Day 13

When in doubt, try to hide the tree in the leaves piled up on the street. (Spotted in Sacramento. Kudos to my neighbors for getting rid of their late trees in a timely fashion.)

Day 7

Abandoned Christmas tree watch begins! Turns out tree pickup here was December 31 — a date which even caught me by surprise as my own tree went uncollected yesterday. I’ve already dealt with mine, but we’ll be following a few gems like this one over the next few weeks as they turn the most delightful shade of brown.

It really is the most wonderful time of the year.

Cortana

Finished testing about a dozen laptops for Forbes and I reinstall Windows at the end of the process each time.

If I have to hear “A little sign-in here, a touch of Wi-Fi there…” one more time I’m going to end it all.

Living in the Future

This guy at the gym is insistent that he does not have an account or a password on Amazon, although he “uses Amazon Prime every day.”

“I JUST DON’T HAVE A PASSWORD, OK?”

Resolving “Unable to retrieve conflict information from the sync server” in Itunes

Many promised fixes online, but this is the one that works. Just leaving this solution here for posterity: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4410910

“What I did was to rename the file called conflicts.synconflicts I renamed it to conflictsold.synconflicts the .synconflicts is the extension so you can’t rename that. I then restarted my computer, opened iTunes and connected my iPhone.

OS(C:) Users/(USER NAME)/AppData/Roaming/Apple Computer/SyncServices/Local/conflicts/conflicts.synconflict”

Actually you don’t even need to restart.

You May Already Be a Winner

I don’t consider myself particularly lucky, but somehow I am always selected to participate in a customer service survey when I call a business I deal with. Jealous?

Real Coin Offerings Have Made Less Sense

Now you can buy any one of the 10 million products in the Houzz Shop using our proprietary digital currency, developed for the home remodeling and design space.