Day: May 29, 2022

My Week Ending 2022-05-29

by dougpete, posted in Just Rambling

Here’s a summary of some of the things I learned and published this week.

Readings 

You can follow my daily readings as they happen here.  Below are a selected few, with commentary, from the past week. They’re posted to the blog daily under the title OTR Links.

Sunday

  • A whack of ideas for what you can do with an Raspberry Pi
  • This is an amazing story of a gentleman who has a vehicle with 1 000 000 kilometres on it

Monday

  • For teachers of Mathematics, here are some great ideas for the classroom
  • If there are any technology coaches still around, here are 10 suggestions to help your teachers grow

Tuesday

  • With the latest announcement from Google, there’s a lot said about Lacros
  • Microsoft comes out with its own concept of what a Chromebook should be – hint, it runs Windows

Wednesday

  • About using Google Lens to find images when searching with Google
  • DuckDuckGo has a bad bit of publicity when it was revealed that they were giving private information to Microsoft

Thursday

  • Everything you ever wanted to know about DuckDuckGo – well maybe not everything but a lot of things
  • A poll taken of US Senators about their thoughts on what action should be taken about guns and not surprisingly, there were a lot of no replies

Friday

  • My old employer has released an anti-Black racism document to drive their learning campaign
  • If you believe that being lucky is just a random sort of thing, you might want to read this and maybe change your mind

Saturday

  • All about Doug Ford’s theme song for the campaign. He should have just called Larry the Cable Guy
  • This would indeed be scary. I think we all have done fire drills but a realistic shooter drill?

Blog Posts on
doug — off the record

My daily contributions to this blog are linked below. If you’re looking for a week in review for doug–off the record, you came to the right place.

#FollowFriday – May 27, 2022

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

https://wke.lt/w/s/1YOOZY

voicEd Radio

This Week in Ontario Edublogs is a blog post/show/podcast that features great writing from Ontario Edubloggers. Stephen Hurley and I use their writing as the basis for a conversation.

Featured Bloggers:

  • Paul McGuire – @mcguirp
  • Amanda Potts – @Ahpotts 
  • Lisa Corbett – @LisaCorbett0261
  • Matthew Morris – @callmemrmorris
  • Shyama Sunderaswara – @ssunderaswara

This week’s show:

Opening Song:

Closing Song:

Technology Troubleshooting

As I write this, it’s Sunday morning and I’m watching the Formula 1 pre-race show. This week, they are in Monaco. If you only watch one Grand Prix a year, this is the one to watch.

Unless other races where there are safety measures everywhere, Monaco runs on the streets of Monte Carlo between metal barriers and a couple of padded ones but that’s few and far between.

You never hope to see an accident in a race but typically when it happens, there’s an opening in the barrier and the car is just pushed behind. That’s not possible here and so you can see large cranes in the background to just pick the cars up and remove them that way.

Hopefully, I won’t see them in use today but it’s nice to know that there’s something in place should it be necessary.

Look what I made

With all the Wordle craze, I of course blogged about it earlier but also created a Wakelet of all the Wordle clones I could find. Once created, I’ve been adding to it daily, it seems. I guess it’s presumptuous to think I could do it all in one session. It certainly has taken the online world by storm.

My collection is available here: https://wke.lt/w/s/BuvP40

Update – May 29: Up to 57 entries.

Video of the Week

Kudos for missing the NRA Convention and standing on principle

Photo of the Week

We have a new garden out front. Lots and lots of mulch.


Thanks for reading.

Please join me daily for something new and, hopefully, interesting for you. I honestly and truthfully appreciate your few moments reading my thoughts. Time willing, this summary appears every Sunday afternoon.

Be safe.

dp

This blog post was originally posted at:

https://dougpete.wordpress.com/

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Whatever happened to …

by dougpete, posted in OTR

… pay telephones?

Thanks to Sheila Stewart for the suggestion. She even included a link to a Thunder Bay group that was talking about it there.

If you can’t follow the link, you’re missing a picture of a pay telephone and a local discussion.

When she mentioned the idea, my mind started spinning about how a pay phone was more than a pay phone for me. I had a lot of memories and hope that I remember most of them here since I tend to let my wandering mind gather ideas while I’m walking the dog.

  • First of all, are there any around here? I looked while out and about this week and couldn’t find any. There used to be two or three at Walmart, and a number at various street corners in town. Also, in convenience stores. Not one to be found. There’s one other place that I can think of – the arena – and I’ll check when we go to advance vote later today
  • I think there may be a couple at the ONRoutes but can’t verify that. I don’t get out much these days and the 401 at Tilbury has been under construction so I’ll take Highway 2 instead
  • Speaking of arenas and other public places, growing up there was always at least one there. It served as a meeting place. “Meet me at the telephone booth at 7:30”
  • Public telephones was one of my earliest ways to make money. Mom would give me some change to call home when I was ready to be picked up. But, if I walked home, I got to keep the money
  • And, who hasn’t reached into the coin return slot to see if someone forgot to get their quarter if the person on the other end didn’t pick up?
  • It was a full time job for kids at Union Station. I’d be waiting for my train and kids would go down the entire row of telephones checking for loose change
  • You didn’t always need money for the call. There was the concept of “calling collect” where the recipient would agree to accept the charges so you got to talk to them for free. When I worked for the Royal Life Saving Society, we had a phone card that we could use to charge calls to instead of paying for long distance out of pocket. You’d dial 0 and talk to a lovely operator who would complete the call for you. Some of us even married that operator
  • Pay telephones have changed over the years. It used to be small change but eventually they accepted debit and credit cards. And why not? Bell got into the internet business
  • Speaking of the internet business, Bell used to have a monopoly on pay telephones and that’s how we were connected. Now, Bell shares the bandwidth with Rogers, Shaw, Cogeco, Verison, and others
  • We didn’t need to memorize telephone numbers; there typically was a local phone book hanging in the booth that would let you look up telephone numbers
  • And, phone booths were always a nice place for graffiti artists and others to show off their artworks, their use of four letter words, or phone numbers to call is you’re looking for a good time
  • Sometimes the phone was just attached to the wall and that was it. Other times, it was inside an actual booth that you could close the door for privacy. Or, to get a little snuggly with others. Or, to get out of the rain

I told you I had some memories. There are more and they’ll come through in the questions.

  • Can you name location for a public telephone in your community?
  • Public telephones have changed over the years. In the beginning, they were mechanical and sometimes you could put a slug in and make a call. (or so I heard) What did they change to?
  • Can you name another pay telephone provider other than Bell?
  • Who else could you call for free in a public telephone?
  • What would you do if someone had ripped out the pages from the telephone book?
  • Why were telephone booths often victims of car accidents?
    Thanks to Google Maps, here’s one from my hometown
  • Often street carried reference to telephones. Again, thanks to Google Maps, we had one in my hometown. I’ve included an advertising tip of the hat to Elliott’s.

So, regular users know the drill. How about answering some telephone questions and sharing your own thoughts? Do so in the replies.

This is a regular Sunday morning post around here. You can read them all here.

OTR Links 05/29/2022

by dougpete, posted in Links

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.