Month: June 2023

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Wow! That was more difficult than I thought it would be.

I’ve been thinking about buying a pair of nice bluetooth over the ear headphones.

I’ve got a set of AirPod Pros 2nd Gen and while I like them very much, I don’t like that my ears get annoyed with me if I wear them for more than a couple of hours at a time.

Were it not for that, I’d have them in all the time.

It would be so much easier than listening to the crazy lady screaming about whatever she screams about, or hearing her fella, yelling at the yappy dogs, while grinding away on some piece of metal, driving or “Fixing” a vehicle that’s on it’s last legs.

What he needs to do, is stay out from under the hoods of the various vehicles he’s destroyed (5? I think at last count,) and leave it to a professional. His version of a properly running engine is very different from mine! 3 of 8 cylinders firing, punctuated by 5 consecutive backfires is not proper operation! There’s also the thrilling sound of him running a chain saw at 10 PM. I’m not kidding, I’ll turn the lights off and he’ll start the chainsaw. That motor is also on it’s last legs! One can only hope that when It dies we’ll be spared the restful sounds of him cutting whatever he’s cutting.

Don’t ask…

All I can say is this used to be a quiet neighborhood. This is what happens when you let riff raff move into nice places!

I’ve been in hollers in Tennessee, and Kentucky where folks were dirt poor, and not school educated but they weren’t this kind of white gutter trash.

It’s funny in a way, California can’t even do white trash or rednecks right.

You can see why I might be looking for noise cancelling headphones, that are comfortable in the long term.

There are literally times when I can’t watch TV in my living room due to the noise coming from that white trash. I like having the windows open this time of year, I like the fresh mountain air (even when it is full of pollen).

So I’m faced with, turning up the volume to unbearable levels, closing the windows, not bothering to try to live my life and watch a movie or TV show in my house, or a set of headphones.

I know there are those of you saying, “Why don’t you call the police?”

Hahahahahaha! Where the hell have you people been living? Police? Helpful? Responding to a noise complaint? The police can’t even arrest and hold her for more than 8 hours after she assaults someone. Which she’s done 3 more times since she assaulted me last year.

BTW, if I lived in one of those “Fly Over” redneck places… Let’s just say this whole thing wouldn’t be a problem. Folks go missing in hollers all the time…

I digress, I was considering the Apple AirPods Max. They’re expensive! But I can also buy them from Costco and save $70. I saved $50 on my AirPod Pros at Costco. My concern there is that the Max is generation one and come fall Apple may be releasing a replacement version.

This led me down a rabbit hole of reviews and firmware versions for both the AirPod Max and my AirPod Pros. That’s when I discovered something interesting and strange. I did a search for “Latest AirPod Pro Gen 2 Firmware” then I got articles from last year through this year. I told the browser to limit the results to only this year. You’d think that would narrow your search but oddly it didn’t by much.

I was still seeing articles listing last years firmware as current and it was clear from context, the article had been written last year but the date was today’s date. I looked at several similar articles thinking perhaps there was a current update but there wasn’t.

There was however a shit ton (Technical Term) of ads.

Then it dawned on me, these outdated articles are monkeying with the dates to appear current so they can serve these shitty ads.

This reduces the usefulness of the internet and honestly makes me discount the validity or accuracy of publications MacWorld and 9 to 5 Mac I’m looking right at you!

It occurs to me that because of folks doing stuff like this to keep serving the same 5 ads over and over again, overall the internet is becoming less useful all the time. If the filtering doesn’t work, then the user is faced with a wave of outdated and current information with no ability to determine what is real, and what is useless.

Imagine writing an article about Trump when he was President, packing that article with shitty ads, then updating the date.

A query like “Who is President of the United States” could return Trump, Biden, Obama and Bush. How would someone know? If they had to turn on the TV to figure out who the president is, then the internet would be kind of useless.

All this ad crap and targeted marketing was a bad idea to begin with, and it’s only gotten worse.

I come again to a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the past few years.

“Is the internet’s usefulness eclipsed by having to filter through all the crap to get valid information?”

I’m really wondering. I guess I’ll know when I see an article saying, “Australian farmers pig has piglets with wings, Farmer Stunned!” I’d bet that at least 25% of folks on the internet would read the article, and a lot of them would believe it.

I fell for one the other night, some bullshit about a mystery in some dudes backyard. It was written like some reality show script. A paragraph that said essentially nothing, then a commercial, and another paragraph then commercial. It went on and on, but it was putting ads in front of everyone that was curious late at night.

Spoiler Alert: The guy bought a house built in the late 50s, the “Mystery” was that someone who owned the house had put in a fallout shelter. Over time, other owners had added soil and landscaping that buried the hatch. Then the shelter had gotten forgotten about except as a dim rumor. The guy found the original blueprints at the county records office and decided to investigate. The shelter was in pretty good shape so the guy renovated the space. It was pretty cool. The article could have covered everything in maybe 4 well written paragraphs with photos. Instead they took almost 100 paragraphs all of which were poorly written.

I finally went to Apple for the answer. I’d not gone to them in the first place because often asking a simple question in Apple’s support section, does not provide a single Byte of data. You’re still going to have to sort through a ton data that’s not relevant.

By the way, as of 6/28/2023 the current AirPod Pro Gen 2 firmware is 5E135.

I still haven’t decided if I’m going to drop the hammer on headphones…

This is how I lose entire days…

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Okay, not ranting a lot, but…

When did tissue manufacturers forget how to put the tissues in the boxes in a way that you can pull one out of the box at a time instead of arbitrarily wadding.

It’s super weird, I used to think it was because we purchased the cheap stuff. But for shits & giggles I’ve purchased a variety of manufacturers products.

They all have the same problem. I thought perhaps it was the cube shaped boxes versus the rectangular boxes. So I’ve tried both. Same problem…

So apparently even the quality of tissue cannot be guaranteed.

I remember not too long ago, tissues was one of the things that you purchased, put on the counter in your bathroom and didn’t think about again until you pulled the last tissue from the box and realized you’d neglected to purchase a replacement box.

In my case, that meant using paper towels, or grabbing a handful of napkins from Carls Jr the next day at lunch. I tried very hard to only go to the grocery store once a week.

I guess my question is how are we regressing on things that have been stable and functional for literally decades? It’s a box of tissue. Boxes of tissue worked fine, they didn’t need tweaking, they worked well exactly as they were.

They worked so well that Howard Hughes used the empty boxes as house shoes!

I’ve noticed in the case of the cube shaped boxes that the dimensions have been changed. I don’t know why, but I can tell you that Puffs specifically will not fit into a metal tissue box holder I’ve been using without issue for 15 years.

So to all you tissue manufacturers, “What is going on?”

Have you decided to have your tissue manufactured in China? Have the Chinese deviated from specification, as they so often do?

Am I the only one who’s noticing?

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He works hard for da money!!!!

I worked way too hard for my income!

Hunter Biden literally worked his fingers to the bone firing off threatening text messages. For his efforts within a month he got 4 -5 million dollars.

Wow! Obviously I’ve been doing this whole making money thing wrong my whole life. What I should have been doing was threatening high ranking officials of the Chinese Communist Party.

I could have retired comfortably a long time ago.

Does anybody happen to have Henry Zhao’s phone number? I can dash off half a dozen threatening nasty text messages before dinner!

I was thinking perhaps I could go for hush money. There are a lot of really nasty politicians in California, I’m sure I could catch someone with their hand in the cookie jar! Oh wait… They’re 98% Democrats (they have no shame,) so that wouldn’t work. I’d have to find a Republican. In California those are few and far between. Dang! I’ll have to move to another state first.

I’m glad that there’s at least ONE IRS agent who has a sense of morality and duty. I’ll have to make a note of his name for future reference. If I ever get audited, I’ll have to ask for him specifically. He might still be a son of a bitch, but at least he has some vestige of moral compass.

I’m also enjoying in a very dark way that the DOJ, FBI, and Merrick Garland have all been proven liars about Hunter Biden’s laptop.

You’l recall, that was the laptop that these agencies and every media outlet swore on their mother’s lives was Russian disinformation. At the same time, these same organizations, called anyone talking about the laptop Russian operatives and in some cases traitors.

Uh huh…

I think every single one of their people screaming the laptop was Russian disinformation should be arrested…

They clearly were attempting to affect the outcome of national elections, and maybe should be investigated to determine if they were Russian operatives.