Category: Annoyances

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Hmm… NewsMax is going behind a paywall

Newsmax logo 2022 origThat’s kind of a bummer.

I enjoyed the shows, There were a couple of commentators that I especially enjoyed. Retired SEALS, and Marine pilots… Funny how that works!!!

I like and appreciate those kinds of guys in my normal life, I suppose it’s no surprise that I’d appreciate hearing guys like that report on, and express their take on the news of the day.

They are no less unbiased in their reporting than MSNBC, ABC, CBS, or CNN. But at least the way they come to their conclusions follows a logic that I can understand, whether I agree with their conclusions or not.

All of the SEALS and Marine folks I know are super pragmatic and their logic follows familiar patterns which are a very similar to the lessons I was raised around. Chief among these is that there are rules. Rules must be obeyed. Rules apply to everyone.

So when these NewsMax guys start asking, “Why is it that XYZ is treated different than ABC?” I get why they’re asking the question and see their point.

Unlike what I have going on in my head listening to Jake Tapper. My brain reboots at least 6 times an hour watching his show.

To be fair, I’m sure that Super indoctrinated Democrats like my Stepfather just sit there nodding their head hanging on every word that drops from Jake Tappers lips. Were my Stepfather to attempt to watch NewMax his head would probably explode.

I get it, and honestly, I still believe that the left and right are both needed, and should work together. Ideally, when they work together they come up with a course of action that’s generally centrist and beneficial for the largest number of people.

I don’t really like other “conservative” news feeds because they’re often a bit too conspiracy theory prone. That being said, I’m not going to pay for a NewsMax subscription.

There are a couple of reasons for this.

First and foremost is that NewsMax played a lot of commercials and I think that should have been sufficient.

Second, I don’t like a subscription model especially for the “Non-Mainstream” news sources. I believe sure as shit, there will be a data breach and the customer list will end up in the hands of someone with authoritarian tendencies.

The last thing I want to deal with is someone looking for dirt on me or my family. Just because I happen to like more conservative news reporting.

I may reconsider my position in time. Especially if I kill off Hulu which I’m not watching much anyway. Maybe I’ll just spend the same money on a different subscription. But there’s still that worry about data breaches.

I hate that I feel like I have to be paranoid.

I guess years watching BLM, ANTIFA, The January 6th commission, and now hoards of Antisemitic Pro Palestine protestors, or leftist judges stripping rights from citizens because the judge doesn’t like the citizens political views, has made me start wondering if this is the way things began in Germany prior to WWII, or Russia prior to their revolution.

I don’t think any of these groups (except the government) can hurt me. Being DOXED would be annoying, having thousands of emails blasting into my in box would be really annoying but the latter is already happening and has been for the better part of a year.

Hmm it just hit me. The Pro Palestine protests actually look a lot like the BLM/ANTIFA/ABORTION/TRANS Protests. I wonder how many people from one set of idiots also exist in the second set of idiots.

Perhaps we can get Kamala to come up with a VIN diagram to answer that question.

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Good Golly! I Hate Passwords!

Ihate Passwords 2Got a message this morning on my phone, maybe from my phone, that I confirmed on my computer.

Some Passwords Compromised! 

I’ve seen the message before, and like most folks I ignored it!

For some reason, this morning I actually looked at the message and the passwords that it claimed were compromised.

A lot of the compromised passwords have come about because I’ve merged the other half’s passwords into my passwords. It makes keeping things running a lot easier to have it all on one computer rather than bouncing between two machines.

The list was long… Some of it was easy to negotiate because there were duplicate logins. Once those were sorted out, then it was down to the business of changing compromised passwords. And here’s where things just go right off the damn rails!

I log into a site. Figure out where the hell the site has hidden change password. Account, Profiles, Client Access, security, or whatever other clever euphemism the company chose to use. It’s mildly annoying but navigable. 

I get to the change password option and things get super annoying! Enter the old password, then enter the new desired password, twice. 

“WRONG! You didn’t include the right kinds of characters, or the right number of special characters, or not enough upper case characters, or numeric characters, the password isn’t as long as War and Peace, that password is too long, 4 characters in the entered password have been used before on this account, or, or, or, or…”

The annoying thing about this is there is almost never any description of what these assholes want, prior to making the first mistake.

I’ve gotten to the point that I’ll hit the submit button just to generate the error that describes what format is necessary for a password.

Because I’m so often annoyed by this irritating bullshit, I use the internal password generator provided by Apple. The down side to this is sometimes even the Apple system can’t generate something useable, but it stores what it generates almost instantly. Meaning that if the generated password is rejected, you may have a bad password stored in the autofill system and then you get to fight with both the password manager AND the asinine website.

This is how I end up with passwords or pass phrases that would make Marines blush.

This morning I was entirely surprised when I ended up in one of these circular password situations and resorted to using an obscenity.

Low and behold, the website told me that such words were offensive and couldn’t be used as passwords.

WTF?

Who the hell are you to tell me what words I can and can’t use for passwords? Furthermore what does it matter? The passwords aren’t supposed to be stored on the site in plain text. They’re supposed to be encrypted. No human is supposed to be able to read the passwords and therefore no human risks being offended. Are we dealing with computers now being offended?

I’d rail and complain except I find myself caring less & less. This particular vendor, service provider, will not matter to me soon. Once I’m out of California I’ll be purging a ton of passwords, and phone numbers from my systems.

I’m actually looking forward to that. I’m looking forward to having a new phone number and a new address. 

I’m also rethinking the whole web access thing, across the board. I’d prefer to have everything mailed to my address. I’d like to get things in my mailbox. Maybe , I’ll be able to step back 50 years. I might start writing checks and mailing them to utilities. Then I won’t have to deal with passwords, PINS, and poorly designed websites.

Who knows? I might even have the Sunday paper tossed on my porch instead of reading it on my pad.

Is this a function of age? Or is this my rejection of increasing complexity to do the simplest things?

Perhaps it’s both!

There’s a lot to be said for de-computerization. You’d have to really know me or be looking at that sentence through my eyes to grasp the full irony.

I wonder if the Amish would be willing to teach me how to live simply?

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I love early morning Heart Attacks!

Digital manufacturingThis morning I got up as usual. I let the dog out, got a cup of coffee, and woke the computer to check email.

Up to this point everything is normal. I’m not feeling all that great, and I was thinking that it would be nice to take the laptop out to the living room where there’s some cuddle space and the dog would likely curl up beside me. 

Before doing that, I checked the backupstatus, because I’ve got the laptop plugged into a hub that provides an ethernet connection. If you disconnect, it makes the next backup have to clean up the files that were interrupted and it doesn’t take that long to let the machine finish its task.

That’s when I discovered that there hadn’t been any backup since yesterday at 4PM. Then, since inquiring minds want to know, I asked why. The computer said there’s no backup disk.

Hmm. I know there is a backup disk so somebody’s got some splaining to do. 

I go check on the NAS device in the closet. It’s running, but the drive indications are all wrong. There’s no error or warning per se, but the NAS is hammering on 2 drives and not responding to commands. The NAS is also not appearing at the address that it’s supposed to for me to access its control interface. 

I try a “soft” power down the NAS appears to accept that command but never completes the execution of the command. I do a hard power down. Knowing full well that whatever is going on is probably bad.

I power the NAS back up and now I’m greeted with all the drives being normal but there’s a little flashing status light. That light is usually solid. I go back to the computer and find that the NAS is still not at the address it’s supposed to be, nor is it broadcasting that it’s available. After scanning a bit I found an IP address that appeared to be the NAS. I logged in to the control console only to find that the NAS thought I’d moved drives from another NAS, and that I would have to update the NAS software to accomplish this.

Ahh I’m beginning to see the likely problem. The NAS tried to update its software and the update went horribly wrong. I guess I’m lucky that the machine still had some clue what it was, but what about my 10TB of data? What about the Porn?!?

Well there’s no path around, I must go forward. I tell the NAS that the 5 drives contain data and they are to be preserved. Then I tell the NAS it can update to the latest version of software. I didn’t want to do this… I’ve been holding off on updating to the latest (read that as completely redesigned) version of the NAS software because I just didn’t feel like working my way through the headache.

I’ve got data from the other half on that NAS that I’m still sorting through and there is no need to complicate matters with a completely different NAS operating system where I’ll have to rework permissions, connections, and applications.

My plan was to do this update when I was done with the other halfs business. 

However, since I have no choice, I click “Proceed” 

The next screen from the NAS says, “Formatting system volume” OH SHIT!!!!!

Does that mean the area that the NAS uses to store the OS, OR did I just flush all my data?

Well the helpful countdown to completion said I’d know in 9 minutes.

For the next 9 very long minutes I used the time honored prayer of IT workers everywhere.

“SHIT SHIT SHIT FUCK SHIT FUCK SHIT FUCK FUCK FUCK!”

After 10 minutes the NAS came back online with a brand new OS and as an added bonus all the user accounts and been wiped. Yea! But the data appears to have remained intact.

So apparently my IT Prayer was heard, and answered, by a benevolent AI somewhere.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that I get to reconfigure the NAS and work my way through a new operating system where everything is moved and some features are gone entirely.

Yea! 

I’ve fired up a set of utilities designed to ensure drive integrity to make sure my data is in good shape. I’ll have to configure around the utilities doing their job to reconnect my NonAdmin account to the data. Oh look, the User Accounts, Groups, and Permissions controls are all different… Greeaaattt!

I have a headache that would stop Godzilla, I think I’ve got some sinus thing happening and I really may not have the patience for this…