Tag: technology

In which I spend money I don’t have

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy6 Comments

2017-Ford-Escape-Left-Front-Angle.jpgNo, I didn’t buy a new car, but I’m thinking about it: I’m at a Ford dealership right now getting a recall repair done (for free) and literally just as I was sitting down to write this post I got an email with an estimate for all the repairs they think the car needs and it’s roughly 1 1/2 times the actual value of the car.  It’s running well for something that is about to fall the fuck apart, but even the shit that’s in BRIGHT RED SCREAMING HOLY SHIT YOU’RE GOING TO DIE font adds up to “may as well total the thing” territory.  So I’ve been sitting here in the dealership for an hour already and there’s possibly as much as another two before I can leave, so fuck it, I’m researching new cars.

I don’t really need another SUV.  I was driving a two-door Toyota Yaris (which I loved) when the boy came along, and upgrading to something with four doors seemed like a critical necessity what with several years of car seats in our future, and we’d been through a spate of scenarios where we’d had to borrow other people’s cars to move stuff right around the same time.  The Yaris, despite being tiny, rode really high, and I quickly discovered that after driving that and then an SUV I don’t ever want to sit down in a car ever again, eliminating virtually every sedan on the market.  I want to climb into my seat so that I don’t have to grunt like some sort of animal when I get out of it.  Despite its age, I’ve been pretty happy with the current (’01) Escape, so replacing it with another seems reasonable.  I just sat down and priced one out on the internet, and discovered to my mild amusement that I could put myself into a new Escape for a lower monthly cost than a Kia Soul (my other leading choice) would end up being, despite the Escape being a few thousand dollars more expensive.  Plus: union-made, a big plus.

(The punch line is I probably could afford a new car if I could just curb my comic book habit and dial back on how often I pay for meals.  That is insane, but true.  Today’s post was very nearly about how comic books are better now than I remember them being at any point in my life.  It’s crazy how much money I’m spending on comics every week.  Crazy.)

I am aware used cars exist, mind you.  And I know the current car was bought used and worked out okay.  I just… nah.  I know about driving shit off the lot and it losing half its value and all that nonsense.  And every computer I’ve ever bought has been obsolete when I bought it, and my Xbox will eventually be on sale for half what I just paid for it, and blah blah blah.  Shit loses value.  Welcome to reality.  I don’t plan on trying to resell anything I buy in two years; this is not worth worrying about at the moment.

Maybe I should get working on the new book before I do something stupid.

Can’t stop won’t stop

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work2 Comments

Because once you get on a roll making business cards…

Dad_Business_Cards_Front_copy_2.jpg

Sooner or later, I’ll, like, write fiction words or something, maybe.

FORMAL NOTICE

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

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.

In which somebody knows the answer to this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy7 Comments

uh-oh-o.gifThis question is a bit too long for Twitter, and I’m not prepared for the torrent of mockery I’ll receive if I put it on Facebook, so quickie blog post it is:

There used to be (it may still be around; I kinda doubt it) a website where you’d be paired up with some random yahoo on their webcam, and you yourself would be some random yahoo on your webcam, and you could chat with that person or click and be sent on to the next random yahoo.  My recollection was that the site was about half thirteen-year-old girls having slumber parties and half masturbating old men who were hoping to con those thirteen-year-olds into taking their shirts off.  There was no chatting; only horror.

This predated both Snapchat and Tinder by a good margin– I want to say I lived in Chicago during its heyday, which would put it in the early-mid 2000s– but you can see how it might have informed both of those services.  In fact I’m pretty sure it was mostly pre-smartphone, since it relied upon having a webcam.

I cannot construct a Google search that helps me, and I can’t remember the name of the site.  Just don’t ask me why I want to know; I just remembered it existed last night and for some reason it still bugs me that I can’t recall the name.

In which I investigate

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Reviews5 Comments

Huty1913428I’m issuing a qualified thumbs-up to the new text editor, guys, and I’m surprising myself by doing so, believe me.  The only thing I’ve found that doesn’t work like I want it to is moving images around, and that feels more like a temporary bug than a deliberate decision someone made.  It’s also pretty easy to fix in HTML if the image won’t slide around properly in the WYSIWYG editor.

One thing I’d like to see is a way to copy posts straight from the new editor; I actually use that feature quite a lot what with the various hashtagged posts I do every week, and it’s kind of annoying to have to go through the My Sites menu to copy a post or to just hope the original (as in, the black-and-white one from three years ago) editor pops up.  However, now that I’ve typed enough that I don’t want to cancel out, I do seen an “All Posts” arrow in the upper-right hand corner, so maybe that’s where I’d go before I start writing if I wanted to copy a post.  (EDIT: Nope.  As of right now, you need the admin page to copy posts, which is unchanged from the last version of the editor.)

Another minor annoyance: Choosing a category does not unclick “Uncategorized” automatically like it used to.  They should fix that.

Continue reading “In which I investigate” →

So much for that, I guess

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy19 Comments

tumblr_inline_n04m1jSVXI1rxlkcnSo as part of my list of Morning Things that I was going to do today, I planned on paying at least the 30% deposit for my booth at C2E2 this March.  Now, they want $912 for the booth, so even the deposit is just south of $300.

Shit shoulda taken five minutes, and only taken that long because I would have needed that extra three-digit number from the back of the card and so I’d have had to go find it.

It is now an hour and a half later, and I’ve invented some swear words in the meantime.  These people simply do not want my money.  I want to pay that bill with a credit card, because … well, fuck you, you don’t actually need a reason, I want to pay for it with a credit card because it’s 20goddamn15 and you can pay for everything with fucking credit cards.

They want either a paper “company check” sent to them (I don’t know what the difference between a “company check” and a “personal check” is, and my Prostetnic account doesn’t have a checkbook anyway) or a wire transfer or for me to give them a forty dollar convenience fee to use a credit card.

To do a wire transfer would be possible but it appears that I would have to open a checking account on my Bank of America card, which isn’t the account I wanted to use anyway, and then I’d have to pay them a fee.  I am not opening any additional accounts with anyone and I am not paying any third parties, particularly Bank of Fucking America, any sort of fee in order to pay Reed Exhibitions some money that they apparently don’t want from me anyway.  And I’ll offer my body as a masturbatory aid for horses before I pay any fucker $40 to use a credit card in 2015.

Irate emails have been sent; I doubt they will get me anywhere, which means Reed Exhibitions doesn’t want my money and I will therefore not be attending the convention after all.  Given that I was almost certain to lose money on the effort anyway I am sure as shined shit going to spend money so that I can send them money.  

Fuckit.

This has eaten my entire morning, by the way, and I’m way too pissed off to transition straight into writing right now, so I’m going to take a shower and eat lunch and then hopefully have an insanely productive goddamn afternoon.  I should send these fuckers a bill; my time is worth money and they have wasted a hell of a lot of it this morning with this nonsense.

#Review: ZER0ES, by Chuck Wendig

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

We’ll start with this, I guess:

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:

zero_HR_2

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.

FYAC, DIAF

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

giphy-1Naturally, this happens the week after Searching for Malumba comes out.  Consider it a bonus story.

I have a number of former students with whom I am in at least irregular contact.  One of them, a former DC student, which is why she has my phone number, reliably texts me three or four days a week about something or another.  Today I got a text from her as I was leaving the house.  She was griping about her teeth; she’d just been to the dentist and had them (apparently rather thoroughly) cleaned, and they hurt.  I reassured her that it was unlikely that her teeth were going to hurt forever and went on my way– which, at that particular time, involved going and getting in my car to go pick up my son.  A moment later, I got three more picture texts– I can tell when someone sends me a picture because of the way my watch shows me the notification, but can’t actually get a thumbnail or anything.

I, waiting at a red light, glanced at the pictures a couple of minutes later and realized that she’d sent me three pictures of her new high school, since they just moved.  She thinks it looks like a jail.  She’s right.

I don’t text while driving often (he said) but when I do, I voice text, and it’s generally pretty damn accurate.  I sent her the following message:

It took me a minute before I had a chance to look at those and at first I thought you had sent me pictures of your teeth.

Because, of course, she’d just come from the dentist!  Smile a couple of times– hell, point the camera at the filling in your molar, hell if I know– and send off the pictures of your nice freshly cleaned teeth.  Not an out-of-context picture of a jail-like school building.

I glanced at my phone before hitting Send.  Thank fucking God.

It took me a minute before I had a chance to look at those and at first I thought you had sent me pictures of your titties.

…

WHAT THE FUCK, VOICE TEXT.  This is supposed to be an adaptive program, right?  It learns your voice and all that shit.  Y’all have been reading me for a minute.  You know I swear.  You have hundreds of thousands of words of my writing to wade through on this site.  I dare you to find another place where I said “titties.”   Why the fuck would my phone think I said “titties” when I said “teeth”?

I’d have had to drive off a bridge.  I’d have had to find a bridge, because hell if I can think of where the closest one is off the top of my head, and then I’d have to drive off of it, because my only options at that point would have been to be arrested or to become an internet meme.

Phones are stupid.