The Sins of Microsoft

05. March 2022 · 2 comments · Categories: Domestic, Random Book and Media Musings

The sins of Microsoft are many – but since their Office suite is practically universal, one almost has to use it, especially if one is not technically adept in matters of a programming nature. I do understand that there are means of working around, involving Linux and some open-source word processing packages, but frankly, it’s all too much for a practicing writer and small publisher to process and still get useful work done, for myself and for clients.

I am, as a matter of fact, completely happy with and sufficiently skilled with Word, with Excel and Publisher themselves, although I wish that they hadn’t gone with the new hotness and ongoing income stream of the subscription model – that is, pay yearly or monthly for the privilege of using the programs. (Yeah, when I started with all this, you bought the package straight up, on a DVD/CD which you installed and used – forever, or as long as the computer lived, or until they came up with a physical upgrade.). I’ve been working with the various versions and so-called upgrades for at least three decades, with Photoshop for at least that long, and Adobe Acrobat Pro for half that long.  Not a genius with either of the last two packages, but well enough to get by. What has lately frosted my cookies is the utter dogs’ breakfast of Microsoft’s consumer account system, and their customer service when things to do with the subscription go sideways.

To be brutally frank, it sucks sweaty pustulent donkey balls. It’s calculated, apparently, to avoid having to deal with a customer’s problem or complaint, much less actually do anything to fix the problem.

To recapitulate – early last month, I had to switch to a new computer, since the one I was currently using was beginning to glitch and had not enough memory to run several essential programs in the manner to which I would have liked them to run. Switching over all the saved documents which were on a detachable hard drive – no problem. Porting over all the bookmarks and settings – piece of cake. Going to my subscription accounts for Adobe Acrobat, and Photoshop, and re-installing those services on the new computer, no problem at all. But signing into my Microsoft account and trying to get the Office suite installed … headache on top of headache. I absolutely had to have those tools on my computer, being halfway through two different projects. My first intimation that Microsoft’s customer services sucks donkey balls – I went around and around on my account, but always came back to – having to pay for the subscription service again. (WHY? Adobe.com was perfectly transparent, and the services that I had already paid for were readily installed.) Bit the bullet and paid for the subscription anew.

Straight, so far? On Friday, Microsoft charged me for the yearly subscription, even though I had just two weeks previously – paid for a new subscription, because I couldn’t install the previously existing subscription package on the new computer. I signed into my account and tried to file a complaint, and request for a refund … and this time I went around and around for more than an hour. They are insidious in their customer service, you see. I twice tried calling the help telephone numbers I eventually found … and got a recorded message which sent me a link which referred me to another Microsoft website page … which circled back to where I had been before. I couldn’t cancel the transaction, couldn’t even change it to a monthly billing, they didn’t even recognize or accept my phone number (what? Although they could send an automated text message to that number.) Eventually, I found a page where I could file my complaint and describe my problem in a hundred characters or less. How very generous of them. No other option for filing a complaint or notifying them of a problem, which seems pretty measly, considering how large a company it is, and presumably stuffed full of technologically knowledgeable employees.

I did get an automated email answer – but one which asked that I type my reply above a line above … which couldn’t be done. Yes, Microsoft customer service sucks donkey balls. Even Amazon has better customer service; yes, they do low-key the contact email and number to call, but with a little persistence, you can eventually speak to a real human being. AT&T, my own bank, our local utility company – all do a much better job. Frankly, I’m convinced that Microsoft doesn’t really want customer interaction of any kind. They just want your money; customer satisfaction isn’t anywhere in the same room, or the building. Monopolies can operate like that, for a while, anyway.

Me, I hope for a refund, eventually, or just for communication with a human being in customer service – or for the SMOD to land on Redmond, Washington State. At this point, I figure the odds are equally split.

Visions of History on the Big and Small Screens

07. February 2022 · Comments Off on Visions of History on the Big and Small Screens · Categories: Domestic, Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

I am tempted to start watching the series 1883 – and likely will, as soon as it appears in one of our regular streaming services, but I am wondering, just reading about it – how far into the episodes I can get before walking away.

I mean, we barely lasted one episode into Texas Rising; a hideous and heartbreaking waste of time and video, being shot mostly in the wild mountains of Durango, Mexico, which bore no resemblance at all to the topography of Texas.* And no, the chapel of the Alamo does not have a crypt. They did get two things right, although the rest of the series was a cringe-fest, according to viewers who had stomachs stronger than mine. Texas did fight a war for independence from the Centralist dictatorship of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and there was a battle at the Alamo in San Antonio, and another at San Jacinto, barely six months later. Otherwise, Texas Rising was heartbreaking for Texas history fans, because it could have been a totally enthralling account of the war for independence and the fight for independent statehood – elements and incidents which were so dramatic and improbable that hardly anything needed to be made up out of whole cloth.

That series and countless others fell into a common fault of movies and television series when ‘doing’ a Western – that is, a story set on the American frontier in the 19th century – wherever that frontier happened to be in any given decade from the 1820s on to the end of that century. The common failing is to run it all together in one murky blur, as if technologies large and small remained constant, as did fashions, the political and geographical landscape, relations with various Indian tribes. As I wrote in this essay, several years ago, “there were very specific and distinct places, as different as they could be and still be on the same continent. 1880’s Tombstone is as different from Gold Rush-era Sacramento, which is different again from Abilene in the cattle-boom years, nothing like Salt Lake City when the Mormons first settled there – and which is different again from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s small-town De Smet in the Dakota Territory – or any other place that I could name, between the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi-Missouri.”

Setting the series to start in 1883 is curious enough – it’s just rather late in the history of the frontier to generate a long-trail wagon-train journey, and from Texas to Montana, too. The western market in beef cattle was about to go bust by the middle of that decade, and the northern ranges ravaged by two especially harsh winters in a row. The various Indian wars along the frontier were done and dusted, all but the last uprising of the Lakota Sioux, inspired by the Ghost Dance movement. The transcontinental railroad had been completed long since. By the mid-1880s just about every major city in the United States and Canada was connected by a network of shining steel rails, obliviating the necessity of a long and dangerous journey by wagon-train across all-but-empty lands in most of the trans-Mississippi west. A cast interview that I did read mentioned that the producers and directors were going all out for authenticity. Well, we’ll see, eventually. I recollect reading an article in Smithsonian, of all places – which lauded all the ways in which the producers of The Patriot were going all out in historical fidelity, but once I watched that movie, I realized that the authenticity was all in small details, such as props, costumes and weaponry … just not the whopping big plot elements, personalities and key incidents. I’m afraid that I will find the series 1888 to be another helping of the same old stuff.

*Wierdly enough – the movie The Highwaymen got the topography exactly right. Yes – the wide lonely vistas, the two-lane paved roads with the line of spindly power poles along-side and the bare fields of new corn or cotton, or whatever spreading out on either side, the tiny roadside gas stations … were exactly right. The small towns, and transient camps, the little tourist cabin enclaves … also exactly right, as to time and place. I have pictures of my own, taken on various road trips which can affirm this.  I don’t know how much that the production company for The Highwaymen spent to do location shooting – can’t have been more than Texas Rising – but one big production got it right, and the other fell spectacularly flat when it came to the ‘look’ of places.

Lifestyles of the Gilded Age Rich

20. January 2022 · 2 comments · Categories: Domestic

I see from a couple of stories in the Daily Mail and on various blogs that I follow, stories and comment regarding Julian Fellows’ new series, The Gilded Age. It has finally come to fruition, after I noted it almost a decade ago, and predicted … well, not very much hope for the project. Well, good luck to the guy – he was about the consistently most amusing of all the reoccurring characters on the series Monarch of the Glen.

I might actually watch The Gilded Age, always remembering the massive thud made by the Beacon Hill series made in the mid-1970s, when another TV producer sought to duplicate the enormous success of Upstairs, Downstairs with something of the same privileged-family upstairs and hardworking staff below stairs, and same era in an American setting. It didn’t fly back then; didn’t even last a season. I guess with the success of Downton Abbey, Mr. Fellows is certain that his luck has changed and for the better.

Alas, the problem in translating English upper-class to American upper-class remains; it’s not ever an exact translation. Julian Fellows may have better luck in spotting his pseudo-aristocratic follies in New York, when Mrs. Astor and Ward McAllister held social sway over the fabled 400. But the fortunes and foibles of the very, very rich in 1880s America were otherwise widely spread, across the entire continent and in too many specific industries. New York high society might be the closest equivalent to English society of the same era, where the ton gathered in London, and around the fabled ‘Season’ of society events, festivals, customs, and social practices. Otherwise, the American richer class were too widely dispersed, with their own ‘seasons’ events and practices, differing favored schools for the education of their young, churches for the binding in marriage of their scions, and neighborhoods for the construction of their monumental mansions. There was no single one cynosure for ‘society’ as Americans knew it, save for a limited slice of it in New York, once upon a day. Every notable region and city had their nobs and nobility – some of them, like the widow of inventor and industrialist Samuel Colt (who might have been the single wealthiest woman in America from mid-19th century on) didn’t even bother to play the New York high society game at all.  Drawing them all together into one narrative for the purpose of dramatic story-telling … glad it’s not my job, and I do wish Mr. Fellows the best of luck in his endeavors in this regard. I have occasionally amused myself by mentally putting together a series which would draw in all the various strands of wealth during the gilded age … maybe something set in a posh resort hotel, like the one on Mackinac Island, or at Saratoga Springs or a health spa like the Kellogg establishment.

Real Life Marches On…

09. January 2022 · 1 comment · Categories: Domestic

Real life ought to march on through the garage a little more often … my daughter and I set Wee Jamie in the middle of his playmat on the big double bed in my bedroom Saturday morning and went to tackle the garage … Hey, why does a nice single woman of advanced years like you need a double bed?! Hey, I want my half IN THE MIDDLE!! So there! Between Small Doggie wanting to be at one quadrant under the covers on cold nights, and Isabelle the Not-Tightly-Wrapped-Siamese wanting another quadrant for herself, I am lucky to be able to claim the middle sector.

Anyway, the garage needs a good turn-out and reorganization of the contents, what with all the … umm… stuff in it. There’s a boxed high chair, a play table for Wee Jamie, and a little work desk with chair when he ages into the needs for it, a couple of other items for him when he is slightly older, some stuff that he has grown out of which needs to be trucked to a friend of ours with an incipient grandchild who will need it, a few things saved against the eventual kitchen reno, another bunch of construction materials which need to be safely organized and stashed away, a whole lotta tools also in crying need of an organization … hey, we had almost a dozen foam and fiber disposable paint brushes, knocking around the inner recesses of the garage! Really, the garage had descended all unknowing into the state where it was just simpler to buy another one, rather than go on an expedition searching for it.

Three unopened tubes of various construction calk. Well, now that is safely sorted into a new wheeled tool-box, with simply everything inside it…

My daughter did a run to Goodwill yesterday, another one today. And consigned a couple of things to the trash can or the curb, for whoever wants them. We went right back to it this morning, ruefully conceding that this will be a project which will consume most of the next week, perhaps the next weekend as well, as we have only got as far as the corner with the workbench, a quarter of one wall and the niche where the freezer and the hot water heater are. But at least now the corner with the tool bench is organized, and all the chargers for various battery-operated tools are set up and charging, and the tools themselves hung neatly in a row on the wall. A large part of the problem is that there is a lot of furniture set aside for my daughter’s future independent establishment, several boxed items meant in the near future for Wee Jamie – like the little toddler-sized desk and chair – and some like the porcelain farmhouse sink intended for my eventual kitchen reno. There are also lengths of baseboard, beadboard, architectural trim and a box of vinyl flooring to be used in the near future on other renovation projects. All must be re-staged in a more space-saving mode, so that I can get my car back into the garage, once it is ransomed from the paint and body shop, which had it to work on over the holidays, after the misadventure with the hood coming loose and smashing into the windshield and roof two months ago.

And I used to think that it was a good thing I wasn’t moving every year, or three years or so. The drastic thinning of possessions which must happen with families who have lived in the same house for a hundred years or more doesn’t really bear thinking about.

A Brief Miscellany

05. January 2022 · Comments Off on A Brief Miscellany · Categories: Domestic

One of the few nice things about this so-far-severely-depressing twenty-first century is the ubiquity of cellphones which can take pictures, and sometimes of a very good quality. Just about everyone has a cellphone, and those of us who have them are wandering around with one in our pocket or purse, or whatever – have the instant ability to take a picture of interesting curiosities at the drop of a hat. Just not when we are setting out on a deliberate photographic safari, with the camera and all in our possession.

There are three such images which remain in my memory as things that I most deeply wish I could have taken such a picture, so that I could have shared the astonishingly beautiful, striking image. They are enshrined in my memory only – so I can’t possibly share them, save in words.

The first is that of a certain Japanese maple tree, a small one, barely the size of a large shrub, growing to the right of the main door to the old base library at Misawa AFB in the late 1970s. The library then was housed in a post WWII single story temporary frame administrative-type building, of the kind which our military put up by hundreds of thousands on bases and posts across the USA and the world during that era. To my eyes these buildings always looked rather like two Monopoly houses put together, long, with a shallow roof pitch and usually windows along the long walls. The little maple tree, which was otherwise not particularly distinguished, nevertheless had the most beautiful, deep ruby-red leaves, once the foliage turned to fall colors. No other maple tree I ever laid eyes on, before or since, had quite the same purity of color – the very soul of red; like bright blood. It was splendid enough … but at least once in the years that I was there, an early snowfall hit, while the little tree by the library was still covered thick in vivid red leaves. And that was the most striking, memorable sight – the red leaves against the pure white new snow. I am certain there were classical Japanese woodcut artists who did pictures of red maple leaves, on snow, probably modern photographers who have managed to capture the same image. But in my own mind and memory, nothing to compare to the perfect red of the leaves of that little maple tree, and the vision of them, against the pure white of new snow … simply incomparable.

The second image also involves snow More »

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