Pre-emptive debugging

I was researching yet another program to watch and organize my media, Infuse Pro – I was mostly looking to see how well it is supposed to work with Blu-Ray rips. The first link I found took me to the AppleTV subreddit. It didn’t answer my question, but I saw a few interesting items in the “Similar to this Post” sidebar, one of which talked about a new Apple TV Remote bug that arrived with tvOS 16.3. I read that post and went on about my business.

Tonight, we wanted to watch an episode of All Creatures Great and Small, which meant firing up the PBS app on the Apple TV. There was one small problem – the picture (and the “on” light on the Apple TV) kept blinking on and off every couple of seconds.I didn’t have that problem on any other input, which made me hope that the problem was the Apple TV. And then I remembered the post I’d read this morning – sure enough, I’d run into the same problem (the remote gets stuck and repeats a command – in my case, the on/off button).

I rebooted the remote following the procedure in the article (press and hold the TV/control center and Volume down buttons for 10 seconds), and then I power-cycled the Apple TV for good measure, and all was right with the world again. So far, anyway.

Applause!

There are two Toastmasters clubs in Los Gatos. Mine is the Silver Tongued Cats, which has been meeting on Zoom since the first shelter-in-place order; the other is Los Gatos Toastmasters, which has been having regular hybrid meetings for the last year or so. The Cats is going to hold a hybrid meeting next week; I was volunteered to be the tech support, so I visited the other club’s meeting tonight to see how they do it.

The room is set up with a big TV at one end of the room with a webcam on top; the lectern is at the other end. Sound is handled by a good old-fashioned Polycom speakerphone – simple technology, but it works!

I enjoyed the meeting, and I really enjoyed going up to the lectern to give the timer’s report; Toastmasters has a great tradition of applauding anyone who is going to the lectern, and I’d forgotten how nice it feels to hear applause in person!

Reclaiming Diane’s Identity

Diane and I were both very early adopters of Gmail. We tried to get our first names as our usernames, but Gmail wouldn’t accept them. Instead, Diane’s username is her first name followed by her last initial, and that turns out not to have been a great choice – it seems that there are dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of people who enter that same string as their Gmail username on one form or another.

One of those people tried to set up a PayPal account several years ago – Diane found out when she tried to create a PayPal account and couldn’t because the email address was “taken”. There was no way to get in touch with PayPal about the problem because she couldn’t log onto the account. It wasn’t a serious problem – if someone really had to be paid via PayPal, I took care of it.

Today, we wanted to renew our membership to the Friends of the Los Gatos Library. In the past, they sent us a note in the mail and we sent back a check, but now they’ve joined the digital age and ask for donations to be sent through their webpage, which goes to PayPal. Diane’s name and email were on the account, so we wanted to use it when we made the payment, but, of course, she couldn’t log into that account.

Then I had an inspiration. She tried logging into the account and hit the “forgot your password?” link, which sent a password reset link to the address on the account – her Gmail account. A minute later, she was logged in. And five minutes later, the account was deleted.

Diane then went to the Friends’ site and made the payment with a credit card; PayPal asked if she wanted to set up a new account with that credit card linked to the account. She said “yes”, and, much to my surprise, it worked! I would have thought that PayPal would permanently retire the email address of a deleted account, but nope!

The experience motivated me to check my old Gmail account, where I found a month-old email from an inn in Washington state confirming a reservation from a couple in Ohio who had put my address on their registration. I hope they got it sorted out before they got to the inn!

I was annoyed when I couldn’t get “David” as my Gmail username; perhaps it was all for the best.

Sun and Rain

It’s been raining on and off all day, but we managed to get a couple of walks in anyway. One was our traditional after-Farmers’ Market walk through Los Gatos; it’s not spring yet, but it was a nice cheery day with flowers, birds, and pollinators.

The other walk was to Trader Joe’s to exercise their return policy; we had tried their Balsamic Vinegar salad dressing and were unimpressed because it was far sweeter than we liked.

After we got home, I spent much of the reset of the afternoon building a spreadsheet to compare the various solar bids we received, and now I’m reaching out to the finalists for more information.

We even managed to find time to get info for our upcoming trip to the Big Island – I’m ready for a vacation!

Life and Taxes

This week’s Torah portion was Beshalach, which tells the story of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt, including the crossing of the Red Sea. The Torah reading includes the Song of the Sea (Mi Chamocha), which was sung by the women after the escape; it is one of the only two readings where the congregation traditionally rises (the other is the Ten Commandments). One of our members has chanted this portion for many years (it’s her birthday portion), and she did so again today.

After services, we went to Mountain View to see Theaterworks‘s production of Ali Viterbi’s In Every Generation, which follows a Los Angeles family through three Seders, in 2019, 1954, and 2050, as well as showing them soon after the Exodus in 1416BCE. The play was a bit uneven – it took me a little while to figure out who was who (I guess it would have helped to read the program first), but once I got the characters and their relationships sorted out, I enjoyed it, and hearing the women in the cast sing the Song of the Sea as part of the play just after hearing it at Temple was an interesting coincidence. I’m not sure how much I would have gotten out of the play if I weren’t Jewish – there wasn’t a lot of explanation!

We came home just before the rains hit and I finished our taxes, despite a bug in TurboTax which caused the IRS to reject my submission at first. I had some “non-qualified compensation” which is reported on a W-2 form. In past years, it’s been treated like any other W-2 (salary) income; this year, the IRS changed the processing to move that kind of income to a different spot on the return, which confused me when I reviewed the numbers until I figured it out. TurboTax got that part right, but it also duplicated the income on the W-2 it submitted to the IRS, so the numbers didn’t add up and the return bounced. Fortunately, I was not the first one to run into the problem and the TurboTax forum suggested a work-around – go into the W-2 and delete the bogus number, then resubmit. It worked, and I’m done!