IEEE Consultants' Network of Long Island

LinkedIn Billing Flaw, Part 2 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

The billing issue with LinkedIn appears, as of this writing on May 23rd, to have finally been resolved.

Each night for the last several weeks, I have tried without success to update my credit card information and gotten back one of those "Sorry" messages. Finally, when I was about to make yet another attempt, I discovered that the update had actually been done by LinkedIn itself, not by dint of any attempt of my own, but by LinkedIn's own action.

I can settle for that outcome for myself, but I don't know whether other LinkedIn customers might yet be experiencing the problem with getting "Sorry" messages by which I had been beset.

Sadly though, resolution took the exchanging of way too many e-mails and consumed way too much time. Look at this list of back and forth messages which spans twenty-one days:

Still, it looks like I won't be getting booted from LinkedIn after all.

LinkedIn Billing Flaw - John Dunn, consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

The chosen word is "flaw" because this is more than just a mere "problem".

I need to change the credit card information for LinkedIn, but their billing system will not allow me to do so. Please see the following:

So far, I have spent twelve fruitless days with "Customer Support" to no avail. Instead of fixing what is clearly their billing software problem, I have received communiques such as this:

LinkedIn had already received the first image above along with text in in which the "exact steps" were very carefully spelled out. Also, the instructions for creating the HAR file were hideously difficult to interpret. I tried my best and ended up with an HAR file that was 22 MB large. I sent that to them, but to date, nothing has been achieved.

If this cannot be corrected, if present day staff at LinkedIn don't know how to maintain normal business functions, my participation in LinkedIn will undoubtedly come to its end. The two LinkedIn groups that I have been maintaining, "Engineering Design professionals" (sic) which I inherited and "Analog Developments", which I originated, will also have to come to their ends.

Has anyone else experienced something like this?

Nat King Cole and Johnny Mercer - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Now and then, one comes across something that is utterly zany!!

This is one of those:   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8cWTBsYMrk

Billing Scam - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

The following e-mail came in a few days ago. It is a fraud. It is a scam.

I called the billing department at this provider and was told 1) invoices are only sent out on paper via the post office and 2) the indicated amount due has no relation to any dollar amount tied to this household.

Note that no physician, no medical provider and no date of service is indicated. Everything is designed to have you make the ruinous mistake of clicking on one of the links which will undoubtedly put malware onto your PC.

Do NOT fall prey if something like this comes your way.

Microsoft Problem - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I recently purchased a copy of Microsoft's "Office Home & Business". I made an error in trying to install it on my laptop and could not find a way to recover from that error. While trying to achieve remedy, I got some baffling screen messages like "You are not the owner of this case." and "We can't find your subscription."

I requested assistance from Microsoft's support but all I got as a result was to become utterly bewildered. Shortly afterward, in came the Microsoft message below to which I made the shown e-mail reply. Results thus far:  Nothing. No answer. Silence. The product remains useless.

Having gotten nowhere with all of that, I tried to reinstall my Office 2007 suite to get back to where I had been before the onset of this debacle and guess what: My Office 2007 suite doesn't work properly anymore either. Via Outlook, I can send out e-mails but I cannot receive them.

Within the bounds of polite language, can anyone offer any suggestions?

Antiques and Fossils - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

What is the difference between an antique and a fossil? If an antique gets to be old enough, does it qualify for fossilhood?

It has been suggested to me that an antique, however old it might be, forever remains an antique because it was created by human hands. Some measure of artisanship was required to have created an antique while a fossil comes into being through natural processes that do not involve human intervention.

Still, the Cro Magnon cave paintings are sometimes referred to as fossil art even though someone had to do something by hand to bring those images into being. Prehistoric spear tips are also the results of creative activity but they too are sometimes called fossil artifacts.

So then, what's the threshold? When and by what criteria did those and/or other entities make the transition?

Vanity Plates, Part 3 - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

Still more folks expressing their personal philosophies in eight letters or less:

Plate Street Obstruction - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

There is a nearby street intersection where some new signs were installed in such a way as to block a driver's view of oncoming traffic. I e-mailed this picture of the problem to the town's Highway Department.

This is what happened:

By simply raising the plates, street viewability was restored. Of course, those plates should never have been installed wrongly in the first place.

Still, if you see some municipal infrastructure issue in your neighborhood, don't hesitate to say something because, all cynicism aside, doing so can work.

False Attributions - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I have heard of, been told about and actually met various persons who having become ill in some way, they then TOLD their doctor what they wanted that doctor to prescribe as treatment for their ailment. Often included in the recitations presented to me were phrases such as "Doctors don't know anything."

One example was a child care professional who should have known better but who asserted that "All antibiotics work in three days." Some doctors have been known to capitulate to sufficiently strident patient demands based on "reasons", however misguided, but perhaps did so supposing that their giving in would not lead to harm.

When someone who becomes ill and then for "reasons" insists on receiving treatments known to be ineffective but who actually recovers, they will then insist that their recovery was in consequence of the treatment they had insisted upon receiving.

I am more inclined to think that those fortunate recoveries were achieved more in spite of having shunned valid medical care rather than because of that avoidance.

The nonsensical "reasons" why many people have shunned vaccination, the nonsensical "reasons" for touting Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquin as Covid remedies and the nonsensical "reasons" for non-compliance with basic rules of hygiene are why Covid deaths in the US have arrived in the one-million range. By dint of much improper oratory, the tragic effects of all of those "reasons" were made all the worse.

There are two responses I have observed from having this matter spelled out. One is quietude in the seemingly firm persuasion that doctors really are wrong and that the truth stands known only to those outside of credentialed medical information sources.

The other response is an eruption of profanity, invective, accusations of ignorance, epithets such as (fill-in-the-blank)-tards and sometimes orders to shut up or else. Sadly, I have seen and/or heard each and all of these at one time or another.

I remember a TV repair article I once read when television repair was one of my big interests many years ago. The article's author wrote of being told that "every time" a television picture's vertical height went bad, it was the vertical output tube. That had once been true in one customer's set so obviously it had to always be true. The writer's admonition to his readers was to not fall victim to any such fallacy.

Ditto in the third paragraph above.

Thirty Millennia - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

From the following URL:

https://www.universetoday.com/155169/nasas-upcoming-spherex-mission-will-map-the-entire-universe-in-infrared-every-6-months/

We read:

"NASA's Upcoming SPHEREx Mission Will map the Entire Universe in Infrared Every 6 Months"

If I understand the article, the plan is to compare successive sky surveys which I imagine means using image subtraction techniques. When they find differences, high resolution observational attention will then be devoted to those differences using the Webb telescope.

We also read:

"....  the Hubble Space Telescope has given us amazing views of the heavens, but in its 30-year mission, it has only captured about 0.1% of the total sky."

That means that only 0.1% of the sky, only one one-thousandth of the sky, has been imaged by Hubble in its thirty years of service. By extrapolation, at that same rate of observations, imaging the entire sky would take Hubble thirty-thousand years or thirty millennia.

That's a sobering thought, isn't it.

Actually, the "Enitre" adjective is a bit overstated. The survery will capture 99% of the sky, but hey, who's counting?