Tuesday, January 8, 2013

The App, The Blog, And The Internet

At this very moment, I'm on a charter bus. I have been on this charter bus for a total of twelve-ish hours today, and I'm still far from my destination. There are some really fun people on this bus. There are some really quiet people on this bus. Some of the people on this bus play the baritone, and if you've played in a marching band for a few years, that information ought to give you an idea of how this bus ride is going.
I finished my book. It was very entertaining, but now I have nothing to read. I'm up to date on Facebook and Twitter. I'm not feeling especially talkative. I'm not currently feeling sleepy. To entertain myself, I thought I'd write a blog post.
I have an iPhone with beautiful, lovely, gorgeous Internet capabilities. I'm on a charter bus that has WiFi. You'd think this would be a match made in heaven, but in fact, I have never been able to get my iPhone to connect to the bus Internet. Therefore, I've been rockin' the 3G for a while.
It was over 3G that I pulled up Safari on my phone and went to the Blogger website. A little orange box at the top of the page complained that it didn't like my browser. I ignored the little orange box and opened up a new post. The website promptly quit working.
Not one to be defeated by technology, I decided to go to the App Store and download the Chrome app to see if that browser would find more favor in Blogger's eyes. It did. Kind of. But it was pretty irritating to type in the normal document-thingy. The screen on my phone is a bit small for that, and it got intolerable once I started trying to make some words bold. So I gave up on that.
I went back to the App Store and downloaded the actual Blogger app. I would have downloaded the app a while ago, but I had seen a few negative reviews and decided I could live without it. But desperation drove me to it, and I winced while installing yet another app over 3G.
So far the app seems okay. Not perfect, I guess, but it's much easier to use than the website. I appreciate it.
So, yeah. That's my story about the app, the blog, and the Internet. I've still got a few hours to go on this trip, so who knows? Perhaps I'll tell another story before the night's done. Or maybe I won't. Maybe I'll go to sleep. Maybe I'll just listen to the baritones who got a hold of the bus microphone. Or maybe I'll write a novel. Or maybe I'll go to sleep.

1 comment:

  1. Good luck sleeping if the baritones are, you know, extant.
    I can usually get my ipad to connect, but then it will just spastically stop working. You have to have a lot of patience to get it to connect at first- there's a logon screen that, despite its 1996-called-they-want-their-html-back flair, takes approximately 34957840893270834672039847 hours to load. Once you've gotten past that hump you can begin to enjoy data at a speed only loosely proportional to the amount of cellphone signal one has or the amount of tall buildings blocking our reception we're driving by (i.e. it worked perfectly in the middle of Ft. Lauderdale but when we got out into open country with just as many bars... NOTHING.)
    Also, and this is a highly objective opinion, the Florida panhandle sucks in terms of both size and scenery (YAY. MOAR FARMZ.) and a highway needs to be built arcing from about Montgomery to either join 75 around Valdosta or 95 in Jacksonville.

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