In the early days of HTML (“WWW“) I looked for every opportunity to embed an in-line link on the websites I was responsible for. The more links, the better. It was all about the “user experience” back then and links added value.

Seems like I don’t see that many links these days and I only had to wonder for about three seconds. Why would they send me off to another page/site? Maybe we were always just “eyeballs.” I miss those links and the places they took me.

I used to think about what it means to “be online.” I still recall when everything was off-line. Or pre-line.

Before social media and the primacy of the latest post — and the irrelevance of all previous posts — I thought of my websites, especially my blog, like a small town library. You kept everything you thought you (or someone) might want to retrieve and read again. I didn’t care much how infrequently a “book” was checked out, just that it was there on a shelf and in the card catalog.

But now the ever-flowing river of Tweets, Toots, FB posts, etc. makes anything below the scroll worthless. The notion of “rebooting” one’s online presence made me think of moving that small town library to a new building on the other side of town.

I remember my excitement, all those years ago (2005), when I upgraded from dial-up internet access to “high speed” DSL. It was never great but it was the best thing available (we can’t get cable). The local phone company (CenturyLink) advertised 10mbps download (1mbps up) but we never got more than 8 and that was good enough. But for the last six months we’ve had continual problems. Good fast connection one minute… then almost nothing five minutes later. Lots of phone calls and two visits by technicians (image of large man scratching his head) and the service is still unreliable. So today is the day we cancel the service (which only costs $45/mo).

I’ve replaced it with AT&T’s wireless internet service. I’m now getting — on average — 35mbps down and 5mbps up. More than 4x faster! And almost certainly more reliable.

I’m paying $60 per month for the service and that gets me 50gb of data a month. Because we’re also DirecTV customers, they give us an additional 50gb. 100gb/mo should be enough but if we run over, we have an additional 30gb on our phones which can serve as wifi hotspots. I’ll monitor this for a few months to see what our usage looks like. DSL is ancient tech and while it has been mostly a good experience, I happy to see it go.

UPDATE 10/17/18: Or maybe not. Looks like we’ve used three quarters of our 100gb just halfway through our billing period. The overages could mount up fast. And we just don’t want to have to watch and budget. So we’re going back to DSL and will learn to live with slow speeds and unreliable service. But hey, I remember dial-up.

Logged in to my Medicare account recently to update password. They used to require an update every six months but got so many complaints they dropped that requirement. After half a dozen unsuccessful attempts to create a new PW I started a chat with a support person. She began by informing me the password guidelines on the Medicare.gov website are wrong. Why are they there if they are wrong? She had no idea and gave me some different guidelines:

1. You should create a NEW password that is 8 – 16 characters in length.
2. The password must not include # or &
3. Must include at least one letter, number and at least one special character such as (@) ($) (%) [but not at the end of the password!]
4. Cannot be the same as your username.

Additional guidelines: please do not follow the creation guidelines in the system at this time. You will need to use at least one capital letters, four numbers and a special character however; you may not use a number or symbols at the beginning or at the end of the password. An example of a good password would be “Home1234$Home.” Alternatively “Red2015$car” You will need to use a minimum of three numbers in the middle.

These didn’t work either so I wound up on the phone with a gentleman who explained these guidelines are not right either. (“Sorry about that. Ha ha!”) Wound up creating a new account with a really lame-ass password.

ME: “Should I change this from time to time?”
SUPPORT: “I wouldn’t.”