I can’t see squat, there’s a hurricane outside.

He’s a good bit older than that and has cancer, and is not able to sit at a computer long enough to learn a new operating system even if he wanted to. Which he really, really doesn’t lol. He hates the thing with the fire of a thousand burning suns and only used it for his necessaries.

I’m also not familiar with any other operating system besides windows, outside of a brief foray into pi-hole years ago that I don’t remember much about, so I’d have to learn it first. While I’d love to start playing around with Linux some day, unfortunately that day isn’t going to be any time soon.

Lucky you. I got told by our IT that I’m going to be their windows 11 sacrificial lamb and will be getting it before everyone else to bang out the quirks. It doesn’t pay to be known as the office nerd :(

My elderly father’s win 10 computer has been absolutely shoving the upgrade down his throat, and I’m about ready to give in and just do it. Telling it to stop notifying him does no good, it just comes right back the next day. Then he won’t touch the computer because the full screen upgrade ad freaks him out and he’s afraid something is wrong. Screw Microsoft.

OP, check out the websites about grants ISPs are getting to put fiber in rural areas and see if your area is on the list somewhere (I would try and link you to some, but I’m on mobile and for some reason I have a hell of a time finding those sites while on mobile). You can see below what I’ve had to deal with for about 20 years, until my area finally got covered by one of those grants a few months ago. I am super rural - like, I am literally surrounded by nationally protected forest and nothing else; it’snot a place I thought would ever be included in those grant locations. It was, though, and I now have Gigabyte internet with no cap, with VOIP, for $74.98 a month. If I’m not using WiFi, I get an actual gig of download speed. If I’m on wifi, it’s usually between 600-900MB.

Up until recently, we paid Centurylink about $150 a month for two lines into the house. Each line maxed out at 0.75MB download speed and 0.23 MB upload speed. We needed two lines to even be able to function. Almost 20 years of this, with no other options besides Hughesnet. We tried them for a little while; their equipment cost a fortune, it was about$150 a month, the speed was nearly as bad and they had a 200MB A MONTH CAP. We had to turn off images for websites in order to not go over the cap. Previous to 2004, I lived in a very rural part of NY. We had high speed internet for $69 a month, no cap. I can’t remember the speed, but I remember that it took 3 minutes to download a full sized movie. 20 YEARS AGO the internet was better, and cheaper!

Of course it’s on purpose, and it’s understandable, too. And if you have voice along with Internet service, spectrum does not allow you to use your own modem for voice. It won’t work. You can use your own for the internet portion, but you have to contact them to get each item provisioned separately, and then get a splitter to accommodate both. You and also have to make sure the person your are talking to understand what you are talking about, because a lot either don’t, or just don’t care to accommodate you and just say no we don’t do that. I am currently taking a hiatus from going through this very scenario because I don’t have the mental energy right now to fight a tier 1 tech on something that should be so simple.

Good luck, I hope it goes well for you!

Would not recommend. That’s how you end up with lopsided shoulders and a bad back.

I don’t know if anyone has murmurings this yet, but if you leave a landline that is through your ISP, and connected to the router, you may not be able to use your own router. Spectrum doors not let you, and despite all the research I did before, I did not find that out until after I purchased my own. You can ask them to split the line and use the old router with the phone, and your new router for internet, but there are potential issues with degradation of service involved, as well as the more mundane problems of running into ISP support who are not interested in understanding what you want, and getting the line actually, physically split.

I actually know what causes most of mine, there are some nerves in my neck that get pinched/aggravated and trigger them. And for some reason, if I have multiple days in a row where I don’t get much sleep, those nerves get extra cranky. They are extra cranky right now.

I also hate it when it has a name that is a super common word or phrase. Our last 3 records management prograns at work have been like this, and their help fires are terrible to non existent. Good like trying to search the internet for information on the software with those common names. Even adding terms relevant to what the software does, didn’t help much.

(Apologies if this is terribly typed, I’ve got an impending migraine aura that stayed right as I hit reply and have lost a good chunk of my vision. I can’t see most of what I’m saying.)

Not everyone. I hated it. A lot of times, 4 10s is actually 4 11s, because they make you take a lunch but you still gotta get those 10 actual work hours in. After a while, it was just brutal and exhausting. Bonus points of suck are awarded if you have to deal with coworkers who think you’re just getting a freebie day off for nothing and turn into assholes.

I’ve seen a curlygirl sub, but it was pretty much dead, sadly.

I did the same! “Why is my crafting crack company making cars now?!”

It’s so much worse than just the nurses. I work alongside a host of different first responder groups, and the vast majority of them are unvaxed conspiracy nuts. Many of these people are dear to me, and I can’t tell you just how crushed I was to see these otherwise normally intelligent people I care about just… lose their damn minds over covid. I think it permanently broke something in me to be surrounded by them and watch them spiral down that rabbit hole. The one I’m around the most is convinced the flu vaccine from just before covid hit turned her injection site magnetic. She actually had me take a magnet and hold it to the spot and when the magnet did not stick to her arm, just kept saying I wasn’t getting the right spot. Didn’t matter where I put it. Didn’t stick, but it was because I was doing something wrong. Not because it’s fucking ludicrous to claim a shot magnetizes you.

I am so goddamn bitter now.

I think that app choice makes a difference, too. I would guess that most people on mobile picked one or two apps to try, and if their picks weren’t great (or the user was too impatient to wait for improvements) they called the whole experience shitty and bailed. Those of us committed to the move hung on and waited for our apps to get better.

In my case, I grabbed every ios app I could find and tried them all. Some were not so good, some were good and improving at a lightning rate. Living through those growing pains is worth it to me, especially when the improvements are crazy fast. I’m mostly using Memmy now, and I’m really happy with it. I only have one tiny, unimportant issue with it involving text selection, but it’s nothing compared to how good they’ve made this app so quickly. Memmy is a large part of why I stick around.

I got super frustrated with Mastodon because of this. I’ve tried a couple of instances with no luck. And hilariously, I have to think that the furry folks are either having the same problem finding a home, or they are stalking me, because everywhere I move, shortly after, a ton of furries appear and do introductions. Furry stuff is not my thing, but I can appreciate how they might have a hard time finding a good place to settle.

YES. It’s so frustrating now. And Gboard suddenly keeps trying to turn every word I type that starts with a “p” into “poo apper”. Wtf.

Swipe was bought by Microsoft years ago, and who knows why they do what they do. The only update I’ve seen in recent memory for it was them adding Bing to the top row.

Aww, thanks. It’s ok, though. I’m getting a lot better at figuring out how not to kill my plants now and just get sad for a little while when one dies. Mostly. Lol

But it’s also hard for someone with depression, because you will kill things while you learn, and that can make you feel even more worthless and useless.

THAT SAID. If you try it and actually discover you have an interest in it, it’s a lot easier to get past the, “Fuck, I killed another one!” and slide into, “How do I not fucking kill another one?!”

Source: me :/