Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

Oh Yes, It's Time Again...

... to discuss the voicemails I get for The Dr. Phil Show. And no, that's not my ego crowing about my mix of storytelling, performance art and science in my Physics classes. It's people trying to get that Other Dr. Phil. You know, friend of Oprah. Has a big TV show. Is going bald.

Take today. Google "dr. phil" and I show up on hits 9 and 10 of the first page. Try "dr. phil show" and a site for fanmail for the Dr. Phil Show shows up as hit 67 and I don't show up until, well, I didn't show up at all in the first 300 hits. Try "dr. phil address" and ding-ding-ding!, I'm #5! Of course this web page says:

I am NOT the "other" Dr. Phil -- Dr. Phil McGraw -- who has the TV show. Please do NOT mail or call me with your problems!
I teach Physics courses to science and engineering students at Western Michigan University. Sorry. You might want to try clicking on THIS link to the Dr. Phil Show for help.

For Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon...

I then did a search on my university office phone number and hit #10 was this:


Yikes! Red flag alert! Look at the URL -- would you go to a place like that? And what the hell does an Oster food grinder have to do with the Dr. Phil Show? (evil grin)

I'm sure this isn't the only "sewer" site out there -- this is how people get my phone number. It's an aggregater site, with text run together from a whole lot of websites about Dr. Phil, so that it'll show up in Google. I got that from Google's cached copy -- the original page tries to go somewhere else and Norton Anti-Virus announces that someone is trying to attack your computer. Nice.

Though I will admit that the full text of my "I am not the Dr. Phil on TV" is in their page. Just not on their Google search snippet. Not that you'd want to go to a nasty piece of work like that to begin with.

So I Get Messages

Today there were three messages. The first was a hangup. Second told me in no uncertain terms that my outgoing message couldn't be understood and that I need to rerecord it -- repeated three times -- and that they are trying to get in touch with the Dr. Phil Show and would I call them back. And then they didn't leave their number. The third was from late last night, a very troubled sounding person desperate to talk to Dr. Phil from Washington state. Sigh.

I can't help these people. They don't believe me anyway, they are sure they HAVE found the second phone number for Dr. Phil and won't take No for an answer.

As for my outgoing message, I called it from my office on my cellphone. Surrounded by computers and such, I don't have the best reception here anyway. Plus cellphone fidelity combined with the Voice Over Internet phone system they switched to, isn't perfect. But the real problem with my message is that it explains that I teach Physics at Western Michigan University, and if you are a student of mine, to say which course you are in during your message. See, the problem is the message isn't understandable because the words aren't what these people want to hear.

Sigh.

To delete this message, press 7. To hear other options... 7... Message erased. Next message...

Dr. Phil

The current 10-year meme on LJ...

Unlike the "years meme" in February 2009, doing the years with "the ones" seems to hit all the low spots between the big years. (grin) Have to do much backfilling and foreshadowing. (double-grin)

March 2011
Age 52. Still living in West Michigan in a house which is almost 18 years old. Mrs. Dr. Phil and I have been married for 27 years. We are down to two 18 years old cats -- Sam is a ridiculously healthy diabetic cat and Blue is very skinny but still full of it. I'm in my 57th semester of teaching Physics, still at Western Michigan University. I have been submitting my SF writing to markets for nine years now and have fourteen SF short stories published, including two SFWA-eligible stories in WOTF-XXIV and Analog, plus another story to be published Real Soon Now. I have two completed novels I need to edit and send out again. I've had one short story on a movie option. And I've had a professional website at dr-phil-physics.com for three years. My LiveJournal and Facebook friends have been greatly expanded by going to Clarion in 2004 and WOTF in 2008, as well as several Midwest SF cons, plus my membership in an "outlaw" group (or maybe it's just an "outlier" group) called the UCF. (grin) And after years of neglect, I have upgraded my Nikon cameras to a Kodak DCS Pro SLR/n digital. NASA Space Shuttle Discovery has just landed from its last flight.

March 2001
Age 42. We are six months from 9/11 and not worrying about terrorists, airplanes or falling skyscrapers. Still in West Michigan. I am comfortably settled into our eight year old house, with Mrs. Dr. Phil and our three cats (Bagel, Blue and Sam). Mrs. Dr. Phil is a librarian at GVSU, and I teach Physics part-time at WMU. It will be more than a year before I get around to sending any of my writing out into the wild -- but I have around two million words written already. In two years we will leap at a chance to travel abroad to Helsinki. It's still a year before I put up my first webpage at WMU and worry about how few students have home Internet access. On 21 March 2001 the Soviet/Russian space station Mir is deorbited and disposed of. In two years NASA Space Shuttle Columbia will break up on re-entry during STS-107.

March 1991
Age 32. Still in the U.P., but not for much longer. It's almost two years since I got my Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Michigan Tech -- and the Physics job market is extremely sparse. I'm traveling to various APS, AAPT and ACS meetings, including the big APS March Meeting, but there are no nibbles for anyone. After seven and a half years, Mrs. Dr. Phil will take a job this summer at Grand Valley State University, we will rent a brand new duplex in Allendale from the man who will eventually build the house we will buy, and a year from now I'll start teaching part-time at Western Michigan University. But for now I am (mostly) unemployed, doing some odd teaching here and there for the Physics Dept., MTU's summer programs and some outreach for Engineering in the local Keweenaw Bay Indian tribe schools. We had inherited three cats from Mrs. Dr. Phil's mom, but Bag, Herbie and Duck all got old and are gone. I've been writing SF stories seriously for six months now using Microsoft Word 4.0/5.0 on one of the last original IBM Personal Computers, but it will be more than a decade before I let anyone read any of it. I've borrowed laptops from work before, but we were able to buy a Zenith MinisPort ZL-2 compact laptop on closeout for $299 -- now I could write "anywhere". It used a unique 2" 720K floppy disk. Next year NASA Space Shuttle OV-105, Endeavour, the replacement for Challenger, will make its first flight.

March 1981
Age 22. Living above a Chinese take-out and an insurance agency across the street from the Linden Avenue EL stop at the end of the Evanston CTA line in Wilmette IL. Graduated from Northwestern University a year ago with a degree in Integrated Sciences (everything). Currently working on some more Physics classes at NU, working as a relief driver for home delivery of the Chicago Tribunes in Evanston IL, and doing some odd writing and photography. In ten years I have gone from Instamatic camera to a Pentax Spotmatic, a Pentax ES, a Nikon F2/F2SB, a Nikkormat EL-W, a Nikon FE with a motor drive, to finally a pair of Nikon F3 cameras. In two months I will take a job at the Northwestern University Library, and after my first day of work, I shall never shave again. The future Mrs. Dr. Phil is a casual acquaintance at this point, but she also works in NUL. Our first "date" will be to see Conan The Barbarian. There is no Facebook, no LiveJournal, no Internet, no PCs. An Apple ][ will likely cost you some $3000 and I don't know anyone who has one. Next month NASA Space Shuttle OV-102, Columbia, will fly into space on mission STS-1.

March 1971
Age 12. Living in White Plains NY, going to Highlands Junior High School in the seventh grade. My sister is a sophomore at White Plains High School. We have a wonderful red dachshund named Nikki. Besides being a total geek, I am into model railroading (AT&SF) and railfanning. My photography uses my sister's old Kodak Instamatic 104. Next summer, a year after Amtrak takes over the national passenger trains, my parents and I will ride the high speed Metroliner to Washington DC and wander around the Smithsonian. Reading The Lord of the Rings when I had the flu and Dune during a sweltering heat wave changes everything. We knew the moment the World Trade Center twin towers became higher than the Empire State Building, because we got a ghost echo in our TV signal until they moved the TV transmission antennas to the taller buildings. In a little over two years we will move to Greensboro NC, where I will be the Head Yearbook Photographer at Grimsely Senior High. I am writing, mainly newsletter materials for a model railroad club, using a manual Royal portable typewriter with a chemical keyboard. American men are still regularly traveling to and landing on the Moon.

March 1961
I am 2½ and we live in a big rambling house in Medina NY near Buffalo. It is the start of the Kennedy administration and NASA's manned space program. Vietnam wasn't news yet, and while I wasn't really aware of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, somewhere I did know about the construction of the Berlin Wall in five months. My sister is three years older. Once I am three, we will both have our tonsils out -- they "explained" that it was cheaper for us to get it done at the same time -- I don't realize how sick my tonsils have been making me while they waited for me to get to age three. We have a wonderful red dachshund, Max. We live next to the village's school bus garage, and I know all the busses by sight and sound. In the next year or two I will not only figure out how maps work but will become the family navigator. When I get to going to school, we will still do duck-and-cover drills against nuclear attack. Later I will become a big fan of plastic airplane models -- most of the kits cost from 29¢ to 49¢ -- and I will know "everything" about military aircraft and the space program.

This decade look is too broad, methinks. I'll think about doing the interstitials in the five-year increments -- 2006, 1996, 1986, 1976, 1966 -- which are much more interesting. (grin)

Dr. Phil

What Else Is The Internet For?

Here's a picture of our kitties -- from the bottom and clockwise: Bagel, Blue and Sam. Looks like Mrs. Dr. Phil took this shot last night. Right after I got up from my chair, all three jumped into the warm seat and heaped together. They're 16 years old and littermates. They've slept in a heap of ones and twos and threes all their lives. They're really very nice cats, but don't tell them. They're spoiled enough as it is.


Twenty-Five Plus Years Ago

Way back in the dark ages, before my beard turned gray, it was dark and red. Mrs. Dr. Phil has had this picture on her desk for A Long Time. I'm sure we have the negative somewhere, but today we can scan the print. I corrected it, removing several levels of red and one of blue, and brightened it a tad, but didn't mess with the contrast. This was taken around 1983 in Champaign IL on a cold gray day when we were wandering about. Mrs. Dr. Phil was in library school at UofI. The hat and parka came from an Army/Navy surplus store in Evanston IL. The camera is my first Nikon F3 and I still wore my Northwestern class ring with the purple stone. (grin)



Contrast that with this shot from ConFusion in January 2009. (double-grin)



But I'm still not old -- I'm still a kid. And I haven't shaved since Friday 1 May 1981.

Dr. Phil