It's been almost four years since I was interviewed by US News and World Report on the subject of my Roomba Discovery.
Hence, it's probably long overdue for me to give a long-term customer review.
When first acquired, we were amazed not only by the novelty of the item, but by the fact that it worked as advertised. We quickly became somewhat dependent on it. For me, the fact that using it meant that my mother would bring in a maid service only once a month rather than once a week. Consider this: at $400, this unit seems expensive. But at $50.00 a visit for a quick once-over vacuuming by the maid service, by saving us from eight uses of the maid service, the robot paid for itself. It would only have to survive once-a-week usage for two months to reach "break even". It lasted for four years.
I never thought I'd live long enough to find myself complaining that my robot is obsolete, but "there you go" and I'm not the sort of person who likes to let things stay broken. Besides, when I was a kid, this was my favorite toy:
As it turns out, the Roomba unit is on its third battery. The original one lasted almost two years, the first mail-order replacement lasted about a month. Having taken a chance and having done some online research first, the second mail-order replacement has thus far lasted four months, under heavy usage. Yet having just bought this new battery, I discovered that the Roomba was not properly cleaning. The dust filter clogged as expected but the particle bin was not filling. This means that the brushes aren't working, and that means that either the motor is inoperative or the gears are worn down.
There are lots of helpful web pages on inspecting and repairing the Roomba. One of them gave me a clue on disassembling it to check the gears in the "brush deck". You have to pull the carapace half off and pop loose the brush deck to get to the gears, but once you've done that, it's only a few minutes work with a jeweler screwdriver to open the gearbox casing. In my case, it was a combination of dirt, grease, and wear that was the problem. The nylon plastic gears had worn down enough so that the motor couldn't transmit power to the brushes. I ordered replacement from the folks who had the best How-To guide, and for only about $50, RobotShop.com shipped me a set of replacement gears. While waiting for delivery, I cleaned out the interior of the Roomba. After assembly, it is now working about the same as it was when we first got it.
While waiting for delivery of the Roomba gears, I decided that it probably wasn't good to be so dependent on one little robot, especially as that little robot was nearly obsolete. Having realized this, in so many words that read like the beginning of some really ancient 1950s science-fiction novel by Lester Del Ray or some such author, I decided that I would like a new vacuum cleaner of the non-robotic kind.
The vacuum cleaner on hand here is an Electrolux canister, which works just about as well as when it was new. However, it was new perhaps 40 years ago, which is a testament to the Electrolux line. I decided to go shop for something more modern, and wound up selecting the Bissell "Rewind Powerhelix".
Sadly, Best Buy did not have one in stock other than the demo unit, and they wouldn't sell me that one. So, I prepaid and they said they'd call me for pickup when it came in. A week later, the call came.
Note: I had to trim out a rather overlong and very unhappy bit about something happening on my way out of the Best Buy in Rockville while picking up my vacuum cleaner. Let's just say "same old stuff" and mutter under our breath about far-reaching gangs of delusional cultists being just goddamn everywhere in this region. The only hint I'll leave right here is that far too many people's minds appear to have been rotted by all of this "Twilight" and "Vampire Diaries" and "Secret Circle" media.
Moving right along, as there are few reasons to leave the house and very many to remain inside, I might as well try and gild my cage, so to speak.
It's also good to be concerned about Global Warming and that sort of thing.
There will of course be an Estate Sale soon, and the majority of the furniture will be sold off. This means that if I want to be able to sit somewhere other than the floor, and see after nightfall, I need to get some things for the house. Right now I am working on lighting and lighting fixtures. Eco-friendly seems to me like the choice to make.
As it turns out, Home Depot carries a fairly large, if workaday, selection of lighting fixtures and lamps and lampstands. Additionally, they have recently expanded their selection of light bulb types and sizes.
As my mother was very frugal (for all of being "Fancy" Pennsylvania Dutch), we had long since mostly changed over from incandescent light bulbs to the compact-florescent bulbs. Yet despite the energy cost savings, these have their own drawbacks, notably the fact that they contain mercury, a hazardous material. Newer high-output light-emitting diode ("LED") bulbs are starting to come on the market, which are designed as swap-out replacements for standard 120 volt AC bulbs.
Home Depot carries their own "EcoSmart" (tm) brand of LED replacement bulbs as well as a few other brands. As I am slowly but surely changing over to LED I am becoming rather familiar with most or all of these products, and also I am seen with some frequency in the Home Depot in Aspen Hill.
I should note in passing that they don't seem to know quite what to make of me, though the folks in the electrical and lighting section are probably a bit annoyed by now with the odd requests I have been making in the recent past, usually for products they didn't carry. Yet perhaps those requests don't seem so odd to them now, as the products I asked about that they did not have then, they do have now. Doubtless they thought I was a wackjob. Now, if they are Astute, they will understand that I was just ahead of the curve, and knew whereof I spoke, however disjointedly might have been my speech. But I digress.
Now that Home Depot is aggressively trying to position itself at the forefront of high-efficiency and low-cost "alternative lighting", a lot of things are starting to pique my interest, for example they now carry track-lighting lamp fixtures with MR16/GU12 dual-post sockets as well as the more commonplace A or E series (screw-in) sockets. The MR16-compatible fixtures enable planning for 12-volt DC systems as well as 120-volt AC systems. Why am I interested in cutting-edge products in low-power lighting? I'm a Solar Energy enthusiast.
The EcoSmart (tm) 13-Watt (60W) A19 LED Light Bulb has about the same form-factor as a glass incandescent bulb, and in fact it's a little smaller in the bulb dimensions although the screw fitting is the same size (A19). I got one for $23.97.
Now consider the "Hampton Bay" torchiere floor lamp. I got one for $24.97. Easy to assemble, no tools required. A hint: when preparing to screw on the top section, if the assembly requires 10 twists clockwise, first twist it 10 times counterclockwise, push the wires into the staff, and then screw on the assembly. The wires will be untwisted once assembly is complete.
Put the two together? For right around $50.00, I get a very bright floor lamp, rather elegant in its severe simplicity, and a bulb that lights the whole room for only 13 watts, and that bulb may very well last as long as the lamp-stand.
Additional eco-friendly lighting is to be had at Home Depot, and for that matter it can be had at an increasingly wide selection of other hardware stores.
A note: these lights come in various sizes and form factors, as well as for a variety of functions. It's wise to choose carefully.
High-power LED lighting inherently excels as floodlights. Emissions from the semiconductor surface is highly directional. Both the Philips and EcoSmart brands offer a variety of extremely bright floodlights, with 17 watts producing as much light as a 90 watt incandescent. That's about five times more efficient!
Because of the directional nature of LED lighting, the manufacturers have had to get a little inventive to bring us omni-directional emission bulbs. Yet they've managed to offer various form-factors and lighting-temperatures (light color). For people who have large circular recessed lighting, there is a large "ambient" unit, putting out approximately the same light as a 100 watt incandescent, with about the same warm yellowish tone. It should be noted that it takes about a second to come on after the power is turned on, though most of these bright LED replacement bulbs don't have that problem. The smaller track-lighting bulbs (MR16 or GU10 socket) are generally floodlights.
As the time for the Estate Sale draws near, I'll have to buy more lighting fixtures and/or furnishings. For some reason, when this house was built, almost no lighting fixtures were installed, other than the porch lights, an entryway light, and lights in the bathrooms and dining room. For all other lighting needs, you have to buy a lamp and plug it in, although thankfully some of the wall sockets are switch controlled.
I'll also have to buy some furniture, one might think, as everything will be getting sold out from under me. Well, that's okay, I do have plastic lawn furniture, and I wouldn't be the first person in the world to make do with plastic lawn furniture in the house. Yet how much furniture do I really need?
I once traveled the country with no more belongings than could be crammed into a Volkswagen Superbeetle, and almost everything I could need was able to fit. Because I have a bad back, I sleep on the floor in any case. Any mattress much thicker or softer than a Tatami mat or futon will wreck my back, so no need to spend thousands of dollars on mattress sets.
Although I have a credenza suitable for knickknacks and tchotchkes, pretty much all of the knickknacks and tchotchkes are going in the Estate Sale, so I guess I can keep the credenza so I have some place to put the mail. A couch I will need, and a couch I have already got. It's not like I entertain guests at all, so for a chair I can make do with plastic lawn furniture.
In any case, it will be good to have the house relatively uncluttered. Minor damage from that earthquake last summer does need to be done. Minor cracks in the walls need patching, and the place is long overdue for interior painting in any case. Why live in a house that is over-full of things that I don't need or don't use?
In any case, what with all of the cultists hereabouts, I might want to move out in a hurry. I might even want to sell in a hurry, in which case I think I'd probably just dump the house on the market "priced to move" and if the cultists all have to deal with real-estate devaluation, well, they didn't have to get together to run me out of town, now did they. Yet even if I am going to be settled in for the long haul, there's something to be said for a certain Spartan simplicity, or a Japanese minimalism.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
SCOTUS Bans Warrantless GPS; Maryland Won't Recall All Vehicle Tags
Monday, January 23 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States ("SCOTUS") ruled that law-enforcement may no longer attach GPS devices to cars without a warrant.
Despite longstanding rumors circulating within the Conspiracy Theorist Community, the State of Maryland will not be forced by this decision to recall all vehicle tags. (The Conspiracy Theory in question posits the notion that the Department of Motor Vehicles requires an extremely deep "vehicle safety inspection" not merely to assure vehicle safety but also to "lojack" every last vehicle that will be registered in the State.) The Conspiracy Theory Community needs to be advised that the SCOTUS ruling does not in any way restrict any parties other than governmental law-enforcement agencies:
Remember, folks, our politicians and bureaucrats here in Maryland are nothing if not supremely inventive in their rationalizations, so much so that they inspire comparisons alluding to Oscar Wilde's famous remark characterizing Fox Hunting as "the pursuit of the inedible, by the unspeakable". It would not be, they would quickly tell you, a "technical trespass" for them to embed a GPS and WiFi transponder in your vehicle tags, as, after all, "driving is not a right, but a privilege" and when you apply for vehicle tags and registration, you are actually soliciting the State to attach their property to yours. Invitation precludes the notion of trespassing.
(The Astute Reader will rightly, if cynically, note that with two brief sentences I have managed to express more bogus rationalization than usually comes out of Annapolis in an entire session of the Assembly. Maybe there really is a future for me in local politics.)
The only saving grace of this sort of thing would be -- and I use the Conditional tense because, as we all know, our esteemed legislators and LEO would never engage in such deviousness and thus this is firmly and rightly relegated to, and dismissed as, Conspiracy Theory -- that all tracking traces from such a universal monitoring system would become part of the public record. A diligent and curious public would of course exercise their rights to be informed. So, Delegate, your car was parked when and where next to who else's vehicle? Now that is going to raise questions during campaign season... No, clearly it is time for the State of Maryland to prohibit this sort of thing, never can tell when something like that will come back to bite you in the ass.
Moving right along, I should recommend to all and sundry who happen to be in the network-engineering or systems-administration fields, that if you haven't yet tried it, you should immediately take a look at BackTrack Linux.
I personally noticed this because I was looking for a decent "wardriving" system for my Windows-7 (tm) laptop, and while some of the packages came pretty close, none had the functionality of Kismet. The BackTrack Linux distribution had Kismet and more. Unlike the Windows(tm) software for wardriving, Kismet will find not only WiFi Access Points, but it will also find Wifi Clients (laptops which are connected to Access Points, etc.) and that can be extremely useful in professional endeavors such as penetration testing. If you're just looking for some free WiFi, the software packages available for Windows (tm) are all that you need. If you want to find out how many unauthorized client devices are probing your wireless networks trying to crack your wifi encryption, you'll need Kismet.
Of course, I personally have no need to check to see if there are unauthorized client devices probing my wireless network trying to crack the encryption; I don't rely on such weak stuff as WPA and instead use other means of securing the internet against attacks transiting my access point. The Astute Reader will of course recall that I do hold US Patent 7,464,403 which concerns itself with wireless security among other things.
Sadly, nobody seems to be the least bit interested in making use of my patent, so I have an unfortunately large amount of spare time on my hands. Hence, the wardriving as a hobby.
BackTrack Linux installed very nicely once I downloaded it from the distribution website and burnt it to an installation DVD. It even partitioned my Windows 7 drive for me, no muss and no fuss and everything works just fine. And of course, because it is Linux, I got an entire operating system and an astonishing software load for free. Combining that with a GlobalSat BU-353 USB GPS unit, I was ready to do some Wardriving.
Here's a Google Earth KML mapfile of the literal thousands of WiFi Access Points in "north Aspen Hill", Maryland. If you have Google Earth installed, this will show you all of the access-points. Some people have entertaining notions for naming their "AP", for example the folks who named their AP "FREE PORN HERE", or the folks who named their AP "Surveillance Car 3".
And the map also shows various "probe networks", assorted client machines, all that sort of stuff.
Given the context of the first section of this blog posting, I suppose I shouldn't much wonder why it seems that no matter where I was taking a reading, there was one client machine constantly signalling its attempts to join wireless ESSID named "<ANY>", with a constant MAC address. No matter where I was, the signal strength remained the same yet the geography constantly changed to match my position.
Well, I had heard that the best and most state-of-the-art GPS tracker bugs (also known as "bumper-beepers") have internal power supplies so that they cannot be detected through analysis of the vehicle's electrical system, monitoring for power drains that can't be explained by such things as the vehicle's nav/audio devices. I've also heard that the best ones also store their data and serve it up via WiFi. It couldn't reasonably do this as an AP, since the beacon signal would easily be detected even by software for Windows (tm). It would have to do it as a client. Just drive by the target with an AP in the car, the client locks on, data is exchanged, you know the drill. Kismet, of course, finds clients as well as APs.
I guess this might tend to explain why my ex-girlfriends always seem to know when and where to find me, along with explaining a lot of other things.
Well, SCOTUS says it's trespassing, so I guess I need to go clean someone else's trash off of my car.
And it seems as if even Nature agrees with SCOTUS: if your WiFi or GPS fail today, it's because our primary, Sol, is having a tantrum.
Despite longstanding rumors circulating within the Conspiracy Theorist Community, the State of Maryland will not be forced by this decision to recall all vehicle tags. (The Conspiracy Theory in question posits the notion that the Department of Motor Vehicles requires an extremely deep "vehicle safety inspection" not merely to assure vehicle safety but also to "lojack" every last vehicle that will be registered in the State.) The Conspiracy Theory Community needs to be advised that the SCOTUS ruling does not in any way restrict any parties other than governmental law-enforcement agencies:
"If long-term monitoring can be accomplished
without committing a technical trespass
-- suppose for example, that the federal government
required or persuaded auto manufacturers to include
a GPS tracking device in every car --
the court's theory would provide no protection,"
[Supreme Court Justice Samuel] Alito wrote.
Remember, folks, our politicians and bureaucrats here in Maryland are nothing if not supremely inventive in their rationalizations, so much so that they inspire comparisons alluding to Oscar Wilde's famous remark characterizing Fox Hunting as "the pursuit of the inedible, by the unspeakable". It would not be, they would quickly tell you, a "technical trespass" for them to embed a GPS and WiFi transponder in your vehicle tags, as, after all, "driving is not a right, but a privilege" and when you apply for vehicle tags and registration, you are actually soliciting the State to attach their property to yours. Invitation precludes the notion of trespassing.
(The Astute Reader will rightly, if cynically, note that with two brief sentences I have managed to express more bogus rationalization than usually comes out of Annapolis in an entire session of the Assembly. Maybe there really is a future for me in local politics.)
The only saving grace of this sort of thing would be -- and I use the Conditional tense because, as we all know, our esteemed legislators and LEO would never engage in such deviousness and thus this is firmly and rightly relegated to, and dismissed as, Conspiracy Theory -- that all tracking traces from such a universal monitoring system would become part of the public record. A diligent and curious public would of course exercise their rights to be informed. So, Delegate, your car was parked when and where next to who else's vehicle? Now that is going to raise questions during campaign season... No, clearly it is time for the State of Maryland to prohibit this sort of thing, never can tell when something like that will come back to bite you in the ass.
Moving right along, I should recommend to all and sundry who happen to be in the network-engineering or systems-administration fields, that if you haven't yet tried it, you should immediately take a look at BackTrack Linux.
I personally noticed this because I was looking for a decent "wardriving" system for my Windows-7 (tm) laptop, and while some of the packages came pretty close, none had the functionality of Kismet. The BackTrack Linux distribution had Kismet and more. Unlike the Windows(tm) software for wardriving, Kismet will find not only WiFi Access Points, but it will also find Wifi Clients (laptops which are connected to Access Points, etc.) and that can be extremely useful in professional endeavors such as penetration testing. If you're just looking for some free WiFi, the software packages available for Windows (tm) are all that you need. If you want to find out how many unauthorized client devices are probing your wireless networks trying to crack your wifi encryption, you'll need Kismet.
Of course, I personally have no need to check to see if there are unauthorized client devices probing my wireless network trying to crack the encryption; I don't rely on such weak stuff as WPA and instead use other means of securing the internet against attacks transiting my access point. The Astute Reader will of course recall that I do hold US Patent 7,464,403 which concerns itself with wireless security among other things.
Sadly, nobody seems to be the least bit interested in making use of my patent, so I have an unfortunately large amount of spare time on my hands. Hence, the wardriving as a hobby.
BackTrack Linux installed very nicely once I downloaded it from the distribution website and burnt it to an installation DVD. It even partitioned my Windows 7 drive for me, no muss and no fuss and everything works just fine. And of course, because it is Linux, I got an entire operating system and an astonishing software load for free. Combining that with a GlobalSat BU-353 USB GPS unit, I was ready to do some Wardriving.
Here's a Google Earth KML mapfile of the literal thousands of WiFi Access Points in "north Aspen Hill", Maryland. If you have Google Earth installed, this will show you all of the access-points. Some people have entertaining notions for naming their "AP", for example the folks who named their AP "FREE PORN HERE", or the folks who named their AP "Surveillance Car 3".
And the map also shows various "probe networks", assorted client machines, all that sort of stuff.
Given the context of the first section of this blog posting, I suppose I shouldn't much wonder why it seems that no matter where I was taking a reading, there was one client machine constantly signalling its attempts to join wireless ESSID named "<ANY>", with a constant MAC address. No matter where I was, the signal strength remained the same yet the geography constantly changed to match my position.
Well, I had heard that the best and most state-of-the-art GPS tracker bugs (also known as "bumper-beepers") have internal power supplies so that they cannot be detected through analysis of the vehicle's electrical system, monitoring for power drains that can't be explained by such things as the vehicle's nav/audio devices. I've also heard that the best ones also store their data and serve it up via WiFi. It couldn't reasonably do this as an AP, since the beacon signal would easily be detected even by software for Windows (tm). It would have to do it as a client. Just drive by the target with an AP in the car, the client locks on, data is exchanged, you know the drill. Kismet, of course, finds clients as well as APs.
I guess this might tend to explain why my ex-girlfriends always seem to know when and where to find me, along with explaining a lot of other things.
Well, SCOTUS says it's trespassing, so I guess I need to go clean someone else's trash off of my car.
And it seems as if even Nature agrees with SCOTUS: if your WiFi or GPS fail today, it's because our primary, Sol, is having a tantrum.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Existentialism for Idiots
(This entry is NOT SAFE FOR WORK.)
Once again, here it is Sunday morning, and once again I have to increment the count of "weekends where I didn't go anywhere and didn't do anything, especially didn't go out to a bar or club". The count's somewhere up around 150 or more. I think the last time I went out was sometime in maybe late 2009.
My "winter depression" or Seasonal Affective Disorder ("SAD") has just about gone, and the grieving process is pretty much in the background. I'm certainly not obsessing over it, though whenever my sister comes to visit to pick up mail related to the Estate or to try to dig through the records in search of something, the subject will likely come up and there's that awkward silence for a few moments and then we have to move the conversation along so as to not be picking at old wounds, so to speak. Though I am feeling better, I'm far from happy, but at least I am getting back to the level of far-from-happy to which I have been accustomed.
That's not all that positive, though. It's really pretty sad, to what levels of Anomie one can become accustomed.
Perhaps, though, it's not mere Anomie, nor even mere Accidie. Angst, maybe? Not quite, though I've certainly been there; this is something not quite so intense or pervasive. Maybe it's just Weltschmerz, a "... psychological pain caused by sadness that can occur when realizing that someone's own weaknesses are caused by the inappropriateness and cruelty of the world and (physical and social) circumstances".
One thing is for sure. I have settled into being what the Japanese call Hikikomori, basically young adults who retreat from society, generally hiding in their rooms at their parents' apartment. Maybe it's Avoidant Personality Disorder.
Or maybe, for me as for Sartre, "hell is other people".
Most people in the Greater Washington DC Metropolitan area -- or at least those who very frequently ride the Metrorail -- will completely understand that bit about "hell is other people", although they usually phrase it as "goddamn Tourists". That muttered imprecation is generally followed by the phrase "don't know nothin', and get in the way".
I personally have generally tried to fill my soul with a generous love of my fellow man, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, when riding down the escalator into a Metro station, only to find that a gaggle of tourists has disembarked said escalator, and then promptly have pooled up in a glob of humanity blocking the landing from said escalator. Frequently they do so with such effectiveness that you cannot get off of the escalator without pushing them out of the way. This is rude, and one shouldn't be rude if it can possibly be avoided yet when the alternative is having the soles of your shoes sanded off by the relentlessly grinding escalator steps, rudeness cannot possibly be avoided.
Yet the great pitfall of rudeness is that once one allows it in one's self, one becomes accustomed to it. Indeed, it can become a form of performance art. It might not seem that the word "elegance" could be applied to rudeness, yet during Tourist Season one may frequently witness harried commuters in open competition to see who can be the most elegantly rude to tourists. Thus, points are awarded to the clever commuter who can push through the tourists blocking the landings whispering "this way to the ticket machines" thus causing the tourists to move from their blocking point, rather than to the commuter who simply screeches "out of the frackin' way you provincial inbreds".
This too has its drawbacks... too much elegance and the level of abstraction increases. With abstraction comes incomprehensibility. It's one thing to tell a glob of tourists blocking the escalator landings "if you stand there long enough, someone will tie your laces together". It's quite another for someone to get stuck behind a glob of tourists taking up the whole width of the escalator, bend down and craftily untie shoelaces and leave them dangling over the escalator steps. Those shoelaces can get sucked into the machinery at the end of the escalator run, and that can suck people's feet into the machinery. And then the tourists will be really blocking the escalator landing.
In the same way that too much elegance and abstraction in messing with tourists can stop being a somewhat rude instruction on commuting etiquette and become little short of attempted murder, too much elegance and abstraction in other social interactions can change from helpful hints on how to get along, into outright abusiveness that has little hope of achieving the desired goal of promoting functional and polite public behavior.
Thus, it's good to be pretty straightforward and try to tell people exactly how they are offending. Simply refusing to do business with offenders quite evidently does little or nothing to cause them to see the error of their ways and work to do better. It's probably proper to try to inform people that they are being annoying.
Then again, some people enjoy being annoying, and there's nothing you can do about them but avoid them. Because if you inform them exactly why you think they are fucking assholes, they will redouble their efforts to be fucking assholes. This is due to the sad yet inarguable fact of life that only a fucking asshole thinks that it's good to be a fucking asshole, which single characteristic is in fact the ultimate basic definition of a fucking asshole.
Everyone on this earth has no doubt had the following unpleasant conversation...
YOU: Um, look, I'm not sure how to tell you this, but you're being a fucking asshole.
ASSHOLE: You betcha! Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha!
YOU: You know, that's even more asshole-ish!
ASSHOLE: Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha, PUSSY.
Most people leave at this point. However, sad and misguided individuals, such as myself, are either too stupid to leave or they may have some bizarre and demonstrably wrong notion about "perfectibility of humanity". They haven't yet learned that assholes enjoy being assholes and regard it as their main worthiness in life. By failing to leave, you're just giving an asshole even more opportunity to do what they most love to do.
At the risk of only giving even more fucking assholes even more insight into how better to be even bigger assholes, I must post a few basic rules on how not to offend. Most actually decent people know this already, or will quickly understand when told.
Don't Get in People's Way. Don't make yourself an obstruction to public use of public spaces and passages. This includes not taking up the whole damned sidewalk and thinking that such thoughtlessness makes you cool or something. It includes not walking out of the door of a store and then standing there with your whole extended family blocking the goddamn door while you make lengthy minor adjustments to your clothing and appearance. It includes not standing just inside the door with your whole extended family blocking the goddamn door while you zip your coats. If your whole extended family needs to stand as a group while zipping their coats, stand to the side so that you're not in the goddamn way of everyone else trying to come in or go out. Or, if you feel some bizarre culturally-based need to block the goddamn doors, at least have the common decency to say "excuse me". And then get out of the goddamn way.
Understand Personal Space. Your pet dogs may have no concept of personal space, as evidenced by the fact that they will walk right up and stick their nose in your crotch and drool down the inside of your pants leg if you allow it. They'll even do it to total strangers, because it's their way of being friendly. Yet people are not dogs, and lots of people really don't like strange dogs poking their noses in places where they are not invited. In the same way, lots of people don't like total strangers who walk up to them and stand more closely than would close family members. If you are in a line behind someone, and are close enough to pick their pockets, that's too close. If you are close enough behind them so that they can feel your breath on their neck, you are far too close. And please understand this if you understand nothing else. There is no excuse for standing too close behind someone in a line when you are the only two people in a very large store. The only thing worse is continually entering a person's Personal Space when there is a very large area allowing all people to have a lot of room.
All Public Areas Are Public to All. If a store is open to business for anyone, they are open for business to everyone. Even the Ugly Customer must be served. Even Fucking Assholes need to be served until and unless they behave in such a way as to be banned by the Management. Until they are officially banned and are banned by Management, they get the same service as everyone. Everyone should expect to get, and to give, the same as anyone else. The Parks are open to everyone, the sidewalks are open to everyone. There's no such thing as "our neighborhood" unless you live in a privately owned and privately maintained "gated community". There's no such thing as "our shopping center where we don't allow the Anglos/Blacks/Hispanics/Asians". This is one of the most basic concepts in the US and Canada. Trying to be exclusive of people in public spaces is one of the great hallmarks of Fucking Assholes.
Commentary and Criticism Are Rights. It is perfectly alright to call someone a Fucking Asshole. It is not alright at all to be a Fucking Asshole. A basic difference between someone who is a Fucking Asshole and someone who is not, is that a Fucking Asshole doesn't care if you call them a Fucking Asshole, and someone who is not a Fucking Asshole will care deeply enough to change their ways and not act like a Fucking Asshole. A Fucking Asshole, when correctly labeled, usually will escalate their behavior simply to prove they are correctly labeled, and also to prove that they can be even more so. A person who is incorrectly labeled as a Fucking Asshole will try to find out why they have that label, and any decent person will tell them. Having given the first offense of uttering the label, it is not compounded by any critique which can be addressed. Accusation becomes conversation and conversation becomes negotiation. The only person who will not follow this path is the Fucking Asshole. Just calling someone a name and then not being willing to discuss it with that someone, is infantile and idiotic. These are characteristics of the Fucking Asshole, and not of the Decent Person.
Now, I could go on and on, and in the future I doubtless shall. But that's enough for today.
At least, now some of the people out there have some idea why I don't like them, or don't like what they're doing. Generally, it's because they get in the way and stay in the way, or get too damned close when there's no reason at all for it, or do both of those things and insist on being Fucking Assholes about it.
Once again, here it is Sunday morning, and once again I have to increment the count of "weekends where I didn't go anywhere and didn't do anything, especially didn't go out to a bar or club". The count's somewhere up around 150 or more. I think the last time I went out was sometime in maybe late 2009.
My "winter depression" or Seasonal Affective Disorder ("SAD") has just about gone, and the grieving process is pretty much in the background. I'm certainly not obsessing over it, though whenever my sister comes to visit to pick up mail related to the Estate or to try to dig through the records in search of something, the subject will likely come up and there's that awkward silence for a few moments and then we have to move the conversation along so as to not be picking at old wounds, so to speak. Though I am feeling better, I'm far from happy, but at least I am getting back to the level of far-from-happy to which I have been accustomed.
That's not all that positive, though. It's really pretty sad, to what levels of Anomie one can become accustomed.
Perhaps, though, it's not mere Anomie, nor even mere Accidie. Angst, maybe? Not quite, though I've certainly been there; this is something not quite so intense or pervasive. Maybe it's just Weltschmerz, a "... psychological pain caused by sadness that can occur when realizing that someone's own weaknesses are caused by the inappropriateness and cruelty of the world and (physical and social) circumstances".
One thing is for sure. I have settled into being what the Japanese call Hikikomori, basically young adults who retreat from society, generally hiding in their rooms at their parents' apartment. Maybe it's Avoidant Personality Disorder.
Or maybe, for me as for Sartre, "hell is other people".
Most people in the Greater Washington DC Metropolitan area -- or at least those who very frequently ride the Metrorail -- will completely understand that bit about "hell is other people", although they usually phrase it as "goddamn Tourists". That muttered imprecation is generally followed by the phrase "don't know nothin', and get in the way".
I personally have generally tried to fill my soul with a generous love of my fellow man, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof, when riding down the escalator into a Metro station, only to find that a gaggle of tourists has disembarked said escalator, and then promptly have pooled up in a glob of humanity blocking the landing from said escalator. Frequently they do so with such effectiveness that you cannot get off of the escalator without pushing them out of the way. This is rude, and one shouldn't be rude if it can possibly be avoided yet when the alternative is having the soles of your shoes sanded off by the relentlessly grinding escalator steps, rudeness cannot possibly be avoided.
Yet the great pitfall of rudeness is that once one allows it in one's self, one becomes accustomed to it. Indeed, it can become a form of performance art. It might not seem that the word "elegance" could be applied to rudeness, yet during Tourist Season one may frequently witness harried commuters in open competition to see who can be the most elegantly rude to tourists. Thus, points are awarded to the clever commuter who can push through the tourists blocking the landings whispering "this way to the ticket machines" thus causing the tourists to move from their blocking point, rather than to the commuter who simply screeches "out of the frackin' way you provincial inbreds".
This too has its drawbacks... too much elegance and the level of abstraction increases. With abstraction comes incomprehensibility. It's one thing to tell a glob of tourists blocking the escalator landings "if you stand there long enough, someone will tie your laces together". It's quite another for someone to get stuck behind a glob of tourists taking up the whole width of the escalator, bend down and craftily untie shoelaces and leave them dangling over the escalator steps. Those shoelaces can get sucked into the machinery at the end of the escalator run, and that can suck people's feet into the machinery. And then the tourists will be really blocking the escalator landing.
In the same way that too much elegance and abstraction in messing with tourists can stop being a somewhat rude instruction on commuting etiquette and become little short of attempted murder, too much elegance and abstraction in other social interactions can change from helpful hints on how to get along, into outright abusiveness that has little hope of achieving the desired goal of promoting functional and polite public behavior.
Thus, it's good to be pretty straightforward and try to tell people exactly how they are offending. Simply refusing to do business with offenders quite evidently does little or nothing to cause them to see the error of their ways and work to do better. It's probably proper to try to inform people that they are being annoying.
Then again, some people enjoy being annoying, and there's nothing you can do about them but avoid them. Because if you inform them exactly why you think they are fucking assholes, they will redouble their efforts to be fucking assholes. This is due to the sad yet inarguable fact of life that only a fucking asshole thinks that it's good to be a fucking asshole, which single characteristic is in fact the ultimate basic definition of a fucking asshole.
Everyone on this earth has no doubt had the following unpleasant conversation...
YOU: Um, look, I'm not sure how to tell you this, but you're being a fucking asshole.
ASSHOLE: You betcha! Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha!
YOU: You know, that's even more asshole-ish!
ASSHOLE: Ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha, PUSSY.
Most people leave at this point. However, sad and misguided individuals, such as myself, are either too stupid to leave or they may have some bizarre and demonstrably wrong notion about "perfectibility of humanity". They haven't yet learned that assholes enjoy being assholes and regard it as their main worthiness in life. By failing to leave, you're just giving an asshole even more opportunity to do what they most love to do.
At the risk of only giving even more fucking assholes even more insight into how better to be even bigger assholes, I must post a few basic rules on how not to offend. Most actually decent people know this already, or will quickly understand when told.
Don't Get in People's Way. Don't make yourself an obstruction to public use of public spaces and passages. This includes not taking up the whole damned sidewalk and thinking that such thoughtlessness makes you cool or something. It includes not walking out of the door of a store and then standing there with your whole extended family blocking the goddamn door while you make lengthy minor adjustments to your clothing and appearance. It includes not standing just inside the door with your whole extended family blocking the goddamn door while you zip your coats. If your whole extended family needs to stand as a group while zipping their coats, stand to the side so that you're not in the goddamn way of everyone else trying to come in or go out. Or, if you feel some bizarre culturally-based need to block the goddamn doors, at least have the common decency to say "excuse me". And then get out of the goddamn way.
Understand Personal Space. Your pet dogs may have no concept of personal space, as evidenced by the fact that they will walk right up and stick their nose in your crotch and drool down the inside of your pants leg if you allow it. They'll even do it to total strangers, because it's their way of being friendly. Yet people are not dogs, and lots of people really don't like strange dogs poking their noses in places where they are not invited. In the same way, lots of people don't like total strangers who walk up to them and stand more closely than would close family members. If you are in a line behind someone, and are close enough to pick their pockets, that's too close. If you are close enough behind them so that they can feel your breath on their neck, you are far too close. And please understand this if you understand nothing else. There is no excuse for standing too close behind someone in a line when you are the only two people in a very large store. The only thing worse is continually entering a person's Personal Space when there is a very large area allowing all people to have a lot of room.
All Public Areas Are Public to All. If a store is open to business for anyone, they are open for business to everyone. Even the Ugly Customer must be served. Even Fucking Assholes need to be served until and unless they behave in such a way as to be banned by the Management. Until they are officially banned and are banned by Management, they get the same service as everyone. Everyone should expect to get, and to give, the same as anyone else. The Parks are open to everyone, the sidewalks are open to everyone. There's no such thing as "our neighborhood" unless you live in a privately owned and privately maintained "gated community". There's no such thing as "our shopping center where we don't allow the Anglos/Blacks/Hispanics/Asians". This is one of the most basic concepts in the US and Canada. Trying to be exclusive of people in public spaces is one of the great hallmarks of Fucking Assholes.
Commentary and Criticism Are Rights. It is perfectly alright to call someone a Fucking Asshole. It is not alright at all to be a Fucking Asshole. A basic difference between someone who is a Fucking Asshole and someone who is not, is that a Fucking Asshole doesn't care if you call them a Fucking Asshole, and someone who is not a Fucking Asshole will care deeply enough to change their ways and not act like a Fucking Asshole. A Fucking Asshole, when correctly labeled, usually will escalate their behavior simply to prove they are correctly labeled, and also to prove that they can be even more so. A person who is incorrectly labeled as a Fucking Asshole will try to find out why they have that label, and any decent person will tell them. Having given the first offense of uttering the label, it is not compounded by any critique which can be addressed. Accusation becomes conversation and conversation becomes negotiation. The only person who will not follow this path is the Fucking Asshole. Just calling someone a name and then not being willing to discuss it with that someone, is infantile and idiotic. These are characteristics of the Fucking Asshole, and not of the Decent Person.
Now, I could go on and on, and in the future I doubtless shall. But that's enough for today.
At least, now some of the people out there have some idea why I don't like them, or don't like what they're doing. Generally, it's because they get in the way and stay in the way, or get too damned close when there's no reason at all for it, or do both of those things and insist on being Fucking Assholes about it.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Wasted Weekend In Review
There's not much going on here other than me continuing to struggle with a pile of upgrading brought on by Firefox's "improved" 9.0.1 version release. It's not just me, there's breakage all over the InterNet because of this. Oh well. This is not going to gain you any more market share taken away from Microsoft Internet Explorer. Meanwhile, I am about 99 percent done with "shaving the yak" just so that a relatively small percentage of likely users can see what they're supposed to see on some of my websites.
Meanwhile, there's not much else to report other than that one of my cars was damaged as part of a collision wherein one vehicle ran into a parked car which was then flung into my own parked vehicle. I should mention here that if you own a Honda Civic, you do not want to get it caught between a Cadillac Escalade and a min-1980s Oldsmobile.
Due to a complete lack of anything interesting to do which doesn't involve going out and hanging around with total strangers in some bar I don't much like, I surfed a lot of YouTube and discovered the entertainment value of watching people "Shuffle Dance". Hey, I might even learn how to do this myself, as it's not too different from skipping and it's clearly good exercise.
Here, have some Shuffle lessons.
Meanwhile, there's not much else to report other than that one of my cars was damaged as part of a collision wherein one vehicle ran into a parked car which was then flung into my own parked vehicle. I should mention here that if you own a Honda Civic, you do not want to get it caught between a Cadillac Escalade and a min-1980s Oldsmobile.
Due to a complete lack of anything interesting to do which doesn't involve going out and hanging around with total strangers in some bar I don't much like, I surfed a lot of YouTube and discovered the entertainment value of watching people "Shuffle Dance". Hey, I might even learn how to do this myself, as it's not too different from skipping and it's clearly good exercise.
Here, have some Shuffle lessons.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Shaving A Yak While Dodging the Crazies...
Dodging the crazies has become something of a pastime of mine. I'd call it a hobby but hobbies are meant to provide enjoyable diversion. Want to see an example of an actual hobby? I'm "moving right along" with my solar charging system and shed-mounted utility and security lighting system. It's so fun that I made some video of it.
No, the crazies can be either of two things, two major classifications, each of which can certainly affect the other. First, "the crazies" is how I can get to thinking when excessive weirdness impinges on my life. Secondarily, "the crazies" is how I think of the sort of people who just can't stop trying to inflict excessive weirdness on my life, apparently just so that they can watch me suffer as they drive me mad with their own madness.
An example: Yesterday, Wednesday the 11th, at about 4:00Pm or so, I was out working on the final touches of the solar-system upgrade. I stepped out of the shed for a smoke, and there was a strange object which rather resembled a car-battery in my back yard, not far from the porch. I walked on over to take a look at it, and noticed it was beeping. Right about then, I noticed this one black man in workman's clothes approaching the strange object, coming from the street. Then I noticed he was holding some sort of a wand, some sort of detector, and then I noticed his vehicle parked across the street: Washington Gas. Major repairs are scheduled for my street, and this man was detecting the courses of the underground gas pipes. Perfectly reasonable.
Less reasonable... when I offered to point out where the line ran next to the house, he said "I already know where it turns", and I said "okay" and turned to go back to what I was doing. The thing is, that man's eyes about bugged out of his head at that point. I finished turning and went back to the shed. Yet still I heard another voice, not that of the man I had just seen, saying "I was ready for him".
This made no sense at the time, but as of this morning, much becomes more clear.
I saw some field-engineer types down the street and went to chat with them, to get more details on when the street and water-main repairs would start. I found out about all I needed to know, and was headed back home, when one of them was overheard saying something to the effect of having heard that I was a dangerous racist. (These two were both "white".) Now, if someone had said something like that to the crews headed out to work on my street, the actions of that Washington Gas fellow and his associate would make sense. If they had been told that, me approaching the one man might have seemed to him like that crazy racist man they warned him about was launching an attack. I guess that would explain why he actually had his eyes bugging out.
Now, of course, the question would be, who told him that, and why.
Kind of funny... I was driving on my usual schedule, off to take a walk in the park, on Monday. While at a four-way stop, I looked over and saw someone I have known for some years, but hadn't seen for several months, so I pulled over and tried to chat. He wasn't dressed for the slightly chilly weather, and said so after brief conversation, and he headed back inside and I headed off to take my walk. Part of the discussion, though, was about my "new" car, first time he had seen it. He took a nice look at it, no surprise as I was telling him how it came to me and reciting various specifications such as engine size and miles-per-gallon.
Now, for the last week or so, my life has been pretty trouble free, but the very next day, in every approaching car I saw faces looking shocked, dismayed, seriously weirded-out. I turned on the news channel, thinking that 9/11 had happened again, nothing on the news. Yet these guys are all checking out my car, and staring at me. Kind of odd, and definitely suspicious.
All of a sudden, I've got sketchy people pretty much stalking me everywhere I go shopping. It's like someone called up their cult leader and the cult leader said "let me take care of this" and then some e-alert system -- like "Amber Alert" or "Silver Alert" or "School Code Alert" -- text messaged about a hundred people to all be on the lookout for me and my car. Crap like this can make a person paranoid. Yet as I said above, "dodging the crazies" is a well-honed set of habits for me.
That doesn't mean that some appropriate ranking official in the local government should fail to look into the matter. Because if you've got cultists putting out the word to be on the lookout, and telling outrageous lies to get people to want to assist, that's not far at all from the legal element of "chain of command, overt or covert" as seen in the Maryland Anti-Gang Act of 2010. The first time one of these poor misled folks crosses the line into the basis "crimes of violence" for that Act, someone somewhere is potentially looking at 20 years... because frankly we don't need no stinking gangs in Aspen Hill (or anywhere) and just because the leadership and officer corps mostly look and act like church-goers and office ladies doesn't mean that they aren't clearly trained and practiced at raising a rabble to run wild in the streets looking for blasphemers and heretics.
There's also the little question about possible mis-use of County resources. After all, the County is about the only local entity that has such alert systems. Wouldn't it be shameful for local politicians to have to explain how any old Tom Dick or Harry can leverage the County emergency-alerts text system to launch unsuspecting and normally-decent subscribing citizens into the role of being a private army pursuing some obscure private vendetta?
"Shaving A Yak" is a phrase meaning that you've got stuck doing something which is both ridiculous and time-consuming, but which is also necessary to accomplish something that actually must be done.
For me, this problem originated with the release of the new Firefox web-browser version 9.0.1.
Many of the websites I host are based on the MediaWiki software suite, the same suite that runs WikiPedia. Firefox's new release abandons an old work-around which has become "deprecated". Thus, website features in older versions of Mediwiki which ought to appear in the left-side navigation and utility frame are now buried in the bottom of the page. It looks icky and it's hard to use.
I set out to fix this by going to the latest version of Mediawiki which doesn't have this exact problem, but discovered that first I had to upgrade my PHP (hypertext pre-processing language), which meant that I had to upgrade the MySQL database server, which meant that I had to rebuild the Apache HTTPD web-server, which didn't like the build-configuration specifications of the PHP, which had to be rebuilt and the the webserver has to be re-built and now various other things need to be dealt-with and one of those was a fairly simple library handling REGEX (Regular EXpressions) which meant that I had to break large parts of the entire server.
Fortunately, this is Debian Linux, which has the helpful apt-get Package Management System. Unfortunately, for apt-get to prevent brokenness from removing a fundamental library, it has to remove all of the things that would be broken. Then it removes the library. But don't fear, we can do a "dist-upgrade", which automagically migrates from the old base software version to the new base software version. In MicroSoft WIndows(tm) that would be like migrating from Windows Vista to Windows 7... you expect it to go smoothly, but this was not to be the case.
So once again, a rather full and large feature set is required by the new MediaWiki and those assorted features are spread across several applications and many more software libraries.
So, I've been shaving a yak, as the saying goes, but I think it's about denuded by now. Once I've got all of the yak-hair I need, I can...
Heh. Even more TL;DR.
But let's all get looking into what sort of unknown and under-the-table organization is operating in my neighborhood, which has to power to turn out at least a hundred observers and apparently even more actual stalkers and "tails" overnight, most of them apparently given whatever story will make them feed information back to their controller... even if that story puts the "subject" at mortal risk.
No, the crazies can be either of two things, two major classifications, each of which can certainly affect the other. First, "the crazies" is how I can get to thinking when excessive weirdness impinges on my life. Secondarily, "the crazies" is how I think of the sort of people who just can't stop trying to inflict excessive weirdness on my life, apparently just so that they can watch me suffer as they drive me mad with their own madness.
An example: Yesterday, Wednesday the 11th, at about 4:00Pm or so, I was out working on the final touches of the solar-system upgrade. I stepped out of the shed for a smoke, and there was a strange object which rather resembled a car-battery in my back yard, not far from the porch. I walked on over to take a look at it, and noticed it was beeping. Right about then, I noticed this one black man in workman's clothes approaching the strange object, coming from the street. Then I noticed he was holding some sort of a wand, some sort of detector, and then I noticed his vehicle parked across the street: Washington Gas. Major repairs are scheduled for my street, and this man was detecting the courses of the underground gas pipes. Perfectly reasonable.
Less reasonable... when I offered to point out where the line ran next to the house, he said "I already know where it turns", and I said "okay" and turned to go back to what I was doing. The thing is, that man's eyes about bugged out of his head at that point. I finished turning and went back to the shed. Yet still I heard another voice, not that of the man I had just seen, saying "I was ready for him".
This made no sense at the time, but as of this morning, much becomes more clear.
I saw some field-engineer types down the street and went to chat with them, to get more details on when the street and water-main repairs would start. I found out about all I needed to know, and was headed back home, when one of them was overheard saying something to the effect of having heard that I was a dangerous racist. (These two were both "white".) Now, if someone had said something like that to the crews headed out to work on my street, the actions of that Washington Gas fellow and his associate would make sense. If they had been told that, me approaching the one man might have seemed to him like that crazy racist man they warned him about was launching an attack. I guess that would explain why he actually had his eyes bugging out.
Now, of course, the question would be, who told him that, and why.
Kind of funny... I was driving on my usual schedule, off to take a walk in the park, on Monday. While at a four-way stop, I looked over and saw someone I have known for some years, but hadn't seen for several months, so I pulled over and tried to chat. He wasn't dressed for the slightly chilly weather, and said so after brief conversation, and he headed back inside and I headed off to take my walk. Part of the discussion, though, was about my "new" car, first time he had seen it. He took a nice look at it, no surprise as I was telling him how it came to me and reciting various specifications such as engine size and miles-per-gallon.
Now, for the last week or so, my life has been pretty trouble free, but the very next day, in every approaching car I saw faces looking shocked, dismayed, seriously weirded-out. I turned on the news channel, thinking that 9/11 had happened again, nothing on the news. Yet these guys are all checking out my car, and staring at me. Kind of odd, and definitely suspicious.
All of a sudden, I've got sketchy people pretty much stalking me everywhere I go shopping. It's like someone called up their cult leader and the cult leader said "let me take care of this" and then some e-alert system -- like "Amber Alert" or "Silver Alert" or "School Code Alert" -- text messaged about a hundred people to all be on the lookout for me and my car. Crap like this can make a person paranoid. Yet as I said above, "dodging the crazies" is a well-honed set of habits for me.
That doesn't mean that some appropriate ranking official in the local government should fail to look into the matter. Because if you've got cultists putting out the word to be on the lookout, and telling outrageous lies to get people to want to assist, that's not far at all from the legal element of "chain of command, overt or covert" as seen in the Maryland Anti-Gang Act of 2010. The first time one of these poor misled folks crosses the line into the basis "crimes of violence" for that Act, someone somewhere is potentially looking at 20 years... because frankly we don't need no stinking gangs in Aspen Hill (or anywhere) and just because the leadership and officer corps mostly look and act like church-goers and office ladies doesn't mean that they aren't clearly trained and practiced at raising a rabble to run wild in the streets looking for blasphemers and heretics.
There's also the little question about possible mis-use of County resources. After all, the County is about the only local entity that has such alert systems. Wouldn't it be shameful for local politicians to have to explain how any old Tom Dick or Harry can leverage the County emergency-alerts text system to launch unsuspecting and normally-decent subscribing citizens into the role of being a private army pursuing some obscure private vendetta?
"Shaving A Yak" is a phrase meaning that you've got stuck doing something which is both ridiculous and time-consuming, but which is also necessary to accomplish something that actually must be done.
For me, this problem originated with the release of the new Firefox web-browser version 9.0.1.
Many of the websites I host are based on the MediaWiki software suite, the same suite that runs WikiPedia. Firefox's new release abandons an old work-around which has become "deprecated". Thus, website features in older versions of Mediwiki which ought to appear in the left-side navigation and utility frame are now buried in the bottom of the page. It looks icky and it's hard to use.
I set out to fix this by going to the latest version of Mediawiki which doesn't have this exact problem, but discovered that first I had to upgrade my PHP (hypertext pre-processing language), which meant that I had to upgrade the MySQL database server, which meant that I had to rebuild the Apache HTTPD web-server, which didn't like the build-configuration specifications of the PHP, which had to be rebuilt and the the webserver has to be re-built and now various other things need to be dealt-with and one of those was a fairly simple library handling REGEX (Regular EXpressions) which meant that I had to break large parts of the entire server.
Fortunately, this is Debian Linux, which has the helpful apt-get Package Management System. Unfortunately, for apt-get to prevent brokenness from removing a fundamental library, it has to remove all of the things that would be broken. Then it removes the library. But don't fear, we can do a "dist-upgrade", which automagically migrates from the old base software version to the new base software version. In MicroSoft WIndows(tm) that would be like migrating from Windows Vista to Windows 7... you expect it to go smoothly, but this was not to be the case.
So once again, a rather full and large feature set is required by the new MediaWiki and those assorted features are spread across several applications and many more software libraries.
So, I've been shaving a yak, as the saying goes, but I think it's about denuded by now. Once I've got all of the yak-hair I need, I can...
Heh. Even more TL;DR.
But let's all get looking into what sort of unknown and under-the-table organization is operating in my neighborhood, which has to power to turn out at least a hundred observers and apparently even more actual stalkers and "tails" overnight, most of them apparently given whatever story will make them feed information back to their controller... even if that story puts the "subject" at mortal risk.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Noted In Passing, etc.
Noted in passing, a few things.
First, I am still boycotting Facebook, mostly because -- as I said to the FB "deactivate your account" questionnaire -- it is an "informational playground for the neighborhood stalker cult". I might even abandon Blogger for comparable reasons, and if I feel like sharing ideas or opinions in a freely-available format online, I can do it from a server where I have full access to the log files. I've done it before, and frankly, it was such an ego boost back in the day to see the logs tracking back to house.gov and senate.gov. It let me know I was doing something right, or at least something interesting. Of course, that was back in the days before everyone cyberstalked via the medium of Google Web Cache. Even when Google started caching every page they crawled -- unless you actually paid them to not do so -- most people didn't bother using the google caches to read blog posts.
Now, in the modern day, most people are sufficiently paranoid so as to actually read blog posts via google cache. Well, I just have to face it: everyone cyberstalks everyone else. And everyone who posts anything anywhere knows that somewhere, someone is cyberstalking them, above and beyond merely being part of a passing audience or even a sometime fan. So a person can either be silent and do their best to leave no "paper trail", or you can just go ahead and be forthright and offer your opinion, knowing that the whole panoply of personality types can be reading you: the honestly interested persons you intended to reach, the clueless types you might hope to enlighten, and inevitably the histrionic biddies and alarmist bozos who want to seize on anything you say as somehow supporting their delusions or wackjob agendas.
And of course, there are the actual stalkers who could be anything from political types trying to figure out if you're thinking of running again (hell no. Just no) through people who are trying to figure out your schedule from afar so that they know when to burglarize, to people who could be seeking more input to add to whatever mad concepts of self-or-other are running through their misguided little brains.
For whom, exactly, am I intending to write?
Mostly, I am intending to write for and to people who are more or less on an even keel, mature enough to have emerged from their teen sociopath mentation and group-seeking instinct, yet young enough to be concerned with matters more pressing than whether or not the folks down the block are keeping every last flake of leaf off of the lawn.
And speaking of keeping stuff off of my lawn, whoever has in the last five days left a used hypodermic and a home-made crack pipe at the bus-stop in front of my house, maybe you ought to stop doing that. Just thought I'd mention it. To be, you know, polite.
I'm trying to write for the folks who don't just think for themselves, but who wonder what other people think... and welcome diversity of thought and opinion. As for the people who wonder what other people think so that they can condemn them for Thoughtcrime, they are cordially invited to take a flying frack at a gobbling goose. Frankly I prefer the junkies who leave their used "works" on my lawn simply because they're not too judgmental of other people, since after all they have problems of their own. Of course, I wish they'd take their problems some place other than the bus stop in front of my house. Just don't try to take my property with you when you go. The same goes for the demented crackheads who like to get all hopped up and then run around the neighborhood talking smack about how messed up I am because I don't want to socialize with their sorry asses.
I'm in a somewhat rotten mood, in case nobody noticed.
First, there's the folks who leave trash at the bus-stop. That was bad enough, even when it wasn't used drug paraphernalia.
Secondly, this is something of a predictable side-effect of me emerging from Winter Depression, but it's probably more to do with me being about sick to death of media coverage of the Iowa Caucuses and the day-by-day reporting of changes in poll rankings of the Republican candidates. I should mention that I have nothing against either the Democrats or the Republicans, as a rule. Perhaps I'm just getting old and cranky -- that's pretty likely -- or perhaps I really should be disappointed that neither party seems to be able to push anyone genuinely admirably Presidential into the running. Santorum seems to be "a good man" though I don't know that I'd share all of his views, especially not since the Republican Party seems to be veering straight into the course of attempting to impose a duly-elected Theocracy on the USA.
Third, I'd love to say that I'm just over losing my mother not quite four months ago, but I am not. Yet I am getting to the point where it's clear that whatever my feelings, life has to go on and I need to get my head together to the point where I can go on with my life... which frankly has been on hold, to varying degrees, for the last decade.
Fourth, I'm not quite down with a cold or flu or something undefined, but that whole sniffling sneezing aching can't get any rest you need some Nyquil sort of feeling is wearing me down. Hot tea with lime juice and brown sugar seems to be helping a lot.
Fifth, the simple fact is that gradual alcohol withdrawal means that I don't sleep well at all. Aside from other reasons to severely limit alcohol intake, I have been advised that drinking will probably exacerbate the course of Dupuytren's Contracture. So now I'm down to less than half of my usual -- yay, I guess -- but that also means that for now at least, a good night's sleep of "a straight eight" is out of the question. It'll probably be out of the question until I've totally quit for at least a few weeks.
Sixth, as if I needed any other reasons to be grumpy, there's that whole "intimations of mortality" thing. After nearly 20 years of really quite good health aside from the occasional sneeze, first I get cataracts and now my hand is curling up to where I try to wave at someone and I look like the Pope offering a benediction. This is going to have to be dealt with, and soon. I am not going to like that, however well it might turn out. Plus it's like all of the infirmities of age one ordinarily expects in their eighties are slamming down onto me in my early fifties. This does not bode well as relates to any concepts of long-term planning.
Finally, having spent the last two years or so with my daily schedule cycling around staying out of my poor old mom's way unless she needed me for something, rather than getting up just in time to clean up after her breakfast and finishing the paper, I am moving back to my previous sleep/wake cycle. Not sleeping from not drinking is helping me move this process along. For those who are easily shocked, I should offer the warning that my ultimate goal is to be up, dressed, caffeinated, and ready to launch on warning no later than 6:00AM each and every day. Maybe earlier depending on how well I'm sleeping... and how well I can master the fine art of the Cat Nap.
Maybe I can even catch the junkie that's been leaving their used "works" at the bus stop.
First, I am still boycotting Facebook, mostly because -- as I said to the FB "deactivate your account" questionnaire -- it is an "informational playground for the neighborhood stalker cult". I might even abandon Blogger for comparable reasons, and if I feel like sharing ideas or opinions in a freely-available format online, I can do it from a server where I have full access to the log files. I've done it before, and frankly, it was such an ego boost back in the day to see the logs tracking back to house.gov and senate.gov. It let me know I was doing something right, or at least something interesting. Of course, that was back in the days before everyone cyberstalked via the medium of Google Web Cache. Even when Google started caching every page they crawled -- unless you actually paid them to not do so -- most people didn't bother using the google caches to read blog posts.
Now, in the modern day, most people are sufficiently paranoid so as to actually read blog posts via google cache. Well, I just have to face it: everyone cyberstalks everyone else. And everyone who posts anything anywhere knows that somewhere, someone is cyberstalking them, above and beyond merely being part of a passing audience or even a sometime fan. So a person can either be silent and do their best to leave no "paper trail", or you can just go ahead and be forthright and offer your opinion, knowing that the whole panoply of personality types can be reading you: the honestly interested persons you intended to reach, the clueless types you might hope to enlighten, and inevitably the histrionic biddies and alarmist bozos who want to seize on anything you say as somehow supporting their delusions or wackjob agendas.
And of course, there are the actual stalkers who could be anything from political types trying to figure out if you're thinking of running again (hell no. Just no) through people who are trying to figure out your schedule from afar so that they know when to burglarize, to people who could be seeking more input to add to whatever mad concepts of self-or-other are running through their misguided little brains.
For whom, exactly, am I intending to write?
Mostly, I am intending to write for and to people who are more or less on an even keel, mature enough to have emerged from their teen sociopath mentation and group-seeking instinct, yet young enough to be concerned with matters more pressing than whether or not the folks down the block are keeping every last flake of leaf off of the lawn.
And speaking of keeping stuff off of my lawn, whoever has in the last five days left a used hypodermic and a home-made crack pipe at the bus-stop in front of my house, maybe you ought to stop doing that. Just thought I'd mention it. To be, you know, polite.
I'm trying to write for the folks who don't just think for themselves, but who wonder what other people think... and welcome diversity of thought and opinion. As for the people who wonder what other people think so that they can condemn them for Thoughtcrime, they are cordially invited to take a flying frack at a gobbling goose. Frankly I prefer the junkies who leave their used "works" on my lawn simply because they're not too judgmental of other people, since after all they have problems of their own. Of course, I wish they'd take their problems some place other than the bus stop in front of my house. Just don't try to take my property with you when you go. The same goes for the demented crackheads who like to get all hopped up and then run around the neighborhood talking smack about how messed up I am because I don't want to socialize with their sorry asses.
I'm in a somewhat rotten mood, in case nobody noticed.
First, there's the folks who leave trash at the bus-stop. That was bad enough, even when it wasn't used drug paraphernalia.
Secondly, this is something of a predictable side-effect of me emerging from Winter Depression, but it's probably more to do with me being about sick to death of media coverage of the Iowa Caucuses and the day-by-day reporting of changes in poll rankings of the Republican candidates. I should mention that I have nothing against either the Democrats or the Republicans, as a rule. Perhaps I'm just getting old and cranky -- that's pretty likely -- or perhaps I really should be disappointed that neither party seems to be able to push anyone genuinely admirably Presidential into the running. Santorum seems to be "a good man" though I don't know that I'd share all of his views, especially not since the Republican Party seems to be veering straight into the course of attempting to impose a duly-elected Theocracy on the USA.
Third, I'd love to say that I'm just over losing my mother not quite four months ago, but I am not. Yet I am getting to the point where it's clear that whatever my feelings, life has to go on and I need to get my head together to the point where I can go on with my life... which frankly has been on hold, to varying degrees, for the last decade.
Fourth, I'm not quite down with a cold or flu or something undefined, but that whole sniffling sneezing aching can't get any rest you need some Nyquil sort of feeling is wearing me down. Hot tea with lime juice and brown sugar seems to be helping a lot.
Fifth, the simple fact is that gradual alcohol withdrawal means that I don't sleep well at all. Aside from other reasons to severely limit alcohol intake, I have been advised that drinking will probably exacerbate the course of Dupuytren's Contracture. So now I'm down to less than half of my usual -- yay, I guess -- but that also means that for now at least, a good night's sleep of "a straight eight" is out of the question. It'll probably be out of the question until I've totally quit for at least a few weeks.
Sixth, as if I needed any other reasons to be grumpy, there's that whole "intimations of mortality" thing. After nearly 20 years of really quite good health aside from the occasional sneeze, first I get cataracts and now my hand is curling up to where I try to wave at someone and I look like the Pope offering a benediction. This is going to have to be dealt with, and soon. I am not going to like that, however well it might turn out. Plus it's like all of the infirmities of age one ordinarily expects in their eighties are slamming down onto me in my early fifties. This does not bode well as relates to any concepts of long-term planning.
Finally, having spent the last two years or so with my daily schedule cycling around staying out of my poor old mom's way unless she needed me for something, rather than getting up just in time to clean up after her breakfast and finishing the paper, I am moving back to my previous sleep/wake cycle. Not sleeping from not drinking is helping me move this process along. For those who are easily shocked, I should offer the warning that my ultimate goal is to be up, dressed, caffeinated, and ready to launch on warning no later than 6:00AM each and every day. Maybe earlier depending on how well I'm sleeping... and how well I can master the fine art of the Cat Nap.
Maybe I can even catch the junkie that's been leaving their used "works" at the bus stop.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
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