Please stand by, we are having technical difficulties...

Sometimes, I really hate the technological world in which I exist and work. Oh, the gadgets, the new software are all fun...when they work.

When they don't work and I don't understand *why* they don't work, I just want to walk away and, oh, I don't know, churn butter manually. At least, I'd get something accomplished.

Last week, my beloved iPhone went weird on me. All of a sudden, my happy applications were crashing right after I opened them. Possibly something went wrong when I started to sync the phone to my computer at work and then thought better of it. Whatever. I ended up restoring the factory settings and then using the backup to get everything back. Did that a couple of times, no joy in Mudville. Then I decided to sync just the applications (why didn't that happen during the restore?) and during the installation of one of them, the install ended with an error. Simple solution, delete the "bad" application and poof! everything started working. So, I wasted a hour of time, doing restores and such, only to discover that one bad "apple" really did spoil the bunch. And I reinstalled the application and everything is as happy as can be. Go figure.

I was greatly relieved to see that all my contacts, calendar items, and photos did come back during the restore.

The other misery for me now is trying to build a web portal and blog with Joomla, MyBlog, and JomComment (all open source software) at work. It just isn't working the way it's supposed to work. I've been spending hours trying anything and everything to get the beast to behave. The support folks are in a different time zone so, it takes a day to get anything out of them. And worse, my friend's husband has been helping out (bless his technological soul)...and *everything* works on his system, but not mine. It looks like some weird IE browser issue (boo, hiss, spit on browsers!) cuz I could get everything to work with Firefox. I feel like I'm trying to swim in mud.

Bleah. Last week, out of sheer frustration, I started throwing my Joomla books against my office wall. Felt good for about 5 seconds. Then I took pity on the books and picked them off the floor.

So, right now, technology is frustrating the h*ll out of me. Learning to be an herbalist sounds a lot more appealing. I mean, using a simple mortar and pestle is something I could handle without feeling like I need to throw something against the wall.