Coffee heat rising

Techno-skeptic

Lost in Space

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TUESDAY:

Total disconnect from the Internet is extremely weird. Truly: a bizarre experience.

I’ve come unstuck from life.

It occurred to me, as I stumbled back into the house after getting home from the Mayo, that it has been years – yea, verily, many years – since I arrived in the Connected Universe. My home (and, by extension, my business) has not been offline in at least two decades. Maybe three. And not being able to get online? Feels like half my life has come to a dead stop. Which, I suppose, it has.

But…this is life???

As I was trudging home from the Mayo through yesterday’s gawdawful rush-hour traffic, the mind wandered.

I need to look up CT scans. The doc’s nurse-practitioner had ordered a CT scan, in hopes of confirming or deconfirming her theory that what ails me is not allergies but a full-blown sinus infection.

Sinus infection. None of the quacks nor the dentist have suggested that one. I need to look up “sinus inf….” Uhm…well…no.

Gotta call my son and ask h… Well. no.

I wonder if the phone in the back bedroom is actually connected to the damn Internet, or if by chance it’s plugged into a real, actual land line? …Well. no.

Crap! If I slip and fall or…or…or if anything happens to me, I will have NO WAY to call for help. Retrieve the emergency inscrutable cell phone from the car; place in jeans pocket.

Has that bastard Moore won in Alabama? Did a miracle happen and drive the state’s wacksh!t bigots to vote him down? No way to know until I get to the Little Guy’s place tomorrow…and that will have to wait until after I schlep the puppy to the vet and bring her back home.

WAHHH! How can I live without watching the news?

Beats me.

On the other hand, if I’m not wasting time watching news stories about which no one can do much…if I’m not wasting time on Facebook…if I’m not wasting time on Nextdoor…if I’m not wasting time playing online games…then there will be little else to do but write the current flibbet of fiction. Under its working title of “Ella’s Backstory,” the thing has proceeded to some 10,224 words. Not bad for a rough draft of nothing much, compiled between other time-wasting activities.

If I wasted my time only on Ella’s Backstory, how much could I get done before Cox restores me to my former ersatz reality?

A lot, I’ll bet.

How much could we Americans, as a people, get done if we did not pass our time in ersatz reality?

WEDNESDAY:

They haven’t laid the blacktop in the alley yet. Possibly if they delay a day or two, the Cox guy, who is supposed to show up this afternoon, will get the lines for the wireless connection relaid.

Possibly not, too: the backhoe operator knocked over the telecomm company’s cable device in the alley, so that presumably will have to be replaced. On what time schedule is anyone’s guess.

Also anyone’s guess: who’s going to pay for this?

Cox will try its best to sock it to me: that’s their standard operating practice. If they make me pay to reconnect a line that THEY fucked up by not installing it properly, I am switching the land lines over to VoIP and buying an annoying cell phone. I’ve probably put off being leashed to a cell as long as I can – these days when you tell people you don’t have a cell phone, they give you a blank look. It’s so unthinkable, they don’t even understand what you’re saying.

Problem is, I can’t afford another monthly bill. Especially not one that’s likely to run around $130. I’m already almost out of money, with nine months to go before the next drawdown. My house is freezing, because the only way I can pay the outrageous air conditioning bills in the summer is to leave the heat off in the winter. There really aren’t a lot of other ways to economize, at this point. I do not travel, I do not go to movies, I do not go to sporting events, I rarely buy clothes, I buy makeup in the drugstore, I do not get my hair done at a salon, and I’ve quit buying food at Costco. There really are no other ways to cut corners, other than to get rid of the dogs.

That would save about $50 a month. Plus the usual Big Hits from the dogs. This morning, for example, I have to schlep Ruby to the vet: now she has a rotten tooth and is getting an abscess. Pulling Cassie’s abscessed tooth cost over $900. Now we get a replay of that disaster!**

And the City has put me out of business. With my computers offline, I’m screwed: all my business is done online. I have no idea whether my clients are trying to get in touch with me, and will not know until I can get to a coffee house with connectivity. I can’t pay my bills. I can’t retrieve clients’ payments from PayPal.

I’ll have to drop by the Little Guy’s place on GangBanger Way, on the way home from the vet. What I’m supposed to do with Ruby whilst answering email in the parking-lot café outside the Little Guy’s escapes me.

Fortunately, it’s wintertime. I can leave her in the car for awhile. But not for very long. Plus I have to be back here by 1 p.m. It’s an hour’s drive between my house and the vet (everything is an hour’s drive in Phoenix’s nightmare traffic). If I get out of there by 10:15 (this assumes he sees me on time and doesn’t consume more than a half-hour of my time), it will be 11:15 by the time I get to the coffee house. That will leave maybe an hour and a half to catch up with the email, cope with whatever headaches arise there, post these blog maunderings, and read the news.

But not so much, really: Cassie rolled out of the sack at 5 this morning with diarrhea. I can’t leave her outside – it’s cold and she’s not used to that, and besides the racket from all that heavy equipment will terrorize her. If I leave her indoors for more than an hour or so, I’ll have an unholy mess to come home to. Scrubbing up doggy diarrhea off the floors is really not what I want to do with an already unhappy day.

If I race home, drop off Ruby, let Cassie out, and then race back up to the coffee house to attend to business, I may not get back here in time to contend with the Cox guy, who is supposed to show up between 1 and 3.

Shee-UT!

** The good news (for a change) is that the bump on Ruby’s schnozz is NOT an abscess, even though her left carnassial fang is encased in tartar. She needs her teeth cleaned, which ain’t cheap. But at least it won’t set me back another $900.

Effin’ Brave New World…

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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.

Car Keys in the Brave New World

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So SDXB’s New Girlfriend (affectionately known as NG)  has a place in beautiful Sun City and a place in Boulder. This summer she sold the big house in Boulder, built by her late husband and herself, to move into a smaller place closer to her son and family. In the process, she experienced some heart palpitations

Sensibly, she goes to a doc to have this checked out. He tells her she has atrial fibrillation, a potentially fatal ailment. So she’s now becalmed in Colorado, jumping through medical hoops.

Fast-forward a few weeks: Her son and DiL have to make a sojourn to Phoenix for some damnfool reason. They wish to borrow her car so they don’t have to rent. But…but…but she can’t remember where she put the keys to the damn car.

She can’t, can’t CAN’T remember where she put them.

So SDXB goes over to the Sun City manse and searches the joint from stem to stern. He even checks every door lock in the house to see if maybe she carelessly left her keys in the door. He performs this exploration not once, not twice, but three times. He can NOT find the keys.

He calls Larry Miller Toyota to find out if he can get a new key made.

In order to make a new Annoying Smart Key, NG herself has to show up there, with the title of the car in hand to prove she actually owns it (!!!!!!!) and with a picture ID to prove she’s who she says she is. And the car has to be at the Toyota dealership. This, as you correctly surmise, entails having to tow the damn car to the dealership!!!! The cost is many, many hundreds of dollah.

I say to SDXB…wait. Waitaminit here! Anderson Lock & Key, the pre-eminent locksmith in the Valley, told me they could copy the key to the hated Venza (the Bell Road crooks didn’t bother to give me two keys…). It would be expensive, but nothing like what Larry Miller proposes to charge.

We call Anderson.

Yes. Sure. They can make a new key. But yes, it requires the locksmith and his computer to convene at the same place where the becalmed car resides. However, they will send the guy out to Sun City, laptop in hand, to make a new key.

For a fuckin’ car key…

Blocking the Scammers

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Enough! I finally decided to get off my duff and do something about the interminable telemarketing robocalling scammers. They’ve taken now to calling as early as 7 in the morning and as late as 8:30 at night. It’s not unusual to get half a dozen nuisance calls in a day. The National Do-Not-Call list does exactly nothing to discourage them, and Cox, the least obnoxious of the phone companies locally, flat refuses to provide the most effective telemarketing blocker, NoMoRobo — because, we’re told, telecom companies claim their old copper lines aren’t up to the task. (Never mind that most landline users now get our phone service through the cable.)

The strategy I chose is far from the most economical. If you want to keep a household phone system that allows you to have a wireless extension in every room, the cheapest way is to switch from landline to VoIP.

Here in Phoenix, Ooma offers a VoIP service that supports NoMoRobo, apparently for no extra charge. This allows you to cancel Cox’s phone service, leaving you only with the cost of the Internet connection, saving about $30 a month. Without the phone in the “package,” of course, Cox can be relied upon to jack up the cost of the Internet service — they never miss a beat, you can be sure. So your saving would be less than the present cost of the phone system. Ooma is only a few dollars a month — because it’s an Internet connection, not a telephone service, you escape the outrageous taxes and fees, which in our parts cost more than phone connection itself.

I decided not to cancel my landline, antiquated though the technology is, for several reasons:

• A landline phone plugged directly into a telephone jack will work even when the electricity is out, and even when Cox’s Internet connection is down. VoIP will not.

Yeah, I know: use your cell phone. Well, I have one clamshell phone that I often forget to recharge…what happens when the power is out, an emergency is in progress, and the damn cell phone (assuming I can find it in the dark) is dead?

• After studying the Ooma sites and the Ooma reviews, it looks to me like setting up a VoIP connection with one of their boxes is “simple” only to The Young and The Techie. You can put money on it — a lot of money — that when I try to make the thing work, I will fvck it up. It then will be days before I can lure my son over here to get it to work, and without a doubt I’ll lose the phone number emblazoned all over my business cards and stationery. These are not likelihoods: they’re givens.

• I suspect the sound quality falls short of the quality a hard-wired system delivers. Even fans of Ooma — which is said to be one of the better programs — call it “echoey.” Do I really want to be talking with clients on an echoing line?

• In theory, the 911 operators can find you if you dial from a land line. Remains to be seen if that’s true. Last time I called 911, I was choking and couldn’t speak. When I couldn’t get any words out, the 911 operator hung up on me. But…the theory is there. Theoretically…

The largest of these considerations is that when I say I’m all learning-curved out, I’m not kidding. I’m so averse to having to take a college course to re-learn the use of a tool I’ve used comfortably for decades, I’m actually willing to pay for the privilege of not having fart around with that.

So I just plunked down a hundred bucks to buy a British-made device called the CPR V5000 Call Blocker. It’s pretty much plug and play, from what I can tell. There are some circumstances in which it may require some jiggering, but apparently they don’t apply to my system.

The thing comes with 5000 known telemarketing phone numbers already blocked. So from the moment you plug it in, you reduce the deluge of calls. Then you just push a button (or #2, from an extension) to block a pest caller when he dials you. Before long, few or none get through.

You can block entire area codes. There are a couple of area codes from which nothing but phone solicitations are sent; block those area codes, and you block every call coming from within that code. Some 1,833 customers have given this gadget an average rating of 4.5 stars. At Amazon, the maker has patiently and fully explained dozens of consumer questions — if you read through them, you get a clue to how to deal with all the issues people ask about — and the company also has live customer service reps who are reportedly competent.

Its nearest competitor, twenty bucks less at Amazon, has racked up just 11 customer reviews, averaging only 4 stars. Since many producers pay people to write reviews, it’s best to discount the 5-star reviews — with so few reviews, doing so would probably drop the average rating. And its sales copy is not written in idiomatic English — they couldn’t even bother to hire a native speaker to pitch their device.

This doodad is supposed to arrive tomorrow. I can’t wait!

Techno-Skeptic: What’s wrong with e-books & e-tunes

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Sappho, the Tenth MuseIf you’ve been reading here for any length of time, you’ve come to realize that Funny is a dyed-in-the-wool techno-skeptic. Yea verily, even a techno-troglodyte. Today from Bloomberg comes a report that confirms my suspicions: China, uncomfortable with the twin horrors that are freedom of thought and freedom of expression, has shut down iTunes and iBooks. Herein lies the problem with e-books and e-tunes: you don’t really own them. You may pay for them, but it’s altogether too easy for someone to block you from reading or listening to them.

We’ve seen this happen with Amazon: there was, for example, the 2009 flap that arose when Amazon remotely erased digital editions of George Orwell’s 1984 (amazing choice!) from consumers’ Kindle devices. More recently, a Norwegian woman discovered all her paid-for content had been erased from her Kindle; Amazon flat refused to give an explanation for its actions.

As Amazon states in its ToS,  you don’t buy a Kindle book — you rent it: “Kindle content is licensed, not sold.” So, with this wonderful magical mystery machine, any creative work you buy can be taken away from you without warning and without recourse.

Apple has a similar proviso hidden in its iTunes ToS: “The Apple Software enables access to Apple’s iBookstore which permits you to license digital content, such as books (the”Service”).”

If Amazon can take it away, so can a government. And what we’re seeing in the current election cycle provides exactly zero reason to believe that Americans will forever be ruled by a fair, just, and civil government. There are those, probably crackpots, who think it never has been. In the Kurt Vonnegut novel in which we all live, the crackpot view could win out, over the long run. It never pays to dismiss “crazy”ideas  out of hand.

If you own a book made of paper and cardboard, yes, someone can take it away from you. Surely, they can throw it on a big bonfire and order you to stop thinking forbidden thoughts on pain of beheading. But they have to come into your home to take a hard-copy book away from you. They can’t just flick a switch somewhere and erase knowledge, opinion, and art.

A real book costs money. A real book takes up space. A real book collects dust. But a real book is yours.

IMHO, that’s worth it.