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PHONE PONG CYBERSAFARI

How hard can it be? Phone companies are constantly spewing commercials at us day and night to upgrade your phone. They should know what they are doing, right?

My personal smartphone upgrade tale is like the old video game PONG. PONG was one of the first home arcade games, a simple game of hitting a square (representing a tennis or ping pong ball) across the screen to you opponent's hit bar. It was a slow back and forth game.

My odyssey starts with opening an email in a spam folder which said my 3G service had expired or would in 2 days. Being a work day, I waited to the weekend to come to terms with transferring an very seldom used personal phone for a new one. The old phone was an international android phone that I used on a trip overseas in 2018. It contains useful translation applications. But according to my service provider, it was not on list of SIM upgrades.

So I went to my carrier's corporate store to get a new phone and transfer the number to it. The store was not busy. There were more employees than customers. I was taken to a table where the sales woman with her tablet began to scroll through questions about what I needed to do. I said I needed to get a new phone as my current 3G service had expired. No problem. What type of phone? I thought an Apple iPhone 13 with basic service would be fine. OK, she scrolled through a dozen more screens. She said she would have to order a phone, and it would take 2 weeks to arrive at my home. Then what? I was told you could activate through your account or bring it back to the store. I had no on-line account, so she said we would have to set one up. The first password chosen failed. Then at the end of 45 minutes, she said her network connection had failed, too. She then suggested that I go to the Apple store, pick out a phone, and have Apple employee activate the account.

I left confused and perplexed. If the carrier did not have phones in stock, or could not confirm an order on its own network, what was the point of going there in the first place?

The next day I went to the Apple store. This store had a waiting list. I was served by a young man who knew exactly what I wanted to do. He got an iPhone from stock, opened it u, and started to check the configuration. He found that the old SIM would not work. He also found out that the carrier required a second level authentication in order to activate the account transfer. A customer service call was made to the carrier. The carrier then sent an activation code to the phone number. However, the phone service had already been cut off. Then from a store laptop, we went into my newly created on-line account to find that the needed code would be texted to my phone. Again, useless since it has no service. Another call to the customer call center led to the Apple employee asking the representative specific questions to get the code to activate the new iPhone. He asked if he could just tell us the code. Than rep could not figure it out.

We were left without a means to transfer the account phone number to he new phone. It was decided that I would buy the phone, then take it back to the carrier for activation.

So, I left the Apple store and headed back to the carrier store. Inside, a young woman guided me back to the same table as before. She was nice, but must have been very new. She left the table a dozen times to ask a co-worker how to go through the steps to activate a phone brought into the store. She was given a new SIM card, took a few attempts to open the slot, then started the digital paperwork for activation. I decided on the basic 5G data plan. After 45 minutes, the new phone was activated and I was on my way home two days after my quest began.

Buying a smartphone and transferring an existing telephone number should be child's play and not a game of PONG.

iToons

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SIX WORDS ARTICLE

Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, knew his girlfriend loved word games. He then created a guessing game for just the two of them. As a play on his last name, he named it Wordle. But after the couple played for months, and after it rapidly became an obsession in his family.

When Wardle released it to the rest of the world in October, 2021 it was without fanfare. But from November to January 2022, it went from 90 players to more than 300,000 people playing it. It was done mostly by word of mouth and sharing solution screens on social media.

Folk hero status for the once-a-day game, which invites players to guess a five-letter word. After guessing a five-letter word, the game tells you whether any of your letters are in the secret word and whether they are in the correct place. You have six tries to get it right. Players now wake up to play the game with their morning routine. It is a simple mind exercise to start one's day. It is less time consuming then a regular NYT crossword puzzle. But it may be more satisfying.

Wardle built the game for himself as a side project. There are no ads or flashing banners; no windows pop up or ask for money. It was just done for fun. He appreciated that people enjoyed it. But it was not the first time. As a software engineer for Reddit, he created two collaborative social experiments on the site, called The Button and Place, that each were phenomena in their moment. But Wordle was built without a team of engineers. It was just him killing time during a pandemic.

Success breeds copy cats. Suddenly, there were Wordle clones spreading across the app world like a wild fire. They copied the exact game or added larger words or more daily game play. Then there were the cheat sites. Popular in video game circles, people began posting ways to game the game. For example, which words to use first in order get know which vowels are in the secret word.

Researchers have tabulated the twitter comments and results to find that there is an approximate 95 percent win rate. It may be biased because who would post their losing screen cap? But by the numbers guys think one has a 1 percent chance to guess the word on the first try and a 4 percent failure chance for the dedicated player. If true, this cements the appeal of the game itself; who doesn't want to start their day winning a challenge. It gets you in a positive state of mind.

But not everyone is happy. Wardle was criticized for for using American dictionary words. He was criticized for not updating the game so it can be played more than once a day. He set his game in stone from the beginning. It is a browser based game which resides on each person's computer. The words are already predetermined by the program. It is a self-contained operation.

Wordle game passed one million players a day. It caught the attention of big media web sites. A million loyal viewers per day is called engagement. Having a person sit on a web page for 10 to 15 minutes a day trying to figure out a word puzzle can be the gateway to the media site or for advertising. The New York Times bought the game from Wordle for a reported million dollars. It makes sense for the NYT to buy a popular web page and integrate into its platform. NYT officials said the game would remain free, for the time being, which means it may go to the paywall or have banner advertisements in the future. But a dollar per view seems like fair compensation for a creator who started off this venture without any goal of making money off of it. Time will tell if the NYT will keep its new golden goose or kill it off by being too greedy.

Wordle is an early morning habit of stimulating the mind before going to work or school. It is simpler than a crossword puzzle. It is something that people like to share with their friends. It makes people happy which is needed in these pandemic years.

And it is also one of those rare incidents where a person's creative work done for fun turns into an unforeseen profitable prize.

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BARF BAGS COMMENTARY

Russian leader Putin is massing troops on the Ukrainian border as a show of force. He does not want independent Ukraine from joining NATO. He would rather invade the country and install a puppet government than have European soldiers on his border. He wants to re-create the Eastern bloc of Soviet pawns protecting the motherland. High tech satellite intelligence contradicts many of Putin's stated moves. Just when expert thought the next Big War would be fought in cyberspace, a Russian oligarch is asserting a bloody ground battle is the next course of action.

The omicron strain of COVID is reeking havoc around the globe with infection rates up to 100 times more than the early strains. Though it appears it is less deadly, the shear amount of cases is putting severe cases and deaths back to pandemic peak highs. It seemed the booster shots in 2021 did not stop the spread of the disease or ease the burden on global health care systems. Many countries are going back to severe lock down measures because of the strain on medical resources. It seems herd immunity is still a far away goal.

In the past, if you had a large theater, a big box department store, a food court and an Apple store, you could have a thriving mall. But the pandemic has caused a collapse of commercial real estate, massive strain on brick and mortar stores with the trust of on-line shopping experiences and movie goers can see first run blockbusters in the comfort of their own living rooms. Theater ticket sales have not even recovered a third of their pre-pandemic sales. Major studios have decided their streaming platforms give them more hope for profitability than the hit or miss movie goer and local gathering restrictions. More localities are ending mask rules and restrictions because their local economies cannot handle a further virus set back. In health as in business, survival of the fittest is now the game plan.

Wonder how much a TV wasteland is your current local cable system? It is filled mostly with re-runs that used to be found on old UHF stations. Black and white television shows from the 1950s and 1960s with syndicated shows from the 1970s through 1990s. But the most popular nostalgia shows, like Friends, have been correlates into streaming licensing deals. So more Oldie channels are popping up on extended basic cable. Besides local news, weather and sports, there are only one or two new programs per channel per week on cable. It is not enough to sustain the cost of $120/ month for unwatchable reruns.

The Big Game (Super Bowl) is over and it continues a trend of having no lasting impact. The game had two teams with small fan bases playing for the championship. The casual viewer was probably at a friend's party than an active watcher. But all parties have been curtailed during the last two years of the pandemic. There used to be the Super Bowl of Advertisements as big consumer companies showcased cutting edge and memorable commercials. That was just as important as the game itself. But alas, the quality of advert-tainments has sputtered to nil. The last hope for casual viewers was the half-time show - - - which has not been newsworthy since the Janet Jackson outfit malfunction. The Big Game is now known solely as being the biggest gambling event of the winter.

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FOUND BUT NOT LOST ON THE INTERNET

Americans first learned about language nationalism when France starting cracking down on the use of English borrowed words in French speech. Policy makers decided that the purity of the French language was in jeopardy if English words would usurp French words in general conversations. Now, it is the South Koreans beginning to wonder if American words and slang are going to impact their native tongue. With globalization and interest in Hallyu culture, Koreans are exposed to much more foreign culture as their country finds new international markets and interest. It is enviable that language changes the more foreign tongues interact to find a common ground to communicate.

Source: ChosenIlbo

Eastern Illinois University's library came up with a clever idea for students. Around Valentine's Day, it offered blind dates for students. A blind date usually means setting up a friend with a stranger on a date. But in this case it was a mystery book for you to read. Except for some parts of Southeast Asia general reading among the adult population is declining. Part of the issue is the digital revolution; part of it is the other entertainment sources other than reading a book.

Source:Facebook

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