Techno Crap

I've been having some issues with my phone syncing up with my computer recently--it hasn't been. I've connected and reconnected each end of the tether, but it doesn't see the phone. I've rebooted the phone and the computer, reconnected the tethers, and pounded the phone on the counter.

Clearly, something is amiss.

I don't actually enter my appointments on my phone--I hate the itty-bitty keyboard--which is also why I'm a text-o-phobe, but I do check to see if something is conflicting. Therefore this lack of technical meeting of minds is irritating.

Anyhoo, hubster (techno-geek that he is) took the phone to work (they use the same phones and have had issues with them) to wipe the memory and restart it with factory settings. Well, I had taken a few pictures on the phone, mainly when the kiddo had her hair cut and she donated it to Locks of Love. He pulled the pics and saved them for me. But they sucked. They were blurry, out of focus and just plain lousy.

I thought it was me. I thought I'd jiggled the camera, or rubbed my finger over the lens, etc. Turns out the little plastic protective thingy was still covering the camera lens.

Huh, talk about feeling stupid . . .

So, of course, he had to point it out, and took before and after shots at his office to show me the difference. Basically, made me feel horrible. I'd missed a milestone in my daughter's life by an oversight.

Until I remember that I didn't set up the phone--the hubster did. Not my fault!

And YES, I did point that out to him. HA!!

Techno-geek waves his hand over something and I'm given a computerized whatchamacallit that is up and running. I used to ask to read the manual, but he's always say 'why bother when I can take care of it for you'. I gave him the 'what if you get run over by a car' argument, but it falls on deaf ears. So I stopped asking and let him do his techno-geek thing.

So while he resynced my phone to my computer. He notices that I haven't had the auto updates in awhile.

I looked him in the eye and said as blandly as I could. "Couldn't have been me. Remember, I don't have a clue about this stuff." And walked away.

I now have an updated computer and phone. And since he hasn't bought a computer in awhile, he's going shopping to update mine.

Write on!

GAK! No Clue What to Post!

I realized about ten minutes ago that I forgot to post to this blog. I have one blog, how the heck could I forget about it? Thus, the GAK!
Okay, I've been a little busy this week, not writing my new story, but getting LC ready for the ABNA contest. I figured that as long as I was messing with it, I'd snail mail about 8 agents I haven't foisted this story on yet.
Of course, in the final hour, I decided to change the heroine's name. No one liked the acronym Puck, and over time, I got over myself and decided to change it. I changed it to Devin.
Yeah, yeah, it could still be a boy's name, but it is also Gaelic for defender. I liked it.
Now I had to do a 'find and replace' in my manuscript, synopsis and pitch. Find and replace is EVIL, pure and simple. Oh, I've had dealings with F&R and I've lost every single, freaking battle.
Oh, no, it isn't as simple as find Puck, and replace it with Devin, because it would place Devin in the middle of any word that has Puck in it--any word. So you put a space before and after and approve each and every change--oh, and don't forget to do the space thingy with the replacement word, because then you get a bunch of ,Devin . Then you have to leave out the space in front and not behind for the times when the name begins in a sentence, and go through it all again.
This isn't too bad with the synopsis and pitch, but when you have 350 pages, it becomes time consuming. After all this, you must check it once more to see if you missed anything.
So I finally subbed my entry to the ABNA and realized that I'd missed the beginning word change in the manuscript that I had downloaded.
CRAP!
Luckily, the contest allows you to fix things until the deadline. So I fixed and now I'll forget about it because I really, really doubt that I'll make the next round, but it is good practice.
How do you feel about entering contests? Do you worry about them or just forget about it and move on?
Write on!