Not Feeling Thankful for Technology

There are a lot of things I'm thankful for this week. After a couple health scares, my hubby and I are both doing well. All our kids and grandkids are fine and we'll see them on Thanksgiving. We have a nice home, good friends, and a strong church family. I've even had some luck recently getting my short stories published. All good stuff.

What I'm not so grateful right now is technology.  Everything seems to be fighting me. First there's Google, who in its infinite wisdom has decided to merge my LD Masterson blog account with my Linda Leszczuk personal g-mail account. Lately, when I log in using my ldmasterson email (not a gmail address) it tells Blogger I'm Linda Leszczuk and wants to identify my blog comments that way.  And if I try to sync my phone to my personal account to upload photos, it dumps all the images that have ever been on my blog down to my phone.

Yesterday, things got worse. I also handle the e-mailing for our church disaster response team. That gmail account was set up originally by a guy named Dan and is only used for maintaining an email address list and sending messages to the team. Yesterday, I left a comment on my blog and Blogger attached Dan's name to it. I have no idea why.

Then there's my phone, which won't play nice with my computer. All I want to do is transfer photos from my phone to my Windows PC.  But when I connect the phone, it immediately tries to upload my photos to Dropbox. Unfortunately, the only Dropbox account I use is for exchanging file with my crit group and they really don't want to see all my family photos. So I downloaded the software that's supposed to let Windows talk to Droid devices. The software sees the phone okay but insists the phone is locked and wants me to unlock it. Problem is my phone isn't locked. Arrrgh.

Bottom line - I have some issues to deal with and they're all going to wait until after this holiday weekend so I will probably be off-blog next week while I try to sort it all out. 

In the meantime, for all my friends here in the States, have a wonderful Thanksgiving and for everyone else, have a great week. 

And here are a couple of my favorite Thanksgiving sillies...

By the way, if anyone knows who to disentangle Google accounts, I'll take all the help I can get. Thanks.

Take care, everyone.

Thought for Today:

 Ain't technology grand?

What's in a Name? Famous Brand Name Changes

Recent conversation between myself and my fourteen-year-old grandson:

Me - Hey, how about Colonel Sanders for dinner?
Grandson - What's that?
Me - You know, Colonel Sanders. Kentucky Fried Chicken.
GS - [long pause] Oh! KFC. Sure.

I know the kids tend to refer to everything by initials (I blame texting) but I was still surprised  my grandson didn't know the actual name of his favorite chicken place. Until my husband got home with the meal and I noticed all the packages sported the same image- three big red letters: KFC.

Curiosity led me to do a little quick research and I discovered Colonel Sanders' Kentucky Fried Chicken changed it's name officially to KFC in 1999.  I guess I wasn't paying attention that year. Or any of the years since then. *hangs head in embarrassment*

But while I was checking out the brand name change at KFC, I came across a couple others you might find interesting.

Ever heard of Brad's Drink?  In 1893, a pharmacist named Celeb Bradham invented a carbonated soft drink which included sugar, cola nuts, and the digestive enzyme pepsin. I guess he thought that last one was  important because in 1898 he re-named his invention Pepsi-Cola.

How about Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web? In January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo, PhD students at Stanford, created what became one of the most prominent search engines on the web. They later renamed it Yahoo, an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle".

Okay, one more.  Do you know BackRub?  The search engine created by Larry Brin and Serge Page’s technology in 1996 was called BackRub because the system verified backlinks to determine the significance of a site. I think you've probably used this one. In 1998, they changed the name to Google.

Have you ever had the urge to change your "brand" name?

[I didn't include any images in this post because they would have been big corporate logos and I didn't want to commit a no-no against any of these guys.]

Thought for the Day:

We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.