Techno Challenged

Technology challenges; I have them. People I know who are computer savvy have them too.   I am not a computer fool, but there are times I feel hopelessly lost.  Usually I rely on Google searches to help me and they often succeed.  Tonight for instance I password protected my router because my Netflix signal kept dropping out;  people were stealing my bandwidth!  It has taken me three months to work up the courage to potentially lose all my network connections while trying to fix the problem; and I did - for a minute or two. It helps that my kids are not home, I would hate to bear the consequences of an error in that circumstance.

I read an article tonight about not using the "like" button on Facebook, in order to change the tenor of one's "feed."  This led to a prompt to read another article in which a person described liking almost everything in his feed, which led to a home page of almost entirely publication articles and ads.  It seems that a lot of people do not realize that their posts and reactions are fed through an algorithm that determines what appears on your home page.  If we saw everything our friends post, we could never keep up with the volume of information, we would simply be overwhelmed, so Facebook slims down the trend by "watching" what we do.

This "watching" also leads to those creepy ads that react to what we write.  Have you noticed that if you post that you got new shoes -shoe ads start cropping up?   I posted about my new website and now I am getting website ads.  The same thing happens in my Gmail account.  I don't really care because nothing particularly private is happening in my Facebook or Gmail accounts; glad I am not a spy, for so many reasons.

I have become pretty quick about disconnecting my power cord and then popping out the battery of my computer when I think some awful virus might be loading itself.   I start up again in safe mode, load my "Virus" user name and re-set my computer to an earlier date. These are the silly techno things I have learned to do in order, most humbly and feebly, to try to protect myself from wiser, though nastier computer savvy folk.

I hope the hackers who hijacked my blog last summer leave me alone.  Fingers crossed that their fingers have found real pies into which they may pry.