Coffee heat rising

Techno-skeptic

Life in Hell…

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The day

Ahhh, another lovely August day in Phoenix: 104°, 29% humidity. WHAT a garden spot!

And folks: we got guys out there workin’ like horses in that unholy, soggy heat.

We start the day with a New Yard Dude, a fella I snabbed whilst strolling through Upper Richistan. For slightly more than twice what the beloved but perennially absent Gerardo charges, he agreed to shovel out the seriously neglected front and back yards. Thank you, dear man!!

He does a superb job, not a mere excellent job. The place is transformed!!

  • The weeds are gone.
  • The rampant tree branches are trimmed back.
  • The quarter-minus is raked and smoothed and niftied up.
  • The back-breaking heavy gravel in front is de-weeded and raked smooth.
  • The dog is in love.

Of all those, the last is the simplest, because the dog is in love with everyone.

The amount of soul-crushing work this gent did defied belief.

And then, God help him and all of us, he jumped in his truck to go off to another job!!!

He did miss the weeds in the alley (Upper Richistan doesn’t have alleys, so he probably doesn’t know that alley weeds are the homeowner’s responsibility). But that comes under the heading of No Big Deal: I have a gallon of concentrated Round-Up. Haven’t used it because I haven’t wanted to contaminate my few sprinkling or spraying devices with the stuff. But WTF? Tomorrow ayem I’ll take one of the sprinkling buckets, mix up some Round-Up, and drizzle it on the alley weeds.

One problem solved.

Next the phones/Internet/WTF.

A Cox guy shows up shortly after dawn cracks.

Along about the time New Yard Dude shows up, another Cox guy shows up.

They puzzle and figure and wrestle and wrestle and puzzle and figure and puzzle and figure and wrestle and finally, for reasons that no normal human can conceive, announce that the problem is SOLVED.

Uhhmmmm….

Ohhhkayy…heard that wind blow before.

We experiment with the phones a bit. Looks like probably…possibly…maybe they’re right. I dunno. I can’t tell. What I do know is that if the damn system works while the Marvelous Cox Dudes are here, it no doubt won’t work after they walk out the door.

Ohhh well and WTH. That just means these cuties will have to be invited back in the house. Wot a shame!

In the meantime, I’ve acquired another wireless doorbell to replace the one inactivated by the latest Sh!thead Attack. This, I must unpack, set up, and install at the front door and at the front gate.

Yes.

Unpack.

Have you noticed how spectacularly almost everything is overpackaged?

Took half my lifetime to slice and wrench it out of its ridiculous plasticized wrapping. Finally got it out. Read the instructions.

They want you to install these little flat battery things somewhere. But…but…WHERE is less than perfectly obvious.

After some unholy amount of time (so it felt) trying to figure out what the fuck they were talking about, I finally came to a guess that worked.

Now we have two of these things that have to be installed at the front door and the front gate, and a bingy-bonger box that has to find a home inside the house.

Wrestle wrestle wrestle Rassle rassle rassle Wrestle wrestle wrestle…finally…YES!!!!!! IT WORKS.

Yes. Now after three days of thrashing around, we have here a doorbell that rings when you push its button.

In other realms:

Half of a pair of dear friends passed away a few days ago. Not unexpected, but still…sad. Planned to return to choir this fall, now that the worst of the plague is dying down. But sadly, it looks like the very first thing we’ll be doing is singing at his service!

Heaven help us all. Especially him.

His wife moved them into the Beatitudes specifically so they could get care for a much aging man (he was 94), and because they had a lunatic next-door neighbor who truly was a threat. Never once did she say to him or to anyone else “I’m moving us there specifically to get care for you,” but now we see that must have been the case. Her daughter tells me she’s moving to California to live with the kids.

Where this leaves the beloved Connie the Long-Haul Truck Driver escapes me. Presumably her brother will have to overrule his exceptionally hostile wife to take over the kindnesses their father bestowed. Or else…heaven help us.

As we scribble, a cloud passes over the  mid-day sun, and the room’s light grows dimmer and dimmer…

Still online…

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…for the nonce. Funny has not crashed in flames yet, but it remains to be seen how long we’ll be able to stay aloft.

Over at Best Buy this afternoon, the gurus did their best to fix things. We seem to be online just now, but why, how, and for how long, I do not know. It looks, however, like the problem is with the little MacBook laptop, not with WordPress and not with…much of anything else. This, I’m writing on the big, aged iMac.

The BB dudes recommended that I schlep out to the Apple store, halfway to Yuma, and try to identify the problem with the MacBook.

That was a long, expensive exercise in futility. Consumed a quarter of a tank of gasoline — at almost 5 bucks a gallon hereabouts — and soaked up a good two hours of time. Those people over there had exactly zero clue, nor did they evince the slightest interest in trying to figure it out.

I left, annoyed…as I so often leave the Apple store.

So that’s it with Apple, folks. The plan now is to replace the MacBook with a new PC, hire someone to transfer data from the iMac into the PC, and slowly, gently convert the Blogging Empire and its tools to the PC world.

It’s been awhile since I’ve worked with PC’s — although I did have to use them when I was adjunct at the community college district, so that skill is not completely lost to time.

This subplot, though, was only part of an endless day’s adventures.

Started out at the doctor’s office, hardly my favorite venue. But it was Young Dr. Kildare’s place, so at least the scenery was appealing. As usual, my blood pressure was through the roof — I hate hate HATE being in doctor’s offices and clinical settings, a sentiment that invariably jacks up the BP a good 10 to 15 points. This was not helped by the fact that they’d asked me to show up at 8:00 a.m., at which point the staff informed me that my appointment was actually at 8:30…meaning a half-hour of thumb-twiddling before the show got on the road. So now I have to jump through all those same damn hoops again to prove to him that in real life I don’t exhibit hypertension.

Tomorrow I’ll go back down to Best Buy, buy a new PC-type computer, and try to talk them into sending someone over to the Funny Farm to set up the transfer of data from the iMac and iCloud into the new device.

Also learned that BB has iPhone training sessions. If this is true, there may still be some hope of learning how to use the gadget my son gave me. Apple’s “class” was a joke and another infuriating waste of time. I’d like to be able to use the kewl phone…but must say, I feel just about zero confidence in Apple and Apple devices just now. The present fiasco with the computers has been going on for weeks. And now I can’t remember my password for the damn credit union. I’ll have to pay the bills by snail-mail until I can go downtown — not till Monday — and get someone to help untangle that mess.

I actually WAS out there this morning but didn’t realize the password had passed out of existence in my brain.

LOL! Frankly, these recent experiences — over the past few weeks — suggest that it would be best to stay with Apple than to jump off the bridge into the murky waters of the PC. Over the phone, I’ve talked with several really excellent Apple techs. They haven’t quite saved my bacon…but at least the pork isn’t blackened. And it does have to be said that BB has a new Mac on offer that is to die for.

iPhone to the Rescue!

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So the kewl iPhone just saved the day! 

Landline went dead. That, of course, meant that I couldn’t call Cox from here, and since I’d have to use WonderAccountant’s phone to reach Cox from her house,…well, there’s a limit to how much nerve I have.

But ta daaaa! The iPhone got right through to an exceptionally funny and clever Cox phone tech. It took her a few minutes to identify the exact problem (among several options), and then she was able to coach me through rebooting the landline’s modem. And it WORKED.

How neat, eh?

Ate up a bunch of minutes, though:

Consider: you, the blessed customer, get on the phone to Cox….

Forthwith the annoying AI bot tells you that one (1) person is in the queue ahead of you and the wait is about 3 minutes.

Then it comes back on and, after four or five minutes of superbly annoying jingly noise, tells you there are three people ahead of you and now the wait is 7 minutes. After it tells you another couple of times that varying numbers of customers have jumped the virtual line ahead of you, a human comes on. Mercifully, this was one very bright human.

The whole adventure probably consumed about 20 chargeable minutes.

Despite the tech’s expertise and grace, the episode brought me back to the feeling that for what Cox is charging — which is outrageous, IMHO, for phone service that’s not real phone service — it might be better to have a half-dozen inexpensive flip phones in the rooms where I think I should have an extension in case I fall and need to call 911, and then use the iPhone for regular talking on the horn to friends and sales associates. Thereby getting rid of the landline…

Cox charges $32.49 a month for a phone service best described as third-rate. It cannot be relied on. It goes down whenever the power goes out, which in these parts is every time it rains. And today it went down because, said our excellent Cox lady, every now and again you just have to reboot the modem. That means unplug it from the power, remove the battery, waitwaitwaitwaitwait, plug the battery back in, waitwaitwaitwaitwait,  plug the power cable back in, waitwaitwaitwaitwait…and hope for the best, such as it is. I’m paying Cox $390 a year for THAT?

The reasons I have a phone in every room are a) so that I don’t have to jump up and RUN to answer the phone every time it rings and b) so there will be a phone to call 911 from if I fall and can’t drag myself into some other room where a phone is located, or reach a phone up on a table or a counter. Both of those issues can be easily resolved with cell phones: the iPhone can simply be picked up and carried around. The proposed flip-phones, which would have no minutes on them and so could only be used to dial 911, can be set in every room, preferably near the floor (again: in case of falls). All cell phones have to be able to dial 911 whether or not they have paid minutes on them. So there would be no reason to pay for minutes on any of them, except maybe to have one preloaded in case something happened to the iPhone.

And the reason I haven’t started learning to use the iPhone till now, after my son gave it to me last May: what’s my excuse?

Fear.

I have developed such a flinch reflex about techno-hassles that having to learn some new gadget or new software just makes me cringe. And this iPhone thing: it’s a whole universe unto itself. You reach a certain point in your life where the if it ain’t broke why fix it? question applies with a vengeance. You just don’t want to struggle with having to learn still more involved, complicated frustrations, especially when you know how ephemeral computer technology is: in another couple of years, you’ll have to discard all you just learned and figure out some new involved, labyrinthine complication.

And I’ve resisted the whole cell phone idea for a whole long series of reasons…

  • The things are damned expensive. If you drop it or lose it or someone steals it, you’re out a chunk of dough…to say nothing of subjected to hassles without end.
  • The idea that advertisers and Big Brother or WhoEverTheHell can track your location with these things gives me the willies. Big time!
  • Have you reflected, ever, on how stupid people sound when they’re walking down a sidewalk and yapping into a cell phone? Folks. I don’t want to hear about your kid’s school day or the office gossip or what restaurant you’re planning to descend on tonight…and neither does anyone else! And I most certainly do not want to number myself among the yappers.
  • I value my privacy. I don’t want people to be able to get ahold of me no matter where I am or what I’m doing! I do not want anybody, whether Big Brother or Big Merchandiser, to track me everyplace I go. Mostly, I would like people to leave me alone.

Learned a double-click trick from the veterinarian’s technician today…it lets you scroll through open apps. 😀 Very entertaining.

 

 

The Great iPhone Project…

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So my son kindly gave me a brand-new iPhone for my birthday! Can you imagine!!??? <3

I never could learn how to operate the Android system. For the requisite cell phones we’re all pretty much required to drag around with us everywhere we go, I use a couple of cheapo flip phones powered by Tracfone minutes, one for the car and one to drop in a pocket when I walk the dog…if I remember. It’s been obvious for quite some time that I need to get a smartphone and learn to use it, but the truth is…I’m all learning-curved out.

True that: I just flat do not want to have to learn any new techno-tricks. But alas…I’m resigned.

That settled, this is really a cool little machine. It’s an iPhone SE, Apple’s attempt at making its phones more or less kinda affordable. And we’re told that the iPhone is a lot easier for the aging brain to grasp than are android devices.

We shall see. In the meantime… Apple does not provide a manual for its iPhone! I couldn’t even figure out how turn the damn thing on! My son demonstrated and…well…then what?

I have noooo idea.

So eventually it dawned on me that of course YouTube must have tutorials on how to work the thing, if I could figure out which video goes with this model. And yea verily: I found one that’s close enough. Thing is…well…it runs an hour and 46 minutes!

If these things are so damn complicated that it requires an hour and 46 minutes to explain how to operate one, why the HELL doesn’t Apple provide some instructions?

At any rate, yesterday I sat through about half of it. Pretty enlightening…at least I’ve got a fair idea of how to turn it on and what it’s supposed to do. Today I loafed, and lazily failed to glue myself to a computer. But did realize that probably Amazon sells manuals for the iPhone… and yea, again: there they are. Most of them self-published DIY affairs full of typos and bêtises, but at least they’re available. For…uh huh: 25 bucks!

So I ordered one from the “For Dummies” series, which usually are fairly clear and at least are edited by real editors.

These, I figure, will obviate my having to take endless notes on the YouTube guy’s video. I couldn’t write longhand fast enough to keep up with him and at the same time figure out what he was trying to say. Which tells you more about how long it’s been since I’ve written even a few words in longhand than about how fast he talks.

You can connect this phone to your wireless, which will provide enough functionality for me to try some of the tricks described in the video and the book. Once I’ve figured out how to turn it on and what to do with it, then I’ll buy it some minutes. There are several plans on various carriers, but I figure I might as well stay with Tracfone, since I have no complaints with them.

Tracfone has a one-year plan that provides 1500 minutes of yak-fest plus 1500 texts for $125, a far cry from Cox’s gouge for a VoIP “land line” (which it’s not, anymore). I doubt if I’m likely to spend 1500 minutes on the phone for the rest of my entire life! And since I’ve never texted anyone in my life nor do I feel any great need to, chances that I will indulge in 1500 of them are about nil. With this package, you also get “1.5 GB of Data at 4G LTE Speed,” whatever that means.

I like Tracfone because you’re not nailed into any kind of contract with them. You pay, and you’re done.

But not quite, exactly. These minutes they sell carry over. The little clamshell phones now have tens of thousands of minutes accumulated on them. If that occurs with the year-long plan, too, presumably over time I’ll have so much paid-for time I can gossip with everyone in the city.

Anyway, first things first. And the first thing is to connect it to the wireless (somehow…) and then figure out the basics of how to use it. THEN feed minutes into it.

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore…are we?

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No. Not in Kansas. We now live on Dystopia 3, a world whirling around some iridescent monstrosity of a distant star. Two sure signs:

1. The neighbor’s new cat…  Other Daughter, the airheaded and evidently mentally ill creature who had the misfortune to be born to the Perp, is a bit of a Cat Lady. Given half a chance, she’d collect enough to fill the San Diego Zoo. Apparently her father, who owns the house down the street where she lives, keeps a rein on that. But still. She gets cats. And she lets them roam loose to depredate all over the ‘Hood.

Her latest treasure is a huge black thing that’s at least as large as Ruby, probably larger. Ruby weighs 21 pounds.

This cat has discovered the flock of doves I like to feed in the mornings, and it has NO PROBLEM climbing over the cat barrier I’ve strapped to the cinderblocks to keep Other Daughter’s little pets out. This morning it killed two of them.

Ruby spotted the f&cker and went after it, but it just ghosted away over the wall.

So now I’ve got to find a way to deal with this stupid woman’s pet predator.

I think there are two possibilities.

One is to quietly sprinkle dog kibble around the alley. This will feed the feline predator, but it also will attract coyotes. The coyotes will take care of MegaCat in due course.

Unfortunately, because the two old horse properties where the coyotes used to den have been sold and bulldozed for McMansions, the coyotes have moved on. I haven’t seen one in quite awhile. So frankly, I’m afraid the dog food trick won’t do much other than make the cat fatter.

The other possibility is to trap the damn cat.

Because he Humane Society and the pound do not want any MORE cats, to discourage people from turning in stray cats, they now charge a stiff tariff for the privilege. So your choices are to kill the cat or to take it a very long way from your place and let it go. I’m thinking the latter is about to be this beast’s fate. If I drive it to Scottsdale and let it go in the flood control wash, it’ll have a lovely place to live with lots of hideaways to get out of the rain, and the place is overrun with gophers and mice and roof rats out there. Cat will be a happy cat. And a gone cat, from our point of view.

Of course, the problem with Cat Ladies is that as soon as you get rid on one of their little companions, they bring in two more.

Most cats are discouraged by the cat barrier, though. This one is not, but maybe her next prize will be.

Then we have…

2. The brain-banging new phone… Today I worked up my nerve to try to install the new Panasonic phones. Alas, “try” is the operative word.

The goddamn thing is so complicated that its little instruction booklet is A HUNDRED AND TEN PAGES LONG!!!!! And it appears to have been written in Middle Martian, replete with weird little symbols that signify something, if only you could figure out what the hell the “something” is.

I struggled and wrestled and wrestled and struggled and could not get that phone installed so it works. To say nothing of installed in line with the CPR 5000 Call Blocker, a device I have no intention of doing without.

So now the decrepit Uniden is plugged back in. And I have no idea what I’m going to do. I simply have no way of figuring out how to get this thing to work.

My son just called and said he’ll come over — not tonight, obviously, but in the near future — and try to set it up. I’ve also called the pool guy, who said he’d put one in like it just a few days ago…but he has the flu and certainly is in no shape to run back out after a full day of work and fart with an electronic Rubik’s cube.

If I can’t get this thing installed…well… I guess I just won’t have a phone.

I mean, a real phone. I’ll have a couple of little flip phones to use for emergencies, but my business & home phone will just…go away.

Here we are in the first third of the 21st century, and we can’t even have a simple desk phone. And seriously: in 2020 I may find myself without a home phone.

Can I say how much I hate that? Why are we putting up with this sh!t?

Techno-Loafing: The Reluctant Consumer

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{cackle!} Today I managed to LOAF through all the hours in which I could have been addressing the latest technological grouse: installing a new land-line phone and its five handsets.

The beloved Uniden finally croaked over. Its answering machine function crashed, and Uniden has quit offering support for its cordless phones. One Amazon reviewer claims to have been told by a Uniden CSR that the company has quit making phones. Unclear whether this is the case, given the number of their phones still available at Amazon…but those could be counterfeits, I suppose. Or unsold stock.

That phone has run for something over 15 years — not bad in the Age of Planned Obsolescence. Whether or not Uniden has quit making it, Costco doesn’t carry it. Costco carries a Panasonic cordless phone with five handsets, which is very much like The Deceased.

Well…on steroids. It looks incredibly complicated to set up. Yesterday I got through the task charging the handsets. Since the batteries require 7 hours of charge-up time and it was after noon before I got around to this trick and I had to go out to dinner with friends, plugging the chargers in was about as far as I got.

Today, going back to choir for the first time in over two months (thanks to the bronchitis and then the cold and then braining myself by falling flat on my face) was about as much as I felt like coping with. Well. That and finishing the client’s math paper: predicting bitcoin prices through the miracle of partial differential equations….did you there’s also something called a difference equation? And yes, they’re different.

The Panasonic does a whole lot of similarly amazing things. Some of them are amazingly neat. Some of them…well, they extend beyond category of “don’t care about it” to “no, thanks, I don’t want that.”

Naturally, like most such phone sets, it comes with a call blocking feature. Thanks. I have my own — the CPr 5000 Call Blocker — and on review I believe it to be better.

You can answer a call with a voice command. How Star Trekkie can you get? Phone ringie-dings at you and you can holler across the room, “Answer the phone!” It hears, it understands, it opens the squawk box.

Right. It hears. What else does it hear? And who else hears it? And who can hack into it?

Speaking of voices, it will nag you when a battery is low. I deeply, truly hate being nagged by machines.

And speaking of privacy issues, it will spy on the nursery for you: it has a built-in baby monitor.

LOL! Get’em used to Big Brother early, eh?

The talking caller ID? Well, that’s cool, I guess, if you can’t bring yourself to glance at the screen on the desk or trudge across the room to look at one of the handsets. But annoying. Again: I do not care to converse with a machine.

Like the old Uniden, it has an intercom function. Since there’s no one else here at the Funny Farm, I’ve found that to be a feature that annoyingly gets turned on at the slip of a finger. And it’s hard to figure out how to escape.

Here’s something cool, though: it will attach to your cell phone!

No joke: it has Bluetooth, and so not only will it engross your cell phone, it will even let you send and receive text messages! How kewl is that?

It has an alarm clock. Just what I’ve always needed.

No doubt it can do any number of other tricks, too. All very neat. But…but…the question is…

Why?

Seriously. Why? All I need to do with a phone is make phone calls and receive phone calls. I really don’t need or want all these bells and whistles. Neat as they are.

All I want is a phone. Just a phone.