I’ve got this “thing” where I don’t like fake stuff.  I prefer diamonds over cubic zirconia (ha!), wrinkles over Botox (I don’t have to look at myself), and butter over margarine.
 
But lately I’m finding more and more exceptions to my rule. Ultra-suede is one of the best inventions ever (especially on dining room chairs), "elastomultister" is now my friend (at least when combined with denim), and I recently learned that the back of my car is nothing more than plastic (in terms of the part that is painted).
 
Our bathroom needs to be updated. Badly. The carpet has become impossible to clean, let alone keep clean. So we’re shopping for tile. If you’ve tackled a home improvement project in the last few years, you’re probably familiar with the Houzz web site. It really is a dream come true for someone like me who is looking for inspiration and needs to see an example of something to avoid a big purchase mistake. You can find pictures of just about everything on the site, and then you can easily organize and store them for future reference. Recently I’ve become very intrigued by the “look” of a wood floor in the bathroom. Apparently this look can be achieved and maintained for a really long time by installing these new wood “look” tiles. Have you seen them? Digital printing enables the creation of tile that is nearly indistinguishable from all kinds of other (real) materials in terms of how it looks.
 
This week’s Tech Frustration is that technology is creating a conflict between what I think I should want and what I'm starting to want. The options (including tile that looks like bricks) are practically endless … and very intriguing.


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That’s what a very nice woman asked me earlier this week when I called a reputable financial services company to discuss my pension. And I have to tell you, it caught me off-guard.  Especially since she knew the pension was earned while working for a computer company. The great news is that she gave very clear and specific instructions. Even after I told her, “Yes, I know how to use a computer” she continued to speak to me as if she wasn’t convinced. It’s nice when the biggest Tech Frustration of the week also makes you laugh. A lot. My husband is now asking me, multiple times per day, “Do you know how to use a computer?” He thinks this is super funny. And he thinks he’s super funny when he says it.
 
Not only do I know how to use a computer, but I’m listening to more audio books. Nothing beats them when you need to clean the house or do other mindless tasks. It turns out that my local library offers ebooks and audio books via Hoopla and Overdrive, so I’m registered for both now. But I have to tell you, I have a strong preference for the Hoopla experience. It is just so easy! Overdrive offerings appear to vary by library, so the key to success with this app seems to be collecting library cards. So far I have one.  It’s really frustrating to be able to see the book you want only to be told it isn’t available via your library, but the people in the city right down the road can borrow to it. I just started To Kill a Mockingbird. After about five chapters I had to get online to figure out why this book is so important. Apparently it will become more evident as I read/listen on, and at least now I know how to listen more carefully. Sometimes I wonder if high school literature classes are wasted on the young. Or maybe mine was just wasted on me.
 
For now, all is well; I have a stock of free ebooks and audio books, the house is pretty clean, and I know how to use a computer. In fact, I'll bet I was using computers before the nice woman was born. But I think it's time to let that exchange go.

​So ... I wish you a Merry Christmas and will keep an eye out for any new Tech Frustrations reported via this site on Christmas morning and beyond. 
 
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A collection of holiday Tech Frustrations
 
Tech Frustrations at the holidays are generally kept to a minimum around our house with three notable exceptions; 1. Christmas tree lights, 2. Addressing Christmas card envelopes, and 3. Timers. 
 
Lights on the Tree
In an attempt to “save time next year” we had been leaving the lights on our artificial Christmas tree each year when we put it away. That was a bad idea. Most years, as we attempted to re-light the tree, the lights didn’t work on one strand.  And most often it was the strand in the middle, of course.  This time saving technique turned out to be more (as in way, way more) trouble than it was worth. Last year we took the lights off the tree before we put it away, and this year all strands, which were stored separately, magically worked when we plugged them in. Go figure. And, problem solved.
 
Addressing Envelopes
Years ago, and I’m sure this was more than 20 years ago, a person very close to me commented that Christmas cards that were not addressed by hand might be considered somewhat offensive. Goodness knows that the last thing I wanted was for someone to find my Christmas card offensive in any way. Yet, I was harried. Very harried. Christmas has always been the one time of year when I’ve claimed that being a good working parent just isn’t possible ... at least for me. Especially when one is concerned about offending people. Long ago I ran a failed personal campaign to update expectations and traditions which went over like a lead balloon. But I digress. So, way back when, I cleverly found (or more likely, my husband cleverly found me), a way to order a computer font with my own handwriting! I was so desperate for help during the holidays that I still remember what I paid for it: $100.00 (USD)! While that may sound like a lot, especially 20+ years ago, I will tell you that it has been worth every penny. (This was so long ago that the font was provided on a floppy disk. Click here, kids, if you don’t even know what I’m talking about.)  To this day the font enables me to fake people out in the spirit of Christmas. Or maybe it just enables me to think that I’m faking them out which clears my conscience. Either way, and unfortunately, the font didn’t completely eliminate all frustrations associated with addressing envelopes. Since I paid $100.00 for the font, I feel compelled to use it every year. Even now when I’m guessing that people are so surprised to receive a paper Christmas card that they wouldn’t remember to feel offended by the way it is addressed. This year, I think I managed to address my envelopes using the computer and printer in only five hours. That’s probably about two hours longer than it would have taken me to address them by hand :) BUT … one reason it took so long is because I documented the process in excruciating detail AND the other reason is that I figured it out all by myself (i.e. without help from any other tech expert except “the Google”).  Use the Contact link on this site if you want a copy of the instructions I created for myself.
 
Interestingly, I just used the Google to see that there appear to be free and cheaper ways to get your own font these days. Let me know if you’ve tried any of them.
 
Timers
Finally, because I am chief decorator, energy conscious, and delighted by efficiency, I like to put some of the holiday lights around the house on timers. My frustration with timers has to do with their size and odd design. Do they need to be big or are ours just old? Maybe my husband, who bought them, likes them big. For all I know, he paid extra for the big ones. I have a cool lit tree from Restoration Hardware that has a built-in timer. The timer is built into the on/off switch which consists of two buttons. I have no idea how this thing works, so just randomly start pushing buttons in early December until I notice that it’s going on and off at reasonable times. What’s that about?
 
Christmas Morning
Christmas morning can bring its own Tech Frustrations, depending on the year, but somehow the cookies, fire, and tech savvy recipients seem to make them feel more like fun challenges. As you play with your tech gifts this year, please be sure to report all of your Tech Frustrations via this web site. We’ll be eager to hear about your experiences.
 
Until then, I’ll be writing Christmas notes and hoping to receive some too.

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My son sometimes stutters. My daughter is a speech therapist and says that we all do. My kids have helped me understand that not everyone converts thoughts into words at the same rate or with the same level of effort.

US President-elect Donald J. Trump appears to face two significant communication challenges of his own; 1) People don’t always understand what he’s saying, and 2) People sometimes understand exactly what he’s saying.  This got me thinking ...
 
Lately I’ve been using online translators and convertors. They help me avoid Tech Frustrations to quickly and easily translate things like Roman Numerals to Arabic numbers, Euros to Dollars, and French to English.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could more easily understand the sometimes choppy and confusing comments made by the President-elect by using a Trump Translator?  

​One of my weaknesses is that I sometimes lose the substance of a person's comments because I get distracted by the style of their communication. When something is really important, I sometimes translate it for myself to be sure that I truly understand what has been communicated. Toward this end, I am introducing the prototype of a new Trump Translator.  Below, you can access translated sections of Trump's recent interview with The New York Times or read the complete translated interview (and/or the complete transcript).  

Let me know what you think via the comments section below (and let me know if you think I need to make any corrections to the translations).

Disclaimer:  These translations are not likely to persuade you like or dislike Trump.  Instead they're provided to help you more easily understand what he tries to communicate. 

Trump Interview with The New York Times - Nov 29, 2016 

Complete Translation
​Section 1: Introductions
Section 2: The Media and the Trump Administration
Section 3: Trump Administration, Campaign, and Election Results
Section 4: Election Results and Electoral College
Section 5: Electoral College, Polling, African-Americans, and Women
Section 6: Energizing the alt-right and Entering Politics
Section 7: Prosecuting Hillary Clinton and Looking to the Future
Section 8: Prosecuting Hillary, Health Care, Immigration, and the Tone of the Election
Section 9: Climate Change
Section 10: Climate Change and the Environment
Section 11: Climate Change and Competitiveness
Section 12: Investigating Hillary Clinton
Section 13: Paris Climate Agreement
Section 14: Wind Farms and Potential Business Conflicts of Interest
Section 15: Prioritizing the Presidency, Business Conflicts of Interest, and Wind Farms
Section 16: Steve Bannon and Brietbart
Section 17: Future of the Republican Party, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Chuck Schumer
Section 18: Working with Congress, Serving Voters, and Retaining Jobs
Section 19: Job Loss to Automation, Bill Gates, and Encouraging Business via Tax and Regulation Cuts
Section 20: Condemning Nazism
Section 21: Infrastructure Jobs and Health Care
Section 22: Infrastructure, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Trump Reads the NYT
Section 23: Winning the Election and Senators Who Didn't Support Him
Section 24: Being Comfortable and Successful as The President
Section 25: Meeting Obama and Understanding The Challenges
Section 26: Foreign Policy: Iraq, NATO, Russia, Syria
Section 27: Pence, Jared Kushner, Israel, Palestine, Making Peace, General Mattis and Water Boarding
Section 28: First Amendment
Section 29: Wrap-up

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Last night I enjoyed dinner out with a friend who is also my next door neighbor. We have a lot in common. In addition to living side by side, we worked together for over 20 years, we have sons who are the same age and went to the same schools until college, and we socialize together, just the two of us and with larger groups too. We had no trouble filling the long leisurely dinner with a wide variety of conversation topics. As I reflect upon the conversation today, I realize that it highlighted a couple of Tech Frustrations. (For those who live near us, we had dinner at a new restaurant called Locality. The quantity of food was small, but worth the price because it was so tasty. My wine was very good too. After the main course, I wasn’t even close to filled, so we pretended that we were in Italy and had a salad to close out the meal. I highly recommend this place!)
 
But back to our conversation that highlighted a couple of Tech Frustrations. The first, and maybe the “funniest” frustration (based on your perspective) is that we seem to be playing a running game of “telephone” thanks to our sons who are also friends. The “boys” live over a thousand miles apart now that they’re away at school and more than that some of the time since each has studied abroad.  In spite of the great distance between them, they’ve been able to easily and casually communicate thanks to technology. And no matter where they’ve been in the world, they’ve been able to watch the Denver Broncos play football live while “discussing” the game with each other real-time. That’s pretty cool and fun thanks to technology, and not a frustration at all.  As their mothers, we get snippets of info from them which we sometimes share with each other … and then report back to them. That’s when it can feel like a game of telephone. I’ve been chastised more than once for misunderstanding info as it goes one way or another. I think the boys probably consider these info exchanges a real frustration … probably amplified by technology.
 
But the thing that has me really thinking about our conversation last night, is how technology is shaping each of our views of current events. To be fair, now that I’m not going to work every day, I’m interacting with far fewer people than I have in the past, and my interaction with people from outside the US is mostly (but not totally) limited to Facebook friends now. I’m relishing the quiet of home, and plan to enjoy more solitude for quite a while. And this does mean that I’m not “out there” talking with people as much.  Still, I’m on Facebook chatting away most days, I watch TV sometimes, I read some news via the Internet, and I often go out to meet friends and enjoy life, so I’m not a hermit.
 
Last night, as we spent a long time discussing the recent presidential election in the US, I was surprised to learn that my friend was not so surprised by the outcome. I, on the other hand, was totally surprised. I also mentioned the "big deal" situation at Standing Rock and learned that wasn't getting as much "play" via her networks.  I was blown away by the differences in our perspectives about these two current events. We spent a fair amount of time talking about these differences and concluded that they stemmed from differences in our “virtual” worlds. Facebook really. We agreed that it wouldn’t have been possible to predict the outcome of the election if we had limited our interactions to people who live around us here in Colorado. Neither of us heard about any significant support for Trump before the election from local friends and acquaintances. We live in a dark blue county of a light blue state. We concluded that the reason that she saw it coming and I didn’t is because her virtual network is more diverse than mine, so she was exposed to way more people than I was who openly supported Trump. I saw very small pockets of support for Trump via Facebook, but nothing significant.  She was exposed to more. So while we live right next door to each other, and share so many day-to-day experiences, friends and acquaintances, our virtual worlds, which provided anecdotal info, are vastly different. And that caused us to have vastly different expectations going into the election. 
 
And then there is the situation at Standing Rock. When I casually mentioned it, it didn't immediately register with her. People in my virtual world are keeping this story front and center, while it’s not as big of a conversation topic in her virtual world. Here we are, two women who live right next door to each other, who probably agree on many issues, use many of the same tools for communicating and staying plugged in, and yet we have some very different perspectives about what is going on in our country. I’ve concluded that my virtual world has given me a false sense of feeling informed.  And that is a Tech Frustration. My friend suggests that maybe we need an app to measure the diversity of our virtual networks. Now there's a great idea!


Let me know you think via the comments section below.

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