Device Light Indicators

This is one of my favorite usability stories which I may have initially told in a different post, but it applies here. When I started word processing graduate school papers in the early 80's, I used a Commodore 64; I had to buy the word processing program separately and had a Commodore floppy drive, which was used to load the program and then to save workfiles on a separate floppy disk.

Without thinking or reading the floppy disk manual (which I still have in some moving box), I had inserted my word processing software disk  and was about to insert my data disk, when I read this warning: "DO NOT EJECT THE DISK WITH THE GREEN LIGHT SHOWING".  The green light was a power indicator. The tech writer must have intended to say was not to eject the data disk while it was still being written to (probably a flicking amber light). There was also a warning against shutting down the drive with the disk in it. So did that mean my software disk was toast, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea? I quickly decided that the documentation was misleading; otherwise, the floppy drive was utterly unusable. Still, I held my breath the first time I ejected my software disk.

This is a big lesson in usability: the initial response to the human interface, including documentation, frames one's experience. And for me, that includes indicator lights. I once remember being the DBA/system administrator behind the National Archives' milrecs application. There had been no transition with my predecessor but I soon saw an amber light on the server hosting the data warehouse. I was confident that this was problematic; researching the issue, I learned that one of the disks was dead on the RAID-5 device. In essence, this is like driving your car with your spare tire; you need to replace the tire ASAP or your vehicle becomes inoperable. If another disk pops, your RAID storage becomes unusable.

One of the things that first-time users need to know is how to process the indicator statuses; what do different colors mean, what about flickering indicators, etc.? To what extent are they consistent from other experiences?  For example, my cellphone displays red while in the process of charging; I also see a red indicator when the cellphone is running low on battery. What happens when a battery is fully charged? Does the indicator go out? Do I need to guard against overcharging?

To a certain extent, we may have other experience contexts, e.g., traffic lights: green go, red stop, yellow warning. To the extent we may infer from other contexts, the light choices may be more natural.

When I got my Gooloo power bank, the instructions really didn't address my initial learning experience. I do know that often with battery-operating devices using rechargeable batteries, including laptops or cellphones, one often must initially charge the unit before using it (unplugged). What I initially experienced was a blinking blue light, vs. say a steady red light in charging my cellphone. Blinking might be an indicator meaning an error condition or charging in process. There is a discussion buried in the documentation of multiple indicator lights on the top of the devices which indicate 4 stages of charging (when the stage is complete, its color turns steady) and when fully charged, the lights go off. Charging is done by USB, which you can interface with household current with the use of an adapter (which you can buy with $5 at Walmart), which I use all the time for charging my cellphone. In this case, I didn't know the context of using a blue light; maybe it was signifying a problem with a charging process. It does explain elsewhere it might take 15 minutes to charge in a car or up to 2-3 hours via USB connection to household electricity. My issue is that this information should occur at the start of the document vs. the reader having to comb through the document.

My 3 PCs and Maintenance Issues

I bought my first PC/compatible while I was a professor in the late 80's. Most of my graduate school papers were actually typed via a Commodore 64, but I wrote my dissertation using Samna in a 2-PC department faculty lab available to department student employees if faculty weren't using them (I was a teaching fellow and didn't have the budget to buy my own). Each faculty member now had a PC in his office. I had backups of my dissertation document, which is a good thing because once Samna went crazy and corrupted my workfile floppy disk. I ended up losing a week's worth of work since the last usable backup. I did have use of an office PC for my three faculty appointments, but I bought my first PC clone in Milwaukee (roughly $2800 for a desktop). I later bought a bulky portable with a handle on the end because I remember needing to do work during a Boston academic conference. I don't recall what happened to them (repair issues?), but quite frankly after Windows 3, I needed more RAM to do stuff and bought a second desktop. Then in the late 90's, I did a lot of road warrior work and bought my first modern notebook computer. I've probably bought a new replacement every 2 or 3 years.

In maybe 2-3 cases, I've had the worst experience with coffee spills. I never kept a coffee cup near the PC, but even a minor splatter on the keyboard could render the notebook all but useless. [In another case, with my one and only Sony, the power button no longer worked after 8 months. I tried to send it to a laptap repair shop, but they refused to accept it.]

At some point I wanted to have a backup PC just in case I had to cope with an outage (email, work, etc.) I had one HP notebook with a dying hard drive, and I bought a new notebook (making more sense to get more RAM, hard drive, newer Windows vs. sinking more money into repairing an obsoleted PC). As the backup PC eventually failed I replaced it with a cheap desktop.

When I moved to WV, my new place was furnished, so I put my desktop in storage with most of my stuff. I had hired some helpers, but the unload was done without me (work schedule). Long story short, my laptop shorted out (a splatter victim which ultimately shorted out). Now actually years back I had started using laptop stands and external keyboards and mice to minimize the risk of coffee incidents, but I had misplaced my stand during the move and had a freakish splatter accident.

I went to my storage unit, and the movers had buried it somewhere in the filled unit, and I didn't want to spent hours in freezing weather (outside unit) pulling everything out. There was a Sam's Club about 3 miles from my new work location, which is where I bought my current workhorse notebook maybe 18 months back.  I wasn't going to buy a second backup PC. When I moved into my current SC unfurnished apartment, I had my helpers bring the desktop in (other stuff went back into storage).

But try as I might, I could not get the desktop to start up. Had it died while in storage (not climate-controlled)? For months, I debated hauling the dead desktop to the dumpster. In the meanwhile I bought an inexpensive notebook as a backup to replace the desktop.

This may seem unrelated but years earlier I had licensed copies of Rollback RX for my PCs. Rollback RX basically allowed you to go back to a prior manual or automated daily snapshot (e.g., something happens and your PC won't start up). I ran into chronic issues with Rollback RX on my new workhorse notebook. I think I had to go back to do a factory-level reset (meaning all of my data and applications were lost and had to be reinstalled from backups) something like 4 times in the first 2 months. I began to suspect Rollback RX was causing my instability issues and did not reinstall the last time--and haven't had a similar problem since then.

Going back to the dead disktop: I don't know if it was an artifact of wiring, but in a final check putting plugs in different sockets and I noticed a  flicker of life in the desktop. I managed to get to boot but I had major stability issues, and Rollback RX wasn't helping. I deinstalled Rollback RX and/or went through a factory-level reset, and the desktop has been stable since.

So that's how I ended up with two existing backup PCs. I also have several layers of redundancy including external drives, Google Drive, and Dropbox. I mostly go on the backup PC's  to update securities, applications, and Microsoft patches. And that provides a context for the following issues I experienced over the weekend.

What's truly odd is that I run into different technical problems on the 3 PC's. I noticed that Windows had delivered updates to my workhorse notebook over the weekend. So I decided to do maintenance on the two backup PC's.

The backup notebook experienced an issue I've had to resolve multiple times over the years. Somehow the Windows Software Distribution folder has been corrupted. The standard remedy is to stop the Windows update and BITS services, drop the software distribution folder, and restart services. In this case, the Windows update seemed to be stuck at about 8% for hours. Granted, a number of times you need to give patches some time to download, but even after hours and reboots, no progress. For some reason the software distribution folder was sticky to delete, even after checking services down. I eventually succeeded after a series of reboots, started up the services and probably within 90 minutes the patches in question were downloaded and installed.

The desktop issue didn't deal with the patching so much as something I had noticed but had not resolved: the Start Menu was not working. There were workarounds for the most part. For example, in Windows 10, I was used to going to the Start Menu to access Settings for checking on Updates. I subsequently discovered Win-I could bring up Settings. At some point I was getting a message to the effect that there was a critical issue with the Start Menu and I needed to sign out then sign back in so the problem could be resolved. It didn't happen. I did some digging and found a Microsoft reference to downloading and running a start menu troubleshooter. Long story short; I got some unusable cryptic error message on problems with Windows shell experience host and cortana. I searched a number of posts and forums with suggestions on running certain Powershell scripts, even creating a new Windows user.

What turned out to be the problem was the installation of Dropbox. (I believe that I ran across this solution, which suggested Dropbox and/or Avast were often at fault.) Once I uninstalled Dropbox and rebooted, I was able to use the start menu as expected. It's not immediately obvious why Dropbox is an issue because it hasn't been for my notebook PC's.

Reminders and Google Calendar

[* update 6/26/16]

I've used Remember the Milk over the last few years (note for this discussion I'm referring to PC vs. smartphone applications).  I've used this service to track various recurring tasks, like paying monthly bills and taking certain meds, and it has a module which integrates with Google Calendar. For some reason, and I submitted a problem ticket on this with RTM, my recurring tasks stopped at the beginning of the month. In the meanwhile, I looked for a workaround.

Google of course has a Tasks product integrated with Calendar. But it really doesn't have recurring tasks functionality. I could use it for something like maintaining a honey do list of jobs around my home. Of course, you could create a recurring event like for birthdays and anniversaries in Google Calendar, but events are not generally tracked. For example, if my appliance bill is due on the 20th of the month, I can set up an event, even have Google send me a scheduled notification. But what I really want is a reminder which explicitly is checked off if and when I pay the bill, like in RTM. I can easily scan to see if there are open/overdue tasks/reminders.

I tried experimenting with a recurring tasks app which integrates with Google Tasks. It was not clear from app documentation about the update window, but I only saw a 3-week fill.

On further Googling, I saw references to integrated reminder functionality across different products like Google Keep, Indox, and Calender, replicating functionality on the smartphone side. But I didn't see a selection button for reminders vs. recurring events.

It turns out there's a conceptual piece of the puzzle which may not all that obvious; I came across a discussion in Google product forums where the Google analyst found herself saying the same thing multiple times. To provide context, I have 3 calendars under my account, presumably by default, a personal event calendar I normally interact with, birthdays and tasks. It turns out that task and reminder calendars must be toggled (I believe the default is tasks)., So, for example, if the task calendar is showing, you would switch to the reminder calendar by a pull-down menu to the right of the task calendar icon. (Personally I would have implemented a radio/checkmark option with both task and reminder calendar names showing.)

Once you toggle on the reminder calendar, entering/modifying reminders is straightfoward. For example, I might set up all-day reminders for taking my meds/vitamins. I left-click inside the day bubble to define the task and edit to set the recurring schedule.

[* update 6/26/16]  I had several unproductive encounters with RTM tech support: basically, how can we replicate the problem? I mean, how do you get any simpler than say I have 4 daily tasks, and when I check today's tasks, I see none listed? No follow-up.

What I have noticed in my Google Calendar RTM plug-in is when I complete the first overdue task, the next day's task of the same type pops up in my window. When I check the overdue tasks, it doesn't list the tasks separately for outstanding dates but the task with a date displaying the earliest overdue date. I still think this is counterintuitive. So, for example, if I lapsed for 2 days, today's date tasks will surface 2 days from now but will never appear in today's tasks.

Paywalls: A Pet Peeve

When I was a graduate student back at the University of Texas, there was a kerfuffle about the local student newspaper wanting to tack on a subscription fee to student fees. Austin at that time was more of a quality-of-life college town with the economy largely driven by college student businesses. These businesses were happy to pay the ads that fully sustained the paper's operating expenses. Why then pay extra for a free paper? The newspaper thought the fact that it was free devalued the service they were providing, that the students would appreciate them more if they were more personally vested in the paper. I don't think that they succeeded, at least while I was there.

I also have an interest since the little money I made during my high school years was running an afternoon/Sunday morning paper route, about 90 customers, mostly enlisted families and airman barracks at the Air Force base. I cleared maybe $1/day biking miles under a broiling south Texas sun. I half-apologized one day to a customer; the newspaper was bulkier than usual, stuffed with ad inserts. I told her "Not a lot of news: just ads." And she smiled and said, "We buy it for the ads."

I think during my salad days I loved newspapers, including the Gray Lady (New York Times). Local news would bore me--the latest high profile crimes, accidents, etc. I eventually got hooked on the Wall Street Journal; I'm not sure when it started, maybe seeing copies in the waiting rooms for a business appointment or job interview. It wasn't the daily stock market results but compelling news stories and editorials. There was a time I had subscribed for what turned out to be a teaser rate for print and/or digital; to be honest, I did so much road warrior work at the time, the papers would pile up unread and then a regular, much higher rate kicked in, leading to a quick cancellation.

When the Wall Street Journal started its paywall (I had to Google to verify the cost), it was $49 a year (with discounts to print subscribers). I quickly signed up; it was a bargain compared to print newspaper subscriptions. But for whatever reason, the subscription price jumped to a double or more, and I wasn't using it enough to justify the higher cost. I think if they shifted to more of a metered model of micropayments, it would make more sense (like rechargeable store or phone minute cards).

So if you don't know, typically a paywall might offer a blurb on a news story or whatever and then require you to log in or subscribe to get access to the rest of the story. Now given the fact I can usually search for a substitute story at no cost, this really only has an appeal if WSJ has an exclusive story.

But what really annoyed me was when WSJ started including op-eds in its paywall. I don't know of anybody else doing that. I don't mind ad-supported op-eds, but I'm not about to pay for the privilege of promoting WSJ content on my free political blog.  I'm not sure when I became first aware of it; it may have been when George Mason economist Donald Boudreaux linked to one of his published opinions there. Whether my and/or other complaints, Boudreaux now tends to warn readers about paywalls; in some cases, authors would provide workarounds, like a draft copy on a personal website, although WSJ probably isn't happy with authors doing that and I've seen less of it lately.

Some news portals allow you a monthly quota of free views, e.g., WashPo recently messaged I had exhausted my quota when I nibbled on the clickbait on the side (a hiker in Maine who got lost off the trail and had died). But when I get dinged for looking at a Karl Rove or Peggy Noonan rant making news at WSJ, it's annoying.

There's one workaround (at the time of this post) that seems to work. WSJ had a piece trending on Twitter about GOP IL Gov. Rauner facing a supermajority Dem legislature in an epic budget battle; state unions reject Rauner's wage freeze and merit pay proposals, and the legislature is trying to give the unions an arbitration workaround to Rauner. (In addition, they want to hike taxes without any concessions on spending, pensions, etc.) I follow Illinois Policy Institute and already  knew the story but I was interested to see any new twist or late developments. And I was stopped by the paywall.

What worked in this case was to copy the headline and do a Google search in a separate window. Near the top of the search page you should see an indented webpage link leading to the full webpage. Now WSJ seems to know you're a visitor and has a link at the top of the page for the latest teaser subscription rate plus maybe a pop-up ad to click out of. I dislike games, though. I almost never cite WSJ content on my blog anymore.

When I was a professor, textbook publishers often sent me complimentary copies (in fact, I got paid a nominal amount to review a few). Now granted my blogs and Twitter accounts don't attract thousands of followers or viewers that might interest vendors into providing complimentary or professional discounted paywall subscriptions, but it might motivate me into promoting their content more than the status quo.

Dropped Mobile Calls vs. Google Voice Calls Over the Internet

For a long time I had always had wired service, even for years with mobile service. Much of that had to do with very expensive cellphone minute plans; I've often had to do things like hour-long tech interviews for my next gig. My primary use of the cellphone was for emergency purposes or for short calls away from home. Eventually, digital calls on cable Triple Play plans were very price competitive to maintaining a landline for the purpose of longer at home calls. When I moved in 2014 to West Virginia, I maintained Triple Play but I found cheaper cell minute plans and rarely used my digital voice prior to moving. Shortly after I rented my current apartment, I didn't upgrade to a high-priced Triple Play plan, especially when I discovered I found a mobile plan that basically provided unlimited calls, texting, and data for a modest premium over my old plan with a few hundred minutes.

There's only one major problem with that solution: mobile calls can be notoriously unreliable. For a number of prospective clients or employers, that's not a major issue because they set up web conferencing, which operates over the Internet, like digital calling. But just to give an example, a few weeks back, my cell call dropped 3 or 4 times over the call. What made it worse, they had a configuration issue at their end and sometimes didn't even realize I was no longer on the call.

There were 2 or 3 times over the past week where recruiters were complaining they couldn't hear me and asked me to use another phone. Finally, yesterday, a recruiter was calling to schedule an interview; for some odd reason, she didn't have voice mail and she didn't email me. She finally gave up after my return call got dropped 2 or 3 times.

So then I had to scramble. I know there are VOIP consumer vendors like Vonage and Magic Jack; certain plans require hardware, and I had put my phone in storage. Skype allows calls among fellow users, and there are certain extra-cost options for other calls, e.g., to landlines.

I had flirted with Google Voice while in WV; I intuitively felt this was the direction to go, although I had not really tested it as a substitute for digital voice calling; among other things, I didn't keep my laptop online at all hours (which is necessary for realtime phone functionality), while my cellphone and digital phone were always on. I wanted to test out Google's innovative free voicemail transcript  (with its generally superlative speech to text functionality) and its use as an alternative for professional contacts. I liked the idea of having a permanent number, e.g., I wasn't sure about number portability options for my mobile or digital cable services.

I'm not sure what had happened to my earlier Google Voice setups when I went to my account for the first time in several months--I could still see obsolete messages stored. Recall one of the things I like to do is take the opportunity to study how intuitive the interface is from my experience).  Part of the issue here was a number of integrated products. There is a Google Voice email-like interface, but the phone functionality operates through Gmail. Particularly relevant is the phone gadget (located with the calendar gadget along the lower left margin below the email folders).  You may need to ensure your Hangout status is active. [I will say there is a call button for configured GV that enables you to search by (partial) matches of names or numbers in your Google Contacts via Hangouts; or you can simply type a number, like my recruiter's number, ad hoc. I could add the recruiter and her number in Google Contacts before making the call, of course].

You're setting up your Google Voice (GV) account (google.com/voice)  in conjunction of your cellphone account. Google Voice number selection itself can be unintuitive. Initially I thought one could propose a number and see if it was available, like usernames to a website. It's better thought of as a picklist of available numbers subject to parameters you specify, like area code.

There is  Google Voice integration with certain cellphone providers (but mine is not included, so I won't discuss cross-functionality between phones). A key point is that your registered cellphone number can be figured as a target for GV text messages and voicemail notifications/transcripts. And this is something which isn't necessarily obvious: Google configures things so when you dial into Google Voice via your cellphone. you go into voicemail (which you have configured with a relevant password). You can otherwise access voicemail through an asterisk when GV answers your call. The reason this was quirky to me was that I was trying to trying to emulate an outside call to be received in Gmail and my cellphone is the only phone I had; in brief, if you drill into your cellphone edit and then click on advanced settings; select voicemail access No. I think this is somewhat misleading; it really means voicemail connection by default (for mobile), asterisk for other phones to access voicemail. I personally am used to an asterisk default for all phones and prefer consistency. (I had initially inferred that I had configured something wrong, e.g., from hangout settings, and it was throwing me into voicemail.)

From within Gmail and activated Hangouts, there's a bubble/quote icon for Hangouts conversation and a phone icon: you want to choose the latter. This allows a search (as described above) from Google Contacts via name or phone number--or to specify an ad hoc number (which to me is not obvious). I was easily able to call the recruiter in question and continue the conversation with no call fidelity issues.

I've somewhat simplified the conversation; some calls (e.g., international) may require a fee/deposit. The topics of Hangout conversations (including video calls), Hangout contacts, Google+, and circles are beyond the scope of this post. It was not intended to be a step-by-step newbie introduction; my hope is that a reasonably knowledgeable PC user could learn from the general description of my configuration experience and more practical description.

Tech Support Chat Sessions, Norton and Windows Defender

[* last updated 5/18/16]

As someone with a PhD in MIS, not to mention over 20 years of professional IT experience, I have a pet peeve against the frequently patronizing, incompetent help desk personnel I've had to deal with. They usually can't cope with anything that doesn't fit in their solution scripts and want direct access to one's PC.

One experience was when I worked at an IBM business unit. I had to install some software which had to be downloaded from a server. I couldn't access the source file and reported the issue. The help desk person assumed it was due to something like a misspecified scp/sftp command. I repeatedly asked him, "Are you sure the source file is available on the server?", and he sidestepped the question. I was getting nowhere as he basically threatened to end the call if I didn't give him access to my PC. It was more trouble than it was worth to fight the issue, so I finally let him take the session, when, of course, he discovered I was right; he couldn't find the source file, even with a privileged session connection. He laughed nervously, annoyingly, "I guess it's not there. Ha, ha. Let me go find out where I can find a copy." This is just unprofessional; as a DBA, I've always tried to replicate a user's reported problem, not through a privileged session but a test user account. In this case, I had to work unpaid overtime for 2 hours (I had a good hour's drive commute home) over something he should have checked from the get-go.

A second fond memory involved a software publisher employer just over a year later. I had gone to Malvern, PA for new employee training (the job allowed me to work from home or at client sites depending on account preferences). We had VPN connections to our company's servers. In any event, I ran into an issue at home after bringing my work notebook home, finding on my first time use of the corporate licensed Microsoft Office product that I was getting timeouts trying to get the product registered. I suspected an issue with the standard VPN connection. Basically the desktop help desk people were in a typical state of denial (e.g., nobody else has experienced the problem; maybe it's an issue with your ISP). He wanted to remaster my PC; I refused, because I needed the PC for training in Memphis the following Monday. Long story short, there were a couple of other VPN options, and after the phone call, I discovered I could get the software to register in an alternate mode. I reported back to the help desk how I got the problem resolved; they were in a state of denial insisting I should have been able to register through standard mode and changing the mode wouldn't have a difference. Facts are stubborn things. The help desk analyst complained to his boss I was difficult to work with (he was still trying to remaster my PC even though the issue was resolved), and his boss escalated to my non-supportive boss.

In the particular scenario for this post, I have Norton software protecting a backup notebook PC. I use the PC on an irregular basis, and so usually I need to update my security software, various applications, and check Microsoft Update for any interim patches. (Yes, I know it eventually checks on default but at an unspecified interval.) In this case, it found Windows Defender needed an update and seemed to stall about 6% of the way through a download.

An important relevant note: Defender is  freeware security, and Norton's software provides similar functionality. Moreover, there's usually a performance hit running redundant functional security software, and Norton basically transparently shuts down Windows Firewall and Defender.

Now just a side note here; at least in Windows 10, there's a Windows Defender setup under tab Settings for Windows Update. In my case, there are toggle switches basically greyed out and stuck on, presumably an artifact of the Norton software install. My inference is that whatever Norton does to micromanage Defender is impacting Defender updates, but Microsoft will attempt to update Defender if it thinks Defender is in use. It's not immediately clear why the Norton install would have effectively frozen Defender toggle switches in an on position.

I did some searching on issues of Norton with Defender and saw on a user thread a relevant discussion, that it's a known issue between Norton and Microsoft that will be resolved any day now. One tip I saw in response to an issue like mine was to the effect that one needs to uninstall Norton which should release the toggle switches, turn the Defender switches off, and then reinstall Norton.

I think the original discussion involved running the Norton removal software to deinstall Norton, and there's when I ran into an issue, because the links to download the removal tool didn't seem to work.

So this is the context for my doing a Norton chat session where I got connected (surprise, surprise) to an Indian agent. This isn't intended to be a rant about Indian help desk people; the previous two examples were both Americans. I've also had my share of issues with non-Indian Oracle tech support in an operational setting. Senior analysts could resolve my issues within 5 minutes, but rookies were very difficult to work with. Oracle maintains a knowledge base of reported problems and possible resolutions. It's difficult to explain it except to note that I typically didn't have access to this knowledge base (Oracle would claim I did--maybe when I used to work for Oracle). So what would happen is the junior analyst might draw a list of say 15 possible solutions--and inevitably decide to make me jump through hoops in their process of elimination; I could usually tell from context almost immediately that the proposed solution wasn't relevant and want him or her to skip down to the next scenario. The analyst would be inflexible and argue that if I didn't comply to his satisfaction with his prescribed sequence, he would close the TAR (problem ticket). I would then escalate the TAR to a senior analyst, which of course duty managers hated but I didn't care. Maintenance costs are nontrivial, and I was a customer: time is money, and my time was important to my employer or client. I didn't exist for convenience of Oracle's training purposes. It was the responsibility of the senior analysts to mentor junior colleagues.

So one of my pet peeves is dealing with what I call scripts or protocols, and Indian help desk personnel are heavily scripted. They don't respond well from deviations from their script. (I'm not going to transcribe the script, but first they will take down parameters for filling out their ticket--your phone number, etc., ask you to remember their ticket number, and so forth. There's typically a gratuitous "I'm sorry you're experiencing this problem", "I can surely fix your problem", etc.) More or less, I discussed the Window update issue, the frozen Defender switches, the user thread solution I summarized above. At no time did he even acknowledge any Defender issues with Norton. He seemed to pick up on my reported issue with the removal tool download. He sends me a URL link. There's a DNS issue (no such webpage). I report back to him. He says try another browser; I'm saying, "Dude, do you understand what I mean by a DNS issue?" (I did pull up Firefox just to humor him.)  He eventually sent me a couple of other links, one of which seemed to connect, but no download. I'm asking "Are you sure that FTP services are up on the server?" Again, no response. He's trying to get me to allow access to my machine; that's not going to happen.  I'm irritated that his scripts include invalid URLs and such; he's not even trying to explain why the download isn't happening. At that point, I was done with the call.

I knew that I could uninstall Norton from Control Panel/Programs. As I hypothesized, the Defender toggle switches were released. I toggled them off and then reinstalled Norton. At that point, I went to Windows Update and manually checked for updates. This time there were no hanging Defender downloads, and Update reported no new patches to download. [Of course, if and when Norton isn't available, I'll need to update Defender or install other security software.] At some point in the future, I'll try testing again whether I can download the Norton removal tool.

[* updated 5/18/16]

A similar problem occurred today on my backup notebook PC. It had a different nuance, because in fact Defender settings were off. In this case, a Defender patch seemed to lead a handful of other, major updates, like a cumulative Windows 10 patch, and the update process seems to stall with Defender. Whatever Norton is doing to micromanage Defender does not seem to be controllable (earlier I had tried turning off the firewall and/or antivirus, but that didn't restore Defender functionality). So I uninstalled Norton and was able to update Defender and complete the other updates. I rebooted and reinstalled Norton.

I tried to do a trouble ticket with Norton, because this is getting to be ridiculous. I shouldn't have to uninstall and reinstall Norton every time I have a queue of Window Updates. Once again, I had to deal with one of their Indian helpdesk analysts, and two times during a chat session where I told him I had resolved my issue, he wanted to remote session my PC. Idiot! He told me Defender was a Windows 10 default security application. DUH! Just do a Google search, and you'll find posts of Norton users reporting Defender issues. As I recall, one post was from 2013, where Norton and/or Microsoft were expected to have a solution "any day now".  Now you don't get nice functionality of the type as MS saying "we're having problems with Defender, so let's put it aside for the time being, and work on your other patches." I know it started with Defender and 2-3 hours later it was still apparently at ground zero. I thought perhaps the software distribution folder was corrupted; but that didn't fix the issue. Finally, I uninstalled Norton, manually updated Defender, finished my patching, and then reinstalled Norton after the patch reboot and checking Windows Update to ensure it was current. The Indian helpdesk guy had zero to say about known Defender issues and/or workarounds; he was totally useless.

The Wonderful World of Google Part I

As I write this post, I am anticipating that I may write more on this topic in the future. I don't have in mind, say, a 6-post series. One of the problems of writing on the topic of Google is that I don't really have a window on planned changes and enhancements on Google products and services. I use so many (just to start, Google Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Keep, Blogger, Youtube, etc.), not to mention my first smartphone, which is an Android model.

It may sound unusual for an IT academic to admit being late to the game of smartphones. Part of that was based on budget constraints, and I saw cellphones as mostly functional devices. Familiar readers may know that I finally got my first cellphone after a major tire blowout in I-5 heading down to LA from Silicon Valley. I had had a couple of work-related cellphones before then. I don't really make a lot of calls, and minutes were expensive, so I might do tech interviews, etc., via a wired, later digital line at home. As time went on, there were restrictions on the use of client PC's and Internet services (especially with the government). I often might not have access to the cellphone at work for security reasons (e.g., recording functionality), but I might be able to take a break from work (e.g., lunch). There was some functionality I wanted beyond calls, say, for example, a stock or mutual fund transaction in my retirement account during market hours. (One prior employer vendor, for instance, Fidelity Investments, will process an exchange at the next end of the trading day. So if I was building a position in biotech stocks, I might look at a down day to build my position. If I waited until I got home and placed the order, biotech stocks might have a good day tomorrow, meaning more expensive shares.)

Substitutes also deferred my decision. For example, a while back, I wrote a piece on a Garmin device. This has some nice functionality that goes beyond GPS-guided directions; for example, I can get directions to the nearest post office, fast food places, gas stations, hotels, etc. Before that, I would go online and print out directions and plan stopping places.

A few things happened in the interim. While I lived in West Virginia, I realized one day I was never using my digital phone, which was probably $30-40 of my monthly triple play cable bill. Whereas the latest iPhone or Galaxy might set you back a few hundred dollars, you could buy a decent quality phone for about $100, and some mobile vendors started offering virtually unlimited talk, messaging, and data for $35-50/month. (Granted, only a certain threshold of data was guaranteed high speed, but then I really wasn't planning to use my smartphone for A/V feeds.)

So I've owned my SmartPhone for just over a year now. As a human factors researcher, I was absolutely thrilled with the idea of studying what types of usability problems I would encounter, false inferences or expectations, natural interface gaps/Procrustean technology, etc. I've found myself using the device in unexpected ways.

I'll give a few examples to illustrate salient concepts. I happen to have short, stubbier fingers, which don't always work well given limited size touchscreens. I don't do a lot of messaging, but I realized the other day, I could utilize Google's excellent voice-to-text technology to dictate my text message.

The voice interface is pervasive through the technology. For example, I could use the Google search screen to request "Show me Mom's phone number."  I was pleasantly surprised to see Google correctly typed out our surname when I asked the same question for one of my brothers. (The English pronounciation is "Gill met"; in fact, Dad used to sign into restaurants with that spelling.) Depending on the question, I might get a spoken response, e.g., "How old is Donald Trump?". On the other hand, when I asked, "What was Elton John's last American #1 hit?", I didn't get a vocal response, but I did get the link of a Wikipedia page for Elton John's discography.

I recently started playing around with building shopping lists, which you can do if you download the Google Keep app. So I can activate my Google voice functionality ("OK, Google"), and say "Add 2 cartons of eggs to my shopping list", "Add a half-gallon of almond milk to my shopping list', etc. And then the next time I'm in WalMart, I can simply say, "Show me my shopping list" and check off items as I do my shopping.

One of the first times I used the browser voice functionality was on a visit home over the holidays. Most of the times I had visited in the past, I had used a barber shop at the nearby military base. Mom used to work at the base exchange (Dad used to bring me to the NCO Club); there was a large barbershop at the exchange with a DMV queue type system, with the exception that active military preempted people in the queue. Long story short, Mom finished shopping and I was still in the queue. She decided it wasn't worth the wait. The base is across from a town where the family used to live, but since my Dad and brothers never used the town's barbers,  we didn't know where to go. I used my cellphone to find relevant barbers along the main drag of the town. The main issue is that I got street numbers which weren't legible from the road. It would have helped if we had better signposts on location (which may have been an artifact of my search). I quickly inferred it was in a smaller strip mall across from a larger strip mall we had entered to check street numbers. (In hindsight, I may have been able to use the Google Maps app already loaded on my phone to get turn-by-turn instructions like for my Garmin; I may test out the functionality for a local barber shop in my area.) But it certainly beat the old school way of checking the Yellow Pages at home.

Another thing I wanted to check was the handling of sounds, ringtones, etc. Now what I brought into the configuration was experiences like the use and installation of fonts. For example, I use an email signature software called Qliner Quotes (described in an earlier post). I wanted to use some Old English calligraphy for my Quote of the Day section heading. My Windows TrueFonts did not come bundled with a relevant font so I had to search for a freeware font and installation.

Now, of course my Android device came with relevant configuration defaults, and I could tell some notifications were available via a flashing green light at the top of the phone. I was rather annoyed at my limited selection of available ringtones, etc., and I might get silent notifications. I might hear or feel my cellphone vibrate, say, if  I got a message someone had retweeted one of my Twitter tweets, but what if I got a notification while taking a shower: I might have to check if my phone had a blinking light; an audible sound was harder to ignore,

Similarly, just like I could add items to my shopping list, I might want to set an alarm. Now here's a situation where I ran into an expectations problem. If I say "set the timer for 1 minute" on my notebook PC Chrome browser (toggling on the microphone icon), I will hear an audible alarm of beeps, but if I do this through the Google search window, it results in a vibrate alarm. (I will point out that if I launch Chrome on the smartphone and use the voice input, I will get a similar audible beep.)

I had figured out how to load one of my music tracks, e.g., "Love is Blue" onto my SD card I had installed on the phone (which was a "fun", unintuitive experience) and set it as the ringtone. But I just wanted to configure something classic, like desk phone rings, maybe a classic email tone for notifications or some buzz, beep, or bell for alarms. I experimented with a couple of ringtone apps like Zedge and picked up on how to select, download and configure the relevant sound. What was confusing was that when I configured an alarm manually through the alarm apps, it used the configured app default, but when I created an alarm through the Google search box, it created an alarm in the alarm app--and showed the configured default sound, but when the alarm was triggered, it was on vibrate and did not use the configured sound. (Perhaps the phone needs to be restarted?) It's not a big deal because I have a couple of ways of setting a usable audible alarm, but it comes across to me as confusing.

Finally, I've sometimes experienced a concept often fleshed out in Japanese quality control, e.g., the Kano model: the attractive quality, e.g., something unexpectedly pleasing that you never realized you always wanted in making a transaction. (Hotels often do this in various ways: maybe it's a complimentary newspaper, chocolates, fruit or warm chocolate chip cookies.)

Google products often have this. Let me give a simple. Google Calendar, in addition to configuring your own personal calendar of events, allows you to subscribe to any of a number of special-purpose calendars, including sports calendars. In my case, I add calendars for the UH Cougars, UT Longhorns, San Antonio Spurs, and the Minnesota Twins and Vikings. (Long story on the latter two; the first three deal with my college experience.) Now I did see the upcoming games and times on my calendar. I later began noticing that updated game scores showed up on my calendar (not to mention the next round of NBA playoff games for the Spurs).

The Google search engine in Chrome can be used not just to query for content but to extract for various information items, e.g., "what is the temperature in Atlanta, Georgia?' If I find a difficult word or wonder how to pronounce it properly I can query "define xxxx"; there is a speaker phone icon click on to hear the word and its definition. If I want today's GOP primary results or delegate count for my political blog, I query those descriptions; similarly I can query for the MLB Scoreboard or NBA Playoff Reaults.  If I query Elton John songs, I get links to over a dozen Elton John videos, a short biography, even upcoming concert dates. When I recently baked a ham, I told my browser, "set timer to 200 minutes" If I land on a webpage from Germany, Russia or China, Google allows for quick, easy translations. I recently got a Word document questionnaire over a professional gig and easily loaded it into Google Docs. It was integrated with voice input, so all I had to do was point after each descriptive entry and dictate my response (with remarkably good translation). I read a recent post which suggested you could translate text from scanned business cards.

There are some minor things which I felt would improve the usability of products for my purposes. For example, I was trying the other day to save a Google Maps search, e.g., for directions to nearby Dan's Barber Shop into Google Keep (see above discussion of shopping lists). It would have been nice if I could have extracted information into a Keep note, e.g., right-click, Save to Google Keep. I could copy and paste the directions into a new note, and Keep has image-import functionality, but I couldn't transfer the image directly. I could save the map image to my download folder and then import the map image into the note. It seems to me that there should be a way of piping the image directly than resorting to a workaround. There may be a Google tool for this or related purposes.

I have come to a natural breaking point for the conclusion of this first post. For many Google power users, much of what I've described here is well-known but may not be obvious for new or occasional users of relevant tools. I stumbled into a lot of this not through tutorials but by playing around with the search engine and other tools. If other people find these tips interesting or useful, this post has served its purpose.