Tag: Modern Problems

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Hmmm… That’s interesting and perhaps problematic.

Years ago, after our house burned and losing our substantial DVD/BluRay & CD / Vinyl collection we decided that we didn’t want to suffer that kind of loss again. There are still CDs and DVDs that we hadn’t replaced because they’ve been out of print (so to speak) for years.

As an alternative, you could perhaps back up a DVD by making a copy and storing the original someplace else. BUT YOU COULDN’T… The anti piracy encoding made that an imperfect solution.

Oh sure, you could buy programs that would “Crack the encryption” those programs would even mostly work but the image quality they produced was hit or miss. Mostly miss!

Why settle for a crappy dvd copy that was barely 480 with a mono sound track, when you had a 1080p or 4k Television and slamming surround sound?

In other words, the solution didn’t work well enough to be called a solution. Oh and that “Cracker” program you purchased… Money right in the pocket of some shitty hacker who’d then happily sell your name and credit card number to the highest bidder.

You could perhaps move a “bit for bit” disk image to network attached storage, some of the storage devices even had applications specifically for the purpose. That solution was slow and often disrupted by the anti piracy shit built into the DVD. You’d get the whole movie, but if you played it back from the network storage you’d find the chapters were all scrambled.

So our choice was to get high speed internet and we’d stream movies or TV shows from a service like Apple, Amazon, Netflix, or Hulu. You could “Buy” movies on Apple, Amazon, or UltraViolet. Supposedly, the movies you purchased would be in your personal library forever (OR until the terms and conditions changed…)

UltraViolet was a really terrible service that worked on every device except the 65″ TV in the living room. To use that nice panel, I needed to connect a computer to it, or some other device. Okay, fine for me. The other half had a bit of a problem with complex technology and keeping track of HDMI inputs, and then routing the audio through the sound system or the TV speakers etc, etc, etc.

He could play Flight of the Bumblebee, Mozart’s Requiem Mass, or Wagner’s Ring Cycle, flawlessly on several different instruments, but the remote control for watching a movie or TV show? There were too many buttons to remember.

Go Figure!

I’d come home from work after the house rebuild and find him reading a book in front of a large screen displaying “No Signal”. Sometimes there would be FM static whispering through the surround sound system, because he’d switched to the radio but couldn’t find a station in range.

I felt responsible, terrible, and guilty. I knew that all he wanted to do was watch some opera performance, or listen to a piece of music that I probably wouldn’t like while I wasn’t home. (I hate Opera only slightly less than I hate Rap.) Oh and Shostakovich… Right the hell out of here! If I happened to be a spy captured by Russians during the Cold War… 3 Hours of Shostakovich and I’d have told the Russians our launch codes and given them the President’s Mistress address and phone number!

He knew that. He liked Shostakovich pieces. So he’d enjoy those pieces when I wasn’t around. Much the same as me enjoying Nine Inch Nails, Linkin Park, and Korn. He enjoyed those groups just as much as I enjoyed Shostakovich. So I listened to those groups on the way to work in the car, or at home when he was off playing church services or a gig.

Honestly… I think the problem was complexity added by the the sound system. When you added the TV, and a connection device to the internal network. Then having to choose which service you wanted to stream from, the Network Storage, or the internet, and which TV you wanted to watch the video on, did you want stereo, or surround sound? On and On, just to play a show or movie.

Writing it just now, and I knew it then, it was a lot of work. It’s a hell of a lot easier to plunk a DVD in a tray or slot and press “play”.

Although as I wrote that, I couldn’t help but think of trying to find a specific item on the internet these days. You’ll get a page or two of loosely related items but not the item, then when you click on the item that most closely approximates what you were looking for, you’ll get annoying cookie notification shit, (Weren’t cookies going away????) Then at least one full screen pop up asking for your email address in exchange for some “Special” discount, then another pop up asking if you need help from a chatbot and all the while, you still haven’t been able to see if the item is what you wanted, or read its description or price.

It’s like the damn gas pumps! No, I don’t want a car wash. No, I don’t want to join your club. Yes, I want a receipt. No, I don’t want a discount on beef jerky inside. Please! I just want fucking GAS!

The ONE question aside from wanting a receipt I’m going to answer “Yes” to, is “Do you want me to turn off the screaming advertising screen?”

Unfortunately, that question is never asked. I suppose that’s why my blood pressure is so dang low when I”m driving across country. I take a lot of back roads, and in those little country towns… A Gas Pump is just a Gas Pump…

Apparently my other half wasn’t the only person who had trouble. Most modern surround systems, and TVs are smart enough that with the right cables, all you have to turn on is the actual device you want to use. The system if properly configured, will see an HDMI input and make certain assumptions about it. Video Game – Connect TV and surround system turn on TV. CD player – Sound system only.

The cool thing is that you don’t have to fiddle with 5 different remote controls (All of which work differently. Some of which have volume controls that do nothing). All you have to do is turn on one device.

I’d been planning to update our equipment to the new standards. I was going to make it a Christmas present to us both this year. I don’t think I’ll be doing that now. He’s gone and I can reconfigure what I have to work until I decide what’s next in my life. But there is a temptation to update everything anyway… It all can be put in moving boxes, right?

In an effort to make things as simple as possible, over the years, I’d made a couple of decisions. Those decisions may come back to haunt me now.

We settled on a single streaming device. We went with the Apple TV in part because this is an Apple household. No, not in the religious sense.

For decades Apple devices, while expensive, worked as advertised, and had long term support. Non Apple devices… Not so much. “Blackberry? Paging Blackberry… Blackberry?” ZUME? PalmPilot? Compaq iPaq? Compaq Computers? The list goes on and is quite long!

This is not to say that Apple didn’t lay some eggs in their time, but Apple supported these devices for a time after they stopped selling them. My Newton Messagepad was a nifty device, ahead of its time, and woefully misunderstood by the blockheads in the media who sealed its demise with horrific articles damning something they didn’t understand, in favor of the Palm Pilot.

Apple though, is getting long in the tooth. They’re beginning to take on the lassie faire attitude that defined Non Apple corporations for years.

That attitude is, “The customer will buy it even if “it” doesn’t quite work.” We’re seeing this in Apple Software, and to some extent, in their hardware. The butterfly keyboard issue is only the latest example of Apple failing to pay attention to quality indicators.

With the Apple TV, the other half could turn on one device, and then have a menu that allowed him to pick what he wanted to see or hear. When we added the HomePod speakers things got a lot simpler One button, one remote. Then it was just a matter of making sure that all the music was available in the cloud. The same was true of Television shows and Movies.

Soon our collection of movies and music was all in iTunes. If the other half had a problem with the system, I could often walk him through corrective steps or just log on to the iCloud account to figure out what was wrong. Simplicity reigned, and I no longer came home to a screen displaying “No Signal”

In hindsight, our collection being completely in iTunes may not have been the best idea. We have a lot of movies. We also tended to buy TV series that we liked. The number of movies would be a problem if they had to be physically stored. They might even be a problem if I were to download each one to the network storage. I could always increase the network storage size, or add bookshelves.

The Apple Movies all have encryption. They can be played from network storage with a computer as long as the computer can verify with the internet that you have the rights to play the video. The Apple TV flat out refuses to see the movies exist on local network storage. Since the purpose was to have the movies on the big screen I haven’t kept up with downloading them since the AppleTV wouldn’t play them from downloads anyway.

One concern I have is that movies are being changed to accommodate the Woke overly sensitive crowd. There’s a bigger problem with some of the TV series I’ve purchased over the years. A current example is the series Archer.

This morning I happened to be looking at purchasing the season pass for season 14 of the show. I noticed with some surprise that seasons 1-8 were available for purchase, as was season 14. What happened to seasons 9 through 13?

I immediately checked my library and found that seasons 9-13 were still available because I’d already purchased them. This begs the question, why is there a gap at all? Seasons 3-5 of The Boys from Amazon are not available on iTunes. I purchased Seasons 1 & 2, on iTunes thinking that I’d be able to complete the series in time.

That seems questionable now. The Expanse is a series that I own except the last two seasons. I suppose I should purchase those before they’re unavailable. I also just checked on “Strike Back” and found that ONLY the two seasons I own are available, the remaining 5 or 6 seasons are completely missing. Just a few months ago all the seasons were available, they were expensive, but available. I suspect I could get a boxed set at Best Buy come Christmas time.

This makes me wonder if digital collections are worth it. If I can’t have a guarantee that I’ll be able to purchase all of a series or have the option to purchase a digital un-woke version of Gone with the Wind, or Looney Tunes then perhaps I need to go back to physical copies.

I still can’t purchase Young Frankenstein on iTunes. But I was able to get a copy of Blazing Saddles.

Then there’s the issue of some of the albums that I’ve had in my collection disappearing and not being available for re-download. Thankfully I have a friend that has a massive collection of music and If I really need to have one of those albums, I have no issues asking him for a high quality copy.

My attitude about this is simple. If I paid for the damn album in digital format and lost the copy of that album due to a drive failure I should be able to redownload it. If you’re not going to let me do that, then my other option is to “Pirate” a copy for my own use.

I have no desire to start selling pirated copies of my music or videos, I just want to the able to play them hassle free.

Unfortunately, I think that ability is going to require buying physical copies of everything again. I don’t look forward to repurchasing DVDs or CDs to recreate my library again. To my way of thinking I shouldn’t have to. Then again, I don’t think like everyone else.

If I were to commit to going all physical copies of everything again… It would be a great excuse to do a complete sound system/entertainment system refresh. That would give a friend and I a great shopping day in the audiophile stores he haunts. I might even go so far as to buy a turntable and get back to vinyl.

I’m not sure I want to go with tubes in an amp. I know my friend will strongly suggest that I do. I think I’d rather put the bulk of cash in really fine speakers.

We’ll see…

In the mean time, I’m going to experiment with some DRM removal software to see if I can download and save my collection to my Network Storage and avoid replacement altogether.

It’s interesting, I think we’re all going to be looking at doing things the “Old Way” because the “New Way” has become so corrupted. I can think of a couple of recordings of live shows from comedians I owned. Those shows / recordings would never pass the censorship the “Woke” crowd seeks to impose.

The Newest Call of Duty game is going to be live censoring any trash talking between players. That’s half the fun! When I played COD with my coworkers, we called each other names all the time over the communication channels. Where else do you get to call your boss a “dumb ass” to his face and have everyone laugh? But along comes the WOKE, they’re going to use an AI to censor “Hate or hurtful speech” in online gaming, and the AI will flush your sorry ass from the game if it doesn’t like what you say.

I’m not sure I’m willing to pony up $70 to have an AI tell me I can’t trash talk my friends during a game. I really enjoyed the creative swearing and trash talk directed at me when I screwed up. Then again, I was playing with retired guys from the Navy, Army, and Marines.

I wonder how the gaming community will respond? If no-one buys the new game, and only plays the old non-AI enhanced versions do you think they’ll get the message?

That’s fantasy! The young kids will keep the games alive and they’ll accept censorship in all its forms because they don’t know any better. Stalin said something about educating the children… I can’t remember offhand the exact saying.

I’m heading to Best Buy later today, maybe I’ll check out the selection of physical copies of music and games.

Have a great one!

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Ya Know, I’d really like to wake up when the alarm goes off.

Lately though that has not been the case.

It’s a function of it being Summer and me leaving the windows open for the evening breezes. I fall asleep listening to the crickets and wind in the trees.

I might wake up if the dog shifts position, or jumps back up on the bed after getting a drink. I fall back to sleep quickly after he settles. There’s a security seeing his silhouette on the corner of the bed. I can tell in the darkness that he’s got his noise pointed toward the open sliding door. If anything were to be bold enough to come to the screen he’d be awake, letting me know about it.

The past few days it’s not been the dog who’s waking me up. It’s other humans!

Crazy Pants has taken to blood curdling screams sometime between 5:00 and 6:30 am. One of these days someone she lives with will realize that they can choke the life out of her and no matter how much she screams no-one will think to call the cops or report anything out of the ordinary.

Yesterday she started the morning by kicking or punching one of the men living over there. I don’t know exactly what she did but I woke to a male sound that reminded me of similar sounds guys make if they’re kicked in the balls or kicked in the gut. Moments later she was screaming about how lazy and useless, blah, blah, blah. After a few minutes a strained male voice was replying. There was an escalation of the argument and increase in volume then suddenly Crazy Pants was quiet. If he choked her, I’m not sure I’d be able to testify that he was in the wrong. She was screaming again this morning so apparently he didn’t choke her to death.

This morning the trash truck showed up at 6:15 am to pick up the trash that they’d not bothered to pick up on Monday. The recycling truck came through, but the regular trash truck didn’t. They needn’t have bothered, most of us pulled our trash cans back off the street because we don’t like cleaning up after the nocturnal critters that like to get into the trash. I’m one of the few folks on this street that still has bear proof trash bins. All the new bins supplied by the trash company have no locking mechanism at all. So raccoons, and other night critters attracted by kitchen scraps, sometimes turn the cans over, spreading the contents all over the street or yards.

There’s a reason the trash company issued bear proof trash cans years ago. But that’s been forgotten by some, and the newbies to town never think about the natural wildlife potentially in the area. It’s always funny when a newbie reports seeing a coyote and the old folks (like myself) respond with “And?” We’re expecting something more than, “I saw a coyote!”

Due to the tropical storm, we’ve had heavy construction equipment working in the wash up & down the canyon. This is the second time this year. The distinctive “Beep Beep Beep” starts around 6:45 right after the large diesel engines rumble to life. They even worked Saturday and Sunday so there was no respite from living in a construction zone.

Before they did the “Wash Improvement” we never had dump trucks, bulldozers, bucket diggers, or any of that stuff up here. Now it’s a yearly event.

I miss the silence of the forest, I miss seeing all the wildlife that we used to see in this canyon before the “wash Improvement project” destroyed the water source, habitat, and local environment. The construction sounds alone seem to drive away some animals.

It might have something to do with the time of year the construction starts. I miss having owls nesting near my house. Their hooting in the night was comforting. The red tail hawks moved much higher into the mountains. I’ll still see them soaring on thermals. Sometimes I’ll hear one snatching a small rabbit up out on some nearby open flats. I used to see them hunting all the time. They make spectacular dives, falling like a stone, flaring their wings out at the last possible moment claws extending, then bam! Their prey seems to just vanish.

Even the coyotes have left the canyon. It’s been years since I’ve seen a bear.

Maybe the trash company is right, there’s no need for the security of bear proof trashcans. The habitat has been sufficiently destroyed that humans don’t encounter their distant cousins anymore.

I want to be clear. This is not about climate change. This is about a man made environmental disaster committed in the name of flood control. This is about an environmental study that was incomplete at best, or the county purchased a “Rubber Stamp” at worst. There is still water in the wash. It’s just not accessible most of the time. This is due to the widening and flattening of the wash.

Before improvement, there was a stream about two feet wide and 2 to 3 inches deep most of the year, it only dried up in late Summer. This stream was fed from further up the mountainside. Up in the heights there are collecting pools that rainfall and snow melt keep full most of the year. Water from these collecting pools made its way down the wash splashing over rocks and down small waterfalls churning and bubbling until it made it to my level. The flowing water was cold, and clear. It provided life to all manner of critter that lived in the forest. You name any animal native to this region and we had it.

Walking along the rim of the wash in the early morning or evening you’d see deer, raccoons, sometimes bear, bobcat, cougar, and a variety of birds. It was possible to observe the phenomena of “Peace at the watering hole”. All the animals needed water so it was rare to see any hunting at the water’s edge. 50 yards from the water source all bets were off!

The “improvement” widened and flattened the bottom of the wash. The water still flows from the collecting pools as it always has. The collecting pools are beyond the reach of the county because they exist on National Forest Land therefore they haven’t been “improved”. The water flows down the natural creek bed to the place where the county “improved” things, when it hits the wide flat areas, it spreads out and soaks into the soil. Much of the water evaporates and for most of the year the bottom of the wash is a mud flat, instead of a place with abundant wildlife. Insects and small mammals can capitalize on what water is present, but animals larger than rodents can’t.

Man, once again makes a desert and calls it good.

Lately we’ve had a new “wake up” feature. There’s someone up the road who may be into those stupid wanna-be drift cars. Their only claim to being a “drift car” is a straight exhaust which is unbearably loud when the vehicle is going up a 15-20° incline anytime of day. It does seem especially loud at midnight though. Unfortunately, where there’s one wanna-be “drift car” others soon follow. Now there’s that noise several times in the evening and often right up to about 2 am. I don’t know what the hell they’re doing but the same cars drive up and down the street multiple times every night.

One car in particular leaves every weekday morning at about 7:30am. It’s annoying but I’m already up by then. I’d be up by then because my alarm is set for 7:15am. Not that I ever get to hear that waking me up if I’m home.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my alarm did in fact wake me. I made this discovery while I was on a cross country trip last year. I was staying in hotels and found that they were quieter than my home. Isn’t that a kick in the pants?

These are some of the things that go through my mind when I consider moving. The noise alone is reason enough for me to leave. But that begs the question where do I go?

Pulling up stakes is one thing, the question is, “where do you go that would be different?” I don’t want to trade one set of annoying issues for another set of super annoying issues.

I’m pretty sure I know what I don’t want, I don’t know exactly what I do want yet. Come Winter, I’ll have the house closed and the noise won’t be such a big deal. Maybe then I’ll have more restful nights sleep and sleep until my alarm wakes me.

Perhaps with more restful sleep will come answers to questions about where I go from here.

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THANK YOU WORDPRESS!

Thank you ever so much for breaking the API between Ulysses and your publishing mechanism in your wonderful lemon fresh update. Oh and by the way… When the hell are you going to make Tags and Categories have the same selection mechanism on the web creation page??? Or is that too freaking logical for you bozos.

Thank you for screwing me out of being able to easily create something on my iPad without having to be ONLINE. What? do you have stock in cellular data plans or something?

Thank you for forcing me to use your shitty web creation form. I know you have some BS mobile application. I dumped the app when it looked like you were wanting me to pay for something or some other service to be able to use it.

And MOST OF ALL, Thank you for flushing 4 blogposts that I’ll now have to recreate in your shitty web form.

Oh sure I can maybe copy the text from Ulysses and paste it into your web page but doing so creates a wonderful editing task where each block has to be cleaned up by hand and stripped of all of it’s formatting then reapply the formatting. I’ll probably run it through a straight text editor to flush all the markup then copy plain text into your web POS.

What’s the matter WordPress? are you miffed that more people are creating content with applications that don’t rely on your web or God forbid that crappy mobile WordPress app?

Maybe instead of getting upset that people don’t like your editing or creation interface, you should take a hint…

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I’m not looking forward to dating…

Yes, I’m still a ways off from that. Nonetheless I’m not looking forward to it.

The reason is straight forward.

Statistically all gay men are Democrats. Sure, there are actually some republican gay men, and there are some conservative gay men. However their numbers are so vanishingly small as to be numerically insignificant. Therefore they don’t exist.

Given the premise that all gay men are Democrats and all Democrats are liars, it follows that all gay men are liars.

I’m sure there are gay men who are not liars, but statistically the number of honest gay men must be so close to zero, as to be functionally zero.

Since I don’t like liars, I’m expecting for dating to be pretty unpleasant.

My other half was a Democrat when we met. I was a Republican. That was back when gay men were just happy to find someone else who loved them and didn’t care about stupid crap like politics. Sure, we canceled each others votes out for years, but over time, we both moved to a more centrist view and then both left our respective political parties so we could hurl insults at Democrats and Republicans, without being hypocrites.

The process of us moving toward more centrist beliefs took many years, and honestly, it was a fun process. We both learned a lot. Mostly, we learned that we loved each other.

I doubt I have that many years ahead of me so I’m not going to engage in another long term conversion project. I have decided in general that I’m not going to date Democrats. Of course rules are made to be broken and someone who is particularly interesting could be forgiven their political insanity.

Given what I’ve seen with the dating apps & sites. I’ll Pass! I think I’ll find a bar or pub that’s comfortable when I want to be around people and other than that I’ll just live my life doing the things I want to do.

There are things I’m interested in and perhaps with a little discretion I’ll find other guys who are interested in those things too. Maybe I’ll just get some nice subtle rainbow items. (Old rainbow not that new abomination!)

Something to hang on my backpack or dive gear, small but noticeable to the discerning eye. Possibly I’ll add some swag from my political party affiliation too. I could also add some swag from the Atlas Shrugged website… That would be over most people’s heads, but some might get it.

This adornment might be off-putting to most, but to the kind of folks I’m interested in hanging out with, or knowing in the biblical sense, it might be a way of winnowing the wheat from the chaff.

Alternatively, I could simply resolve to confine my dating to nothing more than prostitutes…

“Your cash is on the counter Chad, thanks for the mediocre blowjob, now get out.”

I must admit that does seem to be more direct, more convenient, and quite possibly cheaper …

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A Snarky PSA

After the various news appearances by this guy…

Representative Dan Goldman of New York

It’s become obvious that I missed another memo regarding changes to language.

Apparently, the following symbols and terms…

Have become synonymous with…

Here is the poster child for the word, LIAR. His image should be shown as a representative example.