Saturday, April 13, 2013

Updating Mr Ford, and a shredder......

For about three hours last night it was below freezing.....!  Yikes.. and the heater in the house was running full boar on the gas side of its furnace....  When it shifts to gas, you know its below freezing outside...  You don't even need to wake up much...

But it didn't last long, so perhaps things in the motorhome were relatively safe without heat...  But looking at the forecast again calls for 34 tonight...  That is above that danger point, but not by very much, so if they are at all wrong......

But from there on the forecast night time temps seem to turn a corner...  And I certainly hope so..  Enough with this cold stuff.. We never really had any worse weather in Arizona all winter...  And never had any freezing rain...  But with the warmer conditions, we are scheduled to have some rain almost every day next week....   April showers.....  May flowers.....  Well maybe anyway.

And mid morning I backed that car out of the garage and plugged in the new USB strip under the radio....  With the motor running like the instructions said....  I had to answer several OKs in the process..   The shall we proceed from here questions...  But also the screen goes completely black in reboot periods...  That's scary, as in "will it come back...?"

Since this is Microsoft, they call the application of new program changes a Service Pak.  And after the service pak was done, it rebooted and took about 2 minutes to come back around.........  The instructions warned that this took some time and to be patient...  Me?  Not so much..

Well eventually they asked for the new SD card to be installed for the maps...  and then wrote some info back on the USB strip...  The a message was displayed while they spoke it on the screen to go back to your computer and install the USB strip and transmit the update information back to mother Ford...

And of course this wouldn't work on Chrome running under windows 7..  Something about Java not being correct...  So I loaded IE8...  But no go there either as it didn't like my version of active X..  So  I attempted to change the parameters of active X and enable all of its functions...   After several tries, I must have changed the right stuff, as it went on to the Ford gods....

Of course all of my radio presets are gone, and my phone is no longer paired...   And the Navigation favorites that I had stored were Poof!!   So I sat in the car for another good hour setting all that stuff back up.....   What ever happened to a car that just had an ignition key and a AM radio.?

We knew where we were going, and didn't have to call anyone either...  And we had the clear channel AM stations to listen to...  Didn't channel hop either, except for those clunky push buttons that moved the dial mechanically to its memorized spot....

Oh, and in the afternoon my broker sent me the last 1099 that I knew was missing............   Yep ran the whole deal thru the shredder...  Started over printing stuff out again...  I hate doing taxes!!!  Used to hate it when we were at the accounting firm way back when.... Nothing has changed...  We used to sit and review each other's work...  Writing out exception lists... But we called them "Chew Notes".  As in chew you out for making such an obvious error...  And even then some of the most obvious stuff would be caught by our clients.....   That's embarrassing.....  Of course they knew their own work better than we did...

It should be warmer here tomorrow, and maybe not rain...  Months we spent in Arizona and it never rained...  We've seen more rain in a week here than all last winter.....

Retired Rod

3 comments:

  1. Well Rod you know if you didn't have all those gadgets to update you would just be sitting in your rocking chair getting old. Sounds OK sometimes though eh!

    I used to love all the technology but lately not so much. What ever happened to the old "plug and play" theory.

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  2. It is beautiful here in AZ today, but we know what is right around the corner!

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  3. You certainly show a lot of patience when installing new software or gizmos - a lot of folks would have taken an axe to the Ford's dashboard rather than go through all the instructions you had to.

    Your weather sure sounds a bit nasty, doesn't make for much fun bike riding!

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