My Goldielocks TV

Me with my Goldielocks TV

Well, we finally got my new 60 inch wide screen Sharp Acquos TV (a 70th birthday present from my Prince Charming) up and running in my bedroom.  As I feared, it took me and Bill just about all morning to get the TV out of its box (a BIG TV in a BIG BOX), assemble the stand, struggle with it to get it into my bedroom and then to hook it up.  Of course we had to unhook my now neglected 40 inch Samsun wide screen TV.  The poor thing has outlived its usefulness.  I purchased it in 2007.  Bill will inherit it in his tiny bedroom downstairs.

We really did try to set it up all by ourselves but when the setup instructions came to "Air" or "Cable", I didn't know which to choose.  We have DirecTV satellite TV.  I tried both setups, neither one worked.

Frustrated and tried (and stressed, we are two OLD MEN after all whose brains are already overloaded with reams of no longer useful information), I called the Sharp help line.  Of course first I had to figure out the number to call.  Sharp provided me with one of those two cute by half numbers:  1-87-SEE-AQUOS.

I HATE translating these numbers.  I made the phone call.

Thank goodness I got a person right away.  Her name was "Julie" and English was her native language (thank you Jesus).  Only problem was that she spoke too fast.

Julie walked me through the setup, which I would never have in a hundred years figured out myself, and I was up and running!  Only thing was that I couldn't set up my Internet Wi-Fi connection so I can downstream my Netflix movies.  My bedroom is too far away from my wireless router which is in my home office (formerly the smallest bedroom in this house and where I am now typing this missive).

I'll check with my boss today at the hotel and find out what kind of wireless booster they use at the hotel and I'll get the same to use here at home.  I also have to buy a new DVD player that plays Blue-Ray DVD's.  Hey, it's my birthday and I'm going all the way.  At 70 years old I don't hold back anymore.  Not a whole lot of Quality of Life time left.  Make hay while the sun shines Nellie.  That's what I say these days.

So let me say this, the picture on my new TV is FABULOUS!  I LOVE IT!  WOW!

Now I can watch Maks and Len really get into it on "DWTS".  Did you see that last night?  Talk about a reality show.  Hey, I like Maks but I can't agree with him that it is "his show" and he "made it what it is today."  Really Maks?  Give me a break.  Everybody who participates on "DWTS" makes it a great show, including even the bad celebrity dancers.  I love this show, it's the whole human drama.  But I digress, this is a subject for different blog posting.

So here I am with my new 60 inch TV in my bedroom.  I thought it would be too big but it isn't.  I now have a Goldielocks TV.  It's not too big, not too small.  It's just right!

Not Quite There Yet

That's right folks, I'm not quite there yet.  I'm still a bit off the tracks.  In fact, I feel like I've been tied to the tracks for the past few weeks because my schedule has been totally disrupted.  Don't get me wrong though, it was all for the good but this upheaval has thrown my normally, placid and controlled life out of whack. I feel like the train is coming down the tracks and I'm tied to it with the sound of the on rushing train about to overtake me.


Take for instance this morning.  I had all good intentions of writing one of my 'Trip Down Memory Lane' blogs to include some of my vintage photos from the 70's gay era.  All 'good intentions', those are the operative words.  Well, you know the saying about 'all good intentions.'  So true this morning.


So here is what I did.  I thought before I totally committed myself to delving deep into my iPhoto library looking for those vintage 70's photos and cleansing my mind of current events to GO BACK TO THE GOOD TIMES of the 70's, I would take care of my new Verizon Wireless account.  HA!


Two hours later and here I am.  Yes ladies and germs, I was on the phone with Verizon for almost two hours getting my new wireless account set up on my computer so I can view my account on line and make payments on line.  I had assumed that all I had to do was sign on to Verizon and view my account.  Oh no. It doesn't work that way.  I had to setup a whole new account.  Yes, yet ANOTHER Verizon user name and password.  So, here I am two hours later, clock is a ticking, I haven't taken my daily walk yet, and I have to go to work again today.  These days I've been working three days (in a row) a week which is really knocking me off of my game.  


So that's where I am now friends, getting myself together again.  I don't know, is it me or is life a lot more complicated these days?  


See you tomorrow,  hopefully I won't be wound up so tight.  I am so ready to go back to the good old boring Ron coasting through the day, taking occasional trips down Memory Lane and being my usual happy self.  

Guess Who Likes His New iPhone?

The Master listening to music on his new iPhone

Guess who likes his new iPhone?  Bill!  Yes, that's right.  My 82 year old, stubborn, know-it-all, stuck in the past Life Partner for the past 46 years!  I am amazed.  AMAZED!


Bill was very reluctant even to use  a computer up until about five years ago.  He called them "A waste of time!"  Bill is of that generation that is reluctant to expose themselves to learning something new that might show them as less than perfect.  Bill is not alone in this kind of Neanderthal think.  Such celebrities as Larry Kane, Judge Judy and, yes, even Regis Philbin proclaim far and wide that they "don't need the web and all that stuff."  What they're really saying is "I'm a expert in my field and I don't want to risk looking like a dummy learning something new."  

Bill and me 1964 - were we ever that young?

In Bill's former life he was an electronics technician.  He has worked everywhere from the NBC studios in New York City to the General Electric space program.  He's met Barbara Walter, Edwin Newman, and, make sure you're sitting down for this one............Tom Snyder!


When he worked in Washington D.C. he met the likes of Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia (Bill was coming out of the Men's Room and Senator Byrd was going in, rather gruffly according to Bill, he must have had one "pushing").  


Bill was in the Army and Air Force for a total of eleven years.  He was stationed all over the world, his favorite place being Japan.  Bill traveled a lot with his job.

Twenty -seven years ago, when General Electric was going to send him on another assignment (this one to Las Vegas, Nevada) I suggested to Bill that he take the early retirement and stopped the life of travel.  We had just built a new home in the middle of the woods in Chester County, Pennsylvania and I was making mucho dinero at Girard Bank in Philadelphia and I could afford to have a 55 year old houseboy.  Bill took my suggestion and retired early.  And, as fate would have it I lost my job at the bank two years later but that saga is a subject for future blog postings.  

Bill laying cinder block at our PA home 1982 - something I would never do because it would break my fingernails

In the twenty-seven years since Bill hung up his transmitter, a lot has changed in technology.  Of course he hasn't been able to keep up with it.  He's been too busy mowing the grass and performing handyman duties around Casa Tipton-Kelly.  Yes, he's the butch one who does all that mechanically declined inclined stuff.  I take care of the household finances, cooking and am the chief spender (and very good at it I might add) in this partnership.  

Bill fixing our 30 year old tractor this past summer - we got a new one - something I would never do because I would break my fingernails

When Bill finally accepted the inevitability of computers was when he inherited my Mother's old Toshiba Satellite laptop computer.  That was about ten years ago.  I think that computer is at least twelve years old now.  Yep, Bill still uses it. The memory is full at only 1 Gigabyte.  It takes about ten minutes in the morning for it to boot up.  I've tried to buy him a new computer over the years but he refuses.  He says the one he has now is "good enough." One thing positive, I'm glad there is only one Spender in this family......ME.  


So when my friend Don V. suggested that I upgrade from my pitiful TracFone to  the new Verizon iPhone I decided to make one last effort to drag Billy Boy into the 21st Century.  I ordered one for him too.  Oh yes, I expected the usual histrionics about how I was wasting money again and expected the strum and drang that always followed these confrontations about my spending habits.  But that didn't happen this time.


To paraphrase Sally Fields' famous quote "He likes it!  He really likes it!" 

Bill and me 2010 - 46 years later and still standing!

Thank you Jesus.

iPhone, iPad, iMac and FaceTime

Bob C. on FaceTime from Sarasota, FL to Milton, DE

We finally did it! My friend Don V. and I talked our friend Bob C. into downloading FaceTime onto his new Mac laptop.   


Now I'm talking about a bunch of guys in their advanced years.  Bob C. is the baby of the group at "only" 67 years of age.  I'm 69 and Don V. is 70.  We all have a lot of information stored in our gray heads.  I don't know how much room there is for all this new advanced technology but we're trying to keep up with the younger folk who have more empty space in their heads than we do for learning all this new fangled stuff.


Don is our computer guru.  He's been using Mac computers for 27 years.  He has graciously been teaching both me and Bob all the cool functions of our new Mac computers.  I have an iMac and a iPad.  Bob C. has a Mac laptop.


Don was over for dinner with me and Bill last night.  After dinner he picked up on his Mac tutorial lessons for me where he left off last week, when he was also over for dinner (the least I could do for Don's generosity in sharing his Mac information).  


Last week Don didn't get to leave until after midnight.  We were both exhausted.  Last night we both petered out at about 10:30 pm.  One fact of life we have to face is that we're no Mark Zuckerberg (we're better looking and we can blink our eyes).  

Larry M. and me at my Mom's home 1962

A couple of weeks ago Don got me hooked up to FaceTime which is a face to face telephone communication between users of Mac products with cameras.  I was sold on this wonderful function immediately.  Now I can talk to my good friend Lar from my school days who lives in Claymont, DE. 

Larry M. and me at 10 Downingtown Street in Downingtown, PA 2004

This morning I talked to my brother John who lives in Greenville, SC.  Prior to our FaceTime conversation I used to talk to John over his poor phone connection.  Now we have a clear phone conversations plus we have all the nuance and subtlety of conversations by face to face that one can never have over the faceless phone conversations.

Brothers Ronald and John Tipton 1948 

Don has shown me just a fraction of the thousands of apps that are available for Mac users. He has been urging me to get an iPhone and now that I see all the neat new things I can do, I am convinced.  I'm going to order two iPhones (one for me and one for Bill who is 82, we're pushing the envelope here).  I think Bill was sold when he saw me and Don playing Angry Birds last night on my iPad.  Bill likes computer games.  He finds them relaxing.

My "baby" brother John and me at his home in Greenville, SC 1994

So now I have an iMac.  On February 9th, I order two iPhones.  And this spring when the new iPad comes out with a camera, I'm ordering that baby.  I'll give Bill the iPad that I'm using now.  


Who would've ever thunk that a bunch of old guys like us could ride this technological wave?  We're doing it and I feel great about it!

FaceTime

Last year my new Dell computer crashed.  I purchased this new Dell computer because my old Gateway computer was ten years old and would eventually crash.  I wanted to get ahead of the game for once in computer crash horror stories.  To paraphrase Ben Franklin, there are three certainties in life:

• Death
• Taxes
• Computer crashes

My first computer to crash was a Dell.  I paid $4,000 in 1994 for that sucker that had a grand total of 30 MB memory.  I lost all my photos and genealogy program which I had to rebuild.  

In bought a new Dell computer in 2001 with all the bells and whistles for which I paid $2,500.  Right out of the box that computer didn't work.  I couldn't turn it off.  Every time I turned it off, it came right back on.  I called my premium line (still had to wait a long time) for tech help.  The girl I got on the line, after much fussing around, told me I had "too much on my desktop" and had to reformat then computer hard drive!  What the hey?  I had a brand new computer and I had put nothing on the hard drive.  It was all their ads!  

I called again to get another tech person.  They couldn't help me either.  In the meantime, while I was going through the hell of tech help (which is an oxymoron with Dell by the way), I purchased a cheap ($1,100) Gateway computer.  I liked that computer so much (and it worked right out of the box) that I gave away my super, duper Dell to my friend Bob McC. who didn't' have a computer.  All he had to do was pay $100 to have the hard drive reformatted and reinstall the software that came with it.  

Fast forward to last year and I decide to buy a new computer.  My friend Lar had a computer crash around the same time I was looking for a new computer.  He told me he "had it" with the instability of Windows based computers and was going back to a Mac computer which he used to have.  He advised me to also get a Mac.  I checked and decided that I didn't want to pay that much ($1.600) for a 21 inch iMac so I got a Dell Dimension for $1,100.  Yes, I was foolish enough to go back to Dell.  I figured they straightened out their problems by now.  What I didn't take into account was the instability of the Windows Vista operating system.  Mr. Softeee was out to get me again!  

So I buy the Dell over the phone.  By the time the salesman was done with me my bill was $1,600.  Another thing I didn't account for was that Dell has a lot of "extras" that run the bill up.  Mac doesn't. I found out later that Mac's price includes everything.  They don't blindside you with a lot of extras that really should come with the computer.  So I got suckered in again.  I blame myself.

One year later my Dell crashes while my Computer Guy was trying to load my old Palm Pilot software into my new Vista operating system computer.  CRASH!  

That was it. I had enough with Dell.  I had a warranty on the hard drive.  I called and they sent a technician out to replace my hard drive.  My Dell now sits in the basement, unused. I don't trust it or its Windows based operating system anymore.  After you've been screwed several times, you stop bending over and grabbing your ankles.  I had it with Dell, Windows, Vista and Mr. Softee and their endless, annoying upgrades and anti-virus and maleware software that does nothing but slow the computer down to a crawl.  I had it!

Last September I took myself up to Best Buy in Dover and purchased a 27 inch iMac.  My friend Lar said his only regret with his iMac was that he didn't get the big screen.  I took his advice and didn't make that mistake.

Now my only problem with a Mac computer was the new learning curve.  I have to admit, it hasn't been too bad.  I've picked up a lot because Mac computers are much more intuitive that Windows based computer.  Has anyone ever tried an Address Merge function on Vista?  Need I say more?

So, since the time I went the Mac Way, I have learned just enough to send e-mails, store my photos and post my blogs.  I knew there was a lot more to learn.  

A couple of weeks ago my friend Bob C. advised me of his friend Don V. who was willing to teach this old head some new tricks on his iMac.  Don V. has been a happy Mac user for over 20 years.  

Monday he stopped over and he spent an intense four hours in the morning some really cool functions.  One I really like is FaceTime.  This is a function that makes phone calls to another iMac or iPhone user and you can talk face to face by video.  I had the Skype function on my old Gateway but this was much better.  REALLY COOL!

Don called me this morning to see how I was progressing.  He gave me some more tips.  We called our mutual friend Bob C., who is now in Florida, to see if he got the adaption for his Mac laptop computer so the three of us could hook up.  Unfortunately Bob C. spent four frustrating hours in the Tampa Verizon office yesterday with his new 4G setup that didn't work.  The woman in the office told him he had to have Windows on his computer because the 4G wasn't compatible with his Mac laptop.  What the hey?  But that's another blog posting, frustration with Verizon.  I have my own horror stories that would take up several blog postings.  

As you can see from the photos I've posted that Ron is having a grand old time with his New Toy.

Now for the next Toy, an iPhone.  I place my order February 3rd.  

I'll bet I'm the only member of my high school class that is "wired up" this way to the new technology.  I graduated from Downingtown High School in 1959.  I'm putting a call out there now to my former classmates: 

ANY ONE OUT THERE?