You can certainly get accustomed to your technology. When it fails, your day can go downhill fast. That was my experience when my deal with the Devil, otherwise known as a subscription to the Musky StarLink Satellite Connectivity Godsend. When it’s good, it’s our link to the world. When it’s bad, wow, you feel disconnected!
Where’s my dang Internet?
StarLink went down in the middle of my work day. It did not help that my backup plan, connecting to my phone hotspot, was unavailable. AT&T was displaying SOS. Yup. The phone was out of commission, too. I was hosed.
Just waiting for the vultures to start circling my dead connectivity.
It’s hard to tell your coworkers why you’re not at meetings when your only option is to send them a letter, ya know? But, it’s not common and the system is mostly reliable. Still, Lee and I both have had fleeting thoughts about what would happen if someone attacked the satellites we rely on. Back to the olden days? Eek.
I do still write things by hand, like my bullet journal.
Anyway, StarLink came back. And I went out and rode my horse in the intense heat and sweated all that paranoia off!
Tarot card of the day
Man, this new practice of drawing a card a day after many years without it is very different. The thing that’s taking some getting used to is how darned encouraging the cards are so far. Today? 9 of Pentacles.
Look at that happy lady.
This card is about having all you need (in material things) and feeling content. That’s exactly how I’ve been feeling with regard to my physical situation these days. I can’t imagine having a more pleasant and supportive setup in my life, designed to keep me mentally healthy and stable no matter what else is going on.
The 9 of Pentacles reminds me of how kind my family has been to provide this safe haven at the Hermits’ Rest. I have my animals, my pool, the porch, my books, and all that yarn. Material things aren’t necessary, but for some of us they provide comfort, security, and stability when everything around us is unstable.
It’s real. It’s a problem. The solution requires hard choices. Yes, if you need reliable high-speed internet and you don’t live near a major metropolitan area, your options are very limited.
We live near horses, not houses.
It sounds so lovely to work from home at your lakeside cabin, your mountain retreat, or your horse farm in a sparsely populated area tantalizingly close to “real” towns (me). But when you’re watching that little ball go around and around while you’re trying to do a demo, or your download says it will take 36 hours, the romance fades.
Well at least that would take a while. image from Pexels.
It’s a choice to live here, and we knew it would not be easy. We’ve had some good years—I had a wired option from AT&T that worked fine until it broke and I was informed they no longer sold them. Using hotspots was okay, but Zoom ate up our allotted bandwidth very quickly.
So I got this satellite setup from Viasat. It does work, unless it’s raining. But it, too, had limits and would slow to a crawl. Honest. All I do is 2-3 hours of meetings everyday; otherwise not heavy use. We didn’t even dare stream television, to save the fast speeds for work.
For that reason, we had DirectTV satellite television. I’m not going to go over that fiasco again. After waiting weeks to get it fixed, it stopped working. Then the dish fell down. It’s canceled as of last week.
Actual dead dish.
We started streaming for television when I found an unlimited plan on Viasat. All was well other than the slowdowns. They were infuriating. And this stuff isn’t cheap. And we checked all possible systems, but we have a hill nearby and it blocked the solution most folks I know use. Sigh. Much time has been spent on research, which I don’t particularly enjoy.
Spiders build webs faster than I can download a PowerPoint deck.
There was one final option. We just didn’t want to do it. For one thing, it started out very expensive. For another, we are not fond of the owner of the company that provided this really good service we can even take camping with us.
This is it.
It’s a dilemma! StarLink works. It’s less expensive now. Everyone I know who has it loves it. But. But. I’ve NEVER been a fan of Elon Musk. I didn’t like him years before he became the next US President’s puppet master. And one of the few ways you can show your disapproval of the practices of corporations is to not buy their stuff. (There are some companies whose treatment of LGBTIA people or religious discrimination means they do not get my dollars.)
Lee finally made the decision to get the StarLink system. We will cut a lot of expenses, even with streaming subscriptions. And we can have entertainment while traveling when there’s bad weather and we don’t want to be outside.
And the sun sets on that decision.
But I’m torn, ethically. This is one of those times where there’s no “best” thing to do. We will have to deal with the bad karma we’re generating, I guess!
See, I knew things would turn around if I was patient. Today was a normal day with plusses and minuses, but the positive things have helped me feel on a more even keel. When I’m more centered, challenges are easier to handle. You betcha.
I had a bloomin’ productive day
First off, I needed to go check on Apache’s eye. Of course the horses were as far across the pasture as they could get, but that got me more exercise. Win! (Also hooray that I finally have energy after the Covid slump.)
Of course we’re far away. It’s where the burs are.
I was happy to see the eye looking so much better. Drew was happy that I set the fly mask down so he could mess with it while I wiped Apache’s eye. That boy is so full of mischief and fun.
Better. I cleaned it. Where did you hide that fly mask?
It was a good start to the day to hug all the horse buddies, Then I listened to birds, as usual. And worked. (Why am I telling you my whole day? To show it was so much better.)
Dusty is a good listener. He’d read about my whole day if he could.
Then came a miracle! Someone finally came to fix the Direct TV antenna/dish thing! He was nice, competent, and fun. Lee even liked him. This came just in time, since I was totally out of bandwidth on my satellite internet, which kills streaming.
I have to be able to watch my precious football. It’s my not-so-secret vice.
The “fun” continued and I made vet phone calls. We’re working with Dr Brinlee on adjusting Apache’s medication. It is on the right track. And I called Goldie’s vet to straighten out the bill, which I did with no yelling. Hooray again.
Look at my long leg! It’s getting strong.
Lunch was a nice break after phone calls. I’m the head phone caller in the house and I sure am weary of it these days. Anyway, friends and taco salad were a great respite.
An AI image of a happy taco salad
Back at home I enjoyed a welcome sight. I went out to the front porch and all the dogs came out with me. Yes, even Goldie. She’s getting the hang of smooth upward and downward transitions. She needs a lot of petting, but she is healing well physically.
Penney had run to the fenceAll the house dogs!
She even went out and watched as Seneca the motorhome got worked on. It’s heartwarming to see her hanging out with her best buddy.
Supervising under the RV shelter.
More on Seneca tomorrow. We get to go camping again this weekend! All animal medications are under control, we think. Things should be fine.
Ooh! Final good thing. I looked on the Viasat page where I’d had to buy more high-speed data, and lo and behold, there was now an unlimited plan I could use. It’s only $20/month more. I snapped that up immediately and now I can get my work done. It was painfully slow this morning. I’m sure glad I checked to see if I had options. I feel a little less clueless about all these modern necessities at the moment, with the phones, the television, and the internet connectivity all fixed. I did it all myself!
Ooh. My best AI picture yet. It’s internet connectivity!
Next: jury duty, vaccinations, and getting the car serviced. It’s always something.
I was going to say something silly about this question, then I thought about how many friendships and connections I’ve made since I got online back in the olden days of the 1980s. So, thanks, Al Gore, for inventing the internet. (I was at the University of Illinois at the right time, so I do sorta know how it all really went down.) Yes, the internet was important to me, the good and bad aspects!
Still, the parts of my life that are in person are much of what’s made my life good. I’m feeling a little better about my living, breathing horse buddies today. Apache and Drew must be exhausted from all their adventures the last few days. And to top it off, I wormed them! (Well, Tarrin wormed Droodles, because I was worried he’d chomp on me.)
Don’t get near my head!
So, today was supposed to be a one-horse lesson with Lee driving, since Sara is unavailable. Instead I loaded both my dysfunctional steeds in the trailer to see what could be done with them.
Drew started the day not letting me groom him, so that saved some time. When Tarrin looked at him, his neck was better, but his poll (top of head) was a mess. She spent a long time working on it, then his legs. His whole spine must hurt, which is why I couldn’t brush his tail. Tarrin’s convinced he hurt himself and pulled a lot of muscles, plus may have been kicked on his side. I think that’s likely, from observation.
Once she did all that, he did all kinds of yawning and releasing, like his did after his trim yesterday. And when she was leading him to the lesson area, he kept rubbing his nose along the ground.
He did okay doing some ground work, so maybe he’s feeling better. My job is to exercise him first, then try to groom him. I have ways to stop him from biting, too, so we’re hoping he will heal.
Apache is a happier story. The fancy boots seem to have done the trick, and he was able to do ground work just fine. We may get to ride in Friday. I’m so relieved. It’s hard with both horses being broken.
I’m too sexy for my shoes.
Apache is also taking his medication well now, and was easy to worm. And the best news? He’s starting to shed! Maybe he’ll be more comfortable soon!
That’s enough blah blah about horses. I really should start writing in my horse journal again so I don’t fill the blog with all horses all the time. Here’s a bird. It was trying to escape.
Greetings from the Polar Vortex where it finally got cold, even way down here in Texas.
We’ve been busy keeping ourselves and the dogs warm
Today’s question is harder than it seems. It forces me to admit something that kind of makes me sad: I’m no longer an internet pioneer. Y’all, I’m even in a couple of books for being an early feminist voice on the ‘net. I made websites before color monitors existed. I had email way before most people did, thanks to being at the University of Illinois.
I helped make online communities before Facebook. So what? Yep. That’s the past. Zzz.
I no longer keep up with things. Twitter bored me, I have to admit. I also don’t enjoy watching videos for very long (amusing since I create them every day at work). So I’m not on YouTube for hours. And I cannot tell you how annoying and boring I find Tik Tok and Reels and social media influencers.
Please enjoy them and tell me about it, though. I am fine experiencing those things second hand.
So. Boring senior citizen Suna communicates online mainly in Facebook and communities there, and by reading and writing blogs.
I text friends and family a lot, and enjoy my text groups with them. Certainly I’m up on Cameron news thanks to that! I also really enjoy online Zoom meetings that started in the pandemic but are now just nice ways to keep in touch with people I used to email a lot. I feel so close to friends all over the place!
Email is there still, but mostly for work or nonprofit stuff. The few email lists I’m still on don’t get much of my attention these days, because I run out of time.
For what it’s worth, that’s that. I enjoy the online communities as much as the in-person ones, though. I like blog comments and interacting with readers, a lot. So thanks to you commenters and silent readers. You know who you are!
It’s too cold to have a daily bird, though I did enjoy looking at puffy sparrows today. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow. I know the chickens are enjoying their heat lamps and the horses appreciate the new shelter. I tested both of them out today!
Thanks.
Our heater is still working, so us humans are coping well with 19° F weather. The heat pump unit got wrapped in insulation, so it’s not failing when it got into the 20s like it used to. We are getting stuff figured out, thanks to the brain power of the ranch commune.
The far left square is today. That’s the coldest day I’ve recorded!
It may snow tomorrow! I bet I take pictures. What do you think?
This will be short, in grumpy old woman mode. Heck yeah I remember life before the Internet! I voted before Al Gore invented it! I didn’t get a computer until I was in graduate school. It had two floppy disk drives. I got email the next year. No wonder I have such good handwriting. I took so many notes.
I wrote with one of these things!! Actually I still do.
And I typed long, annoying reports on an IBM Selectric typewriter. It had correction tape! Modern! Try doing footnotes with one. I did.
It belonged to my lucky boyfriend.
I even typed an entire book on the Basque language, being paid per page, using three different type balls.
I had so many of these. They typed.
I’m oh, so glad for the Internet, for word processing software, and social media. It’s a privilege we shouldn’t take advantage.
Last week when Sandy the Squirrel accidentally set off the transformer across the road, my fancy wired router bit the dust. Since then, I’ve been trying to get it fixed, replaced with a new one, or replaced by some other thing. It’s been gruesome.
My old antenna receiver has nothing to talk to now.
I have spent over 8 hours on the phone or online chat with various AT&T entities. Today was “only” two hours trying to figure out why I couldn’t get the new hotspot they sent to replace my fancy router to connect to the internet. I got passed from chat to chat. Finally they said they’d call me in 10-20 minutes. Um. They still haven’t called.
No one wanted to help my new hotspot.
I thought to myself, “Suna, you went online and on the phone to avoid driving to Temple. You could have driven back and forth many times by now.”
I thought of bringing my mouse catcher with me to wave around. I didn’t.
I stuffed all my equipment in grocery bags and hauled the Angry Snow Kitty to the AT&T Store. I took my knitting, expecting to wait a while.
By now I felt like this guy. Close to deceased.
Thankfully, they weren’t too crowded and I got a competent young man named Quincey to help me. After much trial and error, with consultation from the head tech guy, they figured out the hotspot was not configured correctly. They had to completely reset it. I was assured I couldn’t have fixed it myself.
My feelings about Quincey.
Triumph! Then, young Quincey showed me I hadn’t cracked my phone screen recently, it was just the screen protector. AND rather than trying to sell me a new one, he looked up which one I’d bought and walked me through getting it replaced under warranty! I just paid shipping. He’d done the same thing recently. How helpful!
My faith in customer service is restored. Both the guys who helped me said to just drive over there next time. I said I sure would. I have always had good experiences with this store. I’ll remember that. Online support? Nope.
Long day. Got a lot done and even received my new internet thingie. Can’t make it go, so more tech support tomorrow. Think of me.
I’m as stubborn as these persistent tie vines, though. I’ll get there.
By the time I got to an event I’d been looking forward to, a party for our recent Master Naturalist class graduates, I had a raging headache. Turns out the weather was changing. But the food was good and I enjoyed talking to friends.
Good job, Barbara D. It was delicious.
After all the serious photos I took, we got goofy with the paper flower decorations.
Yes, there’s an invisible hand behind my head. Mostly invisible. Elegant!Ok, I was goofy. Pamela looks nice.
When I got home, Lee proved he was just as goofy as us. We all needed a good laugh!
Well, we dodged the worst hail from tonight’s storm and haven’t lost power. That’s probably because Martha isn’t across the street. Lightning DID hit the transformer across the road from her, though. Is Martha and lightning equal to Kathleen and snakes? let’s hope it’s coincidence.
It’s good to be home after a fun few days. Many family members were glad to see me and Lee.
Other residents were not so glad.
Excuse me. Why are you barging into our baby bird and poop production area?
Horses were also glad, and I was relieved to find Apache semi-clean after big rain. Drew, on the other hand, has mud dreadlocks that I’ll wait until tomorrow to fix. They at least got their exercise and food.
It rained a lot. You can see how high the water got. Our backup culvert got used for the first time in over a year.
Luckily, the ranch didn’t get struck by lightning or hailed on. Just rain. I guess if lightning struck, it couldn’t break my internet access any more than it already is. Sigh.
Good news: black-eyed susans are in bloom.
I came home with a big to-do list, most of it involving accessing websites. I had four or five Master Naturalist blogs, two horse shows to register for, weather data to look up, etc. Too bad for me. I believe I’ve used up my personal hotspot bandwidth. I got one short Master Naturalist blog up after 45 minutes.
And every flower seems to have its own lynx spider!
The to-do list did contain some non-internet tasks, so I got them all done. At least I have rainbow nails ready for the work week, which I guess will start off at the Red House, until I get that router fixed.
Today’s post is prompted by the happy coincidence that I found my very first volunteer nametag while unpacking a box today. It’s from way back in 1994 or 1995, when I was still living in Champaign, Illinois. Before THAT, I’d been an active member in the Champaign-Urbana Computer Users Group, where I met a whole bunch of wonderful nerdy people, including my PC mentor and close friend, Mark Zinzow, and the eventually famous eccentric genius Michael Hart, who was working on Project Gutenberg even back in the late 1980s. (I regret not having time to contribute back then.)
My name tag!
I did that, because I’d been the de facto PC tech person in every job I’d had since I got my first IBM PC (with two, count-em, two! floppy disk drives) to write my dissertation on, and I needed helpers! Yes, I actually knew how everything worked, back in those simpler days and times.
Time passed and I got a fine job working at Wolfram Research as a technical writer (career score #1) (where I got to work with my second eccentric genius friend, Stephen Wolfram). I stayed friends with the PCUG folks, though, hung out on Usenet to learn more. A few years later, after I’d left Wolfran Research to raise my two sons, I saw an ad for classes on the World Wide Web and websites, which was hosted by Prairienet, a community internet kind of deal where many of my old friends were volunteering. The kids’ dad said maybe this newfangled web thing would be a way to keep my tech skills up while raising the kids. I agreed.
I took a class from a wonderful woman named Karen Fletcher, and suddenly I knew enough about HTML to teach classes myself. This was my first technical training experience (career score #2). Karen was a wonderful friend, even keeping me in touch with horses way back then thanks to her partner who was a horse trainer. She was also a Master Gardener, so we hung around with similar folks.
So, while my kids were little and I was learning about breastfeeding from La Leche League (not linking to them), I was also learning about websites from Greg Newby, Karen, Mark, and others over at Prairienet. And hey, here’s a fact I love to share: the first website I ever made was for my LLL group. It didn’t have any images, though. Why? It was before you could put images in! Everything was text! We were lucky we had bold and italic to spice things up. And lots of asterisks.
Bad image, but my copy is in a box.
One of the friends I met in Prairienet was also a coworker, Bruce Pea. What a nice guy. He got it into his head to write a user manual for Prairienet, since he was all techy and understood how it worked. However, he was not a writer by trade, so I stepped in to copy edit that 1995 book, The Prairienet Companion. I can assure you it was a lot easier than copy-editing the Mathematica Book (second edition), which I had also been working on.
This book contained 95% fewer occurrences than the first draft contained. Thank you, past me.
I turned around and one day there I was, a technical writer and trainer specializing in software documentation and training who also built user communities. Careers are weird! It’s mostly luck and coincidence for me, not a path I was driven toward. But I sure had fun between 1985-1995 learning my webmastering chops!
Another fact: I am still friends with Connor Kelly, the first person to ever find out about a La Leche League meeting online. That’s career score #3, because I swiftly combined what I learned on Prairienet with what I was doing in La Leche League, and in just a year or two was on the real internet, making the website of the whole LLL organization (and many others on the side). That led to volunteer-organizational fame, no fortune, and a lot of drama. And in LLL I helped create a user community, like a baby Facebook that failed due to drama and infighting but looked good enough on a resume to keep.
Hmm. I think I just wrote my biography in a half hour. I can’t believe I dredged up all these memories of myself and the internet as we grew up together. I bet my own spouse hadn’t heard so much about what I did during the decade I just summarized. I’m glad I found that little pin.
The Hermits' Rest 