Ramblin Words

Show us a picture of your mother                My mother turned 80 years young, this past June.   Happy Mother's day Mom.

1947 - June

Remember kickball when I was nine and you were ten
Pick me , please, Lord don't let me be the last
I'm not that bad
I'll catch the ball this time
It's really not fair
The sun was in my eye
and a butterfly had fluttered by
Oh please don't pick Jim
I can kick it much farther then him
I can kick it really far
Maybe this time I'll hit the nearest star
Remember kickball when I was nine and you were ten

I  have recently resigned from my job as a customer service representative at a major mid-west utility company.  I would like to pass along a couple of tips that will make everyone's life easier, when they call any company for help.  First, thing is before you call for help, be prepare to take down information, have a pen or pencil and paper in front of you.  If you do everything on a computer then have the appropriate note taking tool open.  Secound,  have your account number available or some other identifying number.  When you open a service up, ask the representative, what information they need to identify you, usually they will tell you  they accept your account number or phone number or social security number.   Try to remember, that they are asking for that information to protect you, not to irritate you.  With identify theft an on going problem, it is important to make sure that information is being given to the right people.  This brings up another thing, do not give out your account numbers on any service, willy nilly, once someone has that information they have a key to your finances.  I am always amazed who people will give their information to,  I had one call, where the caller who had all the proper information to access the account, was  the Mother of his  girlfriend, my first thought is that the account holder was asking for his identity to be stolen. Third be ready to identify yourself, especially if you are not the account holder.  Again, this is done to protect the account holder,   Besides its just common courtesy, if someone called you and wouldn't tell you who they are, would you want to give them information.  Fourth, turn the TV and radio down, their is nothing more irratating then to try to talk to someone with the TV or radio blasting in the background.  Fifth, if you need more time to pay a bill, ask what options are available most companies are willing to set up payment plans, as long as you have kept previous ones.   In most cases, the reason you need more time doesn't matter, there are policies set up that the representative has to follow, so whether you can't pay because you just brought a new car or you had to have your gall bladder removed is irrelavant.  If you are denied an agreement and there is a medical condition at home, you may ask if there are any medical exceptions available, depending on the state you live in this maybe an option.   The final thing is if you are calling because your power is out, have your physical 911 address available, if you live in a rural area and don't have a physical 911 address, then have either your account number or meter number available.  Remember, the person you are talking to is trying to find your account on their computer, so they can forward your outage to the local office.   Finally, if your power has been out for less then an hour, there is a good chance that the representative doesn't know why the power is out, despite what some people believe some one actually has to be at the site to determine the problem.  Remote diagnosis maybe coming, but its not here yet.    

I recently purchased the Ipod nano 8 gb model, green in color.  I have had several ipods and currently have an Iphone but I never had any of the smaller models.  First it is a lot thinner then I thought it would be, the pictures don't do it justice.  Some people were worried that because of the curved screen glare would be a problem, so far that hasn't been a problem for me. ( I will admit I haven't tried to watch something out in bright sunlight. )  When I heard about that you could shuffle to another song by shaking the nano, I thought it was a stupid tick, then I found myself using it all the time.  The genius option is good in theroy, but needs more time to work since it is partially dependent of people using it.  This also got me thinking about the number of different type of portable players I have had in the last 10 years.  In 1998 I still had a cassette player, the most you could put on a cassette was a total of 180 minutes (90 on each side) and the quality was pretty bad.  The tape would often jam and you would find your self trying wind it back in with a pencil.  Then I brought the sony mini disc. player, which came out about the same time as the first mp3 player, I did like it, however again you had the problem of having to carry around little disc along with the player.  Plus the mp3 player ended up winning the format war.  I then purchased a Creative Zen, my first mp3 player.  It worked fine, but the menu was clunky and hard to navigate.  When I saw my first ipod I fell in love, the one thing the Apple is good at is design of both the physical product, but also the menu. It was easy to use and navigate, I also purchased the 2nd generation Ipod and Iphone.  This is the first nanos I have purchase and I do like it, I am just worried I am going to lose it somewhere.  One of the interesting features I found was the voice annoucement.  It is under setting, if you turn it on it will annouce what menu you are on, what song is playing etc...It not something you want to use all the time but if you are blind or are unable to look at the nano its a great option.
               
My history of portable audio players from kim landwehr on Vimeo. 

I was reading an article by Alfred Thompson at the Cyberspace People Watcher blog, called "Who the famous people are following " and it go me thinking about the word fame and how its definition has changed over the years.  When I was younger, a famous person was someone like John Kennedy or Willie Mays or a movie star like John Wayne. Everyone knew who they were and what they did to become famous.   Yes, except for in rare cases you had to actually do something to be famous, you couldn't be famous just by being in the limelight (see Paris Hilton...) The other change is fame has become compartmentalized.  By this I mean that you can be famous in one area and be completely unknown is the wider world.  For example, Robert Scoble is famous among those who are part of Social Media, blogging  including microblogging.  In the rest of the world he is virtually unknown.  If I asked my family or friends who Robert Scoble was they wouldn't have any idea.  This doesn't mean he is not important or famous, he is in his small niche, just not on a global scale.   We also tend to mistake fame with importance.  Fame and importance can go together , but they don't have too   Britney Spear is famous, but let's face it she is not very important.  The group that invented Small Talk, aren't  famous (outside of  Linux's Geeks) but they are very important.   It is important not to mistake one for the other.

I recently purchased the flip video camera.  I have  been fooling around with it for about a week now.  I do like it, It is very simple to use.  It has basically four  buttons, on/off   play, record and delete.  You turn it on, hit the record button and that's it.  It records in avi format and the quality is good, but not great.   

I would recommend this video camera to anyone who wants to record video, but do not  want to spend hundreds of dollars on a video camera.  It would be a great camera for a young person, who has shown interest in doing video work or making a movie.   

Due to  how Friend Feed aggregates your different social networks, I am rediscovering networks  that I had signed up for but had either forgotten about or stopped using.  One of those networks is Pandora, I liked Pandora but one of its disadvantage was that you had to have a browser window open to use it. Due to this, I stopped using it.  I was reading my Google reader feeds and saw an article from Lifehacker about an application called Pandoraboy.  This is an Mac only application, once you download it  you sign in with your Pandora Information and its sits on your desktop.  You can use it as you would the reqular Pandora website.   I only used for a couple of hours this afternoon, but I do like the product so far. 

My Series 2 Tivo is dieing, or at least I think it is.  I am actually not sure if the problem is with the Tivo box or with the Comcast cable box.   I not seeing any pictures on certain channels, I can still hear the audio but no pictures, at first it was just one or two channels but now its getting worse. If I reset the Tivo the pictures come back for awhile, but then go away again, which is the reason I think its Tivo.  The other wierd thing thats happening is now if I hit a channel where there is no picture, instead of staying there, the system starts moving up and down the channels untill it finds one that is coming in.   It hadn't done that before, just started happening a week ago.  I could get a new series 2 tivo pretty cheap, the problem with that is that I am thinking about upgrading to an HDTV, which would make the series 2 Tivo useless.  I was hoping to have this tivo last untill I got the new TV, but it looks like that not going to happen.  I am going to test the Tivo, without the cable box and just attach to basic cable to see if the problem persist, so I can elimininate the cable box as the source.  I will need to find a way to transfer the video from this tivo to my other one easily. I don't think I can stand being without Tivo and neither can my husband.  

What happens, when two views of a site conflict with each other.  The reason I thought of this was the latest Flickr uproar this past week.  In case you are not up on the latest news, Flickr is now allowing 90 second videos to be uploaded to the site, and many flickr purist are up in arms.   Part of the problem is that although many flickr users, especially ones that have been members for a long time, still see Flickr as a site set up for user and owned by a small user friendly company.  In reality Flickr is now owned by Yahoo, whose main focus right now is making money and staying out of  Microsoft clutches.  I think many Flickr users were upset by the announcement, because they were never consulted. There was no beta testing or blog post saying this is what we are thinking about doing, what do you think, instead it just happened.  I am sure upper management ot Yahoo, can't image what all the fuss is about, after all  they make decision like this everyday without consulting the user of the product.   I understand from other posts that there is an option in the default menu to have it set so they don't start playing automatically and that Firefox has an extension to block them altogether.   I personally wish that option was available for all user no matter what browser they were using, since most people especially at work still use IE.   I have nothing against videos, I have an account on a multiple number of video sites including Youtube, Viddler and Seesmic to name a few.  That being said when I go to Flickr, I expect to see still photos.   Plus since it is for pro user only most user will not be able to take advantage of it unless they upgrade, which of course means more  in Yahoo coffers, which is exactly what they are looking for.