Tag: Technology

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Time for us to unplug

I’ve written in the past about being asked for Twitter and Facebook accounts during Job interviews.

Like many people I don’t particularly like Facebook. When It started it was kind of interesting as a phenomenon but as it progressed I began to think it was really creepy.

If you’re face booking every event in your life, are you really living your life?

Twitter is neat, and I like the brevity of the messages. But again… There are people that tweet non-stop.

I will not and should not be asked to provide Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and / or Twitter accounts to prospective employers. Nor should I be forced to provide websites or anything other than my resume detailing experience, salary history, and references.

If a company wants to look me up…. GOOGLE MY ASS!

Or do a real background check. OR Hey, how about actually talking to me?

Does it matter that I’m a republican and supporting some moronic candidate on Facebook? Or should a company be more interested in whether I have a criminal record or history of violence?

I think it’s time for everyone to revolt against Social Media being used by employers to monitor our private lives. Companies DON’T OWN us 24/7 yet and what I do, who I hang out with, and my hobbies are not a corporate voyeurs business. 

There are several ways I could see this happening,

We all create the “Mom Friendly Accounts”, Only happy stuff here, no questionable fiends, no political or religious comments, and NOTHING that our great Grandmothers wouldn’t approve of.

We all flood the social media sites with the stupid inanities of our everyday lives. This would effectively poison the well of information. How many people are going to read 1000 statuses that say things like “Paid the Electric bill.”, “made dinner”, “farted”, “masturbated”, “had sex”, “paid gas bill”, “saw eye doctor”, “had prostate exam”, “gave blood”, “Oh my god, what a huge stinky dump!”…

We all simply STOP posting statuses

OR

We all close our accounts.

Roma

Speaking of closing accounts… I couldn’t believe what it took to close a MySpace Account. Remember them?

Have we become such a nation of voyeurs that we’re that interested in anyone’s life but our own? Is this why so called “reality” shows are so popular among main stream Americans? I guess that would explain my vehement dislike for such shows… I have a life that I’m actually living.

Between social media, reality TV, and a news media that provides anything but unbiased reporting of what happened during the day, we are dumbing down, tuning out and becoming oblivious to many matters that we really should be paying attention to.

If you really want a good “Reality Show” try reading a Biography, or the history of Rome. Now there’s a story!

And thinking of Rome… I swear, it feels more and more like we’re being distracted from something. Ever heard of a Roman Circus? 

The questions are… What? Why? and Who?

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PayPal #FAIL

 

Actually it’s not PayPal that’s the problem.

It’s our wondrous Federal Government. Also known as the Assholes in Congress.

Could these people be any more out of touch? 

Apparently as of April 2012 the Federal Morons, have mandated that all Money Service Businesses must have on file customer verification information. 

OK… I suppose that having a PayPal account fucking LINKED to your checking account and / or credit card accounts isn’t enough!

I guess I can kind of get it… My PayPal account is over a decade old. By this time if there was anything nefarious about my transactions I’m assuming that I’d already be in prison. But for the paltry 200 or 300 bucks that has EVER been in the PayPal Account the Government feels they have the right to know all about that money and whose using it.

Supposedly the new requirements for Identification are to prevent money laundering and terrorist activities.

I could see it if there were 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars going through the account on a monthly basis… that might be suspicious. But for the average person of an established account? Come on give it a rest!

But the real kicker is this…

PayPal, in order to comply with the FEDERAL Gestapo is demanding that I provide them with the following information either as a FAX or Emailed Scan  of my Social Security card, My drivers License, and A paper utility bill.

Do you see the problem here?

We have well known National Banks, Insurance Companies, and even the IRS, who cannot keep this kind of information from ending up on the internet.

Yet PayPal is asking that we make it EASIER for them to lose this information and set ourselves up for identity theft!

SAY WHAT? You have to be fucking kidding me! 

You’re actually saying that I should just hand this information over to a company that I barely have done business with. A company who will not service ALL Vendors. A company who allows their narrow version of morality to dictate which transactions they will process, and I’m supposed to do all of this OVER THE INTERNET and trust them? I’m supposed to believe that the information will not be distributed to criminals because after all we all know how trustworthy and secure the internet is.

BUZZZZZZ! 

I’m sorry that’s the wrong answer, but thank you so much for playing and here’s your lovely parting gift.

We emailed you a little while ago to ask for your help resolving an issue
with your account.

What’s the problem?

As of April, 2012, new Federal Regulations require Money Service
Businesses, such as PayPal, to verify the identity of a customer before we
can provide various services or product offerings. As a result, PayPal must
ensure we have collected and verified important data such as customer name,
address, date of birth, and national tax ID or social security number.
Because we were not able to fully confirm your identity based on your
current account information, we need to request additional supporting
documentation from you.

You will continue to have full access to your PayPal account, but until we
are able to confirm your identity, we may be unable to process certain
types of customer initiated requests such as adding funds to your PayPal
account.

According to their message above, there is another option. I can choose not to give them this information and simply not transfer any cash to my PayPal account.

BUT that’s not good enough… I’ve spoken with PayPal twice, informing them of my choice NOT to have cash sitting in their hands. Instead I’ve chosen to simply use them on rare occasion to facilitate a transaction with someone that may or may not be above board.

Yet I’m still getting emails like the one above, Thus far I haven’t gotten any phone calls but I’m sure that’s only a matter of time.

The way I see this… I’ve got three choices

1) Ignore them.

2) Give them the information. (Not Happening!)

3) Close the account and not do business with them.

I’m leaning to option #3. I’d prefer one less account ID and Password to keep track of anyway. My credit cards are pretty secure and I’m automatically protected in the event of fraud. So why do I need a PayPal account?

OH yeah… for Ebay… Which I don’t use either! Humm. Maybe I can lose Two un-necessary accounts!

 

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More Car Service

Car220100428

At the car dealership… Again!

One of the problems with modern cars… although I think the problem is more about the people servicing modern cars is that the computer in the car dictates what service can be done and when.

For example, I know I’m taking a trip that will have me driving at least 3000 miles. 

As in the old days… I still like to have the car serviced, tires checked, oil changed, you know BEING RESPONSIBLE so that I don’t have a dead ass piece of junk off to the side of the road in the middle of an unfamiliar town and not knowing who to call or perhaps being uncertain of exactly where I am so that I can get help.

Well the computers have other ideas… Apparently, you’re not supposed to drive your car more than 300 miles from home. 

See last time I was here I explicitly told the dealership I was going on a long trip. So I wanted all services done before I left.

I didn’t have to worry about my trip being interrupted by the car bitching about service needed. Unfortunately, the computer and the people doing the service had other ideas. The computer said that 4300 miles remained before the next service. Between the time that I had the car in for service and today… I’ve driven 600 miles. The car is now saying it wants service in 2200 miles. Hummm…. Can you see the problem?

See, I know the car… I know the kind of driving I do, I know that going up & down the mountain puts a monkey wrench in the mileage calculation. But try to explain that to a machine… or the people that act like machines.

I’ll grant you there are benefits to the computerization of our vehicles. You don’t have as many situations where your spouse says “I didn’t know I needed an oil change, or I didn’t hear the squealing of the brake calipers on the rotors”

But as I say all too often… I’M THE HUMAN, you’re the machine… do what I said.

So here I sit… waiting for another 3 hours for my car to be serviced. Those 3 hours… By the way would be mine… If folks had done what I asked in the first place.

Isn’t that a kick in the pants… It always seems to come down to:

Do what I’m telling you

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Bright & Shiny

I did something that I probably shouldn’t have done.

Macbook air january 15 2008 1799

I just got a brand new MacBook Air.

I was a bad boy and spent money that I shouldn’t have. However I have a plan… it’s probably not a good plan but it’s a plan nonetheless.

At least I didn’t go for the new MacBook Pro retina display… Drool, Drool

So this little puppy is fast I optioned it up to the max, i7 processor, 512GB solid state drive, 8GB of RAM.  Slick! and quiet unless i’ve got it doing something really intense. Then the fans kick in and it’s surprisingly noisy.

I have to hand it to Apple. Their migration assistant works like a champ. It took a while but this machine grabbed everything off my MacBook Pro (2008) version and got me a working machine with almost zero effort.

I am always impressed when software works as described without a hiccup.

My plan is to upgrade the drive in my MacBook Pro and squeeze some more life out of it. Meanwhile I’ll be  using the Air as my main machine for a while. Obviously, the machine will also be with me pretty much 24/7.

I’m pretty impressed with the speed that I’m seeing on applications opening. I’m also getting used to OSX Lion, soon to be OSX Mountain Lion. I’m thinking that I like Lion… I really wasn’t sure that I would and was wondering how I was going to downgrade it to Snow Leopard functionality, but I think there will be no need.

This little puppy is backing up to the NAS as I write this… It’s claiming 8 hours to completion I’m hoping that the backup will be done sooner than that.

I’m impressed by a number of things about this machine. First is, as I mentioned the speed. The other thing that’s interesting is the display. It’s easy for me to forget that the display is only 13″ The clarity is so nice that I’m having no problems working with it. While this is not a retina display, I think that it’s an improvement over the display technology used in my older MacBook Pro. The overall weight of the machine and that fact that it has no critical moving parts is also very attractive.

This machine is also equipped with USB 3.0 and has an SD card reader built in. The USB is of interest because many of my portable backup drives are USB 3.0 devices. The SD card slot means that I have one less thing to carry with me if I’m on a photography expedition.

I haven’t run the machine on battery yet, but plan to tomorrow. Apple claims up to 7 hours I’ll be interested to see how well they live up to that claim.

Without sounding like an Apple fan boy. I must admit that I in general like the Apple products. I like the fact that I tend to get about 4 to 6 years out of an Apple machine where with a Windows machine I’m lucky if I get 2 or 3 years of useful life. In the case of the Windows machines it’s not that the hardware fails… it’s that Windows runs slower and slower until the machine is all but unusable.

That’s whats happening with my little netbook, If the machine is in sleep mode, it typically will not wake up and be useful without doing a restart.

Between all the checks that Windows does regarding how long the machine has been asleep and if updates are available or if maintenance has been done or needs to be done.

The machine is effectively useless for 5 to 7 minutes after it’s waking up. I’m the user and I opened the machine NOT to have it do all these checks, I opened the machine because I needed to use it.

The solution is to reformat the netbook, re-install Windows, and then restore all my information. Honestly… That’s a real pain in the ass.

In contrast, my MacBook has been in use since 2008. It’s been reloaded from its backup one time. That was because I was cleaning up some files and deleted a chunk of stuff that I later realized I shouldn’t have.

If this new MacBook Air lives up to it’s lineage I expect that I’m going to be using it well into 2017.

Damn! As I wrote 2017 I thought no, that can’t be right but sure as hell, 2017 is just 5 years away.

Now ain’t that a kick in the pants!

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Apologies to those of you that legitimately comment on the blog

Target

Due to some moronic people who think that somehow I’m going to repost their dumbass website links for free, I’ve turned on moderating and added an automatic filter.

The moderating means that you’ll not be able to have your comment posted instantly.

The filter means that if you try to embed a link to a website or other stuff that could be construed as advertising or malicious code, your link goes immediately in the shitter, possibly your post too.

I know it seems draconian. I honestly had no choice. The primary offenders appear to be China and several South American countries.

The best one was from some idiot in South America whose message, in addition to being loaded with bullshit links also told me to update my website more often.

Really? You think that’s going to not cause me to take a good hard look at who you are?

To the real people… please be patient if you comment and it takes me a while to approve it.

As always, thank you for taking time out of your day to read my blog.