📌 Making a QR Code is Easy
+ other things I spent more time reminding myself about than it took to do them
In “lessons I keep having to relearn” news, several of the things I’ve put on a to-do list/did not do/re-wrote on the next to-do list only took me a minute (or less!) to actually do.
They weren’t wins—more like reliefs—but I’ll take them, especially “in this economy.”
They include:
Making a QR code. This took me seconds to do, was free, and even let me choose a cute-ish design. It’s a good thing, too, as I’m pretty peeved at Adobe these days,1 and this is the only positive thing I can say about them right now.
Who’s the cutest? QR! Voicing questions. I was stressing about buying a clicker for presentations—which one? what should I look for?—and within less than a minute about freaking out vocally to my partner about it, I had one in my hands. I…had forgotten?…he was a professor many years? 🤦♀️
Now the proud owner of this sexy little clicker number. It even came with extra batteries! Finding free .psd templates for making very custom postcards, business cards, and bookmarks. I was Googling/unhappily using Canva (when I really wanted to do it on my own computer) when I realized: “Huh—the printing services probably have some?” They did. Of course they did. (Check out moo.com or vistaprint.com for lots and lots and lots.) Two clicks later, I was in business.
Sending an email to ask a question that I had been just moving from one list to another, instead of asking anyone who actually might know. This should have been obvious, but in fairness, I have been very tired lately. Haven’t we all?
And, okay, I didn’t actually have this on my to-do list officially, but…
Identifying a bird. I must have tried typing variations of “medium-sized brown bird with black beak and black legs” in Google image search for a good ten minutes before I went downstairs and got my birding guide. Bam—right away, there it was—a female blackbird. (🤯!)
I blame early concept color books for not adequately preparing me for the fact that this could be a blackbird.
I’ll take the little reliefs where I can. It’s a good reminder that sometimes it’s worth giving things a quick college try BEFORE adding them to the ol’ to-do list. Also, sometimes opening a book (or even your mouth) is faster than getting stuck on the Interwebz.
Your “sigh of relief” friend,
Elayne
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I purchased Adobe Creative Suite version (mumble, mumble) a while back, and when I did, it came with two installations, meaning I could install it on two machines simultaneously. Since I always dutifully moved it to each new laptop over the years, and followed the Adobe-directed process for removing it from the previous machine, there was never a problem with re-installing, and it was almost always only on one machine (except for the short window when I was setting up a new one, when it would be temporarily on two). However, the last time I tried this, I couldn’t get it to install, and the customer service representative said I would need to uninstall it from the other laptop before it could be installed on my newer one. I tried to explain how this made no sense, because my software specifically let me install it on two machines, and I followed the process that they, themselves, had set, but they insisted. So, then, dummy I am, I caved and uninstalled it while they were on the phone with me, to get them to fix it. Then—what a surprise—they went to talk to “a manager” and came back and said, “Oh, we don’t have access to the server anymore to unassign your computer.” So I went from having it on one machine to having it on none, and they claimed both that there was nothing they could do, and also that they had gotten me to uninstall it in good faith, and tried to play it off like I was taking advantage of THEM, in attempting to re-install it, actually. (I mean…oh, brother. 🙄) Then they had the gall to transfer me to subscription services, offering me a “discounted rate for the subscription service, for my trouble.” I am honestly just so mad at myself for falling for this. I should never have uninstalled it from my old laptop; now I’m stuck in Adobe subscription land, and honestly, the big difference seems to be that the software wants to AI everything (when that’s the thing I’m LEAST interested in doing, ever).
