Blogger, realist, clarifier, if there is such a term. Truth teller, who's not afraid to admit I'm wrong. Hellacious, renegade violist and "computer whisperer"; was once accused of practicing the Dark Arts with systems.
I'm tougher than most and survived things that would have killed most women. I still love life. I was homeless, now I'm not. No longer in the 'hood. Now, somewhere in the Carolinas. The stories are priceless and endless.
This is the first of my last batch of posts that will be written and produced on my old, old friend, and IBM Thinkpad, that I salvaged from my landlord, who works best with a hammer and is 80 years old. Out of nostalgia, after I repaired the thing, I offered him 50 bucks. He took 10. Okay, I'm a hell of a negotiator.
My landlord salvaged this out of some junk heap. All I did was load an OS onto it, and tried to give it back to him. He looked around at my "computer lab". I said, I'll give ya 50.00 bucks for it." He said, "10.00. okies?" Okies. You can't kill these things.
Anyway, (like you're in the edge of your seat for this riveting story), I'm trying something with C++ on my souped-up septa-core. Corrupted heap at fal-de-rol blah blah blah. Blargle. I overclocked the CPU, which is no sweat for this puppy, but I have to back up, and go step-by-step to fix. All of this is for a gaming site, which I am apparently going to have a real job doing, so this requires Knowledge (which would actually work for #AtoZ and got a "K" letter out of it, but is dry as sand for no one who gives two farts for heaps, corruption, stack overflows, and sector). Since I'm batting 1.0000 in these types of things, it will be fixed.
I wish Miguel would find these in some junkyard. Introducing the IBM Glue gene Mainframe; puts the Cray to shame. I stood up against the side of one of similar style once, and the power flowing through them is amazing!
The other reason I'm doing this, is I'm going to be splitting Tampa, Nebraska and my environs for a week or so, and want to take this puppy on the road, thus want to make sure it's serviceable and that I'll be able to post something besides colorful crap that I can create and upload all day in PAINT. No one wants to see my horrible drawing; it's worse than my photography, which Lee McAulay over at #ROW80 insisted would get me hired for Paranormal TV. It's THAT bad and apparently genetic.
I have not clue one as to what I was taking pictures of, why or when, but it was probably at night, because I am up mostly at night. Suffice it to say, they exist, and they were in my camera, so I must have taken them. The fool camera is one of these little cheap knock-offs that says it does everything. It does, but not well and it's a bitch to figure out. I couldn't find the really good one that I took of the stove in the dead of night, with no lights on and no flash. That one there is one hum-dinger of a photo!
I don't believe that I ever saw my dad pick up a camera, but my mother had no qualms about picking up a camera and taking a picutre of any old damn thing. Her favorites were meaningless pictures of the sky, with no landscape, so you didn't know if it was sunrisee or sunset and you were left with that timeless quality of just . . . clouds, in varying shades, close-ups of just. . . rocks because they were "interesting"; they weren't. Pretty much every rock is just like another, and people from the neck down, so she was either finding friends in Witness Protection Programs, or she was just too damn short to realize she was beheading all of her subjects.
Of course, we all waited with baited breath, everytime she came home with a new batch of abominations, so that we all had something to have a good howl and screech over. She wasn't exactly thrilled when I went to Japan and came home with 11 rolls of film, that were just. . . bridges. I got a few people in shots, by accident, but I told her, "Well, the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree." She thought a moment, when went "True. . ." Just because we knew our limitations was no reason to put down the camera.
courtesly:mymom
I have seventy-billion pictures of stuff like this in my mom's effects. Cats doing various amounts of nothing. The ginger cat, named "Dwayne" actually looked like a stoner and sat like that all the time. I'm not sure who the other cat is, but he/she looks to be in mid-stroke; I'm guessing it's some form of playing. I am equally bad, if not worse when it comes to taking pictures of felines.
Of course, we always had cats, kittens, or kittehs. I have some of the most random shots ever of cats that she photographed. They always look drunk. I'm not sure how one pulls that off, but she was damn good at it. I can't get my cat, Mama, to do all those cute little things that she does and get any kind of decent picture. I must have 147 pictures of the back of her head. Most of the time she wants to lie on my mouse hand and grab my arm and go to sleep. This is all fine; I put a towel over my arms, because she does grab on.
Alex and I speculated about the kitteh population in and around Nebraska Ave. Before I moved here, I had never seen cats with the types of markings that these cats have. It's like they were all designed by a committee of exterior decorators. They're all part calico-tortoise-shell-tabby, with patches of solid color and/or white thrown in and there are about a zillion of them.
I do think that Mama is the Matriarch, or at least one of them. She has been spayed. We saw to that after we adopted her and her very last kitten was killed by a motorcycle, but she has two sons from previous litters who show up to visit and they have very similar marking akin to hers.
A picture of Mama when she's actually looking at ME. I've since taken 83,749 pictures of her ass, her feet, the back of her head, but I've yet to get another head shot.
If you go on an evening stroll on some of the more secluded streets in V. M. Ybor, there are entire streets, where mini-Mamas are just lolling about on the streets. If you try to approach them, they run off to their owners' houses. The people have made a very good effort at controlling the cat population and adopting the strays, but the gene pool here is singular.
A bit farther to the east, in Ybor City, there is a lovely breed of cat that originated there, called the Havana Brown. These cats are so, so dark chocolate, that you cannot tell they are brown unless they are in direct sunlight. They are rather small and the few that I have known are feisty little cats, but wonderful to behold.
These are some of my more recent attempts. We're either getting ready to pass into an alternate universe, ala "Fringe", or I was having a really bad day with my essential tremor. In truth, she just KNOWS when that damn camera is coming out!
Mama kind of rules the places around here, and she can be a little con artist. For several weeks, she was letting me know that she didn't care for her dry food and that she really wasn't all that crazy about the wet food I was feeding her. I was pulling my hair out, trying to find something this elderly, cranky cat would eat. I would give her some bits of rotisserie turkey that I got from the deli; bits of cheese from my sandwich. I made some home-made meatballs; she liked those. Then, last Sunday, I walked into the kitchen, and caught her chowing down on her dry food. She looked up at me, with a look that said "I am sooooo busted!" As my friend Jeremy says, "That's cats for ya!" Indeed.
This is a blast from the past, but I think it's a good post. From September, 2013. I have
been told that I can raise computers from the Dead and that I
practice the Dark Arts in the understanding and healing of them. However,
even the most virtuosic of violinists at the apex of the violin heap,
has had a slip or two off the fingerboard, and played clams a-plenty.
I also have a huge affinity for the viola and despise the violin, for
a few reasons. One being, I am never comfortable playing a violin, so
naturally, I have or have had several of the things at one or another time in my
life, rather like mice or cockroaches, and I have had only one viola,
my Bolognese-built snob of an italian, maker, Guidantus Florenus, or
Wolf, as his luthier named him, when he was appraised and certified
after his bonafides checked out. So, I have no need for other violas.
Those violin notes high up on the "E" (EEK!) string are harmonics. Maybe. I wouldn't know, because they're above the hearing range of anything that lives on this planet. My friend Nancy, who has been my stand partner, much to the woe of our manager (it's his fault, since he knows we get into trouble) swears those are real notes. I think she's lying and I know I'm faking, when some moron of a band-leader seats me in the first violin section.
However,
I rented violins for a while, then I bought a few, then I sold a
couple, because the first were just not quite what I wanted, and then
I bought another and it was okay and then I sold that one. I am
currently violinless, which is really okay with me, since I am not
playing professionally much anymore anyway. Wolf rocks and that is
all I need.
This is just Wolf's scroll. Note the serif (point on the bottom) Seen head-on, (the pic of which I don't have) the two sides are asymmetrical which is a hallmark of Guidantus. He packs a wallop of a sound and is a dream to play; like butter.
Now,
if we were to transfer all this love/hate over to... oh, I don't know
say, computers, it would go like this. I love desktops. The bigger
and leaner, the better. I have an ancient Gateway, that JC farts
around on and watches Hulu+ and Netflix on and he's happy with that.
I have a dual-core, that is pretty much over-clocked right now and it
works well. It has an extra power supply for the monitor and software
for my vision. It works even better once I rid it of all the dancing
baloney, hoo-ha and JAVA type stuff that slowed it down and allowed
it to be susceptible to all manner of bad ju-ju. Still, I am looking
to upgrade to another quad-core AMD this year, with up to 16 X the
amount of speed and Terabytes, rather than Gigabytes, for some very
specific reasons. Sheesh. Thank the Christ you don't have to do that
with violas; although it could be said I already own the equivalent
of Big Blue or Cray of violas, so that analogy doesn't work.
Yes, take your stupid mousey control thingy and vamoose, along with Herr Mozart and that high, screechy thing, the violin.
Yeah, you scoot too! (Truth be told, this is a beauty; probably a Storioni, or a Stradivarius.) Whatevs, man. Begone!
What
does work, is the statement I make about “slipping off the
fingerboard” as it relates to system rebuilds. Over the last week,
I and my “colleague's” business has seen an up-tick in repairs,
rebuilds, shooing away of malware, trojans, hijacks and just general
fuckery. Most of our “patients” have been laptops, which now and
forever, I equate to violins.
Don't
get me wrong, I love my IBM laptop T42. Probably because it is an IBM
product and I am proud of having worked for them and being a
top-drawer engineer there. I fixed all manner of gaffes, goofs and
even restored 2 idiots' laptops that they left in the car overnight
in a town in North Dakota. They had already called in once, and the
idiot IBM engineer who talked to them first told them to leave their
laptops “in the sun for a few hours and that will work.” It
didn't and I received and fixed the second call. Epic in the history
of "Stupid I Have Known at IBM" for the 1st guy. But, believe me, I
have committed my share of confuse-a-what writ large.
Spreadsheets, databases, documents, suites. All of this crap will only replicate the data after it has been entered. I used to think that I should keep a Magic-8 Ball and tell callers, "It is too soon to tell" and other cryptic shit, or talk like Yoda. IBM wouldn't have minded. As long as it got fixed, you could play hopscotch in the aisles. Those were the days.
I
once got a call from a guy who was trying to copy some data in a cell
in Lotus 1-2-3, from Row 2 to Row 500, or something. So, I
assiduously walked him through the process, highlighting the row, in
this case row 1, hit CTR + C, then use the down arrow and holding
down Shift + CTR, highlight the rows, then hit CTR +V and voila! All
of your numbers or formulae or what have you are supposed to be
copied. Only this didn't work. Blank cells. I went at this from every
way I could think of and the guy was really patient. I put him on
hold and consulted with some of my fellow engineers around me. And we
were all coming up with nada, zilch, bupkus.
So,
I go back to my caller and apologized for making him wait and
explained; yargle, blah, blah. There was a silence for a moment, then
I hear this tiny voice in my head set, “Am I supposed to have typed
my numbers INTO the cell I want to copy first, y'know, like before I
copy?” I turned to stone. I wanted to say, “well,
Lotus 1-2-3 doesn't come with the ESP module yet, so yes moron, you
do.” But, that should have been one of the first things I asked
him. Still, I was the OS/2 Goddess.
Similarly,
after my great save last week of the doomed quadcore, wherein I used
several highly unorthodox techniques to rescue the operating system,
using a different rescue method than the one given and utilized a
non-sanctified disc and changed the BIOS boot order and DAMN! If that
didn't work. So, what followed yesterday, reminded me that yes, I am
human and may not reclaim my status of Goddesshood. I'll settle for
Beastess. Yes, I have feet of clay, make mistakes and laugh about them later. I am my own best audience.
I don't hate violins or laptops as much as this precocious nitwit, not by a long shot. But on a scale of things I hate, he's barely ahead of having the shits, throwing up or dying.
Another
Toshiba laptop. Oh, how I hate thee, Toshiba Satellite C655d-s5200.
You work and all your parts are running, so can you please tell me
why, in the name of Chthulu, why every Goddamned ethernet controller
I feed you, you refuse to see? What the hell is wrong with you. You
go online, hard-wired, wifi and no problemo, but you will not and
refuse to see any Ethernet controller. Are you one of those stupid
orphan cards made by some fly-by-night company that is in 6
Satellites and we're just screwed? Should I even give a shit? The
worst part of this whole thing came to be when I realized I couldn't
get on with my wifi antenna because I had it plugged into the phone
jack. I guess I missed “Recognizing Shapes” class at school.
Once, I plugged the wifi antenna in, Surprise! Internet. But no
damned ethernet card. I really, really hate, you Toshiba Satellite
C655d-s5200.
I'm sure this was a riveting class and I missed a whole bunch of stuff that would be mostly helpful. For now, I'll just continue trying to put wifi antennae into phone jacks. I mean, it's not like I can see the damned things, anyway.
Thus
has become my pogrom against laptops in general. The whole mouse and
pointer and select thingy is spastic. I use plug-ins on my own. I vow
here and now, NOT to start acquiring these nightmares. I also don't
do hardware and am not keen at all about Windows of any stripe. So, a
new pet hate; along with Mozart and violins, we can now add laptops.
BOYD
STOREY, RRT
I
went to the hospital on Friday, with a piece of paper that had a
bunch of gibberish on it. It just said something about pulmonary
whatsis and I had no idea what to expect. I showed up early and had
all of my stuff for once. Usually, I leave shit at home and papers,
or scrips have to be faxed and it's just a nightmare. I should have
everything pinned to me, like those idiot mittens we all had growing
up in Michigan.
So,
I was early, and got checked in and then was given directions to the
banks of elevators in TGH, Tampa General Hospital. I don't know what
it is about hospitals, but this is one of the most confusing places,
as was the University of Michigan hospital, where I worked during
school. At U of M, you didn't enter on the first floor, like a normal
building, you entered on the 4th floor. At TGH, there are east and
west units. I think I was directed to the western units. All I know
is the lady says, “You go left past the Golden Tree” (what is
this, a Runescape quest?) another left, go to the end and you'll see
elevators. Go to the 2nd floor to pulmonary.”
Off
I go, past the Golden Tree and find the elevators. TGH is a teaching
hospital. I love teaching hospitals; they're madhouses and there's
all sorts of stuff going on. Besides, this was my home for almost 2
months in 2010. Anyway, I'm waiting by the elevator, with a bunch of
folks and there's a mad stampede, unseen but heard from a hall to my
right. A passel of doctors appear, and they do a football huddle and
whisper excitedly for several moments, then they tear back off the
way they came. A drive-by consult. All that was missing was the clap
and “BREAK!”
The
elevator comes and I'm the last on, as I'll be the first off, so I
get to push all the buttons. I get to the 2nd floor and hop off. The
pulmonary wing is absolutely dead, crypt-like. There's a guy sitting
behind the desk, and he says, “Wallace?” I said, “yup.” So I
mosey on over and I see there's an electronic scale. He says, “What's
your first name, I was told, but I can't remember anything, I'm as
sharp as a bowling ball.” I start to laugh and tell him. I ask if
this here scale works and he says yes, so I jump up on it. Well, it
didn't do anything. Boyd says, “It's got to be turned on, first.
Hop off.” I did and I turned it on. 108.2 pounds. Hallelujah! I haven't been over 104 pounds in over 7 years.
I am so lame when it comes to taking pictures. It's like a cow driving a car.
Attempt #1 (It should be noted; this was BEFORE I was diagnosed with essential tremor, so that's part of the problem. The other part is, the Wallace gene will guarantee that bad pictures are taken 99.99% of the time.)
I
told him this is a major achievement for me and he's looking at me
like, "Sheeh, most women have the opposite problem, and you're thrilled to be 3 pounds heavier". Boyd's ready for this
test and I am too, I really had no idea what we were doing. So off we
went. It turns out it was a spirometry test, as I have COPD, which like essential tremor, is partially inherited, but mostly dictated by behavior; smoking. I had quit 2 years earlier for the last time and didn't miss it. But
through the whole test, this guy is just telling one joke after
another. He's better than I am! The only thing I told him that
cracked him up was when I commented on his last name, “Storey.”
When
we lived in Michigan, we went to a high Catholic Church and in the
summer time, one of the members of the church, a veterinarian, named
Dick Storey, would open his lakefront house in the afternoons and
have house parties and we would all go after church. Being an only
child, I never mixed well with other children at all, but was
perfectly at home with adults, so I would hang out in the living
room, where Dr. Storey had a baby grand piano. Thank God, my parents
were not of the “children are seen, but not heard” school of
child-rearing, although on this occasion, they may have been reflecting on their choice. But they would step in if things started to get out of
control. Once, after a dinner, I was hanging with the guys, because
they were a hell of a lot more interesting then the women in the
kitchen, who were cleaning dishes and probably slurping martinis. The
men were drinking whiskey and smoking cigars. The other kids were
outside, playing dolls, or army men, stuff I had zero interest in, at the time. I developed a raging interest in Military History later on; I was really a crappy girl-child.
Boyd's co-worker/buddy came over and I almost poked his eye out with my cane fiddling with this shit. Boyd helpfully hung onto it for me as I tried to take a picture, and not make shitty videos.
Attempt #2
But, back to the Veterinarian and the piano. During
a lull in the conversation, I announced apropos of nothing, “Dr.
Storey, did you know I can play the piano?” Dr. Storey, having 5 of
his own kids, and being extremely patient, said, “why, Mary, no, I
did not. Why don't you play a tune for us.” My 5 year old self
proceeded to clamber up on the piano bench and play “Onward
Christian Soldiers,” which I had learned in VBS, the previous week.
When I was done, I said, “Any requests?” My father hollered out,
how about “Alexander's Ragtime Band.” I said, “Okay!” And I proceeded to play “Onward Christian Soldiers,” again. I asked for
another request, but before I could fulfill another happy listener,
who had asked for George Gershwin's “Summertime (that would have been
awesome,) my mother came and whisked me into the kitchen. That was
pretty much the end of my piano-playing career.
Boyd
got a kick out of that. But, Boyd had quite a story of his own. He
spent time in the Navy and then, re-upped as a sonar man for several
tours. He's been with TGH and not only does testing on patients like
me, but the heart transplant patients. These tests, consist of
blowing into a tube, several times, as a machine registers lung
capacity, elasticity and volume.
We
did it several times and it went like clockwork; his patter was
continual and I asked him if anyone had ever complained, because it
has a lulling effect, which also caused me to concentrate on what we
were doing. I've noticed in the medical profession, the very best,
will have a way with being able to get through the static of a
patient's fears. They will be able to get the patient to buy into
what needs to be done and it is something that is not easy to do,
although it may look easy. He said he'd had a couple of complaints;
but overall, the response was just fantastic.
When
I had my ulcer surgery, way back in 1985, it was so successful,
because the doctors and nurses made me part of the team. My own
recovery time was 1/3 what was expected for a major surgery back
then.
Mr. Boyd Storey, RRT. A laff-and-a-haff and a great guy! I enjoyed this and I hope I get to see him again. Attempt #3 was the charm.
So,
as easy as it is to bitch about stupid doctors and the insurance
companies themselves, when you run across the best, I think it
appropriate to acknowledge them. I made a deal with Boyd. I told him
if he didn't mind my mentioning him in a post that I would write a
letter to his department head (he gets a Starbucks gift card)
regarding his superior ability and his way and kindness with people.
Thanks, Boyd. You're the best!
For those interested, I am not bad off. I have 43% lung function, but I walk and get around and am strong as an ox. As long as I keep not smoking, which I haven't done for over years now, I will be fine. I plan on being around for another 30 years, as the Wallaces and the Rosses have a longevity gene. Besides, I have too much to do. ===================================================================== A note: Since this post was written back on September 12, 2013, I have participated in several Clinical Trials and my lung function/capacity has increased to 90%. I started doing this in honor of my mother, who died at a relatively young age of 70. She lived every day fully with this disease, with far less than the lung capacity and overall good health that I now enjoy. The other most wonderful thing about this, is I'm helping to find a way to beat back this disease; as I mentioned, it's partly inherited and at my Clinical Trial place, Clinical Research of West Florida, there are patients who NEVER smoked, yet suffer from COPD. One day, it will be a thing of the past.
I'm
not even going to try and put lipstick on this pig; from Techdirt
comes this article, “Creating Chilling Effects on Speech is aFeature, Not A Bug, Of the Surveillance State.” Regarding Free
Speech and written by Mike Masnick. As a tech article, it starts out
with the usual blah-blah, but this caught my eye, “implicit in our
assumption is that these “costs” are things that are negatives of
the program (kinda like a bug.) Others would point out that for those
in power, that's not so much a cost as a benefit. It's not a bug, or
an unintended consequence, but a “feature.” By the way, an update
or a patch is also a bug, just not one that spies on you, in most
cases. Or maybe it does.
Yeah,
I get that, in 2 ways. Calling something by another name makes it
something else. Not. A bug is a bug. But, hey, if it's Microsoft?
Microsoft is nothing but a HUGE bug patch, along with JAVA, ORACLE and
all the other half-assed software companies that are raking in big
bucks for shitty software. I am not bitching; I have a cottage
industry going in fixing crap you never got right in the first damn
place!
"When email isn't enough for us to get our nosy little mitts on your information," would be
truth in advertising.
The
author then goes on to write about the “chilling” affect this has
been on free speech, not just as a consequence, but as a motive. Even
Peggy Noonan, describing a conversation with longtime civil
liberties advocate Nat Hentoff, writes that “the inevitable end of
surveillance is self-censorship.” Well, since I've been in a
homeless shelter and mixed it up with different sorts, I tend to NOT
self-censorship; a lifetime of it, pretty much fucked up my personal
life. As long as I don't foment treason, I can say any damn
well thing I want, under the 1st Amendment, and so can
you, if you're a U. S. citizen.
Also,
at TechDirt, the July 11th 2013 headline was regarding the
“Latest Leak Shows Microsoft Handed the NSA and FBI Unencrypted Access to Outlook, SkyDrive and Skype. Even though I hardly think
Microsoft has the warm fuzzies for the ABC agencies, we're talking
about Microsoft. I truly believe they don't their ass from a hole in
the ground. IBM worries me, as they made a deal with the Nazis in the
early 40s that hardly anyone talks about. And yeah, I've worked for
them both and know the chicanery they are capable of. Remember too, that I hunted down rogue servers at IBM, back when no one thought it was a big deal. This was in 1997. When I worked for Verizon, I didn't have that type of job, but we did have computers up on the towers on 9/11, and they were still transmitting signals for weeks, until their batteries finally died. Shivery stuff.
Anyway,
if were being told it's not a “bug” but a “feature” how fucking stupid do the
NSA, FBI think we are? Wait, don't answer that. We gave up it all up
with a stroke of a signature in 2001, when Bush, Jr., signed the
Patriot Act. Obama re-signed and expanded on some things the
government can do, with no warrants, no knock, no nothing. President
Obama is our first technically savvy president and understands the
ramifications over time of what this all means. We put up with Joseph P. McCarthy's nonsense, list-waving, his 238 or 149 names, whatever,
of known members of the American Communist Party. Until Joseph Welch
chastised during the first of the televised Army-McCarthy hearings.
Senator McCarthy and his lists and career went poof!
People
who say, “I don't care who listens to me, I have nothing to hide,”
are full of shit and let me tell you why. 99% of them have nothing
the NSA, the FBI, or the CIA cares to hear, but that is not the
point. We, as Citizens of the United States have and inalienable
right to privacy. If an outside government agency wishes to breach
that privacy, they MUST produce a warrant. It doesn't matter if it
regards coming into your home, reading your mail, email, searching
your car, requesting certain documents and wiretapping your phone.
Interestingly enough, 5 amendments come into play here, the 1st, 3rd, 4th (especially for wire-tapping) 9th and the 14th amendments. I am not even going to get into
Habeas corpus, which is sort of a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.
So,
in actuality, these things trump stupidities like the Patriot Act, at
least in my book, and here is where the fun comes in. Get yourself a
batch of Facebook friends, preferably some from Russia, Kazakhstan, or Tajikistan and the Middle East. Chat back and forth and then exchange jokes and
stuff. Misspell lots of your words and talk about your dogs, pets and
hobbies. For instance, mention that great WIRE-HAIRED TERROR that
your mom bought you. Swap recipes. The ones for bombe glaceé,
or bombe Alaska might just perk up some ears.
That thing can won't be around long enough to explode. It looks delicious!
Talking
in pig latin, or maybe esperanto is probably good. I don't think the
NSA has any algorithms for that yet. Better yet, before posting on FB
run your text through several translators. It works like that stupid
game “Telegraph,” where a bunch of kids would sit in a circle and
someone would pick a phrase and whisper it to his/her nieghbor. So,
we have this sentence that I started out with in English and ran through several different languages before going back to English:
Kid
1: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. – English
Kid
2: قفز
الثعلب البني السريع فوق الكلب الكسول –
Arabic
Kid
3: Le quick brown fox saute par dessus le chien paresseux – French
As always, my undying gratitude and love to Mr. Brockway at Cracked.com
And
that is how you play “Telegraph.” This would be great and send
the NSA haring off into all kinds of directions, and wondering what
sort of nefarious things are going on. I plan on doing this, as I
already know I'm on all sorts of lists, ala Joseph P. McCarthy dating
back to my father's non-escapade, when 2 of his employees somehow
managed to smuggle out 2 personnel carriers and then sold them to the
Saudis, back when they weren't our friends. So, we got to put up with
the FBI showing up at all kinds of hours, replete with sunglasses at
night. My dad used to pick me up after school; it was my senior year,
and then we'd spend hours aimlessly driving around, not even
bothering trying to rid ourselves of the remoras in our wake. I
joined the American Socialist party in the 80s. President Reagan was
in office, so not looking very kindly upon anti-capitalists, I'm sure
I went in the barrel for that.
Tampa has one of the largest presences outside of D. C. because of MacDill Airforce Base. That Base was the center for the prosecution and direction of the Iraq War in 2003. I guess this is Eric Holder; all FBI agents look alike to me.
Anyway,
we have inalienable rights, per the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights and those are being abrogated and this is a fearful thing
because, when one right is stepped on, then 2 are stepped on. When we
get to Writ of Habeas corpus, which I fear has already been violated,
we're toast. We've lost and we have nothing to protect us then. No
matter. I have no one, other than JC, and he understands this very
clearly. He also knows that I will not let this happen, if at all
humanly possible. We need to wake up, get over the bullshit. People
breastfeeding in public, so what? People get outraged about stupid
temporal things, but this is hard because it feels like an abstract
idea. It isn't.
It's
very real, and it's what I call a chromatic failure, because it's at
every level of the government and then some. Corporations try to tell
people how to vote. That is none of their goddamned business. In one
of my Triberr groups, I heard about a Chief who won't share a
poster's blog if they don't agree with the opinion. That's fucking
censorship and wrong. In closing, we must look to ourselves and not
just to what is going on outside. A free society means that all can
air their opinions, peculiar or antithetical to ours they may be.
That's what liberty is about.
One of
the other things besides music and computers that I find fascinating
is this whole “Search for Intelligent Life Elsewhere.” Of course,
we're currently running out of it here at home, especially in the US
at a rapid rate, so I think we should quadruple our efforts
immediately in our hunt for some entity that is a wee bit brighter
than a door knob. To that end, I have dedicated some of my computers'
awesome power to SETI@home.
When SETI@home is running, my visitors don't come. The last time they showed up, they pushed around a plate of symmetrically placed clementines I left out for them. I guess they liked them.
Fair
enough. I've picked up 3 rather nice projects and since I know no
borders or recognize no governments, unless they've pissed me off
personally, I have picked up a project from Cambridge in the UK and
one SAT, from Russia, along with SETI from Berkeley, California.
Great, snazzy and all that jazz. I've processed some umpteen
quadrillion petaflops worth of data just for SETI alone. We have our
little glitches now and then, but knowing computers, I can work
around the false-positives from this end.
Their Chamber of Commerce needs to get with the times. This is so 1947.
We just
received a new version of SETI@home. V
7.0 and AVG will register it as a virus. There have been notes sent
to all of us for about 2 weeks. I already knew this, when I saw the
Seti signature in the AVG warning and ignored it. But, some poor
shlubs have apparently decided their Boxes of Magic were infected and
fired off notes to the Admins on the project. Needless to say, the
support team is not supportive. It should be the “flog and
public-shaming team.” They are not all like that, but there is a
low tolerance for anything less than absolute wizardry in all of
these disciplines. Most likely, the users are people who are just excited to be included in something rather cool. I just do my thing
and hide. If something breaks, I fix it. That's why I belong to the
ex-CIA team; those retired old bats up there in central Florida.
Still,
there is a case to be made for approaching the “Box of Magic” as
just that. Personal computers have been around for awhile and part of
the domestic landscape for over a decade. Granted, tons of the
documentation is less than easy to decipher and in fact comes across
as a subset of what I call “Chinglish.”
Step 1.
Please to open box forthrightly, as shown in pictoo. (no picture shown) Step 2.
Please to remove CPU and place in upright fashion near floor, not
wall as see in pictoo too. (picture of a monitor display, with cords) Step 3. Please to
insert cable B in socket D, and cable C in socket Z as display in pictoo fore (picture of a set
of pinochle cards) and so on. Please to go and drink yourself blind as show in pictoo 79.
Yup, that I can do.
So,
maybe it isn't the consumer's fault, but once on the internet, there
is loads of good information available to the informed seeker. The
key word here being “informed.” If your Grandma goes and googles
“Delete Key, what to do with it,” the number one answer with a
bullet is this:
I just started laughing all over again; picturing an Apple keyboard, with only a GIANT DELETE key. Less efficient than what? An electric brick?
I
supported Apple products for all of 5 minutes at IBM; after I
recovered from the terribleness of that experience, I swore off any
and all Macs, and Apple-related gizmos and their stupid proprietary
software. I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate it. Just hate it so much, it
needs to all bleed to death, slowly. I tried to help some nimrod who
was using Word 6.0 for his MAC, so help me God. He had me so
flustered during the call, he asked me what a box was, and I shouted
into the phone of this 47-hour long abortion of a call, “IT'S A
THING SHAPED LIKE A SQUARE!”
There were times I wanted to answer, "ESP Help Desk." There were certainly days when pentagrams, divining rods, crystal balls, and Magic 8-Balls would have been useful. When a customer answers "It's broke," to your query of "And how may I help you today," (prior to open- and close-ended questions) you know you're in for a long, long ride.
Dead
silence; 100 engineers quietly hung up on their own phone calls and
turned their attention to me to see if I was going to catch on fire.
I was standing, and bent over and pretended to tie my high-heeled
shoe. For the ensuing 4 hours of this horrible, horrible call. As
Agent Scully would say, “Never Again.” Give me OS/2 thinkpad platform calls, network,
Windows, Lotus Suite, Lotus Notes, Mainframe calls. Fine. Come at me
with a Macintosh call, you'd better be prepared to be hung by a
headset from the highest cubicle wall (less than 5 feet, so I guess you'd better be really, really short, too.)
So, maybe I still should cut the people who post on the bulletin boards
at SETI@home for help some slack, but
they could at least read the damned notes. I've spent so much time
around computers, that I think in Boolean logic. I'm certainly more
comfortable around them, than some people. Trying to guess if people
really mean what they say is a pain in the ass. Having lived with 2
people who were masters of mind games (one of whom was my mother, the
other an ex-husband) has done nothing for my personality. Oh well. It
is what it is.
Today, I
went to the Byrd Center at USF, designated by the Parkinson's Foundation as a Center of Excellence and saw Dr. Deborah Burke, a Movement
Disorder Doctor. She spent a lot of time with me and explained to me
why she is not entirely convinced that I have Parkinson's Disease,
but she is going to send me off for a DaTScan. My tremors have always
been the least of my set of symptoms. Admittedly, I think because I
spent so many years playing the viola, I have much stronger hands and
forearms and a very strong right arm (my shoulders are broad for a
woman, too) that I am able to work around or through the tremors, although they are slowly worsening.
What
I've experienced is this; a lifetime of depression, starting at a
fairly early age (around 16.) Ulcer surgery at a young age, 29, and
bad choices. Father, an alcoholic, although not mean or abusive to my
mother. He always had a job. My mother was manipulative and abusive
towards me. I left home as soon as I reached my majority, but that is
just escaping a bad situation; I had never developed any coping
skills and continued to make bad life choices. In essence, a lot of
crap, and I'm lucky to still be alive. Fast-forward to last year,
after having been in yet, ANOTHER abusive situation, this one
physical for a change, and I fought back. When JC and I settled in,
all of a sudden I couldn't sleep. My father had died in his sleep,
and I guess I had it in my head that this was going to happen
imminently. Go figure. It didn't, but I woke up in the mental ward of
St. Joseph's Hospital, having lost a month and found out I am bipolar. Oops.
I told
Dr. Burke all of this and she nodded. We worked through the medications I'm on and nothing jumps out as a trigger, so we went back to my social history. Dr. Burke observed, “Kind of the chicken and egg
scenario. We don't know where the egg and the chicken and then the
alcohol and...” I started to laugh and she did, too. Neat lady and
a terrific doctor, too. I can tell. Having worked in a teaching hospital for 5 years was a real gift. Doctors who wanted to teach and answer questions and didn't care who asked them, med students or music majors.
So, she launches into the mechanics of
how dopamine is produced in the substantia nigra, that is located down deep in the old bean-aroo and that the main
symptoms of Parkinson's Disease are caused by dopamine's non-production. The
DaTScan will tell us this. However, if there is dopamine present,
then we have to look elsewhere, for the cause of the essential tremor. Bear in mind that fully 35% of all Parkinson's patients never have any tremors. It is a truly elusive disease. The only other way to find out is by
doing a biopsy of the brain. The good doctor said, “Unfortunately,
you wouldn't know the outcome, because you would be dead.” I
thought this was hilarious. I'm not too sure if she found my mirth
amusing or disturbing. The lizard part of my brain kicked in ironically enough, because the substantia nigra part of the brain is located in that general vicinity, when I heard the words "brain tumor." I still pulled it together in time for my uproarious response to the idea of a brain biopsy. Neither fear of mortality nor the idea of morbidity shall deter me in my constant search of mordant humor.
Imagine this in a 3-D form, and you can see how embedded the Substantia nigra is within the brain. That little sucker is responsible for making our dopamine, the overall "governor" of our autonomic functions.
The
thing she is puzzled by is the fact that I no longer have any sense
of smell, I drool (have been doing so, for about a year) and my voice is really
hoarse and it's like some kind of weird anti-puberty. If I had just plain, old essential tremor, I should not have these other symptoms. Again, not everyone has the same PD. "Designer Disease," I call it. I used to have
a pretty deep voice for a woman. Now, I'm not sure what it is. It gets squeaky at times, then, sometimes it's very hoarse. I will stutter when excited, and my diaphragm has become somewhat weakened, which makes it hard for people to hear me at all. Today,
I was at the Pharmacy trying to pick up some medicine. There's always
got to be some idiot, who wants his shit NOW!
The hospital would have made a wonderful amusement park for this jerk. Wheelchair rides, physical therapy pools and the food is great! Whee! Dumbass!
There
are 80 people it seems in line and I'm trying to talk over this
asshole. He was talking to one of the other pharmacist's assistants,
who had already told him his meds would be ready in 20 minutes, but
he's still jabbering at her in Spanish, which she doesn't speak. I
had been waiting and was told my meds were ready. So, I'm trying to
make myself understood and talk over him. I finally lost my patience
and said, “Sir? I'm trying to talk here. Do you see this cane? I
may not have a strong enough diaphragm to speak over you, but I am
sure strong enough to beat the shit out of you!” Standard Viola
Fury response in public when assholes are present.
The guy
said, “Uh yeah,” and scampered off. The pharmacist's assistant
was a new girl and she giggled. I said, “you'll get used to me.
I've been coming here for over 2 years.” I winked at her. The other
pharmacy people asked me, “When is JC coming back to visit us? We
miss him?” I said, “Pretty soon now. He's getting stronger. He
misses you, too.” So, it was a pretty good day. I still don't have
a diagnosis of PD, but I have the ear of a wonderful doctor, and I
believe whatever this is, we'll figure it out, together. Last week, I
walked a mile to the grocery store. I can't be that bad off, can I?
I was
racking my brain for an “H” word today. In my usual fashion, none
of the words I chose and put in a list have been used. As a matter of
fact, I can't even remember the title of the list and have lost it
somewhere in the wilderness of my of my hard drive. I can't remember
what I chose, but it was probably something really Serious and
Meaningful. The hell with it.
The bigger it gets, the worse it gets. Its own peripherals hate each other. Links die and go nowhere, except to Existential Land, maybe. Twitter Support is lame-o. "Let us help pick your new PC!" they gush. I tweeted, "4MB RAM, 33MB processor." "Great! Windows 8 is for you!" "Really? I thought Atari might do!" I tweeted back. Idiots.
While I
was trying to work up a froth of “H” inspiration, I noticed,
wayyy up in the left-hand corner, a new folder icon, where earlier
today, my Recycle Bin icon had been. I haven't touched it, I haven't
deleted anything today; I haven't accidentally deleted my Recycle
Bin, which I have done in the past. I have Windows Vista. I used to
work at IBM and I was an OS/2 Engineer. I worked in 3rd
level support and I loved the operating system. It's robust and hard
to louse up, unlike Windows, which is nothing but a thriving, self-replicating bug
patch.
Vista is
probably one of the less intrusive operating systems versions of
Windows. We've had the Win95, 98, 2000, XP and I guess 7, which I
have no experience with and 8, which ditto. Frankly they all suck.
Apple sucks, too and you need to have Java loaded to run their
garbage. I got rid of all of that when I got some of their more
lethal viruses. I had to reload one of my computers back in 2008,
when I downloaded a Java update. I chased a trojan around on my old
Gateway system for 3 days and finally gave up and reloaded the
system.
I play Runescape; this is the MOST important thing I use my computer for. SETI@home, Math arrays and writing/blogging and fixing the world run a distant 2nd to this! ViolaFury and Linus on their way to the coal mines.
In
February, I got pneumonia and had to go to the ER. When I got home,
my computer nagged me to download an update to RealPlayer, which is
an Apple product and I did but didn't scan it before I installed it
and got a smitty_fraud Trojan worm. I caught it before it's 3rd
iteration. I then got rid of all of my Apple products. I had already
uninstalled Java. For good measure, I uninstalled all of my MS Office
and am running Open Office.org. I'm happy and my computer is happy,
too! There is so much nasty stuff running around out there and
Microsoft is sloppy. All big software publishers are getting sloppy
with their security, and their half-assed approach to security is
more apparent all the time. I bought a 2-year license for AVG
security and I run Spybot on every piece of software that a program
tells me to update. I have all updates set to “ask first before
downloading.” It's worth it to avoid the absolute frustration of
having to reload your system. I did this sort of work for 15 years.
Half-assed doesn't cut it, and the big companies don't care.
I'm half-assed myself; here it is 8:48 pm, just getting to my post. I think the "G" is for Golf was probably funnier. This is new you can use. Let's call it edu-tainment. Tomorrow should be for I is for Idiot. Naaa, too obvious. Ouch.
Damn! I
was going to get up and post something; I’m not really sure what. One of the
more interesting things about life and all of the changes, like, yeah, when
doesn’t it change? But here, lately? It changes with what seems to be an
increase in exponential frequency. It could also be that my poor brain is just
really in that stage where it perceives the changes occurring more rapidly.
Unless I’m tired and I am right now. How ridic.
The warning labels weigh more than the bottle.
I ran out
of my Topamax which really helps my bipolar condition which is one of MY
manifestations of “PD or non-PD, blah-de-blah, blah-di-blah.” I missed ONE
dose. By yesterday afternoon, I felt it. I was able to get my refill and all is
well, or well-ish. But, because I already tried to murder my blog and had to
deal with that havoc? (too strong a word, it WAS funny, but it’s change and I’m
so hardwired, I clank if you bang on my head.) Therefore, I feel it physically,
for a few days afterward. It sucks feeling so enervated after such a minor
thing.
Then,
horror of horrors! (not really, I love a challenge!) Microsoft’s LifeCam
software was part of my latest batch of updates? “Bugpatches” is what we
referred to them. Actually, Microsoft is not in the business of creating
systems and applications. It’s just one giant Bug industry. It should be called
Bugsoft, or Microbug, or Bugshit. The problem is this; with all of the
intelligence and creativity that Bill Gates displayed at IBM, he took what was
a robust and very workable product and dumbed it down.
Bill didn’t
have to do that. He did that so that he could maximize his profit in a shorter
period of time and he did it at the expense of the consumer and the industry.
No one who has any kind of computer savvy or has ever worked in a hard
computing environment, where you work either directly with servers or
mainframes, think Windows-based platforms, or MACs, for that matter are worth a
damn. I can’t speak for the gamers. I play one game, Runescape and ever since I
killed JAVA, (read this article on why I killed JAVA; I'm no visionary, but I've been suspicious of JAVA for years and killed it for good last year.) I have to run it from Jagex's client. I could use Linux, or OS/2;
I just don’t have the patience, and I really don’t have the patience with “PD
Blargle….”
So,
anyway, thanks Bill Gates. Once again, your software fucked up your software. I
hope you’re happy. When I narrowed it down, I didn’t even go to your Knowledge
Base to look for a “fix,” because then I would have needed a “fix” of a
different kind. All of your shit sucks. Your software, community, your
partnership with Dell. As an aside, their horrible Intel processors; AMD processors are much more elegant. Intel had an architectural flaw back in the 90s; for a while 2 + 2 equaled 5. No shit. Hot fix. Their integrity over time has never been truly sound. The AMDs can be overclocked via software and worked hard for years. Although I knew a guy once, who overclocked his with a knife; Mary don't do hardware. Last I knew, his was still working. They are that rugged.
Anyway, they're great for math, data-mining and algorithms, and wonderful for SETI@home, but back to Bill and his C- report card. Customer support, Website, F; big giant fail. I don't even go there. Everything you have ever done has had the stamp
of slightly less than mediocre about it. I realize you have 7 gabillion dollars
and you and your wife gave 1 billion of it to school kids. But the fact
remains, you took your "MS"-DOS and left IBM. You tweaked the code here and there
and built your Windows 1.0 off of that and all else followed.
No Words Needed
That was
back in the day. IBM hung onto PC-DOS and built OS/2 1.0 and WARP off of that,
which was killer and no, you couldn’t kill it AND you could run a Windows shell
and MSOffice on the same system along with all of your Lotus (1-2-3, AmiPro,Notes) products. But Bill had to kill it. He didn’t want the competition. The
sad thing here is, quality didn’t win out. IBM didn’t know how to market it’s
product and Bill Gates did. Throw in Steve Jobs with his Apple bullshit and IBM
never had a chance. Too corporate and too much spook. I’ve seen exactly 2
commercials on TV for WARP OS/2. I see the hardware ads, but the laptops are tooled
by Lenovo.
I found
this Time.com article on the history of WARP OS/2 to see if I remembered right.
Some of it I did, some I didn’t. I worked at IBM from 1995 to 1998, then went
to Verizon. This quote followed by the link to the article says it all:
