TUAK: The Rambling

It’s September 10. Three days ago I spent the afternoon naked due to an unseasonable heat wave. This morning it’s 37o and I’m wrapped in layers and typing through gloves.

I took a picture of the cool digital indoor/outdoor thermometer my brother sent me a few years ago – but then decided naw, they don’t need that. I figured a way to get photos from the tablet to the laptop but you have to really want to do it. The procedure includes but is not necessarily limited to:

1) Take the picture (easy part)
2) Learn or recall the arcane procedure for copying the file to the SD card
3) Remember to actually do that before removing the card from the tablet, which consists of:
a) Turn tablet off
b) Open cardholder cover
c) Pry cardholder out of tablet
d) Desperately search for the SD and SIM cards which took a bad hop under the kitchen counter, because they’re thoughtfully placed on the bottom of the cardholder
e) Insert SD card into adapter
f) Insert adapter into Laptop
g) Open Finder and attempt to find picture files
h) Swear luridly as you discover that you forgot Steps 2 and 3
i) Typist is bored now

While I was going through all that yesterday morning a little ditty started going through my mind. It went something like this…

I want my iPhone back
Gotta have my iPhone back
I miss it oh so much
Can’t live without its touch…

…to the tune of this parody song from 1965, which I haven’t actually heard since sometime in the early ’70’s.

And that got me to thinking about that parody song, which I probably haven’t actually thought of since sometime in the early ’70’s, which caused me to look it up on Youtube because of course it’s there, all old songs are, and I listened to it and decided that it was probably a lot funnier when I was a teenager. Possibly because harmlessly transgressive things tend to be funnier to teenagers but also because the things parodied in the song are ancient even to me. I’m old enough to have heard dead teenager songs on the radio but a little too young to have appreciated them, which is to say I was too young to drive when the fad was current. Say “dead teenager song” to an actual teenager today and you’ll probably get reactions ranging from blank to mildly alarmed.

Type that phrase into a search engine if you have a lot of time on your hands.

Anyway, that excursion into ancient history got me to thinking about cultural references in general, which are often a sore point to me because I made a life of missing (and of course now more than ever miss) pop culture stuff as it went by. I was never socially plugged in at any point in my life, and it shows whenever I watch Deadpool or some other movie that leans heavily on phrases or references to things everybody knows about. What the hell is ‘dubstep,’ anyway?

This oddly sudden cold snap has me thinking of getting my generator out of mothballs a month early for wood cutting, because the woodshed is way more than half empty and we’re overdue for a cold winter. But that’s yet another topic and I’ll stop now. My fingers are tingling.

About Joel

You shouldn't ask these questions of a paranoid recluse, you know.
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6 Responses to TUAK: The Rambling

  1. Fitz says:

    If your tablet has a micro USB slot you should be able to plug it directly into the laptop and transfer files more easily.
    Apologies if you realize that, but there’s a good reason it won’t work, and I’m trying to teach my grandpa how to steal chickens.

  2. sevesteen says:

    I often find that the easiest way to get a file from one device to the other is to email it to myself. Seems silly to send it off to a server hundreds of miles away to get it to move a couple of inches…but it generally works even between brands.

  3. Mark Matis says:

    The limiting factor, sevesteen, is the mailbox size limits at EACH end. If you send it to the same e-mail account from which you are sending, BOTH copies count against that limit.

  4. sevesteen says:

    I’m used to Gmail, which is if not unlimited, grows in limit faster than I fill it up. (every few years I sort by size and delete a few of the biggest things…but I’m still under half my quota after more than 10 years) A bigger issue in Joel’s circumstances (that I should have thought of) is that the best connection he can get isn’t as good as my worst. There’s almost certainly a more elegant solution than moving cards around, it may not be worth pursuing to solve a temporary problem.

  5. makerofgames says:

    Dropbox is a great utility for transferring files between devices. I move photos between my phone and computer all the time that way.

  6. Chris says:

    FTP? Works over your local network, So no need for an internet connection at all, Nothing cares how big the files are and the sd card can stay parked in it’s slot permanently.

    It’ll probably be a pain to get familiar with and working but once it does moving a few gigabytes is nothing at all.

To the stake with the heretic!