The Comfort of a Trouble Shared

They say that “a trouble shared is a trouble halved” and that “misery loves company.” I live a relatively trouble-free life; most of my miseries involve technology, and the last couple of weeks have proved to me how comforting it is to know that I am not suffering alone.

I recently acquired an Apple Watch (an insanely generous birthday gift from my husband). I’m still learning how to use it, and there are features I will probably never use or possibly never even discover (there’s a 365-page manual), but most of what I have discovered is truly amazing. Being able to get texts and even phone calls on my watch is better than having a Dick Tracy two-way wrist radio, and it’s even more astounding (even a little alarming) when my watch and both old and new iPhones (all within feet of each other because I’m sitting at my desk) all ring at the same time!

The app I am currently still fine-tuning is Activity, which allows you to set goals in three areas—Move, Exercise, and Stand—and try to meet them each day. Progress is displayed in the form of concentric rings.

The Move goal is stated in terms of calories, the Exercise goal in minutes, and the Stand goal in number of times you’ve stood and moved for at least one minute per hour. That last goal is pretty easy to meet because the watch reminds you it is “Time to Stand” if you’re falling behind. On days when I go to the gym or exercise classes, I have no trouble meeting the Exercise goal, and I have ended up reducing it so that my two-mile “Walk Outside” activity meets the goal as well. The watch tracks most activity pretty well: both distance and time for outside walks seems accurate. But the distance for inside walks (on a treadmill) is about 11% low, and the watch is seriously bad at counting flights of stairs climbed. I live in a two-story house and am up and down all day (often because I’ve forgotten what I went up/down for and have to go again), but the number is risible. And the watch doesn’t even try to track flights when I climb stairs for exercise, so I’ve had to tell it I’m using a stair climber. Still it’s interesting to compete with myself this way.

Another feature of the watch that had intrigued me, however, was sleep tracking. After a week or so of wearing the watch to bed, I decided I wasn’t confident in its report (not to mention that it was telling me stuff I didn’t want to hear—apparently I get hardly any Deep Sleep at all), so I’ve started leaving the watch on the charger overnight. But one of the factors in my decision was that, even though I had designated 9:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. as my sleep period—and enabled Sleep Focus, which is supposed to prevent any interruptions—the watch would wake me up in the middle of the night (sometimes more than once) with stand reminders! And even if I do get up, this activity doesn’t count toward my Stand goal, presumably because it takes place when I’m nominally asleep.

This makes no sense at all, of course, so I figured I must be doing something wrong. But when I googled the problem, I found a whole community of watch users (in an Apple forum) complaining about exactly the same thing. So it’s not just me, and I can stop worrying about it!

Similarly, when I recently renewed my subscription to the Kaspersky antivirus program, it entailed an upgrade from Kaspersky Internet Security to Kaspersky Plus. Kaspersky has an annoying habit of “forgetting” to block banner ads, so I have to open the program, turn that feature off and then back on again, then refresh the page where I want to block ads. One day I went to open Kaspersky from the icon in the Systray, and it wasn’t there. When I tried to start the program from the Start menu, it went into Neverland, using enough CPU to prevent anything else on the computer from working properly, and never actually loading. After several tries, it was back to Dr. Google, which recommended reinstalling the program, which I did.

But now a new problem has developed: when I start Windows, Kaspersky loads as expected, but instead of minimizing to the Systray, it opens the application window in the middle of the screen—and not even immediately but usually after I’ve started opening other applications, so it’s very distracting. It’s just one click to close it, of course, but this is not the way it’s supposed to work.

Back to Google. Again I found dissatisfied—even irate—users complaining about this very thing. Several of them mentioned that this was new (and obviously unwanted) behavior in Kaspersky Plus. One of them had even contacted Kaspersky support and been advised to set the program not to load on startup, which of course would be insane. Once again, however, I was reassured that the problem was not mine alone. I’m still annoyed, but at least I don’t blame myself.