Day: December 1, 2020

My Last Photo in November

Fandango7 Comments

Brian, aka Bushboy, posted a prompt today that asks us to “post the last photo from your cameras SD card or the last photo from your phone taken on the 30th November.” Brian explained that all we have to do is…

1. Post the last photo on your SD card or last photo on your phone for the 30th November.

2. No editing – who cares if it is out of focus, not framed as you would like or the subject matter didn’t cooperate.

3. You don’t have to have any explanations, just the photo will do.

4. Create a Pingback to this post or link in the comments.

5. Tag “The Last Photo” or #LastOnTheCard.

Okay then. Now I know that Brian said that no explanation is needed, but the last photo I took yesterday might seem a little weird. So I’m going to give just a little bit of an explanation.

We have a Google Home Hub in our family room that we primarily use for video calls with our kids. On Friday morning, the device’s video camera suddenly stopped working, so I called Google support and spent about four hours with various tech support folks trying to troubleshoot the problem. Unfortunately, they couldn’t come up with a resolution.

But early yesterday morning I received an email from a guy named Ian from Google. He provided detailed instructions and said that if I diligently followed his instructions, it should restore the video functionality on the device. So I followed his step-by-step instructions and, sure enough, the video capabilities were restored.

However, there was something new on the Hub’s display that was not there before. And so I took this photo, added the red arrow to highlight what I was talking about and emailed it to Ian.This morning I received an email from Ian, who wrote, “Hmm. That is odd. Lemme check with the team and I’ll get back to you.”

Sorry, my brief explanation went on a bit longer than I anticipated, but I felt I couldn’t just drop this photo on you cold turkey.

MLMM Photo Challenge — Opposites Attract

Fandango18 Comments

You say we are soulmates.
I say we are opposites
You say we see eye-to-eye
I say we sit back-to-back
You try to put me in a box
I want to be outside the box
You say we are better together
I say we are better alone
You say both of us are better than each of us
I say you’re probably right
Opposites attract

Written for the Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie Photo Challenge. Photo credit: Oleg Oprisco.

Truthful Tuesday — Hobbies

Fandango13 Comments

Frank, aka PCGuy, has published another one of his Truthful Tuesday posts. This week Frank wants to know what we do to pass the time. He asks us us:

With the exception of blogging (assuming it’s a hobby and not your profession), do you have any unique hobbies or pastimes?

Well, to be honest, with the exception of blogging, I have no hobbies nor pastimes.

I retired almost four years ago. A few weeks ago I got a call from a former work associate who is about to retire. He asked me how I like being retired and what I do to pass the time. I said, “I love being retired and I blog.”

He said, “But what do you do to pass the time?”

I said, “I told you. I blog.”

He said, “Don’t you have any hobbies?”

I said, “I blog. That’s my hobby.”

“That’s it?” he asked.

“Well, I watch TV, I read, I play cards and backgammon and Yahtzee with my wife, I eat, I sleep, but mostly I blog.”

He said, “Hmm. What do you blog about?”

I said, “Oh, this, that, and the other.

A Snool in a Nacre Shell

Fandango17 Comments

I take some comfort in the fact that it’s December, the last month of the worst year that I have ever experienced in my more than seven decades in this world. Looking forward, I am poised to rejoice when, on January 20th of what I hope will be a better new year, the menace of a man, the mad would-be king, will be out of office.

My only regret on this crisp Tuesday morning is that words like “nacre” and “snool,” which mean, respectively, mother of pearl and someone who is a toady or a yes man, are two of today’s one-word prompts. It makes my blood boil when I see words like those that show up in the daily, one-word prompts because nobody — at least nobody I know — would use such esoteric words in everyday conversations. So how the hell am I supposed to fit rarely used and highly unusual words like those into a cohesive post that makes any sense? Kudos to those of you who can.

Okay, I exaggerated. While I do get a bit irritated when words like “nacre” and “snool” are used for word prompt posts, it doesn’t really make my blood boil. I just had to figure out how to fit the word “blood” into this post. I guess I could have said that Donald Trump makes my blood boil. Because he does. He and almost all of the Republicans in Congress make my blood boil.

By the way, the image at the top of this post is one that showed up when I Googled the word “snool.” It looks, to me, like a psychedelic snail in a nacre shell that I might have hallucinated while on an acid trip back in the 60s, but what do I know?

Written for these daily prompts: Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (comfort), MMA Storytime (December), Your Daily Word Prompt (rejoice), Ragtag Daily Prompt (nacre), Word of the Day Challenge (snool), and The Daily Spur (blood).

The Fix is Not In

Fandango33 Comments

Warning. This is yet another whiney post from me about the as yet unresolved bug in the WordPress app for iOS. Feel free to skip this post if you either are tired of my rants on this topic or have no interest whatsoever in bugs related to the WordPress app for the iPhone and the pain and suffering they’re causing me.

I’m generally a reasonably patient man, but I admit that my patience is wearing thin.

At the beginning of November, WordPress released version 16.0 of its iOS app that runs on iPhones and iPads. Unfortunately, that new release broke something in the WordPress Reader so that when you visit a blog that doesn’t have “wordpress.com” in the address, you can’t “like” or comment on any posts from within the app. Since my own blog’s address — “fivedotoh.com” — doesn’t have “wordpress.com” in it, I can’t even like or comment on my own post if I visit it from the reader.

I pointed out this issue to the WordPress Happiness Engineers on November 3rd, and on November 14th, after continual prodding from me, the Happiness Engineers finally admitted that they screwed up. I was told that they were able to replicate the issue, which is somehow related to the way that iPhone/iPad apps open links and how information is passed between the app and the web page. They said that their app development team was “working on an update that will fix this recently introduced issue.”

I was quite happy that the Happiness Engineers identified the cause of the issue and had committed to addressing it. But since November 14th, WordPress released version 16.1.1 on November 20th and version 16.2 yesterday, November 30th, neither of which has addressed the issue with the WordPress Reader.

It’s been almost a month since this WordPress Reader bug was rolled out and even though WordPress has released two iOS app updates since then, nothing has changed. There has been no fix to this annoying and frustrating bug and Fandango is not a happy camper.