Computer Frustrations (aka Death to the Computer!!!!)

Okay, so I realize that there are some things I have to sacrifice by living in the country. I live on a dirt road. Can't get much more rural than that! We do have electricity. We do have running water. We even have satellite TV (that's another long story though!) However, we do not & cannot get anything faster than a dial-up connection out here. Let me rephrase that, we can't get anything else that we can AFFORD out here. We could do satellite Internet, but it's too pricey & I'd loose it on really rainy nights.

My frustration only really comes to a head on occasion. I know I have to put up with it. I have no choice. However, this last week has been a true test of my patience with this computer & my Internet connection.

My dh's cousin was married in July. On the 28th of October I finally started doing a digital photo book for them. Did I ever mention that procrastination is my middle name?? Well, I digress. :-) I had 73 photos to upload. It took me about two days to do this to one site. I finally finished uploading them & began making the book. Only to realize that the photos I had taken & then scanned (I don't have a digital camera either!) were not automatically resized to fit the box on the page. It appeared I would have to go in & crop each one that didn't fit to a size that would. [sigh]

So site #2 - I started uploading photos there on Monday. It took me two nights & one day to finish loading to that site. Then I realized that they promote a "yearbook" rather than an album. My only option were plain white pages with one photo, two photos, or four photos & the whole book had to have that option. [bigger sigh]

So then I went back to a site I had used two years ago & it worked great called My Publisher. You download their program to your computer, make your book, & then upload it to them. So it took me about 15 minutes to download their program. It took me about a day to figure out how to edit & put the whole thing together the way I wanted. Then I tried uploading it. I tried THREE times to upload it. Nothing! It would work for a bit & then crash the program. [HUGE sigh]

I started thinking that my computer itself might be playing a role in everything since I kept getting a "low virtual memory" warning when I was working on the albums & I couldn't do other things either as it would REALLY slow it all down. My computer is five years old.

So Sunday I sat at the kitchen table & loaded all the photos on to my dh's laptop with a flash drive he has. Then I hooked in to our main phone line (yes, that is why our phone was busy all Sunday AM!!!) & again downloaded the My Publisher Bookmaker program (still took about 15 minutes) & redid the entire album from scratch. I then held my breath & clicked on "upload." My backup plan was to have my dh upload it while he was at work for me (they have DSL) but after an hour it finally finished & I received my first confirmation e-mail!!!! Yeah!!!

I keep hoping that DSL will make it out here some day - maybe when they put pavement on our road - maybe.