It’s been well over a week since Father’s Day crossed our paths. I pretty much killed myself trying to get reviews out on some of the products that I have received over the past couple of months that I thought would be good gifts for Father’s Day. Since Father’s Day has passed, I have been slowing down a bit. However, I did want to talk about a challenge that I gave to my wife for Father’s Day.
I was contacted by a PR firm of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls with “a mission.” They would provide two $25 gift certificates, one for each store. I, or in
this case, my wife, was then tasked with spending that money on gifts for me for Father’s Day. What a great deal! My wife gets to shop (a HUGE passion of hers) and I get to reap the results of her work.
But I added to the challenge, I told her that the items had to be “high tech” so that my blog audience might appreciate the article that I write a bit more.
When I opened my gifts, I was actually pretty surprised with the results. She did cheat a little by spending a TOTAL of $50 but not evenly divided between the two stores. She spent $20 at Marshalls and $30 at T.J. Maxx.
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Note: This is a guest post from a colleague of mine, Harris Loeser, that I felt was an appropriate topic for my site but from a different angle that I have not really touched on: technology concerns for those in their golden years.
I just spent a long weekend moving my kids’ high tech Grandfather (my Dad)Â and low tech Grandmother (both 88 yrs old) from their condo of the last 15 years to an assisted living facility. In the course of this move, I re-learned one key lesson which made this move go relatively smoothly.
Allow me to explain that my Dad is not a technologist, but a lawyer and a gadget freak. So, he has three Macs, wireless, dynamic digital photo albums on the apartment walls, sets up his own Tivo, has his iPhone automatically synching with his Prius, and he knows the guys (and gals) at the Apple store by first name.
As most of you can imagine, moving house at 88 is fairly traumatic for many reasons, not the least being the disruption in carefully remembered locations of everyday items, both digital and physical.
In this case, we hired a “life transition” consultant who arranged the move and all the details of cutting their household belongings in half. This was done highly competently and with almost no glitches. 
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Recently I was plagued with having to repeatedly enter and re-enter my passwords on some of my email accounts using Apple Mail. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. I would get asked to enter when sending email from a certain account as well as when trying to receive email from a completely different email account. Other email accounts seemed to work just fine. The Mail application just didn’t seem to want to remember my passwords even though I clicked “Remember this password in my keychain” every time.
It turns out that to fix this problem, there is a very easy thing that you can do. While I cannot guarantee that it will work for everybody, it did work for me just fine. Here are the steps:
- Go to your Utilities folder and launch the Keychain Access application
- Under the Keychain Access menu, select: Keychain First Aid
- The Keychain First Aid screen will launch:
- Enter in your User Name and Password (this is the name that you use to log into your account or install applications on your Mac). If you haven’t set a password for your account, shame on you! When you are done with this fix, DO IT!
- Select Verify and click the Start button to check how all of your various keys check out. If there are any issues, they will be noted in the lower panel. Since I recently repaired my keys, the verification passed, saying “No problems found” (note: I blurred out some of the information):
- If any errors appear within the Verification pane (they will be in red I believe), simply select the Repair item and click Start. The repair process will run and hopefully correct any issues. Be sure to review the screen for details.
- Do the Verification process again just to be sure.
- Quit out of Keychain Access program
- Launch your Apple Mail application.
- Enter in any passwords that you are prompted for. Be sure to check the “Remember this password in my keychain” box.
- Exit Mail.
- Re-launch Mail and see if you are prompted for passwords as you were in the past. You shouldn’t be prompted again.
I hope this worked for you. If it did (or did not), please leave a comment as to what did (or did not) work.
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I was excited like many others to get the new Apple iPhone firmware 3.0 update last week. Installation was not an issue for me, even after coming from a jailbroken 2G (original) iPhone. That is, until I started looking for some of my applications. For some odd reason, there were several of my applications that had just disappeared. I finally found a fix which I will go into in a second.
Here are some of the symptoms and things that I tried first (gathered from around the web and from my own experimentation):
- Could not locate via Spotlight search – searching for the name of the app showed no results. It just wasn’t there
- iTunes showed that it synced – my iTunes showed that the application(s) were supposed to be synced
- Delete and Re-download didn’t work – I removed the application from iTunes by unchecking the box next to it so ensure that it wouldn’t sync next time. Then I tried to download it via my iPhone. The application would start to download but would hang and never fully install
- Purchase “free” application – I read somewhere that if you purchased a free application and tried the syncing again, that your missing apps would magically appear. This didn’t work for me.
- Not 3.0 compatible – some people suggested that the applications were not 3.0 compatible yet. This wasn’t the case for me because I knew someone who was using the applications in question with 3.0 without any issues.
- On another page – some people found their “missing” applications on another page to the right of the home page. This was not my case either and those apps on a different page would have shown up via a Spotlight search
- Re-sync numerous times – that was just something that I kept doing with no luck
So, after testing out all of the items, doing reboots and soft-restarts, I finally tried what eventually ended up working. And, it is really easy!
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I was contacted by a PR firm of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls with “a mission.” They would provide two $25 gift certificates, one for each store. I, or in
this case, my wife, was then tasked with spending that money on gifts for me for Father’s Day. What a great deal! My wife gets to shop (a HUGE passion of hers) and I get to reap the results of her work.
