technology troubles solved!

technology creates and solves so many of my problems.

we got a video monitor for abigail about two months ago.  i'm one of those people that reads reviews obsessively.  it's not enough for me to read a hundred reviews on amazon.  nooo, i'm the person that will find that same product listed online at bed bath and beyond, target, and walmart so i can read those online reviews too.*  so of course i did that when shopping for our video monitor.  and i ended up getting a monitor for 70% off and it's working great and i love it but there's just one thing about it...

it messes with our wireless.  when i have the monitor on, my internet is super slow.  like my blog page could take minutes to load.  the text would be there but the pictures would gradually load from top to bottom and it was impossible to do stuff online.  luckily, i remembered that one of the reviews mentioned that the monitor interfered with their wireless.  i think their problem was that it kicked them off the network but i decided to experiment and see if it would help.  i turned off the monitor, clicked refresh, and all my pages were instantly loaded.  YEAY!  what an easy fix!  this would be more annoying that what it is if 1. i had paid more for the monitor (they're typically a few hundred dollars!) and 2. if i needed it on all the time.  luckily i only need it on occasionally.  i put baby girl down for nap and then turn on the monitor after 30 minutes or so to make sure she's still asleep.  in the morning i just click it on every fifteen minutes or so to see if she's awake yet or what she's up to or if she's taken her diaper off again.  it's not like i need to sit there and watch her every move... although that is fun sometimes.

yesterday i was trying desperately to put pictures from my phone to picasa on my computer.  i have over a thousand pictures on my phone and at least 10-15 minutes of video and i'm almost out of memory.  unfortunately though, picasa was retrieving the pictures soooo slowly.  like maybe 20 pictures over the course of an hour.  which won't work for 1000 pictures.  and i kept closing and opening picasa, checking for updates, unplugging and replugging in my phone... nothing was working and then this morning i tried again and picasa wasn't even recognizing my phone as a device to retrieve pictures from.  enter google.  there are a million forums on this and what worked and what didn't.  a lot of people said to just plug the cord into a different usb.  or to try a different cord.  i tried both... about fifteen times.  they mentioned to turn your phone off and on again.  still didn't work.  and then i started noticing a pattern where people said their printer was the culprit and once they unplugged the printer it was fine.  i thought this for sure couldn't be the problem because our printer doesn't plug into my computer.  it's wireless.  ohhh hmmm let me check and see if i turned it off after i used it the other day.  oh yes, i did.  it's off.  hmmm.  and then i stood there thinking, "should i unplug it?" which i thought was really silly since it was already off... why would unplugging it make a difference?  but what did i have to lose?  so i unplugged it, came back to my computer, clicked the import button in picasa and...

BAM!  not only did it now recognize my phone again, i had over 1000 pictures instantly.  hallelujah!  that's crazy, right?  how on earth would i have figured this out without google?  i mean, that's got to be one of the most random things ever, right?  picasa on your laptop won't recognize your iphone as a camera device unless you manually unplug your printer (on the other side of your house) from the wall.

technology is a tricky, tricky thing.