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Tonight was Pepper's first Bark in the Park baseball game in almost two years, her first in the stadium in her own back yard, and my first time back there since the place was recently vacated by the big kids from Toronto.
Lots of pictures of dogs from the game, and other stories, but those will wait. I'll just go over my experience from ten hours earlier, yet another attempt to connect to a court using Microsoft Teams.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of the pandemic for me has been not having to get dressed up every day in the monkey suits I'd been bound to for over 30 years. Clients, and judges and trustees in bankruptcy who use audio-only hookups, got me in business casual, if that. Since March 2020 I believe I've been in actual courtrooms fewer than a dozen times, many with crappy results (outright loss, adjournment, and one unfortunate disqualification of both me and the opposing lawyer). About as many, since the state court system adopted Microsoft's virtual meeting platform, I've logged into Skype, later turned into Teams, to state my case....
....and with few exceptions, I have failed to do so. At least one court sent a bad link that set off Windows Defender and wouldn't let me open the app. More recently, though, the problems have been twofold. First, that Teams is painfully slow to load; but worse, when it does, it displays the audio and video of the judge, court staff and other lawyers but I immediately get whines from the other participants WE CANNNT HEEARRRRR YOOOOO, YOURE CUTTING OUTTTTTT! So I wind up calling in on an audio-only number, which is perfectly acceptable, but makes the whole Dressup business kinda useless, plus I now have a room full of people pissed off at me.
This morning, I didn't even get that far. I could have sworn I was sent a link for a hearing that the papers said was 10:00 this morning, but I found no link on my calendar or in my email. I called the court clerk who I'd spoken to, and wound up getting the judge himself on the phone. This is okay as long as we don't discuss any of the merits of the case and just things like Why can't Ray EVER get dressed up and get any mileage out of it? So it's been put off close to six weeks, and a link will be sent.
By then, one or both of two things will have happened. I may have figured out why this always happens with Teams but never does with the completely comparable platform put out by Zoom. I use that almost every week at least once or twice, and nobody has ever complained about not being able to see or hear me. (As for what they're seeing or hearing, well, poets and writers are polite;) I talked with Emily about it earlier, and she's had similar Teams issues at work. Apparently there are settings for microphone that are defaulted better in Zoom than they are in Teams, and you can change them in the latter. But- you can only access those settings when you're actually in a Teams meeting. She offered to set up a trial meeting room so I could fiddle with them- and of course her invitation went to my spam folder. So fuck you, Microsoft, and die in a fire, Gmail.
The other alternative is I may be on a newer laptop by early October. I've recently learned that I am not likely to ever get back my second one that an office genius was going to attempt to repair, and this four year old Dell, while still okay (and largely rebuilt about two years ago when still under warranty), is showing signs of slowdown. Emily thinks its 8 gigs of RAM are relatively light- hilarious to anyone who remembers DOS machines booting up with a bitchin' 640K of memory and Bill Gates saying (or not saying) that would be more than enough. Plus, Windows 11 is unfortunately destined to come around the corner, and I can about guarantee that this machine's chips are not compatible with its built in anti-h8ckr protections. So I'm starting to take recommendations for a model that's not too far advanced from the goodies this one's got: 16G instead of its 8 gig; an Intel processor; an onboard CD-DVD drive; a numeric keyboard on the side; and preferably not a row of overriding controls for display, sound and airplane mode that can be tripped by a cat walking on the keyboardxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Lots of pictures of dogs from the game, and other stories, but those will wait. I'll just go over my experience from ten hours earlier, yet another attempt to connect to a court using Microsoft Teams.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of the pandemic for me has been not having to get dressed up every day in the monkey suits I'd been bound to for over 30 years. Clients, and judges and trustees in bankruptcy who use audio-only hookups, got me in business casual, if that. Since March 2020 I believe I've been in actual courtrooms fewer than a dozen times, many with crappy results (outright loss, adjournment, and one unfortunate disqualification of both me and the opposing lawyer). About as many, since the state court system adopted Microsoft's virtual meeting platform, I've logged into Skype, later turned into Teams, to state my case....
....and with few exceptions, I have failed to do so. At least one court sent a bad link that set off Windows Defender and wouldn't let me open the app. More recently, though, the problems have been twofold. First, that Teams is painfully slow to load; but worse, when it does, it displays the audio and video of the judge, court staff and other lawyers but I immediately get whines from the other participants WE CANNNT HEEARRRRR YOOOOO, YOURE CUTTING OUTTTTTT! So I wind up calling in on an audio-only number, which is perfectly acceptable, but makes the whole Dressup business kinda useless, plus I now have a room full of people pissed off at me.
This morning, I didn't even get that far. I could have sworn I was sent a link for a hearing that the papers said was 10:00 this morning, but I found no link on my calendar or in my email. I called the court clerk who I'd spoken to, and wound up getting the judge himself on the phone. This is okay as long as we don't discuss any of the merits of the case and just things like Why can't Ray EVER get dressed up and get any mileage out of it? So it's been put off close to six weeks, and a link will be sent.
By then, one or both of two things will have happened. I may have figured out why this always happens with Teams but never does with the completely comparable platform put out by Zoom. I use that almost every week at least once or twice, and nobody has ever complained about not being able to see or hear me. (As for what they're seeing or hearing, well, poets and writers are polite;) I talked with Emily about it earlier, and she's had similar Teams issues at work. Apparently there are settings for microphone that are defaulted better in Zoom than they are in Teams, and you can change them in the latter. But- you can only access those settings when you're actually in a Teams meeting. She offered to set up a trial meeting room so I could fiddle with them- and of course her invitation went to my spam folder. So fuck you, Microsoft, and die in a fire, Gmail.
The other alternative is I may be on a newer laptop by early October. I've recently learned that I am not likely to ever get back my second one that an office genius was going to attempt to repair, and this four year old Dell, while still okay (and largely rebuilt about two years ago when still under warranty), is showing signs of slowdown. Emily thinks its 8 gigs of RAM are relatively light- hilarious to anyone who remembers DOS machines booting up with a bitchin' 640K of memory and Bill Gates saying (or not saying) that would be more than enough. Plus, Windows 11 is unfortunately destined to come around the corner, and I can about guarantee that this machine's chips are not compatible with its built in anti-h8ckr protections. So I'm starting to take recommendations for a model that's not too far advanced from the goodies this one's got: 16G instead of its 8 gig; an Intel processor; an onboard CD-DVD drive; a numeric keyboard on the side; and preferably not a row of overriding controls for display, sound and airplane mode that can be tripped by a cat walking on the keyboardxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx