Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Never Let Old Guys on Computers

    When you read my sad story, you will understand why I say, "Never let old guys on computers."

     For some time I have been thinking about scanning photos.I want my children to have all my photos. After all, many of the photos are about the kids.

    First I had to sort out a few issues about equipment. Once I had that under control it was time to discover how everything would work.

   My plan was to scan the photos and send them. So first, I planned to use windows photo gallery. I wanted explanations on each photo. I worked and got info on the photo. Then I decided I better test this and emailed a photo to myself. Well, the info didn't go with the photo.

    Well, plan B, why not use Picasa? I hadn't used Picasa for 5 or 6 years. I couldn't find the Top line that gives you all the options. I thought I must be missing something so messed around for a few hours before deciding that part of the picasa program had gone missing.

     Okay. Download Picasa again. The download went smoothly. After that things went off the rails. I signed out of Picasa. When I went back I couldn't find Picasa 3. Worse than that the old Picasa came up. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't find Picasa 3. Then I made a blunder and uninstalled Picasa 3. By that time I'd had enough and went to bed.

    Thinking things over in the night, I thought I would go to my trusty son for advice

    When I opened my computer in the morning, I saw the Picasa 3 short cut on the desk top. 

    Ooh! That's where it was. Why didn't I see that? 

    So plan AA by now, download Picasa again. Fine. Okay, maybe I should test this out. I'll email a sample to myself. I wanted to use Hot mail. I was asked some questions I'd never heard of before. They wanted to know information about my email server. I was stumped so it was a good time to stop for lunch. During lunch the light bulb came on. Picasa wants you to use Gmail. So check this out after lunch and it works like magic. 

    So after days of stress and much swearing I finally have a system that works. I mailed my baby photo to my daughter. She thought I was really cute and then she said, "I still think you're cute!"

    Now any of you who have read this post to this point, have probably been saying,  "Why didn't he do this or that?" I hope that you include these asides in your comments. I might not be able to use your suggestions , but I will learn from them. It might also be that and old man stays on his computer!

     It's funny how when we do new things on the computer we learn much more than were looking for.

My graduation class 1957. I'm in the back row on the right... the really handsome one!