They Live … sleeping and obeying in 2017 even more than ever!

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I only stumbled across the cult classic They Live a few years ago, but for some reason I just instantly fell in love with its quirky/creepy take on an alien invasion slowly overtaking mankind.

That said, I almost feel kind of stupid in hindsight because I never really made the connection between alien invasion and class warfare, but after watching this short video featuring interviews with John Carpenter and some of the other folks involved … it’s like seeing for the first time!

Just sleep. Obey. Make America Great Again.

Hits a little too close for home, but it just goes to show you how film can both carry entertainment value and include some pretty deep social commentary at the same time. Almost makes me want to sit down and watch it again just to see how many more GOP warning signs were baked into this movie from 30 years ago… 😉

my computer rigs, 2017 edition

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It’s been a while since I’ve written a post like this, so between reading back through this random post about backups from three years ago that I stumbled across tonight as well as trying to blog more myself, here we are! 😉

My Primary Computer
Speaking of 2014, I’m still using the MacBook Air that I got for Christmas that year and I still absolutely love it. You couldn’t pay me enough money to switch back to Windows because I still have a laptop with Windows 7 on my desk for work and I hate it with a passion. I can’t tell you how many stupid errors and nonsensical slowdowns that I get with Windows that I just never see with my Mac.

Every once in a blue moon, I will occasionally see my MacBook crash hard, but it’s nothing compared to Windows!

Anyways, I still run Microsoft Office for Word and Excel because I’m just too used to them and I don’t care for the Google or Mac alternatives. Also, I’m a big fan of OneDrive that comes with my Office 365 subscription because it serves so many functions for really no extra cost:

  • Backing up a copy of all of my documents and photos to the cloud.
  • Transferring photos from my iPhone, my wife’s iPhone, and also her iPad to one location for backups via the iOS app.
  • Allowing me to access random files from my desktop via my iPhone.

The subscription I use is something like $69/year via Amazon and gives me 5 licenses, meaning I’ve got plenty for expansion to throw a copy on the wife’s iPad or on a computer of her own if/when we get her one. Add in the 1 TB of OneDrive storage and that’s one less feature I have to pay for elsewhere.

That said, for actual backups I’m also using CrashPlan which is $14/month and is cool because it facilitates backups to the cloud and to other locations; plus they’re one of the only ones I found that have a Linux app, so I’ve got desktop backups both going to CrashPlan as well as to a drive on my home server, and critical files (Plex library data, mostly) from the server goes up to CrashPlan as well.

Lastly, I continue to pay for a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud … mostly for access to Photoshop, which is overkill because I only use it for resizing photos and contrast adjustments, but I figure I owe them for all of the years that I used a pirated copy anyways! Actually, I also use the old Macromedia Fireworks through Creative Cloud, which is technically defunct but still there, as well as Acrobat Pro just because why not – I’m paying for it anyways…

Oh yes, and I just recently in the last week started using LastPass for password management and I feel really stupid for going so long without trying it because it seems to work really well. 😛

My Phone
Real quick – iPhone 6 … notable apps are OneDrive and the WordPress app, which I use more than anything else for working with my sites these days.

I pay Apple the $0.99/month for 50 GB of cloud storage just so that there’s enough room to backup my phone in full because I’ve had to restore a couple of times and iCloud makes the process pretty painless.

My Home Server
This was setup sometime in spring of 2015 on the old hardware I was using for my Windows desktop … a quad-core something or other that still works for streaming Plex around the house as intended, though transcoding can sometimes be an issue. Its only functions are file server and media server, so the box itself was long-since relocated to a closet because hard drives are noisy.

I think there’s something like 28 TB of disk space currently – almost entirely TV and movies – and realistically it’s about ready for another disk, but I’m not sure if the power supply can handle one more!

Eventually I want to replace this with a rack-mount server and separate NAS, but the hardware I’ve picked out is really expensive… 🙁

Operating system is CentOS because it’s what my web host runs and I’m most familiar with it. Internet connection is a 150 Mbps FiOS line from Frontier (was Verizon) that is about the max of what the server hardware can make use of anyways … kinda hoping that by the time I can afford to switch to a rack, their 300 Mbps package will have dropped in price a bit!

My Web Server(s)
I’ve hosted with InterServer up in New Jersey now for something like 15 years … 2002-ish, maybe? … and they’ve been nothing but great to me the entire ride. Right now I technically have two VPSes with them because I’m migrating to a newer OS, but everything is basically CentOS + PHP 7 + MySQL + WordPress and it works just fine for me.

The web stuff almost warrants its own post beyond that, but I’ve been in the process of consolidating my various sites down into a couple of WordPress multisite installations because I’ve found that they’re way easier to manage. The biggest install is the one where this blog and its subdomains (Thing-a-Day, Thoughts) currently live, and so I’m experimenting with ways to speed everything up using Varnish, caching options, etc… before migrating the rest.

I’m also using the Akismet and VaultPress options through WordPress Jetpack for spam filtering, WordPress backups, and malware monitoring on top of the server instance backups that InterServer also does for me.

My domains are all registered through Google Domains because, well, fuck GoDaddy and their convoluted pricing games.

Did I miss anything?! I hope not because I’m honestly really happy with my current setup – it’s fun, but in no way overbearing to maintain and more importantly, it just works so I can spend less time writing and doing what I need to do and less time fighting stupid Windows errors that are only solved by a mysterious reboot and a pair of crossed fingers!

retro thoughts … Life Force (NES)

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This game was probably one of my favorite space shooters growing up.

I believe I was introduced to it by my cousin Jamie who’s 10 years older than me, so it was a bit of a turn from the Super Mario Bros and Legend of Zelda that I cut my teeth on back in 1988 when Nintendo first became a fixture in my young, eight year-old heart! But I loved all of the different power-ups and the Konami code made it a little easier to stumble through a good portion of the game even when you were just starting to learn the controls…

Some thirty years later, it’s still definitely a challenge … or maybe my reflexes just aren’t what they used to be … as I picked up the controller today at random and only got as far as level 3, which I always hated because the fire blasts were next to impossible to avoid! It was also hard for me to really enjoy the power-ups because it felt like I was constantly losing them 15 seconds after I’d gotten them to the point where eventually I just spent them all on speed boosters instead of even trying for the lasers and options like I normally would.

But I do kind of like how, similar to Contra, Konami alternated the perspective between horizontal and vertical scrolling and it adds a fun bit of variety to the game despite only having six levels total. Frankly, it’s quick gameplay is another bonus because today when I sat down to play, I really only had about 10 minutes while I was waiting for something else, so I was able to get in a quick game of Life Force … and make it to level 3 before dying … in a nice, short amount of time!

Playing this game makes me want to hunt down the other games in the Gradius series because I honestly never played any of them except for this one growing up, even though I did gawk at the screenshots of Gradius III in Nintendo Power. If all of the games followed the same basic structure as Life Force did, they should be a lot of fun. 🙂

A few final thoughts about United’s Customer Service Kerfuffle…

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Last week I wrote a fairly extensive editorial on my thoughts about United dragging Dr. David Dao off one of their flights from a human rights & basic dignity standpoint, however after reading some comments on Facebook today, I’d like to touch on what I’m going to call the customer service side of this whole mess.

The comments in question were a post by Mike Rowe – a guy whose thoughts I enjoy reading, though I happen to disagree with part of what he said this time. The gist of it being concern that in the fourth or fifth apology from United CEO Oscar Munoz, they’ve essentially made it ok for customers to ignore when the crew of an airplane tells them to do something…

“But in the process of finding him blameless, he suggested that millions of passengers are under no obligation to follow a direct command from United employees. And that’s a hell of a lot more disturbing than a beat-down in the main cabin.”

Mike goes on to say that we don’t have a right to fly because we can always be removed for being beligerant or too big to fit in one seat or whatever reason the airline decides to use … and for most of those scenarios I would agree. If you’re drunk or disruptive, then sure – off you go. If you’re lucky, maybe they’ll even land the plane before kicking you out the door, but it’s that any reason deemed necessary where I take some exception because remember here that in this particular case, Dr. Dao was assaulted because United needed his seat to fly their own employees to another airport for work the next day.

And I don’t think that’s right.

Yes, I get that airlines run on thin margins, and that they overbook because there’s an average number of people who don’t show up for their flights as scheduled and the airline doesn’t make any money if those seats otherwise fly empty, but just like those United employees had someplace to be, so did their customer … their paying customer, and in accordance with taking his money in exchange for a plane ticket, it’s the airline’s responsibility to transport him to his destination as agreed.

And sure, it’s true that in its 47-page Contract of Carriage, United reserves its right to deny boarding to any customer it wants if nobody else volunteers when they end up on the inconvenient side of this overbooking teeter totter that they play … but does that make it right???

Those four employees had to get to work the next day to ensure that United’s planes were able to fly on schedule.

But so did the doctor who had patients to see the next day.

Just as overbooking is a relatively common thing in the airline industry, so is employees transferring from one airport to another – the idea that they don’t have a better handle on this issue and that it results in kicking paying customers off of their flights is the real travesty here!

So to Mike’s comment citing that we need order on our airplanes because they’re not democracies, they’re a place to follow orders, I would challenge that it’s the airlines who should lead this responsibility by providing stellar customer service, not the passengers who need to suck it up and accept whatever treatment they’re given because everyone has places to go and flight attendants have a thankless job.

In any other industry, if a business took a customer’s money and then refused to give them the service that they’d purchased, they’d face a day in court because that’s the entire reason said relationship exists between business and consumer … but because of the perceived safety concern, air travel has become an industry where consumers are left little to no actual protections after the airlines and the TSA have taken their own liberties from passengers just trying to travel in their own country and pay good money for the trip.

Last week we watched a guy get beaten because he didn’t want to leave the plane that he was scheduled to fly.

If I sell milk for a living and I sell you a gallon of milk, I can’t just show up at your house later on that evening and demand the gallon back because one of my truck drivers is thirsty and needs a drink so that he can complete his route healthy and refreshed tonight.

That’s my problem for not having enough milk in the first place, and to think that my customers should have to compromise for my own shortsightedness when they’re probably thirsty and want some milk to go with their cookies, too, is bad business.

And that’s why we have consumer protections in place to ensure that customers actually get the goods and services that they pay for.

Americans shouldn’t need a lawyer to review the 47-page contract that comes with their plane ticket in order to make sure that they’ll actually get from A to B like they’re expecting.

Three Positive Things for the Week of 4/15

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Matthew Has Returned Home!
Thankfully our littlest one’s unfortunate run-in with anesthesia came to a close this afternoon as Matthew’s doctor at the hospital signed off on him coming home, and already he’s looking so much better than he did yesterday when he had leads stuck all over his body. Granted, his dick looks kind of gruesome because he got a circumcision while he was there and there’s just no pretty way to slice it … pun intended … but so far he seems to be recovering like a champ and tolerating his brother’s presence and everything… 😛

No Coke!
Admittedly I’ve been pretty terrible about drinking soda again over the last six months when many a year ago I had managed to give it up entirely. Weight loss right now is a much bigger challenge that I’m not really ready to get my arms around … no pun intended … so trying to get back on track with not drinking hundreds of calories of sugar water each day seemed like a more reasonable goal to work towards! And aside from getting a free soda with my lunch the other day – which I only drank about half of before going back to water – so far, so good…

New Writing Project is Go!
And though I’m not quite ready to announce it yet, but I’ve written a couple of pieces for the new project that I’ve been kicking about for weeks/years and frankly, I’m pretty excited about it. The concept is somewhat of a new direction from the types of things that I normally write and includes opportunities to tell a bunch of personal stories, so much in the same way that I’m very pleased with how the editorials that I write for Scott’s Thoughts have come together over the last year and a half, I’m really hoping that these articles will be as rewarding to publish on multiple levels as well. 😀

Addiction, Schmadiction to Technology…

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Last night I stumbled across a relatively new invention that really struck a chord with me … anyone who’s lucky enough to follow me on Twitter might’ve seen my mini-rant about how I’d never let somebody lock my cell phone up on me as a condition for seeing their live performance, but now that I’ve had a chance to sleep on it … I still think that it’s a horrible idea, but I wanted to expand on my thoughts a bit more… 😉

I think the main reason why it seems like such an offensive idea to lock my cell phone up in a sock is simply because it’s quite undeniable how much in the last several years our phones have really transformed into an extension of ourselves.

For me, it started when I got my first iPhone back in 2011. Although I’m guessing that I probably got my first Nokia candy bar phone back in my early 20’s (circa 2000-2001 ish?), it wasn’t until Apple went and changed everything that carrying a cell phone really exploded for me from just being a device to call and text people from to really being a portable computer that put access to the Internet in my pocket wherever I went.

…because if we’re being honest here, being the introvert that I am, if I could have a cell phone that only allowed people to contact me via Twitter or email and not via call or text, I’d probably be all over that! 😛

Seriously, that was one of the points that I read in this Ars Technica article about Yondr’s cell phone locks from a few years ago that spooked me the most! Forced social interaction with no digital world to hide behind when my anxiety gets the best of me?! No thank you!

Anyways, I know that I rely on my phone a lot these days – most people, at least my age or younger do – but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s a bad thing. Although admittedly Facebook and Twitter take up far more of my time than they probably should, I also regularly use my phone for…

  • taking notes for things I want to write later
  • writing things that can’t wait for later
  • checking up on website stats
  • posting pictures of my lunch
  • playing Angry Birds on the toilet
  • ordering last-minute things from Amazon that I just realized we need
  • streaming radio in the car on Pandora
  • taking and sharing pictures of my kids, or something weird that I just saw at the store
  • finding directions to the store
  • checking wait times for attractions at Walt Disney World
  • tweeting random nonsense to myself that’s likely only amusing to myself
  • reading the news
  • entertaining my kids with videos from Disney Junior and Sesame Street
  • ordering pizza
  • reviewing our family calendar
  • checking my bank account and investment balances
  • hell, even just checking what time it is!

And just to be clear, no – I don’t need to do all of those things while I’m in the middle of watching a concert, but that’s not the point. When you’ve got a device that has become so ingrained in your day to day life, the idea of giving it up voluntarily even for a couple of hours is even more terrifying than realizing your battery is at 2% and there isn’t a charger anywhere in sight!

I mean, I’ve had periods where I certainly need some time away from things as well, but when it comes to my phone it usually means just ignoring social media and other forms of contact for a while. I still very much want to use my phone to work on a new column or even just help me unwind a bit – it’s why the last time we went on a cruise, I still carried mine with me all day even though most of the time I couldn’t use the actual phone or data.

Sure, there are people who abuse being on their phones, and no doubt that’s at least part of what this silly lockable sock is meant to counter … though protecting IP rights for performers is also clearly a goal, too, even if they want to focus on “improving the live experience for the audience.” 

Thankfully, for the most part I’m kind of past the part of my life, as the last concert I saw was probably in 2003 and even with the handful of comedians I have watched since, it wouldn’t be much loss to just say that I’ll catch their latest special instead of they’re going to jump on the cell phone lock bandwagon because it’s just not worth it to me. I’ve never been a fan of punishing the entire group for the offenses of a small few, and if we really wanted to dig into the bigger issue, there’s a part of me that wonders if taking cell phones away with cause a bigger hit to these performers’ social currency in the long run.

A lot of the comments that I read arguing in its favor went along the lines of “we had emergencies back before cell phones and things worked out just fine,” but to me that just sounds like generational grumpiness escaped from reality. People were also just fine before regular telephones, and cars, and movable type, but life has definitely improved since their invention!

“Why don’t you just slow down and walk to the store – you kids, driving your cars everywhere you want to go…”

Technology is great, and it shouldn’t be penalized by the smaller percentage of people who can’t be responsible in its use. You can have my cell phone when you pry it from my cold, dead hands … or if the battery is completely dead … but if it means missing out on Chris Rock or Guns ‘n Roses the next time they come to town, so be it.

Regulations and Buying a New Home

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I just read a post on Facebook bitching about how much regulations add to the cost of a new home in America…

You know, like the ones that require builders to be licensed professionals who are going to craft the place where your family lives.

The ones that require your home to be built to best practices so that it’s less likely to catch fire or collapse due to shoddy craftsmanship.

The ones that ensure access to utilities are properly installed and accessible throughout the neighborhood.

The ones that check to make sure that the other guy is legally allowed to sell you your new house before you give him a huge amount of money.

And even the ones that help to protect the banks from risk so that they’ll be willing to loan you the money to pay for your new home.

Regulations aren’t all bad, and in a greedy, capitalist society like ours has become, government regulations are the common man’s last defense between the good and the bad. At least if you prefer your house with four walls and a roof over your head.

Not a Fan of Guns

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A lot of people have terrible judgment, at least when it comes to whether they think they have the right to take another person’s life.

That’s why I’ve always hated “Stand Your Ground” laws like the one we have here in Florida. They sound great on paper, but in practice it never seems to be the guy who’s about to rape your wife after breaking into your house or the guy threatening to kill you with a knife.

Instead, it’s I saw a guy walking down the street who looked pretty menacing, so I killed him.

Or, the guy in front of me in the movie theater wouldn’t put his cell phone away, so I shot him.

That second one is a hot news story locally because it literally happened a few miles away from my house. Two guys got into an altercation about one not turning off his cell phone – at the movie Lone Survivor, no less – and so the other guy, a retired captain from the Tampa PD, “felt threatened” enough to pull his gun and kill the guy.

A 73 year-old who should’ve had decades of experience didn’t know better.

Countless stories filled the news last year about unarmed black people killed by police officers … who should’ve known better.

Hell, we even hear stories about soldiers overseas who kill civilians and get away with it … and they should know better, too.

So no, if these “trained professionals” don’t have good enough judgment to determine who should live or die by their side arms, then maybe no one is qualified to be carrying them around “in self defense.”

Because the punishment for not putting your cell phone away in a movie theater isn’t death.

Helping people survive cancer doesn’t sound like a horrible failure to me…

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The Affordable Care Act has its flaws, there’s no denying it.

Healthcare costs are continuing to rise and with the individual mandate, it’s put a lot of people in a sticky situation where they can’t afford to carry insurance, yet they can’t afford to not carry insurance, either.

As President Trump apparently just realized what the rest of us have been saying for years, “It’s complicated…”

…BUT…

To say that the Affordable Care Act is “a disaster with nothing to love” is an insult to the millions of Americans who were able to get health insurance under the ACA, particularly those who have been able to get life-saving treatments thanks to their new coverage.

So the ACA has its problems … what do we say?

“We can’t afford to help sick people treat their cancer or their heart disease or their chronic diabetes because it’s just too expensive???”

Bullshit.

In 2015, Americans spent $3.2 trillion on healthcare – 17.9% of our GDP, and … like our defense budget … more than any other nation in the world.

And yet unlike defense, we don’t have the healthiest people in the world. The USA is 43rd in life expectancy and no surprise, we’re not the best at treating cancer, either. We’re really good at some types, like breast cancer, but we fall short in others and those where we do excel, we spend a lot of money to only be minimally better than those in our wake.

It was a historic step in the right direction when the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2009, and as long as the USA still dwindles embarrassingly low in these types of quality of life statistics, we’ve still got a ways to go. But it’s blasphemously ingenuous – when Americans have used its benefits to beat life threatening diseases – for anyone, much less the President of the United States, to claim that the ACA was a complete and utter failure.

Was saving the life of this award-winning tech journalist a failure to you, Mr. Trump???

A Father’s Right to be a Douche with His Shotgun…

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I really hate all of that macho, bullish crap about dads “protecting” their daughters by threatening their dates with guns and whatnot. Isn’t like the first rule of owning a gun something about not waving it around in front of people like a complete lunatic???

Thankfully I never really had to go through anything like that growing up. Hell, I still get shivers thinking about the time when the father of a girl who I wasn’t even dating raised his voice at me for calling too late – I probably would’ve moved out of state a lot sooner had one ever actually pulled any of this white trash, overly protective nonsense…

I mean, sure – I get it. Teenagers are stupid. My friends and I did plenty of stupid things when we were growing up, like stealing an orange construction barrel from the school and drinking the cheapest vodka we could get our hands on until we spent the rest of the night puking sandpaper!

But with all sincerity, our stupidity was mostly pretty well contained in that nobody ever got hurt, or drank and drove, or got pregnant, etc…

And I get that not everyone’s stupidity was as harmless – for the opposite of those same things.

I just look at my three sons, and if I try to imagine them in that awkward situation where a father of one of their prom dates wants them to pose with a picture of their rifle, or even just tries to make a joke about how he’ll be cleaning his guns until 10:00pm that night … I don’t really know what I’d do.

Because I can’t very well say that I’d threaten another man for jokingly threatening one of my sons with a weapon … that goes against the whole point of this.

But I might have to sit down and ask him just how much he likes this girl because crazy can be dangerous, too, and I have to look out for my sons just as much as that guy claims to be looking out for his daughters.