Tuesday 06/13/2023
Did the gym round in the morning. At 10:45 we had the usual writers meeting. The cue this time was, if you had your life to live over. I had nothing to say. Others did, quite heartfelt and poignant recollections, like, wouldn’t have married that guy. So it goes.
My left big toe is still gouty. I tried to go for a walk in the afternoon but had to turn back after four blocks; too painful and too slow.
I took a tech squad call, to a guy whose grasp on things is maybe getting a little shaky? He clicked on something he shouldn’t have, and got infected with something that makes these little pop-up ads keep appearing at random times offering penis enlargers or offers to repair his mac. I looked at it a couple weeks ago and didn’t fix anything. This time I had done some research on malware scanners for Macs. Afterward I wrote up the tech report:
“A very successful session. Main achievement was, I downloaded the Bitdefender free malware scanner from the app store and ran it. The scan took 30 minutes and deleted a couple dozen items. I think probably his little pop-up porn ads are now gone. We will see.
“He had dug up an old iPhone 6 from a drawer and wanted to verify it worked. It does work, he dialed his house phone and it rang. We played some residual voice mails, two were robocalls but one was from someone he knew.
“He had a number of texts piled up, and we practiced deleting them. I think it very likely that he won’t remember how to do any of this stuff tomorrow, but at least he will likely remember that there does exist some way to read and delete texts and voicemails.
“He was curious about QR codes, especially how they are used as tickets. Apparently someone took him to a ball game lately and showed a QR code on the phone as their ticket. I said, yes, I did exactly that to attend the Stanford game yesterday. So how do you get them? That led to a discussion of the Apple Wallet app. Then we put his main credit card into his Apple Wallet and talked about how he could now pay for a latte at Peets with the phone.
“That led to me asking, wait, it will ask for touch id, does it know your fingerprint? So we verified that his finger does work to unlock the phone. At some time in the past he had trained that phone to his fingerprint.
“He asked which of the many little app icons on the phone I use, and I mentioned Lyft. Then he wanted to get Lyft working. So I used his iMac to go to Lyft.com (the virus scanner was still plugging away) and it asks for your phone#. When I put in the number of his iPhone, it said, “Is that you, Joseph?” So he has had a Lyft account for some time. Which he didn’t remember getting.
“Then Lyft asks for his email. It doesn’t recognize his current email. I ask, did you ever have a different email. Yes, years ago. I put in that years-ago email and bingo, now Lyft knows him. So I edit his Lyft account to show his current email, and his current credit card number.
“So in principle he is set up to use Lyft. I would not expect him to be able to actually use the Lyft app without guidance, but the mechanism is there.”
Such is tech squad life.
Codgerville 