Category: Tech

Meta Can Kiss My Liberal Ass

Allow me to start this post with a broad statement. I will then change the subject for a while before returning to explain the broad statement.

Hey Meta (facebook, instagram, whatever)… FUCK YOU.

Now, I’ve spent the day getting shit done. I cleaned the bathrooms, cleaned all the floors, fixed the bed in my step daughter’s room because she’s sleeping here tonight, moved my office from the desk in my step son’s room to the desk in the cellar because he’ll be here on Monday which is the next day I will work from home. I also went grocery shopping and I may or may not have stopped at the sugar free bakery in Salem too top it all off.

My step daughter, Bellana will be here later tonight. She’s staying over but heading back to Vermont tomorrow. The day after tomorrow my step son, Harry will be here and he’s staying for a few days. The house is as ready as it gets. Jen and I are as ready as we get. Bring on the kids! WOOHOO!

Now, allow me to restate the initial thesis of this post. Meta can go fuck itself. It can fuck itself right in it’s mother fucking eye.

In the months leading up to the election any time I was on a Meta social network service and I saw any post from anyone anywhere that was even the tiniest bit pro trump/maga/nazi/fascist/white supremacist/racist/bigoted anything I blocked the user. No questions, just blocked the fuck out of the racist/fascist fuckers. Good riddance.

Today I went on instagram. Every single add I saw (roughly one out of every three posts is an add, which is FUCKING INSULTING regardless of the content) was maga related. ALL OF THEM. Every single add. It made me physically sick. So much for the algorithm showing me adds based on my viewing habits, right? Nope. This was just a fascist friendly company shoving nazi propaganda into my face. This was worse than fox news. This was fucking evil. I blocked almost every sponsored account. I didn’t block them all. Why? BECAUSE INSTAGRAM WOULDN’T FUCKING LET ME.

Fuck you, meta you fascist fucks. Fuck you zuckerberg you nazi mother fucker.

A.I. at Work

I just had Google’s A.I. transcribe and summarize a conference call I was on. It worked, I guess. Reading through the transcript I had one important fact hammered home to me.

When I speak in public I sounds as if I am roughly as intelligent as a chipmunk. Make that a chipmunk with a speech impediment. I mean… wow, do I suck at speaking.

Here’s today’s photo a day pic to distract you all from how bad I suck at verbal communication. Ah-duh.

81/365

Less Than Two Hours

I am less than two hours away from winning an ebay auction for a cheap, Soviet medium format TLR camera from the 80’s. I am the only bidder so far. Think I am going to win? Neither do I, but let’s see how it goes.

I’m exhausted. I have a massive headache. I have body aches all over. This is the post-covid booster shot blues. I was planning no working in the office tomorrow but now I think I am going to push that off until Tuesday. Just on the off chance that I’m not quite over this by tomorrow morning. Here’s hoping a good nights sleep will fix me right up.

New Stuff

So many software updates this week. I updated my MacOS and now I can run my iPhone from my MacBook. I am doing it right now. the Bruins are going to start about 10 minutes from now and I am listening to the pregame via the NHL iOS app but I am running it from my laptop. Cool. I can’t see myself doing this often… I mean, my iPhone is right next to me. I could be listening straight from the phone, easy enough. Whatever, new stuff is fun.

I am typing this on the Vivaldi browser. Vivaldi took an update this morning and the whole UI has been tweaked. Everything looks different. Does it look better? Eh. Who can say. Different but the same, I guess. It took about 20 seconds for me to get 100% used to the changes and more or less stop noticing them.

I took an update on my iPhone the other day too and now I have a dark mode that can change the app icons. Different, yes… better? Maybe. I like it. It doesn’t really amount to anything, but it’s fun. New stuff is fun.

Now if we could just get the Bruins to win an effing game. They are finally back home tonight but they are playing Dallas and The Stars are off to a good start. How about we get our shit together, eh Bruins? Tonight seems like a good night to start.

Firewall Fail

I took my laptop to the hospital today. My father is asleep so I took it out of the bag thinking I could watch the season three finale of The Umbrella Academy. I connected to the guest wifi and…

All of my streaming services are blocked by the firewall. I have an account with a free VPN service, but that appears to be blocked too. I cannot connect to it.

YouTube works though.

Audible Failure

I didn’t think that failing at the Audible app was a thing. You know Audible, right? Basically it’s Amazon’s audiobook subscription service?.

I didn’t think there would be a way to straight up fail at using the app, but you know what? That audiobook that I just downloaded is most definitely in German, not English.

Fail, indeed.

Random Thoughts

The last few days have put me into a prolonged, slow burning state of freak out. Fun.

My friend’s father passed away on Monday. My father went into the hospital on Tuesday. No details on either situation will be forthcoming. We just got clobbered by a thunderstorm which, it turns out, was rough enough to knock out the power in the hospital. The backup generators kicked in a second later, but woah.

I am planning to go to the hospital after work tonight. I need to make dinner first but then I’ll go for a quick visit before visiting hours end. Tomorrow morning is the funeral. I’ll go to the hospital afterwards. How’s that for a tough day? The last few days have been bad, but tomorrow… woah.

On less important (re: not important at all) topics, I have one more episode of The Umbrella Academy’s final season to watch. I strongly suspect that once I finish that final episode I will immediately start a rewatch of the entire series from season one episode one. I think that is going to happen.

Earlier today I was looking at Threads (the twitter alternative social network made by the same assholes who make instagram and bookfayce which begs the question why the fuck am I giving this new social network site the time of day) and I posted that musically speaking, today is a Porcupine Tree kinda day (from a mental health standpoint, of course… meaning heavy and complicated and confusing if you’re not paying close attention). TWELVE MINUTES LATER I got a notification that the Porcupine Tree instagram account had been ported to Threads. They haven’t posted anything yet but I guess I should say you’re welcome?

I don’t know what the dad situation is going to be like this weekend but I do know that Bellana, my step daughter, is coming over for a visit. All the bad, scary stuff going on feels a little more bearable when the kids come by. I am really looking forward to seeing how she did at her conference this week. I want all the sciency details.

Speaking of science, from a nutritional standpoint I screwed up yesterday. I spent the whole day at the hospital with Dad and when I left the house I forgot to take my pill case with me. I took my breakfast vitamin pills before I left, and took my lunch vitamin pills when I got home for dinner. I was going to take my dinner vitamin pills before I went to sleep, but I fell asleep earlier than expected and missed that dose. Dummy. Note to self: bring the friggin’ pill case tomorrow. Dumb ass.

What else? Word from the hospital this afternoon is that Dad is starting to show early signs of coming out of whatever was wrong. My fingers and toes and eyes are all firmly crossed. Again, I am not sharing details beyond a small hint of optimism. Enjoy it while you can.

Okay, Robert. Stop stressing and get back to work. You have stuff to do. Do it.

Futurama was Wrong

I was just playing a game of Space Invaders on an Atari 2600 emulator I found online. I had a pretty good game.

Then I thought of that one episode of Futurama where the aliens from planet Omicron Persei 8 invade and Fry defends the Earth armed with his bottle of Shasta and his all Rush mix tape.

So I put on the Moving Pictures album to see if listening to Rush would improve my game. While it did improve my mood and my general sense of mental well being (that album RULES), it did not improve my game. Not even a little bit.

I guess the bottle of Shasta is the missing link. Either that or Futurama was wrong, and we all now Futurama is never wrong.

iPhone 14 Users

My phone is an iPhone 14 Pro Max. I didn’t upgrade to a 15 last year. I used to always skip a generation, then there were a few years where I did not, now I am trying to get back into the every-other-iteration way of thinking. When the next iPhone is released I will probably upgrade. Not because I necessarily want to (though I absolutely do) but because my trusty ol’ two-year-old is starting to get weird on me.

Are there any other 14 users still out there? Are they experiencing weirdness too? That’s a rhetorical question. I’m not expecting a discussion here, I’m just an old man yelling at clouds, so to speak.

It’s not so much weirdness as slowness. Everything, both native and 3rd party applications, just seem to need a little more time to do what they gotta do. Launch? Crunch some data? Open a photo? Play an audio or video file? It just seems to take a little longer than it used to. In some cases it takes a few full seconds more than it used to.

I wonder… is this some planned obsolescence program kicking in? Is Apple trying to convince me to upgrade this cycle by hamstringing my system over here? It’s possible. I don’t think it’s likely- (I mean it’s a 14 not a 4, right?) but it could be.

Not that I need any arm twisting or anything. I do want a new phone and it will probably just be a few months until the 16’s hit the market. I just wonder.

Anyway, I took today’s photo a day challenge pic before I left the cellar this morning. Yeah, it’s another guitar pic. What are you gonna do about it?

327/365
327/365