Weekend Assignment #325: Tech-Savvy? Sort Of

Ack! As busy as I've been the past week, I've only got an hour left to answer my own question for
Weekend Assignment #325: Tech-Savvy!

Weekend Assignment #323: Tech Savvy

When you bring home some new piece of technology, do you usually get it up and running with pleasant anticipation and calm confidence, or is there more likely to be much swearing, wailing and gnashing of teeth? What's the most trouble you've had with a new computer, tv, phone or related tech gadget?

Extra Credit: Who do you call in to help, if you get stuck?

I never got the hang of using this phone in my First Magnus days.

I'm generally pretty good with tech stuff, particularly computers. I always get my new computers up and running myself, and am often asked by friends for computer advice. I also figure out my new phone or new digital camera - well, enough to use it, anyway. I've never, ever used a phone for web stuff, and still fumble to change settings on my camera.

Where I really fall apart is on office phone systems, and to a lesser extent with modem and router problems when they crop up.  I worked for Worldwide Travel for twelve years, and when I left I was still physically walking into the other room to tell people something was holding for them on line 3. I struggled with Cisco phones at First Magnus and Beaudry, and at St Michael's I don't even know how to answer the phone until someone else has answered it and put it on hold for me. No, really. the extension in my office is a little weird, and sometimes there's call forwarding on, and, well, it's all too much for me, with no real incentive to learn this.

And oh, boy, that business with S. last week!  Late on Tuesday afternoon, I picked up her cable box and swapped it for a new one at the Cox Communications store, because there was a price break (less than current charges) for doing so. When I came out, my car was spurting coolant all over the parking lot. Oh, yeah, I'm lousy at automotive technology, too. So I drove straight to my mechanic, who was about to close up. He very nicely drove me and S.'s Cox equipment home. To me home, that is. S., who has pretty much nothing in her life except tv, had to do without it overnight.

Wednesday it took all day to get my car back, so I didn't get to S.'s place with the cable box until about 4:30 PM. I spent the next five hours trying to get the following components to talk to each other (as applicable):

• S's old, non-HD Samsung television, with no remote and broken control buttons on the front
• the new Cox box with HD and DVR capabilities
• the cable feed coming in through the wall
• a cable splitter
• a new cable modem
• a new laptop

The big problem, aside from the Cox self-installation kit being missing the equipment diagram sheet, was S's tv, which was stuck on some less-than-ideal setting, and consequently didn't want to listen to any remote that might otherwise be programmed to control it. After a Cox tech support person and I tried every code on the Cox remote without success, I had to go out and buy a different universal remote. I tried every Samsung code on that, too. None of them operated the channel buttons, but one did manager to get it off its "I'm not listening, la-la-la" setting. On the third call to Cox, after half an hour of arguing with the automated computerized troubleshooter, I got a different tech support guy who had me try a slightly different procedure for programming the Cox remote. Success! He then cleared up the issue with the cable modem, and we were up and running at last. Hooray!

When I get stuck, I try to call the appropriate tech support person, or solve it online. But some tech setup at home falls in John's ball court. He always manages it eventually, including tricky stuff like setting up routers with passcodes and stuff. But it's always stressful for him. At such times, I try to stay out of his way!

Oh, and tonight? This entry was delayed when Blogger decided, wrongly, that Firefox didn't have Java or cookies enabled. I had to reboot twice to get Firefox to load properly.

Karen

EMPS: Welcome to Tucson, Carly!

No, Carly isn't actually here, and at this time of year that's probably wise.  But for Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #96: Your World And Welcome To It!, she wants to see where we would take her for a photo shoot if she were to venture outside her beloved Bay Area. I didn't have time this week to get out to any place especially scenic, but I have lots of shots from past jaunts, many of which I haven't posted on this blog before. Let's see what we can find, shall we?



We're at the worst time of the year, weatherwise. Tucson is well over 100 degrees every day and the humidity is climbing; but the monsoon hasn't actually arrived yet to clear the air with frequent afternoon thunderstorms. I love photographing the clouds and the flash flooding of the monsoon. John and I both enjoy "dramatic weather," and I enjoy the picture-taking possibilities. Here's a shot from June 28th in the late afternoon. We had a nice build-up of clouds, and I began to hope the monsoon was imminent. But nothing much came of it.



On June 2nd, 2010 I spent the very early afternoon at Tucson Botanical Gardens. I'm sure Carly would love the place, for different reasons than mine. Here is a traditional Mexican style garden, one of many themed mini-gardens on the grounds of this local treasure.



My most recent trip up to Mount Lemmon's Babad Do'ag Vista was on May 31st around noon, in search of saguaro blossoms. Mount Lemmon Highway would be an absolute must-see during a visit by Carly.



A few weeks before that, on May 6th, I got a little further up the mountain, chasing the sunrise. Morning or afternoon, it's a great place to visit.



On May 21st I made a quick dash down I-19 to Mission San Xavier del Bac, arriving no more than 15 minutes before they closed the mission's museum at 5 PM. A visit from Carly (or anyone else) would be a great excuse to go down there again, and take many more interior and exterior photos of this historic mission.

And that's just an overview of some of the scenic places I've visited over the past two months! We could easily go to the top of Mount Lemmon, or hike Sabino Canyon. We would certainly visit the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, home to live desert critters from mountain lions to hummingbirds; and Old Tucson, where Rio Bravo and many other westerns were filmed. For real-life historical sites, there's Fort Lowell and Agua Caliente Springs Park, or we can drive out into Agra Valley to look for petroglyphs. We can even go to the Center for Creative Photography, and check out their Ansel Adams collection. Some day, Carly, when we both have time and money, you ARE going to visit me at some pleasant time of year (say, around my birthday in March), and see all that Tucson has to offer someone who loves photography as much. Have I convinced you yet?

Karen

P.S. I know Google lets us link photos to maps, but I haven't gotten the hang of it. Here's a map I've been working on intermittently:


View Karen's Tucson in a larger map

RRPC: Here's One I Made Earlier

My entry for the Round Robin Challenge: Food Preparation (as suggested by Sherrie of the blog Sherrie's Stuff) is going to be a bit of a rant. Apologies in advance! Let's start with a quote:

Jeanine (Jami Gertz): I don't cook. I reheat.
--from Sibling Rivalry (1990)

I've quoted that before, many times over. I'll continue to quote it, as often as it takes!

I'm a triple threat in the kitchen: I don't like to cook, I don't like to clean up, and I don't do either job very well. For me, food preparation usually consists of opening a $1.99 hoagie from Safeway and adding mustard and an extra slice of cheese, or pulling something out of the freezer and sticking it in the microwave for 4:44. The aftermath of my "cooking" tends to look like this:



I have numerous reasons (or at least excuses) for my lack of expertise or interest in cooking:

1. My mom, who considered herself an inferior cook compared to her own mother, did not really have the option of not cooking for her family of four, despite being a professional psychologist with a job, a private practice, a theatre group for which she wrote, directed and acted, and five boards of directors on which she served at the same time, all while suffering from polio encephalitis and its aftereffects. She kept things simple: one meat (chuck steak, pork chops with tomato soup dumped on top, Shake N Bake chicken, hamburgers or hot dogs), one starch (Kraft Dinner, instant mashed potatoes, or Franco-American canned spaghetti) and a canned vegetable. Sometimes we just went with tv dinners. She had very little interest in cooking, and over the years did less and less of it. She even wrote a satirical song (sung to Hernando's Hideaway) about her only-slightly-exaggerated attitude toward housework. It ran, in part:

Once like you I was a house-slave,
Chained right to the kitchen sink.
But the worries that the house gave
Drove me straight to drink!

So, not for me that new vacuum sweeper.
Making love is more fun and cheaper.
So get wise and, just close your eyes and join:
Come on and be a slob! Olé!

Actually, she did keep up the housework better than I do, and she wasn't much of a drinker. In fact, she treated alcoholics for a living. Still, it's safe to say that some of my attitude toward cooking comes from someone whose recipe for "Italian spaghetti" was as follows:

Part of a bag of frozen diced green peppers and onions
One pound of hamburger
One can of Campbell's tomato soup
One can of Contadina tomato paste
One package of vermicelli

In a cast iron skillet that's a pain to clean, sauté frozen onions for Karen to laboriously pick out of her food later, and also the frozen green peppers, in a pat of butter or some bacon grease that's been sitting out in an old green coffee cup. Add hamburger and continue cooking, breaking the hamburger into chunks. Add tomato soup and tomato paste. Meanwhile, boil vermicelli in the "spaghetti pot." Mix with sauce and dole out onto plates. Serves 4.

My dad and I used to add oregano to ours, but that wasn't until the early 1970s.

Um, I seem to have gone on a bit more than I meant to with reason #1 why I'm not much of a cook. Let's go for reasons 2-4:

2. John doesn't like it when I cook steak, lamb, etc., because he hates the smell of cooking meat and we don't have a vent in the kitchen.

3. John doesn't like it when I cook in the summer, because it heats up the house, which has only room air conditioners in three rooms, even further. This is Tucson, after all!

4. John doesn't like it when I cook anything complicated, because I make a mess! Oh, and I don't like cleaning up the mess!

Case in point: when John got home from work on Thursday at almost 9 PM (he worked overtime and then went to the gym), he saw this on the stove:



John assumed it was a dirty dish from earlier in the week, when I baked fettuccine alfredo from two packets of chicken strips, fresh fettuccine, premade alfredo sauce, a splash of milk and a handful of shredded cheeses from a bag. He went straight to the fridge and started eating a $2.00 hoagie. I had to tell him that the dish of the stove contained freshly baked ravioli. It was similar to the fettuccine but made with whole wheat spinach ravioli and a different sauce, plus the leftover half of a roasted chicken, cut up. I'd already eaten my half. John ate part of what was left, and I finished it off tonight. Now I've got the cleanup to do:



It tasted pretty good, but was it worth the effort? Probably not.

Okay, okay. For you guys, I'll cook. It's something very simple, which I've made several times recently. It's flan, the Mexican version of custard. I've been making it as part of "Fish Custard," a better-than-you-think-it-is food combination introduced on an episode of Doctor Who in early April. I can't find packaged American custard from Jello at all any more, so I've been substituting the two closest packaged products I can find, flan or Crème brûlée.

Here goes:



The ingredients are easy: a box of flan mix and two cups of milk.



Step One of the directions, and I'm already messing up! I'm supposed to pour caramel sauce in each custard bowl, but ended up getting more than half of it in the first bowl! I evened it out as best I could.



Step Two: mix the milk and custard mix in a saucepan, and stir constantly while bringing it to a boil.



Step Three: pour it into the custard dishes, right on top of the caramel sauce.




Step Four: put the bowls in the refrigerator for an hour to set. Good thing I laid down a paper towel, because despite my best efforts I spilled a little.



The fridge was not the only venue for my clumsiness. Pouring equal measures of boiling liquid into small ceramic bowls is hard to do well with one hand while photographing the proceedings with the other hand. Inevitably, I made a mess!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a kitchen to clean up. Take a look at everyone else's food preparation adventures. I'm sure most of them do this stuff right!

Karen

Linking List 
as of 5:46 AM PDT/MST Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 (K)
Sherrie
Sherrie's Stuff
http://sherrie-plummer.blogspot.com

Carly - Posted
Ellipsis
http://ellipsissuddenlycarly.blogspot.com

Gattina - Posted!
keyhole Pictures
http://gattina-keyholepictures.blogspot.com

Linda - Posted
Mommy's Treasures
http://mommystreasures.blogspot.com

Freda Mans
Day One
http://fredamans.blogspot.com

Karen - Posted!
Outpost Mâvarin
http://outmavarin.blogspot.com

Rich - Posted!
Rich Image
http://richimage.blogspot.com

Jama - Posted!
Sweet Memories
http://mummyjam.blogspot.com

Sandy - Posted!
From The Heart Of Texas
http://sandyfromtheheartoftexas.com

Fhaye
Your Daily Photo Depot
http://photodito.com

Suzanne
SuzyQ421's Photo Blog
http://suzyq421sphotoblog.blogspot.com

Jenn **Welcome, new Robin!** - Posted!
Shutter Happy Moments
http://shutterhappyjenn.blogspot.com

Weekend Assignment #324: The Future, Unwritten

Weekend Assignment #324: America 2062

Next Tuesday is my birthday, I am not quite 50 yet, but when I was a little girl I liked to sit and imagine what the world, more specifically, America, would be like when I reached 50! Having nearly arrived at my goal age, I am now aiming for another 50 years! So, in honor of my 48th birthday, I want you to search your imaginations, and tell what I can expect in the year... 2062!

Extra Credit: Tell me, is the world anything like you imagined it would be when you grew up? What's different? What's the same?

I guess for me, the short answer is, "It will be like this, only more so, with some surprises."

My friend S. gets out of a flying Delorean - at a Universal Studios
special effects show in 1990.

When I was a kid, I drew my own flying car, sort of a mobile home style, antigrav-capable flying saucer with wheels and a relaxed attitude toward facing forward. I've always kind of resented the fact that The Jetsons and other sf tv, movies and books promised all sorts of fun things that we haven't gotten yet. On the other hand, in the realm of computers and hand-held communication devices, we are either on track or way ahead of schedule. Perhaps in another 52 years, we can get the other fun stuff up and running as well. You have to want it, people!

Sure, there are a few prototype flying cars out there, such as the one pictured above, driven by its inventor, Dr. Paul Moller. Notice, through, that this picture is from three years ago, and I'm no closer to seeing one for sale at my local Jim Click car dealership. Like Avery Brooks ten years ago, I want to say, "I was promised flying cars!"

A Back to the Future Delorean at Universal Studios California in 1990.

Heck, according to Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale, we're only five years away from hoverboards to replace skateboards, and hover conversions for our vintage Deloreans. Oh, and printed books with dust jackets will be kitchy collectibles.

 
While we're at it, where's my hoverboard?

There's a book about all the innovations promised us in 20th Century fiction that never arrived, Your Flying Car Awaits.  I like that a lot.

So what do I think will actually be around in 2062? I expect that the easy stuff - better, smaller, faster tech toys, solar power and other alternative energy sources, etc. will all continue to be designed, refined and readily available. The energy thing has been on America's and the world's back burner far too long, and I believe that will start to change in light of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, President Obama's priorities and other factors. The other, fun stuff, the flying cars, personal robots and so on, will depend on what's possible, cost effective and provides a benefit that people want. Is a humanoid robot better than a Roomba? Would flying cars scooting around the sky have even more accidents than cars on clearly-defined, well-marked roads? Probably, unless you got really clever with programming them. Maybe monorails for distance and slidewalks or People Movers for short hops will be more practical, but I suspect people will always want the autonomy of their own individual vehicle whenever possible.

Judging from the evolution of social attitudes in the 53 years since my birth, I expect that by 2062 we'll be much further along in issues of tolerance, with nearly everyone finally according equal rights and respect to others regardless of ethnicity, religion, sexuality, etc. I'd like to think that the rest of the world will also improve in this respect. But I have little hope that will actually get past the whole idea of wars, not in a mere 52 years. It's not easy to change attitudes and responses that are pretty much hardwired into the human brain, or encoded at every level of human society. Still, we have to try!

Unfortunately, I'm not expecting time machines, faster than light travel, Transporter and transmats and other sf conveniences, even by 2062. There's actually been progress toward matter transmission, but I doubt very much we'll ever be able to "beam up." There are some things the future can't fix, and the laws of physics are high on that list. Darn it.

Happy belated birthday, Carly! May your future be a fun one!

Karen

EMPS: Better Fruit, But At a Price

For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #95: Organic Food, I naturally went to the grocery store, specifically my faithful Safeway up the street. A few years ago, they revamped their produce department to make things look that much nicer, especially their organic produce section. I've photographed items from it before, but it was a different season and a slightly different topic. Let's see what I found to photograph this time!



Here is just part of their organic display. I like the variety of colors and textures, and the Farmer's Market look of the crates filled with, um, not sure what, possibly wood shavings.



Much of Tucson's produce comes from Mexico, including the organic stuff, and even including some of the more obscure varieties. Look at all the colors and sizes of tomatoes in this one bin!



When I was a kid, we used to grow cherry tomatoes every year, starting with vines in planters in the dining room or kitchen window, and later moving them outside. They were always red when ripe, always bigger than the tiny tomatoes one sees in salads now. Nowadays it's all about grape tomatoes and other newly-developed variants on the basic tomato. But here are "heirloom" cherry tomatoes. I think that means they are grown from the original genetic strain of decades ago.



Plums. Again, I like the variety of color here. If I thought they were actually soft and juicy, instead of rock-hard like the regular non-organic ones, I'd be tempted to buy a few. But they cost about three or four times as much as the regular ones, and money is tight.



But I did buy one organic indulgence: this carton of blackberries. Yum!

Be sure to check Ellipsis every Monday for the Monday Photo Shoot! And I'll be back in a day or two with tales of the weekend's photographic adventures. Wedding photographer? Me? Yipes!

Karen

Weekend Assignment #323: What Vacation?

Sorry to take so long answering my own question for Weekend Assignment #323: Vacation Time. I've been extraordinarily busy:

• Last week I was hired by St. Matthew's Episcopal Church as a temporary contractor, helping their treasurer revamp their accounting system and bring it up to date. This is in addition to my regular part time job at St. Michael's, which is just finishing up a review by outside auditors. St. Matthew's has a different accounting system, and I'm researching how best to make it do what needs to be done.
• Yesterday was the birthday of my disabled friend, the one whose finances I manage. We ordered a computer for her, which we've been saving up for since last summer.
• Father Smith is getting married on Saturday, and I'm the official photographer! Eek! Any tips?
• Last Saturday was the first part of the Doctor Who season finale, featuring callbacks to earlier episodes and the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers. I've been totally obsessed with rewatching it and trying to figure out how it will all be resolved. John is almost equally obsessed, to the point where we're watching the entire season to date in the lead up to the resolution this Saturday.

Now you know why I haven;t made the rounds yet on the Round Robin entries! I'll get there, but in the meantime let's answer the question at hand:

Weekend Assignment #323: Vacation Time

Look out - here comes summer! Kids are out of school, community pools and seasonal ice cream stands are open, and temperatures north of the Equator are on the rise. Summer is traditionally the time for families to go on vacation together. What are your summer vacation plans, if any? What time of year are you most likely to pack up the family and get out of town? Is there a particular place you go more often than anywhere else?

Extra Credit: When and where did your family usually go on vacation when you were a kid?

When I wrote this, John and I had tentative plans to get away this weekend, to a midcentury modern (1950s furniture etc.) expo in Southern California. That was before we realized it was the same day as the wedding and the Doctor Who finale! So no, we're not going to that, just as we didn't make it to a ComicCon in Phoenix last month. That one fell through because I was sick and John was working overtime, and I mean a lot of totally necessary overtime. So now the long hot summer stretches before us, with no prospect of getting away at all.

It wasn't always this way. We used to try to get out to Disneyland nearly every year. Before that, John was going to Los Angeles fairly frequently to browse Japanese bookstores and on one occasion to check out Single-A baseball venues. I used to go to Doctor Who and Quantum Leap conventions every year with friends, or to Universal to interview Quantum Leap stars, staff and crew. Now I struggle to get to the Gallifrey One convention in February, and don't always manage it. If I was fully employed, John and I would probably go to Disneyland and elsewhere, at least once a year. But ah, well.

When I was a kid, vacations were a simple affair, at least from my point of view. When I was little, we went to the Adirondacks, Lake Ontario or Cape Cod; but starting in the late 1960s we always rented one particular summer home on the beach at Lake Ontario near Henderson Harbor. We were there, watching on a poor-reception black and white tv, when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

I miss that. If we ever have a good, stable income, continued health and reasonably low debt, I'm going to push John and myself out the door every year for a decent vacation. After all, we still want to visit Disneyland, but that's just the beginning. I want to visit the Harry Potter attractions in Florida, there are entire parks at Walt Disney World I've never seen in person, and there's a heck of a lot of the world still I've never set foot in. I'd like to start doing something about that!

Karen

EMPS: Painted Faces

For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #94: Faces, I'm going to stay away from real live faces, and show you faces drawn or painted by better artists than I. It's a chance to focus in on specific detail from the paintings, drawings and prints we have here at Casa Blocher, the Museum of the Weird.



Let's start with one of the Eleven faces of the Doctor, the hero of my favorite tv series, Doctor Who. This is the Eighth Doctor, as portrayed by actor Paul McGann and drawn in pastels by a young artist named Ruben, um, I don't remember his last name for sure. I think it was Serra or Serna or something like that. He was in our Doctor Who club in the mid-1990s. I bought this large portrait of the Doctor at our local sf convention, TusCon, that year.



Here is a different photo and edit of the same subject. The first one shows the textures of the canvas and the pastel chalk and probably a good bit of dust. This second one smooths away all that with an "Auto De-Noise" filter. I dusted the portrait before rehanging it.



An even more fanciful piece of original art is our painting by bandleader Xavier Cugat. It's full of stylized, silly faces. I especially like the serene face of the patient. If I had this team of doctors about to poke me with a giant fork, I'd be worried! Cugat apparently churned out a number of near-identical paintings of scenes like this.



Aside from a tiny sketch of Uncle Scrooge by Carl Barks, the last of our original pieces of professional art involving faces is this pencil sketch of King Hubert from Disney's 1959 animated classic Sleeping Beauty, drawn by legendary animator Marc Davis. The comic irritation on his face reminds me of Donald Duck when the nephews are driving him crazy.



I also photographed a stylized chef's face on a barbeque tray, the face of a mod Barbie on a doll case, and faces of tikis and parrots from a Disneyland attraction poster. But let's close this entry with one of my many attempts to photograph a rather bizarre but popular art print of a bygone era, the famous Green Lady. It's actually titled Chinese Woman, a 1950 painting by the Russian-born, South African artist Vladimir Tretchikoff. I used one of our vintage lamps to light this particular shot, so it came out much more yellow-orange than the actual print is. But yes, her face is green, specifically blue-green. The Green Lady takes a bit of getting used to, but I like the curves of her somber face and the strange and exotic colors of the piece.

Karen