Brickmuppet Blog 2.0

November 20, 2018

Mom in Hospital (UPDATED)

Last night, I got a call from my brother (who is visiting our folks) that Mom suffered chest pains and then got a case of the shakes, felt cold and her vision went blurry. None of these things are good.

This morning, the diagnosis was a clot in her lung, which is pretty terrible, however as of now that does not appear to be the case. She's being scheduled for "cathaterization" so it sounds like they are going to do an angioplasty or something.

I'm getting slightly conflicting reports from relatives on-scene (250miles away), but prognosis seems much better, even good as of now.

Blogging will remain light to nonexistent.

UPDATE:

They couldn't find a blockage, or a stroke or anything, which is troubling. More tests results are pending, but for now she is released and is staying in the guest room in their house (as she is forbidden to deal with stairs.) One theory is that she may have just been suffering from exhaustion. Perhaps now she'll listen when we tell her to calm down and not drive herself to hard about Thanksgiving.

OK, that's not going to happen.

Anyway, she seems better.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 02:51 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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November 05, 2018

Banality Intrudes (UPDATED)

As annoying as things sometimes get, I can at least take solace from the fact that I have not had to deal with high-school for 20 years.

more...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 12:06 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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1 Unless.... Uberlyft, if you can afford it.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Tue Nov 6 16:03:01 2018 (LZ7Bg)

2 Indeed.
Cost isn't technically the issue though. I've been looking at downgrading to a flip-phone or smartwatch for some time now. However I now have a reason to upgrade from my Blackberry to a real smartphone...it's required for Uber.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Nov 6 18:55:28 2018 (gxCG3)

3 As far as cost goes you can realize a huge amount of value by avoiding the headline flagship phones.
A Galaxy S9 costs, what, $900 or so right now? I ordered a Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S from Gearbest a couple weeks ago for $400. This is an all-four-carriers Snapdragon 845 with a 6" screen and 6GB of RAM: basically the same specs as an S9, but at half the price, and it works on Sprint/Verizon! (It also is a dual-sim which is pretty rare in the US.)

If you don't need that much power, the Motorola G series (just to pick one example) give you most of the same power at a fraction of the price--I got a G5S Plus on sale a while back for about $200, or $50 or so less than it normally goes for. A phone like that will pretty much do anything but the most GPU-intensive 3D games.

Posted by: Rick C at Tue Nov 6 20:08:15 2018 (Iwkd4)

4 I have a Moto G4 Play. Solid and reliable, but the camera is pretty bad. That's the bottom of the Moto G line though and two generations behind. Any current model will be a lot better.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tue Nov 6 21:54:47 2018 (PiXy!)

5 I found the camera on the G5+/G5S+ to be pretty nice as cell phone cameras go. IIRC the 5+'s camera is widely considered to be good.
Having said that I don't take a lot of pictures.

Posted by: Rick C at Tue Nov 6 22:51:12 2018 (Iwkd4)

6 If I weren't flying, I would still be using my flip phone. But I needed a backup device, and my $60 no-carrier phone just wasn't cutting it anymore for the Garmin Pilot app. So, I bought a carrier LG phone, which replaced both devices. Still, it was $240. You just can't get anything much cheaper from a carrier, unless it's a VNMO that rapes consumers in monthly fees.
I remember back when Europe had expensive phones with SIMs, and we had carrier-locked phones that were given away. That was the grand bargain. Now we have $800 phones and no portability - the worst of both worlds. Thanks, Obama!

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wed Nov 7 09:42:08 2018 (LZ7Bg)

7 "You just can't get anything much cheaper from a carrier, unless it's a VNMO that rapes consumers in monthly fees. "
No, but if you're on AT&T/T-Mobile, you can buy any old unlocked phone and use it. The smartphones under $240 or so probably aren't going to be very good, though.
It turns out if you have an activated Verizon SIM card, you can stick it in a new (compatible) phone and it'll just work, like AT&T/T-Mobile always have, without getting special permission from Verizon like you used to have to. I found that out accidentally when I got my new Xiaomi last month. I was going through VZ's website, doing the "I want to switch my phone" form, which kept erroring out, but I'd already done the SIM swap, and noticed the phone went from "no service" to "Verizon".
It is kind of painful saying nice things about VZ, but there you have it.

Posted by: Rick C at Wed Nov 7 10:24:12 2018 (Q/JG2)

8 Oh, right. We're in the LTE age now.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Wed Nov 7 11:48:46 2018 (LZ7Bg)

9 Yes, although my understanding is you still really need CDMA support for a phone to work properly on VZ, but my phone has those bands.

Posted by: Rick C at Wed Nov 7 20:38:23 2018 (Iwkd4)

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