Today’s post has good news and bad news. First though, I am going to add a new category tab in my blog taxonomy. Yeah that was really the first word I thought of. I’m not normal. Thank God. Anyway I want a category for tech type things. I am definitely very much interested in tech. I’ve worked with tech of many different kinds in my video career, solid state tech and info tech of many different kinds. I’ve forgotten more about both than most people will ever even know exist. Even in my fifties I still am interested in keeping up with the trends to some extant. Tech, especially info tech is constantly progressing. Ones understanding of and ability to effectively navigate requires constant training, refreshing knowledge, skills and equipment. So anyway I’ve decided the new category is going to be #tech.

The bad news is in relation to what I think was my last blog post. It regards the trouble I was having with my old iMac. I struggled with the application Adobe Lightroom Classic specifically. As I explained then I spent several days trying to figure out what was happening, and I believed I fixed the problem. It turns out that wasn’t true. I was still having pretty serious problems. I was really worried my workstation was starting to give up the ghost. When I bought this iMac in 2017 I built it beefy hoping to keep it good to go for a long time. And really the 8-9 years it has served me is admirable for any info tech type device. As previously said that is really old for a personal computer or other computing device. But it seemed likely it had started to fail.

The good news is my trusty iMac 2017 isn’t failing. I’m confident this time I’ve figured out the gremlin that was causing my and my computer’s distress. I’ll explain what the problem ended up being shortly. But first, I want to talk a little about the process, which I personally find interesting.

I started trying to trouble shoot about a week ago, last weekend. I spent hours trying things that I’ve done in the past to try and isolate the problem, rebooting, reinstalling, purging caches, adjusting settings and whatever else made sense at the time. All of these are things that I’ve done many times. Oh I forgot to mention I went to Google which brought me to the Apple tech forums, which I used as a guide. I didn’t want to try to get on the phone with anyone, which is one of the first things I would have done when doing this for a job, but that was when whoever I worked for was paying for good tech support. I can’t afford that and frankly don’t really need it most times. Occasionally the problem is not on my end of the but something remote that needs attention, which I requires sitting through low level techs moving you up the food chain, often for hours, before the problem can be resolved. The Apple forums had some good information and I thought I had fixed the problem. But during the week I realized my victory was short lived when I actually tried to use Lightroom to perform it’s function and it balked. During the week I didn’t have the time or energy to really dedicate to continuing my quest for normalcy. And sometimes a little time away from the problem can lead to a new outlook and epiphany.

My big epiphany as I started trying to figure things out this morning was to use Chat GPT AI to help troubleshoot. Hot damn! I can’t say enough good things about AI today. It really helped a lot. That robot was a competent trouble shooting tech-support-agent right out of the gate. AI is pretty insane. I’ve got a lot of mixed feeling about AI. But I can’t say enough good about how it helped me with this problem that had been plaguing me for the last week. I hope robots and humans can live together in harmony.

So what was the problem bogging down my iMac? Turns out it was a bad cable between my external hard drive where I store my photos and the main unit/CPU/iMac. Something so simple causing so much trouble. I took several steps with the AI before coming to that conclusion, but it really didn’t take more than an hour I think. Compared to the weeklong ordeal I that had brought me no relief it was nothing short of miraculous. Now I can play with my photos again! Happy day!

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