{"id":32434,"date":"2022-08-15T12:44:57","date_gmt":"2022-08-15T12:44:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/?p=32434"},"modified":"2022-08-17T11:06:52","modified_gmt":"2022-08-17T15:06:52","slug":"time-and-happiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2022\/08\/15\/time-and-happiness.html","title":{"rendered":"Time and Happiness"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

What Time Is It? What TIme Is Time?<\/h2>\n

I woke up early, felt good without knowing why, and had to check multiple time pieces to be sure I had not slipped through some crackle in time.<\/p>\n

The thought was not completely without basis. My PC at home suddently did not know what time it was yesterday. I suspect the internal battery has once again died. That PC has gone through 5 or 6 internal batteries.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It’s the first PC I ever had where the existence of a battery was even known to me. It kinda surprised me but apparently it’s the only way the PC can stay synced to the time servers.<\/p>\n

I’d like to be a time server. i could so mess with humanity if I could wrest just a little bit of control over time away from the forces of nature and the obstinance of technology’s continuous monitoring of time. I came to loath FB for a lot of reasons but one early dismay was its insistence on showing how much time had passed between my last gesture and my current inhaling of air. 9 seconds ago\u00a0i posted something inane and prattlous. I want those 9 seconds back.<\/p>\n

Or do I? Do I want those 9 seconds back or do I simply regret sacrificing them to someone else’s product?\u00a0<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Mental Decongestment<\/h2>\n

I cleaned house a little yesterday. An old office chair that had lingered in place for almost a year is finally gone. What remains to be hauled away are an old dead printer, a microwave, and I forget what else. A few other objects and clutter gone have given my mind a feeling of decongestment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These feelings these days, of some kind of happiness with my life, I don’t know what to do with it. I know I shouldn’t talk about it. No one wants to hear from you when you are happy. I don’t think it’s because happiness is boring but because no one wants to believe you when you say you can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning.<\/p>\n

Still, my inner demons are not lost, and they are not idle. I have considerable emotional phlegm in my system. A lot of ugliness, anger, and portions of my mind that drown in self-doubt and self-loathing. This will never change.<\/p>\n

Maybe this light is burning brightest before it burns out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Smart Meters Not So Smart?<\/h2>\n

I don’t know if Con Ed’s new Smart Meters are actually Smart or if, like almost anything whose makers and evangelists call it Smart, it ends up being pretty damn stupid.<\/p>\n

Since the Smart Meters went in about 2\u00bd months ago I have not paid a dime for gas or electric. One billing statement claimed I had some jackpot in credit on my account, while another statement said something quite different.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I don’t remember the difference now, without the two statements in front of me. But I called ConEd yesterday to inquire why I have not been billed and why statements all arrive showing $0.00 due while also showing that I had used x amount of dollars worth of power.<\/p>\n

During Covid they quit doing meter readings. At the same time I cut back significantly on usage, puzzled as to why my bills remained so high. I did not realize they had stopped doing readings. When readings resumed I was given about 3 months credit for the decreased usage.<\/p>\n

I don’t know if something like that is happening here but whatever is going on I got no answer yesterday becasue the call with a Con Edison rep was terminated with no warning or explanation.<\/p>\n

Now I’m left worrying that there is no money pot of credit on my account and that I’m going to get socked with a bill for 3 or 4 months all at once.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Talking to ConEd turned up some oddities, which I guess should not surprise me having been a customer for so long. They still had a (212) phone number on file for me from the job I got fired from over 20 years ago. It took some mining of this mind but eventually I remembered that 212-522-7023 was, indeed, my direct line at Time-Warner.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But in the course of this discussion I flabergastedly suggested that 212-255-2748, the number for Payphone Radio, somehow got onto that account?<\/p>\n

It was not that number, nor was it my other (212) line. No, it was a number I punched roughly 27 years ago, when I first started at Time-Warner.<\/p>\n

It seems everything is stored forever. I once had a domain name, or more of an anti-domain name. Who knows what it was but something like f59vvzcg7v-d-bjvffsodger-ivgpvl-dfbhff.com. I registered it as a joke and let it expire after one year.<\/p>\n

But in a chat with GoDaddy over 10 years later the rep commented on what an unusual domain name that was. I was like, that’s still in the system?\u00a0I gues they have some kind of accountability or compliance reasons to store that stuff forever.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What Time Is It? What TIme Is Time? I woke up early, felt good without knowing why, and had to check multiple time pieces to be sure I had not slipped through some crackle in time. The thought was not completely without basis. My PC at home suddently did not know what time it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-8r8","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}