Author Archives: bluedepth

Bundt Buddy

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I’ve noticed for a long while that no matter how long you microwave a dish, the center of the thing you are reheating is always colder than the ring around whatever you are cooking. Even if you use a flat plate and put it off-center on a rotating micowave tray inside the device.

I have taken to putting whatever I want to cook on a plate and then move it around so there is an empty spot in the middle, and that maneuver started me thinking about the general shape of what I was doing. I’m making a form similar to a bundt pan.

This started me to think about a microwave accessory, a ceramic shaped dish that could you could put your food into, it is shaped to avoid this center dead-spot, so your food cooks faster and more evenly. I call it a Bundt Buddy. LOL.

Anyhow it would be silly as it just is one more thing to clean, but if you want to avoid a cold spot in your microwaved food, make it a ring with nothing in the center, like a food doughnut. Smooth it out afterwards.

Oathbringer – 84%

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I’m 84% of the way along reading Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson. So far the read has been a slow go, as he is setting up a lot of backstory and covering a lot of characterization. I don’t mind it, and it’s nowhere near the level of setting work that Stephen King is known for, so I am thankful for that. The twist near the end is quite good, and reminds me, yes Virginia, Hell is Other People.

Goodbye Twitter

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Today in my email I received this from Twitter Support:

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So if you click on the link, the only option is to self-censor, basically a specially crafted button to blow up whatever the offensive tweet was. In my case, my heartfelt wish that our current human stain in the White House has a stroke or heart attack. I don’t want to do anything to him, I want him to simply sieze up and die all by himself. Fly into a rage, then grab his chest and drop over stone dead.

So, Twitter took it upon themselves to force me to censor myself. Right after I got this message, I most certainly did click the “Remove” button, which blew up the Tweet. Then I downloaded my Twitter archive, once that was safe, I then deactivated my Twitter account. I would much rather it all get blown up to kingdom come than self-censor myself against the pile of waste sitting behind the Resolute desk.

I don’t really care to discuss the First Amendment ramifications, as I’m absolutely positive that Twitter will hide in the tall grass of their TOS. And that’s actually quite fine. I haven’t used Twitter in years, only logging in to lob gems like this one at the pile of fecal matter with a spray tan. I deleted Facebook, I can delete Twitteriffic too.

What am I missing out on? Nah, nothing lost. Peace of mind gained. Goodbye Twitter.

In Pursuit of Beard

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When I was much younger, in my teens, I attempted to grow a beard. It was mostly born out of curiosity, how it would come in, what it would look like, and how other people would react to it. I never had the most common issues, which is patchy growth or thin wispy scruff growing in where real hair should be. My hair was rough, strong, and exceedingly curly. Of course, when I was a callow youth I didn’t know enough to actually care for a beard, to style it and maintain it, to direct it. So when it came in, I appeared all a mess. Because it came in super curly and practically kinky, forming ringlets all by itself, I endured light mockery about being a hodgepodge of lanky button-nosed Irish dope mixed in with a Hassidic Jew. So I got scissors, trimmed it as far as I could, and then shaved it all off.

The response to that still rings in my ears, “Oh God! What have you done! Grow it back!”

So for years and years I pursued a standard goatee, shaving inconsistently because I never really felt like my appearance was anything worth fretting over, so I’d get scruffy, then neat, then scruffy, then neat, with little forays into yeti territory with event-driven neatening up. I also had a cheap and trashy pair of Conair buzzers that I would use on my own head to give myself haircuts. Ever since I was 13 and went on a trip to Florida with family, I blundered into the buzz cut and never looked back. That made self-maintenance a ten minute trip in the bathroom with a subsequent small hair explosion as I tossed my hair cuttings outside after I was done buzzing everything down. I did this for years and years.

As I aged, the same firm flow of testosterone that gave me my voice, and really fast growing facial hair also began to kill off the hair on my head. Male pattern baldness, which I’ve romantically referred to as “Sexy Bald Captain” after Patrick Stewart in his role as Captain Picard on Star Trek. I have made easy peace with balding. I could attempt any sort of coping mechanism or I could accept it. I elected to accept it.

So, fast forward years and years forward. My partner, Scott, started to grow out his beard first, and it was a certain curiosity to see how it would play out. Right along this time, during a thoughtless session of self-maintenance with the aforementioned trashy Conair buzzers, I went about giving myself a haircut. Absentmindedness led to me forgetting the usual 7mm guard on the buzzer and I took the first swipe, from the temple back, and the buzzer did its duty and sheared off the hair, practically right down to the skin. I took my goof to a professional place, a Great Clips, and they helped salvage my look from my absentmindedness by leveraging what I had done into a new style, a faded cut with a buzz on top. The reception of this new look was shockingly positive, which was a rather big surprise to me, leading me to think “Why did none of you mention this before!”

After the style recovery, Scott had made contact with a local barber in our city, who runs Junior’s Old School Barber Shop. As Scott was going to seriously pursue a beard and wanted expert care and guidance. We went together the first time, and as I sat there, pretty much an audience to the proceedings, I learned more about beard care in that ten minutes than I knew for all the years leading up to that moment. I felt like I could perhaps give it another shot myself, with the ringing chuckles in my ear about it coming back in ringlets and looking like a transporter accident between a Irish sheepherder and a Hassidic Jew. It was Scott inspiring me, and Junior with his teaching and instruction that led me to where I am now.

I had no idea about all the things that I could explore, and try out, with what nature was always trying to give me. For all the facial hair growth, not a single follicle will ever come back on my head. So perhaps it was time to see where I could take a beard myself. Properly inspired, and myself a new customer for Junior and his Barber Shop I let the wild take me.

I never thought I would be this pleased with myself. The feel of it is hard to describe. It feels nice to fiddle and futz with the growth, the longer it gets the more interesting the sensations become. As I learned more and more, starting with Junior’s advice and observing Scott pursuing his beard options, I started my own exploration. A trip down the beardy rabbit hole.

The things I didn’t know were washes, balms, and conditioners. I also had no concept of a boars hair brush. I just thought of brushes as things that my mother and sister had, paddles on handles that would help them discover snarls and knots in their hair and lead to crying and cursing. A whole new collection of things were now open and ready for me to explore, things devoted to help what I was quickly growing to grow in straighter, smoother, easier to manage, and more pleasant to have and to touch. Thankfully my IRS refund arrived just as I was looking at the pile of new possibilities. There are many brands, many makers, and as many formulations all promising a variety of positive outcomes. Junior recommended the Reuzel brand, and specifically the Reuzel Beard Balm. That’s when it struck me that there was an entirely new class of personal care products that not only could do good things for me, but also give me a very enticing and attractive scent that I absolutely loved. I think what really tipped the scales, more than the inspiration and the learning was feeling what a good Boars Hair Brush can do. From the first moment I tried it, with the Reuzel Balm, the condition of my beard improved and the sensation of using the brush became a kind of indulgent pleasure. Now I carry my brush around with me everywhere I go and if I have some time to myself, using it has become a delight.

I then visited Junior myself, with what nature was handing me and he helped me bring style into my life. He gave me guidance and suggestions, and now I can’t imagine going anywhere else to get my hair cut, my beard trimmed, and all the other careful and delightful things that a excellent barber does for his clients.

I have since then explored more products in this arena. It started with the Reuzel Beard Balm, but now it has branched out to Honest Amish Beard Conditioner, which is much looser than the Reuzel Balm, and has the unique scent somewhere between Pumpkin Pie and Honey. I also have Beardoholic Conditioning Beard Oil, which is unscented but still works delightfully well. I have also purchased and enjoy Beardsley Beard Conditioner, which hilariously gives me the distinct aroma of a fruit salad. I am also quite fond of Lush Cosmetics Kalamazoo Beard Wash and Conditioner. The last thing I bought for myself was a beard comb, not that my brush wasn’t doing wonders for me, and it was, but I thought that a nice comb designed for the very hair I was trying to grow would be a smart move, and it definitely was. It is made of sandalwood, and the scent of that is pleasant in its own distinct way. I selected the Hundred Beard Company Comb.

All of these people, and wonderful products, have all worked together to give me a wonder. I couldn’t imagine ever living without a beard now, and if you are local in Michigan, I would make the trip to visit Junior. If not, finding a barber like him would be the best way to start. There is so much they can teach us all.

Lastly, a picture of yours truly, with the hard work and careful conditioning that all of this has resulted in, at least up to this point:

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Chat Talkers

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While I’ll still have Facebook Messenger on my phone, the preferred systems for chat are still Signal and now Hangouts. Obviously iMessage is still a fine medium to use of you like. Everybody should have my email accounts and phone numbers, if not, let me know!

A Little Tired

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Every day brings me an endless buffeting stream of reminders about how toxic and unpleasant Facebook has become. Early last week one of the apps that I use, Social Fixer for Facebook or maybe it was FB Purity reported to me a laundry list of people who have unfriended me or otherwise disappeared from Facebook.

It might have been the straw that broke the camels back. Or at least contributed to the collapse. Even random pages that are meant to be for cooking, or are supposed to be funny post stories and the top-rated comments are so awful. Almost always there is some babble about Clinton this or that, or Snowflake or Libtard, which are all phrases that I’ve really grown tired seeing.

I once thought that the last bastion of security would be the relative anonymity, or at least the implied carelessness surrounding the emotional response signals that each Facebook story features. But this in itself has become onerous. I am no longer able to just feel like clicking on some sort of reaction on a story is something I can just toss away. Now I have to evaluate the emotional carriage of my emotional signal. If you see something unpleasant, how do you emotionally signal? What if you accidentally laugh, or if the tragedy is wrapped in comedy? What if you see something you are expected to be Sad about, but instead you end up being Angry. Or Wow. Or Thumbs Up.

What does it mean when you learn about a train derailment that killed 100 nuns? Thumbs up? Is that what you react with? And then what happens when people start to measure you for your reaction? Is Wow more appropriate, or wouldn’t Sad be more apt?

Facebook has become a consumer of emotional processing energy. I won’t say that it is an emotional vampire, but I would start to lean in that direction for the comments section on almost every story on Facebook for that. It has become an unwelcome diner at the feast, with its dead little dolls-eyes just staring off into space, with its figurative knife and fork in clenched fists on the table, demanding emotional processing energy. Always something provocative, always selected and wrapped by the pinnacle of artificially manipulative programming known as the Facebook Wall Algorithm. Stories meant to entice you to consume content, and while consuming, stab you in the side and collect the energy you were originally going to use for, well, anything else really. It’s a story designed to get you going, to entice you, to engage you. It’s powered, insidiously, by the very people you know and love, it is the darker side to social networking. We started out doing mutual grooming in a rainforest, and now we have created an entire ecosystem devoted to maximum impact and maximum response in a social context. We’ve used all the energy that we would have used to socialize with each other and channeled it into socializing on a site that manipulates us to squeeze the maximum output from us at all times. And then, monetize that very squeeze.

It’s like being nuzzled by a giant mosquito. While it’s busy at the feast, it injects anti-coagulants and painkillers in an effort to get the host to ignore it is there doing real damage. Facebook is a vampire with a sirens song and an anaesthetic bite. Facebook is a social parasite and it’s almost a perfect one. Designed to be attractive, innocuous, apparently innocent, but manifestly toxic, virulent, and disastrous.

So what is to be done? Facebook still has quite a bit of energy in it’s identity token leverage, you can’t leave because how will you use another site that offered instant gratification because you could “Sign Up” using Facebook, so that once you were signed into Facebook, you effectively had Single Sign On enabled on all those other sites. It made joining services a snap, it makes authentication a snap, and it insidiously leverages the service into your life. You couldn’t leave if you wanted to. You are trapped.

So I won’t quit Facebook. But I have deleted it from my bookmarks and I will delete it from my iPad and my iPhone. The account will dwell, intact and unchanged. I am withdrawing my consent to be squeezed for emotional processing energy. I will no longer process the jobs presented by the emotional response flag system on the Facebook Wall. I will not like something, or be angry, or sad, or wow, or laugh.

This is a matter of self-preservation. Now that people I know are leaving the platform, this seems like a good time to seek out this snuffed campfire path in the road with Facebook. There will be charcoal in the burn ring, there will be seats arrayed around the campfire, but I won’t be sitting in them anymore. I have to see this as an expression of self-care. I have to think of my own emotional processing energy first, to be careful with how I spend it and with whom.

So the things that I write about on Facebook will be posted on this Blog. It won’t likely be long form work, like this, and it won’t be as intimate as some of the things I’ve shared on Facebook, as the blog has a very rudimentary audience control system. Either a post is password protected, or it is public. There are no levels of gray, like there is on Facebook.

I can’t anymore. I give up.

Slack vs. Jabber

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Several years ago I started working for a new company. Their phone system was stuck in the past. The past, like Version 4 when Version 10 was being sold. So we had to upgrade, there really wasn’t any other way around it.

Enter Cisco. As VOIP hardware manufacturers go, if you stay in the silo you’ll have a pretty good life. Call Manager, Unity, and Presence are a heady combination. I decided early on to hire a local company to help me with the design and the initial layout and setup, and I will always regard that choice as one of the best I have ever made, professionally. They did an amazing job, and their staff are absolute tops in their game. They are expensive, but in the end I think worth it. So they came, helped install the Cisco Business Essentials 6000 server, and all the heavy lifting that was needed to get all three products up and running, so that people who were using the old system saw next to nothing different about how everything worked. That’s a kind of holy grail in IT.

A part of the trio of products was Cisco Presence, or to use a shorthand about what it really was, simply Jabber. Jabber is an instant messaging platform, and I had quite a bit of experience as Jabber is, at least ostensibly, an open-source system. I had lots of Jabber experience back at my previous employ and I was looking forward to seeing Jabber rolled out across the company that I now work for. The previous employ was centered on Apple technology and as an IT administrator, Apple was like waking up in the Garden of Eden. It was an earthly delight. The Apple iteration of Jabber included a CLI option switch that allowed you to instantly join everyone in the Jabber directory, nee an LDAP directory, all together. It was called “–auto_buddy” and I loved that feature. It was the killer part of Jabber from Apple. When I added someone to OpenDirectory, I could open a Terminal and throw this one command and all my work would automatically add all my coworkers together, everyone is everyone else’s buddy. It was great, I really enjoyed it.

So then, years forward, on with Cisco Presence, their implementation of Jabber. Off searching for my favorite CLI friend, “–auto_buddy”, only to find out, none of that exists. And so, that hobbled Jabber immediately. Instant Messaging’s ROI is only really salient when you have everyone engaged. You can’t really argue about ROI until that point, because when you have only a handful of people actually connected, they don’t see the point, because not everyone is connected, including the people they want to communicate with right now. If you can’t do a thing immediately, then what is the point of doing it at all? This is the core reason why a lot of tech adoption trips and falls on its face. Especially with collaboration solutions like Jabber. Until everyone joins and uses the system, convincing them that they should use it might as well be one of Hercules’s tasks, like cleaning the Augean Stables. So without my ability to link everyone up, with “–auto_buddy”, I had a piecemeal system. Without the ability for everyone to see everyone else, adoption tripped and fell flat on its figurative face.

Shortly thereafter, it exited the cultural consciousness until years later, when a new coworker had stoked interest in it all over again. But it was doomed, not this time by the lack of demonstrable ROI or the lack of “–auto_buddy”, but rather by compliance control. By the time I had installed the required pieces for compliance, the entire affair was loaded into the figurative airlock and blown out into space.

Before the end of Jabber, and running currently is another system, one that I find more engaging at least personally and that is Slack. It’s free to use, which is a huge help, and also available everywhere. I don’t have to limit it behind the walled garden of our corporate VPN. That is a huge benefit and really eases the use of it, in every case. I can immediately see the benefits of using Slack, especially in groups like mine, in Information Technology. So that’s currently the extent of it. Again, tech adoption is flat and terminal, the selling point for Slack is still tied up with the same point for Jabber. You can only demonstrate the ROI when you have full engagement, and you can only get full engagement when people see the rewards of ROI. So even Slack is just a moribund as Jabber was. But at least with Slack there is room for enticing directions it could take. I’ve been kicking around the notion of examining Slack’s position in a B2B framework. Like between MSP’s and their customers. The MSP starts a Slack and invites their customers to join. Then each customer has a channel that they are invited to. Then the company staff at the MSP hop on Slack and use it for their own benefit. Everything is segregated using Slack’s internal controls, so the MSP gets a benefit immediately and the customers can effectively chat up their reps with a single click on an app, a website, or their phones. This could enhance the collaborative power between customer and provider. Invoices posted, updates about payments, and with IFTTT looming in the background, new automated benefits could be crafted and rolled out to customers immediately.

This could also revolutionize B2C relationships as well, but that would take more corporate bravery than even the B2B solution would. I don’t actually expect anyone to seriously accept my shoot-the-moon ideas, but I would like to imagine the world where I could start my Slack app, see all my professional relationships and be able to communicate with them that way. Maybe someday if Slack succeeds and more people ask the right questions. More people actively interested in collaboration would also help.

Windows 10, QNAP, and error 0x80004005

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While setting up a new Windows 10 laptop we ran into a head-scratcher problem. We store a lot of our setup data in a network attached storage system called a QNAP. The laptop was connected to our local area network over Wifi, and everything connection-wise looked to be good. We could ping both the IP address of the QNAP and the DNS name as well, so we knew for a fact that the laptop could indeed send and receive traffic with the QNAP. When we attempted to call up the QNAP using Windows Explorer on this laptop we used the UNC convention to get to our data, like this \\10.1.1.100 and when we press enter, Windows 10 would pause for a short few seconds and then throw back an error code:

Windows Cannot Access \\10.1.1.100 Error Code: 0x80004005 Unspecified Error.

We then attempted to reboot, then we escalated to a full system rebuild and nothing seemed to work for us. We fiddled with PowerShell commands, to no effect, also flipping on and off IPv6, which also had no effect. So our next step was to switch to wildcat debugging and just start taking wild potshots at the laptop trying to find a way to just make this work. And we found the solution, thanks to a user by the name of dimamed on Spiceworks, who posted the solution we needed:

Adjust Registry Value:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters\AllowInsecureGuestAuth, and set the DWORD to 1.

Then I closed the registry editor, opened up Windows Explorer again, tried the QNAP as I usually do and it worked! We don’t really need it to function for our end users, but it became a matter of professional pursuit to make sure that all our technology can work together properly. It can, with some coaxing.

We hope this solution works for other folks, if you also run into this issue. Please leave a comment if you would, so we can see just how much of an impact something like this has if you don’t mind.

Telephone Scam

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I just received this transcript on my Google Voice line, totally a scam. If you happen to run into it, you can disregard it.

“Name under your SSN. So before we could go ahead and start the legal actions on your name. We want your retained attorney of record to give us a call back as soon as possible at 929-430-6590. I repeat the number. Again, 929-430-6590 and your case identification number is 26 CFR. Do not disregard this message. If we do not receive a call from you or your attorney, either your warrant will get activated. Thank you.”