Sunday, July 6, 2014

Blowing raspberries

A few things are better on the new computer, a few others aren't.

I contacted my internet provider (who also does my email) and got the details on how to connect. It downloaded mail once, hasn't worked since. Supplying a working email account did not reveal my old email messages. I imported them again. I saw fancy graphics counting through the messages as they imported but no messages appeared when that completed. There doesn't seem to be any way to import my previous address book.

I wrote a message to a friend in a simple text editor and clicked on send. I came back later and found it hadn't been sent. So I went to my email account on the web. I copied the text from the old and was astonished the web create mail page did not have a paste. The idea that someone might want to compose a message in some other program apparently never crossed their minds.

Windows Live Mail, the new program, also has a calendar. I looked for an import command. Didn't find one. I went to the program's online forum. Short answer: importing to the desktop calendar isn't possible, though importing it to the cloud is. I'm not interested.

I wish I had known while still on the old computer. But the new program didn't run under XP and the old one doesn't run on Windows 7. Not that my internet provider gives me much choice in the matter.

Though I don't have a calendar program I did dump my entire calendar into a CSV file. There are over 3000 entries in the file going back to 2007. To make sure I didn't miss anything this week I opened the calendar data into a spreadsheet program. I saw that the appointments were ordered by when they were created. Later ones are near the bottom, but it wasn't easy to scroll up the list to this coming week. So I sorted by appointment date – and it sorted by month. All September appointments, regardless of the year were at the bottom of the list. Then it wouldn't let me reformat the date to put the year first.

I'm blowing raspberries at the lot of them.

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