Prediction

Posted by on November 5, 2014 No comments

A while ago, the world was abuzz with the celebrity nudes hack.  I was recently reminded of a recent update I had seen for Dropbox.  It’s easily understood that anything that can be used by you for good can be used against you for bad by someone else.  This feature is no different.

The specific feature that was added to Dropbox was “Remote Wipe”, which is intended to be used if you lose your phone or other portable device.  By triggering a remote wipe, your data is no longer available to steal.  That is a good thing.  This is presumably done through the Dropbox website.

But what happens if someone gains access to your Dropbox website account?  They can remotely wipe your data.  Now instead of your portable device being a backup copy if the service ever became inaccessible, now it’s vulnerable whenever the service is accessible.

Naturally, the hacker would either change the password and/or copy off all the files for their own potential ransom request or personal use.  Can you imagine opening up your Dropbox folder one day and have it be empty except for a text file with instructions on submitting a ransom in bitcoin?

I keep saying it one way or another.  The cloud is not to be trusted. 

You need to:

  • Keep your data locally.
  • Have unique usernames at each website – Use a password manager like KeePass
  • Have unique passwords at each website – Use a password manager like KeePass!
  • Keep a PIN on your phone.
  • Keep catastrophic data in an encrypted file – Use TrueCrypt 7.1a

The more of this you do, the more secure you will be, which means the more comfortable you will be. 

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Posted by on November 4, 2014 No comments

I absolutely despise this season.  I’m not talking about the holiday season, I’m talking about politics season.  This is the time of year where everyone that has an opinion has an uncontrollable urge to convince you that they are right about something and you should think the same way.  It’s like a Caribbean straw market.

And of course, nothing is off the table when it comes to pitching your case.  At a public event a couple weeks ago, a crotchety old woman came up to me to explain why I needed to be opposed to a public transit initiative.  “It’s going to go from City A to City B.  What’s in City B?  Nothing.  There’s no reason to go to City B.  It’s stupid.”  Well, that’s a convincing argument.  Especially for people who live in City B.  Since I didn’t live in that county, I couldn’t vote on it anyway.

But yesterday, I got a spam political email for a public transit referendum in my own county.  What is it with the hatred of public transit?  There’s a bunch of selfish fucks that think if it’s not for them, they’ll fight it to the bitter end.  But before I rant on that too much, this is the point of contention for that email.

The email was delivered to an email address used exclusively for paying my electric bill.  I’ve mentioned before that I’ve started using a single email per website, so I can track how my addresses are misused.  So I responded and asked how he was able to acquire an email address that is used for a single purpose.  Did my electric company sell my email address?

I was surprised I got a response and more surprised by what he said:

No, they did not.

Beyond that, I will say nothing other than what I do is in full compliance with the law.

I chose not to engage him any further.  It is clear that the best criminals are the ones that use the law to their advantage.

Knowing that my email was not sold tipped me off as to how the address was collected.  Somewhere in the electric company’s website (couldn’t find it on a quick search), there is a notice that says that communications with a government agency – which my electric company is – are public record.  Somehow, somewhere, there is a way to request these communications, which would include email addresses.  It’s legal, for sure; it’s also immoral, for sure.

And that pretty much sums up this season.  It’s a bunch of fuckasses doing anything they can to manipulate you and get done what they want done for their own personal gain.  It’s all selfishness.  Two generations before mine – the “greatest generation” – knew that by creating infrastructure for everyone, everyone benefits.  The current in-power generation, throughout their entire life, has created an a la carte existence, where you pay only for whatever you want.  More importantly, you don’t pay for anything that you don’t want.

There is no sense of community anymore.  There is no sense of making the world a better place.  There is no sense of altruism.  The selfish pricks keep screaming their heads off about taxes and how “I’m just looking out for my children’s future!”  Well, how about you do some looking out for other children’s future? 

Gas Runners

Posted by on November 3, 2014 No comments

A few days ago, I was driving home and saw a couple of gas stations with different gas prices.  The one station’s prices were “cash only”.  It got me thinking about a couple of things.  First off, I thought that there isn’t any incentive to go to a cash-only station if the prices are practically the same.  I wondered if it was a desperate concession for the station owner to implement surcharges for credit cards.  This led me to consider gas stations as a whole business.

With any business, you have income and expenses.  You can play with these elements in any possible way to create profit, that is, more income than expenses.  When you are selling gas, you have one income source – gas sales.  You would have many, many expenses – licenses, maintenance, labor, taxes, utilities, and on and on.  One of those expenses would be credit card processing fees.  Like I said, play with these sources to create profit.  Eliminate CC fees and you may make a profit, or more of a profit.

With larger gas stations – ones with integrated convenience stores – you would have multiple sources of income, including food/merchandise sales and possibly lottery ticket sales commissions.  Your other expenses may go up too, but we all know that buying anything from a convenience store is not the cheapest choice.  You are paying dearly for the convenience.

So, by having the C-store, your profits from one sector can offset the expenses from the other.  You can absorb the CC fees because your C-store sales are subsidizing them.  This made me wonder how gas stations could even survive without solid c-store sales.  Maybe this is why they have to sacrifice CC processing.

So now, on to my idea.  You have a gas station with customized gas pumps.  The pumps have a large touchscreen that performs as a kiosk.  After you swipe your card to activate the pump, the screen allows you to purchase items in the store.  Within the store are one or more “runners” that will pick and run the items out to you at the pump.  That’s it.  A simple idea.

But more than just simple, this is an improved form of convenience – you don’t even have to go inside the store.  You don’t have to run your credit card twice – your gas and purchases are combined on one receipt.  The store doesn’t even have to be customer-accessible.  It could be optimized for quick-picking.

The ordering kiosk software could remember people by their credit card numbers and provide frequent, recent, and favorite item lists to choose from.  As with everything modern now, you could tie it to an online profile where the customer could review purchases and create lists of favorite items to be shown on their next visit.

If you haven’t determined it by now, this is how a small station could compete with a large C-store.  You have the extra income stream of the merchandise sales, but a much lower overhead of running a large store, including maintenance, taxes, cleaning, utilities, and more.  And, in some ways, the service level would be higher.  With so many people in a rush, saving the time of going in, shopping, and standing in line to pay (again), all that time is saved.

Cleaning Up

Posted by on October 30, 2014 No comments

At this point, I’m solidly in phase 2 of my music enhancements.  Phase 1 was ripping my CDs to a lossless format (with a .1 of acquiring a specific label’s full catalog).  Phase 2 is scanning the album covers in high quality.

Phase 2 is a MUCH more labor-intensive process.  The scanning part is easy, the cleaning up of the scans is tedious as hell.  I’ve been doing this for four days and in those days I managed to complete 21 covers: 5 the first day, 2 the second day, then 6, then 9.  It takes about 15-30 minutes per cover.  I’m getting better and learning more time-saving tricks as I go, but still, 750 covers is going to be ~250 hours of work.  Being able to put in only a couple of hours each night, 5 days a week, I’m looking at almost 6 months of this work.  That’s pretty insane.

Sometimes, I think I should only focus on the covers that are unavailable online or are rare or out-of-print.  Other times, I think I need to represent my entire collection.  Sometimes I think I need to focus on the MCA Master Series, so I can move on to phase 3 – framing.

So, what is my process?  I scan the cover at 1200 dpi, which gives me a 10mb, 5700×5700 jpg.  I take that into Photoshop and run a descreen filter on it.  This blends the “dots” into a more-or-less solid color.  Then I do cleanup of the stains, dust, and scratches.  Sometimes this is easy, sometimes it is extremely difficult.  Then I add an adjustment layer for Levels, in case I want to tweak the black point or contrast.  I save this to a PSD file, which ends up being 80-180mb in size.  This will be my “master” from which I will do further refinements and resizing.  When all is said and done, I’ll probably have near 100GB of cover images.

Looking at my post history, this conquest has been going two months so far.  All I can hope is that another unexpected obsession doesn’t appear in the next six months.

In Time For Thanksgiving

Posted by on October 28, 2014 No comments

I’m starting to make some steps forward with phase two of my CD collection plan – scanning the artwork.  I did a couple trial runs on an old scanner at the house and it was way too much of a headache.  So yay, I get to buy more stuff.  A new scanner, but not such a big expense.  $65.  I can’t believe how cheap that tech has gotten.

While preparing for that effort, I researched communities that I could benefit with my efforts.  I found one that was appealing, if just a touch elitist.  When I went to sign up, I took the time to read their terms of service.  I didn’t like what I read.

In summary, when you upload to their site, they become the owners of the content.  Further, they insist that they will be the only source for that content.  You can’t post your artwork anywhere else.

First off, let’s just make it clear that it’s very odd to be discussing who “owns” owns a replica of a copyrighted work.  But, ignoring that for a moment and moving to a secondary “IP market”, let’s think about what this ToS means.  I “created” the work with my effort of scanning and cleaning and when I upload it, I effectively lose ownership of that work.

Yeah, yeah, it might be standardized language.  But there’s other standardized language that is more lenient.  Something like: By uploading, I am granting an unlimited license for the site to use my work however they want.  In that case, I retain the original rights (yeah, of a copyrighted work; just ignore that…).

So my problem with the site is that they are taking my work and making it their own.  It’s Christopher Columbus on the Internet.  Why should I be outraged?  Tons of websites have a similar model.  Or do they?  The first thing I’m thinking of is Huffpost, that site that pays people in “exposure”.  But even there, after reading their ToS, you grant them rights to use your submission any way they want, even through derivative works.  And, you still own your stuff.

That thinking and research made me start questioning the entire publishing for exposure model.  If you create something awesome and it gets posted on HuffPost, and gets scooped up by multiple news outlets (licensed? paid-for? maybe.), what do you get out of it?  Your name is attached to it, but does that really help you?  There’s just so much happening.  You would have to repeat that success over and over to get recognized as consistent talent.

I’m much more agreeable to the “toss it to the ether and let other do what they want with it” ideal.  So, my choice is not to affiliate with any artwork website, but to use Flickr.  Hypocritical?  All I’m doing is providing great content to a huge corporation.  Yes, but, all I want from them is hosting space.  If someone wants to use my cd scan for an ebay auction, great!  I would encourage that.  See, it’s not about just making your world better – which I’d already have done for my own cd collection – it’s about making everyone’s world better.

Time, Money, and Music

Posted by on October 22, 2014 No comments

imageHere’s an update to my music label collection: I am down to six remaining CDs.  This leads to the questions, “what’s next?” and “and then what?”

Well, the next thing is CD cover scanning, so I have pristine artwork for all my CDs.  Over time, reissues and re-releases will change the cover artwork, usually to the album’s detriment.  For example, all the Ozzy Osbourne covers got some massive, dumb border around them, with the actual album artwork in a tiny box in the middle.  Who came up with that stupid idea?

So, yeah, I want my album artwork to be exactly like my CDs.  And, I want some album artwork framed and hanging on my walls.  But then what?  I think the next step is owning a real listening stereo system (again).

What’s up with that graphic?  That was the image I got when thinking about owning a high-quality stereo system.  Right now, I can get by with my home theater system, but there is a certain appeal to having a real stereo, with dedicated speakers and amplifier, and components.  Why?  I have a computer with every CD ripped to lossless format playing through studio monitor speakers in my office.  Why this?

Let me first explain the graphic.  I think that owning a dedicated listening stereo is the realm of young, single men and old, retired men.  Exceptions abound, but bear with me.  The graph illustrates the likelihood of owning a stereo between the start and end of your adult life.  Yes, I had a great system in my 20’s.  I got into a stupid relationship and sold it all off for pennies at a garage sale.  Now, 20 years later, I am reconsidering the purchase again.  I’m not sure now is the time though.  Maybe a little later.  When I thought of why now might not be the right time, my rationale illuminated why the parabolic curve makes sense.  It’s about time.

Being young, single and free, you have the free time to indulge in nothing but music.  The same freedom applies once you are an empty-nester or a retiree.  You can also apply this to book-reading or really, any hobbies you had to give up because of the rat race of life.  For me, I’m not sure I’m nearing the end of the rat race yet, but I want to slow down, definitely.  I can say I haven’t exactly disliked any point in my life so far.  I sacrificed some things at certain points that may or may not have been wise.  But overall, life’s been good to me.

Now, about that stereo.  Why is that something to desire?  This sentiment would probably be shared by many hobbyists who have had their hobbies “stolen” by modern convenience.  There is an effort you must make when using older, dedicated equipment.  One might go so far as to say there is a ritual involved.  It’s the performing of the ritual that matters.  If you don’t do it right, the results won’t be good, or said another way, the more precise you are performing the ritual, the better the results will be.  And you can take pride in that.

Sure, the ritual of listening to an album involves choosing a cd, placing it in the tray, pressing the play button, then sitting down.  But that’s more than using a wireless remote to scroll through a huge list of albums, then clicking one.  Book people, you understand.

Disconnecting, and Connecting

Posted by on October 10, 2014 No comments

I made the decision today to delete my personal Facebook account.  To some, it may sound dramatic, but I hadn’t used it in months, so there was no pain involved.  I’m just staying old-school with the blog.  I’ll continue to maintain a different account for business purposes, but that never has any posts from me anyway.  That’s enough discussion about that.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a little about social media.  It started when I was forced to install the Facebook Messenger app on my Windows Phone because that functionality was removed from the main app, and also seems to have been removed from the phone integration (a key selling point of Windows Phone).  That led me to take a peek at Ello, which has been in the news lately as a potential rising star for future social platforms.  I was rather unimpressed.  If Facebook beat out Myspace for the reason of lack of customization, Ello beats Facebook in sheer minimalism.  And, I really dislike monospace fonts.

However, looking at Ello in such an early state gave me reason to think about what problem social media platforms are trying to solve.  When will Ello stop adding features?  How much do they need to add to make it “usable”?

I think what the Internet needs is a global contact list website.  To me, that would be the Internet’s “killer app”.  Do one thing that is critical, and do it extremely well.  How hard would it be to do this?  I’m going to spend some time and see…

Status Update

Posted by on October 4, 2014 No comments

After returning from a refreshing vacation, it’s time to jump back into the collection plan.  The current status is: of 42 albums, I now own 26 and 6 are in transit, leaving 10 left to purchase.

My current mantra is, “Why am I not listening to music?”  There’s a ridiculous number of times that I catch myself just working in silence.  I’m spending a good amount of money to complete this music collection.  At the very least, I should be listening to it.  Geez.  But, I have found some very good music that I am glad to have.

And I did get most of my music ripped to lossless before the vacation.  I say most, because I used Exact Audio Copy and there are some discs that had some errors in ripping and some discs that I had to skip complete tracks.  So, there’s going to have to be a second round of ripping to recover what I didn’t get the first time.

And then somewhere in the future lies the CD cover scanning, which I will use for artwork, both digitally and physically.

A Fool’s Game

Posted by on September 24, 2014 No comments

Today I learned (TIL for all the modern, acronym-dependent, Internet citizens), that when it comes to personal injury, I am no smarter than a toddler playing peek-a-boo.

Almost a week ago, I had some shoulder pain, like a knot in my back shoulder.  It’s not really uncommon, since I am either sitting at a desk or driving in my car 90% of my waking day.  The last time I had this specific kind of knot, it lasted for days and days and kept me pretty miserable, so I wasn’t thrilled to have it return.

So Friday night, I broke out my Shiatsu chair massager and beat the hell out of my back and shoulders.  It was like twanging guitar strings.  Just to be on the safe side, I took a pill from my emergency stash (now 5 years old) and went off to bed.

I woke up the next morning in pain.  Great pain.  I made it through the day with ice, heat, and Advil.  At the end of the day, I figured I was past my problems, but just in case, I took another emergency pill and went to sleep.

Sunday morning was no better.  Worse, in fact.  Probably because I had spent some time Saturday doing yard work since I wasn’t feeling any great pain (Thank you, Advil).  Now, I can’t turn my head or look down.  I self-diagnose myself with a pinched nerve and I can still feel the knot in my shoulder blade.  So I call up a local massage place and get a walk-in appointment.  They say, “We only have a male masseuse available, is that ok?”  Geez, whatever.  Even if I wasn’t in excruciating pain, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.

So I get the crap wrenched out of me on the table.  He probably spent too much time on my neck and not enough on the trouble spot, but everything was messed up, so whatever.  As the night comes on, I’m sinking back into pain.  Advil wearing off again.  Then I get to thinking, maybe it isn’t a knot or a pinched nerve.  Maybe it’s actually an injury, like a pulled muscle or a torn tendon.  After all, I am currently on an antibiotic whose primary side effect is causing brittle tendons.

So, to recap:  I have a knot in my shoulder.  I pull or tear my lat muscles with a shiatsu massager.  I go to a massage and have them ripped up even more.  All the while, I’m peaking and crashing on Advil thinking, “I’m better!” or ”I’m in hell!”

It doesn’t end there.  Sunday evening, post-massage, my shoulder back doesn’t have a knot anymore.  Now it’s just one big swollen mass.  Sleep that night was in 20-30 minute intervals, followed with a painful repositioning.  At one critical point, I was on my chest and turned my head to stretch my neck and I heard and felt something in my neck squirt.  As scream-inducing as that was, it actually was kind of a turning point and I slept better afterward.

Monday, I had to leave work after less than a hour because the pain was making me dizzy.  Tuesday, I felt pretty good during the day, so I thought I was on the mend.  Then the Advil wore off.  Silly, me.  I took more Advil and felt better.  Better enough to do yardwork when I got home.  Silly, me.  Today, I’m paying for my transgressions again.

So yeah, I’m just playing peek-a-boo with my injury.  As long as I don’t feel the pain, it doesn’t exist and I’ll just go and injure it more.  It’s definitely not the first time I’ve done something like that.  This is just the first time I’ve noticed my behavior.

If I Only Didn’t Have a Day Job

Posted by on September 10, 2014 No comments

To go along with all my other damn posts about missing out on inspiration because of life,  I found this in my drafts – a beginning to a short story I wanted to write.  It was going to be about how life is sort of a game played by spirits in the afterlife.  Your spirit controls your body and tries to make it live as long as possible.  Real-life Sims, I guess.  Steve meets one of the “monitors”, who supervise “gameplay”…

“And then the ambulance just rolled away with no lights or anything.  Much different than when the person is still alive, huh?”

Although he tried to make it sound humorous, there was little in his voice that indicated it.  There was only a dull monotone that sounded like the shock hasn’t passed yet.

“But Steve, it really wasn’t your fault.  From what you’ve told me, it isn’t.”

And that part was legally true.  No charges from the police.  No insurance hassles.  The woman had pulled out in front of him and he…

“Yup.  I couldn’t do anything.  Couldn’t do anything but kill her.”  Steve wasn’t making himself feel any better by relating his story.  Wasn’t that what was supposed to happen?  “Get it out” and all?

His sounding board, Paul, had no comforting retort for Steve this time.  He could only sit and silently provide support.  Paul had known Steve for many years.  Although they weren’t what you would call best friends, they would get together often enough to keep a friendship strong.

Paul was exactly what Steve needed right now.  Someone who wasn’t too close that would be shaken by his recent accident and the effect it had on him, but also someone close enough that would actually care about him getting over this.

“It’s shit like this that makes me question everything in life, Paul.  Why her, why now, why not me?  You talk to the religious types and they say ‘God has a plan for everyone.’  And you talk to the non-religious and they say ‘That’s life, dude.’  I have to say, there’s gotta be something in the middle.”

Paul looked down at the mug of coffee in front of him.  “Let him talk it out,” he thought.

“I started reading a lot lately.  Looking for some reasoning.  I came across this thing called Theosophy, which is supposed to explain the whole life and death process, without religiousness.  Or at least that’s what I got out of it.  I read other books about after-death communications.  So I have all these ideas about karma and purposes and reincarnation, but even considering all that, it still doesn’t make any sense as to why.”

Paul looked back up at Steve.  “Why what?”

“Just, why.  Why did it happen.  When you think about ‘God’s plan’ or predestiny or even some weird cosmic theory that someone dies so that someone else can learn a lesson.  There’s the big debate about free will in there, too.  It just seems… random.”

A figure in the booth behind Steve spoke up.  “It’s calculated.”

“Excuse me?”  Steve half turned around, not sure whether to be annoyed at the eavesdropping or intrigued at the stranger’s certainty in his declaration.

“It is calculated, or I should say, pre-calculated.  The outcome isn’t really known, but the scenario is a generated one based on known factors,” the stranger explained in a matter-of-fact way.  “The outcome will change a lot of future events, events that were pre-planned, but get adjusted with current data.”

“Data,”