A Dutch radio reporter e-mailed to talk about Links, just as I happened to be cruising Third Avenue today looking for Links. They continue their stampede up Third Avenue, now occupying sidewalk space well into the Upper East Side, though none beyond midtown have been activated yet.
All I wanted to accomplish today was a phone call, and the reporter’s e-mail proved to be an opportunity to call an actual person. Until now I’ve just called my voicemail, and today I actually managed a call that seemed to have decent sound quality. That had not happened yet. Many Links appear to be able to make calls but most cannot. It’s kinda stupid, but as we know these devices do not exist to make phone calls but to display advertising.
I made a new discovery, or rather confirmed an earlier discovery. You can connect a call, then minimize the telephone. That means audio can emanate from the device with no obvious way for passers-by to turn it off. I also did a little speaking today from my cell phone, talking quite loudly through a midtown Link. People noticed. It was hilarious. I mean really, it was. I could hear myself from clear across Third Avenue — that’s one of the wider Avenues in town.
Had another eureka moment today. Maybe this is the city’s opportunity to get rid of that albatross which costs them untold millions per year: those distended, largely useless emergency call boxes. The city was forced to keep them after failing to prove they had created a viable alternative that fully complied with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Could Links be that alternative?
Maybe so, maybe not. Call quality through most of these devices ranges from atrocious to non-existant, with one notable exception being a call of passable quality I made today. I don’t know why calls to 911 would sound any better than other phone calls. The Dutch reporter said my call to him was basically unintelligible, sounding like Internet phone calls from the dialup days.
Oh yeah, and I just realized why Links are assigned actual phone numbers. I guess that’s so 911 dispatchers will know where the call is coming from. Duh. I imagined that VOIP telephone service would show something random for caller ID, the way Skype shows (111) 111-1111, or other nonse.
The reporter could have annoyed me but I didn’t let that happen. He said he had contacted me a couple of weeks ago. I think it was more like 3 or 4 months since we last spoke. Whatever.
…
At the secreet bar for my first outing in a while. Tomorrow is all-day social calendar.
I just tried something I haven’t thought about in a long time: chat rooms. A majority of what’s out there seems to be video chat rooms of men masturbating. Some things never change. When I first tried CU-SeeMe way back in the dialup days the only reflectors I ever found with people on them were filled with cocks. Only thing I noticed about today’s skimming through one of these chat sites was how small all the cocks looked.
I did finally find some non-porn spaces, accomplishing this by reviving my eternally dormant AOL account and wandering the wasteland of chat rooms accessed from within the AOL desktop client. What a massive change, those chat rooms used to have hundreds of thousands of people present. I suspect a majority of people inhabiting those spaces today are elderly, although a segment of blackhat hacking and SEO activity goes on in the walled garden of AOL. That’s not to say the SEO geeks can’t be elderly but that’s not the general profile.
I also found a web-based chat room inhabited by two men, one in rural Louisiana, the other in remote Ohio. They tried to get a conversation going but it was hard work for them. I just lurked.
What prompted me to do this was a stream of consciousness starting from today’s attempts to use Links to make phone calls. The call quality was so bad that it reminded me of the early days of Internet chat rooms with voice capability. I have an audio file on my Soundcrap page in which I somehow managed to record one of these voice-enabled chat rooms. it’s like CB radio. It’s painful to listen to, but necessary in a strange way.
…
Donald Trump on the TV here in what looks like an interview from a few years ago. He’s talking about Wharton, and how hard it is to get in to that institution. He talks like a little boy. Really, he does. I watched all the CNN coverage last night and found myself falling more and more under the spell. I mean how badly could he fuck things up? And a native New Yorker, a Queens kid at that. I almost busted a nut, though, when I saw Christ Christie introducing Trump. My first thought ws”what the hell is he doing there?” Which I quickly answered: “He’s looking for a job.” His presence behind Trump during his speech seems to have set the Twitter-sphere ablaze with frivolous comments turned into news stories. Nothing new there but what the hell is he really thinking? Christie, that is.
Whatever else there is to make of it all Trump was looking almost presidential last night. when will the dirigible implode? One of the CNN commentators (holy crap those yakking heads can drone on for eternity saying absolutely nothing) made a funny comment. Someone said that the Republican party was going to start doing whatever it had to do to derail Trump’s campaign. The CNN guy said “Why don’t they just wait until inauguration day?” implying, of course, that it’s kinda late to be thinking about ways to get rid of Trump
I actually worry that someone loon will try to assassinate the guy. I wish death on no one, even someone whose politics make no sense to me, but that is what lurks in the future. His handling of the white supremacists was not exactly masterful… or was it?
To imagine what my mother would be saying right now. The very suggestion of a Trump presidency would make her nauseous.
Re: David Duke and the KKK. When my family was in Laos we heard though sources, years later, that David Duke was in the country at the same time. We were there from 1974-1976. Duke was there working for his dad in 1971. Both my parents died thinking they had inhabited the same space with that guy, always calling it strange that they never heard of him while they were there. American civilians in Laos during the Vietnam theater were very rare and known to the U.S. military presence in that country. I guess Duke’s not actually being there contributed to them not hearing of his presence at the time. Yeesh… the things we take to our graves.
It was considered a stain on our time there if we were even remotely associated with that piece of shit. but then we were never officially there (just ask Richard Nixon) so who cares.
i went to school at KM6. That’s now a golf course….
