A Mac and a grizzly

This was the winter wonderland yesterday, but now everything’s melted.

I have two stories for you today. Last Thursday I brought Ben for his weekly physio session. Ben complains bitterly but he is always in a chipper mood afterwards. As we walked down the hall to the 2nd floor rehab gym, there lying on the floor was a two-inch grizzly bear character. Ben was delighted with this find, but I told him we would put it on the bench in case someone lost it and was coming back to look for it.

Imagine my surprise when I got on the elevator on the 5th floor this morning and the same Grizzly was now sitting on the handrail inside. Ben loves to send his characters out into the world in different ways, and it seemed this Grizzly had had a bit of an adventure since last week.

Remember my post about my urge to buy the new iMac computer so that we could put the Proloquo2Go communication software on our iPad? We couldn’t modify it with our old Mac computer.

Well, we got the computer on Saturday. “You know why I have to do this, right?” I said to D’Arcy. “Yes, I know why you have to do it, even though I think you’re pulling at straws,” he said.

The keyboard is so tiny on the iPod that it’s challenging to use and I’m hoping the larger keyboard on the iPad will be easier. I think the picture symbols will be easier to see and with the latest technology, I should have a leg up in trying to customize it with our own photos. Ben's psychologist also recommended the iPad.

So we walked through the Eaton’s Centre carrying our big Mac box and then yesterday D’Arcy spent four hours on a support line with Apple because for some reason we couldn’t download the Proloquo app without losing the existing apps on our iPad. In fact, what I wanted to do was transfer the most recent backup from the iPod to the iPad but it at first proved impossible. You know how everything about a Mac is supposed to be intuitive and simple? Not so much for us!

In order to get Proloquo2Go on the iPad, we had to wipe our other apps, including the great Sign 4 Me app. After hours of instructions and comments like “That’s odd” from the support person, D’Arcy was rendered incapable of speaking -- about iPods or iPads or iMacs.

“I simply don’t know,” was the only way he answered questions last night.

I was later able to restore a backup from the iPod onto the iPad – minus the photo libraries. While restoring it, it said it could transfer some items and not all.

So now I have a ton of work to do to simplify the vocab and get real photos in there.

And Emma from Greece was correct that there is a way to 'turn off' the ability to delete the Proloquo2Go app, but we haven’t figured it out yet.

I have to thank Pam, a support person from AssistiveWare, who is trying to help us. Pam is the parent of a young adult with disabilities and I'm hoping will write us a guest blog.