So, no posting yesterday as I spent most of the day doing tech-related things as LoML and I have finally joined the 21st century by going to smart phones! As much as I love my tech gadgets, we had been tied in to a contract with a cellular company that wanted too much money per month to add any kind of data package. Our contract expired and we decided to go with a no-contract service that has a low monthly rate for unlimited everything. For our birthdays (both celebrate this month) we got each other smart phones. They're Android phones and I spent a lot of time updating each of our Google contacts so I won't have to do that again!
I told you a while back that the bridge leading to our island has been one-lane since August. While it's been frustrating to have to wait extra time at the light, it's also allowed for some really nice pix. These are two of the many I've taken...straight out of the camera, just rolled the window down and shot out the passenger side!
Well, after much technological grief, consultation, and voodoo...I am pleased to present to you the video evidence which I've been teasing you about:
I want to thank my tech support team consisting of my sis' and my SIL (sis'n'law) who guided me and gave me useful info so I could sort out some issues. One interesting note is that my sis' told me about this website: www.speedtest.net It will test your download and upload speeds. Turns out, I had a couple of issues...one of which is that my "old" computer...a custom-made gaming laptop that I use as a desktop has LOTS of issues. It's several years old and has been through the metaphorical wars. It's one we put together for LoML to be able to game on after a total knee replacement years ago but that he quit using after he got better. Recently I took the battery out and leave it plugged in all the time...a neat little trick I learned while chatting up one of the Staples tech guys a while back. But sometimes it's just snarky and locks up when you suggest it do things it doesn't want to do. Truthfully, about all I use it for now is to download my pictures, edit them and then save them to my external hard drive. My bestest ever technojoy that I can't go anywhere without is my Lenovo ThinkPad Twist that I got on Black Friday (did I tell you about it already 'coz I don't remember). I LOVE it. It rocks! Which is why I was shocked and appalled that it wouldn't let me upload my video. Anywhere. So, after my sis' got me thinking about upload speeds (refer to website mentioned above), I got to wondering...because I frequently use a public wifi hotspot at my job to "play" on my twist at lunchtime and/or a public one at the public library, I run a program that creates a personal vpn to secure my system. One of the things it does is hide your ip address. Even though my home wireless network is secure, it's easier to just leave the setting to automatically secure any network through this program (which I've been impressed with...it's called Hotspot Shield). So, I'd never had cause to look before, but it reaaaalllly slows down your upload speed because of all the bouncing around of signals it does (at least, that's my explanation of it!). Once I temporarily disabled it, I had no problem uploading my video to YouTube (Blogger still didn't want to do it, but that's okay...).
Which leads me to one final point for tonight: Xander now has two different email addresses and his own YouTube account. Just sayin'.
