Tag: Annoyances

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This employer vaccine thing is concerning…

Before you lose your mind…

Wait!

This kind of thing has always concerned me. I’ve worked for several companies that I LEFT because of health insurance or corporation biases.

There was one company that noticed I had a motorcycle endorsement on my driver’s license during the onboarding process.

The HR person told me that I’d have to provide them with a bill of sale for my bike within 30 days. She then went on to tell me that riding my motorcycle onto company property was a fireable offense.

After saying this, she went on as if she expected me to just comply without any pushback. When I asked her what the hell? She was quite shocked that I didn’t understand. After a bit of prodding she explained that the group insurance policy forbade anyone being covered from riding a motorcycle.

She was even more shocked when I told her we were done and asked for the hiring paperwork that I’d already filled out so that I could shred it. Then she got mad. I remember her screeching, “We’re only trying to protect you!”

My retort was, “Yep, at the price of becoming an indentured servant whose rights are granted by my employer, instead of The United States Constitution. What’s next? Approval of my sexual practices? Will I have to bring in the bedsheets weekly to prove that I’m not having sex if I’m unmarried? Will I have to prove that I’m not masturbating as well?”

Hey, I was younger and more prone to hyperbole.

I remember walking out of that place so pissed off I literally had to sit in my car in a mall parking lot to calm down for the drive home. Then I realized, “I’m at a mall, screw it! I’m going shopping!”

Then there was another company where smoking was suddenly forbidden, dictated again by a change in their insurance policy. This was not just on company property but in your home. I’d quit smoking a couple of years before, but that day when I stopped for gas I bought a pack of smokes. Then I found a nice bar and ordered a double. I sat there drinking and smoking much too late. I quit the job the following Monday, I quit smoking again about a month later. I made sure that when I went in to quit I reeked of cigarette smoke.

Then there was a company who sent out a survey to each employee asking if they were SCUBA divers, or skydivers, pilots, mountain climbers, motorcyclists, dirt bike riders, or enjoyed hang gliding. Most employees thought they were doing one of those HR team building things where the company would build clubs of likeminded people to tout their work life balance. My antenna went up immediately after reading the list of activities. I didn’t send my survey back.

Two weeks later an HR representative was standing at my desk with a stack of surveys demanding that the employee named on the survey fill it out while they waited. The representative testily pointed out that lying on a company form was grounds for dismissal.

She had maybe 30 other surveys in her hand. I asked, “Why is it so important for you to know if an employee participates in this specific group of activities?”

She told me, “the reason was none of my business.”

I told her, “Then write that I do all of them, then you’ll have whatever reason you’re fishing for to do whatever you’re going to do.”

Ahh… The fun of open office plans with 4′ cubicle walls. Several of my colleagues had incomplete surveys to fill out too. They heard the exchange and marked all of the above as well.

I’d already interviewed for another position with a competitor, and been offered the job.

The little lady stomped off, and I finished my resignation letter effective immediately. My boss pointed out that 2 weeks was customary and I said, “I’m not going to allow a company to dictate my personal life.”

My boss sat back and said, “Oh, you’ve heard.” I said, “Nope, but I’ve been to this rodeo before and know how it ends. Out of courtesy, I’ll give you two weeks because you’ve been decent to me.”

The next week, HR announced that the company decided the activities listed on the survey were too dangerous and employees were not to participate in them because medical insurance would not cover “Dangerous Activities”. In the HR announcement, they said they’d be reaching out to employees with acceptable methods that employees could prove to the company they’d given up these “dangerous” hobbies.

Over the next two weeks, the company received the resignations of about 20 engineering employees. In the end, they were begging for people to stay. HR remained intractable and started trying to hire replacements. But the word was out in the engineering community. It turned out that American engineers like to have fun in their off time.

These are examples of employer overreach from my own life and personal experience.

I’ll grant you that COVID vaccination was a bit different when the vaccines were being touted as providing immunity. But now?

We’ve been told by the CDC, and Dr Fauci that the vaccines against COVID-19 are therapeutic not preventative. We’ve seen articles in the mainstream press saying that the vaccine will prevent hospitalization with COVID but that even vaccinated persons can still get COVID and spread it.

So NOW with this knowledge, is it reasonable for corporations or governments to demand their employees be vaccinated? Is it right for those corporations to insinuate themselves into the personal lives of their employees? Will the future hold that an employee with HIV or cancer, or heart disease be threatened with their job if they don’t take HIV meds, or choose not to have chemo, or refuse a pacemaker?

This comes to mind because T-Mobile can be added to the list of employers demanding that their corporate employees get vaccinated. The article is here.

Since I’m adamantly against a corporation dictating any aspect of my life except when I must be at work to do my job, I’m in a bit of a conundrum.

I don’t want to support companies that do this sort of thing. But after doing some research it turns out that T-Mobile provides the best plans and pricing for me given my family’s needs.

Generally speaking, I’ve been terminating my connections/subscriptions to companies whose policies I disagree with. Apple being a notable exception although I have been reducing the new dollars that I give them.

There’s a problem being entrenched in any corporate ecosystem. You try to get out and they keep pulling you back in… To paraphrase the movie line about the Mafia.

I miss the good ol’ days when companies were just about making profit and were publicly apolitical. I know we’ll never get back to simple transactional relationships with Corporate America.

That doesn’t mean I can’t miss the simplicity.

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Here’s an Interesting Stat

I just cancelled Amazon Prime.

I was paying 12.99 per month since about mid 2019.

In that time I’ve had four packages delivered and watched 25 movies.

For ballpark comparison, let’s just call it 380.00 over the time I’ve had the service. None of the packages arrived via anything except the free UPS delivery. Apparently the stuff that I wanted from Amazon was not available to ship via Prime.

As to the movies…

Well 380.00 / 25 = 15.58 Per Movie. I know that more than a few of those movies were 3.99 rentals.

As a point of comparison, I won’t pay 14.99 for movies on Apple TV. I’ll wait till a movie I want is on sale for some price below 10.00. And I have the rights to view that movie as many times as I want.

Yes, there were some movies that were available on Amazon Prime and nowhere else. But those movies have become fewer and some of them are no longer available in the Amazon catalog.

I’m not saying that Prime is a bad deal for everyone. But it was a bad deal for me. It duplicated what I already had as far as music went. I use Apple Music. The video quality of some of the movies was poor and I, as a rule hate commercials before actually getting to the movie. I hate commercials on paid services in general. Amazon wasn’t as bad as Hulu has become it was just more expensive. Hulu is next on the agenda, I’m not watching much on their service either.

I had maintained Amazon Prime for the series, The Expanse. Funny thing about it was that with the character Alex being killed off at the end of last season, I couldn’t muster enough interest in watching this season to actually sit down and watch it. The actor that played Alex was accused of sexual harassment and was therefore immediately removed.

Having been sexually harassed by women, I take claims of harassment seriously. I also believe in due process, and let’s face it men don’t get due process ever. Even if the charges are completely dismissed, the accusation lingers, forever coloring everything they do and profoundly affecting their careers. Accusations of sexual harassment leveled against women on the other hand, are largely ignored. They are just as damaging to male victims but nobody cares.

I don’t know if Cas Anvar was actually guilty. The accusation alone is enough to destroy a male actor these days. In the series of books, Alex wasn’t killed off.

The whole cast is great, I’ve enjoyed their performances. But for some reason, I just completely lost interest in the story. Perhaps it was end of series malaise, perhaps it was something more. I own the first four seasons, I don’t know if I’ll spend the bucks to add season 5 and 6 to the collection or not.

I find that my interest in movies, TV, and even music is declining. I suppose it’s just that I’m not in any mood to sit down for two or three hours of haranguing about social justice, the end of the world, or whatever the cause de jour may be. Give me a good book instead and I’ll be happy.

In any case, I just cut 155.88 per year out of my budget. I guess I can apply that toward my gas or grocery bills.

I’d say, for everyone to take a look at parasitic monthly billing. It’s really easy for that stuff to accumulate and be forgotten about. It’s probably not going to put a lot of money back in your monthly budget, but these days every little bit helps.

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Have the “Woke” & Transgendered Folks killed porn?

I’d say yep!

Well, they helped for sure.

There used to be some great porn being produced. I’ve got a bit of a collection, but oddly I haven’t added to that collection in quite a while.

There’s just not much of interest these days. A lot of the venerable porn production companies are (or were) located in California.

Over the past few years, I’ve been seeing fewer movies and a lot more compilations from old films being repackaged as “New” movies.

There used to be a lot of good productions that dealt with subjects such as bondage and domination. The current crop of films isn’t nearly as entertaining. It’s like now the directors and script writers are worried about offending someone.

The beauty of porn was that it offended some people. Those who were offended had a simple choice, continue watching and be offended OR turn it off.

There have been porn movies I’ve seen that were totally not my particular cup of tea. Did I whine about it? Nope! I exercised my god given right to find something else to watch.

I’ve seen some newer movies where the female or male wasn’t what they initially appeared to be. These movies are not my cup of tea. So I found something else to watch.

There’s just something about a female who disrobes and has tits and a dick. It’s not like I’m transphobic, it’s just that I don’t find that erotic. I feel like I’ve been the victim of bait and switch and it totally kills the mood I was going for.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of the old production companies now appear to be owned by one or two conglomerates, this is having a homogenizing effect on the movies that are being produced.

There aren’t, for instance many older performers. The entire cast seems to top out at 22. In some cases this is perfectly fine, but I personally have a tough time maintaining a suspension of disbelief when a 20 something male is being called “daddy” or is supposed to be some kind of dominant macho leather stud.

I mean no disrespect to the actor, but honestly, a guy that young hasn’t lived it and it shows. His balls have barely dropped.

The females too, are so young. I have a tough time believing they’re experienced enough to know what they’re doing or actually enjoying it. In the back of my mind I’m wondering things like, “how could she be so experienced? Was she abused?” Then the mood is killed because I’m thinking about that.

In Bi or Gay porn there’s the same problem. All the dudes look like they’re boys not men and I start thinking paternally again.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of the performers I used to look for, aren’t making films with any frequency either. That could be a function of them tiring of the industry, or age, or ageism, but it’s become obvious they’re missing from the scene.

This particular phenomena caught my attention because it was so sudden. Almost like a light switch being flipped.

The porn printing industry (books and the like) also seems to be dying. I know from the warning labels on some of the books I’ve looked at, that an author now has to identify every single act.

“This book may contain Penetrative acts, bondage, forced sex, rape, torture, descriptions of prostitution, kidnapping, etc, etc, etc.”

This list is long and tedious. It’s obvious that the publishers are seemingly afraid of anything that might be uncomfortable for a percentage of the readership to read. To that end they’re creating the equivalent of trigger warning labels.

Come On! Get a grip!

The beauty of a book is that if something is too intense, you can skip ahead. Pornographic stories are NOT supposed to be taken as anything serious. It’s not like they’re an instruction manual, they’re fantasy.

Here’s a sex instruction manual I put together off the top of my head.

Step one, obtain consent.
Step two, become intimate and stimulate your partner.
Step three, remove articles of clothing as desired or needed and continue with touching or other stimulation.
Step four, oral stimulation may be applied to any part of the body, to heighten the arousal state.
Step five gently explore sensitive orifices with whatever genitalia is available if desired. Substitution of tongue, or digits is allowable.
Step six, scream, yell, grunt, as orgasm occurs
Step seven, lie in each others arms… Smoke if you’ve got ’em.
Step eight, Repeat as necessary.

Even this basic manual is skewed toward the multi-gendered so as not to offend.

The Original manual was much simpler.

Step one, Kiss kiss kiss.
Step two, lick, lick, lick.
Step three (optional) suck, suck, suck.
Step four, thrust, thrust, pump, pump.
Step five, Smoke if ya got ’em. Repeat as necessary.

A pornographic story takes these basic notions and expands on the possibilities in a safe fantasy. Most of the stuff written in pornographic stories are wild and outlandish. They’re things or situations that you’d never try in real life. But through the magic of human imagination we can experience these outlandish activities in a safe simulation space within our own heads.

Why on earth would an adult looking to purchase and read a pornographic novel need a warning label?

“Daddy’s Dungeon” as a title pretty much tells you what you’re getting into. The cover art is also a really good tell tale.

If there’s any question you can read the synopsis. Most of the time these days, you can even read a sample online. Back in the day, in an adult bookstore you’d flip to some random pages and read the action. Then you’d make a decision to buy the book or not.

As a male, I’d flip to a chunk of the story, read a bit, and decide based on the swelling in my crotch if the book was worthy of my hard earned money.

OMG! I might just have offended someone with my CIS gendered appreciation of my erectile pleasure!

That’s the problem! The majority of men that I know, enjoy and derive deep satisfaction from our erections. There are however a fractional percentage of folks that find that glorious feeling uncomfortable. These people have decided that since THEY don’t enjoy it… NO ONE should.

To that end, they’ve become a vocal minority who are mucking up one of the single best, basic, and free thing that people do.

Screw!

Then they’ve gone on to destroy even the release offered by sexual fantasy.

Here’s a thought. You do you, and I’ll take care of me.

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Data Cleaning

About a year ago, the other half had a computer that malfunctioned in a particularly nasty way.

All of the data from that computer was essentially wiped because the computer itself managed to rewrite data enough times on an SSD that it killed the drive. FYI. Solid State Drives have a finite lifespan that is dictated by the number of times data is written to them.

The other half’s computer managed to kill not one but two SSD drives in 6 months. Wow! that’s a whole lot of rewriting of data. 20 years worth in 3 months.

The upshot of all of this is that I ended up digging data up from backups, and places on the network where they’d stored data. This doesn’t sound like much of an issue until you realize that the other half stores data in a completely random way.

This is not surprising since hardcopy data is stored in exactly the same way in odd little places all around the house.

After I’d consolidated all the data I could recover into a single group of folders on the server, I said, “Okay that’s all I can do, you’re going to have to sort through and delete duplicates and what you don’t need.”

That was over a year ago. Guess what? Nothing has been touched since the important documents got transferred to the new computer.

Here’s a lovely chart showing how much data is needlessly occupying space on the server.

These numbers are astounding. Gigabytes of duplicate data? Really?

Well, since none of this has been touched in over a year. I’m going to clean house!

This is going to take a really long time. I’m not even going to bother to examine files, I’m going to use a utility to merge folders and delete duplications.

Whatever is lost will probably be of no consequence since it wasn’t important enough to look through in the first place.

The fact is, there’s no reason to have 5 folders of duplicate information indexed and stored on the server. It’s not that I’m all that worried about space I’ve got tons available. It’s about the possibility of a drive crash and all of this crap would make recovering from a one or two drive malfunction in the RAID array really tedious.

I’m sure that I’ll hear about something being lost, sometime in the future, but I’ll deal with that when/if the time comes.

At this point, I’m curious to see just how the deletion of all of this crap affects the performance of the server. I’m betting that the reduction in size of the index files alone will get me a speed boost.

I just hope the utility can swallow and digest a mountain of redundant data.

I should know in another 12 hours or so.

Now off to deal with some other poop. This time it’s legitimate poo, from the dog. Strangely I don’t mind cleaning the poop from the back yard nearly as much as I mind cleaning up the poop on the server.

Have a great weekend.

Update:

260GB deleted. Probably 100GB more to sort through.

The cleaning application, got lost in the mess. This happened several times.

I finally got annoyed with the utility. I was seriously considering asking for a refund. I went in manually to do the job. Initially I was thinking, “DAMN a human brain will still be needed to do the most basic things!”

Uh Huh…

I found that the application was having a problem with folders nested within folders that all had the same names.

It looked like the image to the right.

But in each one of the subfolders, there were files. Some of these files were originals and some of them were duplicates.

This diagram shows a recursion only 5 levels deep. Something like 63 directories and what I was looking at was in some cases 7 levels deep. It was not uncommon for there to be 1000’s of files in each directory.

As you can imagine, it got out of hand very quickly. Especially when you consider that many of the file names were duplications.

I’d been annoyed at the utility for not being able to keep it all straight. But I was far less annoyed when I realized that I, (The Human,) had gotten lost more than once in this digital house of mirrors.

As a interesting aside, It took me two different applications to create even this simple representation. One of the applications flat out refused to engage in the illogic and crashed.

The second application was somewhat uncooperative but eventually allowed me to create it, then save it as a PNG.

I’m no longer annoyed at the duplicate finding utility that threw up its hands. Even trying to create the representation was harder than I thought it would be. I could picture in my head what I wanted to show, but translating that kind of irrationality to something clear was… Odd.

In the case of the utility, I very much doubt that the programmer who created it even considered that someone would do something like this. So I still think the utility was worth what I paid for it.

Looking at the recycle bin, it looks as though the utility handled 4 levels of recursion without a complaint.

It’s because of this kind of thing that I personally am a bastard when it comes to training computer users on the importance of reasonable directory structures. I’ve always said that if you need nested directories more than five levels deep, you’re doing something wrong.

Obviously, there are exceptions to this rule. Computers can keep track of much deeper nesting, but non-technical average human beings??? More than five levels down, you’re asking for files to be “lost” and setting yourself up to chew hard disk space with duplicate files that will never be accessed again.

Yet again… There’s usually a good reason for me doing things the way I do.

So that was my Saturday… I hope yours was more fun and less, uhh… interesting.

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That’s it! I want to get the HELL out of California!

In addition to all of the absolute bullshit that is California…

Traffic, Lockdowns, Abridgment of rights, Water shortages, Electricity Shortages, $500 Auto Registration Fees, Incompetence of the State Government and all the state’s government offices, State waste of tax dollars. Complete lack of planning, Crime, Outrageous Property Taxes, Outrageous Gas prices .55 on every gallon of gas really? Shitty roads, Outrageous State Income Taxes, and on and on and on…

I mean, pick literally any subject and then look to California to see how to do it exactly wrong.

I hate this place and everything about it.

There was a time when the benefits outweighed the hassle. That time is long gone.

This is a losing proposition any way you cut it.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some good people here and even some good Representatives in the Legislature. The problem is there are too few people with any common sense and those numbers apparently are dwindling.

The straw that has broken this camels back is EDD.

I don’t think there’s ever been a more incompetent government entity short of perhaps the last of the Roman Empire, maybe King George III’s tax collectors or court.

First EDD screwed up their modernization of their computer systems. They contracted with, and hired a bunch more people to actually do the work. Apparently the work not only didn’t get done, but they bought a shit ton of equipment that sat in its boxes until the warranties expired. Then the equipment sat for another few years until it was literally obsolete and had to be scrapped.

They were completely unprepared for the number of unemployment claims that were being filed when the pandemic hit. How did they address this? By putting more people on the phones supposedly to answer phone calls, which of course still didn’t get answered.

Oh yeah, there were hearings and excuses and in the end, after the uproar died down nothing was done. No heads rolled, and EDD went right back to its usual incompetent self.

They screwed up who was being paid during the pandemic. Turns out they paid a lot of people that perhaps weren’t eligible for benefits.

What? You mean they threw taxpayers dollars at people that shouldn’t have received benefits??? Yep… in at least the hundreds of millions of dollars range if not billions.

Now, EDD is sending out stupid emails that demand the people who received benefits prove they were eligible to receive those benefits and they’re threatening to charge 30% penalties on those benefits.

But of course the email they send you provides links to the EDD website that frankly is a hot steaming pile of shit. So even if you want to comply with their demand the odds are you can’t since the site sucks so bad.

Just connecting to their web site makes me and my computer morons. The intellect draining capacity of California’s EDD site should be harnessed and used to combat hackers and cyberterrorists the world over.

Come to think of it, the EDD site could be used as a firewall. It’s amazing at creating endless loops of login after login.

The funny parts of EDD’s demands are that they seem to think; A) The criminals who gamed the system are going to send documentation. B) That they’re going to get the money they threw away back from criminals who gamed the system.

Hey California EDD, NEWSFLASH Those people are in the wind and you’re not going to find them!

D’Oh!

But for people who had legitimate claims. We’re having to jump through hoops to clean up EDD’s fuckup.

When you talk to EDD they predictably absolve themselves of responsibility by saying the Federal Government is who is requesting this information.

That is probably true, however EDD should have all the data. They should not be asking for tax returns. After all if EDD approved a person for unemployment benefits that presumes that EDD knows who your previous employer was and verified that you were eligible for benefits in the first place. RIGHT?

It gets better, the EDD representatives are apparently unsure what exact documents you need to provide. Do you need to provide the entirety of your tax returns or just a copy of the W2 or will pages from your California Tax return suffice? They’re not sure.

“It’s the Federal Government that’s asking, it goes into a computer to determine if the document is right…“

Uh huh.

Having spent some time working for a Federal contractor, I can tell you that the Feds are pretty damn specific about what they want to see.

But wait, there’s more! EDD told a representative from a legislator’s office yesterday that they’d called me, (they did). I wasn’t available to take their call so they went to voice mail. This same person told the same legislative representative that they’d left a voice mail, (they did not). I sent screen shots proving the point to the legislators representative. So I have a little bit of a trust issue with EDD.

I have a real problem with providing EDD documents of this sensitive nature.

They’re incompetent, they’ve reported at least one data breach if I recall correctly. I’ve caught them literally lying to a California Legislator’s office.

Given their incompetence and Laissez-faire attitude about what they seem to need I’m concerned that by providing these documents in an electronic format I’m just setting myself up for identity theft.

After all what better hacking target than an organization with a proven track record of stupidity? Just imagine all the wonderful identities that will suddenly be available for the picking.

EDD appears to be auditing the citizens. EDD needs to be audited by a totally independent source. Maybe a group of accountants from Texas or Florida? Someone who’s not likely to sweep things under the carpet in the interest of not embarrassing California.

They made this mess. Why should the citizens be hassled, threatened, or further annoyed to help them clean it up?

I believe, California’s corruption and incompetence goes from the top all the way down to the local level.

I’m sick of it.

Voting is pointless because the people who’ve created this fucked up system greatly outnumber the people in this state who demand fiscal responsibility.

With that realization, I choose to work to get my ass out of here.

Even if that means divorce after 33 years and leaving the house and everything else behind. Honestly at this point I’m thinking about cutting my losses and doing anything to be free of this third world shit hole.

At least in another state I might have a shot at a job where I don’t have to worry about skin color quotas and layer upon layer of politically correct bullshit!

Fuck California!

p.s. In case you had any doubt… I’m not in a very good mood today.