Androids And Apples And Apps And Accounts And Annoying Computers And Stuff

Ok ... so that is a good post title for a letter A post, as we go into Another round of ABC Wednesday ... so ... Ahh ... er ... now what do I actually SAY? lol

I guess I was thinking I should post about that stuff because it has All featured rather a lot in my life lately ;-)

note: As this post has become Awfully long ... feel free to just look at the pictures if you don't want to read All that stuff I have raved on About ;-)

Anyway ...
I am not quite sure where it all started ... maybe way back - when DH bought our first computer, almost 21 years ago? LOL

Actually ... this little quilt, that I made last year, kind of tells the story - in fact that is exactly what it was meant to be About ;-)

... the words sewn onto the background are all the things I started playing with/using, and in the Approximate order I discovered/started using them ...
The couple on the right are the ones not quite in order ... Fractint is a computer program (still around but was less complex, but took way longer to do stuff, back then) that draws fractals ... can't remember when i started messing around with that ... probably not long after we got the computer - whenever DH downoaded and installed it and told me about it ;-)
The digital camera came sometime later ... if I had to put it in between the other stuf it probably would go between geocities and google - I was already using e-mail and yahoo stuff by the time we got our first digital camera (and now my PHONE takes better photos than that camera could!) I probably could have added more stuff like using various photo editing software and stuff ... but I decided that "digital camera" could cover all that stuff too ;-)
For the first few years we had the internet ... which I think we had access to before html/the www - DH used to run a "bulletin board" where people could dial up and download/upload files and e-mail or something like that ... but once web browsers and stuff turned up - I started "surfing the web" every now and then ... not too often - because when I did - I would sit at the comptuer, get "lost in cyberspace" and then it would be 8 hours later! oops?! LOL (some things don't change much ;-)
At about the end of 1997 DH called me over to the computer and showed me how to use the e-mail program to send/read e-mails, and to read newsgroups ... and he "created a monster" LOL  - I found a quilting newsgroup (and a couple of others) and joined in ... then someone on there told me all about Scquilters (the Southern Cross Quilters e-mail list) and I joined that instead ... that later moved to "e-groups" which got taken over by yahoo to become yahoogroups ... sometime after joining scquilters I was looking at someone's quilt website on geocities and got curious and clicked the link to "get your own Geocities page" ... just to see what was involved in case I wanted to later ... a couple hours after I clicked - I was up way too late And I had a website on Geocities! LOL
Sometime over the next few years I also joined a few other e-mail lists ... one or 2 of those have died, all the others either were already on, or moved to, yahoogroups ... and I also used to do quite a lot of "surfing the net" ... and signed up for a pile of different free e-mail addresses and stuff (on sites that have mostly died since then) ... and sometime or another Yahoo, and a few other similar websites started to get not so good (free yahoo mail forwarding kind of ceased to happen, and yahoo bought Geocities and then later on the killed it) and Google got better and became the main search engine ... and I found blogger and started this blog ... a year or 2 before Google bought Blogger - lol
I am still active on a few yahoogroups ... and, after resisting it for a year or 2, I joined Facebook ... and Twitter ... but still didn't use them for a year or so ... but then I realised that a pile of people I know from the Scquilters yahoogroup are now hanging around on Facebook ... so I relented just over a year ago, and let one of them drag me in - lol   Then I found that a couple of them were messing around with Twitter, so I had a bit of a fiddle ... that was in the middle of last year sometime - which is when I made that quilt  ... Twitter is kind of where I got the title for the quilt, but I still didn't think I was likely to use it that much, because it didn't seem to be my thing ... nor did smart phones (which DH took me shopping for a few months ago, and  I kind of wondered why I had one for the first month or 2 ... but then I found out about the CSIROTweetup - LOL ... so I started using Twitter (and Facebook) on my phone, and on the iPad that DH had bought earlier in the year (another thing I wasn't sure I would use much, although I did use it for Gmail and Facebook while we went on a holiday in the middle of last year - I posted photos of all the different food we ate ;-)  funny thing is I think now I use the iPad more than he does - lol)  ... once I worked out how to use the thing, I also started using a heap of other apps on the phone - some that I found out about during the tweetup, and a few I have found since, and then when I went away for Christmas I started using a few things on the iPad (mail and e-books mostly).
I think in the last month or 2 I have probably spent more time on Twitter than on any of the other things! (but I have it set up so my tweets get posted on my facebook - lol)

er ... this has got rather long - and that was kind of only part of what the title of this post refers to!
I was also going to mention how, when I went up to visit Mum and Dad for Christmas/New Year, I spent quite a bit of time fiddling around with all that sort of stuff - because Mum bought an iPad just before I went up there, and she was having a few problems with her computer/e-mail ... and if you have not used Any Apple software or Anything with Apps or signed up to many things where you have online Accounts - it can take a bit to get one's head around it All ... and I am no expert either - I just play with it - LOL  ... but I ended up doing all sorts of odd stuff like using my phone as a wifi hotspot so mum could download iTunes and a big iPad software update (her dodgy internet plan did not have enough data left to use to do that, but my phone plan did ;-) and setting up e-mail stuff on her laptop (a fairly new one, not her first, but a different version of windoze that is a real pain to find how to do stuff in) and then setting up her new internet stuff - she changed from a wireless dongle on a network where she only had a bad signal, to a plan where she gets a lot more data for only a bit more money and has a little modem thingy that connects to 3g and is a wireless hotspot that she can connect either her laptop or her iPad to (which solved the problem of her wondering "should I have got a 3G one instead of just a wifi one?" - she can use her month's worth of data on either the laptop or the iPad rather than needing 2 different plans ;-) Trouble is - that stuff all had to be installed/set up/etc ... so Mum was glad I was there to help figure it all out - LOL
Also, while I was there to help set stuff up, Mum decided that seeing she had such Awful wireless reception from her ISP, she would change over to Another one instead (one that has better 3G coverage in her Area ;-)  ... so I ended up helping her find her way through the maze of Accounts and passwords, And had to explain All About how the Admin password was for the thingy that connects to the net and then sends out the wifi signal that her laptop and ipad need Another password to Access and that those are Additional to the password/login she needs to Access her Account/e-mail/etc on her ISP ... the sort of stuff that can be Absolutely confusing At first, but All makes sense once you get your head around it - probably All stuff that I have learnt About a lot more slowly over the years, while watching DH set all that sort of stuff up while I just used it All ;-)

... and this is where I Added a few ideas (below) for the rest of this post, then left it As it was for a few days (although I did just Add a few more words and stuff to the bit Above)

And maybe some Additional A stuff?

As if this blog post needs to be Any longer?!!!! ... Anything I might have Added, I will be Able to use next time Around the Alphabet - lol

Authors?! (the 2 I met on the Tweetup and how/why I am reading their books? ;-)

er ... yes I did want to mention that About now, but it will Also fit quite neatly in with what I am planning to do for my letter B post, so it will Be in there, if I get Around to Actually writing the B%^&#%& thing ;-)


Anyway ... this post is probably Awfully boring with so few photos ... so here is Another one:

"Aggie's pants" (Agapanthus) ... I took the photo, with my phone, a day or 2 ago, and I just noticed , as I was putting photos into an Album on the computer and choosing which one of  3 Agapanthus photos was going here, there is An Amazing thing About this photo - there is Also An Arachnid on the Agapanthus flowers! (the pink hand is pointing to it ;-) 

I Am sure I have some other Amazing photos I could put in here, but I keep getting lost on Twitter before I get Around to uploading them from the camera's memory card ... and I am not doing that now because DH and I are About to go out, As soon As he gets home from work (unless he has changed his mind since he rang me from work earlier today) - And I want to try and post this before I end up being too late ... Again 
(oops - he is home, hope I have not left Anything out/messed up, because I am About to post this As it is and hope it is at least mostly Alright ;-)