Interlude: Social Justice Warriors

Posted on March 22, 2019 by bluedepth

The end of the Doctor Who panel had a thick conversational thread strongly tied to classic social justice warrior monologue. I did write about it, but then I self-censored my writing because it is not a topic that is open for discussion. It is violently dangerous and maximally hazardous. Right up there with abortion. It is flight worthy.

So there won’t be a post, or any writing about SJW. There is nothing to say. It is too dangerous, too hazardous for even any commentary. It makes jihad look disneyesque. There is no room in that magic kingdom for anything but blood and bloody ashes.

So, no comment. Nothing. Just stand up and run away. As fast as you can.

C2E2 Convention

Posted on March 21, 2019 by bluedepth

The time is right again, the stars are in alignment and the Great Lake has receded to reveal the Convention Center of the Old Ones, the Display Space of the Insane Damned, McCormick Place in Chicago Illinois! Tentacle monsters, inexplicable seaweed tresses, and the definite sense that maybe Jim Butcher used the entire building as inspiration for the Harry Dresden stories.

We have purchased snack foods and purified water supplies. Healthy snacks with an eye to fiber and protein that we can carry with us on our travels without having to purchase an $8 cuppa coffee or a $17 hot dog or a $25 dollar slice of microwaved pizza. We can sit down and enjoy our snacks in the places reserved for buying patrons and enjoy when frustrated concessioners make their precious frowny faces at us as we enjoy our own treats.

I probably have enough for a two week adventure, and that’s okay. It’s all shelf stable and not going anywhere, and it’s all good for me anyhow, so I can drag anything to work and use it to battle low blood sugar hangries.

The cat sitter is set. I have to get a few more cans of food for Ysy, that’s tomorrow during lunch. Then we will be off for a cavalcade of sitting and watching and enjoying as geeks, dorks, and nerds celebrate pop culture, comic books, and social and economic planetary domination over the uninteresting residuals of the species.

We’re all judging you. With our little plastic wrapped booklets of artwork and our little trollies full of collectibles worth more than your entire educational experiences combined. Then we’ll store all of it in perfectly airless preservation solutions until we remember much later that we have any of it and how much is stacked up…?

And we will laugh, privately, and amusingly while the residuals go out to buy diapers and formula.

Facebook Security

Posted on March 19, 2019 by bluedepth

I haven’t logged into Facebook in quite a while and I’ve been doing bits and bloops around the network, like connecting MOD Pizza to my FB account and vastly lower interaction metrics. The Facebook security watchdog noticed!

So they locked me out. I could get back in if I could identify my friends in a quiz format. Fine. Took the quiz, passed. Account password changed and updated.

Hilarious. Facebook is like herpes. I hardly miss the cold sores.

The Ethics Of Contact Lists

Posted on March 18, 2019 by bluedepth

So far it has happened to me twice. I have received contact from people who are very much no longer with organizations that I have a relationship with. The first contact was from a telecommunications technology company, obviously remaining nameless with the offender also remaining nameless. I had recognized the name from a previous connection when I was working with a current telecommunications company that is related to my workplace. The messaging was catered to create a fear response and panic move on my behalf to drum up business for the account executives commission. They had my name and my email address, they worked at a new company, and there is no reason why they should contact me as there was no prior contact with their new company for any purpose where I should expect contact. Essentially they copied their customer list in one company, and then when they went to another position elsewhere just uncorked the list and hit up all the contacts, in a targeted fashion. The first time was remarkable, but I thought it was a situational outlier.

Today, after I got the mail out of my home mailbox, I found another card from a previous contact with which I had made a few financial arrangements with the person, they were no longer with the financial institution that I do business with on personal terms, but a wholly new company, whom I had never had contact before. Again, the person copied their customer list from one company and carried it with them to another company.

I find all this to be wrong. It could even be regarded as corporate espionage. Right now it’s a simple matter of just tossing all these cold contacts suddenly warm again right in the secure recycling bin. There is no way that I’m going to contact any of them, but because I regard this as wholly inappropriate use of privileged information, each time I spot it, the relationship is dead on arrival. I don’t want to talk to these people, and doing this underhanded thing is worth exactly what I’m willing to pay for it, which is to throw it all away and not even give it a single thought. You stole the list, you are attempting to be clever and sneaky. I will not be a party to it.

I, of course, won’t identify companies or name individuals, but I find this to be utterly reprehensible, and as a practice, I’m calling it out. If you quit a job where customer lists are handy, you leave those lists behind, and you find a more wholesome and honest way to approach customers. So, off the offending mail goes, off to the recycling bin!

Good Omens

Posted on March 9, 2019 by bluedepth

https://www.reddit.com/comments/axv3go/only_this_unlikely_duo_can_stop_doomsday_good/

Here is a link to a trailer for a Good Omens. It’s one of my all time favorite books by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. If you haven’t read it, YOU REALLY SHOULD. I can’t wait for this series to come out! It’s on Amazon Prime, so thankfully I can watch it on a borrowed Prime account.

David Tennant as Crowley. I love it!

Goodbye Twitter

Posted on March 2, 2019 by bluedepth

Today in my email I received this from Twitter Support:

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.

A Little Tired

Posted on March 1, 2019 by bluedepth

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

Posted on February 7, 2019 by bluedepth

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.

200 Hours

Posted on June 18, 2018 by bluedepth

The last time I was logged into Facebook was June 9th at 11:45pm. I was scrolling along the wall feed and I distinctly felt ill that I was on Facebook. It wasn’t making me happy, it wasn’t rewarding, it was a chore. More than that, it was an unpleasant chore, and at the time it felt repulsive. The kind of repulsion that makes your stomach go sour, hurk a little and the metallic acid tang at the back of your throat, that sort of raw physical displeasure. I closed the tab, and wrote a little in my journal.

It’s been 200 hours and a few since that moment. I haven’t logged on once since. I don’t feel like I am missing anything, except when I have something to cheer or gripe about. There are a few things that I could have posted on Facebook, and thanks to Yelp, some of that has made its way on to Facebook, but that was automation doing the sharing, not me.

I made a break with Facebook. I’m not going to close anything or remove anything, that would require more exposure to their platform. I simply won’t be there. I’ve got this blog, where I can share things, and of course my journal. Almost everything ends up in the journal anyways, the important things in the blog, and I will leave Facebook and Twitter to the machines, let them suffer it. The universal answer to “Did you see on…?” will default to no. I didn’t see it. I don’t really want to see it, but you’ll show it to me anyways. There may never be freedom, true freedom from Facebook, because it leaks in around the edges and is in the news a lot, so it will become something like a persistent fungal infection. Nothing that actually hurts me, but it makes my toenails ugly. Just leave the socks on.

Facebook, and Google both have contributed to the death of smalltalk. What’s the point of saying anything when nobody believes you and they tell you that you are wrong, up until they read it on the platform and then you hear in a small voice, “Oh, yeah… there it is.” So, whatever. It’s best to just leave everything to the platform, it has in so many ways replaced so much for us. The matter of record, truth, facts, and even basic conversation. The only thing left is to pretend to be a dullard. You don’t know anything, you have nothing to say, and everything is a mystery novelty.

The platform is very interesting. We created something we can’t control, it’s bad for us, but we don’t really care. We’re throwing flowers at Frankenstein’s Monster and celebrating it with daily parades, despite the fact that it rampages and burns down random buildings and causes such conflict and suffering. Hooray for the Monster.

I won’t see it on Facebook. Save your bus fare. Keep whatever it is to yourself. Whats the point of talking about it anyways? All the possible conversations are there, up on that platform, go there, knock yourself out. The Monster loves daisies.