printing photos half way across the USA

I finally had a great experience with printing a photo. While in Virginia last week I took a photo of my wife next the Smithfield Planation on the Virginia Tech campus. She send the photo to her mom by text, which prompted her mom to have a printed copy of it. While my wife had no problem texting photos, since that is a daily task for her, but printing off a photo from her iPhone was out of her comfort zone. I was called in to help find a solution.

I texted the photo from her phone to mine. I launched a web browser and immediately thought of Walgreens since it was right down the street from our house. I saw in the Google search results a match of "Walgreens Photo" and tapping on that brought up a sub-menu with "Prints and Enlargements" as an option. I did not have an account so I quickly created one and then saw a welcome site of an "Upload" button. I uploaded the photo of my wife from my photo library, selected the correct size. Then I saw this lovely button asking me to where I wanted to print the photo. Then it dawned on me that I could have it printed at the Walgreens next to my mother-in-laws house. For $2.99 I had the high glossy print in her hands without paying for shipping. Finally a use for a drugstore on every corner in America!

how painful can Windows updates be ?

Life can be apparently very painful indeed when deal with Windows issues.

Months have gone by since I had to deal with the Windows 8 laptop. I basically let it just sit there, knowing all along that the automatic updates are going crazy every Friday. So last week as work I decided to check on it. Somehow a nasty issue related to VirtualBox being installed by a nameless person at work made the wireless stop working and thus no automatic updates. Unfortunately VirtualBox was installed in the middle of April so that means 2 months of updates have been piling up. That can mean nothing but trouble and hours of wasted time.

First of all it took me over an hour to figure out why the Wifi and Ethernet did not work. All I saw was this weird icon in the system tray that indicated a warning related to Wifi. I tried to plug in the Ethernet cable and still not internet. Since there are many ways to do the same thing I tried checking the internet connection in both Windows Desktop and Metro but all I got was a message that the internet was restricted and limited. What in the heck does that supposed to mean? I had no internet instead of limited web access. I kept searching until I found a message in the Metro internet checker that I used in Ms. Google "windows 8 unidentified network" which found one useful match that I followed thru every suggestion to no avail. My favorite was "download the drivers from Realtek", which was a bit difficult if I could not get in the internet. Thankfully I have a real Apple laptop that I can use for searching or else what hope would there be with this single non-working Windows 8 laptop?

After exhausting all possible solutions, I took a lunch break to walk around the lunch room, vent a bit to those around and then went back with a fresh set of things to try. Finally I found more details on the unidentified network in the Metro advanced network tab that mentioned VirtualBox, that I hoped would be my key to internet freedom at last. I did a new search using the text from that message of "windows 8 .1 virtual box host-only ethernet adapter" and found my real solution at last. The really odd thing is what would anyone put VirtualBox on the Windows 8.1 laptop unless to test other versions of Internet Explorer? I did not care to learn the reason and quickly uninstalled VirtualBox and the second it was removed I had internet!

Sadly that was last week and I am still trying to get the Windows 8 laptop up to date as it requires many reboots and of course then I have to deal with the weekly Friday updates just when I think I am done. It is a never ending drudgery of working with Windows. Now it all makes sense why large corporations don't deal with this problem like I do. They have a dedicated team who vent patches and verify they work and then push them out to all of the corporate Windows machine nightly or weekly. I am glad I don't use Windows and don't have to work at a large corporation!