In this case the rapidly changing landscape I’m speaking of is our digital world. It seems like every single day I am asked to update something! Geeez… this has become daunting! I highly doubt this will change anytime soon.
Software developers have some huge hurdles to overcome. There are so many variables out there! New attacks to their code all of the time, and the artificial intelligence craze is multiplying those variables exponentially.
It’s difficult to find software that we like, to work well with one another. As usual marketing controls everything, so if you are a great small company trying to navigate the ever changing landscape, you’ve got your hands full. The larger company is going to bury you in marketing you can’t afford, so your chance of survival dims daily.
Security is my chief concern, especially when it comes to apps we use on smart phones. Those smart phones are in our hands daily, tracking every single thing we do… and those smart phones have far less security in them than our home and office main frames have.
In our rush, rush current society we live in, that mobility of your smart phone has won the day. Can you believe the weekly report of screen time on your phone that you receive? Mine last week was like over three hours a day!! Holy shit! That is something I definitely do NOT wish to do!
For the past three years or so I’ve made a concentrated effort to simplify my life, divorce the rush around atmosphere we currently live in, and actually slow down and live more purposely.
One of my favorite authors is Henry David Thoreau. My travels in my mobile command center, have been a modern effort of Thoreau’s “Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”
Well our current world is a lot different than Thoreau’s world of the 19th century. He passed from complications of tuberculosis in 1862 at the ripe old age of 44. I think he was wise beyond his years.
In My Last Blog I Featured One Of My Legacy Members
How does all of the above meld into the subject of this post? It’s easy… why does everything have to be so damn complicated? I use a service called MailChimp to get my newsletter out to my subscribers. Some people would like to have what I write sent to them in email form, rather than remember to check in on my website.
MailChimp does that for me automatically. Anything I post before midnight on a Monday is automatically sent out on Tuesday at 1:00 pm eastern time. Well last week evidently MailChimp doesn’t like the Vimeo Link of the slideshow I embedded into my Post.
Once the email went out I learned of this but it was too late. You could easily see the slideshow on my website the way it was intended, but not in that email! Also? It mattered greatly which way you viewed that email and on which device. This was very frustrating for me to say the least. I spent the week trying to figure out how to change this for future posts.
I have emailed links to video in my standard emails with zero issues, so who knew this would be a problem? Stephanie had little idea of what I was doing, and thanked me, but she did say seeing the slideshow was not easy. She had to view the entire email in her browser.
Below is another attempt at Stephanie’s Slide show to see if it plays nice with MailChimp.
I’m also looking to assist ya’ll…
This week I’m trying to educate everyone that will listen to a monumental issue that would be much simpler if everyone would simply play nice with one another? Remind you of anything? No I’m not going there!!
However I see online, all of the time, where software is introduced and the comments are always concentrated on “will your software work with this? Or will it work with that?” There also seems to be a big conglomeration of people that resist membership platforms like Adobe. I get it. The cost is always there, instead of buy it once and forget it.
However! Just how is that software person supposed to keep up with all of the changes, and have any money coming in from their original sale? In my case I find the Adobe Membership to be very reasonable for something I use most every day. Some others? Not so much.
Updating Your Software…
Now I’ve scared some of you when it comes to updating software. This was not intentional, but caution should be exercised. You wish to make sure there are little or no bugs in the update, and also will that update play nice with others? In order to do this you need to pay attention to some ‘geeky” notifications.
My website software and the associated plugins are set to auto update. Mostly because this is basically safe, but should I have difficulties, my server offers a daily backup feature, so if a problem does come up, I can easily navigate back.
This is NOT so with some other things. Currently I’m fully updated with Adobe LR & PS, Nik Version 6, and Topaz the latest. I will NOT be continuing on with Topaz next year if they do not change their tune when it comes to membership over their previous one time purchase.
I’m currently running Mac OS X Sonoma Ver 14.7.4… I have not upgraded to Sequoia yet until I make sure it plays nice with everything else I’m using software wise, especially my Printing software. I will probably look to upgrade to Sequoia soon.
Mean time? Watch your stuff my friends! Be especially careful of apps you download to your Smart Phones. Nefarious people have learned just exactly how much cool information they can obtain through the back end of our Smart Phones.
Artificial Intelligence still scares the crap outta me. Make a mistake in your code and it can take a long time searching that code for an out of place character. Another computer coming along that can learn something from that mistake and multiply it many times over?? Yoda help us all!
