One year ago today: November 12, 2019, let’s not quibble.
Five years ago today: November 12, 2015, my immigration policy.
Nine years ago today: November 12, 2011, my resistor chart, WIP.
Random years ago today: November 12, 2012, dating club, my eye.
As my visit draws to an end, so does my year. The business requirements are done, now for the rest, which involves revamping the budget to match the new realities. Such as I need a new vehicle. This unplanned back and forth wore things out. It’s cold again, I found a new place to walk the doggies. It must be a local party bush, if you don’t know what that is, you’ve never lived in Montana. Some semi-creative type spray painted these trees with luminescent blue, probaby a Halloween thing.
That doesn’t stop the newsfeeds. TechBeacon, a bit-player with an okay record published an article that parrots this blog on Berners-Lee and his new plan. Call PODS for Personal On-Line Data Stores, I don’t see it working out unless they pull the plug and start over. The Internet is not the free exchange of information he planned for and I’ll grant he could never have foreseen the evil empires of Facebook and Google. For that matter, other than this blog, few people recognized the danger. Tim, Tim, what universe are you living on.
Far be it from me to not offer a solution if I have one. Here goes. The only thing now that will control the abuse of private information is the death penalty. That won’t stop it entirely, nothing will, but it would be a first start. There won’t be many repeat offenders. And after a certain deadline, anybody caught trading in such data, death to them and their immediate families. It will never happen, but it is a solution. For the record, this system would only result in one death. After that, things will improve markedly. Hopefully that would occur to a millennial near Redmond, so everybody could go through the motions, but nobody would really care. Aw, that’s mean. Yeah, well what would you call Windows Vista?
Cumberland barge traffic.
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In other news, they say the first domino has fallen on the loony left. One serious flaw in the dirty Democrat vote fraud is they need to know which areas the race is the closest. They need to know where and when to truck in the bogus ballots. One such state was Pennsylvania with 20 electoral votes, enough to swing the election to either candidate. Big media is embarrassing itself ignoring the overwhelming amount of fraud. In this case it was at the highest level. Before we continue, take a mouth-watering look at this vegetable display over at Whole Foods. I don’t have any other pics for you just now.
Funny as all this seems to some, this is a show that can only happen in a country free enough to present the bad guys such an opportunity. The Democrats have been doing this for years, but back then both parties were the same, so people grew complacent. There is a principle that freedom cannot thrive without vigilance and that’s what happened. People knew there were funny things going on at the polling stations, but nobody cared. To the Democrats, stealing elections became standard operating procedure.
ADDENDUM
HP, worst printer company imaginable. With the possible exception of Canon, all brands are crap. But HP gets the lowest score 90% of the time, the other 10% is Epson. My dislike of HP goes back to their rip-off printer cartridge policy. There is a reason nobody repairs HP printers. I’ve also noticed people that still buy them have a common set of personality quirks, including a millennialized brain set. No, I’m not kidding. I’ll touch on that for a moment. You see, the millennials have devised a system where nobody is to blame, every act undertaken has built-in deniability, and they seem incapable of inventing anything really new.
That is only pthe surface. The real issue is they lack an understanding that once they go that route, they become the victim of every other millennial pulling the same stunt. Read that back to me. Top of that list is the way they continually pare away and skimp on existing products. You pay for the software but it isn’t really yours. Cancel your Facebook account and the games you bought won’t play. Buy a product and it won’t work without a service contract. You get the picture. So it is with that in mind I get a laugh when a millennial has a problem.
The reason is I watched them lead each other down the garden path, ignoring all advice except from each other. When something goes wrong, the best they can do is prove how incompetent they are, for them a discovery process. I learned long ago a millennial “power user” knows little more than how to switch his notebook on in the morning. The people who buy smart phones use them for little more than watching movies, logging on the useless webinars, and otherwise using it as a dumb phone. Ask one of them who’s had a smart phone for years about an advanced feature and you get that stunned ape look.
Then they remember all they’ve been trained to do is look things up. They want you to standby while they play around, never admitting they don’t know the answer. It’s part of their 15,000 hour indoctrination course called “public education”. They cannot grasp that looking something up is not the same as knowing it. It’s amazing to see NASA techs who don’t know what square roots are but all reach for their calculators.
So, let me tell you about the HP printer. The neighbor’s unit won’t print, would I take a look at it? Sure, I need the laugh. I maybe told you about this, at the robot club there are two things you cannot say at the meetings. I’ll tell you only one of them. When somebody criticizes a stupid product or process, you cannot say, “Yeah, but the guy who invented it made X amount of money.”
We have an unprintable term for people who say such things. The moment I walked in the room, I saw the whole setup was some kind of joke, business-wise. I’ll give you the quick version. First, I would not remove the ink cartridges. Because the printer was set up over a carpeted floor. The owner had no idea of which OS she uses, no clue what drivers, what to install, what to uninstall. Neat, a business person who does not know how to troubleshoot her own office equipment. The error message kept saying there was a problem with the printer or ink system, like we did not know that already, HP.
At the computer shop, we woud just junk HP printers as unrepairable. Worst are the all-in-one contraptions. They are manufactured so if anything goes wrong with any of the two to four print cartridges, you cannot use the whole machine. No scanner, no copier, nothing. And this error message could not be cleared, only a message to contact HP. Which after one year, if you “registered” your unit, there is no product support. No wonder the EU is getting pissed off at the way Yankees do business these days.
Next, I went on-line. It came as no surprise that in the entire 254 page user manual for this HP printer, there was zero mention of that error message. Nor did the message appear on a regular search. Then I found a single how-to site, only to discover it was one of those arsehole millennial low-effort videos that has no sound track except some dipshit indie troll thumping. I removed the entire cartridge assembly. The video showed two screws, this unit had four. It gets worse.
They were two different hex wrench sizes. One set came out with a standard size Allen, the other set, no way. This involved an expensive trip up to Wal*mart for a metric set, only to discover the screws were non-standard, an in-between size they do not make corresponding to a 7/64ths inch. Wait, there’s more. I forgot to say how the printer was in a dark corner of the room with no lights. Does she have a flashlight? Yes, but it has no batteries. Is there a lamp anywhere in the house we can use? Yes, but the cord is too short. Can’t we unplug the other device? No, inot even for five minutes to pull the printer out. The plug runs a remote ringer and her mother might call.
This folks, is why I don’t do customer service. They never want to pay for the aggravation they cause themselves. There’s much more wrong with the system over there, but I’ve told you more than enough to decide. I wanted to log on to the HP site, but she “doesn’t like” other people touching her computer. She’ll do it, just give her instructions. So I asked her to bring up the control panel and she’s like, “What’s that?”
At this point, I say call me when you need my help. It’s a habit from the old shop. I fix computers for $20 per hour. I teach computers for $30 per hour. Doing both together is $40 per hour. Take your pick. This, peeps, is why the repairman really takes things back to the shop.
