Category: Computers

Late at Night

You ever put something on Facebook or other social media late at night, and have a friend immediately respond to it? Then you think, what are they doing on the Internet so late at night? As a sidebar, do you also sometimes wish you and that person were actually sitting beside each other so you can have an actual conversation?

There are some who remain your friends regardless of how long it was since you last saw them, and the distance between your homes. Good to know such people are out there.

Want to introduce me to a few?

 

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Six Rules for Getting Along with Your Computer

  1. Remember that you wanted your computer. It didn’t want you.
  2. Shouting at your computer won’t make it do anything faster or better, but it might save you from insanity and keep you from taking more drastic action against your computer.
  3. Shaking a computer until parts come off tends to be counter-productive.
  4. A hammer to the computer might make you feel better, but the computer will probably complain.
  5. A computer connected to the web can probably find more curse words than you can find on your own. Use that to your advantage when cursing your computer.
  6. Remember that words have power. If you curse your computer, it might be taken seriously.

 

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Alphabet Issues

Time for a Sunday rant. I have good reason for it. I know; everyone who rants say they have good reasons for their rant. Let me state my case, and then you can decide.

Alphabet Inc. is trying to gaslight me.

Alphabet Inc. was created as a holding company for Google and its multi-tentacled endeavors. Google wants to be everything for us, substitutes for television, Netflix, Amazon, a dominant world force that we can trust. But the delta between what they promise and what’s delivered grows every day.

The three primary Google products I use are Gmail, Chrome, and the calendar. (I also sometimes use Google search, but it’s so damn commercialized, delivering the same results as different entries, that it’s become better to go with other search engines. They’re not much better, though. *Where have all the good searches gone?*) They’re three products that have been around for enough time for them to stabilize and cross that chasm from being bleeding edge to cash cow. When a product reaches the cash cow stage, it’s expected to be reliable and free from significant bugs.

It ain’t so with Chrome and Gmail.

I use the Inbox app to manage my Gmail. I write “manage” because that’s what they use to describe it. Inbox manages my mail as well as a toddler manages the bath water. Emails that have been read and deleted consistently haunt my inbox as unread, causing the frustration and irritation of wading through the past several days worth of mail along with today’s deliveries.

This is where the gaslighting comes in. Gaslighting is an old expression about conning people and confusing them about reality. “Didn’t I already do that?” they ask in old movies.

The villian laughs. “No, dear, you said you were going to. Honestly, were is your mind, my precious?”

That’s how it is with Gmail. “Didn’t I already read that?” I ask myself as I peruse the Inbox. “Oh, God, I thought I answered that yesterday.” I certainly meant to answer it. Where is my head?

Well, hell, it’s not my head, it’s Alphabet Inc. and their Gmail product. I have read, answered, and deleted these emails. Alphabet is just putting them back in.

Thinking it might be Inbox instead, I used Gmail without Inbox, as an experiment.

Nope; same results.

Don’t get me started on what’s going on with Chrome. It is very effective for administering my daily dose of first world blues and frustration, and is a wonderful impediment to having a good mood as I surf the net.

I would switch from Gmail, but our email addresses have their tentacles in every aspect of our lives. Extricating ourselves is a long and complicated process. It’s getting as involved as doing taxes in America or determining if it’s a catch in the NFL.

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Imfloof Buying

Imfloof Buying (catfinition) – when a cat takes over unplanned control of your purchases.

In use: “My cat stepped on my Kindle Fire, and voila! I had a new thriller, courtesy of imfloof buying.”

h/t to Nancy Smith

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Gmail

Don’t you hate it when your Gmail goes astray, and has the same emails that you’ve already read and deleted in your inbox again?

Yeah. Get your act together, Google. This is already past the sell-by date.

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Error

Don’t you love it when you click on the link, and it takes you to a page that tells you, “That link no longer exists. You need to update your bookmarks.”?

Ahem. I didn’t click on it from a bookmark, fools.

Don’t know why that makes me so irrationally irritated.

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Searching

Do you ever get irritated because you put something like “Veteran’s Day” into a search engine on your computer, and the results come back, “Save on Veterans at Walmart. Free Shipping Site to Store.”?

No, neither do I?

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Computers

Have you ever been on your computer and try to do something, and it won’t do it, or it starts doing something else, and you start yelling at it, “What are you doing? Why are you doing that?”

Yeah, me neither.

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Internet Hiccups? I’m Not Alone.

We’ve been experiencing Internet problems. The Internet was dropping on us, or downloading EXTREEEMELY SLOOOWLLLYYY. 

You know how frustrating that can be. My wife was seeing Mac’s ball of futility every other minute, while I saw the standard No Internet Connection message on my HP. It helped us catch up on our reading, but we’re nunkies. (Don’t look it up; I just created it to mean “net junkies.”)

We use Ashland Home Net; most of our friends do not. Our friends haven’t been experiencing problems. We began wondering if it was just us. Perhaps our modem or router was going, or someone was outside, giggling by the side of the house, as they do something to disconnect us. You know, just having fun.

Then, two things happened. One, MSN sent me a notice, apologizing for their outages, problems, and interrupted service. (So, aha, see? Proof that something was going on. And people said I was crazy. I don’t have evidence of that, but it’s probably true.) Two, I called Ashland Home Net.

After two rings, the phone answered and a recording played.

“Tonights Rogue Broadband Wireless Internet Outage

“We are experiencing outages upstream from our equipment. This means, all of our equipment is operating correctly, it is the internet provider that we use that is having an issue.

“This is causing a massive slowdown of our network. Our upstream provider is aware and is working on the problem with every available resource. It is not a simple fix from what we have been told.

“I apologize for the outage and will try to keep you up to date on it as they work to restore service to an acceptable level.

“Thank you for your patience and for supporting a local company for your Rural Internet needs.”

 

I went to their website. Mostly about marketing, it shared nothing of use about outages. Over on their Facebook page, it was another story, with outages going back several months.

Still doubtful that AHN’s FB post explained everything we were enduring in our cathold, I did more searches. They yielded  a ZDNet gem, “Internet hiccups today? You’re not alone. Here’s why.” The article went on to explain, the culprit is the Border Gateway Protocol.

While an ISP maintenance activity may have played a factor, the real problem was that Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing tables have grown too large for some top-level Internet routers to handle. The result was that these routers could no longer properly handle Internet traffic.

BGP is the routing protocol used to share the master routes, or map, of the Internet. On top of this the Domain Name System (DNS) is layered so that when you click on “www.zdnet.com” you’re taken to ZDNet.

When the BGP maps grow too large for their routers’ memory then, as the Internet Storm Center said, “BGP is flapping.”

“BGP is flapping.” I loved this statement later in the article:

Cisco also warned its customers in May that this BGP problem was coming and that, in particular, a number of routers and networking products would be affected. There are workarounds, and, of course the equipment could have been replaced. But, in all too many cases this was not done.

Ah, good. They knew, and didn’t take action. Technology is grand, but like everything else, it needs some love and attention. At least I verified that it wasn’t just me, and my system.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled writing.

 

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Today’s Theme Music

I find myself singing a song, and then consider when I heard it, and where I was when it was released. With this song today, I thought, oh, when did this come out? I was living in Mountain View, California, wasn’t I? But that means the late nineties.

That couldn’t be right, but I look it up, and confirm, yes, this song is twenty years old.

No way, I react. It seems so recent and fresh. But it says it on the net, on Wikipedia, so you know it’s true.

Songs, politics, and technology are my time markers. When this song came out in nineteen ninety-seven, my email account was on Hotmail. My computer was a Zenith. I’d graduated to a monster VGA monitor. My hard drive was twenty meg, and I had both three and a half inch and five and a quarter inch floppy drives, along with a R/W CD drive. I think we were running about twenty-five MHz, and Windows 3.1. Bill Clinton was the POTUS, and the economy was flying. As an aside, Must See TV, with Friends and Seinfeld, filled the top ten television shows.

The U.S.S.R. had collapsed, and the Berlin Wall had come down. There was talk about the Peace Dividend. We thought there was a glorious future ahead of us.

Twenty years. As everyone finds out, significant changes take place in twenty years.

Here is Sugar Ray, with “Fly.”

 

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