Complicating My Life

August 23, 2026 — Pat Bertram

If everyone were honest, just think how different life would be. No need to protect yourself from theft, fraud, scams, hacking, and any number of other dishonest occupations that complicate life for the rest of us.

My brother called me to warn me that Microsoft Windows does automatic encryption when you close down your computer so that if it’s stolen, thieves can’t get into your records even if they can figure out your password. The problem is, if your computer is dropped (for example) and you get it fixed, the encryption goes into force, and you need your encryption code to get back into your own computer. Apparently, this code is about 40 characters long, so isn’t exactly memorizable by most people.

Anyway, since it took him hours and a separate computer to finally get his encryption code so he could get into his own computer, he thought he’d save me the same hassle in case I ever needed the code, and so he tried to walk me through the process of finding out what my encryption code is.

As it turned out, I couldn’t get into my Microsoft account because they wanted to send a security code to a defunct email. I was able to change the email to a current one, but meantime, they have placed a hold on the account for 30 days. I can still do things like check my email, but nothing beyond that until the end of next month.

So why was that first recovery email incorrect? I didn’t realize I’d ever given them a recovery email, so I didn’t change it when Microsoft made it near impossible for me to access that recovery email account.

And why was it impossible to access that recovery email? A year and a half ago, Microsoft informed me I would have to download an authenticator app to my phone so I could continue using that email account, the one associated with my webpage. The bizarre thing is that this particular email was never able to be downloaded to my phone, and the authenticator doesn’t work for PCs, so they were demanding something utterly unnecessary. Since I didn’t want to clutter my phone with something so ridiculous, I ended up having to go through the insanity of updating my accounts with the new email. Except, apparently, for Microsoft.

I wondered if anything had changed, so I tried to log into my webpage and check the status of the email from there. First, they wanted me to download an authenticator app, and when I passed on that, they sent a code to my phone, which I used. Then they again told me to download the authenticator app, and when again I didn’t do it, the same page came up asking for my phone so they could send me a second security code. I gave them the number again and they said, “You already used that number. We need another one.”

So, since I don’t have another phone, I still can’t access that email, and now I can’t even access my web page. You’d think I was big business rather than a solitary person with almost nothing to protect.

My webpage is paid up for five more years, and who knows what might happen. Considering that my online presence as well as my following is steadily shrinking (in fact, probably because of my recent political commentary, I’ve lost three-fourths of my readers), I might let the site go rather than go through all the foofaraw to pay for additional years. Luckily, my website was updated a couple of years ago, and nothing has changed since then, so I’m fine. And who knows — in five years I might be finished with the whole online thing. (If, in fact, in this world, anyone can be finished with it.)

So, after all that hassle, with nothing accomplished, I asked my brother what would happen if I just turned off the encryption. My computer never leaves my desk, so I’m not in danger of inadvertently losing it, and if someone breaks into my house and steals the computer, I’ll have more troubles than an encryption code could solve.

As it turns out, it is possible to turn off the encryption code, but it takes perhaps 8 hours for the computer to completely unencrypt everything. So I left everything as is until next month at least.

Why does everything have to be so complicated? Oh, right. It’s because of all those dishonest folk who are so willing to trespass on the good graces of the rest of us.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, How to, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Technology in 2046

July 16, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
What’s a piece of technology you’re convinced will exist in 20 years?
View all responses

I’m not convinced anything will exist in twenty years. In fact, I truly doubt I will exist in twenty years, so it won’t matter to me what, if any, technology will exist at that time. Chances are, technology will progress as it always has, with artificial intelligence becoming more and more prevalent and changing human lives in ways we can’t even imagine. Of course we can’t imagine — the changes will be coming from non-human intelligence, something so alien that it certainly doesn’t care about anything human. Any pretense at human emotion emanating from those ones and zeros will be just that — pretense.

Besides, we have no idea, really, when and if a cosmic catastrophe will happen. Over the billions of years the earth has existed, there have been many such events, events that seem to have changed the earth’s environment almost overnight. We all know of such events — the dinosaur extinction and the wooly mammoth extinction, to name two. The prevalence of flood myths, of the world standing still, of night becoming day all seem to reference other extinction events.

The truth is, despite all our vaunted science expertise, we really don’t have that much knowledge about how the sun — or any other cosmic body — affected the earth over those billions of years. Our human history is such a tiny fraction of the earth’s history. We live in a rather temperate and stable time, when we think the way the world is today is the way it always was and always will be. What else explains the prevalence of mobile home parks being set up in tornado alleys, towns being constructed on flood plains, and people building cabins in fire zones? When terrible things happen to people in these areas, it’s always a shock, though it shouldn’t be. What is, wasn’t always. A dry flood plain today wasn’t always dry, and it’s still subject to rare and not-so-rare floods.

And if the cosmos weren’t enough of an inimical neighborhood, we have the political situation, too. Here in this country, it used to be the goals were the same, the differences in political parties were due to differences in the means of achieving those goals. Now the goals are so widely divergent they hardly seem to be describing the same country. Most people want us to remain a constitutional republic, but a growing vocal and volatile group wants to tear the whole thing down, get rid of the constitution, the government, the entire criminal justice system, and let chaos and poverty take over. (Which I don’t understand. What do these people think is going to happen to them when they have destroyed this country? They will be living here, too. Or are they so stupid as to they think they will be the ones running things? Or so brainwashed as to believe the country will suddenly become a utopia with no crime and Kumbaya everywhere?)

Some people believe we’re headed toward a civil war. Others think we’re heading toward a world war, complete with nuclear weapons going off everywhere.

I don’t want to believe either of those scenarios, just as I don’t want to believe in a major cosmic event, but what I’ve learned during my many years is that the world does not run on my beliefs. If it did run on my beliefs, we would be living in a utopia because everyone would be spending a lot of time at home, working in a garden, reading, or writing rather tame blogs without a lot of emotion, and certainly no rage or outrage. Just kindness and smiles for everyone — well, almost everyone.

Still, let’s assume there are no major upheavals, civil or cosmic, and in twenty years, the world is more or less continuing on the same road to total technology as it is today. I still wouldn’t have an answer to the question because I’m not convinced of much of anything, though I’m pretty sure technology will have outpaced my need for it. To be honest, it already has.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in being me, history/myth, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 6 Comments »

Dotting Eyes

June 12, 2026 — Pat Bertram

So, artificial intelligence is supposed to run the world in the future? Good luck with that!

This comment wasn’t planned, but it just hit me as I am writing — if AI, or at least Generative AI (or as I once accidentally called it: degenerative AI) learns from people, and half the population is, by definition of average intelligence or below, then how will it ever get smarter than humans? And oh, yes, while I’m on this topic, people say that you can tell what AI has written by the M-dashes. Those are the long dashes I use in my articles all the time — eight in this piece alone, by last count — and I guarantee nothing I write is touched by anything artificial. Well, the computer — my fingers do touch that — but as for help with writing? No. Absolutely not. The point of writing is . . . well, to write. Having a voice in a machine do my writing for me would completely defeat the purpose of connecting with my own inner voice and ultimately with other human voices — not vocal voices since obviously I can’t hear people who read my work, but voice as in a person’s unique way of phrasing, unique tone, unique point of view.

But “voice” brings me back to what I came here to say.

I was listening to a clip yesterday from one of the black conservatives I occasionally pay attention to. I started doing so in order to find out what they think about being used to shore up the left’s anti-voter ID stance, and they don’t like it. They know it’s not Jim Crow-2, since their parents went through the real thing and so they know the truth of it. And they don’t like being patronized as if they were too stupid to figure out how to get an ID or how to prove their citizenship. (To be honest, I think the people I listen to are more educated, more coherent, and richer than those treating them as if they needed their hands held.)

Anyway, somewhere along the line during this two-minute clip, I lost track of what the speaker was saying because I was stunned into immobility. I simply couldn’t believe how AI translated his speech to text. He used the phrase “dot your Is and cross your Ts,” and what appeared on the screen was “Dot your eyes and cross your teeth.”

Um. Yeah. It might be artificial but it sure isn’t intelligent!

“Dotting eyes” wouldn’t necessarily be an erroneous transcription if he were talking about art, since that tiny dot in the eye of a painted face is what makes the depicted creature — animal or human — seem alive. And some people are born with teeth that come in crooked, so I suppose in some cases, it’s possible for teeth to be crossed, though I can’t really picture it. (No surprise since I am not able to visualize anything — all I ever see when I close my eyes and mentally try to call up an image is . . . black.)

But still — dotting eyes and crossing teeth? I sure hope the AI systems that run weaponry are a lot smarter than that or we are all doomed.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Posted in blogging, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment »

Uninventing

January 18, 2026 — Pat Bertram
Daily writing prompt
If you could un-invent something, what would it be?
View all responses

I spent a lot of time thinking about this question because it seems as if there should be things in our lives that need uninventing, but I can’t think of any. There are a lot of things that have far reaching ramifications that I don’t like, such as generative artificial intelligence, but since it’s a direct result of computers and the internet, if it was un-invented, it would simply be reinvented.

There are things I don’t like, of course, but I try to stay away from them. It’s easy enough to do, most of the time. Keep the computer off, put the phone on airplane mode (as I do at night since no one is depending on me, and even if there were, there is nothing I could do about it that late anyway), don’t read books published after 2022 unless I’m familiar with the author.

Even though in some form, artificial intelligence has been around since the 1960s, models for the public like ChatGPT weren’t released until late 2022, and it seems as if the writing world has gobbled up the technology. People like that they can write a book in a day! Yay! Well, yay for them, not for me. I read to connect with the author’s view of the world, to find perhaps more depth to my own world. Connecting with artificial intelligence would not be the same thing at all. I’m sure, with time, generative AI will master even the complexity of human thought and emotions, developing novels that have layers to them, but I’m not interested.

Actually, I’m not interested in most authors who were first published in the past ten or fifteen years. There seems to be an underlying nastiness to so many of them, with unreliable characters lying in their own POV about what they did and about other characters, so the reader doesn’t know and can’t guess how appalling the unreliable character is until the end when you find out they were the bad guy all along. Eek. I don’t know if this is the sort of story new writers prefer or if it’s what editors are looking for, but either way, I don’t like being left with a feeling of squalor, as if there’s a thin film of filth on my soul.

But I am getting away from the point of what I would uninvent — nothing. On the other hand, if I could get rid of some policies, that I would gladly do.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.

Posted in culture, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 8 Comments »