March 27, 2025
I paid $4.97 for gas (regular) at 1 of my 2 my usual stations in Burbank, CA. That's pretty close to $5 a gallon.
And L.A. sales tax is going up .25% to 10.50% in April 2025.
INFLATION IS BACK...AND BOOMING.
UPDATE: On March 31, 4 days later, for gas I paid more than $5 a gallon. $5.07!
Life is tough enough without complicated faulty technology. Oh, wait, life IS complicated faulty technology.
I got a new cell phone. The Apple iPhone 15. As a fine art photographer, with nearly 4,000 photos in my portfolio, I especially looked forward to possibly using the cell phone camera as a sometime alternative to my Nikon camera. In my hopefulness I was dead wrong. The camera does not/will not take photos, it only takes videos! I don't do videos, I only do photos.
I experimented with my new iPhone 15 camera numerous times to take a simple photo. It only took videos. I went online on Google Search and looked up this problem. A number of results offered instructions on how to fix this issue. I tried them all. NONE of them worked. Apparently, at least with the camera I own, it is impossible to take a photo, I can only take a video of a subject. This is 100% worthless to me re fine art photography.
Why is this happening? I assume because Apple and its engineers are clueless and did not fully test the camera settings or did not realize this would be a huge problem for buyers who do photography. Or they didn't care. So far, I have found no fix, no update, no settings that eliminates the FORCED taking of videos instead of static photos. As a result, I cannot/will not use my iPhone 15 for taking pictures and the camera, and all its functions, is worthless to me. To me, this Apple smartphone is a waste of money. And, if I can't trust Apple, there is no other brand of smartphone I would trust.
A suggestion for all technology companies...
BEFORE you launch a new product, do a Focus Group. Not a Focus Group of engineers or techies, a Focus Group with potential users who may or may not be technologically proficient. And fix any/all bugs BEFORE you launch a new product and frustrate users who buy it. Don't make smartphones that are stupid.
My comment on a New York Post news story was rejected by the New York Post. The story headline was
.png)
|
|
F Fox News. AGAIN.
March 11. 2025
On the FoxNews.com article re Rosie O'Donnell moving to Ireland I posted a comment, a comment that was denied publication by Fox News. Screenshot is attached.
.png)
Way too many of my funny/not funny reader comments have been denied publication on the Fox News website. If Fox News is going to
censure freedom of speech, speech that is a 100% true and appropriate like my failed-to-publish above comment, Fox.com is no longer a legitimate place for reader comments and
I will notify all relevant U.S. government agencies under the Trump
Administration!
SPAM EMAILS SUCK
Now that Trump is president how about America cracks down on spam emails? Lately, I have been getting numerous daily spams from financial sources I never heard of and am not interested in. Lots of crypto currency spam emails. Lots of investment spam emails.
I did NOT sign up to receive any of these emails. Did somebody, whose site I visited and logged in to, collect and sell my email address? Could it have been a large legit company? Maybe an online news source I visit daily? I don't know.
In any event, Trump/Congress must stop annoying unwanted email spam. ASAP.
Got an email from Netflix informing me that my monthly subscription cost in March 2025 is going up. Going up 16%. Yes, they're raising prices 16%. Have they not heard that Trump is the President and vows to LOWER inflation? Oh. According to Bloomberg news, in 2024, Netflix co-founder, Reed Hastings, a longtime Democratic donor, endorsed Kamala Harris as the president candidate in a post on the social media platform X on July 22, 2024. A day later, Hastings told the Information that he donated $7 million to a pro-Harris super PAC.
This is an email I sent to the CEO of Verizon.
We have been home customers of Verizon for over 20 years. We got 2 new iPhones, and changed our plan (to Unlimited Welcome) but cannot change the payment to autopay.
Here are the outrageous things that occur when I try.
Cannot access our account,
either by phone or by internet
Verizon demands my PIN number. I got my PIN number like 20 years ago. I do not know it, do not remember it, and did not write it down. Without it apparently there is NO access for us.
Same with phone support. I
cannot access a human support agent, without my PIN.
I tried Chat support and was
on hold for 30 minutes before I gave up.
We went to the Verizon Store and they were unable
to help in this matter.
I do not believe I have a Verizon account online at verizon.com. The Verizon website will not allow me to create an account, or access a possible existing account. I found no option to create an online account.
Verizon is also overcharging our monthly bill by like $50. Everything I attempt to do to
simply change my payment plan, or access support, has been made impossible by Verizon. This has
been incredible frustrating and should not be so complicated and difficult, if
not impossible. In this matter, as loyal long-term customers we are very very
very unhappy with the inability for us to access our Verizon account.
Have I gotten a response from the Verizon executive office? Nothing. Nada. Zero.
I could not send a message to Fox News about their FoxNews.com website. Their online contact form did not work. I could not find another way to contact them online. My message?
"The Foxnews.com website is failing to update its news. Some of the stories in some of the categories, like Digital Originals, are 27 days old! If you are going to offer a news category please update it daily, if not hourly."
Some of their website news category offerings are so out of date, news-wise, the Fox News website almost worthless.
Jan 2025
It's Monday, mid-January and, again, there's nothing on TV to watch. Not one fictional TV show, not one episode. This is because the TV industry now only offers 10 new episodes per season instead of the 20 in the old days. And, no, I hate most reality shows and documentaries.
And, due also to way too many ads, I am giving up using TV and radio entertainment. I cannot stand the 25% of ads during prime time TV and sit with the remote control in my hand, switching channels immediately to try to avoid all the annoying ads. The problem is that ALL the network and cable channels have too many ads. I am left with watching Netflix, which, though it costs extra money, thankfully does not have ads, yet. Too many stupid, uninteresting shows, too many foreign non-U.S. TV shows and movies, yes, but no ads. Yet.
As for radio shows and news radio the engagement with the audience is short and they too often interrupt the show or newscast to break for ads. So often that I am giving up that media too. I will get my news online, where I can usually dodge the ads.
As for my long lifetime of watching TV at night I can no longer do it. It sucks. And, no, I don't want to play video games or use social media for my nightly entertainment. Perhaps I will go back to reading books in the evening for entertainment, something I started when I was 10 years old. Or maybe go out and socialize 7 nights a week at a local bar. Ugh.
Posted on Microsoft Community
Andrew the Author
Created and posted on December 16, 2024
Why request blocked???
Once again, as a paying
Microsoft 365 home user, when trying to contact Microsoft support via their
main website, using Chrome, I enter the correct log in info and, viola, what do
I get?
The request is blocked.
20241216T153554Z-1868988d889486wlhC1LAXqx2n000000093g000000000qyz
What the
heck is going on with Microsoft? NO tech support? No phone support? No Chat
support? THIS IS 100% UNACCEPTABLE!
When Trump becomes President in 2025 he should have dominant/monopoly Microsoft (and ALL monopolistic entities) that
ignore paying consumers punished. Yes, punished. A billion dollar fine by the
FTC would do nicely as a starting point. A billion dollars fine a day would
really get their attention.
2 years ago
On a Sunday morning before noon I tuned in to the TV show, "Zombie Flipping", on the A&E network channel on cable. It's an interesting show where a group of flippers buy horrible houses (they call them zombies) and renovate and flip them. I tuned in about halfway through the episode and first had to sit through a bunch of tv commercials. I noticed. I said to myself, "Wow, there's a LOT of tv ads. It's very intrusive and annoying". I vowed to find out how many ads viewers had to suffer through the next time the show took a break to run commercials. Soon the show stopped and the ads started. On my fingers I counted the tv ads.
THERE WERE 12 F-ING TV ADS IN A ROW!
Seriously? 12 tv ads in a row? More than 15 minutes in an hour? 25 f-ing percent of a TV show is ads? And the networks expect viewers to put up with that? And the dumbass TV execs don't know why TV viewership has declined so much in the past decade(s)?
I let the tv play in the background while I wrote this rant. There were lots of ads. Too many ads. I am now considering no longer watching TV at all, due to too many ads. Or, in the case of streaming and TV networks, lousy or old shows. If only Netflix and Amazon Prime and Hulu, et al, had more new g-o-o-d TV shows instead of hundreds/thousands of ancient shows/movies I've seen or new crappy shows I have no interest in seeing. Seriously.
Update:
2 years later. The news channels are also unwatchable due to the number of ads. In 15 minutes per hour there could be 30-50 ads, many of them repetitive and of NO interest to me. I am using the internet news sites more and more to keep up with the news. At least there I can scroll past all the ads and don't have to sit through the ads and hear them, or change the channel, only to find the same annoying issue on ALL the other tv news channels.
Too may ads, and lousy shows, have now ruined the TV viewing experience. Not to mention that, today, most TV shows are stupid and unwatchable (with a few exceptions) and only have 10 episodes per season, as opposed to the 20 episodes in the good old days, and a lot fewer ads.
CBS and “60 Minutes” suck!
November 2024 - CBS has extended the left-wing lousy “60 Minutes” tv show by 30 minutes, some episodes now airing from 7PM-8:30 PM on Sunday. This interferes with the Prime-Time schedule and throws the viewers off for the popular shows that follow: Tracker and The Equalizer. Now, we viewers have to wait another half-hour for Tracker and The Equalizer and are stuck afterwards, at 10:30PM, with nothing to watch anywhere.
Hey, CBS, return “60 Minutes” to 60 minutes or, better yet, cancel it.
(photo of Kamala, unable to copy and paste)
Kamala, 59, Drives Probably the Most
Expensive Car In the world
This USA
News Update story was featured on Newsmax.com. I saw it there on Sunday,
November 17, 2024, at approximately 1:15 AM. I clicked on the headline and
carefully scrolled through the entire article. Kamala was not listed or
mentioned anywhere. The headline is misleading. False reporting.
I got an email from my apartment management in L.A. about how we must recycle some things.
Pet waste and diapers are OK to throw out in the trash. But we have to recycle "paper"? Like our junk mail??? And cartons? Like the small shipping cartons we get for every little thing we buy online? Are you f-ing kidding me? And I probably will have to drive to the recycling "Blue bins" that are somewhere on the property to recycle that stuff.
On Microsoft Start, a Microsoft news site, I made a comment on an article about technology using passkeys instead of passwords. My comment was, "As in classic science fiction will we humans end up having a chip inserted into our brains at birth and be monitored/controlled 24/7 throughout our life by government?" The comment was not allowed. It said it did not meet Community Standards. I sent feedback to Microsoft. "Does not meet your community standards? Have you read "1984" by George Orwell?"
September 13, 2024 1:43 AM Los Angeles, California
All the cell phones in my house suddenly blasted an emergency alert signal. OMG, is there an earthquake? An explosion? A terrorist attack? A wildfire bearing down on us? I raced to the nearest cell phone (no, I don't sleep with my cell phone), my heart beating rapidly and my fear response at full throttle. It must be something critical as a government issued Emergency Alert in the middle of the night, waking millions of people in the area, had to be something dire and dangerous.
It was an Amber Alert. A child abduction alert. A 3-month old child was reportedly abducted, somewhere in L.A. County (which is very large at 400 square miles). A child was abducted? In the middle of the night? Possibly by a relative. Nowhere near where I live.
The Amber Alert was quickly canceled and disappeared from the phones. No reason for the cancellation was given. Was it a false alarm? Was the the child found? The possible abductor captured? We have no idea.
A bigger questions is WHY were millions of people awakened by a loud "phone siren", an Emergency Alert, or in this case an Amber Alert, in the dead of night, for something that had ABSOLUTELY NO POTENTIALLY NEGATIVE EFFECT ON THEIR LIVES???
The government waking millions of people up suddenly, in the middle of the night? With a NON-life threatening phone siren, a NON-Emergency Alert, a loud cell phone alert to those receiving it, that does not effect THEIR lives? In the middle of the night? Could that be dangerous? Could that be especially dangerous to older people, and people with existing heart conditions?
I looked up Government Alerts in Google. Apparently, government alerts, including Amber Alerts and Public Safety Alerts are set to "on" by default on smartphones. Yes, it appears that you can opt out of receiving Amber Alerts on your smartphone. I didn't know that. And tonight it's too late as I am now wide awake from this Amber Alert.
And, an hour later, as my heart rate and fear response has hopefully returned to "normal", at 3 AM, I still cannot go back to sleep.
Go to hell, Gov Gavin Nuisance. Your/our California state lottery just pissed off and screwed players by dramatically lowering the maximum amount we can win on some $5 scratch-off tickets, from $555,555 to a measly $77,777. THAT'S A REDUCTION OF 87%.
previous ticket
For the first time I decided to buy a $30 California lottery scratcher ticket. I stood at the lottery machine and looked at all the $30 scratchers. I decided on one called, "Royal Riches", which offered a win up to $10 million.
Yes, winning $10 million would do nicely. I bought the ticket. I turned the ticket over and was OUTRAGED! The ticket clearly stated "Winners of the top prize have the option of receiving an annuity paying $400,000 a year for 25 years, or a lump sum cash payout of $5.8 million". Wait a minute, that's not a true $10 million payout! With inflation, a $400,000 annual payout for 25 years might be worth about $6 million. Or less. And an immediate cash payout of less than $6 million is certainly not a $10 million payout. WTF???
I spent $30 on the assumption of a possible $10 million win. Or, if I did not win big I hoped to at least break even. $30 is a lot of money for 1 lottery scratcher ticket. It's the most expensive one the California Lottery offers. And they only want to pay the $10 million winner over 25 years of inflation, or pay out a lump sum of 58%? WTF! I was outraged. And felt like I was being screwed.
I will NEVER buy another $30 California Lottery scratcher again! Never. Unless, of course I win the top price (I will take the $5.8 million cash) and then I will play it again, every f-ing week.
UPDATE:
The next day I scratched it off. A $30 California Lottery scratcher. It said on the ticket that there were 39 chances to win. Did I win? Did I win $10 million? $1 million dollars? A thousand dollars? A hundred dollars? Did I at least break even and win $30? No. I won NOTHING. Zero. Nada.
"You don't have permission to access "http://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/28808/microsoft-store-contact-support?" on this server.
Reference #18.8af7d517.1719578331.1c75acd9
https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.8af7d517.1719578331.1c75acd9"
I am signed in. I need tech support and there is no way to contact Microsoft online Chat? WTF? I PAY Microsoft every year for Microsoft 365!
July 12, 2024
2 weeks later, my HP printer is not printing the full page. It's out of warranty so free HP support is not available. I went to contact Microsoft to see if it was a Windows problem and maybe they could fix it. I went to the Microsoft.com website, logged in and clicked the Support link. This is what came up, using both Chrome and Edge browsers:
You don't have permission to access "http://support.microsoft.com/contactus" on this server.
Reference #18.92f7d517.1720817518.db19a643
https://errors.edgesuite.net/18.92f7d517.1720817518.db19a64
WTF? The same Access Denied message I was insulted with more than 2 weeks ago? I don't have access? AGAIN? This access denial is a known ongoing intermittent issue and MICROSOFT DOESN'T THINK IT'S IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO F-ING FIX IT?
Oh, and you can't call Microsoft tech support anymore. When you call the phone number listed in Google search for Microsoft tech support the f-ing bot that answers directs you to the Microsoft website and then hangs up on you
F U MICROSOFT
Here is a personal update, a rant about Microsoft and the technology sector.
My post on Microsoft Community:
Why is support not available? December 3, 2024
It is 3:50 AM on Tuesday, December 3,
2024. Apparently, there is no Microsoft support available. Not even by Chat. I
enter all the requested info correctly and it just says "support is not
available". Or, worse: "The request is blocked.
20241203T114858Z-16d98b95757fj6vvhC1LAXbafg00000001mg0000000013sd"
WHY? As a paying Microsoft
user I need tech support...NOW!
from a volunteer support for Microsoft
Replied on December 3, 2024
This has been explained
many times here, but I realize that it's a widespread issue, so I'll explain
again.
There are more than 1.5 billion users of Windows all over the world. If, on any
given day, 1/100th of 1% of them want to ask Microsoft a question, that's
150,000 phone calls every day. For Windows alone. And Windows is only one of
Microsoft's many products.
Unfortunately, Microsoft
is not able to hire enough people to handle that volume of requests, which is
why Microsoft employees do not provide customer support to individuals. They do
hire third-party contractors to handle calls, but there are only a limited
number of them, for the same reason.
On the other hand, there
are many thousands of ways to get help with Windows, including here in
Microsoft Community. In fact, you'll almost always get better support outside
Microsoft, since third parties have more time and resources than Microsoft can
offer. This is particularly advantageous to users, since many ask the same
question, as here, or need to have someone provide detailed instruction on how
to use some aspect of their computers.
My reply:
Microsoft pretty much has a monopoly on device operating systems (70%). That
being the case, if Microsoft cannot/will not make a product that works
properly, and cannot/will not properly support its products then it should
lower its annual subscription prices. As for bots and help articles and
communities, that ain't the same as individualized company tech support. Perhaps the new
Trump Administration will look into this, as it investigates the technology
industry.
