Summer of no love

Oh, deep joy—I’ve just discovered that the condo pool hours (for the pool that’s directly below the only windows in this flat) are 0800-2100, every day (except Saturday, when it's open until 2200), from Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day.

For the past week I’ve been listening to the lifeguards train daily. Although they’re not splashing or shouting, if I have any window open at all they sound like they’re in my living room.

That’s my entire summer spent with no access to fresh air, then.

And now I understand why the owners have left the country.

Gratitude Monday: "Jesus, take the wheel."

It is not exactly a stop-the-presses moment if I say that the innovators who brought us the ability to produce and share online selfie videos from our smart phones have a lot to answer for. Because there is way, way too much of that dreck on the Interwebs.

However, there is cream in this ocean of souring milk, and sometimes it does rise to the top. Two examples I particularly like:

Last week a Texas woman named Candace Payne made an impulse purchase and was so tickled by it that she shared her delight on Facebook before she could even leave the parking lot:

The woman practically single-handedly broke the Internet, with her video going so viral it left Zika in its dust.  

As you might imagine, Payne has been blitzed with all manner of offers to monetize the video; she may end up with her own talk show. But she told NPR’s Rachel Martin that people have also reached out to her to say that her video with her truly infectious joy lifted their spirits at a point when they didn’t think that was possible.

And that’s a tremendous gift.

My other example is from last July, when a Tennessee woman named Veronica-Pooh Nash Poleate was troubled by reports of people being killed by sharks off the North Carolina coast. The spirit moved her on her way to church to fire up her video and remind us that if we go into the shark’s house, we can expect to be eaten.

I happen to think that “Watch the ocean from a distance” is excellent advice. Especially during shark season. Or, in the Chesapeake Bay, during jellyfish season.

One major commonality of these two videos is that both women talk about and embody joy. “It’s the simple joys.” “Let us rejoice.” This is something that it’s very easy for us to lose here in the reality of the 21^st Century. Sometimes it’s particularly easy for us to lose as we wade through the massive universe of vicious, ignorant, manipulative and fatuous user-generated content that the Web has made possible. Especially during an election season.

So today I’m grateful for Payne and Poleate, and others like them, who pop up occasionally online and remind me to look for that joy, even in places where I don’t think it could possibly be found.

Back to the stone age with Verizon

When I was working for a college newspaper, the professors/advisers used to threaten less conscientious reporters with going to press with a huge white hole in a page, slugged “This blank space brought to you by [name of reporter who didn’t get copy in by deadline].”

Well, today’s hot steaming pile of white space is brought to you by Verizon FiOS, a company that has accomplished what I had not thought possible: it’s made me wish I had Comcast back.

Both phone and Internet service went belly up on Wednesday. When I called their we-won’t-help line and got Eric somewhere in the Philippines, he ran a line test and informed me that the problem was with “the big box”. (Not the first time since I moved in two months ago that I’ve had to call Verizon about equipment failure.) This turned out to be the high-rise apartment building equivalent of the customer premises equipment (CPE) box that regulates the “last mile” of wire from a central line to each customer’s unit.

And Verizon would have a technician out to look at it…sometime between 0900 and 1700 on Thursday.

Checking yesterday on the Verizon trouble ticket got me this:

Their idea of "working hard" is a possible fix two days after the failure is reported.

So, without access to my normal blogging device (i.e., personal laptop), I’m doing a quick bootleg post from work.

Where I’m also checking out Comcast services. Because their equipment is working fine in my apartment building.

Low-riding

Okay, I’ll confess that this is something I never saw in the Valley They Call Silicon:

I’m guessing it’s some sort of motorcycle cover that was dislodged by winds or possibly would-be thieves. But it looks remarkably like a two-wheeled version of sagging.

Drive by

On one of my walks around the ‘hood I encountered something that nearly transported me back to the Valley They Call Silicon. Because y’all know how much I love making stories out of car art.

This sticker was a first:

And of course it was on a Prius.

The spook in the 'hood

I’ve written before about how big Halloween seems to be in the yard-decoration stakes in the Valley They Call Silicon. Some displays take weeks to install, and I wonder where the zombies and tombstones live for the other 11 months of the year.

This was not a big deal, that I recall, during my last sojourn in a Confederate state, but recent walks around my NoVa neighborhood makes me wonder.

Only about a block and a half from my current residence I encountered this as a permanent installation, in the front yard of a house that is otherwise perfectly anodyne:

Gratitude Monday: The scent of spring

I rambled around my NoVa neighborhood on Saturday and Sunday. It’s an old one—well, reasonably old by Virginia standards. New construction is seeping into it, but for now, at least, the balance is in favor of houses that date well back into the early part of the last century.

The yards are old landscaping, too, which I really enjoy. Especially when I come across an abundance of flowers. No matter what kind of crappy mood I’m in, flowers on the hoof always lift my spirits.

And on both days, I experienced the joy of walking into a wall of the scent of wild roses before I actually paid attention to the shrubs.

And then there were the beautiful flowers themselves.

It’s been a while since I’ve had that kind of encounter, and I’m very grateful for being reminded that all sorts of beauty fill my life every day.

Crime wave

As I was walking past the Marriott at Metro Center yesterday I became engulfed in a swarm of spandex-clad cyclists, who turned out to be cops.

They were taking part in the Police Unity Tour, an annual event that raises money in honor of cops who have died in the line of duty. Participants come from police departments around the country.

Here’s what I thought, though: now might be the moment for someone to knock over a liquor store in Orlando, Fla., or Long Beach, N.J.

Social strategy

As long as I’m on the topic of web annoyances, let me remind you of promoted tweets. Those are the massively irrelevant ads-disguised-as-tweets that appear in your Twitter feed.

If you want to block them (meaning that the offending promoters’ content will never again darken your timeline) you have to go through a multi-click process. Yes, in the global scheme of things, clicking to rid yourself of pests is not onerous. But in social media terms, it’s a gigantic pain in the butt.

I do sometimes click on the tweets just to see the blowback they get from others also pissed off by the ads. That can be pretty amusing.

But I still wonder what the ROI is on these things, especially for the smaller businesses that think a few promoted tweets are going to take the place of real lead generation.

One example came into my feed yesterday:

It originated in October 2013. Do 23 retweets and 18 likes outweigh the hundreds of people who’ve blocked all of this company’s content for the past two and a half years?

Design creep

Well, isn’t this interesting—just one day after I happened to be discussing annoying web practices, I was doing some research on events management and came across something else that I’m seeing more frequently: online stalking.

I’m referring to the practice of having invitations to chat (or take some other action) not only pop up when you’re trying to ingest their content (in fact, before you’ve had a chance to read it), but also stalk you as you scroll down the page. Viz.:

And

I do not know what designers and companies are thinking with this, but I wish to hell they’d stop.

Yeah, okay—I do know what they’re thinking: they’re so eager for you to engage with a sales rep that they don’t care if you read their content; perhaps they don’t even want you to read it. I mean does anything shout “We want to sell you something NOW before you even know what it is” more clearly than blocking your access to the content, and continuing to block it as you try to move away from the damned box?

Not only that, it’s downright creepy to have that thing follow you about. It’s the online equivalent of Alex Forrest, and it does not encourage me to stick around your website, much less buy anything from you.