Month: June 2015

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Purple-Tinted Rainbow Twaddle Masquerading as Legal Reasoning

Justice Kennedy was exactly the right person to sum up the legal reasoning of the majority opinion behind SCOTUS’ 5-4 HODGES decision. [Note: link is to pdf of Kennedy’s formal opinion.] Let’s just let Kennedy’s emotional bullshit speak for itself:

purple-tinted-rainbow-twaddle

That’s what passes for legal thought in the SCOTUS nowadays. . . Blatant distortion of fact and meaning. Logical fallacy after fallacy supporting emotional bullshit. That is the whole argument for same-sex “marriage” in a nutshell. At least Kennedy got that right.

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A Never-Ending Cornucopia. . .

My Wonder Woman never ceases to amaze–and amuse–me. Today, she took “depositions” from two first graders, elicited their testimony, made them write it out to submit for the principal’s adjudication of a dispute. She really poured it on ’em.

I’m pretty sure they’ll remember this day. *heh*

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More Mediacom Misbehavior. . .

. . .allowing me to have fun with the subliterate drones that Mediacom employs to lie to its customers.

I was incensed enough at Mediacom’s deceptive, unethical and outright evil behavior today that I had the opportunity to school a Mediacom customer *cough* “service” *cough-gag-spew* representative on the differences between obscenity, vulgarity and profanity. And yes, I made the poor, illiterate moron in the employ of The Evil Company listen to the whole thing. And when he insisted he had corrected the (34%) over-billing that was the proximal cause of THAT particular phone call, I made absolutely certain he knew that I chose not to believe him until I had documentary evidence in my hand, since everyone from Mediacom (except for our local service tech) has lied to me for years. Yes, everyone, even if they are just repeating lies they have been assured are truth.

Thing is? I told every single person from Mediacom I have talked to since it started strongarming me into installing their “DTAs” that this “billing error” would happen. All of them insisted it would not.

And ALL of them insisted that “federal law requires encryption of digital cable”–a flat-out lie, if the FCC is to be believed, since all its regulatory comments say only that cable companies encrypt digital content as an option. Lies, lies and more lies.

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Addictions

Some are not necessarily all that bad, ya know?

I have a lifelong friend (former college room mate) I once asked for something to read (late, had read everything in the apartment–I thought–and just wanted some words in front of my face). He handed me a soup can. I was happy. Yeh, addicted to the printed word. It’s an addiction I can live with, though. (After the soup can, I read some cereal boxes. I had the whole pantry to get through.)

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Mediacom, Sucking Dead Bunnies Through a Straw. IOW, Business as Usual.

Well, Mediacom is at it again. This quite apart from sending us 4 “DTAs”–digital jail boxes–that were ALL dysfunctional, and known to be so, according to the local tech who’s replaced 25 of them in the last couple of weeks with known-good MODELS from a different MANUFACTURER. No, this is something else: supposedly we’re hitting our data cap. Really unusual activity. Data consumption on the order of 3GB during a service outage is one clue.

Then, yesterday afternoon, after griping out yet another Mediacom Suckage Expert (A.K.A., “customer service representative,” “phone tech support person”) I DISCONNECTED our cable “modem” for 2.5 hours, reconnected and. . . more than 2.5GB of additional usage recorded.

Next? I then disconnected the cable “modem” for 16 hours. Reconnected and. . . yep. More usage, though less: only 1.6 additional GBs of data usage reported while our system was completely, physically disconnected from Mediacom.

Our neighbor, who has extremely modest Internet needs/usage has reported the same issue to Mediacom just this week. Mediacom, of course, says it’s all us.

Lies.

Local onsite support is better. The local support tech (I say “local”. Mediacom has him covering LARGE parts of 3 counties all by his lonesome) has had multiple encounters with folks supposedly hitting their data caps who simply aren’t, in all reality. Yeh, well, I just talk with folks around town, and my neighbor and I aren’t the only ones I know about.

Mediacom: asking the question, “How many customers can we screw today?”

Update: Strangely, after four hours of connectivity today, Mediacom’s data usage report has shown no increase in usage during that time. Yep. As ALWAYS, the problem is at Mediacom’s end of the pipe.

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I Don’t Know Why More People Don’t Do This

N.B. Casual computing notes. Almost NONE of this is for a business setting, although securely accessing remote desktops can be a big help there. But that’s not something I’d push the Windows Remote Desktop Connection app for. Maybe that’s just me. . .

My lil “living room lappy” doesn’t have much horsepower, but it doesn’t need much to log onto the media computer connected to the TV, and a lil rdp file semi-automates even that. Just using it as a semi-dumb client works really well in that situation. Heck, it even saves steps if I’m too lazy (and you can bet I frequently am) to walk back to my “real” computer back in my office. *shrugs*

I really don’t know why more folks don’t use remote desktop access for everyday stuff. It is a wee tad less convenient accessing other computers from my Kindle Fire. Sadly, the best tool for it seems to be TeamViewer. *scratches head* That doesn’t really make sense to me, but at least it works when I need it to, for values of “work” that are a bit kludgy.

*heh* The first time–years ago–I accessed my Wonder Woman’s computer and took control of her mouse, it freaked her out. Of course, that was back in the day when I had to set quite a few things up well in advance for her computer to accept my access. I don’t remotely access as many computers nowadays–especially WAN computers–as I used to do (all the time, it seemed for some years), but I’d just not ever want to do with NOT being able to access–and use just as if sitting at it any computer (of mine) on our LAN, any time, from any of them.

Yeh, yeh, I access files and folders more than I actually do remote computing on different computers scattered around the house, but not a day goes by I don’t fire up an application on Z-I from Z-II that just works better on Z-I than on Z-II, or whatever (yeh, not the computer names). (My music transcription software is an example. I might want to jot a few notes *heh* or make some edits while on the lil living room lappy, but the office machine is better for that. So. . . rdp, baby.)

Yes, it does sometimes mean files are scattered around at different machines, but regular justifications of archives on NASes, etc., help keep everything pretty well organized. (And then there are the “families” of files that have specific homes “in the cloud” as well, and synch up on all registered machines. . . which are then synched/justified on NASes. For the few terabytes of data I want to protect, it works all right.

Oh, look. The voices in my head wander’d afield. Who’d-a thunk it? 😉

(Yes, I know there are some approximations of full desktop access available for various Android and even *meh* iPad situations–see my comments about Kindle remote desktop access–but really? Notsomuch.)

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How to Mend Fences. . . or Not

When you have wronged someone, always apologize in a genuine, straightforward manner, acknowledging your fault, offering to make amends if material harm was done, doing so in a frank, straightforward manner.

When someone has wronged you, always accept a genuine, straightforward apology offered as above. But, always reject a weasel-worded fake apology and specify why. Fake apologies that do not even admit fault are worse than useless; they are additional offense. If the offender refuses to amend their error, shake the dust from your feet and simply ostracize them, make them thereafter a non-person to you, unless the offense also carries substantial material harm. Then, sue their pants off.

In family disputes, this may need a wee bit of tweaking. Between spouses, ignore everything in the second paragraph. No, seriously. 😉

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New Policy

Well, no, not new-new. Perhaps a better way to say it is a new statement of a policy that’s grown and matured over time.

Never suffer a fool, gladly or not, for in doing so all you do is kick the can down the road and into a neighbor’s yard. Therefore, when encountering fools, dumbasses, trolls and yahoos, kick THEIR cans as often and as hard as necessary to at least make sure they know what behaviors have earned them their pain.

Of course, “kick their cans” is normatively a metaphorical construction that more or less means, “Read them the riot act, and keep reading it to them as often as you have the time and energy to do so until they at least decide to behave properly around you.”

Almost all of the fools, dumbasses, trolls and yahoos out there are “special snowflakes” who have never had their nonsense and execrably rude behavior thrown back in their faces, have never suffered any consequences for their behaviors. Mock them. Roundly and soundly. Point out each and every one of their flaws (“And you smell bad, too!” is a nice one–especially in Internet fora. *heh*) Name-calling, as long as it is restricted to being descriptive of their behaviors and not as attempts to rebut their arguments (assuming they can make any) is fair. If they fit the class, they’ve earned a wee bit of name-calling, but keep it descriptive and as close as possible to their evidenced behaviors!

Being polite to jackasses only encourages them in their bad behavior. Sometimes, they need a (metaphorical, remember!) 2×4 upside the head. Well, more like most times.

Thatisall.

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You Do Not Want to Have This Image in Your Head

Over on FarceBook, one guy posted,

“got a pedicure yesterday. Need to go to XYZ, WV, and do a mineral bath and massage treatment next.”

My teeth are still good enough, but I’m not flexible enough, anymore, to give myself a “pedicure”. . . *heh*