There is no question that the current drop in temperatures has me thinking about a severe winter. Part of my downsizing effort had me looking through my closets for stuff to eliminate. There hanging by its lonesome was my winter coat. It is a down jacket that has served me well and is lacking a zipper pull. I fixed it by threading an oversized paper clip through the eye. It works fine, it keeps me warm, but I’m thinking I could use a nicer coat. Then I wondered how many people there are out there like me who are looking to eliminate a coat from the wardrobe? Probably a few more. Then it occurred to me that I am a Lion. Collecting and distributing used winter coats would make a great service project for the club.
I’ll make a presentation this evening to my board of directors and see how it flies. As part of my research I went to the internet and searched for coat collections. WOW! Lots of people are doing it, and that signals a genuine need. That is, there must be a bunch of homeless or needy people who can use some warmth.
So what do I do when we get a bunch of coats collected and now we have to do something with them. The internet offers multiple organizations that will accept gently used coats. I wasn’t surprised to see that The Burlington Coat Factory was amongst them. Most likely our club will donate them to a local organization called Together We Cope, or the Salvation Army, or the neighboring VFW that is collecting coats for veterans.
We can also accept cash donations towards the purchase of coats for anyone we find in need. Since we service up to twenty-eight families with holiday food they might also be needing some warm coats.
The trick is to let the public know what we are doing and to ask them to help with donations. Spreading the word to friends and neighbors via email or on Facebook should be easy enough even for guys like me.
Probably the toughest thing to do is to get a very large box (gaylord) to place coats into.
The latest e-book I am reading is The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle. Yes, he also wrote stories with Sherlock Holmes. It is an old story published in 1912, but because of a modern day movie called Jurrasic Park it seems familiar. If you ask me, Steven Spielberg stole the entire plot for his film from this book. All he did was to make the creatures come to life for the movie. Don’t get me wrong Spielberg’s accomplishments in showing us stories with realistic animatronics and green screen techniques is nothing to scoff at. His genius has made him a multi-millionaire if not a billionaire.
What impresses me about this story is the writing. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle does a masterful job of creating images with words. I find myself on the edge of my seat wriggling with anticipation as the story unfolds and the plot becomes filled with action, suspense, and excitement. The writing of many of the old books I read during this COVID season were stodgy and stiff and lost me in proper English grammar and phraseology of the nineteenth century. Lost World hasn’t done that to me. Since I have not completed the book I cannot comment on the ending, I still don’t know what it is.
One problem I am having at this moment is a lap-top battery that is dying. When the battery suddenly comes to the end of its power, the screen goes black and all reading, writing, or computing is finished. At least with a hard copy book, and a simple book mark, one can resume reading almost instantly. All I do is pick up the book, (i.e. after finding it) and open to the mark. On the computer, one has to wait until the battery is recharged then boot the machine before reading may commence. As long as there are old people alive the need for hard copy books will thrive.
Since the boomers are all aging they too will learn the simple joys of holding a book and flipping pages. That is so much simpler than swiping the touch pad with two fingers, only to learn that the curser has gone to sleep or is not on the book page and needs to be found before the swipe thing works. I forget though that evolution will cause boomers to grow a phone out of their palm and an extra thumb on each hand to facilitate texting.
I’ve been with WordPress and this BLOG for over twelve years, but I have to proclaim that WordPress can use some help. Two days ago I wrote what I believed was a pretty eloquent post covering a number of issues blended into a movie review. I was in the process of adding images and media to enhance the words. I hit the publish button and nothing happened. I realized that the post was frozen. Nothing I did would make it move in any direction. I saw a proclamation that read something to the effect that I had a more current back up. Without thinking about it, my bad, I hit the button for the backup. I got about in fourth of the piece from the backup.WTF? That is not my idea of a back up. A back up means you get your most recent post back in its entirety. I tried multiple ways to recover, but realized too late that I was fucked. I lost a great post. I’ve been stewing about for two days, but it won’t change a thing. WordPress is continuously trying to improve the experience but only succeeds in messing things up. I would be very happy using the original program of ten years ago. After all it’ s only a bit of trying and repetition that makes it happen.
I have never tried any other blogging program, but now I am open to exploring what else is out in the world. Every time WP tries something new it is to please the younger crowd that thinks from their seat. Of course the younger crowd has been kept from the world of logic and common sense. They all think like their phones, and therefore, so must the rest of us cater to the whims of Apple and Samsung. The result is a bunch of change that fails often, and causes an old guy like me to have apoplexy about it.
I have patiently endured the many changes WP has made and have tried their new editors, but I find that I like the old systems best. Once learned they make sense and when something makes sense it become easy to use. God forbid the younger set learn anything about making sense.
WP has made some things easier and more intuitive to use, such as the method for adding media into a blog post. Their latest systems are immensely easier to use, and I like them. What I don’t like is the tendency of the post to freeze and require shutting down in the middle of things to get things rolling again. That is not a normal thing, and it is a bug that must be corrected. Every time I been trouble shooting a problem like this I learn that I am not the only one having the issue. That is a problem for Word Press.
Recently, I detected a problem with my video streaming service (Comcast) and lost hours trying to make the damned program work. All the time thinking is was me in my old age not understanding how to do these new fangled things. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it is not me it is the vendor of the service. That pisses me off. I spent a good part of my life fixing products that were expected to work but didn’t. I know how frustrating that can be for the developer, but dam it, that is not an excuse. Get off you asses and fix the problem. I finally extracted a fix-it commitment from Comcast on the issue of their lousy streaming service. They have passed the date they predicted, and I am still having issues. Less than before, but the problem is still lurking in their software and comes up often. My fix is to pull the plug and do a hard reset. Usually that fixes the problem for awhile. Funny, I never read that in the owners manual that I should pull the plug and reboot to fix a problem three times a night.
The problem with all of these companies providing all these wonderful services is that they are so successful that they write off the few customers who have problems. If my boss had ever caught me writing off a problem because it was too small to worry about, I would have been applying for unemployment. Eventually, companies will begin losing money to their competition and wake up to the fact that it is their fault that it is happening. In the meantime, poor Joe the customer wastes his precious minutes of remaining life trying to resolve an issue that cannot be resolved. Joe has to learn how to click the “off” button to fix the problem and substitute reading books instead.
