Radio Silence

Only one day left of this ridiculous campaign. Much as I love to have NPR on as I potter around the house, today I think I will maintain radio silence.

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Adventures in Anachronistic Consumerism # 42,985

After waffling most of the summer, I finally committed to going back for my high school reunion in Minnesota, crossing a pair of time zones and spending too much time in airports (Phoenix, really??) to get there — but that was the price of delaying, which is my own fault. And while there, why not go see a Twins game at new Target Field? So I made arrangements with a friend, N, to go see a game,  and hoped to be able to buy tickets online but simply mail them to her home in a suburb of Minneapolis.

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Adventures in Anachronistic Consumerism # 42,984

It’s my own fault. I don’t need much from my computer, email, a word processor (all I want is just a fancy electronic typewriter, really), and access to the internet. Which I had, except that my arthritic HP was pushing eight years old (I think) and getting slower and slower …

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Boston Red Sox Buying a World Series Championship – Is George Steinbrenner Grinning in His Grave?

 I e-mailed my friend who brews with me about the next beers we are going to make. “What,” he replied. “no huzzahs and hosannas for the World Champion Red Sox?!”

 He’s from Connecticut. I don’t blame him for being a Red Sox fan. But I do note that he’s singing a new tune.

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Just Another BART Altercation

Last night I saw this large, balding guy follow a short man onto the BART train, hollering at him. When the short fellow tried to laugh it off, the balding guy got right in his face, aggressively laughing back, mocking him as his head bobbed up and down. 

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Comcast and My Lost Emails

I sent an email to three friends about baseball. I got a reply from one of them, C, and in reading his message I noticed that he was answering an earlier reply from another original recipient, my friend R. But I had never gotten the earlier message from R, even though C had hit reply to all and his message clearly showed my e-address in R’s earlier message.

Concerned, I called Comcast. In explaining to the Comcast customer support technician what had happened, I offered to forward the message that clearly showed R’s earlier response, which never had arrived in my inbox. He gave me an email address and I forwarded the message. And we waited.

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The War for Couth Continues

So I mentioned the ferret-faced woman in my last post, and how a month or so went by until I saw her again.

When I got on at Civic Center this time, someone was in the window seat next to the chair I usually go for, so I sat an aisle back. The train got crowded quickly after that, and I noticed an elderly couple  looking for seats together; they might have been Indian immigrants. They hesitated by that open aisle seat before passing me by. Just then I saw ferret-face get on the train, looking for her best opportunity.

Behind me I heard a woman offer a seat to someone, and then an Indian-accented voice politely decline. Ferret-face passed me by, then began demanding someone move.

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Further Setbacks in the War for Couth

I’ve stopped using BART regularly for my morning commute. Whether or not our so-called economic recovery has been jobless, my anecdotal experience is that the BART trains are now regularly packed with commuters headed somewhere, so much so that when I went in early one morning last week, on the train at 6:15 a.m., it was already standing room only into the City. SRO? At 6:15?

My feet, knees, and ankles are no longer what they were when I ran cross country all those years ago,  and years of standing on buses and trains have taken their toll. I need to sit. So I’ve been doing the casual carpool thing. Most often it’s quiet and uneventful, but every so often there’s a livewire.

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Mouserly fits and starts

 I’ve mentioned before my woeful story of the mouse that died. How like an aging athlete it had trouble moving to the right. It still cut to the left okay, but at times I’d try dragging to the right and the mouse was moving but the cursor wasn’t going anywhere.

It becomes time to hang up the spikes—or at least the mouse wheel. Which left me at the mercy of the digerati and their love of all things new.

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Of Mouses and Morons – New Lows in Tech Support from Hewlett Packard

After years of faithful service, the HP mouse to my HP computer went on the fritz. Like an old athlete with aging legs, it had difficulty moving to the right. I’ve compensated by jiggling it, lifting and tapping it, babying it along, but increasingly it would lock in place, and it had earned its rest,  much as I dread replacing gear. For I firmly believe that New! Improved! in any consumer lexicon are merely synonyms for shoddy with fewer useful features and prone to breaking down.

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