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Computers

Old Lady Skypes iPad, Dumps T-Mobile

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😀

It worked!

This morning I downloaded the Skype app onto my handy little iPad, which mostly has functioned as a Kindle reader and game center. Set up an account, fed my friends’ phone numbers into it, and (most important!) entered numbers for the roadside service and for Chuck’s Auto Service.

Tested: ta da!!! Works likes a remarkably high-quality squawk box. No earbuds required. No need to hold a gadget up to your head. Kewl.

Canceled the endlessly frustrating T-Mobile service. The phone, disconnected from its carrier, will do just fine to dial up 9-1-1, should the need ever arise while I’m on the road.

I’m quite tickled. In fact, I’m feeling a lot happier about this than I did when I bought the T-Mobile phone and signed up for the allegedly low-cost month-to-month service.

AT&T costs $15 a month. Skype costs 2.3 cents a minute; that would be $2.30 for 100 minutes, probably more time than I’ve spent yakking on phones over the past year. The optional Skype phone number is $60 a year or $5 a month, bringing the cost to about $20, maybe $22 a month. You can use it for texting, too.

T-Mobile’s no-contract service is $33 a month (plus tax, which brings it to $35) for a few minutes of conversation and unlimited texting and Internet.

The iPad is intuitive and easy to use. Links to contacts’ phone numbers are large, obvious, and easy to click. Skype also provides a dialpad that fits your fingers. You get as much low-cost talk and text as you choose to pay for; unlimited Internet; access to iCloud, your MacMail, and all your contacts; apps coming out the wazoo; Kindle and iTunes books; a browser you’re familiar with; and virtually no learning curve. The Nokia provided by T-Mobile is endlessly puzzling, anything but intuitive, microscopic, and has a keypad designed for the delicate appendages of a mosquito.

Pretty neat improvement, IMHO.

Today’s Grand Switch had an immediate cause, beyond the general user-unfriendliness of the Nokia. Month or two ago I set up T-Mobile to charge the monthly $33 to my AMEX card. This worked at first. Then along about the 10th of this month, in comes an email saying they’ve received the most recent payment and now I have to go to the T-Mobile site, sign into my account, and “purchase a pass.”

So I attempt to jump through this hoop. Go to the linked page and find…no choice to “purchase a pass.” You can “fill,” but in my experience this is a command to bill you for another $33. Not inclined to experiment with that, I drop by the T-Mobile store around the corner.

There I ask what is meant by “purchase a pass.” The employees have no clue. They’ve never heard of “purchasing a pass.” They say it means I haven’t paid this month.

Back at the Funny Farm, I call American Express and discover that T-Mobile charged and received their $33 on January 4. A few days later, while I’m driving around, I drop by another T-Mobile store. It’s about 10:30 a.m. Their signage says they open at 10. But the doors are locked and no one’s in the store.

Enough, already, with paying $33 a month for air, a gadget that makes my head ache when I try to use it, and endless hassle.

If this works out, I may buy an iPad mini and put Skype on that — sometime after Apple emanates new versions, pushing down prices for the iPad that will be made “obsolete.” The mini model would easily fit in a zippered pocket in a purse. Until then, I’ll have to hide the iPad in the car when the weather’s cool and tote it around during the summer.

But at least I’ll be toting around something I can use.

 

 

What Makes Word Crash???

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I knew it! I just knew it: the job was going to make me grind my teeth. Good thing I stuck the mouth guard in before I started typing mind-numbing data. Boring. I hate boredom. Boredom frustrates me, and frustration makes me clench my teeth. Without that mouth guard I would’ve broken all the teeth in my mouth when Word “closed unexpectedly” just as I hit “Table > Sort > Sort by paragraphs • Ascending” on 29 single-spaced pages.

“We are sorry; Word had to close unexpectedly” means “You are screwed! Any data you haven’t manually saved is gone, and NO, there is no auto-recovery file backing up the work you were doing. And yes, we did calculate this so it would happen just as you were coming to the end of an hours-long slab of brain-banging labor.”

Word does that all the time. We figured out that it’s not a function of Wyrd for Mac, because Tina reported that her Wyrd for Windows does the same thing, and she runs it on a high-powered PC. I have Wyrd set to auto-save about every three minutes, plus I’ve learned to hit “Command > Save” after just about every sentence, phrase, and word. I’ve also set Wyrd to make back-up files as it goes, creating mounds of annoying clutter.

So no data was lost, but I didn’t know that until the system came back online. Frustrating, time-wasting, and annoying.

It seems to have something to do with tables. Apparently a lengthy or complicated table — one with bulleted points in it, for example — causes Word to crash.

First time this occurred, a client had constructed tables and stuck more tables inside some of the cells. He even put an image in one of the cells! The damn thing crashed if you just looked at it.

More recently, we edited a corporate book compiled of entries by a whole slew of authors. To enforce some sort of conformity, the PR director had come up with a tabular form, whose purpose was to regularize the content and format across the board. Great idea…but as soon as someone decided to enter a bulleted list in a cell, it would cause the whole elegant construct to crash.

Always just as the august editor was about to close out, having spent two hours laboring over the edits. I lost track of the number of hours we had to write off for that project because of Wyrd crashes. Six or eight, as I recall.

Then there was the author who inserted Japanese characters inside Word tables. Complicated, elaborate tables. CRASH!

What makes Word crash? Tables make Word crash!

Nothing was lost yesterday but some time that wouldn’t have been paid, anyway. It was my own project. But those recurring Word crashes sure are annoying.

Dust in the Air, Dust in the Gears…

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Peeked out the window at 5 this morning. The air was (and still is) so dirty it looks foggy out there. Ugh. Nice Valley fever weather.

Oh well. At this time of morning it’s cool enough to walk the dog, so we took a stroll through the rich folks’ neighborhood. And the pool water is perfect for a post-doggywalk dip.

The pool is sooooo much easier to take care of now that the devil-pod tree is gone! It’s practically trouble-free. Yesterday I had a new guy from a new company come over to clean out the filter, which he did quickly and for less than Leslie’s charges. The last CSR encounter with Leslie’s pretty much tore it for me. Went over to Angie’s List and started calling A-rated companies till I found one that considers a central Phoenix house to be in its “area.” Liked the guy: he was quiet and efficient. And now the pool is humming along merrily.

Meanwhile, my computer seems have gotten a little fog-making dust in its innards. Yesterday Word crashed (again). I think the Word for Mac on the desktop has corrupted. It’s emitting those “Word had to quit unexpectedly. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this has caused” messages. What this means is that you’ve lost everything since your last autosave, and possibly then some.

The other day when that happened, I rebooted and it started opening scores and scores of old files!

At first I thought, holy sh!t, no wonder it crashed if I had that many files sitting open! Because I do get in the habit, sometimes, of leaving way too many files open in various programs. But soon (as in instantly) it became apparent that no one could have that many files open at once.

Force-quit.

Start over.

Does it again!

Force-quit.

Start over.

Does it again!!!

So I just sat there and let it open and open and open…thought it was going to open all the files on the disk, which would be about 2700. But no, it finally stopped after 30 or 40.

So now I had to close each one manually. And no, they were definitely not things I’d been working on. Some dated back to 2008! Hadn’t been opened in years!

As nothing, though, compared to yesterday’s adventures. I’d been working on a client’s book; spent about three hours on the current chunk of copy the previous day and expected to finish  in about an hour and a half. It’s difficult, arcane, and tiring to read. Goin’ along fine for about a half-hour, and

“Word had to quit unexpectedly”

Damn.

Reboot. Open the file.

Take a look… It has lost ALL of the work I’d done the day before!!!!!!!!!

WTF? How is that possible? I know I hit save before I went to bed, and besides, the thing is set to save every ten minutes. It should have saved almost all the edits I’d entered. Thrash around and thrash around: nope! No backups, no nothin’!

Weirdly, it had saved stuff I’d done near the end, in the past half-hour or so. But  none of the stuff I’d done the previous day!

So I was mightily screwed. I had to redo three hours of work before I could get on to the hour and a half worth that remained. Set the thing to autosave every three minutes. Typing and typing and wrestling and wrestling, and damned if it doesn’t crash AGAIN! This time it saved all but about two pages of edits. E-mailed it to myself and downloaded onto the laptop. Used the Macbook to finish editing the chapter. Took hours and hours and hours. All that work I’d done the day before was down the toilet, reducing my pay from $45/hour (academic rate) to about $22.50/hour.

More annoyingly, I’d planned to give myself a little break yesterday afternoon. In the Darwin Award department, I’ve hurt my back by sitting too long in front of the computer with my feet propped on the desk—gave myself a roaring case of sciatica. Just sitting in a desk chair hurts, and I’m so spavined I can barely limp to my favorite venue, the refrigerator.

Welp, I’d bought some nice fabric with which to  make some new drapes for the bedroom, and I figured, what with Charley staying at M’hijito’s house for the nonce, that I could spread the stuff out on the floor, trim it up, and get started on sewing the hems. Having to reach and stretch like that would surely loosen up the kinked muscles and pinched nerve.

That didn’t happen. It was after 5 p.m. before I finished. Then I had to race to wash up and get to class, skipping dinner to get there on time.

Today I have about three hours to do on another two chapters of this author’s work. It will have to be done on the laptop, obviously. While it’s possible that the Japanese characters in the copy are overtaxing Word, I kinda doubt it. I’m pretty sure the desktop’s program has corrupted. Oh well. At least I can sit on the sofa to work. If I can finish by noon, maybe I’ll still get a chance to make curtains.

And so, to work…

LinkedIn…Gronk!

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Got LinkedIn? Here’s something to keep you amused: Go to LastPass’s secure (we think ) tool to see if yours was one of the 6 million passwords recently stolen from LinkedIn. As you can see, mine was.

Entertaining.

According to CNNTech’s Doug Gross, all is not especially lost if you’re password was ripped off. The thieves still have to de-encrypt them. If you were clever enough to concoct a complicated mess of a password, or if you use a hash-em-up tool like LastPass, KeePass, or 1Password, and if you were wily enough to invent a different password for every site you habituate, then you’re probably not at much risk. Still, you certainly should change your LinkedIn password. Matter of fact, you should change all your passwords every now and again.

The aftermath of the great LinkedIn caper has been a flood of scam e-mails. So be alert and don’t click on any links from any source you don’t recognize.

By the way, BBC quotes LinkedIn Director Vicente Silveira as saying, “Members that have accounts associated with the compromised passwords will notice that their LinkedIn account password is no longer valid.” That may or may not be so: The password I ran through the LastPass tool, eliciting the big orange warning above, worked just fine on the site.

MacThump: Naked Emperor Trips & Falls

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Ten endless hours. That’s how long it took to get my MacMail account back up and running. That marathon was punctuated by two trips to the Apple store, neither of which was especially satisfactory. As beautiful and kewl as the Macintosh’s hardware is, in the software department sometimes the MacEmperor has no clothes.

Damn. Timing couldn’t have been worse. I’d planned to spend an entire day working on a client’s project. After a godawful techno-day, along about 10 p.m. we got an email bitching about our slow performance, for which there are several reasons. One of them is that the client thinks I’m going to write a book in seven weeks, an entirely unreasonable expectation. The other is…episodes like yesterday’s.

Ever since Apple migrated  my MacMail over to iCloud, which is required when you upgrade your operating system to Lion, I’ve been getting pop-ups that demand that I re-enter my password. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and… Until I force-quit the program in both computers. That usually makes it stop. For a while.

Speaking of for a while, this has been a known issue for quite some time, but it seems to be worse with iCloud, one of the most useless inventions yet to cloud the technohorizon. When I went in to complain about it several weeks ago, I was told it was a server problem, nothing to do with my machines. Ohhhkkaaayyyyy…. How’s about we fix our servers?

Yesterday, the minute I sat down to open said client’s mountain of e-mails, up popped one of these messages. NOTHING that I did would make it stop. Infuriated after half an hour of dorking with this, I tossed the MacBook in the car and drove down to the Apple store. Of course, by the time I got there, the phenomenon had stopped. However, 14 files, most of them graphics, were sitting on the server, and if the damn thing started up again—which I figured it would as soon as I opened either computer at home—I would never be able to get at them.

Plus really. This had been going on altogether too long. I already have a .com e-mail address for my business through Bluehost. Now that MacMail has proven itself to be utterly unreliable, I asked myself, why on earth aren’t I using the Bluehost account? And more to the point, how am I going to get at this stuff if I the system chokes again?

From the Apple store, I e-mailed all 14 client files to Tina for safekeeping, figuring she could send them back to me if they again became inaccessible on the Mac. Since 13 of them were graphics that not only had to be numbered and stored coherently but also entered in a directory of cutlines and credits, downloading to disk seemed infeasibly time-consuming while I was standing at a counter in the Apple store.

Back at my house, I checked out the Bluehost account, decided it’s not great but it will do, and started the work of transferring my business and personal e-mail from mac.com/me.com to mybusiness.com. Once this was set up, I sent out a blanket e-mail to all my clients telling them what the new address was. I also created an auto-respond message sharing the new address with people who send e-mails to the mac.com address.

{goddamnit! As I write this, MacMail is bouncing at me AGAIN to demand that I fill in a password.}

To set up an auto-respond, you have to use the same function that allows you to make MacMail move certain classes of messages into the trash or into other folders, as desired. This is, on the surface at least, radically different from the auto-respond function in Outlook.

Backstory:

The community colleges and the community college district blitz employees, 24-7, with a constant hailstorm of irrelevant messages. Somehow I got on Phoenix College’s mailing list; I’m on Paradise Valley’s because I contract for that campus, and everyone is on the central district mailing list. Every day something upwards of 100 messages come in, telling me what is being served at the Phoenix College chow line today, not to forget to turn in my PeopleSoft time sheet (contract adjuncts do not turn in time sheets), that someone on a campus 30 miles away is having an anniversary, that somebody in some office is trying to get rid of some used bookcases…and on and on and on and on. This stuff floods my in-box.

But in amongst this trash are messages that I need to see: messages from the departmental chair, for example, or announcements of policy that actually applies to adjuncts. So rather than derailing ALL messages from PC, PVCC, and the two huge mailing lists at the district offices, I’ve been blacklisting offenders as they send an irrelevant message.

As a result, I’ve written scores and scores of “rules” sending messages from specific sources to “Trash.” I lost count of the number at 200.

The auto-respond adds another “rule” to this overstuffed closet of horrors. And apparently that was just one. rule. too. many.

I gather all my contacts into a BCC line, put my own e-mail address in the visible “To” line, and send out a message telling all my cronies and business contacts where to find me henceforth. So I’m sitting there configuring the new e-mail client over at Bluehost when I hear a couple of “bings” from the MacMail. Looks like bounced messages from the notice of the new e-mail address. Figures—some of these folks, I haven’t heard from in years. I think it’s rejected messages.

…heh heh heh heh heh heh heh…

385 incoming messages later, I’m on the way to the Apple store.

In the 20 minutes or so it takes to get there, another 3,000 messages cascade into MacMail. No. That’s not a typo. By the time I walk into the Apple store seeking help, well over three thousand new messages reside on the server.

I can’t make them understand what the problem is. Either they really don’t understand, or they’re working very, very hard to pretend not to understand. Since they deny knowledge of the password denial issue, I suspect the latter. This seems not to be atypical of Apple consumer policy: pretend it’s not there, and maybe it’ll go away. Finally I find a guy who realizes the 3,000++++ messages are the result of an infinite loop. The thing is sending thousands of copies of the “change email” message I sent out to my surviving contacts an hour or two before.

SHE: Generated by what?

HE:: Dunno. It’ll take an Apple Genius to figure that out. Wanna make an appointment?

SHE: You do understand that I need to use my system to do business with a client whose commerce is worth about two grand, don’t you?

HE: How about Friday afternoon?

Yeah. So I accepted an appointment at 1:15 and left, just freaking FURIOUS, and my fury having been stoked to a high pitch by the patronizing jerk who told me the solution is to turn off MacMail, as though the command to “send” or whatever it’s doing would magically go away from the iCloud server if my computers here were shut down. Right.

Anyone who’s ever hit “send,” watched it grind away interminably, then quit MacMail, gone to bed, and got up in the morning to see that MacMail sent the message during the night knows very well that turning off the program resident on a local terminal is not going to turn off whatever resides on Apple’s servers. I’ll refrain from calling the man a moron, only out of misguided courtesy.

By the time I get home from the Apple store, another 20 or 25 minutes later, something over 5200 messages from myself were crammed on the server. That’s after I deleted te 3,000-whatever off the server while was arguing with the Apple nerds.

Studying the issue, I realized this didn’t start until after I built the Auto-Responder command.

Must…delete…autorespond…rule…

So go into Preferences > Rules. There I find that all but a half-dozen of the 200+ rules I’ve written to derail nuisance e-mails from the colleges are disappeared. And of the few I can see, NONE of them is the Auto-Responder message rule.

Sumbitch.

Command-A, goddamnit!

Hm. It selected all of something.

DELETE, for the love of Gawd!

Well. Nothing remains in the dropdown menu. Could it have deleted all those rules?

Open Macbook; Preferences > rules. Command A. Delete!!!!!

Whatever was in there is gone, but it’s not all gone because some trash from the colleges is going into the “Trash” file. Oh well.

Command-Q! Command Q!

It seems to have worked. At least, it worked on my end. The endless loops of messages from me to myself, growing fuzzy subject-lines of Re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re’s like some digitized mold, have quit elbowing their way into my inbox. They’ve pretty well stopped.

On the other end? First word came in from La Maya, who’s hiding in Yarnell while she writes a book. Forty clones of the “change my e-mail address” message alit in her inbox. At this morning’s meeting of the Scottsdale Business Association: incoming armies of clones ranging in number from 15 to 40. From KJG: about 40. This means that every single message to the hundred or so “contacts” in MacMail have been showered with re: re: re: re: re: re: re: re:  messages.

Jeez.

Started this post this morning. It’s now 11:20 p.m. I’ve been up since midnight the night before last, with a three- or four-hour nap in the nighttime hours between Wednesday and Thursday. Yesh. That is a 42-hour day.

Hard though that may seem to believe.

 

Am I Going Slower? Or Is There Just Too Much to Do?

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Now, I know I’m not the first one to think this, because a lot of my friends say the same thing: It seems like the older you get, the harder it is to get to places on time, because it feels like you just can NOT get through all the stuff you have to do to get out the door. Objectively, it can’t be true that there’s just too much to do: after all, we raised kids without feeling that we couldn’t get through all the diddly little tasks on our plates, and nothing will slow you down in your effort to get out the door better than a kid! So, either we’re going slower as we age, or something else is interfering with our progress.

Hint: As I write this, I’m multitasking: trying to fix my breakfast so I can bolt it down before M’hijito gets here with his dog (not gonna make it: it’s already two minutes to eight) while writing a post while being pestered by my own dog while waiting for a video for the magazine-writing class to upload to YouTube.

***

And now that breakfast is done and Charley is here, I’m back in front of the computer where I find that MacMail is AGAIN demanding that I type, retype, and re-retype my password, a cycle that doesn’t stop until you crash out of the mail program. This, it develops, has been a known issue for quite a long time, though I didn’t experience it until upgrading to Lion and moving to the endlessly pointless iCloud. When it starts, thanks to flicking iCloud’s servers, where MacMail now resides, it affects all my computers. And now I can’t get my mail.

So, I’ll have waste some more time wrestling with that while watching the upload to YouTube and then, whenever that video goes online, posting it to the Eng. 235 site.

It’s now 8:27. I’ve been up since 6:00 a.m. and accomplished little more than to bolt down two pieces of toast, two pieces of bacon, and a handful of cut-up oranges. I haven’t been able to read the newspaper. I haven’t put the clean dishes away and loaded the dirty dishes littering the counter into the dishwasher. I haven’t made the bed.

I did at least wash my face and brush my teeth this morning…something I often don’t seem to be able to get at until I actually do have to go out the door.

The ordinary bits and pieces of what once was normal daily life get shunted aside while I try to cope with what looks like work on the computer (but, because it’s paid so little, isn’t real work, IMHO). So…what have I done in the two hours and 31 minutes since I rolled out of the sack?

• Checked on upload status of “Interviewing” video
• Retrieved  URL, opened video, checked it.
• Embedded video in “Lecturoids” section of the website
• Also embedded it in a new post, by way of bringing it to stoonts’ attention
• Uploaded “Query Letter” video to YouTube
• Answered several e-mails
• Discussed two projects with business partner, via e-mail
• Checked grades for two sections of 102 stoonts; observed great improvement over last fiasco
• Mentally blocked out a post for Adjunctorium
• Responded (again!!!) to confused Eng 235 stoont
• Fed and watered the dog
• Got the paper; watered a plant that got missed by the sprinkler system
• Fixed coffee; started bacon and toast
• Discovered I’d somehow uploaded “Interviewing” as “Query Letter” to YouTube
• Got into YouTube account; deleted video
• Re-uploaded the “Query Letter” video to YouTube
• Read another e-mail; framed answer mentally
• Retrieved bacon from microwave; retrieved carbonized toast from toaster
• Picked and sliced oranges
• Sat down to breakfast
• Almost finished when M’hijito showed up with dog; coped with dog bouncing activities
• Finished breakfast
• Responded to another e-mail from confused stoont
• Checked “Query Letter” video on YouTube
• Embedded video in Eng 235 post and in “Lecturoids” page; posted both
• Came back to this FaM post and continued writing it.

And now I’m about to go zap my cup of stone-cold coffee in the microwave. Gotta respond to that e-mail. Gotta sit down and study for real estate course. Gotta go see what that wacky pup is doing. Gotta check the pool chemicals. Gotta water the new plants. Gotta write a post for Adjunctorium. Gotta work on the client’s project. Gotta update client billing. Gotta work on edits for book-length piece of pseudo-lit-crit. Which reminds me…yes: pseudo can work on its own as an adjective. Did I forget to mark that in the middle of the night? Bet I did. Gotta search back pages of pseudo lit-crit; delete hyphen.

Gaaaaahhhhhhhh!

***

Well. The 50-ton digital elephant in the room is…what?

The computer!

• e-mail
• blogs
• iCloud
• YouTube videos
• more e-mail
• online courses
• still more e-mail
• {plink!} Facebook notice
• more e-mail
• Google calendar reminder: teleconference in 20 minutes

About 90% of this stuff wouldn’t have occupied time “back in the day,” because it didn’t exist. As for the constant onslaught of e-mail messages: People felt no great need to be “connected” and so refrained from blitzing everyone with their thought of the moment. More phone calls took place, probably, and those did take time; but nothing like as many phone calls were made as e-mails today. Business memos (up to 100 a day pour in from the community colleges) were distributed in hard copy, and because printing the things cost time and money, a lot fewer messages were emitted.

Look at the vast amount of my time that’s consumed with computer-related tasks. I’m squeezing my life in around them—barely finding time to wash up and get breakfast by the 8:00 a.m. deadline; barely finding time to gather what I need to do before I have to leave the house; dropping the newspaper before I’ve even read a page so as to get back to the chores waiting on the computer… Life has become nonstop gestalt: every single thing you do is interrupted constantly by demands from e-mail, online calendars, and work that didn’t even exist before life became digitized. In the Dark Ages, the work that did exist—say, publicizing your business—happened in discrete chunks. It wasn’t something you had to do unendingly over Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress.

Maybe it’s not old age. Maybe our lives really, objectively are out of control.