IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

Oops! Something Went Wrong, Part 6 - John Dunn, Consultant Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

My group blockages at LinkedIn appear to have ended.

As of July 26th, I was blocked from 38 groups, as of August 2nd, August 7th and August 16th, I was blocked from 35 groups and as of August 19th, I was blocked from 25 groups. However, on September 4th, I discovered that my posting abilities had been restored to all 49 groups in which I am a participant. As of October 2nd, full posting ability has not been disrupted.

While the blockages were in effect, I sent correspondence to The Better Business Bureau, to The Federal Trade Commission and to The New York State Office of the Attorney General. In all three cases, I received replies (my paraphrasing) that the issue had been made a matter of record at each agency, but that no remedial steps were to be expected.

I don't know if one or more of those agencies quietly had a hand in that restoration nor whether restoration will continue to be the case as time goes on. However, if you have had an experience similar to my own and are still affected, the above information may be of use.

Lucy's Fee - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

For seventy-two years, Lucy Van Pelt has been a steadfast member of the Peanuts comic drawn by Charles Schultz. One of her long traditions, aside from pulling away the football that Charlie Brown tries to kick, Lucy has offered psychiatric counseling for a fee of five cents.

Guess what I found this past Sunday!!

Lucy's fee has doubled. Whoever altered Charles Schultz's work would probably touch up the smile on The Mona Lisa if given the chance.

Changes to Mutt and Jeff have previously been noted. Please see: 

https://licn.typepad.com/my_weblog/2023/08/changing-changing-john-dunn-consultant-ambertec-pe-pc.html

To me though, this is worse.

Comments?

 

Change of Optimum Domain - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

On Thursday, September 7th, I sent and received a few e-mails at a few minutes before seven PM. Then at eight PM, I discovered that my e-mail service was no longer working. Although incoming messages addressed to [email protected] were still coming in, when I myself tried to use the e-mail service to send a message out, a short note would appear in the lower right corner of the screen saying:

"Send/Receive error  -  click here" and so I did. Then another message appeared in a small, mid-screen window of which the following was a part: 

"The server name you entered cannot be found on the network (it might be down temporarily). Verify that you are on line and that the server name is correct." 

When on Friday, September 8th, the e-mail service was still not working, I called up my provider, Optimum, to seek service restoration. After much discussion with two tech-reps, I found out that Optimum had changed my e-mail address from [email protected] to [email protected]. The domain name had been changed.           

I related this tale to a friend who sent back an image from an e-mail said to have come to him several years ago about just this very thing.

Checking back, I never saw this message come my way although I have been using the domain name optonline.net for more than twenty years. Now there are thousands of points of contact to whom that domain name has been part of e-mail address statements and I (and other users as well, presumably) must individually notify those thousands of entities of this seemingly arbitrary change. In my case, those entities include medical providers which at my age and my medical status can literally be a matter of life or death.

Imagine if your phone company were to surprisingly change your phone number and you had to notify everyone you know of that change. The action that Optimum has taken is almost as bad as that.

With much bewilderment and stress, I finally figured out how to change my Outlook settings to work with this new server domain name. The process was as follows:

First click on "Tools", then click on "Account Settings...", then click on "Change..." and make the following changes.

1)         All e-mail address domains have to be changed from optonline.net to optimum.net.

2)         "Incoming mail server" must be changed to:              mail.optimum.net

3)         "Outgoing mail server (SMTP)" must also be:           mail.optimum.net

After restoring my own e-mail service, I found that my wife's PC had also had also stopped working for e-mail. Oddly, nothing seemed to be coming in to her PC from anywhere. I followed these same steps and suddenly a whole slew of new messages came rolling in. I had to let her sort through them all but still, I have a lot of people of my own needing to be notified.

In Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening", there is a line that reads:

"...but I have promises to keep."

It feels like that.

The Great Wall Breach - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

This cellphone screenshot of the damage recently done to The Great Wall needs no adjectives to emphasize the atrocity that was committed. However, what one must notice is the sheer scale of the earth moving that was done.

No matter how isolated the location might be, it is inconceivable that nobody noticed what was going on while it was going on. Surely someone had to have seen this taking place but did not report it out of fear of being falsely accused of complicity.

Think of the character "Sgt. Schultz' from the old "Hogan's Heroes" television show saying "I see nothing. I see nothing!"

Kitchen Fire Hazard - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

The following story is anecdotal, but disquieting.

A friend of ours had raised vegetables in her backyard garden which crop included plum tomatoes. The other day, we were treated to the present of a small bag of those tomatoes. We were also told a story which did give us pause.

Our friend was using those tomatoes to make a tomato sauce. There was a pot full of water boiling away on the stove with some tomatoes being cooked when she decided to add a few more tomatoes. As she did so, with no warning whatever, there was a flame which flared up from the pot and then vanished.

Nobody got hurt, but why did that happen?

We discovered that all kinds of fruits and vegetables depend on the gas ethylene to achieve ripeness. Many produce items internally generate that gas for themselves, some more than others, and some fruit and vegetable processes involve direct exposure to introduced ethylene.

It can be dangerous. Please see:    OSHA Report

The subject tomatoes were very ripe which now poses the following question:  Could there have been ethylene gas trapped inside one or more of those very ripe tomatoes which upon release in the boiling process, were carried by turbulence to the stove flame and caused to ignite?

I have not been able to find any written materials citing such a possibility, but it would seem to be a matter of concern for kitchen safety.

Comments?

 

Student Loans and the IRS, Part 2 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

When I heard that discussion on the Brian Lehrer program with a telephone caller who was caught by surprise owing a capital gains tax in connection with a student loan, I also put that story on a neighborhood bulletin board.

One responder, a CPA I believe, provided a lengthy write-up of related tax issues. It was quite a  lot to absorb. However, another responder left some remarks from which I think the smoke may not yet have cleared.

Some of that second person's choice of vocabulary was quite unexpected. It included phrases like "entitled brats", "free income", "favor high taxes on OTHER people" and more. With no knowledge of the radio caller's identity or history or personal circumstances, there was a willingness, even an eagerness, to invoke negative judgment. To me, that kind of reaction signals what I see as profound cynicism.

So what is a cynic? Consider the following made-up rant which might shed some light on that.

"You think you can pull one over on me?? Oh, yeah??? Well, you can't fool me, not even for a second. I know all about your kind. I know what you want to do. I know what your game is. I know what you're planning and I'm not going to let you get away with it. No sireee!! I'm way too smart to fall for your tricks. See??"

This kind of recitation, (Something very much like this was once actually aimed my way.) reveals a reflexive quickness to judgment and betrays a profound overconfidence in the cynic's assessment of personal analytic ability. For a cynic to truly know what this rant avows to be known would require telepathic ability. No member of our species has ever been shown to have that.

A sad aspect though is that such a cynic can carry that thought pattern into every aspect of life. Whether at work or at home, I don't think anyone who is predisposed in that way can ever experience being peacefully happy. There will always be something coming to mind that is either threatening or offensive or both.

Such perpetual tension means that for some people, happiness is self denied.

When - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

When the first color television sets went on sale in the mid-1950s, their key element was their picture tubes, their tri-color cathode ray tubes. Electron beams had to be aimed at color dots very precisely in a chore called "convergence".

Attaining convergence was a difficult challenge. I remember reading lots of articles in television repair magazines instructing the reader how to achieve convergence. Sometimes the described processes had to be repeated several times over.

"When ya gonna buy a color TV, huh???" was a question I seemed to hear over and over with the usual answer being "When they get it perfected." 

Around 1964, there was a whole lot of hoopla about introducing europium into the color picture tube phosphors. Suddenly, as I recall reading, colors were brighter, more vibrant, more stunning and all kinds of other superlatives.

I still heard the same Q and A though.  "When ya gonna..." followed by ".... perfected."

Eventually I guess, some level of perfection was achieved because nobody of my acquaintance still watched black-and-white television, even before the advent of HDTV. For all of that multi-decade history, the worst consequence of imperfection was making Perry Como look like he had a greenish complexion. There was nothing dangerous about perfection's absence.

Today, we have a similar situation, but one fraught with real danger. I refer to electric vehicles and their lithium-ion batteries.

Issues of vehicle range, issues of charging problems, issues of tire wear, issues of lithium metal availability and so forth are making the news but the real issue to me is lithium-ion battery fires. Tesla's vehicle fires, Tesla's battery factory fire, E-bike fires, the Chevrolet Bolt fires and its discontinuance and then its re-introduction (Trust us. We got it right this time.) are to my mind all examples of an immature technology very much paralleling the immature color TV technology of yore.

Nobody was ever harmed from watching a mis-converged television picture, but battery fires have indeed done harm.

Will I ever personally purchase an electric vehicle?

Maybe when they get it perfected.

Student Loans and The IRS - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I was listening to radio station WNYC this morning, 8/21/2023, to the Brian Lehrer program. There was a substitute host and an interview guest discussing student loan forgiveness. A listener called in with a disquieting story. I will try to summarize it.

This young woman had a student loan with an outstanding balance of $23,000. Her loan provider offered to clear the account in totality if she could make a payment of $3,000. By much effort, the caller amassed that smaller amount and made the requested payment for which the provider did indeed close out the account. This was all well and good.

The surprise came when the caller learned from the Internal Revenue Service (the IRS) that the difference between the original outstanding balance and the payment she made would count against her as a capital gain on which she then owed the IRS a capital gains tax amount of $6,000.

Upon hearing this story, the interview guest's response (my paraphrase) was "Oh, yes. The IRS does treat those amounts as capital gains." which reply was delivered very matter of factly. The assumption seemed to be that of course this would be so and that everyone knows that.

The caller didn't know that and I certainly would not have known that either.

If you or anyone you know is in a similar student loan situation, I very much caution you and/or yours to be aware of this and to check out the tax implications, preferably with professional guidance.

"Oops - Something Went Wrong", Part 5 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

The following is an excerpt of my recent letter to The New York State Office of the Attorney General:

Good day.

I am writing to report a fraud being committed by LinkedIn Corporation.

Since October 22, 2010, I have been a paid subscriber to premium services of LinkedIn Corporation. As such, my subscription privileges include the ability to post essays to LinkedIn groups of which, at this writing, I hold membership in forty-nine such groups. I have made many topical posts over the years. My total to date is just over 1200. Recently however, LinkedIn chose to impose a new set of posting "limits" which may be referenced at:

https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a544801

By virtue of that newly introduced list, I am at this writing now blocked from making any posts whatsoever to thirty-five groups out of that forty-nine group total despite my having regularly paid for full posting privileges as a premium subscriber.

Full posting access is not being "limited" as LinkedIn has claimed. Instead, full posting access is being denied. It is analogous to purchasing a one gallon container of milk in a grocery store but receiving only eleven ounces. One could drink the eleven ounces, but it would be improper to have been fraudulently denied the remainder.

When an attempted LinkedIn post fails, this message appears: "Oops - something went wrong. We were unable to post at this time. Please try posting again." but trying again is never of any use. Trying again never works. I can find no correlation of that to the so-called "limits" chart at the above URL.

My attempted posting subjects have included mathematics, medical issues, engineering and scientific topics, anecdotal materials and so forth.

An example of blockage is shown as follows:

So far, LinkedIn staff has refused to accept this denial of services problem as a legitimate complaint despite their accepting my monthly payments for their services. Instead of being responsive to my input regarding this matter, I have been rebuffed, I have subjected to attempted deceit and I have been subjected to attempted misdirection. Each of those three can be described in further detail if useful.

A request I made for assistance from the Better Business Bureau (BBB) in mid-July has also come no avail. Having made their own inquiry to LinkedIn, LinkedIn still refused to provide remedy. That agency has therefore informed me that my unresolved issue is simply to be made a matter of BBB record and that the case there is closed.

A request I made for assistance from the Federal Trade Commission in late-July regarding LinkedIn has so far yielded no response.

I assert that the LinkedIn denial of posting privileges for which I am a paid premium subscriber constitutes a commission of fraud by LinkedIn Corporation. Further, it is my supposition that I am not the only LinkedIn victim.

I seek full and permanent restoration of those paid for posting privileges and I request your assistance to that end.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Changing, Changing - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I stumbled into an old Mutt and Jeff cartoon the other day which looked particularly familiar, even knowing that all of the cartoons under that title have long since been published.

Please check out these two dates and look very closely at the images at their respective URLs:

From January 3, 2015:         January 3, 2015

From August 12, 2023          August 12, 2023

Although the line drawings seem unchanged between the two dates, please note the extensive revisions of color and especially notice the almost completely rewritten text. Although the color changes seem arbitrary and I find it difficult to imagine why those changes were made, some of the text changes may have significance.

In the older first panel, Jeff's new beloved is referred to as a "midget" while in the newer first panel, she is referred to as a "dwarf". Although some websites consider the two words to be synonymous, some mention can be found that "preferred terms vary by person and community, according to the Little People of America website."  Maybe this was a response to perceived sensitivity.

In the older second panel, we find the expression "fit as a fiddle" while in the newer second panel, we find instead the expression "a-one". Maybe this represents accommodation to an evolution of slang. There are other examples of altered phrasing in the succeeding panels as well.

Nothing stays the same, does it. Change is everywhere, expected or not.