Walking Down Memory Lane

Posted on July 1, 2017 by bluedepth

Some notable events from other July 1st’s

2003 – Installed a network aware fax machine, and then attached it to Groupwise. My god, Groupwise. This is such a walk down memory lane! And this of course was the first of a repeated meme that online shared mailboxes at work are upsetting to people because they aren’t “private”, in the same way that a regular fax machine is “private” by hovering over it and muscling out anyone who might try to use it. It of course begs the question, what are you transmitting at work that is “private”, that you shouldn’t be doing at say, a FedEx shop or Office Depot?

2003 – Toppenish, Washington was in the news because a keyword blocker at a library got upset because it found something it didn’t approve of in the text of the domain name itself. Nowadays we don’t search domains for text fragments, we actually categorize them.

2004 – Again with the Fax Machine. In this case, not having long distance on the line requiring the use of an AT&T calling card, with a 60-digit calling sequence just to send a fax far away. And the merry mixups when people who work for an Institution for Higher Learning demonstrate no higher learning by being unable to comprehend digits. Ah, those were the days.

2004 – Farhenheit 9/11 – Hah, those were the days, weren’t they? When it only felt like scandals were rare and maybe all the crazy conspiracy theories were just theories. Oh, the memories.

2006 – Sharing the photos of the bathroom rebuild. It was a long while ago that we tore the guts out of that bathroom and updated it.

2007 – At O’Hare, running through security, on my way to visit family in Syracuse.

2008 – Another trip to Syracuse. This time through Detroit.

2009 – The problem with the cloud is poor security and access points everywhere. What happens when people plant incriminating evidence via a route, like junk mail, that you pay very little attention to – and then make an anonymous tip about the evidence? It was an interesting consideration and helps reinforce how important it is to keep everything digital tidy.

2013 – I wrote a lot of things about the security threat that our very own NSA represents. And little did he know that in 2017, the tools they collected and wrote would leak out and turn into WannaCry ransomware attack. Thanks NSA!

2015 – Facebook Notifications get an enhancement and they can accept a GPG Public Key, so all the Facebook Notifications over email are all encrypted. This was a really good proof-of-concept option from one of the worlds biggest Internet sites, alas it won’t ever take off because GPG is an all-or-nothing technology, and since you aren’t going to have all, all you get is nothing. It was this day that I also gave a lot more thought to The Golden Rule and started to reshape my life around it as a moral compass.

New Year Resolutions

Posted on January 17, 2017 by bluedepth

This new year I resolved to be done with Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. I had abandoned Twitter a long time ago, Reddit was easy as I was never really invested in that platform anyways, and then most recently leaving Facebook behind.

It needs a little characterization. I haven’t deleted my Facebook account, but what I have done is ceased to engage on that platform. I still do check in once a week just to mop up my timeline recommendations from people putting my name on their posts and otherwise just establishing a heartbeat there so that the people who are on the service and follow me notice that I still live. I suppose that eventually even bothering with the heartbeat updates will grow tiresome and I’ll give up on that as well.

I have instead moved my entire social networking existence to a new service called Imzy. It’s at imzy.com, and I encourage everyone to join me there. There are some pretty good AUP rules in place and communities can also have extended rules, building off the core AUP of the site itself. Imzy is a perfect place to have real discussions with people online. There is a culture in Imzy which I haven’t found anywhere else. It’s this lack of trolling that I witnessed and it’s what led me to dump Facebook.

I don’t know what this means for this blog. Imzy is a great platform all on its own, and when it comes to blogging, my user community has a lot of features that my blog can’t meet. The sense of community I think is what is missing from a lot of services, and my blog. This service is mostly just a billboard for me to yell at the darkness. There aren’t any real conversations going on here, unlike in Imzy.

I figure if I don’t post more blog entries I may just archive all of this stuff and shutter the service completely. Then again, I may just be lazy and let this blog long-tail it to eternity. Only time will tell.

Assert The Win

Posted on June 10, 2016 by bluedepth

Sometimes it’s the best thing to assert you win and walk away from a toxic problem. So far today I’ve done that quite a bit. What have I abandoned?

I’ve walked away from Facebook. It’s been four days since I even logged into Facebook and since then I haven’t missed it. I’ve been catching up on my news; the Spiceworks Community board consumes a lot of time. Then after that, I turned my attention to my Pocket list. There just isn’t enough time anymore to deal with Facebook. When I logged into it, I had eighteen notifications, and I frowned and realized that I didn’t care that much. I’m writing a lot of my thoughts into my journal after coming to the realization that sharing with others isn’t going to be a positive experience. Now nearly everything on Facebook is an unpleasant experience. So, abandoning toxic things seems to be a good thing for me.

Another toxic system is Office365. Microsoft and I go back for a long while, right along with my almost palpable hate for that company and their products. Going into just how Office365 lets me down is very dull. Nearly every interaction has me wishing I could just close my laptop, put it in my backpack and run away from my life. Everything that has some Microsoft technology associated with it has me frowning in deep disappointment. Alas, there is no way to escape the Great Beast of Redmond, so we gnash our teeth and endure the horrors.

The final horror is WordPress itself. I use a stock theme, Twenty-Twelve. It’s not a custom theme. It’s not slick or responsive. It’s just a dumb theme. So while reading my blog, I realized just how much I wanted to change the line-spacing for my post entries. This is where my expectations fork, there is an Apple fork and an “Everything Else” fork. The Apple fork has been proven time and time again, that the answer is simple and shallow and easy to get to, understand what the change will do, and make it work. Then there is everything else. Here we have WordPress itself. I wanted to change the line-spacing on my theme. So I go to the Dashboard, and I spend ten minutes blindly stabbing at possible places where this option might be hiding to no effect. Then I do a Google search, which is the first and last place that most possible solutions are born and die. A good Google search almost always results in the answer you are after. So, “WordPress vertical line spacing” led to a place that eventually had the solution in it, but the theme didn’t match what I was expecting. This is the core of frustration, so I modified the search to include the themes name itself, and that helped. I found the setting, and it was in a CSS stylesheet file. I left the WWW when it was still HTML only. CSS irritates me. But anyways, hack CSS, that’s the answer. It’s a dumb answer, but that’s it. So I find about 130 places where line-height is an option. I laugh bitterly at the number. Which section to edit? Are you sure? So I gave it a shot. I set the line-height to 2.0 and then looked at my site. I can’t tell if it improved or not. But the most adaptive solution is to assert it did what I wanted. Mark the win as a notch and move on. Do I care? Well, I wanted to do something. I did something. Did it work? Probably not.

But then we get back to that first fork. That’s why I love Apple so much. Nearly everything they touch MAKES SENSE. I don’t have to struggle with some labyrinthine mystery. Maybe my edits will work, maybe they will break whatever it is, maybe it won’t matter. Maybe any setting I change will be overridden somewhere else, by something that was never documented. That’s the core design principle of both WordPress and Microsoft. I suppose we should just be happy that the most basic functions work. Much like the Internet itself, the fact that any of this works is a daily miracle.

So instead of writing a huge rant, one that nobody wants to read and nobody cares about I will assert that I won, psychologically move forward and be able to forget the conditions that led me to those particular experiences. The blog doesn’t work like you want? Don’t go there. Facebook a cesspool of ugly humanity? Skip it. Microsoft? Ah, if only it would burn to the ground. But we can’t have what we wish, even if we’d do anything for our dreams to come true.

So! Hooray! A Win! Facebook, WordPress, Office365! Just stop worrying about the bomb. It’s “Someone Else’s Problem®”

Shifting Platforms

Posted on December 8, 2015 by bluedepth

I go through cycles of having an interest, and then not having an interest in social media. Twitter and Facebook are the core services that I’m thinking about here. Amongst these services, I’ve given up on Twitter. I no longer engage with anyone in Twitter and the leading edge of loud, noisy chatter has carried on without me. If I do run the Twitter application, it’s mostly to witness some event as it unfolds, like a news source, or to jump on some shame bandwagon when a public figure makes a terrible mess of their lives by saying or doing something stupid.

I am about to give up on Facebook as well. There are many reasons for this renewed effort to leave the system. I am tired of the see-saw polarity between stories. The negative political stories mixed in with the positive reaffirming stories build up a kind of internal mental noise that clouds my day and keeps me from being focused. Another reason to leave is the interface has become somewhat moribund on its own. You can sometimes comment, sometimes not. The only option to express your reactions when it comes to feelings is “Like” and the entire service has become self-balkanized. I have friends and family on Facebook, but out of all of them, I only follow a few and I’ve muted the rest. I don’t really miss the engagement, but always having to think about tailoring my thoughts based on the audience has started to give me fatigue.

I think then that it may be time for me to go back to writing blog posts on my WordPress blog. The blog encourages longer format writing, and I expect that engagement will drop as I won’t be using Facebook. In a lot of ways, it is a kind of social addiction and the only way to break it is to wean off of it. Perhaps cold turkey is not right, but rather cool turkey.

I don’t expect anyone to follow me off of Facebook. I will share my blog posts to Facebook so people can still see what I write, but the engagement will drop off. Feel free to comment on my blog if you wish. Otherwise, that will be that.

On a more technical note, I changed how the stories are shared across systems. The original way was to publish a WordPress entry, which would share to Tumblr, and that would then share to Twitter and Facebook. I have torn that down and set it so that WordPress itself shares to Facebook, Google Plus, Tumblr, and Twitter. It’s a more direct path that doesn’t require people to slog through my Tumblr. I think it’s more direct this way.

Throwback Thursday

Posted on September 25, 2014 by bluedepth

Since I’ve been journaling so very much I’ve got a lot of memories stored up in my Journal. Here’s a slice of my life for the past September 25th’s:

2003 – Refilled toner cartridges are all the rage, and I put a kibosh on them because they are a terrible idea. Working on other peoples computers proves to be a gory biological hazard at every turn. Grand Theft Auto 3 makes kids kill. Moonies make a surprise return and surprise everyone with their bigotry. Congress did something! They passed the FTC Do Not Call List.

2006 – Jerry Falwell referred to Hilary Clinton as worse than Lucifer. Tee Hee!

2007 – I got my first iPod Touch. What a long wonderful journey it has been with Apple, man, the memories. 🙂

2008 – I was enjoying a good ten-minutes hate on Microsoft and Java. At work I started interviewing S3’s.

2009 – I was drinking quite heavily to cope with my awful days. Drop.io was still around, and OIT was making it difficult to use, what a shocker. I started thinking about drugs like Xanax to help me cope with my difficult days. Work issues abound, failures left and right. Some sort of Jazz Ensemble at a local eatery tortured out some music.

2010 – Legend of the Guardians in the movies, enjoyed it quite a lot. Lots of noisy twitter noise.

2011 – SyFy asked what shows we liked, all the ones they cancelled. LOL.

2012 – Resistance using the Help Desk Ticketing System shows up. Search for S3 internally falls flat on it’s face, not really surprised. Love for Waze, enjoying social navigation. Closet hanger in Hobbiton failed, I fixed it, after a while of battling with it.

photo by:

Daily Prompt: Singing in the Rain

Posted on September 21, 2014 by bluedepth

Safe inside, toasty warm, while water pitter-patters on the roof… describe your perfect, rainy afternoon.

It’s a split between the slow romance of a rainy afternoon or the quiet snuggliness of a blizzard. Either event always carries within it the possibility of power outage and since the last great outage I’ve found myself both challenged and strangely engaged. Without technology, without all of the noise I found it much easier to live and carry on. The nighttime is pitch, refrigeration is a commodity and cooking becomes more challenging with the loss of an oven, but being cut off from the trappings of technology let you get back to what really matters.

I’ve for the longest time felt that technology has shrunk the world and made everything knowable. Even the things that should always remain hidden and unknown. Some people share too much, and we’ve devolved into fetishizing worry and concern over things that we have no ability to affect. Ever since I killed my television, effectively walking away from broadcast TV and all the awfulness that comes with it I’ve found my life in flux, rebalancing and having more access to happiness as a result. The mood of a rainstorm or a blizzard is a perfect setting for considering where I am in life, it’s the perfect moment for introspection and reflection. It doesn’t escape me that both of these conditions glorify the home, things that surround the home are always going to make me happier.

When the power fails, when technology recedes you find yourself sitting alone with your thoughts, if you are with other people you start to struggle for activities to occupy your time. Telling stories, talking, reading books, playing games – the things we all did before all this technology came and made everything “better” are sometimes the very things that we need to get back to. I have always carried a special reverence for old things, older technology that has been supplanted by newer technology. Just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s better. My analog wristwatch and my fountain pen are personal testaments to that very thing. The rain and the snow lend encouragement to the things in our lives that none of us should stray very far away from. I’ve found myself actually fantasizing about turning off the house power to have new oases of freedom from electricity and the trappings of technology. It’s not actually practical as turning off the house mains would shut down my refrigerator and that would make living significantly more difficult and increase misery if I lost all that safety in the box-that-stays-cold.

I think more people should at least play pretend that the power has gone out. Try to reconnect to each other without technology, without social networking and all these little gadgets that have filled up our lives. Break out the lanterns and play card games, play board games, talk, tell stories, relate to one another again without all the structure that we’ve surrounded ourselves with. The irony isn’t lost on me, that I am advocating breaks from technology while typing on the very pinnacle of such technology and eventually posting it into the very thing I rail against. I think it comes to a sense of balance. Not being completely embedded, obsessed, and reliant on technology on one hand and not being a Luddite in the other. There’s a time and place for both and keeping both alive in your life feels important somehow. Electricity isn’t like sunshine, it isn’t guaranteed. It’s important to figure out life without electricity and to be prepared. This balance and respect for older things makes a lot of sense to me.

It’s far afield from where this daily post started – a description of a rainy day and how it makes you feel turning into a pleading that you can see better represented in Koyaanisqatsi. Funny what a little rain will bring.

PAD Book – 1/1/2014 – Stroke of Midnight

Posted on January 11, 2014 by bluedepth

January 1
Stroke of Midnight
Where were you last night when 2013 turned into 2014? Is that where you’d wanted to be?”

On the last evening of 2013 I was alone with my two boys during the winter storm raging overhead. My partner had the day before left to visit his family in Albany and I was tending to duties around the house and keeping my two boys safe and occupied. Actually I don’t know who was keeping who happy more. I certainly was a warm lap to sit on and the food-giver, but in a lot of ways they were almost always with me, keeping me company and keeping me occupied with their adorable (and sometimes destructive) antics.

I found a bottle of bubbly wine in our collection from M. Lawrence winery up in the Leelanau Peninsula that I had purchased long enough ago that I don’t really remember when. Around 11pm on New Years Eve I inspected and uncorked the bottle and puttered about the house, a small plate of christmas cookies and a champagne flute that I thankfully found hidden in the rearmost of the top cupboard in the kitchen where we keep all our wine glasses.

At 11:50pm, my iPhone rang and it was Scott with an incoming FaceTIme call. We spent the interval from New Years Eve to New Years Day linked virtually by FaceTime. It was a great use of technology and in many ways we had our cake and got to eat it too. Scott got a chance to visit with his family and we got a chance to spend New Years together, after a fashion.

After 2014 had arrived, I disconnected from FaceTime and finished my glass of wine and with cats in tow, padded off to bed.

Was it what I wanted to do? It really was a matter of what I had to do. I couldn’t leave my two boys on their own for a week as the eldest is the most fragile and I frequently worry after his health and activity level. I was able to use technology to cheat around the edges as it were, to be both at home and in New York with my partner at the same time. I’m so glad I was able to take advantage of the technology and it’s just one more, amongst a gallery of other reasons, why I’m so very glad that I have Apple technology in my life. It made it all seamless and easy. I could have done it other ways, but it would have been a mess. The Apple way is smooth and simple and just as easy as answering the phone.

– This is also the first of the Post-A-Day prompts from the book that WordPress.com assembled to inspire bloggers like me to write more and more frequently.

PAD April 27 2013 – Your Time To Shine

Posted on January 11, 2014 by bluedepth

Early bird, or night owl?

Naturally I’m definitely a night owl. I can get started in the morning without difficulty but I do my best work in the afternoon and evenings. I tend to take nice hot relaxing showers before I go to bed, I find it helps me get to sleep easier and it is often during these relaxing times under the hot spray that my best thoughts arrive. I’m a huge fan, and I’ve written before about how useful it is to seed the subconscious mind with work and then reap the rewards when you are doing totally unrelated things. I like the idea that as I am relaxing under the warm water, which is my “home element” and it’s during these times that I have most of my epiphanies. There is more for me in the evening hours than ever in the morning hours. Too early and my mind isn’t running, honestly I’m usually besotted by dreamstuff that I drag into my waking life from my dreams to be useful for very much at all. I’ve found that I can dislodge a lot of the backed up dreamstuff if I journal it out. I used to muse that my mornings are occupied by dull setup procedures and that I don’t get seriously engaged until late morning bridging over to early afternoon and running into the night.

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Throwback Thursday

Daily Prompt: Singing in the Rain

PAD April 27 2013 – Your Time To Shine