Twitter Trouble

There is so much to learn how to do these days. I have decided that it’s better late than not at all and am trying to get a better understanding of how to use social media. I bought an Idiot’s Guide to Social Media while ago. Now that I think about, it’s more like a couple of years ago. All that time it has been sitting on the couch waiting for me to crack it open.

So, yesterday I did. As I read through the topics, I wanted to know all of them and preferably all at once. I threw starting at chapter one out the window and jumped around looking at different topics.

Of real interest was Twitter. I have a Twitter account which apparently picks up my Facebook posts, but I wanted to know how Twitter works and how to use it better. I remembered that Linda Hopkins had sent me a Twitter tutorial a while ago. Again it is actually years ago. It made me sad to realize that it has been just about two years since she was hit by a car and died. It’s still a shock and I mentally hear the phone call all over again that I got from one of the people in my knit and crochet group and get the same sickly feeling I had in my stomach.

I’m sure that Linda would be glad to know that all her generous and thoughtful gestures live on. The email turned out to have a link to a You Tube video. I watched it and learned quite a few things I didn’t know.

Armed with my new knowledge I signed into Twitter and went through changing some of the settings. It all was easy and I saved them. I decided to change my photo. It seemed very straight forward and I followed all the prompts and finally a message said I’d successfully added the new photo. Only, I hadn’t. Now there was no photo, just an empty white circle. I went through the whole process again with the same result and then a bunch more times. I began to get annoyed seeing how the time was going by. It’s the thing I hate about all the computer stuff. You can go in circles forever without seeing what, if anything, you’re doing wrong.

I remember when I got my very first computer in the 80's. My brother is and was a wizard with computers. He was even involved with the start of the Internet. He was visiting and took me to Egghead Software which also sold computers. It was like he was talking a different language as he spoke to the clerk about motherboards and such. My brother set the whole thing up and installed WordPerfect and then he went to bed.

As an aside, before I got the computer, I kept asking my brother why I needed one and he told me that the difference between using a typewriter and a computer was the difference between doing the dog paddle and flying. It sounded good to me.

After my brother went to sleep, I was anxious to try my new toy. It had a gray screen and I think 10 some kind of bytes as memory. He had shown me how to open WordPerfect. I typed in what I thought was the correct command, but I got an invalid path message. I tried again and again and again, getting nowhere until I gave up feeling totally frustrated. In the morning I found out that the problem was that I had put a slash going the wrong way in the command. Why didn’t the computer tell me that?

Back to now and my Twitter problem. I finally gave up trying to change the photo on my desktop computer. Something made me go to Twitter on my phone and try to change the photo there. It worked instantly, except only with the photos that reside on my phone.

By then I was out of time to work on sharpening my social media skills and up to my armpits in frustration. Grrrr.

As another aside – my brother is a total brainiac when it comes to computers. He writes his own code to create whatever he needs. But it tickled me that he said he was having trouble figuring out his smart phone.

Next Tuesday is the day when ON THE HOOK officially is released.