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.

2021 – Year End Roundup & Goals

01. January 2022 · Comments Off on 2021 – Year End Roundup & Goals · Categories: Domestic, Random Book and Media Musings

Well, upon looking at last year’s roundup of goals reached, and goals to reach – I haven’t done too shabbily at all. Of course no big-name producer for streaming entertainment has made a serious (or even an unserious bid) to make the Adelsverein sequence, or the Luna City series into a mini-series – but hey, I live in hope. What’s a dream for, anyway?

Anyway; the windows, sliding door between the dining room and the Sumptuous Catio and French door for the front bedroom were all done and dusted early in the year, just before the great Texas Snowmagedden of 2021 descended upon us, and just in the nick of time, too. The Daughter Unit and I weathered through, just fine, since it never got cold enough in the newly-re-sided and insulated house to freeze anything of note.

The Chicken Abode was also done, and stocked with four laying hens, and it all worked very nicely, right up until the tragic day when something vicious got into the back yard and slaughtered two hens outright and mauled a third so severely that she died two days later. The fourth hen died around midsummer, cause unknown, and Larry Bird the rooster also, but from old age. I don’t want to restock the coop until spring, when Wee Jamie the miracle grandson, is a little bit older, and I have the time to spare from tending to him, while my daughter begins on making her fortune as a licensed real estate agent.

Basically, all the previously established goals for maintenance of the house itself have been achieved. Now the only remaining project is to finish paying for said projects: the windows, the siding and paint, and for an emergency fix to the HVAC system incurred the week that Wee Jamie was born. Fortunately, I have a couple of clients for publishing assistance, which will, with luck, help with that. The only remaining project that I have in relation to that is to get the den floor done in the same high-end vinyl flooring which has gone into one room and the hallway so far, and pay Roman the Neighborhood Handy Guy to do the work. I also want to be able to afford a nice pneumatic nail gun, so I can do certain carpentry stuff myself and not have to keep borrowing Roman TNHG’s compressor and nail gun.

New projects for this year:

1 – run a short length of tall fence with a gate in it from the side of the garage to the brick-faced pillar which encloses my next-door neighbor’s yard, to make a small private patio, which opens through the new French door from the front bedroom. I plan to paint the whole fence and gate white, to match the trim on the house. Eventually, when my daughter has had a good few years in real estate and moved out to her own establishment, this room will become my office and library.

2 – renew the fence and gate on the opposite side, and paint it white to match – basically, a straight façade of fence, garage door, fence across the front of the house, keeping all but two small areas on either side of the driveway private and secure. Maybe install electric porch lights on both sides.

3 – if sufficient addition income from royalties and the Teeny Publishing Bidness permits, see to redoing the back fence, which is in truly parlous condition. No, I don’t think I can reuse the original fence palings, one more time, although at the rate that costs for them are going up, I might have a good try at it. Wood is wood, and I kind of like the weathered look.

Alas – all this work for the Teeny Publishing Bidness means that writing Luna City 11 is put off until mid-spring, and the Civil War novel, That Fateful Lightning (which is half-done at the moment) is also put off until I can submerge myself in Civil War campaign and medical trivia and write the second half; full of drama, battles, blasted hopes, showers of half-inch sized lead ammunition, and hope for a better world when the war is won. Hopes that are seasoned with despair and tragedy, for wasn’t it always thus?

Consider a Fair Warning

28. December 2021 · Comments Off on Consider a Fair Warning · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings

OK, prospective Facebook and/or other social media prospective and aspirational friends, those who have occasionally favored me with ‘friend’ requests, because other friends/acquaintances of mine have friended you, most usually in trusting error … let me bluntly explain why I have not favored you with acceptance of your kind offer, or with replies to your messages. I am a writer, a scribbler of historical fiction and contemporary rural comedy – I am emphatically not a rock star, a movie actress, or filthy rich. As a collector of fans for such works of fiction which I produce, I am not interested in slavish adoration, merely a courteous and mutual exchange of good will and friendly if somewhat remote interest in each other’s lives, loves, interests and hobbies.

This goes double for other writers – Hi there, we share the same addiction to telling stories, and anxiously checking on our sales rank and our hopefully generous royalties in hopes of turning a hobby into a profession. Nice to know ya! (No, I don’t want to know the name of your agent, or your publisher. I moved beyond playing the trad-pubbed game about fifteen years ago.)

If you are a male of certain years, claiming to have some high-powered job, like a surgeon or a serving military officer of somewhat elevated rank, list on your profile that you are divorced, widowed or otherwise single and yet have no more than three or four pictures on your profile, including one of you with a cute animal, or sailboarding, or your graduation from some high-end uni, I am most emphatically not interested. Especially if;

– there are only those three or four pictures.

– you claim to be currently in some exotic locale like … Doha. Syria. Boston. Or until late this year, Afghanistan. Look, guys; I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night.

– if the picture includes you, or someone you represent to be you, clad in a military uniform with a nametag or patch on it, and that name does not match the so-called name on your profile …this merits an automatic delete. In the military that I used to belong to, not the fantasy one apparently inhabited by romance scammers, we used to call this ‘attention to detail.’ Lack of it can occasionally be fatal.

As an aside – general officers usually have no leisure time to screw around with their social media profiles or with pitching woo to unknown single ladies of a certain age. Such gentlemen might have a lot of pictures of themselves out there on the ‘net, which can provide fodder for the occasional romance scammer, which is why such characters show up so often among my friend requests. I understand that male models with a large portfolio online frequently have their pictures hijacked for the same purpose.

– there is a certain embarrassing lack of familiarity with Western naming conventions which often reveals itself in such invitations. I understand this kind of thing can be confusing to Third Worlders with radically different naming conventions. But a pitch for friend status with a radically unsuitable name, like a surname for a given name or vice versa … oh, sorry – gong! Not going to get specific with examples, as I don’t want these a-holes to sharpen their game.

– finally, addressing me as ‘dear’ or with any other terms of affection on bare minimal acquaintance through the medium of a private message through FB will earn an automatic banishment.

Consider yourself to have been warned – respectfully submitted,

Celia Hayes

 

 

 

For Christmas

24. December 2021 · Comments Off on For Christmas · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings

(A relevant seasonal excerpt from my World War II novel, My Dear Cousin, which was completed and released last year at about this time. Part of the narrative is in letters, between two cousins; Vennie is an Army nurse serving in North Africa and Europe, Peg the wife of a Far East POW, waiting out the war in Australia, wondering for years if her husband is still alive.) The description of this 1942 Christmas holiday celebration in a military hospital was taken from this book.

Letter from Vennie to Peg, dated 26 December 1942, Postmarked APO NY, headed Arzew, Algiers

My dear Cuz:

We had our Christmas here in Algeria at the hospital and it was more beautiful and moving than I can describe. I should set the scene of it for you; the main hospital building has a central entrance hall across a small courtyard, with a wide staircase which goes halfway up the back wall with a dozen wide steps – there is a generous landing, from which two flights of narrower stairs go up along the wall to the second level. When I first arrived at this place, riding in the back of a jeep, crammed in with seven others, our legs hanging out every which way – I did not see this. It was as dark as a pit, and every inch of the floor of this hall was covered with stretchers of wounded. But as we took control of the city and calm and order returned. With hard work and dedication, our people have turned this back into a place of order and healing.

The wards are clean and airy, and the operating theater once again fully equipped with all the proper gear, brought up from the Army transports in the harbor. Our patients have clean linens and white sheets – blankets too, against the cold. You would not believe how cold North Africa is at night, during the winter!

We had such fun planning and creating a wonderful Christmas. It means so much to the men, and to us, so far away from home, and in a foreign and unfamiliar land. The comfortable rituals seem so much more meaningful. I believe that for the rest of my life I will remember this particular Christmas with much more clarity than those of my childhood, which seemed to all blend into one pleasant holiday blur, with not much to make any one of them stand out, not even the Christmases when I journeyed home to the ranch from Galveston.

Besides the candy that we made in the hospital kitchen – at least four hundred pounds of it! – the Red Cross director in Oran produced quantities of more hard candy, packets of cigarettes and small gifts for this enterprise, enough to fill every single stocking; all seven hundred of them! Our enlisted corpsmen at Arzew came up with tinsel slivered from the foil that X-ray plates come wrapped in, and many ornaments for the Christmas tree cut from empty tin plasma containers. A party among the Army engineers organizing the harbor went out into the country and cut a tall fir tree for us, which we put in the hospital foyer in a bucket of gravel and sand, just as we used to do at home. A sergeant among our patients (recovering nicely from an abdominal wound) was an art teacher in his previous life. He was busy cutting and folding heavy paper, and painting them with brushes and paint procured through the Red Cross (again, all honors to the director in Oran who found these items for us) to appear like lighted candles, pinecones, branches of evergreens, holly berries and leaves, and ornate bows and placards of Christmas greetings, to make garlands to adorn the lobby.

On the landing – which you must picture as being twelve steps up from the lobby floor – we had a small table, draped in white sheets, with more white sheets hung against the walls above, and a large cardboard cross, four feet tall, onto which we had hand-sewn purple bougainvillea blossoms was hung above it. (Purple was the proper color for the Christmas rites, so Muriel tells me. She would know, as she is quite devout.) The corpsmen had contrived a pair of elaborate candelabras, and filled them with wax tapers, and brought in some small palm trees planted in pots on either side of the altar, as well as two large vases filled with flowers behind the candelabras.

It was magnificent. Our Catholic chaplain, Father Powers began saying a solemn Christmas mass at midnight, at the foot of the altar. Any who wanted to attend were welcome. We had litter patients at the front, and ambulatory patients crowded in with the nurses and surgeons behind them. The choir of men – and they were all Catholic, Protestant and Jew together – began singing “Silent Night”. It was all so beautiful and deeply moving, Peg! I simply cannot describe to you how lovely it was. Although I am not Catholic and only indifferently Christian.

We had a small party afterwards, hosted by we nurses – with cookies and cocoa and then to our various beds. But in the morning, on Christmas morning, Captain Ro (Romanesco, our unit dentist) dressed in the Santa costume which we had made for him, of the same fabric that all of the Christmas stockings were sewn, and went around to all the wards, distributing Christmas stockings stuffed full of gifts: the candy, cigarettes and etc. I can’t even begin to express how happy the men were to receive these simple presents, or how thrilled we were, to observe their happiness. In the larger sense, we can really do so little for them, for those who have received crippling wounds, wounds which I fear may shorten many lives, or at least make life a challenge for them. But they were all so happy with their presents – as if they were all small boys, receiving the one thing that they most desired in all the world.

This simple holiday in a foreign land, in time of war, Peg – it all made it worthwhile to me.

All my love, to you and yours.

Vennie

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