Well, yes. In my life, anyway! I once loved gadgetry. Now I suffer from gadetnoia, and I’ve got it bad!
So, for the past few weeks, well, months now, actually, I’ve been cleaning house—digital house and real house.
Light Switches
Yes, you read that right. Even the light switches in this house are driving me insane.
Why can’t I just flip a switch and the light come on?! What ever happened to the good old days?!!
No, now, when I flip one of three switches by the front door to turn on the front door light, nothing happens! Is it because it’s not dark enough outside (since the light fixture has a sensor on it). Is it because the sensor is bad? Is it because I am using the wrong light switch? (The light has never once been on!) Is it because the switch is really a timer (and it’s not in the programmed time for the light to be on with the sensor that may or may not be working) and not a traditional light switch?
And there is the motion detection light at the bottom of the steps to the front door, you know, the motion detection light that doesn’t come on until you have fallen to your death at the bottom of the stone steps. Does it not work properly because I’m using the wrong light switch, because the motion detector is bad or misaligned no matter where I position it? Or does it just hate me?
And then we have the new low voltage lighting for the path to the front door. It looked marvelous for 2 weeks. Then, one by one, the lights stopped working. Now, the light farthest away blinks all night long even though the lights were going off at midnight.
Last night the front door light that has never worked began this odd pulsing glow as if it were communicating with an alien spacecraft. Between the pulsing glow of the dead door light and the blinking of the low voltage light the hood thought we were a disco!
As my friend “Pez” always said, “Good God Almighty!!”
They even have lighting systems that change the color of the lights in your house in real time to match the color of the album art for the music you are currently listening to in iTunes! AWWWWWWWWK!!!!
So today I told the electrician to get rid of all of this @$!* and put in new light switches and fixtures that I can turn on and have light then and there. Period! 100% reliability! To hell with timers and motion detectors and pulsing blinking sensors that are in sync with the new lighting art exhibition on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. I want good old fashioned reliability, and I want it now!!
The only good thing that is electric at the house is the electric bill. Since we now have solar power, our electric bill has dropped from in the $300 a month range to just $5 a month. Yes, f-i-v-e dollars per month!
I cleaned out my email. I archived everything that I had received prior to December, 2012. Why that date? I don’t know. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.
Since the great purge, I’ve only needed to get to old messages 3 times. Oh well. It was time to be set free of the 8 gigabytes of email and email attachments that were being backed up in the cloud, emails all the way back 10 years. And do you know how many places a Mac stores email attachments?! Just insane!
iOS Annoyances
My iDevices are still a work in progress and are actually what brought about the great digital purge to begin with. I was getting 6 calendar alerts and reminders every day about the tides (high and low) and sunrise/sunset in the bay area. (We photographers are strange that way.) Nothing I could do would stop them. I was losing my mind. Every few hours an alarm would sound on the phone and 2 iPads along with a pop up messages. Good grief already!!
Even Apple couldn’t figure this one out. But, it may have taken two months, but that problem is finally solved.
Next, later this week, I’m going to thin out the number of apps on my iOS devices. If I don’t use the app with some degree of regularity, it’s history!
Facebook is sending me over the edge with their constant ads. They have annoyed me one time too many.
I have been getting daily “invitations” to play some stupid game (I am not at all into digital games! At all!!) supposedly from a girl I went to high school with. (Right! I believe that! I haven’t talked to her on/off line in 35+ years!)
I’ve been getting Facebook birthday reminders about friends of the family that are now deceased. Today 3 birthday reminders pop up on my phone about friends of friends? People I don’t even know?! What?!!
So I went into the (now never ending and obscure) settings of the Facebook app and discovered that about 20 apps on my phone have been in constant contact with my Facebook account for goodness knows how long and doing god only knows what. I deleted all but two of them. I completely shut off all reminders of every kind from Facebook, shutting it down as much as possible. If it pisses me off again, I’m deleting the app.
Basically, I want Facebook out of my life. I hate it. Always have. I find myself looking at it less and less. I just want to use it to keep up with friends. Nothing else!
I will basically use Facebook to share blog posts. My blog has been and will always be the primary way I share my life with the world.
Conclusion
I feel better already! I guess I’ve just become an old fuddy-duddy. (No spell check! I wanted fuddy not fuddle! Damn these digital demons designed to make my life easier!)
Apparently the gadgets have affected the hair as well. LOL