Hot Damn, Back Again!

Like most technical repairs, if you dick around with it enough, you'll either really break it and have to call in an expert or you'll fix it and look like a fucking genius.

Guess who has two thumbs and looks like a fucking genius? This guy. Don't ask me what I did, I did a whole bunch of stuff and the blog is back. Looks like it badly needs to get updated though, huh.

Let's start with some newer images.

Taken during an impromptu beach trip a few weeks ago.

Looks like I still need to fix a few broken pipes, can't access newer images, at least not on this computer (shared house computer).

Will add more tomorrow. It has been a good while since a good update has gone up here. I had a good weekend. Gonna write about it tomorrow.

No Tech for You!

Sometimes I wish I could have the say-so authority to just take away some users computers entirely. They are either repeat offenders of clicking on virus pop-ups that infect their computers over and over again or they are just unclear on basic computing concepts and practices.

These aren't bad people by any stretch and I realize that, to many people, computers are a necessary evil. One cannot work effectively today without some basic computing skills.

And large organizations would be advised to be proactive in addressing user education by providing training classes, maybe even mandatory training classes since skills range very widely from utter neophyte to supreme guru. And there's no more cost effective process than preventative education.

Resolved and Quickly At That

My tweets today have been mostly centered on my stupidity at resetting my password to upload blog posts and content here. Yes, I did it all on my own and have no one to blame except my hosting provider's limp support system.

Granted, once I got in touch with support, they hammered out the solution pretty quickly and that's a plus.

However, the linked support pages from within my signed in account pages were garbage. And that's pretty ridiculous when they can't keep URLs up to date. The lack of alternate means of contact is more annoying than ridiculous since I wouldn't want to be contacting them unless I had a problem and that means I'm already annoyed.

But still, once the process got kicked into gear, it went quickly and I now I can both access my blog again, I can also even start updating IP Politik, my politics side blog, to start using again to help keep the political nonsense off the main blog to some degree or another.

I guess I'm just having one of those "Meh" days where you'd just as soon be doing anything else than what you are doing. I'd rather be sleeping or riding my bike and I know I won't get to do either for at least a few more hours and it won't be riding.

I think one of the problems is that I have too many accounts, too many logins and passwords to keep straight and not enough time to get things into an organized place enough to get on top of it all. Plus I've got projects languishing on back burners all over the place. Projects that I don't want to languish anymore, I want them boiling and throwing off hot nuggets of revenue!

Anyway, I'm back at speed again, will start posting political posts to IP Politik (with a short link here, I'm sure) and am also looking to migrate WIPE (Wal-Mart is Pure Evil) to its own custom domain to stop the cross-pollinated RSS feed. There is always, always work to be done.

The Geek Squad is Pwning Your Pron

The Geek Squad's ongoing porn problem wherein the techs are finding porn on client computers and stealing it to share amongst themselves. Or, in two cases, they've found child porn and turned the client over to the cops (likely after the whistleblowers made copies for themselves).

I am all for the widespread distribution of sex-centric media presuming any recipient is old enough to legally "consume" it. And, of course, presuming the participants are of legal age and have consented to being videotaped.

I have a serious problem with children getting access to porn and would applaud Geek Squad's efforts. But then they go beyond their legal bounds and steal materials from their client computers.

And then the company CEO goes and gets questioned at a public Q&A about their plans to address this exploitation and theft. And he first steps in a rather large pile of dookie and then inserts his besmudged foot squarely into his mouth. Lovely and well done, oh Captain my Captain. I wasn't planning on using the service before but now there's absolutely zero chance I'd let an unethical geek working for an unethical company come near my files and data.

And no, I don't have porn stashed all over my computers but I am a strong advocate of privacy rights and expectations of ethical behavior.

Mac Support Weirdness

First off, the new Imacs? They are freaking beautiful, elegant and kind of sexy for a computer. I'm not sure how I'd like keyboard over the long term but damn, the monitors are sweet, the little remote control is very nice and they are just a pretty excellent package all the way around.

Secondly, what the fuck is Voiceover? One of the machines in the lab had gotten inadvertently switched on with it and it was the most annoying, godawful thing ever. The same crappy synthesized voices we had back in the 80's? Awful. And annoying.

One thing I am learning as I take my first tentative steps into the world of a professional tech support monkey, is that people and kids in particular are really good at screwing up computers in ways I never would have thought possible.

So far though, I'm having a good time!