The saga of the (damn) phone continues and blah blah blah

Before my first day of nursery school, my parents made sure that I knew my phone number: 20588. There was an area code (had been for almost ten years), but there wasn't any reason to use it, well, not for a four year old. A few years later, we got an exchange, and our number became RAymond 20588.

(As I write this I am somehow resisting the temptation to call the complete 10 digit number and introduce myself. "Hi, my name is Noodles and I had your phone number in 1956.")

I'm obsessing about this today because I spent waaaay too long yesterday making over my cell phone contacts list. When I got my first cell phone, I entered local seven digit numbers, sans area code, because there was only one local code. Then, about a year ago, a second one was added, and it became necessary to do 10 digit dialing here.

I redid my phone list, and a mighty big pain in the ass it was.

Yesterday, we Canadians finally got a working Skype client for Android phones, and I soon realized that while the powers that be in Red Deer, Alberta were fine with 10 digits, the rest of the world wanted country codes, and, for some reason, a plus sign.

So, when I had a young facile brain, I only had to deal with 5 numerals, and now that I am losing brain cells like a hairy dog sheds his coat in April, I have to mess around with 11 and the damn +.

Maybe I will call Katie and Scott P in my hometown and bitch about it--after all, they have my oldest phone number now, so they owe me.

sick, but not too sick to be digital

I have spent the last two days at home with a seriously bad cold. Going to work was out of the question.

I spent a whole lot of my time off messing with technology and now have my phone tricked out with Layar and Flyscreen. Not that my old eyes can actually see much on that small screen, but I feel less out of the loop. My friend Howard is sendingme a wave invite, so I will get to hang with the kewl kids for sure.

I do have to wonder though what changes in technology we will see when the 30 somethings are 50 something and are as visually impaired as most old farts are.

It's 2006 (again)

I just spent waaaay too much of a three day weekend rebuilding my computer. Over the past 3+ years, it had done what even the most meticulously maintained digi-friend does, becoming first creaky and then a bit unpredictable. The final straw was a bad reinstall of Internet Explorer 7, a program I need for a work thingee that will not run on FireFox. It also will not run on IE8, thus the attempt to return to IE7.

Normally this whole reinstall the OS business takes the better part of a day. I managed to stretch it out to three days because I have become increasingly stupid as the years have progressed. It's the noodles.

It was almost enough to make a quit grrl start smoking. Almost.

Your Quit Date is: 7/8/2009 6:00:00 AM
Time Smoke-Free: 62 days, 2 minutes and 16 seconds
Cigarettes NOT smoked: 2480
Lifetime Saved: 18 days, 22 hours
Money Saved: $496.00

He stinks, but I think I'll keep him

Today is the one month anniversary of my quit.

Your Quit Date is: 7/8/2009 6:00:00 AM, time smoke free - 31 days, 15 hours, 26 minutes and 32 seconds, Cigarettes NOT smoked: 1266, Lifetime Saved: 9 days, 16 hours, Money Saved: $248.00 .

Ron did not quit, but he is only smoking about 1/2 a pack a day--a huge change. I assume he smells a whole lot better than I smelled a month ago, but sheesh...

OTOH, it is also the 38th anniversary of my first wedding. That husband never smoked, but our marriage sure was stinky. I think I'll keep husband number 2 (well, as long as he doesn't smoke in the house).

Drunk, stoned, pregnant (or all three)

We went to an afternoon showing of the new Harry Potter movie and then stopped at A&W and brought home burgers and fries. Even though we did it on the cheap (matinee rates, shared popcorn, no sodas), we blew through $50.

No wonder teenagers find someplace to get buzzed and have sex on date night. What 16 year old can afford dinner and a show these days?

TMI

It felt like I had won the lottery when a friend from work recommended a hair salon walking distance from my house. It was not only convenient, but for the first time in years I was able to get a consistently good cut. It became my every six week splurge, and although it felt pricey for Red Deer, it also made me feel like a grown up to actually have a regular hairdresser again.

A few days ago, I walked into the place expecting to spend 40 minutes talking about my hairdresser's athletically inclined children and the weather whilst "Angela" cut my hair. As I entered the salon, my spidey sense told me all was not right in Angie-land: she looked gawd awful.

One of the things I like about Angela is that she doesn't torture her own hair. There are no peculiarly coloured curly bits and she doesn't look like a country music singer. She looks like a happy 40 something woman with a good haircut. As I walked into the salon it was clear that the only thing that hadn't changed about Angela is her hair. I suppose that is because her own hairdresser is fine; it's Angie who is a mess.

Spidey sense aside, I definitely knew something was wrong when she seemed to forget that my tender head was on the other end of her finger tips as she dug into my scalp. Stupid me, I could have claimed a faux phone vibration and taken off, but did I do that...oh no...that would be too sensible. Instead, I asked her what was wrong. And as she pounded my scalp, she proceeded to tell me all about it.

The "it" was a story about her husband who was going to Thailand for six weeks of sex with someone he had met online.

I stayed not just through the shampoo, but continued to sit in her chair when she picked up the scissors. Heck, I even stayed when she switched to an electric razor of some sort and proceeded to buzz my neck. In truth, the hair cut is fine, though I had neck burn for a few days. What wasn't so fine is that I now know waaay more about this woman and her life than I should.

I can no longer go into her salon and let my mind wander as she chats about what she's making for dinner or her kids. I can no longer have anonymous stranger haircuts. My only hope is that in six weeks time she will have forgotten that she has burdened me with her confidence. Of course that is about when her husband is coming back from Thailand, so chances are, if I show up, I'll hear about that as well.

Damn, I'm glad I never told her I blog or friended her on Facebook. Sometimes it seems like the Internet is the only place I can wander around relatively anonymously.

Old is good

Ron is a thoughtful man. On June 3, which is both my birthday and our anniversary, he brought home my favourite flowers, a pound of mighty good dark chocolate, and a bottle of champagne. The flowers lasted a full week. We savoured the chocolate for about three days. We never did get around to drinking the bubbly.

Tonight we were having (frozen) chicken pot pie and broccoli for dinner. We looooove (frozen) chicken pot pie and broccoli. We love it so much, we broke out the champagne.

And it was good.

Until that happened I was going to write about another dream. It seemed like I would be going slightly overboard to write two dream posts in a row, so I was very glad to have the opportunity to write about our dinner instead.

Assuming though only my friends will have read this far, I am going to add in the dream thing. It's something that young people dare not do.

In the dream, I was a contestant on a local TV reality show. The challenge of the week was to create an International Festival in Red Deer. Each contestant was dropped, by helicopter, on a different downtown corner. We were only allowed to use nearby individuals and items available for sale within 300 feet of where we were dropped.

At first it seemed as if I was handed an impossible situation. I recognized that the chance that anyone would be truly successful lay somewhere between pretty slim and totally non-existent, but I was dropped off on a particularly boring block, with nothing even vaguely international in sight. As I was standing there feeling sorry for myself, a city bus pulled up. I quickly decided that grabbing people off of the bus was entirely within the rules.

I never really did see the people on the bus, but apparently it was the immigrant express. I was able to create a festival with 11 colourful booths, each one representing a different culture. The food we created was wonderful, especially the pulled goat. I don't think there was any champagne--city bylaws you know.

The stream

I don't know for sure when it was that I last heard anyone call the Internet "the information superhighway". I suspect though that it was Harry Smith on the CBS morning news about fifteen years ago. Or mebbe it was the first time I heard it called that. I honestly don't remember, but I do know that when he said it, I thought that it was made up language designed to explain something that needed no explanation for people actually making the trip.

Last night, in my sleep, I found myself dreaming about a different way of interacting with technology--the stream. In an intense, and very long, dream, I was moving thought my normal life but I was connected to information in a different way. At first it seemed sort of like I had one of those big screens that sorted through information in different ways--you know, like they used on CNN during the election--but the screen was desktop size and I sat in front of it. I spent a considerable amount of dream time making appointments to see people and doing workly things using the screen which seemed to be able to intuitively call forth all sorts of different features automatically when I had some task to input.

It felt like something new, but also something that was not much more than a calendar on steroids: time based, and interconnected with things like an address book, to do list, and email, but not much more. As I was realizing that, my mind wandered to another way of doing it, which at first seemed to have to do with getting more connectivity through a bigger pipe. I dreamt about going through a door and finding someone standing in a hallway that somehow circled the bits of my life. He was holding a big plug. It looked a little like the 220 thing-a-ma-bob that is on an electric stove.

As I considered plugging into this bigger thing, I suddenly realized that it was a false choice. That the real choice was whether I was going to choose to let the stream whirl around me, only faster and with more connections and continue to access it by sitting in front of a screen, or whether I was going to let go and become part of the stream with different bits of me swirling around connecting with different things in a way that was not time based--at least not in that march of time sort of way.

The choice was about accepting a different reality in which interactions happened that were relationship mediated. Different things could happen simultaneously and I could be fully present in all of them. There was no moving from Point A to Point B. Linear connections became inconsequential. It was a rejection of multi-tasking, which currently involves moving from one thing to another, and then coming back to the original task or two or three. In this new way of being I still had tasks but I did them simultaneously with whomever was involved. At the same time I was involved with a different group of people doing something else. When something I was doing with one group impacted the other group we all knew it and went from there.

I wasn't using the stream-as-tool, I was part of the stream itself.

In the dream, becoming part of the stream was an existential choice. I knew that if I joined the stream, it was the last decision I would make in the old time based way of looking at such things. Everything would change. I remember wondering about whether anyone I knew would be in the stream with me and wondering what it would feel like to be interacting with people who were still connecting in the old way.

I walked into the stream.

Its not all about the smoking babeee

I didn't sleep very well last night. I had run around a bit during the day, with a short shopping trip and some wandering around the grocery store. It felt so good to be able to breathe well enough to do this, for the first time in about six months, that I kinda sorta forgot that this kind of thing is not exactly easy on my ankle, and I paid the price in big time pain during the night.

I fell in late December, shortly before Christmas. My activity level dropped way down, and when I developed pneumonia and lingering respiratory problems, I thought that it was caused by this change in my lifestyle. In any case, I have been pretty much a slug since December and I never was able to tease out what was going on. It didn't help that I gained a whole lot of weight as all of this was happening--partly do to lack of activity, perhaps, but also because of the steroids I was taking, and mebbe some depression.

As the date for the surgery on my ankle drew closer, I became very scared that the problems I was having breathing could prove deadly. I have never been a fan of general anesthesia. In any case, I decided, in what I now see as a flash of brilliance, to stop smoking before the surgery. I did not really expect it to make a dramatic difference, but it did. I have not had to take any breathing meds since the day I quit--a week ago. In Quitnet terms that would be: 7 days, 8 hours, 42 minutes and 36 seconds smoke free, 294 cigarettes not smoked, 2 days 5 hours, lifetime saved, and $56.00 not gone up in smoke.

The dollar amount is not all that impressive, but that's only because I was buying gray market smokes. I guess I could add in a line about no longer breaking the law.

I know that I still need to have the surgery, but I have decided to pay attention to that little voice in the back of my head that is telling me to regain my health before putting my body through this. My job for the next six months or so is going to be to keep my quit and to lose the el-bees I have put on.

Poor Ron, he not only has to put up with my non-smoking bitchiness, he has to continue to do the shopping and related shtuff for awhile longer. Apparently being able to breathe and being able to run around are really two different things.

Of green peas and Os

Every time we go to our local farmer's market, Ron picks up a big bag of pea pods and our menu is rearranged to be pea-friendly. As we eat the peas, I inevitably say something like, "Sure makes you appreciate the Jolly Green Giant and Sprout. These peas don't taste very good." Still the ritual repeats itself--one part hope, one part nostalgia.

As pathetic as that might be, our lives are still better than the poor woman missing her crossword puzzles quoted in the NY Times this AM.

“You get the pleasure of solving each clue, so there’s that ‘aha’ moment over and over — it’s like having multiple orgasms,” she said."

Hummm, I may not accurately remember the fresh peas of days gone by, but I have not yet confused the joy of a great crossword puzzle with great sex.

I seem to have stopped smoking

And it seems to be related to wanting to breathe. I'm going to reserve judgment on it all for the next six weeks before reaching any tentative conclusions. I'm too old to jump and my brain is full of noodles.

A sip of the kool-aid

I spent several hours yesterday installing something called SIP on my mobile phone. It wasn't horribly complicated, but it somehow took me awhile to get all the settings right. Now that I have it, I can make long distance calls on the cheap from my cell phone--for less than a penny a minute in Canada and about the same to the US. Now that it is set up, Ron can use it from his phone too.

Chances are I'll seldom use it, after all, I have VOIP at home that includes every place I would ever need or want to call included in my monthly rate. As soon as Skype gets its act together and comes up with a decent app for Android phones, I'll probably use that instead. I use it now to make long distance calls from work.

I did this particular techie dance because it somehow felt necessary to have very cheap long distance on this phone that I seldom use, but carry with me everywhere. I did it because I was damned if I was going to toss more gold into the deep pockets of Rogers Communications by adding on a long distance plan. I did it because this particular thing felt somehow subversive.

I am deeply ashamed that I have been sucked into this must-have-more vortex. I am also deeply ashamed because I used to be subversive in ways that really mattered.

Wrangling wireheads

A good friend stopped by after dinner last night. He had ridden his bike for about 30 minutes to get to our house, and he carried with him a backpack containing his on-its-last-legs laptop. This time he didn't come for beer and casual conversation; he wanted his favourite wireheads to look at his machine and make some recommendations for a replacement.

B is a great guy. He visits our house often, sometimes several times a week. He is also one of Ron's clients and was a co-worker back in the day. Ron sees him as a serious business dude. I see him as a creative type who brings a whole lot of right brain thinking into his business life.

Therein lies the rub.

Ron's recommendation was that B purchase a high end Dell or HP laptop. My recommendation was that B get a smallish ruggedized laptop (note the first paragraph wherein B rides his bike onto our patio with his laptop in a backpack) and buy a second machine for home--a high powered Mac that can run both operating systems.

My thinking was that B throws his laptop in his truck, carries it with him when he is out in the oilpatch, and takes it with him when he stops by for a cold one at places that need bouncers. He also has this other, softer, side. I've seen it in creative multimedia presentations and reports he has written for work. He's also done some great design work.

In any case, I recommended a Mac. And my husband heard me. As you can see, I survived to tell the tale.

B actually liked my idea. He went so far as to say that he thinks Macs are sexy. At that point, I thought Ron was going to take the beer out of his hand and toss his best friend to the curb. Instead he glared at me, as if to accuse me of having bewitched the man.

I have not owned an Apple product since buying an Apple IIe back in the 80s. I don't see one in my future, either. Chances are if I ever got bitten by the creative bug, I'd buy PC software and be done with it. Ron, on the other hand, not only has never used an Apple product, he hates the company with a cold white hatred he usually reserves for talk of the Liberal Party, Quebec, or the 1981 National Energy Program.

I love the man, but he does have a knuckle dragging Neanderthal side.

Because we don't actually fight in our house--at least not in public--Ron spent the next 10 or 15 minutes glaring at me and muttering. B finished his beer and ran out. No one spent the night on the couch, and there were no visits to lawyers today. In fact, the only follow up at all was when Ron told me that after nine years of marriage, I am still a complete mystery.

That's a good thing, right?

Etiquette and the moveable desk

I'm off work for the next six weeks. I am making an effort not to think about work related things anymore than absolutely necessary. I am though wondering who will sit at my desk when I am gone, and what they will do to my computer.

This is the first place I have ever worked where everyone has an administrator account and people move around the office like they are playing musical chairs. I'm lucky enough to have an out of the way office in the basement. It's quiet and highly valued in the summer because our offices have no air conditioning. Now, the people I've scared the bejesus out of will stay away from my office. OTOH, my boss is likely to assign the office to some unsuspecting summer student who believes that it is perfectly fine to install music players and games onto my pristine machine.

I've done what I can to prevent that. I have hidden my speakers (note, they are mine, not my employer's) and left behind the trackball that apparently no one else can learn to use. I have an office chair that is stuck at a height that makes working at my desk a painful nightmare for anyone over 5 feet tall. I am the only person in the office who has two monitors, and the commonly used applications open in a way that appears to be helter skelter, but makes perfect sense to me. The average person sitting at my desk will wonder how anyone actually puts a piece of paper on the desk to write, as my smallish desktop is filled to overflowing with equipment and strangely named hanging files. The truth is, I don't put paper on my desktop. On the rare occasion I have to use a pen and paper, I move elsewhere. I am digital, not analog.

When I go back to work in mid-August, I will probably be the interloper in someone else's office as I am likely to still be on crutches, and our stairs are scary things even without a mobility impairment. The plan is to move all of my equipment from the basement into my temporary digs.

It's taken two years of hard effort, but I seem to have succeeded in training the powers that be that you don't screw with The Princess.

You need to be ingenious to be Canadian

I'm from "down south". In Canadian-speak that means I am from the US. I (proudly) became a Canadian citizen a coupla years ago, so I am both us and them.

There are things I love about Canada, when compared to the US, and vice verse. Mostly it's a wash, with two big exceptions (and no, I am not talking about health care--though I could go on and on about the pros and cons of both systems). Canada wins hands down when it comes to civil rights, marriage, yada yada for people in same sex relationships. Canada loses big time when it comes to access to technology.

In Alberta, any two people can form what is called, in legalise, an interdependent relationship, and have all the rights (and responsibilities) of married people. If you decide to get married, the Government of Canada does not care what you wear between your legs.

It seems so simple.

Now, wouldn't you think that a country that figured out how to just do it, when it comes to civil rights would be able to figure out how to approve/make possible a Canadian version of Google Checkout? And wouldn't you think that they would figure out a way to make texting between people in different countries happen without huge fees attached?

But, noooooooo....not here, not when we have substandard Canadian services to protect.

This is where the ingenious part comes in.

I have to root my phone in order to buy paid apps from the Android Marketplace because it would be a horror for Google Checkout not to be fully bilingual. A French one and an English one simply will not do, even if a vendor can work around our non-standard bank routing numbers. I have to use Twitter to text my US friends unless I want to send Rogers 25 cents for every message I send.

Shopping on line from Canada, sure; let me tell you about the two bras that had $60 worth of delivery charges and import duties added on, or the small boxes of Red Hots that took nine weeks to get here because each box had to be opened and examined by the government. The Made-In-Canada solution to this is to drive for five hours and cross the border once or twice a year, spend a few nights in a US motel, and pick up the things I have had Amazon deliver to me there.

When I applied to immigrate to Canada, I had to prove that my marriage to a Canadian was legit and he had to sign an agreement to be responsible for my well being once I got here. What they should have done is make sure I was obsessed enough to figure out how to use digital technology here.

Old phone numbers never die and related rantings

My last cell phone actually belonged to my employer. So, when I got a new phone a few weeks ago, I also got a new number. Actually, I got some fellow's recycled number. I don't think he used the phone for (gasp) talking very much. He does though appear to have been a texting fool. And mebbe not a very nice person. The folks who continue to text him/me/us sure seem pissed/peeved/feisty.

I reply in a very standard way, "I'm guessing that you didn't really mean to send this to a 57 year old married woman named Noodles. It appears that your target has moved on and gotten a new number." I'm thinking it will die down soon.

OTOH, the woman who has a Gmail account very like my own has been going strong since 2004. Now, I understand why someone with the same name as mine would want my Gmail address. And I try to be sympathetic, after all, I would not want to be forced to append a "1" to my very nice name either. However, it's been almost six years and she needs to suck it up and stop signing up for mailing lists, bulletin boards, and newsletters using my address.

And it's not just commercial mail. I have gotten mail from her co-workers, her friends, and her family. I know where she vacations and what she got her husband for Christmas in 2006. When I get her personal mail I either write back to the sender and let them know there has been a mix-up, or forward the mail to her myself.

You'd think that after all these years, she'd write back, but nope, nada, zilch, nothing. I'm betting she really screws up her text messages. Fortunately, that's not my problem.

The scary circus

Yesterday afternoon, when I heard about the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, the first thing that popped into my head was that it was propitious timing for Mark Sanford. Finally, the pundits of the broadcast journalists' 24 hour news cycle would move on.

As I watched the news over the past few days, I was repulsed by the glee with which what should have been very personal pain was being exploited. I understand that his being MIA from his duties as governor is newsworthy, even important. I also understand that the discovery that it was related to an adulterous relationship had to be reported. What I saw on TV though was something else. It was the transformation of something newsworthy into circus entertainment. The fact that this was done by making public stolen private emails, and no one seemed to give a damn about the privacy issues, horrified me.

It was heartening to see that at least one other person noticed. From Lee Siegel blogging in The Daily Beast:

"Why the total silence with regard to the violation of Sanford’s privacy? Surely it has to do with our new Twitter and Facebook culture. Private life has been turned into public performance; people retail their privacy to win popularity, acclaim, and perhaps commercial profit. The media’s uncritical euphoria over social networks—look how Twitter is liberating Iran and China!—is turning the invasion of privacy into a cultural style. Yet this contemporary dream of freedom looks a lot like a previous generation’s nightmare of surveillance."

And then we die

The fellow with the scary hands is holding a 35,000 year old flute. That makes it the oldest instrument ever discovered. I find it comforting to think about some early human in the Ach Valley of southern Germany spending part of his or her day making music.

I also am overwhelmed by the sense of how transitory my own time on earth is. I somehow doubt that a woman living in the future will see a picture of my PC or flat screen TV and wonder about my life or be comforted by the flow of time and the connections we have with each other.

The article about the discovery of the flute points out that when this flute was made and used, people were still gnawing the raw meat off of bones. It doesn't seem all that important because I can sense the connection between us that the flute represents. Perhaps that woman from the future will have that same sense of me.

Homework

I'm taking an on-line class. It meets every other Wednesday night in a chat room and we have reading and written assignments associated with each chat. I'm finding it a good fit with my learning style. The course content isn't actually new to me, but going over the material in an organised way is helpful. It's easy to overlook the basics and the course is helping ground me (again).

One of my classmates said that the written assignments take him about 30 minutes. They take me several hours. I would blame it on the noodles, but he is barely passing and I am doing really well.

Jimmy Do Wrong Wrong

My agency is downtown. Most of what we do here involves trying to help people who are homeless or struggle with addiction or have garnered a psych diagnosis (or all three). The soup kitchen is next door to us.

One of the signs of summer is that the city has decided to patrol our street corner more regularly. What that translates into is having two RCMP officers (both pseudonymously named "Jimmy") walk up and down the street arresting people for loitering and searching them for drugs and paraphernalia. They write them $250 tickets for loitering and arrest them for the drug related shtuff.

People who loiter don't have $250 in my world. The tickets later turn into warrants, which then result in people being picked up for those. Then they spend 30 days in remand because they can't pay the fine, which by now has doubled. I'd love to know how much is spent on this whole process. I'm betting a housing subsidy costs less.

My new phone

I bought a new cell phone. It's an amazing piece of Android goodness made somewhat craptastic by the limitations built into all things digital by the Government of Canada. This does not matter as I have not given the phone number to anyone but my family and my boss and I am almost never more than a room away from a real computer.

I could have bought one of those phones with big buttons and an operator that puts new numbers into the phone for you. Instead, I sync with the cloud and proselytize for IMAP over POP on phone forums.

My brain is full of noodles

Years ago, when I started my first blog, I was filled with a sense of purpose. Not this time. Nope. I'm just going to blog. I have so little to say these days, that I should probably twitter instead, but I am too old and my brain is full of noodles.