Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

The Yellow Skies of Arizona

by

So this afternoon Tina and I are about to leave our favorite Tempe restaurant, after having loafed and grazed for a couple hours. It was chilly when we arrived — hence our taking up an indoor table instead of our usual patio throne. Peering through a window, she says, “It looks like it’s getting colder out there.”

And yes, it surely does seem to have grown darker. “Some cloud cover must be coming in,” say I.

But no.

What made the sky darker was smog.

The worst smog I’ve seen in Arizona since before my son was born.

Since he’s some 40 years old now, the filth in the air is thicker than it’s been in over 40 years! Literally, the sky has a yellow cast. The touristy little hills at Papago Park, just east of the freeway — within (reasonably healthy) walking distance thereof — looked hazy gray through the dirty air.

Cripes. No wonder my head is stuffed up to the point where my teeth hurt! This is the reason we left Southern California!

If I had a camper, I’d throw the dogs, a jacket, and a couple clean shirts into it and head for northern Arizona. Right now. And if I still had the ranch? Well, I’d prob’ly be living there these days.

Makes Prescott look better & better.

Dust Abatement Update

Yes. So…dust abatement in Phoenix: The Cox guy did show up yesterday afternoon. He did dig a trench across the alley and he did reconnect the cable line and while he was at it he saw the previous service dude had made a mess of the inside of the cable stanchion thing in the alley and so he attempted to fix that.

The phone is working again and my computer is more or less online.

So, yeah: dust abatement is apparently what we need.

Yarnell looks better and better.

Image:
Papago Buttes. Joe Flood from Washington, USA – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=745342

Another Brave New World “Benefit”

by

So this is charming: Amazon proposes that (for $250) you give them a key to your home and buy a two-way camera/monitoring device to put at the front door. In exchange, they will send their delivery people — who are side-giggers on a par with Uber drivers, from what I can see — into your home to set packages inside the door.

Well. In the age of package piracy, that sounds in theory like kind of a kewl idea.

But…

What about the dog? the cat? If some guy opened my front door today, Ruby would shoot outside and head for Yuma. No, she would not come back. No, she would not allow some stranger to catch her and put her back in the house. She would be gone. Permanently gone. Lost and gone forever, O my darlin’ Clementine.

If Amazon had owned a key to my front door when Anna the GerShep held forth, they would have had a contract deliveryman without a foot.

Hm. Whose liability would that be? Amazon’s, for coming up with such a dopey idea, or for at least not asking “do you have a dangerous dog laying around the house”? Or the homeowners’, for giving a key to some feckless delivery guy, knowing the dog would remove his foot if he tried to get in when they weren’t home?

Interesting legal question.

And…

Do you really want Amazon monitoring activities at your front door, or anywhere else around your house? Don’t we have enough Big Brother in our lives already?

My god, this stuff is amazing. Who would think Americans would be so hot on “convenience” and “kewl” that we would simply abdicate all pretense of privacy in our lives? It just goes on and on.

Brave new world? Weird new world.

When Electronic Payment…Isn’t!

by

Yesterday I discovered something that I had NO IDEA even existed. Did you realize that under some circumstances, when you set up an electronic payment through your credit union’s or bank’s BillPay function, the bank may send a check — that’s right, a paper check — instead of direct-depositing the payment electronically?

WHY one would want a function like this escapes comprehension. If you wanted to pay your bills with checks that take eight to ten days(!!) to be delivered, you’d get out your checkbook, write a check, tuck it in an envelope, address and stamp the envelope, and drop the thing in the mail. It defeats the whole purpose of electronic BillPay.

Oh, well. There it is.

And there it was, lurking in my credit union’s online pages.

So now I go to deposit a slew of checks others have mailed to me. By serendipity, I happen to glance at the list of creditors that I routinely pay online and notice  SIXTEEN-HUNDRED DOLLARS outstanding to Visa. Not only that, but last month’s bill, which should have been paid days ago, has not been paid, and Visa wants me to pony up $25 right this minute to avoid a late charge.

I call the credit union’s Visa vendor and ask WTF. The very charming young recent college graduate who answers the phone cannot figure it out, any better than I can, but she urges me to pay the twenty-five bucks. She says it can take eight to ten days for an e-payment to arrive. This, I reflect, seems to defeat another purpose: the purpose of specifying the date on which the bill is to be paid. In this case, I had set the electronic payment to hit Visa’s vaults a couple days before the due date.

We both study the system, but neither of us is really getting a grip on what is going on there and why Visa hasn’t been paid. She remarks that a check was sent. I say no check was sent: I arranged to pay electronically, as I always do. She says sometimes the CU will send a check instead of an electronic payment, and it says right there on the page that it takes eight to ten days to deliver a check. I say I never heard of such a thing, and what would cause them to do that? Neither of us can figure out what would trigger such a procedure. She seems to think it happens at random.

Holy mackerel!!! think I.

I jump into a pair of shoes, grab the car keys and a printout, and FLY out the door, headed for the credit union.

There I encounter yet another excellent young person. One thing you have to say about banking with a credit union: you DO get great customer service. And you get to meet quite a few admirable young men and women.

I explain the whole rigamarole again. New CSR agrees that the payment got made by check. She suggests that if Visa tries to gouge me for a late payment, I should come back, in person (ah, yes: another 40-minute drive!!), remind them of this side show, and they will forgive the gouge.

Just what I need to do with my time.

So I drive through the rush-hour traffic back to the Funny Farm, still puzzled. WHY would the CU randomly decide to write a check for an electronic payment? I most certainly DID NOT ask to have that happen. Making it happen requires a three-step hoop jump, and each step is very obscure.

First, you have to go to the section of your account — three pages into the website — to find the list of payments scheduled for the near future.

Next, you have to click on the yellow-pencil icon beside a current payment-in-waiting to allow yourself to “edit” the payment.

Then, you have to select “pay with check,” in the slot next to “type,” five lines down.

No way could you accidentally do this with a slip of the fingers. So I’m DEAD SURE whatever happened here was not a senior moment.

Whatever did happen, it surpasses annoying. It cost an hour or more of my time, driving through the homicidal rush-hour traffic to get not very much done. It may cost me a late-payment gouge and a ding on my credit report. And it got me freaking upset, no doubt pushing up the blood pressure. Again.

What is do be done about it? That also escapes me. If the CU can randomly decide, out of the blue, to convert an electronic payment to a snail-mail check payment, then that means I either have to schedule EVERY payment about 10 days in advance of the due date (which I can’t really afford to do: that will drain my checking account into the overdraft range before long), or else go online within a few days of EVERY scheduled payment to be sure it’s going to reach the creditor on time.

One thing’s for sure: I’m not giving Visa $25 out of this month’s living expenses as “protection” money against an unfair gouge. So that pretty much guarantees having to schlep back up to the credit union in another couple weeks. I’ll deal with that when it happens.

But it doesn’t make me happy…

Effin’ Brave New World…

by

Please. I want my covered wagon and my smoke signals back…  Seriously: SDXB was just over here and remarked that we live in the kind of dystopia that was science fiction and horror fiction when we were kids. We are so ensnared with our effing “conveniences” that they now dictate our lives and spy on us for any number of unknown and unknowable parties.

Anyway, I found out why, after a gangbuster spring, editorial business abruptly fell off to zero at the start of the summer. Google, it develops, arbitrarily brands various incoming messages as “spam,” whether you ask for that or not. In addition, Google has infiltrated my Apple mail, apparently picking up “trash” classifications and deeming them “spam.”

Now, here’s the problem. I have a G-mail address with my company brand. That is, it says “@mycompany.com,” not “@gmail.com” or “@mac.com” or worse yet, “@me.com.” This looks much more professional, and for several years it’s been all over my business cards, all over my stationery, all over my email, and enshrined in the “contact” pages at my business websites. A lot of people email me at that company address. In fact, I’d venture to say most people do.

Meanwhile, though, I do not care for Google’s email interface. Miraculous though it may be, I find it clumsy and annoying to work with. Also, I have other things to do than sign in, several times a day, to a G-mail account. Nor do I want to have to sign in to two accounts every day. So I have all the @mycompany.com email forwarded to my Apple email.

Yesterday, a particularly august friend (let’s call her Friend¹) emailed and asked if I had received a message (copied and pasted into her email) from someone to whom she had referred me. The potential client never heard back, and she let Friend know it.

Well. No. I hadn’t received it.

So I go over to the G-mail account, shoof around, and find this woman’s message in Spam. Along with Friend’s message. Google has decided an inquiry about my editing and indexing services is spam. And it also has decided Friend is a spammer; it decided that some time ago, because a number of her messages resided in Google’s spam folder. Come to think of it, so did messages from several friends. Including Friend², a raft of whose recent emails were sitting there unanswered.

I can’t find any lost messages from dozens and dozens of imagined would-be clients, but since there are only 80 spam messages in that account today (most of them solicitations for sex services by women with fake Russian-sounding names), I assume Google sets up the spam box to auto-delete every month or so. Indeed, the earliest message in that folder is dated September 27, so it must hold only about a week or two of back messages. Presumably, then, any messages that went in there over the Long Dry Summer are already gone.

To give you a clue what this means: the woman whose email was rescued by Friend¹ had a project worth somewhere between $1,200 and $2,000.

It appears that Google has shimmied its sticky tentacles into my Apple system. It’s not enough that this mega-monster corporation spies on you at every turn on the Web.  Somehow G-mail has gained access to Apple mail so that, in order for me to get into my MacMail account, I first have to sign into my gmail account!!!!!!!

This occurs whenever one of my Macs is turned off and rebooted. To get back into MacMail, I have to fire up the iMac, look up the complicated password, go to Gmail, paste in the password, and be online there.

I am sorry, but I DO NOT LIKE THAT ONE LITTLE FUCKING BIT!

I don’t know how this came about, but I’m pretty damn sure I didn’t ask for it because I hardly ever go to the gmail.com accounts because I’m not interested in Russian whores from Moscow. Not knowing how it came about, I can’t cancel it because I can’t find any function to make that happen. In fact, I’m pretty sure this is something that was installed unilaterally by Big Brother.

When I discovered this, I killed a couple of hours trying to convince Google that Friend¹ and Friend² are not spam artists, but in the meanwhile realized that there’s no way I can stop it from derailing messages from prospective clients. Didn’t do any good: a day later, everything I’d installed was un-installed, and it was back to intercepting and throwing out messages from the same people.

It looks like the only way I can make this stop is to delete my business’s Google account. That is NOT good, because as I’ve said, every piece of business-related correspondence and marketing has that address on it!

And the time suck! My GOD!!!!

To advise correspondents to use a different address, you have to get EVERY contact into a message’s address line. That’s not so hard — you can send an email to “All Contacts.” BUT…you can’t make Google automatically stick those ±200 addresses into the bcc line. To put all those private addresses into the bcc line, you have to cut them, a few at a time, and paste them into “bcc.” It won’t let you highlight all > cut all > paste all. Nooooo way! You have to select a few at a time to move them over.

Apple’s procedure is even more time-sucky. In MacMail, you have to put every contact in your address book into a “Group.” Then you have to sift through to delete duplications and out-of-date addresses. THEN you can send a message to tell them not to use the old address.

So I was on the phone to an Apple tech at 7:30 this morning when SDXB showed up at the front door and the dogs went screaming BATSH!T and he kept banging at them, driving them MORE batsh!t. No coffee. No breakfast. Not even a minute to clear my mind. She was trying to figure out the simplest way to get 200 Apple contacts into a single e-mail. I finally had to get off the phone to let SDXB in; she said she’d send the instructions, which I can download and try to figure out myself.

Good luck with that.

So it looks to me like the only way to disconnect Google from my private e-mail service is to go online and delete every. single. gmail. account owned now and in the past by me and my various businesses. This includes several accounts I set up for students in freshman comp courses, so there’s an eng101 account, an eng102 account, an eng104 account, an eng235 account, an eng315 account, and on and on and freaking ON. There are accounts for business enterprises that never flew and fell to the earth, stillborn in the nest, YEARS ago.

This is going to take hours. Maybe DAYS. And since Google presumably is already into my Macmail, there’s really no guarantee that deleting those accounts will take Google OUT of my MacMail. In fact, I do not know what will happen if I delete the gmail account that Google thinks I should sign into in order to have access to MacMail. It may simply block me from MacMail permanently…because, of course, you can’t sign into an account that no longer exists.

You know, I think all this stuff, taken together, defines dystopia. We are already living in Hell.

HOW do Brick & Board Stores Stay in Business???

by

Earlier in the day I made a Home Depot run by way of collecting objects needed to keep the shack standing. Among them is a new cover for the much-used Weber gas grill, which resides in the backyard in a block niche that backs onto the chimney. This space is open to the elements. Since I now cook almost exclusively on this grill, it behooves me to take care of the thing. So I like to protect it from the rain and heat with a heavy plastic cover designed to fit its particular shape.

This fine device consists of just that: three pieces of plastic sewn together, with some glue or similar goop to seal the seams — the way a light tent is built. Only without the struts.

Home Depot has them, all right. Price? Sixty to eighty bucks!

In the past, they’ve had cheaper knockoffs on the shelf, but I didn’t see any there today.

Good grief.

So back at the Funny Farm, it was straight to Amazon.com, where I found the desired knock-off, reasonably well reviewed, for $20.

Meanwhile, I’d bought a Goodyear collapsible hose — nice and lightweight and supposedly kink-resistant — and wanted to see how Amazon buyers had reviewed it before tearing off the package. And I could NOT find it there. It develops that Goodyear products are now made by Continental, a German firm.

So presumably the examples on Home Depot’s shelves are way, WAY out of date: i.e., no one will buy these hoses. Turns out there’s a reason for that: consumers commenting at HD overwhelmingly hate the thing. So….we’ll be keeping the receipt.

So you wonder how a store that sells outrageously overpriced products and hoses that receive 125 one-star reviews out of a total 135 reviews(!!) manages to stay in business.

Oh, wait: By driving all its competition out of business…

Fun & Games with Equifax

by

Amazing. A hundred and forty-three million people get all their private financial information stolen from Equifax, an organization that snoops into your business and accrues data about you without your permission — without encrypting said data. Adding to this latest entry in the Annals of the Floored and Flabbergasted, Equifax executives knew what was coming down the pike, so sold their stock in the company before the news hit the street.

So. If your personal information hasn’t already been stolen, chances are pretty good it’s gone now: 143 million is one in two Americans who may be a victim of this latest heist. What can you do?

You’re not helpless, interestingly enough: there are several strategies that will help protect against the effects of identity theft.

• Freeze your credit bureau accounts. You have to call all three credit bureaus to have each one apply a freeze. It ensures that no one — including you — can set up a new bank account, credit card, mortgage, or the like without your knowing about it.

This is probably the best move you can make. It does add some hassle to your life. Any time you want to take out a loan or open a new bank account, you have to un-freeze at least one account — usually Experian. This is made slightly less inconvenient by the fact that you can limit the period that it’s unfrozen, having it refreeze after x number of days. Which sounds good until you realize that you have no way of getting the people your dealing with off the dime: invariably, they don’t get around to asking for a credit report until after the un-frozen period ends.

• Monitor your credit card and bank account statements. You should be doing this anyway, but now that’s even more true. Check each statement promptly after it arrives for any transactions you don’t recognize, and if you suspect fraud, call the card issuer or bank immediately.

• Set up fraud monitoring on your accounts. Equifax proposes to give its victims a year of free fraud monitoring — conveniently, through its own subsidiary.

This is problematic. First, one year of monitoring ain’t much. If bad guys have your Social Security number, you don’t have a year-long problem: your problem is going to last the rest of your life. After that year, you’re going to have to pay for the privilege. And second, if you sign up for the service offered by Equifax, you have to give up your right to sue the bastards — or to be part of a class action suit.

There is some wrong-doing here: they knew about this on July 29, plenty of time for the higher-ups to unload stock. We proles didn’t learn that our personal data was on the way to the Dark Web until yesterday. So no: you do not want to forego your right to sue, and no: you do not want to agree to accept arbitration.

Paid identity fraud monitoring is probably unnecessary. You can accomplish the same thing for free or for very little by freezing your credit bureau accounts, keeping a sharp eye on your financial statements, and also checking the EOB (explanation of benefits) statements that come from your health insurer for any treatments you didn’t receive.

• For free, you can monitor your credit reports. By law, credit bureaus are required to give you one free credit report a year. Since three credit bureaus dominate the privacy-invasion landscape, you can arrange to stagger requests for reports, so that one comes in every four months, giving you a recurring view of activities reported to the credit bureaus.

The federal government has a free identity theft recovery program for people who believe they’ve been victimized. When you review the complicated, time-consuming steps required to respond to an attack on your identity, you realize exactly how serious this vast breach is. It is, in a word, a fiasco.