Blog Archives 070320 to 070228

Old pointless chatter instead of new pointless chatter.

 

070320 Davis, CA
I still don't have mobile phone service... I did find out a number of things though. Here are a few facts and steps to sum up my discoveries:
1) While it is not legal to require someone to give their social security number to get phone service, it is standard practice at T-mobile to automatically fail someone's credit check if they refuse to give their social security number.
2) A failed credit check results in a refusal of service with no notification.
3) When calling up and checking on this, service can be granted to someone with a failed credit check, so long as they are willing to submit a massive deposit and agree to lousy terms.
4) If said person gives in and gives their not-legal-to-be-required social security number and therefore passes the credit check, then account transfer (from the existing "pre-paid" account to the new "post-paid" account) can proceed.
5) Incompetent service personnel can create the most amazing tangles, by misspelling both the first and last names and failing to enter required information, like the SIM card number.
6) With approval but without the required information, your account will be listed as "in processing", but will never actually be transferred.
7) Once your account is "in processing", you must be both fast and dilligent, since the customer representatives in the "pre-paid" department will attempt to transfer you to the "post-paid" department, and vice-versa.
8) Once you successfully manage to talk to "accounts", the department that handles the account transfer processing, they will refuse to do anything unless you can provide them with your not-legal-to-be-required social security number or the reference number for the account transfer.
9) Upon providing the reference number for the account transfer, the incompetence (see fact 5 above) will be revealed. The incompetence can only be cleaned up by purging the previous records and then, yep, you guessed it, providing the not-legal-to-be-required social security number for a credit check to be associated with the now clean and properly spelled account transfer record.
10) Once T-mobile has a "clean", credit-checked account entry, they will need the SIM card number, a step requiring removing the battery from the phone you are currently using... You are currently using your mobile phone because I skipped the step of discovering that the call menues you can reach while using a land-line phone never bloody-flipping-well let you ever reach "accounts"!
11) When you call again, dodge being transferred between the "pre-paid" department and "post-paid" departments, and then win through to the "accounts" department, you have the fun chance to explain things again and the provide the SIM number. After providing this, the account should be transfered in only three more business days... The same claim you will have heard at least once before.

Anyway, after talking to the seventh person and having them ask me how my day was, I started answering "You don't want to know and I don't want to tell you. Please save us both time and transfer me to the "accounts" department, since they are the people with whom I need to speak." Four times out of four times I attempted this, the person on the other end chose not to transfer me and made sympathetic noises instead followed by asking me to explain the situation. Ahrgh. Was I being unclear?

070318 Lake Tahoe, CA
Skiing was good. The snow was pretty icy in the morning, really good for a couple of hours around noonish, and getting a bit wet and heavy by the mid afternoon. It has been a rather long time since I last went skiing and I'll be feeling the tops of my thighs for a while. I have a couple of skis, but I did not bring them, choosing to rent instead.

I was talking to one older fellow (a skiing fanatic) about skis and he was mentioning that he had two pair of older skis that his son had thrown away... The fellow was saying that his son was right to throw them away, since they were no longer worth the bother even for early season skiing, when rocks can play havoc on the skis. He said he tried them for that once and then ended up just using his newer skis and paying for them to be refinished after the rock skiing. These "old" skis under discussion were six years old. He was pointing out that, looking around the slope, you see almost no one falling. The newer skis tend to lift free of entangling snow easier, cut across ice easier, etc. Thinking about that, I'm pretty glad I didn't bother to try bringing my 20 year old skis.

I had forgotten to bring my goggles, so I had to buy a pair at Alpine Meadows (the ski resort to which I went). I did two quick runs in the morning, without goggles, to get a feel for the light levels, and then went and bought a pair. The sky was clear, the sun was bright, and the snow and ice were multiplying the light all around. I chose not to risk snow blindness. Since the temperatures were pretty warm, I never put on the turtle neck thingy I usually use to cover my lower face. I'm now sporting a tan that shows exactly where the goggles covered my face. D'oh!

As I write this, I can practically hear my mother going apoplectic, and exclaiming all the advice I didn't follow: "Sunscreen! Don't you know the cancer risk!", "Look before crossing the street!", "Remember to wear pants before you to out!"... OK, I did actually follow the last two pieces of advice, but they are things of which my mother has decided to remind me in the past year. You know, in case I often forget to clothe my lower body before heading out in the morning.

Anyway, after hitting the slopes from the moment the ski resort turned on the lift chairs (8:00-ish) until about 2:40-ish, I called it a day. The lift chairs don't stop until 4:00, so I was "wimping out" by stopping about 90 minutes early (when going skiing, my habit is to pack the day full and be one of the last few coming down the mountain), but this time I decided not to totally kill my legs and I called it a day. Besides, I still had a bit of a walk back to the condo.

In other news, I decided to shift my mobile phone account from the pre-paid account I've been using (with exhorbitant rates) to a post-paid account (i.e. standard billing). Unfortunately, it takes about 2-3 days to get the switchover to happen (for unknown reasons) and since I did this Friday, I will probably not have phone service again until Monday or Tuesday. Eh, at least I can keep my phone number.

070317 Lake Tahoe, CA
I don't know why I'm here... I normally don't just go places; I go places for a reason, because I am seeking something or visiting someone. I don't go places just to see a place, there has to be something more, like solitude, or for the environment to inspire an attitude difficult to otherwise capture, or to disrupt routines that have become ruts. I guess I tend to want trips to satisfy two linked questions: 'why travel' and 'why to that place'.

Anyway, my workplace has a timeshare in a condo in Tahoe. It is opened up to the employees to sign up for on a lottery basis. I was the 36th person to sign up this winter, so this weekend was the first opportunity for me to come. I'd signed up originally planning on inviting my brother and his family to come up; it is four bedrooms and I have the place to myself from Saturday afternoon on. Unfortunately, this is the weekend they are wrapping things up in San Jose and moving to Boston.

Still, this is the weekend I have. It comes at the end of a long series of weekends of not being home. Counting the weekends backwards, there was the trip to visit E. and C. in San Jose, then the weekend before they visited me in Davis (which I count as not being home because it was a weekend of not having the usual weekend schedule), then there was the trip to San Fran with W., then there was the trip to Berkeley to visit R. and A., then there was the trip to Albany to visit H. and Y.

So, other than the weekend E. and C. visited Davis, it has been a month and a half since I spent the weekend in Davis. It's not like I need this trip to disrupt a rut. I'll go skiing tomorrow, and I know I will enjoy it, but I'm oddly unenthusiastic about it. I'm going to do something fun that I don't do as often as I'd like, but I'm sort tired of not having a weekend at home, so I can't bring myself to feel more than neutral about skiing. It's an odd feeling, but the mountains are beautiful and the weather is great.

070316 Davis, CA
Well, I no longer have the excuse of the shifting over of this site to explain further delays in posts. I just have not felt like writing much. Part of the deal is that I'm having some minor computer issues. My aging and partially shorted out (the usb port controler was destroyed by an accidental static electricity zap) laptop that serves as my home computer has started having overheating problems. More or less, in the current temperatures, if the computer is on for greater than 80-90 minutes, the temperature sensor on the motherboard registers heat damage danger and shuts off the computer. This means that I'm a bit annoyed by the computer and don't much feel like sitting in front of it to compose posts or do much web surfing. I ought to just replace it, but it still kind of works, so that is a low priority task. There is a whole lot more I should be doing.

One nice thing is that I have space in a condo in Tahoe for this weekend. I'm planning on going up, doing a bit of skiing, and generally just relaxing and looking at the snow and the mountains. It should be nice.

Oh, in other news, I've been talking to W. about visiting her in Poland and touring around a bit. I was thinking of seeing Warsaw, Bialowieza National Park, the Great Masurian Lakes, hiking in the Sudeten Mountains and/or seeing the Carpathian Mountains. W. suggested touring Auschwitz as a must-see. I can't bring myself to have any enthusiasm at all to visit the death camp. W. stresses the importance of knowing the history and holding the memory close at hand, to enforce the message that it must not be allowed to happen again... I agree that we should not forget the lessons taught by the horrors of World War II, but I'm not sure that I'm in need of a reminder. I look around my bedroom bookshelves and see "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William L. Shirer (which I've read twice), "Nuremberg Diary" by G. M. Gilbert (US military psychologist to the war criminals being tried), The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman, and "The Diary of Anne Frank" by Anne Frank, Eleanor Roosevelt, and B.M. Mooyaart. I think I have some knowledge of the history. I see that the world has learned a little and reacted when ethnic cleansing has been attempted in Europe (Kosovo), but reacted slowly if at all in other cases (Rwanda, Dafur). I see that some major powers still resort to savage brutality (torture) even while claiming to be on the side of right. I fear I will find a visit to Auschwitz depressing, not only because it is a reminder of man's inhumanity to man, but because I have no faith that the lessons have been learned.

Auschwitz still stands, but the lessons seem at least partially forgotten. There are people in power in "civilized" nations who continue to propagate inhumane policies of kidnapping (aka "extrordinary rendition") and torture (aka "stress questioning") while claiming to be in the right because they've passed laws to allow these acts.

"We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was 'illegal'."
- Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail"

070313 Davis, CA
I have been putting off site/blog updates for a little bit while the site is being shifted to a new server. My brother is moving to Boston shortly, so his computer (the previous hoste of this site) will be unavailable for a while. Therefore, this site has been shifted to my father's computer. It's nice having a couple of computer techies in the family who can do things like this. Big thanks to my bro', who has handled all the little fiddly bits needed to make this as transparent and seamless as possible.

070305 Davis, CA
My brother, sister-in-law, and herd of nephews visited this past weekend. As usual, the young ones were full of frantic energy. Well, a bit more frantic than usual, this time out. Normally, when I see the kids, they are full of wild "oh boy, it's Uncle Keith" energy and I rarely stay long enough or visit them often enough to see them in a state not filled with "Uncle Keith" excitement. This time out, they were oscillating bundles of energy for three reasons: The usual "Uncle Keith" excitement, the fact that they are moving soon and their home life has been disrupted, and the fact that they were getting to do a road trip and sleep over at my apartment in Davis.

They were very cute and it was great fun watching them zip about. Just watching them was a reminder of how orderly (and breakable) the things in my life are these days. Their highs were filled with such joy and their lows filled with such heart-breaking sorrow, it was clear that it is tough to be a kid. I'm glad I'm a grown-up... I'm just not sure how parents survive their children. I was tired out just watching them bounce around. Come to think of it, so were E. and C.; they had pretty early bed-times (the parents as well as the kids).

070302 Davis, CA
Even though I don't have a TV, I have still occasionally spend a fair amount of time in front of a screen, passively watching stuff: I've spent far too much time watching stuff on YouTube. So, I thought I'd share one or two video clips with you here. First up is Music for one apartment and six drummers, by Ola Simonsson. Next is Furious Angels a music video by Rob Dougan. And that's it for the links; I feel like it is sort of like cheating to just provide a bunch of links rather than a real blog entry. Still, rather than write more, I'm going to tidy up a little since my brother and his family will visit this weekend.

070301 Davis, CA
I was talking to two coworkers at lunch about a recent flap in Sacramento: someone was researching the name of an inner-city Sacramento school, the Charles M. Göethe Middle School, and discovered that C.M. Göethe was a philanthropist and conservationist, but also a strong proponent of eugenics. This "discovery" has resulted in a recent push to purge his name from the school and from a number of other educational and philanthropic works (parks, public buildings, etc.).

Anyway, the conversation wandered from Göethe into a discussion of what the eugenics movement was at the time of Göethe's support of it; it was then considered a progressive issue and some 20,000 psychiatric hospital patients in California were sterilized between 1909 and 1950.

My two coworkers quickly separated into the "relativist" and "absolutist" camps, with one arguing that wrong today is wrong always, and the other arguing that context is always the most important factor in deciding morality. I took an intermediate position, arguing that there are some absolutes and also many grey areas. The absolutist argued that killing, for example, is always wrong, whether in war or in daily life... but he was shortly thereafter forced to amend this to admit that killing in self defence should not be considered wrong.

I pointed out that in modern times the old beliefs in valor and honor, which once gave a bright shine to wars of agression or conquest, had become tarnished and fallen away as justifications. Most people these days may not be fully aware of it, but they can feel that invisible moral line in their heads, letting them know that killing out of agression or for gain is wrong in war as well as in daily life, but killing in self defense is acceptible to their morality. For this reason, most modern wars are pitched as defensive wars... We don't want to, but the "domino effect" means that if they win over there (Vietnam), it is just a moment before they (Communists) will be attacking us over here. We are being forced to "defend ourselves" over there (Iraq) because the only alternative is to defend ourselves over here.

After all, this is why it is generally accepted for suburban, affluent people to go do drive-by shootings in the inner city... To proactively defend themselves in the inner-city neighborhoods before the poor start doing drive-by shootings in suburbia. What's that? You say that people don't generally think that's OK? Hm... Has anyone told the White House?

Oh, on the Göethe Middle School topic, we all agreed; keep the name and educate the people. Do not hide his history for good or for ill, but use his mixed legacy to teach people about history. Unfortunately, the most likely outcome is that history will be white-washed, with the school (and probably other buildings and parks) renamed to something inoffensive and bland. This Orwellian purging of references and sanitizing of history seems to be disturbingly popular.

070228 Davis, CA
Very fast update, because it is late and I've been busy. This past weekend (Saturday the 24th through Monday the 26th), I toured around San Fran and the bay area with W. I'd met her on the airplane when I went to visit my parents in December and we'd stayed in contact in the intervening months. She is returning to Poland soon and took the opportunity to have a "native" guide for seeing something of San Fran. Touring alone is not that exciting, so I had not seen much of San Fran yet and was happy to play tour guide. If we had had incompatible personalities, it could have been awful, but we got along really well and it turned out to be a great way to see the city. As it was, the visit felt very short.

Page Last Modified: 2007 09 29, 21:52:51

 

 

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