technology Archives - Page 5 of 8

It’s not my technophobia; it’s THEM

“Remember: it’s update, not upgrade. “

Every once in a while you read a blog post that you not only enjoy, it edifies your very being. I’m talking about Dustbury’s post Demotional rescue. Now you need to know that Chaz, who runs the joint, has been online close to 20 years, and he’s approximately 314.15 times savvier, technologically, than I will ever be. And I’m OK with that.

Still, Chaz installed OpenOffice 4.0.0, only to discover “feature bloat and unnecessarily complicated toolbars …
then it started to crash on a regular basis. I figure any spreadsheet software that fails on an effort to insert four lousy lines — no formulas or anything — into a 16k single-sheet document needs to die, and pronto. I banished the offending version and went back to 3.3.0, which I still had in a directory somewhere.”

Then: “DivX, a nice little package of codecs and converters and whatnot, has been pestering me for updates for some time now, and when I gave in, they threw up a whole new splash screen telling me how wonderful this new toolbar was. Now I look upon toolbars approximately the way I look upon cold-air intakes: they might have been useful twenty years ago, but they’re not getting near my engine. I duly unchecked the box, which also threatened me with a whole new search engine, and a new splash screen came up with the option greyed out — but still, technically, checked. Out you go, DivX, and never darken my drives again.”

When I load software, after reading the manual, thank you very much, I always assumed it was my inability to grasp the technology. (Some dopey tech people didn’t help in this regard. Don’t they know English?)

It seems, though, that at least SOME of the time, that update makes things worse, not better. What was instinctive is now incomprehensible. Hey, I’m still a technophobe, but at least I know I have a good cause! As Chaz wrote: “Remember: it’s update, not upgrade.”

Taking the time to see

I need to remember to spend more time observing and less time with busyness.

I was waiting for the bus after work. Ofttimes, I’d pull out a magazine or newspaper to read, and I almost ALWAYS have something to read. But on this particular day – and it was a particularly lovely afternoon – I just didn’t feel like it. Using my backpack as a pillow, I lay on this granite slab in front of my work building and just observed. My goodness, the New York State flag is REALLY frayed, much worse than the US flag. I had never even noticed this before.

I tend, I think, to observe more than the average person, some of it, admittedly, mundane. Most of them get on the bus, or in their cars and immediately get on some sort of electronic device, lest not doing so would leave them adrift in the world. (That state law banning handheld devices while driving? A joke around here.)

One of the elevators in our building opens to let people on, then closes, opens, closes, opens, then when it finally closes, it buzzes as though someone had been holding the door open.

We have new phones at home. Actually, I bought them 14 months ago but didn’t install them for almost a year, when the phones suddenly going dead were too much of an irritation. What I didn’t know is that the phone announces the caller, usually badly. “Call from. Shen-ec-tdy. En why.” (That was supposed to be Skin-EC-ta-dy.) And it does it two times, then cuts out after ‘Call from’ on the third round. You have no idea how much silly, but cheap, entertainment value I get from that. (Some have suggested that I am easily amused…)

Friends are amazed by how well I know the WALK light patterns of irregular intersections in the city of Albany. I take it as a defensive measure against getting run over.

I need to remember to spend more time observing and less time with busyness, filling every available minute. It’s fun, and it relaxes me.

Feel the need to LISTEN to See by the Rascals.

Oh, so THAT’S how you do it!

My wife kept talking pictures with her digital camera, confident that, SOME DAY, we would figure it out how to access them.

My birthday week (last month) became quite busy, though entertaining. On my birthday itself, my wife and daughter took me out to go bowling. I used to love to bowl, going back to when I was in a league when I was just ten years old. My game was definitely off, but it HAS been over five years.

That evening at choir, we had a dearth of tenors, and I was requested to sing in that section, rather than with the basses. Fortunately, the parts aren’t TOO high, or too difficult. The snow that fell that night was wet and slippery but was largely over the next day.

Friday night and Saturday morning, I helped with the setup of our church’s participation in the Giffen School Book-and-Author event, then worked the event, as did The Wife and The Daughter.

Came home and played hearts with friends Jendy, Broome, and Orchid. At the end of the play, there was some desire to take photos. We took a picture of Broome, Orchid, and me, Jendy already having left. They said, “You can send that picture to us, right?” My wife and I had to acknowledge sheepishly that while we could TAKE pictures on my wife’s digital camera, we didn’t know how to SEND pictures.

It was after a wedding of a friend of my wife’s on July 28, 2007, that she expressed interest in greeting some sort of digital camera, and I bought it for her in either December 2007, for Christmas, or July 2008, for her birthday. It stayed in the box for well over a year, before she tried to figure it out. After some technical difficulties, partly based on a dying battery, she started taking pictures in the summer of 2010 at Lydia’s ballet class. She could even take videos. But moving these from camera to another medium was not in our skillset. Among other things, the manual was MIA. If there was some sort of cord attachment, it was missing as well. Yet, my wife kept talking pictures, confident that, SOMEDAY, we would figure it out.

Apparently, some cameras can send pictures through the wireless Internet, though ours was from an earlier generation. But Broome popped out the little drive and uploaded it onto my daughter’s laptop. So, over the next several months, or years, you’ll see the output; after all, we have 2.5 years of pictures previously inaccessible, including some short videos.

How did I put pictures on this blog in the past? I used to take photos with a one-use camera and get them made into a CD-ROM. Not quick, or cheap, but it worked. These aren’t necessarily great photos here – the first and last (so far) taken by my wife – but you’ll see some really nice ones over time.

That problem no solved, it’s time to use the Kindle my wife got for her birthday back in July 2011.

Loss of data

I was putting together my monthly list of links, when it struck me that some of the pieces were of a type. They were all about information of one form or another and how sometimes, it goes away.

JEOPARDY! wiz Ken Jennings – he won 74 games in a row – gave a TEDx talk at Seattle University in February 2013 called The Obsolete Know-It-All. It runs about 18 minutes, in which he discusses the JEOPARDY! competition with Brad Rutter (human) and the IBM computer named Watson, as. He talks, among other things, about how a part of the brain shrinks when one uses GPS, or uses the cellphone to look up your friends’ numbers. This is one of those issues I respond to viscerally. Looking it up on Google may be more “efficient,” but it doesn’t compare with knowing stuff.

If the technologies fail us – power grid crashes, computers compromised by cyberattacks – what will we still know? What does it all mean in terms of our human interaction? By contrast, 5 ways robots can improve accuracy, journalism quality.

Andy Marx writes about the day he and his grandfather Groucho saved the television show ‘You Bet Your Life’ from ending up in a Dumpster. If he hadn’t answered the phone, the shows would have been lost forever. In the comments, there was an interesting link to a story of how much of our cultural history depends on one person’s decision to preserve something instead of throwing it away.

Speaking of TV, Ken Levine’s comment about the late Bonnie Franklin, and her TV show ONE DAY AT A TIME falling between the cracks prompted the question about why some shows remain perennially popular while others fade out. “It doesn’t necessarily seem to be question of quality.” Interesting responses in the comments section.

Mark Twain Captured on Film by Thomas Edison in 1909. It’s the only known footage of the author.

Finally, since Jaquandor inspired this with his lazy linkage, I appreciated reading what he has to say: When going back to edit your writing, how do you determine what to keep and what to weed out? I imagine novelists in particular whether to exorcise a scene, or just save it for another book.
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My first thoughts about the end of this year’s Boston Marathon. Probably not my last.

Mondays and technology

At home, the Internet is not working. Well, it is on but I can’t receive it.

Some days, I work hard to bring you a well-crafted thought process. Other days, the piece just writes itself. This is what happened on Monday, March 4, 2013:

I get the Daughter to school barely on time (too long a story), and just catch the #10 Western Avenue bus. I would not have if people were all using bus swipers; fortunately, the cash users slowed the process down sufficiently.

I then ride the #737 bus to Corporate Woods. Near the library on Henry Johnson Boulevard, I overhear the driver say to the dispatcher that the bus has broken down. Did I hear him correctly? I did! He announces that a replacement bus would be there in five minutes; I thought this was an optimistic estimate, since the last time I was on a bus that broke down (also a #737, on the way home, stuck on Northern Boulevard near WTEN-TV), it took 20 minutes. Fortunately, this time, it was only eight minutes.

Bypassing my work office, I go to my allergist’s office. I get a couple of shots every four weeks for my allergies. I can visit a few days earlier, but if I go a day later than the 28 days, I’ll have to start the regimen all over, building up the dosage. They have this new computerized system, whereby I swipe a card they gave me and it’s all automated; no paperwork. From a medical privacy standpoint, this makes much more sense than the sign-in sheet, where one can see the other patients’ names. But, in the short term, this is taking much longer; the staff has a learning curve, so it took 30 minutes to be called, rather than the usual five or ten. After the shot, I’m supposed to wait 30 minutes to see if I get a reaction.

I’m getting to work much later than I anticipated. One of my colleagues is stymied, and feeling poorly to boot. She’s using this software to do a ring study around an address in Kingston, NY. But the output says it’s in Eddyville, NY. I don’t even know what Eddyville is, and I lived in Ulster County for a time; it’s not even recognized in Census geography. My co-worker asked, “Could you figure this out? I’m going home sick.” The ultimate fix was to use the latitude and longitude, rather than the street address, which allowed me to rename the map whatever I wanted to, such as the street address in Kingston.

At home, the Internet is not working. Well, it is on, but I can’t receive it. This proves to be a relatively easy fix of rebooting the wireless router.

I receive these annual dividend checks from an insurance company, MetLife. Do I want to complete enrollment with their vendor Computershare of Providence, RI so I can get the money automatically deposited into my checking account? Sure! Twenty minutes later, I was stymied by the fact that I had to set up an account with Computershare, and the password I had to create was in the wrong format – but I couldn’t find instructions as to the correct way: no caps? ALL CAPS? alphanumeric? Then I called their less than instinctive automated “customer service” number, but ended up in voicemail hell, before it cut off altogether, blasting a loud hum in my ear. Finally, I gave up and snail-mailed the information. Curse you, Computershare!

I surely understand why people are technophobic. While I had some successes that day, the last encounter, in particular, was quite frustrating.