Hi! I missed you all! You didn't know I was gone, but I was soooo gone and with no ruby slippers to bring me back!

So Wednesday after work, I went out of my way to bring my old Verizon equipment to the county Verizon store that would accept it back, because all the Verizon stores near me would not, which is just bogus crap, but that's how they do it. It was raining bad and the entrance to the store was hard to find and the clerk I brought it to didn't want to do anything because there was a power outage at the store and wanted me to come back another time, and I wasn't happy with that idea after all the efforts I had made with getting there and being turned away by reasonably near stores. I suggested he use ancient technology and put a post-it note on my box of old equipment with my info and process it when the power was back up, which he agreed was possibly doable, and I left it with his seething self. He got me back good by disconnecting my current service on Friday afternoon while I was teleworking at home and I lost hours of work time.

And I lost not only hours of work time. I was on the cell phone, and on chat on cell phone for 5 hours and much of that time on hold with sounds called music, and talked to a variety of Verizon workers of different departments and map locations who told me lots of things about calling back that didn't happen, some of it wrong, some of it lies, and champion question ignoring on chat, 5 hours went by this way and I had the biggest brain meltdown in years. Wow, did it make me crazy. Good thing I was in the privacy of my own home. I screamed, I cried, I lost my voice, and hated life, the universe, and everything and found my only comfort in Dorothy Parker's poem on the feeling. I put myself to bed early after ibuprofen and a big glass of wine and slept on and off for 12 hours with cuddly cats. Nothing can shoot my sanity out the window and into the stratosphere like dealing with utilities or new computer programs, but with the amount of contradictory info and being on hold I got I dare anyone prone to anxiety to hold onto their brain through that. My fault for my stupid, stupid tenacity to hang on for 5 damned hours of we-don't-care-if-we-keep-your-business-or-not crap, without food or get up and walk breaks. Gandalf should dub me "Will Beyond Sanity". I was so wrecked. Probably not being recovered from the hard move and fretting over how long getting stuff set up here is taking and other stuff didn't help.

Sleeping long, however, was a good idea. And I am so glad my cell phone is a separate account, also with Verizon, or I don't know how I'd have dealt with this. I dealt with them for a couple of hours on Saturday and did other things. Still no reconnection, but my identity verification was complete--because my current cell phone account and old home account with them cut off on Friday was not good enough. Today I went through 3 more Verizon people--I may have spoken to everyone who works at Verizon at this point, and got to a really good technician in New Jersey who pushed tech services and got my line turned on this afternoon. It's a new account, but I was able to forgo them making a home technician appointment and just activate the lines to my phone and internet equipment. And here I am. It was a journey through Shadow and Pain.

The only reason I did not switch to Xfinity is because I have no illusions it would take less crap to get set up with them, and dealing with home service visits, as well as MORE equipment to get back to Verizon. If I had just dumped the old equipment in the trash, I probably wouldn't have gone through this and there's no indication that they were ever intending to ask and bill me for the old equipment or give me a discount, among other things Verizon clerks make up.

But my vet called yesterday with Moo's biopsy results, and the lesion on her head was not cancerous, but it could have developed into cancer if left, so I am glad we had it removed, and that made Saturday better. More of these lesions could develop on her head area, so I will need to keep close watch. Her stitches come out Friday--so far she is not scratching them, thank goodness, and I will get more details on these lesions then. Tomorrow I see my oncologist about the results for the yearly breast MRI I went for last month, but I would have heard something already if the results were iffy, so no worries there. Next up, get the 3 tooth implants that I had put in last year checked and then start getting crowns for them, and get a new pcp and appointment for that.

I look forward to the heat breaking and being able to step into my yard without melting. I would have liked to have gone to see Apollo 11 projected on the Washington Monument, but no way I could in this heat. But I got to see the Apollo Saturn launch on location for the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975, so I can't complain. If this crap had to happen, at least it did not happen on a weekend with nice weather to miss.
I read a lifestyle advice article on my home feed on FaceBook that listed a few of my friends on top. It was from a credible source, the NYT, but not a section of the NYT I would have picked out myself. I had some thoughts about it and looked around trying to see how it got on my home feed--which friend it came through, with no luck. In fact, I really don't know if the friends listed on it had read the article or had negative or positive reactions to it. When I went back to my feed to look closer at this info, the article had disappeared. Granted, I am still a FaceBook novice, since I avoid posting there, and perhaps savvy old timers can track these things with ease, but I have my doubts. I don't know how this article really got to my home feed. And if a casual attempt to track it doesn't reveal these answers readily to me, then it probably doesn't reveal those answers to most FaceBook users. Most likely, the question does not even occur to many FB users.

My friends on Facebook are all very bright, liberal or progressive. My home feed is full of news articles filtered through opinion pieces, but it is often not clear if the opinion is from my friend or one of their friends or a more removed pundit. Though I agree with the anti-Trump, progressive point of view of most all of my FaceBook friends, I find the difficulty of tracking who is making the comments very troubling. It's no way to get your news or to discuss news, and it is so easy to game and to slip in bots. Today I saw friends perhaps passing on the complaints of progressive groups about changes FaceBook is making to its news dissemination process, though I am not certain this came with my friends' approval, but whatever changes FB makes, they will not be worse than how it currently works or solve these problems and make it better.

Why are smart people using FaceBook to discuss politics when attributions are so fast and loose there? Why have they left behind other forms of social media blogs (like dreamwidth and LJ) where what articles you pass on are ones you have clearly linked to with your own html links and where your words are published on your own blog? More importantly, why are smart people using FaceBook to get their news feeds instead of going directly to news and blog sites they trust? FaceBook obscures the pathways the articles take and the attribution of commentary. It's horrible.

Why put your trust in FaceBook? The convenience is not worth the power you give this one web source by depending on it.

So yes, this is another futile anti-FaceBook screed. The only reason I look at FB is because so many smart people have left our social media homes for that horrid interface, and many people I know from various walks of my life have made it their social media home. In the last year I have been clicking there more because it is the only website where they congregate, and I give thumbs up and heart emoji's, but its not a place I want to put my words, pics, and time. It's a good interface for advertising events--concerts, meet-ups, and book launches, and should be used for such. But I worry about so many smart friends using it as a newsfeed--and how little use it has for the kind of productive political discussion you can still have on blogs.

It's not the internet as a whole that is making our society more stupid--it's FaceBook prime and center, more than any other site. And if we don't want FB's diffusing of attributions and ways of giving room for bots to play, then we have the power of keeping it from being so ubiquitous by not making it a prime source for news and political discussion, if not personal posts.

FB is a wrong turn in the evolution of social networking blog interfaces.

Dreamwidth and LJ are still my prime internet homes and will continue to be, and I will keep hoping my friends will come to their senses and come back or migrate to other old style social networking blogs that foster better interaction and political thought. But I really hope most of all they will stop using it as a news aggregator--by the way it is set up, it can easily mislead you about who is recommending the articles that appear before you, and narrow instead of broaden your news sources in the process. What looks like convenience on FB wastes your time (and synapses) instead of saves it.
lavendertook: (listening to conch)
( May. 29th, 2017 08:06 pm)
Do any of you, dear flist, have advice on buying an iPhone? I am planning on getting one this week.

Currently, I have a flip phone from a Verizon family plan that it is time to retire and move myself into the 21st century with an iPhone. For my own account, I already have an internet wireless and Fios connection and a landline phone bundle with Verizon. I plan to add the iPhone to my current plan, or switch to a new bundle with Verizon if it will be cheaper.

Would it be cheaper to buy the iPhone itself from the Verizon store, or get it at Best Buy or an Apple store and then take it to the Verizon store to set up the account? Any advice on which iPhone?

I'm going for an iPhone instead of a Smartphone because I like apple computers and have a MacBook, but if you think that's a mistake, now is your chance to tell me, if you'd like.

Any advice on what I should look for in the Verizon plan?

I don't think Comcast is an option for my apartment building, but I'd rather not go with them anyway.

Tank yew!
It's been over a week since I had a dial tone on my landline home phone, and after days of many hair-tearing hours on hold on my cell phone, technicians were supposed to come out today to work on the lines for my phone in the basement of my apartment building. They did not show. The DSL has been getting spottier and spottier over time, too.

I've had Earthlink as my DSL and landline phone provider for over a decade. They used to be good, with responsive customer service, but I'm so done with them now. And their web chat help is a total joke.

So US peeps, do you have a national internet/landline provider your'e happy with that you'd like to recommend to me? Or a regional if you're in the mid-Atlantic? Or any advice for me on the switch over process?

I've had recommendations from a few people for Verizon, and I saw on a provider rating website that customers seem in general to be happy with that service. I hate joining one of the big monopolies, but Earthlink's time seems to be over and I need something reliable.

I feel so insecure without a landline--the batteries run out so quickly on my little cell phone. I'm not a big cell phone fan.

All advice on this is very welcome.
lavendertook: (arwen in library)
»

LJ?

( Mar. 9th, 2013 11:53 pm)
Is anyone else having trouble loading LJ? The pages are all wonky and won't load any images or comments.

I recently updated to Safari 5.1.7, and installed a java script update yesterday, but things loaded fine this morning and didn't get all wonky until this evening.
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