Star Wars Fans, We Are

Overheard while working from home:

IT guy: Go ahead and turn off your wifi, wait 10 seconds, and turn it back on.

Customer: Okay, but it's in the other room, so I have to go in there. Stand by.

IT guy: Red 6, standing by.

Customer: I'll stay on target.

Figured It Out

As a follow-up to my Google Assistant adventure the other day, here's another story that demonstrates one of the ways I'm not ready for modern times.

(Normally I'm fairly hip, but technology lately has been leaving me in the dust. So far, to no great disadvantage that I can see. Here's hoping that continues to hold true!)

Some swiping motion I was often making with the phone repeatedly turned on the Google Assistant, so she kept offering to help me at odd times. I tried very hard not to keep activating her, but that didn't work very well. And it was very irritating.

Finally, in frustration, when she asked me how she could help, I said, "Turn yourself off." Sure enough, up popped a nice screen with step-by-step instructions on how to find the setting to deactivate her. Which I quickly did.

I felt a little bad about it.

And yes, I was tempted to check out the setting that offered other possible voices for her helpful but intrusive services -- there could be some fun possibilities there -- but I stayed on task and got it accomplished.

Guess I'm on my own now.    

That Makes Two of Us

A vignette from yesterday:

Me: [accidentally activates Google assistant on my cellphone while putting phone away]

Assistant (muffled, from inside my purse): What can I help you with today?

Me (to myself): What the hell was that???

Assistant: I'm not sure.

Prove It

Photo: captcha.net

Sometimes when I comment on a blog, the host is using CAPTCHA and I have to do that extra step.  It's not a problem. I totally understand that it's a bot protection device and I'm all for that. 

I finally got curious about CAPTCHA and did a little research. Did you know that CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart? Kudos to Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University, who did some great work and coined that catchy name in 2000. Who knew? 

(By the way, the CAPTCHA site is super readable -- especially for a computer site! -- and has a lot of interesting background information on what it does and why it's needed.)  

Most of the time CAPTCHA is just a little wordy game that I kind of enjoy. I especially like the one with the photos that asks me to "Click every square with a traffic sign" -- although it would be more fun if it wanted me to, say, click every square with a flower. 

But there's one that asks me to "Please prove you're not a robot." Often this takes me into the realm of wild thoughts: 

What if I'm a robot and I don't know it? 

Books have been written on just this subject. It might make a good reading challenge. 

Once robots can read a word with a squiggly line through it, how will I prove myself? 

And doesn't the question itself seem a little aggressive?

It's the Little Things

My laptop experienced an eclipse recently. About half the screen went dark, in a smudgy diagonal line from top right to bottom left, even as it continued to function appropriately.

Everyone I spoke to said, "Time for a new laptop."

That made me sad, because I'm rather attached to that machine. It's served me well for many years.

However, now that I've managed to select a new machine, I love its speed and sleekness. When I ask it to turn on or off, it doesn't have to think about anything--it just does it, sans drama. It has a hip matte finish. It's lighter and slightly smaller than the old laptop, so it's easier for us to go places together.

More than that, it has backlit keys! As soon as I touch it, the keys light up from underneath. I didn't much care about that feature when the tech guy explained it to me, but now that I have it . . . wow, is that nice.

If the light isn't perfect, I can still see to type (especially handy with those pesky function keys). And I can't help but enjoy the appearance that it responds to my touch by going into a kind of overdrive.

It's safe to say that my new friend and I are still getting to know each other, but the bonding is going well.

And the old laptop? After an hour in the presence of the tech guy, who swears he didn't do anything but turn it on, the eclipse has receded and the sun has come out again. So now I have a nifty little backup assistant to work on my photos. Provided the planets stay aligned.

Meanwhile

Nature continues on her lovely course. We've had our chilliest nights so far this winter recently: 39 degrees for the low with a frost warning, which is quite cold for us, and gives us no time to "harden off" because it was 78 a few days before and will be 78 again soon--maybe even today. All that up and down gives us no time to gain our footing before it changes again.

And Kayak Guy chose this cold snap to be out camping! He will need a hot drink and a warm nap (and a shower) when he returns.

Meanwhile, I stayed home, successfully mediating a spat between my computer and my printer. At last, I can print again.

Meanwhile, the azaleas.

The Naming of Hal

I finally broke down and got a smartphone, after an exciting hiking experience that would have been ever so much more efficient (but not nearly as adventurous and fun!) if I'd had a working compass or GPS.

A friend informed me that what I had was a "dumb phone." Ouch.

Now I am the proud and somewhat befuddled owner of a Razr M droid.

I'm not tech phobic, so I am enjoying learning new skills like touchscreen, e-calendaring, and mobile e-mail. I realize everyone else has known this for ages, but hey, it's new to me.

I have especially enjoyed testing the navigation feature. It's totally cool that I can speak the address into the phone and it then speaks the directions to me in a very pleasant female voice. I tested it last night on the drive from work to home, and it worked perfectly.

Then I tested it on the drive from home to downtown, a distance of 18 blocks and well, that was not so successful. My driver did not take the route suggested, and the phone did not seem able to recalculate quickly enough. It kept telling him to turn in various directions and some of them were simply impossible.

More importantly, when I tried to exit the navigation feature, I could not figure out how to do that. I decided to turn the phone off, but it continued to give me directions - somewhat muffled by the fact I had put it back in its case and inside my purse. 

That was puzzling, and a bit creepy. How can it still be working if it's turned off?

But at least I got the phone's name out of the experience. I shall call her Hal.     

Garden Action

The garden is coming along, at last. I was a little late getting started. Also, I suspect that my plants are not as robust as certain others because I am using organic seeds and fertilizer. (GMO, anyone?) Still, progress is progress.

Less progress is being made on getting a faster connection so I can upload photos without devoting a whole afternoon to the project. Once I get that solved I can post about watermelon seedlings, squash seedlings, and some baby sunflowers. At least, I think that's what they are. Garden maps are for sissies.

Meanwhile, this isn't my sunflower but I couldn't resist it. Sunflowers will always be my favorite.

You've Heard of Duelling Banjos, Right?

Now try duelling laptops.

Disconnected

Discombobulated. Dissatisfied. Disgusted. But recovering.

I spent the entire holiday weekend without the internet, thanks to my attempt to set up a wireless connection.

Of course, the store person told me it was easy, which is the kiss of death. It's the computer equivalent of someone who gives you directions and wraps them up with "You can't miss it." When I hear that, I know I will be spending a lot of time driving around in circles.

Anyway, right off the bat, the installation CD started asking me questions I didn't even understand. "The wizard has detected that you already have a gazingus. Do you want to replace your gazingus or install the new gazingus in line with it?"

You know, a few seconds ago I didn't even know I had a gazingus. Now I have to decide if I want to keep it, and how that might affect my new gazingus. And, if I already have one, where did it come from and why can't I use it to get a wireless connection?

(Not to mention, if this guy is such a wizard, why doesn't he know what I want to do? Or at least make a recommendation?)

Later in the process I discovered that tech support costs money these days. Welcome to the new normal. It also cost me about 90 minutes on the phone with some guy who sounded like he was in Australia (he definitely had that distinctive "Aus-TRYL-ya" A sound). Even though he sounded a bit like Crocodile Dundee, he didn't fix my problem. His solution was that I had bought a bad gazingus and I should take it back to the store and get another one.

It was kind of nice not having the internet over the weekend, in a way. I got a lot of house stuff done, including moving three bookshelves from the office into the dining room. The dining room now needs additional artwork but looks more like a real room and less like a campsite. The office still looks like an afterthought, but it's really no worse than before.

And the new gazingus? With C.S.'s encouragement, I gave it another try last night and installed it in about 5 minutes. Mostly by ignoring 80% of the steps suggested by the wizard. So there.

Old School Computering

I'm reading Pynchon's latest, Inherent Vice, which takes place in the late '60s or early '70s and is jogging the memory like you wouldn't believe. Pynchon makes occasional reference to the computer, which was a primitive device in those days, and it got me to thinking about my high school Fortran class.

Fortran was one of the languages that computers "spoke" in the early years, and in order to operate a computer, you had to speak the language, too. As I recall, you had to have some understanding of the binary code and, after that, I don't know what all else. It wasn't like you could turn on a laptop, call up Google and, at the tap of a few fingers, find the recipe for khorkhog.

Our assignment for the course was simply to write and process a program in Fortran. Only it wasn't simple at all. First you had to map it all out on notebook paper. Next you had to transfer the information onto punch cards, which were tan in color and about the size of legal envelopes and, when punched, created all these tiny bits of thin cardboard that could be used for confetti or wedding rice.

After you got done punching, you stacked the cards in precise order and drove them down to the university, which had the only public-use computer in town. The flourescent-lit room was large and noisy. It contained rows of punch-card consoles, a couple of card readers, and boxes of computer printout paper stacked to the ceiling. The computer itself was an imposing steel contraption with blinking lights and reels of memory tape whirring back and forth, and it was located in a glass-enclosed room sealed off from dangerous air molecules.

You'd stand in line and, when it was your turn, place your punch cards in one end of the reader, push the "Run" button, and wait for the machine to spit out computer paper bearing the results of your work. I'd estimate that at least 50 percent of the swear words I now know came from observing the older college students looking over their fresh printouts. Invariably, there was some glitch in their program -- a card out of sequence, a hanging chad, the number "1" punched instead of a "0" on column 8, row 14 of card No. 1,369, etc. -- and it would be back to the console to fix the problem, return to the reader, stand in line, re-run the program, and wait for the results to reveal more errors than existed the first time.

The computer room stayed open all night and, at some point early in the morning, you would throw up your hands and go home. I don't think I ever got my program to run correctly but received a B in the course for trying. I still don't understand what all is happening in the ciruitry and whatnot underneath the keyboard, and I don't care. All I know is that when I click the "Publish Post" button in a few seconds, you'll be able to see this post.

I think.

Happiness is a Paragraph, Right Where You Want It

Okay, now I'm going to embarrass myself by demonstrating how little I know about using a computer. When I interface with this blog, am I using a computer language? Is it called "code"? Is it called "html"? I know so little, I can't even talk about it!

There are a few things I know about computers, though. I remember that my college friend's roommate, a computer science major, would sometimes disappear for days. We'd all be asking, "Hey, where's Alberto?" and Ted would say, "Working on a project." We all knew what that meant. Alberto would reappear 3 or 4 days later, unwashed and unshaven, from the depths of the computer lab, bearing a thick stack of punchcards and a banner on green-and-white striped printout paper, with HAPPY BIRTHDAY TED spelled out in huge letters (with the big H made up of little H's, the big A of little A's, and so on). That's one thing I know about computers: when you get going on something and have glitches to fix, it takes days.

Another thing I know is: when you know what you're doing, it's easy. I once worked in an office where both of the lawyers were also computer types, and they used to change the cards in the computer while I working on a document! Apparently they knew what they were doing, because it never caused a problem. It made me terribly nervous, though. I spent a lot of time saying things like "PLEASE. Don't do brain surgery while the patient is still conscious!"

But I digress. The original point of this post is that I have discovered how to fix my perpetual problem with paragraphs. (Too bad it isn't Alliteration Saturday. I'd be all over it.)

Perhaps you know what I'm talking about, or maybe I'm the last person to have this problem. Sometimes there were too many spaces between paragraphs. Sometimes there were too few. Sometimes when I took the extra spaces out, I couldn't get ANY spaces back in again, no matter how many times I used the return key. Sometimes I would do the right thing by accident. Often I would just give up. I exhausted my trial-and-error repertoire, without making any progress whatsoever.

Now, thanks to Melissa's tip sheet, which I found through Oreneta Aground, I am still clueless about how it all works, but I have a tool that allows me to solve the problem when it occurs. I tried to write the actual fix into this post, but when I typed it in, it didn't show up, it just made a new paragraph begin! How cool is that?

Anyway, life is good when I can insert paragraphs at will. Sometimes I just don't care about the process, I just want to get the result, you know?

Yeah, I'm way behind the times. I'm okay with that. And even though the computer and I don't always understand each other, at least we are communicating.

Hooray for "code" or "html" or whatever it is! Hooray for paragraphs!

Yippee! Yahoo!

It's great to be back in the virtual saddle again! The computer finally came out of the shop yesterday and it's working ever so quickly and competently. Here's hoping that continues.

The gurus were very nice and didn't laugh at me when I explained the problem in terms like "When these two programs are running, they get all tangled up in each other" and "Clicking too many buttons too fast upsets the computer." Well, they didn't laugh in my face, at least. No doubt their demeanor was different after I left the room!

Now it's as though the computer has spent two days at the spa and had one of those cleanses. If I had to guess, I'd say its "energy field" has been "rebalanced and amplified," just like the spa literature promises. Even the keys feel a little more sensitive.

The computer also had a facelift of sorts. The desktop is now yellow tulips. The icon on the Start menu is a bonsai tree. Customizing things is all well and good, but it's kind of fun to turn on the computer and think "Okay, surprise me" and get something I didn't choose for myself. I know they are stock photos, but hey, serendipity can be fun.

This makes me wonder: does the computer feel better? I know it’s a machine, but it's also a little blogging, banking, coommunicating partner. It “hears” everything I say, after all, “knows” everything I do, and “remembers” all my important creations. Without it I have trouble running my life.

My cars have always had names (and personalities to match). But the computer just slaves away without any identity. I treat her like a tool instead of a partner. I really only talk about her to complain that she’s not performing well. It’s the same old thing: I don’t care about her feelings. Maybe she'd be happier if she got a little specific recognition. Everyone likes to be appreciated, right? Even a so-called machine.

Good News, Bad News

First the bad. J.G.'s computer remains in sick bay and I'm your host again tonight. As usual, my day was filled with baseball and more baseball, so I'll spare you the details.

Now the good news. J.G. is very excited because she has been invited to co-author an academic paper with a law professor. She'll be working with the prof on a paper that examines our nation's oil dependency and looks at ways to wean ourselves from the addiction. Cue Robert Palmer ("You might as well face it, you're addicted to . . . oil").

Computer Issues Continue

J.G.'s computer remained in the shop for a second straight day. It doesn't exactly rank with 18 days without power, but it is annoying her. In the meantime, you're stuck with me. And all I have to talk about is baseball, which is consuming my life at the moment.

There is one player I should mention. Incredibly, the guy is a reader. Very intelligent. Attended a Top 20 university, received a degree in business, and told me today he wished he had majored in English instead. Not your typical ballplayer. Most of them went to the pros straight out of high school. Anyway, he's agreed to let me write about his reading habits throughtout the course of the summer. He reads novels and some of it is actual literature. That'll probably anger the hard-core baseball readers. But perhaps it'll interest a different audience, too.

As for J.G., keep your fingers crossed that her computer gets fixed soon.

Blogging by Proxy

J.G.'s computer is sick and in the shop, and she asked me to take over blogging duties tonight even though I'm a little short on bloggable material at the moment. (Is bloggable even a word?) Doubt that any members of our Hotch Pot audience would be interested, but I am working on a story about baseball players who bat right but throw left. Apparently, these types of players are extremely rare, far fewer in number than their opposites, players who bat left but throw right. Not sure exactly why that is, other than there are fewer natural throwing lefties to start with. I'm open to other theories if you have one.

Other than that....I finished Nabokov (what a descriptive writer) and moved on to Stanley Elkin. I'm still on the short stories kick as I try to make it through spring training. Just 40 more days to go.