I was told "TFB: Just upgrade!" by a 70 year old!

Rather, she told me to "suck it up and upgrade" but you can't make swears in headlines or face becoming a headliner yourself. 

My community is talking about getting rid of Comcast because the contract is ending and most of the residents want to go fiber optics and stream. Get out of the cable industry and not have old stuff around. Hardly anyone these days has a land line or watches TV. Everyone streams everything. So all you need is internet and call it a day. 

The long and the short of a story is... due to the pandemic (thanks Covid for pushing people off certain technology... 😬), people aren't watching cable TV because they're steaming everything via their smart devices. Nor are they talking on a house phone.. there is video conferencing on said smart device or group text messaging. 

You'd be hard pressed to find one of these in a "modern" house...

 

(Corded phone)

We don't have that exact model in my unit (we did up north, though), we do have different style of corded phone in one of the rooms while we have one of those cordless phone systems in the rest of the house. 

But.. people aren't paying for a house phone because they have a smart phone. It's been a slow roll, but majority of phone users have gone to cell phones over the last 20 years and ditched the land line. I remember in college, my professors were commenting about only using their flip phones for phone calls because the contract was cheaper and the phone was always with them. I was thinking how crazy it was because my flip phone was basically for an emergency.. I never dreamt of it being my main source of conversation with the circles I ran in. Look at me now. I've graduated from a plethora of dumb phones to a fruit smart phone that makes me feel like a dumb truck every so often. And I don't like using it to make calls on unless I can use a pair of headphones. I can't hear so great on the flat surface. My flip phones were great because I could hear the conversation so well and not have the people around me hear both sides (thanks to speakerphone).

Anyway, I'm rambling.

The people in my complex say fiber is the way of the future even though fiber is on its way out. We have to get to some happy medium in our community in order to secure ourselves a path to a better technology arena. 

So off with Comcast's head in January 2023 because they're not doing us any favors. They are willing to dig our yards to give us fiber but at a cost the board doesn't want. After vetting a few different companies, my complex has decided to go with a Florida based communication service called Hotwire Communication. I don't know much about it, as I've not been home and around for the video conference meetings. I know that we are getting so many cable boxes, a router, a free year of home phone, plus a couple extra perks, but the community has to sign a 10 year contract and everyone has to download Hotwire's app onto every user's smart device. And the monthly bill will be cheaper. 

My challenge is, I don't use the free banger box Comcast provided. Why do I need a bigger box with DVR capabilities and a voice remote? I have a Roku 3 that has all the cable TV apps I need (so I don't watch all of them, big deal. I barely have my TV on these days. If I watch 2 hours worth of TV a week, that's 90 minutes too much lately). So paying for a set top box with DVR is worthless. Even to have internet streaming isn't used much by me. My mom watches TV through out the day (when she's not at the pool or shopping or with friends) and she uses the DVR in the main room. Plus she talks on the house phone and uses her cell phone to text, check her email and play games (I swear she's an adult... for all the apps she has on her fruit phone). She uses the triple play contract to the max. 

Which makes people like us the losers in this situation when we have to upgrade. Our needs are phone, internet and TV where the board members of my community plus the people who work from home and rely solely on internet are the winners. They need internet / data and maybe the occasional TV. Nothing else. 

So to ramble on some more and come back to why I almost got told to STFU by a 70 year old... is I was asking my mother if we are going to have to separate the networks on the new Hotwire box, much like I did on the xFi box. 

If readers recall, I've made a few posts about how troublesome it was when we got the xFi box because our printers needed the 2.4Ghz network and could not run on the 5.0. Even my Roku needed the lesser of the two at one point. 

My mom asked some of the tech savvy people she swims with... the ones who want the change. They all said it should be fine... everything will connect. When mentioned to a friend tonight, she had quite the different story. 

I was told that I should just bite the bullet and upgrade all my stuff when we get the new contract. I don't need old printers or an old streaming box. You can stream on the TV with the cable box we're getting. Printers / scanners are cheap these days so getting something that runs on the 5.0 band is more economical anyway. This woman said she is old enough to not give a shit anymore. It's a good thing we are going fiber and getting off coax cable. If she has to buy new stuff, she will, and we should too.

Yes, I told her why I was questioning it and what I had to do to our router... to make everything work. And it's not so easy to just buy new or upgrade when you've got a printer specifically to print on discs. Those aren't readily available these days unless you want to troll through every model known to man to make sure you can print on paper and disc (and it's much like DVD players that record onto DVDs.... good luck for finding something of substance for under a grand and brand new). Which is why I was told to just suck it up and upgrade or re-invest in something different.

Hell no. I'm not forking out more money to replace something that works perfectly fine. If the modem can't do what I want, why should I have to take good electronics to the landfill? It's not like the printer crapped out. If something happened to it, like it got hit by lightning and electrocuted itself or something dropped on it or spilled on it and it broke, I can see replacing it. But if the only thing I replace routinely are the ink cartridges because I print a lot, screw that. If it ain't broke, don't throw it out. It's the modem that'll need replacing. 

New type of #branduse ?

 Fair warning:

I am using my iPhone 11, Logitech Bluetooth mouse and Apple magic keyboard to write this blog post. Please excuse any and all errors.

This morning, I was getting ready to go out and realized that I seem to have a small brand allegiance to Toms of Maine at the moment. 

Between the toothpaste, deodorant and mouth wash, I must be trying to do something healthy because surely the price points aren’t saving me any money.

 

I have to be careful with the deodorant, though. As with any “with oils” brand, I can’t use lemongrass oil (aka cymbopogon flexuosus oil) as I seemingly break out. So I’m finding that the natural brands with ingredients such as coconut are better, as long as the lemongrass is no where to be seen in the ingredient list. 

But… this Tom’s fresh coconut is fresh yet not coco-smelling. Every tube I buy under the “fresh coconut” label smells like patchouli. The sage label smells like sage. But the coconut smells like I’m a hippy dealing in other oils. Weird because even my mom said it doesn’t smell like coconut, and I didn’t tell her what she was smelling. 

The mouthwash is definitely minty fresh, but doesn’t last all day. Maybe the fresh feeling lasts an hour, but maybe it’s because I’m already half a Yeti into a glass of water by the time I’m feeling not so wicked. Who knows; could also be due to a snack or two I sometimes find in the mid mornings too. 

The toothpaste is like the deodorant. I can’t do whitening + fluoride + other things because it makes my mouth break out. I can do one or the other but not all in one. So it’s weird that this toothpaste I am using isn’t giving me trouble. I won’t complain if it is doing the job of keeping my teeth sparkly. 

Proves how much I pay attention...

.... to the "current" songs and movies...

Yesterday I was cruising along, going to work, and some random song comes on the radio. It sounds new, but it doesn't sound new. Like it very well could have been Pink trying out a different genre of music while attempting to stay on the pop rock relevancy channel. 

Not that there's anything wrong with Pink. I like her music and actually thought the song I was listening to was a new song of hers. Some new collaboration with a male artist (like she did with Rag'n'Bone Man last year). 

But when the song on the radio was over and the computer generated announcer say "Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper: 'Shallow'", I was like "waaaaaaaaaaatttttt??????"

I haven't seen any of the incarnations of A Star Is Born, including the newest version, of which Shallow is from. 

I really don't have any vested interest in Bradley Cooper movies or want to see Lady Gaga try to act. I mean, sure, she was okay in House of Gucci, but I was more amazed in the overall cast than any particular person in the movie. The move was drawn out anyway and I found myself bored. Maybe because I'm not a person who has to follow that brand or have one of their products.

At any rate, hearing Shallow from beginning to end was quite surprising. It's an interesting song, and I wasn't expecting Bradley Cooper to actually sing. The song isn't giving him a pass for me to like him any more, but I don't pay attention enough to some of the new stuff out there and just wasn't expecting this song.

I am tired of listening to NPR the past few months, and don't want to keep hearing the same 4 songs on the throwback rap/hip-hop station. So I channel surf. With all the advertisements the stations play, I hear about 2 or 3 songs by the time I get to work because the ad filler is way over loaded. I happened to have stopped at a station in time to play Cooper and Gaga, so I left it. 

It's different than I expected. I don't know exactly what I was expecting, but I probably would find myself singing along if I knew the words, even though it won't be a favorite song of mine. It is catchy enough of a sap country song to stay with you for a few minutes. It also isn't going to make me run out and try to rent the movie. I've got way too many movies to watch right now to make this one a priority, just like I've got way too many books to read to start using my e-reader. 

Just something to talk about for the moment and finally admit to hearing it from beginning to end with no interruptions. Let's hope it doesn't become a total earworm for me this morning, because it did yesterday, as I wanted to write about it then... 

Cheers.