My New Cellphone
I'm a relatively new (< 7 years) owner of a smartphone. I've gone over my history of cellphone usage elsewhere (I finally bought one after an auto problem driving on an isolated stretch of I5S on the way to Los Angeles); I really didn't see the need to buy a smartphone until around 2014; in part, my well-known original provider was charging over $25/month for a 300-minute plan, which really meant 10 minutes total daily (including incoming calls). I saw the phone primarily as a communication device; I really didn't buy into using a phone to do entertainment, but I later came to see text, data and apps as useful, e.g., in accessing driving directions on the road, doing stock transactions, viewing emails at work without typical business restrictions on work PC's for personal use, or getting statuses on parcel deliverables. So my current provider, an affiliate of a top competitor, offered unlimited call, text, and data for a flat fee of about $35 (although only a certain amount of data was/is guaranteed high speed each month, which has been raised on multiple occasions)I've chosen to purchase inexpensive (<$100) Android phones, although I did have a work iPhone while living in Arizona. The first was a ZTE which I found one day refused to accept my password. My carrier noted the phone was no longer under warranty and I bought a low-end phone from a prominent Android phone vendor. All was going well (although I was on a terminal supported release of Android 6) until a freakish accident on my recent Texas vacation where my holster, not water-resistant, fell into a small puddle of water. Although little water actually came into contact with the phone, enough damage occurred to impact charging capabilities (at some points plugged in, power usage outstripping charging) and others couldn't hear me on calls, although I could hear them. Now I have a Google Voice number and can easily make a call over the Internet at home, plus I can alternately use my Google and Amazon devices, but it doesn't deal with the issue I originally experienced in California; people will hang up if they don't hear the other party.
So I reluctantly put down nearly $100 for a new Android (same manufacturer) with double the 16GB memory and an Android 9 operating system. I redeployed my 256 GB SD card from my old phone which was easier said than done; on the old phone, you had to pry off the back shell, and there was an SD slot just above the battery. I had found it exasperating trying to seat the tiny SD card into the slot. The new phone has a hidden tray in the upper left edge which you need to release with (say) the tip of a paperclip; the tray has slots for the SIM card and an SD card. I found the settings fragile with the SIM card (enabling calls on the phone network) constantly popping out but eventually I was able to close the tray into the phone, and both cards were functional. The actual phone came from my provider in a plain white box with literally no instructions of any kind, even activation or a diagram of controls: simply a phone, a USB cable, a wall/USB plug, and a paperclip-like tool.
Among other things, I discovered the standard USB micro cable was incompatible with this phone (as a DBA I am obsessed with redundancy and backups), so I quickly found and ordered a 3-pack from Amazon for less than $10. I also purchased a close-fitting shock-resistant case and was trying to figure out how to release the phone when I ran across a Youtube clip which showed someone using a credit card along the edge of the rubber seal on the right side of the phone.
One of the new features is support for face recognition. I have used biometric interfaces for years. As a Lockheed employee working in downtown Chicago in the latter 1990's, I had to use a hand-recognition device to enter the company floor office suite. It would routinely fail in a disproportionate number of instances, so I often had to call for assistance. Then a few years back I had to use an iris-scan device to enter a federal building in a West Virginia town. It would occasionally fail and there was usually someone in security I could reach over intercom. For multiple jobs, I've also had to use password tokens which would rotate every few seconds.
I hold CompTia Security+ certification. One of the concepts we discuss is multi-factor authentication, which includes different methods to verify your access, say something you know (e.g., a password), something you own/hold (e.g., a card or device like a phone), or something you are (e.g., your fingerprint, voice pattern, eye identification, or face recognition). As someone who has researched human factors in information systems, I have long been interested in certain "natural" interfaces vs having to memorize a large number of rotated unique complex passwords, combinations of digits, lower-case, upper-case and special characters.
So one of the interesting features of my new cell phone is the use of face recognition to exit sleep mode and use the phone. (It also includes a custom multi-digit PIN bypass, thank God.) I had a lot of trouble the first time I registered my face, so I re-registered my face with much better results. I estimate it works two-thirds of the time, which may improve over time. It is exasperating when I see "no match"; it happened while I was writing this segment but when I re-swiped, it instantly recognized me the second time, so it may have something to do with the way my face was oriented towards the camera.
A Long-Suffering Viking Fan Wants to Savor the Moment
I have posted multiple times how I became a Minnesota Twins fan almost 20 years before I ever set foot in the state as an MIS professor visiting Minneapolis to attend an international academic conference. I didn't really register for Little League until my 8-year-old brother (almost 3 years younger) did while our maternal grandfather visited; I didn't want to be upstaged by my little brother. I was assigned to the hapless 1-19 Twins (imagine the humiliation of the team which lost to us), mostly (as a southpaw) playing the outfield. I mostly remember stealing third base in a game. The third base spike wasn't properly seated in the ground and my right ankle made contact with the spike coming in at full speed. My ankle swelled like crazy, and I had to leave the game. My little brother was selected for the champion Yankees. (I still tease him about it because he was born near the heart of Red Sox Nation.)So one game some 8-year-old punk started taunting me about having a girlfriend, not true; even though I had 3 little sisters (soon thereafter 4), this was the ultimate insult; I was still at the "girls have cooties" stage of boyhood. So I playfully grabbed him by the collar and told him that he had better cut it out. At which point the coach grabbed me by the collar, threw me out of the dugout, and told me to go home. Now it turned out we were playing the Yankees, so instead of going home, I went up into the stands, still in uniform, and rooted for my brother. My coach spotted me up in the stands and immediately kicked me off the team.
What's worse was I was ruled ineligible to attend the end-of-season fried chicken banquet featuring Sumter favorite son Bobby Richardson, former Yankee second baseman, as speaker. My former coach refused to waive my exclusion. This was heartbreaking; my parents tried to plead my case to no avail. To this day, I consider my former coach an asshole.
I soon discovered there was a real Twins major league team and, in some weird love/hate quirk, became obsessed with them. I would volunteer to go buy a daily newspaper for Dad, so I could check out the last day's games. I quickly latched onto Harmon Killebrew, the Hall of Fame slugger, as a role model and adopted his batting stance. Soon thereafter, the American League reorganized into divisions, and the Twins won some of those crowns but failed to advance to the World Series until the 1980's and 1990's, winning two 7-game World Series.
I really didn't follow pro football until high school, and I soon discovered Minnesota also had a pro football team, the Vikings. I transferred my allegiance and quickly suffered through the first of 4 Super Bowl losses, which may be the worst record in Super Bowl history.
Ironically, when I checked into the Minneapolis hotel for that conference, Viking cheerleaders were there making an appearance. I was living a male football fan's dream.
The Vikings have continued to disappoint long-suffering fans since their last Super Bowl loss; I still recall them blowing a fourth-quarter lead, missing an easy field goal and losing in overtime on a field goal kick by Atlanta (1998).
So I didn't have high hopes for this year's team, especially after losing to divisional rivals (Green Bay and Chicago) to close out the regular season and playing the heavily favored New Orleans Saints on the road. Ironically I joined the game late in the third quarter, with the Vikes holding a surprising 20-10 lead, despite former Redskins' QB Cousins having a reputation of being unable to win a big game. I then see the Saints rally to tie the game late in the fourth quarter. I thought to myself, "Damn! Here we go again!" But this time Cousins completes a long pass to put the Vikes first and goal about 3 yards from the end zone. Cousins eventually throws a short touchdown pass to win the game.
Let's be clear: the 49ers had a 3-game better record during the regular season and are the heavy favorites to win at home later today. But let me savor last week's underdog victory just a little while longer.
Incidentally, I just learned from the same middle brother that his daughter became a Viking fan when he moved to Minnesota while working for Exxon/Mobil as a chemical engineer.
TV Scheduling Back to Usual
Hallmark maintained its Countdown to Christmas through last weekend. On Movies & Mysteries it ended with a newer cable movie marathon. It is continuing last year's scheduling of a holiday movie late week (Thursday evening on Movies and Mysteries, Friday at 10 PM EST on Hallmark Channel). I think Hallmark is continuing to run cable movies daily from 2 PM to late evening, I think midnight this year, plus booking movies overnight on weekends, which I prefer over their dated sitcom lineups.I've started to watch a backlog of content on Amazon Prime/Video. Easier said than done. I have a cheap flat TV I bought for about $130 at a Walmart in Arizona, mostly because Time Warner, my cable provider at the time, no longer supported coaxial cable connections to my cheap portable color TV. (I have a mixed record on embracing new technology. I bought one of the first VCR's on the market, but I lagged adoption of CD's vs. vinyl, PC's vs my Commodore 64 for grad school papers (I did write my dissertation on a PC in a faculty lab using Samna), and cellphones/smartphones as described above. There were various reasons, including budget constraints and a large LP collection. I can still recall buying my first PC clone, a desktop that cost nearly $3000. A few years back I bought a much more powerful backup desktop PC (minus monitor) I think for about 10% of that. )
So I was watching TV a few weeks back and experienced some weird crap, like volume on the TV creeping to maximum on its own, totally unresponsive to controls, and input selection on my TV remote suddenly going crazy, cycling through modes quickly. I wasn't sure if one of my remotes was stuck, if the TV or devices were malfunctioning or what. Among other things initially I disconnected my Chromecast and Amazon Fire stick, rebooted things, and eventually the volume was controllable by my cable remote. Maybe the TV couldn't handle multiple HDMI devices, e.g., power loads, maybe one of the ports was dysfunctional, maybe one or both of my smart devices were failing? Who knows... I kept the devices offline, took batteries out of my TV remote.
In the interim, I've misplaced my Fire stick remote, and it seems like Amazon wants to charge about what was the cost of my original Fire stick to replace it. I tried reconnecting the devices and using my TV remote again and noticed I ran into the TV cycling anomaly when I last added my Chromecast, which I quickly disconnected. I then ran into the creeping volume increase problem, which I corrected by reseeding the cable TV HDMI connection. I later shifted the TV to the second HDMI port and was able to connect the Chromecast to the third HDMI port with seeming success, although I haven't cast anything yet from my Chrome browser. So I haven't tried to reconnect my Fire stick, especially given the misplaced remote.
So how do I see my Amazon content? Well, of course, any of my 5 PC's, plus my Chromebook, can probably play it, but I recalled seeing my cable provider somewhere saying it hosted Amazon Prime Video content (you have to register the device with your Amazon account). The discussion was somewhat opaque about how to access Amazon content via the remote, and I really hadn't played with voice remote features of my cable remote but discovered I could get there by speaking "Amazon Prime" pressing down on the microphone button and discovered I could manipulate the Amazon menus using mid-remote direction controls.
So far I've watched a couple of movies and started watching the Jack Ryan series. One of the movies I watched was a heartbreaking powerful Amazon documentary on China's horrific one-child policy; hearing about women subjected to forced abortion, Chinese women parroting Communist propaganda talking points justifying child genocide, an aging population with a shortage of young people to support them, millions of Chinese men unable to find eligible women (because of male baby preferences for the one-child quota), etc.
