I was at this place. Never mind where. Someplace where I might be, but is unfortunately lots more hip than it would have been when I had any chance of being hip. Timing is everything. Lots of tattoos, interesting hair, clothes, hats. Listening to this fellow, 24 by his own account, talking to someone who claimed to be a project manager for a government organization. He wanted to show someone his deck before he posted it to StackExchange for comment. UX/UI, agile scrum sort of stuff. He wanted to make sure his design was suitable for the olds, you know, 45 or 55, his mom. And grandmom. Who couldn’t be bothered to drill down more than a link or two before they got lost.
I wanted to pull out my phone and point him at my original HEP CERN webpage (still up!) and the correspondence from (not to drop names) a certain knight discussing same and tell him that some of us olds had been doing UX/UI/agile/scrum since before he was born, and long before it was called that, as a sideline to, you know, actually building things that discovered the Higgs, or gravitational waves, or finding earth-like planets, and not just trying to learn Python or CSS or Swift while trying to find a unicorn startup or a quant job at an HFT firm.
Then I took my blood pressure meds from the onion on my belt when my Pulsar digital watch beeped, as that was the style at the time, and wondered if my head would end up in a jar next to Mike D (one hopes) or Nixon (hell), and kept my silence as they prattled on for the next 20 minutes. For that is the worst sin – to be boring.
At least put my jar next to Mimi Rogers.
The US might be more religious whacky than Europe, passing stupid and embarrassing laws about porn and bathrooms, but at least we put a stop to that nonsense about the church bells.
Really, five minutes on the hour beginning at 7 and going til 11? Then it settles down to only ringing the hour all night long? [1]
[1] I know this because 0) jet lag, and Europe [2] has also not figured out 1) fans, 2) sheets, 3) pillows, 4) bug screens, interior climate control [3], and 5) sun-dried tomatoes [4]. Also not figured out microwaveable protein. Tyson – huge market for you here. I really don’t want to spend 45 minutes cooking chicken every night.
[2] Well, ok, I’ve heard that Germany is the Alabama of Europe (and Bavaria is the Texas of Germany), but I’m looking at you too, Spain, France, and CR. So far so good Switzerland but for 4x the cost you better not wake this atheist out of my Ambien-fuelled jet-lag-induced 4:00-7:30 AM slumber with fucking church bells.
[3] Yeah, it’s no fun being gowned up, masked, gloved, hairnetted in a cleanroom at 27 C and 50% humidity but there’s nothing to be done because green. Or something. Sweat and flight hardware would seem to be incompatible.
[4] No, Aldi is not the same as TJ’s.
When I am god-emperor, tree trimmers will only be allowed to work from 8-5 M-F. Yes, I know that such things are necessary evils if you want to have trees in the ‘burbclaves, and we do. But under my regime, chainsaws and chippers will only be allowed during the hours when the majority of folks are off at work. Not at 7 pm on a Saturday evening. And all afternoon on a weekend.
Blue laws are ridiculous for selling liquor, but under any decent regime, 40 hours a week is time enough for lawn and tree maintenance. There’s got to be some time when there’s some peace and quiet in the ‘hood.
Called it. Almost two years ago.
No more anonymity for anyone.
I’m still on OS X 10.10 Yosemite, not El Capitan, because 1) I am accustomed to iPhoto and Aperture, and both will stop working eventually on El Capitan, and 2) Exchange works somewhat in 10.10 (on my home vanilla system it works fine and always has; on the semi-fucked-up work release of the same OS it is semi-fucked-up but I’ve arrived at alternate solutions [1]) and I am unwilling to fix it if it can be held together with duct tape. Maybe it works better, maybe it works worse. So far Photos has been not impressive. And I neither want to learn nor pay for Lightroom until I have to.
I’m not seeing any advantages to El Cap that are making me want to upgrade yet, except that I ain’t new to this biz and it’s not lost on me that eventually I’ll have to if I want to have working computers, or to ever upgrade.
But not yet.
But another nail is in the coffin – Google has made Nik free, thus continuing their strategy of embrace, purchase, and abandon. Not for something better – basically they’re just dropping turds in the punchbowl. Ruining it for everyone else, same as they did with RSS. Picasa and Nik. Robots. Make it free, drive everyone else out of business, then abandon it.
I don’t see the strategy here. It’s not as though they are replacing these things with paid products or monetizing something equivalent for advertising revenues. They’re just killing these things for fun. Like my dogs did with that little mouse in the snow. The mouse might have found it less fun.
If I had a Nest or Dropcam, I’d write it off. I’m figuring their involvement in self-driving cars is probably the same sort of thing.
I still figure gmail is going to stay around due to the info it gives them about you, though it seriously makes me want to continue to transition my emailing back over to the private, non-advertising funded, accounts.
[1] Yes, Exchange and MAPI sucks, and it was a major fail that 1) work hired an ex-MS guy to be CIO, and 2) that he chose Mac-and-Linux-unfriendly Exchange over a standard IMAP server, in an environment that is more than half Mac-and-Linux. But Apple gets it right, and to compound the mistakes above, My Employer modifies OS X until it’s sufficiently borked that what works fine on my home computer doesn’t work with out jiggery-pokery on the identical work-issued system. Yay?
tl;dr: OPM database was tied to 007 database, but also to State Dept. Passport database, DOD service records, and
pass-through access to a complete set of other extraordinarily sensitive National Security data, including detailed information on every US defense contractor facility, data about which defense facilities both USG and contractors may have visited, and any contacts made with non-US officials and civilians both inside and outside the US, even while on vacation. Ultimately, the potential exists even for the compromise of the personally identifiable information (“PII”) of NATO and non-NATO visits to and from the United States.
To top it off, then they gave the three credit agencies access to this PII so that we could all get meaningless credit reporting for the next three years. And also increase the attack surface for the availability of that information.
Someone had it right – user data is toxic waste, and PII is radioactive. It might be useful, but like Hanford in the 40s, the companies using it haven’t figured out that dealing with keeping it secure is going to be a long-term leaking hazardous waste seeping pond.
Tagged data is toxic waste, hack, OPM, passport
Threat surface
My Employer decided the day after the Belgium incident (not the day of, oddly enough, though I certainly knew about it long before I went to work, so they must have, but didn’t react very quickly) to institute tougher security checks at the entrance. Physically touching peoples IDs (but not RFID scanning them, because no Bad Guy would ever be able to laminate a card – build a dirty bomb, yes, operate a plastic card-counterfeiting operation identical to those used for credit cards, no) and opening trunks (but not checking backseats or briefcases) really slowed things down. But it would not have stopped the San Bernadino incident – because those guys had cards and IDs. And work-issued cell phones.
And all it did was push the threat further out. What was to stop a Bad Guy with a legally purchased SKS from simply driving down the line of several hundred cars backed up to the freeway entrance that security had conveniently lined up like carnival ducks?
In fact, it seems like this was the MO of the Brussels airport attack. It was in the lines before the security check, not after.
Security theater. Not that there was any specific threat, just something-must- be-done; this-is-something-therefore-do-this. The richest part, if you have a certain sense of black humor is that Security lined up employees for a repeat of the same scenario. Or sad, in another mindset.
I’m still more likely to be shot by one of the rent-a-cops than killed by a terrorist though.
I do pine for the old days when the on-campus shooting range was available to members of the employee shooting club. Before my time, though not long before my time.
The world is a different place now. We’ll tell ourselves that, with a sigh, even though it really isn’t – it’s largely safer and less violent.