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Relative Dating

“Today” and “Yesterday” are intuitive ways to indicate when something happened. Except when one cannot determine when today is.

See, I appear to have a weird DNS issue where some software is not able to communicate with servers. Microsoft Teams appears to be one of those products affected. So, in a thread that says “Today”, I end up scrolling back up in the feed to verify that today is today and not say yesterday because the time did not refresh.

This is better than Facebook or Twitter where the feed is non-temporal, so scrolling up does not mean that a yesterday or 3 days ago reflects a date relative to today. Especially when the phone is connected to a shoddy WiFi and has not refreshed in hours unknown to me.

The Special Character That Wasn’t

In trying to uninstall a piece of software, the computer reported that process failed because of a special character in the directory where it was installed. What? That doesn’t make any sense. First, it was a generic folder name. Second, how did the same installer software create this directory it now cannot remove?

Eventually, the issue turned out to be that the file system where the installer put a directory was not mounted. It is one I have to provide a password after startup, so my laziness turns out to be my Achilles heel.

This means the error message was completely misleading. It sent me in the completely wrong direction. I hate, hate, HATE this vendor, so I am not sure I want to report the bad error message because it will mean having to deal with them. Morally and ethically, I should. But, I have better things to do.

“School spirit”

It seems like a common thing where employees wear shirts with a high school or college logo in the town of the team on the days prior to and on the day of a game. The more I talk to people, the more I run across people who are posing.

  • Employees dependent on good tips from fans tailgating or watching the game.
  • Employees needing an inside route to the good graces of a fan boss.
  • Employees following the herd.

I tend to troll. Instead of wearing an opposing team, I wear something from another sport.

Friend Request Hoax

A legitimate message expressing concern about your impersonation account would:

  1. Ask if you created another account.
  2. Provide the address to the new account so you can go to the profile, click the three dots on the cover photo, select Report, and follow the instructions for impersonation.

Instead, the hot hoax right now says:

Hi….I actually got another friend request from you which I ignored so you may want to check your account. Hold your finger on the message until the forward button appears…then hit forward and all the people you want to forward too….PLEASE DO NOT ACCEPT A NEW friendship FROM ME AT THIS TIME.

Let’s break this down.

First, we have the preying on a fear we all have about our Facebook accounts getting hacked. Worse, this “hacker” is now going after friends.

But, the recommendation makes no sense at all. “Hold your finger on the message until the forward button appears…then hit forward and all the people you want to forward too…”

Forwarding the message to others is how chainletters operate. You are being played by forwarding it. You are spreading fear. You are not helping.

App ratings

I get it, if you have made a mobile app, then you need good ratings. However, most of the time that I get a notification to provide a review, I already have.

I probably left a good one as I was new to it. But, I have found more issues for subsequent times. So you are going to lose a star or two.

Zero-Sum Politics

Liberals see “rights” as something of a public good (like national defense or a scenic view), whose consumption by one individual doesn’t diminish consumption by others. In fact, they believe that all Americans are thereby made better off.

In the conservative version of identity politics, however, everything’s a zero-sum game: Freedom from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion or other characteristics doesn’t unleash greater human potential to the benefit of all. Instead, it’s a step backward for everyone else, part of the never-ending war of all against all. Your gain is necessarily my loss.

In a world where one sees others gaining with a zero-sum game view, one should have fear for oneself, family, and friends. When the government encourages certain behaviors, they are picking winners and losers. Fear of being the loser becomes a real thing.

Whereas, with the non-zero-sum point of view, when the government encourages certain behaviors, it lifts up the lowest to improve the environment for everyone.

Good guy with a gun

I’ve seen security kick plenty of people out of bars. They sometimes come back wanting to start something with security. In this case, one shot at security from outside who returned fire and apprehended one of them and held him at gunpoint for authorities. A police officer who showed up killed the security guard.

When I was an “emergency coordinator”, we once had a session about what to do during an active shooter situation. Guns were not allowed then. (Unclear now.) It was the Hide, Run, Fight philosophy which was hole up in a secure room if you can, get out if you can, fight back as only a last resort. The trainer’s point was when a police officer shows up, if you are armed, then you might get shot because they will not know who is a good vs bad. They see a weapon and might shoot before they know.

Freelove != Free Love

Got an email from Academia.edu saying,

Dear Ezra,

Alessandra Carneiro uploaded a PDF that mentions the name “Ezra Freelove”.

They have a premium service where you can buy access to mentions of your name. I know of only one mention in a VSU paper as a thank you for my work there in IT in helping them. So, I was curious about a second. I wasn’t going to spend $99 for it, so I looked up the name of the author. Only one person with that name has papers uploaded, so it was easy to just browse them.

Searching for “freelove” in all 8 led to no results. Then, I noticed “free love” one title. It was also the most recent. My actual last name is nowhere in the article. This website’s search must be ignoring the spaces in the four mentions.

Not the first nor the last time people conflate my surname with the term.

Check the date

TL;DR: If you see a story that compels you to share it in outrage, then check to see if this really is still an issue. It might be from years ago and no longer an issue.

Longer:

A few friends posted a news story about how the current Federal administration decided to pay $6 million of the almost $1 billion requested by North Carolina related to damage caused by Hurricane Matthew. Hurricane Michael hit Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina last week. So, I am sure this story is more noticeable because the two storms both start with M and are boy names unlike Maria last year. The story was published in 2017. It also wasn’t clear about the NC request and best I can tell, FEMA has allocated $500 million that is being very slowly spent, HUD $168M, SNAP $70M. There probably is other money like small business loans from Federal agencies, but I did not really find a clear single number.

Another story I noticed over the weekend that became popular was the governor of Maine claiming almost all the drug problem was Blacks and Latinos from out of state going there to deal. (And impregnate White women.) This one was from 2016 when LePage was attempting to support the Republican presidential candidate. It was disheartening to see people calling for a recall of someone term-limited and ineligible to run in the election next month, so he is going out the door anyway.