Golf Balls do NOT Talk

The Marshall Follies

Because having cancer becomes boring after a while, Marshall found a Thing growing on his leg. Multiple doctors said it was completely benign.

Until yesterday, when we noticed it had grown to almost the size of a golf ball and started talking to him.

We took him and his benign Thing to the vet. While the Thing was still technically benign, it could rupture, causing him to leak Important Red Fluid. Of course that will require an operation. I wonder, if operations were $25, would he require so many of them. Marshall is unfazed and requested another malt.

ONE DAY after typing the above, Marshall passed me in the hall. There were bloody pawprints all over the carpet, steps, and through the house. He's now bandaged and his operation is in the morning. Nobody really cares about the blood - Marshall just has to be ok. And he will.

ONE DAY later, he had his operation and was just fine. The entire vet office came out to see him. The owner ran out to see my wife and congratulated her on the cocker with 10 lives.

Unfortunately he's wearing the Cone of Shame. It only took a few hours, after knocking half the house down, to figure out you have to get the cone over the bowl to eat or drink. Now he sits next to us, panting and whining. He has his own fan, to which he is always oriented.

TWO DAYS later, the cone came off. It confuses and unnerves us when he behaves like a dog. Well, he behaved like a neurotic dog, and within a few minutes, had licked his wound open. Suffice it to say he now needs daily antibiotics and daily bandage changes. The vet office has been wonderful to us since this started.

Since the vet office isn't open on Sundays, it was our day to change the dressing. To day it didn't go well could be the understatement of this entire multi-year experience in blogging. I don't ever want to do that again, nor does he. He went to the emergency vet to have it done and is now sporting a glowing green bandage, which goes really well with his black fur.

• This week's stats are in and the winner was Spain, with either 130 or 7 page views.  I'm sure this is not Google's fault, because I always mix up 7 and 130.
• The positive takeaways are that linux is the most popular operating system and Internet Explorer is the least used browser.
• The most popular visitor name is Juan. Google knows all.
• I made that up. The Juan thing. Google still knows all.

Coworker Follies
I write about him largely because we have the most amazing communication breakdown in history. We can't get out a sentence without the other not understanding.

ME: You got stuck with Windows 10? That's horrible.
HIM: We'll see how you feel when you get it.
ME: Fortunately my machine won't ever break or need replacement.
HIM: Your home laptop?

we're talking about work machines. Where did my home machine come into this?

He sends me a text about an issue that's really cumbersome and will add a long time to tasks. We go back and forth, trading ideas. I send a final suggestion. He says he's ok with it as it is.

Then why did you bother telling me about it? Did you want to argue with yourself by proxy? Do you have so little to do that you have to needle your coworkers and make sure they're not doing anything either? Do you have some sort of really weird fetish that involves wasting your coworkers' time? Was it good for you too?

One Day Later....
ME: Oh man, I just took that technical training. HR stated that the PTSD incurred is worse than a day at the DMV.
HIM: Oh... wow... so you are exempt from taking it?


Meanwhile, we have to take a Workplace Harassment class.
I figure by next year, I'll be teaching the class. As a how-to.

• I've been living in the same house for a long time. I love my neighborhood. It's nice, safe, and quiet, as I tell everyone. Apparently I lied. It was quiet, until the machines took over. It started with the House That Took Over the Neighborhood. It started as a small starter home and now, in a 4 year process, is three times as large on the outside, and has seven floors down, the last one being 3,004 feet underground. Perhaps they're preppers. Maybe this is a Neighborhood Military thing to surprise the enemy (when we find out who the enemy is). Then the Loud Family, which has some form of construction every day of the week, including rain days. It usually involves a loud circular saw biting into something metal.
• Today it's BEEP-BEEP-BEEP, like a backup beeper from an 18 wheeler. The BEEP-BEEP-BEEP is coming at ten second intervals, as if the 18 wheeler is backing up, moving forward three inches, then backing up again. Perhaps one of our neighbors has opened one of those schools that you see on tv, where you learn to drive a truck in only four weeks.
• My wife, who keeps track of everything that happens in the hood, told me the neighbor was digging up her yard. Looking out the window, the 18 wheeler turned out to be one of those cute, tiny little Caterpillars that you rent to dig up yards when your shovel breaks. It digs one foot of dirt, then backs up. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. All day. Probably all night too. I just want to know why a piece of 'construction equipment' half the size of a VW Beetle, requires a backup beeper. Is it to protect little children riding by on their little trikes with their little helmets?

Unlike mowing, I do not have a pathological hatred of vacuuming.

It's a household thing, as even Marshall doesn't care about the nemesis of all dogs. He barked a bit when he was younger, now he figures screw it.

Tell me if you hear any of this while vacuuming... [I'm in italics]

You can't just vacuum. You've got to pick stuff up first.

Doesn't the vacuum pick stuff up?

No - that stuff will clog it up.

Let me give you the rug rake.

Why do I have to rake the rug?

To get up all the pet and people hair.

Doesn't the vacuum pick it up?

No - that stuff will clog it up.

I need to get at that dirt.

What dirt?

The dirt under the weed whacker. In front of the tv.

What is that huge black stain from?

You should try vacuuming under the chair too.

Why is there a three foot long screw by the couch?

That's not the dog - it's a dust cocker.

Are your guitars migrating to the living room?

No.

How many do you have out?

One - next to the couch. That's not a lot.

What are those?

Oh. Four total. That's not a lot.

Could you move that one - your parents are coming over.

Which one?

I can kill you from here, you know.

Please do something with that whip before your parents get here.

Does this vacuum pick up [THUMP - screech]. Apparently not.

• Wanna impress your snotty cybersecurity friends at parties? The answer is hell yeah, until you realize that cybersecurity people aren't at parties, so they stopped being invited years ago.
• Try this: a RAT is a Remote Access Trojan. It is placed on a system to create a backdoor for future access. A bank in India discovered its ATM wasn't working, despite being full of money. It was then they discovered the RAT. When they opened the machine, 17,500 rupees were shredded, by the dead rodent they found. Sometimes this stuff becomes literal.
• If you're a customer of the southern US PDQ food chain, hope you didn't use your cards to purchase anything. From May 19, 2017 – April 20, 2018 the system was hacked. PDQ had no idea, hence the ridiculous amount of time it lasted. The announcement said it might have happened via a vendor's remote access. They have no idea, but figure if you were a customer during that time, your card information was accessed. I'm sure they are very sorry, but forgot to say that in the announcement.
• Comcast shut down an interface on its site after it was discovered to reveal home addresses, account numbers and additional customer data without permission to others sharing the same network as the customer or using an app on the network. Comcast naturally apologizes and says they don't believe any data was accessed because you need to be logged into the network already.

• “Overlooking basic API authentication illustrates a shameful degree of negligence at Comcast,” Ben Johnson, CTO and co-founder at Obsidian Security

The good news: WPA3, the security successor to your wireless network's aging and already cracked WPA2, has been announced.
The also good news: WPA2 will continue to be strengthened.
The less than good news: it could be a few years before you see WPA3.
The OMG they did it again news: Easy Connect is a feature that makes it easier to connect Smart Home and Internet of Things devices to their networks. What could possibly go wrong?

• You know I hate social news stories, but my wife brought up that Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban have never texted. Kidman said it forces them to talk to each other. Wife said that they stole this from us.. we rarely text. Why, you ask? Because her phone is so brain damaged that it might refuse to ring or claim the call is email. If she tries to text me, it takes up to three days to arrive. Before you tell me this is on purpose, it takes the same amount of time for everybody else.
• Just to make things more interesting, it developed alzheimers and randomly mixes up information. When her mom calls, the first name displayed is the vet, the last name from my family, and a random picture. If she didn't know the phone number, she'd have no idea who was calling. I've spoken to phone experts who have never seen this before.

A New York school district wants to introduce facial recognition, to make its children safer. Ooh - new, invasive technology! But the privacy nuts won't like it. No problem, we'll say what we always say: It's for the children.

Ooh, wait.. it's not an accurate, proven technology. It isn't good at recognizing people of color. It also isn't good at detecting guns, although that's what the school board wanted to do.

The ACLU formally protested. The school board, in a closed session, rolled around the floor laughing. One actually peed in his pants.

• A hot new internet trend is posting pictures of the cat in your house that somehow appeared but isn't yours. So if your children ask where cats come from, tell them cats are a quantum lifeform that both exist and doesn't exist at the same time. When you are not observing them, they pop into existence and POOF - you have a cat. It's really that simple.

Just to let you know what kind of job police have in England, a woman attempted to rob a convenience store. The clerk locked her in and hit the Police button. She had a knife. Since she got nowhere with the knife, she picked up a bottle. The clerk wasn't impressed with the bottle, and she started threatening the people on the outside of the locked door. The police, understanding that the woman, on the other side of the locked door with the bottle, might use it on them. The cops went into Full Panic Mode and responded with riot gear and pepper spray.

Other countries should have this kind of trouble.