Completely Unacceptable

Just my opinion.

Former Vice President, and Current Presidential Candidate Joe Biden insulting a 21 year old student on national television is demonstrative of Candidate Biden’s lack of qualification.

The young person asked a legitimate question.

Joe Biden demonstrated with one sentence why he does not deserve to be President of The United States.

You’re a lying, dog faced pony soldier.

bidenblowsit3.pngFirst of all, what the hell does that even mean?

At Joe Biden’s age, he should understand that he’s essentially interviewing for a job. He should also be able to answer a direct question;

How do you explain the performance in Iowa, and why should voters believe that you can win the national election?

Rationally and courteously, instead he asked an irrelevant question then resorted to bullying and dismissiveness as his response.

His campaign has tried to brush this off as a joke. Did he apologize? Did he make any attempt to answer the question, or indicate that he was joking? No? He wasn’t joking. 

Even more disturbing is that the crowd laughed. Someone, ANYONE in that crowd should have stood up and called him out on his behavior. 

This man is nothing special, he’s not a god, he doesn’t have to power to have someone arrested for speaking out against what is clearly an inappropriate response to a young voter.

This is not to say that the young person was incapable of defending themselves but given the circumstances, I could see them needing a moment to regain their balance. 

An older, more experience person should have given them that moment. While reminding Joe Biden that he is choosing to serve the American People. No one is forcing him to run for election. Choosing to serve America, means treating everyone with courtesy and fairness.

This is not the first time Biden has been insulting or dismissive. 

I think it clearly shows us that he is not a candidate worth voting for.  The last thing we need in the Office of The President is another elitist who believes they can do no wrong and  above question or reproach.

It’s time for Biden to throw in the towel. 

Retire Sir. Leave the field while you still have some honor.

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.”

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!

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?

Patterns…

1200px Fibonacci spiral 34 svgAll our lives are defined by patterns.

Some of us are more attuned to sensing and or seeing those patterns.

As a Software QA person, I honed that ability to a fine point.

Sometimes software demonstrates a highly repetitive defect in a very short period of time. At other times, a pattern of failure is demonstrated over a longer period of days, weeks, or months. A person like me, tends to start noticing patterns in everything around us.Fibonacci sequence nautilus shell1 Fibonacci sequence

We’re all familiar with fractal patterns whether we know it or not. The waves crashing on a beach and the water receding, the view of a hurricane from space, the form of a maple leaf.

Another pattern defined by math is the spiral of a nautilus shell. That pattern is seen in nature everywhere. A fern leaf getting ready to open, the nautilus shell, snail shells, usually demonstrate “The Golden Mean” mathematicians call it the Fibonacci sequence.

The point is, once you see the sequence, you can’t unsee it.

This is a brief view into how my head works. 

It’s not just math though. I’m not gifted with the ability to see equations like some people are. For me, doing math is actually kinda hard. But If I can see it represented in some kind of three dimensional space, I suddenly get it.

I suppose I’m more a creature of spacial equations than theoretical equations. A physicist can work out the math behind velocity, mass, gravity, and distance to tell that a monkey can leap the gap in between buildings, or from branch to branch.

cactus.jpgThe monkey, on the other hand, feels it and “knows” he’ll make the leap to the nice bit of fruit on the branch without a whiteboard. It’s instinct and spacial relationships.

People behave on the boundaries of chaos. Groups of people move and react in generally predictable ways, but when it comes down individual decisions people get very chaotic.

That being said, sometimes people are insanely, tediously predictable.

This appears to be the case with the other half’s employer. 

For the second time in 10 years a female boss appears to be drunk with power, feeling that she’s above reproach and deciding that the other half isn’t communicating.

The other half has responded by producing the emails, and text message exchanges. Instead of putting the issue to bed it’s only exacerbated the conflict. Now the boss is becoming more erratic, generating multiple changes in direction within a week, or day, not clearly communicating the changes and expecting people to read her mind.

I’ve seen this pattern before. In my own life with female bosses and in my other half’s previous female boss.

The pattern appears to be based in vengeance. It’s designed to create an overload of changes in hopes that the targeted individual or individuals will drop the ball and be demonstrably incompetent.

Incompetence equals unfit for job, which equals a termination offense. 

It’s a straight up process, and it works. All it takes is tenacity and the targeted individuals making mistakes.

The mistakes happen automatically because the boss is at the same time is usually haranguing the targets, increasing their stress and waiting for the targets to slip up, like a hungry shark in shallow water under a well greased bridge.

There are variations, of course but generally either the stress makes the target find another job, or they get fired.

One of the more common flourishes is to make sure that the target “fails” very publicly, securing the Bosses “High Ground” of righteous indignation.

It’s a similar system used by wives and mothers to “win” arguments with husbands and children. 

The only time I’ve ever beaten this system is by producing 5 different presentations and being able to give one of the five presentations to the boss at a moment’s notice. In that case the boss changed her mind 3 times in the conference room. My ability to produce whatever she wanted clearly irritated her. My “win” still cost me my job for being a smart ass.

Not to worry, she fired me, but one of her male colleagues hired me the same day. He & I worked well together for several years until the company was sold.

Essentially my experience in these situations has always been fatal. As such, I don’t fight the battle anymore. I save myself the stress and aggravation by finding another position. No win scenarios are pointless to fight.

When women are drunk on power, they’re egalitarian about how they abuse it.

Remarkably other women are less prepared to fight on equal terms than men.

For most men, it’s aggravating beyond belief (See American divorce rates). For women, it’s kinda like a double whammy. The women feel betrayed and aggravated. It makes women easier targets, because they do the wrong thing, & slip more easily off the greased bridge.

This of course makes finding new jobs more challenging. I’m not by nature a misogynist. When it comes to bosses I’ll always prefer to work for a man.

Things are just a whole lot easier.

All this is to say I’ve noted the pattern occurring with the other half, and yesterday I described my concern.

All I got from that was “I’ve noticed and thank you for your concern…”

Okay I’ve said my piece. Unfortunately, now the chips will fall where they may.