Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Give Me a Ring Some Time

There was a simpler time, a few cell phones ago, when I created ring tones and had a specific ring tone for various people.  When Char called, it was the Cal fight song, for example.  I can't remember what other ring tones I had.  It was really kind of silly, actually, because I almost never get phone calls.  It's either Jeri or Ned or very rarely my mother's step son or Tom.

I have lots of numbers in my phone, but if I get three phone calls in a week, that's a big week.  But I sure had fun picking out "meaningful" songs, creating ring tones, and using them.

Now that I have this super-duper iPhone, I don't have a clue how to add my own ring tones, or how to make them.  Oh, I'm sure that if I spent a lot of time searching, I could figure it out, but I just go with the ones that came with the phone. (And I suspect you can no longer get a program to make your own ring tone for free.)

Char gets a ring from a bell tower, which is like the campanile in Berkeley.  Not as meaningful as the Cal fight song, but the best I could do.

For Jeri there is a duck sound, since I remember the duck boats in Boston.

Walt has a dog bark, which seems logical.

Ned has a "boing" sound (I don't know why) and Tom is set up for the sound of a motorcycle (because he once had a motorcycle), but in all honesty, I don't remember ever hearing it.

As for the rest of my contacts, they just get the generic ring tone.  Which is fine, if boring.
How I'd love to think long and hard about what would be the perfect sound for each person.  Jeri has a home made sound on her phone...it's Phil saying "Short Stack!"  On her old phone she set it up so it was the notification of a text message from Phil, but now she can't set up separate ring tones for separate people when they send texts.

But all the advances in telephone technology have taken all the fun out of having a cell phone.
For that matter, when we got our new land line, years ago, I found out I could choose personalized ring tones.  Whenever Walt calls, it plays the William Tell Overture, but I no longer know how to do that or where to find imbedded ring tones if they exist.  But since Walt calls me more than anybody else, I suppose that doesn't really make a difference.



In Beauty and the Beast, all of the household servants who are gradually being turned into pieces of furniture or other household items, look on the blossoming relationship between Beauty and the Beast and have hope that the curse will soon be lifted and they will be "human again."

That song has been running through my head all day today, as the couple of doses of cold medication and dozens of throat lozenges have worked their magic and other than a few bad coughing spells, I have been cough free.

I am feeling so well that I am going to Atria tomorrow.  I can't remember when I was last there, but it might have been before Christmas.  My mother came here, but I haven't been there.  When they called to say she needed toiletries was about when the creeping crud began descending and I just bought a bag of soap and stuff and dropped it off for her at the front desk.

I feel guilty for not calling to explain, but if she figured out how to answer the phone, she wouldn't understand and if she understood, she wouldn't remember so there didn't seem to be any point.  But I will load up my pockets with throat lozenges and make up for lost time tomorrow.

 
Yesterday I finally figured out to do a setting on our smart TV.  It is supposed to have closed captioning and I have tried several times to use it, but to no avail.  But with spending the day in front of the TV yesterday and determined to sleep my way to health, I checked out some settings and by golly, found the right control, not the one I had been using.  So I can now turn closed captioning off and on and I watched the latest episode of Last Tango in Halifax (a show I love) and understood everything  Normally, I miss about 3/4 of the dialog because of the northern British accents and I merely get the gist of what is going on.  But yesterday I understood it all.  This opens up a whole new world of British drama for me.

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