Just another unexpected problem of contemporary life...

The device at left will be familiar to many of you: A Roku remote.

You may not have something exactly like this -- I wouldn't have had this one if the kids hadn't gotten it for me -- but you may have something similar.

A small device -- just right for getting wedged in the recliner, or buried in the couch cushions. Small and light enough to be carried by even an unsteady toddler -- and deposited in any number of places, including the garbage can in the kitchen. I'm pretty sure that the kitchen garbage was the final destination of at least one of our TV remotes. We had a Vizio remote, a little shorter than the Roku remote, a trifle wider, but still light and very portable.

Then one day, a couple of years back, we were watching Granddaughter No. 6 -- but not closely enough -- and the Vizio remote was never seen again.

I thought I was vigilant before about keeping remotes remote from curious grandchildren. But that incident redoubled my resolve.

As evidenced by the Roku remote herein shown.

It is the same remote that we received with our Roku device, some Christmases back. Not a replacement. The exact same one.

I stress this because it is apparently a signal achievement: These remotes are made to be lost.

I have occasion to babysit at Younger Daughter's house on a recurring basis. When I arrive and something horrible is playing on the TV (I didn't like My Little Ponies when my kids were young, and I like the latest incarnation no better) I always inquire as to the whereabouts of the remote. It had been months since they've been able to find one (until tonight, that is -- Younger Daughter was a little vague on where it had been found).

Regardless, the one she handed me this evening was by no means the original.

But things getting lost in the couch cushions is nothing new. Even in my youth couches were notorious for swallowing wallets, keys, or eyeglasses. So losing a remote would not be a particularly unique problem of contemporary life.

And, inasmuch as I can show you this picture, my problem is not losing the remote anyway.

We recently cut the cord (actually we had subscribed to DirecTV for the last few years, which we used after ousting Comcast Cable) and so have been using the Roku remote quite frequently now.

Quite frequently.

And, in the natural course of things, given the increased usage, the remote stopped working entirely just this afternoon. This happens. I assumed that the batteries must have died. Nothing new about batteries failing.

Replacing the batteries in this device was... difficult. There was no little fabric strap to facilitate pulling out the old ones. But I perservered. I achieved. I got the replacement batteries from a brand new package, too.

And, yes -- before you ask -- just as Younger Daughter asked -- I did make sure I put the + and - ends of each battery where they were supposed to go. I had to put my glasses on and turn on the lamp -- on a bright sunny day -- to ensure that I did this. But I did do it.

And then... nothing.

The remote with the new batteries, properly installed, was just as dead as it was with the old batteries.

We're flush with batteries at this time. So there was still another, unopened package of AAA batteries I could open and make another attempt. Which I did.

And then... still nothing.

Younger Daughter knew about my troubles because she happened to call whilst I was engaged in this ultimately futile effort (she wanted to engage Long Suffering Spouse and me for babysitting duty tonight). So I asked: Have you ever had a remote fail? Has one ever stopped transmitting?

I should have known these were foolish questions before I asked them. We weren't speaking by video this afternoon, but I could, at least in my mind's eye, see her give me a pitying look. No, she said. Of course we haven't, she might have added, but did not; we've never been able to hold onto one long enough.

Replacement remotes are plentiful on Amazon, Younger Daughter assured me, and, in the meantime, or in the alternative, Roku has an app that turns any mobile phone into a remote. Immediate problem solved.

But it's got me wondering: Do remotes 'burn out'? Do they lose the ability to transmit over time? Why? What is the life expectancy?

I promise that is a problem we never had to address 'back in the day.' Certainly, I never have. The TV or VCR or DVD player would burn out before any remote ever failed. This was something new. Just what I needed: A new annoyance....

The one unbelievable thing about Stargate SG-1

Long Suffering Spouse and I recently found Stargate SG-1 on Netflix.

We used to watch that show all the time. We started watching it again on Netflix. We found we still liked it. Naturally, therefore, it is being removed from the streaming service effective today. Anything we like is discontinued and/or canceled.

There are hopes to revive the show, according to recent news accounts. If the show does come back, a central premise of the old show will be discarded: This time, the Stargate program will no longer be a secret.

That was always one of the least believable aspects of the show anyway -- and I say this fully cognizant of the fact that the show was a splendid and unapologetic mashup of science fiction and ancient Egyptian (and Norse) mythology, complete with parasitic monster "snakes" who inhabited, and possessed, many of the bad guys (and some of the good guys, too -- Teal'c for one, and all the Tok'ra).

Ben Franklin said (correctly, I believe) that two people can keep a secret -- as long as one of them is dead. Yet, somehow, a few leaks notwithstanding, despite hundreds if not thousands of people directly involved in the program, who knows how many other members of the Deep State (the show really was ahead of its time on this) trying to horn in on the alien action, and hostile politicians concerned about costs and benefits, viewers were supposed to accept that the Stargate program remained a deep, dark secret. Even with alien invasions and battles in Earth orbit -- the vast majority of the world's population never had a clue.

But while the continued secrecy of the Stargate program was pretty hard to believe, it was not the most unbelievable aspect of the show.

No... the least believable aspect of the show was the premise that all this ancient alien hardware, often buried beneath rubble, or in a glacier, for thousands of years, nearly always worked. Network connectvity was never an issue. Just dig out the gate, dust off the DHD, and off we go! In one episode, the Stargate on one planet was hit squarely by a meteor, buried in rubble, and still worked like a charm.

And the alien equipment never needed updates.

The SG-1 team would come under heavy fire, race back to the gate, dial home, and -- after a big whoosh -- there was the wormhole straight back to the base.

Never was there an announcement before the whoosh: "An update is available for this Chappa'ai. Would you like to download this now, or postpone it to later?"

Once chevron 7 was locked, where was the video? You know... the one that said, "Your wormhole will begin after these ads."

Occasionally power went down -- at the base -- because human equipment powering the Gate failed. But if there was power available, there was always the appearance of blue, standing water -- never the spinning circle of doom like you and I get every other time we turn on our computers. Never once, after the intrepid SG-1 team dialed in, was there a message saying, "Your Chappa'ai has encountered a problem and must restart. Information is being collected about this failure to send to the Ancients."

Faster than light travel? No problem. Little gray men impersonating Norse gods? Totally understandable. Flying pyramids? Advanced aliens wearing suits of armor? All good here. But this Ancient technology always, always working? Impossible!

Curmudgeon falls into the streaming revolution -- Part II

I begin today's installment (for yesterday's, click here or just scroll down) with something of a confession: I was not entirely ignorant of streaming services before the kids gave me the Roku stick.

The TV in our family room -- the one that's hooked up to the DircTV service -- came with Netflix and YouTube and something else (I forget which) built in.

And, when Olaf and Younger Daughter were living here (they moved out four years ago already!) I was allowed to use their Netflix account.

See, it can be set up for five people -- and I was one of them. I think my designated screen name was "Mooch." No, that's not a name I chose.

Anyway, that's when I learned an important lesson about how these services operate: Every time I clicked on a program or movie to watch, a computer algorithm started whirling and twirling deep within the bowels of Netflix -- if I clicked on a Mickey Mouse cartoon, I got all sorts of cartoons and other Disney effluvia "suggested" for me next time I watched. And, of course, if I clicked on a rom-com I'd get a whole bunch of those suggested for me. Eventually, the Netflix algortihm would start getting to "know" me -- just as Amazon's algorithm has since gotten pretty good at figuring out what books or movies I might like. Scary good.^*

Sometimes, with the DirecTV, or, before that, with the cable, when I've clicked through the channels, I'd pause on some cheesy movie or tasteless TV show, just to see what all the fuss was about. You've done this, too, I'm sure; don't pretend otherwise.

But the way I figured it, the show was on anyway, and would be there, whether I lingered there or not. Unless I was hooked up to a Nielsen meter, I didn't contribute to the decline and fall of Western Civilization by peering in.

On the other hand, with Netflix or some streaming service, when I order up a program to watch I am in some small way endorsing it. I am complicit. Because the algorithm will note what I have chosen and then serve up more or whatever it was that I elected to watch. A reality show. A Chuck Lorre sitcom. Any movie with the words "bikini" and/or "hot tub" in the title.

I understand that I could give a negative review if I thought the program tasteless or trashy or whatever -- but I assume the algorithm would just wait and see if I called up another episode or similar show before sneering, yeah, right.

So I'm a little uncertain about how much I'll actually use my new Roku stick. I might learn -- or confirm -- things about myself that I don't really want to know.

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^* Long-time readers -- as if I had any left given my erratic, and infrequent, posting here -- might remember that, in 2011, I publicly declared that I was afraid to buy from Amazon. I wasn't lying. And I did not in fact buy from Amazon until the giant corporation made peace with my home state by collecting taxes on purchases. And, once that happened, I didn't suddenly start buying everything online -- mostly, if not always, I confined my online orders to stuff not readily available from local stores. But even this was enough for the Amazon algorithm to start predicting with increasingly eerie accuracy stuff I might like. Recently, I've begun searching on Amazon for things I don't like and wouldn't buy -- so I can put its computer off my scent....

Curmudgeon falls into the streaming revolution -- Part I

My children were generous again at Christmas, giving Long Suffering Spouse and me a Roku stick and a "new TV." And all it's cost me so far is $132.

You may wonder why the phrase "new TV" is rendered in quotes. (You may also be wondering what a Roku stick might be and why gifts from my children are costing me money, but all things will be revealed in time, Dear Reader.)

TVs in this day and age aren't really TVs at all. They are monitors. No different, really, than the monitor on which you are viewing this post, if you're reading on a desktop.

TVs today have no tuners; they receive neither VHF or UHF stations (remember when that was a big distinction?); they have no knobs or buttons -- except possibly a manual power switch, well concealed. They do have plugs in the back. Since this was allegedly a "TV" it had a threaded protrusion as well as an HDMI cable plug. The threaded protrusion is where one might connect an antenna with a coaxial cable.

The TV that formerly stood atop my dresser was where the juvenile squirrel that invaded my house in 2007 perched when said squirrel, after I'd noticed him mewling in the open living room window, opted to ignore my suggestion that he exit through the front door, and scrambled up the stairs to the second floor instead.

This was a small color TV -- 12" maybe -- and an outmoded, analog type to boot. Somewhere along the line, though, we'd gotten a digital TV tuner -- which we connected to the TV with one of those aforementioned coaxial cables -- enabling us to watch TV in our room, sort of, depending on the atmospherics, or whether it was our night to be on the main flight path for O'Hare. Which it is, seemingly, on most nights.

But, whatever, I had the digital tuner. The new 24" super keen flatscreen had a threaded protrusion for a coaxial cable so -- I thought -- at least I'd be able to sorta kinda watch TV as we had before, if on a bigger screen.

I hadn't taken the rabbit ears into account.

The old TV had an antenna -- rabbit ears -- that, while not designed for these frequencies, allowed at least some of the modern digital signal to reach the connected tuner.

The super keen new flatscreen, of course, did not.

As a result, we got no picture at all from the digital TV tuner. Not even a sporadic one.

So I knew I would have to buy a digital antenna.

But, first, I would install the Roku stick.

The Roku stick -- about the size and shape of a pack of gum, only with an HDMI plug on one end (that plugs into the back of a super keen flatscreen TV) and a power cord on the other -- picks up a signal via the home wireless Internet. The signal that the Roku stick picks up allows the viewer to log into Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime or ESPN or CBS All-Access or any number of free, or allegedly free, providers -- including Roku.

"Yes, yes, yes," Long Suffering Spouse said, with some exasperation, as I offered this explanation. "But how does it work?"

I gave the best answer I could. "Magic, I think," I told her, and, unsurprisingly, she found this answer less than satisfactory.

Still, it's the best one I have.

The First Law of Technology is that one need not know how something works in order to use it. I gave up trying to keep up with how computers worked when Windows replaced DOS -- but I've managed to get by, more or less, ever since.

This, of course, would be one of those "less" situations -- but I didn't know that as I gamely plugged everything in, set up my account, linked it to my laptop and started downloading Roku "channels."

I did everything properly -- it's my blog, so you'll just have to take my word for it -- at least on the second run-through. Long Suffering Spouse and I went out to a New Year's Day reception while the Roku "channels" were first installing. At some point, while we were out, the operation failed, leaving me with only six of the 20-something "channels" that I was supposed to have gotten on the standard install. When we got back, I started installing these one at a time.

It took... a... long... time.

But this was nothing compared to the time it took to load and play a 90 second instructional video.

Now we did have a wireless network before this. And it worked fine. Our phones or iPads got signal upstairs, as did my laptop. When Olaf and Younger Daughter were living with us, I'd upgraded the cable modem, which intensified the wireless network throughout the house to the point where the kids could use their computer in their room without difficulty. Youngest Son fell asleep at night, when he was living with us, watching reruns of The Office or Seinfeld on his computer.

But, apparently, Roku sticks need more signal than my modem -- however adequate it had been heretofore -- could provide.

I consulted with the kids and their spouses and learned that I would need a Netgear router.

So, now you see how the kids' gift cost me $132 -- the price of the digital antenna and Netgear router.

And I still had to install them both.

The antenna installation was fairly straightforward, of course. It has a flat panel that is supposed to be part of the antenna rig -- but it also has rabbit ears. I knew what to do with these.

But I thought the Netgear device would replace the AT&T modem.

Not so.

It apparently takes the modem's feed and amplifies the signal throughout the house -- pumping it up to the point where, now, I could finally find out what was available on all those Roku channels. And I should talk about that in my next installment.

But, for now, the best part about the Netgear super high-tech Nighthawk router?

It has rabbit ears.

The more things change....

Curmudgeon's van again requires service

Our family van is old now. Very old.

This sporadically-updated collection of essays began in late 2005. Our current van was new then. In fact a tribute to its predecessor is about the only post I can specifically recall from my first, long-abandoned blog (you are reading, now, you see, my second effort at blogging).

I readily concede that all older vehicles have their eccentricities... but I think our van is actually haunted.

By what, I don't know. Some mischievous sprite who has taken a personal dislike to me, I suppose.

I've never been any good with cars. Or car people. I have discovered that car people can actually smell automotive ignorance. And, brother, do I reek.

Despite my limitations, I have done my best to maintain our family fleet. I get the oil changed as directed, for example.

A year or two ago, when the family van's front left turn signal went on the blink (*ahem*) I took it to my neighborhood oil change place -- they do turn signals there, too -- and got the blinker replaced.

It may have worked for a week.

I took the van back and had them replace it.

But, once again, it stopped working within a matter of days.

Incensed, I made plans to take it back a third time, fantasizing about driving the vehicle through the overhead doors.

Then it rained.

And the blinker blinked, just as it was supposed to.

But, when the weather cleared, the blinker stopped blinking.

It took us awhile, you understand, to see the relationship between the rain and the restoration of the turn signal. What rational creature would make that connection?

But, eventually, there was no denying. The blankety-blank blinker only blinked when it rained. Or snowed. You know... adding water is not recommended for the ordinary operation of electronic devices. I may not be a car person, but I could figure that much out. Still... what was there to replace?

I had every reason to fear that some sort of electrical system failure underlay the blinker issue, the same sort of electrical issue that made our power door locks inoperable... and unfixable... some years ago. (On one of my thousand-dollar forays to the dealer, I asked them to repair the locks -- and they did -- for about 48 hours. No, I didn't take it back then. Some things we just must accept.)

Rust is steadily claiming the van's sliding doors. One of these days the doors will simply disappear. If the family purse permitted it, I would be considering the purchase of a new vehicle. But, alas.

So we make do.

Or we have tried.

Lately, though, the van has developed a new trick. The air conditioning works fine -- but the fan that blows the cold air into the vehicle has begun working only sporadically.

'Sporadically', for any of you young people out there with a limited vocabulary, means that the blower generally works when I'm driving -- but generally doesn't work when Long Suffering Spouse drives. Or is along for the ride. Especially if the outside temperature is 90 or more.

A week or so ago, Long Suffering Spouse put her foot down. I had to do something about the blower.

And it is a safety matter. That same blower which keeps the van comfortable in the heat is what keeps the defroster defrosting.

So I took the van to a different car repair place -- not the dealer -- I don't have $1,000 to spare at the moment -- and as I was within a mile or two of the place on that first occasion the blower suddenly kicked on. The van was positively chilly by the time I got to the dealer (the outside temperature -- which had been over 90 the day before -- 'coincidentally' crashed at about the same time -- a pneumonia front came in off Lake Michigan). But I gamely explained these facts to the nice people at the car repair place... and they looked at each other... and back at me... and they agreed to take a look.

An hour or two later, an earnest young man delivered the verdict -- keeping his distance from me, you understand. "We looked at it," he told me, carefully. "But, you see, it's working. Why don't you bring it back if it should stop working? Maybe then we can figure out what's wrong."

They were so eager to be rid of me on that occasion that they didn't give me a bill.

And, of course, the blower has worked flawlessly since.

Until yesterday.

Long Suffering Spouse drove the van to school yesterday, and then to Younger Daughter's house. Younger Daughter had to schedule an unanticipated doctor's visit for Granddaughter No. 1 and Younger Daughter's husband had their family vehicle. Long Suffering Spouse was to let Younger Daughter borrow the van and sit with Younger Daughter's other kids so Younger Daughter could get to the doctor. (We have backup car seats in the van -- that's another story -- so it's all legal.)

Anyway, the blower noticed that Long Suffering Spouse was driving and immediately stopped working. It didn't start again when Younger Daughter took the wheel either. Long Suffering Spouse advised me of these facts, at some length, as she drove back -- with the blower still inoperative -- from Younger Daughter's house last evening.

Accordingly, this morning, I packed up my laptop, hoping to get a little work done at the repair place. Long Suffering Spouse had to go to school this morning -- classes are over, but there are end of the year meetings all week -- and I was to drop her off on the way.

But the blower noticed I was driving... and sprung back to life.

I figured to work from home this morning, and I no sooner exited the van when my cell phone rang.

It was Long Suffering Spouse. She needed to return some school-owned equipment this morning, and she'd forgotten to bring a power cord belonging to same. I went inside, grabbed the cord, and fired up the van again.

The blower worked fine.

I parked at school, and delivered the cord.

I started the van, heading back home.

But guess what decided to stop? Well, hot weather is predicted for the coming weekend....

So, here I am in the repair shop. Typing.

The blower stayed off on the trip over. I told Long Suffering Spouse that, given how they'd looked at me last time, there was no way I was setting foot on the premises if the blower resumed operation en route.

Oh, yes, they remembered me from last time.

But, when the blower didn't work for them this morning either, they agreed to undertake its replacement.

That earnest young man has come into the waiting room a couple of times now to tell me that they've encountered unexpected difficulties getting it out.

The mischievous sprite is no doubt toying with them, too.

But, supposedly, at some point ere long, the van will be restored to me and the blower will work.

We'll see for how long....

I have a new tyrant in my life

Behold the Fitbit.

Youngest Son and his wife got Long Suffering Spouse one of these contraptions for her birthday a couple of months back. She liked it. She marveled at how many steps the device registered just as she moved in her classroom, especially on days when she had younger children (my wife teaches Spanish at the parish grade school and, over the course of the year, sees everyone from three-year old preschool through 8th grade). If she ever had time to use the walking track above the gym in the Parish Center -- she seldom does -- she'd come within daily striking distance of the magic 10,000 steps everyone talks about.

Then my wife began thinking. She began to wonder how many steps I was taking each day, going to the office, running errands, pacing while on the phone.

[Cue ominous-sounding music here.]

"A hundred, perhaps," I guessed, when she asked me. "A hundred fifty if I have an extra cup of coffee."

She was not amused.

But I already knew I'm going slowly to seed. I'm not going downtown as often as I used to -- and, many times, when I do, I drive down. Recently, I've driven frequently because I've needed to provide chauffeur service for my oldest granddaughter -- Younger Daughter didn't always have access to her car -- Olaf drives to work -- and Granddaughter #1 still had to get to preschool twice a week.

Yes, I enjoyed playing chauffeur.

Duh.

But walking to and from the parking garage is not the same thing as walking home from the train. And, with efiling, I really don't have to come downtown at all except to check the mail and go to court. And I don't have a lot going on in court at the moment. So there have been many days when I haven't bothered to go in. And it's been a cold, wet spring in Chicago this year. Who wants to go downtown when it's raining? The drive is miserable. And who wants to take the train when you know you're going to get rained on? I probably haven't walked home more than 10 times this year -- Long Suffering Spouse will pick me up at the train.

So, when my wife asked me how many steps I thought I took each day, she thought I was being a wisenheimer -- even though I was exaggerating only slightly.

She got me this new infernal device a week ago.

It has surprised my wife, and confirmed my perceptions.

So now the question becomes -- what am I going to do about it? What do I have to do about it?

It's about to buzz me again -- I haven't taken my 250 steps in the past hour.

Tyrant.

In which Curmudgeon explains about monopolies and why he was an hour and a half late to work this morning....

Some men are born Curmudgeons. Some have Curmudgeon-ness thrust upon them. Despite my long-time nom de blog, I may be among the latter category. I did not set out to be rip-roaring angry this morning. But then....

Abuela is having health issues. She is 80; she will be 81 in August. She will be 101 in August 2034, too. In other words, this crisis will pass and she'll be fine.

But, right now, she is scared. Her blood pressure, usually low, is soaring. Her pulse is speed-racing, even when she doesn't move. And, at the moment, other than dialing the phone to one of her daughters or one of her doctors, she's not moving at all. Last week she got an appointment with a cardiologist set up for this morning; she also talked the cardiologist into providing a monitoring device and a 24/7 help number. She called it last night when her heart beat started zooming out of control again. Then she called Long Suffering Spouse.

And Long Suffering Spouse checked in with her before we retired last evening -- Abuela had calmed down some -- and, under the circumstances, I was neither surprised nor upset when Abuela called again this morning as Long Suffering Spouse and I were trying to get ready to leave. I kept emptying the dishwasher while Long Suffering Spouse fielded the call.

I finished unloading the dishwasher. I put in the dishes that accumulated overnight (remember, Youngest Son is back from college). I fixed my bagel and poured my coffee. Long Suffering Spouse was still on the phone to her mother. I couldn't tell by sound, you understand -- my wife was obviously not getting a word in edgewise -- but she was still in the rocking chair in the living room not moving.

I took my coffee and my bagel and my sandwiches for lunch into the den and fired up the desktop computer.

Younger Daughter and Granddaughter #1 were awake; they were just turning on Play With Me Sesame for the 9,000,000th time when I walked in. I opened the screen door, letting the cool air wash over me.

Younger Daughter immediately groused that it was too cold. Well, yesterday it had been too hot. Younger Daughter had merely complained that I'd not turned on the air conditioner; Youngest Son was nearly belligerent about it. But 30 degree temperature drops (and sometimes 30 degree temperature increases) are just part of the background noise of living in Chicago. I didn't let it bother me any. I was still pleasant and cheerful.

I opened up Facebook. I'd taken some pictures at the Memorial Day Parade in our neighborhood and posted these on the parish Facebook page and, sure enough, I'd picked up a few "likes." This pleased me. The milk of human kindness was coursing through my veins. I clicked on the Home tab intending to look at the news in a couple of other groups I've assembled. The little Windows 7 wheel of misfortune began spinning.

And kept spinning.

I looked at the router, the router I'd just purchased from AT&T barely two weeks ago. I may not have needed to do this. I thought my old router had failed, and Younger Daughter really needed the Internet to finish a project she was doing for my friend Steve (keeping the gaps as small as possible on her resume, doncha know), but when I went through all the steps to set the new device up I realized that my equipment wasn't broken; rather, AT&T had broken the Internet. There was a large outage in the Chicago area and we were caught up in it. I was, I admit, fit to be tied on that occasion.

Now, as I looked at the router and saw the ominous red light, the milk of human kindness curdled.

But, fine. Even new equipment can have a problem. Pull the plug, count to 10, try again. I know the drill. For good measure, I rebooted the desktop.

I waited.

One by one the green lights lit on my router. One by one, but not the one I needed. That light came back red. I was seeing red by now, too.

Still, there was one more thing to try -- the Windows troubleshooting menu.

People used to be able to fix things, back in the day. My father taught me how to change spark plugs and set the gaps and change the oil on the car. But then came electronic ignition and bans on what you could do with the old oil you drained. So I don't change my own oil. And nobody changes spark plugs.

But, also back in the day, only not as far back, during the DOS days, I could troubleshoot problems, locate corrupted files, reinstall programs. Meanwhile, back in Redmond, Washington, Darth Gates and his minions were designing Windows. (We can't have a self-sufficient peasantry, he must have told them, they'd be far too independent.) But, as a sop to those of us who thought we could diagnose and fix problems, the evil geniuses came up with 'troubleshooting menus' -- additional buttons to push, all to no avail, while the button-pusher's blood pressure spikes ever higher.

So, no, I didn't expect much from the Windows troubleshooting menus, and I was not surprised when Windows soon admitted that it could not resolve my problem.

Meanwhile, as I was plummeting from the heights of happiness to the depths of Internet despair, Long Suffering Spouse was trying to talk Abuela into not driving herself to her doctor's appointment. "If you feel like you're going to pass out, someone else should drive," my wife said -- repeatedly.

Younger Daughter volunteered and Long Suffering Spouse relayed the offer.

The offer was rejected. Long Suffering Spouse didn't really want Granddaughter #1 anywhere near a doctor's office -- who knows what germs she might pick up? -- and Abuela was adamantly opposed.

Youngest Son was volunteered.

Note the use of the passive voice. He did not know his services were being offered; he was asleep. He just got a job coaching a high school travel baseball team and they have a game today; only he knows when and where. So he might not have been actually available anyway. He was dismissed as a possible chauffeur.

"Do you have court this morning, Curmudgeon?" my wife called from the living room. I was in red-light Hell by this time; I snarled back that I did not have anything scheduled. But the last thing I wanted to do today was drive my mother-in-law around.

"Curmudgeon can do it," my wife told her mother. "No, it won't be any problem at all; he has nothing up in court." Abuela agreed to think about it and the conversation, finally, came to an end.

I could at last tell my wife that the Internet had died, right before my eyes.

"Did you try unplugging and replugging the router?" she asked.

"Yes," I barked. "It's not us; it's AT&T. Service is down again."

I raged and fumed and sputtered and swore about monopolies and Third World service at First World prices (I could see Granddaughter #1 mentally taking notes). My wife and daughter anxiously tried to shush me.

Long Suffering Spouse was not pleased. "Calm down! You're going to have a stroke, Curmudgeon," she scolded me, "and they're going to put you in Abuela's room at the hospital."

Ah, yes, Abuela.

"You realize, of course," I told her, "that your mother wants you to go with her? She's scared."

"I can't go. I have to go to school. I can't believe it's so late. I'm not going to get a parking space."

Long Suffering Spouse was up until midnight preparing materials to use in a couple of her classes today. She had every intention of going to school. I'm generally the expendable spouse, the one whose day can be sacrificed for the crisis du jour -- like when Younger Daughter called me to tell me she was going into labor. As long as I was reasonably close by, Younger Daughter wouldn't have dared to try and reach her mother at school.

But Long Suffering Spouse is worried about her mother, too. She expects her mother to be admitted to the hospital after she's seen today; I think Abuela is almost looking forward to it. Abuela seems to like being in the hospital. There was the time, a few years back, when Abuela's hemoglobin crashed; I forget the details. But if good hemoglobin is 11.5 and you need a transfusion at 8 or 9, she was down to a 5 or a 6 or a -2 or something -- something truly alarming -- and it was decided to put her in the hospital immediately. My wife went to take her (it was summertime) and got her in the car, with her bag packed, all ready to go, when Abuela realized she had forgotten to pack a favorite perfume. So my wife went back in her mother's house, rummaging through her bedroom, looking for a bottle of perfume, while she feared for her mother's life. And Abuela, sick as she was, was giddy like she was going on vacation.

Aside from a couple of similar episodes, Abuela has enjoyed really good health, particularly in the last 10 or 15 years. I think it must be sort of disappointing for her.

Anyway, mad as I was at AT&T, and mad as my wife was at me for being so mad, she could see the logic in what I'd said. "I'd better call school right away then," she said. "What's the number?"

We got her the number.

She got an answering machine. "No, this won't do at all!" she shouted. "Bring me my iPad. I need to send an email."

"You can't send an email. We have no Internet." (Younger Daughter asked whether we could send an email to the school from our phones. But the school system is a proprietary one, and one must be logged in before doing anything. I don't know how to do that quickly, if it can be done at all from a phone, I told her. Do you? No, my daughter admitted.)

Eventually, Younger Daughter and I persuaded Long Suffering Spouse to go to school in person and inform her principal of the problem. Problems. Meanwhile, I steeled myself for the ordeal of calling AT&T.

I dug out the most recent bill (it's not even overdue yet!) and began looking for a customer service number.

Like all monopolies, AT&T does not believe in customer service, only billing. On the bill detail there is a number for Internet or DSL billing questions. My actual Internet or DSL billing question -- how dare you send out bills for this crappy level of service? -- was not likely to receive a polite answer. But, after further scrutiny of the bill, I did find a paragraph labeled "customer support," that listed phone numbers -- different phone numbers -- that one could call to speak to AT&T in English, Spanish, Mandarin, Korean, Tagalog, Polish, or even Russian. They probably connect you to one of Putin's own family members if you call the Russian number. AT&T is the kind of business that a guy like Vladimir Putin can appreciate -- as long as he's an owner, not a customer.

Anyway, my Mandarin not being really up to par, I decided to call the English number.

A computer answered.

"If you'd like to continue in English, press 1," the computer said. "Para continuar en Español, marque numero dos."

If you have to, you can think about that one for a little while.

I dutifully pressed number 1 and the computer started talking again. "I see you're calling from" -- and here the computer recited my home phone number. "Is this the number you are calling about?" Yes, I snapped. The AT&T computer voice is always so damn chipper; it just gets me madder to hear it. "One moment please while I gather information about your account." The computer then makes a little whoosh and gurgle like it's pulling in data from the far-flung corners of its endless files. "In a few words, tell me about why you are calling. For example, you can say, 'I'd like to pay my bill' or 'I'd like to order new service.'"

"AT&T is a bloated, corrupt monopoly that was broken apart by the courts but which stupid politicians and regulators have allowed to re-form into an entity even more evil than it was originally."

"I'm sorry, I did not get that," said the computer.

"My Internet is out. Again."

Eventually the computer put me in line to speak with a representative -- all of whom were busy servicing other customers at present, darn it -- but in the meantime I could listen to a steady stream of commentary -- like how many Internet connection problems can be solved by turning off the modem, or unplugging it for 10 seconds, and plugging it back in. I added some commentary of my own about this and Long Suffering Spouse -- back from school already -- started in shushing me again.

Then the recorded voice told me that all sorts of further troubleshooting advice was available at AT&T.com. Isn't that nice? If I could get to AT&T.com I wouldn't be in hold-Hell here now, would I?

These messages, and others like them, all equally unhelpful, repeat until a human can be found to pick up the call.

I feel sorry for the poor lady who answered my call. It's not her fault that she has such a miserable job. The economy stinks. And then she has to listen to people driven crazy by endlessly looped messages that are completely unhelpful.

At least when you call the IRS you get soothing classical music as you waste away on hold. Or the music would be soothing if (1) you weren't calling the IRS and (2) it wasn't interrupted every 45 seconds or so by a voice urging you to stay on the line.

The woman from AT&T identified herself. She made me identify myself (didn't the computer already tell her?) and then she asked me how she could be of assistance today.

"Internet service is out in my area again. This is the second time in less than two weeks. This is entirely unacceptable."

"Can I put you on hold, sir, while I investigate? I'm not aware of any outage in your area."

At least this time, there was music and no useless suggestions.

When I began speaking in tongues at the computer this morning, Younger Daughter hustled her child out of the room. Play With Me Sesame had ended anyway. So I put the morning news on for something to pay attention to besides prerecorded inanities from AT&T.

In this news this morning it seems a person was struck and killed by a Metra commuter train in the vicinity of Arlington Park. I don't live in that vicinity, but I do live much closer to the center of the City along that same train line. And, sure enough, the news advised, the CTA was honoring Union Pacific passes this morning on the Blue Line (which I do take) because of disruption to the Metra service going to the northwest suburbs. So that was making the Blue Line slower than usual.

That would have been bad enough, but the Blue Line was also having equipment problems coming in from the airport -- in other words, by me -- and things were really messed up.

"I may just go back to bed," I announced. "If I ever get off hold."

The AT&T lady eventually came back on the line. "Sir, it turns out that there is an outage in your area." She seemed surprised. With monopolies, the customer is almost always wrong.

"When will this problem be fixed?"

"It is currently scheduled to be repaired by 7:30 p.m.," she said. Just another 11 hours (give or take) to go.

"You know," I said, "this is completely unacceptable. To find a number to call you, I had to pull out my bill. And what should I find in my bill but a notice that you are 'upgrading' Internet service in this area? Faster speeds for bigger dollars. Now why would I -- why would anyone -- do that when you can't keep the system you have operating smoothly?"

"Well, sir, I do see that we are going to fiber-optic service in your area and we won't be dependent on the old, copper telephone lines anymore. And that's the problem, that the old lines are in need of replacement."

Like the one I'm presently speaking to you on? But I kept that to myself. Instead I said, "And I also notice that you are billing me for a full month's service even though you have had two outages in two weeks."

"You are entitled to a credit, sir," said the woman. "I can put you on hold and connect you to a billing specialist."

"Please," I begged. "Do. Not. Put. Me. On. Hold. Again."

"Well, alright, sir, have a nice day."

I hung up the phone.

And it rang again almost immediately.

It was Long Suffering Spouse's sister, Josephine, calling from her office. Abuela, it seems, was on the other line with her, even now, telling her how weak she felt, how she thought she might pass out, how she was worried she wouldn't be able to answer the door when Long Suffering Spouse came to take her to the doctor. But, Josephine said, Abuela did not want to call Long Suffering Spouse and burden her with this. She didn't want to inconvenience her. "Not want to inconvenience me? I've already taken the day off to get her to the doctor," Long Suffering Spouse told her sister.

She hung up and said she'd better go to her mother's. "I can drop you off at the train. If it's working."

"I need to get some bills out," I admitted, "and I need the Internet for that."

"If it's not working in your office, just turn around and come home," my wife said.

But it was. It is. And I still need to get out some billing. Now that I've blown off some steam.

Paper still has a place in the world

I like my tablet and I've reached a rapprochement with my smart phone. I've been blogging, off and on, for almost a decade (this is, after all, my Second Effort). So I'm not totally tech-averse. I'm not a doctrinaire Luddite, whatever my kids may tell you.

Still, my desk at the Undisclosed Location is choked with paper. Stacked high. I still find I read better on paper than I do on the screen. I read newspapers. I read books. No one steals a newspaper or book from you on the el going home; iPhone users have to be aware of "Apple pickers."

Perhaps that explains why I really laughed out loud when I saw this commercial online this morning. Perhaps no explanation is really needed.

And, thanks to modern technology, we can get jarring telephone calls even on the train!

Wireless signal is spotty along the CTA's Blue Line train tracks, especially when the sometime-elevated train becomes the Subway. Maybe that's why the caller ID on my oh-so-smart phone said "Unknown."

The last time the oh-so-smart phone said "Unknown" -- also when I was on the train -- it turned out to be Long Suffering Spouse. This time it was Younger Daughter. And, yes, thank you, I do have my wife and daughter -- all my children and children-in-law, in fact -- in my Contacts list. So I should have seen Younger Daughter's name and her number when she called yesterday, although I saw neither.

"Hello?" I said, tentatively. (One of these days, I'll answer a call from Unknown and it will turn out to be a sales call. From that day forward, all Unknown calls will be denied.)

"You're going to have to turn around and come home," Younger Daughter announced.

"What's the matter?"

"There's something in the fireplace and it's alive."

"What do you mean, in the fireplace?

"Well, I can hear it. It's moving and scratching -- here, listen." She must have held the phone near the fireplace -- pretty brave of her, really, considering -- and, over the roar of the train and the fading signal, it is entirely possible that I heard some sort of skittering noise.

"It's a bird or squirrel," I said. "It must have fallen in the chimney. But the flue is closed. It can't get in the house."

"Are you sure?"

"If the flue is closed, I am. And the flue is closed."

That was about when the signal gave up the ghost.

But several texts accumulated while I was out of range.

I called Younger Daughter back when I got in the office.

"I agree with your plan," I told her (having read through the several text messages). "Today seems like a fine day to take the baby out for errands."

"Well the noise stopped," she said. "Maybe it climbed out."

"Or died."

"Yeah." Younger Daughter did not seem comforted by this possibility.

"Well, don't open the flue to find out which it is," I suggested. I didn't mean to be rude, I told her, but I actually had stuff to do yesterday -- including telling you about the first phone call yesterday morning -- and I had to go to court as well. (Imagine that: I sometimes still go to court!) Younger Daughter seemed mollified by the end of our conversation; she outlined an ambitious itinerary that included retail therapy and a visit to Abuela. I said OK and plunged into my day.

Three hours later or so I was in the lobby of the Daley Center looking for someone. The person I was looking for was allegedly looking for someone, too. But the person I was looking for was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, the court had been waiting 45 minutes. I pulled out my phone to check messages -- I didn't expect to find this man hiding in my voice mail, but there might have been a clue.

Instead, there was only a frantic message from Long Suffering Spouse. "Where are you? I've called your cell phone, I've called your office and I can't find you! There's some sort of animal in the house!"

Apparently I wasn't the only one Younger Daughter had texted. My wife keeps her phone off during the school day -- she doesn't trust the 'mute' button -- but she must have had a moment to switch it on during her lunch break yesterday. The message had just been left a few minutes before, though, so I tried to call my wife.

She answered. "Where are you? I've been trying to find you everywhere."

"In court."

"Oh. I'll hang up."

"No, I'm outside the courtroom now." (I'd gone back up on the elevator as I was dialing the phone.) "I already talked to Younger Daughter. It's not in the house. It's in the chimney above the fireplace. It can't get through the flue. Whatever it was stopped moving a couple of hours ago now."

"It probably died."

"That's what I said."

"Well, we can't use the fireplace!"

"We haven't used the fireplace in two years."

"Sure we have. Haven't we? Once?"

"Look, bottom line here is the noise is stopped. Whatever it was is dead or gone. Younger Daughter and the baby are going out on errands. We can figure out everything later."

I had to get back to the courtroom to report the outcome of my unsuccessful reconnoiter. Sometimes work intrudes on the steady stream of family phone calls.

Some people wonder why I long for the days when we weren't accessible 24/7/365. But, just once, I would like to start in on a project and work on it without interruption.

Do you know the surest way to get a client phone call? Start in on a different file. If you can start in on a different file -- if all the crises at home are being managed....

Late afternoon, early morning phone calls shatter your nerves as well

It is always a nervous time in the Curmudgeon home, don't get me wrong. A young Woody Allen would complain that we're all too neurotic, even for him. A young Robin Williams would complain that we're far too manic for him to be comfortable.

But we have been even more on edge than usual for the past several weeks because Older Daughter has tried her luck again with IVF -- a different doctor -- different medications -- same old roller coaster ride (for more about Older Daughter's past IVF experiences, click on the IVF tab at the bottom of this post).

Except.

Except maybe -- this time -- there may be a different outcome.

No, I haven't written about this latest attempt before. I've written about others and they all turned out badly. I won't write about the details now. I don't believe in tempting fate. But I have to mention -- to tell this story -- that, despite an inauspicious beginning, and some very dark moments along the way, things had progressed, as of yesterday, to the point where an ultrasound was scheduled and it was anticipated that a heartbeat would be clearly visible.

Older Daughter is in Indianapolis; the rest of us are in Chicago. We had to wait for her report. Nervously.

She got hold of her sister first. "Hello?" said Younger Daughter. "What's the news?"

There was silence on the end of the line.

"Hello?" repeated Younger Daughter. "Are you there?" (She wanted to ask, are you OK? but there was no way to frame that question in a way that would get a 'yes' answer if the news were bad -- and the continued silence was really getting to her.)

"I'm really pregnant," came the response, finally. Oh, so softly.

So understated that Younger Daughter had to consider an extra second or two whether the news was good or bad.

Long Suffering Spouse later reported a similar lull at the outset of her eventual conversation with Older Daughter. "I couldn't tell if it was good news or bad at first," she told me later. "But she's so happy -- and I'm so happy for her -- but, I have to tell you, if she said 'it's surreal' one more time, I was going to reach through the phone and strangle her, happy or not."

No, she wasn't really threatening her child; she was venting pressure. We all were. Older Daughter called six more times or so. Long Suffering Spouse had her on the speakerphone at one point as Older Daughter was talking about really wanting to eat salty foods and drink milk.

"Pretty soon you'll want pickles and ice cream," I said. No, Long Suffering Spouse never had bizarre cravings like that, but I've watched my share of sitcoms, back in the day.

"They both sound good," Older Daughter said, "but maybe not together."

"So is it official?" I asked. "Can I start drinking for two?"

"Well, my husband is," she said. "I bought him a bottle of 10 year old Bushmill's this afternoon on my way home from the doctor."

Older Daughter had told her husband she'd buy him a bottle of good whiskey when she knew she was pregnant. This was actually bottle number two -- she'd bought another one a couple of weeks ago when a prior ultrasound demonstrated a fetal pull (the precursor of a heartbeat). In her excitement at the time, she'd confided all this to the salesman who waited on her in the liquor store. She saw the same salesman yesterday afternoon, she told us.

"And he said 'so this means things are going well?' and I said 'you remembered?' and he said 'I told you I'd be praying for you.'"

"You have no idea how many people have been praying for you," Long Suffering Spouse interjected at this point. "So many."

Yes, there was a general lessening of tension in the Curmudgeon household yesterday evening -- great happiness and joy (and relief) for Older Daughter and her husband Hank.

And, then, this morning, at about 6:40 or so, the house phone rang. Long Suffering Spouse was already downstairs; I was still getting dressed. She beat me to the closest phone. I had no doubt about who was calling; I ran down the stairs half-dressed. Fortunately I did not trip on my untied shoelaces.

Long Suffering Spouse heard me coming and met me in the dining room.

"She's going to kill me," she said.

"What's wrong?" I asked. I didn't really want to know, but I knew I would have to listen.

"Nothing," my wife said. "She just called to say she hopes I have a nice day. I almost had a heart attack there."

"Me too. Was there anything else?"

"Well, yeah, she said she must have been so stressed yesterday that this morning she could hardly move."

"I'll just bet."

Younger Daughter stumbled down the steps a moment later. "Who was that, as if I didn't know? What happened?"

"Everything's fine," Long Suffering Spouse and I said at once. Long Suffering Spouse continued to explain about how Older Daughter complained about being unable to move this morning."

"At one point yesterday," Younger Daughter told us, "she told me her co-workers must all hate her. She kept looking at the clock. Six hours to go, she'd tell them. Five and a half hours to go. If even she realized that she was making everyone around her crazy, it must have been awful."

"How are we going to survive until May?" asked Long Suffering Spouse, but neither I nor Younger Daughter have an answer to that one.

Calls after midnight are the ones that are supposed to scare us, right? Nothing good happens after midnight? But now, we see, calls in the middle of the day -- and certainly first thing in the morning -- can be just as frightening.

And that was just the beginning of my day.

Tomorrow's post will cover the next crisis that arose -- all before I got into the office....

The more contact numbers one has, the harder one is to reach

Click to enlarge or follow link below to original cartoon.

In a post earlier this month I mentioned in passing that the more contact numbers someone has, the harder they are to get hold of (I'll have to remember to include this in my next installment of Curmudgeon's Laws). Anyway, it appears that one of my favorite webcomics, xkcd, has noticed the same thing.

Naturally, I only understand half the references here, but I'm pretty sure I'm interpreting this correctly....

Curmudgeon gets a smart phone, proves how dumb he is

It's official. I now have an appliance that's smarter than me.

There is, of course, an argument to be made that most of my appliances, and some of the furniture besides, were already smarter than me. I try to ignore that sort of thing.

The first proof that smart phones are smarter than we are came in the way we were manipulated into getting them.

Youngest Son, it seems, was missing important text messages. Even on my old dumb phone, I could set up a message to be sent to multiple people. And when I pressed 'send' they all got the message. But a smart phone -- being smart, and also wanting to place its relatives -- sends messages to multiple recipients that can't be opened up on the dumb phone. Youngest Son would get notification that he had a message, but the contents thereof would remain tantalizingly beyond his reach.

What's that you say? He could have seen that Coach Smith sent a message, which he could not read, and responded by calling Coach Smith? "I can't see your message. What do you want?"

Yes, I suggested that, too.

Many, many times.

But apparently there were notifications from professors and deans and regional fraternity councils and such like where calling would not be an option. Youngest Son complained bitterly that he was missing job opportunities as well.

He knew that would get me.

Still, I was going to hold out. Lawyers laughed at me in the courthouse when I pulled out my dumb phone to make a call. They pulled out their oh-so-smartphones to schedule, to post on Facebook, to read vital emails that they could see in two minutes when they got back to their office. But I was resolute. I didn't need a phone with all this stuff on it when I had computers with large, easy-to-read screens. No one was going to swipe a newspaper from me, or a book, as I rode home on the subway -- could these peacocks say the same for their very smart phones? No, sir. Not at all.

In the end, of course, it was Long Suffering Spouse who crumbled. You will get him a phone before he goes back to school, she finally told me. Youngest Son did his best not to turn handstands with glee.

Perhaps she chafed more than I realized at the thought that her students, seeing her ancient phone, did not recognize it as such. "Is that a phone?" one would ask. "Really?"

And, of course, our old phones were useless for storing and displaying pictures of our grandbaby.

Well, we took Youngest Son back to school on Sunday. His tuition is not paid. My real estate taxes are not paid. I pointed out that adding new expenses was not a good plan at this time.

My defenses held until Saturday.

There we were, at Costco, buying phones. I had one hope. They had to run my credit. Surely my credit rating must have cracked under the enormous weight of over $50,000 in credit card debt!

But, no.

Now I have over $51,000 in credit card debt and a smart phone that sits here mocking me.

What? You think I'd buy him a fancy-schmancy phone and not get one for me and the missus, too?

Password protected -- for our amusement

How many passwords do you have to juggle? Six? Ten?

Simple passwords are too "weak" -- and a lot of sites will insist that you bulk up... passwords must have at least one capital letter, two numbers, a specialty character and anything else that we can think of to screw up your ability to recollect whatever we finally allow you to have. And don't think you can use the password from your most restrictive site as your password everywhere. That would be too easy. At least one of your sites will reject it as having too many characters... passwords must be between 8 and 14 characters long, except on Tuesdays in spring, when passwords must be between 6 and 12 characters long, or Thursdays after the Full Moon in any month having an 'm' in it....

Then there are the sites that make you change your password every 90 days -- because the Russian hackers are always watching you in particular (what makes you so special, anyway?) -- and don't even think of using the password you used to use, either. (The Russians almost got that one, you know.)

But, given the proliferation of passwords, the worst are sites that limit you to one or two tries -- and then make you wait... and wait... for an email. When you get the email, you can reset your password. Too bad you remembered that password in the meantime. Too bad, that is, for you.

This blog has an email link... and it's been spammed

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer wants all her employees to come into the office -- no more working from home.

And it's no wonder: Yahoo! email is increasingly insecure.

I have a Yahoo! email address for this blog... and everyone in my address book got spammed this afternoon.

I use another Yahoo! email address for my public blogs... and everyone in that address book got spammed a few months back.

And it seems hardly a week goes by without my receiving at least a couple spam Yahoo! emails -- a single line live link with no subject line but from a real, known person so it gets by most spam filters. Click on the link and you give the spammers access to your address book -- and somehow that includes passwords, too. I've just changed all my passwords... again.

Ms. Mayer and her newly reunited office mates really need to look into why Yahoo! email is particularly vulnerable.

She needs to make this a priority.

Seriously.

In which Curmudgeon tries to scare his few remaining readers offline....

The bad news this morning is that Google is turning over more and more user data to law enforcement investigators, without a warrant or any judicial oversight.

The good news, according to the linked article by Matthew Sledge on HuffPost Tech, is that Google is telling us about it.

Well... I suppose it is better to know that these sorts of things are going on, and indeed becoming increasingly routine, than to live in blissful ignorance. Probably.

Oh, and one other thing: Sledge writes that "Google received 21,839 user data requests from foreign governments in the second half of 2012, a significant increase from the 18,257 it got in the same time period the year before."

(Sledge's article is drawn from Google's Transparency Report, posted yesterday on Google's Official Blog.)

Meanwhile, yesterday on the Atlantic Monthly website, we have a chilling story by Megan Garber, "'Current Employers of People Who Like Racism' ... and More Actual Facebook Graph Searches."

A Brit named Tom Scott was one of the first to get access to the newly announced Facebook search engine (they're rolling it out slowly). He started playing around with it and posting his results (with identifying individual characteristics generally fuzzed out), on a Tumblr blog called Actual Facebook Searches. The response, he writes, has been overwhelming, all for "a cheap joke I cobbled together in an hour or so."

Oh, but what a dangerous joke...

“Spouses of married people who like [cheat-on-your-partner dating site] Ashley Madison”

He ran a search for married men who like prostitutes -- and got back results that offered to identify the spouses of those men. And he did another one for "Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran" -- that's a death penalty offense over there, kids -- or "Current employers of people who like racism" -- he didn't fuzz out the results showing such employers to be the U.S. Air Force, Target, McDonald's....

Mr. Scott has posted some FAQs at his site. An excerpt:

Aren’t you giving ideas to repressive governments?

I’d bet money they’ve already thought of it and have already done those searches. The searches I’m making now were suggested on the day that Facebook Graph Search was announced, more than a week ago.

Also, I think they have more accurate and time-tested intelligence-gathering services than Facebook Graph Search. See the next question:

Isn’t Facebook’s data so bad that it doesn’t matter?

In many cases, but not in all.

Searching for family members, for example, is often disrupted by the (mostly teenage) people who’ve marked friends as their family. And for the “Iranian men who like men” search, a lot of that may be mistranslation: it could be interpreted as the literal ‘interested in meeting’ rather than ‘would like to date’.

I’m freaked out now. What’s your advice?

If it’d be awkward if it was put on a screen in Times Square, don’t put it on Facebook. Oh, and check your privacy settings again.

As I was expressing my anxieties about these latest technological breakthroughs at home, my son-in-law Olaf tried to comfort me with what he said is an old maxim of the Internet: If you're not paying for it, you are the product being sold.

Hard as I tried, I could not find a way to feel all warm and fuzzy about that.

Before we condemn -- or laugh at -- Manti Te'o

Image obtained from Yahoo! Sports.

Look, I don't know any more than you do whether star Notre Dame linebacker was in on this whole 'fake girlfriend' thing or not.

If he was, he's got some serious problems -- and needs some serious help.

If he was the victim of a cruel hoax, as Notre Dame is saying so far, people are going to think him a fool, an idiot, a naif at best: You never actually saw this girl, this love of your life, in person? You never Skyped, you never Facetimed?

But before you hurl stones, ladies and gentlemen, where are you right now?

We live so much of our lives on line these days, sometimes the people we meet here are darn near as real to us as the living, breathing people we interact with in person. If we actually do interact with anyone in real life, that is.

In an essay last April about the difficulties of telling truth from fiction on line, I cited to the terribly sad case of Paula Bonhomme, a woman duped into spending over $10,000 on gifts for a 'man' named 'Jesse James' that she 'met' through an acquaintance in an Internet chatroom dedicated to fans of the HBO series Deadwood. Actually, the acquaintance didn't make an introduction, she made up Jesse -- and an extended family, too. Eventually, the victim 'met' most of Jesse's 'family'; she thought she and 'Jesse' were in love, and she made plans to fly from her California home to meet Jesse in Colorado and move in with him. 'He' canceled at the last minute, though, sending the poor woman into depression and therapy and eventually, according to her pleadings, an infection caused by the depression-related suppression of her auto-immune system. Then she was told that Jesse had 'died' -- of liver cancer (not leukemia as in Te'o's case). Even after Jesse's 'death,' the poor woman kept up a relationship with the mutual 'friend' who had supposedly made the introduction, the defendant in this case, meeting her in Colorado and traveling to New Mexico to visit some of Jesse's favorite places. When the defendant came to visit her in California, the victim spent over $1,000 prepping the house for the visit.

When the deception was finally revealed, plaintiff sued -- but the Illinois courts held she had failed to state a claim and threw her case out of court. See, Bonhomme v. St. James, 407 Ill. App. 3d 1080, 945 N.E.2d 1181 (2nd Dist. 2011), Appellate Court affirmed in part and reversed in part by the Illinois Supreme Court, 2012 IL 112393. (For any lawyers out there, the Supreme Court held that plaintiff had waived any other claims she might have been able to make, placing all of her hopes in a claim for the tort of fraudulent misrepresentation, but that tort did not lie because the parties did not have a business relationship.)

Why did the defendant in the Bonhomme case do these terrible things? For fun, perhaps, and for the gifts -- for the money.

Why would someone ensnare Manti Te'o in this horrible web of deceit? Well, supposedly, Te'o finally realized something was amiss when his 'dead girlfriend' called early in December... as Notre Dame was preparing for the BCS National Championship Game. Maybe gambling interests were aware of the hoax from the outset, or maybe some smart guy sniffed it out and decided to 'reveal' the situation to Te'o at a time when it would mess him, and the team, up most. Notre Dame generally -- and Te'o in particular -- played as if they were seriously distracted by something.

I'd like to think that Te'o will be exonerated from complicity in the hoax, even if he ends up being perceived as hopelessly gullible from all this. Of course, I also wanted to believe that Tiger Woods wouldn't cheat on his gorgeous wife.

But, as we rely increasingly on our screens to get us through our days, to manage our appointments, to do our networking, to manage even our 'friendships,' I can't help but wonder if all of us won't become increasingly vulnerable to scams like this. If all the "Nigerian generals' widows" would just take a course or two in grammar and basic writing skills, how many more of us would get sucked in?

No. I may feel sorry for Te'o and I may wind up angry at him. But I won't laugh. There's nothing funny in this story.

I love WordPerfect, but X6 is testing my affection

I suppose the Battle of the Word Processors ended long ago, with the evil Bill Gates winning the day -- as usual -- with Microsoft Word.

I can't stand MS Word, personally. There's only one feature in the entire program I've ever found useful, namely, the Track Changes function (Ctrl + Shift + E). If someone saddles me with a Word document (I had to buy a copy of the program at one point just so I could open client documents) I can at least use that one helpful feature to note any suggested revisions.

No, I've been a loyal WordPerfect user for many years. I learned on WP 4.1 for DOS. I've owned one or more copies of WordPerfect since WP 4.2 for DOS.

The difference between the programs is fundamental: Word lets you use paragraphs in a few different ways, all theirs, while (thanks to Reveal Codes) WordPerfect lets you format any way you need to -- word by word, letter by letter, if need be.

Another brilliant feature of WordPerfect is that files created in one version can be opened, without difficulty, in other versions of the program. Word files, however, go back so far and no farther. Word 2007 started creating something called .docx files which I couldn't open up on my registered copy of Word 2003. Someone told me where to find a 'patch' -- but files opened in this manner come with a warning that the format may be altered or some of the other zippy new features may not translate.

It was the alleged ability of WordPerfect's latest iteration, X6, to cleanly open .docx files that got me thinking about moving up from WP X5, the version I had been using at work: Somebody had sent me a Word file and I needed to make changes but these might involve formatting -- always, always, always a disaster with Word -- and this pushed me over the edge.

And when I called the nice people at Corel (the current WordPerfect corporate owner; there have been several) they sold me an upgrade with a disk and a download so I could install my backup copy of the X6 program on a mini I sometimes use at home (the mini has no disc drive* of any kind).

Well, of course, things being how they are, I did the download to the mini right away -- and let the disc languish in my desk drawer at work for quite awhile.

Eventually, though, I got around to installing it.

It uninstalled all prior versions of WordPerfect (I'd moved WP 11 over to my new desktop at work when I discarded the old one). WP X5 wanted to make sure I wasn't ripping off the Corel Corporation by installing an 'upgrade' disc without owning an older version of the program -- but it didn't uninstall WP 11. I've seen programs insist on eradicating all versions of their former selves and I've seen programs that sit on top of the old ones; I didn't think much of it either way.

Anyway -- another good thing about WordPerfect -- the new version was quite similar to the old one in terms of all the things I'd want to do. I increased the size of the default document and instructed it to keep Reveal Codes open at all times. Everything was fine and familiar.

Until I went to print an envelope.

Naturally this was toward the end of the day and I was running on fumes.

I went to print an envelope and only the bottom line of the address appeared at the very top of the envelope. I went through about 20 envelopes -- moving margins, saving new custom envelope descriptions, trying everything I could think of.

Eventually -- don't ask me how -- I got an envelope to print more or less correctly.

I went home.

But next day I could not repeat my triumph. Another 20 envelopes were sacrificed. I started looking for help. Corel initially sent me directions on how to print envelopes.

Um.

I've been printing envelopes in WordPerfect since (at least) the late 1980s. I know how to do that.

Eventually, I worked my way through the automated help to a human. After the margin fixes didn't work -- again -- he told me to reinstall my printer.

I reinstalled.

But my results were the same.

If it weren't for the one stinking envelope I got once I'd swear this was a software bug in the new program. In fact, I still think it must be.

The nice man from Corel suggested I reinstall version X5. Run envelopes with that and see how it works, he said. (It worked fine for two years until I bought X6; I was pretty sure it'd work again now.) But -- eventually -- a new grandchild and some actual legal work got in the way -- I tried reinstalling X5.

It won't reinstall.

Not unless I uninstall X6.

That really would defeat the purpose, though, don't you agree?

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* Apple says there is a difference between "disc" and "disk." I'm pretty sure I used the right version here; at least I tried to.

Competing Declarations of Internet Independence get Curmudgeon thinking about how the Intertubes should be managed

... how the Intertubes should be managed, if at all.

I hope to return to this subject again, if you don't mind terribly.

With the Fourth of July nearly upon us I've been seeing all sorts of stuff lately about "Declarations of Internet Independence." Unfortunately, most of my browsing on the subject has come in those sleepy hours after dinner, when focus is impossible and only fleeting impressions can be made.

This morning after court, therefore, I thought I'd try and reconstruct what I've looked at and organize it into a quick and timely post.

That was a couple of hours ago. So much for quick.

First of all, I've found at least three Declarations of Internet Independence in circulation. The oldest, by far, is this one, datelined August 1996 from Davos, Switzerland.

Two more current versions were compared in this post on PC World Australia.

The first of these is the one I'd seen (although, in my twilight consciousness yesterday, I'm not sure where I saw it. On BuzzFeed, perhaps?)

The second of these is, according to the linked Australian post, "from free-market think tanks TechFreedom, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and other groups[; it] calls on governments to 'do no harm' to the Internet and to avoid getting involved in the broadband marketplace."

If you've been following Popehat's coverage of Carreon v. Funny Junk (and, if you haven't, you should -- and the link will take you to all the related posts in one fell swoop) or, even more relevantly, to Popehat's coverage of Kimberlin v. Walker, you'd understand that the legal system seems ill-equipped, or at least ill-prepared, to deal with the collisions among free expression, privacy, and copyright that happen everyday on your very own computer screen (and, perhaps, on your own blog).

Sites like YouTube exist for people to post stuff that interests, amuses or outrages them -- and copyrighted TV shows and movies are among the many things that interest, amuse or outrage YouTube users. Currently, as I understand it, YouTube stays out of trouble by immediately taking down anything when a copyright holder suggests the possibility of infringement.

The mouse on my computer gives me the power to swipe images and huge chunks of content with very little effort. I usually provide links to my sources (of course, even full-time scrapers often do that much). More importantly, I try and provide multiple links in a post and original content analyzing or discussing (or making fun of) the subject for which links are provided. This post, for instance.

If I include a snippet from one of the links, even a fairly lengthy one, it is my belief that I am making fair use of that author's content for an original post. But, at one point, AP was taking the position that more than four words from one of its articles constituted infringement, context be damned. That strikes me as an unreasonable position (and I haven't worried about it -- and I'm too unimportant a blogger for AP to worry about me).

Where someone's content is grabbed and reposted seems important to me, as well. If you think about it, most Facebook posts are the equivalent of stuff our parents used to stick on the refrigerator. The only difference is that a cartoon clipped and posted on a refrigerator was seen by only immediate family and any guests; stuff posted on Facebook may be seen by any user's "friends" -- and reposted ("shared") from there.

But I'm not at all persuaded that there is usually (or even often) any intent to infringe another's copyright by posting to Facebook. For the copyright holder, the abbreviated Facebook posts are really advertising for the original content. From what little I know about Twitter or Pinterest, I think that these may be considered as following a similar approach of advertising-rather-than-infringing.

A blog or other website where someone sells ads however, and reproduces other peoples' content, is fundamentally different. I recall hearing a prominent Chicago TV personality rail recently against the Drudge Report: The creators of that site link to all manner of news stories and sell all sorts of ads on their page showing the compiled links. No compensation is offered to those whose links are compiled, but the compilers earn income from ads which would not be placed but for those links. At least the selection of the links compiled makes the Drudge Report arguably unique and original; presumably a Drudge competitor would compile different links. And, at least in theory, an article or post 'picked up by' the Drudge Report should receive additional traffic than it might have otherwise, thereby potentially providing income to the actual creator of the linked work.

On the other hand, if a compiler provides not only links but also excerpts -- and no discussion or analysis or other original accompanying content -- readers may not be inclined to click through to the original content. The compiler there has hijacked traffic that could have inured to the creator of the linked post -- and has potentially earned income in the process. Is that really a fair use of the original work? (I'd be inclined to think not.)

If this is not something you've been following, or thinking about, I've thrown a great deal at you this morning (at least you'll enjoy the well-written Popehat links) -- but it occurs to me that those of us who use this medium have a pretty strong interest in trying to keep it open, accessible -- and civil -- and we should be leading the debate in the real world about how best to tame the Internet beast, rather than reacting (usually in horror) to attempts to impose controls on the free flow of information here in the ether.

Have a Glorious Fourth.

Sometimes I'm just happy that the jargon is meaningless to so many others, too

From Randall Munroe's webcomic, xkcd (click on the link to see the

cartoon in situ -- and in order to read Mr. Munroe's embedded comment).

I've spent a lot of time reading LinkedIn profiles in recent weeks, trying to see how I can catch the social networking wave and possibly some actual business as well. I am continually amazed by the gibberish that passes for job descriptions. When I read some of these profiles I wish I could actually reach out and grab the person by the neck and throttle him (or her) and scream what do you really do?

But it's not just LinkedIn profiles that are baffling me. I took a deposition of a young man a few weeks back -- nice enough kid -- about the age of Oldest Son. He testified about his job (under oath, mind you) and I didn't understand a damn syllable of it. Something to do with marketing. And he travels. A lot. But I could develop no understanding of what he actually does.

Is this the new economy? As soon as someone figures out what you do, they stop paying for it? Come to think of it, Oldest Son is a consultant -- and I have no clue what he does either.

This might explain a lot about my law practice.

New underwear bomb plot foiled! Let's clamp down on civil liberties some more!

And you thought getting through airport security was tough when you only had to take off your shoes!

I have no doubt that some genius at TSA has already proposed strip-search boarding -- sexually segregated, of course, and behind privacy screens.

Not that it would work, of course.

What does work, and what the CIA apparently did in foiling this latest bomb plot was what used to be called "police work." That's where real security comes from: Identify genuine threats and investigate, infiltrate or monitor them. Eventually, if Americans are discovered to be involved and if they violate the law, arrest and prosecute them. If foreigners are involved, and if they pose a threat, take such actions as are permitted by the law of nations and, in cases of imminent peril, such additional measures as may be necessary to protect human lives and property.

Am I droning on here?

Well, let me make this much abundantly clear: I do not mean we should be spying on all Muslims.

Nor do I mean that the government should be permitted to build a giant facility in Utah where everyone's every email or Facebook post may be intercepted and read by government snoops. And yet? It may actually be happening. Call that Total Information Awareness if you will; I call it unreasonable, unconstitutional and... oh, my, it is going to be harder and harder to hang on to even the shreds and tatters of our civil liberties in the very near future, isn't it?

Look: There are blogs, there are websites, there are ezines, there are pamphlets and books and lectures -- all out in public -- in plain sight -- where the terrorists first recruit the dupes who would don the exploding BVD's. There's plenty to monitor without violating anyone's rights. It's just a matter of paying attention and following up; that's police work -- not secret police work.

Remember right after 9/11? Remember when everyone was saying that, if we give up our freedom the terrorists will have won?

By that definition, Mr. bin Laden's unhappy interview with SEAL Team Six notwithstanding, the terrorists have apparently won.

Is that really what you want?