This particular blog hasn’t been active for that long, but WordPress just notified me that I registered with the site ten years ago today.
Tag: internet
Okay come on now
The following results were returned– in fact, were the first seven results– by a search on Indeed.com that specifically excluded the words “nanny” and “babysitter” and specified within 25 miles of my house:
Two jobs in New York and only one job that doesn’t use one of the words the search was supposed to eliminate. Nice job, Indeed.com! Perhaps you could use someone skilled with coding to rework how your search functionality does its job?
(I will never not be mystified about how I can do a search for a thing on a site, and get results that don’t use the words I searched for before I get results that do.)
In other news, fiction is actually being produced right now. It has been a long time since that was true. But yes! I am working on a Benevolence Archives story in between pointless job searches.
So this just arrived
…I am starting to think that listing my resume on CareerBuilder.com was perhaps not the brightest decision I ever made. This showed up in my mailbox today; the only alterations I have made are the italics and to change my real name to Luther’s:
Respected Luther M. Siler,
Our Company New-W. would like to congratulate you on your selection for the position of Logistics Supervisor. New-W. is a reputed company dealing in logistics of delivery of goods purchased from USA & Canada online retailers to customers all over the Globe. Our company gives you the perfect opportunity to get experience in the field of logistics with field work and provides the best of career growth to hardworking candidates
To confirm your acceptance, please send the following to us:
• Your Name & Surname
• Your Cell NumberAs a logistics supervisor you duties will include the following
• Receipt and dispatch of packages to clients Worldwide
• Coordinate the logistics of delivery process with other members of the team
• Control to admin panel on daily basisSALARY & PERKS
For the 1st month which probationary, you salary will be in the range of 2400-3500$. After successful completion of this period, you will be eligible to receive bonuses depending on your performance.
We look forward for a fruitful association with you.Sincerely,
Alfreda Hall
New-W. Company
I note also that the return email does not appear to be affiliated with “New-W. Company,” which somehow fails to surprise me.
Jobhunting!
Which sin is that again?
Okay.
The boy’s at school, for the first time in two weeks. My wife is in Boston. I actually have the day to myself to accomplish my own aims for the first time in a while. I have, so far today, managed to get to the pharmacy and pick up some medication. That’s actually bragging! That counts as a thing!
I have at least 10,000 other things to do, though, especially when we consider that I potentially have jury duty tomorrow, and who knows how long that could last. Trials sometimes take a long time, right? This means that there are a number of things that I really ought to do my damnedest to get done today since who knows if I’ll be able to get them done during the day at any other point this week.
Then there’s that whole “write fiction” thing I used to do.
And I haven’t been to the pool in two weeks, because of the aforementioned boy’s Spring Break. I maybe ought to start doing that again soon.
So naturally I’ve spent the morning glassily staring off into space, idly websurfing, and trying to talk myself out of a barnburning politics post that probably is better put off until after New York votes on the 19th.
I thought about trying to see if anyone had streamed a playthrough of Dark Souls III, which might prevent me from having to buy it and then not playing it. That’s what has counted as ambition so far today.
Good morning, Internet.
FORMAL NOTICE
I am in a technology rabbit hole involving cloud syncing, overcomplicated, computer-generated passwords, and Google nonsense. Also my email address may be changing. Also I may be in a foul mood for the remainder of the day. Also technology is stupid, especially technology that doesn’t cooperate by, say, syncing across computers like it’s supposed to.
Also I have an eye appointment this afternoon and am expecting to spend a chunk of the afternoon blind.
I’ll let y’all know when I come up for air, but hang a “HERE BE MONSTERS” sign on the blog for a bit.
So far
Today has featured an auto repair shop declining work on a car because it would be too expensive and complicated, damn near falling asleep while driving my kid to school (unrelated to the car work! I swear!) because apparently none of last night’s sleep took, lost toddler shoes, verbose teacherly apologies, an entire pot of coffee, a couple of hours of resultant heart palpitations, beta reading, utter ridiculousness on Twitter, preparations for a toddler (not mine) birthday party, taquitos, and somehow dragging the beaten and lifeless carcass of the Sunlight manuscript across the 40,000 word mark.
Guess which part was my favorite.
I am exhausted. I’d be happy that it’s the weekend, but 1) this weekend is going to be busy as hell, and 2) I’m unemployed at the moment so it’s not like weekends are any different from any other day.
In other words, have a couple of music videos, because I am done for the day.
A very brief thing I realized
I will probably stomp on this post in, like, an hour when I write something new– today has potential to be kinda posty, actually– but I just realized something. I jumped on WordPress the other day because they appear to have removed my ability to access my site’s lifetime geography/country stats.
It hit me last night that, at least within my somewhat limited understanding of how the interwebs work, a possible good reason for that is that WordPress just emailed every single subscriber a link to a new site including a custom map for their blogs, and that perhaps that volume of map-clickery and map-generatery is putting strain on a server somewhere. So they removed the older version temporarily to keep from borking the site.
I’m going to spend a few days assuming it will be back once the “Ooh, my annual report is here!” excitement wears off.
(If you know more about how the interwubs work than I do, and this explanation doesn’t make any sense, do me a favor and just let me stew in my own ignorance. At this particular moment I’d prefer to think that this was done for a good reason and I’m willing to be mildly wrong for a short time about a relatively irrelevant thing if it means something makes sense.)
More later. I seriously have two other posts I want to get done today, and it may actually be three.
#Review: ZER0ES, by Chuck Wendig
We’ll start with this, I guess:
It is with a certain feeling of irony that I use my phone to get on Twitter to tell @ChuckWendig that I really liked ZER0ES.
— Luther M. Siler (@nfinitefreetime) November 15, 2015
A warning: this is going to start as a review of ZER0ES, Chuck Wendig’s new hard-to-type novel, but I suspect given the mood I’m in and some of the stuff the book did to my head that it’s going to go far afield pretty quickly. So we’ll do the tl;dr version first: my favorite Chuck Wendig book last week was The Blue Blazes. It’s not anymore. That said, I have the sequel to Blazes on my Kindle, so ZER0ES’ reign as my favorite of his books may last exactly as long as it takes to read my next Chuck Wendig book.
Right, I usually start these things with the cover:
Nicely evocative, innit? You kinda have to look at the actual cover at the right angle in the right lighting to catch the human face, but it’s a neat cover. Here’s the bare-bones plot: five hackers, unknown to each other, are kidnapped and ushered off to a secret location and forced to work together. Hilarious hijinks ensue and eventually there’s an insane NSA surveillance AI to struggle against. I said when I reviewed Star Wars: Aftermath that I didn’t feel like Wendig’s typical writing style worked for a Star Wars book all that well. Where his style does work is a tense thriller about hackers and surveillance and technology and shadowy government programs and, oh, Greek mythology. That’s in there too. This book doesn’t need to be part of a series, but man am I excited to read it.
And it’s interesting that I’m finishing it on a day, or at least on a weekend, where I find myself badly wanting to cut myself off from large chunks of the Internet for a very long time if not all of the rest of it. The book isn’t explicitly about social media, mind you; it’s more concerned with interconnectivity, where nowadays your refrigerator and your phone and the webcam on your computer and your toaster and your Xbox are all connected to the same wireless network, and a couple steps beyond that you get to the traffic lights down the street and the power grid. I was musing about Batman earlier for some reason and it hit me that any sort of real-world Batman being a real thing is impossible, not for the usual reasons but just because it would take a drone with an infrared camera about four seconds to note the big hot space underneath Wayne Manor, and good luck driving the Batmobile home, dude, because there’s no way to get away from cameras and they’re all connected to each other.
That scene in Avengers, remember it? Bruce Banner asks Nick Fury how many, hell, I don’t remember, “gamma scanners” or something SHIELD has access to, and Fury’s reaction is to shrug and ask “How many are there?”
That’s what ZER0ES is about. And while I loved the book quite a bit, it’s kinda doing stuff to my head right now. I hate Facebook. I’ve always hated Facebook. There’s not been a single second where I had an account on that site and I didn’t despise it. Fuck, everyone hates Facebook and yet none of us can cut the fucking cord. I’d lose access to a handful of people who I basically don’t interact with anywhere but Facebook because I can’t convince any of them to start their blogs back up again.
And I’m talking about my real Facebook. Luther has one too, and I have to pay at least a little bit of attention to that. Blech.
Twitter, on the other hand, a lot of the time I love, but because of the mix of people I’m connected to, there are huge chunks of time where being on Twitter is keeping my blood pressure up. I have a ton of activists on my feed, and I’m not mad at them, but, well: I can’t log into Facebook without being reminded that the world is stupid and I can’t log into Twitter without being reminded that the world is evil. Facebook’s all about putting stupid bullshit in front of my eyes: a post that basically asks people to count to 30 that for some reason has been shared three hundred thousand times, or the latest right-wing meme lie that none of my friends shared but one of the idiots tried to debunk and as a result it ended up on my page, or yet another fucking Upworthy video, or whatever moron factory’s picked up Upworthy’s banner now that I’ve managed to block them.
Twitter is for reminding me that the cops killed another nine-year-old today, and the cop that did it is going to get away with it, and that a significant chunk of “humanity” is going to try their damnedest to convince everyone that the nine-year-old deserved it. And that this was the third time it had happened this week.
I don’t know how much longer I can put up with any of this shit, honestly.
But, hey: Go read a good book. It’s analog.