How God recently helped me, involving our computers

A few days ago, we were visiting some of our family. Part of the visit was to see one of our grandsons, who plays water polo with his high school team. We were glad to have seen that, more than once. We had never that game before.

I'm not as spry as I once was, and am not always as balanced (physically!) as I should be, I guess. A couple of years ago, I managed to fall while walking along a wide concrete walk around a harbor. During last Thanksgiving season, I walked over to a neighbor's in the dark, and forgot that he had put some loose bricks at the end of a wall. I stepped on one or two of them as I went around the wall's end, and fell, landing on his concrete driveway. While at one of the water polo games, I stepped on some miscellaneous stuff, a couple of meters from the pool, and down I went. I thank God that I took no injury in any of these accidents -- not a bruise, not sore a bit. That's one praise.

During the last fall, I lost my grip on my Android tablet, and it fell into the swimming pool. The referee stopped the game while one of the players dove down and got it. But the tablet would not come on. As far as I can tell, it's dead for good. It served me well. I had used it for various kinds of reading, including devotional reading, and for other purposes.

We like Coldstone ice cream. There is a store near where the games were being played, and we went there. Ice cream stores, and other small fast food franchises, in California, usually don't have restrooms. I discovered that I needed one. I was directed to a public restroom, but it was padlocked. There is a Target store near the ice cream store, and I decided that was my best bet for a restroom. While at this Target, it occurred to me that I might purchase a new tablet there, which is another praise. (Otherwise, I would have had to find another store, or go on-line to order one, and not gotten one for a day or so.) So I went back to the electronics section. I asked the clerk how much storage a tablet, for sale, had, and she pointed out something that I had forgotten, namely that this new tablet had a spot for a memory card. I suddenly recalled that my damaged tablet had had a memory card in it. I bought the tablet, and, as soon as I could, placed the memory chip from the damaged device into the new one. It worked! I didn't have to copy files from our computer to the new tablet! That's another praise. If she hadn't reminded me of that, it would have taken hours to copy the files I wanted on the tablet from our computer.

We got home, a couple of days later. A few hours after we did, our laptop computer would not access the internet. We got it with a protection plan, so I took the laptop to the store where I got it in the first place. I first copied all of our data files -- photos, spreadsheets, etc., to an external hard drive, in case the laptop was no longer usable. After less than 24 hours, I was able to pick up the computer. The repair person said that something had gone wrong with a Windows 10 update, which is plausible, and that I could not have fixed this without special software. He accessed the internet, using our computer, from the store, to show that the problem was fixed. But when I got home, I discovered that our graphics programs, and Microsoft Office, were no longer accessible. I could get on the internet, which is another praise, but I couldn't get along without a spreadsheet, a word processor, nor that graphics program, and, of course, I had already paid for them. I got in contact with the store's on-line repair people, through chatting (I couldn't have done that without internet access), and having her take control of the machine, from wherever she was. In a couple of hours or so, Office, and the graphics suite, were again usable. There was no charge for the repairs, other than the original purchase of the protection plan. Those are also both cause for praise. I'm now using this laptop to write this, and expect to post it on the internet, as this blog post, in a little bit. I thank God for his goodness!

I needed to back up our files, anyway.

Thanks for reading!

Sunspots 635

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

The Arts: Listverse tells us about the original Star Trek characters, 10 of them.

Christianity: Perry Noble, fired from the pastorate of what is probably the largest church in South Carolina, because of his alcohol use, almost committed suicide.

Christianity Today on why racially uniform congregations are unfortunate, and why we integrated worship is a good thing.

(Sort of) Relevant reports that a human chain rescued some people from drowning, caused by a riptide, on a beach in Florida.


Education: Scientific American reports that college students would do better if they didn't bring laptop computers to class.

Food: (and religion) Relevant reports that the Catholic church refuses to use gluten-free wafers as part of communion.

Health: (sort of) Listverse tells 10 true horror stories of medical malpractice.

Scientific American reports that most people have at least one episode of mental illness some time in their life, and most of us recover from such episodes.

Listverse discusses some interesting facts about breast implants.

Politics: (or something) The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group is composed of 90 large cities, from around the globe, who are attempting to mitigate climate change. It was interesting to discover, in the list of members, huge cities that I had not heard of.

Christianity Today reports that there will be a lot less Christians immigrating to the US in 2017 than did in 2016, because of the Trump administration's policies on admission.

National Public Radio reports that six Afghan girls, formerly refused visas by the US State Department, have been allowed to participate in a robotics competition in the US. President Trump evidently intervened on their behalf.

I didn't choose the title of this post, in the Village Voice, but it's a sane and sobering corrective to the political strife that most of us engage in.

Michael Gerson, Washington Post: "A faith that makes losing a sin will make cheating a sacrament."


Science: Scientific American on how babies perceive and distinguish colors.

Nature reports that scientists have figured out how to store a brief, low-resolution movie in bacterial DNA.




Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 551

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:


Christianity: Christianity Today reports on the most popular Bible verses, based on on-line access to them. Popularity varies by the user's country.

Computing: How to look at the other person's screen when they call you with a Windows computer problem.

Education: (And politics) FiveThirtyEight has studied the effect of affirmative action in college admission -- without it, minorities are still not as likely to be admitted.

Politics: Most Americans aren't middle-class anymore.

Science: Wired reports on a lacewing fly with an amazing signal that attracts females.

Wired also reports on what happens if you get shot -- and it's not a lot like the way TV and movies portray it.

Sports: FiveThirtyEight analyzes Stephen Curry's long basketball shots, and finds that, so far this season, his accuracy is unprecedented.

Breanna Stewart, of the University of Connecticut Huskies, has become the only player in women's college basketball history to have both more than 300 career blocked shots and 300 career assists. She is also the only women's player (and, I think, the only player of either sex) to have been named most valuable player of the NCAA Final Four for three years. And she has most of this season yet to play, God willing!


Image source (public domain)