Amazon has no "not delivered" option

If an item from Amazon has not been delivered, but Amazon says it has been delivered, there is no option provided on the "returns" page to account for this.  I had to ask google what I should do, and it brought me to a page which suggests I should wait, look around, and look for delivery stickers.  Then, if 3 or more days have passed to "contact" Amazon.  It does not give any information how to "contact Amazon."

Normally Amazon delivery through Amazon is quite reliable, and they take photos to prove their deliveries.

But if another carrier is used, they do not take photos, and it appears Amazon simply takes their word for a successful delivery.  It's also possible that Amazon might not understand what the carrier is actually telling them.  (Later evidence suggests that's exactly what happened.)

(This has happened to me before...  That time, the product was eventually delivered a week late.  This time I am already over a week after the original "attempted" delivery, but only 3 days after the supposed "actual" delivery, and there has been no box, notice, or anything.)

*** Update: It seems that my formerly "delivered" item is now being shown as a return.  So I think what happened is that it was damaged in shipment which was detected by the carrier, and they returned it to the sender.  When Amazon was previously saying it was "delivered" it was not delivered to me but back to the manufacturer.  Then the manufacturer processed it as a credit, and it seems that Amazon got that message.  So I'm good, except this was supposed to be a replacement, and I still need one, but so far I've only paid and been refunded so it looks like I have to start all over.

Photos Could Not Be Downloaded

 When I try to download the photo I need to complete my blog post today, I get a message box titled:

Photos could not be downloaded.

With the additional information below stating:

Photos could not be downloaded at this time due to an error.  Please try again later.

It's remarkable how opaque this "information" is.  What kind of error, and by whom?  It's basically telling me nothing I don't already know, except that the "try again later" qualification at least sounds hopeful.  But how long should I keep trying until I try to get support, or perhaps even an attorney?

One might wonder if it is one's own error.  Perhaps the iCloud session had timed out.  No, apparently it hadn't, I could go through all my other information, scroll through my photos, and then I even discovered I could download other photos.  Just not certain photos I had taken last night, almost 12 hours ago.

Ok, the particular photos in mind were actually RTA images stored by Analyzer.  But I just finished downloading a bunch of those from last night, it just balked with the curious error message when I got to the last few.

So I downloaded some other images, then about half an hour later found I could download 2 of the photos I had been needing.  But not the last two.

I'm still waiting for those to get out of jail or whatever it is that Apple will only explain to me in the vaguest terms.

All this brings to mind a principle I've been advocating for a long time.  Local is best.

It's much better to have local storage (and computing) on your own local devices whenever possible.  Then it can't be denied for one of a multitude of reasons, some technical, some administrative.  Basically, you can't trust anyone else to deliver information to you when you need it.  For all that kind of information, or basically everything of significance you need, you need to have your own local copy.

But what if your own devices fail?  If it's the storage that has failed, it should be provided by your own local backup, of which you should have at least 2.  Then one more non-local backup.

If it's the computing hardware that has failed, or you can't use even that for some administrative reason, then you can't do anything anyway.

Following this philosophy, I had never used cloud anything by choice, until required to by Apple, because my Apple iPhone would no longer "trust" my Apple computer running (by my choice) an older Apple OS.

This is the year I plan to buy a new Apple computer, grandfathering my old computer with it's old OS in place.  But until I do that, I've needed iCloud to bridge the gap and still let me work with my photos.

And I have generally not liked it at all.  I vastly preferred downloading my photos directly to my own computer.

One plausible theory is that Apple must clear any images that were not made by the iPhone camera following some protocol that ensures it is not being used to transmit illegal information such as child pornography.  And for some reason, the server that performs that checking is bogged down, so it can't approve your image yet.

Update: the problem seemed to have gone away immediately after pressing the "refresh" button on my Chrome browser.  That brought me back to the home page (where'd I'd been before...but possibly only from cached copy).  Thence I selected photos and the desired images could be downloaded.

This still isn't a complete explanation of why my files were essentially unavailable for download even when I was able to download all but the last ones.

 

Apple iCloud Login Finally Understood

Whenever I try to log into iCloud from my Chrome browser running on a mac, it has required 2 factor ID.  Every time.  I suppose that's to be expected...

But now I re-discover why logging into iCloud each time has been giving me fits, sometimes taking an hour to resolve, if I haven't given up.

When I open up iCloud in Chrome, it shows me a menu giving me just 2 options.

Manage Devices and Find Devices.

Well those weren't what I had in mind, actually.  What I wanted to do was access my photos from my computer, that's all.  And going down either choice simply leads to endless nothing.

But the problem was, that when the page opened up it was asking for two factor identification, and it was asking me to enter the code they had texted me, but the browser scrolled down to the very bottom of the dialog box, helping you to find your phone to get the code that had just been texted to you.

I don't know why the browser scrolled to the bottom of the page rather than staying at the top so I can see what's actually going on.  But it's happened to me every time (and taken a long time for me to 'remember' the problem, though I figured it out every time before, but only after a long chain of trying everything else which made it hard to remember.