A lot has happened since you last read this column!

Have you gotten tired of Facebook or Classmates sending you email like this?

I dropped Facebook long ago because what generally happened was a half-sister posted yet another picture of her yard.  I ignore Classmates because the great news is that someone who I didn’t know posted something or other.

Well, you may or may not be interested in the “lot” that happened to me last week.  If not, go on to something else,  If you are curious, I hope to reward you with a few chuckles.

At least twice last week, I woke up with some stupendous ideas for this column, mostly about politics and billionaires.  I should have gotten up and written them down, but I preferred trying to go back to sleep.  I would remember these great ideas in the morning.  Of course, they faded with the rising sun.

Well, a few annoyances happened and they are hard to forget.

My printer started producing broken letters.  I twice tried the nozzle cleaning procedure, but the test papers came out even worse.  I even replaced the one ink cartridge that was low.

The warranty was about six weeks shy of running out.  Oh, well, for a few dollars, it’s hardly worth making a claim.

I looked up a few printers on Best Buy, and of course my model was no longer sold.  And of course, none of the current printers used the ink jet cartridges of my model.   I selected a model that was similar in functions, took my old printer to be recycled, and at the last minute took the receipt for the old printer.

When I got to Best Buy, I took in the tray that accepted envelopes.  I hoped I could use it in the new printer so that I didn’t have to change the paper in a tray.

I looked over the model I had selected and it looked like a good replacement.  As I really knew, the old tray wouldn’t fit.  I asked a clerk a few questions including how to recycle the old printer.  He said to bring it in a cart.

I went to check out, paid for my new printer and some ink cartridges.  I couldn’t find my Rewards card but the cashier looked it up. I took my purchases out to the car and brought in my old printer for recycling.  I gave the clerk at customer service the old printer and my story.  When I gave him the receipt for the old printer, he said that I had a replacement warranty!  I could have paid for the new printer with the old printer.

I still couldn’t find my Rewards card, and so he gave me an in-store card for future purchases.  I had no idea what I would be using it for in the near future, but as you will read, I soon found a use for some of the credit.

I took the printer home and started to set it up according to the instructions.  Things went smoothly except for setting up wi-fi on my modem and on my computers.

Then I tried printing some business cards.  The printer broke the card stock apart and jammed.  Check instructions.  Open back panel.  Pull out pieces of card stock, broken along the perforations and crumbled.  Also pull out pieces from the front.  Put back panel back, but it won’t fit.  Just which way does this thing go in?   I think it took me ten minutes to do it right.

Print a sheet of business cards and leave for a meeting, finally.  This was Thursday.

On Friday, we headed to the Twin Cities.  As I often do on trips of an hour or more, I use my iPhone and a low-power FM gadget to play podcasts through the car radio.  Except the gadget didn’t work!  The power light was on, but the radio frequency lights wouldn’t come on.  Nothing I tried would change the situation.

So, we spent two hours barely hearing “To the Best of Our Knowledge” (ttbook.org).  I had the iPhone between the seats and we could barely hear the speaker above the road noise.  At least we learned more about the operations of Coca Cola than we had known before.

When we got to the Twin Cities, we headed first to the Roseville Best Buy store.

We couldn’t find the same make of FM gadget, but we did find one that was considerably less expensive and automatically found the most open station.

I paid for it with my rewards card and the in-store credit card.  I still couldn’t find my rewards card, but I could use the email message on my phone about the rewards credit I received for the printer purchase.

We next stopped at a grocery store.  While my wife shopped, I installed the FM gadget.  It gave me 88.1 as the frequency and I could hear the podcast scratchily.  I reread and reread the instructions, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get a clear signal.

Because the reception changed as we changed direction, we figured that we were getting interference from the humongous antennas in Shoreview.

Before we left the Twin Cities, we tried again in a Caribou parking lot.  We reread the directions and tried again.  We were able to listen to a podcast with a minimum of static.  We were still within sight of the Shoreview towers.

Oh, I also found my Best Buy Rewards card.  It was in my wallet all along.  It is silver-gray, not blue and yellow!

We have three lessons here that we constantly forget.  One, read the directions first and understand them.  Two, when looking for something in your wallet, make sure you see the face of every card.  Will I forget the next time?  Does the sun rise every morning?  Three, I found one of the lost middle-of-the-night notes.   It was in a folder I didn’t check.  Sorry, it’s more about billionaires.

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

Change of routine leads to paranoia

When we go to our cabin, we usually make a couple of stops before we leave Duluth.  At the last of these, I plug in my iPhone for a podcast of Wisconsin Public Radio's "To the Best of Our Knowledge".  The podcast lasts about 52 minutes, a bit less than the time it takes us to get our cabin.

Yesterday we planned to go to our cabin with no special stops.  Instead of listening to Minnesota Public Radio until we made our stops, I plugged in my iPhone before I even backed out of the garage.

About ten miles away, I wondered if I had shut the garage door.  My wife said I probably did.  After all, whichever of us is the passenger almost always checks that the driver closed the door.

I didn't turn around, but it kept gnawing at me all the time we were at our cabin.  I had visions of our lawnmower and snowblower being stolen.  I wondered if my wife's car would be broken into.  Around and around rattled these thoughts in my mind.

When we returned today, I forewent a couple of stops that I wanted to make and we came directly home.

Whew!  The garage door was closed.  As it opened I saw that my wife's car, the lawnmower, and the snowblower were all there.

A couple of hours later I'm still feeling the sense of relief!

Moral?  Don't be distracted as you pack and definitely don't be distracted as you lock up.  Have your paranoia about doing all you should before you leave, not after you are on your way:)

Cereals sponsor serials - a homonym homilie

The only cereal sponsoring a radio serial that I remember at the moment was Wheaties for "Jack Armstrong,  the All-American Boy" but I think there were a few other cereal sponsors  for radio serials.

This little play on my words popped into my conscious mind when I was thinking about the title of the Italian podcast, "Fuori Tempi", which means Outside Times, but I'm not sure what that means.  I'll probably find out when I get around to listening to it.  The title made me think of the phrase "fuori serie" that means a special car model that is not in a companies usual line.

Corporate Whimsy

Facebook, that time gobbler that so many can't do without and so many hate, is at it again changing the way it works.

Yesterday I posted a picture on Flickr and then wrote a note on Facebook with a link to the picture.  When I clicked return, the picture was showing on my message list.  A few friends commented on it and I saw the picture above their comments.

Today as I scrolled through my list of messages, the picture was gone but the text remained.  I left a comment about it, and one friend said she hadn't seen it before and now she did.

One of the first rules of good human interface is consistency.  If I do a certain thing in a certain set of circumstances, I should be able to get a similar result each and every time.

Facebook is not alone in inconsistent user interfaces.  Microsoft, Apple, and many others confuse users time after time.

Through iTunes I download Wisconsin Public Radio's "To the Best of Our Knowledge" podcasts, receiving two each week.  Suddenly, about four weeks ago I was getting only one.  Last week I got none.  This week I got one.  With a little email help from the TTBOOK host, Jim Fleming, I figured out that iTunes or somebody has decided that I don't need podcasts that I've already downloaded, even if they were from two or more years ago.  TTBOOK does rebroadcast programs and thus republishes the podcasts.  But shouldn't I be the one to decide that I don't want to listen to an old program again?

Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac had programmable macros with an extensive, easily used description for each available function.  Microsoft decided to take macros out in Office 2008.  They said users should write AppleScripts instead.  I'll just say that AppleScript is a byzantine programming language.  Microsoft decided to put macros back in Office 2011, but many old macros don't work or only work erratically.  And the descriptions of the functions are often incomplete.

I'm sure many readers have their own tales of frustration about how software, computers, cars, and customer service departments work.  So many of what we depend on may be produced efficiently, but do we get effective results using them?