LOL! This all turned out (well…so far) for the better.
My friend La Bethulia kindly gave me an out-dated iPhone, she having updated hers a couple times since she bought this one.
Hot diggety! All we had to do was clear all her data off of it and then get the thing to connect me, magically, to some sort of service. Which service, I have no clue.
Well, doesn’t that sound simple?
Well…no. Nope. Not at-tall.
Finally, after about a 40-minute wait, I got an Apple tech on the phone. She ascertained that the problem is, the phone not only is set up to take her secret code, it has to be confirmed with a fingerprint!
INSIGHT!
Well, we did find that one of the two codes La B. guessed was the passcode actually IS the passcode, so that’s progress. We now have an appointment over the noon hour on Monday to traipse to Scottsdale to try to get this done. Between now and then, I guess I’ll have to figure out what carrier I want, something about which I have no clue and no desire for a clue.
{sigh} I hate these technohassles.
So I’m hoping that by Monday I’ll have my very first iPhone, and that from there I’ll be able to learn how to work it.
Never could learn how to use the Android phone that was my first foray into the cell phone jungle. So we shall see. This at least will not cost me an arm and a leg: if it’s another FAIL, that will make it slightly less aggravating. But they say iPhones are the easiest of these gadgets for old buzzards to learn. AND Apple stores give lessons in working the iPhone. Free.
Okay, with any luck the Human is now recoveredenough to cope with another headache-filled day.
When the Apple tech left off on Saturday, we still had not solved the problem with my MacMail. This was after a total of around six or eight hours wasted on the phone, wrestling with it.
Yesterday he had something come up and took a day off work. So this morning I called his extension & left a message.
Meanwhile, yesterday along came a demand, in the part of the email still working, that I pay for the use of iCloud. I believe this to be phishing, because the sender’s email was not at apple.com or anything even vaguely resembling it. Not impossible, though: right now the only way I can get at my email is through iCloud’s server: somehow my regular MacMail account has been disabled. But whatever: I am NOT paying for iCloud, a service that I do not want and that I highly resent having foisted on me.
While I’m waiting for him today, I guess I’d better prepare a mailing list for a message I can send out from Gmail, telling all my friends and business acquaintances to deep-six the Macmail address and use one of the old gmail addresses. This REALLY pisses me off, because compared to Apple’s mail program, Gmail is cumbersome to use and a damn nuisance, and of course, Google wants to serve you ads. I don’t see them, because I use an ad-blocker; but presumably ads will be sent, in every message, to my friends and clients. Which I do. NOT. appreciate.
Even more than I do NOT appreciate Google spying on every word I transmit through my private goddamn messages.
And mean-meanwhile, in the headache department: The swimming pool repair company’s guys showed up at 6:30 a.m. to start jackhammering the old plaster off the pool.
WHAT a freakin’ racket! This is an all-day project: they’ll be banging at the pool’s gunite walls until late afternoon or early evening. It’s one bitch of a job, and one gawdawful noisy job. Its only saving grace is that it must annoy the hell out of the annoying neighbor behind me: revenge for the business with the flammable debris dumped behind the wall on the 4th of July.
The thing is, these guys — all Mexican laborers, nary a one of whom speaks English — are working completely unprotected. They have no ear protection, no eye protection, and only a bandana tied over the face to keep the fine, lung-cancer-inducing plaster dust out of their noses.
And that is fuckin’ inexcusable. What does it cost to buy your employees — or contract laborers, which is probably how these guys are paid — a few pairs of ear-plugs, some cheap plastic goggles, and nose masks? Exploitive bastards.
Trying to think of a tactful way to suggest this to our honored pool company owners, but failing just now to come up with any polite words. Maybe I could send them away until Swimming Pool Service and Repair comes up with some basic safety and health equipment?
That, of course, will entail having to hire some other company to finish the job…presumably also with unprotected and probably illegal workers.
Welp, I haven’t heard a thing from the Apple guy. So it’s off to compile a list that can be sent out from Google, and then say good-bye to Apple Mail.
The e-mail disruption of the past few days — one of many ongoing little fiascos — has meant that I have to retrieve my personal and business mail from the iCloud website, rather than from the application that resides on my computer. Thus every time I need to check on the mail, I get Google News flashed in my face, because long, long ago in another time and in another space, I set that URL as Facebook’s and Safari’s home pages. Well…that has become a bit counterproductive. When your nerves are feeling frayed, the last thing you want to read about is the three-ring circus in the White House.
But there’s a much larger and more universal problem with Google News than that. As an information source, it doesn’t cut the mustard. Why? BecauseGoogle’s bots spy on you, peering over your shoulder at the stories you pick and noting how quickly you go to them. It then helpfully serves you content it thinks you’d like.
That’s very kind, o’course. But what it means is that you read news in a bubble. You don’t get a full picture of what’s going on or of what people who don’t think just like you are thinking — possibly rational thinking that would give you a fresh point of view on issues. You get what you are. It’s like looking into a mental mirror. That’s because Google News isn’t selling news to you. It’s selling you to advertisers. And so it fits Google’s purposes — to say nothing of its advertisers’ purposes — to turn you into a sheeple.
Being forced to go to your Web browser every time you want to check incoming mail brings that factoid sharply into focus — or at least it should. And having the Orange Ringmaster’s latest inanities and menaces shoved in my face every time I want to see my mail really is beyond the pale. I like getting the news, but I would like to get NEWS news, not whatever infotainment or disaster-mongering Google thinks I will find amusing. The obvious solution, then, is to reset your browser’s default “home” page to some legitimate news source. But…which one? The best, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, have paywalls — they’ll string you along by letting you see four or five stories, but after that they block you unless you subscribe. There’s always NPR, of course, but it subscribes to its own agenda, which is just about as tedious as the right-wing agenda.
However, there’s an alternative, and for the nonce it’s free: wire services. In particular, UPI and Reuters. Wire services earn their pay by selling news reports to newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, and magazines. They don’t have to charge online readers to stay in business, and they’re less agenda-driven than most news outlets. Quite a few of them, understandably, refrain from running a news feed: they’re selling to customers, and random Internet users are decidedly not their customers. This is true, for example, of the Associated Press (AP) and the Canadian Press. AP does have an interesting blog, but it’s mostly photos…entertaining time-killer but not especially informative.
So… I decided to make Reuters the home page for both Firefox and Safari. It’s a great deal less annoying than Google News, because it doesn’t shove the latest outrages from Washington right into your face. One of the cool things about the Reuters site is that you can choose the topics you’d like to read about:
Browse the subject links that appear in the banner (each of which has its own set of related sub-topics), and you get a much broader and more informative selection of news reports than you do with Google News.
I’m including links to Reuters and AP in the right-hand sidebar’s list of news sources. Check them out: they’re sure an improvement over Google!
Customer service. That’s it. That IS the reason to pay more for Apple products. Seriously. Over the past three days, I’ve spent eight hours on the phone with Apple techs. All that time as been (heh) “free”: no one is going to charge me for the time four highly accomplished tech advisers spent on trying to make my MacMail work.
My mail program crashed, big time. Unclear why. Apple’s folk thought it was a hardware problem. A visit from Cox and God only knows how much for a new modem/router showed that it was not. Finally got to a boss-level tech who decided (we hope he’s right) it was a problem with iCloud, not with my hardware. Figuring this out over the phone literally took hours.
Could I have done without a catastrophic crash of my email system? Damn right.
Will I probably abandon the program, one way or the other? Yeah. I suspect that Google is going to be more stable. Right now I have messages forwarded from my business email account — which actually is a Google account, even though it doesn’t end with google.com. Messages from famadverts and funny-about-money at gmail accounts also forward to MacMail. They can, after all, be aggregated in a single Google account.
But…it has to be said: Google has exactly zero customer service. So…why would I want to do that?
WOW!!! It just does not stop: day after day after day after day filled with conundrum, catastrophe, and freaking disaster.
Yesterday? Yes, the thing on my hand is NOT ringworm; it is indeed cancer. Probably squamous cell cancer, which can be removed…but…but…
a) You thought melanoma was the skin cancer that could metastasize and kill you? Well…yeah. But so can the squamous cell variety. Not as often, though. Fortunately only about 1 percent of them do…but the way my life has been going, my version of the 1 percent figure may mean a 1 percent chance it won’t. b) Once you’ve had one of these things, you’re probably going to get more of them. You have to go in to the dermatologist every three to six months for a full-body check, now and evermore. c) Surgery isn’t exactly major (assuming it hasn’t spread), but it doesn’t sound like a helluva lot of fun, either. We’ll find out how much fun we’ll be having after the results of the biopsy come back. Oh, yes, and let’s not forget… d) They also cut off a tiny, extremely black mole from my sun-battered leg, which came up some months ago and has just been sitting there silently. Not a good thing, especially in these star-crossed times.
Okay. That was yesterday. Now we have fuckin’ TODAY.
Last night my email goes down. I’m on the phone with Apple for an hour. Supposedly fixed it. This morning: it’s down again.
I spent another hour on the phone with another tech this morning. She finally decided the problem has got to be with Cox.
Fortunately(?), I pay extra to get Cox tech support. Got on the phone with one of their guys: because my laptop’s computer has an advanced type of screen, this guy could not view my computer. He says he’ll switch me to another tech. Well, he doesn’t: he just switches me to a regular Cox CSR.
I spend another hour on the phone with her, as she climbs uphill doing battle with Cox’s fine technology. Systems are up and down on HER end, so she’s already having a bitch of a day. Finally she’s able to get the thing to run well enough to tell that the issue is probably my modem…you know, the damn thing they attached to my computer when they ripped out the land lines? All my phones are running on Cox’s answer to VoIP. Which I personally would call plain old VoIP, available for 4 bucks a month from Ooma.
Understand: that’s THREE HOURS of wrangling with techs and technology, and my email still isn’t working right!
Since I had this little fucker installed, over my dead body, last February, it’s only eight months old and it’s ALREADY CRAPPED OUT!
Fortunately, they signed me up to an expensive service contract, so having a guy come out here and fix it will be (heh heh heh) “free.”
That does it. Whenever I can catch my breath (WHENever????), I am going to buy an iPhone, take the classes to learn to use it, and shut down the damn fake land lines. That’ll save some money…or not: whatever I have to pay at least won’t be going to Cox!
A week from Digital Hell has left the Fat Lady barely treading water. God, but I do hate computerized time sucks. The background noise from Washington doesn’t help…
Two half-days — i.e., a total of a full eight-hour day — have been consumed on the phone with Apple techs. Can’t complain too much about that: it’s mighty nice that Apple has techs and allows them to spend uncounted numbers of hours helping customers to fix this, that, and the other snafu. I’ve lost track of the details — makes my head hurt to think too hard about this stuff. But the upshot was that after one of the techs decided that nothing would do but what we must re-install the Sierra OS on the MacBook (even though I told him that would cause a huge fuck-up), we got…yes, a huge fuck-up.
The current surviving upshot of that is that though the MacBook can read and store to DropBox, the iMac no longer connects to DropBox. When I inquired of DB techs how that might be fixed, I got a pages-long email filled with arcane instructions, not the first word of which do I understand. Truly: whatever it is they have in mind that I’m gonna do…I have NO idea.
So now I’m paying a hefty fee for DropBox’s storage and can access it only with one computer. The thing is, the iMac has an external hard drive permanently installed, to which Apple’s nifty Time Machine constantly backs up data. So that means the iMac should keep an up-to-date back-up of DropBox.
Except…now it’s not. Because it can’t “see” DropBox anymore.
So to keep that backed up, I have to schlep the Macbook into the back office and hook it up to an external drive and manually run Time Machine. This doesn’t take long, but it’s an effin’ PITA and I don’t think I should have to do that when it was working fine before.
Meanwhile, however, WordPress is about to pull the Number of All Numbers on its users. The WP that we know and love — and that operates all our blogs — is about to be dumped in the trash, to be replaced with a radically new system called Gutenberg.
This, obviously is going to represent a gigantic new learning curve.
Those of us who are sick of the brain clutter occasioned by the glories of computer technology do not welcome said development. And those of us who have had experience with earlier seismic upheavals know what to expect: If entire sites don’t crash (which they probably will), at best data will be lost. Probably lots of data.
Funny about Money has been online since 20 and ought-7. And y’know, I don’t really want to lose all that history.
Sure, I know: the nature of the Web is ephemeral. But damn it all! Writing this stuff and tracking down images and doing the research for some of the more solid pieces is work. Why should some tribe of computer jocks take it upon themselves to steal my work so that they can amuse themselves with fun new code?
By way of preserving the stuff for posterity, such as it is, I decided I would back up FaM not through BackupBuddy (whose product I suspect will be unintelligible once the program that generated the content goes away) but by copying it to Word and then, at my leisure, formatting it for print. And eventually printing it out and stashing it in a closet, where one day after I croak over my kid will find it and can, if he so pleases, feed it into his backyard firepit.
At least I will’ve tried…
This sounds like a much bigger job than it is. In fact, it only takes about a half-hour to copy out a year’s worth of blog content. But since we’re talking 11 years, that’s still ample time suck, thankyouverymuch. But at this point I only have one year’s worth of posts left to dump into Wyrd files. This at least will keep what content is left in a form that can’t be magically “disappeared” by the upcoming change.
And when I say “what content is left,” I kid you not. At one point along the line, either WordPress or Big Scoots, my current web host, unilaterally decided to delete all the images in SIX YEARS’ worth of posts! Yes. Without asking my permission, without so much as telling me. So everything predating the first quarter of 2013 is absent most of the images I inserted. Isn’t that super?
At any rate, at least the copy is still there.
Apple’s substitution of iPhoto with the irritating and practically useless Photos program effectively ditched images that were made before the current operating system superseded the far more user-friendly OS of yore. They may not have been erased, but they’re hidden in the system so deep I’ll be damned if I can find them. So even if I wanted to take the time to track down the deleted WordPress images and use them to decorate the rescued posts, it would be a daunting and probably impossible task.
One of the things I did learn to do, thanks to that fiasco, was to save images that go into current blog posts separately from Photos, but copying them to a folder on…yeah…DropBox.
How can I do without these hassles? Let me count the ways…
All of this has interfered with my usual routine little hobby activities. Thank God there’s no paying work in-house!!! Didn’t get this week’s installment of Ella’s story written until the last minute. Whatever went online this week was not proofread and frankly I have no idea whether it makes any sense. I have not uploaded today’s installment of “Asked,” either, not because it isn’t there but because I’m effin’ All Computered Out.
{sigh}
Meanwhile, the Circus in the White House has gotten pretty entertaining, hasn’t it? The sleaze has been outed. Now…will our honored elected representatives get off their collective duff and do their job?
Really: even if Trump is indicted and/or impeached, that might be worse than what we’ve got. We then would end up with Pence as President. And Mr. Pence is, unlike our present Great Leader, decidedly not a clownish dunce. Mr. Pence is an accomplished politician who knows how to get things done. Unfortunately, he also is a doctrinaire fanatic, and so the things he’d like to get done are not necessarily things that are good for the rest of us.
LOL! This all turned out (well…so far) for the better.
Okay, with any luck the Human is now recovered
