This has been a very busy week because of yet another marriage.  Two of Aunty’s kids got married in December (one big wedding and one very small).  Wedding #3 was on Wednesday with dinners for family and a beach house party for friends on Saturday.  Whew!  Three kids down, and one daughter left to marry off – the one in this video, catching the bouquet:

A great consequence of all this busy-ness (besides gaining 2 great son-in-laws and a wonderful daughter-in-law) is having son Mikey at home to tackle his assigned to-do list of computer fixing.  He whizzed through updating the company’s google listing search errors, transferred all the files and apps from Aunty’s old Mac laptop to the new one, and migrated emails and folders over (with some glitches that Spectrum and Apple Support helped figure out).  Aunty suspects a conspiracy with internet companies and computer makers that upgrade, morph, and change programs so we are forced to buy a new computer or phone every few years, and it is a pain to keep up, much less understand the new spin on it all.

Do you understand what the iCloud is?

If you do, congrats.  All Aunty understood was that it was storing stuff automatically, but where it was and how to access it was a mystery that didn’t need solving.  Except for pictures.

Nephew David is a photography hobbyist with a good camera and an eye for great shots.  He started sending Aunty bunches of photos with Google pictures.  Lots of them.  Waaaaah!  How to store them when iCloud is full and the desktop is already so crowded and iPhoto had years of old stuff taking up space.  “Mom,”, said techie son, “You need to store all your photos on Google photos because it has unlimited storage, for free.”

Oh, no, ANOTHER cloud thing?

Yep, but it had unlimited space and it was free, so….. Aunty said, “Okay, YOU do it, Mikey.”  And he did, at photos.google.com.   A prerequisite is a gmail account.  He also used an application to “pull” the photos from iPhoto into Aunty’s Google photo account.  This took a long time because each folder needed to be opened up and dragged into the Google photo page to be downloaded.  Once done, it was very nifty to be able to “search your photos” with a subject description (i.e. art or dogs) and create albums from those searches.  Really nifty, and that was just the beginning of Google brilliance.  Sharing becomes really easy because it is connected to your gmail account.  Pictures taken on smart phones also appear instantly on the computer, like magic.

Google also has another free cloud thing for documents called Google Docs – really awesome stuff where you can write, edit, save, etc. – but Aunty was already so full from computer migration and photo library moving, that it was techno overload and will be a lesson for another day.

Like Star Trek

Aunty feels like she has boarded the starship Enterprise, exploring strange, new worlds, to seek out new things and chuck the old.  Except Aunty is old and not ready to be chucked.  So it becomes a matter of learning new tricks, slowly, and one at a time.  It used to be a universal truth that the older you get, the wiser you become.  Maybe we still do get wiser, but those young people are smarter, learn faster and have nimbler thumbs.

Post note:  Aunty has used Uber twice since coming back from California.  Once to pick up her Mazda after servicing and another time to travel from Hawaii Potters Guild to Ala Wai Community Park.  It was VERY convenient.  The hardest thing about it is signing up for it at Uber.com (using this link will give Aunty some Uber credits!)  Google and Uber.  Two made up techie words that are changing our world for the better.