Tag: Annoyances

Posted on

Too much static!

I’ve been finding it very hard to write lately.

There’s a lot of stuff going on in my life and my local environment that have created a bunch of noise in my head.

I’m worried about a lot of things, and even ignoring the larger issues of the world at large the static is making it very hard for me to put thoughts together in any coherent order.

There have been a lot of false starts in blog posts and other projects, they’re not progressing because lately I have the attention span of a gadfly.

The more I try to set aside time for me. Just me to sit quietly, collect my thoughts and plan a day, the more interruptions, or disasters, rain down on my life.

I’d love to actually plan a day and not have every single plan blown to hell almost instantly. Perhaps I’m asking too much!

The more distracted I am of course the less gets done that I need to do and the greater the frustration I have, because my stuff is piling up.

It’s a vicious cycle and really starting to harsh my buzz.

The latest annoyance is that the most recent MacOS update is killing my laptop’s battery in just a couple of hours. I discovered this when I decided to take my laptop and myself outside to enjoy the nice weather we’re having.

I thought perhaps being outside would assist me in clearing my head. The plan was to remove myself from all the distractions inside the house and just sit looking for a job, and perhaps writing a bit, in the sun and fresh air. HA!

On balance I got about an hour of what I wanted to get done, done before the unusual power drain became apparent. Then I was sucked down the rabbit hole of identifying what was causing the power drain.

Still unsure about that. After turning off all the communication channels. BlueTooth, WiFi, etc. The drain was still happening. That led me to all the crap running in the background, (most of which is Apple’s ill defined subsystems,) according to Apple’s monitoring software there was nothing wrong. Uh Huh sure! Looking at the UNIX monitoring software there were 600 processes running most of those were sleeping but several of their “New” modules were consuming a lot of CPU time. It’s unclear how to actually turn off any of these modules which I’d do in a heartbeat because I don’t use them.

This kind of thing annoys the crap out of me because clearly Apple dropped the ball again! They’re apparently not doing real world testing and that annoys the hell out of me because I’m a software tester that has applied to Apple at least 20 times for testing positions, only to be completely and rigorously ignored.

I’ve said it before. Automated testing has its place, but an actual human working with the machine is still necessary because automation can only spot those items it’s programmed to spot.

In other words, automation will confirm that the software completed the expected task. A human on the other hand will spot things about the requested task completing, with other collateral issues, (like excessive power drains,) and get curious about what’s causing them.

But God Forbid, the great and wondrous Apple actually considered that!

As I said, I’m annoyed. Here’s an axiom for you:

Shitty software is still shitty software regardless of the logo. No-one is immune to creating shitty software. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, are all guilty of unapologetically foisting shit on the public. Apple never apologizes for anything, no matter how bad it is! (Unless they’re forced to do so by a class action lawsuit.) Just once, I’d love to see Tim Cook apologize for a crappy Mac OS or IOS release in his opening remarks at a convention or online event. I’d probably have a heart attack but it would be worth it.

The MacBook Pro isn’t the only device having battery problems. Apparently, some iPhones are sucking their batteries dry after the latest release of IOS 15. Apples response, in typically Apple fashion is, “**smug** You’ll just have to wait until we get around to fixing it. **smug**”

So for the time being, I’m chained to my power adapter, instead of enjoying the spring weather and being able to write. What happened to my MacBook outlasting the competition?

Oh yeah… poor testing & verification on one of their products core advantages!

To make matters worse, this has been an ongoing issue for at least the last four releases so you’d think someone in their software development and testing team would have a big assed sign that said, “TEST BATTERY LIFE IN REAL WORLD SITUATIONS!”

I’d be happy to design a sign for them if they’d be willing to pay me a year’s salary for it.

Posted on

I Had the perfect post

It was all there in my head. A perfect gossamer soap bubble, it completely encapsulated what I wanted to convey. It was exciting and I’d just started to type it.

Then interruption upon interruption. Dog howling, Washer buzzer going, Extraneous conversation directed at me.

I usually filter out about 75% of the words I hear, to boil the conversation down to the actual facts. The process excludes attempts at humor, a myriad of detail that is not necessary to support the ideas and generally over complex sentence construction.

What I’m often left with is, “Do you want lunch?”

The problem is, all of this requires a ton of extra mental processing. In this case the additional processing load caused the beautiful soap bubble of thought, to go pop!

I tried to recover it, but while I was trying to recover it, store the words in my memory, more and more mental processing was being directed away just to determine if the conversation was anything that required immediate attention.

You know, something akin to, “Hey you’re on fire!”

Although the person doing the talking would probably have phrased that condition something like this;

“You appear to be hot, not in the sexual way, but there seems to be smoke rising from your general vicinity. Oh look, I can see now that you are actually combusting, or is that just your clothing? Well if it is just your clothing I’d suggest that you remove the combusting clothing and seek the resources of the nearest water access point. Unless the combustion is electrical in nature, then perhaps you’d like to have the fire extinguisher that is designed for that purpose. Do you think you’re likely to want the fire extinguisher and would you like me to retrieve it from the closet for you?”

This, I think is why, the person in question is virtually useless in an emergency. All the chatter in their brain limits their ability to actually take action.

Really, it’s interesting to watch. They just stop and stare glassy eyed at a situation. It’s like watching a computer trying to compute Pi to the last digit.

It’s also why I actively don’t hear what they say 75% of the time. Mostly, I scan the sonic stream for key words that may be actionable.

In the example above, the actionable words would be, “smoke,” and “combustion”.

With my stepfather the filtration rate is 95%. President Biden has a filtration rate of 99.8% Biden is harder because he usually manages to spawn at least 4 other conversations or stories and tries to tell them all at once.

Biden’s “word salads” are epic and wholly unsatisfying. The few times I’ve expended the energy to understand what he said, have led to my brain having to restart from first principals.

Autonomic functions – reloaded – normal.
Optical input – normal
Higher cognitive functions – Reloading
“I think, therefore I am…”
and so on until I’m operational again. This can take some time, and is not completely painless. On the bright side, It does clean out a ton of “hung threads” in my thinking processes.

Biden’s speeches are wonderful at rebooting my brain.

There are other things that can reboot my brain, for example 75% filtration of incoming conversation, a bunch of random input and having a really wonderful blog post, or chapter of a book spring fully formed into my head.

Admittedly, I’m somewhat ADD.

At any given moment there’s a lot of other stuff going on in my head. Some of it useful, and some of it not. This makes focus hard for me to achieve and maintain. Once I achieve focus, I tend to go to extreme measures to hold onto it. Including biting someone’s head off if they’re blathering on about something that is inconsequential.

More fairly, something I think is inconsequential.

The fragments of my soap bubble of thought, are lying in a heap in my brain. It will require a substantial effort to reconstruct, and I’m ambivalent about the ROI.

Even reconstructed, that particular train of thought will not be as perfect as it was.

That dear reader, is why you’ve gotten this goofy post, instead of something more enlightening or thought provoking.

Apologies!

Posted on

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.