Month: April 2023

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Okay, I had an Apple Orgy!

I know, I know… I shouldn’t have done it. I guess that I’d reached a breaking point with all my stuff aging and getting more and more unstable.

My iPad was and original iPad Pro. Like first generation! It served me well but as is the case with all electronics, eventually it gets tired. In this case the old machine wasn’t lasting as long as it should on battery, it was so slow that some things just wouldn’t work at all.

The keyboard folio that I purchased when I got that iPad had also died sometime in the last year.

All of this led to a level of frustration because with my old computer not working properly, and the iPad also not working properly, I felt like I was surrounded by failing machines.

I got my new MacBook on Monday, and at some point during the night I thought, “It’s time for a new iPad too.

Both have M2 processors and both run most all the software that I’d like to use.

In addition, my old iPad had cellular connectivity, I was paying for the service but the iPad couldn’t really use it to best advantage.

This new iPad is fast, efficient, and can use the new cellular bands.

I just realized that perhaps I should have picked up some kind of folio like case in addition to the nifty Magic Keyboard. But that’s going to be something I consider over time. After I get used to this machine.

I picked up a couple of inexpensive accessories to make use of the new Continuity feature in Ventura. This is a pretty darn cool deal where the computer will use the camera on the iPhone during a video call. It’s dang cool, but to use it you need some way to have the phone camera stable and looking at you. Belkin makes a slick MagSafe thing that allows you to hang the phone on the laptop screen or you could use its kickstand to set the phone on the desk.

I’m curious about the video conference ability on the new iPad too. I think I’ll be switching back and forth a few times before I settle on a video conferencing platform.

All of this has cost a lot of cash. I’m looking at it as cash that is well spent, as it makes my life easier, make me happier, and possibly will make my working remotely if I get lucky and find a remote job too.

It’s just nice to have working tech that isn’t crashing as the drop of a hat.

There’s a stack of Apple boxes on my dining room table. It looks a lot like the day after Christmas.

Now I just gotta figure out how to pay for it all.

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After almost a year I finally broke down and bought a new computer.

Truth be told, I bought a new machine last year.  It was defective out of hte box. Long story short, I ended up paying for that machine even after it was stolen from the carrier when I shipped it back to the manufacturer.

This meant putting up with a machine that was failing in a number of ways, not the least of which was the keyboard. There were other things too. strange and unaccountable crashes and behaviors that I’d see but the computer would claim didn’t happen. Uh Huh… tell me that AI hasn’t already invaded our computers…

After a year of my older system degrading. I finally bit the bullet and ordered what I wanted. I got the new machine yesterday, It’s up & running and we’re in the “Settiling” portion of our lives. I rebuilt the system from the ground up, not using any backups. So I relaoded everything and then moved the data from the server to the new system. 

My reasoning for this was that I wanted to leave behind anything that might have been lurking in system files from the old machine(s) and get a fresh start. So here we are…

Hopefully this will make filling out forms and job applications a bit easier, and less error prone.

What I’m saying here is any errors in text, punctuation, or what have you, are now soley the problem of the human running the machine not the machine.

Maybe I’ll even be writing more since it won’t be quite so frustrating an experience.

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Really… How can a company be this out of touch with their clients?

I didn’t know who the fuck Dylan Mulvaney was.

Here’s the short version. He, and I do mean “He” is a dude who thinks he’s a woman and has achieved some fame on the Tic Tok application. He’s been calling himself a woman for a year.

Big Deal, SO WHAT?

There have been a lot of little blurbs about his partnership with Bud Light which I’ve mostly ignored because it’s just another Trans whatsit bunch of crap. Today there’s an article about some kind of backlash brewing over his partnership with Bud Light.

There’s an old saying that any publicity is good publicity and maybe that’s true, but a couple of decades ago, it was all the rage that Coors beer wouldn’t be served in Gay bars. I forget now what the deal was, I thought it was silly at the time, and quickly lost interest. Generally thinking, I doubt that the gay boycott of Coors had much of an effect on their bottom line.

Although at the time there may have been men ordering Coors in straight bars just to flip off the gays, perhaps that improved Coors bottom line. I kinda doubt it, most men didn’t spend more than a couple of seconds thinking about their beverage choices.

Today on the other hand, a non-trans boycott of Bud Light and Anheuser-Busch products will likely hurt the Busch bottom line. (Note to self, make sure that my broker sells any Anheuser-Busch holdings immediately.) On the plus side in six months to a year Anheuser-Busch stock may be available at rock bottom prices.

I have a feeling that the majority of our country and the world is sick and tired of hearing about all this Trans bullshit. I know I am. It’s no problem for me to avoid Anheuser-Busch products. I prefer Blue Moon, or Corona.

If I’m indicative of the rest of the country. I suspect we’ll see Dylan Mulvaney whining on Tic Tok that he’s not in a partnership with Anheuser-Busch anymore because of Trans Hate. Then we’ll hear of Anheuser-Busch’s executives being quietly shown the door. Perhaps then we’ll be having less of the Trans shit in our daily lives.

For your reference, Anheuser-Busch products include:

Budweiser, Bud Light, Stella Artois, Shock Top, Kona Brewing Co., Michelob Ultra, and Busch Beer.

If you’re of a mind to send a financial message to Anheuser-Busch.

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Questions that I probably shouldn’t ask…

In addition to dealing with my other half’s affairs. I’ve also been reviewing joint accounts and subscriptions that we both were using and that now, only I will be using.

One of those subscriptions is for Microsoft Office 365. We had a family membership that covered all of our respective devices and computers. That cost us $99 bucks a year. I’ve not been using Microsoft products as much as I used to. Apple’s Pages works just fine, allows export to Word format, and is faster than Word.

On a Mac you don’t have as much available with your office subscription and honestly the applications are bloated beyond belief. 2 Gigabytes for Word??? Really? That’s a lot of disk space, I’ve used full on desktop publishing software that occupied less space!

I don’t use any Microsoft applications except Excel and Word. I’ve been using those less and less because Apple Pages and Numbers do a fine job for my needs.

I don’t care for Outlook, and generally have no use for PowerPoint, or OneNote, Skype, or much of the remainder of the MS Office Suite.

I maintained the Office subscription for the other half. He needed to have more of the suite and hated having to remember to save documents in MS formats so that he could share them with colleagues. Now that he’s gone, I found myself reevaluating my relationship with Microsoft.

This reevaluation was spurred by my receipt of a Word Document. When I opened the document, Word started. This was typical and expected. Then Word demanded that I be connected to the internet so that it could validate my access to the program. I wasn’t connected to the internet at the time, (I’d gotten the document prior to leaving the house but hadn’t had time to open it.) I had no intention of signing onto the “Free” WiFi at the Starbucks for only one document. So I could open the document in view mode with Word, OR open it in Pages, do what I needed to do, and not be annoyed any further.

I chose Pages and did what I needed to do.

But this got me thinking…

When I got home, I opened Word. After a minute of validation and whatever else Word thought it needed to do, I was treated with a template screen. Oh for the days when Word just opened to a blank page without my having to choose a template. I seem to recall being able to choose a template after the fact. I could be wrong.

I opened the Microsoft web site so that I could look at my plan and when it was going to renew, The renewal is in July… I’d have changed it from the family plan to an individual plan right then except that Microsoft would have made the changes instantly and any other stuff that I needed to access via the family plan would have been lost instantly too.

Stuff like any documents in my other half’s one drive folder.

Oh No Microsoft… I paid you for a year and by golly you’re going to provide a full year of services!

I made a note in my calendar to make the changes to the account in July.

I went back to the blank document now displayed in Word. Hmm, autosave is off, that’s odd. When I try to turn it on, I’m directed to save the document to my OneDrive storage thereby uploading the document.

Why? Why does Microsoft insist that AutoSave be sent to online resources when I have a perfectly good hard drive in my local computer?

Pages doesn’t care. I can save stuff to my local drive or to iCloud.

Could it be that Microsoft is scanning all documents uploaded to their OneDrive resources for specific information?

Is it possible that Microsoft is colluding with various government(s) to locate and keep a watchful eye on people who may be writing things that government(s) might not like?

I know it sounds like conspiracy theory but if you think about it it’s a super simple way to monitor anyone that’s using Office 365. Lots of folks would say that having AutoSave and being able to access their documents from anywhere is worth it and they’d start pumping their stuff into OneDrive without thinking too much about the ramifications.

I was thinking about the recent TikTok hearings and wondered if our wonderful Congressional folks would even stop to consider that between OneDrive, Google Drive, Drop Box, iCloud, and any of the rest of “Cloud” storage facilities tons of Americans information is at risk. For that matter the EU should probably have a go at investigating just how secure all that cloud data really is.

Should any of us really trust these services to stay out of our data? And how do we know? All we have is these corporations promises.

I logged into OneDrive and deleted everything. Yes I know that MicroSoft has copies, and that all my stuff has been scanned and shared with China or the US government if indeed that is happening. But I don’t have to make it easy for them.

AutoSave will remain off in my version of Word and Excel. Come July, I’ll make a decision about continuing with Office 365 too. If I bail on Office 365 then my Outlook email address will be gone. I’m wondering if that would be such a bad thing, or would I find that I’m dealing with less SPAM on a daily basis.

Think about it folks, what information do you have in some cloud account and is that information sensitive? It may be that all this cloud storage stuff is worse than TicToc because it’s slid in quietly under our noses.

They say if you don’t think you’re going to like an answer, then you shouldn’t ask the question.

Inadvertently, I asked a couple of questions that I kinda wish I’d just ignored.

I will have to get a new computer in the near future, you can bet I’ll be thinking about security as I’m setting it up.

I wonder if there’s a way to just never connect the new machine to the internet…

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Trans folks it’s not hate, we’re just tired of hearing you bitch!

I say that as a CIS Bi/Gay man whose seen the LGB movement completely hijacked and turned into something that I’m personally revolted by.

You’ve completely destroyed the credibility and “normalcy” we spent decades building.

So thank you assholes for taking the rest of us down with you.

We spent years dispelling that LGBT people were pedophiles. Your drag queen story hour, child transitioning, males in women’s sports, and pervy guys dressing up as women to get into the girls locker rooms, have completely undone all our work in the eyes of the American public.

But on top of that, every time anyone looks around you’re screaming about some perceived slight.

There is NO TRANS GENOCIDE! Do you even know what Genocide means?

You have all the same rights as everyone else.

There are no roving bands of ARMED, CIS, WHITE, CONSERVATIVES, scouring the countryside looking for a trans person.

Nobody actually gives a shit about what you wear, or who/what you identify as on which day.

But when you talk about a day of “Vengeance“, As y’all did this last weekend, I have to ask what the hell did you expect people’s reaction to be?

It’s funnier than shit, that most of the LGBT community appears to be anti gun but then ya’ll start taking pictures of yourselves with AR-15s as part of your Trans Vengeance day.

I have to ask which is it?

It would be nice if y’all would just pick a lane…

OH RIGHT!!!! You can’t pick a lane about something as basic as gender so why the hell would you pick a lane about anything else in your lives?

No-one is out to get you, (At least they weren’t.) Most people didn’t think about you, in anonymity, there is safety. You idiots forgot that. You’ve pretty much painted a target on your own backs!

Most folks see a dude dressed in a dress and a wig, they politely ignore it. People see only what they want to see and folks don’t see an ugly woman, a dude in a dress, or a chick dressed like a man.

Most folks, myself included, aren’t concerned about your personal issues the only thing we’re concerned with in a business setting is do you know your shit? If you do, you can paint you ass blue and dress in animal skins for all we care.

Why do you feel it necessary to drag me, or anyone, into your fucked up drama? I supposed a better question would be, why do you Trannys need to generate so much drama?

By the way, that asshole that killed 6 people in Nashville… Wasn’t a victim. The 3, 9 year olds, and 3 adults were victims.

On second thought, maybe she was a victim of GAY INC. Maybe she started out as a person who had some mental issues that could have been handled with traditional therapy. But then she was sold a bill of goods from all the Gay organizations that trade upon victimization. You know, HRC, GLAAD, and all the rest.

Thinking this way, perhaps I could get behind naming GAY INC as responsible for these murders.

The bill of goods I’m referring to, seems to say that everything would be just fine if you pump yourself full of hormones your body wasn’t built to use, that through surgery all would be well and after your transition every single problem in your life would magically disappear.

Perhaps she bought into the thought that trans genocide was a real thing. Perhaps she was on testosterone. A hormone that men must learn to control over their entire lifetimes.

A hormone that during puberty, makes men act out, do stupid things, fight about inconsequential issues, etc.

You know… for years our society has called it testosterone poisoning. So is it still testosterone poisoning if doctors inject testosterone into a woman?

It seems like it should be.

In the case of a woman, there’s the added problem, most women have no idea how to handle riding the testosterone dragon. They also may not have time to figure it out before they lose themselves in ‘roid rage.

The same could be said of men transitioning to being a woman. I’m terrified to think what estrogen does to a mans emotional controls.

Talk about a sock drawer!

Trans people, do whatever the fuck you want to do to yourselves. I personally don’t care.

But my indifference is not hate. It’s being tired of your shrill screaming about shit that ain’t happening.

So take your drama someplace else and shut the fuck up.