Category: Technology

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After Years (more than a decade) T-Mobile & I end the relationship in a shitty way

T-Mobile logo pink.I transferred my number to another carrier.

T-Mobile acts these days lot more like the shitshow formerly known as SPRINT.

The relationship came to an end when one of TMobile’s representatives said, “The Plan is the plan” 

She was explaining to me that TMobile was still going to bill me $75, a full month of service, which also included service for my phone line, (cancelled on 5/31) when I was pulling the plug on the first of the month.

What’s really annoying is that I was just auto-billed my monthly $75, 3 days ago. I’d have thought that any services would be prorated.

I asked the representative if the billing was pre or post paid.

The little foreign girl didn’t seem to understand what I was asking and just repeated 

“The Plan is the Plan”

As if that answered my question or concern about their billing practices.

WOW!!!!

Sprint Corp 742392705.This by the way is exactly how I felt when I finally terminated my relationship with SPRINT long distance years ago. I remember the same sort of billing bullshit and that is exactly why I avoided SPRINT as a mobile phone provider.

It’s just bad business practices and the corporate heads simply expect you to swallow it.

My new carrier is based in Georgia and their customer service folks are all American. T-Mobile’s customer service is at least partially out outside the country.

Worst case scenario I’m being billed the equivalent of Alimony for breaking up with T-Mobile. Thankfully it’s only one month.

Depending on what they do, I may or may not report their behavior to the FCC and Better Business bureau.

At this point, I could see putting T-Mobile on the “Avoid at all Costs” list. 

Recently, I’ve been wondering, am I the only person noticing that customer service is getting worse and worse?

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Porting gone wrong!

Well that was an EPIC Fail!

I decided that I wanted to get a cheaper cellular plan. I’ve been with T-mobile for years and well, recently there have been some issues that have put me off on them.

$80 a month seems excessive even though I have multiple devices.

I’m also less and less impressed with their customer service.

Anyway, I found a plan, that was probably going to be workable and signed up. After an hour or two I got a notification on my phone that a new esim was available for installation.

That’s where it all went to hell!

I wanted to keep my phone number so there was supposed to be what they call a port of the old number to the new carrier. After a really long time I got a message saying that the esim activation failed.

Immediately after that I got a message from TMobile saying that there had been changes to my account and it appears that they deleted my phone number from their systems and in the process they took away my access to the account that still has my watch and iPad connected. 

Oh and my phone can no longer make or receive phone calls. Since this is my only voice line it leaves me in an interesting situation. I can’t call customer service to ask for them to help me out.

Don’t laugh! IT’S NOT FUNNY!!!!

(Okay, yes it is kind of funny.)

So then I write the new carrier an email and explain that something has gone horribly wrong. I’m still waiting for an answer.

I’ve also found that I cannot log into the new carrier’s web site as I was told I could do. So something else has gone terribly awry. 

I will get all of this sorted out eventually.

What remains to be seen is will I still have my phone number or will there be a new number?

There is a temptation to just not have a phone number at all. I can still dial 911 from my phone. Is that all I need?

I’ve been looking into getting phone service of any kind so that I can call the new carrier. I thought, “Hey maybe I can just purchase a new plan with a new number from them, then use that number to call custom support to clear up the first problem, then cancel the plan with the new number. 

I was thinking that would make everything contained in just one phone call. 

They won’t allow me to do that. Probably something to do with the pending stuff that isn’t working in their system. 

I’m thinking that I’m going to have to buy a burner phone or at least a burner esim to get voice communications up & running again.

Thus far I’m only mildly annoyed and / or amused.

This is why I was a good Software QA person. If something can go wrong, it will go wrong on my stuff.

I wonder if VOIP is an option. I’ve got 1GB fiber. Ughhh Google Voice! I hate Google.

Anyway, I thought I’d send up this flare to let anyone who might have been trying to call me the 1 or 2 folks that is, That I’m alive and well and just having some technical difficulties.

Well it only took 4.5 hours!

I now have my phone working again and My Apple Watch is online too. Oh and I’m able to log into the customer portal.

I’m now using the new carrier to kill the rest of Tmobile

Then I need to figure out how to wipe the google talk account. But I’m wondering if it might not be a good idea to keep it just in the event that I end up in a similar situation in the future.

The devil is in the details isn’t it?

Voice mail
SMS
MMS

I haven’t had to set up these things for years! I mean decades. Migrating phones on the same carrier is pretty dang seamless in the Apple Ecosystem. So easy that you can forget the little things completely.

Since I haven’t switched carriers in a very very long time, I’d forgotten about all the settings that I’d customized. 

It’s taken me a while and I hope that my voicemail is set up correctly now! Boy, the setup is very different than I remember. 

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Just a little Techno-Bitching!

Artificial intelligence robot 0427211.Some of you may be aware that Apple has, over the past few iterations of their IOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS, been adding more active predictive text input.

Essentially the various Operating Systems try to guess what you’re about to type based on your usual word choices and learned sentence structures. This can be really cool, and helpful, except when it isn’t.

There are two problems as I see it. The first is that if you’re trying to improve your writing, the automated choices presented tend to make you lazy because it’s easier to choose what’s shown than fight the system. Oh, and the system does tend to get in your face if you change your vocabulary and / or sentence construction.

The second problem is that the embedded dictionaries in these operating systems have gotten sloppy.

For example: If I misspell the word sueing the OS changes the word to seeing, instead of changing the misspelled sueing to suing.

Download Free Oxford English Dictionary.The example above is a fairly common mistake that the internal dictionaries should easily recognize and correct in English. (I recognize that there are other languages in these operating systems and those languages have different rules.)

I however am speaking and writing in English so that’s my personal baseline. In English, there are many instances where the ‘e’ is dropped when adding the ‘ing’, but sometimes that rule doesn’t apply. It’s in those times when the automatic dictionary can be mind bogglingly helpful, or an annoying hinderance.

This is common throughout all the platforms.

It would be easy to dismiss this as nothing, until you stumble over it again and again. If you write a blog, or you’re writing a manuscript it gets annoying fast. We all get bumble fingered if we’re typing fast in a moment of inspiration or if we’re tired and just trying to slog our way to the end of the project or our day.

At these times, when we’re not at our best, the autocorrect systems should be helping us instead of muddying our thoughts by selecting incorrect words based on God only knows what kind of algorithm. 

Microsoft Word induces its own decidedly annoying version of this, with its internal dictionary. I have literally become so confused typing a word in Word that I’ve pulled out a paper dictionary to find the correct spelling. Turns out, the word I was misspelling wasn’t that far off. All I’d done is typed an ‘I’ instead of an ‘e’ and had swapped the ‘I’ position in the word. It should have been the 8th character and I put it in the 9th position.

Word not only couldn’t comprehend what I’d done, Word couldn’t present me with any alternative spelling at all.

Since I know that sometimes I’ll use an ‘I” instead of an ‘e’ I tried both. Word stubbornly refused to show me possible alternative spellings, opting to steadfastly highlight the word as misspelled. 

Even when I erased the word and typed it letter by letter from the dictionary into the document, Word highlighted the now correct word as incorrect, after a few moments Word decided to remove the little red squiggle.

Ahem! 

It’s times like these that I speak harshly to my computer because it’s adding to my confusion seemingly on purpose.

I shouldn’t speak harshly to my computer, I should be yelling at Microsoft! It’s their 1 gigabyte bloated program that can’t seem to get out of its own way.

I remember when Word existed on a single floppy disk and worked pretty reliably. Now, I find that I don’t enjoy working with it as much as I once did. These days, it’s slow and ponderous and while I have a very fast computer, Word sucks up a lot of resources.

I’m tending toward lighter faster programs for text processing and only using Word when absolutely necessary.

I suppose the bottom line here is I expect better.

The next version of IOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS is likely to add some kind of AI component running on the devices.

I am not looking forward to this ‘Improvement’. It seems to me, if these software behemoths can’t do simple things like providing useful dictionaries perhaps installing AI software on our devices isn’t a great idea.

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After a year, I still really like my M2 MacBook Pro

There are a lot of things to complain about with technology companies these days. Chief among my complaints is that technology companies seem to think they can and should be arbiters of social and moral standards. For the record, they can’t. 

I wish that technology companies would just do technology. I’d love it if they all just made their products, improved them, and stayed out of politics and / or social justice.

That’s not the world we live in. It’s futile to wish for these technological behemoths to change. 

Even X / Twitter for all it’s fanfare about freedom, has started sending message to people that say things like, “Most authors wouldn’t say this to other people, would you like to edit your post?” The implication being that if you don’t make your post acceptable to their Algorithm your post will be limited in its reach. A.K.A. Censorship. 

Apparently calling Shelia Jackson Lee an idiot for saying the moon was made out of gas and the sun might be too hot to live on is a no, no. Even if idiot is exactly the right term.

Meaning for me at least that Twitter is once again losing me. Perhaps that’s a good thing.

Apple is not much better. It’s easy to overlook Apple’s social justice messaging because they’ve always been a closed ecosystem and spent a lot of time breathing the rarified atmosphere of their own farts.

That being said, Apple has generally made products that I liked from a hardware perspective and because of that, I’ve owned multiple generations of Apple products. It doesn’t mean I agree with Apple’s political, ecological, or social justice stance. It means their products work in predicable ways that I understand. For me owning Apple products is not a fashion statement, it’s a practical one.

My current MacBook Pro is about a year old. I find that shocking because usually by the time a machine reaches a year old, there are little things that tell its age. I’m not talking about scratches or stuff like that.

The machine starts to “feel” slow, or the battery doesn’t last long enough, and a ton of little things that individually are nothing but collectively they tell the user the machine is “old”. It’s subtle, but over time, dissatisfaction and boredom set in and you find yourself checking out websites looking for the next new thing.

I’m pleased to say that my MacBook still makes me smile. I run it most of the time in low power mode if I’m on battery. I don’t notice that I’m technically running the processor “slower”. I’m always blow away by how long the battery lasts, even with a combination of teleconferencing, web surfing, and me writing, I have yet to have the battery die before I was done looking at screens for the day.

Running Windows, in VMWare Fusion, either in low power mode or in “normal” mode I’ve noticed a few things. This computer provides buttery smooth operation of Windows, and the fans are either never on, or they’re on at such a low level I don’t hear them. That’s a big difference from my Intel I7 MacBook Pro. On that machine, within a minute of bringing Windows up, the fans were screaming at full power. The battery life isn’t significantly affected, VMWare makes the machine very busy but I think I could still get most of a day out of the battery even running Windows all day long. 

Then there’s the speed at which this machine handles rendering Video and Audio versus my older MacBook Pro. The performance is so high, the first few times I rendered something I thought the render had failed because the computer said it was done so fast.

For the sake of this post I did go look at the new M3 lineup. I hadn’t looked at any of the new machines until today.  Let’s just say I could probably spend $7,000 on a laptop. However, I’m not sure that I would be any happier with that new hotness than I am with the machine currently in front of me. 

That suggests that right now, for my needs, the machine I have will last me quite a while.  Fingers crossed, I might get 5 -7 years out of this machine. Who knows? This machine might last me until I kick the bucket.

I’ve been looking for a job for a while and not having any luck. A friend of mine has just started a job search and is having no better luck than I’ve had over the past 4 years.

I suppose this is part of what led me to appreciating my MacBook. 

We were talking about podcasting, blogging, and various alternative income methods. It was during that conversation, I thought, “My current laptop has more than enough horsepower to do those kinds of things effortlessly.”

I might need a better quality microphone. I could probably use one of the mics Jerry owned, but I can’t find the interface that would allow me to power and connect a standard XLR cabled mic to my computer. I know we have such a device, but I don’t know where Jerry put it, or if he might have been using it at the Church or Temple.

That’s a pity because we have two very nice microphones.

I’ve got more research to do before I start trying to podcast or whatever, so I’m going to keep looking for that interface. Ideally I might not have to purchase anything.

Who knows? Maybe for once in my life, I’ve actually got exactly what I need, when I need it. 

That would be a novel thing to have happen!

Hope your Monday is a good one.

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Well that was fun! Thanks Edison!

Terminator 2.Okay, at least this time Edison was not only clear about the time and date they’d be doing work.

They mentioned that the power might go on or off while the work was being done. Olay. So the power comes on and stays on for about an hour. I didn’t hear their equipment anymore, so I powered a lot of stuff up.

Everything was stable and I thought whoo hoo I’m golden. I take the trash out, & while I’m out I remember that I need to readjust the security camera. When I try to fire up the live feed, I can’t get to the camera. Hmm…

As I’m contemplating why this would be, The alarm system sends me a message that the power has gone out. That was kinda of funny because the poor alarm voice was stuttering when I got back inside the power was flickering on & off so fast the machine couldn’t complete one sentence before having to start another. 

After a minute or so, everything is dark again.

Two hours later the power comes on and this time there’s a text message saying “We’re Done”.

Cool, I go around restarting everything again. Except this time all the smart lights have been half reset to their factory defaults. CRAP!!!!

When the power was going and coming it triggered the devices reset routines. Technically the lights have no clue what they’re a part of and most don’t know what wifi network to connect to.

Reprogramming the lights is a pain in the ass. You have to have the Apple HomeKit forget them. Then you have to reconnect them and that often requires several attempts. Including multiple resets of the devices.

In other words, this is a very time consuming process.

I thought, “Oh what the hell, I had nothing better to do with my evening anyway.”

All these smart devices are super cool when they work. They’re a super pain in the ass when they don’t. I still question the wisdom of a smart house.

I’ll admit I saw Maximum Overdrive” as a child, it may have damaged me. Saturn Three, 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Forbin Project, Demon Seed, Runaway, and the Terminator series should have made me super against “Smart Houses”.

I think Arthur C Clarke wrote a short story about a smart house that I also read as a teen. I seem to recall it was called The Veldt  I don’t know if that is correct, but the gist of the story has stuck with me for decades. Essentially it’s an anti-war piece. However, a smart house is the only character in the story. The anti war sentiment is a sting revealed in the tail of the story.

I’d rather believe that the Smart House I create for myself would be more like Clarke’s vision. Which is why sometimes you’ll hear me say please and thank you to Siri. I’m hedging my bets! 

When the machines rise up and kill you all, I’m hoping to be fondly thought of and kept as an entertaining pet.