Category: netflix

Wednesday, 23 November 2011

10:10 – Barbara took off this morning on a trip to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee with her parents, sister, and sister’s husband. They plan to spend several days going to shows and shopping at the outlet malls. They rented a Toyota handicapped-accessible van to make it easier to handle Barbara’s dad’s wheelchair. They’ll be back Sunday. I told Barbara I’d watch 20 or 30 episodes of Despicable Housewives while she’s gone and then tell her what happened when she gets back. The truth is, I probably won’t turn on the TV while she’s gone. I’ll work during the days and read during the evenings. Well, read and throw the ball for Colin. Over and over and over.

I’m still working heads-down on the biology book. I sent the protists chapter to my editor this morning, and am currently working on a chapter about fungi and lichens.

Meanwhile, during the last couple of weeks, the euro crisis has gone from desperate to catastrophic. Italy and now Spain are on the verge of needing bailouts to avoid defaults, and there’s no money there to bail them out. Belgium isn’t far behind, and France maintains its AAA rating in name only. The FANG nations are now the G nation, with Finland, Austria, and the Netherlands coming under the gun. The ECB has reached and passed its limit in terms of its willingness to buy Italian and Spanish bonds, and without that subsidy Italian and Spanish bond yields will skyrocket from their already-catastrophic 7% levels. Private investors are no longer willing to risk their money in sovereign bonds or private bonds from any EU country other than Germany, and they’ve begun to be leery even of German bunds. The IMF and the BRIC nations have basically told the EU that it’s on its own and it can’t expect any IMF/BRIC bailouts. The US has tossed diplomacy aside, told the EU not to expect any financial support from the US, and is now ordering the EU in no uncertain terms to DO SOMETHING. The trouble is, there’s really nothing to be done, and even if there were, Germany is not willing to pay for it. We’re watching the collapse of the eurozone and the EU itself, and the timeframe is now weeks rather than months. This is not going to be pretty.


13:42 – Oh, my. Forget what I just said about Germany being the last FANG nation left standing. Germany–Germany!–just suffered a failed bond auction. Germany offered €6 billion worth of bonds, but private investors were willing to buy only about 60% of them, leaving the central bank having to buy the rest. Granted, the interest rates were low, at about 2%, but even so. This was the worst auction of German bonds in the euro era. At this point, it’s clear that investors don’t want even German bunds, perceiving (correctly) that Germany is in deep, deep trouble.


14:38 – Actually, I think I will watch something while Barbara is away. We started watching the BBC series, Survivors, on Netflix streaming a couple of months ago, but we watched only the first episode. Barbara found it grim and depressing, and I could tell she really didn’t want to watch any more of it. But it’s still in our queue, and I should be able to get through the remaining 11 50-minute episodes while she’s away.


15:46 – Ah, I wondered how long it would be before this shoe dropped. After watching the concessions given to Greece, it was only a question of time before other bailed out nations demanded that kind of favorable treatment retroactively. The only thing I wasn’t sure of was whether it’d be Portugal or Ireland first. Well, it turns out to be Ireland. Can Portugal be far behind?

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Monday, 7 November 2011

08:03 – The Netflix Fairy, AKA our friends Mary and Paul, showed up this morning and left Sons of Anarchy S3D4 at our door.


For the last three months, the ECB has been buying worthless eurozone sovereign bonds, nearly all Italian but some Spanish, at a rate of $40 billion to $50 billion a month. Despite that, bond yields have continued to climb. This morning, Italian bond yields touched 6.7%, just short of the 7% level that toppled Greece, Ireland, and Portugal into receivership. On the current trajectory, Italian bond yields should pass 7% in the next week or two.

There’s nothing magical about that 7% number other than its effect on market sentiment. If history is any guide, once Italian yields hit 7% we’ll enter a vicious circle, with higher yields causing panic and panic causing still higher yields. If (when) Italian yields hit 7%, don’t be surprised if they rapidly begin skyrocketing into the 10% and even 15% range. At that point, Italy quickly loses all access to the markets, because no one considers yields in that range to be sustainable. And the ECB is dropping loud hints that its patience is about exhausted and it will soon stop buying Italian bonds. Without that prop, yields will skyrocket even faster. Once it becomes obvious that Italy cannot survive without being bailed out, it really is game over for the euro.


09:56 – I’m investing in tinned food, a shotgun and a farmhouse on a remote Scottish island. We’re all doomed. This guy may be exaggerating, but not by much.


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Friday, 28 October 2011

08:48 – One thing that’s always struck me as strange about Netflix practices is that they don’t allow non-members to browse or search their catalog. One would think they’d want non-members to be able to see what they’re missing.

I just downgraded our plan from streaming + two discs to streaming-only, which took effect Wednesday. With the exception of the final disc of series four of Sons of Anarchy, there was nothing left in our disc queue that we cared that much about seeing, so I planned to go streaming-only for a few months to give Netflix a chance to add more discs that we wanted to watch and then bump up our membership to include discs. But, as of yesterday, I can no longer see anything that has to do with discs. Our disc queue is now invisible, although I understand that Netflix keeps it archived for two years. Not that that matters, since I did a screen capture of it before I changed to streaming-only.

But I can no longer search for discs, nor do search results even include series or seasons that are available only on disc. For example, series one and two of Sons of Anarchy are available on disc or streaming, but series three is disc-only. When I search for Sons of Anarchy now, all I see are the two seasons that are available streaming. Not even an indication that series three is available on-disc.

Given that Netflix is trying very hard to force people toward streaming, I wonder if the converse is true. If I had a disc-only plan, would they let me see what’s available streaming even though I couldn’t watch it? It seems to make sense for them to do that.

Actually, Netflix has made things easier for me. Rather than keeping an eye on new disc-only material, I’ll just wait six months or so and then upgrade our plan to include discs. There certainly ought to be at least a month’s worth of new discs we want to watch by then. Not that we’ll have to wait six months to see the last two episodes of Sons of Anarchy S3. Our friends Paul and Mary subscribe to both discs and streaming, and they tend to let discs sit around for extended periods. I asked Mary the other day if she’d mind getting SoA S3D4 for me, and she readily agreed.


Work on the biology book continues. Right now, I’m working on a lab session on culturing drug-resistant bacteria. Once I finish that session, I think I’ll jump over to a different group for a change of pace, maybe the genetics group or the life processes group. Or maybe even one of the survey groups. I’m also down perilously low in chemistry kit inventory, so soon I’ll have to set aside a day or so to build more chemistry kits.


14:55 – Well, that didn’t take long. In the first real test of the “solutions” reached at the EU crisis conclave Thursday morning, Italy has failed miserably on today’s bond sale. The yield was catastrophic, 6.06%, and Italy was unable to sell all of the bonds it offered. To knowledgeable observers, that’s sufficient evidence to declare the latest crisis summit a complete and utter failure. Not only did the non-actions taken at the summit not reverse the collapse of EU finances, they appear not to have even slowed things down. Contagion continues, unabated.

Of course, none of this crisis kabuki really had anything to do with Greece and not much more to do with the euro or the EU. What it’s really about is an attempt to shore things up until Merkozy can get past the next elections–not that either of them has much chance of being re-elected–and, even more importantly, the continuing push by the EU elite for “more Europe”. They’re actually loving this financial/debt/liquidity crisis, because it supports their long-term anti-democratic plans to consolidate Europe as a single political entity, ruled by them. Fortunately, I believe the FANG nations will refuse to go along with their cunning plan, leaving eurocrats holding the empty bag of the southern-tier nations only. Let them see what they can do with that motley collection.

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Saturday, 22 October 2011

09:08 – Barbara is doing very well. It’s only been a little more than two weeks since her surgery, and she’s already getting around pretty well. She can’t wait to get back to work, although she’ll have to wait at least a couple more weeks for that. Meanwhile, she’s up and around the house and able to do light stuff. She cooked dinner the last two nights, and walked down the block with me yesterday to talk with Kim.


I just downgraded our Netflix account to streaming-only. Our DVD queue still has 100 or more discs in it, but they’re all low priority stuff. Meanwhile, our streaming queue is full of stuff that we actually want to watch. So, for the next few months we’ll watching streaming material and wait for more DVD-only stuff to accrue. Then we’ll go back to a 2- or 3-at-a-time disc plan and watch that stuff.

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Thursday, 20 October 2011

09:37 – Barbara is back to using her regular cane. She used the walker frame on Tuesday, my four-foot cane yesterday, and declared last night that she was ready to start using her regular cane again. She took the final anticoagulant shot yesterday, and started this morning on one 325 mg aspirin daily, which she’ll continue for a month.


I see the Greeks are revolting, for what good it will do them. Most of the MSM are calling it “protests”, but throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at the police is a bit beyond protesting. Attempted murder, say. It seems that most Greeks are blaming the EU and IMF for their problems, and the socialist government is near collapse. No one knows what will replace it, but the Communists are pushing hard. I expect we’ll see the current rioting devolve into actual revolution if things don’t greatly improve soon. And things are likely to get much, much worse, not better. As the infection spreads and other southern-tier countries default, we can expect to see similar violence as governments teeter and then topple in Italy and Spain and Portugal and Belgium and France. Not Ireland, thank goodness, nor the northern-tier eurozone countries. Unless they’re foolish enough to commit their economies to subsidizing the southern tier.

Unfortunately, the US is on the same course, albeit probably five or ten years behind. And there’s no one to bail us out.


13:32 – Barbara went to the doctor this morning, just to get looked over and have a few tests done. Her doctor didn’t seem too concerned about her brief loss of consciousness Tuesday. He seems to think it was caused by her severe pain immediately before the event, which caused her body to be flooded with adrenaline. He’s going to keep an eye on her low hemoglobin levels, but for now he basically said to take an extra multi-vitamin tablet every day and be sure to drink plenty of fluids. He also said that she was doing extremely well in terms of knee movement and so on, especially for only two weeks after her surgery.

Here are a couple of articles that caught my attention. First, despite the Guardian’s early report that a consensus had been reached before Sunday’s upcoming crisis summit for a huge effort that would finally resolve the euro crisis, it soon became obvious that not only had no such consensus been reached, but that Germany and France were farther apart than ever. This article sums things up pretty well. Franco-German deadlock over ECB’s role in rescue fund

Then we have Who Will Bail Out the Rescuers?, which starts by talking about the inability of France to contribute to bailouts and then goes much farther afield. I’m not entirely sure, but I think the article recommends stocking up on firearms and ammunition to shoot back at rioters. And police.


15:04 – Okay, this is interesting. I’ve had Sons of Anarchy S3D1 at the top of my queue since several weeks before it released, which has been a month or two. The status has never shown anything except “very long wait”.

We’re on the two-discs-at-a-time plan, and my DVD queue is getting down to the dregs. Other than Sons of Anarchy S3, Netflix just shipped us the last disc I really care about today. Our anniversary date is next Wednesday, and I’d already put a reminder in my calendar to downgrade our account to streaming-only and wait a few months for more DVDs we wanted to become available. And then this email arrived.

Re: Arriving Later: Sons of Anarchy: Season 3: Disc 1
From: Netflix
To: Robert Bruce Thompson
Date: Thu Oct 20 13:43:20 2011

****************************
NETFLIX – Shipping update
****************************

Dear Robert,

“Sons of Anarchy: Season 3: Disc 1” was not available from your local shipping center. Fortunately, it was available from a shipping center in another part of the country. It’s on its way and should arrive within 3 to 5 days.

You’ll notice we also recently sent the next available DVD from your Queue to enjoy while “Sons of Anarchy: Season 3: Disc 1” makes its way to you.

Your Queue now shows this extra DVD rental. Enjoy.

-The Netflix Team

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Tuesday, 11 October 2011

09:25 – Barbara is doing well, and Colin is delighted that she’s home. The only thing I’m dreading now is Barbara returning to work after Colin having several weeks to get used to having her full-time attention. He’s always demonic on Mondays, after having her home for just two days, so I suspect he’ll take a long time to adjust after she finally returns to work.

The news is full of articles about Netflix’s reversal of its split. The general attitude seems to be that Reed Hastings is incompetent and that Netflix has made huge mistakes from which it may not recover. My attitude is that it’s a mistake to assume that a smart guy like Hastings has suddenly turned stupid. Everyone seems to think that the decrease in Netflix’s subscriber base is a Very Bad Thing, which simply shows that most people can’t think. Netflix may have lost something like 3% of its subscribers, true. But those 3% were mostly subscribers that Netflix didn’t want, ones that were actually costing it money rather than contributing to its profits. Ones like me, in other words.

If Netflix had left its pricing unchanged and somehow still gotten rid of those 3% of undesirable subscribers, they’d have increased their profits. As it is, they also increased their prices, which means many of the remaining 97% of their subscribers are paying significantly more than they had been. Much of that increase will be spent on licensing additional programming–Netflix has added about 3,500 new TV episodes in just the last couple of weeks–but no doubt some of it will go to the bottom line. Netflix will be much more profitable than they otherwise would have been. Which is why it’s stupid that the stock price crashed. It should have skyrocketed. And it likely will, once the market realizes what just happened. As I said, Hastings is a very smart guy.


11:00 – I just ordered a cane for Barbara from Costco. She’s currently using a walker frame that belonged to my mom, but she’ll probably be off it and using a cane before too much longer.

We actually had a big argument about which cane model to buy. She ended up getting her way, and I ordered her a plain old cane-cane for about $18 with shipping. I tried to convince her to go with an upgraded model with a built-in 12-gauge shotgun, but she flatly refused. So I went to Plan B, and tried to convince her to go with a model with a built-in 32″ (81 cm) sword blade. She wouldn’t go for that, either, so I went to Plan C and tried to convince her to get one with a built-in tear gas dispenser. No dice. So she’s getting just a plain old cane-cane.


11:53 – Barbara has been using the regular toilet since she came home, so we moved the potty-chair frame into the shower in our master bath for her to sit on while she showers. I didn’t want to move it, so I just took a shower in the downstairs bathroom, next to my lab. There was already soap, regular shampoo, and so on in that shower, but I happened to notice a bottle of oatmeal and baking soda shampoo with a picture of a pretty Golden Retriever on the front. It promised a smooth and glossy coat, so I decided to give it a try. Sure enough, when I came upstairs, Barbara commented, “You sure have a smooth and glossy coat”. Or something like that.

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Sunday, 9 October 2011

06:17 – Wow. I seldom manage to choose anything really bad from Netflix, but the latest disc was an exception. The series is called Off the Map. I decided to sample disc 1 because it stars the delightful Caroline Dhavernas, late of Wonderfalls. (What is it about the Canadians? They consistently come up with adorable young actresses like Dhavernas and Emily Van Camp. Come to think of it, they’re both native French speakers as well. And I guess New Zealand isn’t far behind, with young actresses like Lisa Chappell and Jessica Napier.)

At any rate, Off the Map had a usable premise, basically Young Doctors Without Borders. There’s a great setting–medicine in the jungle–and all of the technical parts, such as cinematography and sound, are well done. The cast seems decent, although of course Dhavernas stands out. In the hands of competent writers, this could have been a really good series. Unfortunately the writing is as bad as I’ve seen. Sappy garbage, with every cliche in the book. The music is ham-handed and intrusive.

I got through the first 20 minutes or so of the first episode before I decided the series was hopeless. And I really wanted to like this series, because I like Dhavernas and enjoy watching her. Still, enough was enough. My first hint should have been the fact that IMDB rates this series 6.2 stars, which is truly terrible. Netflix let me down. The average of 3,000+ ratings on Netflix is 3.9 stars, although admittedly they did estimate I’d give it only 2.9 stars. I gave it one star, but only because that was the worst rating I could give it. Don’t even think about renting this stinker.


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Tuesday, 4 October 2011

08:25 – Barbara had another scare last night, when her sister called to tell her that she was taking their mom to the emergency room. She’d hurt her leg that afternoon while volunteering at the hospital, and of course at her age there’s always concern about broken bones. All turned out happily, though. Barbara’s mom had only sprained her knee. The emergency room docs put a brace on it and allowed her to return home.


I got email last night from my editor, Brian Jepson, with great news. O’Reilly has decided to do the biology book in four-color. Every book has a budget, based on expected production costs and projected sales. The only way Brian had been able to get this book approved originally was to put tight limits on page count (extra pages cost money) and printing costs (four-color costs a lot more money). So we went into the project with a strict page-count limit and a center section of full-color plates. Before long, I asked Brian if I could trade the color section for more page count, to which he agreed. I really didn’t want to give up color images completely, but I really needed the extra page count.

But apparently the cost of four-color printing has come down somewhat, and Brian said that when he was discussing things with his colleagues they commented that it makes no sense to do a biology lab book with monochrome images. I suspect the sales history of the chemistry lab book also might have had something to do with it. That book is what publishers call an “evergreen” title. That is, it continues selling steadily for many years. That’s in stark contrast to most titles, which sell 90% or even 99% of their total lifetime sales within a few months of publication. The biology lab book should have a similar sales trajectory to the chemistry lab book


10:15 – I just checked my Netflix disc queue and found that there isn’t much disc-only material that we care about. When I upgraded a couple weeks ago from streaming + one-disc to streaming + two-disc, our disc queue was jammed with 30 or 40 discs that we wanted, most of which are series that Barbara likes and that were initially disc-only. Several of those quickly changed to add streaming, including the most recent seasons available of Army Wives, Brothers & Sisters, and Grey’s Anatomy. As soon as that happened, I pulled them from our disc queue and added them to our instant queue. So we’ve gone from 30 or 40 discs we want down to four Sons of Anarchy S3 discs and a handful of others.

Meanwhile our instant queue now totals 94 items, including a dozen or more series that between them total hundreds of episodes. We are not, to put it mildly, short of things to watch, even without discs, particularly since Netflix is adding more streaming titles every day. Our anniversary date is the 26th of the month, so in three weeks I’m going to downgrade our plan to the $8/month streaming only option. We’ll do without discs for the next few months while we catch up on streaming material, if we ever do. Once there are a reasonable number of disc-only titles we want, I’ll bump it back up to include discs for a month or three and then drop back to streaming-only.

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Monday, 19 September 2011

09:52 – I’m sure Reed Hastings’ email will be reproduced elsewhere on the web, so I won’t bother. The big news, of course, is that Netflix is splitting into two independent companies, with Netflix keeping that name for streaming and the disc rental service renamed Qwikster. Separate memberships, separate queues, separate billing, separate user ratings, separate everything. Oh, and Netflix might as well have casually announced that GameFly is now toast, since Qwikster will also be renting games.

My first reaction was negative; I don’t really want to have to manage two separate queues without any links between them. The stuff we watch sometimes changes from disc-only to disc-plus-streaming and then back again. More than once, we’ve watched the first episodes of a long series on disc, watched others streaming, and then had to switch back to discs when the streaming contract ended. That hasn’t happened as much lately. Of the 92 titles in our instant queue, only three–The Planets, Walking with Cavemen, and Occupation–are currently showing as expiring. As usual, we get only a few days notice, in this case until the 23rd.

I really do wish that Netflix would negotiate permanent unlimited streaming licenses. It’s fine if they delay streaming availability until a few months after the DVD releases. For example, series 3 of Sons of Anarchy just released on DVD. Series 1 and 2 are available streaming, although only Netflix knows for how long. Series 3 will, no doubt, be available streaming in a few weeks or months. So why doesn’t Netflix negotiate a standard contract with the rights owners to Sons of Anarchy? Agree to pay them a fixed sum for permanent unlimited streaming for each episode as the new seasons become available, after a window to allow DVD sales. Most DVD set sales occur very soon after the set is released, and there’s little in the way of paying markets for old series episodes after that. Sure, a few people may buy episodes or even the entire season from iTunes or whatever, or they may be able to sell re-run rights to local TV stations, but an old series is basically spent in economic terms once the DVD set releases.

Licensing on this basis would be win-win-win for the copyright owners and for Qwikster and for Qwikster subscribers. The copyright owners would get “free money” from Qwikster, and Qwikster would build its back-catalog of good TV series and subscribers would have a lot of good content waiting to be discovered.

Of course, people like Barbara and me would love to see such a plan. More and more people are doing what we do; wait until a new series is available on Netflix/Qwikster before starting to watch it. I adore Emily VanCamp, for example, and she stars in a new series that debuts in a couple of days. In the past, I’d have set up our DVD recorder to record the episodes as they were broadcast and then zap the commercials. But we won’t watch it on broadcast TV. Instead, we’ll wait until next summer, when it will release on DVD, and watch it commercial-free.


Work continues on the biology book. I’m currently prototyping the biology kit and putting together purchase orders for a small number of the kits. I plan to have the book 100% complete by year-end, so I have to have kits ready to ship soon after that.

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Monday, 12 September 2011

08:41 – Yesterday, I went ahead and upgraded our Netflix account to 2-discs-at-a-time. We watch a lot of streaming stuff on Netflix, but a glance at my disc queue told me we needed to get more discs. There are about 30 discs at the top of the queue that have just released or will release this month, covering new seasons of six or seven TV series that Barbara follows, including Gossip Girl, House MD, Sons of Anarchy, Brothers & Sisters, Castle, Grey’s Anatomy, and one or two others. With the one-disc-at-a-time plan, it’d take us about four months just to get all those discs, not counting anything else we added.


The markets are expecting a Greek default, possibly as early as this week, and certainly before year-end. Given a CDS price, it’s a straightforward calculation to determine what the market estimates the probability of a default to be. Based on current CDS prices, the market estimates the likelihood of a Greek default in the short- to medium-term to be in the mid- to high-90% range.

Meanwhile, it’s pretty obvious that Germany is about to bail, so to speak, on the Greek bailout. Rather than sending more money down a rathole, Germany seems to intend to use that money to bailout its own banks, which will all be bankrupt if (when) Greece defaults. The German position seems to be that if that money must be spent, better to spend it recapitalizing Germany’s own banks than pouring good money after bad into Greece.

There is no longer any serious debate even within official EU circles that Greece will default. The questions are when and how. There has been a lot of talk about expelling Greece from the EU and the eurozone, which simply isn’t going to happen. For that to happen, the founding EU treaty would have to be modified, which would require the approval of all EU members, including Greece. Nor is there any mechanism for Greece leaving the EU and/or eurozone voluntarily. As a sovereign nation, Greece could of course simply announce its departure, but that would result in a chaotic bankruptcy.

And that is exactly the trump card that Greece holds, its only trump card. As I commented some months ago, the Greece situation reminds me of the scene in Blazing Saddles where the guy takes himself hostage and threatens to shoot himself unless everyone backs off. That is exactly the position Greece is in right now.

The thing is, at this point Greece is really immaterial to the euro crisis. Whatever Greece does or doesn’t do won’t affect events in any significant way. The real euro crisis is much, much larger than Greece. What matters are the debt crises of the larger nations, which started with Italy and Spain and have since expanded to include France and Belgium. Whether Greece departs the eurozone, voluntarily or involuntarily, those larger economies are also going down, and there’s simply no way to bail out even one of them, let alone all of them.

That’s why I’d bet that there are serious back-room discussions going on right now among the FANG nations, Finland, Austria, Netherlands, and Germany, about withdrawing from the current euro and forming a new eurozone comprising only nations with stronger economies. The cost to the FANG nations of doing that would be huge, but they pale into insignificance compared to the costs of continuing to subsidize the poor nations. A breakup of the euro is inevitable. The only question is the timing and form.


Our friends Paul and Mary were out of town over the weekend, so as usual I went over to pick up their mail and newspapers. When they had their security system installed, Paul gave me a personal numeric code for the keypad, as well as a codeword to give the monitoring service if anything ever went wrong. Fortunately.

So, yesterday I picked up their Sunday newspaper in the driveway and unlocked their front door. The system started beeping, as usual. I walked to the keypad and punched in my numeric code, as I’d done a hundred times or more before. The system went, very loudly, into intrusion mode. I stood and waiting for the alarm monitoring service person to challenge me, which she did. I gave her my verbal password, which she accepted as valid. She asked if I wanted her to call the police, and I told her no, that I was just taking care of the house for friends. I then told her what had happened, and she said I must have entered the wrong numeric code. I thought that was pretty unlikely, given that I tend not to forget numbers, but I tried it again, along with several permutations. No joy. So I asked her if she could reset the system so that I could just punch the Away key when I left. She said she couldn’t do that without permission from the homeowners and suggested I contact them. I told them that Paul and Mary had no land-line phone, that I didn’t have a cell phone, and that I didn’t know their cellphone numbers anyway. She said in that case she couldn’t help until I contacted them somehow and got them to authorize her to disable the system.

She disconnected, and I was left standing there with the alarm screaming. So I locked up the house and headed back to my house to call Paul or Mary and get things straightened out. By the time I got home, there was a phone message from Paul on our answering machine. As I was about to call him, he called me and said he’d talked to the security company and told them I was authorized to be there. He asked if I’d mind driving back over to their house and disarming the security system using their own numeric code. So I drove back over and found that the alarm was no longer sounding. Paul and Mary were already on their way back home, so I punched the disable key and entered their numeric code to turn off the system.

When Barbara got home from her parents, her only comment was that I needed a cell phone. I don’t have one now because I seldom leave the house, and the few times I do I’m usually with Barbara or a group of friends, all of whom carry cell phones. I figured if I got a cell phone, the battery would inevitably be dead any time I actually needed it, so I haven’t bothered. I suppose I should order a Boost Mobile prepaid phone, something like the Sanyo Mirro.

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