On my landline — yes, I still have a landline — this caller ID has been appearing regularly for a very long time.
Checking calls from back on the 8th, the 4th, January 18 and January 10, they had the same ID, apparently from Michigan State University, and all the numbers ended in 11xx.
Hmm. I get similar robocalls from my alma mater, so I checked Michigan State’s alumni page. Yep, the main number is 517-884-1000.
I picked up yesterday’s call before the answering machine kicked in. A young woman, sounding like a college student, addressed me correctly by name, and said she was calling from Michigan State University.
Before she could launch into reading her fundraising script, I explained that I attended college in Massachusetts, and have absolutely nothing to do with Michigan State. She seemed flustered, and I assured her that I was sincere. She apologized and hung up.
Some further checking showed that I’m not the only one who’s been called, despite having no connection to the school. Their having my correct name and phone number makes it likely that Michigan State is using a database that’s been padded with files from other, unknown, sources.
Here’s hoping my name has been flagged for deletion at Michigan State. If another call comes in I’ll let it go. I’ve given up trying to convince auto warranty scammers that I’ve never owned a 2012 Jeep.
This weblog was started when I was a much younger man, and temporarily sedentary, suffering from an acute ankle problem. It resulted from a combination of the ankle injury from the 2002 car crash, and “overuse” from running more than 2,000 miles per year. This post goes back to more than 17 years ago.
Having returned to a regular running schedule last year, my weak ankle’s trouble has become a chronic condition. Ice packs, along with wobble board and balance pad exercises, aren’t enough anymore. I’ve filled out an online form requesting an appointment with an orthopedic group, and in the meantime my leg is back in the immobilizing boot.
It’s been thirty years since I connected to the Internet from home and bought my first desktop PC. Those two events go together. Until then I had been using a Tandy 1400 LT dual-floppy portable DOS PC with a monochrome LCD screen, bought used from a brother-in-law.
Tandy 1400 LT
The 1400 LT was excellent hardware that I enjoyed using very much. Extremely durable, its mechanical keyboard would impress any laptop user today. It even had an RCA composite video connector that displayed CGA graphics on a regular TV. Perfect for playing games, such as they were.
The software I used included Quicken, TaxCut, ProComm, and an office application called PFS: First Choice.
Accessories were an Intel 14.4 Kbps modem on the serial port and an Epson dot-matrix printer on the parallel port. The LaserDisc store, Sight & Sound, had a bulletin board that I dialed into with ProComm. I could check on new releases, titles in stock, and chat with the staff and other customers.
Circle Dialing phone service, that seems so ridiculous now, required picking a plan with a limited number of towns you could reach without making an expensive long distance call. I chose my plan based on the towns where my parents and my in-laws lived. Also included were Waltham, where the store was, and Bedford, where TIAC, The Internet Access Company, had a dialup access point.
CompuServe and AOL never interested me. I didn’t see the point in using commercial online networks. The 1400 LT would have been perfectly good for dialing into a UNIX Shell account at TIAC, and I considered doing that, but I was traveling on business up to half of the time, leaving my wife alone to care for our infant son. So I delayed getting online.
Reading an issue of PC Magazine in late 1993, I saw an item about the release of the Mosaic Web browser. I realized that although the Internet wasn’t yet mainstream, it was about to explode, and I should get ahead of the curve. The problem was, to run Mosaic I needed a much better system than my clunky little laptop, and I wouldn’t know how much I could spend until seeing that year’s bonus at work. I found that out on January 31, and I set a budget of $1500, equivalent to more than $3000 today.
Scouring Computer Shopper magazine, the best I could do for that bottom-dollar price was to order a no-name PC clone with an AMD 386 40 MHz processor, 4 megs of memory, a 160 megabyte hard drive, and a 14-inch SVGA CRT monitor. No sound card, no CD-ROM drive. DOS and Windows 3.1 were included, but not pre-installed.
Before the made-to-order system was delivered, I signed up for a UNIX Shell account at TIAC, and got online with the 1400 LT. I played with the text-based Web browser called Lynx, but mostly I explored Usenet newsgroups. In fact, a few months later, that was how I first learned of Prue’s married and maiden names.
Once the new system was installed and ready, I connected the modem and dialed into TIAC. I switched my account to a more expensive SLIP/PPP plan, and paid for Trumpet TCP/IP. Mosaic was free. ProComm included the necessary file transfer programs. After downloading and installing Trumpet and Mosaic, I was off and running, or at least crawling.
Paramount had a Star Trek Web page, and despite the… var-y… slow… speed… of… the… con-nec-tion, I was astounded. The mouse pointer was navigating a Web page. I had seen the future, and it was graphical Web browsing.
A series of modem upgrades ultimately maxed out at 33.6 Kbps, until moving to the house I’m in now, where Road Runner broadband service was available at a screaming 1.5 Mbps.
What happened to the 1400 LT? I sent it to my brother. His stepdaughter stole and pawned it.
What happened to my first desktop? It was too slow to run Windows 95, so I upgraded the BIOS to support an 83 MHz Intel replacement processor. Later, after getting a new system with a Pentium II, the old desktop was my first Internet router, to have more than one PC in the house access the Net. (Much better than the connection sharing feature in Windows 98.)
Intel Pentium II Bunnyman
I installed two $15 Ethernet cards and created a bootable diskette with a custom build of Linux. Later, after buying a dedicated hardware router (pre-WiFi), I put the 8-year-old PC in the back of my 13-year-old Honda Civic hatchback, intending to take it to work. Instead, the all-steel case with internal bracing helped to protect me by providing some support in a rear end collision as I sat at a red light. The car crumpled, the PC was wedged in too tightly to remove, and the case was barely bent.
I thought I was done five years ago managing my late parents’ estate, but it seems a trustee’s work is never done. This came from American Express to correct an error they made in my father’s account.
So that’s $0.16 each for myself and my five siblings, and I’ll keep the extra four cents for my fee. But uh, oh. There’s no such account as The Estate of George Pratt, and as there was no formal dissolution process for the trust, I don’t know what its legal status is. I vow to earn those four extra cents by devoting myself full-time to the resolution of this pressing financial matter!
I continue to be amazed by the number and diversity of Doug Pratt’s. By adopting the pen name “Dog Rat” over 30 years ago, I preemptively avoided being mistaken for one of them.
The Doug Pratt interviewed here talks about being gay and Black in Cleveland. We’re the same age, but that’s all we have in common besides our name.
There is also a lack of diversity in my name, at least with hobbies, as I explained on my Contact page.
A very long time ago, after we moved into our first house, I was in a Cambridge audio shop buying an excellent NAD 3120 amplifier for the living room. As I recall, it was on sale for only $90.
NAD 3120
The owner of the shop looked at my credit card and laughed. “You’re Doug Pratt? Doug Pratt is a crazy guy who comes in here all the time looking for bargains. You’re not Doug Pratt!” Except for the “all the time” part, I was guilty as charged and I still have the amp. Ten years later, shortly after we moved, another Doug Pratt moved into the town that I’d left.
Sumpy, my trusty basement sump pump, has had it easy for more than ten years. He hasn’t needed to run since my next door neighbors installed sump pumps in their house.
Monday’s storm was so bad that it woke up Sumpy. He’s been running every few minutes for the past 24 hours. I’m glad he was able to hold his water until after the electricity came back on. Otherwise, if I hadn’t caught it in time to get the generator running, there would have been a mess to clean up in the basement.
I used to have a couple of PVC drain pipes that fit together to extend the outside outlet and take the water away from the house. I still have them, but as mentioned here a while ago, they were used by the landscaping contractor for the downspout drain project, so I had to improvise.
In the garage I had a long, plastic shipping tube from a video projector screen project. The tube seemed like a perfect replacement for the pipes that are now buried underground, but when I dropped it on the ground it broke in two! Despite being much thicker than the other pipes, it’s actually much more fragile.
Forced to improvise again, I knew that duct tape wouldn’t be good enough to hold the two pieces together. Then I remembered the roll of aluminum tape I bought when replacing the dryer vent.
It worked! And I was wondering if I would ever have another use for that expensive roll of aluminum tape.
I’m going to reward myself for a successful hack with an Elvis Special — a peanut butter and banana sandwich. I won’t fry it the Elvis way, but I’ll toast the bread.
