Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

those buzzers buzz REALLY HARD.

also people put them in their pants

The proliferation of potato chips as a side is my personal consumer fraud crusade

When I waited tables in the late 90s, at one restaurant they made us carry those buzzers in our aprons so we’d know when our orders were ready. Regardless of how alert I was (it varied) I was always caught off guard by the intense sensation of that buzz.

fan of the buzzers. It’s ideal when places are loud and buzzy and have multiple stalls. You can go wait wherever you want and claim a table instead of standing around listening.

Some just light up and don't buzz

Feel like the buzzers came in right around the same time diners started waiting outside since they couldn't smoke at the bar any more.

I also don't like places that take your number and text you when your table is ready. I don't want to have to keep checking my phone. We went to a restaurant with my mother-in-law and she got there first so she gave them her number. They said it would be about half an hour. After sitting in a waiting area inside the restaurant for about 25 minutes I went up to the front to see how much longer it would be, and they told me they texted us 10 minutes ago. My mother in law is not the most tech savvy person but there were no texts on her phone. Maybe they had the number wrong.

I remember them from a long time ago at Outback?

I worked at an Olive Garden in high school. When I hosted we always had waits of 30-45-60 minutes. I would've killed to have had buzzers. Instead we would have to come up with bland descriptions of people to later try to find them for their table. Because of course people had used completely offensive descriptions of people before and the people had seen it written down.

Somebody wrote "Tattoos" to describe me on a check one. Before i had ink it was probably "Ugly".

*once

i mean i'm navigating the virgin media phone call decision tree and am now in a queue listening to Niall Horan forever after having been transferred twice between departments. somehow this feels... not good. i mean i recognise the cost savings, though let's say i'm not convinced these are passed on to the customers.

but you know, what else would i want to do with a saturday morning.

Tom Walker now - Heartbeats apparently. This is vile.

give me vivaldi any day tbh.

ooh, they're going to transfer me again. he can do some of what i need but doesn't have the right cost code for the rest of it. hopefully more tom walker coming up.

virgin media are not my favourite people to phone

on hold. not sure what this music is.

it's sort of nondescript electronic. not too bad for hold music actually.

it would be quite good if more hold music was vaporwave, to close the circle a bit.

he's going to send an engineer round! direct action! 35 minutes and counting on the actual call.

i've got fucking Heartbeats by Tom Walker in my head now. They will pay for this.

I'LL BE THERE IN A HEARTBEEEAAAAT.

and finished. time for a cup of tea. shout out to the last guy who I spoke to who was lovely and very helpful. i said so, and he said he was very grateful to me letting him know that and he appreciated it. little tear in my eye now. we had some good times.

John Lanchester picked up his bespoke mobile phone device and dialled the number for Virgin Customer Services...

... using the electronic keypad the digital display of the phone provided.

fizzles calling VM CS easily merited being the 200k thread tbh

“ I feel like there isn’t enough attention given to the fact that all these high tech, self driving transportation options are ultimately going to translate into restriction of movement. “Firewalls” that can’t be crossed and “regions. Seems like it should be a bigger concern.

― Manitobiloba (Kim), Wednesday, September 4, 2019 3:27 PM (six months ago)”

When I wrote that six months ago, I wasn’t exactly sure what the triggers for such a thing might be, but I sure have been thinking about it again in the past week or so.

I was gonna comment on the audio issues of Zoom conference calls -- but damn, that sounds super prescient, Kim!

I’m half waiting for the call in coming months that my car needs a software update. Actually heck, I’m not sure the car even needs to physically go in for these things anymore.

My car can access the home WiFi from the driveway. Oh brave new world etc

new br / dvd player is half the size of the previous one but has no display and no way of seeing where you are within the film whilst watching the film. (also, no audio out for connection to amp, despite having cd playing options)

(the last one suddenly started saying 'blocked' last time i went to use it. no eject, nothing. it was 75% air inside, just two small pcbs, the drive and the led display)

Yeah, mine did the 'blocked' thing, I found a way to unblock it on the ternet.

when recording music on a laptop (or even a phone), using any bluetooth device will throw the recording out of sync due to the latency, requiring you to manually fix the syncing.

so you wind up going back to wired devices anyway

Ha, yeah, we tried to do home karaoke using an iPhone mic app and bluetooth speakers. That lasted all of about 45 seconds.

when I used to do elaborate vocal harmony recordings in 2002-2006, I used an old vintage wired mic, my desktop, etc, and CoolEditPro, and it was fairly easy.

now I give up in 5 minutes cos there's the syncing problem and about a million others.

all of my happiest audio editing experiences took place in CoolEdit 96 and a circa 2001 version of Sonic Foundry ACID. bought a recent ACID license a couple years back to be able to play all my old tracks and the interface was so overstuffed with tools and junk that i couldn't even get comfortable doing really basic stuff. IIRC i could still get CE96.exe to sorta run up through Windows 7 or so. beautiful little program.

rip Deck II

whoa there was a Deck III!

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/14077-bias-deck-3

Wanna talk history, Deck was developed out of an old sequencer called Dr T’s Beyond which I used on my Mac plus, back when Vision and Performer (non audio versions) were too expensive. So it was always wild seeing elements of the beyond interface show up in Deck.

I loved that world. Here's another one:

Soundedit 16.

I did a lot of audio recording and editing on a Windows 95 PC with Cakewalk Pro back in the day. Also, playing keyboards through a MIDI to serial port cable using softsynths. I imagine the latency on modern PCs would be excruciating.

ooooh I remember Soundedit 16! ... also, recently explaining to someone why crossfade edit icons look the way they do because they are signifying the angle you would splice actual tape to achieve the fade effect ... because I learned audio editing on an Otari 1/4" reel to reel.

MX 5050?

IIRC i could still get CE96.exe to sorta run up through Windows 7 or so. beautiful little program.

I've sat fucking around with the Windows backwards-compatibility settings so many times trying to get this to run again. There's never been a better straight audio editor. Would pay £20-30 no problem for a 2020 rerelease as long as it was exactly the same in every detail including the name.

same. absolutely. anything else i've ever used to try and clip and clean up .wavs, or get shit to loop nicely, or whatever, the interface itself is so in the way, the way you click and select things is never quite right, etc.

we've mentioned it upthread but USB ports vanishing from laptops is the bane of fucking existence

my laptop purchased earlier this year has a USB port ... though previous one had 3.

though the fact that most laptops don't have 10 key number pads is absurd to me

yeah modern laptops basically require an additional $50+ multi-port USB-C adapter widget if you want to connect them to anything else besides the charging cable