Accelerating Change

There are times when the realities of the world really bowl me over. Like when I realize I can sit in my backyard and use a cheap four year old netbook to publish anything I want to say to a worldwide audience. (Sure, that audience consists of maybe a dozen people, but still: the potential is there.)

These kids these days, they have no idea how revolutionary this is. Brats. We'll see how they'll deal with the accelerated change that's coming in their lifetimes, after they roll their eyes at our stories of computers with keyboards and cars that burned oil and couldn't steer themselves.

They'll probably deal with it fine, actually.

Huh. So this is how it feels to be middle aged.

Yard Sale

Having a yard-sale. Brought my laptop out into the yard, once I remembered it was portable. Going on Craigslist to see what I should charge for things. 27" TV, $35? IBM Selectric I Typewriter. $60, maybe? That's less than I paid. An original Xbox with a huge stack of games. Sold the Xbox to a guy whose 11 year old son has been wanting to play Halo, but has a Wii. So now he's all set up with Halo I and II, and four controllers. The thing with the kid makes me feel a lot better about selling it. Not that I've turned it on  more than a dozen times in the last six years. Most of my save-game files date from 2004.

Chatting with neighbors and lookie-loos about our antique house; it's 300 years old and unique, so hopefully somebody will want to buy it. Also the sun is out for the first time in days and days, so moods are bright and people are friendly. Buttons the chicken has let herself out into the yard. She is the only chicken smart enough to do this, and so she gets to eat all of the bird-seed that the bluejays knock on the ground. She'll actually hold still long enough to let children pet her. How many yard sales do you get to go to where you can pet a chicken? Kids love to hear the rooster crow, and they're excited about the koi pond, too. I'd worry more about them falling in if it were deeper than 18". Maybe we should start charging admission and set up a petting zoo. Then we could sell the property with a pre-established business.

I have mixed feelings about selling the Selectric typewriter. Until I try to pick it up. Then I hope somebody buys it right away.

iPod Touch Repair Challenge

I ended up getting a co-worker's cast off first generation iPod Touch. Like I need another gadget, I know. But the price was right (free), and it came with an added bonus that many gadgets don't--it didn't work. Stopped working a year ago, actually. The screen turns on and the battery holds a charge, but the touch-pad is completely unresponsive. We can't even push the "slide to unlock" bar. Because I like to tinker and I hate e-waste, it's a challenge I couldn't refuse.

At our local mall there is a kiosk that sells protective cases and screens for "smart" phones. They've got a big poster that says, "Screen broken? Fix it here!"

Surprisingly, getting the young fellow's attention was a challenge. Usually those kiosk guys are shouting at passer-by, doing the hard sell. This guy was too wrapped up in his own iPhone to notice the passing crowd.

When I did get his attention, and he did see the gadget, he said, "Oh, sorry. We can't get the parts for those old models any more."

"Old models?" I said. "These things were released under four years ago."

"Yeah, but we see it all the time. Touch screens stop working after a while."

"All touch screens?" I said. "On everything?"

He said, "Hey, it's like life. Things wear out and stop working."

"You're a philosopher," I said.

So...challenge accepted. Even Apple can't make a product so crappy it's unrepairable after just four years.

Can they?

Will My Computers Ever Do Anything Besides Update Themselves?

I know this might sound a bit Andy Rooney, but Good Grief!

I use the damn things so infrequently these days that it seemsevery time I turn one on, it sets itself so single-mindedly to attending to its computer business that I can’t seem to get any people business done.

First the antivirus starts updating, then the operating system, then when I launch any single goddamned program I’m asked if I want to update to the latest version. Heaven forbid I want to play a game. By the time they’re done downloading new “splash screens” and game data, my supper’s ready and free time’s over.

Then I realize the reason it’s grinding to a halt is it’s performing a virus scan. “Last scan performed over one week ago!” Thanks for the warning, jerk. I last turned this piece of junk on a week ago!

Even my word processor is out of date! Open Office has become something called Libre Office, and the Windows Live Writer I use for blogging just encouraged me to help Microsoft develop their products and switch my default search provider to Bing. Apparently it wasn’t happy just composing blog entries.

When I give up and shut the things down, they tell me I can’t turn them off because they need to finish installing their updates.

Tell me why I shouldn’t go back to using my typewriters again?

Core Inflation vs. Reality

So it’s hard to miss that we’re paying $1.50 more per gallon of gas these days then we were a year ago. It’s also hard to miss that, at the grocery store, a package of butter costs a dollar more than it did just a couple of months ago.

So it’s no surprise to read news reports about rising food and fuel prices, or to hear experts say they’re concerned about the chilling effects of such rises on the economy.

What is surprising is to read that core inflation is chugging along at a modest 2%.

Gosh, that hardly seems like anything to worry about.

Until you learn that “core inflation” specifically excludes measures of food and fuel prices.

Um, excuse me, but other than mortgage payments and internet service, food and energy are actually the only things we’ve spent money on this year. I drive to work, then I drive home to a house where I get a nice hot meal in a house that’s heated, hopefully, to a temperature that’s tolerable if I wear long underwear and two sweaters. Ben Bernanke will have to forgive me if I’m not stocking up on iPods and furniture and designer shoes to take advantage of this modest inflation rate.

Anyone else out there get the feeling that our government experts aren’t really acting with the best interest of the citizenry at heart?

Either that, or they simply have no idea what they’re doing.

I’m not sure which is scarier.

High Tech Hallucinations

When I think about it, it seems like a lot of energy was expended in the second half of the last century trying to get high in one way or another.

Drugs, literature, art, music. Choose your poison. A lot of it came down to the pursuit of that wow man, far out, sort of experience. Jimi Hendrix playing an electric guitar with his feet, Jackson Pollock splattering canvases with house paint, Philip Glass droning on with his repetitive rhythms and harmonies, Phil K Dick blurring the boundaries between the real and the hallucinatory, movie directors translating those visions to the screen, quantum physicists seeking the cracks in the fundamental laws of nature.

There was this sense that we were constantly on the verge of something fantastic and abstract and mind expanding. Much of the time, this something didn’t seem like it could come from outside, in the world. It was just waiting to burst out from within us, if we could just find a way to give it permission. If only we could nurture our inner child and rub the right crystals and find the reiki practitioner with a light enough touch.

Well, the quest goes on, I suppose. Because, well, let’s face it: if we find these moments at all, they never last. That’s why the addict always needs another hit, and why yesterday’s paintings don’t evoke the same response the second or third time we’ve seen them.

Fortunately, there is this: the portals into these sorts of experiences seem to be everywhere now, and most of them are a good deal safer than the pills and needles so many resorted to in the past.

I just lost a couple of hours messing around with a few free gizmos on my PC which I hadn’t even been aware I had.  I’ve long used Winamp, for example—it’s a far superior media player to the toxic ITunes disaster that Apple foists on the world—and I’ve used it to rip, play, and organize my audio files for years. I just hadn’t bothered to click on the little “Visualizations” button before. Which, in a moment of idleness, I did today.

At which point these images you’ve seen here started cascading across my monitor, in full high definition, at a rather dizzying 30 frames per second, and pulsing and dancing in sync with the music. Screen edges crumpled, vortices spun, fireworks launched, fractal ferns swayed, clouds and stars fought for dominion of the moon.

It helped that I was listening to Ludovico Einaudi, who tends to be fairly meditative and soothing. But the program transformed my easy listening background music into something utterly captivating.

And I thought, hell, any one of these frames puts to shame anything Jackson Pollock ever threw against a canvas. The Evernote screen capture utility did a nice job catching a few of the stills, since I had the odd compulsion to grab some of this stuff that was being generated on the fly. But after a few minutes of doing that I just sat back and listened to the entire two-disc album.

Far out, man. The things I’ve seen. And it’s nice that I didn’t have to drop acid or otherwise put my neurochemistry at risk to do it. William Burroughs should have been so lucky.

Swearing at Citi Mortgage

We get this letter from our insurance company. They say they haven’t received payment for this year’s premium, and our policy is going to be cancelled in a couple of weeks.

Only our insurance company is paid by our mortgage company, which holds funds for such in escrow. So I try calling up our mortgage company to ask them why they haven’t made a payment.

It takes some time to get through to an operator, since none of the menu selections have anything to do with escrow or insurance payments. But hitting zero enough times finally gets me a live one, who offers to transfer me. Only he comes back on the line after five minutes of hold time to say that the escrow department is backed up right now, so why doesn’t he give me their phone number so I can call them later directly?

Reasonable enough. Instead of being put on hold, I’m prompted for my account number. I have a mortgage statement in front of me, so I punch it in.

Only the system won’t accept my number. “This number cannot be verified. Please try again.” So I do.

Eight times.

This turns out to be a very tight, closed loop. There are no options, except for entering the account number again. But even though I’m looking at the account number on my statement, apparently I don’t have an account. At one point, a voice suggests I make sure to enter all leading zeros, but I’ve been doing that all along.

Pressing zero doesn’t work, and neither does speaking the word “operator.” I’m not sure why it would, since there have been no suggestions that this is a voice-activated system. Regardless, I’m so frustrated at this point that I swear, at the top of my lungs, into the cell phone. And I’m in the middle of a rather long string of uncharacteristically vile words (many of which I haven’t used since my sheet-rocking days) when an operator comes on the line.

I had read that some telephone systems had been programmed to register stress and anger in a caller’s voice, but I’ve never encountered it before. And I actually felt a little embarrassed. The operator has a hard to understand Indian accent, but however I feel about outsourcing, she doesn’t deserve to listen to that. She seems very eager to help, though, and apologizes multiple times when it takes her a few seconds to locate my information.

She authorizes a payment to my insurance company and confirms they have the correct account number. “Just give it a few days for the payment to go through,” she says.

Only today we have another letter saying the insurance is being terminated—today—because they still haven’t received the payment. So I try calling the mortgage company again, and get in the same account number loop. This time I only try twice before launching into my vulgar tirade.

Magic! It works.

And the woman says, “If you have to call again, don’t enter the final digit of your account number. Skip anything after the dash.”

“It’s not zeros,” I say. “It’s a four.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Just skip the final number and press pound.”

Okay.

Anyway, it’s all straightened out. Probably. The check cleared after the final warning letter was sent.

But what really gets me here are three things. First of all, how is your average caller supposed to know not to punch in part of his account number?

Second, When we were approved for this mortgage, it was about eight years ago. We used a local bank, who actually did the full-on credit check, employment verification, etc. We had a local mortgage officer we’d dealt with on two previous deals, and we frequently called her up with questions and received excellent service. Then, as the world proceeded to go crazy, our mortgage was sold four times before landing with Citi Mortgage, a corporation we would never have borrowed from. Each time our note was sold, we went through a nightmare trying to get the escrow department of each new bank to connect with our insurance companies and our municipal tax collectors. It was demeaning and unnecessary.

Finally, and most importantly, what does it mean that the only way to receive service from a massive corporation (and one which holds a great deal of power over you) is to scream profanities into a telephone? It just seems like another failure of decency in culture, when the system demands you act like an asshole in order to be treated like a human being.