iPhone Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Not underwater

national news

A few people checked in with me last week with sentiments such as “How did you and your family fare during the deluge?” and “I saw there was bad flooding out your way; hoping everything is ok.”

Yes, our house is not underwater. The basement was damp, but there was no water on the floor.

It’s rare for upstate NY news to appear on the national newscasts, but it’s been “a thing” for a few days now. There was real damage in areas not far from our home. In West Albany, which is part of the town of Colonie, but only about 2.5 miles from our house, people were evacuated by boat.

The flood-prone areas – the city line to Colonie on Central Avenue (see above), the area around Stuyvesant Plaza at Western Avenue and Fuller Road, for two – caught some drivers unawares. According to a news report, one guy drove one way on Central at 4:30 a.m., picked up a passenger, drove back, and got stuck.

From the NWS: “July 29, 2026 was the 2nd wettest calendar day on record for Albany, NY with 5.45″ occurring! The daily record missed the all-time calendar day record set by the Tropical Storm Floyd rainfall back on Sept 16, 1999 when 5.60″ occurred at the Albany International Airport. The rainfall yesterday did pass the 4.69″ measured from Irene back on August 28, 2011. Daily records for Albany go back to 1874.”

It was a fairly narrow geographic band of rain, but the places that were hit got hammered. You may have seen the centuries-old grist mill in Castleton-On-Hudson, just 10 miles south of Albany, obliterated.

Cohoes Falls is quite pleasant, but it’s no Niagara Falls, except that day.

By comparison

Do you know what I did that day? Nothing. I never left the house, didn’t get dressed.

It had been a hectic few days before that. My wife had dropped me off to visit a sick friend on the previous Friday. When I got home via bus, my wife had left her keys in the door. The next day, I couldn’t find my keys.

So I don’t know whether I lost them inside or outside the house, which made the search more exhausting. Are they in the sofa, did they fall out of my pants on the bus, or something else?

Then, when my wife and I went to the movies on Monday, I turned off my iPhone. After the film, I tried to turn on my phone, but I saw “SOS,” which meant my phone was showing that I had lost my Internet connection.

I tried multiple times: toggling Airplane Mode, turning it on for a few seconds, then off to refresh my network connection; restarting my iPhone; toggling my cellular line/eSIM off and back on in Settings; resetting Network Settings. Nothing.

The next day, my provider messaged, “You’ve turned off our service on your phone.” I didn’t, but I went to THAT setting and turned it on.

Neither losing keys (my wife made more on Tuesday) nor not being online was a real crisis, merely a bother.

But they were enough stressors that I took the rain day to do nothing.

iPhone 13 and Apple Watch Series 7

Proving I didn’t live where I didn’t live

The doorbell rang, and then there was knocking on the door. I came downstairs and received a box from the FedEx guy. It came from a fulfillment center in Fort Worth, TX. When I opened the package, I found a packing slip for an iPhone 13 and an Apple Watch Series 7. You might guess the problem.

The form message from Spectrum Mobile was a bit ominous. “If you did not order this product, DO NOT OPEN DEVICE PACKAGING and please contact us immediately at (833)…” Oh yeah, “Once a package is opened or seal is broken, future returns or exchanges may result in restocking fees of $50 per device.” And there’s a 14-day window, not from when I received it but from the shipping date two days earlier.

I should note that I do have some services, including the Internet, from Spectrum. But I have nothing from the related Spectrum Mobile.

The first person I spoke with said they’d cancel my Mobile account, which I doubt happened because I kept getting welcoming emails. The second person was worse. They suggested that, since I had the equipment anyway, maybe I wanted to keep it and switch to Spectrum Mobile. What? Upselling me when a fraud has been perpetrated on both Spectrum and me? Then I was on hold for a minimum of twenty minutes.

One out of three ain’t bad

At least, the third person, in the fraud department, was helpful. They told me:
* The items were purchased on a MasterCard that was not mine. But during the transaction that got this unwanted equipment to me, the purchaser used MY Social Security number. This was extremely discomforting.
* The purchase was for $268, but that was just the downpayment on the purchase, which totaled about two grand.
*The buyer used a variation of my name on an Outlook account that is not mine.

I was trying to figure out how a crook would make money sending me the equipment I did not request. My wife theorized that maybe porch pirates were scoping out our house. The rep suggested that I might receive a contact from the fraudsters to tell me the package was sent to me in error. They could then get me to return the box to a fraudulent address.

Before I sent the package back, using a FedEx label Spectrum emailed me, I became obsessed with my vulnerability for identity theft. I went to the Experian page and checked the information they had on me. My credit card usage appeared to be correct. But the file showed that I once lived in Schuylerville, NY in Saratoga County, NY, in the Albany metro, but 30 miles away, where I’ve never resided.

Experian wanted me to send documentation, such as a photo of my current DMV ID, to prove I DIDN’T live in Schuylerville in the past? Je ne comprends pas. I requested that they make the change sans the picture.

My (sort of) brand-new iPhone 8!

He MAY text

For the longest time, I wasn’t really all that fond of cellphones. Part of it was an aversion to being available all of the time. Is this a societally GOOD thing?

And now that almost everyone has a camera, they all feel the need to share the most mundane content. I will acknowledge that it is has been important in pointing out abuse and injustice. But it has so distorted what news is. Is a cat falling, but caught by people holding a flag, newsworthy? It is as if there’s an amateur video. Otherwise, it doesn’t exist, or so I’m told.

Still, the real issue apparently is that I have managed to acquire a series of duds for Android cellphones. They were unreliable. My most recent one would drain the battery by 5% from the time I turned it on until it was fully functional. And then it would continue to lose power so rapidly that it’d be pointless to leave it on. It was passive/aggressive behavior on my part towards the phone that I’d misplace it so often.

Then months ago, I bought an iPhone 8. It wasn’t the latest and greatest, but it had to be miles better, didn’t it? And it was reasonably priced, so if it didn’t work out, the investment wouldn’t have been too bad.

I started the process of setting it up, but I was interrupted and didn’t get back to it for a couple of weeks, by which time I couldn’t remember my two-step authorization number. Or something. Anyway, I just gave up on it for a few months.

Help!

Finally, I went to the Apple store in the mall – I hate the mall – and they reset it to the original mode. I was able to set up a better authorization process. And it was all good.

Well, except that I didn’t have a SIM card. My previous phone always said No SIM card, yet worked; not so on this phone. So I waited for the new card to arrive. I called my carrier to get my service switched to the new device.

I couldn’t get the card on this little tray, and my carrier’s customer service guy couldn’t talk me through it. So I went BACK to the Apple Store, and five minutes later, voila.

This means that now, probably, I’ll text! You can send photos to me by phone instead of emailing because that’s been so onerous for some people. I’ll add apps, which I was shedding on the old phone – and I didn’t have that many – because it didn’t have enough memory.

But I’ll still use my watch to tell time because pulling out my phone while riding my bicycle doesn’t seem like a good idea.

My fear now, of course, is that I’ll become so enamored of my new phone – it’s at least like at first sight – it’ll be disappointing if I break/lose it.

Mostly unrelated: Arthur is doing something, and I have no idea what he’s talking about.