When I was a teenage driver with my very first car, an old beater I think I paid $50 for, I spent more time trying to keep it running than I ever did behind the wheel. (Even back then, $50 didn’t get you much of a car.) And even back then, I could break something much quicker than I could fix it.
Once I decided that my old Chevy needed new spark plug wires, so I bought some and proceeded to pull all of the old plug wires off at once and started plugging new ones in willy-nilly. That done, I tried to start the car and promptly ran the battery down trying. That’s when my dad told me about a gasoline engine’s firing order, and how the right wire had to be plugged in to the right spark plug and into the right hole in the coil. Who knew? (Obviously not me.)
After Dad and my older brother got things sorted out and the car running again, my old man gave me some advice that has worked well for me all of my life. He said, “Some people have mechanical minds and can fix stuff, and some don’t. You don’t. So do yourself a favor and figure out how to either make enough money to pay people to do the things you can’t, or even better, make friends with people who can.”
Fortunately for me, the same fate that made me dangerous with any tool more complicated than a spoon has also sent a lot of very talented, very generous people my way who can do the things I cannot. Bless them all. I’ve got friends who can fix anything from transmissions to computers, and I suspect a couple could probably even set a bone if I broke one. I even married a lady who could, and did, build a bus conversion for me!
Yesterday I got help from two of my techie friends. We have been having a lot of problems with internet connectivity, and Phil May and his lovely wife Tracey, owners of TechnoRV, came by and Phil surveyed our system and made some suggestions on how to place our 3G air card, 4G MiFi device, Wilson signal booster, and inside and outside antennas to get the maximum signal strength. Thanks for all of your help, Phil!
During the afternoon, I tried to upload the new digital issue of the Gypsy Journal to our webserver and ran into a roadblock. After fighting with it for several hours, I decided that there was a problem with my login information, though just what that problem was, I could not figure out.
I finally called my pal Greg White over in Texas and he tried some things and was eventually able to log into the website. But I still couldn’t, using the same FTP address, user name, and password. And I’m still not sure why. Finally I e-mailed the PDF of the digital edition to Greg and he uploaded it with no problem. Greg, I owe you, again!
Up until now I have used a file transfer program called Ipswitch on my Windows desktop or laptop computers. While Phil was here, he had suggested a similar program for my iMac called Forklift. So once Greg had the issue uploaded, I downloaded a fourteen day free trial of Forklift and tried it, and it worked just fine. I think I’ll use that in the future.
By then it was too late in the day to start sending out the link to the new issue to all of our digital subscribers, so I’ll do that today.
Where would I be without all of my talented friends? Thanks guys!
Thought For The Day – There are no limits to what you can accomplish when you are supposed to be doing something else.
