Technology

And another remote goes to live in the basket by the tv.

/ wvfurandroot / 6 Comments

I’m sitting here watching the local news LIVE on my TELEVISION. My Agog-O-Meter is off the charts.

After puberty, I didn’t watch much television. I preferred books. With the advent of the cyber revolution, the Internet offered me all the entertainment I could handle (plus some). So even having the capability to watch 7000 channels, I mostly ignored the beast. UNTIL, against my will, I became addicted to Law & Order. I was appalled. I was embarrassed. It called for strong measures.

My New Year’s resolution for 2008 was to quit watching Law & Order. It remains the only resolution I’ve ever kept. Without a steady diet of homicide, pedophilia, rape, arson, corruption, and a justice system gone amok, I’ve been happier. You just can’t watch that crap day in and day out with consequences. That Law & Order is on at least one channel at every hour of the day doesn’t help.

I quit cold turkey and it was a lot easier than I thought. I would go days without turning the television on. So, I cancelled the satellite service which was installed years and years ago. The decision to get a satellite dish was made after (a) learning the Barn sits in a television broadcast signal “dead zone” and (b) after spending heaps of money on ever bigger, more powerful, unsightly antennas. The last antenna was only slightly smaller than a cell phone tower. It allowed us to get Channel 3 clearly, 8 on sunny days, 11 now and then, and 13 never. PBS was hopeless. I raised the only child born after 1970 who didn’t grow up with Sesame Street.

When the Green Bay Packers had their great revival in the mid-90s, Chef Boy ‘R Mine and The Ex couldn’t stand the thought of missing a game. 7000 channels including the local stations soon appeared crystal clear on our television moments after the DISH TV truck arrived at the top of the hill. (7000 channels, of course, necessitated a new television.)  The guys monopolized the television and I didn’t much care.

For the most part, I have not missed having television. The parts that aren’t included in that most part are being able to watch the news, not being able to watch Jane and The Dragon, and not being able to turn on one of the annoying morning shows while I’m trying to wake up and get motivated.

So, I figured out how to watch the local news on the computer. I joined Netflicks. I was reasonably happy. Then I learned about the Roku player – this cute little thing was going to let me stream Netflicks to my television set – not a beast by any means, but a larger picture than the laptop. The Roku came with a number of channels none of which included live newscasts.

I got greedy. I wanted news. On the television.

My television does not have a digital tuner. There’s nothing wrong with it otherwise – decent picture, right size for the room, and long-since paid for. When they pulled the analog plug, I couldn’t even get a fuzzy picture. If Armageddon occurred, I was going to have to listen to it on the radio or hope CNN had a livestream.

I am thoroughly enjoying the Roku.  If you have a Netflicks account and aren’t otherwise able to stream it to your television, I can highly recommend the Roku.  If they would just provide me with live newscasts, I would be a content, fulfilled woman.  But they didn’t and I wasn’t.

Well. A friend gave me a digital converter box and a set of rabbit ears. I didn’t figure it would work very well considering the rabbit ears, but I hoped it might pull in one channel clear enough to keep abreast of current events. I also acquired an ancient tiny portable television as I wasn’t about to pry the “big” television out the armoire in order to hook up gitchies to whatzits that might get one channel. And besides, I didn’t want more stuff hanging off the television – between the stereo receiver, the DVD player, the VHS player and the Roku there’s more than enough cords, cables, boxes, and remotes.

So, I hooked it all up. Even without the rabbit ears extended, I immediately tuned in the 3 major networks and a bunch of other stations I’d never heard of. The picture was beautiful. As fate would have it, one channel was playing the news, one had Law & Order on, and another had Jane and The Dragon playing. Even PBS came in clear as a bell.

I was agog.

So bug-eyed, I disassembled it all and hooked the converter and rabbit ears to the “big” television which was a pain in my pudgy pitoot. Moving everything into the armoire resulted in a loss of PBS and the Jane and The Dragon channel, but I can get them back if I fiddlefart with the antenna.

I am state-of-the-art now!  Relatively speaking.

It’s been a good week to be me.

Now I’ve stayed up too late watching the tube and probably will get up too late to tomorrow to see Today.

[Really, I don’t understand the appeal of late night talk shows. I swear my IQ dropped 10 points watching Jay Leno.]

Mashed Potatoes and the Internet

/ wvfurandroot / 14 Comments

Today, a Facebook Friend said

 ♥ instant mashed potatoes. Yeah I do.

 Now I haven’t met this person in real life, but one of the wonders of Facebook is that such details aren’t all that important in cultivating a real friendship.  However, I told her that this love of instant mashed potatoes might be grounds for our breaking up.

Mashed potatoes are not just a high-glycemic carbohydrate.  When the tuber is boiled, combined with milk and butter, and mashed, the resultant gestalt is home, family, nurture and nature – in short, love on a plate.  If the potatoes contain a few lumps, the effect is intensified.

Piffle - NOT a great value.

Instant Mashed Potatoes go with take-out Thanksgiving Dinners and gas station champagne.  Just because somebody sells it, doesn’t mean anyone should buy it.  Some things are travesties of the spirit. 

I was a small child during that era that Mad Men is making trendy.  Dinner was at 5:00 and involved meat and potatoes most days of the week.  Sure there were buttered noodles and converted rice as well as fried, baked or boiled potatoes, but mashed potatoes were the norm. 

When we moved to Hawaii in 1967, we were met with the potato problem.  Getting spuds to the islands was expensive and they arrived rotten.  That first box of mashed potatoes entered my mother’s kitchen.  Mashed potatoes were such a norm it didn’t occur to anyone to eliminate such from the menu in the absence of real potatoes.  I suppose if for some reason Thanksgiving found me without a home-cooked feast, I would succumb to Bob Evan’s take-out offering just as I have, on occasion, succumbed to gas station champagne.  Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday and champagne my favorite party drink.  Still.  These are travesties of the spirit.

I cannot stress this enough, I am never going to post in my Facebook status that I  ♥ either one.  Let’s not get silly.

When we were stateside again, the return of real potatoes to the table was a delight.  My brother was beside himself.  He was so young when were in Kaneohe that he had no memory of real potatoes.  He fell in love with Idaho’s export.  The first thing he would do when presented with mashed potatoes was to look for lumps. 

 My mother did not use an electric mixer to mash her potatoes.  We had the tried and true masher.  And those things take work.  Only someone with a great hatred of lumps in the mashed taters would use one of those things long enough to eradicate every potato chunk.  Lumpy potatoes became a sign of non-instant potatoes.  Whoever mashed the potatoes in our house, and we took turns, did so intentionally leaving lumps.  Lumps made my brother happy. 

Lumpy potatoes = good. = great = love =somebody cares about me.

As a family, we talked about this. Lumpy mashed potatoes were explicit in our family culinary lore.  Besides lumpy, we liked our taters with enough backbone  to form a bowl to hold the gravy or the butter – none of this whipped into frothy, drippy frenzy of tortured tubers.  Oh no!  Our potatoes had character and a stiff backbone. 

My dad’s spaghetti sauce was legend.  The homemade pizza pert near.  And we were known for the taters.  Some folks ate them politely, but with varying degrees of puzzlement.  After all, we didn’t look like slovenly folk who would half mash the potatoes and be stingy with the milk.

 As my burgeoning interest in cooking collided with my anachronistic interest in 50’s music, I became obsessed with Dee Dee Sharp’s Mashed Potato Time.  A good friend and I, Charlene, made up our dance we dubbed the La Hava” which we could even do on roller skates.  We had to make up our dance because You Tube didn’t exist and we couldn’t find anybody to teach us the real Mashed Potato. 

The La Hava was very versatile and worked for lots of the 50’s songs we loved – Leader of the Pack, Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love and The Last Kiss.  We must have been quite a sight – our teeny bopper suburban hippy selves rocking out to my mom’s music.

Joy to the World

But before La Hava and Charlene, there was Nancy and long afternoons in my living room with a Monopoly board, iced tea, and the top-40 radio station.  We were wildly, giggly, obnoxiously in love with Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog as was much of the country.  [I was also wild about Patsy Cline, but Nancy teased me about it and I remember one horrible fight over it.]

I wonder if she remembers the day she and I, my mom and some more of our friends (including Charlene) danced around the living room to Three Dog Night.  My mom had the tambourine.  Nancy and I were using wooden fruit for microphones singing loudly and unabashedly off-key – drunk on happy music and the ridiculous sight of my mother with a tambourine.  Or maybe it was Charlene and I singing off-key.  I have this tiny, incomplete memory that Nancy may have been musically gifted.  [To this day I still don’t know why we had a tambourine – we were not then nor are we now a family gifted with even the semblance of musical ability.]

I found Nancy on Facebook the other day.  Quite by accident.  After 36 years, it will be like building a friendship.  I haven’t spent any of my adult life with people who knew me as a military brat.  Who knew me before life started settling into predictable patterns.  It will be interesting to see how building a friendship with someone I was once close to compares with building one with someone I’ve never actually met. 

Dancing to Mashed Potato Time wouldn’t have been as much fun if we hadn’t had to invent the steps.  I’m grateful You Tube didn’t exist.  I’m delighted that Facebook does so that I could reconnect with Nancy.  I’m also delighted with Facebook’s penchant to bring me friends I’ve never met.  I’ve switched to a Kitchenaid to make my mashed taters these days.  If you time it carefully, the lumps remain.  Technology preserving the old ways in new ways – if you time it carefully.

I can ask Nancy if she remembers.  I can also ask her if she knows where Charlene is.  If the La Hava becomes the next viral line dance, you’ll know we three hooked up in a bar somewhere. 

Frontier – Rooting for the Underdog

/ wvfurandroot / Leave a comment

Reviewing my notes while on the phone with Frontier's Customer Service Call Center.

I meant to post Part 2 of the Frontier Saga before now, but my life kept getting in the way.

When I left y’all, it was 3 p.m. and I’d raised hell with Frontier Customer Service which ended in a promise that a technician would be at my house prior to 8 p.m. At 8:05 p.m., I entered into chat with yet another Customer Service Representative who was anxious to get me off of her screen. She was exceptionally polite, but we went through rounds and round and rounds of linguistic gymnastics in which it became obvious she wouldn’t or couldn’t let me talk to her supervisor.

I settled in for the evening. We chatted. I used words like “unacceptable” a lot. I also used the phrase, “No. I’m not going to call that number – I’ve called that number several times already.” After assuring me it was both impossible and illegal for a Frontier representative to call me after 9 p.m., I settled into the sofa  even deeper and she and I stared at a blank computer screen for a good while – just under 15 minutes.

While sitting in chat, I sent an abridged email to Ken-The-President knowing full well I was spinning my wheels, but what the hell.

Apparently, tying up a CSR in chat for more than an hour gets one a lot of attention provided one is polite, but insistent.

My phone rang. A very nice gentleman from Frontier was on the phone and I disconnected from chat. I’m sure that poor woman Snoopy-danced all the way to vending machine for sorely needed chocolate.

Multiple phone calls later, the Very Nice Gentleman assured me he was on the case and I toddled off to bed right around midnight.

The next morning, I was astonished to find email from Ken-the-President. Said email was not of the “thank you for contacting Frontier where you can be assured…” Oh no. It was a real, detailed response to my email. Ken-the-President assured me he was On The Case.

All morning my phone rang with various people from Frontier. At roughly 3 p.m., I left my office to meet the service technician at the house. Multiple problems were found and Dan-the-Repair-Guy was surprised I ever had a connection that worked.

Since it was not raining, the connection was working. Nevertheless, Dan replaced my wiring, the box, and the modem. He gave me his cell phone number and told me to call him if it went down again.

It rained and I didn’t have a connection. I called Dan; Dan was puzzled.

Meanwhile, folks from Frontier are still calling me. I tell them all the same thing – the connection works fine until it rains. When it rains, I lose my DSL and acquire so much line noise that phone calls are nearly impossible. Some hours after the rain stops, whatever got wet dries out and the connection works perfectly.

Everyone is perplexed but On The Case. I still get multiple phone calls with questions that probe the exact conditions of the outages.

In my spare time, I surf the net for stories about Frontier’s acquisition of Verizon in West Virginia. The stories are Not Good. There are widescale outages that go on for more than a week. Fibernet, who use Frontier’s backbone, are especially not happy. The Public Service Commission is not happy. Lots and lots of people are not happy.

I search some more. I read business analysts who said before the acquisition that Frontier cannot possibly pull off West Virginia given Verizon’s mess.

I challenged Ken-the-President to “prove it” with respect to Frontier’s web page statement which reads as follows:

Welcome, West Virginia.

We are excited to be serving you.

Over the next few months, you will see that we do things a little differently than your previous Service Provider. Because for us, serving you is more than just a day-to-day operation. Our work is all about you, our customer. We have an ongoing commitment to servicing the communities we work and live in. It is about giving back, growing with our communities and supporting your needs.

It is remembering that you are a person, not just a customer.

As I told Ken, once I got in contact with a technician, I’ve been absolutely tickled by Frontier’s service, but that the call centers still need a lot of work.

I'm never going to pull off a back flip, but it's the thought that counts. Right?

I don’t pretend that any customer of any business should have to fire off an email to the president to get all of Customer Service on the same page, but I’m enormously impressed nonetheless.

I continue to read the news stories. Frontier is getting hit with just about everything that can go wrong going wrong. Powerful thunderstorms are wreaking havoc on an already havoc-ridden infrastructure.

Almost always, I root for the underdog in sports competitions (including politics).

I’m now rooting for Frontier to pull off the impossible – restore the communication infrastructure of West Virginia to a reliable state and, eventually, improve it without going bankrupt. Lots of professionals say it can’t be done. (Go Team, Go!)

My DSL still goes up and down like a yoyo. I still have the same problem – we’ve merely eliminated some potential causes. I fully realize that in terms of fixing the problem, I’m exactly where I was. But after years of Verizon’s nonsense, I have every reason to believe that Frontier does, in fact, care that my service is unreliable and is, in fact, Trying To Fix It.

In terms of the greater good, it is probably ridiculous that they stopped what they were doing elsewhere to work on my silly-ass little problem. On the other hand, they created an enormous amount of goodwill with me.

Welcome to West Virginia, Frontier.

[Connie dons a bizarre set of clothing which she hopes approximates that of a cheerleader and tries to think of a clever rhyme that will go well with pompoms and back flips.]