Me

I am getting annoyed at the new technology trends. It seems like everything that you own, from your computers, to cell phone, and even your car is being controlled by someone else. These endless “system updates” are becoming another income stream for technology companies that are looking to use your connected equipment to make more money. Car companies are charging people a monthly fee for things like using their cruise control and their air conditioning. The air conditioner costs $15 a month, the ability to tow a trailer is $20 a month, and engaging the four wheel drive sets you back $40 a month. Heck, even the seat warmers cost $4 a month. It will cost you $20 a month to use your key fob to remotely unlock or start your vehicle.

Remember when you used to buy software? Now you rent it by paying yearly fees to use the stuff that you bought.

One of the things that I did at my current house was to make it a smart house. I have more than 150 smart devices: I can control ceiling fans, lights, irrigation, and even the thermostat- all with smart devices. The backbone of the system is Samsung Smartthings. It has been great. I started doing home automation back in 2014. Since then, my system has expanded.

One of the best things is my lawn sprinklers. I have a personal weather station on the roof of my house, and the system analyzes how much rain I have gotten, using that to adjust the schedule and amount of water the lawn gets. The lawn looks amazing, and the only effort it requires on my part is some weed and feed every 3 months or so.

When I am out of the house, the system monitors for intruders, water leaks, fires, turns the air conditioning to a more economical setting, turns off the water heater, locks the doors in case I forgot, and even turns lights on and off to make it look like I am home. It monitors my freezer temperatures and the humidity of the gun safe and will alert me if there is a problem. The system feeds and waters my wife’s cats, and empties their litter box. My carpets are vacuumed and floors mopped. All automatically. Until we decided to move, I was going to add robotic lawn mowing to the stable and get rid of my lawn service. I feel like George Jetson. Nearly every household chore is automated, and it makes things very convenient and easy.

Until recently. Samsung has been making changes to their systems so that they are easier for people with no tech skills to use. What this means, is that my devices are getting changed and “dumbed down” to the point where I don’t think my next house will be a smart house. Where I used to be able to write, edit, and change the drivers to my system, it is becoming less so.

It all started with changes to how the system dealt with my Sonos speakers. I once had it set up so that the system made announcements over the speakers: things like “your wife is home” when she would arrive, or “your in-laws have arrived” when they came over, so that I knew to put pants on. Then there was a system update 2 years ago, and the speakers don’t talk to the system anymore.

It’s little things. I used to have the ceiling fans set up so that I could adjust their speed from 0-100 percent. Last night, there was a system update, and now my choices are low-medium-high. If I had wanted low-medium-high, I would have set it up that way.

It isn’t just Samsung. A couple of years ago, Google bought out the company that made my fire alarms. Now I can’t change, replace, or add anything without updating the drivers to Google device drivers and becoming a NEST customer, which will charge me money for monitoring the system.

So going forward, I have a few choices:

• Continue with Smartthings, and keep losing functionality. It will still require a fair bit of time and money to set up the new house
• As long as I am moving, I could switch to Home Assistant, which I have been playing with and will give me a lot of control, but will even more work, a steep learning curve, a good bit of money, and I just don’t know if I want to invest the time and money to do it right now
• go back to having a “dumb house”
• or sharply cut back on what automation I do have, to get what I refer to as “a mildly retarded house” with a lot less functionality, but at low cost and not a lot of work.

There is a lot going on right now, and I don’t know if I have the time for most of the options above.

My mail saga continues. There is a knock at the door today. I open it to see the owner of the landscaping company that mows my lawn. We see him all over the place, at parties, friends homes, restaurants. (It’s a small town) Anyhow, he hands me a package that he found on the side of the road about a mile away from here. It’s addressed to my wife. It looks like its been outside for awhile, as it is pretty weathered.

I look up the tracking number, and USPS says it was delivered a week ago.

Delivered (or not) by the same government that wants to be in charge of delivering your healthcare.

I usually write my posts the night before they appear. As I write this, I just got home from a 12 hour shift in the pediatric emergency room. The shift before that was in the acute unit of the main ED. I got attacked by a suicidal, unmedicated schizophrenic. I am still sore. Also this week, I went to my CCRN (Critical Care RN) course on two of those days.

I also have to work a 12 hour shift on Saturday from 10:00 to 22:30.

I am exhausted and don’t have it in me to research and write a post right now, so I am going to bed and there may or may not be a post for Saturday. With my long hours on Saturday, there may or may not be one on Sunday.

It’s not going to get any better. I’m trying to finish my masters degree, build a house, and move into that house. All within the next 4-6 months.

So all of you- enjoy your weekend.

My problem has been repaired. The issue was that I had a Work/School Microsoft account that was used to access school software that was needed to attend class, back when I was using this laptop for school. The IT drones at the school were idiots and somehow that account authorized my computer to upgrade to Windows 11.

When the upgrade happened, it changed all of my bookmarks and settings to what they were when I was still a student. It also loaded a bunch of apps to my browser and changed my default search engine.

I don’t think that any data was lost or compromised. It just took a bit to get the work account removed, and to get all of my stuff restored.

One of the things I am doing is changing the way that we handle Internet and Television. That system is a ripoff thanks to what they call “bundling.” My last bill was $230 for CATV and Internet. We don’t get any premium channels. I am trying to figure out what I am getting for all of this, but I have seen Greek instruction manuals that are less confusing than our cable bill:

• They charge me $102 for Internet service that is nominally at 800MBps. When I check it, the best I get is around 50-70 MBps. My in-laws live 2 miles away and are getting 250 MBps, according to speedtest. So I decide that I am not paying for speed that I’m not getting and look to see what a lower speed would save me. Lowering my speed to 400 would actually RAISE my bill by $22 a month. Going to 200 would raise my bill by $34 a month. Yeah, I know that they have a disclaimer that says speed can vary, but only getting 10% of what they are advertising seems to be a stretch.

• Now on to television. My wife watches far more of it than I do, but I do occasionally watch. Mostly movies, hockey, and old television shows. My wife loves watching shows like medical dramas. I can’t stand those, but we gotta keep the wife happy. They charge us $91 for 185 channels. Cutting it to the 125 channel option would save us a whopping 94 cents per month. If I go to only 10 channels, it would save me $40, but I can get those same 10 channels with an antenna for free.

They bundle them together, and the bill claims that with discounts, I am being charged $130 a month. Seems reasonable, so how do they arrive at my $230 biil?

• Add-ons. They charge us $30 for three cable boxes, another $10 for DVR service, $6 for the remote controls so we can use their cable boxes, and $38 a month in service, sports, and local channel fees, Then add in the taxes, and the total bill is a quarter grand. $3k a year for cable and Internet. Believe it or not, this is the best of the providers in our area. We tried DSL. That service has even slower Internet. T-mobile has a home Internet that works over 5g cell towers, but there is a 200gb per month data limit. That isn’t going to work if we stream. They are raping us because there are really no other options.

So I called them. We are getting rid of cable TV and cutting the Internet speed to 400mB/s. Why pay for 800 when we never get speeds that high, anyway? If it continues, I may even cut it further. We already have Amazon Prime and Netflix, because they were free with other things that we already have and pay for. So here is the plan:

• Internet: $87
• Netflix: Free
• Amazon Prime: paid for through other means
• Paramount+ $12/mo
• Hulu (with ads): $8/month
• Peacock (with ads): $5/month

So it will cost us $25 for TV and $87 for Internet. Once we see if there will be any hidden charges, especially from the not-so-transparent Internet provider, we can consider upgrading to the “no ads” version of the above services, which will cost us an additional $19 per month. However, we just cut our cable/internet bill from $230 to $112 per month.

There are some things that commenters say, not just on this board, but on the Internet in general that really make you come off as being less intelligent. As the owner of this site, I am not going to prohibit them, but I do want people to be aware that saying these things makes people want to ignore anything that you have to say. Call them my pet peeves. I will still post comments like this, but I can’t promise that I won’t roll my eyes while clicking the “allow publication” button, nor can I promise that I won’t make fun of you for it:

• Using “HONK!” in a comment. I get that you are trying to sound smart by calling things “clown world” but it really makes you look like a moron. When I see this, it is a sure indicator that the rest of the post will not make a coherent point and is guaranteed to be annoying. Make your point without it.
• Writing a comment that so poorly uses the common rules of English grammar that your post is indecipherable. Honestly, I just skip your comment without reading it when I see things with tons of deliberate misspellings and poor grammar. Life is too short to spend several minutes rereading your comment and trying to decipher what you meant to say.
• Don’t purposely misspell names to sound clever. Obozo, Teabaggers, Trumpf, Bushitler, Magats, all of those are juvenile put-downs that do nothing to forward a real exchange of ideas. It usually is a huge distraction from whatever point you are trying to make.

It reminds me of how people used “word” for everything back in the late 80s. You would say, “I love chocolate ice cream,” and someone would reply with: “Word.” Feel free to roast me for being a grumpy old man in the comments to this post.

My ongoing series about carrying in hospitals has been a bit of a disappointment to me. I am receiving a number of messages, comments, and emails warning me about raising a fuss with an employer about firearms. A couple of points:

Nurses in Florida are in extremely short supply. Good emergency nurses, even more so. To the point where hospitals are paying bonuses of $10,000 a year just to accept a job there, on top of their pay. Considering that nursing is an associate’s degree, a nurse fresh out of school who is starting with no experience is being offered $70,000 a year is pretty good money.

Unarmed security guards in Florida have to take a 40 hour class. They are easily replaced, and there is no hospital that is going to fire a nurse over their disagreement with the opinions of a security guard, barring unusual circumstances.

With that being said, I am not dumb enough to give the guard any of those unusual circumstances. I was polite and that is why it pissed off that guard. It went like this:

Security Guard: That law doesn’t apply here. You can’t carry a gun here because (reasons covered in other post)

DM: Really? I didn’t see that in the statute. Can you point me to that law, or cite the number? I would like to read it for myself.

SG: (produces Facebook page of local cops) See? The cops even say so. Just trust that security and the police know the law better than you do. It’s our job to worry about the law, you guys just need to worry about the medicine. If you see anyone that you think might have a gun, let us know and we will take care of it.

So like I said, Mall Ninja is practicing law by reading Facebook posts. So if THAT is the reason why I get fired, so what? Nursing shortage- I will have another job within a couple of days. Even so, that is why I have the emergency fund that I talked about last month. It’s called “fuck you” money. Don’t let someone use money to control you. You should be working on your financial independence.

To my second point, and the thing that really has me disappointed: If those of us in the freedom/gun community are too afraid to even ask questions of a security guard about gun policies at your place of employment, then how are we ever thinking that we will use those guns to defend your rights? If you won’t even risk pissing off a Mall Cop at your job, how will you ever use those same guns to defend freedom? If so, the entire argument about the Second Amendment is moot. You might as well turn them in for some gift cards. Think about how far you are willing to go in defending your rights.

I would also add that the nurses in the emergency room tend to be on the Conservative end of the spectrum. It’s hard to see what we see and still have a bleeding heart. I have already had in depth conversations about guns with several nurses and Doctors at the new job. Most of them belong to the local gun club, and there are even a couple of III% and Molon Labe stickers on vehicles in the parking lot. A couple of us are looking to setup a range day, and one nurse I was talking to is a precision rifle shooter who builds his own rifles and rolls his own ammo because factory isn’t precise enough. He was telling me about a 1,000 yard range that he makes the drive to. This is the most progun ED that I have ever worked in.