Tag Archives: computers

Vrooom-A-Zoom Zoom!

18 Jun

July 18, 2021

Amos: I’m a Zoomer now!
Me: What?
Amos: I’m a Zoomer. I’m zooming!

That’s Amos, who works for me. He’s a crack investigator whom I once avoided for 20 minutes by the cleaver ruse of simply walking two feet behind him and slightly to his left.

Amos has a little trouble with technology.

Amos: This cellular phone isn’t working.
Me: What’s wrong?
Amos: I can’t find the antenna. I think it must have fallen off.

I had to set up a Zoom meeting for Amos so he could get some training from an outside contractor.

Amos: That’s what you call people who do Zoomer meetings, isn’t it? Zoomers?
Me: Yup. You’re a Zoomer.

Amos has gone through 4 cell phones since I have known him, about 3 years. They never seem to work right. They all have the same problem: user error. Amos has no idea how to set up a contact, so every time I call him- and during the week I may call him four or five times a day- I have to tell him who’s calling when he picks up since he doesn’t recognize my number.

Amos also cannot receive email on his phone. There is something wrong with the settings on all his phones, he tells me. He’s gone to his local Staples to fix it and they always tell him they can’t find anything wrong. Amos says it is a scam to get him to buy a new phone, which he usually does.

When I want to send a case to Amos, I have to email it from a coworker’s account since Amos has somehow blocked me on his email, which he has to go to Staples to access and someone there has to “pull the email off the computer” for him.

My boss recently bought a fax machine for Amos. That was nearly three months ago. It is still not working. Amos has called in the phone company, the company that made the fax machine, and tech support from a number he saw on a flyer on a pole, and they all agree that there is nothing wrong. Amos is so far behind that he is flailing about like a trout on the line trying to figure out the fax machine, a piece of technology that is nearly obsolete.

Amos does not have a home phone line and is dependent on his cell phone (a disaster in the event of emergency) so in order to set up the fax he needed a phone line put in, which will cost him $30 a month. He asked my boss to reimburse him for that. My boss, who is notoriously cheap, agreed to pay it based on my advice.

I told him why not? The odds are he’ll never figure out how to use it anyway and he’ll send it back.

Go Speed Amos Go!

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What’s up with Japan? (Classic Allen Keyes is MIA Repost)

1 Oct

October 1, 2012

Where is Allen Keyes? Is this any way to start October, with Mr. Keyes MIA? Well, he’s not really MIA, I know exactly where he is. He’s too heavily invested in his fantasy sports league to do a little thing like write a blog. And I can’t blame him, since the season is winding down and the playoffs are about to begin. This is a serious time in the World Cricket Championships.

So I asked Mr. Keyes what I should run and he said to pick something at random. So I did. Luckily it fits his worldview as well as mine.

February 14, 2011

I have always maintained that culturally, Japan is as far away from us as, well, North America is from Japan. To a certain extent I can understand. There is something paradoxical about a culture which so quickly adopted Western garb and certain Western habits while also keeping alive traditional Japanese values. It is not uncommon to see men and women in business attire mixing with people in kimonos and robes at the local marketplace. However, it is hard to give them any kind of a pass when I read things like this:

I see Japanese people in masks around New York too but I simply chalked it up to fear of the bird flu. Turns out I was wrong. To say I don’t get it is to grossly understate it. I shouldn’t be surprised though. Compared to America, huge number of teenagers (and not-so-teenagers) spend entire days and weeks online in cyber-worlds that are more important to them than life itself. It isn’t uncommon to see young Japanese kids styling their hair to emulate their favorite manga or anime characters. OK, so maybe people over here wear Superman t-shirts and get Batman tattoos, but have you ever seen whole age groups dyeing their skin green like the Hulk?

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m making broad, unsubstantiated generalizations.

No I’m not.

Of course, this comes straight out of Japan.

Yeah, strapping yourself into a harness which electrically pulsates will really add “a human-like level” to online conversations. I wonder what the electric chair would add? More to the point, how long before this gets adapted for porn?

What is happening to human to human interaction when people think that a shirt which squeezes you while looking at your mother on a computer screen is the equivalent of a good night hug from your mom before you go to bed?

“For a while technology has been driving people apart, locking them in front of computer screens. Now we hope to use it to bring them together.”

No. All this new technology does is make it easier to be apart! Nothing can compare to another person’s touch, a parent’s embrace. Perhaps what we need is a device that kicks people off their computers so they can spend time with their families and get some genuine human interaction.

Taking this to the logical extreme, once this is perfected, you can take the human out of the equation completely. Once a computer screen and a hug shirt can mimic the human experience, how long until they can be programmed to do it with no person at the other end? Parents can program their computers to play goodnight messages, hug their kids, even tuck them in without all the hassle of actually doing it or even thinking about it. Kids are such a bother.

So why have them? The next step is not to replace the parent, but to replace the child. Why have a real child that poops and cries when you can have your computer mimic one? It can hug you, it can give you “a deep immersive experience.” All you would need is one child and millions of users can “interact” with it via these machines hooked up to computers. And it doesn’t even need to be a real child, just a computer program. Remember, this is the country that gave us the Tomagotchi.

Virtual parents and virtual children. The only upside is that with virtual sex, these losers will die out without ever procreating and maybe this whole stupid idea will become extinct.

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