Dr Copa Scrip for Success

One of the things that I enjoy a lot about where we live is the fact that we have three acres of land, and live across from a large farm. On our land, about half of it is woods. We don’t really notice our neighbors very much, the landscaping has been nicely done so that their houses are not immediately visible out of most of our windows. I like the fact that at night there is no light pollution, so we can look up at the sky and see the stars. For the most part, the only sounds we hear are the sounds of the livestock from the farm across the street, or the birds singing.

One of the things that has surprised me about living out here is how many of my neighbors say that they can’t get high speed Internet at their homes. I can remember when we lived in New England we were stuck with slow dial-up, but technology has advanced considerably and now it seems that people can get high speed wild blue Internet service just about anywhere in the country!

The next time I meet someone who says that they can’t get high speed Internet at their place, I’m going to ask them if they’ve tried satellite internet. It’s worth a try!

One of the reasons we chose this house to buy was because it had a propane fireplace in the family room. We reasoned that it would be a good emergency heat source in the event that we lost electricity during a storm. Well, we have used it once or twice, just for atmosphere, not really for heat, but let me tell you that fireplace certainly did heat up that room!

Well, we DID lose electricity yesterday due to that blizzard, so I went to turn on the fireplace. Wouldn’t you know that fireplace would not start up? I couldn’t get the gas to turn on! So I brought our kero-sun heater into the house from the garage and lit that up for heat. My wife complained that the fumes gave her a headache and she cracked open a window for ventilation. She was convinced we were going to die of some kind of cabon monoxide poisoning. I’m sure if we had been able to get on the Internet at that point she would have been looking that up!

I think that DSL service is too limited for most people – I don’t understand how and why the technology of DSL only allows for service withing a short distance from the DSLAM location.  I can’t imagine that very many people live within those boundaries!  I do think that people who have children in school should have some form of Internet, even if it is slow.  These kids are going to need Internet access more frequently as the progress through school.  And mobile broadband is just too expensive at this point for people to be able to use that service for personal use.

Isn’t technology wonderful when it works?  And it’s absolutely hateful when it doesn’t work the way it is supposed to!  I’ve been around long enough to know that computer glitches are the work of the technology demons that hover over and around everyone who uses the computer.  At any moment the blue screen of death could appear!  In the not too distant past, even minor computer glitches could paralyze an office for a day or two; waiting for the “computer guy” to show up to fix the problem, or even worse the computer would have to be taken to an off-premise site for a week or more.  Ahhhh….. those were the “bad ol’ days!” of the pioneering days of the personal computer.

In the modern day, remote desktop software can be, and often is, the answer to many of the problems that can arise in an office full of computers.  This secure software enables a user to be in one location and access the computers in a different location to trouble-shoot and hopefully repair what is wrong with the troubled computer.  So if the problem with the computer is not something as drastic as the motherboard frying, the quick-fix is a real possibility with this type of technology.

Have you noticed that when you call a large company that you almost never get a real live person quickly?  I recently was calling my health insurance company to try to get information about some of the claims that they should have received and processed.  I found that instead of the traditional “press 1, press 2″ prompts that I’ve become accustomed to, I was getting an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. 

My ivr customer experience was frustrating in this case because the machine could not recognize what I was saying.  I think that I speak English perfectly well, but my wife says that I have a pretty thick New England accent.  Very aggravating if you are supposed to speak answers into the phone and the machine on the other end keeps replying “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand your answer.  Please repeat…..”  I got frustrated and handed the phone to my wife, who does NOT have a New England accent.   She even found herself having to repeat her answers several times for the doggone thing to go through!  I think there are some improvements to be made in this kind of system!

A more exciting advance in self service technologies is the voice recognition biometric technology.  This type of technology is used in security situations – it is like taking fingerprints of your voice.  I think this will be a great tool in the area of banking and law enforcement!  This can help law enforcement track down suspects who have gone so far as to go through plastic surgery to change their appearance!