Category: Technology

So it’s that time of year, when Apple issues updates to everything.

In years past it’s been a relatively painless process but generally speaking I’ve always wanted to have all my ducks in a row before beginning the process. That’s just good computing practice.

This year, I’m very impressed.

My iPhone and iPad updated without any bumps in the road at all. Last night I started the process to upgrade the Mac OS on my computer. I updated all my applications, then backed everything up. 

Then I started the upgrade process expecting for it to take a couple of hours. I walked away figuring I’d let the computer do what it needed to.  Imagine my surprise when 45 minutes later I noticed my computer was patiently waiting for me to do something.

I initially thought something had gone wrong. It hadn’t, the system is fully upgraded and everything is working exactly as I’d hoped.

My little MacBoor Air from 2012 is as zippy as it ever was and will no doubt go for another year or two. This is amazing given that my company Windows computers have as a rule been completely replaced every two years or so.

Yes, I am dazzled by each new generation of Macs. Then I look at the price tag and think, “Yeah it would be nice but…” Oh sure, I could buy a low end Mac. However I’ve found that buying top of the line Macs typically means that I get a nice long life out of them. The way I’d configure a top of the line MacBook Pro works out to about 4 or 5 grand. Amortize the cost over 6 to 8 years and it’s reasonable, if I was looking at replacing a Mac every year as some folks do, it quickly becomes an unsustainably expensive habit.

So my little MacBook Air and I will just keep on moving into the future. At some point I know the little machine will not be able to take an OS upgrade. When that day comes, I’ll have to decide which of the newest Macs will replace it. But until then I have a machine that does everything I want it to do and is probably capable of a lot more.

I hope your upgrades go as smoothly.

I’m off to explore my new operating systems.

I know that Windows is a complicated large OS but, Wow! its slow as hell when it comes to updates. The updates are necessary, I just wish that they didn’t have to be so massive every other time I decide to use Windows.

OK I’m impatient. I get that. 

I’m reminded of why I went to Mac in the first place. I think I started with Apple around the time of OS7 and I made the switch because of Windows preventing me from simply writing a letter. Here’s the funny thing, I drove to LA, bought my first Mac, set it up, and had written the letter and mailed it, before Windows said it was ready for me to actually start working.

After that time, I never looked back I was a Mac person. I keep a Windows system around mostly to keep work and home separate. Work stuff I do on the Windows system, personal stuff I do on the Mac. Both systems run on my old reliable MacBook Air so at least I’m not having to cart around or worry about two computers. Since most businesses insist on using Windows it just works out that keeping Windows available is convenient.

Yes, I know that I can use Microsoft’s Office 365 to create compatible files and move them easily across systems and frankly I do. But having a Windows desktop on my screen tends to keep me focused on “Work” if I’m doing something for work.

This morning though, I just wanted to quickly check in and see if there was anything needing my attention. That was an hour ago and Windows is still updating.

I’ll let it cook for a while longer then if It’s still not ready I’ll take the risky option of 3 finger restarting Windows and hope that the entire VM isn’t trashed.

Sigh…

I wonder if I should just move it all over to a Work User on the Mac and then at least I’ll have something that always freakin works. 

So I love my Rolex. It’s one of my favorite things.

However, lately more and more people have been taking notice of it. Granted if I lived in a better area it probably wouldn’t be a big deal but I don’t live in a better area…

I live in an area where there are a lot of seemingly desperate people and there are a lot of homeless people. A recent event catalyzed the decision I made yesterday.

I was coming out of a grocery store Wednesday, and there was a homeless guy asking for money. He said, “A white dude with a Rolex can afford to give me 5 bucks…”

Defenses came right up and I decided that my beautiful Rolex was perhaps a little too ostentatious for the area in which I reside. $5 Bucks? How soon before it becomes $100, or $1000?

This isn’t the first time… I’ve had one guy pull my sleeve up while waiting in line at a convenience store and say stuff like, “NIIIICCCEEE, what’d that cost?” Another time a cashier at a food joint fixated on my Rolex and announced to the entire room, “We got a guy here who can buy all our lunches.”

This latest incident is the most threatening, and one of the many reasons we as a society can’t have nice things…

Soooo, I’d been considering an Apple watch, and decided as I briskly walked away from the homeless guy, it was time to buy one.

My lovely Rolex will be put in a safe place and I’ll enjoy the benefits of a watch that I have to recharge daily. Sigh!

As always the guy at the Apple Store was very nice and helpful. I got what I wanted and it came in a nice black box.

I have to admit there are some things that may prove useful about having a computer on my wrist.

I can change the face to match my mood.

Currently, Micky Mouse is tapping his foot on my wrist.

I’ll have better information about my walks and reminders to get up and stretch will be welcome during my work day. Having the ability to place and receive calls ala Dick Tracy Might not be something I’m actually going to like, but if it’s an emergency situation that might not be such a bad thing.

I guess this is a sign of the times.

Being White has become a liability. Having worked your ass off is no longer something to be respected, (regardless of your skin color) but instead, means you’re a target for people who absolutely believe they are entitled to your shit because if you’ve got money, you’ve surely got money to give to them simply because they happen to be breathing.

Increasingly, I find that I don’t much like the world we live in.

The set up on the watch was pretty easy. I was finished before my lunch arrived at my table. Everything that is, except the cellular part of the setup.

it was then, I got sucked down the rabbit hole of technology. Turns out that my cell phone carrier can’t verify my actual billing address.

THANK YOU GOOGLE!

Yep The old Google screw-up (Ongoing for the past decade) bit me in the ass yet again.

Apparently, when Google was driving around taking pictures of our homes and neighborhoods, without our permission I might add, they made mistakes. NO! NOT The Google!!!!

They drove into my rural town and promptly listed my physical address as being in a neighboring town almost 10 miles away. But they maintained the correct zip code. This created a disconnect between the ZIP code registry and the Township. Effectively rendering all the addresses Google mapped on that day invalid, nobody except Google can fix it, and at this point, the error has been propagated across so many databases, it will likely not be fixed in the data.

Instead someone in the town council will simply cede our end of town to the neighboring town because it’s easier. People have had to rent boxes in neighboring towns just so they can get medications and Amazon packages.

We’ve been trying to get Google to revise this mistake for over 10 years. No Luck! Google is too big and too powerful and because they’re rarely wrong… It means that the general perception is that they’re infallible.  Another decade or so, and Google will be elected Pope!

All this meant; for me to actually enable the cell phone functionality, on the  watch required 3 hours on the phone with my cell phone carrier instead of simply being able to enable the technology with my phone. The first 1.5 hours was with a lady in God only knows where, who obviously had no idea about first world problems.

She did however alter my billing plan such that she tripled my monthly bill.

Ahem…

The second call, early this morning resulted in my having to reset the watch (losing all the configuration data I’d put in), resulting in being able to see that I had an account and that the watch connectivity was actually available. The third call, finally put me in contact with a guy who knew what was going on and was able to actually make the connection between their services and the communication unit in the watch.

What should have been a simple thing turned into a clusterfuck.

I now have 13 days left to return the Apple Watch if I don’t “Just Love” it. I like it thus far, but I don’t know if I “Love” it. My Rolex I absolutely “Love” and have loved since the day I bought it.

Time will tell I suppose. But I like the idea of my Rolex sitting in a safe, out of reach of the people I’m forced to live around here in San Diego. Alternatively I’d prefer to feel like I could wear my shit without worrying about getting bashed in the head by some asshole who thought what I had… should be his.

Call me old fashioned.

My brother is right…

I need to get the hell out of Kalifornia and move somewhere a bit more like his neck of the woods. Somewhere more like Mayberry.

Finally, here in the mountains we have real internet.

When I first moved here, we could only have dialup. That was actually OK because most business was being done on phones that were hardwired, and most documents were Faxed. 

Then DSL came to town but the phone company wasn’t investing in maintenance or expansion. DSL worked pretty well for a number of years and really only presented problems when software manufacturers switched to download delivery. 

It could take 12 hours to download operating system updates. 

As the DSL connection degraded, the download times got longer. Eventually the DSL speeds we were seeing from Verizon were on par with the old dialup speeds. Sadly it wasn’t uncommon for my 4G connection via my cellphone to be faster.

Finally the DSL became unusable and Verizon’s “Tech People” told us the problem was our router, refusing to acknowledge the problem was in the phone lines.

In desperation we switched to HughesNet Satellite. We didn’t change our router, and it worked fine at first.

Overall it is a very expensive solution and it’s fraught with issues. Forget using WiFi calling, we never were able to use Skype, or FaceTime, over the Satellite Link. We could however use those services occasionally on the 4G cell phones as long as we didn’t move very much.  

Satellite degraded over time too. Eventually we couldn’t stream music, or video, and we had to deal with datacaps on how much we could download in a month.

In the course of time I switched to a new router. While that expanded my WiFi range and sped up my internal network connections, it did nothing to correct the issue with satellite. 

To be fair, In general the service worked… just not as advertised, those snazzy commercials with grandparents watching their grandchildren’s recital? Oh Hell no!

Grandma & Grandpa would be eating cheap dry cat food to pay that bill as they ran through their datacap, and clicked on “Add Data”.

In the end HughesNet became unusable for anything other than email and some web browsing, if you were willing to wait for the pages to load.

I didn’t bother trying to download software updates, preferring to wait until I got to a place with cable modem connectivity.

The same became true of the other half, all software updates were done away from home in the workplace.

Add the cost of Satellite TV which was ever increasing, and well at some point the price vs. benefit of the service(s) becomes untenable.

We’d been hearing rumors about a Fiber Service coming to town. They have in fact come to most of the town but after a year of waiting for them to get to our area they still haven’t gotten here.

Then we heard that Spectrum Cable was up here with HD TV and internet. Turns out that the price was 1/3 what we were paying for DirecTV and HughsNet.

So boom! We now have a nice little cable modem running in place of the HughesNet device.  We still have DVR, and TV and the quality is good.  For the first time ever, the AppleTV can be used to it’s full potential. WiFi Calling works, so hopefully there won’t be any more repeats of the old Verizon commercials “Can you Hear me now?” While running around the house to find “The Spot” where the cell signal is strong enough to be usable.

100Mbs isn’t the fastest but it’s a big improvement over the last stats from HughesNet of 1-5 Mbs. 

An additional advantage is that the wiring closet is now devoid of two devices for the Satellite TV both of which generated a lot of heat in a fairly confined space.

This means that the router, switch, and hard drives will be happier.

Another odd thing I’ve noticed is that my network traffic is lower. My router isn’t having it’s IP address reconfigured every minute and in general the load on the whole system is lower.

We actually streamed a movie last night; Flawlessly.

Who knows? My little house in the mountains might be a place for me to work from home again.

Only time and the job market will tell.

 

Update 3/15/2017

Ah ha! 

We had to badger HughesNet to get someone out here to take their dish down. Turns out, they want you, the customer to climb up on your roof to retrieve this expensive transceiver.

Neither of us was climbing 30 feet in the air onto our roof to get this piece of tech. Of course had the installer actually done what we’d asked the dish would have been where we could access it in Winter to brush the snow off and we could have had satellite internet connection  all the time instead of only when the snow melted off the dish.

But the much more interesting thing is the bubbled fused dirt and debris you can see on the business end of the transceiver.  All of that crusty stuff serves to deflect and degrade the satellite signals, both coming and going from the transceiver itself.

Of course since we couldn’t reach the dish, we couldn’t clean it. So now I know why the signal degraded over time. Even if we’d kept HughesNet we’d have been calling them for service or replacement of this unit.

I hate to even think what kind of fiasco it would have been to get them off their collective asses to fix this. Given that their tech support is tiered and we’d have no doubt been forced to work our way up the chain of command over weeks before we got to someone that knew enough to think about progressive signal degradation as a function of obstructions between the satellite and the dish much less as a function of granite dust or reflected heat fusing dust and debris on the focal point of the signal.

I hadn’t thought about it either until I saw this unit and scratched my finger across the lens.

Well, you learn something new every day…