Not A Chew Toy!

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I’ve been struggling on and off for a while now with my old MacBook Pro MagSafe 2 85W adapter. A while ago, Bailey, my male feline decided that the power cable from the block to the magnetic adapter would be a great thing to nibble on. I know it was a cat, because the insulator had sharp little teeth marks all along it, and I know it was Bailey because he has killed Apple EarBud cables in the past.

The cable for my MacBook has been a source of irritation for a while. My electrical tape patch apparently wasn’t enough to restore the accessory to full working state. There are times when I plug it in and no charging, or if I can get it to charge, sometimes when I move the Macbook the power subsystem detects something awful and immediately terminates the power in the laptop. Power failures like this are annoying because everything pops off, no shutdown, just instant-off. So earlier today I went out, ponied up some more money to deal with the Bailey damage, about $60 bucks after some Best Buy Bucks were on my account that I used to defray the cost a little bit.

So now I keep a constant vigil against cat related IT damage. While I was away in Dallas for work, the adapter started giving me fits there, but I was able to coax it back to life, and it didn’t cause any hard resets for which I am very thankful. So now I have to throw the old one away and make sure there aren’t any more chewing misadventures for this cable.

I got to thinking about how I charge the laptop at night, and what I might do is plug the bigger cord into the business end of the wall wart and put everything in my backpack to charge up. That way it’s all out of sight, out of mind.

Very Naughty Kitties!

Kalamazoo #NeverAgain March

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Today we drove up to Western Michigan University and joined the community in the anti-NRA #NeverAgain March from the flagpoles on campus to Bronson Park.

It was surreal to park on that campus again. We walked up to the flagpoles and the crowd was quite well organized and burgeoning. Several schoolkids were there with the event organizers to speak to the crowd and offer their viewpoints and context to what we were about to accomplish. Here’s a sample of what we saw:

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The group was peaceful and orderly, there was no violence and no exclamations. As we walked away from the flagpoles, and down past the entry to Sangren Hall on Western’s campus, that was the only point that I noticed any counter-protestors. There was supposedly going to be counter-protestors from the local Open Carry group, but Western’s Public Service does not allow open carry on University grounds, so the only counter-protestors we saw were some people with signs. There were very many of us and maybe a handful of the counter protestors.

The event organizers helped a lot by telling all of us that counter-protestors were expected and that the best way to interact with them is to not interact at all. This was an exercise of First Amendment Rights on both sides, the teeming horde of us in the #NeverAgain march, and the handful of counter-protestors. Nobody that I saw made contact, there were some glances, but nothing overt that I witnessed. The march downtown was met with lots of honking horns from the rerouted traffic. The police were kind, principally silent, and really to keep watch around the edges and to handle traffic. We came into contact with one police officer who was attempting a charm offensive, he thanked us for our orderly civic display and we thanked him for traffic control and keeping watch over us all.

The march itself was very pleasant. There wasn’t anything remotely provocative about any of the progression down to the central park downtown. There were no accidents that I saw, no foolishness from anyone, and we all demonstrated our political viewpoints in a very calm, exceptionally orderly manner.

Afterwards, when the words were said and the kids had their moment to shine, the march broke up and everyone drifted away. We ended up going to Kelvin & Company for a snack because we really wanted a break from the chilly wind and all that walking. After our little stop, we dropped by another new store on the Kalamazoo Walking Mall, RocketFizz. We enjoyed some Special Dark Hersheys Chocolate Bars and I bought a bottle of butterscotch root beer from a bottler in Washington State, Oh-So brand, I think. The walk back was long, and upon reflection if we had stashed the Juke somewhere downtown we probably would have had a faster way to get back to campus. Political marches aren’t very common, so that we missed out on a logistical tip wasn’t so awful. We got in a lot of walking steps on our Fitbits, at least.

Meijers is a Dump

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We are at our local Meijers Market and this establishment doesn’t have any functioning bathrooms for male patrons. So, with no choice and urinating outside of a bathroom a misdemeanor, I just walked right into the out of order bathroom. Because, public health huh? They have a restaurant here, so I’m pretty sure they have to have a functioning bathroom.

Heh, technically I could have just used the sink.

This place is a dump. Now it’s unfit for serving and selling food. One question: where do employees go? How do they wash their hands? Heh, where oh where is the health department?

Phrasing!

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Having lunch at a local establishment and there is a chalkboard with the menu drawn on it. It’s really quite well done and we both enjoy this place.

Then we saw this, and it stuck me in a funny way:

And the only thing I could think of was “Oh my God! They feed the pigs vegetarians!”

It’s fitting, hilarious, and I don’t think I could ever unsee this.

And then it struck me that if I shared this on Facebook I’d get blowback for suggesting that we feed vegetarians to pigs. Thankfully this is not Facebook, and the comment section is not a free for all. It isn’t even a democracy, not fair, even.

Crocodile Apologies

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The media is starting to process the Cambridge Analytica misuse of Facebook data, and the story is only just getting some legs underneath it now. I see this as a reflective surface of the panic that we all felt back in November 2016, digging all that psychic turbulence back up again.

I want to focus more on Facebook itself. There have been several instances where Facebook has declared innocence publicly up until proof found, usually by journalists or investigators, and then when the truth comes out, Facebook stops, pauses, and issues an apology for their transgressions or mistakes. This reactivity is for me what lies at the core of my misgivings about the Facebook platform, and Facebook as a company.

In my opinion, it appears that Facebook is only chastened and contrite when caught red-handed doing something improper. I cannot trust a platform or a company that behaves this way. I honestly admit that I never really expected Facebook even to want to try to be upright and wholesome, I wanted them to, but all of this is similar to the feeling that I had when Google walked away from its mission statement “Do No Evil.” Facebook cannot be trusted.

There is no shock or surprise that Facebook has no tapeworm function available, only two options exist, leave everything alone or blow it all to kingdom come. I know there is a third path, the manual deletion of everything in the Activity Stream, but over ten years and quite a regular amount of use that is utterly impractical. Plus, I expect Facebook to be both capable and invested in retaining my data even if I think I’ve deleted it. Just because it no longer exists on the interface to me doesn’t mean that it is gone. I doubt thoroughly that even deleted accounts get deleted. I would bet money that they get hidden from view. It would not be in Facebook’s self-interest to lose any data they can get their hands on. I would also not put it past Facebook to also log every keystroke that goes into the text boxes on their site, so even if you don’t post anything, I would bet that Facebook has a record of what you did type and that you abandoned it. That they could record and store your unshared thoughts, indexing, and selling them even if you didn’t share. Logging into the Facebook site itself is a personal hazard to privacy. I have no proof of this last part, but I would fully expect a company like Facebook to do this very thing.

There is little that quitting Facebook will accomplish, since human personalities are quite fixed and constant constructs. We maintain that iron grip of control and Facebook has monetized it, and now, since Cambridge Analytica, they have lost it. Pandoras Box is open.

So why stop using Facebook then? Facebook must be caught being evil, which means that the intent is a stain that runs right to the core. I’ve abandoned Facebook itself because continued use is tacit approval of their offensive behavior, and if it makes them money through advertising revenue, and I’m a part of that? That’s personally unacceptable.

Wayback Machine: March 22nd

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On a lark I thought I would go into my www.bear-writer Journal and see what I was up to on previous March 22nds. Here is a little view:

2017 – The Kalamazoo River was quite aromatic. Funny enough, it was aromatic today too, in 2018. There is a paper plant on the river and their effluent supposedly comes out at 150 degrees Fahrenheit. This cooks the vegetation in the river and then that releases various organic chemicals. The practical upshot is, the Kalamazoo River smells farty.

Cisco also released a gaggle of updates related to CVEs linked to a CIA release last year. Ah, cybersecurity.

2014 – An article about Marriage Equality. How quaint. I still maintain that such a thing goes nowhere because rights that people can vote away aren’t rights, they are privileges.

I also wrote about the little shower-thought epiphanies that strike randomly. That you were working on a problem for a long time and you stopped “thinking” about it, but you didn’t really. And then on a day, a fine March day, the solution comes plopping out of your subconscious, with a neat little red bow tied around it, ready to go. I had one for Western right before the end, but I whacked that idea with a shovel and buried it in a shallow grave. I apparently also had a similar idea for Meijers, since I was applying at Meijer corporate in Grand Rapids as well. As the Dalai Lama is famous for saying, “Sometimes you don’t get what you want, and sometimes that’s an incredible stroke of luck!”.

2013 – Returning from vacation, waiting for a flight in Charlotte, North Carolina.

It’s been a rather long while since I did a vertical memory exercise. Another hidden gem when it comes to my journaling.

Haiku Autosuggest: Keeley

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A while ago I was laughing about the sort of silly output that you can expect from Keyboard Autosuggest on iPhones when you give it a subject word to start with. This turned into a free-range idea and I left it alone for a while.

Several nights ago, awaking from a dream that I no longer recollect, it occurred to me quite all of a sudden that I could merge Keyboard Autosuggest with Haiku, the Japanese poetry of 5-7-5.

Obviously this is gobbledegook, but I suppose on some level it is rather funny.

Haiku Autosuggest: Keeley

Keeley thinks it will / take me about an hour more / than a week ago

Going West With Facebook

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Much like the elves in Tolkiens tales, sometimes the time is right to board the boats and head west. In this particular case, what to do with Facebook.

I’ve been using Facebook since July 2nd 2008. In the beginning it was wonderful, sharing and everyone seemed kinder, more conscientious, I suppose the world was better back then. Many people were looking for a new platform once LiveJournal collapsed, which if we are really serious about it, came when SixApart was sold to the Russians. Americans fled pretty much after that. And so, Facebook was a thing.

Mostly friends, it hadn’t taken off yet. Many of the later iterations that make Facebook the way it is today weren’t even thought up of back then, and in a lot of ways, it was better in the past. But then everyone started to join the service and we started to learn about the ramifications and consequences of using Facebook. I can remember that feeling of betrayal as Facebook posts were printed out and handed to my workplace management. That really was the first lesson in privacy and the beginning of the end of my involvement with Facebook.

Facebook has been on-again-off-again for a while. In time I realized that I was addicted to the service and the sharing. With enough time I realized that Facebook was actually fit more as a mental illness than an addiction. I had to stop it, because in a very big way, it was the service or my mental health.

So fleeing Facebook is the name of the game. First I downloaded all my content from the service, then I started to move the saved links from Facebook to Pocket for safekeeping. Then I went through and started hacking away at groups, pages, and apps. All of these tasks will be long-tailed, they’ll take a while for me to polish off because Facebooks tentacles run very deep, and in a rather surprising way, just how deep they actually go is remarkable.

So now I’m looking at writing more and sharing more from my Blog. This post is kind of a waypoint to this end. I installed a new theme with some new images featured, and the next step is to figure out a “Members Only” area where I can separate out the public from my friends. There are some items that I intend to write about that use specific names and I don’t want to play the pronoun game with my readers. I also don’t want hurt feelings or C&D notices, both of which some of my writing has created in the past.

I will detail my journey with disposing of Facebook here on this blog. I have eliminated publicity to Twitter and Facebook, but I left G+ on, because G+ is a desert.

So, here we go!