Buffet Interrogations

I've pretty much eaten at cafeterias and buffets all my life after going away from home for college.

I like them because you can fill in all the things you need in the amounts needed, including fruit.  Fruit is one thing not often served by restaurants, except those with salad bars, which are kind of like small buffets.  Marie Calendar used to have a pretty good Salad Bar and Buffet about 25 years ago, but it went into such decline at the local outlet that I began to fear going there.  Buffets and salad bars have been in disappearance and decline it seems, since about forever, especially from their peak about 22 years ago, but I've frequented a pretty good steak bar and buffet for decades.

I've always liked to have my buffet dinner during working house (mid-day is best for the greatest meal) and do my reading, usually a magazine or nowadays often my phone.

Buffets don't require much personal service.  But they want to make a show of personal service if for no other reason that their table servers be paid a lower rate as "tipped staff."  OK, I'm fine with tipping for minimal service, or even none.  (When I was younger, this pissed me off.  I'd rather get my own drinks than have people constantly ask me if I'd like a refill.  But now I have more sympathy for the employees, and frankly I don't get asked as much anymore anyway, as I drink less.

I'm fine with tipping these people--they need the money...and I'm partly saving the service cost in the direct payment.  But sometimes these people amp up the show to either assure contribution, assure retetention for following the the rules, or some such.  Before too long I feel like they're not really serving me, they're "Serving" me to someone else.

Often servers make ask over removing plates after they are done.  I generally wouldn't care much if they didn't take anything, OR just took it without asking.   Actually, at expensive restaurants, they generally grab the plates at the earliest moment unless you stop them immediately.  However, once you stop them, they then make permanent adjustments.   But at buffets they often ask if you want you're plate removed, when you've started on another, and it's an interruption.

Much interaction nowadays is for the drink refill service, and I suppose one can't complain about that, as long as one is not asked too repetitively if you want your drink refill, which was typical in some places I used to go.

And then there's the seemingly mandatory "Is everything OK" or sometimes "Are You OK?"  I guess once per visit would be OK, but frankly I'd prefer not being repetitively asked such questions, or even once, when I'm obviously very busy eating and reading something.  If something is not OK, I usually try to find some staff immediately, or stare at any staff I see, not look busy reading something.

If I merely nod or mumble OK, that usually works for most servers, but some seem to be a bit hard of hearing, in which case I might get further asked the "Are you OK?" a second or third time with greater emphasis.  And then have this entire ritual played out 2 or 3 times in one visit to the buffet. It gets very tiring.

Decades ago, I started complaining about being asked such questions, actually in regards to the minute by minute "Would you like your drink filled.:  One time I determined that I had been asked if I would like my drink filled 8 times during a 30 minute dinner.  I refused every time.  No matter how many times I asked, to the same service people, that I didn't want to be asked such questions anymore and ever again, the same people resumed asking at the next visit.

Ultimately, hoping I'd get less attention, I tried reducing my tip.  That didn't get the intended result either, but convinced one server I was a starving student, so now I now got fake sympathy on top of everything else.

The very worst of all, is being asked what I've brought to read, as is most often done at entry.  It's as if I was bringing the anarchist cookbook or something, and they were screening people for such things.  They always try to make it seem friendly, I find it intimidating.  I haven't brought The Nation to buffet in years, I hesitate to admit, for this reason.  I was thinking of hiding it in something else, and I did that a few times.  It's bad enough to take Scientific American, which is one of my standards.  In fact that might be worse, more than once a person commented that they knew of something better, or they stumbled for a moment, which in both cases I suspected was for politico-religious reasons.

Upgrade to Mojave Quicksand

Software makers are endlessly putting quicksand in my way.

The latest is the endless reminder to "Upgrade to Mojave" which has no obvious way to turn it off, EXCEPT to upgrade to Mojave.

Actually, I do not want to "upgrade" to Mojave, because it will break all my 32 bit applications.

As I have said before, "upgrades" are really a kind of corporate fascism (realizing that is redundant).

Fortunately, there appears to be a way to turn it off.  This time Google was a better friend than Apple.

Speaking of upgrades, I talked to my computer geek friend last weekend.  He generally uses Mac, but when he uses Windows (for games) he uses Windows 7.  He says when Microsoft expires Windows 7, he's going to switch to linux.

I'm beginning to feel that way about High Sierra.

Typical: No Manual, No Quickstart, Bad Link

My Flir One Pro came with a thin page that identifies itself as the Quick Start Guide.

Constantly forgetting to get my reading glasses out, I finally start at the side with lots of almost microscopic printing.  Turned out that's the multi-language warranty section.  The slightly larger type on the other side is mostly the United States Limited Warranty.

The actual instructions on this Guide were simply:

Download the FLIR ONE app to
your smartphone.  To get started; visit
FLIR.COM/Start

So I downloaded the app.  It comes up saying

Plug in your FLIR One to see the heat.

So, I plug in my Flir One Pro, and nothing happens.  I wait for minutes.  I try plugging and unplugging.  I try terminating and restarting the FLIR ONE app.  I still get no response.

OK, too late, I gave up for that night.

The next day, I took a look at the Quickstart manual again, and remembered the website.  Aha.  As instructed, I typed this into my Safari browser:

FLIR.COM/FLIRONE/Start

It comes up to the FLIR product page.  No Help.

*****

Some site searching gets me to FLIR ONE faqs, I couldn't seem to find an actual manual.

Sure enough there's a battery faq.  Apparently there is an internal battery that needs to be charged.  OK.  So I start charging, and see a blinking green light.  What does that mean???  The FAQ doesn't say.  I try posting the question, it seems to recognize my blogger ID.  Post rejected saying "missing item."

I suspected there was no manual after all this time, but still more searching I found the actual Support Page, and then with more tricky navigating, I finally got to, The Manual.

And the manual makes it quite clear, the light blinks while it is charging.

Total online searching time: 15 minutes.  Total wasted time about one hour.  One missed opportunity to use.

Premium Gasoline

For as long as I can remember, respectable sources such as Consumer Reports (and I am continuing my long term subscription because we need respectable sources like them, funded by readers, even if they're not always right) have said, as do the automakers themselves, that most cars DO NOT NEED premium gasoline.  Only a very small number of high performance cars are said, by the manufacturer, to require premium gasoline.

I've been pretty much following the line for as long as I can remember too.  I had been putting regular gas into my car, until recently.

Since 2001, I have purchased two new cars made by Toyota (a very respectable manufacturer) and I have always had them serviced on the factory schedule.

In each case, I started noticing engine knock around 30,000 miles.  Perhaps that was partly a matter of perception...I didn't want to believe it knocked before then, and it was about then I started listening for it.  A soft knock, the kind you are not necessarily supposed to worry about, but still it was there, especially on climbing small hills (there are ONLY small hills around me nowadays so I can't speak to the other kind) and accelerating, and especially when accelerating up small hills.

Now the dealers have done several related services on schedule, and some extra services because of my sometime complaints, and sometimes they have found additional things to do.  In every case, I always do everything the dealer recommends, because I intend to keep my cars a long time, and I want to establish a good relationship, so in spite of beliefs that some of these "recommended" services are only, or primarily, high profit "PACs" for the dealer, I do them anyway.  I also don't want it ever said that I didn't do this or that, and that used as an excuse for some later failure, and I want them to want to keep my business by their doing their best work, if there even is such a thing.  Sometimes I've gone to the point of BEGGING for additional service to be done (and when I did, btw, that never worked, they never agreed to do anything on my say so, but that's another story).  Ladies are always complaining about the extra services suggested by dealers, and that men get a special break where they don't recommend costly unnecessary stuff, but I doubt that many women actually go for as many of the extra service add ons as I do on principle, because my principle is not saving money in the short run, it's saving money in the long run, and you do that by keeping your car as loooong as possible, and you do that with regular service, continuous relationships with the same service people or at least the same dealer, and not giving them the slightest excuse for less than perfection, and my car is an important part of my life I want the best for.  Or you could say I'm soft hearted, prone to justify my intellectual laziness, or just plain don't like to argue with people, and all of those are true also.  I tolerate a little diguised dealer profit, indeed I expect it, and I wonder if ladies aren't more inclined to question each cent and not be anyone's fool no matter how much pushback it takes.  Or, perhaps, I'm just richer than I previously needed to be, or just a fool.  But indeed you can't get very far arguing with car dealer service departments either.  And with most new cars, especially hybrids, it may be impossible to find a trustworthy independent mechanic.

Typically, after major services, where they do a "tune up" by adjusting the timing, or when they replace the spark plugs (there are no "points" to replace anymore, and spark plugs run for about 90,000 miles or more with little change), I notice an improvement in the knocking.  And also if I complain about knock, they typically recommend an additional "injector cleaning" which might cost $100-$200, but which, as far as I know, is basically pouring some cleaner into the gas tank, and maybe into the engine somewhere too, seems to help too, but not as much as spark plug replacement.

But even after all these services, subsequent to 30,000 miles, the knock never completely goes away.  There might just be a little on the most aggressive accelerations up small hills, but it's still there, and increases pretty quickly back to the "normal" post-30,000 mile gradually rising baseline level.  So all the extra service may be for nought anyway, and I'd long ago stopped complaining about engine knock, though I do the "injector cleaning" whenever they recommend it out of the blue.

Sometime earlier this year, as my car now has about 180,000 miles, I decided to try premium gasoline.  And, guess what, the knock ENTIRELY WENT AWAY.  I could hardly believe it, after these imaginary or nearly imaginary improvements from spark plug replacements and injector cleanings, NOTHING COMPARES WITH USING PREMIUM GASOLINE!

Now I recently noticed that my friends put premium gas into their 2001 Hyundais and so on too.  And if you watch at the gas station, you may notice quite a lot of people using premium gas.

Now I don't know how to explain this.  Is it that the car, which isn't supposed to need premium gas, really isn't built or maintained to that standard?  Do tolerances increase, possibly after 30,000 miles or so, to the point where knock free performance is no longer attainable on regular gas?

Or is it that the gas itself doesn't meet its advertised standards?  One would doubt that, but you never know, and certainly the oil companies (1) are always trying to upsell you to the premium gas by telling you how wonderful it is, and (2) they probably make more money on it, so they might have incentives to somewhat relax the capabilities of the regular gas.

I think it would be interesting to find out, but I don't have my own crew of automotive and fuel specialists to do so.

Instead, I've just decided to do what my friends do, and just use the premium gas.  That minor knock I feel on regular gas may not be that harmful, but I don't know that for sure either, and it might be, and it's annoying anyway, and knock free performance is like owning a new car, even if it has 180,000 miles.

Free Trials and Subscriptions

It sounded very appealing, NOAAWeatherRadar.  It was recommended by the App Store for me.

Opening the app, I was confronted with a stark choice:

1) Free Trial
2) $9 annual subscription.

Who wouldn't choose free trial?  I pressed Free Trial but there was no response for the longest time.  All of a sudden my phone had become VERY slow.  I don't know what the problem was, but it may have started when I started running the app.

After waiting a couple minutes, I pressed the close button, or at least that was what I intended to do.

Just lightly touching the close button, uncharacteristically, it recognized my thumbprint and authorized the Free Trial.

Now I was in for $2.99 Per Week.  After some thinking, I realized that would be $156 per year.

WHAT A RIP OFF!

I was in a panic to CANCEL NOW!!!

After a few minutes, the app had not even started yet, so there wasn't any internal dialog I could have with it.

First I searched online, and the advice actually given by Apple in a section matching the app name and the cancellation issue was very difficult to follow...and then ended in a Russian language segment which was impossible to follow.

I tried navigating various ways through the Settings (which has become very complexly hierarchical) and couldn't find anything relevant.

I tried using iTunes on my work computer.

I contacted Apple and had a long chat session where I tried, or at least tried to try various things that were suggested.  I couldn't get anything to work and finally had to go use the restroom and the session ended.  They suggested that the subscription was not through Apple and therefore Apple could not help me.

I had given up, when about 30 minutes later I got a message from Apple about the subscription having been made.  Then I was able to find and cancel the subscription.  I hope.  After the change, the $2.99 option appeared as unselected along with the $9/year option.

Friends suggest Apple gets a cut and makes it easier for the subscription-takers than for the subscription-cancellers.

I have come more and more to hate subscriptions.  It took three 90 minute phone calls before I could get my XM radio cancelled.  I was not suprised when Sirius--long the laggard--ended up buying XM, because XM radio support had been next to impossible.

Password resetting

Few things in online computing have been as problematic as passwords.  One of the bigger issues is when you've forgotten your password (and it especially doesn't help when you have to change it every 90 days or whatever) and so press the "Forgot your password?" button on the website.

Quite often this engages various impossible hurdles, such as answering some key questions like "What High School Did you Attend" as there are 100 different ways to name a pariticular high school from memory: was the middle initial included or spelled out, etc, or who was your first boss (was that after high school (can't remember that one fortunately), after college, in college, then do you count the student research grant supervisor, or likewise how to spell out his or her name, and so on.

Or guess at some letters buried in a pile of doodles.

Yeah all these impossible things.  Then you may not remember which email address you used (some forwarding to others), so you might have to try several, possibly going back through all the hurdles again.  Often they won't tell you if your email was recognized or not, you have to wait 10 minutes or so (or more if your email is flakey) to see whether you get the email, or have to try another.  Then, what happens when you do finally get the email (or if, actually, the email password reset has not worked in years...as was true for my Credit Union).

I've always found the more the institution is a big bank, the less password grief they give you.  Big banks can cover a few losses, they can use more sophisticated or expensive additional security measures, and they see the greater loss from subjecting people to crap and possibly losing their customers and failing to become the #1 bank.

Everyone else, the less money they make the harder for them to handle risks, and some more than others become password paranoid with all the crap: very long passwords, possibly double passwords, that you have to TYPE in (not paste), and they pre-select for you frequently, plus the kinds of hurdles I described above.



Actually I found the eBay process recently sufficiently easy to get through.  (They handle a lot of money, after all.)  There was just one problem.

They gave me a link to open my account.  Nice, but then when I went to change my password, it still asked for my old password first, and didn't accept the activiation code used to open my account.

It's amazing how many bugs could so easily be found by merely trying to use the program.

SONOS following the lead of Who?

At one time, Digital Equipment Corporation (aka DEC) was the top seller of computer equipment to colleges and universities in the USA.  Who?

IBM people famously never said the word DEC.  Whenever DEC computers--the darlings of students and professors--were mentioned, IBM people said "Who?"  IBM basically couldn't sell computers to academic people at universities.  Often it seemed they weren't even interested.  They would only sell much more expensive computers to college administrators.  They knew where the money was.

The general uneducated public had never heard of DEC computers either, but everybody knew the name IBM (though, few knew then that IBM had assisted the Holocaust.)  So the rhetorical question "who" often had a lot of traction.

Now mostly remembered for the PDP-11 series of minicomputers especially in the ultimate VAX-11 form, at one time DEC was mostly known for the PDP-10, which is the computer the Internet was born on in the late 1960's and early 1970's.

DEC machines were also the very ones upon which Unix was invented.  The ideas of Unix have become the core of computing today, with many spinoffs including Linux and MacOS.

I started using a PDP-10 with the original "Decsystem 10" at my college in 1973.  I remember it very fondly.  Unlike "Ask Mr Protocol," I never got to play with Tenex, which came out later, or Unix until much later.

Sometime in the late 1970's, however, DEC made a startling announcement.  The long anticipated update to the aging PDP-10 processor, code named "Jupiter," had been cancelled.  Henceforth DEC would put all its resources into the development of the new PDP-11 VAX, which was not at all compatible with PDP-10.

Major universities across the country were outraged.  Stanford, in particular, snorted "We have more than $1B invested in PDP-10 related equipment!"  Stanford's wrath is of particular importance, because Stanford decided henceforth not to rely on self-interested and self-important computer companies and make their own computer system instead.  This was how the Stanford University Network came into being, and by the 1980's S.U.N. was spun off and became SUN Microsystems, the company which in less than 10 years ate DEC's lunch in education and research and ruled that arena for 25 years--while inventing technologies central to distributed computing and the Web--but ultimately becoming the victim of it's own arrogance.

[It also happens to be true that the VAX computers were slow as heck, and incapable of handling more than a few users running larger applications of the day, 1 mips with perhpas 1 meg hardmemory, possibly gigabytes online on "fast" busses.  Not until the mid 80's, with the 8600 series of Vaxes, did DEC have anything decent all all, that was only 4.4 mips.  Where I worked you could make a cup of coffee while the 11/780 was processing your password.  And VMS didn't buffer more than one line at once, which made the slowness especially intolerable.  People told me that Unix on an 11/780 was much nicer.

Curiously, the PDP-10 always seemed reasonably fast.  It didn't get bogged down in paging as much.



And so, in 2018, in yet another fit of anti-user modernist arrogance by a technology company, SONOS has summarily dropped support for its original dedicated controller, the CR100.  Now SONOS does not have a dedicated controller anymore, you must use a 3rd party computer, tablet, or smart phone to control a SONOS system.

Hundreds of users (probably representing a universe 100 to 1000 times larger) have been sufficiently outraged to post to a SONOS Community Forum.

Although "warnings" were given before the CR100 disabling system "updates" in January, by April or so the warnings were taken down, according to some reports.  I don't remember seeing any warnings when I did the fatal update in August, but at that particular time both my CR100's were discharged because I was reorganizing my bedroom audio systems.  Mostly I do use the Mac interface to SONOS, but I find it handy to pause or adjust the audio level from the bedroom controller.  Fortunately I still have some control from the Sonos boxes themselves.

*****

When the SONOS system was introduced in 2004, the CR100 was an industry leading remote control: wireless, with picture display,  a scrolling touchwheel for scrolling through lists of titles and songs.  In fact, the CR100 was a fully complete system controller as well.  It had a nice drop in charger.

Only 5 years later did I actually get a smartphone.  Certainly the smartphone has a higher resolution screen...which is actually a real touchscreen.

However, even today, touchscreen controls require more attention.  They don't always work as you intended.  The dedicated contact sensitive buttons of the CR100 can even be felt because they are indented from the top panel.

Worse, using a your own smartphone as a Sonos controller is a pain in the neck for many reasons.

1) Your smartphone may not necessarily be at hand as you settle down to listen, or reach over to pause the sound before going to sleep.

I find this is especially true for me because I use my smartphone as an audio analyzer, etc, and often leave it where I was blogging about that instead of carrying it with me to the listening spot.  With the CR100, I just kept it at the listening spot, or, more importantly, at the bedside--the place it's unbeatable for.

2)You have to log in to the smartphone.  I find the finger sensor on my iPhone only works half of the time or less on the first press, and just over half the time after several presses.  So, something a little less than half of the time, I have to punch in 4 digits, which is a two hand operation, and it's easiest if the phone is straight in front of you.  (File this under more smart phone annoyances as far as I'm concerned.  I'd consider turning off "security" altogether, but then the bottom button can't turn the phone on, and you have to reach for the less handy side button to turn the phone on.)

3) You have to navigate to the Sonos app.  At least the iPhone has only 1 tier of icons to navigate through.  On the Samsung Android phone I had, you'd first have to navigate to the correct tier of tiers.

4) You have to open the app, and it might first ask, or even insist, that you upgrade the app first.  That could, of course, take the whole afternoon, as you find yourself needing to upgrade your entire system.  You can't simply upgrade the phone app to the app of the rest of your system, you need to upgrade EVERYTHING to the latest version, because you can't select which app version, and an app upgrade may be required by your smartphone version, not the version of the rest of your Sonos system.

And here, all you wanted to do was pause the music in the bedroom just before falling asleep.

With the CR100, you simply press the pause button.