Poor little rich kids (tweet, tweet)

All you slobs out there probably think that it’s pretty darned easy being ultra-wealthy.

Well, let me tell you…

Even when you get beyond the fact that so many of the clearly envious great unwashed are clamoring for them to pay their so-called “fair share” of taxes, there’s the day to day problems associated with being a job creator for those faceless, thankless minions in China and India for whom jobs are being created. And the even more pedestrian issue of finding good help-around-the-house(s)  who won’t go yapping (on their blogs, in their tweets, to the National Enquirer, in tell-all books) about you and your private, personal, wealth and job creating lives at the first chance. (You know, one good thing about the illegals. Not only do they work cheap, but a lot of them don’t speak English. I’m telling you, it just gets harder and harder for the rich.)

Then there’s coping with the hangers-on who probably just pretend to like you in hopes that you’ll give them a used tiara, or something.

In truth, being wealthy may remove a teensie-weensie bit of anxiety about whether you’re going to be eating cat food in your old age and/or sleeping over a heating grate. And it may enable you to buy a raft of swell stuff without fumbling around trying to find the price tag without making it obvious to the sales person that you’re fumbling around trying to find the sales tag.

Come on, who wouldn’t want an iPad in every room, in every home? Who wouldn’t want 2,000 thread count sheets? And cashmere dust rags?

But big money can also buy you big trouble. And some of that big trouble’s social-media related. Especially when your poor little kids are using it.

Take the situation that the children of Michael Dell have found themselves in.

Alexa, a recent high school grad, went and posted a picture of her 15 year old brother Zachary on this tremendously interesting and relevant Tumblr site called the Rich Kids of Instagram. (Seriously, as an aside, you should absolutely go and wander through RKOI. You will regret that you ever doubted for a New York minute that it isn’t difficult being the scion of someone who’s well to do enough to allow you to take private helicopter rides around San Tropez. Truly, you will stop channeling your inner Robespierre and start feeling a whole yacht-load of sympathy for those poor rich folks.)

Anyway, the picture of Zachary that Alexa posted on RKOI – now, alas, taken down – was of young Master Dell scarfing down a lush buffet while seated in the family jet, heading for a no-doubt well-earned vacation on Fiji.

Anyone with a bit of curiosity could see that Alexa had posted the picture on Instagram and pointed to it via her Twitter account. On that same Twitter account, Alexa happily detailed her every move, including the exact days she would arrive in, say, New York, and where she was shopping. She also put up such things as her high school graduation dinner invitation that foretold where (time, date, location) Michael Dell and his wife would be in a couple of weeks’ time. (Source: Business Week.)

Which would not be that big a deal – my sister Trish updates her FB when we’re sitting in the bleachers at Fenway Park (this year, given how crapoid the team is, there’s nothing going on on the field that’s all that riveting) - if, unlike my sister Trish, Michael Dell wasn’t spending:

…about $2.7 million a year for the security protection of his family, according to Dell regulatory filings.

Which, I guess, must mean that $2.7 million worth of security is part of his compensation package. But it also means that Dell is paying $50K a week for security. Which seems to translate into quite a few reasonably well paid, round the clock security folks watching out for Dell, his beloved, and his possessions.  $2.7 million a year in security!  Presumably, if you’re paying it, you’re needing it. Now that, my friends, underscores the point that a life of financial ease is not necessarily a life of personal ease.

Given the security outlay,

…you can imagine how pleased [Dell] must have been to see his children’s jaunt to Fiji detailed on a catchy website and his daughter providing an online diary of her life, replete with GPS locations dished out by her cell phone.

Alas, Alexa’s Twitter account has been shuttered. Dell is mum on whether it was because of security concerns, but the speculation is that security’s the reason.

Jason Thorsett, a manager at a bodyguard company, figures that Dell’s security team went bonkers when they saw the Dells’ locations being given away.

“I’m sure they called the dad and shut it down,” he says. “It’s innocent on the kids’ behalf, but social networking has become the bane of our existence. They undo a lot of hard work on Facebook and Twitter.”

All those 140 character bread-crumb trails leading kidnappers to their targets.

“Twitter is the worst because it’s so instantaneous,” Thorsett says. “You get that GPS location of exactly where you are. It’s just insane.”

What did I tell you?

It is SO not easy being ultra-wealthy.

Ah, what a pleasure it is to renew my Kaspersky license through Best Buy

I’m a clean-living kind of gal, and that goes for my computer hygiene, too. I make it a practice to practice safe computing, and have been doing so for the last couple of years with Kaspersky, which I purchased through Best Buy.

So in early July, when I got a notice from Best Buy inviting me to re-up my subscription, which was set to expire on August 3rd, I readily responded.

After all, when it comes to a clean computing, you don’t have to ask me twice. I am so there.

So I went ahead and renewed for another year, printed out my receipt, and figured that, anti-virus and malware-wise, I would be good to go until August 2013.

A few weeks later, I got another note, warning me that my subscription was going to run out shortly, and that my trusty computer would become – gulp! – vulnerable.

I checked to make sure that I hadn’t hallucinated renewing, and found that I hadn’t.

So I called Best Buy (which, by the way, I’ve always found to have very helpful customer service and support).

The BestBuy person told me that my renewal was on track, but that the way “the system” was set up – not sure if this was on the Kaspersky or the Best Buy end, but I’m thinking it’s Kaspersky – the renewal is not processed until the day of, thus making sure that you get the whole year you paid for.

Now I can’t say that this made a whole hell of a lot of sense to me.

Why wasn’t “the system” set up to just put in the new end date? Why wasn’t “the system” set up to stop sending me warnings.

This second question became even more apparent (and irksome) to me as D-Day approached and I began getting daily dire warnings about not renewing.

Again, I called. Again, I was reassured that my renewal was in order.

And still the stalking continued.

On renewal day, I got a message letting me know that my subscription had lapsed – gee, thanks – and that I’d better renew. (Been there, done that.)

Concerned about my exposure, I called Best Buy once again.

Oh, they told me, the processing’s done at the end of the day, and yours should go through. Meanwhile, just run a scan. Even though it says that you’re not protected, heh, heh, you are, and you’ll be just fine.

As indeed I was.

48 hours later I got this e-mail:

Hello Maureen,
Congrats! Your Kaspersky Anti-Virus has been renewed. These charges will be applied to the credit card provided and will enroll you in yearly automatic renewals to ensure continued protection. Enjoy continuous anti-virus protection for your product.

There has got to be a better way to handle renewals than continuously annoying folks who’ve already renewed. And blaming “the system…” Well, that system is man-made and, thus, can be man-updated. I can’t imagine it would be all that difficult to program in a few lines to turn off the stalking e-mails for those who have already re-upped (even if, behind the scenes, the renewal won’t really be processed until later in the game). Surely, my multiple calls to the customer service line, when multiplied by thousands of others, would cost justify making a fix to “the system.”

Perhaps this an effort to goad people into automatic renewal. Which I actually don’t like all that much: with the shelf life of my average laptop, I’ll always be in mid-cycle somewhere along the way, and since you get 6 months Kaspersky free at Best Buy to begin with…

Well, I suppose that, given the myriad little aggravations that life throws everyone’s way, I shouldn’t allow myself to get so wound up about this little annoy-een. Still….

Grrrr, grrr, grr-dy, grr, grr….

Ambi-texterous

All sporting eyes may be on London these days, but the what- up/RFLMAO brigade are looking no further than Times Square where, yesterday, our nation’s texters supreme had a Go 4 the Au at the 6th annual LG U.S. National Texting Competition.

Eleven competitors, ranging in age from 16 to 24, vied for the title and, perhaps more important, the $50K grand prize. (What do you make of a sport where the masters’ division starts at 25?)

Wisconsin’s Austin Weirschke pulled something of a Michael Phelps, and won for the second year in a row.

In case you’re no more familiar with the particulars of texting competitions than you are, say, with those of dressage or water polo:

The competition tests three skills: speed, accuracy and dexterity. There are three rounds to the competition: texting while blind-folded, texting with hands behind their backs and Text Blitz, where phrases are shown to the contestants for a length of time and they have to copy it as fast as they can before the next one. (Source: Boston.com)

While no one that I’ve seen is contesting Austin’s win, the contest itself is not without controversy. The source here is the use of physical keyboard, rather than touch screen.

This is no surprise – LG is, after all, the sponsor, and they’re a QWERTY kind of provider. Plus when they started the competition back in the day, there were no smartphones, and texters were all texting on cell phones. (Remember hitting the abc button three times to make it go “c”?) So when LG came through with the slide-out QWERTY keyboard, it was a real breakthrough.

Now, most smartphones use the touchscreen approach. Even the LG phone used in the championship lets you go touchscreen if you want.

LG did include a touchscreen component to last year’s competition, but touchscreen screwed up the flow of the contest, and slowed the contestants down. Speed rules, so this year’s contest went back to pure keyboard.

Thus the LG contest is being pooh-poohed in some quarters. One quarter – not being self-serving or anything like that – is Swiftkey, which makes keyboard software for Android devices that accelerates typing. Their CMO, Joe Braidwood said that:

…he thinks the competition is outdated and joked that "it's like forcing people to ride push scooters when they could have motor bikes. You can't have a modern day race with an old school device." (Source: ABC News.)

And, in fact, the Guinness World Record for fastest text message on earth is held by someone who used Swiftkey-like keyboard software. But to keep things on an even keel:

Currently the Guinness World Records has two records for the fastest text message ever sent -- one for a message sent on a touchscreen and one sent on a phone with a physical keyboard.

I am unlikely to win either one.

I’m a reasonably fast and accurate typist, and a reasonably slow and inaccurate texter.

I use a touchscreen for texting, by the way. When I got my first smartphone a few years back – a Blackberry – I thought at first that I would want the physical keyboard. But when I saw what it looked like, well, push scooter to moped works as an analogy. So does ‘it looked like you were carrying around a typewriter.’ It was too old-school looking even for me. But perhaps I would be a more fluent texter if I did have an old QWERTY physical keyboard to punch around.

As it stands, I find that I really have to pay attention when I text. And paying attention is something that I usually don’t bother to do until after I’ve hit the “send” button and find that the word “head” went through as “dead”. I’m always sending out errata texts “miss” = “loss”, “clown” = “nightgown”.

QWERTY or touchscreen. I’m not apt to win any texting contest.

My typing, though, is pretty okay.

That’s thanks to the touch-typing course I took at Worcester’s Classical High the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in high school. The course mostly entailed monotonous, repetitive typing exercises:

A-S-D-F space Semi-L-K-J

rug jug bug rug jug bug

While I never became a speed typist – you could only go so fast on a manual typewriter before the keys would jam –  this method did get you familiar with the keyboard without having to look at it, and with using all those fingers and thumbs. No hunt and peck for me, my friends. Too bad there’s almost no such thing as transcribing a handwritten manuscript anymore.

While I am a touch typist on a keyboard, I absolutely do need to look at the touchscreen when I’m texting. Perhaps if I were willing to practice more. Perhaps if I treated texting more as a sport. Which, according to LG's Director of Trade and Experiential Marketing, Carl Brown, to his contestants, it is:

"The thing that surprised us the most is how these contestants really look at texting as a sport. They train for it, they recruit texting buddies," Brown said. Turns out texting is more like the Olympic games than we thought.

If you want to congratulate Gold Medalist Austin, you can ping him on the contests FB page.

Ah, the thrill of victory the agony of defeat. (Or, rather the agony of de-thumb.)