After I installed Norton Anti-Virus, I decided to upgrade to put it on some other devices. I have yet to successfully do so. I sent the following letter to Symantec:
I thought adding new devices to my Norton Anti-Virus subscription would be a piece of cake. It has been a nightmare of changing circumstances. Somewhere along the line, even the email address on my subscription was changed to I know not what.
I really prefer using email to ask questions, but your only choices are Chat Room or telephone call. Both of these put the customer and employee under pressure to keep doing something. Haste makes waste.
I have been going around and around trying to follow the directions for installing Norton on additional devices. It has devolved into just giving me the choice to buy it from the App Store.
Please email me detailed instructions on how to get my email account recognized again and to install Norton Anti-Virus on an iPad mini, and iPad, and an iPhone.
- End of letter
I tried again today at a coffee shop to put Norton Antivirus on my wife’s iPad Mini. Everything worked fine until I was taken to the App Store. I forget the details, but the App Store hung up after I put in my wife’s credit card info. Why a credit card was needed for a free download, I don’t know I finally turned her iPad off.
Later I tried to make a donation to a local charity. I made a mistake typing in the credit card number, and it turned to box to a rose background. It was really hard to see what corrections I was making. I eventually got all the correct information in and pressed the “Donate” button. Nothing happened. The only way I got out of that as to close the window. This is the first time that such a glitch has occurred on the site.
After reading many of the comments to https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/many-apples-design-innovations-make-products-worse-195651509.html, I don’t feel so badly. But Apple doesn’t see to be listening to “The Rest of Us”.
Showing posts with label coffee shop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label coffee shop. Show all posts
Saturday, November 25, 2017
Sunday, November 12, 2017
Has Apple left the “rest of us” behind?
I am sending the following paper letter to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple.
Tim Cook
Apple
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino CA 95014
Dear Mr. Cook,
It is 1984 and Apple is Big Brother!
I have been debugging software, my own and others’, for fifty-nine years. In 1983 I left corporate life to work on personal computers. Some of them were more difficult to program than the main-frames I had worked on.
Then came Apple and the Macintosh in 1984. By September I had my first Mac (and a Lisa). Pascal was a joy of simplicity, even if I had to do it through the Lisa. Every time a new Mac came out, I was eager to buy one as soon as possible. More storage, more speed. Hurray!
One of the standing jokes was that Mac owners didn’t need manuals because of WIMP. About the only thing I needed a manual for was how to use diacritical marks in text (åäéñ).
Then OS X came. I never did recover everything that I had on my on-the-floor box. For awhile, I did upgrade to a new OS X. But changes started making old stuff obsolete. Or changes were rather gratuitous. Did iPhoto really need new background colors? Did iPhoto need to change how photos were annotated? It seems that changes were made more to keep programmers busy than give the users truly better software.
I’ve been in that position before. I didn’t want to maintain the old mainframe software; I wanted to work on the new hardware.
I have a long list of peeves of how Apple software changed gratuitously from simple one-step operations to operations with a hidden second step. I got to the point that I would only change major levels of software when I bought a new computer.
Then, either deliberately or accidentally, I upgraded to Sierra on my lap top. Fortunately I was at a coffee shop with unlimited internet access instead of at home with a limited monthly access. One of the big surprises was that Sierra dumped all of my Document folder to iCloud!! It was lots of “fun” moving it back to my MacBook Air. I know lots of people who would have to go to Geek Squad or other help professionals to get through this.
My wife’s iMac is swiftly deteriorating. Again, we have to do a lot of fussing to move data to my old MacBook Pro. The disk drive no longer works. Fortunately, we have some large capacity thumb drives so we were able to move her Document folder to the MacBook Pro.
And thumb drives get me to another of my Apple peeves. If one pulls out a thumb drive without “deleting” it, all the data is lost. This is really a 1984 nightmare.
How many of “the rest of us” has Apple left behind?
Tim Cook
Apple
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino CA 95014
Dear Mr. Cook,
It is 1984 and Apple is Big Brother!
I have been debugging software, my own and others’, for fifty-nine years. In 1983 I left corporate life to work on personal computers. Some of them were more difficult to program than the main-frames I had worked on.
Then came Apple and the Macintosh in 1984. By September I had my first Mac (and a Lisa). Pascal was a joy of simplicity, even if I had to do it through the Lisa. Every time a new Mac came out, I was eager to buy one as soon as possible. More storage, more speed. Hurray!
One of the standing jokes was that Mac owners didn’t need manuals because of WIMP. About the only thing I needed a manual for was how to use diacritical marks in text (åäéñ).
Then OS X came. I never did recover everything that I had on my on-the-floor box. For awhile, I did upgrade to a new OS X. But changes started making old stuff obsolete. Or changes were rather gratuitous. Did iPhoto really need new background colors? Did iPhoto need to change how photos were annotated? It seems that changes were made more to keep programmers busy than give the users truly better software.
I’ve been in that position before. I didn’t want to maintain the old mainframe software; I wanted to work on the new hardware.
I have a long list of peeves of how Apple software changed gratuitously from simple one-step operations to operations with a hidden second step. I got to the point that I would only change major levels of software when I bought a new computer.
Then, either deliberately or accidentally, I upgraded to Sierra on my lap top. Fortunately I was at a coffee shop with unlimited internet access instead of at home with a limited monthly access. One of the big surprises was that Sierra dumped all of my Document folder to iCloud!! It was lots of “fun” moving it back to my MacBook Air. I know lots of people who would have to go to Geek Squad or other help professionals to get through this.
My wife’s iMac is swiftly deteriorating. Again, we have to do a lot of fussing to move data to my old MacBook Pro. The disk drive no longer works. Fortunately, we have some large capacity thumb drives so we were able to move her Document folder to the MacBook Pro.
And thumb drives get me to another of my Apple peeves. If one pulls out a thumb drive without “deleting” it, all the data is lost. This is really a 1984 nightmare.
How many of “the rest of us” has Apple left behind?
Wednesday, September 09, 2015
Teetering on the edge of the abyss
I apologize to my dozen readers for not submitting a column for last week. I was still in Internet purgatory and could not give you any further information about my accommodation to our surprises with cordless access. I did have a couple ideas on politics, but I just couldn’t come up with more than 200 words for either of them.
Because you are reading this you know that our provider, Consumer Cellular, has let us have Wi-Fi access again. But even that was iffy. Our access was not turned on until I called around 9:00 on the morning of the first of September. Then for some reason it was blocked again. Another call.
I still have no idea why we were having run-away data in the middle of August. Over a gigabyte in one six-hour period when I wasn’t even knowingly accessing the Web!
I did learn from a search of Apple Community Support that one can close all open apps. My run-away problem could have been a run-away app that kept pinging the web. Anyhow, to close open apps push the home button twice. Miniatures of all of your open apps will appear from left to right. Swipe up on each miniature and the app will be closed. When you click on the app in the home screen, it will open again in the same state as when you closed it.
Don’t worry about closing your phone and message apps. When a call or text message come in, your iPhone will open the necessary app.
I am carefully monitoring my usage both by checking usage with the settings app on my iPhone and with the Consumer Cellular website. Already I have used 826 MB of my 4,096 MB limit, and we are not even five days into the month.
I am not going to be downloading podcasts or updating apps on my dime. I used 135 MB updating three apps and 250 MB getting the latest episodes of four podcasts. Since I download podcasts once a week that would be 1,000 MB a month.
I will definitely be updating these from coffee shops.
I use seven to twenty MB per session accessing accounts and paying bills. I use about twenty MB reading newspapers. These may be doable from home, but I will wait a few days before I resume accessing these from home.
So far today I have accessed the web from an Essentia Health cafeteria before exercising and from Whole Foods Co-op while my wife shopped. I plan to send this from Mt. Royal Market when I’m done.
Let’s see, two coffees a day at two to three dollars each. That would be $120 to $180 a month. That is more than my savings from cutting the cord! Well, I should be getting out of the house more often. And we are not getting all those robocalls on our landline.
Robocalls remind me of diatribe letters that I get every so often. The writer puts on the outside of the envelope in big, oversize, multi-colored capital letters some diatribe about Obama. I don’t even bother reading all the outside message, the letter goes unopened into the recycling box.
Actually, I am apolitical about all of these dire consequence letters, surveys, whatever else some group sends out: Back Obama! Stop the Republicans! Save the whales! All of them go unopened into the recycle box. We get at least six a week.
Back to our regularly scheduled article.
Some glitches cause one to wonder what is going on. I would access my bank account, enter my ID and password, and then get a big message about “System Error”. But it didn’t happen all the time. I think the first time might have coincided with Consumer Cellular turning my account off again on the first day of restoring service. But it also happened yesterday, and today it worked fine.
One app I thought would eat up a lot of data is FaceTime. Our son called my wife’s FaceTime account and they chatted for fifteen minutes or so. The usage on her phone only went up by about 50 MB. I think this might be because FaceTime has some excellent data compression.
Apropos data compression, I hope newspaper sites that play video ads automatically have good data compression. I hope the same for those interesting videos in the New York Times Science section: like two octopuses fighting.
From some of the postings in the Apple Support Community, I did learn that one can increase the data limit with AT&T. I believe it was well beyond the 4 GB we can get from Consumer Cellular. I think also AT&T provides 4G service rather than 3G service. I should look these up as well as LTE. I believe the higher level of service gives better quality and faster speed.
Ah, speed! Sometimes I watch a page come up in a blink of an eye, and sometimes I wonder if the progress bar is even moving. Is it that a site has a large number of users, the site has some other problem, the network has a problem, or my computer has a problem? Or all of the preceding?
Apropos AT&T, we received a card this week offering “$300 in credits when you switch to AT&T”. You have to visit a store, shop at a website, or call an 800 number. There is also a square to scan with a smartphone.
I read the square and found prices per month to buy individual iPhones, but it was unclear how much monthly service would cost and how much data would be available. So much for the free market (buyers have all the information they need).
Also appears in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2015-09-09
Because you are reading this you know that our provider, Consumer Cellular, has let us have Wi-Fi access again. But even that was iffy. Our access was not turned on until I called around 9:00 on the morning of the first of September. Then for some reason it was blocked again. Another call.
I still have no idea why we were having run-away data in the middle of August. Over a gigabyte in one six-hour period when I wasn’t even knowingly accessing the Web!
I did learn from a search of Apple Community Support that one can close all open apps. My run-away problem could have been a run-away app that kept pinging the web. Anyhow, to close open apps push the home button twice. Miniatures of all of your open apps will appear from left to right. Swipe up on each miniature and the app will be closed. When you click on the app in the home screen, it will open again in the same state as when you closed it.
Don’t worry about closing your phone and message apps. When a call or text message come in, your iPhone will open the necessary app.
I am carefully monitoring my usage both by checking usage with the settings app on my iPhone and with the Consumer Cellular website. Already I have used 826 MB of my 4,096 MB limit, and we are not even five days into the month.
I am not going to be downloading podcasts or updating apps on my dime. I used 135 MB updating three apps and 250 MB getting the latest episodes of four podcasts. Since I download podcasts once a week that would be 1,000 MB a month.
I will definitely be updating these from coffee shops.
I use seven to twenty MB per session accessing accounts and paying bills. I use about twenty MB reading newspapers. These may be doable from home, but I will wait a few days before I resume accessing these from home.
So far today I have accessed the web from an Essentia Health cafeteria before exercising and from Whole Foods Co-op while my wife shopped. I plan to send this from Mt. Royal Market when I’m done.
Let’s see, two coffees a day at two to three dollars each. That would be $120 to $180 a month. That is more than my savings from cutting the cord! Well, I should be getting out of the house more often. And we are not getting all those robocalls on our landline.
Robocalls remind me of diatribe letters that I get every so often. The writer puts on the outside of the envelope in big, oversize, multi-colored capital letters some diatribe about Obama. I don’t even bother reading all the outside message, the letter goes unopened into the recycling box.
Actually, I am apolitical about all of these dire consequence letters, surveys, whatever else some group sends out: Back Obama! Stop the Republicans! Save the whales! All of them go unopened into the recycle box. We get at least six a week.
Back to our regularly scheduled article.
Some glitches cause one to wonder what is going on. I would access my bank account, enter my ID and password, and then get a big message about “System Error”. But it didn’t happen all the time. I think the first time might have coincided with Consumer Cellular turning my account off again on the first day of restoring service. But it also happened yesterday, and today it worked fine.
One app I thought would eat up a lot of data is FaceTime. Our son called my wife’s FaceTime account and they chatted for fifteen minutes or so. The usage on her phone only went up by about 50 MB. I think this might be because FaceTime has some excellent data compression.
Apropos data compression, I hope newspaper sites that play video ads automatically have good data compression. I hope the same for those interesting videos in the New York Times Science section: like two octopuses fighting.
From some of the postings in the Apple Support Community, I did learn that one can increase the data limit with AT&T. I believe it was well beyond the 4 GB we can get from Consumer Cellular. I think also AT&T provides 4G service rather than 3G service. I should look these up as well as LTE. I believe the higher level of service gives better quality and faster speed.
Ah, speed! Sometimes I watch a page come up in a blink of an eye, and sometimes I wonder if the progress bar is even moving. Is it that a site has a large number of users, the site has some other problem, the network has a problem, or my computer has a problem? Or all of the preceding?
Apropos AT&T, we received a card this week offering “$300 in credits when you switch to AT&T”. You have to visit a store, shop at a website, or call an 800 number. There is also a square to scan with a smartphone.
I read the square and found prices per month to buy individual iPhones, but it was unclear how much monthly service would cost and how much data would be available. So much for the free market (buyers have all the information they need).
Also appears in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2015-09-09
Friday, August 28, 2015
Clawing out of the Abyss
As of this writing, we are into week two without cellular access on our iPhones (See “Cutting the cord and falling into the abyss” in last week’s Reader).
I think the biggest thing I miss is reading the Duluth News Tribune, Star Tribune, and the New York Times at breakfast and lunch. To check email, statements, and other important and unimportant information, we have to go to the library or coffee shops. I’m drinking a lot more coffee than I normally do.
The easiest is to walk to Chester Creek Café at the corner. But we don’t want to take up a table when there are many lunch or dinner customers.
Perk Place is a quiet place, but for some reason I could not log on to their server. Another Mac user had been successful. I wonder if he was using a newer operating system. A staff member did get me signed on using the coffee shop account.
Once upon a time I would walk to Bixby’s and other shops at Mt. Royal, but every year the hill up Woodland Avenue seems to get steeper, especially with a backpack with a computer. And so I wimp out and drive.
The Mount Royal Library may or may not be crowded. When I went on Thursday it wasn’t, but it did take a bit of effort to log in. I was successful with my iPhone and iPad, but I never managed to click all the right buttons for my laptop.
A diversion at the library was looking for a follow-on book after viewing “The Young Victoria”. The movie had a lot of follow-on summary information. I wanted to know more about her reign and her successors. I used my iPhone to sign on to the catalog and select some books. Having the call numbers of the desired titles on my iPhone sure beat copying those numbers onto paper from the library computers.
Caribou at Mount Royal Market is spacious and quiet. It’s biggest drawback is that there are no power outlets at the tables.
And at the cabin we are completely disconnected from the web. At least, we can still use our phones.
So, I have to carefully plan all my work before hand. I am writing this at home and will go to one of the coffee shops to email it to the Reader. I have to write most of my email beforehand. I have to plan ahead what web sites to visit.
One of those plan-ahead sites was the Apple Support Community. While at a coffee shop I downloaded thirteen threads about excessive data usage. It’s nice to know that I am not alone with this problem. Some useful advice, some blaming the user, but no really clear cut advice.
I do know first hand that solving computer problems can be a long, arduous project. Relevant information comes in dribbles from the customer and lots of digging by programmers. I was the lead investigator of frequent crashes of a Univac 1108 in Sweden. Many of the memory dumps showed a particular program was active. I badgered to customer into giving me a copy of the program. I took the copy to another site and the program crashed because it was putting data outside of its assigned space. To make the story short, the problem was they were using an outdated library and that their computer had a memory protection failure. I think it took three months from the first alarm to final resolution. And those computers were a lot simpler than what we carry in our pockets now!
Once upon a time it was said that Mac owners never used a manual. I did look up a few things now and then, mostly just what keys did I need to push to get å, ä, é, î, ö, and other western European characters. The Mac’s were described as WIMPs: Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pictures. Just about everything you needed to know was obvious from one of these.
Even then, many users came up with seemingly intractable problems. Apple’s answer was to encourage user groups. Unfortunately, often there was nobody at a meeting who had an answer. I remember somebody asking why they couldn’t make their “Whiz Bang” printer work on a Mac. The leader would ask if anybody had a solution and look around the room. Not a hand went up. This happened over and over again.
The human interface, the computing power, and the range of software has improved exponentially in the last 31 years (remember the 1984 Apple ad). We can do many tasks quickly and easily just by poking the screen or dragging a finger over it. But when things go wrong! Hoo boy!
I think I caused my problem with an inadvertent reset. My choices include going back to the last iCloud backup, but would that be done before the coffee shop closed? By reading the manual, I found that I can double-click the home button, swipe up on the screen, and then slide through all the open apps. I can close an app by sliding its image up. This doesn’t remove the app from my iPhone, it just stops it from doing any harm.
Once September rolls around, we’ll have the data part of our Consumer Cellular contract restored. I think the closing apps plan is my best alternative. I’ll start with only keeping the supposedly harmless apps open: Weather, Mail, Calendar, and a few other standards. Then I’ll have to wait until all the data is in for that six-hour period. If usage seems normal, I’ll keep a few more apps open. Either I’ll eventually find the run-away app or that the conditions are such that the app is now behaving.
Meanwhile, I’ll be drinking lots of coffee. I thought of having beer instead, but it will be just my luck to knock over the glass…
Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/08/26/5837_clawing_out_of_the_abyss.
I think the biggest thing I miss is reading the Duluth News Tribune, Star Tribune, and the New York Times at breakfast and lunch. To check email, statements, and other important and unimportant information, we have to go to the library or coffee shops. I’m drinking a lot more coffee than I normally do.
The easiest is to walk to Chester Creek Café at the corner. But we don’t want to take up a table when there are many lunch or dinner customers.
Perk Place is a quiet place, but for some reason I could not log on to their server. Another Mac user had been successful. I wonder if he was using a newer operating system. A staff member did get me signed on using the coffee shop account.
Once upon a time I would walk to Bixby’s and other shops at Mt. Royal, but every year the hill up Woodland Avenue seems to get steeper, especially with a backpack with a computer. And so I wimp out and drive.
The Mount Royal Library may or may not be crowded. When I went on Thursday it wasn’t, but it did take a bit of effort to log in. I was successful with my iPhone and iPad, but I never managed to click all the right buttons for my laptop.
A diversion at the library was looking for a follow-on book after viewing “The Young Victoria”. The movie had a lot of follow-on summary information. I wanted to know more about her reign and her successors. I used my iPhone to sign on to the catalog and select some books. Having the call numbers of the desired titles on my iPhone sure beat copying those numbers onto paper from the library computers.
Caribou at Mount Royal Market is spacious and quiet. It’s biggest drawback is that there are no power outlets at the tables.
And at the cabin we are completely disconnected from the web. At least, we can still use our phones.
So, I have to carefully plan all my work before hand. I am writing this at home and will go to one of the coffee shops to email it to the Reader. I have to write most of my email beforehand. I have to plan ahead what web sites to visit.
One of those plan-ahead sites was the Apple Support Community. While at a coffee shop I downloaded thirteen threads about excessive data usage. It’s nice to know that I am not alone with this problem. Some useful advice, some blaming the user, but no really clear cut advice.
I do know first hand that solving computer problems can be a long, arduous project. Relevant information comes in dribbles from the customer and lots of digging by programmers. I was the lead investigator of frequent crashes of a Univac 1108 in Sweden. Many of the memory dumps showed a particular program was active. I badgered to customer into giving me a copy of the program. I took the copy to another site and the program crashed because it was putting data outside of its assigned space. To make the story short, the problem was they were using an outdated library and that their computer had a memory protection failure. I think it took three months from the first alarm to final resolution. And those computers were a lot simpler than what we carry in our pockets now!
Once upon a time it was said that Mac owners never used a manual. I did look up a few things now and then, mostly just what keys did I need to push to get å, ä, é, î, ö, and other western European characters. The Mac’s were described as WIMPs: Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pictures. Just about everything you needed to know was obvious from one of these.
Even then, many users came up with seemingly intractable problems. Apple’s answer was to encourage user groups. Unfortunately, often there was nobody at a meeting who had an answer. I remember somebody asking why they couldn’t make their “Whiz Bang” printer work on a Mac. The leader would ask if anybody had a solution and look around the room. Not a hand went up. This happened over and over again.
The human interface, the computing power, and the range of software has improved exponentially in the last 31 years (remember the 1984 Apple ad). We can do many tasks quickly and easily just by poking the screen or dragging a finger over it. But when things go wrong! Hoo boy!
I think I caused my problem with an inadvertent reset. My choices include going back to the last iCloud backup, but would that be done before the coffee shop closed? By reading the manual, I found that I can double-click the home button, swipe up on the screen, and then slide through all the open apps. I can close an app by sliding its image up. This doesn’t remove the app from my iPhone, it just stops it from doing any harm.
Once September rolls around, we’ll have the data part of our Consumer Cellular contract restored. I think the closing apps plan is my best alternative. I’ll start with only keeping the supposedly harmless apps open: Weather, Mail, Calendar, and a few other standards. Then I’ll have to wait until all the data is in for that six-hour period. If usage seems normal, I’ll keep a few more apps open. Either I’ll eventually find the run-away app or that the conditions are such that the app is now behaving.
Meanwhile, I’ll be drinking lots of coffee. I thought of having beer instead, but it will be just my luck to knock over the glass…
Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/08/26/5837_clawing_out_of_the_abyss.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Two entries - better late than never
I've had two blog entries in my head since April, but I never found a round tuit to write them. Even though they may not be timely, you might find them interesting.
An April Fool's joke
On 1 April my wife was standing in the kitchen after breakfast musing about something. I said, "Your shoes are untied." She looked down at her slip-ons and said, "Oh, that's a good one!"
Who am I to complain?
For years when it's not ski season, I've gone downtown for coffee, then to the library, and then maybe to lunch.
At first, I went to a coffee shop owned by some friends. When they retired, I went to a coffee shop nearby instead. Besides the good coffee, I appreciated the classical music from public radio.
Then government budget cuts hit the library and it was no longer open on Monday mornings. So, I went to the fitness center instead. Maybe afterward I would walk to the library.
This spring when the ski slope closed, I went back to the coffee shop. Instead of classical music on public radio there was pop music on commercial radio. I mentioned it to a barista; he said the owner changed the station because some of the regulars complained that the classical music put them to sleep. They came to the coffee shop to wake up.
The pop music was not overly loud but the commercials were and set my teeth on edge. I never went back.
Who am I to complain? I went there once a week for nine months of the year. The regulars were there every weekday twelve months a year.
I went to another nearby coffee shop twice but the coffee was so weak that I decided not to go back.
I could have gone to another coffee shop (locally owned) but it was farther from the bus stop and over a windy bridge.
So, I've stopped going downtown on a regular basis altogether. Maybe I'm saving money but I miss dropping in on a few shopkeepers. And I've stopped reading the variety of magazines at the library.
The real downside is I've stopped walking so much. It has to be a nice day with no special errands for me to walk the mile to a local coffee shop twice a week.
"I took the [road] less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." - Robert Frost
An April Fool's joke
On 1 April my wife was standing in the kitchen after breakfast musing about something. I said, "Your shoes are untied." She looked down at her slip-ons and said, "Oh, that's a good one!"
Who am I to complain?
For years when it's not ski season, I've gone downtown for coffee, then to the library, and then maybe to lunch.
At first, I went to a coffee shop owned by some friends. When they retired, I went to a coffee shop nearby instead. Besides the good coffee, I appreciated the classical music from public radio.
Then government budget cuts hit the library and it was no longer open on Monday mornings. So, I went to the fitness center instead. Maybe afterward I would walk to the library.
This spring when the ski slope closed, I went back to the coffee shop. Instead of classical music on public radio there was pop music on commercial radio. I mentioned it to a barista; he said the owner changed the station because some of the regulars complained that the classical music put them to sleep. They came to the coffee shop to wake up.
The pop music was not overly loud but the commercials were and set my teeth on edge. I never went back.
Who am I to complain? I went there once a week for nine months of the year. The regulars were there every weekday twelve months a year.
I went to another nearby coffee shop twice but the coffee was so weak that I decided not to go back.
I could have gone to another coffee shop (locally owned) but it was farther from the bus stop and over a windy bridge.
So, I've stopped going downtown on a regular basis altogether. Maybe I'm saving money but I miss dropping in on a few shopkeepers. And I've stopped reading the variety of magazines at the library.
The real downside is I've stopped walking so much. It has to be a nice day with no special errands for me to walk the mile to a local coffee shop twice a week.
"I took the [road] less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." - Robert Frost
Monday, September 18, 2006
Poor man's mocha
As I sit in a coffee shop spending too much time updating my website and blog, I listen the various orders being made. One order that always amuses me is mocha without whipped cream. Why bother?
Save yourself half the price and order your coffee with a shot of chocolate then add half-and-half. I bet you'll hardly notice the difference.
Save yourself half the price and order your coffee with a shot of chocolate then add half-and-half. I bet you'll hardly notice the difference.
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