Emergency alert to be tested on US cellphones, TV and radio on Wednesday

About 20 years ago I was on a trip and thought I should call someone to tell them I wouldn't be back in time to go to a community dinner. I didn't want people to worry that I wasn't there. I stopped at a pay phone in west virginia and I thought to ask first how much it would cost. It was about $20 for the first 3 minutes!! I didnt' do it but later a woman at a museum let me use her phone. She even let me take it out to the street without her to get a good signal.

In 1945 my mother married and moved to Western Pa. She would pick up the phone and the operator would say, Number pleeuz. and she would say Oliver 4-1234 or something. And after a few days the operator said, "You don't have to say Oliver 4, Ma'am. They're all Oliver 4."

If the line was busy, the operator would say, "The line is buzzzzzy". That's the origin of the sound of the busy signal. :-)

One day when I was at school the phone company came and put dials on the phone. They took the 2" square plate off the top of the wall phone in the kitchen and wired in a dial that screwed to the top where the plate had been. In my parents' bedroom they replaced the phone entirely.

Based on movies, it's clear they had dial phones in NYC maybe a decade before we got them.

Oh yeah, when I was in the first grade, my parents were at friends on a Saturday night in December. I was almost 6 and my brother was 12. We had a baby sitter but I thought my brother was picking on me. (Well, he was.) So I looked my parents' friends' number up in the phone book and called my mother to complain. And they were so amazed that I could use the phone book. I thought their amazement was strange or silly. After all, in school they had started teaching me to read in September. More than 3 months ago. What was the point of teaching me to read if they didn't think I would do it?

We had to read outloud when the teacher called on us so I know that every kid in my class could read by the end of December.

Great stories. We didnt' have anyone to call overseas but i know even in the 60's it was about $5 a minute.

We would call my grandparents in Indiana after 6 or on weekends when the rate was lower, and we'd crowd around our two phones so we wouldn't waste time and money covering the same topics for each of us. Having two phones was considered upscale.

And you could hold them on your shoulder, even without a special bracket if you practiced.

I still have the special bracket my mother bought around 1960. The rubber is melting at one end and I'm afraid to touch the rest of the rubber, but I guess I can still use it or I could just remove it and glue in some more rubber. But that handset is connected to a phone and I want to find the one I have with no phone.

I found one of those in the desk at home. No one used it, or maybe the case was cracked. I took it apart and saw the bladder, which I guess had been a mystery to me up until then.

They leaked if you moved one quickly and stopped suddenly. I think I learned to not do that. They leaked into the cap and when you took the cap off the ink dribbled out onto whatever.

Your keyboard doesn't leak?

When I was a first year student in college I bought one of the transparent Bic pens with the simple blue cap, kept it in my shirt pocket, and it leaked**, making a big blue spot that would not come out on my shirt. I went back to the college book store and complained and that the pen didn't work any more And I was told their slogan, "Writes first time, every time" was really "Writes first time every time" and since it wrote the first time, it met that standard.

I despised ball-point pens and still despise most of them. They don't always write and the line is harsh looking. I used cartridge pens for a long time, and I'd refill the cartridges with a left-over syringe and a bottle of ink. I still have the bottle of ink, about half full, but I can't find the syringe. Finally they came out with roller ball, which are really ball point with a different name. But some have a medium or broad "point" which is good for marking up computer listings. And they write all the time and don't smear much. So those I like a lot.

LOL A boring play would make it easier to sleep than nothing at all. Tell her I said it's not because of her.

Some kids must have gone to kindergarten, since my mother said it existed, but I never identified one. For me, in the first grade, we had the pledge of allegiance and the Lord's Prayer. In the 3rd grade or so they added "under God" to the pledge and I never liked that, because I'm a true conservative. (In most cases) I like things the way they were, and now I don't like that they inserted religion into it. Also the Lord's Prayer. Even though there's nothing in it with which I disagree, it's religious and doesn't belong in public schools. When I got to Indiana in the 1957, they didn't have it.

I think that was just if your phone was off, you'd still get it if you turned your phone on within 20 minutes, but not if you turned it on tomorrow.

I saw a woman wandering around the supermarket the other day, holding a conversation, with her mobile phone strapped to her face by her hijab ...

My favorite ball point is the old Parker T-ball jotter. Large ink supply, smooth, smug-free. It seems that the OEM refills are either unavailable or ridiculously expensive. I found an excellent substitute that works as well and is much cheaper. I'm still on my first cartridge, using it for almost one year, use the pen every day. On the huge web store everybody loves to hate whose name starts with the letter "A":

Price: $7.99 ($1.33 / Count)

OK, so the package and the refill says "JAYMO" not Cottage Mills and "Made in China" (with German Ink?????) but they write well. Note: Each tip is coated with a dollop of clear wax to prevent drying out. You need to remove that with a fingernail or a piece of toilet tissue or you'll think that the refill is all dried up before you even started using it.

We never had the Lord's Prayer in the New York City public schools but we did have a daily Bible reading over the P.A. speaker on the wall at the front of the classroom; usually from the New Testament. I felt and still feel the same way you do about injecting religion into a public school. Besides, our classes looked like the U.N. General Assembly. Kids of all skin colors, lunch boxes with all different sights and smells and often unfamiliar foreign language accented English and odd sounding first and last names. You can't avoid growing up tolerant in that environment and I'm thankful that I had that opportunity.

As a punishment?

By the time I got to school, the Nine Old Men had kicked God out of the public school. More or less. He was still there in passing in the Pledge of Allegiance, and in high school we had some sort of pre-commencement ceremony that began with a prayer. IIRC attendance at the ceremony was optional--except for the school band, of which I was a part.

And we still had Christmas carols in music class, which was nice.

I don't think we had any non-Christians, although we had some Jehovah's Witnesses who were excused from the Pledge and from any other religiosity.

But when was it widely adopted in NYC?

That rubber doesn't seem very stable now.

According to the YouTube caption, "A 1940 educational short by Bell Telephone to show customers that were receiving new dial phones how to use the new device, and why they were getting these new sets."

Of course, that's not when they became common. However, I suspect it was probably soon afterwards because after WW II began, labor efficiency became very important and many telephone operators no longer needed ended up doing "the men's work" when the men went off to war.

see:

I must be younger. I don't remember phones without a dial. At least not at home. But we had to use an operator to call longer distance or certain cities.

Making an international phone call could take an hour or two to prepare, involving an (international) operator. Then one day it could be done automatically, but we had to wait for a second dial tone.

:-)

Oh, my mother knew very well when I could read. She was a teacher, specialized in 5-6 year olds. I'm sure she tracked my advances or was directly involved on it.

At some point they taught me to use the phone and made me memorize the house number.

:-D

Wireless Emergency Alerts

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA, formerly known as the Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS), and prior to that as the Personal Localized Alerting Network (PLAN)),[1] is an alerting network in the United States designed to disseminate emergency alerts to mobile devices such as cell phones and pagers. Organizations are able to disseminate and coordinate emergency alerts and warning messages through WEA and other public systems by means of the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System.[2]

Background

The Federal Communications Commission proposed and adopted the network structure, operational procedures and technical requirements in 2007 and

Cell Broadcast

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cell Broadcast (CB) is a method of sending messages to multiple mobile telephone users in a defined area at the same time. It is defined by the ETSI's GSM committee and 3GPP and is part of the 2G, 3G, 4G LTE (telecommunication) and 5G standards.[1] It is also known as Short Message Service-Cell Broadcast (SMS-CB) or CB SMS.[2][3]

Unlike Short Message Service-Point to Point (SMS-PP), Cell Broadcast is a one-to-many geo-targeted and geo-fenced messaging service.

...

Technology

...

ne Cell Broadcast message can reach a large number of telephones at once. Cell Broadcast messages are directed to radio cells, rather than to a specific telephone.[5] The latest generation of Cell Broadcast Systems (CBS) can send to the whole mobile network (e.g. 1,000,000 cells) in less than 10 seconds, reaching millions of mobile subscribers at the same time. *A Cell Broadcast message is an unconfirmed push service, meaning that the originators of the messages do not know who has received the message*, allowing for services based on anonymity.[1] Cell Broadcast is compliant with the latest EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as mobile phone numbers are not required by CB. The originator (alerting authority) of the Cell Broadcast message can request the success rate of a message. In such a case the Cell Broadcast System will respond with the number of addressed cells and the number of cells that have broadcast the Cell Broadcast (alert) message.

The CB message parameters contain the broadcasting schedule. If the start-time is left open, the CBC system will assume an immediate start, which will be the case for Public Warning messages. If the end-time is left open, the message will be repeated indefinitely. A subsequent cancel message shall be used to stop this message. The repetition rate can be set between 2 seconds and to values beyond 30 minutes. Each repeated CB message will have the same message identifier (indicating the source of the message), and the same serial number. Using this information, the mobile telephone is able to identify and ignore broadcasts of already received messages.