Green St. Patrick’s Day

Nobody else here in the hotel restaurant I swearing green, also I’m less concerned about getting pinched.

Is my laptop bag a little green? Does that count as apparel?

It doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t be pinching strangers. Or even people you know.

Mind is racing at this point following more disunion of the Just Asking Questions ep w/ Radley Blake and Coleman Hughes. The criticism of the “debate” was flowing back to The Fifth Column. Why would they be “platforming” someone who denies Chauvin’s judgement as a murderer?

Um. Because free people can believe whatever they’d like about anything, and there’s no danger in having someone on who arrives at a different conclusion than the prevailing narrative.

I mean, there’s people who ardently believe that the Earth is hollow, and people’s souls are stored inside that hollow core.

Um. Okay, then. Nice to meet you. I’d be okay never speaking to you again. And there’s nothing wrong with me having that opinion.

I think I wrote a bit about the documentary that pretty proclaimed Chauvin’s innocence in George Floyd’s death.

While I don’t believe that, I would say that on balance, Chauvin nad ht either officers probably harmed society less than a lot of the people who burned the city in the aftermath.


Upstairs for more coffee consumption…


Okay. The whole thing kind of speaks to the whole there’s one-right-way-to-think-about anything. The talk with the president of the University of Austin also touched on this. You are free to reach whatever conclusions you like about just about anything.

Why his that controversial?

Why do you deserve the worst ham the state can bring down if you do the wrong thing?

Don’t platform people.

Did Michael Cohen explain this to you from what he saw in Prague, Sister Rachel?


Forgot to upload this:

View out the back of the hotel from the breakfast room.

You Aren’t The Problem

I’m happy now that I didn’t give NYT money.

I listened to this yesterday.

It really bothered the hell out of me, and made me happy that I was too lazy to give them money.

The title is a teaser, but why am I really upset by this?


More tomorrow.

Late On Saturday

So it really doesn’t matter.

Work is incredibly trying at this point. Really trying to not get too caught up in asshole behavior, or, to needle the HR mafia, the equity that’s been stolen from me with new policies.

Just pace it along in with the family stuff that’s going on nearly a thousand miles away.

Kind of distracted on this Championship weekend. Only two games tomorrow. 1500, and 1830 Eastern.


Also tracking the stuff on the AI-generated photos of Taylor Swift.

So the solution is to snitch, call the cops? What can government do to fix the issue?

NOTHING

Except kill people and break stuff.

Should Daffy have killed Bugs for this?

What’s the difference?

The thing about seeing someone naked in an intimate way is different than just seeing a fake representation of someone engaged in whatever while namked.

Was I disappointed by the photos of a forty-something Belinda Carlisle in Playbo No. Were they representative of what she’d be on a routine day? Doubtful.

The chances of me actually ever seeing her naked in person are still exactly the same — zero.

B.C. did the shoot of herself willingly, and got paid for it. But let’s say she didn’t. How would throwing people in prison make the situation better?


For football tomorrow, I had this thought:

Just bouncing around ideas. There’s certainly better food in San Francisco and Ballimore, but those were what first came to mind.

Saturday Stuggle Session

Yes, I’m tapping the HR creatures’ favorite thing. Had some interesting discussions about it the comments § after one of the latest BARPod episodes.

Coming to realize that a lot of the discussion(s) surrounding what’s happening in newsrooms is that these young staffers are young people with severe cases of affluenza. They went to top-tier schools, probably many via legacy admissions policies

They work, often in concert with the similarly-backgrounded HR staff, to wreak absolute havoc.

All I do is refuse to participate.

And not consume any of their content. But I’m going to be pretty quiet about it.


Cannot concentrate. Resisting more coffee.

Following orthopedical procedures for a family member.

Shmoocon #4

Watched this one. Well, the presentation section. They were in the Q&A at least, maybe.

I have the vaguest understanding of what he had done, and was trying to do, with regards to taking control of systems with a rogue keyboard.

Fascinating stuff to be sure, but I keep having this thing pop through my head about likelihood.

Yeah, you can do this stuff, but what’s the LOE, and what’s the probability somebody actually would do it?

When you have physical proximity to a system, can you do it within the access window?

I guess I really considered likelihood when I was younger.

I guess I did some when doing hardware integration, but for something like what was covered in the session, none of this is at all likely to happen.

As I’ve written before, cars and cooking are too-often captured metaphors, but it’s the first thing that came to mind; I’m sure you could manufacture a tire with a bulletproof sidewall, But why would you? It’s going to be heavy, and more expensive than most people whold be willing to pay for a tire.

Coming back to the keyboard, what are the chances someone would be in proximity to your PC or phone long enough to get in?

The vendors are rolling out patches that eliminate the vulnerability the speaker used. It’s a very simple fix. To a problem most people will never experience. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be fixed, of course, but why lose sleep over it??

Shmoo 1

Walked in to this a few minutes late.

The speaker is trying to do some ninjafu on name server setups.

I’ve written far more than anyone ever should about NS setup.

You can easily get back some real garbage on answers.

Feeding it all over TCP/HTTPS won’t fix it.

I think I understand what he’s trying to do with the tool he wrote.

At the same time, I’m not 100% sure I get the point.

You occasionally get bad stuff from NSes.

I don’t know….make sure your shit gives good answers?

If it’s a case where somebody outside is getting bad information from your domain’s servers, feed the problem to things like dynamic firewalls so no traffic comes.

So. you wanna go to footer.com. Their NS responses are suss. No, you can’t visit.

Like sex in the champagne room….

Thirty

Wrap-up

I really do need to make an effort to go back through old entries various places, and consolidate them here.

I mentioned yesterday that I was looking for inspiration from the past. I’d glanced at something from 11/29/2011, but didn’t have it anywhere. It was on OD, but what I wasn’t the longish survey I’d seen at first glance.

But I didn’t have it here.

Now I do.

I’ve been pretty good about moving things around, but with multiple CMSes, etc., I have a lot of what I’d done in places I really can’t access.

The stuff from OD before it went away for the first time I had in ASCII exports spread far-and-wide. Finding things in there is easy enough — ^F (MM/DD)

I did lose all of the formatting, but I can’t be too upset about that.

I understand that the amazement about your MySpace page was the cool embedded drawing

Maybe you said something incredible.

More likely, however, you were putting up something that looked cool, and distracted people from trying to punch the monkey.

Know Your Meme is failing me on that one. Younger people probably aren’t familiar with the sorts of stupid ads that’d pop up when you were surfing the Information Superhighway back in the day.

Whatever you’d cranked out could be obscured by something annoying put there to distract you into giving away money.

I, on the other hand, tended to use HTML tricks to obscure content. I never do that anymore stopped doing that sort of thing. Or did I?

At the same time, for the most part the content persists in spite of the efforts to hide or delete it.

You can strip things away, and get back to what came out. Since it’s coming form a person, you start in with things like Chomsky’s generative grammar. (Which I’ve seen other langoustines describe as “creationist.”)

At some point, however, something comes out. It’s saved somewhere. Once the buffer is written, the effort it takes to remove it is pretty steep.

Everything Gets deleted eventually.

But you have to work at it to make that happen.

Whether or not you really want to throw things away is another story, altogether.

There aren’t a lot of people who’ll want to read my shit. In fact, I don’t want to read my shit a lot of the time.

But it’s there. It might be spread far and wide, but I can wrangle it back. If I want to.

Doing it is going to require a bunch of time, and I might not want to exert the effort to do it, but I think I know where the bodies are buried.

Eventually I’ll coalesce things into one thing, and store that far and wide.

Maybe all that’ll be a random MariaDB dump where someone can pick through and find what came out of my numb fingers.

Probably not; I’m not that interesting. But it’ll be there for someone to find if he/she wants to see it.

For the past fourteen years, I’ve hammered out whatever’s been seeping from my scarred brain the vast majority of days in November.

I can still type. For the most part.

It’s a skill that’s really second-nature at this point. I’m not sure that writing with a pen or pencil really is.

Am I proud of what I’ve barfed out for the month?

Ummmm.

Maybe I should reword that. Am I really upset about what I’ve generated?

No.

But I am finished.

That’s an accomplishment by itself.

I can use it is proof, even if it’s only to myself, that I can stick to something.


For miscellany vacillating between trying to watch the undercard presidential debate, and the Thursday Night Football game.

Honestly, neither is of much interest. Whichever one I end up with probably won’t occupy my attention all that long.

Oh well.

I can do that tonight because I’m finished.

Tomorrow, fingers crossed, my medication will arrive so I can take that.

And we can slide into December.

shiver

Twenty-eight

Really short-arming this one today.

So, start with one of T2K’s prompts…

What would a tree say if it could talk?

What wood it say?

I am so incredibly busy, but just trying to figure out what to do from here.

And no motivation to do much of anything.

Crawled back inside my head to see if there’s something from which I can sample.

Nawp.

Hangover from concert prep — this is running through my head the past few hours.

But it’s kind of one of those situations where I’m distracted enough that I’m forgetting what’s next.

When’s my medication supposed to show up?

Crap.

I’m supposed to take that tomorrow.

*wanders away to check when it’ll get here*

Everything’s on track for your order to arrive by Nov. 29, 2023.

Tomorrows.

I hope a) it gets here on time, since the pharmacy just says “shipped,” and b) there’s enough time to let it warm up so the shot doesn’t bother me too much.

Maybe the earworm is kind of wishful?

Who knows?

Two more days to write. Two more days to work.

I’ve got this.

I think.

I really need to put this entries from 2017 and 2018 into WordPress so I can dig through entries more easily.

Hm. What’s on OD?

2011 there’s a very long survey I did.

Maybe next year. Imma go eat.

Twenty-three

Family arriving are probably about an hour out, so I’ll take the opportunity to knock this out for the day.

After a long, actually restful, night of sleep.

Odd distraction in the background…he Bing weird wallpaper has some serious Indian Indigenous People’s CORN surrounding the edges of the browser window.

But back to what I was writing about….

The Macy’s Parade this year had En Vogue with Bel Biv DeVoe.

Yes, hon, we’re getting old.

But, at the same time, there’s a bunch of thirties pupping out for me this Thanksgiving.

I’ve written about my excitement for Saturday night to see Liz Phair on the thirtieth anniversary of Exile In Guyville tour.

If memory serves, Thanksgiving 1993 was spent on a very cold three-cities USO tour through some of the newly-opened countries to westerners.Saw

Saw the Lipizzaner Stallions training somewhere outside Vienna. Z night in a relatively-nice capitalist hotel in Budapest, really cheep Russian Vodka from the gas station next to the hotel, intense interrogation of all aboard the tour bus by Slovak border, and Prague in a cloud of ice fog.

The last The Fifth Column, tied the Argentine election thing back to the ALMA Bombing, which happened the following summer. I mean, I have some memories of the news about that, but we were in the process of moving back to the states right around that time. Getting a tiny Golden Retriever, and settling in to stateside life. The doc I found on Netflix is mostly in Sparkish. Looks to be a few episodes. Tiny type white font on the captions….yeah, it’s gonna take me a which to get through that.

Honestly, July 1994 probably would have been high school football camp coming out of what was probably one of the earliest MS flares I remember. I’d dropped to probably about 155 pounds. So going into football camp with a bunch of central-Pennsylvania boys worked well. They were much bigger and stronger than me, but I was slower, so it worked out awesomely.

Should I do the seemingly-common trope about how things were so much etter in teh 90s?

No.

There was still a lot of things that really sucked.

Okay, I think I’ve gotten enough in for today. Time to go enjoy the day. Am I really giving thanks? Um. Maybe?

Eighteen (8/7)

Again. So incredibly busy.

There is a system I’m supposed to temporarily manage that’s required more that twenty (20) forms for access.

Are the lefthanded processes designed to prevent what happened — someone else taking responsiblity for the steaaming pileoutstanding legacy system?

Make. It. Through.

Writing is going to be interrupted here soon because the weather is about to get nasty here on the endge of the Beltway Swamp.

Flashback to 2018 because I guess there were bills I’d paid previously that the recepient company never cashed.

Um. How does Senator Tuna Melt keep getting re-eelcted?

Fantasy setup. Some bills paid. Looks like I might be able to get my money out of this scam I’d gotten embroiled with.

But I think I’m going to go grab a nap while the storm’s raging.