You may remember the former Chairman of the FCC – a fella by the name of Michael Powell. You might recall him as the son of Colin Powell who stood in front of the United Nations with a straight face, displayed cartoon depictions of mobile weapons launchers and held up a vial of confectionary sugar, stating, “if this was anthrax, it would really suck. So we must invade Iraq.” Of course, Colin feels really bad about it now, so it’s cool.

His boy Mikey was appointed to the FCC by our old pal Bill “Let’s Deregulate the Media” Clinton (a bit of what we have to look forward to if we’re “lucky” and don’t have an out-of-the-closet Republican elected) and named Chairman by everybody’s favorite Bush, GW. As Chairman, Mike fought fiercely to eliminate regulation in order to “open up markets” in the wireless and Internet industries. Like all the other lying sacks of shit Republicans and “Libertarians” Powell claims that regulations stand in the way of little companies taking on the industry giants.

This is why we now have Comcast – the largest cable provider in the US and owner of NBC Universal – poised to take over cable giant Time Warner in order to become the even bigger biggest cable company in America. This is clearly good for consumers, because both companies are routinely ranked by consumers near or atop the list.

The list of the worst companies in the country, that is.

No doubt as they get bigger and their profits grow, not only will prices for cable and Internet drop, but connection speeds will improve (perhaps to as much as one-third of what they get in say, Europe and South Korea) and being on hold with customer service will be a pleasure (my suggestion is that they give you a choice of hold music: opera is the default and would be free, but if you’d like to switch to, say, one of your Pandora radio stations, you can do so for a mere 99 cents per minute).

Of course, that extra money you pay a month for “up to” 20 Mbps will be kind of worthless unless the websites you want to visit are also paying a “premium” for the fast lane from the edge of Comcast’s network to you house. So you can either get content from a service that’s willing to pay the extortion fee to not have their bits choked nearly to death or you can sit and watch “buffering” messages all day when you’re trying to watch what looks like it would be an interesting 5 minute YouTube clip that somebody just posted. Win-win.

All that needs to happen is to get rid of that pesky Net Neutrality once and for all. And that’s where our fearless Commander-in-Chief comes in.

You may have noticed that the FCC is basically a place where telecom and cable lobbyists come from or go to. They serve their time making a paltry 5-figure salary in DC (plus whatever kickbacks they can manage) and then become industry lobbyists (for example, Meredith Attwell Baker – whose job at the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) is presumbably a step up from the job she originally left the FCC for in 2011 – VP of “Government Affairs” at, you guessed it, Comcast). And of course there’s Mikey Powell, who is now President & CEO of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA).

And then there’s our current FCC Chairman, Tom Wheeler. he was inducted into both the Cable Television and Wireless Halls of Fame, prompting President Obama to joke that “…he’s like the Jim Brown of telecom or the Bo Jackson of telecom”.

Ha! Funny one, sir!

Not as funny as your pledge to never hire lobbyists, though. Now that was a real thigh-slapper.

Of course, the purchasing of the Obama Presidency hasn’t been limited to the telecom industry (looking at you, Timmy Geithner, Eric Holder (Global Crossing), William Lynn (Raytheon), Mark Patterson (Goldman Sachs)…), nor is Obama unique.

Lots of hopey, not much changey.

Sadly, I fear that Net Neutrality is a lost cause – it’s too arcane of a subject to get people worked up over, and since we don’t seem to have a prayer at getting gun control or equal pay or doing anything to slow down climate change and they’re taking away the ability (if not actually the “right”) of people to vote and dismantling laws to try to combat discrimination (‘cuz that was like, so sixties)….

Well, I just don’t see a free and open Internet being the one thing that will get the unwashed masses riled up enough to go out and do something. Hell, if I’ve learned only one thing from network teevee over the years (at least in this age of “reality TV”), it’s that you can by and large put any crap you want out there and people will sit, numb, watching it. If they don’t like it at first, they’ll get used to it – especially when it’s the “featured” topic on the Today Show every morning.

I just hope NY legalizes pot so I can get as comfortably numb as possible.

If you want to know why you should give a shit about this, here’s a good article to read. Unless you live in Washington State or Colorado, in which case I’d just do a few bongs and go back to bed.

Our new chancellor, Kent Syverud, has ignited a bit of a controversy here in our fair city by asking how to pronounce the word “Syracuse.” There are two camps on this – those who are correct, and those who are idiots. People who aren’t idiots pronounce the first syllable “seer” (rhymes with beer). Morons say “sair” (rhymes with “air” or “bear”). How the fuck anybody can get “Sarah-queues” out of something that starts with “syr” is beyond me. I mean, is that country in the Middle East called Sareeah? Of course not. No more than that place where they had the 1984 Winter Olympics is called “Seerayavoh.”

I used to think it was just one of those locals vs. SU students from Long Island things. I mean, my mother used to say it as if the first syllable was the name of that twit on the iPhone, Siri (as in, “Siricuse”), but my mom was a bit of a Norm Crosby type (she always suspected she had a bit of the “dylexia”), so I’ll cut her some slack. And at least she didn’t say “sarah.”

And I suppose it could be a bit of the Central NY vs. Western NY thing going on (those WNYers talk funny – they say “pop” instead of soda and my old college buddy from the Buffalo area used to pronounce that thing you sign when you rent an apartment as “leash” and those seats in the upper part of the theater were know as the “ballcony”), but there’s a poll in the local newspaper (whatever it is we call a newspaper these days that exists pretty much only online – I’ll stick with newspaper) that seems to indicate that locals are more or less split between seer and sair.

Then I thought, well, they must have included people from Solvay ( a place known – rightfully or not – for inhabitants – Tyrolians, originally – who eat cats). Them people talk funny, too (my pal Don from Solvay used to, for instance, call that number-manipulating device a “calca-later” and express astonishment by saying “jeepers” which I supposed he pronounced correctly, but jeepers? What is this, 1947?).

Anyhow, just to set the record straight, it’s Syr rhymes with beer. Case closed.

And while I’m at it, it’s “gif” not “jif.” And I don’t care what Steve Wilhite says. The reason if that the acronym GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. The “g” is graphics is a hard g, therefore it’s gif, as in gift. If it was the Giraffe Interchange Format or Gigantic Interchange Format, then it would be jiff. QED (which is pronounced Kwed, in case anybody ever asks you).

A strange thing happened yesterday – when I went to write a post, all my little quickie toolbar thingies were gone. Now, I don’t actually need them since I know any html I might want to incorporate into a post but it’s still kind of a pain in the ass. For one thing, if I was writing this in the development tool I use for work I’d at least have keyboard shortcuts, code snippets, color coding, and tag completion. Here, I got nothing. Just a plain textbox staring back at me. And that kinda sucks (I mean, my typing stinks as it is – the less of it I need to do, the better). So until I figure that one out (and I’m reluctant make too many changes around here, lest I break the smilies or the embedding or something – then there’d be hell to pay), I guess I won’t be adding too many links or fancy formatting.

Anyhow, it’s Friday, which is always a good thing. But I don’t have Monday off, which is always a bad thing. But Bill Maher is back this week, which is a good thing. This week, his guests include Tom Steyer. Since he didn’t go to SU I’m not familiar with him, but he’s apparently a hedge fund manager and billionaire. He was born in 1957 and Wikipedia says his net worth is valued at $1.6 billion, which makes him about three years older than me, and roughly $1.6 billion wealthier (you know, depending on how many significant digits you want to round it off to).

Yet he also seems to be a “liberal” and an environmentalist who has pledged to give away half his fortune. So that’s nice. I pledge to give away half my fortune as well – but I’ll have to wait until I croak, ‘cuz after we get a Republican House, Senate, White House, and a Supreme Court packed with nine Republican Stooge Conservative Justices, I might be needing it to buy dog food in my old age (and not for the dogs, either). Plus half my fortune is probably about what old Tom spends on a six month’s worth of haircuts. But you folks in the Bay Area will probably know more about Steyer than I do, so I’ll defer to your opinion(s) of him.

Also on is Annabelle Gurwitch. I don’t know her net worth (though she’s a scorpio whose birthday is the day after Roseanne Barr, Charles Bronson, and Adam Ant and she’s about a year younger than I am), but I do know her from her being on WTF as well as her having hosted Wa$ted! on the late, great, Planet Green network (which has now been rebranded “Destination America” – “…targeted mainly towards Middle America and featuring mainly American-centric travel, food, and natural history programming” because we don’t have enough teevee geared toward “middle America” these days, and certainly not enough shows about food). On Wa$ted, she and her co-host would go around to slobs and show them how much shit they were throwing out could be recycled, and how much money they were wa$ting. I liked it. But, hey, I’m sure a show where they visit diners in Ashtabula would be even better.

Next up is John Avlon, who I don’t really know much about, but if I were to judge a book by the cover, I’d say his book is all about assholes. Plus he’s married to Margaret Hoover, who isn’t the biggest Republican asshole in the world, but, let’s face it, that’s a pretty high mountain to climb, and she’s young yet. I’m guessing Avlon is on to be the token “moderate,” which means he’ll be a right-leaning putz smart enough to toss out an applause line or two to the left-leaning (or so Bill always seems to say) audience.

Then there’s this week’s token “libertarian” douchebag, Charles Murray. Oh boy.

Rounding out this week’s guest list is Glenn Cove’s own Christine Quinn – a “Democrat” so far up Mike Bloomberg’s ass she couldn’t even get elected mayor as a lesbian in New York City.

She does look a bit like Edie McClurg, though, so I’ll give her that.

If you’ve been paying attention to my posts of the past weeks, months, and years, you’re probably asking yourself, “hey, didn’t that guy used to use a lot of semi-colons? Where have all the semi-colons gone?” Well, yes, yes I did (and thank you for noticing). Then a few weeks (or was it months?) back, I read this quote by one of my favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut:

“My advice to writers just starting out? Don’t use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.”

Now, I have to admit that the term “transvestite hermaphrodite” is somewhat confusing, because (IIRC) a transvestite is one who enjoys wearing clothing associated with the opposite sex, while a hermaphrodite is an organism that has the naughty bits normally associated with both male and female sexes (like an earthworm or Ann Coulter). So I’m not quite sure what the wardrobe of a transvestite hermaphrodite would actually consist of.

But if Kurt says no semi-colons, then that’s good enough for me. So I’ve been trying to avoid them ever since (trying to cut down on the commas, too, but they’re harder to give up than beer), though I notice I’ve fallen on hyphens as kind of a crutch.

I’ve also been avoiding settling down and getting to work this morning, but I guess I can’t put it off much longer so I better get to it (or at least have another cuppa joe).

You may have heard that, according to the Wall Street Journal, it appears as though the FCC will advance new rules more or less abandoning the concept of Net Neutrality. Or, as President Candidate Obama said in 2008:

“The most important thing we can probably do is to preserve the diversity that’s emerging through the Internet…something called net neutrality. I will take a backseat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality.”

Hah! Good one. We didn’t realize what a terrific sense of humor then-Senator Obama had back then, though he’s certainly gone on to demonstrate it in the years since (nothing funnier than an Afghani wedding reception, after all).

Basically, the FCC is going to give Intertube providers the ability to charge a “premium” for fast transport across their networks. But I’m sure they’ll go out of their way to continue to make improvements to the non-premium parts of their networks. Uh-huh.

So if Netflix is willing to pay Comcast a fee to not have their traffic throttled (which, of course, they already are) and Amazon Instant Video (or HBOGO, or SHowtime OnDemand, or Hulu, or…) isn’t, well, guess what. You can either pay out the ass for Netflix or sit and watch Amazon buffer all night long.

Of course Netflix will also have to pay off every other carrier out there, too. Not much good having an agreement with Comcast if AT&T, Verizon, et al are just gonna throttle you down until you agree to the extortion (or course, the FTC and DOJ are doing their best to make sure the Comcast will soon be the only company that owns all the Intertubes and the media, so that should simplify the payoffs). And as a consumer, not only will you be paying more for access to video streaming sites, or VOIP services, news sites, or, dare I say, blogs, but I can pretty much guarantee you that the price for your crippled Internet service won’t be going down, either.

It’s a lose-lose situation.

So thanks, Mr. Preznit. We can always count on you to do what’s right – for the Telecom companies, and the big banks, and your pals at Goldman Sachs.

Ah, what a good day it would be to live in Colorado or Washington State. Four-Twenty and Easter on the same day (for the first time since 2003, and not again until 2025. Hopefully by then pot will be legal in NY State, ‘cuz I’ll definitely be needing some. After, that it won’t happen again until 2087 and if I see that one, it’ll be in a different life). Weed, Peeps, and Chocolate Bunnies – tell me that doesn’t go together like, well, pot and potato chips or dope and Doritos or I guess marijuana and pretty much any food-type stuff. I can recall discovering the awesome combination of saltines and Miracle Whip back in college when there was nothing else in the apartment. And damn, they were good.

Apparently the in-laws are coming over to celebrate today (Easter, not 4/20, though I think smoking dope would do them some good – god knows it would help me), which is better than me having to go anywhere. And since I have tomorrow off, I could conceivably not have to leave the house until Wednesday morning. Except it would give me a chance to play with the new car radio.

Yes, I did manage to get that sucker installed (not that it’s exactly rocket science). The radio pocket tabs where the screws go kind of disintegrated when I took the old screws out, which meant I couldn’t reuse the top part, so I had to kludge it in a bit with the trim ring that came with the new radio, and then I had to cut off the bottom part of the old pocket and jam that in separately. Doesn’t all really fit perfectly, but it’s only noticeable when you’re looking for it. Since it’s pretty much only me in my car at any time, I reckon I can learn to live with it.

I found a replacement pocket online for about $10 and ordered it for when I feel motivated enough to unplug the 500 (okay, more like 7 or 8 I guess) wiring harnesses in the dash panel that are exactly long enough to pull the fucker out and get about two fat fingers behind to plug and unplug while you’re standing on your head trying to see the stupid sockets – god forbid they add an extra couple inches to the wires. Sometimes I think the Hyundai is in cahoots with the North Koreans.

Anyhow, whether you’re celebrating Easter, 4/20, the birthday of Raymond van Barneveld today, or just hanging out today, enjoy yourself. And stay away from the the Peeps. Seriously, they’re disgusting.

To all you folks out there who think being tortured and nailed to a cross to die and have your carcass being picked apart by scavengers constitutes a “good” day, Happy Good Friday to you. To everybody else (who doesn’t work weekend, anyway), hey, every Friday is good, right? This past week, I didn’t take Monday off. That turned out to be a dreadful mistake, so I have next Monday off. That makes today an even better than “good” Friday.

So, I mentioned a password manager the other day, and I’ve come across another one that may actually be better (and freer). It’s called LastPass and while I haven’t tried it, it looks like it has some good features (including, for instance, auditing you passwords for ones you’re re-using, and which sites may be affected by, for instance, Heartbleed). So it might be worth checking out. There’s a “premium” version you can upgrade to for $12 a month if you want to support them. As I said, I haven’t used it, but I may just give it a try.

Speaking of Heartbleed, I’ve had a chance to look into it and it doesn’t appear to be quite as horrible as it was originally made out to be. Bloomberg reported that two NSA “insiders” claimed that the agency knew about this bug in OpenSSL for two years and had been exploiting it.

This could be true (wouldn’t put it past them), but it seems like bullshit. For one thing, it’s kind of a crappy exploit. As I mentioned before, you can only get a random 64 Kb of server memory every time you “ping” a vulnerable server. This could, in theory, be a username and password if a user just happened to be logging in at that time, but it’s also just as likely to be a nugget of a web page or something.

This means that in order to get useful info, you’d either have to get lucky in a hurry or be constantly pinging the server and collecting the info. From what I’ve read, it is possible to use this exploit to obtain a server’s private key (that’s the thingie that can decrypt anything sent to it that’s been encrypted using the server’s public key – which is how this stuff works), but from what I’ve read it’s not a trivial thing to do.

Also, the guy who put this but of code into the project (a Kraut, ironically enough, given that the Germans are some of the most pissed off folks at the US spying) has been identified and come forward and he says that he just failed to verify that a particular variable had a “realistic length” and the error slipped through and that the NSA had nothing to do with it.

Having fucked up my share of code, I find that to be pretty believable. And given that this is all open source stuff done by volunteers, I really think the for-profit companies that make use of these freely available software libraries ought to spend some time and money on reviewing the code. Maybe they’ll do that now.

The other reassuring thing is that there’s been no evidence of anybody scanning the Internet over the past two years looking for vulnerable servers (one guy I was listening to the other day was saying that if you had a decent setup, you could scan the entire Internet in about 20 minutes). Of course, once this flaw was announced, the scanning commenced almost immediately.

So, anyhow, it seems as though most of us won’t get bit by this one, though it’s not a bad idea to go and change all your passwords (it’s not a bad idea to do that periodically anyway). And if you can enable two-factor authentication at a website (especially something like your bank or PayPal or whatever), you should do that even if it is kind of a pain in the ass.

Oh well, I guess it’s time to see about getting some work done. Have a good Friday.

It’s slightly extremely annoying to be outside sweltering in the sun on the deck on Sunday with thoughts of opening the pool and going for a swim, only to have everything covered in snow two days later. It was something like 83° on Sunday and around 78° on Monday. Even yesterday morning wasn’t bad – in the low 60s, which I’ll take. Then the rain came, the temperature dropped, and the rain turned to snow. It was 19° when I got up this morning.

Oh, there’s not a ton of snow. Enough to cover everything but not enough to make me regret taking the snow tires off the car (or the plow and chains off my tractor), but it still kind of sucks. The only nice thing about the cold weather is that I get to wear a jacket to work, which is nice ‘cuz I need the pockets. Having to stuff a wallet, phone, mp3 player, and a 5-pound wad of keys (do I really need all those keys? What the hell are they for?) into my pants pocket is tough. Especially since I’ve graduated to wearing “bell top” pants these days.

That’s the other problem with warm weather – no ability to cover up with a sweatshirt or sweater (‘cuz if I wear a hoodie, nobody can tell I’m fat).

Oh well, after a cold day today, it’s supposed to warm up for the rest of the week. Not the summer-like weather of last weekend, but into the 50s, which is actually better for getting stuff done outside. Not to mention installing the new car stereo I ordered yesterday.

It’s nothing fancy, but the original factory stereo in my 2004 Hyundai has gotten kind of buggy over the years. The biggest pain in the ass is that when you turn the volume knob up, the volume goes down. Sometimes. And when you turn it down, it almost always goes down, up, down, nowhere, down, up…. I wouldn’t care, but much of the time I’m in my car I plug in my mp3 player and listen to music or podcasts. For this, the car stereo volume needs to be up pretty high. But when I want to listen to the radio, it needs to be down quite a bit lower, or my ears get blasted out.

So I’ll typically have the tuner on, and the volume on 16 or so. Then I plug the mp3 player in, and I can barely hear it, so I try to turn the volume up (like, 21-22 is pretty good. Higher is OK, ‘cuz then I can use the mp3 player volume). So it’ll do something like this: 16…17…16…15…14,13,12,11,12…13…12…11…13…14…15…16…17…18….

OK, at this point, it’s still kinda low and hard to hear, but if I strain, I can kinda hear depending on what I’m listening to, and then I hear Clint Eastwood’s voice in my head

I know what you’re thinking, punk. You’re thinking “if I keep turning this knob, is it gonna keep going up so you can hear the goddamn, thing, or is it gonna go back down?” Well, you’ve gotta ask yourself a question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?

And then I yell out “YEAH!” and turn the knob some more and it goes down to like 2 and I can’t hear a damn thing and I get really pissed (did I mention I’m also trying to drive the car at the same time?).

For while, I alleviated this problem by using the remote control (why the hell car stereos come with remote controls these days is beyond me – I mean, what, I’m gonna get in the back seat and crank some tunes? I don’t think so). But then the remote quit working, so now, finally, I’ve had enough.

As I said the new one is nothing great, but it’s got a USB port and an aux input on the front. And Bluetooth. And a remote, of course. And hopefully the volume knob works.

In addition to the typical Monday depression, I’m ungodly sore and tired today. That’s what happens when you get a little decent weather around here (especially on the weekend) – you try and cram in as much activity as you can because you know it aint gonna last. In fact, after another warm day today, they’re telling us to expect a couple inches of snow on Tuesday. Hey, Mother Nature, quit fucking with us, would ya? It’s not like I tried to slip you margarine or something (on a side note, I just checked – did you know you can’t buy Chiffon in North America anymore? It’s only sold in the Caribbean. Happily, Mother Nature, aka Dena Dietrich, is still with us).

Perhaps not with us much longer, hopefully, are Republicans in Wisconsin. Seems that the GOP there wants to have a vote affirming their right to secede from the Union (if not to actually secede – yet). Well, we already knew Wisconsin Republicans aren’t exactly union-friendly, so this isn’t much of a surprise, I guess. My only hope is that they’re just planning on leaving. Maybe they can all catch an iron ore freighter and head across Lake Superior to Canada.

Preferably during November.

I heard a clip of Ted “The Genius” Cruz speaking at whatever convention of dumb fucking teabaggers is going on (or just got ever with or whatever – the one where they booed a mention of Jeb Bush), and he was saying that the number one priority for Congress out to be to abolish the IRS (guess he’s taking some time off from repealing Obamacare).

The crowd promptly commenced to do some enthusiastic hootin’ and a-hollerin’ as you’d expect them to. I really wish I could have slipped into Ted’s mind (sick and twisted though that would be – no amount of showers cold get you clean after an experience like that) and finished his speech, ‘cuz (once their excitement calmed down a bit), I’d have continued with something like….

“We don’t need the IRS because we don’t need what the ‘R’ in IRS stands for – ‘Revenue’. We don’t need roads or highways, we don’t need schools, we don’t need Federal Prisons, we don’t need Social Security and Medicare, we don’t need an Army, a Navy, an Air Force, or Marines, we don’t need the VA, we don’t need to pay military pensions, and most of all we don’t need to pay for elections so dumb motherfuckers like you can elect stupid assholes like me.”

Oh well, I guess I should get back to work. Or at least go look out the window for a while.

I accomplished my weekend goals by 2PM yesterday afternoon. Not that they were lofty ones. I got the chains off my tractor, which took way longer than it should have, thanks to a stubborn quick link in the inside of one wheel that took forever to get off. And I got the snow tires off the car. So if I get motivated after grocery shopping today, I can mount the new mailbox I bought weeks ago and have been waiting for decent weather to replace the old one with.

Then the reality of the end of the weekend sets in, and Sunday night will be a little sadder this week, as there is no new Shameless. I feel a real connection to Frank Gallagher – he’s definitely a kindred spirit. He’s what my life could have been like if I only had the courage to live free (plus he must’ve gotten laid a lot, based on the number of kids he’s got – though I’m not sure we can count Liam. That’s Showtime Liam, anyway, not Channel 4 Liam).

That sadness is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the new season of Nurse Jackie starts tonight. Apparently I’m drawn to alcoholics and drug addicts, though pills have never been my thing, thank goodness. I prefer organic mind-altering substances for the most part.

Another new show starts on Showtime tonight as well (though it’s on at 10pm EDT so I won’t be catching it live – though you can watch the first episode online) called “Years of Living Dangerously.” It’s about Climate Change and you might be surprised (I was) to hear that Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the Executive Producers (also James Cameron, among others). It also features “correspondents” like Harrison FOrd, Matt Damon, out old pal Tom Friedman, Don Cheadle, Chris Hayes, Olivia Munn, Lesley Stahl, and Michael C. Hall (who will hopefully be going out there and cutting climate deniers into easily manages pieces and dumping them in the ocean).

I hadn’t heard of this until the other day when somebody left a flyer (or is it flier?) in our mailbox inviting us to a “watch party” for it at the local library, with a discussion afterwards. Sounds like one of those quaint, touchy-feely MoveOn.org type ideas.

So I’ll record it and watch it and no doubt shake my head and gasp at all the appropriate places (but if they try to show me drowning polar bears or something, I’m turning it off). But the fact is, I’m already on board and don’t need convincing, though frankly I think it’s too late.

That’s what I’d like to tell all this morons that say it’s all a hoax perpetrated by Al Gore. First, it’s for real whether you believe it or not, and second, don’t worry – you idiots have won. Even if the world immediately started getting serious about this, it’s already too late to do more than mitigate some of the effects. At best, we could make things a little less shitty – but I don’t see that happening.

Hey, Al Gore’s not tricking me into cleaner air and developing energy sources that we don’t get need to import from a bunch of fanatics that hate our being in their part of the world and want to see us all dead.

Fortunately, seeing as I don’t live near the water, I’ll be dead before this has much of an impact on me. Except for shit like the winters not being cold enough to kill all the Brown Recluse spiders living in my cardboard piles.

Oh well, time to scurry off to do the weekly shopping.

As I mentioned yesterday, it was so nice out that I was motivated to remove one of the storm windows from my office and put the screen in (just one of the two – no point in going crazy here). It’s not supposed to be quite as nice today but they’re talking about temps in the 70s over the weekend and maybe even 80 on Monday (that ought to get the pool algae fired up) before of course turning to shit on Tuesday. So the big plan for the weekend is to take the chains off the tractor tires and get the snow tires off the car. Pretty ambitious, I know – and risky, too. But I reckon I can drive through whatever Mother Nature throws at us (or wait it out in my bunker, as long as I have enough beer).

Do you use Dropbox? I do – I also use Google Drive (or whatever they call it), Microsoft’s OneDrive (which used to be SkyDrive), Apple’s whatever it is they call it, I have 5 GB with Asus, and I think I’ve even got a few gigs of storage at Yahoo. And I know I’ve got, like Flickr and Picasa and other stuff out there that I occasionally use, but my “go to” cloud storage is Dropbox (at least until the free space I have gets all used up). The main thing I use it for is uploading pictures from my phone and tablet (I already encrypt any documents I put up there – not that anybody give a shit about my ref-fi documents or copies of my tax forms, but, hey). It automagically syncs whenever I dock my device and then I have everything on every device I can connect to the Internet with.

So it was with much chagrin that I read yesterday that Dropbox has added Condi Rice to its Board of Directors. Because, hey, who wouldn’t want a person who loves her some warrantless wiretaps to have a say in what happens to the private data I store on the cloud. Not that I’d be terribly worried if all my photos of dogs, cats, and snow were to somehow be leaked to the NSA (who no doubt has them anyway), but it’s the principle of the thing.

At least pretend you give a shit about my privacy (and your integrity).

So now I guess I need to move everything over to Google or something. What a hassle.

Along those lines I dunno if this has made it out to the mainstream news or not, but a while back a vulnerability (the “Heartbleed” bug as it’s known) in OpenSSL (used by a shitload of websites – for instance, Yahoo) was discovered and to make a long story short, it…

…would let anyone on the Internet get into a supposedly secure Web server running certain versions of OpenSSL and scoop up the site’s encryption keys, user passwords and site content.

Once an attacker has a website’s encryption keys, anything is fair game: Instead of slipping through a proverbial crack in the wall, he can now walk in and out the front door.

Here’s a list of what’s currently vulnerable and what isn’t (those that aren’t may have been in the past, so going out and changing every password you have is up to you – though if you use the same password for everything, I’d advise you to knock that off).

If you’re curious about sites you go to, you can check them here. And if you want more information, there’s plenty of it out there. Google is your friend.

So, a coworker of mine is experiencing some angst. Her son left for college last fall, and although he’s fairly close she laments that they “never see him.” Add to that her high school age daughter told her that there’s a boy she wants to have over and, well, let’s just say she’s got some premature empty-nest syndrome feelings going on.

Those of us who know better, of course, tried to tell her that a fledgling leaving the nest is not a time of sorrow. It’s when they friggin’ come back that the real depression sets in.

When they leave, well, remember when you were young and you got your first apartment? That feeling of freedom you experienced, and you realized you could sit around on your couch (which was probably a pine frame with plaid-covered foam cushions that came in a set that included a “rocking chair”, coffee table, two end tables, and two lamps) in the living room and drink beer and smoke cigarettes (or whatever else your little heart desired) in front of the teevee and you didn’t have to explain your comings and goings to anybody and nobody was expecting you or making demands of you and if you wanted to live surrounded by pizza boxes, beer cans, and cigarette butts, well, by golly, that was your goddamn choice.

When the kids come back, though? That’s like your mom moving back in with you. And, don’t get me wrong, you love your mom (you really do), it’s just that you’ve kind of gotten used to her living over there and you can go visit or she can come and visit you and that’s really nice but eventually she goes the hell home.

Things are better that way. I reckon my coworker will figure that out soon enough.

Oh well, time to virtually head off to work. Let’s get this over with.