Coffee heat rising

Techno-skeptic

i-Hassle

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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.

…sorta…

NoMoRobo: FINALLY here!!!

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Lo and behold! At the crack of dawn this morning I learned that Cox has finally broken through its inertia to make the NoMoRobo nuisance call blocker available to its customers.

Along about 6:45 this morning, the phone rang. Goddamned robocall. Worse yet, it went through, within a ring or two, to Cox’s accursed voicemail system, where the recorded blat is recorded and whence fucking Cox emits little bleeping lights to your phone, pestering you to go listen to the recorded ads.

Apparently this damn system has been in place for quite some time. WHY it suddenly decided to intercept phone calls before they ring though to my answering machine is an unanswered and apparently unanswerable question.

After some hoop-jumps, I get through to accursed Cox’s web page. And I also manage to reach a human being or three.

These worthies eventually clue me that I have to physically go onto the damned web page and physically disable the damned voicemail function. WHY this should suddenly be so was never explained. Why would they think I would want this “service” if I didn’t specifically ask for it?

BUT…along the convoluted way, one of them remarks that NoMoRobo would solve the nuisance call issue. I point out that Cox has steadfastly refused to implement NoMoRobo. He now says — admitting, finally, in so many words that their modem-driven connection we were all required to take on is, contrary to Cox’s claim, VoIP — that yes, as of the 15th Cox gave up and made NoMoRobo available to its victims customers.

DamNAYshun!!!

So forthwith it’s over to the NoMoRobo website — it takes all of about two minutes to sign up, if that long.

NoMoRobo has existed for several years; it won a contest sponsored by the FTC to persuade entrepreneurs to create programs or devices to block the 2.4 billion nuisance calls that bombard consumers every year. Cox, however, declined to make it possible to install.

I could get it on Ooma, but as long as I had copper land lines — that is, real land lines — I declined to switch over, because the hard-wired service continues to work through a power outage, which is not even faintly true of VoIP. So I’ve stupidly stuck with Cox, like a donkey in the traces.

It was good to get the NoMoRobo attached to the phone service. It’s free.

However, it was not so good to find my upcoming bill on the Cox website and discover the bastards have jacked up the base bill to $133 a month — a $16/month increase, slated to go up again in February.

So…I just got off the phone from Cox’s “loyalty” department (no kidding! 🙄) and got them to drop the rate back down to just two bucks more than they’ve been charging, for the next year. Very, very, very fuckin’ tired of this game!!

Anyhow, except for a call from Connie the Long-Haul Trucker and a reminder to pick up new glasses from Costco, the hated phone has been SILENT all day long! It’s kind of eerie, actually.

Gnus of the Day

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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? Because Google’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!

…And the Beat Goes On

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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!

eee-fuckin’-nuff!

Old Dogs, New Tricks?

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Welp, the Great Website Revamp foisted on us by the credit union turned out not to be the disaster I feared. No hassles, no headaches, no lost data, no disappeared scheduled transactions…yea verily, not even a helluva lot of change in the site’s appearance. At all. Guess the reason I was dreading it so much is that this old dog has come to dislike — deeply — learning new tricks. Especially new techno-tricks. 😀

No doubt this trait does have to do with age. Believe it or not, when I was a young pup I was ahead of the wave. We were the first in our (affluent) set to get a PC — an IBM, direct from the breathtakingly pricey IBM store on the ground floor of a fancy high-rise on North Central. And yes, I could code in those days…you had to know some code to do anything on one of those things. DOS was, yes, code. And XyWrite? A pure ASCII system.

XyWrite…how I miss it. Never once did it crash and lose half a day’s worth of work. Nay, not even half a minute’s worth. Yesterday Wyrd shut down twice as I was struggling through an exceptionally difficult Chinese math paper. This team is definitely in the “All Your Bases Are Belong to Us” set…actually, that idiom is significantly clearer than many turns of phrase infesting said paper.

Luckily, Wyrd is now set to save every 5 minutes. Plus I usually hit ⌘-S every time I enter an edit these days. So little was lost. Actually, a lot was lost in the original file, but Wyrd would bring up a phantom file containing the most recent data, which I would then have to save back down under the original filename. This, when you have several files open at once, amounts to a significant PITA.

I vacillate between thinking there’s something wrong with me — I do not learn fast enough anymore, I cannot remember things, I’m getting fat and lazy and just flat do not WANT to learn anything new thankyouverymuch — and thinking we humans of the 21st century are besieged with techno-ditz: far, far too much ever-changing minutiea that is not helpful, does not improve our performance (often quite to the contrary), does not improve our lives (ditto), and exists solely to annoy the hell out of us.

Case in point: the phone system down at the church’s front office. In three hours I get to slide into the chair at the front desk and watch very charming people come and go for four hours — I’ve taken to volunteer receptionist’s duty once a week. This sounds like it should be easy for the likes of me. My first job was as a receptionist at a large law firm. There were four of us seated in front of the elevators on three floors. I was usually on the main floor, where the incoming calls hit the switchboard. There were two of us at that station, and each had 12 incoming lines. Often all 12 were active at once.

Did I have any trouble handling these? Noooooo…. No problem at all. Easy as breathing.

Fifty years later: on a busy day, maybe two phone calls come in. Can I remember how to transfer those to staff? Can I figure it out from the instructions taped to the desktop next to the phone set? Hell no!

Literally, I can NOT figure this damn thing out. I’ve sat next to one or another of the women who do know how to work it for three entire shifts and still cannot remember what they told me or figure out on my own how to operate it.

It’s just not that hard! Yet my brain does not want to know it.

Maybe that’s it: the brain does not want to know anymore trivia.

But alas. I’m reminded of my late, great secretary, lovingly known as La Morona. The one who almost burned down the Social Sciences building when she put her lunch in the microwave, set it to “high,” and went off and forgot about it.

La Morona could not learn PC hardware and software to save her life. The poor soul. She had been using an antiquated Mac for years. When we hired her, she was sure she could learn the PC. Just as I was sure I could learn that phone system.

Not so much. At one point…oh, this is good! I’d sent her to an employees’ training course to learn how to navigate the university’s arcane bookkeeping system. And arcane it was — one of my RA’s was an accountant (a real one), and when I tried to foist the job on her she rose up in high rebellion. I should have known better than to inflict it on La Morona. About a week or into it, the instructor called me on the phone. The woman was in a rage. She demanded that I send in a disciplinary report on La Morona. Why? asked I. “Because she asks too many questions.”

Sigh.

Presumably because she was trying to learn something that no one in her right mind would want to know…

I really do think there’s a point at which your mind says enough of this crap, already! and simply refuses to store away any more pointless trivia that we all know full well will be changed or dorked up before it can be used more than a half-dozen times.

Yesterday, in the techno-terror department, my Chinese team’s lead author emailed in a sweat. Apparently one of his colleagues is a classic loose cannon. This personage sent the article we’ve been working on in to Elsevier, totally unedited. Result? The editor sent back a flame that must have set their hair on fire.

My guy says this editor sent back a sh!tload (not in those terms, of course: sh!tload seems not to be among the vocabulary lessons given in Chinese middle schools… 😀 ) of editorial suggestions. I interpret this to mean she did a light edit on the thing and entered a bunch of changes or QAs. Understand: at this point I’m two-thirds of the way through second edits on this unimaginably sophisticated and abstract magnum opus!

Now I’m thinking WTF? How am I going to justify a whole new set of edits against my edits in 18 pages of typeset copy? This is going to be a nightmare of Brobdinagian proportions.

I decide to motor on through to the end; then open the file he sent and at that point figure out what the hell to do.

Well, when I finally do reach that point, I find it is, thank GOD, not edited or commented-upon copy, but simply boilerplate the woman has copied from Elsevier’s website and pasted into her email. The “what to look for in your ESL copy” boilerplate. Thank you, ma’am: we already know that.

So. That was close!

Facebook: How’s Life without It?

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Better, much better. No question: Life is better without Facebook.

Tuesday — day before yesterday — a ton of work got done in the absence of the FB distraction. Instead of getting sucked in at the crack of dawn, the dogs and I were out the door before 6 a.m. (And today, by 5 a.m.) Tuesday I finished chapter 20 of Ella’s Story and yesterday wrote chapter 21. Tuesday, too, provided time to drill holes in the ground around the paloverde tree and dose the monster tree-eating paloverde beetles’ grubs with insecticide.

Facebook pesters you with endless “notifications” of every hiccup emitted by any and all “friends.” These come in by email, which I was diverting into Apple Mail’s “Trash” so as to keep the flood of trivia from distracting from more important messages. In just a few days, well over 200 messages had accrued. These I deleted in mass today, since I surely didn’t have time to read them and, even if I did, FB won’t let me respond to them anyway. Fortunately, before the last one was disappeared I spotted the sub-microscopic “unsubscribe” link, which I hope will stem the flood.

Yet another report from Reuters describes Congress’s alarm at Facebook’s generous habits of sharing your personal data with whoever has a dime to pay — this time with a huge Chinese social media company, among others. “Chinese telecommunications companies,” the news agency observes, “have come under scrutiny from U.S. intelligence officials who argue they provide an opportunity for foreign espionage and threaten critical U.S. infrastructure…”

Ugh! Truly, I regret ever having signed up for the platform. What sleaze!

The issues are that Facebook invades its users’ privacy, shares personal data ad lib, exploits your curiosity and your desire to stay in touch with friends, and engages in practices antithetical to U.S. security — to say nothing of the individual user’s security. On a more local level: it expands to fill all corners in your life, occupying undue amounts of time.

To say life is better without it is to understate.