I have a theory that for everything someone is great at (cooking, singing, twerking) there’s something they really suck at. In my case I am a pretty good crafter, I have an acute sense of direction *I rarely get lost* and I pride myself in lovely handwriting. I’m also awesome at throwing bebe showers, shopping at Anthropologie, having the raddest headpiece at the Le Diner en Blanc, being Lumpy Space Princess winning the Showcase Showdown on the Price is Right, officiating weddings and doing the robot.
So with all these accomplishments come the many things I suck at; keeping plants alive, making pies, NOT dropping cameras, taking bokeh photos, deciding where I will throw Olivia’s birthday party, making peace with my Nikon DSLR camera, having a working laptop, okay I could go on and on but my point is, I love technology but I suck at making it work.
I am constantly battling with my laptop, my cameras and my iphone. So Sunday I had enough and decided to head to Best Buy during their cu-razy Cyber Monday sale to see what solution I could find. My latest issue has been memory. My iphone is full, my Nikon J1 is full and so is my Macbook Air. This is frustrating since I take like on average 50 photos a day. Luckily, I found a loophole by taking photos with the Instragram app, I can take more photos even when my iphone camera says its full. The problem is when I need to upload the photos to my laptop I had to delete photos to make space. This wasn’t working for me since I was losing photos I wanted to keep. I found this guy to help me.
He wasn’t a Mac specialist but said he uses a Mac at home so he offered a suggestion that would give me long term support. The Apple airport time capsule. I purchased a time capsule back when I bought my laptop as suggested by the dude who sold it to me. At the time I felt like he was just padding his sales commission and I couldn’t set up the wi-fi for it so I returned it and bought a $50 generic external hard drive. It worked for about a few months, then it was full of the twenty thousand photos from my computer. So I explained this to Jim Halpert and he tried his best to assure me he wasn’t John Krasinski and I needed the Time Capsule.
The bad news was it wasn’t on sale, the good news was there was a newer, better version available that had 2 TB of storage. I bought the dumb thing and spent 2 hours on the phone with Best Buy again trying to figure out how to set it up. See, technology is a blessing and a curse. I have little patience for configuring things. I love our Apple TV, but I hate that I have to plug it in every time we want to use it. I love how lightweight my laptop is, but I hate that it has a tiny 256 GB hard drive. It took me three days, several phone calls and chat messages with dudes in India and a headache before I finally called Apple directly to help me set the time capsule up. Easy breezy, I finally got it working by Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what happened next.
 |
| We keep our modem and the Time capsule in Liv’s room since that is our only phone jack |
This lovely $325 Apple bookend now wirelessly backs up all my computer junk. It’s also a wi-fi router but I already have one from AT&T so it’s sole use is my external hard drive. I began backing up Wednesday afternoon and it finally finished last night around 10pm.
Do you lovelies back up your computer files? I discovered I have a very hoarders computer life. So I should be okay with removing files I don’t use often and deleting tons of old photos to make room on my hard drive. So far I’ve gotten rid of 1,500 photos and I now have 4 GB of spacious memory. I am scared to delete any of my faves since I’ve been burned by external hard drives so many times in the past. Apple keeps trying to assure me this one is the Bentley of external hard drives but my technology curse is rampant.
So now that I have a better handle on my laptop storage issue, I am ready to tackle the next problem. My lack of coding and blog layout makes me frustrated constantly so I am going to take an online class at Pugly Pixel *it sounds like fun and has great reviews* I am hoping to learn how to format/size my photos, play with new fonts and design a new layout for Violently Happy. I wish I could figure out how to change my blog address on my Link Within widget but so far, nothing. I just may have to get rid of the suggested links *will anyone miss them?* I have a Word Press account that I wanted to move this blog over to but I found it to be pricy, and not as user friendly as Blogger so this e-course should get me up to speed so I can move into the cool, trendy part of the internet.
I am optimistic about my war on technology. I am super stoked to make my blog fresh to death!!
