(no subject)

I guess I could yell at somebody, but it will not help.

Unique Restoration did send the project manager, Scott, by on Monday to look at my wall, see a small patch of discoloration outside, and tell me that that was all that needed to be fixed. When I mentioned mold might be growing in my wall because, you know, water went down it on Christmas Day, he kind of pooh-poohed that and said that if he went searching he could find mold in any house, so he wasn't taking that too seriously. I told him that if it the issue was important enough to drill holes in the wall of my neighbor downstairs and have fans running for a week, I would like to know my apartment was ok as well. I did also mention that the work had to be finished by this weekend. I finally convinced him to send someone by, Rick, to drill holes and leave fans to dry humidity out.

Rick calls that afternoon, says he can't make it, can he come Tuesday morning. I stress to him that the work needs to be finished and patched by Friday afternoon because I am showing this place. He says that that means he will just have to hurry everything up and work fast. He comes Tuesday morning, drills holes, puts the large industrial air blower and dehumidifier, tells me to run it for a full 24 hrs. I sleep in the living room.

I call UR yesterday to ask when they are picking up their equipment and patching my wall. I get Frank on the line who tells me they will be by at 9 AM for all that. Rick arrives at ten -- at least he showed up, which makes it the second time someone has showed up at all in 5 promises Frank has made about people showing up -- to take away the equipment, and hold a little tool against the holes to have it not beep which means there's no water inside. I ask him about the holes. He tells me this needs to be a whole new estimate process and will not be done today. I remind me he promised me. Rick plays dumb. I now have a wall full of decorative holes near the bottom, and a viewing of The Loft on Sunday at noon. I guess I get to give someone a call again.

Thanks, Unique Restoration!

Edit: I can't even get myself to call them. I know I cannot do this myself, my previous patch jobs have been horrible bumpy messes. I just have had a string of suppliers and services-people mishaps that leave me feeling I can't even get angry because that never helps. I just feel powerless.

(no subject)

"And there's something else Thompson recommends. Limit a cell phone's abilities. Allow it to make and accept calls to and from parents and 911 only."

"Cells, texting give predators a secret path to kids", CNN.com, from jeffla

Oddly enough, I know of this cellphone company that allowed a parent to do just that, with some other monitoring features. It's defunct now, because it couldn't get its phones into stores.

Also interesting is that the article asks parents, one of whom monitors her children's email and chat logs, why they aren't checking up on phone-calls and text messages. The parents say they do not think about it, but CNN fails to mention a twist here: the parents actually can't while they are happening. While the parents can certainly see on the bill who is calling and texting who and how much, FCC rules forbid any intercepting of text messages. Text messages are considered part of phone communications, and those are actually heavily protected against eavesdropping in the US. I once did an exploration at Disney Mobile to use Disney's enormous and amazing chat-flagging system to warn parents of questionable text conversations their kids might be having (although my angle was bullying since I consider that a far more prevalent problem than sexual predators) and we just couldn't find a structure to make it work. Even if it was just warning the parents without showing the message it would be illegal, I was told by a DC expert on FCC regulations, since (IIRC) he had worked on kids and commercial text-message issues. No eavesdropping, no 3d party recording. Even a machine that was doing any kind of textual processing and alerting of a 3d party based on content was not allowed, never mind a machine doing filtering.

Parents are allowed to demand their kids show them their phones so they can go through the messages stored on the device, but it is far easier to delete those traces on a phone than it is to remove all caches and stores from a PC. We did once hear at DM of Verizon offering an add-on service for a parent to get all the texting logs from a child's phone at the end of the month, but we were all wondering about the legality of that. It certainly could not be done at all in any way as a real-time service like I was thinking.