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4B Daily News – Thursday, July 26, 2012 FEATURES Upset with grandparents Dear Annie: I am 33 years old and fed up with how distant my family is. I am disappointed with my grandparents for the way they behave. I grew up around them, but they moved to Arizona when I was 19. Annie's I thought we were close, but it seems we are growing further apart. Sometimes they are in our town for several weeks, but we only hear from them once or twice. One would think they would set a better example for maintaining family ties. They recently came back for three weeks, and we didn't know they were in town until halfway through their trip. They took us out to eat and casually mentioned that they are taking my two aunts and two of the grandkids to a resort for three days. We weren't invited. In fact, whenever they are here, they focus all of their time and attention on one daugh- ter and her kids and forget the rest of us. Mailbox by Kathy Mitchell and Marcy Sugar to your grandparents and tell them how much you miss them and how their favoritism is hav- ing a negative impact on your feelings and their relationship with your daughter. It's not a ''demand.'' They cannot change their behavior if they are unaware of it. It may take some extra effort for them to remember this, and it's OK to prompt them when necessary. Also, don't hesitate to take the initiative whenever you want to speak to them. Dear Annie: I know this is a bit out of your league, but I don't know who else to ask. My son is a university student. His major requires that he take several math classes. In every class, the pro- fessor is his worst teacher of the semester. They don't explain any- thing, and they don't give feed- back on tests or quizzes. As a result, he does poorly. I thought it was just my son or My grandparents are getting older and won't be around forev- er. I really want my daughter to meet all of her family while she has a chance. How do I change this? Is it even worth trying? It's not really the same if they call more often only because I demand it. — Donny Dear Donny: You should talk that university, but he now is tak- ing a make-up math class at our local community college. He says the same thing is happening with the professor there. What is it about college math professors that makes them unfeeling, unhelpful and uncaring? Why can't universities get them to treat their students better and be more helpful? — Cape Coral, Fla. Dear Florida: While we are certain some math professors do not explain things as clearly as they could, when this happens with every professor, in every environment, we have to assume your son is more than a little math-challenged. As a college student, it is his responsibility to find a way to understand the material. Instead of blaming the professors, suggest to your son that he get some remedial math assistance. He should be able to find a tutor on campus. Dear Annie: ''Disappointed'' needs to grow up instead of com- plaining that she is now left to buy her own honeymoon lingerie because her bridesmaids haven't offered to host a shower for her. Oh, boo-hoo! It is not mandatory that anyone host a shower for her. Perhaps she chose really Pinched nerve is the culprit in hand numbness DEAR DOCTOR K: I'm bothered by numb- ness and tingling in my little finger and general weakness in my right hand. Could I have carpal tunnel syn- drome? DEAR READER: Based on your descrip- tion, I'd say you have cubital (not carpal) tun- nel syndrome. Another name for this condition is ulnar neuropathy. expensive bridesmaids dresses, shoes, etc., and her attendants are already financially overextended — and they are hosting a bache- lorette party. But rather than focus on the positive, she prefers to be upset about the lack of a shower. Grow up, Bridezilla, and thank your bridesmaids for what they are doing for you. Buy your own honeymoon lingerie. A wed- ding is not about the gifts and the parties. — California Dear California: Yes, but you are being a bit hard on the bride. She wasn't demanding a shower. She was simply disappointed not to have one. Annie's Mailbox is written by Kathy Mitchell and Marcy Sugar, longtime editors of the Ann Landers column. Please email your questions to anniesmailboxcomcast.net, or write to: Annie's Mailbox, c/o Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254. BY OMAR L. GALLAGA MCT Beyond organizing: Storing and preserving those precious photos and videos your files online. Last week, we talked about sorting and orga- nizing digital photos and videos. I confessed that I've been over- whelmed and underpre- pared in dealing with our expanding family archive. dates, put the file name there, too. Some print- ing photo services like Snapfish offer to auto- matically backprint the file name. Take advan- tage of that. You could also store But I think I'm get- ting back on track with organizing. Now, I'm thinking about where to store those photos and videos and how to pro- tect them to make sure my children will have easy, permanent access to what we've shot. Last week, I men- tioned Sally Jacobs, a professional archivist with experience at the Library of Congress and the Wisconsin Histori- cal Society. Her web- site, practicalarchivist.com, is a good place to start if you're thinking about preserving your photos and videos. some valuable and sim- ple tips that I plan to use immediately. The first is analogous I learned from her Jacobs also proposes the "3-2-1" rule: Three copies of a file in two different format types in more than one location. For example, have copies of your photos on your computer hard drive, on a DVD and on a photo website. Saving in multiple formats is especially important for videos, where the com- monly used file formats seem to change more frequently. Finally, keep some of these copies somewhere other than your home should dis- aster strike. • Backups and safes to keeping a precious family album close to the front door in case you ever have to flee your home in an emer- gency. Jacobs suggests culling the photos and videos we're most likely to treasure and preserv- ing those first. "At the very minimal amount of messing with your photos, you select the best ones. That's so easy! The best ones stand out," Jacobs said. Before you deal with the rest of your digital files, make sure these high-priority photos and videos are backed up first: Copy them, get them printed, share them with family. "How does an image survive long-term?" she asked. "Because it's reproduced the most. It's a numbers game." Jacobs has a tip that will help you find digi- tal copies later of the photos that you're print- ing now. In addition to labeling the back of photos with names and DVDs, USB sticks and external drives with massive amounts of space are all cheap methods for backing up data. And they can be great ways to protect photos and videos. External hard drives in particular have gotten so cheap and so roomy that you can probably store every bit of data you own for $50-$100. But as Jacobs says, Blank CDs and those external drives and DVDs won't survive if your house burns down. "It's great that you backed everything up, but not so great if it's melted," she said. You could store your • Cloud storage, photo sites and online backups This year, Microsoft and Google introduced Internet storage ser- vices called SkyDrive and Google Drive, respectively. Each gives you a sizeable amount of data (7 gigabytes for SkyDrive, 5 on Google Drive) for free. They're competing with a company called Dropbox, which has for a few years offered 2 gigabytes of free stor- age (plus more free space if you jump through a few hoops) in an easy-to-use, mobile- friendly service. for keeping files online if you don't mind trust- ing your data to so- called cloud storage. If you go over those stor- age quotas, each service offers much more space for a fee. All are good options • Printing and (the great) beyond As you're archiving photos and videos, make sure they're still readily accessible. What's the point in pre- serving them if you can't view them easily? The old shoebox full of photos doesn't have to be just a memory, either. Don't be stingy about printing your photos on good paper. Check packages of photo paper for an idea of how long your print- ed images might last. And not to get mor- like carpal tunnel syndrome, is a "pinched nerve" prob- lem. The affected nerve is the ulnar nerve. That nerve starts in your neck, enters your arm, and passes through the inner side of your elbow (behind your funny bone) on its way to your hand. In fact, when you hit your funny bone and feel a shooting pain down your arm and into the hand, it's because you hit the ulnar nerve, not the bony cradle that the nerve passes through. Cubital tunnel syndrome, Dr. K by Anthony L. Komaroff, M.D. The ulnar nerve passes through a tunnel made of fibers (the cubital tunnel) en route to your hand. If the tunnel gets narrow, it puts pressure on the nerve. This pressure causes numbness, tingling, weakness or pain in your ring finger or little fin- ger. (In contrast, the more common carpal tunnel syn- drome affects the thumb, index and middle fingers.) Cubital tunnel syndrome can also cause your hands to become weak and clumsy. Tasks that require you to when seated. Also avoid keeping your elbow flexed more than 90 degrees, or repeatedly bending and straightening your elbow. Try sleeping on your side with a pillow supporting the entire length of your arm. Try wrapping a towel around your elbow or wearing a splint at night to keep it straight while you sleep. If you can't avoid bumping your elbow and causing pain several times a day, try wear- ing a soft elbow pad to pro- tect the nerve against such trauma. Medications to reduce swelling may help. We have more actions that may have trig- gered the prob- lem. For instance, switch to a headset- style phone and remove arm- rests from your office chair. Avoid leaning on your elbow while driving or information on pinched nerves in our Special Health Report, "Hands." (Learn more about this report at AskDoctorK.com, or call 877-649-9457 toll-free to order it.) extend and flex your elbow repeatedly can irritate and inflame the ulnar nerve. Leaning or resting on your elbow for long periods can also put pressure on the nerve; so can holding a phone to your ear for longer periods each day. Sleeping with bent elbows may also aggravate the problem. The most effective way to treat cubital tunnel syn- drome is to change the Most people improve with the conservative approaches I discussed. If you don't, your doctor may suggest surgery. The most common type of surgery is ulnar nerve release: The sur- geon cuts open the tunnel that is pinching the nerve. But it would be unusual for me to send a patient with cubital tunnel syndrome (or ulnar neuropathy) to a sur- geon. Usually, the simple approaches do the trick. Dr. Komaroff is a physician and professor at Harvard Medical School.To send questions, go to AskDoctorK.com, or write: Ask Doctor K, 10 Shattuck St., Second Floor, Boston, MA 02115. DealFlicks aims to fill bid, but think about what would happen to your digital photos if you're no longer around to manage the archive. Jacobs says many fami- lies are too afraid to dig into someone's digital files after he passes away. drives in a fireproof safe or buy a fireproof and waterproof external hard drive. I've seen such devices from com- panies like ioSafe for about $200 for a 2-ter- abyte (more than 2,000 gigabytes) drive. Of course, that won't help if you're burglar- ized. A better strategy might be to keep your files backed up at home and to put your most precious photos and videos on portable dri- ves stored away from your home (at a rela- tive's house or in a safe- ty deposit box, for instance). If you have a modest photo and video collec- tion, you could keep a complete archive in the cloud for free, easily accessible from any web browser or from mobile apps. If you have a slow Internet connection or limits on your data consumption, this may not be the best strategy for you. Other services like Carbonite, CrashPlan and Mozy offer more comprehensive backup plans at varying prices. Some people keep copies of their pictures on photo services like Flickr, SmugMug or Google's Picasa. The advantages here are that your images are easy to access and share with others. On the minus side, it can be unwieldy to manage a large photo or video collection on these sites and you never know if they'll be around in five, 10 or 20 years. She suggests keeping a clearly labeled drive just for photos and videos. At a minimum, make it easy to find these digital memories on your computer. A folder named "FAMILY PHOTOS IN HERE" would be hard to miss. MICRO: WHEN IS IT 'IRL?' DIGITAL SAVANT defining IRL, a com- mon online acronym that means "In Real Life." As an increasing amount of our time is spent in email, texting or on the web, "IRL" is used to differentiate anything that happens offline and away from the gravitational pull of the Internet. It's also used in video gaming. Online, you could decimate villages as a brawny orc named Slag- mar, while "IRL," you might be John Toe, podiatrist. This week, we're Read more technology news on Omar L. Gallaga's blog at austin360.com/digitals avant. exactly how many empty seats there are on any given day in movie theaters. But if his Oakland-based startup DealFlicks is successful, whatever seats are empty will be filled. The company, which offers movie tickets and conces- sions up to 60 percent off, launched in April. So far, they have signed up four cinemas. "I would love to have something ... blow up and do real- ly well," Wycliffe said. The effort has entailed 60-hour weeks for Wycliffe and his partners, Kevin Hong and Zachary Cancio. While Cancio works on the DealFlicks website, the oth- emptied movie seats OAKLAND (MCT)— Sean Wycliffe does not know ers are busy trying to pierce the rings of staff that surround movie owners, or hunting them down at conventions. Even- tually they're hoping to raise as much as $1 million from angel investors, Wycliffe said. So far they have raised $50,000. They haven't charged for DealFlicks yet but will begin taking a 10 percent cut off tickets sales. "Right now we're just bootstrapping," said Wycliffe, sitting at an Oakland cafe. He graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in 2010 with a bachelor's degree in economics instead of his original choice, business and math. "I didn't want to kill myself as hard," he said, adding that he regretted not having taken more computer classes in col- lege. More tech know-how, he said, "would have been worth killing myself for." The idea for DealFlicks originated during a matinee in 2010 — maybe "The King's Speech," Wycliffe said. Empty seats surrounded him. "All of a sudden the light bulb clicked," he said. "Why not do a Hotwire for movies?" Instead of hotel rooms, DealFlicks would discount unsold cinema seats instead of empty hotel rooms and flights. But finding someone to build the site proved to be the greatest challenge, said Wycliffe, whose role models might seem like an unlikely duo outside of Silicon Valley: Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates and microcredit entrepre- neur Muhammad Yunus, a fellow Bangladeshi. Wycliffe lost his first partner to the tech boom. "So that was kind of programmer No. 1," he said. By the time his second programmer turned out to be a disappointment — and Wycliffe learned some coding on his own — it was late 2011. He started thinking about business school instead of movie seats. He had since founded Project Pueblo, a nonprofit that tries to improve economic and living conditions, most recently in April, among the Navajo Nation in Arizona. Then a finance-minded friend, Hong, 27, joined DealFlicks. who revamped the system for this month's launch. "It's just five times better," Wycliffe said, pulling up the site a day before it went online. The site gathers data from the movie theaters websites and displays available deals. The catch is that users only find out which showtime they will attend after they pay. The model makes planning a night at the movies problematic. After losing a third programmer, Hong found Cancio,