Archive for the ‘Behind the scenes’ Category

Frustration

Monday, January 17th, 2022

I was wandering around the internet this evening, and ran across this post at The Other McCain.

I had worked up a reasonably-sized post with various music-related reminiscences that were brought up by the post, including links to various YouTube videos and more. Unfortunately, trying to include a link to Rick Beato’s “What Makes This Song Great?” playlist caused the WordPress editor (which I hate) to chew up the post, taking everything within and following the link, and making each word into a separately-quoted part of the link, after removing capitalization and punctuation. Having almost my entire post disappear into an href tag is incredibly frustrating, because for one thing, the editor doesn’t give me a simple way to highlight text and add a link (or, if it does, I haven’t been able to find it yet), and for another, when I hand-enter the html tags for links, I don’t expect the editor to decide it doesn’t like them, and to rewrite them and suck almost the entirety of the damned post into the tag! It’s been several years since I was hand-coding a lot of html, but just making a hyperlink is pretty damned straightforward!

It’s like WordPress only wants me to write things down as though they were diary entries, and doesn’t want my to link to anything. Given that this blog has always been more of a “here’s something shiny that caught my attention” than “here are my deep (or not-so-deep) thoughts about /some subject/,” that is a major drawback of the new editor that WordPress has forced on me sometime in the past year or so.

I know other people have expressed disgust with the WordPress editor; I’ll have to see what solutions they’ve come up with.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything

Tuesday, September 3rd, 2019

And not completely by my choice, really. Last week was bookended by my annual eye exam on Monday, and my 66th birthday on Saturday.

I’ve been quite fortunate with my eyes, for the most part. When I had my qualification physical for the Naval Academy during my last year in high school, my vision was very good. I was 20/15 in one eye and 20/10 in the other. The tech who checked my eyes told my father that I could “damn near see through walls.” I was able to avoid the need for glasses until I was 43, when I started needing reading glasses. I’ve been needing them more these past few months, and Monday, I was told that while I’m still 20/20 in both eyes, I now need bifocals to correct my astigmatism.

My eye exam also brought other bad news: I’ve been taking care of someone with dementia, and it is no longer safe to leave them alone for more than a few minutes. Time to look for a care facility, it seems.

Catching up a bit

Wednesday, April 12th, 2017

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here. I’ve been busy at work, I’ve been dragged down by my seasonal allergies (when I’m congested, I can’t use my CPAP), and I’m just getting over a bout of food poisoning (my own fault, embarrassingly). They’re all just excuses, though. I haven’t felt motivated to post, and that’s the real reason.

I did want to mention this past Monday evening, though. I have a number of Jewish friends and acquaintances, and I was invited to a Passover Seder that was held at a local community college. It was a nice evening; I had fun, met some nice people, and ate some interesting food. Couldn’t sing along with anything, but I did get to do a reading.

The amusing (if offensive) portion of the evening was on the way into the venue, though … the local chapter of The Gideons was passing out New Testaments just outside the entrance. Legal, I know, and I’m not arguing that it shouldn’t be; I’m saying it was tasteless and offensive. I know it was important from their point of view, but I still think they shouldn’t have done it.

Is there a reason for this?

Wednesday, January 18th, 2017

I’ve been looking for productivity apps for my phone and tablet lately, because I’ve been wanting to improve my productivity. However, I’m also somewhat concerned about my privacy, so I’d prefer to use applications that don’t require me to obtain an account in order to use them. Most of the Kanban apps require accounts on their service, but I’ve found two that don’t, and I’m checking them out.

I understand that certain applications really do need access to a server in order to implement the full set of capabilities. But riddle me this, Batman … why the hell does an editor require me to sign up for an account? What capabilities does the server provide in this case? I mean, I was able to do search and replace, automatic word wrap and hyphenation, and other such functions back when I was using an Apple II. Is my smartphone less capable? If they’re going to keep my files on their server, no thanks. That’s why I make backups, and that’s why Apple provides iCloud. What’s their value-added here?

I’ve deleted the application, because it doesn’t just have limited capabilities without having an account – it won’t let you use it at all until you sign up for an account. You can’t even find out whether the available help information tells you why the account is needed. I really wish the app store required developers to state whether their app was usable without an account; it would make my selection process easier.

DirecTV has just lost a customer

Monday, September 12th, 2016

I’ve always had occasional reception problems with DirecTV, in this house, anyway. Their website claims that on rare occasions, extremely bad weather can cause very short losses of reception. My experience is that anything more than a light drizzle will knock out reception completely, often for hours.

Back at the end of July, I started seeing my video go blocky on all channels, with accompanying audio garbling. It’s the sort of thing you see when you lose sync in decoding a video file. My initial suspicion was that the antenna had become misaligned, and the receiver wasn’t getting a full data stream. I called their support line, and we went through various fixes for about an hour. I had to cut the call after an hour because I had to get to a class, but the last thing they recommended was doing a local reset of the receiver (they’d already done a remote reset). That apparently cleared things up for about a month, but it could have been coincidental, because the problem came back about a week ago.

It started with messages stating that the receiver was looking for a satellite signal, but that would go away after a few seconds, and nothing was affected, anyway. After a day or two of that, my video became blocky, with garbled audio, just as before. Tonight was the first time I had a long-enough block of time to call for support, because if your problem isn’t addressed by the FAQs on their website, you have to call them on the telephone.

After explaining the situation to the person who answered, I was told that I had to provide my cellphone number so that I could receive AT&T texts and other notifications. I didn’t realize that I had AT&T services, because I don’t, but they’ve apparently bought DirecTV, and you can’t get help without giving AT&T your cellphone number.

She did a remote reset of my receiver, which didn’t help, and I didn’t expect it to. While that was in process, she tried to upsell me on NFL Sunday Ticket and an $8/month warranty to save $50 if a service call needed to be made. I declined both. I like football, but I’ve been watching it less in recent years, and the last service call I required was when I had DirecTV installed when I moved here almost a decade ago. It’s also pretty tacky to try to sell me premium services when I’m asking for help because basic services aren’t working.

She then asked me to disconnect and reconnect all of the cables, which I had done back in July, and which had no effect. Next, she told me that I needed to get a technician from my television’s manufacturer to make a service call and determine what the television’s problem was. I told her that it was not a television problem, because shows that I’d recorded on the DVR prior to the problem’s recurrence could be watched without problem, the over-the-air antenna did not show the problem, and watching DVDs did not show the problem.

She reiterated that the required next step in troubleshooting was to have a technician from the manufacturer examine the television.

I hung up. I’ve been contemplating getting rid of DirecTV for a while, and the fact that I can expect neither reception nor service has tipped the balance for me. I’ll drop by the local office tomorrow after work and let them know – I’m not going to sign up for a new account on their website just to cancel service. Probably can’t do it online, anyway.

Ok, I get the idea. No garden this year.

Tuesday, May 24th, 2016

My garden area is small, and too shady to really grow good vegetables, anyway. I do try, because I like having a garden. Mostly, what I can grow successfully are herbs, and that’s ok by me. I made a fair amount of a nice oregano pesto with last year’s crop.

This year, however, the weather has been against it. I’ve got a hops plant that I planted last year, which got about 6′ tall by the end of the season. This year, it was about 9″ tall when a late snow hit it in March, breaking the tallest bine. Then, most of the leaves were stripped from it on May 9th, when a hailstorm came through. Small hail, but lots of it. My oregano and sage made it through without trouble, and the strawberries were damaged, but not badly.

Today, we had another hailstorm. One of my neighbors told me that there was 2″ of hail on the ground in places. It was almost all gone by the time I got home from work. The weather report said it was quarter-sized hail, although what was left on the ground when I got home was much smaller. There are no leaves left on the hops plant. At all. My oregano is about half the height it used to be. The sage (with its woody stems) is the same height, but with fewer leaves. The strawberries are no longer visible.

I think I may write off the garden. I’m not sure how far I’d need to go to find a nursery that didn’t have all their outdoor plants blasted by the hail.

Not an auspicious start to the day

Saturday, January 16th, 2016

I’ve been home sick for the last two days, and I’m still under the weather.

This morning, after sleeping in until about an hour ago, I got up to make breakfast. In the process of getting the ingredients together, I managed to knock over an open bag of chestnuts and drop an egg on the floor. In the process of cleaning up, I managed to knock over all of my brooms and mops.

The cats still haven’t come back into the kitchen. I think I’m going back to bed before I do something to accidentally start World War III.

Throwaway tech

Monday, March 2nd, 2015

I took my iMac in to the local Genius Bar on Saturday. It no longer boots, and I was having display problems before the “won’t boot” condition occurred. I’d looked into the display problems, and they were apparently caused by overheating damaging the RAM chips on the logic board. Presumably, leaving my system on for long periods (among other things, I used it as the main server on my home network) was what led to the problems.

The RAM can’t be replaced, of course, so I presumed repair would require a new logic board, and I wanted to find out just how much that would cost.

Well, the tech at the Genius Bar did get it to boot a couple of times, and the sensor diagnostics indicated no overheating problems. Trying to run some of his other tests didn’t work, though, and he couldn’t boot/run the more in-depth tests that may have isolated the problems. Therefore, replacing the main logic board is the minimum that seems necessary to get the system running again. Unfortunately, my iMac is a “late 2006” model, and Apple no longer manufactures replacement parts for it. If I want it fixed, I have to go to an aftermarket repair facility. Looking on line, used logic boards run about $500, and labor charges can only add to that.

The tech at the Genius Bar suggested that my best course of action with the old iMac would be to sell it to one of the local aftermarket repair facilities for parts, because there’s still a demand for iMacs like mine. I imagine I’ll end up doing that. Although my company did send me for training in surface-mount soldering last year, I have no way of determining what to replace to solve the problems, and scattershot replacing of parts is likely to be expensive, with no guarantee of success.

For a system with 1GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive, that’s not worth it to me. A new iMac runs about $1100 for the low-end model, which would give me a system with better display, 8GB of RAM, and 1TB of hard disk. I’m not sure I’ll do that, though. I have a “late 2011” MacBook Pro I’ve upgraded to its maximum RAM capacity and a large flash drive that serves most of my needs quite well, so I can get by for the foreseeable future without buying anything new. For file server purposes, I may see how well my Beaglebone Black works.

Poetry time

Thursday, December 18th, 2014

I wrote this a few months ago, and figured it would be good to get it off the 3×5 cards it’s on and put the verses in order, so here it is:

The Tattoo of Dorian Gray

His friends got him drunk one night last November.
When he woke up, regrets were the plan for the day.
What possessed him to get it, he doesn’t remember –
The tattoo of Dorian Gray.

Each morning, he gets up and looks in the mirror.
When he sees it again, his face turns away.
The horror he’s seeing just couldn’t be clearer –
The tattoo of Dorian Gray.

He knows that without it, his life would be better.
He wishes that he could just wash it away.
It cannot be covered by shirt or by sweater –
The tattoo of Dorian Gray.

His life’s getting worse, and he’s feeling quite tired.
He thinks its appearance grows worse every day.
He’s always regretting the night he acquired
The tattoo of Dorian Gray.

I suppose I can consider myself lucky

Friday, October 24th, 2014

Because I fixed breakfast at home today, I found a problem in time to handle it fairly cleanly.

When I eat breakfast at home, I take my vitamins. One bottle was empty, so I went into the basement to get a replacement. Smelling something unpleasant, and knowing that the cats’ litter box had been dealt with last night because trash gets picked up this morning, I looked around and noticed a wet spot at one corner of the freezer. When I opened the door, I found this:

Freezer

The cookie dough on the top shelf I wasn’t concerned about. Everything on the next shelf down and in the door was defrosted. Items on the bottom two shelves were still frozen solid. I took about fifty pounds of meat that had been defrosted for who knows how long out to the trash. It might have still been ok, but I’d rather not chance it – I lost 15 pounds of weight after I got sick in Bulgaria, and I wasn’t keen on losing any more that rapidly.

I say I’m lucky because I discovered it before the trash pickup came; I’d not have liked to have it hanging around for another week. Now, I’ll be looking for a chest freezer – I’ve had to prop weight against the freezer door to keep it closed.