How about a new class every 5 years I got time.

Flint wrote:

I honestly think you could take a 'computer literacy' course at a community college, if there's one around.

People have asked for such a class and nothing has happened.

Flint wrote:

My instance of Word was logged into my personal Microsoft account, somehow?? There's no possible scenario where I could have manually done that ...

The plot thickens?

I Googled a tech question, it was (of course) answered in a Reddit thread. I clicked on the link and was reading the thread, then the page refreshed. What's happening, I wondered..?

Oh, no big deal. It was just LOGGING ME IN WITHOUT ASKING. Who/what is doing this??

I HAVE A [HOME COMPUTER USE CASE] AND A [WORK COMPUTER USE CASE] 
I DO NOT WANT THEM MIXED. I DO NOT USE THEM FOR THE SAME THINGS

 

I am signed up for a class tomorrow at 930 AM, at the library. 1 on 1 training on my pixel book. I'm Exited.

My wife had an offer to add a free cell phone line to her T Mobile family plan.  I'm hoping to retire in the next few months, and while I have a work phone that has my entire life on it, I thought it would be smart to get myself a personal cell phone and start using that one for 2 factor authentication and personal stuff.  I had an old iPhone 11 handy, and I did a factory reset on it and got it unlocked from the AT&T network.  So I got the new T Mobile SIM and put it in the phone and then I added my Google account and Apple account to it.  I was going to really pick and choose what apps I wanted to put on this "new" personal phone to keep it clean. My idea was I would have 2 seperate phones and slowly get all my personal stuff off the work phone before retiring and have only what I needed installed on the personal phone.

I turns out, they don't let you do that.  When my personal phone gets a phone call, both phones ring.  When my work phone gets a call, both phones ring.  All my photos on my work phone wound up on my personal phone (25 thousand of them.)  Texts are showing up on both phone simultaneously. I don't know if it's Apple or Google doing this.  I genuinely thought that 2 different phones would behave differently.  I haven't loaded all the apps onto the personal phone, I didn't do a "restore from iCloud" move. I think it's my Apple ID doing this. I suspect you have to create 2 different Apple IDs or 2 different Google IDs if you want your phones to be not connected.

My new cgm I set up thru my phone is interfering with my camera. computers SUCK!!! That's why I left the meeting.

The only thing she taught me was how to upload pictures to the cellar. I was expecting a class. And what I got was an intern to teach me the one thing, and that was it. Kind of a joke really. Just like everything else in this town.

Thank you Monster, but I have a for Dummies that is answering my questions.
Please stop by we'll have BBQ.

Microsoft continues to act all anti-trusty. In insidious ways:

Office apps like Word and Excel, when saving a document, it defaults to One Drive. You have to click Browse to open the dialog which allows you to save locally to the PC. It never remembers this-- you have to do it every time. It's inconvenient, so you eventually give up and start keeping your files in One Drive.

So why does this matter? Because they're steering a captive audience towards their cloud storage application, driving them away from using their direct competitors, like Dropbox. Once they have people hooked into One Drive, they're less likely to start using another similar app. Why ever subscribe to Dropbox when MS already strong-armed you into using their product?

This is sneaky and gross.

eta: AND the end result that every Office user has to deal with-- IT TAKES LONGER, AND IS LESS CONVENIENT TO SAVE FILES. A basic ƒucking function of the goddamn thing.

Last edited by Flint (8/14/2025 12:40 pm)

In my field, not having the correct number of leading zeroes turns data into meaningless gibberish.

I've been pasting this stuff into spreadsheets for 20 years, and Excel never once "offered to help" with this until 1 week ago.

Not only doesn't the Outlook search work well, unable to find emails using unique keywords that I am certain are in the email, but another "feature" is that if I have a typo in the search field of Outlook, and I see that no emails have been found, so I hit backspace to delete my typo, Outlook deletes actual entire emails from my inbox instead of typos in the search field because somehow the mailbox gets selected and then unknown unread emails are deleted.  You would think they would be in the deleted emails folder, but there is nothing there with today's date.  So I had to go to our mail service, which is Mimecast, and sign in there.  I think I found all the emails I inadvertently deleted, and I forwarded them to myself as attachments so I *think* I have what got deleted, but I just can't be sure.  I think I hit backspace 4-5 times, and deleted 4-5 emails, but I just don't know.  Asked ChatGPT how to keep this from happening again, and it gave me a box to uncheck deep in Outlook menu options, so hopefully I've blocked this feature. Can't be sure.  I don't care for Outlook.

I think maybe the early years of devloping the computer and the internet were so successful that we got a really good result.
The thousands of experts are now trying to justify their pay and improve it.
It is not working. My first three computers (and their software) were mostly delights.
My current HP/Microsoft/Bing/Copilot/and? machine pisses me off constantly.

Go Google!!!