Scrolling through Facebook friends and noticing some of them are dead
I have started unfriending those people. Don't expect to hear from them again at least on this side. That way I do not feel foolish sending birthday greetings only to have son or daughter come back and say the person died five years ago.
Something positive about life today: I think I have reached the point I can stop worrying about dying young anymore.
I eventually left FB a little while ago, and I'm still processing that, but yeah. That always gave me weird feelings. The birthday reminders felt like visiting a grave. Part of me is afraid of forgetting people. But part of me thinks...if this is the only thing holding a memory together, is it that important?
I loathe and despise those reminders because in my experience they call forth performative grief competitions—God help you if you don’t visit relative A’s page to post flowery tributes there, even years later, because there’s no excuse for you—after all, everybody knows you got the birthday notice. And there’s been abuse in my family, thing I want to do is post flowery gush on an abuser’s page just to prevent others from judging me—I don’t know if it’s worse when they know about the abuse or when they don’t.
I really thought fax machines have gone the way of the dinosaurs, but apparently medical offices here use them too! I had to get some info from one medical office to another yesterday. The receiving office gave me their fax number! Then the sending office asked me if I had the fax number.
I loathe and despise those reminders because in my experience they call forth performative grief competitions—God help you if you don’t visit relative A’s page to post flowery tributes there, even years later, because there’s no excuse for you—after all, everybody knows you got the birthday notice. And there’s been abuse in my family, thing I want to do is post flowery gush on an abuser’s page just to prevent others from judging me—I don’t know if it’s worse when they know about the abuse or when they don’t.
Gah, that's horrible. I totally get resenting that. And that is one of the truly horrid things about f-book, that it turns what should private things into public events. I was very fortunate I learned netiquette here before I wandered over to that hellscape. And even then I could still see the harm being done by the way it pressures people to conflate online and IRL personae. And that's a shame because it really was a useful space for a lot of good things.
I learned to punch cards using Fortran at university. One took a stack of cards to the Maths block (where the university computer was situated) and went back for the output a couple of days later.
For calculations we used slide rules and logarithms. I never got the hang of the former but was a whizz at the latter!
Scrolling through Facebook friends and noticing some of them are dead
I have started unfriending those people. Don't expect to hear from them again at least on this side. That way I do not feel foolish sending birthday greetings only to have son or daughter come back and say the person died five years ago.
Something positive about life today: I think I have reached the point I can stop worrying about dying young anymore.
I eventually left FB a little while ago, and I'm still processing that, but yeah. That always gave me weird feelings. The birthday reminders felt like visiting a grave. Part of me is afraid of forgetting people. But part of me thinks...if this is the only thing holding a memory together, is it that important?
I loathe and despise those reminders because in my experience they call forth performative grief competitions—God help you if you don’t visit relative A’s page to post flowery tributes there, even years later, because there’s no excuse for you—after all, everybody knows you got the birthday notice. And there’s been abuse in my family, thing I want to do is post flowery gush on an abuser’s page just to prevent others from judging me—I don’t know if it’s worse when they know about the abuse or when they don’t.
Ooof - that's nasty. It is possible to let such people judge you into non-communication? I don't use FB much, but when I joined I put a made-up birthday in as I didn't want that piece of sometimes-security-info to be publicly listed. Yesterday I received several congratulations which momentarily confused me, and the comments here brought it to mind
Scrolling through Facebook friends and noticing some of them are dead
I have started unfriending those people. Don't expect to hear from them again at least on this side. That way I do not feel foolish sending birthday greetings only to have son or daughter come back and say the person died five years ago.
Something positive about life today: I think I have reached the point I can stop worrying about dying young anymore.
I eventually left FB a little while ago, and I'm still processing that, but yeah. That always gave me weird feelings. The birthday reminders felt like visiting a grave. Part of me is afraid of forgetting people. But part of me thinks...if this is the only thing holding a memory together, is it that important?
I loathe and despise those reminders because in my experience they call forth performative grief competitions—God help you if you don’t visit relative A’s page to post flowery tributes there, even years later, because there’s no excuse for you—after all, everybody knows you got the birthday notice. And there’s been abuse in my family, thing I want to do is post flowery gush on an abuser’s page just to prevent others from judging me—I don’t know if it’s worse when they know about the abuse or when they don’t.
Ooof - that's nasty. It is possible to let such people judge you into non-communication? I don't use FB much, but when I joined I put a made-up birthday in as I didn't want that piece of sometimes-security-info to be publicly listed. Yesterday I received several congratulations which momentarily confused me, and the comments here brought it to mind
A very happy un-birthday to you, M-in-M, and here's to many more!
There's going to be a dig locally in the summer, and I have very excitedly put myself forward as a volunteer, because I used to be a professional archaeologist.
Then I had second thought - I was a professional archaeologist over thirty years ago, and a full day's digging now would probably kill me!
So I'm just going to go along for the afternoons, and see how it goes.
Today, I suddenly realized technology has all but passed me buy. I had been waiting for the information to register for our local synod assembly. Before we would get a packet of information, but none came. Checked with church secretary. She had not seen anything. Yesterday, I thought I should check the synod website. Sure enough, all the information was there. Completed all the required forms. Am formally registered for the meetings now.
But that is not all. Want to go to a collegiate basketball game? Everything is online now. You do not get a ticket anymore, just a QR code on your phone.
I like to think I am up to date with modern marvels, but I can now understand why my mother was lost when it came to emails.
I am a bit miffed at the steady disappearance of paper things.
I love it. Paper's easy to misplace.
Yeah. Often the first thing I do if I get a piece of paper I might need later, like proof of postage, is photograph it for when I lose the paper. Added bonus: OCR is now good enough I can copy and paste the tracking number too.
I'll be honest - I'd have struggled to function in a pre-tech age. I mean I did struggle as a young adult - forgetting to pay paper bills, missing appointments etc.
The person who invented Direct Debit may have saved my life.
I'll be honest - I'd have struggled to function in a pre-tech age. I mean I did struggle as a young adult - forgetting to pay paper bills, missing appointments etc.
The person who invented Direct Debit may have saved my life.
Oh yes, the number of times I posted a rent check late...
I'm just starting to build the courage to have a train ticket on my phone. I wouldn’t dare with a flight boarding pass. Of course, it would help if there were always working sockets on the train to charge the thing! OTOH the ubiquity of e-tickets may have actually encouraged the installation and maintenance of such facilities; they certainly had sockets at every table last time I was in an airport bar.
I will need a new seal on my mobile home roof. When I asked how long it lasted, the roofer said 10 to 15 years. It hit me that it would be a lifetime guarantee for me.
A paper ticket from a museum, concert, or trip is a keepsake to me. I still request or print a paper ticket whenever possible. We have a number of treasure boxes, photo albums and journals with tickets of all kinds in them.
A festival we've been going to for many years is now e-ticket only due to needing to save money. Given how bad phone signal in that area is, last year I printed the tickets as well as downloading the pdfs to phone. Made life simpler at the wristband exchange (and you could spot the regulars, because a great many of us had done that!).
I'm just starting to build the courage to have a train ticket on my phone.
Tried that for a work get-together in 2024. Discovered that my phone was auto-rotating the bit of the ticket that gets scanned as I tried to put it over the gate reader... it took about 4 goes to work! Next time I'll try to check the settings in advance.
I’ll admit that I very happily use e-tickets over paper tickets. I always have my phone on me, and I very much appreciate not having to worry about whether I remembered to bring paper tickets.
I always save them to the wallet on my phone so they can be easily found. That also means lack of a signal isn’t an issue. (That’s rarely an issue here anyway.)
Last paper tickets I think I got was when we went up a tram in Oregon three years ago . Printed them off the computer and took them to the tram. Guess what they did with the tickets. Once they took them, they threw them in a trash can. Hope they got recycled.
For calculations we used slide rules and logarithms. I never got the hang of the former but was a whizz at the latter!
I use logarithms most saturday, albeit on a calculator, how else am I expected to take the cube root!
... with the cube root button?
(incidentally, I was rather pleased to discover that Casio offer their main scientific calculator in app form "CalcES", which is more than adequate for anyone not taking exams)
I'll be honest - I'd have struggled to function in a pre-tech age. I mean I did struggle as a young adult - forgetting to pay paper bills, missing appointments etc.
The person who invented Direct Debit may have saved my life.
Give thanks for Alastair Hanton, generally regarded as the inventor of what became direct debits in U.K. His work led on to BACS and National Giro.
I get the missing of paper - it does help you keep records of what is going on.
But also, no bills through the post. No bills found lying around that I have to wonder if I have paid or not.
My filing system, prior to marriage, was chaos. It was a floor-based system. And I would clear it up every six months or so and dispose of what was no longer relevant.
My (older) system told me off last week for not possessing a Smartphone. So I do print off tickets etc - though at least one airline is now closed to me as they won't accept printouts.
Things like bills and bank statements mostly come via email, I don't print them unless I have to, for record-keeping.
For calculations we used slide rules and logarithms. I never got the hang of the former but was a whizz at the latter!
I use logarithms most saturday, albeit on a calculator, how else am I expected to take the cube root!
Of course, any calculator that does logs also does cube roots directly...
Not the app one on my phone, and when I am feeling fussy, I end with taking quart-roots, etc. I do not carry a scientific calculator into the sacristy on a Saturday. I am estimating the number of hosts for Sunday. Unfortunately, it follows a Poisson distribution and is small enough for that to make a difference.
For calculations we used slide rules and logarithms. I never got the hang of the former but was a whizz at the latter!
I use logarithms most saturday, albeit on a calculator, how else am I expected to take the cube root!
Of course, any calculator that does logs also does cube roots directly...
Not the app one on my phone, and when I am feeling fussy, I end with taking quart-roots, etc.
Interesting, the one on my phone does do cube roots. Got to flip it to landscape to get the scientific mode, then cube root is on the second page of buttons along with sinh, cosh, tanh, and all the inverse trig functions. Can't do a quart-root on it though.
Interesting, the one on my phone does do cube roots. Got to flip it to landscape to get the scientific mode, then cube root is on the second page of buttons along with sinh, cosh, tanh, and all the inverse trig functions. Can't do a quart-root on it though.
Just had a visit from my granddaughter ( 21). She has seen all her grandparents recently ( more than 4 because of remarriages) but declared I am doing better than the rest for my age. A mixed compliment.
I am sure it wasn't meant to be back handed @Puzzler! I'll take any compliments going these days.
Apologies for harking back to the fax machines tangent, but Cheery son and I went to visit the vampires last week and I asked whether I could cross off the incorrect email address that had printed onto my form. I was told yes I could, but "we never email anyone". With this thread in mind, I asked whether they fax the results and the woman indicated that they do. I was a bit surprised, but perhaps it's a case of If it's not broken, don't fix it!
I'm feeling a bit creaky this morning as I have been trying to get back into walking and my buttocks are a bit stiff. I am not sad that it is raining and means I can have a rest day!
A sort of opposite to this - I have told some people I am retiring this year. And some people are amazed that I must be far too young. And one person said "You need to lose some teeth before then" - which I most definitely have.
But the really not-old thing is that someone I used to work with has just retired. He is just old enough to be my dad.
I also had rather the opposite yesterday. The congregation kindly sang happy birthday to me for “Aravis’s special birthday” (no announcement of the number). As he was leaving, an older man who is fairly new to the church said to me “Congratulations, my son is 50 this year too!” at which point I admitted that it’s actually my 60th…
I went house hunting with a friend recently. She's looking for a retirement place and she was asked whether she was over 60 or in one case over 55. She is more or less exactly the same age as me so 73 this year. She was rather pleased to be asked,
Comments
I loathe and despise those reminders because in my experience they call forth performative grief competitions—God help you if you don’t visit relative A’s page to post flowery tributes there, even years later, because there’s no excuse for you—after all, everybody knows you got the birthday notice. And there’s been abuse in my family, thing I want to do is post flowery gush on an abuser’s page just to prevent others from judging me—I don’t know if it’s worse when they know about the abuse or when they don’t.
It just seems weird to me.
Gah, that's horrible. I totally get resenting that. And that is one of the truly horrid things about f-book, that it turns what should private things into public events. I was very fortunate I learned netiquette here before I wandered over to that hellscape. And even then I could still see the harm being done by the way it pressures people to conflate online and IRL personae. And that's a shame because it really was a useful space for a lot of good things.
For calculations we used slide rules and logarithms. I never got the hang of the former but was a whizz at the latter!
Ooof - that's nasty. It is possible to let such people judge you into non-communication? I don't use FB much, but when I joined I put a made-up birthday in as I didn't want that piece of sometimes-security-info to be publicly listed. Yesterday I received several congratulations which momentarily confused me, and the comments here brought it to mind
A very happy un-birthday to you, M-in-M, and here's to many more!
Then I had second thought - I was a professional archaeologist over thirty years ago, and a full day's digging now would probably kill me!
So I'm just going to go along for the afternoons, and see how it goes.
But that is not all. Want to go to a collegiate basketball game? Everything is online now. You do not get a ticket anymore, just a QR code on your phone.
I like to think I am up to date with modern marvels, but I can now understand why my mother was lost when it came to emails.
I love it. Paper's easy to misplace.
Yeah. Often the first thing I do if I get a piece of paper I might need later, like proof of postage, is photograph it for when I lose the paper. Added bonus: OCR is now good enough I can copy and paste the tracking number too.
The person who invented Direct Debit may have saved my life.
Oh yes, the number of times I posted a rent check late...
I use logarithms most saturday, albeit on a calculator, how else am I expected to take the cube root!
I always save them to the wallet on my phone so they can be easily found. That also means lack of a signal isn’t an issue. (That’s rarely an issue here anyway.)
And it makes a mess
... with the cube root button?
(incidentally, I was rather pleased to discover that Casio offer their main scientific calculator in app form "CalcES", which is more than adequate for anyone not taking exams)
Give thanks for Alastair Hanton, generally regarded as the inventor of what became direct debits in U.K. His work led on to BACS and National Giro.
Of course, any calculator that does logs also does cube roots directly...
But also, no bills through the post. No bills found lying around that I have to wonder if I have paid or not.
My filing system, prior to marriage, was chaos. It was a floor-based system. And I would clear it up every six months or so and dispose of what was no longer relevant.
I am glad those days have gone.
Things like bills and bank statements mostly come via email, I don't print them unless I have to, for record-keeping.
Not the app one on my phone, and when I am feeling fussy, I end with taking quart-roots, etc. I do not carry a scientific calculator into the sacristy on a Saturday. I am estimating the number of hosts for Sunday. Unfortunately, it follows a Poisson distribution and is small enough for that to make a difference.
Interesting, the one on my phone does do cube roots. Got to flip it to landscape to get the scientific mode, then cube root is on the second page of buttons along with sinh, cosh, tanh, and all the inverse trig functions. Can't do a quart-root on it though.
Oooh, so does mine! Thank you for that
They lost me several days ago. I barely passed advanced algebra, did not take calc.
This happens whenever I see my grandkids. Heck, it happens when I see the church kids, and I see them on a weekly basis!
Out of my league.
My problem would have been my knees. Unless the ball is hit directly to me, I would not be able to run it down even if we were playing doubles.
Apologies for harking back to the fax machines tangent, but Cheery son and I went to visit the vampires last week and I asked whether I could cross off the incorrect email address that had printed onto my form. I was told yes I could, but "we never email anyone". With this thread in mind, I asked whether they fax the results and the woman indicated that they do. I was a bit surprised, but perhaps it's a case of If it's not broken, don't fix it!
I'm feeling a bit creaky this morning as I have been trying to get back into walking and my buttocks are a bit stiff. I am not sad that it is raining and means I can have a rest day!
But the really not-old thing is that someone I used to work with has just retired. He is just old enough to be my dad.