Flash and Drives

The word "Flash" is something of a misnomer when connected with "drive."  
     Last fall I got a cute little blue and silver flash drive in my goodie bag at a writers' retreat. I’d been saving mine for a worthy project, and last night I found one. After I copied stuff onto it from my desktop, my Macbook Air wouldn’t even acknowledge its existence. Furthermore when I removed it from the USB port, my whole Documents file was empty!!! I restored old files up through this March with an old red plastic flash drive and wasn’t quite as unhappy. 

     On that note, I went to bed. 

     This morning I determined to nail the sucker! “Something” probably happened when I tried to “restore” backups from my desktop’s Time Machine’s Seagate drive onto the Air last Sunday--as a way of moving files. There is a neat and elegant way to do it that I couldn’t remember and ended up throwing up my hands. After futzing for 3/4 hr. I determined that the “new” blue and silver drive was a dud. Neither computer would admit to its existence. I tried using Disk Utility/Verify Disk—nada. The old cheapo red flash drive works like a charm. Thinking I may have accidently deleted all my Air's Documents, I looked in the Trash. Nada. I restored a few more files with the old Flash drive and played around with the Air. 

     It blinked—and all my lost files appeared in place! 

     Thank you, Deus ex Machina also known as God of the Machine. 

New Book Cover: Redux

Yesterday I drank my coffee, dusted off my hands, booted up my computer, and went to tackle the cover upload again. Open Firefox (check). Log into Create Space (check). Find Dashboard/Replace Cover (check). Browse (check). Choose file ...
How come all the Print cover art files are greyed out? I just uploaded one yesterday. I squint at the file menu and see that the other Print covers are .PDF and this new one is .JPG.
Merde!
Back to Square 0 and contact the artist.
The gods do not want me to use this new cover!
Or maybe it's Mercury Retrograde or something.

Of Mice and Mice

My new, latest bells and whistles, computer came with a wireless mouse. Thinking I really should get into the 21st Century, I sent off my precious wired mouse with the old computer.

     $%^#! wireless drives me nuts! I go to highlight-cut-paste and the page jiggles and slithers from under the cursor. I try to read on-line articles, and it zips up and down opening pages. I click on a date in Calendar—and set the appointment in the next month.

     Called AppleCare (bless ‘em!). When the tech's eye is on the screen, the mouse behaves, (of course). When he looks away, pages start slithering. My wireless mouse has a bunch of “features” I don't want checked in Systems Preferences. I uncheck them and set the mouse to S-L-O-W. 

     Problems persist.

     AppleCare again. Turns out you can't turn the Scroll “feature” off in the wireless mouse. Since I want to use it like a wired mouse, I should get a wired mouse.

“You still have wired mice?” I squeaked.
   "Yes, you can swap yours for one at an Apple store."
    "Thank God." I almost wept. 

   Next morning a friend picked up the wireless mouse to exchange.
   When I went into my bathroom, the drain stank of a dead mouse. Seemed symbolic somehow.