Dell=usional

I;m getting pretty annoyed at the techno=disaster that keeps befalling me.

Oh, pardon me. That last sentence was meant to have an apostrophe and a hyphen in it, but they just aren;t where they;re supposed to be on this computer and I can either leave the semi=colons (and equal signs) in or take an extra hour to type this post.

Or I could stop using contractions, I suppose, as well as hyphenated words. I am not sure I can do that. Oh damn, now what have I done that turned on the italics?

This whole mess is because my Macbook Air woke up yesterday morning and decided it couldn;t remember how to recognize the USB Ethernet modem it has happily used for 7+ weeks since we became homeless vagabonds.

I tried the AG routine that solves most technology problems several times. I shut it off, turned it on again, removed the usb modem, even tested it on another Mac to discover it was still working, uninstalled and reinstalled the software that drove the device, slammed my hand against the screen, then the keyboard, shook the laptop, shut it off for a very long nap and tried it hours later, read everything I could at Apple;s support web site and found nothing like this problem. Gave up.

So out of the bag of things we weren;t going to take with us this trip came the Dell mini netbook. It;s a $500 laptop = if your lap is the size of Barbie doll;s. And in order to handle the incredibly scrunched up size, the geniuses at Dell have moved some of the keys on the keyboard. Like the ' and the -

It;s also got a really really really tiny screen. So tiny, in fact, that I can barely see what cards I have when playing online poker. Funny enough, I have been winning much more regularly with that problem, so don;t necessarily take that as a complaint.

But the real downer about all this is that I took a super great picture today on my new phone (replacing the other one which won;t quite die, but cannot quite do what it needs to, either. I wanted to post that picture on this blog, but I could not figure out how to do it.

That is because Microsoft makes even more annoying products than Apple, apprently. At least with the Macbook, when I wanted to transfer a mobile phone picture via Bluetooth, all I had to do was tell the Mac to get a picture off my phone. Never even had to use the manual to figure that out.

With Windows, I couldn;t even figure out how to turn Bluetooth on so the PC could discover there was a phone inches away from it.

So I resorted to the phone;s hard=wire solution. Only Windows couldn;t figure out how to make the phone work with the PC = something Apple machines seem to solve automatically.

So consider this my crabby, technology=annoys=me post. Oh, and by the way, I am apologising in advance for any typos and misspellings but I can barely read the words on the screen and I am not going to risk blindness by going back to check for errors.

We won;t need the USB modems once we start our trip tomorrow so I can stop trying to post using this Dell. Which is good, because it;s only a matter of moments before I throw it out the window.