Minor Irritants From Modern Technology

Tucson Weather Today

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I have had so much trouble with the FREE Wi-Fi internet access that my apartment complex provides (such as going down for two or three days at a time several times each month) that I decided to go ahead and sign up with CenturyLink (telephone company) for high-speed Internet. They will be here this coming Monday (tomorrow) to hook up the equipment. I have to pay around $40 each month but I think it will be worth it to not have to worry about whether I will be able to get online each day.

Time will tell, as they say. (Although I once read that the biggest liar in the world is they say.)

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I don not own a cell phone. Never have and probably never will, although before I retired in 2001 I had to put up with a company provided cellular monster hanging from my belt and seemingly unable to stop ring, ring, and ringing eternally. Which is probably why I do not want one.

The land-line telephone sitting beside my arm chair is the same one I've used for more than ten years. It's a little blue AT&T Princess phone, but lately it's been acting up. The coiled handset cable no longer makes a good connection and produces lots of static and sometimes cuts me off when I am talking. So this morning while I was out for my walk I stopped in at Walgreens and bought a new little slim line phone. You'll never guess how much it cost. Ha! It was a close-out sale and I got it for only a dollar and a quarter. Wow! Some great deal, huh? And it works fine.

Before I connected it to the wall jack, I tried the headset cable with the old phone and it also worked fine. So that means all I needed to fix the old Princess was a new coiled cable... but a replacement cable costs seven dollars at Radio Shack... Go figure.

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While clicking through the TV channels I paused on a godawful afternoon show titled The Talk and heard a woman say, "Doesn't matter what it means, what counts is what it connotates..." Is connotates a valid word, I wonder, or one that has been through popular usage incorrectly coined from the word connotation which stems from the verb to connote -- Who knows?

Doesn't matter, I suppose.

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The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government.
-- U.S. Constitution

Immersed In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

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Tucson Weather Today

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For the last five days I have had no internet access. And that's hard to take. The Wi-Fi here is undependable. But it's FREE and I keep hoping it will get better. My alternatives for a high-speed connection are Cox Cable or Quest, which are far from free.

As always, you get what you pay for.

What to do... what to do...

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On PBS I recently heard a government official say, "...and that is virtually unique." -- Well, I am having trouble visualizing the meaning of that particular combination of words. Unique means 'one of a kind' and I'm not sure how 'virtually' is meant to modify 'unique.'

I am in a quandary.

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Whenever you hear an orator say, "The fact of the matter is.." you can disregard the 'fact' which will follow.

Using The Tools That Are Available

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Tucson Weather Today

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While searching for an elusive fact using Google somewhere around five o'clock this morning I was suddenly distressed to find that once again my FREE Wi-Fi connection had failed and was no longer available to me. Yes, after less than one day of its restoration after a previous two-day failure, Wi-Fi had abandoned me and once again I was utterly and helplessly offline.

It is now 5:35 a.m. which is usually my most productive time for online work, and now I am faced with waiting until 10:00 when the office opens before I can report the Wi-Fi failure... again. And even then, of course, the office will have to notify the technician who will have to drive to the router's location and reset the downed equipment.

FREE Wi-Fi... I am reminded of the cliche so often quoted by a fellow member of my writer's group, Mr. Anthony Dauer, who is fond of (gleefully?) repeating: "You get what you pay for."

I have no idea when I will be able to upload this blog entry, but whenever that is, please note that it was written before six a.m. on Tuesday, April 19 in the year 2011, which is surely much earlier than it is now being read, by you or anyone else.

'Drat!'

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I was reading earlier an article about the creation of memorable sentences, and was struck by a short poetic piece written by Kenneth Koch.

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, in her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up and created the Sentence.

Isn't that charming?

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Three pieces of string go into a bar. The first one orders drinks and the barman says, "We don't serve strings in here." The second piece of string fares no better. The third piece fluffs out his ends and saunters up to the bar, shouts, "Three beers and make it snappy!" The barman looks at him and says. "You're a string, aren't you?"

The string says, "No, I'm a frayed knot!"

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I just heard on NPR that the losing prosecutor on the O.J. Simpson trial (ancient history?) Marcia Clark, is now a mystery writer. I was going to look up the details concerning her upcoming novel... but then I remembered that I have no Internet connection.

'Drat!'

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There is an advantage, though, to being helplessly without an Internet connection; I am unable to be distracted from creative composition by the perceived necessity of checking my email, Googling for suddenly needed fact-checks, and anything else available online that will take me away from the hard, hard work of writing fiction.

I suppose one could call that an advantage.

Even though I am offline there are other ways of distracting myself... I can always slip one of my old DVDs into the computer and watch a John Wayne movie, an episode of the old Dick Van Dyke Show, or some of the wonderful skits performed by good old Red Skelton.

See how creative I can be?

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A couple hours ago, since the office was not yet open, I left a note at their drop-box regarding the Wi-Fi situation. Then I embarked upon a long walk. Went to Fry's (formerly Kroger) Supermarket and bought some bananas and apples. They had Organic Gala apples on sale for 99-cents per pound. That's amazing. I bought seven apples, two and a half pounds for a total of $2.47. Wow! Now that's a real-deal.

It's now almost 10:00 a.m. and I am back home -- and now I have Wi-Fi again. That's what I call efficiency.

Thank you, Sallie.

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In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
--Bertrand Russell