Dragged Kicking and Screaming into the early 21st Century….

[captainsblog]

This is the word of the Luddites.

Thanks be to Lud,

whoever or whatever the hell he was.

Slowly but surely, we are catching up our technologies to the approximate year, or at least decade, on the calendar. Since late 2021, we have gone to computers with the latest Windows operating system; next, added the corresponding current, and subscription based, Microsoft Office products for word processing, spreadsheets and email at my office; and we continue to convert most of our entertainment into streaming programs on a relatively new smart TV. Finally, after Sunday’s little visit to Chez Apple, we have now cut the last of the cords non-lightning cables with our phones. Eleanor made the quantum leap from a 6S to a 13 iPhone. It’s not the newest and shiniest on offer over there, but she’s finally caught up to the surprising amount of memory that my even older refurbished phone has had all along.

I've yet to receive, much less look at, the final invoicing yet to see what this sudden leap will wind up costing every month. It shouldn’t be all that much, because among other things, the salesperson applied an AARP discount to our entire account. I refuse to have anything to do with those bastards, but Eleanor gets her Medicare supplement plan through them, so the barcode on her membership card worked and that got us free activation on the new phone, as well as an insurance reduction, and I think slightly lower pricing, on our entire account. I believe the only condition on that is that I’m required now to end every call by yelling, GET OFF MY LINE.

Her new display is smaller than the one she previously had, but slightly larger than the one I have on my own sixth generation Apple product. That of course meant we needed to pick up all kinds of new accessories. A new OtterBox to protect her new phone itself, a screen protector, and, since the new one uses the smaller USB connector, we walked out with an additional set of the new lightning cables and AC adapters for the other end of the charging process.

I’m dictating this segment of the post from a Mostly Dead shopping mall not far from the Bills’ stadium, because it was on the way from a chiropractor appointment and I can do a work out at my gym’s facility here.  There’s also a Best Buy connected to the mall, so I ordered some additional charging cables and adapters for around the house for her (and eventually me when I finally upgrade to the current decade) that cost all of about 18 bucks after applying reward certificates from my account with them. I got to the gym way early for a class so I used the time after the electronics visit to get a little bit of mallwalking. It’s kind of a spooky place, with very few stores remaining, at least of the traditional mall fare of my own Yute.  Here’s a photographic tour of some of those odd sightings:



Fine, I don't remember these much from my own days hanging out in Roosevelt Field, Marketplace or the Oatmeal Mall, but Hot Topic was definitely the go-to for all the cool kids when Emily was in middle school, wow, going on 20 years ago.

Before reaching what was left of the food court, there was this standalone:



Apparently the contentious divorce from Orange Julius is now final:P

I'd have stopped here next-





-but I didn't have a pocket full of quarters;)

As for the central food court itself, it was dull and dusty, but at least had a couple of booths to sit in next to an AC outlet to keep my phone charged.  Just a closed pizza place and another of the knockoffs of the Five Guys burger chain that must, possibly by law, be located within a quarter mile of every Orangetheory gym I've ever been to:



Other than these? Not a Casual Corner around the corner, a book or record shop, or a Piercing Pagoda in the middle of the aisles, abandoned to virtually just mallwalkers. There's a psychic giving readings (must be a fraud, because she didn't yell when I thought that she was one), a crazy cat lady emporium with rescues beyond what the SPCA can handle, a Bath Fitter and the actual client from my Arbitration From Hell renting a storefront here.  Word is the mall is up for auction again, and the Seneca Nation may be bidding on it. Since they can put tax-free products like ciggies and weed on their sovereign territory, it might be the only thing saving this place from complete death.

----

Then came time for my 4:30 class, my 13th of 15 scheduled this month, which once again in my own unique OCD way I’ve managed to do with 13 different coaches so far and my last two tomorrow and Friday will be with a 14th and 15th.   Today was one for never leaving the office the entire day until going back to the phone store at 5 to see if they could tell us what we actually paid for all this.  Since they pride themselves on being paperless now, we're going to just have to guess at that for now.

My final death grips holding onto the late 1990s are on this computer.  Microsoft's been messing with workarounds I've been using with those fancy new programs and apps, to make this machine act like my original Gateway laptop from 1995.  Since the 2007 versions of the Microsoft Office suite, they've gone all graphicky, with menu bars and keyboard commands being as hidden as they can manage.  Yet they always allowed the old key functions, from the row of F-keys on top to ancient alt-this and ctrl-that combos on the keyboard itself. That is, until they stopped allowing some.

Just last week, the Gods of Gates took away my long-standing use of the alt-I commands in Word to insert contents of another file, the date and time, or the image of a pdf file elsewhere in my documents. I've mucked about and discovered I can program them back, but have to do so one by one. Or, as with the most typically used "insert file" one, I can and did add it to the dadburn ribbon and am now trying to train myself to do it that way.

But for something even more annoying, Look what they've done to my Start Menu, Ma,
(Ils ont change ma menu Démarrer, ma)

It looked like this all the way back to Windows 95 through XP:



Clean. Simple. On the left. Easily added and subtracted from. Just like Mom Melinda Gates used to make. Somewhere around version 8 of Windows, they got all PicturePicture with everything there, too, introducing the hideous "Metro" format that made your entire screen a mishmash of boxes for your programs, as well as NOT your programs but apps and ads and news and sports and weather and all that.  Everybody hated it, but it largely kept shoving it down users' virtual throats.  But there were add-ons that brought back the old-school look. Mine was called Classic Shell, and once installed, it overrode the boxy garbage and set things right.

Until last week, when pressing the windows key, or the four-square icon with the mouse, got you this instead:



Not quite as hideous, but still not my Maypo, which I still want.  Turns out my old Classic Shell is still around, renamed Open Shell, but Microsoft's engineers have basically put the Windows key on the pad itself off limits to it. And to that "Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Ce...." you see I experimented with.  Literally the only way not to get this display is to disable the button.

As Sam was known to say when he made HIS forced quantum leaps,....





 

Comments

[weofodthignen]

I can't help thinking that would be great, if the tribe buys the mall and revitalizes it by putting in a dispensary and tax-free cigs. Both horrible things so far as I'm concerned (the smoke from both makes me feel terrible, especially the weed, I appear to be allergic), but malls were nice in their way, including as a refuge from the climate and from cars when walking.

Silliness

[sturgeonslawyer]

(Ils ont change ma menu Démarrer, ma)

I see what you did there.