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Okay, so you may want to write this one down if you're alive in twenty twenty five, live in twenty twenty five. Pretty catchy, huh, I'm jimpoling. This is my view from the middle. So I better hurry up and produce this episode, and you all better hurry up and listen to it, because it'll get out of date real quick. Twenty twenty five will turn into twenty twenty six. You may be listening to this in twenty twenty six or twenty twenty seven, but I think you'll catch on to the concept here. How many people do you know refuse to accept modern ways of living? How many people do you know say things like back in my day? How many people do you know say, oh, I don't use the computer. I get a bit frustrated at times when I encounter people my age and say things like this. It gives my age a bad rep Oh, I'll get my grandson to show me to use my iPhone. Come on, folks, take a minute to figure it out. It's not all that difficult. I worked around a lot of technically smart people in the radio business, and whenever someone couldn't figure something out that they should have been able to figure out. We'd all yell take a class. What my line has always been, if you're alive in twenty twenty five, live in twenty twenty five, of course, insuring the current year. There are scammers out there who are counting on senior citizens having the I don't want to figure it out attitude. Now that I'm well to the north of age sixty five, I'm constantly bombarded with emails that hope I'm oblivious enough to buy into this complete nonsense. I get several emails each week, sometimes multiple ones each day, saying my credit card information needs updating on my Internet account, and if I don't click here and update it, my service will be cut off. I also get emails purportedly from Norton Anti Virus or mcavey saying that my computers infected with the virus. Click here to fix it. Or I'll get an email purportedly from PayPal confirming my purchase of software for four hundred and some odd dollars click here for more information, hoping I'll panic and start clicking away. Then there are messages purportedly from Apple saying that my iCloud drive is full. Click here directify the problem. Another doozy that some people fall for, or the text messages from county epaths or sun pass agencies saying their account is depleted a funds or their payment is overdue. Yep, you guessed it. Click here to solve the problem. And Oldie Buddy Goody is the Arabian prince who left you a million dollars. Click here to any of your bank information so we can send it to you. Another one I've seen appears to be coming from the US Postal Service or UPS or FedEx, saying they're trying to deliver important package, but they need some sort of payment information to do so click here to fix it. One of the more agreat just ones talks about how you owe money for a traffic ticket and if you don't click here and pay the fine right away, you'll lose your driving privileges and face fines and other legal actions up to and including imprisonment. And the most insulting one is the email from what looks to be from the Social Security Administration quote detecting a potential inconsistency in your recent report end quote whatever that means, and wanting you to click here to make sure you continue to get your benefits I shudder to think how many seniors who depend on Social Security fall for that one. Of course, when you start clicking here is when the problems start. Your computer can be infected with a virus or maltware or software that can skim your credit card, bank account information, social security number, and other personal information. You can also get into a screen where they want you to put in your personal information and god forbid, financial info like credit card numbers and bank account numbers. Of course, if you do that, you're likely to see large sums of money evaporate from your checking account or charge to your credit card, or even worse sometimes are the small amounts charged to your card that you don't tend to notice until it's too late. By the way, usually the best way to detect a scammer is to look at the from email address in your email client. Now you can google how to do this if you don't know how, it can be different depending on which email program you use. If you found and downloaded this podcast, I'll assume a modicum of computer literacy and you uhould be able to figure out how to look at the original from email address. If this email represented to look like it was from Amazon, telling you to update your payment information or your Prime account will be nuked. Is from someone with a email account, delete it, it's fake. If it's from someone with an Amazon dot Com address, then it might possibly maybe could be legitimate, but even then you might want to call them to be sure. If that from address is from goofy guy ripsnort dot com, then that email telling you your Social Security benefits are about to run out unless you take action now is probably most certainly bogus. Take a class. Someone must be falling for this stuff, otherwise it would be dying off, but instead it seems to be getting worse. I've even received emails that look like they're from my credit card company, complete with logos, mailing address, phone numbers that are all valid, but are totally bogus. And if you go down their garden path, you're likely to get scammed out of a lot of dough. Some of these guys running these scams are getting pretty good at it. I was suckered into the postal delivery thing last year because just coincidentally, I was expecting an important package and I thought it was legit. But thirty seconds after I put in my American Express card number, I realized what it was. I instantly canceled the card and got a new one. I never dial a phone so fast in my life. But some of these scammers aren't very smart. The emails may have what look like legitimate logos and company information on them, but have misspellings or sentences with sanks and broken English, indicating a foreign entity constructed them. But now with the advent of AI artificial intelligence chat GPT in the light, they can even get around that issue, making the bogus emails even harder to spot. But the senated thing here is there are a number of people, mostly seniors unfortunately, who don't understand technology and don't want to understand it. So on the surface, this stuff looks like it's on the level, and they go clicking here and getting themselves in all kinds of trouble. I was born in nineteen fifty six. I spent a good portion of my childhood watching a black and white Crosley console TV that took five minutes to warm up and had a huge eight inch screen on it. I propped a chair in front of it and put my face eighteen inches from the screen, watching Star Trek Hogan's heroes, Batman, get smart, Dick Van Dyke, Andy Griffith, Well, you get the idea. There was no remote control, there were no surround sound speakers, there was no high definition. There wasn't even any color. No DVR, not even VHS or god forbid, Betamax, no DVDs, no Blu Ray, no streaming services Netflix, Hulu at all, no satellite TV, not even cable TV. We had rabbit ears she had to adjust and weed out the snow in interference. We had three VHF channels for three networks, and later UHF station started popping up and you had to buy a separate converter box and antenna to get them. Now, that was some high tech stuff. We were live in the nineteen fifties. And living in the nineteen fifties, Missus Kiffner was a little old lady who lives in our block in Detroit. She was the first in the neighborhood to get a color TV set. She used to invite me over once a week to watch the color. As she put it, that was Sunday night when she and I watched The Wonderful World of Disney in color. My dad eventually won out and bought our first color console TV. I think it was twenty five inches or something like that. The color convergence was terrible and the picture would periodically turn green or have red outlines around people's heads, but it was what it was. We were alive in the nineteen sixties and living in the nineteen sixties. But Dad went out and bought this marvel of technology just so he could watch his favorite actually, I think only TV show, Hogan's Heroes. He loved to watch Hogi, as he called him. It was the one show my dad and I enjoyed watching together. I still watch it to this day, but now on my home plex video server. I think I watch it more for the connection to my dad than for anything else. My dad was an accountant. In addition to his job as personnel director and treasurer of the corporate Goodwill Industries Company, he also did some income tax for people a lot of our basement. This was before home computers, before even electronic calculators, at least the ones that a normal person could afford. But he had an adding machine. It was one of those hand cranked jobs at first, but then he upgraded to an electric one. My dad was not afraid of technology. I think that's probably where I got it from. But the adding machines in those days really only had two functions, adding and subtracting. If you wanted to multiply, you had to punch in the numbers and then hold down the ad key and count out the number of times you wanted to multiply. So if you wanted to multiply two hundred and thirty six times twelve, he punched in two thirty six, then held down the ad key until he clacked twelve times and edited it together. So I'd hear my dad downstairs during tax season whistling, don't fence me in off key, and that adding machine clacking constantly as he would multiply numbers. I'd like to think that if my dad were still alive today, he would be up with the times, at least as far as electronics go. As for me, besides my high tech Crosley black and white TV set with the UF converter, I had my transistor radio where I would listen to all the Detroit area radio stations and dream of someday being a disc jockey. Never got to be a disc jockey, although I spent forty years in the radio business doing almost everything else. But it all started with the transistor radio and oh my tape recorder. My gosh, I can't forget the tape recorder. Much like Ralphie and the Christmas Story and his burning desire to get a red writer bb gun, I was intent on getting a tape recorder. It was my favorite Christmas gift of all time when I was a kid. Somewhere. I still have a picture of me opening that present on Christmas Morning, revealing a small, real, real tape recorder that I would use to record myself and my favorite radio stations WJR and the Golden Tower of the Fisher Building CKLW, the Big Eight, first in the Motor City with twenty twenty news, WCAR, WXYZ. The list goes on and on. Later on, when I got my first stereo, I added FM station's WRIF, W four, WWWW and WDRQ. No, we didn't have serious XM satellite radio, but I was alive in the nineteen seventies and living in the nineteen seventies. If you're to walk into my house today, you'd see technology on full display. In practical usage. All the lights in our house are controlled with voice commands. I won't say the al Exa word, since in doing so, I'm likely to trigger all your al ex A devices. But she can control the lights, the air conditioning, the TV, the stove, the washer and dryer, and yes, even the little robot cleaner that mops the kitchen floor. We have a sixty inch flat screen with an Anchyo surround sound system and an invidious shield streaming box. We have far too many streaming service as we subscribe to. I mentioned the Plux video server. We have five computers, two iPads, two iPhones, and an Android tablet. We have an electronic Nest thermostat Wi Fi controlled garage door that I can open and close from anywhere in the world. We have Nest security cameras all over the place, along with a safe touch alarm system. So if you're thinking of robbing us of all the aforementioned things, think again. I have an upgrade our internet service to fiber optic, Yet, although it is now available, the need for it hasn't outweighed the inconvenience it would cause to transition our Internet accounts over. But if there was a way around it, and eventually there will be, I'll be first in line to upgrade. When I worked in the radio group. Before I retired, I could control the programming on my radio station, and, if necessary, in a hurricane emergency, the programming on all eight radio stations in our cluster with my iPhone. I bought a new car last July. It's a twenty twenty five Toyota Camery hybrid that's definitely smarter than I am. It took me a while to figure out all the things that can do, but I pretty much have it now. I haven't had to ask my grandson for help on it yet. Hey, I'm kidding. By the way, I wasn't really shopping for a hybrid, but I got a good deal in this car and it just happened to be a hybrid. Funny thing. Though I thought I was supposed to buy a hybrid to stop the global warming climate change crisis, I bought one, but I'm told the crisis still exists. I think that was deceived. When I first entered the radio business in nineteen seventy nine, they were still using turntables to play records, although not being a disc jockey, I've never got to use one of those. They were using carts tape cartridges that would have commercials, new sound bites, jingles and other assorted things on them that needed to be played on the air. My first job in radio is to dub radio features two to three minutes mostly syndicated vignettes onto krts for a radio station that ran in all news format. News copy was typed using manual typewriters on half sheets of paper. When I look back on it now, it was actually kind of fun to sit down and literally bang out a news story in one of those old, clunky manual typewriters. You can't really bang a story out on a computer. Well, you can, but you probably shouldn't if you don't want to replace your keyboard once a week. When I moved into management, I dragged my newspeople from manual typewriters to electronic typewriters, to Doss computers. We were alive in the nineteen eighties and livid in the nineteen eighties. I moved them to Windows computers with databases instead of flip card rollodexes. Insert nineteen nineties into the aforem engined mantra. We moved to cloud computing technology. We went from recording on reel to reel tape and carts to digital systems that could transmit audio product to the Internet or to any other radio station on the network across the country or around the world. We went from sending out affiliated stations on the Florida News Network paper logs to an internet based system, the first of its kind for any state radio network anywhere, a system still used to this day. We went from sending audio to radio stations via telephone line to satellite feeds to Internet streaming feeds. We went from only delivering news on the radio to adding in internet news services and social media. Ditto on the Mantra now in the two thousands. Okay, so maybe I'm not a TikTok our Snapchat guy. That's just my personal preference. But along with Facebook now an old or social platform, Instagram and x formerly Twitter, I know how they work. Probably a sixty nine year old man shouldn't be on Snapchat, but that's because it's targeted toward younger people, not because I'm afraid of it or not understanding it. My later years in the radio industry may be more of a computer technician and web developer than a traditional broadcaster. My longtime experienced newscasters moaned and complained at every transition, but eventually got used to it. I delivered my mantra each time. If you're alive in enter the year here, live in well, you get the idea twenty tens and then twenty twenties. So there I was in the middle, technology nipping at my heels as my career progressed, technology fully integrated in my house, my car, and my life. And then there are the resistors on the other side, people my age who refuse to even try to learn new technology. So yes, I get aggravated at those who constantly resist, who insists on living twenty or thirty years in the past and pining for the good old days. There are practical ways to approach it. You don't have to go overboard, but you don't have to dismiss it. Either. Technology will advance whether you're ready for it or not. I'd rather be on the side of making practical use of it to better my life than allowing it to defeat me. Click here. If you're alive and twenty twenty five, live in twenty twenty five. I'm Jim Paulding and that's my view from the middle. Can you identify one person in your life who has had a significant impact on you did you ever have a hero? Next on my View from the Middle. Have a story to tell about being in the middle, let us know. Email Jim at my View from the Middle dot com. That's Jim at my View from the Middle dot com.