Instant junk mail

Every so often I receive a letter with no return address but lots of attack printing on the front and back.  I thought that these letters were in response to my “Party of One” columns in the Reader Weekly, but I stopped writing for the Reader over a year ago when I had been bumped one too many times.

But they keep coming every few weeks and every few weeks I put them unopened into the recycle box.  I guess this mysterious writer also reads this blog.  Thank goodness I don’t allow comments on it.

My advice to this writer is start your own blog.  It’s free and you might even earn a bit of ad revenue.

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

Writing to editors, authors, and other public figures

This article was "triggered" in part because of a letter I recently received and in part by the email conversation I mentioned last week with Michael Mann, author of "The Hockey Stick".

I have an unopened letter sitting on my desk.  It has no return address and the envelope is covered with a diatribe against Obama.  I generally put these unopened into the recycle bin.  Maybe I kept it as a fodder for this column.  I assure you that I will eventually put it unopened into the recycle bin.

My brief conversation with Michael Mann began with appreciation for his book and a quote that Adam Smith warned about "the denial machine" Mann mentioned.  I was surprised that the conversation went on so long; I should consider that he has many more things to think about than the wandering thoughts of an old man in Duluth.

After I finished a series of fantasy novels, I sent the author a letter of appreciation through her website.  She emailed a nice reply, but I didn’t follow up except possibly with a thank you.  I think these were all through her website because I have no copy in my mail box.

I had read a book or two by an author of military-political affairs, and I sent him an email thanking him for them.  He replied with a thank you and a suggestion for another of his books.  Then he came to Duluth and I got to meet him briefly.  I didn’t say anything significant; I’m a writer not a speaker.

And sometimes an email to an author leads to a long-standing friendship.  Some time ago I sent an appreciative email to a regular "Local View" contributor to the Duluth News Tribune.  We have some major differences of opinion, but our common ground is a basis for lunch every month or so.

Another local writer had a website that invited conversation.  I had had many email or face to face conversations with this writer.  I was surprised when he cut me off that he had more to do than have email conversations with me.  I wonder if I had written something he found offensive or if he really was very busy.  I hope he is very busy with many lucrative projects.

Over the years I've submitted many a letter to the editor or even an opinion piece.  Some of them were published; probably many more were assigned to the circular file.  But basically your letter or article should be timely, concise, and based on "facts".  I put "facts" in quotes because “facts” are too often some group's talking points rather than some observable set of information.  The hard part is that a fact in one situation is not a fact in a similar situation.  But be forewarned, many editors rewrite letters to conform to the publication's guidelines.  In doing so, they can "flip" your meaning to just the opposite from what you intended.  It has happened to me at least twice in two different publications.  If you are lucky, the editor will send you a copy of his or her revision for your approval.

I have all but stopped writing to politicians.  Almost all of them have staff send a position paper.  Too often these position papers are barely related to the subject of the letter or website comment.

Probably with electronic communication, even their staffs are overwhelmed.  Count opinion for or against.  Find position paper that seems to address issue.  Send it out with politician's automatic signature.

I miss Rudy Boschwitz's replies.  Whether he agreed with my letter or not, he would send it back with a one-sentence germane comment and a smily face.  I wonder if I have any of these in my very disorganized files.

Two letters from famous people that I thought I had kept I have not been able to find in several years of trying.

One was to Alex Haley, author of Roots.  I was sysop of the Genealogy Roundtable on GEnie, GE's competitor to CompuServe.  I invited him to attend one of our weekly online chat sessions.  He responded with a kind letter declining the invitation.  I think his reason was that he was a typewriter guy and hadn't really moved to use of computers.

The other was to a well-known movie actor.  I was going to write that you should note my middle initial.  But it isn't in my byline.  It is "D".  If you are under sixty I'm sure you will have no clue to what D stands for.  Your clue is the movie Being There Shirley McLaine, Peter Sellers, and ...

I wrote to this actor posing this same question.  He wrote a delightful reply.  Again, I can't find it in my messed up files.

What’s the point of all this bragging of hobnobbing with famous people?  Well, my original title was How to write to editors, authors, and other public figures.  With my catalog of correspondents this article became longer and longer, and it had only a nod about how to write a letter to the editor or an opinion piece.

So, here is my brief advice on corresponding with a famous person.

If you have something important or interesting to write, don’t hesitate to do so.  Many appreciate comments from their readers, customers, or constituents.  For many famous people, you can easily find an email address or website that takes comments. You only need three guidelines: be polite, be factual, and be brief.

Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2015-07-23 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/07/23/5661_writing_to_editors_authors_and_other_public

Always throw away unidentified mail?

Last week we received a letter that only had my name and address and something like "Important Update Inside" on the envelope.  Normally such mail goes straight to the recycle box.  But my curiosity got the best of me.

It was from a regional manager of Frontier Communications, the telephone company for our cabin.  It was about a recent 13 hour outage because a fiber optic cable was cut in Duluth.  The cable was not Frontier's but supplied lots of its traffic.

The letter said that Frontier was working on (or had installed) a second fiber optic cable to provide redundancy.

Well, that was nice to know.  I sympathize with Frontier with a problem outside its control and that it has taken steps to reduce the possibility of future outages.

The letter did have the name and email of the manager, and I did send him something about identifying mail.

This really comes under the third point of a free market - complete information (see "GMO producers don't want free markets").  Was Frontier trying to hide something by not identifying itself on the envelope?  Was it outsourcing the mail to a firm that used a standard envelope for "hidden purpose" mass mailings?  I'll probably never know because the Frontier manager never responded.  We do know that this is another example of corporate "efficiency" at the expense of effectiveness.

I can't save a tree because I'm saving a tree

Tomorrow is our recycling pickup day.  I looked for paper bags for our stack of old newspapers and our boxes of junk mail, envelopes, and office paper.  We had none!

We have been taking cloth bags to the grocery store to "save a tree".  We use store bags when we forget the cloth bags or we have more than two bags of groceries.  The more we remember to take the cloth bags, the smaller our stash of paper bags gets.  Today we had no full-size paper bags.

Fortunately, we had a couple of smaller bags and we didn't have that big of a pile of newspapers or that much other paper.  But what happens next week if don't get more paper bags?

I've been musing about the balance of recycling.  What is the balance between resources used to produce new paper and containers and those used to recycle these items?

For example, how much water is consumed rinsing out plastic bottles, especially detergent bottles. 

How much water do I use to rinse all the tomato juice residue out of a bottle.

What is the energy cost to have three different haulers come through the neighborhood to pick up recyclables and the traditional trash.  Few haulers have combination trucks and must come through twice.

What is the energy cost to drive to specialty waste spots with compact fluorescent bulbs, yard waste, and old electronics?  Especially if the collection sites are not on your usual travel routes?

I doubt few people know the balance.  Probably the true value of recycling is that it makes people more conscious of their waste.