Frustrations of Change

The old man has just passed another milestone and is now is the fourth day of his 87th year. Having been fully occupied in keeping up some sort of mobility, blogging suffered in the priority race. In spite of that he decided to keep on trying to exercise his little grey cells by anticipating Microsoft's threat to stop servicing his beloved Windows XP computer. So I decided to scrap my wife's seldom used XP laptop for a new desktop with new bells and whistles powered by Windows 8. The result has been long hours, days and nights of stresses and strains just trying to think of how we could make this thing work gradually so the transition to the newer system would be easier for our slower learning curve. 

The store's technical squad finally delivered the beast yesterday and tied it in with my XP desktop to some extent the way I wanted it to go. After many frustrations and the exhaustion of watching the geek get it set up and operating I finally retired through a mostly sleepless and uncomfortable night with visions of large icons and sugar plum fairies floating randomly across the lit up screen in front of me.

Still, in an hour or so this morning I am sort of getting the hang of things. So this is by way of a test issue of the Post, the first from Windows 8. The technical expert did get emails running on both computers last night. Now I must see if it still does this morning. The old man will try to be more forthcoming next time.

- 30 -  

This Technically Challenged Old Man's Week

My wife may say I am not only technically but mentally challenged to even consider fooling around with computer bits and bytes. After this past week of watching me mess around with my ISP's email account and attempting to reset my Outlook Expres email program repeatedly and unsuccessfully she might add that I am also stubborn, miserly and unwilling to ask for help when I obviously need it. That, though attributed to my wife is really my own assessment, but I believe myself to be frugal rather than miserly.

Since first changing one of my email addresses so that it would be the one to use to create my Google account, I never managed to receive any mail through Outlook Express addressed to the address shown on this Post above. Even after I managed a lengthy chat session with my ISP's help desk people.

Finally yesterday morning after many hours over many days attempting to follow instructions to reset my email configuration to include the changed address, I finally broke down and asked my computer service store just down the block for in-home help. They sent one of their young experts yesterday afternoon. It took him about a half hour after trying to figure out the various explanations I gave him of my problems, and what I wanted to happen, to get the whole thing worked out with some fast navigating through my system to get it to work. All the mail that had been addressed to this address streamed into my inbox, including the original warning from Google that my URL for this Post would be cancelled. And to add the success, I got billed only for their reduced seniors rate. I tell you, we old men never had it so good! Of course they did not cancel because I had asked for a review from the Blog itself after I saw the warning there.

I will not pursue this further today. I still have much to learn about the many facets of Blogger that will hopefully improve my efforts over time.

Hopefully I will manage another effort in a day or so.