there. Right on the dresser like I said it was, and then I give him the book and he says “Where the hell did you find that?” and I say “right on the dresser” and he says. “No. I looked” and then I think “Holy Crap. All I want is a jury of my peers when this assault goes in front of a judge” and instead I say “Well. I don’t know what to tell you. It was on your dresser” and he looks at me suspiciously like for some insane reasons based on revenge and indecency and a plot to drive both of us mad I have snuck the blue book onto the dresser after he looked there….
…and the icon was just like that, because it was right there. Right on my desktop where he left it, and even when I found it he still couldn’t get me my picture, even though he told me that the reason I couldn’t have the picture was because I had lost the icon, and if only I hadn’t taken things off my desktop…then he would be able to help me, which was a total lie…because, well. Do you see a picture here?
NO YOU DON’T. This super easy system that was going to solve all of the problems and be just fantastic won’t give me my picture and now Joe has gone out and the super easy system has screwed me over and I just can’t help myself. I am a bright woman. I know I said I would be flexible. I know I said I would try. I know I said that I understood that I can be a little inflexible sometimes and that I would entertain the possibility that I don’t relate well to change, but here I am, exactly where I told him we would be if he took my pictures away….and I can only think one thing.
This is why I like knitting. It’s never like this. It never has a new system, you’re never blocked from all your knitting because of a network problem, and you never, never need to wait for someone who can’t find an icon to come home and figure out 24 insane things before you are able to get to your rightful wool.
You are SO not alone in this. I have my own laptop, in addition to the “big” computer upstairs. I can find things immediately on my laptop, couldn’t find the photo (or much else) I’m looking for on the big computer if my life depended on it. There are so many levels/layers of folders, that I feel like I’m wandering around in the 10 levels of hell, whenever I try to look for anything…I have no suggestions, just empathy.
My husband installed a new hard drive in mine when I was at work for the last 4 days, I now have no old email, silly things like travel plans. I do seem to have my pictures. Did he install Leopard? And I also have a lovely thing that is supposed to hold all of my stuff, really don’t know how to use it
Sympathies.
i recognise the ‘I can make it better” and then having to wit.
I have a hole in my bathroom wall while we wait for a new fan to go in.
It’s going to snow tonight but still we wait.
PS – can’t believe that I’m first to comment!
Aw, I’m sad because we won’t get to see what your favorite item of the year was. Joe should know the blog will be angry with him, making us wait a whole 24 hours.
My hsband suffers from Male Pattern Blindness too. Unfortunately, there is currently no known cure. On the plus side, it makes it reallty easy to hide that last piece of chocolate cake from him. Just put it behind the milk in the refrigerator and he’ll never find it, no matter how hard he looks. I have employed this strategy with great success.
There are three levels of knowing things… 1)You know something and you know that you know it. 2)You don’t know something, but you know that you don’t know. 3)Then there’s you don’t know something, but you don’t know that you don’t know it. Sounds like Joe is at the last phase of knowing when it comes to computers.
Ah. Husbands. They mess with stuff to make it “better”, and so often in the short term it’s not. And they can’t find anything. Anything at all. (This, in fact, makes them an awful lot like kids sometimes — at least like my kids, who also try to “make things better” (read: broken), and who can’t find their noses on their faces.) As for technology, pthbbt. This is why I am trying a drop spindle before a spinning wheel — new technology is often very confusing…
I have one word for you flickr. That an another hard drive on a desk top dedicated to photo storage. That’s how we roll. I download photos at the desk top, upload them to flickr and then there they are for me to play and fiddle with as I please, leaving my lap top unsullied. But then I can’t make super hilarious proclamations about computer-lag sucking my life-force. Only you.
Me: Honey, it’s cold out. Do you want a jacket?
ManCandy: No, I’m from Michigan. Your California weather does not affect me!
Me: Okay then.
(5 minutes later in 32-degree wind)
ManCandy: Can I borrow your scarf?
Seriously, how did they EVER get to be the dominant sex? It boggles my mind.
I TOTALLY sympathize! I had a roommate back in the days who was a computer geek. He had permission to use my computer but OMG, I *always* knew when he had “tweaked” something because I would come home and be unable to do ANYTHING with my computer the way I wanted. I finally had to tell him not! To! Change! ANYthing! on it unless I was there.
Web admins at work are a lot like this too – they throw a bunch of jargon at you and make you feel like a total idiot. I think these are all the same genetic pool that the old IBM selectric typewriter repair guys came from…anyone else from that era? Whenever anything went wrong with the typewriter in the office they always tried to say “it’s because of your long fingernails.” Which was always funny because I’ve NEVER had long fingernails so I’d just hold my hands up and let them try to think of the next BS excuse 😉
This sounds so similar to my household! I could agree with you on so many accounts. You need to get a USB flash drive and download all your pics on to there. When you need it, put the stick in your pc and upload the photos you want. LOVE MINE! And DH can’t touch mine. LOL
I feel your pain. Craig “helped” me last week, and I finally got my hard drive at home to work after it was “fixed”. I would have felt Craig’s pain, too, but the bruise was on HIS arm, not mine.
Dear Lord Almighty, how can it be so pervasive?
I am sending copies of this entry to my husband and my brother-in-law (and my sister so that she can be reassured it’s not just us).
I have been blessed with two sons who, even at the tender ages of 4 and 2, share their father’s inability to find anything unless it is already in one of their hands and I am there to tell them which one.
Good luck. You’re going to need it. That and a Pro membership in Flickr.
W E L C O M E T O M Y
W O R L D….AND, CONDOLENCES! Never let significant OR non-significant others touch your computer..ever. If it’s working, let it!
On the plus side, you still make me laugh despite the lack of pictures, so I’d say in this case a picture IS NOT worth a thousand words, especially coming from you. I just keep telling myself if my hubby were perfect I’d be bored and we all need some spice in our lives, right?
Best wishes for the New Year to you and your family, whether they are related by birth, marriage (or semblance thereof) or simply by a mutual love of fibre and laughter!
Cheers, Barbie O.
LOL I hear you loud and clear.
My lap top signal is interfered with by various things (the microwave, the phone, the neighbor’s microwave, phone and computer and low flying jets).
Oscar swears if he can have my computer off line for 4 hours he can ‘figure out’ how to implement a change of signal that ‘should’ solve everything (We already tried changing phones and not running the microwave, but the neighbors aren’t willing to put their lives on hold for the sake of my Ravelry addiction, eh?)
I told him that if (and only if) I went into the hospital for surgery or won a trip to Venezuela he could fiddle with it.
That is exactly why I still use my old 35 mm camera. I have the photos in my hand. I have the negatives in storage. I can always find them when I want to. They aren’t as easy to share, but I’m happy.
About that blue book which was right where you said it was. A very knowledgeable man once said that the reason men can’t find anything is that the uterus is a “locator device.” Frequently when my husband is looking for something, he’ll call to me and say, “Honey, would you please bring your locator device in here and find…for me?”
Any many a time I’ve seen a little boy looking at the ceiling and asking where his shoes are.
I guess it just comes along with testerone!
Abby
Go Knit. It’s the only thing to do in times like these. Oh, and when I’m asked to go look for blue blooks which I’ve already said are on the dresser, I say, “If I find it, can I beat you over the head with it?” Knowing I have permission to resort to head beating, helps me refrain from actually doing so.
I admit to a level of geek that is pretty high. Since I would go nuts without my laptop, noone touches it but me. I do the updates, I do the mods (OK. I ask my husband to install RAM in it, but that’s because he has more experience at that than me…)
I almost understand the problem. (Did you get a Drobo? We’ve had interesting complications with ours and our network).
One – as a computer professional, the only reason more images on your computer would be slowing you down is if your drive was way close to full. (technical explanation – you would be running out of swap space) I’m on the faster hard drive side on this one.
Two – I second the USB external drive. I have a set of them, and my older photos are on there. I have two, and one is a backup of the other.
Three – is two words… password protection. You can set your computer to need a password to start up, wake from sleep, etc. Then no nasty surprises happen – as long as you don’t spill the password.
OMG – it sounds like you were hiding in our upstairs hall closet! Believe me – you are not alone – that very conversation (or a variation thereof) is going on in homes all over the world!!!!
Sounds just like my Fair Isle students when I tell them they have to learn Continental/English. Or me when the dude suggested spinning linen as if it were wool was a waste of a workshop. Or some people (read The Rest of the Universe) when I ask why they’re swinging those Magic Loops when they could be purring along on a 12 inch circular. Fade to Garth hammering the mechanism to bits. (small voice) “We fear change”
And, I might add, with good reason.
if you posted the picture to your blog in the past you can re-copy to your computer and repost.
but i imagine its the big pink thing and no one could forget what that looks like anyways. thats the best knit ever.
Try to look on the brightside–at least Joe will fix it, sometime. My husband and I “share” a laptop. He is always downloading bass videos, chess games, etc. I then get plagued by a slow computer,pop up ads, or the antivirus software screaming that it’s infected–while I spend an hour or so trying to fix the damage when its my turn because he doesn’t know how!
I should say, however, that, since SO is an IT analyst by occupation, he usually can fix things & in a relatively short amount of time.
Those pictures are important! My hubby got me a new laptop for Christmas, which I love, but now I’m stuck trying to rescue all my kids’ photos that have been stored on the old computer before it dies completely.
Knitting is about as low-tech as it gets. Gotta love it.
Honest to God, I had to get up in the middle of reading this post to go help my son find the ravioli bowl in the cupboard that was right where I said it was. Now thanks to Emma’s comment, I know the name of the dreadful trait that my son inherited form his father: Male Pattern Blindness. Must be carried on that Y chromosome. Stephanie, it doesn’t help you to fix the problem, but I hope it makes you feel better to know you are in good company. Just keep knitting….
All women need to remember that the uterus is a homing device, allowing them to locate all things lost. Since men are without the uterus, they simply can find nothing on their own. It is a genetic deficiency, shared by all men. 🙂
Let the record show that I am officially no longer alone in this: I too, like things the way they are. Why? That would be because when technology is involved, “making it better” most always involves weeping and gnashing of teeth…time that could be more enjoyably spent knitting. If Momma’s happy, everyone’s happy…
Unless you where running out of drive space, chances are it didn’t even make it go faster.
You po’ baby! I so empathize it’s not even funny.
I’m supposed to get a laptop soon that will be ALL MINE. Except himself may have to borrow it for a trip he’s taking in March, first. Hello? We were originally going to buy it for MY trip in May. Sigh. It’s going to have 400 different firewall/anti-ad/anti-virus/safety things on it if he gets his hands on it first – and then it’ll move at the speed of a dying turtle (just in time for my trip in May). Sigh.
I think they’re the “dominant sex” because they can do denial so much better than we do. Or maybe they just lie better… (?) Take yer pick.
Meanwhile, remember:
This too shall pass.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm. It does indeed once again say something about the notion of living alone with adoring pets, no neighbors, a very, very long driveway, perhaps a moat, and a kindly UPS man who delivers daily and cheerfully. Yup, now that’s what we’re talking about!
OMG we’re married to the same person…really! I actually told him not to touch my computer anymore and when he didn’t listen, I password protected it =) We almost lost years of pics when one hard drive crashed irrepairably during it’s *ahem* tune up…It raises the hair on the back of my neck to hear the words, “Why’s your computer running so slow?!?!” Good luck with your restoration!
(Male Pattern Blindness, oh THAT’s what it’s called-thanks Emma)
Wait. You’re saying men can’t see things unless…they’re on top?
That explains so much.
I am so completely in your court on this one. We got a new computer last spring…not sure why as the old one seemed fine to me…and my husband assured me that all the photo files would be moved and I’d be able to access all of them. Ha! Turns out that the only set of photos that didn’t get moved to the new computer were the ones of you and I at the St.Paul, MN, book signing in April 2007. Some how, the backup copy was made the day of the signing and the new computer was purchased the next week and he didn’t know he’d missed anything…yah, right.
So, now all the files are on the new computer, but the system for accessing them is different and I had to learn a new editing system and I hate it. I would have been happy on the old system for at least a decade. But…they tell me this one is faster. My response? Who cares…I’m not faster.
Thanks for letting me rant!
Tikabelle,
Men got to be the dominant sex because cavewomen let them and through the generations we forgot to take it back. I studied it in college and thirty years later I still don’t understand it. I married a man who knows he don’t know nothing about computers. I have a friend who does but he lives to far away to mess mine up unless I give him permission and then I watch him like a hawk.
I too, am married to an engineer. It’s a scary thing. He thinks anything can be fixed with a BFH if necessary.
I feel your pain.
Technology is wonderful, except when it isn’t. I spent three years of my life earning my keep as a computer tech for a decently sized university, and let me tell you…knitting is better. I loves me my computers(and it brings me great joy that Her Harlotness and I share the same make ‘n model of laptop) but seriously…knitting just wins. Like you said, not much in the way of technical difficulties when it comes to sticks ‘n string.
For photos, I reccomend either a) an external harddrive or even a two gig thumbdrive(or bigger) that you just leave attached to your computer. If the computer fries, the external should survive. Or burn the images onto a cd as backup. Just..yes. Image files are small, they won’t take up much storage space. Your darling hubby is overreacting, I think, unless you are secretly hoarding one monstrous collection of high-resolution yarn porn.
…maybe just bury your image folder, naming it something else creative, like WoolPig?
Men are strange creatures.
My husband thought I didn’t like sewing.
Just because, when I was sewing something,
I would yell and holler, and stomp my feet and
throw things around and have a right good tantrum, he thought I didn’t like sewing. Imagine!!
I have sometimes visualized standing before a judge, explaining things in detail, just as you have. The not finding things is a perfect example, and then, when you find it, accusing you
of having hidden it. And the next line is:
“and that’s why I killed him, your honour”.
And the judge says: “okay, but from now on, don’t you go killing people who don’t deserve it.”
I sympathize with you. I’m glad that you didn’t get “fixed” out of blogging–I can live without your pictures for a little while, but your text is a staple of life.
Happy New Year!!
Marlyce in Windsor.
My sweetie hides computer type things for very important people so that very,very bad people can’t find them. I hates it when he says my computer is too slow . . .
As for male pattern blindness, here at our three-daughtered home we distinguish between a “look” and a “man look”.
g
http://www.photobucket.com
Upload those pics and don’t give out your password. It is a beautiful thing!
It’s like the ketchup in the refrigerator. The only way they can find it is if it falls out on their toe when they open the door.
joe, meet my boyfriend zach. these two studied at the same school. it’s called “how to drive your partner crazy in ten seconds or less”
this morning? zach asked me where his shoes were. i said, “the ones that are right there under the coffee table?” and he said, “there’s no shoes under the coffee table.” and i said, “yes there are, i can see them.” and he said, “i already looked under there, so those must be your shoes.”
and so i pulled his shoes out from under the coffee table, contemplated throwing them at him, and instead set them ON the coffee table and said, “i don’t think these shoes will fit me.”
can we get this school they all attend shut down somehow?
OK, this made me laugh my ass off because my husband also cannot find things that are Right In Front of Him. It is completely maddening.
(Although I once heard someone posit that men can’t find things because they look where they *expect* to find the desired object and if it’s not there, they don’t have the sense god gave mud and don’t think to scan the ****ing environment for the thing.)
Oh dear. I think I’ll keep on being a girl geek rather than letting my geek boyfriend touch my computer. So sorry for your trouble!
Not sure what he installed. When I read the first few paragraph, I was going to suggest an external hard drive – it’s attached to your computer via USB and it’s just a hard drive. But your computer will run faster because it’s not physically on your computer. And they are not too expensive and you can get a compact version to throw it in your computer bag when you travel! I love mine and I probably will never live without it again! Plus, it’s easy to operate!!! You plug it in and it works, if it doesn’t, you shut down the hard drive and turn it back up again and it works! And – when Joe finally wants to get you an upgrade on your laptop, you don’t have to worry about transferring files!!! All you have to do is unplug and plug!
First off, I do see a picture. It is of a cow eating grass after the cow has eaten all of the grass and left. LOL
Next, I do believe that certain members of the human race, namely those that have the “Y” (“Y” doesn’t this work as well as I think it should?) all should get together and fix eachother’s
“problems” and leave us alone. With 4 computers in the house, you would think that he could leave mine alone once in awhile.
You should’ve written this into your wedding vows. Way more useful than all that sickness and poverty crap. It’s days like this that make women think of divorce (or murder). Not an unpaid bill, not illness (although a man with a cold might qualify for assault, as well, what with all the whining), not disagreeing over how to raise the children, not leaving the toiletseat up. This. Exactly this.
Why must they do this? Is it genetic???
Ouch. My husband is forever nagging me about the volume of photos “clogging up” our system – he wouldn’t dare take matters into his own hands, though.
His version of the “drive your partner crazy” thing involves the assertion that anything important I told him and he forget must have been said just as he was falling asleep and is therefore not his responsibility but the fault of my crazy woman style of communication. Since we are now in physical proximity almost 24/7, I am pretty sure I speak to him at other times as well, but that could all be just a hormonal delusion. Who knows?
although occassionally you do have to wait for for replacement needles in the mail and run out of correct dye lots, but at least that is understandable. but dang it, computer issues suck.
Your Joe and my Doug could sit down, have a beer, and discuss our picture-loving, computer-slowing ways.
Except that if Doug even comes close to the computer, I go banshee crazy because he does not know what he’s doing. He can’t even talk the talk. Next time, go crazy. It might just stop Joe in his tracks.
You are SO not alone in this … after years of the same thing back and forth, I have password protected mine machine and NO one touches it. When the Internet speed was finally a problem, I tackled switching to cable and installing my own modem and router. Yeah, I had to call another geek girlfriend for advice on setting up the security, but together, with a big glass of wine each, we did it just fine – no testosterone involved. It’s been working – my daughter’s wireless too! – for months now. He didn’t even say a word of advice. I think after it all worked, he was a little surprised, but we’ll not go there, shall we?
Good luck with the pictures.
Virginia
p.s., he can’t find his wallet, keys, cell phone or socks either.
I’m a little concerned that your photos are no longer on your macbook. Even when Joe sorts out the current glitches, how is that going to help you when you need a photo when you’re on the road? You’ll have to always carry an up to date dvd with all your photos? That doesn’t seem workable. The only way I can see photos slowing down your system is spotlight indexing — but I think you can configure spotlight to skip directories. I think there has to be other solutions.
Sigh. Everything you said, my dear. Everything you said.
Substitute “CD-ROM drive” for “pictures” and imagine the Catch-22 of needing to install drivers for a well-meaning-husband-purchased backup device (or printer) when the CD drive doesn’t accept disks, then add a technie EX-husband who is rebuilding my web site from scratch and wants to port my blog to it for testing…..
Yarn is my friend. Maybe some alpaca will be my very bestest friend.
When you get your pictures back (And you will) load them all on Flickr. They will keep them safe, and it’s easy to embed them into blogs and organize them and have them all handy, no matter where you are.
And it’s only $25/yr for infinite pictures! It’s lovely, really.
You may not need to wait for somebody to come home to find your picture in knitting, but sometimes you have to wait for somebody to pour your next gin & tonic before you can rip out 3 days worth of sock knitting that you’ve totally bungled. Still, I prefer that problem to the one you face with the pictures.
Flickr.
Seriously.
I use it simply because if I can’t find that one photo of those socks I knitted 2 years ago, on my computer, I can go to Flickr, click on my knitting collection,and viola, there it is.
Sigh. You knew this day would come.
I have a suggestion for future photos for the blog-reduce their file size. You can do it online at
http://picnik.com
It’s like photoshop, but without having to learn anything. You just upload the photo into the site (same as loading it into the blog) and then go from there.
Then once you’re done resizing or retouching or drawing devil horns on Joe’s face you can save the smaller file to your computer and the big file to the external hard drive.
If you want to try it I can walk you through it with a phone call.
In the meantime tell boy to make computer go like before.
I feel your pain! I too married a Geek. He has recently decided to upgrade the remote that controls the computer that controls the TV. In order to get said remote to work after the TV has gone to sleep, I must reboot the computer, wait for a specific screen, and hold down buttons 1 and 2. I liked the old remote and didn’t see anything wrong with it. His reason for upgrading the remote? It was too slow.
I question the claims that having lots of files/photos on your computer’s hard drive makes it run more slowly. It’s the RAM and processor speed that governs how fast it runs, not how many files you have. It doesn’t matter if your hard drive is empty or packed to capacity, unless you’re trying to load ALL THE PICTURES AT ONCE into a program, the speed should not change at all.
I just double-checked with my husband who is a professional IT tech and he confirms this.
If your laptop is running sluggishly, I’d say something else is to blame, not your photo collection.
ok – I have to chime in – I work in the tech field and I honestly believe that if something ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Fortunately, Microsoft doesn’t follow that theory and that’s what keeps me in business and I can keep on supporting the people that want to fix what ain’t broke.
Hey Sweetpea;
New systms in knitting? Am just about to start chapter 3 of Cat Bordhi’s book. My baby brain has been twisted into knots – thank god I no longer really think for myself…
Bonne chance with your pics.
jenH
So sorry to hear about your picture troubles. Unfortunately I’m like Joe…I’ve been trying to get my mother to put her 9000 (literally we counted) photos onto a jump drive so they don’t so down her computer, which runs like molasses. I’m sure it also doesn’t help she’s still on dial-up. Anyway good luck finding your pictures.
Homicide is definitely justified. I’m a lawyer, I should know. Just get a female judge. Not only can’t they find anything, why do they constantly think they need to tell you how to fix something just because you are trying to tell them something. You haven’t asked for help, but they interrupt with it. At least that’s what my hubby does. Usually I have already fixed the problem, but since he won’t let me finish my sentence, he doesn’t know that.
Computer ground rules are definitely in order. Personally, I wouldn’t let him touch it at all. Better to pay a stranger than to have him “fix” things that you need. MEN !
Yo, burn those pics to CDs and have them on a physical shelf making up their own photo-goodness library. Nothing virtual, nothing to find under layers of whatsis. Pull out disc labeled “March 2007” or whatever. Discs be cheap and hard to tech-improve into oblivion.
I always do 2 different things to get photos off of my computer. I either upload them to flickr or to photobucket. Just as a future reference. 😉 Especially since then you’ll always have the pictures available, even when you’re not on your computer.
What you need is a knitting retreat.
I seriously considered knitting instead of calling about my internet issues. My computer decided that I didn’t actually need the internet, so it showed that I had a really good signal to connect, but wouldn’t actually let me open ANY web pages. I called Sony and actually talked to someone in my home country… and he was a genius! He assured me that my problem sounded odd, but totally wracked his brain for fixes. NOTE: he wracked HIS brain, not some knowledge base that should have the info. I couldn’t believe it! I still fail to understand why my computer decided, of its own accord, that I didn’t need the internet… because I do!
In my experience, unless the external drive is directly cabled to the computer I am using — NOT connected by wireless — the external drive is less useful than a floppy disk.
My true love is a professional computer geek with a massive salary that he gets paid to do things I can’t even describe because I am not smart enough, and he like Joe is brilliant and all about the gadgetry and the theory and the fabulousness, and yet even with him as my tech guru dragging me kicking and screaming into every upgrade I later thank him for, albeit grudgingly, we have discovered together that in my studio, the computer has to be physically linked to the external drive where my photos live or they don’t talk to each other. Period. There is no as yet discernible logical reason this should be so (except maybe the Edwardian-era lady house ghosts); both his computers on the other side of the house talk to the external drive that lives in my studio just fine without the cabling that my computer apparently needs to be heard across just this single room. It simply is so, and we bow to its so-ness.
We call it “man looking” in my house too. 🙂
Oh no – man eyes! You know Superman had to be some kind of alien to have x-ray vision – goodness knows no human male can see anything that isn’t hitting him in the face when he’s looking for it. Even my precious hubby. But he’s awful cute, so I’m keeping him. 🙂
AMEN!! I get dragged kicking and screaming onto new computers, new operating systems, etc.
One word – alcohol and lots of it 🙂 A man can drive you to drink. This is why all 3 of my computers are password protected.
I actually have the opposite problem – I’m the geek and hubby is the one who can’t get it through his fr*cking head not to openfiles in email and keeps getting viruses on his PC because he won’t switch to a Mac which all sane people use .. *whew* sorry about that 🙂
one word: men.
can’t kill them. can’t stand them some days.
well call it “man blindness” at our house. yesterday i found the butter in under one second at a friend’s house when her husband could not. and i don’t even live there.
men. enough said.
Many years ago when I was about 14 and my brother was 19, he complained that he “could never find anything in the @#$%& refrigerator. My mother told him that the milk, the object of his search, was on the top shelf on the left.
Obscenities ensued from the direction of the kitchen. Mom: “Phoebe, find the milk for him.”
Ten seconds later…Me: “Here it is. It was on the top shelf on the left.” But there was a tomato in front of it–a 2″ tomato in front of a quart of milk. Of course, that made it invisible to the male eye. (All these years later and he’s no better at tasks of this nature.)
I think it is the difference between hunters (men) and gatherers (women).
Right you are about knitting. While the quality of yarn may have improved and the needles may be better, basically it hasn’t changed in the past millenium, and a good thing too.
People make fun of accountants (geeks make fun of accountants) because they do not upgrade at every opportunity. (I am both a geek and an accountant, I am so confused!) But, accountants take the ‘if it is not broken’ attitude.
As for new systems in knitting, well, there sort of are new things, such as socks on two circulars or magic loop. At one time circular needles were news. In knitting, it is far easier to stick with the traditional methods, if you choose. With technology, you can be forced to upgrade.
As far as pictures slowing down your system, well, that is similar to your hunt for all your STR yarn in a certain weight. If your stash was very small, then it would have been easier to determine, that was all the STR you had in that particular weight. However, as you have (much to my envy) free range stash, it takes a bit more time to make such a determination.
Yes, indeed, Male Pattern Blindness is hardwired into the Y chromosome. My everlovin’ husband will ask me where something is. I tell him. He says he can’t find it. I say look again. He says it’s not there. I look there, see the whatever sitting right where I said it was, or maybe under a magazine, and I tell him, It is right here, as you would have clearly seen, HAD YOU LOOKED!
At least he no longer misplaces his Blackberry or keys because he always puts them in the same spot on the counter (after many comments by me that I never have to search for my keys, cell phone, sunglasses, etc. because they are always in my purse!).
I love my DH deeply — he is a Good, Kind, Intelligent, Sexy person. Love him.
That said, he suffers terribly from Male Pattern Blindness, except for, unfortunately, the cake. He can (and will) find goodies I hide for myself, figure I’ll never miss one… and before you know it, he’s eaten the whole darn thing!
But the shoes… yep, can’t find the shoes…
Good GAWD that is MY husband your referring to. I went without phone,cable AND internet for a week and a half because dear hubby thought he would “tweek our system”. I swear that man requires things to be tatooed to his forehead before he “gets it”…as I always say, (lovingly of course) you just CAN’T fix stupid!!
If your Mac is running slow:
-find a copy of DiskWarrior and run it- this will repair the directory, which helps the computer find all the files that it needs. Often this makes a big difference.
-make sure that you have about 5 GB free space on the hard drive
-Macs need defragmenting less than PC’s, but if you have been using it a while, iDefrag gets the best reviews.
I’m assuming that you are running OS X
-Tell Joe to stop fooling around with all that network stuff. If you have a hard drive with all your photos on it, plug it directly into the computer with Firewire or USB2 (USB1 is way too slow) and your pictures will always be there.
Macs do not slow down if the hard drive is too full (or even if you have too many apps open, unless they have memory leaks) However, you should have at least 5 GB free so the mac can do its on-the-fly file defrag thing.
Sometimes I feel about my knitting the way you feel about your computer.
Dear Joe, Please fix computer; please restore photos, please do not make our Harlot angry or frustrated. We likey photos.
Manvision. It’s a disease carried on the Y chromosome. I have threatened to install narrow shelving on every available wall in my house and ‘his’ garage so that nothing he is looking for is ever behind or under anything. ever. again.
I am at the receiving end of the spectrum. My husband loves computer games and spends many hours playing them. Apart from that, he is computer illiterate. His computer games are video-intensive and he regularly gets messages to upgrade hardware/software/video drivers. Which I have to do, with all the consequences this entails. Example: last week, he told me his video drivers needed to be upgraded. I pretended I didn’t hear him, but then he pestered me every day, until I sighed and said OK. Then I sat in front of his computer, knowing it would take at least an hour, while he was looking over my shoulder, expecting it to take 5 minutes. (It always takes at least an hour, and that’s when I don’t have to end up buying a new, better, video card, which these stupid games demand frequently.) Anyway, an hour later, I had upgraded the video drivers, after a lot of difficulty, ATI being very awkward when you want to perform this task. Yeah, the computer worked fine. However…. with the upgrading of the f***ing drivers, all the saved games of his most recent game, the one that took him days to go from one level to the next, the one that was the most challenging and where he had finally achieved a major victory… anyway, they were all gone. Zero. Zilch. Gone forever.
He hasn’t forgiven me yet. And you thought you had problems?
I’m sorry for your computer woes. I do, however, feel the need to point out that (perhaps) one reason that you love knitting is because you are an expert at it and don’t have to rely on anyone – or you know exactly where to go when you get stumped. That is a great feeling. While you are reliant on geeky Joe for the technology, I suggest announcing a prize that he will be eligible for when he fixes the problem – like steak or cookies or whatever Joe’s preference is. Men are really just kids – you need to speak their language. 🙂 Good luck!
I must agree with Joe – he’s right on the speed.
I must agree with you – the pictures are important not to lose.
That is a very nice picture of a, er, uh, ahem, a white rectangle.
Steph, honey, please tell that man to KEEP HIS MITTS OFF OF YOUR COMPUTER!
It’s yours. You bought it. It’s for your work and your blog and it’s NONE of his concern.
Hubby (who is a computer consultant by trade) is not allowed to touch mine unless I specifically ask him to. I don’t care if he built it. He touches it and I gut his. 🙂 And believe me, I know how.
Well, not exactly knitting exempt. I was just in Italy happily knitting away on some socks (2 circs), of course, when my Knitpick’s Harmony circular fell apart. Being a woman of some forethought I tried unsuccessfully to knit the sock on 4 metal DP’s. No way that was happening. Why I even had the DP’s since I can’t figure out how to use them is pretty weird. While my family happily made plans for touring the counrty side I whined about not having my sock circular. Found one in an out of the way yarn shop in Ravenna. Great back in business right? Nope, the other circular broke. After another round of swearing and sweating out DP’s I decided to try knitting on 1 circular needle. Surprise! it worked well enough to finish the project. I hope you find your pictures!
OH MY GOD–how did we end up married to the SAME MAN????
I hadn’t heard “Male Pattern Blindness” before — in my office it’s known as “man eyes”, as Steph B just posted. We’ve got four men and two women program managers… and it’s amazing how often Catherine and I can see/find/unearth/recall where we last saw things that the guys can’t manage to find.
I like my colleagues very much. But sheesh! do they have to work so hard to fit the stereotype?
I so know what you go through with the “I looked and it’s not there” line. Like, just because I’m home more than he is, I am the only one who ever touches stuff. Car keys are my favourite- I provided key hooks in the hall closet and I consider my responsibility fulfilled.
I am considering an external drive, but moreso because of dropping and breaking issues than speed issues. Good luck figuring out your solution, and I hope it doesn’t include jail time. You’d be much more useful doing community service.
That sucks. No one should ever update your stuff and then go away until they are sure it is working!!!!
now for the suggestion part. ignore if you want.
I use flickr. I had to switch in order to make make running a blog cheap. I had to get an annual subscription. But then, I’m a total computer geek.
You can mess around with flickr for free, but of course you have no photos to toy with! If you can login to the server where your photos are (possibly dangerous) you could upload one photo to flickr and then link it up to your blog. And then it’s cool because you can use fd’s flickr toys to make cool looking mosaics.
So the thing is, managing over 3K (the number I have, not the number you have) photos in flickr involves having a somewhat obsessive compulsive need to ‘file’ things. Think about whether that’s really you before taking some of the posted advice. I actually kind of like labeling all my digital photos with different tags.
Man eyes. “Oh, are you looking with your man eyes again?” That’s what I call it when said something cannot be found/seen by any male. There seems to be a strong case of man eyes around the fridge especially. Drives. Me. Crazy.
I have one at home the same- husband- who improves tech stuff- and yes it is better in the end but like you it is hell in the meantime. My sympathy is with you and the girls- my only get out is my work laptop that he is not allowed to touch or I will set the Work Geek Squad on him to wreck doom on his tech kingdom- failing that I just leave the kitchen in a complete state after cooking- its his job to wash/ clean up-HA! that usually sorts it!
Male Pattern Blindness…Manvision…..MEN!!! Good to know (I guess) we are not alone. Happens here ALL the time. Can’t see for looking.
My husband wants me to take my photos off the computer too, after we’ve burned them onto a cd. Because then we have the cd. Except that the cd won’t display the photos. Or print the photos. Though it says it HAS the photos. You’ll be glad to know I did not delete the photos (like I did last year, when he told me too, and lost 2000 family pics). And I’ve passworded my email so he can’t get at the photos, or my emails, which I lost the year before (a year’s worth of correspondence with a dear friend). Augh. Men.
Well. it seems that we are all married to Joe-Clones.
And Rams? far too funny for me to be reading whilst drinking coffee. Far too funny, and yet so true…
It is just for moments like these. When my husband has done something kind and sweet, I tell him to remind me how wonderful he is in the near future. Because both he and I know that one day soon, he will do something that just torques me off to no end. 🙂
You need to print this, post it on the fridge, and refer to it when he gets the yen to tinker: http://boingboing.net/images/flowchart-2007.png
My computer nerd boyfriend is a similar beast. He’ll mess about with server things, usually resulting in a loss of my internet connection. And then acts like he’s done me a huge favor when my normal internet connectivity returns.
My husband can NEVER find his stuff, and I always – and usually without even looking – know where it is. So yesterday when I “misplaced” a bag of new yarn I’d just gotten two days earlier I asked him if he’d seen it. He got up and helped me look, we looked everywhere and for a loooong time. Only for him to realize that he’s “pretty sure” that he thought the bag was trash and so he THREW IT AWAY.
Yeah. You read that right. *sigh*
Oh how I sympathise – there’s nothing that sends a greater chill down my spine than my husband saying of some computer task “It’ll be really straightforward, it’ll only take an hour or so.” I know, I just know that that means that we’ll be several days without a computer, and that when it is up and running again I won’t be able to find anything.
I chastise myself fairly regularly for being such an untechy stereotypical woman (I have a physics degree – once upon a time I programmed computers in assembly code…), but really – why does he have to be such a stereotypical geeky bloke?!
I completely agree with all of the Flickr suggestions. $25 USD is a small price to pay to have all of your priceless pictures saved in a safe place, neatly organized and with great privacy settings. It’s very easy to download a picture from Flickr to your computer whenever needed. I actually did that this morning to change my background image to an updated picture of my son.
It’s super easy and the FlickR UploadR tool is by far the easiest way to get them all up on the site.
Good luck!
Welcome to my life. The total inability to find the thing that is in the same place it always was, the making things better by first making them worse and the gadget love – I know them all. My two pet phrases are “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” and “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it”.
I still love him though.
“and he looks at me suspiciously like for some insane reasons based on revenge and indecency and a plot to drive both of us mad I have snuck the blue book onto the dresser after he looked there…. ”
I KNOW!!! WHY do they insist on believing that we are messing with them on purpose? Cause, Buddy, I have better things to do with MY time!!! (Like closing the drawer on that same dresser….oh….eleventeen times per day, progressively more violently, with a kick of my foot.)
Ohhhhh yes, my drive that stores all the pictures I haven’t had printed because the online photo service takes so long has decided to stop talking to my computer so now I have no pictures of things like my baby’s birth, things I’ve knitted and given away, etc.
Wonderful. I hope yours turns out better.
oh my god – I so feel your pain. I wonder if this is something that is exclusive to the Y chromosome or if it is just exclusive to artistic people / musicians. Mr. Happy is forever jury-rigging everything in our house!
He finally re-hung our basement door after 18 months and when I saw all the little wooden shims sitting on the floor, I asked, “Weren’t these supposed to go back in the door frame somewhere?” He replied, “Naw, it’s fine without them.”
Last night, I couldn’t open the basement door.
ARGH! ARGH! ARGH!
See, I think you don’t remember when you didn’t know when to knit, because when I was learning it seriously felt just like that. “Go through the loop.” “What loop?” “The loop that’s right there.” “There’s no loop there!”
Volunteering to be on the jury.
2 pieces of advice:
Never ever ever let your husband touch your computer.
Like others have suggested, get an external hard drive.
Joe’s head would probably explode to know that there are people [ie me] who have upwards of 9,000 photos on their harddrives.
flickr.com, baby! Let somebodyelse store all those photos for you. Also, its the photo storage service of choice for Ravelry.com!
Thanks to whoever mentioned “male pattern blindness” – so true! My other favorite “manspeak moment” is when the spouse is standing at the top of a ladder and says something like “What I really need is a Phillips head screwdriver” instead of “Honey, could you fetch me the Phillips head screwdriver from the workbench and hand it to me?” I am constantly amazed how often guys (and sometimes children of either sex) talk this way.
I have to say I am pretty lucky, though – in our house the geeks are myself and my 17 year old son. My husband has a whole tech support department at work and so he just expects the computer to work.
Hope you find the “photo oasis in the desert” soon.
I hear you and I am living the same experience. Heaven help us both.
I think that’s a very nice picture. I see all the beautiful things I’ve seen on your blog over the past year.
Actually with my current sock-infatuation, I see socks – lots of socks! And possibly a blue book hidden under the pile.
*ducking for cover*
Ummm… I’m the household techno-geek, so I do this kind of stuff to my DH all of the time.
I actually have an icon on his desktop that says:
“Click this thingie for the Internet, you Luddite”
Of course, I blame any computer problems he experiences on the ID-10-T error.
(ID-10-T = ID10T = idiot. Ha. I feel so superior.)
At least he tries. No seriously. I know you don’t believe me. But try this – I am trying to sell patterns on my website using payloadz and pdf files or hard copies. I know ZIP about this process, and fear it, and am intimidated by it. My husband, who is a PROGRAMMER drags his feet, whines, and generally acts as if I am removing all of his hair with tweezers when I beg for help.
If it wasn’t for the 16 years of love and companionship and the new diamond earrings….
I have a bumper sticker: “Sometimes you just have to shoot the Engineer.” Is that a legal defense in America? My husband has a Masters in Engineering and can’t retrieve voicemail on our home phone. When he “fixes our computer” I know to leave town for a week. The same with our sons, both geeks…when they visit, the computer doesn’t do what I want for a month. We need a support group.
You know, after being married for 14 years to a guy who couldn’t remember where we kept anything (“where do we keep the…?” “Uh, same place we’ve kept it for the last 14 years!” Geez, grow a brain) and then getting involved with a guy I later came to call Stalker Boy, I’ve pretty much decided I just don’t need men. I am far better off alone. Maybe I’ve had incredibly bad judgment or really, really bad luck, or maybe men just suck, but I’m not taking any more chances.
LMAO! Not only the post but the responses! This is why I do not keep a man in the house.
Well, I do have my son, but he is only seven and I believe that I am training him appropriately.
You poor dear! It sounds like quite the day. That’s the kind of thing that tempts you to forcefully extract an apology and a “you were right dear” from said offender and tell them that in the end it doesn’t matter how grateful you will be. What matters is how justifiably ungrateful you are now.
Isn’t it neat how computers make our lives easier? Does this mean your archives won’t show pictures? Maybe you could swipe one from there, assuming you took of photo of your best-knitting-in-2007 in the first place.
happy new year whats new
could you post pictures on flicker
we could find them with an account
password tis free
this computer was hacked hit by lighiting
it was not my favorite list that slowed
the machine down at all or caused
it to crash—i am in florida its
going to freeze tonight cold air
snowbirds will wear shorts the rest
us will wear ear muffs
I learned last night at my knitting group that it seems most male partners (including my husband) have been behaving like idiots over the past week. You have my sympathy.
Right. I’ll pick up wine on my way to knit night.
No picture? I see a white jumper in a snow storm.
Now see, all this time, I thought my husband was like this because he’s an engineer. Not just any engineer, but a mechanical engineer. He thinks that it is fun to take things apart and try to fix them. If he gets too bored, he starts to do this.
But, I see now that it is an affliction that many men suffer from. Or, should I say, many women suffer from?
My condolences. I understand, a little too well, oh yes I understand.
My mother wouldn’t even get up when dad would holler out from the kitchen (or bedroom, or bath) that he couldn’t find something, where did she hide it?
She would (and still does) reply, in a calm voice, “Move a few things, it’s right in front of you. It’ll bite you on the testicles if you’re not careful!”
Strangely, my mother is where I get my taste for black humour.
Wow. I mean, wow. How long did it take you to type that rant? It’s more wordiness than I could muster in a week of blog writing. I’m impressed. 🙂
I want to print this out and FRAME it fer cryin out loud and give it to my husband-the-geek. !!
The ironic thing is, the best item of the year may very well be the wedding shawl…
I hate to say it, but it’s not just men who can’t see things. My partner will search and search for something and not find it and I can walk into the room and find the “missing” item in less than 10 seconds most times. She’s a genius at organizing people and seeing the big picture, but she loses the details (like where the ringing phone is located).
Oh, and Rams, I about fell off my chair laughing and then thanked the deities that practically nobody is in the office today.
Still got that big pile of dirt out back? You could bury him in it.
Yep… Bobby pulls the same crap.. the very same crap… all that crap…. just can’t leave something alone and yep… that same ‘it has to be something you did to it’ crap when I didn’t do anything to it… (he can’t find his crap either…) the fact they remain walking this earth should earn us all sainthoods…
Oh, no. I’m sorry, what I meant to write was, “I’m sure he was only trying to help, the dear man. His intentions were honourable and loving and burying him in the backyard would definitely not be a course of action I would recommend.”
We play that game at my house too but hubby always ends with “why are you trying to make me think I’m going crazy?” and then I wander around chanting to myself, “I will not go crazy…”.
Well, this too shall pass & he’ll save the day yet again.
Some of the best business advice I’ve ever received – Develope a fabulous, deep, and ongoing relationship with professional technical people. Professional means people you don’t cohabitate with. Mine are in their twenties and thirties and are wonderful. I give them candy and money. They listen to what I say and they don’t say stupid things. I love them.
OMG! how do you find time to read all these comments!?
BTW: i have the same problem with my old computer when it coulodn’t hold all my files. i had to rewrite an entire report! 🙁
Ohhhhh. I have a mac – and a LOT of photos. They did indeed slow my computer down. I added an external drive with LOTS of space. It works wonderfully-opens up whenever I turn the computer on. I am so sorry you are having this kind of “tear your hair out frustration” !! It WILL be a better day tomorrow!
And that is precisely the reason why I suggested we forgo Christmas presents to each other this year and buy another laptop — DH the software developer can fiddle and meddle and mess about with whatever makes him happy and my laptop is left alone!
And we won’t talk about the Great Picture Deletion of 2006, or the Subsequent Lucky Break three days later that resulted in the Great Picture Restoration of 2006. Oye.
This is why I have my own laptop; we nearly came to blows when we tried to share one. It was like wallpapering all over again! 🙂
(((((HUGS)))))
My OH set my PC on fire when I was at the supermarket, during an “upgrade”.
I feel your pain.
The book thing I call male pattern blindness.
My husband, a software geek extraordinaire, has a deep and abiding fear of hardware. This means that there are a lot of bells and whistles we don’t have, but also that he leaves my pictures alone.
I have to confess I did this to my husband because I am the geeky one. Its not what one plans–is all i can say in my or Joe’s defense and the things should reappear from that nice external drive the photos went to live on, except sometimes there are difficulties. All is fixed here but there was a very bad week.
We fix this stuff for a living (the computer screw ups, not the can’t-find-my-keys syndrome – there is no known cure for that) and we see the results of this day in, day out. Especially after the holiday period or a rainy weekend. Middle aged men are the worst.
Having your own in-house professional computer fixer is not the answer to your prayers though. I haven’t seen my photos for a week now as they have gone walkabout on the network since he virtualised the server. My camera won’t talk to my computer anymore and I can’t upload the latest podcasts to my iPod because apparently it isn’t recognized even though they have been the best of friends for a year now.
Apparently this is all my fault because I never sort out my Inbox and have millions of old emails in there. I know this is bollocks but he outranks me (technically) and won’t fix it until I tidy up the emails. I’m not cooking until he puts it right. This could get ugly.
And the reason they became the dominant sex? Because we were too busy at the time doing the laundry and seeing to the kids to stand about arguing over who is in charge.
Marriage.
The only time I ever heard my God-fearing Catholic mother drop the *F* bomb was when she and my father spent two days attempting to put up a ceiling fan together. They put it in, took it out, resized, returned it, the electricity went on and off on and off on and off—
After two days of me and my brothers (we were all over 16) cowering in fear in any room not attached to the dining room (we were hungry and had to pee badly) the thing still hung 1 1/2 inches from the ceiling.
*F* bomb.
25 years later that fan still hangs 1 1/2 inches from the ceiling and gives a little shimmy with every rotation.
Mom and Dad are still happily married. We go on.
Happy New Year!!
“Holy Crap. All I want is a jury of my peers when this assault goes in front of a judge”
We are out here, my sister Harlotta. I promise. It will be totally justified assault.
Dave Barry (his books won’t be too far away from yours in the humor section) calls that unable to find things ‘male-patterned refridgerator blindness’. It attacks them when they are children and it NEVER GOES AWAY. And the OTHER thing that gets me is they never ask anyone else MALE where anything is. I truly do believe that they think the uterus is some type of homing device. Now, Steph, you and I both know (and every other woman on this blog) that there is nothing up there with an antenna!! Once my husband (who was home at the time) called me at school (not home) to ask me where something or other of his was. Not being at home, or having seen it, I could not tell him…he found this frustrating. Having been married for over twenty years to this man I said to him “look, our daughter is home. She has a uterus…she if SHE can find it for you.” She did. This is the inherent flaw in the system – we can and do find their (*&#$ for them. Sigh. Like I said…totally justifiable.
I hope your picture problem gets resolved soon. I went ahead and started paying for online storage so that I didn’t have to shuffle so much around…
I’m sorry to hear about your computer troubles! Never a dull moment!
I wanted to thank you for your Unoriginal Hat pattern. I have made 3 in the past 10 days! The first one for my 18 year old son turned out so well that I made 2 more for me.
Happy New Year to you and your family. I love reading your blog.
Please let Joe know that THE BLOG would have liked to see a photo of your favorite project! I’m sorry about your ‘puter…I hope he figures it out quickly. 🙂
P.S. I’m banking on either Juno or Bohus…am I right?
I think I love you.
Um, pretty sure actually. Thank you, as always, for the laugh. Back to work isn’t so bad after all I suppose. Thanks Harlot.
It is the continuation of man vs. women. We like things in our own way otherwise the “system” falls apart. Men think they know better but when it comes to looking for something (their’s or not) if it is under anything, like the corner of a newspaper…”it’s gone!” You can teach an old dog a new trick but you can’t teach a man how to find things! To think they are the hunters and we are the gathers. My fingers are crossed that your photos are recovered.
No jury in the country would convict you.
Just sayin’. And my favourite FO was Icarus – here’s my link
http://knittingnatty.typepad.com/knittingnatty/2007/09/without-further.html
OMG! Joe must know my son Mike who is trying to convince me that all I need “is a router card and your new Christmas computer will hook up to the Internet every time….and quickly”. And all I want to do is throw it out the window into the snow….I think I’ll go knit. Thanks Steph!
I am just here to testify! for the men, who seem to be getting a bum rap here. I am a computer geek in some regards but networking-type stuff totally mystifies me. Fortunately my husband does it for a living. He never screws things up, and he has fixed things for me many a day–quickly. Okay, he’s not the best at finding things, and he’s got other flaws, but so do I. I dunno–I like men!
Flickr’s nice for the photos but it’s impractical to keep your photos there at full resolution. Plus it locks you into paying whatever they charge per year. I got an external hard drive for this reason. I liked the comment about giving up and attaching it to the computer directly instead of trying to make it wireless. It’s not a huge loss of convenience.
My dad had this to write to me in an email in which I emailed him a link to your blog stating that you needed his help:
“This is why I like knitting. It’s never like this. It never has a new system, you’re never blocked from all your knitting because of a network problem, and you never, never need to wait for someone who can’t find an icon to come home and figure out 24 insane things before you are able to get to your rightful wool.”
Well, you could be blocked because you’ve only got your set of #1 circular needles, but really ought to use your #2’s, or you could use that other wool that’s just a scootch thicker, but it’s in your apartment and you want to start knitting NOW…..
Hey, I’m a guy. I don’t see why you couldn’t whittle down the needles, or soak the yarn in Coca-Cola or something and just get started. Then again, I don’t know how to knit, and anyway I’m too busy trying to figure out where the electricity goes that keeps disappearing between the wall switch and the lights in the living room, and then I have to reboot the wireless router, and plunge the sinks, and probably smelt some ore and hammer some new horseshoes…… 🙂
– dad
(who probably has an overflowing bucket of electrons down in the basement, where they’re go after leaking thru the living room walls.)
Read this out loud to your dearly beloved.
Why Computers Sometimes Crash! By Dr. Seuss.
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interrupted at a very last resort, and the access of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.
If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, and your data is corrupted ’cause the index doesn’t hash, then your situation’s hopeless and your system’s gonna crash!
If the label on the cable on the table at your house, says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, but your packets want to tunnel to another protocol, that’s repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall……
And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse; then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, ‘cuz sure as I’m a poet, the sucker’s gonna hang.
When the copy on your floppy’s getting sloppy in the disk, and the macro code instructions cause unwanted RISK, then you’ll have to flash the BIOS and you’ll want to RAM your ROM, just quickly turn the darn thing off and run to tell your Mom!
Well, that certainly clears things up for me. How about you?
I bet this will sound familiar:
My husband decided I needed a laptop because I could use it for work stuff. But then the laptop kept going to the recording studio. So then he decided we needed a bigger computer at home — “so you’d have enough room to store all your photos and stuff”. (Nothing to do with playing computer games, of course, nor with mixing music and burning it to CDs at home.) Custom-built a computer that would be way better and less expensive reportedly than anything commercially available. Built one for the studio too; which would be fine, except the studio doesn’t make money, so all this is coming out of the household accounts, and now the studio has two computers, and we have one computer for 4 people.
Did I mention all our household pictures for the last 3 years were on the laptop? Which then crashed before my husband transferred the photos as he promised he would (months after he took the laptop). And that camera is lost too, so there are photos that are just plain gone. Of more than yarn. And I want to back up my photos, but neither of the TWO CD-R drives are working to burn new photos!
So the kicker? Last month, he says to me, he says: You have too many photos on the computer, it’s slowing it down. (Nothing to do with the games/music, of course.)
Isn’t that what we bought it for? And the storage isn’t anywhere near capacity yet.
Grrrr.
BTW, as far as uterus as finding device — I think it’s a mom thing. My girls are not good at finding things either. And it’s not puberty, because the preteen is the worst. But at least my little one explicitly recognizes and thanks me for the finding ability! Of course, when somebody tells me thank you and how wonderful I am, I’m a lot more likely to find things for her happily compared to the other family members. Which probably leads to less looking on her part — she’s pretty smart. Or manipulative. Flies and honey, you know! (Who wants to catch flies anyway, though?)
I confess that I am a long time computer geek. I can bit twiddle with the best of them. So – Diana, you need a wireless card and router that is not operating on the same bandwidth as your other stuff. If your phone is 2.4GHz, get a 5GHz router and card. And vice versa. The Apple Airport Extreme uses both. (Love me my Apples!)
Steph – there is no excuse for not leaving things findable. The geek law here is to slave away with as many caffinated drinks of your choice until the wee sma hours and all things are as findable as before you started.
In Joe’s defense – loading all the photos slows things down. Not so much his defense – there are other ways of speeding things up. You can turn off the icon thumbnail view that eats time generating. Open Finder, View, Show View Options, uncheck show icon preview.
And really an external hard drive is your friend. Because if you brick again (god forbid, everyone start saying a novena for her poor computer) you’ll still have your files. Flickr is also your friend.
Well, at least he will be able to fix it when he comes home. When my husband “fixes” things, I have to hire a professional before they are usable again.
Apropos of nothing, you would be proud of me. I went on vacation with two perfectly organized knitting projects but I forgot to pack bras.
My husband has the same problem of male pattern blindness! On the other hand, I have the opposite problem with my computer. I get no pictures at all to put on my computer in the first place. I finally gave him 2 sale papers a few days before Christmas with digital cameras on sale. I told him I wanted my own camera so I could actually have pictures of my children (and knitting to post on Ravelry). The only problem is that my computer is so old and incredibly slow that I don’t know if I can download any pictures! My USB port is on the back of the computer, where I can’t get to it because of all the extra stuff he has thrown on my desk!
I feel your pain!
This is one of the reasons I put a password on my computer and DH can’t get in without me sitting right next to him. (The other reasons has to do with women with breasts larger than mine, but we won’t go there…)
I feel your pain sister. I would much rather slog along on a slow computer than be lost in new high tech every day of the year. Case in point. I asked for a simple cd album for Christmas from the local book store. ( I even took him to the store and showed him the CD) But instead of the CD I got an Ipod Nano that makes NO SENSE to me. I spent well over 6 hours trying to figure the blasted thing out and I don’t really like it. I just wanted a simple album to sing to on the way to work, but no I get a fancy schmancy high-tech gadget that gives me more grief than pleasure. Please do force me to use new technology – I was happy all low tech. Had he observed that I prefer to spend my day low-tech with 2 sticks and a string he would have just purchased the much cheaper CD album.
I might have had too much coffee today–I *do* see a picture there.
Jen
Ah, my thing is that I’m the geek and I do it to myself. Luckily I get over at being mad at myself fairly quickly.
On a similar note, I archived all my 2007 email because it was slowing down how long it takes to load my mailboxes in Apple Mail. Just saying that you might never ever want to mention that your e-mail is slow to Joe and just make backups of your most important e-mail.
Too funny. In my house, lately anyway, it has been my husband who is the finder. Mostly because he keeps moving my stuff up to the higher shelves where I can’t see it. And then he mocks me for being short. *Sigh* Even though life without men would be a whole lot easier, it would be a lot less interesting too. 🙂
I nod my head in total understanding. That is all I can do. Everything else is completely lost in my computer…
Oh god, that’s my Dad. For instance, I got a new shiny laptop just before Christmas. It was working fine, except for the GPRS modem. So Dad goes about seeing what’s wrong, and ends up installing a new BIOS. The laptop is effectively bricked. Usually that’s fine, because the computer can be booted from a floppy disk (or whatever those are called). But the laptop? Doesn’t have a drive for those. And then he dropped it on the floor, breaking the screen into smithereens.
I got a new one. Too bad his job is largely the same, except with more complicated network bits. 😀
Yes, I understand. My (75-year-old) mother told me some time ago that men can’t find anything if they have to lift something – it’s been proven many times.
The things that my boyfriend doesn’t see are infinite (light bulbs that have burned out, but are out of my reach; dirty dishes in the sink; any and all leftovers in the fridge; his shoes; one million candy wrappers strewn about his computer desk, the almost-empty container of whatever, his hamper, his cell phone, wallet, keys, etc).
The things that he does see are somewhat limited: all bad-for-you snack food, and the one infuriating hair that grows under my chin that I pluck vigoriously, but he somehow always sees before I do…
My mom always told me that my dad has “selective hearing,” but I think my boyfriend also has “selective looking”. Grrr. Good thing I love him, or I might have killed him by now.
“Male Pattern Blindness”
SO STEALING THAT! 🙂
I feel your pain. I have thousands upon thousands of fonts in my computer, as well as pictures, and it does slow me down quite a lot…
But I won’t let my man touch my laptop. No sir. Not for all the yarn in Lens Mill.
OH MY GOSH–that sounds exactly what my dad has been doing with my laptop..he thinks it has problems, but I was getting along just fine..ok, here he comes, so good luck with your pictures!!
oh Stephanie – you crack me up – thanks for the laugh and the knowledge that I am not the only one married to “he who will fix it….” at least we know its done with love (!!??…) Paula
In my house it’s called Male Pattern Blindness. I have three of them and they are all afflicted with MPB. I am pretty sure all men suffer from it.
And that flexible/inflexible thing . . . I am thinking of it as a lifestyle choice, and you get major points for at least trying.
Pictures = slow computer? Ohh, come *on*! I’ve got around – ::stops to check::: – 11,000 on mine, and it hasn’t slowed down any. Admittedly, not all my picture files are photos, or high res…and there’s 242Gb of free space, so it’s got plenty of room to defrag…but geesh, I’ve got close to 4Gb’s worth. Backed up, yes, but I want immediate access, so they also stay on the hard drive. I never know what I’ll want to work with; why should I have to look through my backup drive or CDs? Try telling him all his non-photo files on his computer are slowing it down. After all, files are files…the more you have, the slower your computer gets, right? ::snort:: Oooh…Especially sound files! Those are *big*, too. Yep. Those *have* to be slowing his down! Maybe you can help him move ’em? Heheheheheh.
Words to live by: “Gitcher Paddy fingers outta the holy water.” (I don’t know where Mom got that from, as her side doesn’t have any Irish, but it sure stopped all of us – including Dad – when we showed inclinations towards Messing With Things. She didn’t even have to scream it. Mom didn’t mind Dad remodeling the house around her, but by god if he was planning on changing anything she used, he darned well knew to get her go-ahead first. And if she said no, he listened. [g])
Boy do I sympathize! I’m married (for 40 years, no less!) to a computer geek who also has the distinction of having a genius IQ, and frankly, those kind of men scare me to death! While they may be brilliant, and oh so totally correct about the computers in the other world, in our knitting world, on our computers, they have absolutely NO FREAKING LOGIC in that brain of theirs, and when they have the audacity to “fix” our computers, we’re screwed! Eventually, all will work correctly; either that, or you learn to adjust to their “fixings”. Nothing else I can say. Good Luck!
Amen! I second that one! 🙂
Ah, yes…but you just know at some point of time in history, the following conversation happened…
Her: “What are you doing…”
Him: “I’m upgrading…”
Her: “But you’re…you’re breaking it…stop that…that knitting needle has an end on it for a reason!”
Him: “This will make it easier to knit large things…”
Her: “Like what? A cover for the Sistine Chapel? The damn thing’s not even finished yet, why would it need a cover?”
Him: “It will take the strain off your wrists…”
Her: “I don’t mind the strain.”
Him: “Don’t give me that, I heard you bitching just the other day that you couldn’t haul buckets of chicken mash because your wrists hurt from, and I quote, ‘The sweater you were knitting for that bloody big lummox you sleep with'”
Her: “I was talking about the dog.”
Him: “Ha ha. You were talking about knitting, and, now, here, we’re done. See? All the weight goes on the cord and sits in your lap.”
Her: “Yeah, but what if I forget and just keep going on in a circle?”
Him: “Are you really that stupid?”
Her: “Don’t you have some sort of ‘Guild’ thing to go to, oh ‘Master Knitter’–I understand that Henry VIII needs another pair of bloody silk stockings!”
Him: “Oh shut up and give me a kiss…and, hey–have you seen the keys to the swaybacked ass? The cart won’t go without him…”
And this is why I love my thumbdrive. It is large (2 gigs is more than enough for me, but I probably have fewer pictures), and it allows me to put my pictures in a portable location so I can back them up on other computer systems and not have to make my home computer dreadfully slow.
Hrm. Does he have a lot of music on his computer? Because having a lot of music can do the same thing.
Rule One: Computers are like toothbrushes–only one person should use them, EVER!
The only problem is that sometimes a computer breaks down.
Hence Rule Two: Whenever a computer breaks, only someone unrelated by blood or marriage and who is paid to work on it should fix it. That way if they screw it up, you can yell at them with abandon and not have to live with them pouting about it.
My dear ex husband decided that he needed to help be build a new computer since he does that for a living. I tried to tell him it was super simple and I wanted to do it myself. He decided to back up my old hard drive with 5 years of photos and email on it, rather than just yarding it over as a second hard drive, and then he used a very fancy system to back it up…as one huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge file. He then reformatted, aka nuke-wiped, the hard drive. That one huge file got corrupted, and I lost everything. He then proceeded to burn the CPU (brain) into little crispy pieces, and wrecked my brand new big hard drive. It could not possibly have gone worse, short of burning down my studio. Not that I’m resentful or anything…just glad he’s my ex 🙂 The first thing he did was give away all the things I knitted for him – cue the little tiny violins now! I whine so loudly so no matter what you’ll be pleased as punch with you significant other 🙂 p.s. photos don’t make your computer slower, they’re just back there as files. That would be like having cookbooks sitting on your shelf unopened slow down your dinner. Adding memory makes it go faster for cheap!
As I’m sure was said in previous comments there is no way too many pictures would slow you down unless your hard drive was close to full. A good reason to have your pictures on another hard drive is for backup so you wouldn’t lose them, but that’s obviously not working for you ;). Lucky for me I know all this techno crap and don’t have to worry about the hubby trying to “fix” my stuff. He would die a slow painful death if he started screwing around with my computer. It kind of scares me hearing stories of people that actually have technically oriented jobs but are still “bricking” things at home.
Stephanie, this post has prompted the most entertaining comments I’ve read in a long time!!
As a knitter and a geeky-techie who has earned a living fixin’ computer things, I’ve even seen this behaviour in my Y-colleagues. I have observed them simply exiting the building! It took me a little while to figure out why. What they are doing is buying time, because they don’t have the answers, yet continue to keep up the appearances that they do. It is both hilarious, and a wonder to behold! As an experiment, I have even tried this approach. It works! ACTing!
Good luck with the ‘puter problems. I’ll burn an old hardware manual as an offering on your behalf. R.
Now, I know you don’t have this perspective because you work from home. Most of us loose our work stuff, right before a deadline, because some guy updated the whoosit, and it’s not even a guy we like more than average.
Tech support at home is occasionally infuriating with the making it better, which always causes it to be worse for a while, but at least he’s kinda cute and cuddly.
I’m so with you on this: “‘ll use a terrible system that totally sucks for years rather than learn a new one.” It’s pretty much the story of my entire life.
But I have to disagree somewhat with this: “knitting …is never like this. It never has a new system, you’re never blocked from all your knitting because of a network problem, and you never, never need to wait for someone who can’t find an icon to come home and figure out 24 insane things before you are able to get to your rightful wool.”
For me, that’s how knitting mess-ups feel sometimes too. Not quite as bad, and better because there is no marital element in knitting mess-ups to magnify the problem.
But sometimes, frogging and trying to get started again in the right direction feels pretty much like upgrading a computer–it’s gonna get a lot worse before it gets any better, it’s gonna take hours out of my day and make me hate what I’m working on, but it is inevitable and the longer I put it off the worse it’s gonna be.
I’m thinking of my lovely suri alpaca minimalist here….press on and hope for miracles or go back and make things worse in order to (hopefully, maybe) make them better? Hmmmm.
{hugs} I just did that to myself to “clean up” things similar to how I have to “clean up” my stash. well, end result was i couldn’t find image in the safe place i moved it to or it’s original hiding place, but as a geek, i did it to myself. (image was on another computer, which i knew and never dealt with.. sort of like the stash that is hiding in the couch pillows). 😉
{hugs}
I am feeling your pain. We got a new TV over the Christmas holiday. My DH is Aeronautics Tech in the Coast Guard. He connected up the TV to all of the components (DVD, CD player, Cable box etc.). The next night we had a party. I went to turn the music on and of course could not. Standing up he comments to all in the room “I have to go and show her how this thing works.” Remembering that there were wives present that their husbands work for him in the same field I kept my mouth shut. I know they understood. BTW, he would never find chocolate cake hidden behind milk either.
The rules about MY computer is that you Don’t Change Anything Or I Rip Your Lips Off. It is generally a very effective threat.
Here’s hoping that today’s little hiccup is not an indicator of how much fun you will have with technology in 2008.
And Joe? Remember last year’s Christmas wool? Just because she didn’t use it doesn’t mean she didn’t love it. And just because she hisses, spits, yells and throws temper tantrums doesn’t mean that she isn’t having fun.
(Although the inflexible rule at my house is that you must sound like you’re having fun or I take the toys away. The boys learned this quickly.)
Happy 2008!
Amen!
Ooohhh…Ann (yet another) at 4:53 PM mentioned icons? Ok, yeah, *that* could slow things down. Which is why I don’t use icon views in any of my folders, only the list view. PC or Mac, icon views suck for speed if you’ve got a lot of photos trying to generate previews. Or, well, files; period. *If* this is the problem, use image viewer/organizer software instead of Finder to look through photos. Those programs generate thumbnails faster in the first place; and keep a preview file saved, so next time you’re browsing a folder, the thumbs load even faster. There are free viewers out there for both PC and Mac, if you use a graphics program that doesn’t happen to have the browse function. Or if it’s slow about that part. 😉
An excellent tech support rant. I nominate this for Post of the Year.
Now might be a good time to go back and reread your post from November 26, 2007. 😉
Heh. As a software engineer, and all-around computer literate person, I totally understand.
I HATE it when someone fiddles with my stuff. I’ve got it set up so it works, dammit, don’t break it. It’s not better if I can’t use it.
Why does this sound like a conversation at my house???
At the risk of sounding very geeky my husband has our pics and music on an internal network server that I think he calls “share”. So when I go to photos I can see them on my computer but in actuality they are not on my computer at all. Except for ones I’ve put on the computer but haven’t moved to the share. I’m not sure how to do this, unless it happens automagically when I move picture files. They aren’t on his computer either, they are on a seperate tower. Pretty cool. But I don’t know how he did it. He’s always trying to show, explain get me to use high tech things and then he gets mad because I don’t get it. But he doesn’t explain it right either.
I have discovered that knitting is refreshingly low tech.
Unfortunately, I feel your pain. But what is worse is that my husband gives suggestions like I need to get rid of the pictures on my computer because it’s slowing it down but leaves the how to up to me. (Which is probably best, because he isn’t the best with fixing these sort of problems, just making suggestions)
The actual conversation with my son who is pretty good with computers. Me: I have to find out why this computer is so damn slow as of late. I think I need more RAM. Him: That’s what I’ve been telling you, Mom but you won’t listen. Me: I heard you but it doesn’t make sense to me. Why? Why would I need more RAM all of a sudden when I haven’t changed or added any programs? Why would it be fine and then suddenly I need more RAM? Unless you have been adding stuff? Him: No I haven’t done anything on that computer for months.
Me: Then why? Him: I don’t know, just because it does. Me: Grrrr
Ditto, Fixing the stuff on the computer and suddenly all is gone. Ditto, hiding stuff in the fridge so they can’t find it by just putting it one shelf down from the top. Ditto, the telling you you’re a dope and then being dopey. I’m so there with you. With all of you.
I am so lucky that my husband is a techie…and doubly lucky that my knitting requires no technology for him to be able to “fix” or “improve”. Best of luck, I hope Joe can retrieve your photos.
Yep, and yarn NEVER disappears in the stash either. NEVER let a MAN near MY laptop. Nope, they might see how many downloaded patterns I have dumped higgledy-piggledy in My Documents! Yeah, it’s on my list of things to organize when my Round Tuit gets here GRIN!
Clearly, in this regard, Joe is just wrong. You can never have too many pictures of knitting!!
I’m sorry. Did you say “Joe” or “Marc”? You see, I too am married to a techie-guy who insists on plunging us into the Dark Ages every time he makes an “improvement”. As for the seemingly genetic inability to find things, my son’s pre-school teacher is the only female in a household of 4 guys (5 until her oldest moved out.) She can frequently be heard exclaiming, “Wait a minute, let me turn on my locating devices. OK ovaries, do your thing… beep…beep… beep… Oh look! There’s your {insert lost item here} right in the middle of the floor where you left it. I wonder how it miraculously appeared there!”
We are in good company though. I remember the comedienne Rita Rudner commenting years ago that her husband was unable to look behind things. She frequently hid a gallon of juice behind a quart of milk in the fridge. Hmm…. wonder if that would work for my stash….
I sympathize, though I have no husband or significant other to blame for my iMac woes. I swear I have not messed up my own computer! Said woes have gone on for six months now, and neither the male nor the female geeks at Apple have been able to figure out the cause.
Instead of going on about that, though, I want to hark back to one of the later comments to your Dec. 13 post about the Christmas concert. (Maybe I’m recalling it because the fortitude to endure male pattern blindness and computer fixing bears some resemblance to the strength to endure Christmas concerts, or stay through the whole soccer game in the sleet?)
On December 16, 2007 at 9:11 PM, Lucia ended her post by asking, “how can it go by so slowly and so fast at the same time?” I thought that was a wonderful observation, and quoted it to some acquaintances at a holiday party. One of the men, a father of several children, replied, “The days can be really long, but the years are short.” What a great way to explain the conundrum.
I have an iBook with literally thousands of pictures on it, and it is not slow, so I’m really sceptical of Joe’s claims there. Hard drive memory (which stores files, like pictures) and operating memory (which is what the computer uses to “think”) are not the same thing. Emptying one will not make more room for the other, anymore than emptying out your file cabinet will make you smarter.
I second the advice to password-protect your computer so he can’t mess with it.
(If either D. or I messed with each other’s computer, there would be an enormous explosion!)
As for MPB, what I’ve heard is that men (and some women) are looking for a specific view of the object and not for its aspects. So one doesn’t go looking for “a blue book”; one needs to look for things that are blue, or have straight edges, or are rectangular, because a blue book that is lying on its side, or partially on its side, or whatever, doesn’t look like what one mentally pictures a blue book to look like.
Learning this made it easier for me to find my own stuff; it is a LEARNED skill, like folding laundry or putting away dishes. Why should men bother learning, when they can blame their ignorance on a lack of a uterus? I say, stop enabling them.
🙂
The knitting equivalent is getting to the part of the hat where you need a new needle size only to find that you’ve organized it away somewhere and you can’t for the life of you find it. Good luck with your pictures. I’ve been there and hate that.
Love the fact that you gave a little plug for Pong. Just think of all the things that children of this millenium have missed out on!
yes
I’m assuming that it’s a physical device and you’re running a mac. Macs run everyone and their mothers on USB ports, so check if it’s plugged in correctly and check if the laptop is detecting it at all.
Btw, the number of pictures you have on your computer makes no difference. It’s the amount of RAM you have. So you have very little, thus your computer. RAM is kinda like… having a tabletop. If you have a small tabletop, you have to keep putting things away into drawers and such like so it doesn’t all overflow to the floor. If you have a bigger tabletop, everything is in easy reach on the surface.
Well, with 202 comments preceeding mine, you may be tired of reading them all. I think you and Joe have an early and virile form of cabin fever settling in. It’s a loooonnnngg time until spring comes……
Well, his heart was in the right place. I suggest you give us your list and we can search the site for the picture or give us the date is was first posted nad we can do the archieve thing.
Oh My Goodness! My BF tried to “de-clutter” my life by removing my contact lenses from the boxes they came in and put them in one place…then I told him that the boxes had an L and R on them so I’d know which ones go in my left and right eye….bless his heart he tries.
I recently met a woman who had the perfect explanation for the things men do that women don’t understand. I had just told her how my husband had installed a high-end sound system and 40-inch flat screen TV in our family room and then hooked up his old PC and used it primarily to watch crappy homemade old music videos (e.g. Greg Allman in concert 30 years ago) on YouTube, with lousy sound.
Her: It’s because of the sock party
Me: Excuse me?
Her: You know how one sock goes missing out of each load of laundry?
Me: Yeah, but…
Her: Once a month, every male over the age of 13 goes to the sock party. It’s where they learn to do all the stuff that drives us crazy. They go while we’re sleeping. They have to bring a sock to get in.
Me: This explains sooo much.
More to the point, I have been that panicky “I want you to fix it NOW but don’t you dare touch anything” person, even though I know something about computers. When my ex-boyfriend was applying for his first computer job, the interviewer asked him how he would deal with the end user from hell. He described me. He got the job.
I sure hope the picture was not something you had done for him!
OMG!!!!!!!!!
They cloned my husband – and YOU married him too!!!!
I SO like the idea of being able to hide our stashes from our spouses just by putting vast quantities of yarn in plain sight – that IS a good plan!
And so, your struggle has not been in vain – we’ve learned a new way to get yarn into the house – don’t bother sneaking it, just lay it on the dresser!
Happy New Year!
One word.
flickr.com
My personal version of hell is trying to teach my DH how to do anything , anything at all on the computer. the slightly lesser version is helping him with a plumbing project. I consider murder after those episodes. He wouldn’t know how to “tweak the computer” so he starts projects instead. Male pattern blindness. Yes.
Today’s post was the first I’ve read and I can’t wait to read more…sooooo funny as my husband is the same way about pictures, technology, my laptop (which I’d prefer he kept his hands off) and my yarn! And he’s exactly the same with the “where is my ______” questions…why do we have to be the ones to keep track of everything in the house!!? I hope you are able to get the pics back. Can’t wait to read more posts. Thanks!
My hubby, love of my life, prince among men, trustworthy and true, is under threat of death if he touches my laptop.
I will send my 12 year old son up to you asap…I won’t bother with the husband who is just as knowlegable as Joe, but will immediately blame you for doing something to the thingie….thanks for a good laugh!
This is why NO ONE touches my computers, ever. But then, I’m the geek of the house so I can do that. 😉
I think perhaps you need a secret computer that Joe will never be allowed to know about.
I laughed and laughed and peed my pants when I read your blog. It is exactly why I knit. Try living with 3, yes, 3 Engineers, geek (Hubby) super geek(no.1 son) and extra super geek(other no.1 son). Imagine all the wires, routers, this and that all over my house. And the constant fixing and upgrading etc. I’m not allowed to touch anything that looks electrical. I am though able to use MY computer (we have 6 computers in the house, I think?) I have made it out of bounds and you can’t get to it through the maze of knitting paraphenalia I hide it behind. Again if they don’t see it they can’t find it. It works fine for me.
Happy New Year
I am so glad that my husband hates computers, and is way to busy with other stuff to mess with mine. Just don’t ask about the closet that has no doors, the kitchen table that is in the workshop and the brass bed that has been taken apart and placed in various spots in our bedroom. Got to love them anyway.
You really don’t need pictures anyway, you write beautifully without them.
Happy New Year.
Tina
(Male pattern blindness has been inherited in this family too!)
I live next door to my parents. My siblings used to “improve” our parents’ computers every time they came to visit. The only problem is that if my parents did not understand what the improvement was, I was the one drug out of bed in the middle of the night to fix the “improvement.” I had a little chat with my siblings and they don’t make too many changes any more.
My DH likes to update our email system every so often ( seems like once a year but he assures me it’s not that frequent!) Every time he does, my email address stops working and I have to get a new one. I wouldn’t mind so much except it always happens right after I get new business cards printed. I think next time I need cards, I’ll think up a new email address and get 2 sets of cards printed just in case. 😉
Happy New year!
AMEN sister friend…AMEN! You’re singing to the choir!
When he asks, you can say “OH YEAH I TOLD THE BLOG, BABY. And the Blog is pissed off. The Blog wants their pictures and they know who to blame for it.”
I just want to share something my previous boss (a recovering attorney) told me. If I was ever going to murder my husband for something like that (and since he is the house geek, yes it does happen here…), that I should be sure to murder him in the heat of anger so that a good defense attorney would be able to get me off. Cooling off or thinking about it for a while means it is premeditated murder, and you can go to jail for that!
Just keep that in mind for future use….I don’t know if they will let you blog from jail.
I totally, totally get all of this. I love the way you explain the whole thing so completely thoroughly and I am like, “Yes, yes, gotcha, mmm-hmm,” and you can explain the exasperatedness. I am married to the same kind of guy. I do get kind of happy when I know where the stuff is, because I do like being right! I hope your thingy that your pictures are in are talking to your computer soon-
Isn’t that picture just a view from your window in Canada these days? Here in Florida, I’m told there may even be snow in Daytona Beach tonight. So maybe the picture is accurate after all? 🙂
Maybe Joe just needs his own blog… 😀
I feel your pain on so many levels. My husband insists on using my desktop (Why, when he has a perfectly new laptop running Vista. Oh, maybe that’s why…) and he has on more than one occasion tried to upgrade or tweak something that has left me with a huge brick for several days.
I hope you get your pics back soon.
Hang in there, gal, it’ll work out. It will invariably take too much time and drive you mad in the interim, but it’ll work out. My current computer is not only slow, but stupid. It’s a stupid-stupid head that is slower than a slow thing. My solution? I bought a new Mac mini. It’s still “in transit” and the waiting is driving me mad.
I also just learned that some wool I sent off to a mill last July will be arriving in a couple of weeks! The wait for that has been driving me nuts. I have no patience and hate waiting for anything, so I knit. Knit and breathe.
My best knitted thing for this year? A pair of gloves I made for my Mom for Christmas out of that rainbowdey soysilk-wool my husband gave me last year. It was a joy to spin, a joy to knit, and mom loves them. I’ve linked it in the URL link-me bit. They’re mismatched and pretty, so go lookit and forget your computorial woes.
Gulp – I am getting one of those picture thingies tonight. DH is at the store now… crap – I hope I can still get to the pictures and I won’t have to hide them under “News” or something. Great – now it really will be knitting porn (off limits and hidden).
Doesn’t Joe fear the wrath of the blog? ‘Cause he should. Got to love them for trying to “help” us.
Ahhhh…..”I looked”. We’ve only been married for 6 years but somehow the “I looked” comment has taken on a life of it’s own and only become worse in the last year. It’s stunning, really stunning when they think they’re helping and think they’re looking…
As a geek, I have to side with Joe. It’s in the code, he can look it up for you. My husband and I are similarly geeky, so we understand about the sheer necessity to MAKE IT WORK. 😉
While I keep most of my photos I’m not doing anything with on a shared external hard drive, I understand the need to be able to play with any photo at any time.
I love to play with the photos, but I know I have a limited harddrive with which to play. So I keep maybe the last 2 shooting sessions on the drive, and the rest out of the way. It’s what makes the most sense to me, and what makes the most sense to my poor overworked laptop.
Change is scary to most people, and I’ve learned that the big shinyness of new things is scary to most casual computer users, and the scariest thing that a user can hear is “You’ll thank me for it later.”
This post made me glad that my husband doesn’t really care about the computers. Or I would have been the one writing this. Good luck getting your pictures back.
men are hunters, and can only see things that move. a quiet blue book cannot be spotted. try moving it and see what happens!
Ahh, see, I’m the person who knows more practical techie stuff around here.
My husband will come in and say “Mike’s computer is slow” and I’ll say ” Did you flibbergibbtie the flummoxofier?” And he’ll say “ITS WINDOWS” and then I’ll go flibbergibbtie the flummoxofier and it’ll be fine.
I’m also the one who says things like “The wireless sucks in the front room, we need to move it into the craft room so the microwave doesn’t screw with the signal” and he’ll argue, because, really, he has a degree in software engineering and he should know something about microwaves and wireless and all I have is 28 years of computer experience and a degree in history… and I’ll move the wireless into the craft room and the microwave won’t crash it anymore.
But does he ever admit that I’m RIGHT??
HA!
Sorry… I feel your pain… and Joe’s…
Stephanie: I feel for you. I called Comcast this morning because my connection isn’t as fast as a colleague’s connection and I had speed-envy. Well I paid for it, because when Comcast tested my modem, it did something bad to my router and it stopped working and I had to go buy a new router. And of course, Comcast isn’t planning on reimbursing me. 😉 Next time Joe wants to move your pictures, tell him to burn it to a CD or DVD from *your* Mac. Then take the disks and hide them some place that only you know about. That way he can’t “lose” them for you.
TMK
In defense of Joe and others with male pattern blindness–I packed for Knitting camp with two bags of yarn and projects and one bag of clothes. Two bags made it to the can–can you guess which ones? Right. I had to run over to the local Walmart to buy some emergency underwear, pj’s, a couple of shirts, shampoo, etc., etc.!!! And, I didn’t even have time at camp to work on all of my projects! I came home with three bags, however–all full of yarn!!
Gee, this sounds just like my house. 😉
Refridgerator Blindness,closet blindness,… My husband suffers from all types of male blindness. He also breaks whatever he tries to fix-I curse him each time I put something in the trash compartments(you know,garbage in one,paper/recycling in another) because he thought he could “tweek” it. Now it falls apart on a daily basis. Does he admit it?? No. Does he put anything in the trash? no. Not anymore-because it falls apart each time he touches it.
I have learned to just quickly call the repairperson du jour before he even knows something is broken. Men. I’ll be on your jury if you’ll be on mine.
I’m not so sure about this male pattern blindness. I think they can see perfectly well. The problem is that from birth, their mothers ran around like crazy looking after them and doing everything for them, and when they grow up they expect their wives or partners to do what mom did. These guys are not blind, but they are good scammers, and would we really want them to be any other way? If they weren’t the way they are, what would we have to talk about? And this way, we get so much stress-relieving knitting done!
Most men are like Joe. They just HAVE to fix something for the “””better?”” AND furthermore if it doesn’t work out it s always OUR fault for doing “”something”” we shouldn’t have touched . When this happens I just say “”WHATEVER!!”” tell me when you fix it and its running the way it should be or when I find something like a blue book and he doesn’t believe it was right where he already looked I say “”WEll I’m not Hudini” and walk away. It’s hard living with them but bless their hearts they do have “our” best interst at heart. How can we not love them , they are such poor weak creatures . Zorba said that about women but I think it’s more apt for men hehe
Ok, I am the “Joe” in my house. My knitter wife insisted I read this and I very nearly peed laughing.
You kill me. I think I need to have wonderhub read this. Srsly.
Btw – my best college friend is in Toronto right now. I don’t think that your site would allow me the profanity I needed to express her opinion of the weather there, at the moment. I told her she needed hot tea, or wine – or, better yet, hot mulled wine. I think she agreed with me.
Happy New Year – here’s to finding your pictures!
Why don’t you improve some of his equipment…
This same thing always seems to happen to me when my dad improves something with our computers. For instance, he made it so that my moniter is now the tv, but I can’t figure out how to view my moniter on my moniter, so I am watching myself type on the tv. So enjoyable.
So glad knitting takes the edge off anything…
It’s called refrigerator blindness. My husband and son both have it. Male dominant genetic thingydo, I think.
Scenario: “Where’s the mustard?” “On the door.” “Where? I don’t see it?!” Huff huff huff. “Here it is … the big yellow squeeze bottle.” Doh!
I totally sympathize! Sometimes consolidation means things get lost! Which I totally despise too!
We have the same “Where is it?” syndrome at our house- if it ain’t in the strike zone, it’s not there. We’ve been this way for 14 years, and that’s just the way it is. It’s a guy thing. I know this because when I was with a male friend of mine awhile back, he lost the car keys in plain sight. When I located them, he was amazed, his wife does the same thing. I know my friend, I know…
It’s the frakkin’ computer gremlins! Don’t Joe and his fellow techno-wizards realize that “anticipatory” computer tinkering just rouses the sleeping gremlins? Now you’ll have to wait till the next full moon and sacrifice a hard drive under it, while dancing naked and chanting of your unworthiness to push the power button or touch a keyboard again, all in the language of the gremlin: 0 and 1 ad infinitum, in myriad combinations. Sigh. I don’t envy you, but I do suggest you make Joe do part of the ceremony.
Before and afterward, there’s always knitting.
Oh… He is in so much trouble!!! Hope the best for you and your pictures.
We have the exact same discussion about the pictures and slowness every month or so at our house. I have run interference by deleting all the photos of yarn after posting them to Flickr. I know that the day will come when this tactic will no longer work and we’ll have to get an external hard drive or something. You have a million more than I do I’m sure.
Joe, this is Stephanie’s living. She makes her living with these things in a way and she HAS TO HAVE THEM where she knows how to get them. Deep breath.
Anyone remember the old computers – that were supposed to be so sensitive? You called a repair man and he came in with a long screwdriver, stuck it in a hole in the side and jiggled it and everything worked again. But not if you tried this remedy yourself. Back in the day!!!
See? This is exactly why I learned to do all the house stuff myself. I can’t stand waiting around for someone else to get around to anything. But the technology thing remains beyond me. Every time I think I maybe understand something, some whatsis dies and I have to get a new one and it works completely differently and I have to start over. What a dumb system.
Heard by me – filed under: Honey, where is it?
1. Where’s the flour today?
2. Where’s the XXX…..it was here 7 years ago.
Oh well, he can reach the stuff on the top shelf that I can’t.
“Honey, where are my keys?” “Have you seen my belt? I can’t find my wallet!” 22 years and it hasn’t changed. Male Pattern Blindness — at last a name for the disease! Don’t you just love it?
Hey, Steph, many condolences on the computer snafus. You walked a nice line there between humor and homicidal mania (which is where I’d have been, frankly.)
As for the best thing you knit last year: No sweat. We all know it was the Bohus!
Steph,
I can _totally_ relate. My better half is also a computer guy. Degree and everything. But every time I have an issue with the computer, it’s “Not something I know anything about” says he. OK, so I’m just about out of things he knows nothing about. 2008 may be the year that I have a problem with something he can actually help me out with!
I am adding to the comments late, only because “someone” has been messing with my computer, and I couldn’t use it because of some new things that had been added! (One guess who that might be.) I’m with the others who say “go knit!”
Oh crap. That does not sound good.
As the most ‘capable’ tech person in the house – I don’t have to worry about things like that. I only have to worry about when I do try things. Which I mostly don’t do.
Joe. You have some making up to do. You might want to contact the good women at Lettuce Knit – or something equally wonderful.
Oh – and get the pictures back!
Oh dear. Sigh.
I can’t feel with you on the spouse who is determined to tinker with technical things. I’m usually *that* person in our house. However, i am sorry to hear that you also have a freakin’ “surface looker”. My pile maker of a wife is a surface looker. I always walk over, move one item and then wammo!…there it is.
I hope that it gets remedied pronto. A full memory or hard drive DOES slow stuff down. But there are those compatability issues. Sometimes I think I should stick to taking photos, PRINTING them out and having a notebook of projects. (Oh, and an updated scanner, to put the images on the blog!)
Oh no! I hope it gets fixed soon!!!
Your Joe and my Nathan should get together and trade stories about crazy wives who complain about things that have been “fixed.” I have no idea why they must tinker, but they must! (DH gets it from his father, and my MiL has the same complaint.) Whatever happened to “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”?
Yes, but you can find your last set of #2 dpns chewed up by your new kitten at 11pm at night when you can’t run out and buy more and you were ALMOST finished with that sock! Argh. 🙂
Hang in there.
They say that newer technologies are more intuitive, but they lie. 🙂
*laugh* You owe me $40 for a new keyboard because you just made me spit wine all over this one.
My husband is not allowed to touch my computer. If I need it to be touched, I call Jake the Computer Guy. Generally, Janke the Computer Guy comes over after Dave has sufficiently fiddled with his own computer that he needs professional assistance. While Jake is here I get him to upgrade my ‘puter and give it a physical.
Hint: back up your pictures onto one of those nifty li’l memory sticks you can hang around your neck. You can put them right back on the computer when Joe isn’t looking.
If you are fairly serious about your photography (and you certainly seem to be) it’s worth buying new photo cards and saving the ALL the cards insetad of clearing them off to take new pictures. I generally go through a card and delete all the bad shots, and when it’s full of nothing but good shots, I burn a CD as well. Then I buy a new card for new photos.
Male Object Blindness goes back to hunting and gathering days. Men are programmed to find moving objects, and we are programmed to find things that are sitting still and hiding — fruits, nuts, small game. Which is why we know the cake is behind the orange juice in the fridge. When men stand in front of the fridge with the door opemn, they are ambush hunting — patiently waiting for their prey to creep out from its hiding place.
PainterWoman is right: print out the photos. _And_ back them up to CD, _and_ back them up on a USB flash drive or card, _and_ on an external hard drive. And maybe on floppy disks too.
This is the real reason regular backups are needed: not that the machine will fail, but that someone will tinker with it.
Like so many with helpful mates or friends, I’ve sympathized with your blogged computer woes over the years. I firmly believe Joe is a knowledgeable, well-meaning spouse, like mine. I also firmly believe that when something VERY important to me (that I don’t understand all the workings of) needs upgrading or fixing, someone I pay doesn’t leave me banging my head on the wall to stop the pain. It can be done quietly and diplomatically. It’s made life less dramatic around here.
Ohmigod, after reading this I love my husband even more. He never touches my computer unless I ask him to, we have redundant wireless and wired systems and internet (cable and DSL), and the last time I asked for help with my computer–which was completely dead–he waited until I was gone for an entire day, got it running fairly well–although it’s still terminal–and then helped me figure out which new computer to buy.
And he’s the one with 350 GB of photos on ALL of our computers. And no, they don’t slow it down at all, they’re properly organized. It’s all about the RAM and the processor speed.
well, my husband used to accuse me of losing his stuff all the time (like, what do I need a 45″ black belt for, or size 36 jockeys???) now, in his ripe old age of 59, he realizes that he has NO IDEA where anything is at any time, because he can’t keep track of things at all. The newest thing is for the older kids to PLEASE PLEASE ask Dad before borrowing something, otherwise he spends many hours searching through everything he owns, convinced he as yet again misplaced the item and that he is indeed, on the verge of Alzheimer’s
Mary E
Well, shit. That really really sucks.
Remember rabbit ears? When your father thought that you shouldn’t be sitting there watching a slightly fuzzy movie because he could get it to come in better and you ended up missing most of the rest of the movie while he messed with the effing rabbit ears only to end up with the same quality of picture you were originally watching. Only of course he declared it better because he did it. Not that you had touched the rabbit ears since the last time he adjusted them in the middle of Bugs Bunny.
Well, let me present you another type of husband–one who freeze anything technological whenever he touches them. Therefore, I have to do everything on our computer, or computer related items. If anything that runs by electricity is broken, I have to look into the problem! Believe me, this is just as infuriating as YOUR husband because the last time I used the darn thing, it worked just fine! But, he suffers from that same Male Pattern Blindness. It is in the genes!
I have had that exact conversation with my husband. “It’s on your dresser.” Yup. In our house however, I do the unrequested upgrades (okay, maybe I should have put upgrades in quotes) and throws off the household equilibrium (ie, I screw things up). I need to work on this in 2008 …
The joys of electronics, I personally was very excited when I received a Terabyte MyBook for my birthday, but I did all the installing and saving so that there would be no question of “what did you do?” The information is still there, don’t worry.
One suggestion that is very easy to use to store pictures off your computer (I have the same issue of too many photos and it bogs down my mac): FLASH DRIVES. They are teeny tiny and all you have to do is plug them into the USB port on the side of your mac. (I can see your eyes glazing over, just keep reading.) They can hold a lot now, and they are extremely easy to use. I also use an external hard drive to back up my laptop but flash drives are realtively inexpensive and if you can plug the camera cord into your mac to download photos, you can use a flash drive. Give it a shot!
This post was such a work of art I had to send it to my partner. This sums up exactly the reason for the fit of expletives I let fly on New Year’s night when I was trying re-cross a mis-crossed cable (like 20 rows down) and she was talking to me about how we could solve some kind of so-called problem with the HDTV we didn’t have yet (she purchased it the next day), a HTPC (Home Theater PC, I think) and 4 different kinds of antennae. I was also starving, and the pizza was 45 minutes late.
Male Pattern Blindness is a companion syndrome to Selective Hearing Loss. “You never told me that!” “What? I didn’t hear you.” It’s especially frustrating when it comes out double-barreled: “You left a note? {because he wasn’t around not to hear you} I never saw a note!”
I can so relate. This happens whenever the IT guys change something on my work laptop, or my hubby tries to “make things better” on my home laptop.
Oh and he also suffers from Direct Vision Blindness. Personally, I think it’s just because he doesn’t pick things up to look under them for other things. If it’s not right on top, it’s obviously missing.
I am not a Mac user and not sure what kind of drive Joe used to free up your disk space, but a pretty logical thing would have been to put all your pictures on a few DVDs. If you have too many of them consider using an external hard drive or a zip drive, they can be plugged in through USB easily. This just creates extra and separate space for your pictures to live in and you can access them easily as if they were on your computer’s hard drive. 🙂
Dez–Thanks for your brilliant explanation of Male Pattern Blindness! It all makes sense now….
hahahahah!! That sounds EXACTLY like my house! My husband does a lot of great things around the house, but holy crap does it take a long time and holy crap does it get way more complicated than it should be!!!!
I so loving reading your post. I work 60 miles from home and I get phone calls from my husband asking me if I have seen his wallet. What is really sad is I can usually help him locate it. Go figure.
I’ll defend you for the assault.
Just an FYI, I’m told that actual murder ceases to be worth it after a couple of years in the slammer.
Geez…and all this time I thought it was just Jim who “looked” for stuff like that. Must be a universal guy thing. I’ve resorted to the “don’t make me come over there” threat. Which much like your picture drive, doesnt’ work.
I totally see where you’re coming from. My DH has the same blindness, but why didn’t you just save your photos to CD or DVD, or even one of those disks you put into a camera? So much simpler than saving them to some external hard drive. Of course, you may not have thought of that and your DH being a geek and a man, well, why go with the simple solution?
I have a lot of photos (yes, I also keep them on my computer) and I keep most of them on back-up CDs in my safe.
Maybe Ken can help you get them back – can he at least retrieve the ones on your blog?
All the same, good luck!
Adding to Male Pattern Blindness is the very common and often misdiagnosed (by male doctors) Selective Hearing Disorder. Ah, those poor poor men. No wonder they need a woman around constantly.
Don’t let him touch your computer ever again. You don’t mess with his electronic equipment, he doesn’t mess with your computer. Having said that, get a woman techie to load up your laptop with all the usual virus software, speed up, etc. utilities. ALL of them. And you will be good. And she will be kind.
I married a techie whose specialty was security. His passwords were so complex you needed a PhD in cryptology to figure them out. Suffice to say that I rarely let him have a go. To tell the truth, he can’t help himself. He really can’t. Anymore than I can drive by a yarn store and not pop in.
My husband FINDS everything for me. I lose stuff, he finds it. No kidding! But don’t ask him where something is that he packed for the trip. No clue. Go figure.
Is this somehow connected with that other disease of men:
Me: Honey, just wanted to remind you to change that lightbulb.
Him: You never asked me to change the lightbulb.
Me: Yes, honey, I did, 2 days ago. Twice.
Him: No, you never did.
Large crashing noise as light fixture is smashed with broom.
We’re all there with you. Go Knit!
I read your blog every day and finally have to comment because I can relate. I can frequently relate to what you have to say but I am paired with the mechanical equivalent of your Joe! I am more savvy with computers than my Ed but the equivalent happens when he decides to “improve” the performance of one of our vehicles. I don’t even care if it’s one of his collection but he really ought to keep his mitts off my car! Really!! At the moment it has a thingie installed which disconnects the battery with enough life left to start the car if you leave your lights on for example. (It usually does this when Ed has failed to completely close the passenger door and the dome light has stayed on.) It doesn’t happen often and I never remember the d_____d thing right away and then I have to find the gizmo in the glove compartment because when I kept it in my purse it would engage randomly when something hit the button and now it does that if I have to brake suddenly and things in the glove compartment shift and . . . . You get the idea. I hope you get your new drive talking to your computer real soon.
It occurs to me that this is the perfect time for the Yiddish word “farpotchket,” defined by Howard Rheingold as “Totally ruined from having tried to fix it.” “This was a mess before, but now it’s completely farpotchket.”
WHY oh WHY must men “fix” things that aren’t broken? why do they have the need to “improve” things that are just fine? and WHY if they have such uncontrollable desires, don’t they confine their fixing/improving ways to their OWN stuff? Would I EVER consider going out in the garage, and telling my husband how he could make his table saw/router/mitersaw etcetcetc work better? obviously its a case of men not having enough to do.
My sympathies to you. I too had a male (not my honey) try to fix my laptop so it worked better and all the peripherals (two printers, a DVD/CD burner and a very important cable modem) lived in harmony.
I now cannot find my NaNo book, the massive fanfiction I plotted out or my picture folders (fortunately, the pics are also saved on PhotoBucket). Even more fortunately, my honey came back last night, and promised to straighten everything out tomorrow. When he’s done, I’ll send him your way.
It’s always helpful to head off these problems before they begin. My hubby doesn’t use the computer at all. He’s not “a computer typy of guy” which suits me just fine.
Dateline: some 20+ years ago
Circa 3:00 AM
Scene: Me, in the dark, hunched over the computer-type thingie we thought was so very ingenious at the time, madly writing a largely unsaved term-paper that’s due in the morning.
DH – the IT professional (yawning as he enters sleepily from the bedroom): “Why are you working in the dark? You’re going to ruin your eyes. You need a lamp.”
Whereupon he proceeds to reach down beside my desk and unplug the computer-type thingie from the wall-socket to plug in a lamp. And then grins at me like a tail-wagging puppy who just dragged in a limp rodent as a special gift (look what I did for you!) That’s when I went to bed. Without him.
As the resident locator of all things from soup to nuts, I have threatened to cover all the walls in the house with a one-level 6-inch-deep storage system so that he can find things. And I am totally stealing Emma’s term “Male Pattern Blindness.”
ATWIKHYH (“and that’s why I killed him your honour”) is a time-honoured well-worn phrase in our home.
If you ever give up knitting, you can become a marriage counselor.
I am SO with you on this, laughing myself silly in total empathy.
On another-perhaps more stressful-note, what’s this about a wool shortage? The AP had an article about farmers not wanting to bother with the shearing of sheep, so were now raising sheep that did not grow wool. How is that possible? Isn’t that what sheep do?? http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.aspx?feed=AP&date=20071227&id=7978841
I know exactly what you mean. I have a computer geek for a 15 year old son, and he’s always looking over my shoulder and laughing and making suggestions. He thinks I should change from Bloglines to Google Reader, he hates Comic Sans, he thinks I’m a total tech-idiot. OK, he has taught me a few useful tricks. It’s interesting because we homeschool and now I now exactly what it’s like to be on the receiving end of someone trying to teach you something that you’re not ready to learn!
Oh my goodness… I just had a laughing fit so hard that resulted in coughing and peeing my pants! {trying now to recover…} I feel for you, really I do. I used to have to put up with that from my dad and husband, both in the software biz thinking they know everything. Luckily, husband is now ex-husband and I only have to contend with dear dad.
Think of it this way… maybe you can knit a pair of socks while Joe is fixing “your” problem? 🙂
LOL I feel your pain. I even try to hide my laptop so my husband won’t “try” anything to help!!
Haha – I Know exactly what you mean about husbands “fixing” things and actually making a mess of your system!
I can’t find half of my photographs either because they are on some storage device
Bad Joe. Very bad Joe.
We aren’t infallible when it comes to finding things though, even if the uterus is a tracking device. I was asked yesterday to look for my husband’s pager in the bedroom on top of the TV because he forgot to take it to work. I could not find it to save my life.
It turns out it was because he was wearing it.
Dear Stephanie,
I am trying to get into the kwb part of your site to enter my donation to kwb–it won’t let me in, and when I entered my donation c the Doctors s Borders site it did not give a place to put that I am motivated by your ongoing project of support for them. How can a very computer unsavvy person let you know so it can be added to the total?
Thank you
Jude in Sacramento
Not sure if you’ve seen this yet, but for those suffering from computer upgrades, beware of sharks.
http://xkcd.com/349/
I’m all for the typewriter and camera’s with film! I could change the paper and use carbon for a copy on the typewriter. I could throw the paper away if I didn’t like it. Now we have computers (which make it easy to blog) but we still need to keep hard copies in case the computer freezes or whatever. I’m not sure about the camera thing but I haven’t found a new one that can focus!
Wanted words on CBC called your blue book problem “a manscan”.
there are far too many manscans in our house, too.
A question for RAMS (or anyone? but she brought it up :)… I watched the video on ‘magic loop’ on knittinghelp.com, but I don’t see that it’s any improvement over 3 or 4 double pointed needles. In fact, it looks like a lot more work!
why do people think it’s better?
Are you sure that your husband and my husband are not twins????
Sigh. They are so all the same.
In my house as soon as DH says he’s going to fix something, I know it is time to hide. A couple of MONTHS ago he was going to fill a hole in the wall. He put the spackle stuff there, then it sat for months (all the tools) in the hall. Then he sanded it, and stuff sat here a couple more months. Then I moved it, I was sick of tripping. Then I asked, when will you finish this? The answer of course, was that he couldn’t finish it because I had “hidden” the tools. Yeah, on the workbench. Then he decided to paint over said hole. Great. The paint brushes and paint tray are still in the bathroom, a month later because I don’t dare to ‘hide’ them. Sigh.
Oh my gosh, my DH is the exact same way. He is a brilliant man who does this computer stuff for a living. He designs computer programs for people but when he says he’s going to install an improvement on my computer, I cringe. It’s like “Tim, the Tool Man” who can’t fix his own sink. I know I’m going to be without my “toys” for several days while my DH researches the problem and finally figures out what went wrong. Ugh! That’s when I go grab a book to read or my knitting needles.
Yeah, I can sympathize, my hubby is very much like that too.
He builds most of our computers from scratch. Including our DVR, which I can’t work and sometimes records the wrong shows.
Just so you know, 312 times later…
You’re not alone.
However, when you find a way to tell HIM exactly what you want, how you want it and when it totally completely and utterly works… puh-lease!!!!…. let me know!!
You’ll be a Goddess amoung Gods and my most favorite person EVER!
After reading your post about your husband “fixing” the electronic stuff in your house and how it is better AFTER 2 weeks, I am convinced that your husband and my husband were separated at birth.
Beth Kerry in St. Louis, MO
AAAAAUUUUGGGGHHH!!!
–that Charlie Brown scream.
Me too!!!
How many times…he’s upgrading or reformatting my computer, but all my shortcuts/documents/music/pictures will be perrrrfectly safe…
–my old ones are still missing from the LAST time he did it! And he still can’t figure out why I like HARD COPIES of CDs/laserdiscs/articles!
I’ve become Broken-Record Woman about ‘Do you think you might be able to get my things back onto my computer?’ for the last two weeks now…
…
Tonight he said he was actually thinking of reformatting my computer again. o.O!!
Are you sure you didn’t marry my husband?
Just catching up on some blog reading. Glad you’re feeling better, but gladder you decided to rest.
Sorry about your photos. What I would suggest is getting an external hard drive that connects to your laptop with a USB cord. Get a 100GB or bigger one, and you’ll probably be able to backup your entire laptop and all your pictures.
Mine works like a really huge floppy disk drive that I just plug in (instead of having to shove the entire thing into a slot) and I can copy anything onto it. Because it plugs in directly to your computer, you shouldn’t have problems with things not talking to each other. And if you can take it with you when you travel (unless you need the full laptop), or if you need to transport files, etc.
Anyhoo, just trying to save a relationship…..hope that helps!
Happy Knitting!
Laura
Very sad. Like the time I didn’t want to switch banks and we did anyway, and then I paid all out bills out of the wrong bank. It was very bad.
I think I may be the last to post 🙂
Hubby actually ADMITS that his ability to find things has decreased since we married. Apparently, I misplaced the husband training manual when I helped him find his watch — on his wrist.
The only thing he truly keeps track of his keys. And he mocks me when I misplace mine. Of course, he never knows where I put them, he just mocks.
Sigh.
K
You poor, poor Harlot. I am so, sooo happy to be the residential geek here. Not even the sweetest, gentlest, funniest, brainiest, wonderfulliest and most ample p*nised man would survive messing with my computer.
And I’m only slightly exaggerating. Ye gods, the road to hell really *is* paved with good intentions.
My hubby blames me for ANY computer glitch. Whether I did it or not. A while ago the printer settings were all screwed up. He asked me what I did. I said,”nothing” Then he showed me some screen and said that I must have done something, see,this screen is blah, blah, blah. I had never seen that screen before and I told him that. He didn’t believe me. We went around like this for a bit until he gave up and tried to fix it. Upon which he discovered that he had uploaded something and THAT was what was screwing it up! Did I get an apology? Nope.
I totally feel your pain. When we buy a new computer thingy because we “really need it” I hide for three days until the swearing is over and only enter the room to pull the wire for the latest wireless thingy up behind the desk or give Advil and ice for the inevitable headbonk coming out from under the desk.
Want to know how to be on the receiving end of the worst this-may-indeed-lead-to-the-need-for-a-jury look you’ve ever seen? Ask why there is a nest of cables the size of a small country behind every piece of office furniture in your house when you supposedly have a wireless network. Dare ya.
Fabulous post. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve smiled or laughed reading it. And I agree – computers and men can both be maddeningly frustrating. =)
So happy to see you knitting one of my favorite Patons designs from the Street Smart book I worked on years ago. I totally agree on the wool vs acrylic debate for cables. You must be able to block/steam cable textures to bring out all their beauty. This is impossible with acrylic.
After reading the whole blog entry and replies section I am ready to admit that our favorite “shout over your shoulder remark” is NO JURY IN THE LAND! And most of our cards are signed “I love you anyway”.
Look familiar?
http://xkcd.com/349/