Tag: Annoyances

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Grrrrrr! Brain not cooperating !

I’ve been trying to write something to finish a short book.

I’ve tried looking at the blank page. That didn’t work. Took the dog for a walk head didn’t clear. Scanned some porn, uhh nope! That didn’t help.

I figured I’d turn toward the blog to see if I can write anything. Then two sentences in, the dog wants to play.

I have worked on cleaning out some of the paperwork out of office closet and found that once again the other half had stashed paperwork in another backpack. On the bright side this stuff was all from 2010 so I don’t have to worry about it. Straight to the shredder!!!

My limit is 2016, pretty much anything prior to that year with the exception of tax records (those are 2013) I’m just tossing in the shredder pile. I’m going to have to find a shred event for a lot of this crap because the shredder can’t handle it. I might be able to keep the shredder running if I could cool it with liquid nitrogen. I’m completely out of that so the shredder runs for 20 minutes then shuts down for an hour.

Then I sat back down to look at the blank page again. Nope, nothing…

The paperwork led to an archeological vein of melancholy as I found a bunch of stuff from 2009 and remembered that we’d just gotten back into this house after the fire. We were happy. We both had good jobs, new cars, new house, and everything was bright. I’d been saving like a fiend in my 401K because I wanted us to be able to retire.

My 401k was depleted 6 years later by unemployment and the other half insisting that we stay in California. I loved him, so we stayed. He lost one job, due to a minister that was far more sinister than ministerial. He kept his other jobs and replaced part of what he lost with a less invasive church position. I found another job that destroyed my career (what was left of it.)

It’s so damn funny that HR people don’t seem to understand taking a job slightly outside your career so that you have a roof over your head and food on the table. These dumb ass HR people just can’t seem to process pragmatism. They seem to believe that you should run up credit cards, then move back in with Mom & Dad while looking for the golden position. Most realistic people would take a job to feed their family. Well, realistic people of my age group, anyway.

There was a time when employers respected the hell out of initiative. There was even a time when the employer that gave you the slightly outside your career would offer to you the first open position that they had that was in your career path. After all they already know your work ethic.

That doesn’t happen anymore. Promoting from within doesn’t seem to happen very much anymore.

Regardless, I’d started rebuilding my 401K and saving as much as I could from 2016 through 2019 all the time looking for a job in my career path and trying to regain the ground lost so that we could have some decent retirement.

Then, well another layoff due to offshoring! Yea!

What I didn’t know was that the other half wasn’t thinking the same way I was. Even If I’d made half a million a year, and done the max 401K contribution, it wouldn’t have helped much. We’d have been in about the same boat I’m in right now. Unless I was putting hard cash away in some other kind of investments.

It made me sad. I tried to do better for us.

I didn’t plan for him dying before we’d retired. I figured I’d be the one on the slab first.

That’s actually kind of funny.

Like Baldrick from Black Adder, my cunning plan blew up in my face.

This is one of the hardest parts of all this. It’s the recognition of what we almost had, what we missed, what we’d hoped for, and dreamt of.

I sometimes feel like I’m sweeping up broken glass. I keep getting those thin shards in my feet because I’m barefoot and I can’t cross the glass to my shoes.

What I’d really like to do is finish the dang story so I can publish it.

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I was trying to write something about stuff the pisses me off.

You’d think it would be easy. That’s the problem it’s too easy and there’s simply too damn much that pisses me off.

How can I possibly pick and choose?

One of the things that keeps popping up again and again is this Trans Crap.

I’m over it!

I am not and do not want to be associated with any of these events, or people.

Who you sleep with is nobody’s fucking business. I think most, if not all, of us in the LGB community are just as sick as the straight community is, of having TRANS Shit shoved down our throats 24/7.

To be clear, a lot of the LGB folks want a divorce from the T and rest of the alphabet soup folks.

The “T” and whatever the hell other “letter people” don’t represent the mainstream of the LGB folks and have completely hijacked whatever normalcy in society we’d managed to win.

These dumb fuckers have set us all back to the ‘80-90’s where normal folks think LGB folks are coming to corrupt their children. We’re not! But the “T” and alphabet folks are dragging the rest of us into their psychosis.

To be clear you don’t wake up one sunny morning and decide you’re not the gender you were born. You don’t come to the conclusion that you need to cut body parts off, over an overpriced Starbucks coffee and scone. Or for that matter, Legos and Barbies.

Even the real Transgender folks are being dragged along by a bunch of deranged jackasses, for whom “Non-binary” or “Trans” is trendy.

Here’s a newsflash dumbasses. Non-binary isn’t anything new. Human beings have always lived and acted in a sexual continuum. Very few people are completely straight or completely gay. Creating a term, then publicizing that term is nothing more than the HRC, and other money grabbing organizations way of remaining relevant.

If Non-binary is what you need to give yourself permission to sleep with whoever, or experiment with your sexuality then fine.

Just remember it’s not a fucking new thing, we’ve all gotten drunk, been horny, and woke up naked with a hangover, and someone we didn’t expect snoring beside us.

A lot of the more mature folks in our society, (not by age, but by attitude,) simply got up, and owned that things might have gotten a little out of hand. Most of us put a pin in the acts and / or gender of the person we’d done those acts with, and the associated ramifications until the hangover was gone.

I don’t give a runny shit about the “T” alphabet morons anymore. I used to care because I knew folks who were part of the real, (super small,) T community that actually did believe with all their hearts and proved out via psychological counseling that they were in the wrong skin.

Those people would forgive me for being done with all this madness. I’m willing to bet that they’re over it too.

I always wanted to live someplace where sex and sexuality was tacitly acknowledged. Yeah, we all fuck, yeah we all like it, yeah we have preferred partners, end of discussion. NEXT! We almost got there, maybe next time…

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All I wanted was to listen to music…

Riiiiight!

I pulled a thread, and now none of the smart lights in the house are working. The security camera is also offline. I managed to kill the battery in my phone about 5 PM.

As Mr. Scott once said, “The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to clog up the works!”

This is what happens when you have a “smart house”

I have no clue exactly what the hell is going on. But I’ve done factory resets on my router, and all the smart light bulbs. I’ll be factory resetting the HomePod Minis, the Apple TVs and the Big HomePods.

I’ve been playing whack a mole. I’d get the lights working, then move on to the next thing that was broken, and boom the lights stopped working. Then I’d fix a light and something else would suddenly go offline.

It’s the darnedest thing.

For those of you wondering why I’m mistrustful of AI, here’s a perfect example why i don’t trust AI and think all AI systems should have a kill switch! That switch should be something totally mechanical that can’t be programmed around. Possibly augmented by a very large Axe.

None of the stuff at my house is particularly complex but something is running through the devices like a horseman of the apocalypse.

I’m thinking that I may have to power down then reset each and every device in the house to factory default then add them back one at a time.

I’m also thinking that I’ll need to delete the house from all the HomeKit enabled stuff.

By the time I’m done with this, chasing this problem around and around the house will have cost me 2 days. I started farting around with this Bullshit at 8am yesterday morning. I was listening to music, then suddenly there was no stereo. I asked the question, “Why?”

Before I knew it, I’d been consumed, as had my day. I actually had other things that I’d planned on doing yesterday none of which I got done except the laundry…

It’s also a good thing that I didn’t have any video I need to preserve. Because the security camera has been removed and re added to the home controls twice and will require the procedure again. Each time, any recorded video stored in the cloud is erased.

Totally brilliant bit of software engineering there. Another interesting feature is this, If the camera is offline in the Apple Home application then you can’t even look at video that’s recorded in your iCloud. So once the camera goes away and requires that you delete it and re-pair you’ve lost anything and everything stored for the last 30 days anyway.

I’ll be looking at a different paradigm for cameras in the future.

What’s the point of having the data recorded but completely inaccessible due to some silliness caused by a software update. Isn’t that the point of storing videos in the cloud???

Apparently, I’ve missed a memo somewhere.

Here’s the update. Flushing everything seems to have worked. I now have music throughout the house again and the smart lights are working. This was definitely the brute force method of solving the problem. I’m sure that it will reoccur at some point in the future.

That cynicism comes from experience with technology. Even if you’re not the one fiddling around with the devices, there’s always someone in development who’s tweaking a line of code here or there. Then someone else decides that a software update is necessary, or some scumbag hacker takes advantage of a security flaw and causes an update. One way or another, something is going to change and your nice stable system will be completely hosed.

I’d really like to be able to bill for the time lost to SPAM Email and all the software update related issues. The folks I’d like to bill are the little scumbag hackers, or their parents, or their countries of origin.

Well on with the rest of the day.

Have a great weekend