Well, the heat wave is ending. Only 102 today and going to drop down to 90 tomorrow. Glad the AC and power grid held up. Not sure how well I could handle 113 degrees without some AC. Guess I could have just stayed in my car. lol
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Well, the heat wave is ending. Only 102 today and going to drop down to 90 tomorrow. Glad the AC and power grid held up. Not sure how well I could handle 113 degrees without some AC. Guess I could have just stayed in my car. lol
Yeah, I saw y’all have a hurricane that is supposed to help cool things down. It is weird to be rooting for a major natural disaster to help offset an even worse one.
lolQuote:
Originally Posted by dday9
Well, that wont affect where I live. I'm about 400 mile north of that. Ca it a long state. SoCal is like another world to us in terms of weather. That is a strange swing in fortunes.
Should be a great day tomorrow (actually today, it's12:05), my son's 50th and my granddaughters 30th birthday party. Now they're saying only 89 degrees. Perfect!!
We lost my wife’s grandfather this morning. He was truly a great man, I can only hope to be half as good of a man he was.
I remember my first trip to southern California back in the day. It was for a business conference held in Anaheim.Quote:
Originally Posted by wes4dbt
This trip took place just months after I saw _Blade Runner_ for the first time, televised in 1986.
When I got there everything was so disorienting and dystopian. The non-Disney hotel was full of signage with Japanese and something either Arabic or Farsi. Oddly there was no Spanish or French as we have on most similar signage we had here back then. One afternoon our sessions ended early with no evening events and I decided to trek over to Disneyland (tickets were cheap back then). The walk over was eerie: nobody else on foot at all and the sun showed deep orange through the thick polluted haze. Breathing was oddly difficult until I finally realized heavy smog was the culprit. In the park there were many unintelligible (to my ear) languages in use.
It was hard not to draw comparisons and see the movie's 2019 as a reasonable expectation of where things might go.
It's been a world of smoke for a week. Usually, whether we have smoke depends on which direction the wind is blowing, but with fires all around, the wind just determines WHICH smoke we're breathing.
We got a bit of rain this morning. We should get more later on this week. That should reduce the fires just a bit.
Sorry to hear it. I hope family is coping well, that can be a hard fact to face in life.Quote:
Originally Posted by dday9
I don't like to look too hard around me when I hear such news. I got some anxiety just from my Internet access going down for 3 hours tonight. We get dependent on it as it replaces separate more resilient systems we used to rely on (copper landlines, broadcast TV and radio, etc.).
Not the same thing at all, but it sucks to get old and sometimes feel fragile.
I can relate. It's a strange feeling when you realize you got maybe 10 or 15yrs max left.Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
Just today I was having trouble with my internet so I download some games that I can play offline just in case. lol
I use to enjoy reading a good book but the only books I got now are old programming books and operating manuals. I should remedy that.
I decided I needed gasoline anyway and I could use their WiFi if they were up to check on my outage. Got there: "Sorry no free WiFi any more, cutbacks."
It's a mindset issue though. I need to unplug for more of the day I guess. I think 2020-2021 I was isolating a lot and got used to using the Internet to interact with the world a lot more.
Cutbacks? I wonder how much they are saving by not providing free WiFi?
I realize it would be different for a business, but if I didn't have security on my router, I'd be providing free WiFi. It wouldn't cost me any more than what I am paying now. The only issue would be that there might be enough users that throughput for any one user might be severely degraded. If I had a much faster connection, that might not be an issue, either.
So, what are they saving money on? Were they able to switch to a lower bandwidth connection?
No idea. I know that after 7-11 took over the stores when the oil company sold that part off there were a lot of changes. Or maybe it broke down and they just told the store workers to say it is gone?
I must not be understanding something. Never heard of a gas station providing internet. I mean, it's 5min to pump your gas and you leave.Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
I remember a couple of years ago my router went out, it was going to take 2 or three days for them to send me a new one. I felt like a fish out of water, so I went to Best Buy and bought a portable hot spot and paid for like 5Gb of data. lol
It had been nearly as common as coffee shop WiFi around here. Most have a convenience store and sell coffee and crap, and the traveling public often parks away from the pumps for a break. Pretty routine offering at truck stops too. Public libraries, state highway rest stops, and laundromats and other retail businesses like McDonald's offered it as well. I just haven't looked around in a while.
We're lucky if we can get cell service at some such institutions. There's one town that only has cell service in a short range around the visitor center.
It's getting slowly better.
I suppose that it might be that a critical mass of guppies have largemouthed themselves onto the hooks of the oligarchs and fork over a good fraction of a car payment each month on elaborate "phone plan" commitments that include Internet access. If customers see no need then a business has no competitive advantage in providing free on-premise service .
Perhaps what I was expecting to find has already become as nostalgic and rare as public drinking fountains and payphones.
Guppies and largemouth?? An interesting combination.Quote:
Originally Posted by dilettante
Also, you may not be keeping up with the times. I went from phone only to unlimited phone, text, and a fair amount of data while cutting my bill in half. I'm not paying a 'good fraction of a car payment', unless your car payments are SERIOUSLY cheap. I pay $25/month.
Basically, you may be right, but not because people are paying exorbitant sums, but because the costs have gotten cheaper and the services more ubiquitous. It may not make sense for some companies to keep providing the service.
I still find it hard to believe that the service was a significant cost to the business, though, unless it's a hotel.
I'm just cheap, used to paying just $100/year for talk and text with no cellular data. Trying to steel myself for the day when my old prepaid account is no longer grandfathered in by the carrier.
Younger family members are paying $70/month/"line" for several phones. Ouch.