Category Archives: Journal

Beard Product Review Series

Posted on by
Reply

The next few series of blog posts will all be about the ever-growing pile of beard-care products that I have amassed since I was inspired by Scott to give my beard another shot. I also must clearly declare that I couldn’t have pulled this off, a beard I am proud of, without the help of my barber, Junior. Sitting in a simple chair, one afternoon, and learning more about beard care in half an hour than I knew up to that point. Whenever I learn something new, that’s mightily important! It seems that these days so few things are honestly new anymore.

The structure of the reviews will cover the name of the product as the headline, how I got the product, and then a descriptive paragraph where I will include the packaging, the presentation, and some roughly quantitative measures like texture and viscosity. After the facts, then I will cover some of the more subjective qualitative measures of each product. I haven’t run into anything that I want to bin, yet, but likely if I do bin something it’s going to be a warning post definitely.

So, on to the first review, which would be the first product that I tried…

Circling The Drain

Posted on by
Reply

Endless solicitations for donations and requests for money for political campaigns make up 75% of my email junk folder.

The absolute meaninglessness and crassness arrives every single day, multiple times a day. Everyone is doing it, and so they all feel like this is the best way to spend their time and what they should be doing.

“If you aren’t doing your job, you should be fundraising.”

But lets stab the pause button on all of it. What is your job? These people all are part of a great machine known as representative democracy here in the United States of America. But since the primary form of political power and political speech is actually money, we can dispense with vast sections of what used to be political reality. Senators no longer need to deliberate, Representatives no longer need to represent. Political animals no longer need to do anything other than raise and spend money. That’s all there is to it. The money is the fuel and the Machiavellianism is the toolbox that the fuel is channeled through.  The dark triad runs politics: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and Psycopathy.

So I get messages from Jon Hoadley, from Gary Peters, and a rogues gallery of other political animals all seeking just one solitary thing. Money. The toolbox has only one tool in it, the sopping paint-roller of fear. Money to buy writing about fear, and to instill it into the population. To squeeze us all using fear, appeals to fear, declarations of fear, condemnations using fear, it’s all the same message. We need money to terrorize you all, so that you will all give us more money, so we can ramp up the terror. More fear, more money, more fear, more money.

This is why politics is broken. This is why all of the norms are shattered. This is why the world is slowly and inexorably circling the drain. There is nothing else, no other messaging. No other communication. They don’t represent us, they simply solicit for money and vomit forth giant sopping loads of fear.

Fuck fear, fuck money, and fuck politics. This is why they fail, this is why it’s all crap.

This all came to a head with my US Senator, Gary Peters. I honestly don’t know who he is or what he stands for. The only time I ever got any communication from him, or I should say, is copy machine and letter folder, and envelope printer, and postal meter, was yesterday in a solicitation for money. I didn’t read anything in the actual letter. I just folded it up and slipped it in the recycling bag at home. It’s the same thing I do with the mental image of whoever Gary Peters is, I fold him up, and slip him into the recycling bag in my head. Right along with Gary Peters is Jon Hoadley. Whoever he is, whatever he stands for, the only time I hear from him is when he wants money. Again, I don’t care about him or what he represents, because it is all meaningless. It’s money, it’s fear, it’s politics.

Don’t ask us for money. Don’t make that ALL that you do. Engage with us, reach out to us, there are a lot of us but isn’t that a part of your actual job? And so, we return to the previous line above for a point: “If you aren’t doing your job, you should be fundraising.” And the answer is written as plain as day, you just aren’t doing your job. So all you are doing is fundraising and thinking that that is your job. That is why we are so very tired of all of you. You don’t know us, you don’t talk to us, you don’t represent us. You spend no time actually interested in your constituents and think that this is all a game of celebrity political whack-a-mole.

There is no love lost. It’s all lazy, mendacious, and corrupt. You wear a bright blue vest with the word DEMOCRAT written on it, and so we vote for you. Not because of who you are, but because we have reduced everything down to two colors. We vote and we elect you into office and we know that nothing will be accomplished, that the very best any of us have to hope for is a kind of silent trudging through the maintenance of the status quo. Life has a ritual, a pattern, a routine. As long as the routine is not affected, all the rest of it is just inconsequential political theater.

So, trot about on the political stage and waste your lives doing nothing for nobody. We aren’t watching, we don’t really care, you are all completely out of touch with the rest of us, that all of this is just an immense comedy. It’s a sham and we all know it. But none of us care to fight it out because there is no hope of change. There is nobody who will listen, there is nobody who actually cares, there is just another meaningless fear-driven solicitation for money.

 

 

Cream of Mushroom Soup & Grilled Cheese with Sauteed Onions and Peppers

Posted on by
Reply

Oh, oh my God. First I started with Pressure Luck’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and then put the spurs to a small pile of onions and green peppers, then slipped them into grilled cheese with Meunster cheese, which is my favorite.

Some adjustments I made to the soup was double the Sherry, double the Garlic, ramped up the Thyme to 1 tbsp, and used Chicken Stock instead of the BTB Mushroom Base. I think the BTB would have rocked it, but I think 5 cups is too much, so next time I’ll go with 4 cups, instead.

Such a delightful dinner! The instant pot only took five minutes to bring it all together. Bravo!

Favorite Things

Posted on by
Reply

As I grow older I find simple pleasures sometimes have a resonance that I previously discounted. The younger me never thought very much about hobbies, pursuits, and things I could do all by myself as being worthy. But then age started to creep up on me, I’m 43 years old now, soon to be 44 years old.

The things I enjoy now fill me with a certain considerable thrill. I’m taking care of myself. I call it self-care and it’s very good for me. It also fills me with a twinge of regret, that I didn’t pursue this when I was younger. The past is window dressing and set design, so we don’t spend any time or energy on it. You cannot change the past, you can just forget it. A funny touch of irony is that as you frequently access memories, you damage them, so a painful memory left in the dark and never recalled is fresh, while a memory that is replayed and remembered has more resemblance to Frankenstein’s Monster than a real memory. Each time you dig up the past, you start stapling new things to it. Funny that the way to destroy the past is to pick it up, drop it, and pick it up again. Recall it, frequently. You can enhance this effect by starting to drag creativity into it as well. Perhaps an awkward conversation was awkward because you were wearing clown shoes? Maybe. Over time, the doubt that they weren’t clown shoes erodes and you’ve turned your painful memory into an absurdity. In the end, there is less and less emotional resonance with absurdity and the memory dies. Getting back to the present is the key, in fact, it’s only in the present that you can really live. The future won’t happen the way you think it will, the universe is perverse in that manner.

The things I enjoy now are taking care of myself. Being possessive of my time, what I spend it on, and selecting people in my life that are important. Important for me to be in their lives, or them to be in mine. All of life is an elaborate script, with people dancing on stage, cavorting for a time, and then dancing off, exeunt stage left, pursued by a bear. I’ve recently come into new projects, and one of them is growing this beard. It’s a feature, it’s a project, it’s a hobby. I never thought I would do this again, the hair coming in super curly and having to put up with the commentary on my appearance. Perhaps age has led me to a kinder growth pattern, or perhaps it is hormonal, as I age. But I am truly and madly enjoying the feeling of having it, and the occupation of caring for it. Nothing quite like enjoying a thuroughly strenuous workout, getting squeaky clean afterwards, and then sitting back with a glass of fine bourbon on the rocks while I slowly work beard oil in with my boars hair brush. Twinges of itch fading as the oil moisturizes both my skin and my new facial feature. What used to be wiry and chaotic is now soft and orderly. I haven’t found the silver bullet that does it all for me, but I have found many excellent efforts. These options have created a new pursuit, a new hobby. Every day it’s something new, different combinations of balms and oils, and if you get close enough, you might catch a scent that already has gotten compliments. I think that it might be one of the most unexpected parts of this entire thing, patently that nobody really bats an eye at me with such a prominent feature now, but that they comment on the scent without really understanding what it is. They enjoy it, and that makes me chuckle with satisfaction.

The older I get, the more I wish I had started sooner. I suppose the only real advice I could give anyone who was seeking it would be an appeal to the Golden Rule, and to start as young as you can with jealous levels of self-care. Nobody really will care for you as much as you will care for yourself. Find things that put a bounce in your step, make you look forward to the mornings, the afternoons, and your evenings. Things that don’t involve other people to play the part of gatekeeper, but within yourself be the gateless gate. Don’t seek happiness from without, but rather assert happiness from within and kindle the flames as best you can with your own efforts. We all have firewood, metaphorically speaking, and many of us have a rain-soaked woodpile that refuses to burn. You can’t really start a fire even with kindling unless you spend a lot of time either holding the flame to the wood or drying it out. The only way to dry your kindling is by keeping it covered and letting the air get to it. In this metaphor, life only gives you what you can handle, when your woodpile or your kindling is nice and dry.

The ice is nearly gone, the bourbon is nearly out and there is little more the brush can do other than scratch the itching that growth like I have sometimes brings about. Find something you love, cultivate it, and respect life for what it was always meant to be, to quote Brandon Sanderson in his Stormlight Archive books, one of the most fundamental ideals is Journey before Destination. Spend a while with that little phrase, see where it takes you.

Cisco AMP for Endpoints

Posted on by
Reply

Several months ago we bought into Cisco AMP for Endpoints. There was a lot of work right after that, so we set up the management account and put it aside. Months later, I felt a little awkward about it, so I thought I would devote my April to Cisco AMP for Endpoints.

I just uncorked my AMP for Endpoints account, for this post and going forward, when I write AMP, I mean Cisco AMP for Endpoints, because it’s a mouthful. AMP itself seemed forbidding and difficult, but then once I started working with the site, configuration wasn’t that bad. I decided to test AMP in my environment by starting a “Factory Fresh” copy of Windows 7 32-bit in VirtualBox on my Mac, with 4GB of RAM assigned to it. A standard humdrum little workstation model.

I downloaded a bunch of starter packs, including the “Audit” model, the weakest of them all. I installed it on the workstation and the site responded well enough, noticing the install. As I was working with the system, I noticed that AMP complained that the definitions were out of date on the client, so I went hunting for a “definition update” function. There isn’t anything the user can trigger, you have to wait for it. Oh, that’s not good.

So then I had AMP on the test machine and I thought I would try to infect it. So I found a copy of EICAR, which is a sample file that all these technologies are supposed to detect and find hazardous. Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP) sees EICAR well enough, and really gets upset by it, immediately stuffing it into Quarantine and sending an alert. AMP also detected EICAR and because it was in Audit mode, just sat on its hands. Which I expected.

So then I found a bunch of sample malware files on a testing website, because while EICAR is useful for basic testing, it’s as relevatory as a knee-jerk reflex. It’s nice to know there is a reflex, but it’s not the same as an actual malware infection. I opened the ZIP file, typed in the password and all these malware samples came spilling out into the downloads directory. So, a workstation that is quickly becoming filthy. That’s my use-case for AMP.

So after “infecting” the computer with the files, and the tamest model, which is just to have them in a folder, I went to AMP and told it to switch the model on the test machine from Audit to Triage. That took almost twenty minutes! Are you for real on this, Cisco? Twenty minutes!!!

So I knew what I had on this workstation, but I pretended that I was the admin on the other side, with an unknown workstation connected, reclassified with Triage and waiting. I knew that the computer was infected, and as the admin, “not knowing what is going on” with the endpoint, I sent a scan command. This is the worst case scenario.

On the AMP side, I didn’t see anything at all. I panicked around looking for any hint that the AMP system recognized my scan request, and so I sent five more scan requests. Obviously, one scan request should have done it, but I wanted to make sure that I worked around even an imaginary screw-up in Cisco over scanning. Nothing. Workstation just plotzing along, infected files just sitting right there in the Downloads folder, just waiting for double-clicking end-user to make a tame infection a wild one.

Obviously this is the worlds worst scenario, one were SEP somehow is gone, not installed, or somehow lost its marbles, leaving AMP on its own to run defense. Scan! Scan! Scan! — Nothing at all. AMP just sits there just merrily SITTING THERE. Like shaking a coma patient, is very much what it felt like.

So then I started with the Help feature, request help, okay, I knew how this would go. This would lead to TAC. God help me. Cisco’s system didn’t know what AMP was, hahahahaha of course not. But there was a chat system in a teeny tiny little button, so I tried that. Someone! Hallelujah! They found my contract and linked it up, and started a case for me. When I went back to the test system, AMP had done it’s work. FINALLY. It only took twenty minutes! A lot can happen in twenty minutes. How many files could have been ransomware-encrypted in those twenty minutes?

So now I await a response from Cisco TAC. During the chat I declined the entire phone call angle since Cisco TAC people cannot speak English, or at least, I cannot understand their speech. So I told them that I would only communicate over email. So lets see what TAC has to say. We spent a lot of money on this, so obviously I’ll likely deploy it, but man, I am sorely disappointed in a system where every second counts. On reflection, Cisco AMP for Endpoints was probably a mistake.

Pete Buttigieg Donation

Posted on by
Reply

Everytime I see Pete Buttigieg or hear him speak I am overwhelmed with awe and respect. He isn’t spending time listening for reply, there is no wool gathering, and he isn’t lying.

He may be a longshot, but so was Obama, and he won. So I plunked down $25 for Pete Buttigieg through actblue.com. I have also decided who I want to win the Democratic primary and the presidency of the United States.

Who does he pick for VP? Beto O’Rourke, Elizabeth Warren, or even Joseph Biden. That’s his decision in the end, but anyone in that set would do very well.

Nowhere To Go

Posted on by
Reply

I sat at home, looking outside the big picture window as tiny flakes of snow fell from the slate sky and thought about my day. Where to go? To go? Lunch? Where?

Then I got over it. There is nowhere to go. There are no destinations out there where I could find anything that I want. What I want is lost to the past. Again I find myself fondly recalling “The Spot” coffeehouse in Buffalo. It was immense, comfy couches and chairs, and a central ebony bar where you could order any beverage as long as it was tea or coffee based. That’s where I want to go. So of to Yelp to see what is available locally.

Give me a break. Everything is either in run down factory space, which means derelict paper plant shipping skids repurposed into shops, with benches and uncomfortable seating arrangements, with expensive blown out menus — or a chain. Chains serve a purpose but they are not, and never will be, destinations. They are locations of opportunity.

So, lunch at home. Entertainment at home. Everything is here, why would I leave? So I’m all dressed up and have nowhere to go. And the key is to make peace with that. To make peace with the inaccessible past. To let it go and accept the boring and dull crapscape before me.

Thank goodness I can cook for myself! I’d be lost otherwise. The only reason to leave will be to fetch Scott at 5pm. That’s it.

Dinner Designs

Posted on by
Reply

Tonight we shall have Colcannon for dinner. I can’t believe that it took me this long to discover such a fundamental Irish dish!

This will give me lunches for the entire week. Also used up two gnarly segments of cabbage (with the oxidized parts cut away), and put another dent in the porkbellies that I froze weeks ago.

Enjoying a rather strong Bloody Mary as well.