Exercise... for the older folks

It's Saturday. I will be on the couch for the remainder of the day. Please make an appointment with my secretary if you need to see me about anything.

It's not easy getting old. For instance, I cannot tolerate the default font size in Wordpad, Word, and Windows' various mail programs*. The first thing I must do is increase the size. It's one of the many dichotomies of age, some things you need to shrink (waist line) and others need to be expanded (type size). As you get older, even your erotic dreams (which get fewer and fewer, I'm told) wear you out.

Still, I manage to play golf** 3 days a week. Other than searching for the remote, it's the most exercise I get. If you can call riding around in a golf cart for 4 hours "exercise". That's not entirely true, I do get out of the cart and walk, sometimes 15 or 20 yards. And I do swing the club at the ball... too many times, it seems to me. And then there's the bending over to pick up the ball from the cup (only because I haven't got one of these little suction cup thingies on my putter).



I will now attempt to get technical so if that sort of thing bores you, feel free to read any of the thousands more entertaining and interesting blogs available. I know I probably will. Even while writing this.



My other common exercise is trying to get something working properly on one of the computers in the house. We have 4 in all; 3 desktops and one laptop. They are all connected by a router... and a bit of hope. I am the house "tech". Faye and Franny are my "clients" or "endusers". Except for not having to cook or do laundry, I do not get paid for my work. Whenever anything is amiss with a computer, I am called upon to work some kind of magic and make things all right again. I work pretty fast. It has only taken me two years to get all three computers onto the router. ****

A couple of years ago, I had someone run a Cat-5 cable across the attic from the router to Franny's room. Not thinking very well for most of those two years, I tried to make her computer connect to the router using the wrong kind of cable. It took only two years for this to dawn on me before I remedied the situation. In the meantime, I spent a lot of time walking back and forth through the house, grumbling. Hence, I call this "exercise."

Of course, fixing that little problem opened up a whole series of new ones. Now, Franny wants to be able to see the music collection stored on the other computers. So, the networking had to be for more than the internet access. And then there was the upgrade to Windows 7*** which created some other problems for me. Microsoft decided to make networking easier and simpler by creating something called Homegroups and provided very vague explanations of what these are and how to use them. Presumably because they are "simpler" and "easier." Which they aren't. And changed how you "share" folders (which I still call "directories"). So the upgrade to the "simpler" and "easier" operating system broke almost all the things that had been working just prior to doing it.

I eventually straightened this out. Mostly (see addendum). I think.



* Someone please explain why they (Microsoft) cannot simply stick with one mail program for more than one version of their OS?

** The codger's favorite kind of swinging. Well, the only acceptable and available type anyway.

*** With the explanation for *, please elaborate on why when things are made "easier" and "simpler" they get more difficult and complicated?

**** Yes, I know I said I have 4 computers in the house... The fourth one, the laptop, is being stubborn. It's made by HP so that's to be expected. It's on the network but cannot join the Homegroup because, it is reported by the software, it does not have the proper protocol enabled even though it does. A two hour online chat (I love these because I can't type either) with an HP "technician" revealed that (a) he knew nothing about Homegroups, Windows 7, or how to fix the problem. This was because he never understood the problem to begin with. I will eventually fix this and it will all make sense to me then. The laptop does have access to the internet in spite of Microsoft making things "easier" and "simpler." It can "see" the other computers, it just will not share things. Let's call it "does not play well with others" like they used to say on my report cards.