Technology, a love/hate relationship?

Just wanted to pass on an apology if it did not appear that the editors of the DyeStatCal.com site are as "on top of" dealing with communication that may have come their way over the last month and a half. I will let Rich Gonzalez speak to his difficulties with the current technology, but Doug Speck since early April has gone through four computers. I pick up magazines now a days about our nice technological aides, and every other article is how to protect your computer against some attack on it by viruses, worms, pop-ups, and other ad-ware that can take over or possibly destroy machines. It seems like really strange times with these nice machines that usually help us so much.

Doug Speck's problems started with a laptop under warrantly that was about a year old (I bought the extended warranty fortunately) that just started shutting down at times, costing all work that had not been saved at that moment. When it became constant I took it back to where I bought it and it did the same thing for them, so they took it from me. They explained to me that it was probably an over-heating problem, and a simple fix would do. That was six weeks ago, with the machine shipped back to the manufacturer, and we are hoping to get it back someday. A loaner (extended warranty I purchased allowed same) seemed nice, and spent probably 5-8 hours loading software to continue our work on it before the screen on that machine decided to go blank and bad after a week and a half. There was another laptop at home that we had used in the past, and it managed to totally crash after becoming totally unusable very quickly. A third loaner form the place where I bought the one back at the manufacturer currently has turned out to be okay, but it gives error messages that it is out of memory at the strangest times in word processing, when I know that it should not be.

Thanks to great support from people around the state we are kind of overwhelmed with information constantly, and machine problems cause a "disconnect" from the constant stream of information that takes significant amounts of time to recover from.

Somehow we will struggle through things. Speaking for myself, Doug Speck, I think I have operated at about 60% efficiency over the last month and a half. I have considered asking for someone out there to maybe advise on some of this. I do not really want anything for free, maybe advice on what to load, how to avoid some of this gunk that slows things down or takes you over along the way!!

I know Rich G has had some real frustration lately with his adventure with the "worm" business. We really feel everyone in our sport deserves the best, and if you have sensed something amiss of late, above is an explanation. Not attempting to burden you with our problems, but just an explanation if your e-mail on some bit of information about something that certainly deserves publicity that does not seem to have been gotten to as quickly as maybe in the past. As we indicated early on in this summary, it seems like very interesting times with our little machines now a days--we will make it somehow, so bear with us!

Doug Speck