windows – Facts, Fictions & Fantasies

Fandango’s Story Starter #201

May 20, 2025May 17, 2025Fandango9 Comments

It’s time for my weekly Story Starter prompt. Here’s how it works. Every Tuesday morning (my time), I’m going to give you a “teaser” sentence or sentence fragment and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a story (prose or poetry) around that sentence/fragment. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is simply to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.

This week’s Story Starter teaser is:

The door and windows were locked from the inside, yet the body lay cold on the lawn below.

If you care to write and post a story built from this teaser, be sure to link back to this post and tag your post with #FSS. I would also encourage you to read and enjoy what your fellow bloggers do with their stories.

And most of all, have fun.

SoCS — Open and Shut Case

November 25, 2023November 24, 2023Fandango4 Comments

For this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, Linda G. Hill has given us the topic of “something that closes” and asked us to write about the first thing that pops into our head that closes.

The first thing that popped into my head was people’s minds. But you know what? The day before yesterday was Thanksgiving (in the U.S., anyway), and I don’t feel like going off on a rant about how close-minded so many people seem to be. So after dismissing close-minded, the next things that comes to mind are windows and doors.

My wife and I live in a relatively safe neighborhood and we have a 70-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who barks at anything she’s not expecting to hear or see and her bark is frightful.

Still, every night, before we can go to bed, my wife says, “Did you check to make sure that all of the doors and windows are closed and locked?”

And if she discovers the next morning that I forgot to lock a door or close a window, she lets me know that I have failed at the one thing that she expects me to do every night before we go to bed.

It’s times like that when I think it would be in my best interest to just close my mouth and keep it shut. 🤐🫢

Thursday Inspiration — Getting Started

December 22, 2022December 22, 2022Fandango14 Comments

For Jim Adams’ Thursday Inspiration prompt this week, we can use the prompt word start, or by going with the above picture. I’m bypassing a musical response this week to focus on technology.

The landscape in today’s world of operating systems can be confusing. For laptop and desktop computers, there’s Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and Chrome OS, to name the major players. And for smartphones, it’s mainly Apple’s iOS and Android OS.

Each operating system has its own idiosyncrasies, but their common job is to manages all of the software apps and hardware on the computer, tablet, or smartphone. They perform basic tasks such as file, memory, and process management, handling input and output, and controlling peripheral devices such as disk drives and printers.

But having devices with different operating systems can be a hardship when you use multiple devices. For example, my almost seven-year-old Dell laptop runs on Windows 10, whereas my smartphone runs on Apple iOS. My wife’s Macbook uses the latest Apple’s Mac OS, but her smartphone is an Android OS device. And these device-specific operating systems behave differently.

So why am I telling you this? It’s because my wife’s five-year-old Macbook has seen better days and she was thinking about replacing it with a new one. But our son, who is a brazen Google fan — he persuaded my wife and daughter to abandon their iPhones in favor of Google’s Pixel Android smartphones — advised my wife to get a Chromebook, which uses the Google Chrome OS, instead of a new Macbook. He ordered one for her as a Christmas present and it arrived yesterday.

So my task today, which I’m about to start, and, hopefully finish, is to help my wife set up her new Chromebook and migrate her data files from her Macbook to her Chromebook. Our son assured us that if we run into problems, we can call him and he, as an expert in all things Google, will serve as our trainer if we run into any snags.

We’ll see how it goes. Wish me luck

Written for these Daily prompts (in addition to Jim’s Thursday Inspiration prompt): Word of the Day Challenge (landscape), Ragtag Daily Prompt (chrome), My Vivid Blog (idiosyncrasies), Fandango’s One Word Challenge (hardship), Your Daily Word Prompt (brazen), and The Daily Spur (trainer).

Truthful Tuesday — The Forefront of My Mind

March 3, 2022March 2, 2022Fandango21 Comments

Yes, I know it’s Thursday, but Frank, aka PCGuy, was late in publishing this week’s Truthful Tuesday posts, so I figured I could be late in responding. Anyway, this week Frank wants to know…

What issue or issues are forefront in your mind at the moment?

So many issues are at the forefront of my mind right now. Let’s see, where can I begin?

The Russian Invasion of Ukraine and what the implications of that act of aggression by Vladimir Putin will be for the nation of Ukraine and its people.
Related, the affect of that invasion on the global economy. More specifically, the American stock markets, where most of my retirement dollars are invested.
Whether it’s time to bite the bullet and get hearing aids, since I’m about 95% deaf in my left ear and about 40% deaf in my right ear. Can you please stop mumbling and speak up? Sheesh.
Whether my wife and I should adopt another rescue dog, since we lost our last dog in November 2020 and our cat this past January. My wife wants to. Me, not so much.
What the goddam Republicans are doing to my country.
Whether I should pay someone else to wash all of our windows or do it myself.

Okay, I think that about covers it.

The Thrill Is Gone

August 21, 2020August 21, 2020Fandango52 Comments

Do you remember WordPerfect? It was the dominant word processing software for personal computers in the pre-Windows days. Before WordPerfect came out, I used to use WordStar.To say it was cumbersome and not exactly intuitive or end-user friendly would have been an understatement. But it dominated the PC market in the early and mid 1980s when MS-DOS was the operating system of record.But then WordPerfect was introduced and because of its simplicity and ease of use, it rapidly became the standard in the DOS market in the late 80s. What I liked about it was that it showed you a blank page and all you had to do was to put your fingers on keyboard and just start typing. It was, in a word, unobtrusive.

Unfortunately for WordPerfect, it lost its dominant position after it failed to come up with a decent version for Microsoft Windows. Microsoft Word [for Windows] rapidly took over the market and WordPerfect was no longer the standard word processing app by the mid-90s.

You’re probably wondering what this has to do with the price of eggs. Well, I’ll tell you. The beauty of WordPress is that it’s unobtrusive. When you want to write a post, you simply click on “Add New” and you’re presented with a blank screen. You don’t need to be computer savvy. You don’t need to take a course, read a manual, or watch a whole bunch of YouTube videos to figure out how to write and publish a post.

Well, it used to be that way, anyway. Flash forward to 2020 (one of the worst years in the history of the modern world). The folks at WordPress decided to come up with something new. They introduced the Block editor. For a while, after WordPress first announced its Block editor (formerly called the Gutenberg editor), it maintained its so-called “Classic” editor for those of us who were used to and liked the easy, unobtrusive way we created our posts.

But this past week, WordPress officially retired its Classic editor and now requires us to use the Block editor. We are forced to learn a whole new paradigm for creating a post. And if you happen to use a smartphone for your blog, fuhgeddaboudit. The Block editor just doesn’t cut it on the small screen.

I’m just a hobby blogger. I blog because I like to write. I enjoy expressing myself on what matters to me in the world around us, dabbling with short fiction, and interacting with other bloggers. I don’t need a whole lot of fancy bells and whistles for my blog. I just want to be able to open up a browser on my iPhone and use its virtual keypad to tap away at whatever comes to mind, to add an image or two, maybe to put in a link here and there, and then to publish my post. Easy peasy, right? Not so much, anymore, I’m afraid.

There are a few “backdoors” to the Classic editor that remain available. WordPress claims that, for those of us who like the Classic editor, they have given us the “Classic Block” in the Block editor. Have you tried that? On a smartphone? It sucks.

WordPress offers a a plugin called “Classic Editor” that allegedly restores the Classic editor as your default editor, giving you the ability to bypass (or ignore) the Block editor. But in order to install the plugin you must upgrade to the Business Plan, which costs $25 a month. I’m retired, I don’t have or run a business, I’m not trying to use my blog to promote or sell anything or to make any money off of my blog, so I certainly don’t want to spend $300 a year for the Business Plan when I don’t have a business.

Alternatively, you can, as I am doing now, use the Classic editor on the “/wp-admin” site. And while it’s better than the Block editor, it is a bit more difficult to use on an iPhone than the version of the Classic editor that WordPress just took away from us. I’m wondering how long it will be before WordPress dumps this version of the “Classic” editor, as well.

Blogging on WordPress is starting to feel more like a burden and less like fun. I don’t know if I want to put up with the hassle of trying to learn a whole new paradigm for blogging, or to jump through hoops to be able to write and publish my posts, especially when I use an iPhone for blogging.

So as much as I hate to say this, I’m announcing that, after this month, I’m going to take a bit of a hiatus from blogging. I’m not abandoning my blog, I’m just not going to post as often as I do now. Maybe not even daily. I’m going to end a few of my prompts, like Fandango’s Provocative Question, Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge, Fandango’s Who Won the Week, and Fandango’s Dog Days of August prompt (which was scheduled to run only through the end of this month, anyway).

I have scheduled my daily FOWC with Fandango prompts through August 31st, and I haven’t yet decided if I will continue to post those after that. I also haven’t decided whether or not I will stop Fandango’s Friday Flashback.

This really breaks my heart because I love blogging. I love interacting with all of you and I will miss this — and you — terribly. But as the song goes, you gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, and know when to walk away. And when the thrill of blogging on WordPress is gone, it’s time to fold ’em.

Blogging Insights — How Tech Savvy Are You?

July 27, 2020July 26, 2020Fandango19 Comments

In this week’s edition of her Blogging Insights series, Dr. Tanya wants to find out about our tech cred. She wants to know…

How technically savvy are you?

Back in the day I used to consider myself to be reasonably savvy when it came to computer hardware and software. I was able to work magic with MS-DOS and master all kinds of DOS-based PC software. And then Windows was introduced and my level of tech savvyness became the ability to simultaneously hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot the damn computer.These days, my iPhone is my primary device for most of my computing, communications, and blogging needs and if I run into technology issues, I usually just turn my iPhone off and then back on again and whatever the problem was is miraculously addressed.

Did you launch and set up your blog on your own or did you need help with it?

I did it on my own, but it’s pretty easy to do that with WordPress.

Do you feel that it is more important to have a flair for writing or to have good computer skills to be a successful blogger?

I’m not sure I know what being a “successful blogger” actually is, since each of us has our own way of defining blogging success. That said, by definition, blogging requires the use of technology. Thus, I think you need at least some basic computer (or smartphone) skills to be a blogger. But having the ability to write posts that are articulate, interesting, informative, engaging, and witty is the key to being an effective blogger. And, in my humble opinion, having decent skills in grammar, spelling, word usage, and punctuation helps a lot.