Me To Internet: Why Can’t You Be More Organized? Gah.

The internet is starting to annoy me.

Here’s the thing: I’ve learned on my new phone how to sort apps into helpful little folders, which I can keep on my phone’s screen to provide easy access to the stuff I want to see instead of going searching through my apps to find it. I have a news folder, which has tons of news outlet apps in it. I have a media folder, which has stuff like Amazon Kindle (it came free with the phone – I haven’t used it) and the music player and Pandora. And I have a shopping folder, with stuff like Amazon.com and Groupon and LivingSocial.

I want the internet to have folders.

I’m not talking about bookmarks and favorite sites and shortcuts on your start screen. I’m talking about what happens when you search the web for something quite precise and get back an awful lot of really quite imprecise things.

The great thing about the internet in the United States is that it’s basically the vomiting of a capitalist democracy. Everything one could possibly want or need, right there for the asking, at negotiable prices or from whichever provider you choose. Nothing is screened, nothing is filtered or blocked, unless you set a filter to keep your kids from looking at porn, or your workplace sets a filter to keep you from looking at porn. Everything is provided, no judgment, just thrown at you with all the force of the cyber-universe. You even get to pick who tells you what about what’s happening in the world. (I actually find this terribly, terribly dangerous, but it’s the freedom we have in America.)

But it totally sucks when all that heap of stuff gets thrown at you and you have to go searching for a needle in an internet haystack of pages and pages and pages of search results because some smartypants put in a bunch of BS SEO coding to make their site pop up when it is in fact not at all what you want. What I need is a set of folders, so I can search for something and the internet can automatically sort the results into them so I don’t waste my time clicking on something that turns out to be a retail site when I’m looking for a literary reference. A Sorting Hat for my internet searches. Wouldn’t it be nice to have these things?:

The News Folder
Obvious explanation. Not to be confused with…

The Folder For News With Which You Agree
Calibrate it to include Fox News, MSNBC, Drudge, etc.

The Folder For Things That Will Only Annoy You
Featuring stuff like World Net Daily, Gloria Allred’s press conferences, political ads, all other types of ads, as well as a subfolder for News With Which You Disagree, to contain that which is opposite to the Folder For News With Which You Agree.

The People You Like To Mock Folder
Featuring Snooki, Rep. Todd Akin, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc.

The People You Love To Hate Folder
Ann Coulter’s Twitter feed, Rep. Todd Akin’s website, Kelly Osbourne, Joan Rivers, as well as any racist or elitist proclivities you may personally have.

The Folder For Stuff That Cracks You Up
Texts From Dog, Someecards, Sh*t My Dad Says, Rep. Todd Akin again.

The Folder For How To Do Stuff
Subcategories for home improvement, automotive, rocket science and working your blessed phone.

The Folder For Stuff That Keeps You Alive
Important information on your doctors, medication refill schedules, etc.

The Folder For That Thing You Saw the Other Day That You Can’t Find Now Even Though You’re Using the Exact Same Words In the Search Bar, Dammit
Yes, please.

The Folder For Stuff You Actually Want To Waste Time On When You’re Bored
Because nothing is more irritating than searching for something to do online, only to have to sort through thousands of search results, by the end of which time you’ve wasted your boredom just looking for something to soothe it, and now you’re both behind schedule and annoyed.

and perhaps most importantly…

The Folder Containing the Exact Thing You Need, Despite Not Really Knowing How To Word Your Search
So you don’t feel like an idiot. Predictive search, my ass.

Is there something that does these things already and I just don’t know about it?

I’d do a search for it, but…

These Aren’t the Droids You’re Looking For: One Woman’s Search For A New Phone

My phone crapped out on Sunday.

Truth be told, I should have seen it coming. The phone was 2 1/2 years old. I keep phones beyond the new-every-two eligibility date because I don’t like the idea of just tossing out a miniature computer because I feel like getting a new one. It’s my grandfather’s spirit alive within me, but my grandfather was kinda quiet so within me he’s blended with a hefty dose of The Muppets’ Statler and Waldorf. Point is, I had the phone a while, and I had drop-kicked it a time or 27 in those years, and that was starting to show. And it’s my only phone, because I joined the legions of people who have shunned landlines in favor of fewer bills. Saturday, while I was lost and trying to find my way to a violinist to rehearse the music for my cousin’s wedding, I learned that, as of exactly that morning, any attempt to use the web browser on my average-intelligence phone simply shut the whole operation down entirely. By Sunday, the touchscreen no longer sensed touch. I could answer a call, but I couldn’t place one.

Game over.

I solicited recommendations on Facebook and of course was met with an onslaught of “Get an iPhone!” I knew this would happen, but you see, I’m a bit of a contrarian when it comes to things everyone is doing. It took me forever to join the aforementioned legion of landline-rejectors. If everyone jumped off a bridge with their iPhones, I would simply use my outdated Garmin to navigate around the traffic jam they had caused by parking their cars on the bridge. I like to root for the underdog, and I feel like every phone and software company that’s not Apple is the underdog these days.

Alas, I walked into the Verizon store fully prepared to buy an iPhone, since, as one friend put it, “There’s a reason everyone says, ‘OMG I love my iPhone!’” As soon as I came in the door, I was attacked by two or three hungry salespeople (one of whom, I soon realized, actually wanted to push Verizon Fios on me, a conversation made more awkward by the fact that he was significantly hard of hearing and had a speech impediment as a result). After learning of the 25 minute wait, I sat on a bench until my name was first on the screen of people being served – like at a deli, only with names instead of numbers, which I don’t like. I don’t like a bunch of strangers in a store that sells GPS-tracking mobile communication systems knowing my name. (Side effect of Stalker Syndrome).

You have no choice, really. Your phone is dead and your mother simultaneously landed in the hospital because she fell at the ice cream parlor and whacked her head on the ground and gave herself a subarachnoid hemorrhage, and also traumatized her grandsons, all in the name of two scoops of Rocky Road, which she shouldn’t be eating anyway because she’s teetering on the edge of Wilford Brimleyitis (true story – she’s fine now and I plan on blaming every ridiculous thing she ever says in the future on her head injury), and so you need a new phone.

Do you know how hard it is to sit somewhere and wait for something for 25 minutes when your phone is broken and you are therefore cut off from the world entirely?

(That was irony.)

When the salesguy got to me, he made quick work of dispensing with the idea of an iPhone. I know – how is that possible? Well, I didn’t want the iPhone 4S – at $170, there was no way in hell. The 5 is coming out next month, which means any price I would have paid for any iPhone would be too much come the release of the 5. So the salesguy steered me to the Samsung Galaxy 3S, another smartphone that’s the highest quality they sell (he says). But it had a $200 pricetag. No go.

So we lit on the LG Lucid, a Droid phone boasting 4G compatibility. iPhones are all 3G, and Verizon is switching its network over to 4G. That means conceivably (I was told), when that switchover is complete, the Lucid will be better supported than the iPhone.

The Droid, he said, can do all the things an iPhone can do, if not more. In fact, I’ve heard tell that there’s no limit to what Droid can do. The salesguy said the Lucid Droid has talk-to-text — something the iPhone 4 does not have (the 4S does). Hmm, thought I. Helpful, given how much I drive. And text. The Lucid Droid has tons of free apps made for both it and the iPhone, so I’m not losing out on that at all. And it even does FaceTime, except it calls it Tango, which is a free download for anybody with any kind of smartphone. So my brother-in-law can’t give me crap about not getting an iPhone for purposes of video chatting with Twin Nephs. Interesting. 

But… but… everyone says the iPhone is better. Everyone says it’s awesome.

Oh, he Lucid is fifty bucks?

Sold.

Bonuses: LGs are great products, insurance is cheaper, deductible is cheaper, no upgrade required on my service contract and it’s a more durable phone if I, say, drop-kick it a time or 27 while I own it.

Ninety minutes after walking in and trying to learn sign language to talk to the cable rep, I walked out with a gizmo that probably could have done it for me, plus its cover and a car speaker for hands-free happiness. I had to immediately go to work, so apart from using it to call my father and find out how my mother’s brain was doing, I didn’t get to play with the phone much. But late in the night, I got to talk to the coworker everyone had told me was the guru of all things Droid.

He was. He was like Obi-Wan Kenobi to my R2D2. And he was my only hope. Since everyone else had an iPhone and didn’t speak Droid.

He taught me all kinds of handy stuff, like, um, how to get it to make a call. Also how to aggregate similarly-themed apps (news apps, entertainment apps, etc) into folders to keep in one central location rather than paging through my apps all the time. He recommended really good apps. He showed me the Google voice bar, which I can talk to and basically get the phone to do everything from sending a text to navigating to making lasagna from scratch. So what, I didn’t know how to find my text messages by the time I had to leave?

Once I figure that out, I’m gonna program it to beam Wilford Brimley into my mother’s kitchen to yell “Diabeetus!” every time she picks up something she shouldn’t eat.

History In the Making

I used to think my grandparents had lived through amazing times in history.

Now I’ve realized I have, too.

On my days off last week, I watched hours of the Olympics. They are, among other things, a fantastic way to pass time. It goes faster when you watch the Games, I’m pretty sure. Then on Sunday night and the wee hours of Monday morning, I watched the newest episode of “The Newsroom,” which dealt with the night Osama bin Laden was killed. I won’t say where I was or what I was doing that night, but in sum, there are a lot of reasons I’ll never forget it. (No, it wasn’t dirty. Geez, people.) I happened to finish the episode on my laptop at 1:30am, the perfect time to flip on the TV and watch the rover Curiosity land on Mars. Live.

Ho-hum.

It has struck me over and over in the last week or two that we are constantly witnesses to astounding things. So constantly, in fact, that we have become impervious to them. That’s what makes us, sadly, so different from the Greatest Generation. We have lost so much of our ability to be amazed and humbled.

I am typing this - typing it – on a laptop computer no heavier than the slab of ribs I’m defrosting in the kitchen. This laptop can bring me live images of something happening literally a world away. My phone, connected to no wires and requiring me to stay in no perimeter (unlike the days when I was frustrated that the phone cord didn’t reach into the dining room from the kitchen), contains almost as much data processing hardware as the laptop does, but is a fraction of the size.  On either of them, I am able to communicate instantly with friends as close as the next room and as far as Australia and Hong Kong. I can even see them, if I choose.

“The Newsroom” begins each episode with a theme montage that features, first in a series of images, and old-timey satellite soaring through space. Just the fact that there is such a thing as an old-timey satellite is sort of mind-blowing.

These things are parts of our everyday life now. We barely notice.

But for some reason, the confluence of recent events has my mind on a different track. I’m grateful that knowing my grandparents and their experiences as I did has taught me an appreciation for history as it happens. I have parlayed that appreciation into other elements of my life. And so at a time when the Olympics converge with the Mars Curiosity landing, an epic (if nearly intolerable) presidential campaign, a global economic crisis and a chaotic assimilation to endless social media, sometimes I just have to stop, look around, and catch my breath.

Those of us who weren’t awake for it may not have reacted much to the Curiosity landing. After all, it’s not the first time we’ve landed something on Mars. The Opportunity is still there, you know, roving. But this was the first time we landed something the size of a car there, without any real testing to see if the whole thing would actually work. It did. It landed perfectly in the perfect spot, unbroken to our knowledge. Within seconds of watching the live reaction from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to the news that Curiosity had successfully touched down after what NASA had termed “seven minutes of terror” for its landing sequence, that thing was beaming back images of the planet it was on. Sending pictures through space of a planet none of us have ever set foot on.

Why is that not every bit as awe-inspiring as when we sent men to walk on the moon?

In 35 years, I have lived through the return from an oil embargo; the election of a Hollywood movie star as president; the invasion of Grenada; the Iran-Contra affair; the war in the Persian Gulf; massive world-changing earthquakes in California, Japan, China, Indonesia and Haiti; Hurricane Katrina; the World Trade Center bombing (1993); the Oklahoma City bombing; September 11th; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the impeachment of a president; the election of an African-American as president; the appointments of the first and second African-American Secretaries of State; appointments of the first, second and third female Secretaries of State; the dissolving of the Soviet Union; the destruction of the Berlin Wall; the Velvet Revolution in Poland; the protest in Tienanmen Square; the Occupy Movement; the Arab Spring and similar uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Libya and Iran; countless space missions, landings and discoveries, including the International Space Station in cooperation with the Russians we previously tried desperately to humiliate in the Space Race; the dawn of the personal computer; video cameras (Beta/VHS/digital); the invention of the internet; laptops, cell phones, digital cameras, cell phone cameras, the microwave, answering machines, voicemail, Facetime and Skype, Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, dating sites, Twitter and innumerable other technological marvels; the turn of a century that once seemed only fantasy (without computer meltdown); the arrival of unfathomable diseases and the cures and effective treatments for so many more; pet microchipping; heart valve replacements; artificial hearts; lifelike prostheses; cars that park themselves…

I could go on and on.

And yes, some of these things exist now only to make our lives easier and allow us to be lazier. We may mutter that it would have been better if they’d never been invented at all.

But watching the Olympics… watching people of every race and nation break down in tears at the triumph of victory and the pain of defeat, watching pride and heartbreak combine, watching people do things I could never, ever do… I find myself cheering for every single athlete, every single time. I don’t care that they’re from China or Russia or Korea. I don’t care that they come from a country diametrically opposed to mine. I don’t care that, by and large, we view their nation’s people as threats to ours. Because when they are united in competition and congratulations as individuals, each with a story, each with a suffering, each with hopes and fears and families they have loved and perhaps lost, it is never more clear that we are all the same. I cry when they cry. I cheer when they cheer. Watching the Curiosity land on Mars, it is undeniable that, everywhere on this planet, every person is subject to the life-ending fragilities and immortalizing strengths of the human condition.

What these things, all these histories I have lived through, show is that we as a species crave and strive for purpose, understanding and unity. What almost all of these things do is bring us together, search for life, and sustain life.

I watched a room full of geniuses at NASA’s JPL jump up and down, cry and cheer endlessly over what had been accomplished at 1:31am Eastern Daylight Time on Monday morning when they learned that all their work over 12 years had finally landed on Mars. On Tuesday, I watched an entire Olympic stadium full of people from all over the world roar their heart-swelling support for a Dominican runner who sobbed on the first place podium after kissing his grandmother’s photo on the track where he’d just become the fastest man to run the 400-meter hurdles.

I watched history unfold, with the common strings of pride and sacrifice uniting the planet, and discovering another one.

And I am still amazed.

*******
Video worth watching:
Felix Sanchez’s Olympic Gold Medal Ceremony
http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/track-and-field/highlights-mens-400m-hurdles-medal-ceremony.html

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, Monday, 1:31am EDT/10:31pm PDT
http://www.nasa.gov/mp4/673828main_curiosity.mp4

Water + Toshiba Satellite A505 = Frozen Pizza

It’s funny how I couldn’t think of anything to write about until I killed my computer.

I was carrying it out to the balcony to do some work on the first not-100-degree day in like a month when I spilled at least half a glass of water on the keyboard. I couldn’t put it down or flip it over fast enough. The water settled in between the keys as I moaned and tried to convince it to stop, you know, possessing the qualities of liquid.

When I could, I flipped it over, shook out whatever would shake out, and then dried it off with my skirt. Inside my place, I dried it off again, grabbed toilet paper and dried between the keys.

I hit the power button.

A flutter of light. Then nothing.

I hit it again. Same results.

Hair dryer. I need the hair dryer.

I carted the laptop – which was only 14 months old – into the bathroom and started blowing it dry. Maybe the heat setting is bad. Cool air button.

I took the battery out, put it back in. Tried the power.

Bupkis.

If I had the sweet kind of relationship with my mother, I would have wanted her at this point.

I called my IT guy at work and left a voicemail about what one should do if one hypothetically spilled half a glass of water on one’s laptop. Not at all surprisingly, the IT guy did not fix my computer problem.

I called Brad and BIL1, both great with computers. Brad had no suggestions other than what I had done. BIL1 was more educated, but less positive.

“Yeah, you probably fried the motherboard.”

Mommy!

“You might be able to unscrew some things and get the keyboard off, and then you can dry underneath it. I did that when I spilled milk on mine once.”

I went digging through my tool box (read: Rubbermaid storage container full of crap dating back to 1995) and found the proper screwdriver while BIL1 asked about my warranty.

“I don’t know what I got. I don’t remember, and I have no idea where it is, ” I told him, twisting tiny screws.

“Well, you can call and find out what you have,” he said.

“Yeah, but… won’t that tell them that I’ve done something to the laptop?”

I get paranoid about stuff like this. I picture them typing it into my account info: Asked re: coverage, extension, type of coverage, 8/4. Then I go waltzing in all, “My computer isn’t working,” and they’re like, “You called, right?” and my grand plan to pretend absolutely nothing happened to the laptop goes out the window because I am such a bad liar that I start in with a facial tic before I even attempt the lie.

“Well,” said BIL1, “sometimes taking apart the computer voids the warranty, so…”

Okay, retwisting tiny screws now.

“…And you don’t want to try to turn it back on for at least a day. Let it dry completely, or if you haven’t already fried it, you will.”

I couldn’t form the words to say I’d tried three times already.

The lack of contact with the outside world had already started eating at me before I even hung up the phone. And all of a sudden, there was so much stuff I needed to write about. I whimpered. I didn’t even have paper. Who needs paper when you have a laptop? Forget internet access; I couldn’t even type. Faced with the understanding that it would be at least 24 hours before I could even try to boot up again, I was freaking out. I paced. I chewed my lip. I looked around.

I had to leave the apartment.

I went to the grocery store to fetch cat food and sour cream for the scones I wanted to make. Once there, I blindly cruised aisles I didn’t need to be in, mentally mumbling half-thoughts to myself like the guy in “Office Space.” Without realizing it, I stood unblinking in front of the frozen pizzas. When I snapped back to consciousness, I wandered away, fighting the urge to become an emotional eater.

The grocery store had been a bad idea. I was hungry, and I was upset. Danger, Will Robinson.

Forcing myself to buy only what I needed, I proceeded to the checkout with cat food, sour cream, a small frozen pizza (oh, leave me alone), a college rule notebook and a package of pens.

Wow, I thought as I looked sadly at my basket. I am a pathetic loser. The cat food seals it.

(Cat food is like feminine hygiene products. I try to make sure I need other things when I go to the store to get it. God forbid everyone know it’s the only reason I’m there.)

It was a Thursday at 5pm in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Forget it. There were four checkout lanes open, and three of them were “express,” meaning those lines were so long that I had to double down in the line behind the woman who had apparently done her shopping for the month. Standing there, I started writing this post in my head. Longhand, there’s no delete key, and cutting and pasting is way harder. I had to get started mentally now, to work out the kinks.

I compulsively checked my email and Facebook on my phone.

Twenty minutes later, still standing in line, I realized what I could lose if the laptop was complete toast. I have an external hard drive, given to me by my boyfriend for my 33rd birthday, as I was getting ready to buy a new computer. It has all the files from the old laptop, plus a “mix tape” he put on it weeks after we broke up – a sort of gallant gesture that fulfilled a promise he’d made to enhance the somewhat un-romantic gift with which he intended to make life easier for me by giving me a way to transfer everything easily from the old computer to the new one. Very thoughtful, really. But apart from the old files and enough music to play from now until my death without ever repeating a single song, the hard drive is empty. It doesn’t have a single thing on it since I bought the new laptop… because seeing the hard drive reminded me of the boyfriend.

We won’t get into that.

Point is, I hadn’t backed up anything from the new computer. Pictures, revisions of my resume, my cover letters, the beginning of a book I started writing, the video I took on the Mickey Boat, including my sisters doing a very, very poor – but absolutely gut-busting, pants-peeing hilarious - Charlie’s Angels impersonation… all of it gone if I couldn’t get my laptop back.

I entered the Bargaining Stage. If I can just get it to turn on one more time so I can back everything up to that hard drive… I can ding the Future Real Estate Fund to buy a new laptop if I have to.

Sigh.

I went home, dug the notebook and pens out of the grocery bag and started writing out this post. By the time I got to the sentence you just read, I’d forgotten what other posts I’d been formulating in my head. (How did anybody remember things before computers?) The laptop sat, open and dark, its guts possibly destroyed by the least threatening thing in the developed world, its battery removed. Taunting me.

It’s a good thing I was getting together with Ali that night and driving to my sister’s the next day to go to a concert. The urge to try to power my baby up before it had dried out was too great. I felt as fried as the laptop might be. I thought of what might be gone for good and how much hassle it is to set up a new computer, and I flopped down to eat my pizza.

Woe is me. I am woe.

Now I’m functioning off a backup laptop: my old one, which I gave to Ali when I bought the new one. It has an aqua blue line down the center of the screen and it’s slow, but it works. Thank goodness for friends who can’t afford their own internet service and can’t pick up a signal from someone else’s unsecured wifi. I’m still terrified of what happens when I try to turn on my computer again. BIL1 says I might be able to get the motherboard replaced and avoid buying a new computer altogether for the second time in 14 months.

Hold me.