This memorial contains almost a month’s worth of parts – though not all of ‘em are about electronics! – and the post you’re reading is the fourth in the series.
------------------ Feb ---------------
I stepped over a barrier early – very early (in the still-dark) – on the morning of 3 February when I awoke before the dawn amid the sound of rain. I don’t know why I woke up but the pool will overflow into the storage area if it’s too full. Rain fills the pool and there’s a vent at the back of it that leads inside to the basement. Somehow my unconscious mind made a connection between the rain and potential damage to items kept there – and waked me.
Still in my underwear but out of bed I walked downstairs and switched the pump handle to “backwash”. Nothing happened – before, when I’d taken this step, I’d heard a sound of running water as the pool’s contents went out through the drainpipe – so, in the confined space, I turned my body about to face the control panel mounted on the concrete wall. I was bent over at the waist but by just pressing a few buttons on it I activated a command that said, “Backwash for 3 minutes,” then I straightened up and went upstairs where I picked up a book to read. Using the house spotlight and after opening the back door I checked the water level once time’d passed but it still looked too full – the threat of rain still present – so I went back to the little enclosure under the concrete slab and once more punched in the commands. I went upstairs, watched ABC TV for five minutes, then bundled myself down the garage stairs, turned the handle back to “filter” and went to bed, but couldn’t sleep and got up again to make coffee.
Joe sold me an old TV for $200, and I had the device installed on the wall above my work desk. Tim the IT guy did this. He came over to the house on 8 February carrying a kit he’d bought containing mounting brackets and screws as well as spacers (which’d be a critical component). It took a bit of trouble to find the studs in the wall upon which to hang the TV. Using an echo-sounder he had in the car to locate them, after drilling one hole Tim had to call Joe to get details about how the studs’d been installed. With that information he then drilled four holes at the spots we chose, though to find them took five or ten minutes and, once the holes had been made, Tim attached the bracket with some bolts included in the product box that was sitting, waiting a little more silently than me, on the floor. He drove out to Bunnings to get an antenna cable while I pottered around and made dinner, then he stood on the desk to carry the TV – which weighs a fair bit – up to the bracket. Hanging the TV on the metal bracket was the next step, and to finish up he stuffed the power cord up into the space behind the device. I got it turned on in time to watch ‘7.30’ while seated at my desk.
On 20 February I announced on Facebook that I’d stop using the site due to the company’s news ban. The next day I opened my PC’s browser and didn’t see the usual Fb tab as I’d removed it from the configuration you control with ‘Settings’ in Chrome. I missed seeing what friends posted – some I knew IRL, others I’d only met online over the previous decade (I started using Facebook in 2007) – but felt justified by the IT giant’s heavy-handed response to a reasonable government request that they should pay to carry news that draws readers to advertisers’ productions. I’d written some stories about the change and felt, therefore, that I was doing my bit for the media industry – a class of people to which I belonged – and mused silently on how wise I’d been to reject the Page feature I’d initially set one up in 2010.
That decision had been taken because the company’d stopped putting posts made on Pages into the native Facebook feed. It was the sense of entitlement that bothered me, the idea that it was Facebook who owned the content and not the users but the media ban didn’t really impact me because I still heavily used Twitter and because one permanent browser tab belongs to the Sydney Morning Herald (I’m a subscriber). In addition I’d been following news outlets with different Twitter accounts, including the Age, the Guardian, and the New York Times. Having so long ago refused to be bound to one platform I now suffered less than many others did as a result of management’s selfish actions.
The switch reaped other rewards on 23 February. The day before I’d put out a call on Twitter – using several accounts – to find podcasts. I got a number of different replies, each of which contained recommendations to one or more shows. In the end I had to start a “Get” sheet in MS-Excel to accommodate them, putting in space for such details as who made the recommendation, when the download was performed, and when the review was published. The response was phenomenal – far more generous than the result from a similar call-out made the previous year on Facebook – netting a bevvy of content I could listen to while driving Ensign. In the end, though, I deleted all of these shows as their quality was uniformly low.
----------- Mar ------------
I started using Facebook again at the end of February and went back to using Google Chrome on 3 March due to Edge’s failure to load some key information, pages I rely on for daily business. It didn’t take long to make the switch, which involved setting up the startup pages and logging back into some accounts on Twitter. All the other regular pages were still logged in from when I temporarily stopped using the application on 22 January though I had to relog-into two Twitter accounts that had been automatically logged out by the website.
I also started, in the last week of February, listing things for sale on Facebook Marketplace, an activity increasing in the first week of March. I started with packing boxes left over from my move to Botany sold as a job-lot for $100 on 28 Feb to a Portuguese-Australian woman who arrived in a bright blue Renault Megane station wagon with a boy who might’ve been her little brother. They stuffed the car full and, in the end, left some boxes uncollected. Having pocketed the cash, I closed the garage door but a bug had bit, so I listed some picture frames I’d recently bought from Joe (the man who sold me the house), both on Fb Marketplace and on eBay. I found the latter harder to use and the company also charges you whereas Fb Marketplace lists for free. On 5 March I went out on a limb and listed a receipt spike that’d been in the family for a long time – I’ve got no recollection as to how I came to own it, but it was probably something of dad’s – as well as a coffee table I’d been given as a wedding gift in 1991 and that was still in good condition. I listed a WiFi aerial, I listed some bulldog clips, I listed some picture hooks, I listed a tape dispenser, painting supplies (roller, roller brush, sandpaper, paint tray), furniture risers, plastic wallets, a photo frame.
On 13 March I posted this on Facebook:
Fb Marketplace needs fixing! Put up an ad for planter boxes y'day and accepted a request but then there were a hundred requests coming later, some at higher prices. I asked the first respondent if he's go higher and he said, "No." Then went to bed. The messages still came however, and woke up to another 25 requests in my inbox. You can't mark items as "Sold" until the guy comes to pick up the thing however because if you do the chats disappear, so had to deal w all these requests. It was taking all of my time – couldn't do anything else. So I turned down the first guy and changed the price on the ad – though my mobile's interface went down, so had to run upstairs to the PC to do it. The first guy wasn't happy but I'd asked him for a better offer and he'd point blank refused – even his eventual offer was much lower than the offer I'd had on Marketplace later. So here I am with the requests still coming in and the guy who wants to pick the things up this morning still doesn't know what time he'll come.
Fb needs a better interface, so you can say, "Sorry, offer accepted, guy's coming soon." Or something like that. ATM it's just "Available" or "Not available." Secondly, you need to silence requests until an exchange happens, so that you don't lose the chats but keep them paused in case the exchange falls through, so you can revisit them later if need be. In addition there are no guidelines as to conduct. I went looking for something written inside the interface but couldn't find anything.
The interface is just terrible, even though it's effective. The fact that Marketplace went down on my phone is doubly nerve-wracking.
I found out a day or so later that there was a “Pending” flag you could set to show an item’d been asked for but for which the actual exchange hadn’t yet taken place.
Such concerns promised to return as I possessed so many things – the quantity of packing cartons (cheap at $100 for a purchaser) required to shift all of my belongings a testament to squirrel-like propensities – and, thinking it might be worth allocating time and try to monetise a resource, I daily listed new items on the website. Moving house had stretched my budget to the limit but I still bought food, paid for petrol, and used electricity to run various devices, so welcomed the liquidity.
A freebie from Toyota when the year before I bought my car – a wireless phone charger – went for a song to a guy who turned up 45 minutes late. He said he’d by mistake gone to Bondi, then asked if he could transfer the cash using his phone. I said I had no Commonwealth Bank account (a lie) and then advised him to use the ATM on Botany Road. He asked me if I wanted to go with him, in his clapped out sedan, but he went alone and brought the cash – $5 more than the price he’d initially agreed to, on account of tardiness – then took the charger and went away. In the end I forgot to include the printed instructions (so I hope he worked out how to use the thing). Joe heard me raising my voice to talk with the fellow and came out to see if I required help. I told Joe, with laughter in my voice, that the buyer’d been late arriving.
I didn’t tell him on 22 March when I sold two picture frames to a woman in Wagga Wagga. Joe’d sold me three frames for $50 and I got $150 just for two small ones. For this transaction I started using PayPal – the woman’d preferred this payment method – and I had to overcome a sense of aversion upon learning that the company takes a cut of transactions. I promised myself not to use this method of transaction again – if I could help it – but the woman in Wagga wouldn’t do the deal any other way, so I tried to accommodate her preferences. In the end I drove to the post office once and to TNT in Botany twice – the first time to get a quote, and the second time to consign the parcel, which was wrapped in old packing boxes held together by sticky tape – and she paid for the postage but it took me half a day to get everything done. Good thing I wasn’t charging by the hour.
I contemplated listing my old couch once the new one arrived on-shore. From the couch I was watching TV and I was also using it for reading books. From there, on 5 March, I tried to view my Sedition digital artwork on the TV. The website for the company said to use the TV’s web browser, but when I used it to log in – a process made excessively fiddly using the remote controller – my purchased artwork wasn’t visible in the space the company calls my “vault” and which is located on their server. I emailed the company and they asked me how I was attempting to view the work, and also which artwork I was not seeing. I replied in the morning after I got up – they’re based in London – and then saw in their regular mailout that an LG app was available. I wondered if they had a Samsung one so that I could use to view the artwork and, once prompted in this way, the service guy in London told me that, yes: a Samsung app was coming so that it’d be easier for me to view artworks.
By this time I’d worked out how to use the oven and the microwave. For the former, a gamble on buttons would result in being able to cook, say, a piece of salmon at 180 deg C for 24 minutes (for dinner) but details still lay beyond my ken. I could do it myself easily enough but wouldn’t be able to explain the procedure to someone else. For the microwave I also got used to doodling the buttons for a second or two while I located the setting that would allow me to defrost something – it might be lamb chops. Another setting – which buttons? I’ll try this! – would let me warm up a cup of milk. I’d not yet been able to communicate any of this information to my housemate so it was my job to run the devices when required, as, in the normal course of busy days, it sometimes was.
Emergency measures took control of my timetable on 20 March due to heavy rain associated with a weather system over the ocean. I visited the pump room at least a dozen times during the day and, before going to bed, made sure to leave the pool at a level that would safely allow a quantity of water to fill it overnight. Each backwash cycle takes three minutes, and I must’ve pumped out half the total volume of the pool over the course of the day. The following day – the Sunday – the weather had moderated greatly and even at 9am I’d not once put the pump on backwash, even though I’d woken at 6am. On Monday morning I again put the pump on backwash for three minutes, a measure that wasn’t really necessary.
On 29 March I sold the TV stand for $10 on Facebook Marketplace to a guy with a BMW.
----------- Apr ----------
Sold a paint tray and roller on 4 April for $30 as the deal was for $25 and the woman’d wanted to do an electronic transfer but I insisted on cash and her husband gave me $5 too much in the notes he pulled out of his trouser pocket. It was Easter Sunday but I didn’t feel any regret as I’d decided to harden myself against recalcitrant buyers. I’ve never liked religious holidays and this one seemed to curdle even the milk – I’d had to get more as my housemate’s boyfriend was staying over – bought, this time, fresh from the Botany Road convenience store.
I sensed other-worldly powers while Ming and Omer watched LOTR on Netflix, and when the Russian woman messaged me about the painting supplies I responded immediately, wanting a sale to offset money spent on water the day before (Joe’d asked me to pony up though we hadn’t settled.) I put the sharply folded banknotes in my worn wallet and slunk upstairs.
TweetDeck changed its default background colour to black in early April and I had to switch it to white every time I chose to use a different identity. Then on 10 April they put in a control that allows you to set a default background colour, measurably facilitating my interactions.
On 14 April there was water accumulated on the bottom shelf of the cabinet in the laundry, possibly (I thought) due to the outlet from the washing machine not draining properly. That night I emailed the plumber but they said the next morning it hadn’t come to their inbox. This was the same day the electrician came to fix the intercom. This man had been in the house two days earlier but hadn’t brought with him the right equipment to enable him to repair the device, so came back one more time. The next day the plumber called about the photo I’d sent through, asking me to send it again. The receptionist advised that the earliest they could make an appointment would be for 27 April, and so we decided I’d put on another load to test if it was a real problem or if it had just been that my housemate’d emptied a bucket of water into the sink at the same time the washing machine was operating. I wasn’t certain – and would have to use a laundromat unless I could do laundry at home – so did as instructed and the water drained properly and without a mess so I called the plumber to let the receptionist know that everything was fine.
The same day Tim the IT guy finally fixed the email on my phone. On the Friday of the week before I posted on Facebook: “After email probs and NBN power cut, Vodafone service has gone off today. Trifecta this week!” At that time Tim was over to see about the PC’s Outlook client, but then had had to do business out of town which kept him away for a few days. Net Registry, which provides my website server space and software, had as usual changed its server address details making it necessary for me to jump through a few hoops in order to be able to send emails. In the end the change cost me $264 in charges placed by Tim and that on 22 April I settled with an electronic funds transfer. He’d been out to my place three times but only charged me for two hours’ work.
On 22 April I received an email from Toyota notifying me of the pending release of the Kluger hybrid. I called the dealership who’d sold me the RAV4 to find out about the new car, which will be a 4-cylinder. The salesman the previous year had told me Toyota wouldn’t be making 6-cylinder hybrids but traditionally the Kluger has 6 cylinders. I was surprised that a 7-seater with 4 cylinders could perform to an adequate standard, but this question seems to have been well and truly settled, proving that it’s the electric motors in hybrids that provide most of the traction power. The petrol engine is mainly for charging the battery.
The next day I tried to set the status control on a sale item in Facebook Marketplace to “pending” but wasn’t able to locate the option. It was for a picture of Queen Victoria on the occasion of her death. I’d bought the item for $10 from a guy at Ramsgate Beach and had a buyer willing to part with $35 in exchange for possession of the piece which was evidently part of a deceased estate. I’d seen the seller’s stuff on the website and had asked to view before buying so he’d told me where he lived and I drove down and, after parking, saw the photo on the garage floor among a group of unpromising artworks in which I’d no interest. I might’ve offered $5 but decided on the higher amount out of consideration for the man’s feelings, as it was the only thing he had that I coveted.
I finally got around to delivering the photogravure on the last day of the month after, the day before, the woman’d said it wasn’t possible for her to come to my place to pick it up. I asked her at her workplace – on Botany Road in Alexandria – if she collected Victoriana but she said she just liked old things. She was delighted with the almost-mint but original condition of her purchase and gave me the right change when I handed over the photo, listening patiently to a potted history I made to chronicle for her my purchase and resale. I’d parked on Epson Road – just down the street from the auto shop she works in – so walked back to the car quickly. It took me ten minutes to drive home and the stopover was on the way for me as earlier in the morning I’d been at my GPs’ in Pyrmont.
On 26 April a woman named Cristina Bunea contacted me on Twitter via direct message with the intent of getting me to use her app. It’s called “Odin” and is designed – so she told me – to allow people to share interests. I tried to post a link to an article on my blog however and got an error message. I told Cristina about this problem via DM and she said, “there might be a space in the field where you're pasting the link so that's why it gives an error. alternatively, it's easier to just save from the mobile extension.” Then she put up a video which didn’t work. I’d asked what a “mobile extension” was. All things considered, my experience using her service gave me little reason to feel confident about the software and I regretted having sent invites to three friends.
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