Who Was That Guy Anyway?

Yeah, the guy that invented the computer. What kind of a person would do such a thing? I seem to remember that I was perfectly happy (technologically speaking) before we had these things. I remember calling people on a telephone that was wired to the wall so you couldn't misplace it. There were clocks  that told what time it was so if you were late for something it was your own fault. You could write a letter to someone on a piece of paper and for a small number of cents a man in uniform would deliver it for you. You could buy a small notebook made out of paper to write things in so you wouldn't forget. If you ran out of pages, you could buy another one and another and another. My father-in-law did that and he kept them all well marked and organized.

The other day I bought a new computer for my lap, although I hardly use the one I have on my lap. I use it on the top of my desk.  I bought it at Staples like my daughter suggested. She was right. The prices are better and they now have the equivalent of the Geek Squad only their prices are cheaper.  They were very helpful in answering questions. I had them set it up and get rid of the "bloat ware" that seems to come installed on all new computers. They did it in a day. Then came the hard part; getting all my pictures, music, etc. from my Apple iBook to my Toshiba PC. A Google search gets you a number of sites that tell you how to go from a PC to a Mac, but precious few that say anything about going the other way. I found one that was promising and it started out telling me what to do and then half way through switches to how to go from the PC to the Mac. There were even comments from people who couldn't fathom why anyone would want to transfer anything from a Mac to a PC. Hadn't we, the great unwashed, learned anything about computers? Didn't we know that Apple was the second coming and that those who used them had reached Nirvana? Yes, I know all that already, but I got this one for less than half the price of the Apple, so end of story.

So, anyway, I was getting confused about all the steps to take to copy my music from iTunes on my Mac to iTunes on my PC. I decided to burn my music library to a few discs and see what would happen. The end result was that my new computer copied all of my music, but didn't copy the playlists. I reasoned that I should  quit while I was somewhat ahead and to just reconstitute my playlist manually. That's not too big a deal. The next job was to copy the pictures. In our household we have had the practice of downloading pictures from cameras to my iBook and to Anne's PC, so most of the pictures are in both places. Rather than to spend a lot of time figuring out a cross platform transfer, I just copied the pictures from her new laptop to an external hard drive and then plugged it into my machine and voila, there they are in Windows Live Photo Gallery. I'm still manually entering favorites, blogs and such stuff. Not a bad thing, because I now have to look at some of these things I've been carrying and realize that I no longer need or want them, but this process is taking hours and hours. I now have to become familiar with Windows Live and Windows 7 because they seem to offer a number of free applications. What they also do that's not so nice is to populate my Favorites Bar with stuff that they want me to have, but that I don't care about. There may be a way to stop that, but I'm a few years away from figuring it out. I also have to move my Contacts, but it is time to review that list also. Who the heck are all of these people? I know one thing for sure. If the name of the guy who invented the computer is on that list, I'm deleting him.