Yes, even PhD's encounter usability issues

Cellphone Storage

I'm on my second smartphone, a low-end Android phone. I once had an iPhone for business purposes when I worked for a well-known defense contractor, but I've never understood the logic of paying hundreds of dollars for basic communication. It reminds me of my first MIS professor, Al Napier, who used to ridicule people who bought PC's to store recipes--functionality easily served by a 99-cent plastic recipe box. It took a while for me to buy my first personal cellphone; I had an auto mishap driving down I-5 to LA from the Bay Area. I was in the middle of nowhere. A truck driver stopped and let me borrow his cellphone.

I remember when I started my ownership, domestic long-distance was a modest monthly fee supplement. Up to that point, I had been using long-distance minute cards to save on long distance calls. It didn't take a lot of calls to cover the premium, and now it's basically a bundled feature for most plans. I stayed with my first vendor for maybe a dozen years. They were charging something like $25 for 100-300 minutes of month--and overage charges were nontrivial. Even 300 minutes a month meant 10 minutes of use per day--including incoming minutes. So I still maintained local phone (or later ISP-bundled digital phone) service, which I would use for longer calls like tech job interviews.

I was aware of text and data options but these were expensive surcharges, and I was paying a separate ISP charge already. I could print off driving directions while I'm at home, etc. I had other ways to play music in the car. So what led me to make the jump? A mobile company offered an all-you-could use voice minutes, texts, and data (although high-speed was only guaranteed for a certain usage cap) for about $35/month. So basically I didn't have to watch the clock in placing or receiving calls, which allowed me to consolidate communications (but I still have a Google Voice account, which provides a call summary and transcript of received voice mails). I'm still not big on texting, but it's a preferred mode of communicating among my siblings, I get shipping confirmations (e.g., for Mom's Christmas gift being delivered today) and appointment confirmations, work-related weather delays/statuses, etc. As for data, I've used Google Maps, and I can shuffle through my Pandora channels through my new car's Bluetooth connection. (Of course, like all database administrators, I have contingency plans. A good example was when I drove to an unfamiliar destination in Pennsylvania, and Google Maps suddenly lost connection near the destination. Luckily I also had a Garmin device (and I'll often bring a USB power bank with me--my experience with 2 devices is the battery quickly runs out of juice, no oral warning), plus I had printed driving instructions.

This is a long context for discussing a recent installation of a SD card in the current smartphone. I still remembered migrating apps to the SD card I installed in the first phone. (The first was a cheap Chinese brand, and one day my password no longer worked. My carrier was unsympathetic, pointing out the warranty had expired.) Apparently in the preoccupation over reloading apps et al. in the new phone I never bothered to buy and install an SD card. I started getting notifications about running tight on internal storage. (Unlike computers or tablets where you can see the SD card slot filled or empty, you have to remove the back of the phone to find a slot near the battery.) I was trying to find a button to shift apps to the SD card (Android doesn't make this easy from what I can see; you have to drill into storage for the app to see if it has a change/transfer button, and most don't).  The bottom line is if an SD card is installed, you will see a relevant entry in the storage settings of the phone. At some point, I realized and verified I didn't have one installed. Nor a big deal: I could buy a 256 GB one for about $30 (including tax/shipping), more than enough for apps and other file storage.

Properly seating the tiny card took a few tries for some reason, but soon I found maybe 1-2 dozen apps to migrate to the card--enough to stop the annoying storage alerts, but it soon started nagging at me I could be using some of that humongous storage for other purposes, like a copy of my iTunes/other music libraries. This would enable me, with the right app, to play music offline, say with spotty Internet coverage on the road or while flying.

Here's where a major usability issue came into play. I can recall tethering my old phone via USB connection to my pre-Windows 10 computers and being able to see the phone and storage for file transfer, bur couldn't see it in my patched Win 10 environments with my new phone. It took a variety of tweaks, including non-default setups for USB/other tethering.and in one case changing USB cables (the original was fine only for charging from the PC; I never could get the tethering status to change, though) and a reboot was necessary for my main notebook--plus at an earlier point I got a pop-up alert on the phone saying I had to authorize functionality. Not very intuitive at all, and numerous sources on the Web weren't helpful (except a suggestion to consider swapping the USB cable).

I had intended to use, as recommended in another post, Double Twist (including a host PC application) to sync my music library to the phone SD card, but it only seemed to recognize storage devices on the PC itself, not the cellphone/SD card. Don't tell me I'm going to have to mount my phone SD card directly in my PC SD card slot to sync my library! I recall reading someone say to create a music directory in the cellphone SD card root and the music app, like Double Twist's cellphone app, should see your files. So I copied/pasted my iTunes/other music folders to that root music directory. Sure enough, all the songs/albums appeared in Double Twist app, and it's fairly easy and intuitive to build playlists.

My New Notebook PC Display

I typically use external keyboards and mice with my laptops; in part, this is due to my fair share of coffee spill issues over the years, and I prop them up on elevated stands (it's much cheaper and easier to buy USB accessories). But one thing I've never really used is external VGA/HDMI displays (I did have one for my backup desktop, which didn't come bundled with a monitor). I have used multiple units at work over the last 3 years which allowed me to use more screen space without having to toggle windows, e.g., keep my email inbox on one screen while working or browsing on another. But at home I have multiple notebooks side by side so there is little advantage to emulating my workplace setup.

Well, that was until my main workhorse notebook PC started developing what I call a Northern lights effect on my integrated display; it was still legible but highly annoying. To be frank, I had never checked my notebook for monitor connections until after I placed an order for a $50 display via Amazon. I had made sure the display was VGA-compatible because I knew I had VGA ports on 2 slightly order laptops. When I saw no VGA port on the workhorse, my heart sank--until I saw the HDMI port. (I knew the display was an HDMI one.)

The only annoying bit in installing and using the new display was it didn't work connecting to the second HDMI port on the monitor (the closest connection to my laptop). However, I did see the display turn on as expected when I switched to the first port. The new display is bigger and better than my notebook display.

But I did experience an unpleasant, unexpected side effect. While I was preparing my daily political post, the Youtube clip I was playing had a lower, more tinny sounding output. I eventually realized that the sound was coming from the display and my sound default had somehow been displaced. I reverted the change to get back to normal. At some point, I'll review how to fine-tune the display output; I just didn't like it being switched without my knowledge.

Other Issues

It's arbitrary to list others, because it seems like a new problem crops up nearly every day. But here's another example, around the time I was dealing with my cellphone SD issue, I discovered that none of my purchased Amazon Music was stored on my tablet SD card--other file/types, yes. Among other music, I've purchased a lot of Christmas collections over the years and had planned to carry my Fire tablet with me on a planned trip, much like my incentive to store offline content on my cellphone. I was somewhat confused because my Kindle purchases are automatically downloaded to the tablet.

There are online/offline modes to My Music on the tablet. I hadn't really used the app on the Kindle (I usually use my Amazon Music app or cloud portal to play my licensed music.) I saw a status like "no songs downloaded" in offline button and there was a download button, which I pressed with no status response. In the online section I saw which showed a small fraction of songs which played directly (but not stored from what I could see on my card, and I think there was a Kindle option that music would be stored there). The other songs seemed to be marked as in a queue, presumably for download but would not play automatically on selection. I eventually discovered I could play the queued songs indirectly through a right-click option. But it didn't seem like any of the majority of queued songs were downloaded overnight. What was going on with the queue, and how could I check its status? I didn't seem to find an adequate explanation, including from Amazon's website.

Long story short, I eventually found a Fire tablet setting to automatically download purchased music, which was not enabled by default. Almost immediately soon afterwards I could now see a significant percentage of SD storage taken by music files, and when I toggled on My Music Offline, I could see literally hundreds of tracks available.

I'm not saying relevant documentation isn't available on Amazon or other tech sites; it may be be an artifact of my queries. I guess it would have helped if I could have found a quick start document like "how to download purchased music on your Fire tablet after installing an SD card".

Unexpected Side-effect to Windows 10 1093 Update

I have 5 PC's , 4 of them serving as backups. I've done scores of Windows patches over each of them for years, with no notable issues-until now. The upgrade has been done to 2 of my PC's, with issues observed on one, my workhorse PC. So I'm not sure how generalizable the issue is.

But I noticed some 3 cloud backup products, plus a scheduled task was complaining about permissions or missing files. Long story short, I discovered a \users\[username] and a users\[username].000 archive directory. The former seemed to be an incomplete directory of 3 folders (one an AppData folder. The latter was my original user directory, including the root directories for two of my cloud backup solutions. This is more complicated than it sounds, because I maintain key application files in the cloud backup folders as well as a scheduled task bash script.

The cloud backup solutions with root directories handled the issue differently; one gave me the opportunity to redefine the path to the root (my preferred option); the other client (for a very well-known cloud vendor) simply aborted after alerting me to the "permissions" issue. Searching on the vendor website said you can redefine the path--but that implied your client was up and running. Great-did that mean I would have to resort to hacking the registry?

I filed a problem ticket with the vendor and faced the usual bureaucratic nonsense. First, they are obsessed with bookkeeping procedures, such as my PC's computer name (I've done installs on backup PC's for obvious reasons); second, they resort to procedural scripts, like if you're running their latest and greatest client software. (This product pushes client updates to PC's.) This is after I fully explained the nature of the issue in the write-up.

In the meanwhile, I implemented an old Unix shell game workaround which seemed to resolve the immediate problem (the cloud client software started up successfully), and I've made adjustments to hard-coded paths in scripts. It's not worth my time and effort to follow up on that problem ticket.

Not sure why the Windows update seemed to stop in the middle of updating/migrating my user folder, but I'll keep an eye on that issue in future updates.

If It's Not One Thing, It's Another

It might surprise people to know even an MIS PhD runs into various computer issues, seemingly on a daily basis. For example, I've often used a well-known software security product, and it seems to run into some issue, maybe up to a handful of times a year, where it runs into some technical issue that it can't self-correct, and the recommended "solution" is to deinstall and reinstall, often using a special utility to do so. For some odd reason, the last time I did so, some deinstall popup seemed to start up for weeks after an apparently successful reinstall (it had no issues updating). The pop-up didn't seem to do anything, but I was confused why it was happened and worried it might actually uninstall the functioning reinstall. Maybe it was an interim patch that finally corrected the problem, but I do recall trying multiple deinstall/reinstalls thinking maybe there was some corruption in the installation.

I own multiple USB devices (to avoid things like coffee spills, I usually use an external keyboard and mouse, I have a printer (cf. below discussion, a flash drive, and multiple external hard drives. I recently ran into issues in using one of the USB drives: it started crashing backups, and it seemed to imply files had corrupted, so I tried to rebuild the hard drive. but my robocopies kept breaking down (Microsoft's native directory syncing tool).

It dawned on me that I had swapped out the drive's USB cable to the right-side port to attach my printer's USB cable (I rarely use my printer often, located to the right of my notebook PC). I had in the interim attached it to a USB extender hub on a left-side port. It dawned on me that I was overloading the port with 2 hard drives attached and decided to swap back the USB connection to the right-side port. BINGO! This time robocopy worked as expected, with no breakdowns.

Now I'm going to cite my multifunctional printer here, mostly for reader convenience: I own an older Canon PIXMA MX452. This model includes both wireless and USB connection. I think I initially configured it for simpler USB connection (wireless was somewhat more complex, including a separate printer configuration). So why did I finally embrace a wireless setup? For one thing, as described  earlier, I have limited USB slots. For another thing, as I've discussed before, I own 5 PC's (in addition to a Chromebook). I tried to install the printer drivers on my first backup PC, an older workhorse HP, and God knows for what reason it wouldn't  install over a USB connection. The wireless printer setup was a fairly painless printer setup. A modest setup menu navigation, press your router button and voila. (I managed to do it without referencing documentation, which is positive for printer usability.) I was then able to navigate the wireless option for printer driver installation; I got a popup for my local wireless connection, and subsequent test print jobs worked as expected.

I then installed the wireless printer driver option on my 3 remaining backup printers; I think I had one sticky install I finally managed to work through. I finally tackled the wireless install on my workhorse printer this week, including deinstall/reboot. For some reason, it was not finding the printer on the network (my backup PC had no problem seeing the printer on the network), so it demanded to connect to the printer via USB cable. It showed my local network wireless, and the properties seemed correctly configured but it wasn't seeing the printer on the network.

After multiple installation attempts, I tried to reinstall my original USB connection, but for some reason, now it didn't seem to be able to find the printer via cable--almost the same problem I initially had with my primary backup PC. Long story short, I went back to the wireless connection install, and THIS TIME I got the wireless connection popup--and was able to complete and test the connection.

It's not clear what I did differently during the successful iteration. It's almost like your car doesn't turn over the first time you turn your key, but it finally does on a subsequent attempt. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." I probably ran into some nuanced bug. But for a moment there, I was worried that I was unable to print from my workhorse PC and have to go to a backup PC to do printing.

An aside note which I may have referenced in passing.on an earlier post. I love Dropbox, but I'm not a premium subscriber. I had been using Dropbox to share certain files across my 5 PC's. At some point, Dropbox changed policies so the "free option" only allowed up to 3 (?) PC's to connect to one's account. That sucks. I can work around the problem by, say, using a flash drive with said files, and of course there are other services with GB's. of free storage. 

Some Recent Usability Annoyances

Healthcare Payment Incidents

I've found myself in the odd situation of having to write checks recently for healthcare-related expenses, of all things. To show how infrequently I have written checks, I've moved 6 times since my last checks were printed. For some time, I've automated nearly all periodic expenses: rent, utilities, insurance, credit card, etc. It's more unusual to write a check. My WV landlady had no Internet portal and required checks; I usually end up writing checks for things like apartment security deposits, gifts to relatives, etc.

Paying My Hospital Doctor's Fee

My first issue dealt with my physician's fee (allocated as my responsibility from my health insurance provider). Incidentally, getting multiple invoices from the same visit is somewhat annoying. The main hospital charges process (whether against my credit card or checking account) completed as expected, but the physician's specified portal just ran into failures with misleading, incoherent error messages. Trying to reach portal tech support proved to be problematic and basically a sinkhole of my time. Finally, it was just easier to waste a stamp and a check to take care of the problem

My Initial COBRA Payment

The second one was more serious and eventually resulted in a health outpatient procedure being rescheduled (this story in part was initially discussed in my signature political blog (I have some specialty post formats, like a journal). I recently left my position (let's just say it involved some nasty office politics on the contractor side, beyond the scope of this post), and my employee insurance expired at the end of March (the diagnosis occurred weeks before I left the company). Basically I couldn't get my COBRA paperwork until then, and more importantly (and not really specified in the paperwork) the insurance company would refuse to verify coverage  until they had advance payment in hand. My procedure was scheduled before mid-month.

So the hospital outpatient coordinator called to tell me that a routine insurance check showed my coverage had lapsed and they weren't about to do the surgery with the risk of not getting paid. I had maybe over the weekend at most to get this taken care of. I finally got in touch with  the COBRA administrators in Wisconsin. No, they didn't have an Internet payment portal; no, they wouldn't accommodate a bank wire or any other method I could think of. I had to send a check from a delivery service, like $25 overnight Express mail. So initially after I sent the check expedited by the Post Office (and verified receipt by tracking number), they denied getting payment, then argued the check had an error on the second line (something I can't recall ever doing before; I thought I double-checked the check before mailing it). By that time I was screwed. A replacement check required another day I didn't have, and the hospital scrubbed the procedure.

I did have confirmed receipt by the original surgery date but too late. But even then it took 2-3 business days to resolve insurance status, because somehow the hospital still couldn't verify my insurance. For whatever reason, the insurance people had to send proof of health insurance to me, vs. the hospital directly (but I had to jump through hoops to download it), and even when I sent it to a supervisor point of contact at the hospital, the coordinator claimed she never got it.

Now I'm sure that there are worse horror stories than this, but I've been in other COBRA programs, e.g., 10 years ago, and didn't run into these kinds of issues. Of course, it wasn't a case where I had a procedure scheduled early in the COBRA period. The proof of insurance showed after the fact that I had coverage from the beginning of the month, including the original surgery date. I guess the hospital wasn't willing to take on the risk of my making a first premium payment.

Uber Payment Verification & Scheduling

I haven't ridden in an Uber since about 2016. I had run into a couple of issues in the North Charleston area, both involving return trips, the first involved a late flight from San Antonio, and the second was a return from the obligatory drug test from my new Arizona employer (my car was in the shop)

So in the context of my upcoming procedure described above, I won't be able to drive for a short period of time post-surgery. .Part of my concern in trying to use Uber in a distant Baltimore suburb was that credit card billing zip code had changed. Documentation from Uber pages didn't seem to dovetail with either my desktop or Android app.  Trying to reenter the same credit card didn't work; I tried to delete and replace, but I didn't see a way to delete the credit card (vs. Uber help); again, I didn't see a dovetail with the documentation. Another source seemed to indicate maybe the app won't let you delete without adding another credit card. But, once again, with 2 cards; I didn't see any obvious way to select one of the cards and update/delete them.

A similar thing in terms of scheduling rides. What I experienced simply did not reflect what was documented.

[Postscript: part of this involved a round trip to downtown Baltimore over the weekend. So originally the Uber screen  flashed "no drivers available" and my heart sank, but a couple of minute later it flashed a driver was maybe 10 minutes away. I was dreading the idea of someone picking up me up in congested Baltimore Saturday morning. It turned out to be the fastest pickup ever. It turns out he just dropped off somebody. I noticed his car wasn't moving on Uber; they had identified a green Toyota. And there was a parked green Toyota to my right with just a driver.  I poked my head in the window and asked if he was looking for me; I could see my given name on his cellphone.]

VPN Issues

I use a VPN provider for obvious reasons. Among other things, I didn't want to expose my connections on insecure hot spots in airports and hotels  But there are a couple of annoying issues I've noticed while my VPN software is running:

- I found that my outgoing gmail emails from the Thunderbird client will fail.
- Multiple secure websites will notice your implicit usage (through VPN) of a different IP and will challenge your connection, e.g., by asking for a previously specified security question and/or a code sent to your email or smartphone. You may be asked if you use this computer frequently.

Some Application Annoyances

I have some 5 PC's and a Chromebook (3 of them were/are backup computers which had failed to start at some point). So basically I have multiple external drives  with current backups and some thumb drives  with portable applications, which would allow rapid transition/recoveryauk in the event of my workhorse computer fails.

-Part of my strategy is making use of browser sync functionality.  At some point several weeks back, I noticed some divergences; bookmarks and extensions were not carrying between my workhorse and most used backup computer (the old workhorse). I had tried checking setups which for a long time looked like:

At some point Chrome transitioned to a series of toggle switches via vertical ellipsis,  settings, sync and Google services, manage sync; now my account was displaying a syncing status; what I discovered today was for some odd reason (which I don't recall doing), all the sync settings were turned OFF. Once I toggled them back on, I quickly saw the bookmarks sync across PC's and chromebook, and adjustments on my workhorse system quickly propagated across devices.

There are a couple of key annoyances with my Thunderbird client. (beyond the long launch time). One is these pop-ups that occasionally stubbornly refuse to close (and if you try, often causes Thunderbird to crash. Another pet peeve is I don't like the message preview option. I think this may be a default because they want to solicit donations on related space. So you often have to toggle off message pane via View/Layout/Message Pane (or F8). Occasionally you have to toggle the message pane on in order to toggle it off.