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On Tue, 04 Apr 2006 20:38:18 -0400, p wrote:

On Tue, 04 Apr 2006 03:37:06 -0400, mm
wrote:

**The first one lasted almost 20 and I'm going to put a good surge
suppressor in front of this one (hope that makes a difference.)

I'd go into the details of the features this has that I want, but it
would take a long time and is probably boring to most people.

I'm interested in hearing what those featires are, anyone who is
bored the list skip the posting.

I'm sorry I let so many days go by. I would email you two if you had
email addresses.

Primarily, after it starts either playing the outgoing or recording
the incoming message, it doesn't stop when I pick up the phone. This
is great when I'm in bed and don't have a pen and paper to make notes,
or I'm too sleepy. People leave their name and phone number, and the
machine takes it down for me. They also might say when I'm supposed
where.

At that point, I might say "Please pause for 7 seconds so that the
machine will hang up." and if they understand and are sufficiently
quiet, as at least my regular friends are, the machine senses the
quiet, beeps and hangs up. Then we can talk longer with no recording.

Sometimes I don't say that, and I let the machine record up to the
length of the tape. Even with friends, it helps me to review these
tapes to rehear the conversation, and I can get things that I missed
the first time. I don't save these tapes, and there would be nothing
embarrassing even if I, say, died before I had a chance to record over
them.

On a couple occasions, I have been quite burdened by the law in
Maryland and some other states that prevents recording phone
conversations. (remember Linda Tripp) But if they called and the
machine said leave a message, I think even if I got on later, that law
woudln't be applicable. In the most serious case, my mother's stock
broker was lying to my mother about me and to me about my mother, and
to both of us about what she was doing with the account. My mother
was 85 years old and fully competent, but I warn you that vultures are
more likely to steal from old people, even when they are competent.
She, the stock broker, churned my mothers account, causing her to pay
income taxes on realized capital gains, when my mother wasn't having
any high medical bills or other new expenses and there was no need to
buy or sell anything at all. My mother knew that she could refrain
from trading until she died, and then the stocks all got a new base
value without anyone in the family paying capital gains taxes on the
increase, some of it since my father died in 1955. That's the law.
But the stock broker worked it out, lied and said my mother had
approved it over the phone, so that my mother paid taxes on 40 years
of increase in value including inflation, at least 20,000 dollars more
in taxes just so the broker could make 5000 dollars. (Name of the
broker sent via email on request, probably the largest local broker in
Maryland.)

When you are old, set up your account to require written
authorization. Even though you may be fully competent, the broker
will rely on your age to make a tribunal (usually arbitration) think
that maybe you're not so compentent as you look, and maybe you did
approve it, even when you hadn't. When you're as old as my mother,
the broker will think, she may be dead by the time this goes to
arbitration, and indeed my mother was.

It's like one year in the dorm. Every night I slept soundly with my
door open, don't remmeber why. But the one night in the whole year
that I got drunk was the night someone came in and took my wallet. He
could have done it any night, but I seemed vulnerable drunk. So too
do old people seem vulnerable, even when they may be no more
vulnerable than anyone. But more people attack them, so it is
self-fulfilling.

When challenged, the stock broker relies on the fact that they say
that they do not give TAX advice. This sounds like they don't give
tax advice on complicated tax matters, but the example I gave above is
not complicated at all, it's known to every broker, they know they
would not be working in the client's interest, and some of them do it
anyhow. Because they want the commissions.

Another smaller matter, disssimilar from this one and unrelated to it,
is pending now, where I would like to record what is said.

Also, I like double cassette machines. So nothing they sell now is
what I really like. With double cassette, it is easy to have several
outgoing messages and to change them in a couple seconds, by changing
the tape. Easy to save incoming messages that need to be saved.

I like my old machine's logic. It was the top of the line and
everythign that coudl be done in person could be done remotely,
including changing the outgoing message, and it allowed for
interrupting the outgoing message with the pass number when I wanted
to play my message.

Also, I like the logic of this machine and have trouble with others,
including the one I'm using now, which was the best of the bunch.
Wwith my old machine, I used to be able to play the incoming messages
as often as I wanted, in a row, then rewind or not, depending on
whether I want to keep it or not. With the machine I was forced to
use, I press Play Recent and it rewinds and plays the messages since
the last time. But it won't do that a second time. I can press Play
All once too, but if after that, I rewind to the start and press
either Play, it won't play anything. I have to fast forward a bit to
what it considers the middle of the tape, and then press Play and then
it will play. This problem occurs other places in the tape too iirc
under certain circumstances. For a while I thought the machine was
broken. The manual studiously avoids saying anything about these
situations and now I'm sure the machine isn't broken. A Panasonic
Easa-Phone

And this is just what I remember. I haven't used the machine for more
than two years so there might be good features I've forgotten. There
haven't been any good features on any of the 10 machines I bought
since then, except the date and time stamp might be. But since I'm
home every night or call in once or twice a day for messages, and can
call in cheaply from out of town** when I'm away, no message has ever
been so old that I've really needed the date and time. In fact it
annoys me to have to spend the time listening to it before every
message.

Also most new ones let you skip to the start of the next message, and
delete messages in the middle. This is good, but the absence of these
things never bothered me and certanly not as much as the absense of
the things that I do miss.

**I rarely do that. When I'm away, I stop thinking about life back
here, except I woudl call once a week.

I'm a terrible person to buy presents for. Especially mechanical and
electronic ones. I know what I like, and that's often all that I
like. I don't need a lot of things, but what I have has to be just
so.

When I want to fix something, I have almost endless patience. I've
done one or two things with 100 possibilities -- I forget what they
are now -- and 1000 possibilities is only ten times as many. It
doesn't have to be done tomorrow, but when I'm done, that will be the
time.

After all this, I hate to tell you this, but I should. There was no
code on the bottom, but my friend sent me more stuff, including the
spare rubber belts I had bought but not used, and not the manual, but
the QUIK summary of controls, and on that his wife or he had long ago
written the code!!! And there is a zero in the code which means my
plan to do all non-zero codes would mean I would have done the first
900 combinations without finding it. It would have been in the last
100. So it woudl have taken twice as long as my estimate.

But I still benefitted greatly from the info about phone voltages and
ringing voltages. Phones were one of my first interests** and I've
wanted to know this stuff for years, before the two projects I asked
about ever existed. Besides the one remaining, there will be others
and this helps a lot to fill the big hole in my knowledge. It's useful
and satifying even when I"m not using it.

**In college in chicago, I even went to the Illinois Institute of
Technology just to read about phones. They only had one book that
represented my then sub-interest, and I couldn't check it out because
I didn't go to school there, but I spent hours reading it at their
library.

A big thanks, again, to all of you.