Teyrnon

I just thought I'd make a quick post to say I'm still around and peruse this site on occasion. I'm thinking about posting here more but I have questions about whether or not anyone is still seeing my posts here. Does anyone else who might see this still check out LJ now and then or has everyone moved on to other realms?

It's something I've needed to do a for awhile now.  Mindspring was my first real ISP and I used them for the longest time. I'd probably still be using them if they'd been able to give me DSL when I moved out here in 2004. But they gave me some nonsensical excuses and I ended up getting through BellSouth a year later. Earthlink offered me a substantially reduced rate to keep my account so I took it. It seemed like a good idea to keep my the email addresses I'd been using forever.

They recently raised my rate without any explanation or much warning. I hadn't really thought about it in years so this brought it to my attention. I started asking myself why I was paying for a service I hadn't really used in over five years. So, after some research I sent them a letter through the postal service explaining my wishes. When the billing date came around this month I noticed the account appeared to be shut down so I've been watching the credit card to see if the monthly charges turn up. They haven't and we are now well past the date they would have charged it. I count that it's been discontinued as a done deal. I am just a little annoyed that they've failed to send me the requested notice that they had received the request and had acted upon it.

Now I'm debating whether to cancel the dish subscription. I'm still watching a few programs on the cable channels but I'm finding that there's less and less I'm interested in watching on the channels I have. Take the History channel for example. It's become the pawn shop channel seemingly and they no longer appear interested in doing the kind of programming that drew me in from 2004 to 2010. Then there's the SciFi channel, now SyFy, which I think are determined to be the paranormal reality show and wrestling channel. Color me unimpressed. If Dish decides to raise my rates again all bets are off and I will be canceling in a heart beat.

I was going through the pockets on my travel pack and found an old WiFi signal detector. It just had some lights to indicate signal strength. I recall using it to figure out how far into the yard the wireless network extended. That worked back when there were much fewer wireless networks in the yard but nowadays with a wireless router in every house near me knowing the signal strength isn't helpful without knowing which network it's picking up.

Nowadays a cheap low end Android tablet or even an iPod Touch would probably work better as a handheld device to determine the reach of a particular wireless network.

So, what kind of tools have you had over the years that were useful at one time but aren't so useful now?

This is a follow up to my post from last week. The first of two. A comment to that post posed a few questions that I felt called for answers too long to fit into a comment. I thought I'd address the technical side of things first.

When I was little I was a bit of a storyteller. I'd make up elaborate stories and tell them to anyone who'd listen. My father was encouraging of this. Certain other people weren't. When I was in the sixth grade someone suggested I start writing my stories down instead of simply telling them. I began just that. I filled several spiral notebooks with my scrawl. Most of these are lost. I think my mother threw them out when she found them.
( Read more... )

As some of you know for decades I've carried a notebook for jotting ideas, logging various things and what not. I'm coming up on the last page of the hardback 256 page journal book I've been using since 2004. I've been trying to move away from paper of late and I find myself trying to decide what I'll be replacing it with. Do I want to get another blank book and keep at it with pen on paper or do I want to go higher tech with a PDA or something. Decisions, decisions. Right now it looks like my choices are pretty much iPAQ or netbook if I want something electronic.

So I pose the question, what do you guys use these days?

Can someone please explain to me the point behind Twitter? What's it good for?

Among the things pulled from the closet this weekend was a plastic bin of nothing but CD jewel cases. I've transferred them into a cardboard box as the bin is a perfect size to hold some of the video tapes now littered across the living room and kitchen. Do people use these things anymore? I prefer CD wallets and paper sleeves these days for CD and DVD storage. There was a time when I religiously put all cds into jewel cases but that time is long since past; a decade or so past, in fact. They take up too much space. I'll probably end up throwing them out if I can't find a good home for them. [sigh]

I ended up making my trip into Atlanta a bit sooner than I anticipated. I was figuring on doing it in a week or two and maybe even a month off but an issue with my bank and the necessity to get money into my checking account to pay off that after Yule-tide credit card bill forced the issue and I had to get to a branch of my bank to get things sorted out. Getting a ride to a branch in Gwinnett County wasn't going to be feasible for a couple months so I looked over my plans and decided that Wednesday was going to be the day.

There is an express bus that goes through the Park & Ride lot a mile from the house. It started up during the summer of last year but I never felt confident of my health or felt a burning urgent need to go through the hassle of dealing with an unknown transit system; technically two unknown transit systems since both GCT and GRTA are involved in this express service. I'm a bit less adventurous in this regard than I was in my younger days. My bank provided the urgent need and so I had to go. I got up at 5:00 this morning and got myself ready. I left the house at 6:00. It was very dark out. I've never walked through this neighborhood at that hour of the morning before. It was dark; really, really,dark. We don't have an over abundance of streetlights here. In fact some streets don't have a light at all. That made me a little nervous. My wardrobe tends towards dark colors and I was more than a little concerned about getting hit by a car or worse shot at. Someone shot our mailman a few years back in broad daylight and there have been reports of violent mischief in the area. Bored middle class teenagers; enough said.

Lest I forget to mention this, it was rather cold too. I wore that wool jacket I got a few years ago. I don't think I've ever worn it before. Usually I just wear a thin windbreaker. It was sufficient and I'm glad I wore it. I think I would have really been in sorry shape if I'd worn the windbreaker. I also wore some cloth gloves I got from the corner drugstore the other year. Those were adequate. (Note to self: Get a new pair of gloves.) Anyrate, it was cold. It was probably just a hair above freezing when I left the house and I don't think it got much over 40 degrees Fahrenheit all day.

Other than being dark and cold the walk to the Park & Ride lot was uneventful. I found the bus stop, it's one of those little covered pavilion type things that seem popular. Anyrate, it was easy to spot. There was no one else there so I sat down. I knew I'd have at most a half hour to wait. While I was waiting others started showing up, in ones and twos. Before long there was maybe twenty or thirty of them It seems strange but they formed a very orderly line stretching a good ways back. I've never seen such an orderly line at a bus stop before. Usually people kind of spread out at a bus stop and gather into a line when the bus appears but these people were forming their line right from the get-go. It was kind of unnerving.

The bus ride itself was about an hour long. I sat all the way in the back in what was probably one of the least comfortable seats in the bus. It was a peaceful ride, I watched the scenery go by and the sky lighten.

Okay, this is getting long and I grow increasingly hungry. I'll continue this later in another post.

It seems so strange. I was shifting through some old files and it hit me; it's 2007. Sure, that doesn't seem like a revelation and it's not. We all know what year it is but it's the passage of time and how much the world has changed that struck me. Ten years ago was about the time companies everywhere started to get the idea that they had to have websites. The whole eCommerce and webstores thing really started to get off the ground and it wasn't long before everywhere you looked you saw web addresses; on trucks; on benches; in phonebooks; all over the place. The ubiquity of web addresses in the street level world is a phenomenon about a decade ago. Combine that with the increasing ubiquity of cellular phones and related technologies and it hit me the current generation of teenagers have grown up in a world of unparalleled, in history, communications and online culture. What impact has that had on youth culture? Has it been a mostly good thing or a mostly bad thing? I don't know. My last experiences working with children were in the early 90s as part of the adopt-a-school program and haven't really had any contact with kids since then.

I was a child of the seventies and eighties with a background in computers going back to as early as 9 or 10 when I learned my first programming language; BASIC. I was about 13 when I called my first BBS. This was somewhat unusual but not terribly so for that time. It was all back in the early to mid 80s. Back then computers were a source of wonder and fascination. I try to recapture that sense of wonder from time to time with varying measures of success and it's one of the things that has defined my life over the past three decades. Goodness, where has the time gone?