Politics and The Muse

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Today was a rather good day for writing about politics. Sometimes my best creative writing happens while I’m in a conversation with friends and family. 

In this post, and the posts to come I share some of the writing. It’s somewhat stilted because there is an edited-out other, that was done to protect their privacy and identity. 

Before you continue to read, as a kind of trigger warning it is relevant to state that I am profoundly left of center. If you have tribal triggers or you are a troll, this is where you are invited to stop reading right now. As this is my blog, my space, my little corner of existence I do not have to guarantee anyone adherence to their First Amendment rights, this is my soapbox. I invite you to get your own. Obnoxious comments will be eliminated without consideration. Now you know the rules of the road…

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The First Purge

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The First Purge was an ok movie, kind of blunt and chunky. The plot was a ice-cream truck, you could hear its sing-song tune from miles away.
 
Pretty spot on themes, like ripped from the headline themes. America post Nero the Pigfucker, circling the drain, and what comes of that. Funny how they got a doughy-faced actor who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tucker Carlson to play the role of the political slimeball.
 
There is a bit of a conversation piece to the movie as well, a showcase for what could be a natural consequence/sink for trickle-down economics. Beyond all the gunplay and stabbing, it ties off trickle-down economics with a possible solution, especially trickle-down with the current seasoning of kleptocracy that we have now.
 
Reverse Robin Hood, steal from the poor, give to the rich, while the discontent grows in the poor class, they are too uneducated and dim to understand where their anger should be directed, so it just floats about like an aimless fog. Then you have the premise of Purge Culture thrown on top, an ignition and a tacit approval of lawlessness for one night. It’s almost downright poetic, after trickle-down economics strangles the economy and creates an immense sea of angry poor people, the 99%, encourage them to kill each other in one night of Purge.
 
The movie franchise itself doesn’t really stab at this, it only hints at it. Much like a lot of other things in our world, folk don’t really think it is that bad, because how could it? That’s not what America is. Until you trip and fall off the edge and catch glimpses that not only is it as bad as you feared, but it is much worse and much more pervasive and inescapable. In some ways, we are actually already past the drain-hole and heading down the pipe, we just don’t really get it yet.
 
With these movies, the culture is expressing this novelty, so it is a part of our common cultural discourse now. The media plays for us like a magic mirror, showing us aspects of ourselves in many different ways. You can see it in movies, like this franchise, as well as in popular news media with the monomaniacal passion for equal time and balance. There is good and bad in every story, good and bad with everyone, and a heaping pile of bad requires at least lip-service to something good, even  if it must be ginned up to get it over the hurdle.
I don’t really think we’ll ever have a purge culture, but it is fascinating to watch the magic mirror play this out for us as it does.

FreeBSD 11.1

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Every few months I take a little time out and evaluate the GPL/BSD Linux(y) space for readiness and usability. Always these operating systems prove themselves out quite handily for their indigenous niche, which is behind the scenes and in server rooms.

I like to evaluate systems like these to see if they’ll ever be ready for a breakout performance on the much more visible stage of front-room existence.

I start with VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro. I provide every VM about 4GB of RAM, about 40GB  of storage, and the understanding of what installation on a limited medium like this means for any OS. I won’t be pulling punches about raw performance, because in a VM, performance is not a priority. I evaluate these systems with the idea of “Mr. Average User” in my mind. How can “Mr. Average User” carry on with whatever I review?

Starting with FreeBSD 11.1, the installer was textual which was perfectly fine if a little low-brow. Most users are much more comfortable with pretty graphical installers right from the beginning. One oddity was that the FreeBSD boot manager did not detect the installation media and make the right choice to boot to the VM’s Virtual HD after primary installation was successful. I had to halt the system, remove the installation media, and start it again. Honestly if you were looking at a physical computer, the end user would likely remove the installation media from the USB port or DVD drive anyways, so this isn’t a problem. It does bear that Linux handles this much more elegantly.

The base system installs with CLI entry only. There is no GUI option, you have to resort to Google to get to that point. The command is fine, however getting into root if you don’t know how to by using “su” from a default install doesn’t work, your end-user account isn’t defaulted into the sudoers file, this could have been eliminated if I had added the right group to the plain user account, like “sudoers”, however I am unsure if FreeBSD follows that convention or not. In any case, all of this immediately drops the user into Google-Fu. We’ve already lost the most basic users now, and we’re only carrying on with those that have some geek experience.

Getting to the GUI level is a rather involved process. The nature of BSD has always been couched in my experience as “You get the system you asked for explicitly, not the one you implicitly assumed you would get.” So an installation of X comes with the core system and twm, a zero-frills window manager. Also, there are basic commands that need to be added with using the pkg tool, like vim and screen, although that is a lot less of a problem since other Linux platforms also don’t include some of these packages as default throw-ins. You have to install X, then you have to install your special Window Manager choice, like gnome3 for example. The actual installation is hands-off, which is very good to see, but users must come to FreeBSD with the notion that you aren’t going to get a polished Ford Mustang with just one ask. You should expect a stripped out Ford Fiesta without doors, first, and then add on extra components until you build yourself up to a Mustang.

I was finally able to get a Gnome3 X-Windows system up and running, only had to Google a few items, like adding my standard user to the wheel group for access to the su command, and then adding sudo and configuring that, to make it easier to add more software. There wasn’t any software management system in Gnome3, but I didn’t really look that hard for one either. The pkg installation routine is easy to understand and works well, generally. The one issue I did notice was that the mouse was quite difficult to use, but I expect that there would be some issues where it was a VM and I was asking it to run a lot of stuff all at once.

I find myself frequently referring to a metaphor from HG Wells’ Time Machine book. There are Morlocks and Eloi, and how the two groups can mingle as a way to discuss how these operating systems can be used by the two different kinds of people. FreeBSD is very much a Morlock system. There is no way a Morlock could find its way into an elevator, pick the surface, and have afternoon tea with an Eloi in terms of FreeBSD. In an Eloi’s viewpoint, FreeBSD is a smooth black box that makes little rattling noises, but beyond that is almost totally inert and worthless.

As always, FreeBSD is best for deep back office tasks. It has a lot of technical greatness, from the ZFS file system to the Fortuna PRNG, but it is best left to the basement level for the Morlocks to use. It would make an excellent server, but a terrible workstation.

 

 

On The Domain?

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At work a funny question came up. Should we put an important user and their super slim executive-style laptop on the Windows Domain or just use a Local Account? There is really only one user who fits this bill, and so we’ll leave that obvious bit out because I don’t include names in any of my blog writing.

The question comes down to reliability. Can we trust that the Windows Domain account will always work? Eh, that’s the 64,000 dollar question, now isn’t it? The user cannot under any circumstances ever see “This laptop cannot form a trust relationship with the selected domain.” error that pops up rarely and irregularly around our Windows Domain.

Obviously the answer is, since it’s Microsoft, apply the KISS Principle. We keep it simple, we keep it a local account, because we simply cannot trust Microsoft at all. Maybe the domain will work, maybe it won’t. Maybe Kerberos will work, maybe it won’t. Right up there with the worthlessness of Windows Domain GPO’s, will they apply? Well, they appear to, but they do nothing in practice. In my experience GPO’s are a mixed bag at best, sometimes they work, like home drives and printers, but sometimes they just bellyflop. We don’t really do much with GPO’s because Microsoft’s technology is so hilariously poor. Roll out software through the Domain? Hah. Never works. Fiddle with settings on the Domain? Never works. Never ever ever works. GPO’s are essentially a crock of shit at best, and a waste of time at worst.

So, if you have a mission critical user on a computer, do you use a Windows Domain? Only if you like putting 2×4’s up against your legs and whacking your ankles with a sledgehammer. Yeah, that’s the level of suffering and agony that is Windows. We’ll skip it, thanks.

I will say, I did briefly consider calling Microsoft Technical Support once a long time ago when we were looking at GPO’s for something in the long ago. But you know, that’s not a serious offer either, and creates way more work and suffering than just skipping the entire thing and declaring that whatever it is simply cannot be done. Not that any requests have actually come in that way, our interest in GPO’s were purely in-department wonderings. One foray into them, they don’t work, spread gasoline on everything and light a match and let it all burn.

It’s been a long time since I wrote this bit, but it still holds true and will for the rest of time. Microsoft is the worst company on Earth and I regret every experience coming into contact with them. I only use their “technology” because I have no other choice. Microsoft rules a kingdom of shit. May they all die in a fire.

So no, we won’t be using a Domain Account.

Ysabel Progress

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Our new little kitten, Ysabel crashed hard-core and slept for six hours! When she woke up she was famished. I made a plate of food for her and she polished it off. Then she ran around the room like a crazy kitten and started to meow. Her incision looks perfect still, and the store on her tongue is progressively getting better and better. I think she has integrated in the flow of the house, next it’s to meet Bailey and Keeley. Step by step.

Cat’s Megamix

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I have a 25 hour long playlist on Spotify that is solely composed of Cat relaxation music. Currently it’s playing throughout the house and especially for felines, and also for their hapless human lap-warmers, the slowly paced lullabies and carefully composed music interspersed with isochronic beat patterns have chilled all felines right to unconsciousness. Instead of mobbing the door leading to Ysabel’s welcome room, they are on my lap, or near me, totally lounging, sleeping, and napping. Even the new kitten digs the music, and has likewise fallen asleep.

It may be wishful thinking, but this music seems to be having the same effect as Felidae does.

There is another note of kismet in all of this. The way we discovered Ysabel, just how free and easy all this has been so far. Right down to the right gadgets and the service and the music to bring it all together. It feels effortless, although I freely admit that this has only just started, but perhaps if I stay optimistic everything will follow suit and work out for the best.

This all assumes the music doesn’t put me out like it is the cats. Who thought it, music enhanced introductions. What a marvel!

Ysabel’s Room

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We’ve finally got Ysabel’s Room in order. I moved the bed to the library where the resident cats eat and hang out. It’s next to a big pair of windows, so that’ll work out for bird watching and relaxation. We set up the introduction crate with a kitten cavern and a poly pad cushion on the base of her crate. The crate is in the corner so she will feel maximally safe and protected.

Then we put one of the Google Homes in the room and set Spotify to play feline relaxation music in the background.

Ysabel will be ours at 3pm tomorrow, Friday 6/29/2018. We’ll go to KL Cat Hospital and then home.

Wish us all luck!

Keybase Redux

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The current ecosystem out there in the Internet is not one that wants for communication nor security. Not at least in options for either, but rather in the popularity contest between the oldest forms of communication on the Internet versus all these new ways of communicating out there. There are so many ways!

Email and web-based sites like Reddit and Facebook have all proven themselves over and over again, perhaps not quite as secure as any of us would hope, but in uniquity of use. Everyone had to get over the hump of everyone they knew having an email address or a Facebook account. Once the novelty wore off, the security headaches appeared. Most notably how difficult it is to get people to adopt basic security methods when dealing with email, the death and burial of PGP and GPG technologies rendering email plaintext for anyone to snoop on who might have access to do so.

Then the parade of other sorts of solutions exploded. Signal, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger exploded. People talking to each other, sometimes privately, sometimes not. Facebook ate a little bit of Signal, but so far I haven’t seen anyone actually use it to protect their chats.

Recently I have come across another app like this, called Confide. It brings forward a lot of the features that attract me to things like Signal and Telegram, the end-to-end security between chat partners without worrying about anyone in between eavesdropping. Confide also eliminates a huge privacy hole present in Snapchat, which is Confide appears to have eliminated the possibility of screen shotting the content of the message so it can break out. This obviously has limits, because you can very well take camera-based pictures of the Confide process and eliminate the screen-shot security, but it does push that envelope further out where people have to perform a lot of extra steps to be clever.

Signal was the first app that I saw that introduced exploding messages to this marketplace. Within the Signal app, and Confide as well I presume, you can set a lifetime counter to a message and after the timer has expired, the message is irretreivable.

There were other solutions that came along as well, more colaborative and team-based, like Slack and Discord, services that supplanted text messages like SMS and iMessage for me, especially at work. The further along I went, the more I realized that for a lot of these systems they unfortunately have two big things running against them, they are a change in how people communicate and change is one of the scariest things out there; the second thing is just how oddly resistant people are to actually collaborate. Quite often I am struck by the dial tone I get from folk when I attempt to explain why collaborative solutions like Google Docs and Slack/Discord are so amazing. So I pretty much make an elevator pitch and then let things lie where they land.

Enter Keybase. Originally the site appeared to be a central hub to link personal identity and personal avatars to PGP/GPG keypairs. I suppose you could affectionately regard it as trying to plug in Frankenstein’s Monster just to get a few more twitches out of the poor bastard. However just today, I received an email inviting me to check out Keybase again. They have teams, chat, files, and exploding bits that seem to mingle elements of Signal and Slack together.

What platform wins? Winning is population. When everyone collectively agrees that a solution is so good that it wins by sheer existence alone, that platform wins. Facebook tried it by manipulating human emotions and reward centers, and monetizing all our data that we wanted to share with each other. Right now the platform du jour is Facebook and the corruption of that system is starting to exact a toll on the people who use it. I have abandoned Facebook, and my life has improved. I don’t have the social reward mechanism in place any longer, but it has given me more time to read books and articles online and helped me become a happier person.

What then for these other applications and what they have to bring to the party? I have almost all of them, but use them all very sparingly. What is the point of a communications platform if you don’t know anybody who is using it? It’s the lesson learned by Google Plus in how it attempted to fight with Facebook. If the people aren’t there, then nobody is there. There is a reflection of this all the way back to the start of email as a communications mechanism. PGP/GPG was released back in the late 90’s, and because it didn’t take off, it spiraled out of control and went pear-shaped when it crashed to the surface.

Only time will tell, but from what I’ve seen of Keybase, I’m pleased and intrigued. However again, without anyone to actually use this platform with, it’s just another app that I don’t use on my phone or computer.

Ysabel Josephine

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Last week Scott approached me and mentioned that he saw an article online from the Kalamazoo Animal Rescue, a local no-kill animal shelter and fostering service that places cats and dogs with their new forever homes. The kitten he met was named Baby by her foster mother, and she was born on April 11th, 2018.

Scott met her first, then I met her afterwards in a second encounter. These photos cover that experience. After we did a lot of soul-searching and talking it out, we decided that we had room and heart enough for this new kitten to be a part of our lives. In these pictures, she was just washed and was cold and shivering. By the time we were done holding and cuddling with her, she was almost dry. The shivering gave way to some loud purring and she napped gently on both my chest and on Scotts.

She’s scheduled to be fixed tomorrow, and then after that we’ll take her home to live with us. As kittens go, she is incredibly sweet and even tempered. She’s been bottle fed by multiple humans, she has socialized with many other cats and kittens, dogs, goats, and pigs, so integrating with our two at home shouldn’t be too much of a problem for her. She is FELV and FIV negative, something that was important to make sure of before we could get any further. The link below will take you to the iCloud Photo Sharing site with her baby pictures.

https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B15GfnH8tGpb1UY

Welcome Home, Ysabel Josephine. We love you.