Month: February 2020

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Used to be a saying, “You can never find a cop when you need one.”

These days I suppose that may still be true. 

Personally, in my misspent youth i never had any trouble locating the police. More properly, they never had trouble zeroing in on where I had been. Usually by the time they got to the location, I was already gone. There was that one time when I took a page from Briar Rabbit. For some reason police don’t like trekking through swamps at 3am…

Go Figure!

Today, Lawyers are much worse than the Police ever were. They’re in everything we do. Funny thing about it is what happens when you’re actually calling a Lawyer and offering to pay them.

Over the past year, I’ve tried to engage no less than six lawyers and None of them have returned my call(s). I guess lawyering means that you don’t have to worry about income and you can afford to blow potential clients off.

Good for them, I guess. 

Bad for those of us stuck in an ever increasing web of rules, regulations, law, and general bullshit.  

Lawyers have a great scam going, they’ve complicated things to the point that they’re indispensable on the government side of the equation and then charge us obscene amounts of cash to provide guidance out of the mess.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but they’re about as specialized as doctors. Now you not only have to engage a lawyer, but you have to know which speciality of the law they practice.

GREAT! just what we all need, more complexity!

To illustrate the point, have you noticed that when you deal with an insurance company, or a utility, or virtually anything else lately, you get read a long assed list of terms & conditions that two sentences in, start sounding like the teacher in a Charlie Brown cartoon?

“Blah Blah Blah”

Even renting a damn car there’s page after page after page of bullshit.

All of this bullshit is legalese and cannot possibly be comprehended by at least 25% of average people. Hey, read any newspaper in print or online and you’ll see that even ‘educated’ people, you know, the people who insist they’re our betters, can’t write worth a damn. We have people in professional positions that don’t know the difference between there, their, and they’re.

Given this, how can you possible expect ‘less educated‘ people to fully understand what the hell they’re signing and agreeing to after a barrage of several pages of legalese?

My Dad used to say that the best thing we could do for this country was put all the lawyers on a cruise ship, sail it out to the middle of the Atlantic and sink it.

I think his comment was based on two factors. 1) Lawyers complicate things. 2) Our government is rife with lawyers. 

Dad was always fond of the “Twofer”, and of doing business with a handshake. His word was his bond and to my knowledge he kept his word. There may be evidence to the contrary but let me keep my childlike illusions.

As a kid, I knew two things. Avoid entanglement with the law, and avoid, as much as possible, drawing the attention of the government:

Pay your taxes, don’t screw around with too many deductions and play it straight enough that the IRS, FBI, or any government agency didn’t come snooping.

Capone was our cautionary tale. Xaviera Hollander added a little color to my minimalist philosophy as I reached adulthood.

With rules, regulations, laws, and all the other complications in our lives it’s made me start to consider the following:

To play it straight, is automatically more expensive. To play the game loose and fast, keeps money in your pocket, and gets you to your goal faster.

Being a stand up guy means you’re going to get screwed. Nice guys don’t get shit except being shat upon, and honest people increasingly are being seen as fools.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves me considering coloring outside the lines. 

A quote from Captain Reynolds in Firefly or Serenity really rang true with me;

“Come a day there won’t be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all.”

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Now, can we get back to business?

Trumpnews.jpgIt’s been a week hasn’t it?

Trump delivers a very nice state of the union address. Regardless if you hate him or love him, it was up lifting, positive and heart warming.

Nancy Pelosi demonstrates her frustration and disgust with The President.

Trump is acquitted.

(I’ll bet Nancy was throwing stuff after that vote)

pelosipissed.jpgAnd Trump’s “Victory Lap” was embarrassing.

Mr President, you need to keep your list of enemies private. That way, when they disappear you can shrug your shoulders, maintain plausible deniability, and assign your shittiest investigators to “determine” what happened. On inconclusive results you can say, “I don’t know…”ultimatebs.jpg

When you’re handed a victory, you should just say something like, “It’s as we’ve always maintained, this was a purely political stunt. Now that this matter is cleared up I & the Whitehouse will be able to get back to work.”

You see, that would freak out your enemies far more than letting them know they’re your enemies. They’d never know if or when you were coming for them.

You might want to ask President Putin for some pointers… 

That’s not to imply any collusion between you and Russia. It’s simply acknowledging that President Putin was a spy and there’s no doubt in my mind that he knows how to deal with enemies.

For that matter you might consider hiring some Southerners. My Dad once told me, “If you have a run of really bad luck, look for an enemy.” Which is to say that Southerners have long known how to smile in the face of adversity and then just when their enemies are least expecting it. They put the knife where it can do the most good.

Just a couple of thoughts for your next four years.

OH STOP!

We all know that Trump is going to be The President four more years. The Candidates from the other parties are… Uh, well, Pitiful! Based on what I’ve seen I wouldn’t vote for any of them to wipe my ass.

To be sure, I’ve been looking. For once in my life I’d like to cast my vote not for the lesser of two evils, but for someone that I actually believe in.

You know, someone who’s honorable, dignified, logical, has great personal presence, and who’s in the game for the people, not them self.

I don’t give a shit what color they are, their sexual preference, or gender.

Full disclosure;

I actually agree with some of Trumps opinions and policies. I also agree with some of the Democratic policies. Please remember; I have maintained for years that neither party has all the answers and extreme polarization is not serving the best interest of the American People.

Do I like President Trump? Uhhh rarely. Did I vote for President Trump? Nope. Did I vote for Hillary? Absofuckinglutely NOT!

Had Hillary become President, I’d have seriously considered becoming a citizen of Russia. At least then I’d have known what I was in for.

To her credit though, She apparently knows how to deal with her enemies. Albeit she’s sloppy. The trick is to be able to keep your hands clean. That’s why there are professionals for these sort of things. Erase the drives or tapes, THEN have a terrible fire! Didn’t we learn that with Richard Nixon’s infamous 18 minutes?

The problem with being Machiavellian or implementing Vlad Dracul’s way of governing is that you can’t nibble on the barrel. You have to go all in. You’ve got to commit totally.

As it turns out, few people have the stomach for it.  Which may be why world governments aren’t more fucked up than they are.

I actually see that as a sign of hope. Hey, gotta see the positive where you can…

In other events:

I thought going into this week that I’d extricated myself from a company whose website I’d been maintaining for years.

Uh, NOPE!

I don’t know if it was their intention but they really fucked me up. On the plus side it confirmed that I was on the right course and made the right decision. On the down side every email, & text really pissed me off. Honestly, I had expected it to be difficult because I’d  been too nice.

breakuptxt.jpgI gave them months to prepare. After spending 4 hours on the phone Friday & Saturday with the hosting company it appeared that their website was fully and completely their own. Then, I’m guessing that they got an estimate from a couple of web designers and shit themselves.

After that, they came back at me, trying to guilt and manipulate me into maintaining their site. 

The problem is, that each message pushed me into a rage. So I lost a number of days because I just walked away from the computer and couldn’t look at anything digital. 

I went so far as to shut down all the tech just because I was tired of being needled. Phone, computer, even my apple watch. I do like the simplicity of my good ol fashioned wind up watch.

You’d think that would be a good thing. No Tech for days on end…

Well, yes and no.

Yes, because it’s remarkably quiet and there are fewer distractions.  

No because when you turn the tech back on, your shit explodes with all the missed messages and you’re stuck scanning and deleting all the BS in one long irritating session. (Next time, I’m going to have a whiskey or two while dealing with it.)

After spending yet more time writing a polite email explaining that I wasn’t interested in teaching them HTML, CSS, and JAVA. Wherein I attempted to describe the basic mechanics and suggesting that they use a pretty nice tool they already have, that’s completely graphic and requires no knowledge of HTML. The whole time I was writing this polite email, I was receiving texts that read like those you get during a bad breakup or divorce.

Anyhow, after sending the email, they sent me a snotty response. “Fine,” I thought, “They finally got it.”

The next day they try again to engage me, it almost felt like they were trying to trick me into helping them.

I was walking around the place asking myself, “Was I not clear? Did I write above their reading level? What part of ‘No’ don’t they understand?”

Then I realized they didn’t want to understand what I was saying.

They wanted it to be personal, painful, and ugly. In effect it was a form of bullying. So I just blocked any communications from them. (Thank you Apple!)

I have other things to do. One of which, is living my life on my terms not the whims of others. To do that, I need to not be pissed off all the time.

In retrospect, I should have turned them loose years ago. The very first time they complained about the price.

That’s a lesson/note to self for the future, “If someone bitches about the cost when you know you’ve lowballed it… Walk the fuck away! It’s a losing proposition.”

Today, I’m feeling better. Oddly, I’m not missing them or their bullshit in the least. Go figure!

Now I’m ready to tackle some things I promised real “Friends” and can do so without being annoyed by people who claim to be my friends only when they’re ramping up to ask me for something.

Job Search:

I was trying to rewrite my resume when all the bullshit above was going on. I simply gave up. I’m going to be using the weekend splitting time between it, writing in general, and keeping promises.

There has been no activity at all on the resumes that I’ve already sent. I’m getting down to the wire and fingers crossed I’ll still be able to pull my ass out of the fire.

Hope everyone has a happy weekend.

I’m sure as hell going to try!

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If Pelosi is all about obeying the law…

Then she should be ready to pay the price for breaking it.

When Speaker Pelosi tore up her copy of the State of the Union address in full view of the American people and the world, she may have violated the law.

(18 U.S.C. § 2071)

(a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.

Of course it would be for the court to decide. There were members of the Supreme court in attendance at that State of the Union address. While they probably would have to recuse themselves from the hearing, they could be called as witnesses.

Speaker Pelosi has said that no one is above the law.

She must now prove that she too is bound by it.

As a citizen of The United States of America, I formally request that an investigation be opened in this matter. Further, if evidence warrants, I request that Speaker Pelosi brought to trial.

 

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What? Wait…

IowaCaucus.jpgI was reading about the Iowa Caucus.

The acting DHS secretary Mr. Wolf said that the application issue appeared to be a “Load” issue. By “Load” he means that the servers were unable to keep up with the number of requests.

Okay I’ll buy that is a possibility, if everyone in a state was voting at the same time. But as the number of voters decreased, the server would catch up and post each transaction in turn. If this was the problem then it’s pretty obvious whoever tested the software didn’t do any load testing and quite possibly didn’t do much testing at all.

Lets face it, we’re all familiar with online opinion polls, and I’d imagine the servers handling those are dealing with millions of votes a minute. Seems to me that Shadow (The company that apparently spent 3 years building the software,) would have looked to other examples of voting systems, during their development process.

For god’s sake, there are PORN sites that handle votes for performers without crashing. Given the prevalence of Porn Sites I’d guess they process something on the order of MILLIONS of votes per Second.

Then I read that the application was only for the 170 – 190 precinct captains. So the paper votes were cast, then counted, and the captains were to use an application to input those numbers?

You’re telling me that with 3 YEARS of development no-one ever tested with a measly 200 simultaneous users?

WTF?

As I sit reading more about this, I’m astounded.

I have Apple Time Capsules here in my home that can handle 50 simultaneous users on WiFi.

A low end Dell server purchased from Best Buy could probably handle 250 users from the moment it was plugged in, possibly more if all the server had to do was tally incoming data for ONE Single application.

I have to point out that I’m kinda talking out of my hat here because I don’t have all the facts. So take what I’m saying here with a salt lick.

My point is, that with something as important as votes, if I could put a system together with commercial of the shelf (COTS) equipment for less than 10K in hardware and a little web programming there is absolutely NO EXCUSE for the debacle we saw in Iowa.

Much less so when you factor 3 YEARS of development time.

Hell, with 3 years of development time, I could give you Web and Phone based access, Live updates, and auditing of figures entered by precinct, candidate, and user. Complete with state of the art security. I’d have also taken the DHS up on testing the system too. The DHS has an entire division dedicated to Cybersecurity. 

I’d probably have requested that the FBI and NSA take a look too, if they were willing.

WHY?

Because the product would have to be rock fucking solid and more eyes looking at a system are more likely to find flaws that can be corrected before its debut.

Especially given that over the last four years we’ve heard about nothing but Russian influence in our election process. I’d be wanting to make something that was so secure that there’d never be any question about the veracity of the product or its results.

Make no mistake, this is (or was) a product.

Shadow would have been in a prime position to resell the product to all 50 states and would have been reaping the benefits for decades with maintenance and upgrade contracts.

Now Shadow will fade into the morning light like a bad dream, having made millions (I’m guessing) for its principals and casting everyone below executive level to the unemployment line.

Oh, and they’ll have an added lovely parting gift of FAILED project on their resumes.

As I said, we don’t yet have all the facts and likely, we never will.

Online voting could be a reality. But only if we commit to doing it right. 

Don’t you find it interesting that we have more security in place online and over the phone to deal with our banking needs than we do when dealing with the direction of our country as a whole?

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The problem with paying for a resume rewrite

A few months ago, I began an experiment. 

I paid to have my resume rewritten. The experiment was worth it, in that I had a fresh set of eyes looking at my resume.

Another benefit was that I was able to do some comparison between my old resume and the rewrite to determine if the choice of wording, layout, etc. would have any effect on the response rate.

In short, it didn’t.

The rewrite is something that I was never really happy with, because it was not “My” voice, nor did it reflect me the individual. The rewrite is pretty generic and while it is “true” it is also boringly high level.

I have a pretty good command of English. Many would say that my use of English is better than most. The wording in the rewrite is convoluted, (some might say tortured ) English. When I first read the rewrite, I thought that the writer had simply opened a Thesaurus then stuck their finger down the poor tome’s throat to induce vomiting.

The paragraphs are needlessly complex, using words that while technically correct, give the appearance of desperation, and someone trying impress, by putting lipstick on a pig.

Nonetheless, despite my discomfort, I used the rewrite. My reasoning was that the search engines are looking for keywords before even presenting a resume for consideration. You have to get your resume in front of a live person to get the interview.  Because I didn’t know what those keywords were… I deferred to someone who was supposed have that knowledge.

I’m terminating the experiment. The rewrite has garnered no interviews of any kind and in fact has generated less interest even amongst the spammers.

So over the next few days I’m going to rewrite my resume from the ground up. I’ll incorporate the elements I like from the rewrite, merging old and new into a resume of my own creation. 

Hopefully, writing something in my voice will make me more comfortable about the resume in general, and be more demonstrative of my intellect and experience. After all, any company that hires me, should hire me, not someone that knows nothing about me, my experience, my industry, or my abilities.

I’m pretty damn articulate all on my own. I tend to speak plainly and my writing reflects that. I’ve always believed that my resume, as a reflection of my career and abilities should stand on it’s own merits.

My philosophy is that the hiring manager should be able to get a sense of who they’re interviewing, and hopefully hiring, from the resume so they can dedicate the interview time to asking relevant questions. I personally hate spending interview time reiterating what’s printed in my resume. Ask specifics about this position, or that particular skill. 

I know that’s old school, just because something is old school doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

After all, I’m looking for a position that I want to excel in and the hiring company is looking for someone who can do the job well, and be happy doing it. 

It seems like a simple enough equation.

I wouldn’t say resume writers aren’t worth the time or money. This is especially true if you have a hard time writing. I would suggest that if you choose to use a firm, choose carefully. Vet them thoroughly and see what value they provide. 

Frankly, I think it’s time for us to stop treating resumes like web pages, stop applying SEO to them. How about hiring managers actually reading a resume?

When I was a hiring manager, I’d read the resumes of my employees word for word. This simple act gave me the ability to mentor, allow for growth, and properly task my direct reports, so that they could be successful. I’d ask them to give me updated resumes once a year. That kept me apprised of new abilities and skills attained by my group, enabling me to better manage and foster growth.

There’s nothing more rewarding than seeing an employee’s face light up because you give them a task they’ve never done before, using something they’ve worked hard to learn over the past year.

Just a thought, again old school.