Category: Information

Mysterious Ol’ Facebook

A small mid-morning rant, category: technology.

Facebook notifications won’t load/display this morning. After playin’ with it five minutes as I sipped coffee and doing a few searches for fixes, I shrugged it away and reported it. Not a big deal, really.

After reporting it and sending a screen shot, I noticed my FB support inbox was showing four new messages. I opened it.

None were new. One was over sixteen months old. They were all about my violations of their community standards. They’re a laugh.

One was a Bored Panda post I’d shared about people working from home and dealing with their dogs. This affronted Facebook’s spam standards.

Whaaat? They don’t want me to share humorous animal stories because they’re ‘spam’? Geez, I think I’ve been using FB wrong lo’ these many years.

Two others were messages updating me about my protests. They’d blocked two others because they violated their community standards. I’d appealed. These were notices that they were wrong, and had restored the posts. Well, good for me. Good for FB.

The fourth was an appeal I’d put in about another post they’d removed. They were reviewing it and would get back to me soon. Dated June 12, 2019, I figured their idea of ‘soon’ and mine doesn’t match.

Now, the most interesting thing is that the notifications that I can’t see on FB, I can see when I’m in my FB support inbox. Intrigued, I went back to FB and attempted to see the notifications through various feeds. No go. But the push notifications still pop up and load.

Well, it’s modern technology, innit? When it works, it’s great. When it fails, it’s a big friggin’ mystery. In the ol’ days, we’d clean the cache, or reboot, or sumpin’. I’m going to have more coffee, and see if that takes care of it.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

I went with an old familiar from David Bowie and Queen today. Queen’s Freddie Mercury is gone, along with David Bowie, unnecessary reminders about our final destinations.

They made their marks, though. Thanks to technology, solace can be had by listening to their performances again and again.

As today is election day in the USA (prompting some mental hearing of Alice Cooper and their song, “Elected”), but “Under Pressure” (released in 1981) seems more of a fit. Sadly, that’s because Trump and his followers, abetted by the GOP, are working hard to create obstacles for this civic duty. Once upon a day, the United States had low turnout but the elections themselves were flawlessly executed. A lot of that changed with the hanging chads debacle in Florida in 2000. At least, such is where it seems to start in my mind, as the SCOTUS was called upon to interpret state laws, halt the recount, and declare a winner. Since then, campaigning and elections have become more contentious in the USA.

The nature of Trump’s campaigning and the attributes of his base have added to the pressure. Trump wants votes to not be counted, squalling like an infant over cheating that doesn’t exist, threatening to challenge results in court beforehand, obviously attempting to intimidate voters. Gun and ammo sales are up. The FBI is warning of the threat of violence from armed Trump supporters.

More pressure yet comes from COVID-19. Again, politics are in play. Republican led states are leading as COVID-19 cases climb. As cases climb, hospitals fill, but our healthcare system under greater and greater pressure.

That pressure comes atop the economic pressure instilled by necessary measures to flatter the curve. Experts consistently warned that a sizeable chunk of the US population is working poor, without emergency savings, living from paycheck to paycheck. All that was swept under the rug. Now, coronavirus has curtailed the service and consumer economy, and people are under pressure to have enough money to pay the rent and buy food.

Yeah, it’s a mess. All of that is just a tiny fraction of the mess we’re in – so many things weren’t mentioned because I didn’t want to go too ranty before my coffee – but it all adds to the pressure that we face in the United States, part of the pressure we’re facing in the world, making the Queen/David Bowie song “Under Pressure” my choice for today’s theme music.

Now I need to go see a machine about some coffee. Cheers

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This Sunday

Sunday morning started with the usual Sunday morning white man with cat issues, which is replying to the demand, “Feed me, feed me, feed me, and get these other cats away from me,” in surround sound because I have three of them. They didn’t care that we’d fallen back an hour, clock-wise, here in ‘Merica. Their clocks weren’t affected.

Eventually, the beasts were fed, watered, and released back to the backyard wilds, freeing me to be me. I slid to the computer. That’s when the morning took an oomph turn. My mighty HP laptop wasn’t connecting to the net. Everything else in the household was connected; why was I selected for this cruel honor.

Something about the machine was off. Memories of being a younger person and working on my cars were awakened. I started car life with a 1965 Mercury Comet sedan. Forest green and automatic, a lively 289 V-8 was under the hood, as we said in those days. It was a stoutmobile. She’d run.

She was like my first girlfriend. I learned to do things, and did the standard stuff, from gapping and replacing plug and points (and all the wires) to brakes, muffler, and shocks, and all the fluids and fuses in between.

I think, because of that car, I’ve always since tried to fix things myself. Tried is a key verb in that sentence. (Is it a verb? I don’t know. I used to know these things.)

Details of what I did and the results will be avoided. No need to restore my stress levels by recalling those excoriating details. I worked on the computer for hours, returning it to connectivity. Doing so demanded a need to run recovery, a Microsoft Windows 10 process that’s not as nice as it sounds. Lots of personal files were removed (yeah, they said that wouldn’t happen, and they were wrong), along with apps and programs that I’d installed.

I had back ups of files, and MS does have some file recovery stuff. Eventually, though, I had almost everything. For some reason, I lacked the bible for the latest novel in progress. Don’t know what happened to that doc.

Reading old files slowed the process. Oh, there was The Soul Stone written years ago, never submitted nowhere. I read and enjoyed its first pages, along with Spider City, Everything Not Known, Everything in Black and White, and some stranger works, and the first draft of the self-published words, like the Lessons with Savanna series and Returnee. All still there, waiting for me to turn my attention back to them and do something more with them.

Not on this Sunday, though.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

So many songs out there, you know? So many genres, and talented musicians, artists, performers, groups. We live with an embarrassment of riches. Technology helps us get even wealthier by allowing us to find and play them almost instantaneously.

With all that’s out there, an amazing number of songs get cornered into niches and seem to disappear from consciousness. One of those songs for me is “Special” by Garbage (1998).

It’s a song that I’ve not heard on the radio in yonks. Came to me this morning as I was reading the news about undecided voters. This was after I called and wished my old man a happy eighty-eighth birthday. He’s an undecided voter.

Somehow from all those swirling thoughts, conversations, and read words came the “Special” lyrics, “Do you have an opinion? A mind of your own?” But of course, the undecided do. They just can’t seem to decide what to believe and support, it seems. I’ve read all manner of political, sociological, and psychology papers about why they’re undecided in recent weeks. Multiple reasons can be enumerated, from being stuck in echo chambers reverberating with false information, to being outraged and disenchanted about the GOP and Democratic Parties, to doubts that Biden is much of a change from Trump (in their opinion), to weariness.

That makes “Special” an apropos song for Saturday’s theme music. Here we sit, on the elections’ cusp in the U.S.A. in 2020, waiting to see what everyone thinks, and how they vote.

Have a good one, wherever you’re at, and please wear a mask. Cheers

2

Monday Miscellany

  1. Dreamed that I was concerned about a young cat. Young, I was busy working somewhere. Constantly watching over it, I kept worrying about it having food, enough to eat, and being safe. In an odd moment in the dream, as I turned to go down a hallway and check on the cat, I thought, the cat is me. Strange dream moment. The entire dream had a quality of peeking into a different version of my existence.
  2. In the same dream, interspersed with my concerns about the cat, my cousin, Rick was planning to take me to meet his son, Danny. Like a recurring gag, Rick would appear and ask me when I was ready to go. I’d be blank: “Go where?” Then I would remember, “Oh, that’s right, to go meet…” Then I’d blank on the name and he would supply, “Danny.” Once best friends, I haven’t seen this cousin in over twenty years. We drifted into different directions, as they say. He had a son who I’ve never seen. I don’t recall the son’s name. He divorced that young woman within months of her giving birth to his son. I don’t know what all this means.
  3. An Uber self-driving car has killed someone. Uber isn’t being charged. Thinking, shades of Isaac Asimov, I conjured a story where a person is set up to be killed by a self-driving car.
  4. My wife was reading about “Death Wish” coffee. She thinks it might be a coffee that speaks to me. She reading aloud some hilarious Amazon reviews. “I bought this to keep me alert and focused at work. By my second cup I no longer needed a keyboard or mouse, as I was able to control my computer directly by thought. By the third cup I could hear colors and smell sounds. After my fourth cup, I decided to burn off some of the excess energy with a quick jog, and ended up finishing the Kessel Run in 11 parsecs flat!” Another: “Dear Death Wish, I just tried your coffee after receiving it the other day. I always start my day with about 4 cups so I thought, “Eh, why not”. After about the 3d cup I decided to start that kitchen demolition I had been wanting to do. But I forgot to turn off the water beforehand. Then I thought, “Eh, I always wanted an indoor pool”. Then I thought I should cut a hole in the roof to accommodate a skylight for the pool. Everything is going to plan but I need more coffee now. I need to start on installing the diving board.”
  5. Some serious crazy is seeping out of the GOP. Renea Turner calls herself “Trump in a skirt”. (I wonder if she grabs men by their peckers?) A woman who ran as a write-in candidate against Ohio Governor Mike DeWine in 2018, she declared herself governor of the state because she’s decided that DeWine overstepped his legal authority. She’s been implicated in a plot to kidnap and prosecute Gov. DeWine. This is at least the second such plot against a governor revealed in the last thirty days.
  6. We heard about twenty-three year-old Ryquell Armstead this weekend. Who is he? A professional running back with the Jacksonville Jaguars, he’s been out with COVID-19 the entire season. Quoting ESPN.com, “Armstead has been hospitalized twice and has suffered from a variety of complications connected to the virus, including significant respiratory issues, and has been hit harder than some expected.” That’s the issue with COVID-19: you don’t know how it will affect you. He is Black, and we know that Blacks are more susceptible, but he’s also young, and a trained athlete. It’s scary what the virus can do. He’s expected to recover and play next but the obvious caveat is that he was never expected to be out this long and have the complications that he’s experienced. As former New Jersey governor Chris Christie discovered, having COVID-19 can be a painful and exhausting experience, even if you survive. He, who did not wear masks all the times, is now a convert and urges, “Wear a mask.” I agree.
  7. My fiction writing continues to come along but it’s fitful process. As noted before, I miss the structure I created with my routines. I also miss the solitude said routines created, along with the stimulation caused by casual contacts. But I persevere because I’m stupid that way, and the tale that I’m discovering continues to entertain me. Time passes so swiftly each day, though. I find myself wondering what happened to the hours. Got my coffee, though, so it’s time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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Trump On 60Minutes

I watched Lesley Stahl attempt to interview Donald Trump on 60Minutes last night. He was amazingly childish and immature while managing to also be arrogant and condescending. I’ve actually had employees like him. Managing them was as bizarre as his behavior on the television show.

Trump’s cognitive dissonance was frequently revealed. He’s always dismissing the mainstream press as false news and denigrating their veracity. Meanwhile, when Ms. Stahl asks him for proof, he tells her to read the newspapers. Well, which is it, Donald? Fake news or evidence?

The FBI that he so often disparages was cited and lauded in the plot to kidnap Governor Whitmer of Michigan. Yet, again, if his justice department had the evidence that’s being published routinely (according to him) in newspapers, why isn’t that same Justice Department bringing charges?

I won’t address the multiple times he was exposed as lying. Just not worth it because it’s surreal. He can be shown videos of the things he’s said, shown videos of evidence revealing his lies (like when he’s claimed “everybody behind me had a mask” at an Arizona rally), and quoted verbatim, and simply refuses to acknowledge that he’s been caught in the lie. That’s nothing new; he’s been doing it since he began running for the presidency, and continued it once he moved into the White House.

Nor is it worth talking about his healthcare plans. They’re in the same blackhole of existence as his tax returns. He will never reveal either.

The cognitive dissonance, and that his supporters don’t see it, is worth addressing.

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Seven Things Saturday

  1. We were out walking and encountered a rafter of wild turkeys. We have a few rafters in Ashland. We rarely come across them on our end of town. Encountering these smart birds is usually entertaining. Most rafters are eleven to seventeen birds in our area.
  2. This rafter was checking out the electric bikes available for rent. I imagined the turkeys were saying, “Hey, I’m tired of walking. Let’s rent some bikes.” Another replied, “I don’t see why not. I don’t see rule against turkeys anywhere on the rules.” “Cool. Does anyone have a phone? We need to use an app.” None did, ending their idea before it started.
  3. I recommend a show called “Staged” if you can watch it. It’s David Tennant and Michael Sheen as themselves. In theory, they’re rehearsing a play online during the COVID-19 lockdown. What we see are two experienced, celebrated adult film and television stars coping with the situation. The remaining cast is excellent, as are guest stars like Adrian Lester, Judi Dench, and Samuel L. Jackson. We caught it on Hulu. Sadly, there are but six episodes. My wife wants to watch it again. Good fun.
  4. My friends are circulating an email speculating how dinosaurs reproduced. It’s entertaining stuff to read. Ever imagine how big a dinosaur’s anus must be? Well, I immediately thought of the blue whale. If you watch “QI”, you know exactly why.
  5. That’s one of many emails being circulated by the same group of friends, my beer-drinking bodies. Emails about Osiris-Rex landing on Bennu and grabbing a soil sample also flew, along with the usual stuff about local politics, humor, and super-conductivity being achieved at room temperature.
  6. Active COVID-19 are increasing around the world. The US set a new daily high with 83,000 plus. Mortality is down, but hospitalizations are on the rise again. Please wear a mask and practice distancing. I know it’s hard but you’ll be happier in the end. Don’t believe me; check out recent pieces about the Stockdale Syndrome (“Have faith but face reality”).
  7. Had blood drawn as part of the annual process. Glyco-Hemoglobin A1C and Comprehensive Metabolic Panel. All looked although sodium remains stubbornly high. Good news, right?
  8. I may have driven the skunk away. It’s a bittersweet thing and still early days. First, I propped a board against the vent so that if the skunk left, I’d know. Second, I shook the house with Led Zeppelin II. Third, I then installed a boom box on max volume in the crawl space and played it for hours. We’ll see.

Yes, I know that was eight, contrary to the post title. Just call it a bonus.

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Med Frustrations

Okay, gotta vent. This is one of those first world blues rants, the kind that deal with technology, systems, and customer service taken for granted that ends up failing and pissing me off.

I’m on two medical prescriptions these days. One is for my enlarged prostate and was prescribed for me when I experienced problems in peckerville in 2019. It’s all benign and is working well enough now.

The other prescription is for high-blood pressure. That was discovered as a result of my peckerville issues. I’d been borderline high pressure throughout my life but it was suddenly over two hundred thirty.

Changes were made in diet and exercise, and the prescription, Amlodipine, begun. I was always getting thirty day prescriptions. I shifted that to ninety day for convenience, and then, concurrent with COVID-19, I started using a mail service to refill my prescriptions back in February or so.

This was being done through Express Scripts. I set my meds up for auto-refill. All was going well. I was satisfied.

But, last week, I noticed I was down to nine Amlodipine pills. I hadn’t heard from Express Scripts. That surprised me. I went into my email and did a search to verify that I hadn’t received something from them. Nope. I logged into my account.

Finding the Amlodipine prescription, I noted that it wouldn’t be automatically refilled until 10/23. Well, that was too late. I put it in the cart and ordered it. Done and done. Went to my email. A confirmation email had been received. Wonderful. The system was working.

But…

Everyone expected the but. But what happened, I’m sure people are wondering, to set off the rant?

But, I didn’t hear anything else.

Days passed. I logged back into my online Express Scripts account after not receiving further emails. I checked my recent orders and shipments. Why, there are no recent orders and shipments. I searched via the order number they provided me. That order wasn’t found. I searched via the invoice number provided. Nothing.

WTH? I’d copied it from the email and pasted it in.

The email also had a ‘click here for order status’ button. I clicked it.

It took me to the login page, where I went through the same thing as before.

WTF?

I did this several times, re-reading the email and tracing steps, trying to understand what went wrong. I couldn’t. I’m sure this wasn’t good for my blood pressure.

I reached out to them via an email and explained my issue.

That was Wednesday evening. I heard from them today, Friday. One was an email. Call us. Two was a phone call. ANONYMOUS.

I didn’t answer that call; I don’t talk to ANONYMOUS in this day of scams where everyone and their dog is trying to con me, asking for donations, or pleading for political contributions. Their message: call us.

I called them. They claimed that the order put in was for my other medication. That was ordered the 18th. It’d been canceled because it was an overfill. By the way, my Amlodipine isn’t on auto-refill. Do I want to put it on auto-refill?

Seriously.

I don’t think this exchange did my blood pressure any good.

My response: how did my Amlodipine go from auto-refill to non-auto if it wasn’t the one that I ordered the other day?

Two, if I ordered a prescription, whether it was overfill or not, why didn’t I receive an email notifying me that it’d been canceled? Didn’t they think there was a reason I was ordering it? Isn’t it just good customer service to notify a customer when an order is canceled?

Three, if I ordered it on the 18th, why did I have an email from them that I received on the 17th telling me that they were working the order?

Four, if the Amlodipine wasn’t on auto-refill and they don’t show me or anyone else changing it, how was the order previously automatically refilled? Was that just magic?

They didn’t have answers for any of these things.

Perhaps I did push a wrong button on the 17th when I was processing online. Given their system, I find it doubtful. The product must be selected. Then, it’s right there in front of my face. Perhaps I had a brain fart and shifted from thinking Amlodipine to the other one, Tamsulosin. I’m not infallible.

And, yeah, given time differences of one or two hours, I suppose I can accept the idea that the order I put in at ten PM on the 17th showed up as being received on the 18th. That doesn’t explain the rest, especially the lack of an email telling me that the order had been canceled.

And that sucks.

Fortunately, I have an excellent local pharmacy. I shifted from them mostly because of the whole COVID-19 thing. Getting my meds through the mail with auto-refills took a few things off my place, thereby reducing stress, and eliminated the need to leave the house to get refills.

I called that pharmacy today for a short term refill. They were understanding. They would need to call my doc for the prescription, but no problem, they would do that. They’re so nice, I feel bad about abandoning them.

Then I called my doc’s office to provide a heads-up that they would receive a request, and why.

Well, the rant is done. I don’t feel any better after ranting. Too many loose ends. It’s gonna take a while to get over it. Meanwhile, my trust in Express Scripts has dropped significantly. There are just too many open questions about what happened for me to have complete trust. It’ll take time, probably years, for them to earn that. That’s what happens when a trust is breached.

Thanks for reading. Hope you’re having a better one. Please wear your masks.

Cheers

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