Unplanned Obsolescence

 I hate it when something goes wrong and you have done two or three things new or different about the same time, and it's that much harder to pin down the cause. It becomes a sort of chicken or egg thing. 

The laptop is behaving strangely. I think it's heading up on two years' service to me, but I also recently got Norton anti-virus protection. Is one or the other wrong, or both maybe? This laptop is a Lenovo I bought one Sunday morning when whatever I had at the time went belly up. It seems a year of service is about all I can expect from a laptop. What with planned obsolescence being the foundation of capitalism, I'm probably right. I remember going to Best Buy years ago to get my first laptop and telling the kid there that I had very rudimentary skills and needs to match as far as a computer went, so I didn't want to spend a lot because I didn't plan on performing any computery stunts; just Facebook and maybe that Twitter thing and possibly doing a little writing. I'm certain he figured I just wanted to jerkoff to porn. That too, of course. Duh. (And he didn't say that. I could just tell by the look on his face.) But I was a babe in the woods of computers and honesty is quite often my best policy. 

I'm still a bit lost in the woods when it comes to computers, but I attribute that to my age. I'm a technological bubblehead. This became very apparent when I complained to the fine folks at Nord or Norton that my laptop seemed to be bogging down since I loaded their product. I figured they could run a test on their end and flip a switch or something. No. They wanted ME to run tests. I'm my own IT guy by default and I can fumble through some shit in life with cars and women and other things that breakdown, and enjoy some success, but they were asking me to perform stunts that I didn't understand. It's like that dream everybody has about being in class for a test after missing the whole school year. The whole class is prepared but I'm not! Life seems that way all too often. 

Now, this Norton deal came with a VPN. I don't really know that I need one though. Last week my bank here emailed me about an unusual log-in from Brazil. They were probably 99.9% sure it was a VPN deal, but nice of them to check. My line of thinking is that a VPN could cause similar confusion on other sites as well. And of the 6 or 7 mumbo jumbo instructions I got from Nord to do my own research on my problem, it seemed like one of them referenced VPN's getting mucked up by extensions This registered with my dumbass. I found extensions (YAY ME!) and bounced ones I thought could be problematic. Did it help? Maybe... But this is where we get into other possible sites being problematic. I'm on Bluesky a lot and, honestly, Bluesky is pretty sucky. I also go on Facebook because I'm one of those awful people that has family and friends. Facebook fucking sucks. Koch Zuckerberg is obscenely billionairey and hates to spend money on improving the site that made him filthy rich. These are the two sites I have problems with. Right here, right now on Blogger is not a problem. Neither is Yahoo, YouTube, Pornhub or anything else I seem to conjure up. That tells me what it's probably telling you: Facebook and Bluesky have the issues- not me. All this shit might be coincidental to my getting the Nord/Norton/whichever the fuck it is. And Lenovo's planned obsolescence might not be planned yet? Regardless, Nord is getting kinda bitchy about me not getting back to them with those test results yet. Oddly, though I don't appreciate their attitude, I respect the attentiveness. You don't always get that these days. 

Ultimately, I'm happy with what I got the deal for: protection on the internet from bad people. They are out there, you know. And, if there were any bugs on my end, it seems like I took care of them in my own half-assed way by ignoring Nord's full-assed way. I can't do a fucking thing about Bluesky and Facebook to get them to act right. No immediate plans to bounce either just yet. I'll just carry on with my fumbling through life. It got me this far.