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OH! For God’s SAKE! Water Pistols?

Standard Water Pistol

The Boy Scouts of America has banned water pistols. It’s been on their books for a while but resurfaces each summer because the BSA reminds folks of the rules in preparation for the season’s activities.

BUT REALLY? I’m caught by the memories of my family and my friends and their families playing with squirt guns.

Across America during the summer folks are playing with super soakers, and hose nozzles and generally having a good time POINTING things at each other.

The Boy Scouts have also banned Nerf Guns, Lazer Tag, Paintball, Airsoft etc, too. (You can shoot at a non-living, non humanform target.) I guess that I can kind of, see banning projectiles.

Lazer Tag is a bit of a stretch. (Stealth, and learning when to dive for cover may be far more relevant to us all in the near future.)

BSA Logo

Lazer Tag is about moving, maintaining cover, and shooting accurately… Ok, maybe that is a bit warlike.

Water pistols???? I can’t help but remember summer outings with scouts where the scoutmaster tried to get us with a bucket of water and we buzzed around him like angry hornets fast and with accuracy that had HIM drenched while we were mostly dry.

No-one gets into a water pistol fight when it’s 100° F thinking tactics or anything other than “Got YA!” with a lot of running around and laughter. 

Water pistols are about the most benign, inexpensive, fun you can have as a child. Who doesn’t have fond memories of loading up a water pistol with Icy water from the ice chest at a family outing?

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I pity anyone who doesn’t remember catching an adult male in the crossfire and thinking, “We’re done for…” only to have that adult whip out a bigger badder squirt gun and chase all the kids, joining in the mayhem. Eventually everyone comes back soaked, laughing, and having made a memory that will put a smile on their face for the rest of their lives.

Some boys in my generation wouldn’t have had the opportunity to build those memories without Scouts. Those boys would never have had a chance to see adult males playing. Moreover, those boys, as they became young men wouldn’t have learned that restraint and letting the little kids “win” is also part of being a man. 

All boys need that kind of experience. It doesn’t matter that they might not get it from their fathers, what matters is that they get it from somewhere.  Scouting should be about those lessons, not legitimizing silly policies in the name of political correctness.

I fondly remember many lessons being taught to me on long warm summer days in the South. 

It seems like we’re stripping away what it is to be children. 

Even worse, it seems like we’re forgetting the simple beauty and joy of Adult Males showing children that it’s ok to play, be silly, and even “lose” a game.

I can tell you as an uncle, it’s really tough to “lose” a game without the children catching on.

You want to build their confidence with the “win”,  but make them work hard for their success. You never want them to feel that you threw the game.

That was a lesson I learned one particular summer in Tennessee just outside of Cookeville. I was watching my father play a game with my little brother. They were whooping and hollering in a pasture, playing some hybrid game of tag.

fireflies aka lightning bugs

I was sitting on a rock smiling as they tussled. I couldn’t join in because I had a big ass bandage on my foot.

Lightning bugs were blinking in the tall grass when Dad came out of the pasture carrying my nearly exhausted brother. Dad had been “caught” 10 times and that was the end of the game. 

As Dad came toward me he stopped. “Son, put your arm around my neck,” he said, helping me get on my feet. “Just keep your weight off your foot as best you can, lean on me, yeah that’s the ticket.” Dad carried his 5 year old and acted like a crutch for his 15 year old, bringing us both in to dinner. 

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Microsoft I have a bone to pick

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Back in the day Xbox required that it’s users convert CASH into Microsoft Points. For people like me this meant that over time we accumulated credits.

Recently Microsoft decided that the points were going to be phased out in favor of straight cash transactions.

Now those credits have been converted back to a cash value (At no interest) Microsoft has also started a countdown to forfeiture of the credit amount in our account.

Here’s the bone.

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I can’t spend that money on anything except a game, rental, or purchase of movies, or purchase of music. 

Okay so I want to buy a game. 

It costs 59.95. I have 45.65 on account. So logically you’d think that Microsoft would say

59.95-45.65 = 13.30 

Then offer to take the 13.30 + taxes from my credit card.

You’d be wrong!

They want to bill the entire amount to my credit card and leave me with the 45.65 still to spend and still to expire on June 1.

This is exactly WHY I hated the whole converting money to credits in the first place. 

Additionally Microsoft won’t let me use the credit to pay for my xbox gold membership or pay for anything else from the Microsoft line as far as I can tell.

I feel really screwed over this and I find myself thinking that the next game console I purchase will likely be from Sony. Xbox Live is expensive on a yearly basis if you’re only an occasional player and it’s a pain in the ass to sign up once in a while if you’re not sure that you’re going to be playing online. 

At the same time you practically have to have the Xbox Live account active because if you don’t, then decide to turn it on you have to deal with updates and more updates and more updates before you can play the freaking game you wanted to play.

I went through that today. I just wanted to play Call of Duty.  BUZZZZ! There are updates required…

After navigating a counterintuitive user interface to select the game I wanted to play then to be told I couldn’t play the game because there was a required update, then waiting for that update I’d already gone on to other things and wasn’t interested anymore. The downloads finished and I turned the machine off.

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Am I impatient? Probably!

But sometimes you only have a half hour to play and updates like that really cramp your style.

So Microsoft… here are a couple of things you might want to consider.

1) My account should be my account across all your product lines. Credit balance or not.

2) Learn to freakin do math!

3) You better really come up with some seriously awesome games because I’ve seen the Sony Playstation render games (DAMN!) and it also includes a nice BluRay player!

But most of all, 

We as customers shouldn’t be thought of as “Fish in a Barrel”

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I’m writing this on a Mac, I have office and I like the Office 365 preview you’ve been kind enough to share.

BUT…

I also have viable alternatives to Office, Windows, Skype, and in fact your entire product line. You might want to be a little more “Customer Friendly”

Just saying…

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Sometimes ya gotta bend the rules!

Karen Momsen-Evers

I read about this woman the other day.

Seems her husband sent her a text message just as she was getting on a plane and now she’s saying that Southwest Airlines prevented her from calling her husband to prevent his suicide.

I think that the whole incident was handled badly from start to finish. I hate to say it but I think the woman is trying to implicate Southwest as somehow partially responsible for her husbands death, perhaps for monetary gain.

I’ve read several versions of the story and with each version it seems more like she’s looking for someone to blame. 

Sadly her husband killed himself. But this lady had the option to step off the plane

Southwest

The Flight attendant could have explained other options to this distraught lady.

The flight attendant was DEAD wrong if in fact, she slapped the phone down. Try that with me and it’s going to get REAL ugly REAL fast!

I’ve noticed that flight attendants these days are far more sanctimonious and rule bound than they need to be. I know they put up with a lot, and passengers are already spun up by security, lines, and the cattle car environment of planes these days, but flight attendants don’t have to be assholes! They are after all, servicers!

Flightattendant

It would have been nothing for the flight attendant to tell the pilot about this lady’s concern and get a call to emergency services in her township. In fact it would have been easier for the airline to make that call than the lady herself. If she’d dialed 911 in New Orleans, she’d have gotten 911 in Louisiana. Someone at Southwest ticketing or even the control tower might have had better luck finding a Sheriffs number in Wisconsin, making the call with the address and getting emergency services to the lady’s home.

The problem is that the Flight attendant wasn’t listening. A problem we see all too often, these days and more often than in the past this not hearing someone out ends in tragedy.

All that being said, with each telling of the story I’ve heard or read, something doesn’t sound quite right.

This event doesn’t’ pass the smell test with me, I think if someone digs into it we’ll find other issues and possibly simple greed. 

Do life insurance policies pay off if the policy holder kills themselves?

Makes me wonder, how about you?

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Well that seems to have cured the problem…

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Unfortunately, It means that now I have to get back to work, looking for work.

My network is once again happy and stable. Backups are being made in minutes instead of hours and surprise surprise surprise, my access to the internet is once again solid.

It’s amazing what a few bad components (all of whom report they’re happy and functional) can do to screw your world up.

It’s going to take me a few more days to stop being twitchy about my network, but I’m sure that in no time I’ll take it for granted like I’ve done for the past 5 or 6 years.

We’ve got bandwidth, we’ve got gigabit, we’ve got connection!

I’m happy!

computer idiot

Oh and I discovered another little bit of interesting information.

Those of you that are not Time Capsule or Mac users might want to stop reading here.

I think I’ve found an answer to a problem that I’ve been seeing over the past month or so. The internet has been almost completely useless in resolving the issue in part because of one guy who apparently posted the exact same question on every message board ON THE PLANET! Hey dumbass, that kind fucks up any useful search results for the rest of us.

Anyway…

I think I’ve found the solution for one of the discoveryd problems. This may work for you, it may not. Apple’s discoveryd service has been, and is being documented as having serious issues. Some of these issues appear to be associated with Apple’s “handoff” and automatic hotspot functions.

IPv6addresslayout

I haven’t figured out that stuff yet. But I have managed to put a stop to my logs being overrun with one particular error.

Here’s the deal,

I’ve been seeing this error all over my logs.

5/15/15 10:31:05.057 PM discoveryd[75]: Basic Sockets Couldn’t set IP_BOUND_IF on socket fd[63] scopeID[4] errno[22] result[-1]

This error happened so frequently and hit my computer so hard that it would suck the battery down in just a few hours, my computer would heat up because it was running the CPU at near 100% and all the while it’s silent except for the traces in the log.

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I thought this was an artifact of the dying routers and drives, but that assumption was wrong.

Last night after I’d become mostly convinced that the network was stable, I noticed my computer was running warm again. I wasn’t doing anything to account for the system being run hard enough to be that warm. I had safari open in the background but I was actually doing some word processing.

I checked the logs and found that this error was literally zipping past. The console application was posting this message 50 times a second.

So I went to google. There I found the dumbass person’s question all over the place but few possible explanations and no answers.

Then I decided to look at IP_BOUND_IF to find out if it was an Apple only function or if it was a general UNIX function. Turns out, it was discussed on a general UNIX board.

From there I started investigating. I noticed by navigating to some web sites I could increase the frequency of the messages and by going to other web sites I could stop the message all together.

switches

This suggested that the problem wasn’t actually in my computer or even in my network, but that the problem was externally induced.

There were some websites that wouldn’t render any page, but those same sites would make this IP_BOUND_IF error post faster.

Then I stumbled across some sites talking about IPv6 having been enabled on some ISPs. This reminded me that I’d seen an IPV6 DNS entry when I was setting up the new router and that entry had been automatically populated.

I was curious if my new ISP had in fact turned on IPv6, so I went to the router control interface. Sure enough, there was an IPv6 DNS entry. Oh Cool! I thought, then I noticed there was no IPv6 address being provided to the router via the WAN.

DHCP is providing my IPv4 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx address and an appropriate DNS address to the router. But the only IPv6 information is a WAN supplied DNS address.

I wondered if my web requests were trying to go out to the IPv6 DNS address for lookup and results were supposed to come back to an IPv6 Client address that wasn’t assigned. That might explain why IP_BOUND_IF was failing. I know next to nothing about IPv6 standards. I’ve tried reading about it but have found that the specification makes a much better sleeping aid than educational one.

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I figured, “Awww what the hell,” I told the router, do local link IPv6 only. That means that my machines that support it inside my network will get IPv6, but that it will not be routed to the internet at large.

The IP_BOUND_IF errors went away, my internet surfing got faster and all pages now rendered properly. I don’t know if I guessed right, but my logs aren’t sucking up 100% of my CPU resources anymore.

Obviously, my ISP is working on IPv6 and they’ll probably implement it sometime in the future. When they do turn is on I’ll tell my router to use it. For the time being though, I’ll keep the IPv6 internal and rely on the good old IPv4 standard to surf the web.

For what it’s worth, I hope this helps. I make no warranty or guarantee.

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This is why many conservative gay folks…

sandyrios

… are still in the conservative closet. Yeah they’re out about their sexuality, but not about their philosophy, or politics.

All I can say after reading and listening to what this woman said is, “ARE YOU F&$KING KIDDING ME?”

Sandy Rios of Sandy Rios In The Morning said ON AIR that she’s wondering if the sexuality of the Amtrak Engineer in Tuesday’s train derailment was a factor in the accident.

PennsylvaniaTrainCrash

She goes to great lengths and is obviously choosing her words carefully to say she’s not inferring the accident happened because Bostian is gay…

Then goes on to infer exactly that! (Yeah and some of your best friends are gay too!)

Here’s a link to the article in the Huffington Post

LAfreewaybailout

This is the same as me saying, “I’m not inferring that because her last name is hispanic that she’s likely to leave the scene of an auto accident but well sometimes being hispanic is a factor in hit & run accidents… I was once in an accident where a hispanic lady left the scene. I mean she just abandoned her car and a friend picked her up before the cops came.“

True story, The lady did abandon her car on the freeway, left behind one hell of a mess for the CHP to clean up. 

For years gays have been accused of having larger amounts of disposable income than their straight counterparts. Additionally, they’re supposed to be more into taking care of themselves, they’re supposed to drive nicer cars, have nicer homes and apartments, they’re typically well educated, well insured, and well just awesome in every way.

Were you describing a straight person with all those same traits, you’d say they’re responsible & reliable.

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Yet when you preface those same traits with “They’re gay…” somehow these traits lose their blush and now all that responsibility & training counts for nothing with conservative assholes like Rios.

I’m a mostly conservative asshole, and I know a lot of really conservative gay men. We’re not obvious about our conservative beliefs for two reasons.

1) Lots of gays are totally Democratic, progressive liberal dip shits.

2) People like this ‘gash in a sundress’, (Thank you Pam from TrueBlood, that is a great line!)

Pam

When you say you’re a conservative gay person you’re treated badly, and people identify you with Perry, Santorum, Rush Limbaugh, or crazed bible thumpers from Westboro Baptist Church.  Obviously, none of my conservative gay friends are anything like these examples, and by the way we don’t hate ourselves either.

Generally we’re thinkers who tend to prefer common sense practicality over “theory”. We don’t tend to buy into social engineering and are more about people deciding what’s best for themselves. We realize we don’t have to agree on every point with someone else and can hold discussions with folks who have different opinions without resorting to name calling. After we’ve had even “spirited” discussions, we can still be friends, have a beer and even sex, and feel great about life and how lucky we are.

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Thank goodness this lady isn’t mainstream.

Next, people like Rios would be claiming that gays shouldn’t operate heavy machinery, drive cars, or fly planes, for fear of a gay person “getting the Vapors” and losing control.

[After all it only takes one despondent faggot, and planes get crashed into the ground.

Oh wait the German pilot was straight… oh wait the Islamic terrorists that crashed into Pennsylvania were straight, and it was a gay man that was one of the leaders of the rebellion against the terrorists on flight 93.]

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The same line of reasoning was, ironically enough, used to deny women the vote and briefly the ability to drive in this country.

That line of “Less than” reasoning is STILL used in some countries in the Middle East to deny women’s rights.

So Ms. Rios, YA might want to think for just a moment about all the privileges and rights you have, which would have been denied simply because you’re a woman and therefore “Less Capable”.

Then for just a moment think about the fact that you’re suggesting a “Less Than Capable” status because someone is gay. Then after that…

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Do us ALL a favor and shut your pie hole!

Allow me to spell this out using small words so you can understand the meaning.

Gay people are just like everyone else.

Give gay people ALL the rights of being a US citizen and you’ll see just how normal, and dare I say it, “Average” they are.

Oh and by the way, we’re better drivers than you straights…

We do have nicer cars and therefore have to be better drivers, just to avoid accidents with distracted soccer moms like you!