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WDP — Online Communications

Fandango5 Comments
Daily writing prompt
In what ways do you communicate online?
View all responses

We haven’t had a telephone landline in our home since around 2010. Instead, we rely on our smartphones. My iPhone is my all purpose communications device and I use it for almost all of my communications, online or otherwise. About the only time I don’t use online communications is when I’m speaking face-to-face with others.

When I want to reach out to someone, I use my iPhone’s Wi-Fi or cellular service to connect with them. When I want to find out what my adult kids are up to, I look at their Facebook and Instagram pages. When I want to talk with them about something, I text them or send them an email. That is their preference and it’s fine with me. Our family has shared online messaging via Slack and SMS messaging.

I bank online, pay my bills online. I use chat if I have a question about a product or service, as most sellers and service companies these days offer chat help functionality. I buy most of the things I need online at Amazon, eBay, and retailers with an online presents (i.e, pretty much all retailers), or directly from sellers. I even order most of my groceries online.

Most of my health care providers offer online video chat, so unless they need to examine this old body of mine in person, the majority of my communications with doctors is via text or online video calls. Of course, dentists and eye doctors are the exception.

And of course, there’s WordPress, where literally all communications between members of our community is online.

So, in what ways do I communicate online? In most cases, it’s via my iPhone, of course.

Truthful Tuesday — Business as Usual

Fandango18 Comments

Frank, aka PCGuy, has published another one of his Truthful Tuesday posts. This week Frank wants to know…

Has this pandemic altered your holiday plans for later this year, or will it be “business as usual”? Please explain.

So let’s talk about upcoming U.S. holidays.

  • October 12 – Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day
  • October 31 – Halloween
  • November 3 – Election Day
  • November 12 – Veterans Day
  • November 26 – Thanksgiving Day
  • December 10-18 – Chanukah
  • December 25 – Christmas Day

I’m going to immediate eliminate Columbus Day and Veterans Day because, even before the pandemic, we never really did anything special on either of those holidays. Election Day is not technically a holiday — although I think it should be — but we’ve voted by mail for the past decade anyway and that’s what we’re doing this year, so nothing is different.

That leaves Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Chanukah/Christmas. With respect to Halloween, I wrote about that in my response to last week’s Truthful Tuesday, so I won’t repeat that here.

Thanksgiving. We usually have our daughter, her live-in boyfriend, our son, and his wife over for Thanksgiving dinner. But not this year. We will all be at our respective homes. We’ll likely chat and play games via Zoom. Whoopie doo!

Chanukah. Although neither my wife nor I practice the religion, we have a Jewish heritage, so we would typically have a Chanukah party at our place, complete with brisket, potato latkes, noodle kugel, and a menorah. Not this year. We’ll probably be chatting and playing games via Zoom. Whoopie Doo!

Christmas. Because we’re not at all religious, our typical Christmas Eve has been spent with family at a Chinese or Japanese restaurant. On Christmas Day, we would exchange gifts before going to a dim sum buffet for brunch and a movie. But this year we’ll probably chat and play games via Zoom. Whoopie doo!

I hope that if Frank asks this question next year at this time, my answers will be very different.

Chatty Q&A?

FandangoLeave a comment

0E949CFA-EB8D-4B2C-8DB8-851E4E1FFA39So Rory, A Guy Called Bloke, tagged me for this “Come Chat With Me” thing. The rules are:

  1. Answer the questions you receive (straight, funny, absurd, up to you)
  2. Create three questions of your own for those that you tag to answer
  3. Tag three people

So what does Rory do? He asks three truly absurd questions. Thanks a lot, Rory.

Hurly Burly or Wally Bolly and why?

I don’t know. How about Hurdy Gurdy and Woolly Bully?

Blue underpants with green socks or pink boxers with yellow sandals?

How about no underpants and no socks or sandals?

If the letter A wsn’t in our lphabet wht would you plce in its plce or in other words?

Reminds me of this:

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. 

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”. 

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k”. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f”. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. 

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. 

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. 

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. 

By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”. 

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl. 

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. 

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

Now I have to ask three questions:

  1. If you could have been born in any country other than the one in which you were born, which country and why?
  2. If you could go back in time and change any important life decision of your choice, what would it be and why?
  3. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Now I’m supposed to tag three other bloggers, but instead I’m going to tag any other bloggers who want to come chat with me.