How to skip that stupid message

[The Real Bev]

I don't know, my earliest Android phone was 4.x.

I should do that. I think mine just says "This is Bev" so that actual friends will know they haven't got a wrong number. My son's message used to be "This is the machine; you know what to do."

I didn't have a problem with it until my consciousness was raised sometime back in the 90s :-) I really only care because I want to be grammatically correct but I'm too lazy to write he/she or him/her whenever it's called for.

Mine is white (faux iPhone, I guess; only white was on sale) and white gets dirty. While I'm a slob, I don't like to actually SEE grubby stuff.

Stuff like that, along with cables etc. should be ordered directly from China rather than paying a local shop a 500% markup for the same stuff. I've been happy with dx.com and most of the ebay sellers and am both patient (takes maybe a month) and willing to risk small amounts of money.

[KenK]

Micky wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Mine leaves an icon on the top of the screen showing a voice mail is present. I turn on the phone and check for that every few days.

[The Real Bev]

Too much time wasted!

Feed suspicious numbers into a normal google search box and it will tell you what other people have had to say about the number -- mostly that it's spam.

[nospam]

calling your own number resulted in a busy signal.

there was a test prefix, which was different for different areas, where if you dialed *that* prefix plus the last 4 digits then hang up, it would ring back but with a test tone.

rotary phones worked (and all that existed long ago), but ringback worked just as well with touchtone.

[Micky]

New York City and maybe some other cities had dial phones in the 40's, as you can see from movies of the period, but in other places it was later. I grew up between Pittsburgh and Youngstown and I remember coming home from school and seeing that the phone man had been there. He changed the phone in my parents' room but in the kitchen, he took the 2"x2" square black metal cap off the phone and replaced it with a cap that had a dial on it. This was between 1953 and 57, probably in the middle of that range.

I think the experience of having to send a repairman to every home was a big part of their plan to go modular and make us do such things ourselves. That and more women work so it's harder to find someone home. My mother was home 70 to 90% of the time.

[Micky]

I like that message. It's the contrast to the phone company telling us we can hang up after we leave the message. Before they said that, I used to just hold on until the person I called came home.

My consciousness was raised for a while, but then it got tired and lay down again. A little later, it fell asleep.

Somewhere in school, high school or earlier, totally unrelated to him and her, I got the strong impression that slashes shouldn't be used in polite or formal writing. Even worse is reading such stuff aloud and saying "slash".

(This might be related to people who say, not reading just talking, "this is what the quote unquote instructions say." when it ought to be " what the quote instructions unquote say".)

I don't mind the black so much now that I know white or blue phones are more expensive.

Indeed.

Sort of related: I bought a $3.15 7-outlet USB hub with 7 switches and

7 lights from Amazon, and it said it would take 5 to 8 weeks, or something like that, but it came at 4 weeks. It said I could track it on UPS, but UPS still has no record of it, and it says nothing about UPS on the padded envelope it came in.

It's $5 now but will probably go down again. I ddidn't know USB wire came so thin.

[Micky]

Good point. For me it was reassuring to see that my new phone knows how to ring.

I've done that with this one. The exchange, first three digits, is (or are) I think one digit off from one many of my friends have, so it had me fooled at first. But since only 6 people know my cell number that made me check.

[The Real Bev]

Funny, I used to do that too. I guess those instructions aren't a waste of time after all.

Slashes and double hyphens are too useful to eliminate. Reading them aloud is completely different, though.

Or do air-quotes. When we can get free licenses to kill three people per year I don't think those people would be on my hitlist, but maybe if it was a slow year...

A woman had set up a begging station near the entrance to the mall parking lot across the street. She was there for several days. Her sign said that she had just found a job and needed money to buy suitable clothes. She had a white phone. She was also blocking the sidewalk. I finally told her that she was obviously a scammer, that if she really needed the money she would have picked up the soda can lying 6 feet away (worth a nickel and I collected enough cans on our daily bike rides to buy a very nice [used] bicycle), she was blocking the sidewalk, and if she was there the next day I was calling the cops.

We bought some Chinese button batteries from dx.com that took extra time because they were shipped from Sweden. Go figure.

I found out that USB3 cables use twice as many wires as USB2 cables, so I ordered some extension cables so we can easily plug USB3 devices into the USB3 sockets on the back of the computers. 1 meter long, $3.64 each, free shipping.

[Micky]

On the NBC news tonight they had acouple whose car insurance went up

25%. They had 3 cars for the two of them. If they can't afford the insurance, they should sell one car. I would think NBC could have found a couple with only 2 cars.

Those are either nickel-ice or carbide-snow

[tlvp]

Update: just met that "nnn" again today, and it's 805. Cheers, -- tlvp

[tlvp]

Turn on "Airplane Mode" :-) . HTH. Cheers, -- tlvp

[Micky]

When it gets to 1200, sell.

[Micky]

Oh, yeah, I did know about that, but I didn't put 2 and 2 together.

And I thought you could only do it on an airplane.

[tlvp]

Have Jefferson Airplane playing softly in the background.

Cheers, -- tlvp

[Micky]

That sounds right.