My first thought was 'I really don't feel like getting up.'
My second thought was 'I really don't feel like going to the bathroom.'
Thirty two minutes later, I was up.
I was greeted by the tranquil sound of heavy machinery doing something to someone's house. For a quiet neighborhood, there's sure a lot of noise.
There is something about getting dressed that makes you aware of the problems of the world. I can skip out of bed but the moment I put on socks, everything stops dead. The worst kind of force imaginable comes right after the first sock. There is absolutely no momentum from the first sock, so I sit there, trying desperately to get the necessary oomph for said second sock. While trying, I review every bad and embarrassing thing that happened since first grade. One day last year it was dark by the time I got the second sock on. Taking them off takes no time whatsoever. Modern Science is studying this time warp, as is Modern Psychology, which has a much greater chance of a solution.
I look down at his spot and notice that Marshall continues to fail to be there. Something must be done about this.
Opening the curtains, I note that I don't like opening the curtains. This is something that will be automated in the future.
I stumbled to the coffee machine, still bleary-eyed, and made a cup of my favorite French roast. This will energize the hell out of me, probably sometime after my second nap. The Art of the Weekend is defined by being able to get downstairs before the first nap begins.
Know what's disheartening? Picking up your coffee cup to drink the second half and noting that sometimes the grinds get through. After I removed the grinds, I noticed they were moving. There are two ants in my coffee. No line of ants getting ready to hit the diving board, just these two. Quite frankly, I'm amazed that anything from the animal kingdom could survive my coffee. Most people can't. Besides, how did this happen? I don't think there were ants in the cup. I hope there weren't freeze dried ants in the coffee pod. There's no food around to attract them. To make thing absolutely perfect, I just took a mouthful of coffee. They're probably going to reproduce in my GI tract, making my next colonoscopy a real treat for the doctor.
Two windows are open on either side of the house, giving me a stereo field of sound for the construction going on outside. For a quiet neighborhood, there's sure a lot of noise. There is a brief halt to the noise, which sounds like a giant vacuum; not of the Hoover variety... just silence. I don't like silence, because that's when the demons come out to play. Not the Ghost Hunter demons - the ones inside, which are much more scary.
The quiet is immediately shattered by the air conditioner. Wife loves the air conditioner. We just bought a new one, which will keep food cold in case the freezer breaks. She uses a fan in the bedroom in addition to the air because she likes fresh air moving. The she wraps herself up in my blanket so she doesn't get cold. Meanwhile it's snowing and I'm without a blanket
I'm pretty fair with the wife. I told her while she's away, I need either a dog or a vice wife/babysitter. I don't think that's unreasonable. She does. Further, she has the car. So after a week of slaving over a hot computer, I'm locked in the house. This is a bad thing, because when I get bored or unwilling, I get up to Stuff. It's not a good idea to get locked inside a house with a bored lefty, unless you like to watch the world burn.
Only I'm so.... tired.
Definitely time for my first nap. They say that people who plan their next meal while they're eating have a food problem. If I plan my next nap while napping, do I have a sleep problem? If I have a bowl of cereal, what type of fauna will likely accompany it? And what is that horrible noise coming from the back yard? Probably bits of tree falling and small planes crashing, as usual. For a quiet neighborhood, there's sure a lot of noise.
- If you've got an HP Officejet printer with fax, you've got a problem. Discovered at DEF CON 2018 (Disneyland for hackers), was a way to get into printers with a specially constructed fax. This means if you don't have a fax or have a printer that's not an inkjet, you're ok. HP released patches for this earlier. Don't forget to check for patches for everything you own, including your wireless system.
I love Google (Do No Evil): they're so perfectly evil... apparently when you turn off the Let Google See Your Location History, it compiles your location history. Google says this isn't true - they tell you all this and there might be another setting to turn this off, but they're not going to tell you what it is. This was a study by the AP, using unaffiliated assistance. Google flat out lied. And just when the iDevice users are starting to smirk, let them know that the same thing happens on their phone. I believe if you TURN OFF LOCATION, you should be ok. Of course there are about 3 people on the planet who do.
- If the iDevice people want to feel smug, they can check out this story, which goes over the unimaginable number of android phones that are open to hacking because of the unholy bloatware installed by the carriers.
Lastly, for the acrophobics and planephobics, is a story wherein a researcher found hundreds of planes exposed to remote attacks. A fellow passively (using signals in the air, not probing or hacking) checked out a plane's satcomm system and discovered rather a lot of open services anyone could access without a password. Plus the fact that certain planes can be hacked from the ground through satellite communications systems.
Once again I tell you that we WILL NOT learn.
Let me start by saying that airplanes are very safe. VERY safe. Everything that can be redundant is redundant. Twice or three times. You're much safer in a plane than a car. Have you ever heard of Pilot Rage? Whenever there is an airplane tragedy, something is learned to make the planes safer. I trust the method because no one has any interest in planes pointing themselves at the ground and meeting it nose-down or in an otherwise unfortunate manner.
Computers, entertainment systems, and satellites?
No f-ing way.
Again, we have had personal computers for a long time. Before that it was mainframes. We have learned countless lessons on problems, failures, and security. Yet each new generation of devices fails to take any history into account. It's right there, available to everyone, plus fairly obvious to anyone watching over the years. Yet we have insecure entertainment and satellite communications systems on planes. Internet of Things devices that are hackable right out of the box.
Happy Security Day to you!
- 18 months after pacemaker vulnerabilities were reported, they're still vulnerable. Just to make things more interesting, the flaws also affect an insulin pump. If specially timed electrical packets are sent to the general vicinity of a person with either of these devices, they can be forced to do the chicken dance. Aside from health and morality issues, the UN qualifies this as torture for the wearer and the viewer of the spectacle.
Overheard on tv: the cockpit voice recorder was powered by the left engine, and stopped working when it fell off.
Mice. Of the computer variety.
Having excavated my home office, I decided it might be a good time to upgrade things a bit. It's not that I haven't been in there for a while, but one of the mice had a ball in it. Another was just plain weird. A bunch of mice from the Mouse Pile were even more strange, in ways a mouse just shouldn't be. As the computer mice were not modified by real mice, it was confusing. Not enough to investigate, though,
So the smart thing to do is Amazon. This is a fantastic solution to most things, in keeping with my policy of late adoption. I would be even later if I hadn't seen Wife using it. She makes great use of it. This makes me nervous because she also watches tv channels solely dedicated to selling things. Those will not be adopted, unless I take a fancy to dressing like a middle-aged female. Never say never, but this is really close to absolutely never.
Since I go back before the mouse, I have some perspective.
No, really, there was a time before the mouse. There was an operating system called DOS (and other complex ones before that) and it was all character-based. No windows, no clicky clicky, and porn was scarce, if not impossible.
Mice, when they appeared, were pretty clunky. The mouse balls got really dirty really quickly, requiring minor surgery to clean. This was magical to people when I started doing desktop support. In fact, most things were magical to users when I started doing desktop support. I had to misfortune to support a warehouse full of voluntary idiots, who felt no need to learn a thing and entitled enough to have all of their issues solved by desktop technicians. Most of their issues were PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair) or I.D.10.T (idiot).
So... mouse balls... so many years of really horrible jokes.
The next great step forward was the laser mouse. In reality, it was an LED mouse, but truth is rarely rarely allowed to get in the way of advertising. No more mouse balls! Now if the mouse started behaving strangely, the magic of pulling a small hair out from in front of the LED was standard practice.
IIRC, mice were hideously expensive at first. On the order of $80.
Almost as if by magic, they fell to $15 and less. They appeared to be the same mice. Would economics of scale explain the decrease? How the hell should I know - it's not like I know crap about economics.
Scouring Amazon, I came up with 15 pages of mice. An embarrassment of riches. Removing the lovely wireless mice and the travel mice that a small child would find small, there were about 40 mice left. All I wanted was a generic full size mouse (paralleling my desire for a generic land yacht to drive). I even limited the search to (gasp!) Microsoft. Years ago I was tempted to call Microsoft support and ask if their mice worked on linux, but decided it wouldn't provide enough entertainment for sustained hilarity. There were about 10 mice from which to choose. Two that looked alike cost $11 and $89. Why bother asking? The rest had prices that varied between $9 and $15, in very strange denominations and names. The Microsoft Mouse was $9.35. The Microsoft Office Mouse was $13.43. The Microsoft Office Mouse black was $12.33.
They also failed to describe a single feature of said mice. I looked at my existing mice to trace lines and figure out which one I wanted from Amazon's pictures. Of course the mice keyword also brought up women's shirts and a few sex toys, per the prophecy of Ancient Astronaut Theorists. Do you have this much trouble buying a mouse? Two days later they arrived, wildly different from the picture, and not at all as large as I wanted. I ordered 2 different Microsoft mice on purpose, to prove there was no difference in hardware for different pricing. And there was no difference. The Basic Black mouse was exactly the same as the Office Mouse in black, with special laser hair removal and a long purple cord.
Ok, so I once again managed to turn a small need into many ridiculous paragraphs. I also proved that although Amazon is an absolute boon to voluntary agoraphobes, there are some things better done in person (if one can find a computer store in which to do it). Sex is also better in person, but not always logistically possible; in which case you do it in snail mail.
Next issue will contain a related home office story about LCD displays that are square instead of the standard landscape orientation (335x42.5 wide, aka 16x42.5 asperger ratio). Another interesting fact is that computers do NOT like mixing the two types at one time. This causes a display that will blind anyone looking at it, in addition to rendering them sterile.
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| birds do it, bees do it, the court of common pleas do it... |
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