As I age…

As I age I notice an accumulation of stupidity and everyone else either ignores it, or flat out doesn’t see it.

I wish I could ignore things and remain blissfully ignorant. 

Some examples:

Tail lights. I’ve recently seen at least two different cars, with all three tail lights flashing at different intervals from each other. There are warnings in movies about flashing light sequences affecting photosensitive individuals. In a movie the person is sitting in a chair. On the road, a photosensitive person might be in the driver’s seat of 2 thousand pounds of vehicle and can do considerably more damage if they react poorly or have a seizure.

F-hN5LJWgAQ59Xq.jpegI’ve noticed the irony of college protestors demanding an Israeli cease fire, but being perfectly happy to beat the living shit out of a Jew with a different opinion. Which is it? Peace or War? 

The Washington Post Censored the Cartoon at right, even though it is a perfect description of truth. WP didn’t want to offend? How does truth offend? WTF?

We literally censored people from the internet who spread “mis-information” about elections, COVID, Vaccines, etc. When Rashida Tlaib spreads mis-information on the steps of the Capital using her position in Congress to magnify her importance and therefore her voice, nobody says shit about it, until the House passes a vote to Censure her. What is said after the Censure vote is in condemnation of the Censure.  That for me is a complete WTF moment. Personally, I think Tlaib should be taken from the capital in chains and tried for Treason. Oh, for the college educated… Censure is very different from Censor. You idiots might want to open a dictionary.

Evidence suggests Joe Biden has apparently lied about his involvement with Hunter’s businesses, and the “Biden Family Business” to the tune of millions of dollars, at minimum it looks like influence pedaling. Nothing much is said or done about it. Donald Trump inflates the values of his properties a tad, gets loans from banks, pays off those loans, making everyone money and harming no-one. Yet he’s in court on fraud charges?

Warner Brothers has decided not to release a completed movie as a tax write off. Let me get this straight, if I build a house and never move into it. I just lock the doors, and never use it, rent it, or sell it. I can write off the entirety of the house on my taxes? How about nobody gets tax write-offs on completed projects until the project actually loses money. That seems a lot more logical doesn’t it? Oh and shouldn’t Warner Brothers executive be sitting in court alongside Trump for fraud? It’s a cinch that they borrowed money to produce that movie. 

The entirety of the UAW strike and its resolution. WTF? I understand wanting higher wages and benefits. But you do realize that a nicely equipped FORD costs almost as much as a top of the line BMW luxury car. A GMC Truck costs more than some models of fully equipped BMW SUVs. So tell me again UAW how you’re going to preserve your jobs building your current line, or when everyone transitions to electric vehicles with fewer parts and higher purchase prices. If I have a choice, I’m going to pick the cheaper vehicle with longer range. Toyota? Kia? Nissan, hello paging common sense, is common sense in the building? There’s no incentive to buy FORD, CHEVY, GMC or Tesla at the prices they’re currently charging. Even if you wanted to buy one of these brands, you can’t order the vehicle exactly to your specification. Go on, try to build one on their websites. You’ll find you can’t have certain engine / trim combinations. For example I found I couldn’t have a truck with nice seats, no chrome,  a V-6 engine, 4×4 transmission in a 2 door with 6 foot bed configuration. They make what I want with a 4 cylinder 2×4 transmission but swap in a V-6 4×4 and NO! You get 4 doors and a 4.5 foot bed. Sorry, that just doesn’t work, I want to carry a full sheet of drywall flat in the bed of a pickup, and be able to drive uphill. This is especially true when the prices are at $40 – $60,000 before options.

Loyalty Reward programs. This is a bit hypocritical of me because I use these programs. Not using them in protest which I should be doing, is punishing myself, not the companies. Why do we need these Loyalty cards? Why not simply sell the goods or services at the discounted a.k.a “REAL” price to everyone all the time regardless of their loyalty? Why is it that on a recent grocery store run I was able to save $45 off the bill, but only had one .50 manufacturers coupon? Is it that the grocery store inflates the price so much they can afford to discount everyone’s bill by 1/4? How about gas stations? Why not give everyone a break on the price and speed up the refueling process along the way, instead of having folks enter loyalty numbers and selecting options of payment and 50 other questions?

Medical Costs. Same generic RX for years. Sometimes it’s $120 other times it’s $90, still other times it’s $50. I’d really like to know, how much does this shit really cost? Perhaps a better question is, “How much on average does it really cost to get medical treatment?” Maybe we should base insurance costs on the average, not how much can we get for removing a splinter in Beverly Hills.  Why can I negotiate 2/3 off on a medical bill? It’s not even negotiation. All I had to do was ask… That suggests that the actual cost of doing business is 1/3 less than advertised.

A better overall question is this;

Why do we put up with these clearly irrational things, and why are these things accepted as “Normal”?

Well yesterday was interesting.

I got up, filled the car with gas and washed it, came home, walked the dog (as best I could given the heavy equipment running incessantly,) ate lunch, showered and played ball with the dog for an hour or so then saddled up and drove to Palm Springs.

I was expecting the grueling stop and go traffic that has become so common every hour of the day or night here. So I left early for an appointment out in PS.

Thing is, traffic wasn’t the usual insanity. In fact it was a pleasure driving. That’s something I haven’t experienced in California for a very long time.

The last time(s) the freeways were this open I can count on one hand. Sept 11, A day without a Mexican, and the height of COVID panic. 

No, Really, I’m not being racist. The organizers called it, “A Day Without a Mexican”. It was a protest organized by an organization that helped illegal aliens and they wanted to make the point about how many Mexicans provided various services such as labor, to the Los Angeles region. The whole thing backfired spectacularly. 

As requested, the Mexican labor force didn’t show up to work. And the freeways were blissfully wide open. No broken down cars or trucks littering the I-10. No gardening equipment was bouncing randomly on the 405 during rush hour. And no one was inconvenienced at all at any of the fast food joints. The whole thing was so noticeable AM and FM radio personalities were saying we needed to have “A Day without a Mexican” on a regular basis.

I think the organization the set the protest up is no longer around. I haven’t heard anything like their rhetoric for a very long time.


Anyhow, I was moving along so well, and the online freeway maps were all showing green, that I dropped into the Apple Store and purchased this nifty little charging stand. It was inexpensive and super neat, ( I wish I’d thought of it!)

If you’ve got an Apple Watch, you’re familiar with the magnetic charging puck you set your watch on to recharge. Apple makes a bigger version for charging iPhones. I’ve had the iPhone charging puck for a few years. The problem with the thing is that it’s not anchored to anything and it’s light enough that if you pick your phone up, the puck stays attached to your phone, so you put stress on the cable, and if you’re in a hurry you’ll pull the phone off the puck and the puck lands on your desk, nightstand, or counter, with a bang. 

In my case the wooden nightstand. The puck has enough weight to ding the top of furniture. Especially if it lands edge on.

IMG 0078The nifty little stand I purchased lets you snap the Apple charging puck into it and then holds your phone via the magnetic puck at a nice viewing angle. It also allows you to use a new feature in IOS that turns your iPhone into a very nice bedside clock.

I like that the phone is up off the nightstand, (so I don’t put my water glass on it, mistaking it for a coaster in the middle of the night,) and I found a clock face on my phone that is nostalgic. This particular face is reminiscent of an old Sunbeam electric alarm clock in my parents room when I was a child. My mom kept that bedside alarm clock until the grinding of the gears kept her up at night. Yeah, we’re talking analog, with a gear train and it was always warm to the touch due to the a/c motor and neon lamp inside.

Goofy as it sounds, seeing that face in the night makes me feel like “I’ve Arrived…”

Arrived at what, I don’t know. Perhaps the stage where nostalgia puts a smile on my face.


Apple Store purchase completed, I got back on the road to Palm Springs. And I flew! Just being able to drive without dealing with morons blocking the freeway because they were texting, jerking off, smoking dope, or finger banging themselves was bliss! 

I love my car, but I really love my car when I can open it up.

Admittedly, there were a couple of times yesterday when I punched through the inevitable knots of stupidity before those knots fully formed and “solidified”.

I punched through these tiny annoyances at 95MPH. 

FUN!!!!

I wasn’t in a hurry, I was just enjoying the power and smoothness of a machine that I really enjoy. 

The down side to my enthusiasm, is that I arrived at my appointment 30 minutes early. It would have been 45 minutes early, but for the Apple store stop!

After that appointment, I’d planned to meet a friend at one of the bars in the area. The plan was to have a couple of drinks and then wander off in search of food. Whoops! Last weekend was Palm Springs Pride. The weekend before that was Palm Springs Leather Pride. Several of the bars that I like were closed on a Tuesday night due to “Pride” fatigue.

REALLY!!???

Pussies! In my misspent youth I was the energizer fucking bunny! Party Starting Thursday Night go to work Friday Morning, with clothes stashed in the trunk of my car “just in case”, and party right on through the weekend, go to work Monday morning and I was driving all over hells half acre to bars and friends places.

(Honestly, I don’t know how the hell I did it. Oh, right… There was speed involved! Uhhh, well, okay, I retract my earlier “Pussies” comment.)

I met my friend outside the closed bar we were planning to meet in, his dog recognized me after 3.5 – 4 years of not seeing me. My friend recognized me too, which felt amazing since he looked so damn nice and I feel that I’m aging poorly and at an accelerated rate!

We negotiated the bar closures, and several restaurant closures to find ourselves sitting out on a patio having a lovely dinner & drinks. 

We caught up, and enjoyed each other’s company. Then as these things go, it was time to call it a night. My friend had an early morning and I had a long assed drive. 

Fortunately, I was once again able to enter the time warp on the freeway, and got home at a decent hour.


IMG 2933

Jesse was throughly displeased with me.

I think he might have thought he’d been left alone forever. He was outside, it wasn’t too cold, he had food and water, but the house was dark and he might have remembered the events of January. Maybe he thought he’d lost me, I’m not sure.

When I got home, the lights turned on automatically, the garage door opening may have woke him. When I stepped out onto the deck I was greeted with happy zoomies, then several balls were dropped at my feet. 

Then… My dog slut shamed me!

No I hadn’t had sex, but I had been with another dog so for the next 15 minutes every inch of me was sniffed. The look on Jesse’s face was really funny. On the one hand he was glad I was home, on the other hand he’d caught me cheating. Last night, he wasn’t letting me out of his sight. He went so far as to keep grabbing my arm. 

I learned that I don’t like being away from him for extended periods. All told I was gone about 8-9 hours. I missed him. I think we need to start going places together. This is going to be a pain in the ass at first, but I would like for him to be able to be a good traveling companion. I think it will be worth the time and effort.

I need to find some decent seat covers!

I was planning to head out to the grocery store this morning. But as upset as Jesse was last night, maybe I’ll wait to do that until tomorrow. There’s a Petco near the grocery store. That would give me the opportunity to shop for seat covers and a padded harness that wouldn’t hurt him in an accident or hard stop if he was secured via a seatbelt.

Now I’m off to make amends by sharing my breakfast.

Have a great day.

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?

There’s a real case for eschewing utility companies internet portals

The most recent case in my experience is Golden State Water.

Envelope.jpegNot only are they trying to raise the rates excessively. (What else is new?) But they’ve got this stupid system where you can’t use their web site to change anything except your email address. Oh, and using their website requires that you submit to paperless billing.

Apparently they’re not even in full control of their customer portal. They may have contracted it out, so God only knows to whom. It does explain why the site is kinda screwy.

All of this started because I’m closing one of the two post office boxes. There’s a lot of the mechanics of living that I’m having to alter since the other half died. Thus far I’ve been employing a minimalist approach because honestly I thought I’d be the hell out of California by now. That’s not going to happen, for reasons that I won’t go into.

I’m going to be here until at least Spring of 2024 so I’m having to work through a lot of the fundamentals. Mailing addresses for utilities, I’ll have to pay for 6 more months of Post office Box rental. I need to close the other halfs P.O. Box and all that kind of thing.

But, and this is the trouble spot. Most all of these utilities want you to monkey with their websites, create accounts and such and then… Don’t let you make basic changes to your account. I have one account that won’t let me change the phone number without deleting and re-creating the account. There’s another that won’t let me change the email address. Both of these situations are funny because I know folks who change phone numbers and emails more often than some people change socks.

If you can’t change basic stuff, without having to recreate an account, then the vendor will have loads of zombie accounts on their servers. That’s just as much a security issue. Figure one person might have at minimum 2 accounts, possibly more. If the account database is compromised bad actors would have access to two or more emails and passwords.

I get that there are security issues. I find myself asking if there are such security issues, then perhaps we shouldn’t be conducting business over the internet.

We got a new IOS and a Speaker of the House

Mikejohnson2 1 3301794256I’m happy about the Speaker because he seems untainted by the rampant corruption in Washington. Time will tell. I do really like the thought of him whipping Congress into working something like real business hours instead of what we’ve been seeing. We’ll never get our money’s worth out of Congress. That’s a given, but maybe this new guy will put an end to Congress sitting around jerking off instead of passing budgets, laws, and finding ways to cut the obscene waste our government finds all too easy to create.

I’ll admit my fingers are crossed that this guy isn’t corrupt. Louisiana has a long and storied history of corruption in politics so I’m taking a “wait & see” position.

I’m hopeful though.


Iphone 15 pro max renderYesterday Apple released a lot of software.

I’m most excited about the new IOS 17.1 release. Because my iPhone and watch having weird glitches was annoying. The weather complications on my watch being blank most of the time, but intermittently working was really annoying.

I spent part of the morning updating everything in the house. Thus far all the goofy crap my watch and phone were doing appears to have been fixed. I’m sure as I move forward with the new IOS I’ll stumble across new bugs. I just hope those new bugs aren’t as plentiful as the bugs I was seeing in IOS 17.0.3.

I’ll admit that the updates went pretty smoothly. You could only appreciate how happy I am about that if you knew how much Apple Iron there is in this house.

While I was waiting for software to download and load, I managed to make a lot of headway on my list of dumb things I have to do. So the time wasn’t wasted.

I used to sit and watch the update process. I don’t anymore. I figure that watching it isn’t going to make it be any more reliable or move along any faster. It’s almost binary now. Either it works or it doesn’t. One path causes me no trouble and I get what I expected. The other path, something has gone horribly wrong and I’ll have to figure out how to fix it.

Either way, there’s little sense in my watching the screen for some cryptic message that won’t mean anything to me or to an ill trained first tier technical support person I reach at Apple.

Sadmac1

I guess that’s me applying the “Don’t worry about it until it happens” philosophy of life.

There is one thing I don’t do. I don’t update everything at exactly the same time. Typically I’ll let the phone finish before I update the iPad, computer, HomePods, AppleTVs, and watch. 

I have this vision in my head that I start the update process on everything at once. Then everything failing and seeing sad Mac faces everywhere. Which would mean I couldn’t even email for assistance.

Remember the Sad Mac?

I had to laugh at myself about the Dynamic Island.

At first I was like “Yeah, So what?” Then yesterday after the updates completed I realized that I’d been seeing the Dynamic Island all along.  True there are only a few apps that I have which make use of the Island while I’m doing other things. But the Dynamic Island is actually there all the time and providing me with useful information. It’s so seamless and honestly I expect useful information to be presented exactly where the Dynamic Island presents it that the island was almost invisible to me.

I have high expectations of software. So I’ll have to say to Apple “Good Job”. 

Now let’s have a look at other apps both Apple and third party to see if Dynamic Island integration can be useful.

I’m also liking having the always on display on the new phone. I didn’t think I’d like it but I do. Now I want to get a magsafe stand for the bedside table. So I can use the whole standby functionality thing. I haven’t had a bedside clock for years. It’s weird that my bedside clock became my phone, wand now my phone is morphing back into a bedside clock. 

Apparently I’m not the only person who’s thinking this way. MagSafe stands, particularly the one from TwelveSouth are backordered all over the place.

Well, off to continue the sorting and tossing of crap out of the house.

I hope everyone has a really nice day.