Brief analysis: the multiple failures and little successes of yesterday's attempt to live-blog the fair and the train ride to it
Sunday, August 25, 2013 at 4:44PM 
First, I must admit my failures yesterday greatly outnumbered my little successes, with both success and failure illustrated by this image of Kalib headed toward the super slide. I knew from the outset it would be a challenge to get my iPhone through the day without the battery going dead. Before I started this whole iPhone/Instagram thing, if I began the day with a full battery charge the phone would still have decent charge on it come bed time, when I always plug it back in again.
If I use the iPhone camera with Instagram even a little bit, I always need a second charge. If I use if often, I might have to charge it three times a day; perhaps four. Still, I thought by being careful and turning the phone off for brief periods of time, I could get the essence of the train ride blogged and then do the same at the fair.
Maybe I could have done better than I did, but the on/off button at the top of my iPhone has become defective. It can take many, many, tries and several minutes each time I try to turn the phone off or on, or even to put the screen to sleep to save battery power while the phone is on.
So what kept happening was that I would I struggle for several minutes to turn the phone off, then, maybe just minutes later, would see a picture I really wanted to take, so I would struggle and struggle to get the phone turned back on again. When finally it would turn on, it would take awhile to recycle and get back to where I could activate the camera again, but by then the picture would, of course, be gone. This cost me many pictures yesterday - and each time it happened, it drained that much more of my battery power, most often without my having obtained even a single picture to show for it.
During the train ride, we passed through areas of varying 4G strength. We never lost the signal altogether, but there were several stretches where the signal was not strong enough to complete one or the other of my posts. I say "one or the other," because I posted everything twice - first, on Instagram, because that is where I make the file that I then put on this blog.
So, I would go through the whole process of Instagram, then, having drained my battery that much further, the Instagram would it fail to post. So I would have to redo it - sometimes two or three times - before finally it would take. I have discovered I need a stronger signal to post to this blog than to Instagram, so, even after I had succeeded in doing the Instagram, it could take a few more tries to post to this blog. The drain on my battery would be huge - in at least one case, a full 10 percent.
This greatly limited how many pictures I could take and how many I could post.
Worse yet, the iPhone Squarespace App has a TERRIBLE flaw. Sometimes, it will drop the picture and just post the words - especially if I have edited the words much at all. If I have gotten them right the first time and do no editing, then it seems the picture always posts as it should, but sometimes a text edit can knock the picture right out of the post. I discovered this flaw when I went to Nuiqsut, so I try to always double-check that the photo is still attached when I launch the post and then to triple check in my browser once it is posted. But this takes time and drains battery power.
So, while I did my best to double check that the photo had not been dislodged before posting and if it had been to reattach it, I took my chances and quit doing the browser check - it just consumed too much battery power.
And so, after I returned home, got some sleep and got up, I was horrifed to see several picture-less posts. Those posts made no sense with just words and no pictures. Jobe corny? What does that mean if the viewer cannot see the cob of corn?
As to the post this picture goes with, the conductor taking Jobe's ticket, it was missing altogether on this blog, but was there in Instagram. This must be my fault. I must have done the Instagram, then immediately tried for another picture and then forgot to come back and post it here. This left a big hole in the description of our journey. I have now placed this picture with the original words in proper sequence, as well as here.
Then there is the matter of entering text itself. This also proved costly in terms of time and battery power. I can enter text either by typing on Instagram's tiny, tiny, vertical keyboard or I can dictate. It takes both a strong signal and battery power to dictate. If the dictation makes a mistake, or several mistakes, then correcting those mistakes can wind up taking longer than if I had just done it by thumb. Worse yet, I did not carry reading glasses with me and so all the characters were hard to read. I could not distinguish a comma from a period, etc.
So I wound up with even more errors and gaps than usual.
The very worst thing, though, is that I just missed any kind of picture of the bubbles altogether, because they happened while my phone was getting partially recharged by solar power. I explained this last night and I don't want to explain it again, but, those boys were firing those bubbles so rapidly and in such overwhelming numbers, at anything and anybody. The light of the sun about to set was beautiful - perfect. I believe that was the best potential picture of the day.
And then all the bubbles stopped right when I got back with my partially recharged phone.
Still, despite all the failure, the day was a success. I got to spend it with grandkids, my son and daughter-in-law. Time spent with them always seems to be good time. As for pictures and stories, I missed a whole more than I got, especially of the fair, but maybe what I got is enough. Too much happens in life, and it flows past way too quickly for even the most prolific of us to capture more than a glimpse of it.
As to the top picture of Kalib headed toward the super slide, taken just before our brief excursion into the carnival rides, followed by our departure:
The success: just that I got it at all. And this is one of those images that is definitely better in full, horizontal, frame than in the Instagram square. In past years, this slide was the only "ride" either of the boys had ever been on. Between them, last night they may have gone on a total of only three rides and I may have been able to get a pic of only one of those rides, but for them just to ride was a graduation. Afterward, they wanted to go back to the slide and slip down it again this year, but the train was whistling impatiently. We had to leave, board and go.
The failure: I knew I would likely not have enough battery power left to post this and the shot of Kalib and his mom on the carnival ride and then still take a picture in the return train and post it. It had to be one or the other. So I chose the carnival ride.
Yesterday, I could not take the time or spare the battery power required to add categories and tags, so I just left them off. I am going to make a master category to link to every railroad/fair post I put up.
It will be:
Alaska Railroad/State Fair
I will add it to this entry on posting and then attach to the others when energy and time permits.
Reader Comments (8)
Bill -- what I don't like about instagram is that to read what you're up to, I have to go to the blog site, scroll down through many posts to find where I left off, then read backwards to get your narrative. I am a non-young person who is not up with the latest technological advances, so perhaps I am just a hopeless dinosaur. But I don'[t understand what you're trying to accomplish by adopting this new approach. I much prefer the old-fashioned blog in which you give us a new post every so often, which we can read in a linear fashion (and I don't mean linear = upside down).
It doesn't sound like you're having much fun with it either, so perhaps the universe wants you to go back to the old method.
Thank you, Kathy.
My blog was on the way to dying. It was taking too much of my time to go through the picture editing and blog-building process. Then I discovered that I could blog on the fly with an Instagram, which eliminated the need to sit down and take the time and so I decided to give it a try. My readership has actually been on the increase since.
I can see what you are saying, though, especially when I do a series of related posts that tell a chronological story, such as our trip to the fair. I might, at some point, experiment with some of these - do my Instagram posts on single story on the fly and then let them sit before I bring them together in a series in the old fashioned way.
I am not sure how the time would balance out -whether it would take about the same as I was experience, less time, or more.
The only way to find out would be to experiment.
That first picture on this blog has so much ambience! I feel like I've stepped back in time.
I don't mind going down the blog and then reading from where I've last left off upward. I love the snippets posted "as you go," often of things you would not be able to share in the old method of blogging. Since I know you don't have the time to do as much blogging the old way, I truly appreciate the "snippets!"
Little Sister, I thought the same thing. I felt like I was at a carnival long long ago. I loved it.
Because running out of power is not much fun for us readers. From the Apple Store I found this answer regarding batteries, "The iPhone 5 has a 1440 mAh lithium-ion battery, providing 8 hours of talk, 8-10 hours of internet use, 10 hours of video, and 40 hours of audio playback. iPhone batteries usually last the entire lifetime of the phone."
So how about an carrying an auxillary power supply that is listed as having about 4 times the power of the iPhone:
http://www.amazon.com/Jackery-External-Portable-Enclosure-Flashlight/dp/B00AANMVNQ/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1377541098&sr=8-7&keywords=auxiliary+power+for+iphone&tag=s601000020-20
Help us ... your loyal readers avoid 'Logbookwasilla' withdrawal.
Have a Great Day!
I am loving your frequent posts. The scrolling back is just the price we'll gladly have to pay. As you can see I start with the present and go back till where I left off. Probably should go in order, but I don't care, each post is excellent on its own.
I really enjoy your instagram posts, and I also sort of enjoy reading them "backwards"--makes it so whimsical. Your great sense of humor really comes through in the snippets.