The Grumble Thread - No energy for a full on rant.

[T42]

"I just bought a multifunction cardio watch and the instructions are in Chinese and English. Can you translate them into French for me?"

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHH!

I wish people wouldn't assume that translating = reading and typing, especially when the damned Chinglish needs to be translated into English first.

Heigh ho, he did help me install a new water a couple of years ago...

[ian]

Yesterday, while freeing the car for a trip to the shops, I absently reached down to grab the old-skool five kg weight we use to prop the garage door open. My fingers sank into something with the consistency of hummus.

It wasn't hummus.

[Basil]

Mrs. B.  Yes, all Ceredigion Council car parks are free during the pandemic.  (No, I've no idea why either)
However,  the car park at llangrannog is privately owned and is still charging.  It also has number plate recognition technology as the sign clearly states.
I wasn't pleased to receive a demand for £100 £60 in the post this morning.

[Kim]

Mrs. B.  Yes, all Ceredigion Council car parks are free during the pandemic.  (No, I've no idea why either)

To encourage people to drive, obviously.  One of the stupider bits of public heath advice to come from Bloody Stupid Johnson over the last year.

[Mrs Pingu]

My Kindle seems to have some sort of droid rot. It refuses to connect to our router all of a sudden. It's quite happy to use my phone as a Wifi hotspot though.

[Mr Larrington]

My last-but-one Kindle went through a phase of refusing to do wifi at all before finally dying on its arse.  These days I leave it in airplane mode all the time and load stuff via Calibre and a piece of anbaric string.

[ian]

My Kindle seems to have some sort of droid rot. It refuses to connect to our router all of a sudden. It's quite happy to use my phone as a Wifi hotspot though.

It may be a victim of the gradual demise of TKIP, in my experience devices don't tell you they need to switch encryption to AES, they just cease doing wifi. Or the Kindle has decided to use the hidden channel only available to diabolists (and Americans).

[Feanor]

My Kindle seems to have some sort of droid rot. It refuses to connect to our router all of a sudden. It's quite happy to use my phone as a Wifi hotspot though.

Is it an old Kindle?
Our first one IIRC could only do 2.4GHz (802.11 b/g), and was limited to the US channel range (1-11, I think).
If your router has decided to auto-womble off to channel 13, the Kindle might not be able to see it.
Check on the router what channel it's operating on.

I had to nail my access points down to a channel in the US range, and not let them auto-seek a quiet channel beyond 11.

But that was a long time ago.

[Pingu]

I tried it just now and it connected to the notwork immediately. There have been no router or any other changes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Feanor]

Some routers will automagically channel-hop to confuse the enemy find a quiet channel.

[Regulator]

Mrs. B.  Yes, all Ceredigion Council car parks are free during the pandemic.  (No, I've no idea why either)
However,  the car park at llangrannog is privately owned and is still charging.  It also has number plate recognition technology as the sign clearly states.
I wasn't pleased to receive a demand for £100 £60 in the post this morning.

Many councils suspended parking charges so that they didn't have to handle the coins (or that was their excuse).

[Pingu]

Some routers will automagically channel-hop to confuse the enemy find a quiet channel.

Ours is set to use a specific channel.

[Mrs Pingu]

Does seem odd though that in the past year the Kindle and the Logitech Harmony both got bolshy about speaking to the router (in the latter case won't do it at all now).

[hellymedic]

Did an online hearing test this evening, which confirmed my hearing was OK. (I thought it was, but sometimes I have problems and wondered if these were 'them' or 'me'.)

Person who wants to join D's astro soc phones, having had no contact since he last phoned 4 weeks ago. D is outside working in shed. I don't want to disturb him, nor do I wish to leave my seat. Caller's speech repeatedly becomes unintelligible and he remedies this several times. I find and give him email address of Memb Sec. I then attend to personal issues and wash the dishes.

Caller phones again. Email has bounced. Speech again becomes unintelligible. I am standing, stressed as I can't hear properly and can't prop myself up well if a hand is occupied with phone. Transpires he has left a dot out of the email address I gave him. Resends email and it goes through OK.

I've been somewhat sharp with caller. I don't like this but dealing with the incompetent (and inconsiderate¹) is frustrating!

1) I'm sure caller KNOWS when he is not speaking into phone properly.

D says he gave this chap details of other committee members. Doesn't know what his problem is. I suspect meatware error.

[andrewc]

The pandemic must be over.   The Chuggers are out in Liverpool. 

[Feanor]

Did an online hearing test this evening, which confirmed my hearing was OK. (I thought it was, but sometimes I have problems and wondered if these were 'them' or 'me'.)

Person who wants to join D's astro soc phones, having had no contact since he last phoned 4 weeks ago. D is outside working in shed. I don't want to disturb him, nor do I wish to leave my seat. Caller's speech repeatedly becomes unintelligible and he remedies this several times. I find and give him email address of Memb Sec. I then attend to personal issues and wash the dishes.

Caller phones again. Email has bounced. Speech again becomes unintelligible. I am standing, stressed as I can't hear properly and can't prop myself up well if a hand is occupied with phone. Transpires he has left a dot out of the email address I gave him. Resends email and it goes through OK.

I've been somewhat sharp with caller. I don't like this but dealing with the incompetent (and inconsiderate¹) is frustrating!

1) I'm sure caller KNOWS when he is not speaking into phone properly.

D says he gave this chap details of other committee members. Doesn't know what his problem is. I suspect meatware error.

Are all the contact details not available online somewhere?

I can't imagine any club membership issue that requires phone calls in 2021!

[Kim]

Is it an old Kindle?
Our first one IIRC could only do 2.4GHz (802.11 b/g), and was limited to the US channel range (1-11, I think).
If your router has decided to auto-womble off to channel 13, the Kindle might not be able to see it.
Check on the router what channel it's operating on.

I get caught out by this on an irregular basis.  Channel 13 is a valuable strategy for making use of uncongested spectrum around here.  It's better now we have more than one AP, as 13-incapable devices will connect to the one on the other channel with poor signal strength, thereby providing a Clue.

[hellymedic]

Did an online hearing test this evening, which confirmed my hearing was OK. (I thought it was, but sometimes I have problems and wondered if these were 'them' or 'me'.)
Person who wants to join D's astro soc phones, having had no contact since he last phoned 4 weeks ago. D is outside working in shed. I don't want to disturb him, nor do I wish to leave my seat. Caller's speech repeatedly becomes unintelligible and he remedies this several times. I find and give him email address of Memb Sec. I then attend to personal issues and wash the dishes.
Caller phones again. Email has bounced. Speech again becomes unintelligible. I am standing, stressed as I can't hear properly and can't prop myself up well if a hand is occupied with phone. Transpires he has left a dot out of the email address I gave him. Resends email and it goes through OK.
I've been somewhat sharp with caller. I don't like this but dealing with the incompetent (and inconsiderate¹) is frustrating!
1) I'm sure caller KNOWS when he is not speaking into phone properly.
D says he gave this chap details of other committee members. Doesn't know what his problem is. I suspect meatware error.

Are all the contact details not available online somewhere?
I can't imagine any club membership issue that requires phone calls in 2021!

I visited the astro soc's website later. There is a perfectly good online form to allow folk to join, linked from the homepage.

The man is INCOMPETENT!

He cannot handle a phone, email or website.

How the freaking fuck will he manage a TELESCOPE?

GGGGGRRRR!

[Cudzoziemiec]

He's looking forward to studying minute organisms invisible to the naked eye. 

[hellymedic]

He's looking forward to studying minute organisms invisible to the naked eye. 

 

I'm not looking forward to the next round of serial incompetence, as I'm bound to be the one answering the phone while D's in the shed...

[ian]

You'd think most men are competent with the operation of an extendable tube (as long as that doesn't stretch to aiming it in the right direction, that ain't the North Star, it's your shoe).

[hellymedic]

Yebbut many modern telescopes aren't extendable tubes; they're computer-guided catadioptric magick...

[ian]

That probably explains the damp patches on the trousers then.

[Ashaman42]

All day at the office trying to fix a bit of kit and never got to fix/test my fix because I ended up with a whole day of whack-a-mole problems with testing equipment not working and then the equipment to fix that equipment not working.

Turtles Problems all the way down.

[Kim]

Yebbut many modern telescopes aren't extendable tubes; they're computer-guided catadioptric magick...

I suspect this is where the real distinction between enthusiastic amateurs and professional astrononononononmers is drawn:   The former aren't guiding their telescopes using a crusty SunOS 5 workstation running some spaghetti Fortran code written by a long-since-departed postdoc that nobody dare touch.  They've probably even got a hard drive with multiple gigabytes of free space for astronononononomical data.