Thunderbird Events, Airlines and Usability

I have an upcoming trip to visit my Mom during the holiday season. Flights, of course, are ridiculously expensive, plus I had to juggle my work schedule. So I made my arrangements a few weeks back. It was a rather unusual round trip where I take different major airlines each direction.

Then a week or so back I went to make a parking reservation at Preflight Airport Parking at BWI, which I've been using probably since 1998. (I've also made trips out of Dulles and Reagan.) Only I couldn't find it. Ir was bizarre; a few Internet queries didn't solve the mystery. There is a hub website for Preflight, but BWI was conspicuously missing without explanation. So I made alternative arrangements. I asked a work colleague who lived here for years and thought it was ridiculous to make reservations anyway and preferred the public lots. Long story short, I noticed today when I did a Google search, there was a promotional ad for Bullseye Parking at the head of the listings, and when I drilled down, I saw a familiar list of promoted amenities (e.g., daily newspaper, bottled water, etc.) and the street address seemed familiar. I still don't know the specifics but it looks like this location got spun off or purchased from the national chain. I don't know how I didn't stumble across it earlier.

The reason I mention parking is because I recall having to give estimates offsetting my flight times for the parking vendor. So among other things, Google automatically put (at least my trip out of BWI) on my calendar, and I've integrated my Google Calendar with my Thunderbird email client. I suddenly realized that I was staring at a 6 AM flight out, and I thought it was more like mid-morning. My Google calendar had the right time, and I double-checked with the airline.

It was fairly clear for some reason Thunderbird was offsetting the time zone for the Pacific Coast, not that unusual for high-tech items like PC's.  I didn't query clearly enough to see a solution for my problem. Long story short: if you go to Tools/Options, there's a Config Editor button on the lower right. (You'll see a draconian warning of changing things at your own risk, sort of like when I had Lasik done, they warned of a risk of blindness.) Do a search on zone; (calendar.timezone.local). I then modified Los_Angeles to New_York. I then bounced Thunderbird and now my events had the expected scheduled time.

Then I had a weird experience with American Airlines when I clicked on My Trips and seemed to pull up no flights. It then seemed like I had to query using my name and the record locator, a fairly Procrustean approach, purely for the convenience of its own system.

Amazon and Simple Cases of Dubious Usability

I have to admit to a fondness for Amazon devices: I own 2 Echo Dots (the second one was a company Xmas gift last year), a Fire stick for my TV, and a Fire tablet. They are particularly useful in  conjunction with Amazon's distinct Prime subscription, which includes, beyond its signature free 2-day shipping on many items, even below certain aggregate minimum purchase thresholds, free reading, video and music subscriptions: there are some limitations to the reading and music services, which can be alleviated by supplemental "unlimited" services. So the Fire stick opens up the option of playing Amazon content on my flat-screen TV; the Echo Dot gives me on demand access to literally thousands of songs, including most Beatles' hits. (I have a significant person music collection, but it's simply easier and more convenient to ask Alexa, Amazon's natural language interface, than to pull out my own CD's and play the track). Still I manage to hit on strange gaps not included with the basic service; Alexa will play a sample clip and plug the unlimited service, e.g., Derek and the Dominoes' classic "Layla" and Neil Diamond's "Solitary Man". Alexa itself is fairly remarkable in terms of recognition; it's rare for me to have to repeat myself. For example, I had a minor issue getting it to play the Bangles' classic "Eternal Flame".

This led to a couple of unexpected minor usability hassles, one involving the affiliated location of the devices and a recent change in my WIFI password.

The WIFI issue actually surfaced first, but let me discuss the location issue first. (It had been some time since I had used my devices, and I have other ways of getting information or music, like weather on my cellphone or playing Youtube videos. So I asked Alexa what the temperature was, and it said 60 degrees. OK--I knew that wasn't valid for north Maryland, so I asked Alexa about the location, and as I had suspected, Alexa thought I was in southwestern Arizona.

Now there were a number of reasons this bothered me or contradicted my expectations. For one thing I left Arizona nearly 18 months ago. I had changed my address with Amazon at that time, and Amazon had fulfilled numerous orders at my current address. I expected that Amazon would have synced/propagated my address to my devices. Second, Alexa didn't seem to have an ability to modify its own location. I could get the current temperature, but I would have to specify northern Maryland rather than rely on a default. Third, it would seem to me that Alexa could probably guesstimate my location from its own Internet connection.

I vaguely recall doing setups for my Echo Dot via my Fire tablet, which has the Alexa app. (I also downloaded the Alexa app on my cellphone and my PC over the weekend. To me, oddly enough, although consistent with going to Google Play on my cell for new apps, one must go to the Microsoft Store to pick up the PC app. It's odd in the sense I go to Amazon itself to install/update my other notebook utilities (e.g., Kindle and Amazon Music).) I quickly did a search which confirmed I needed to edit the location via settings for the device.

So you to Settings for the Alexa App and go to Device Settings. I then see a listing of my devices, along with network statuses. I notice for some odd reason my tablet shows a status of being offline, although I can see my home cable WIFI on at the top of my tablet. This is a long introduction just to explain there is not a central setting for my device locations, but one must drill down into each device and update its location (scan down to the general device settings). I find the light blue on blue background not as legible as white on blue, you have to touch each address line to edit and then touch save in the upper right corner when you're finished. (I then verified my changes by asking my Echo Dot Alexa for time, temperature, and location.)

Fixing the WIFI password wasn't similar in nature, and this inconsistency was very annoying. Now I also have a Google Chromecast device, which operates somewhat differently; whereas the Fire TV stick comes with a remote which you use to navigate Amazon's menu-driven interface, Google operates by letting you cast PC content onto your TV screen via a menu-drive connection in the Chrome browser (e.g., my licensed video content through Youtube). It would be nice if I could use just one device, but Google and Amazon are content competitors.

I remember being confused by the Chromecast process for modifying the WIFI settings. (This may be an easier process.) I muddled through the process, and it was almost as if Chromecast setup suddenly realized that my PC had an existing WIFI connection and could reuse its configuration.

Now I had come into the reset issue from having had to set up my 5 PC connections. You scan for available network, click on your WIFI network and you have to supply the password, which in my case is usually complex (with special characters) and a pain to manually type. There's usually a less painful way which is to click a button on the top of your cable router (which temporarily opens the device for new connections; my button blinks for several second). So I thought the process would be a similar extrapolation.

Most of the stuff I saw on the topic seemed to rely on doing it via the Alexa app on my Android cellphone. It seems like the app forces you to connect via an Amazon wireless network (WHY? Why can't I simply connect directly to my WIFI network?). The app tells me to be patient--it might take a couple of minutes for the network to be visible on my cellphone list of available networks--which NEVER happens. Another Internet search suggests that I move my cellphone close to my Echo Dot. I finally see the Amazon network. And then I run into a couple of problems with the cellphone app; one was a message to the effect that network connection was too weak for the app to connect (now what do I do?); the other was that Echo Dot Alexa told me it was now connected to my cellphone and to continue the setup, but it was like the app was frozen and wouldn't respond to my touches to continue; maybe it was working but sent no status message to the screen.

At some point, I gave up trying to use my cellphone app (and the PC app seemed to take forever to install from Microsoft Store), so I finally turned to the Alexa app on my Fire tablet, which I had originally used to configure the Echo Dot.. I somehow muddled through the process: I suddenly realized my home WIFI network was appearing on the Echo Dot device status. I'm not exactly sure what I did; it wasn't as if I got a picklist of networks or was asked to enter my WIFI password in the process.

From a usability standpoint; this is unacceptable, especially since Internet access is critical to device functionality. Alexa had absolutely nothing to say other than to constantly gripe that it couldn't connect to the Internet and to check the help section of the app help section. Yeah, right. I couldn't even find a simple explanation on the website on how to update a changed password on my devices other than this: "You can save your updated Wi-Fi passwords to Amazon by re-running any compatible device through its Wi-Fi setup process."