New Toys And My Brand Of Luck

I took a few plunges recently. I ordered a new tablet, replaced my backup software, and bought a new phone. And chaos ensued... as it often does for me.

I was getting emails from Carbonite telling me my subscription was about to expire for my laptop. So, on Saturday, I decided I would switch to another company, I-Drive, and purchased the software subscription. It covers all computers in the house for one fee (a much lower fee than Carbonite) but, of course, it required installation after download. And that is when the chaos first happened. In the midst of installing the software on Faye's machine, we lost access to the internet. Not a big problem since I had already downloaded it but an annoyance because it required some interaction with the website... and the cloud.

Eventually, all was well. Faye's, Francis', the laptop, and even the Toshiba tablet had the software installed and running. Initial backups were run on the laptop, my machine, the tablet, and Francis' machine. Feeling exceedingly proud of myself, I thought I was prepared for anything. I did not count on Murphy and his laws.

Yesterday, I bought a new cellphone. It runs Win8. It worked fine except I needed to replace my SIM card with a smaller one after cloning all my contacts to the new one. For that, I went to the local ATT phone store. Ten minutes later, they had the new phone working just fine. I still had to make it work with my Focus. For that, I turned to the salesman at the Ford dealership who sold us the Lincoln. 5 minutes after getting there, the phone was paired, Bluetooth-wise, to the Focus. All was going just fine. I arrived home feeling on top of things.

The doorbell rang. It was the arrival of the new tablet. No problemo, I thought. and it wasn't... except that the Getting Started booklet neglected to tell me how to shut it down (booting it up was easy), nor how to configure the cabling for the charging unit, and I learned that Win8 is different than past versions. Very different.

I also needed updates to bring it up to the more stable version 8.1. That's when we lost the internet again... as I was looking at the manual for the device. Silly me, thinking Comcast wouldn't screw up my internet connection at this crucial point in time. Of course it did. So, I went to dinner with friends (as we do on Tuesdays each week) leaving the new tablet powered on and Faye's machine running its initial backup. Two hours later, we had the internet back and I downloaded the manual for the new tablet but Faye's backup was only 30% complete so it will be running all night (at least till midnight anyway). Woke up this morning to find something had gone wrong and it still wasn't quite finished.

Tomorrow things might be relatively normal around here... but I doubt it.