Computers | Funny about Money

Disconnecting: A Good Thing?

February 18, 2016 by funny

DayUM but I’m sick of the whole time-sucking, tooth-grinding, sub-minimum-waging computer effing CONNECTED goddamn THING. Here’s a question (by way of getting a word in the title into the first graf, as an SEO thing): what if, what IF you disconnected (got that, Google? DISCONNECTING!) about every second day? Yeah, you got that right: what if every other day you refrained from signing on to your computer, your tablet, your phone, your whateverTF?

Oh, let’s go all the way: what would happen if you only signed in every third day? What if you read your email and cruised the net and dorked around with your social media no more often than once every three days? What if you reserved the third out of every three days for computer connectivity, and all the rest of the time you reclaimed for your SELF?

Dare one suggest that your sanity might be much bolstered by such a scheme? Dare one suggest that, in fact, you might regain a grip on your humanity?

This morning as I was driving out to the Thursday wee-hours meeting in Scottsdale, a thought intruded on the zen-like calm elicited by sharing the roads with several thousand fellow homicidal drivers:

• I want my ranch back.
• I want my horses back.
• In specific, I want a propane refrigerator and a propane range and water running in from the Hassayampa and a stockpond full of bass and couple of candles for light after dark and my dogs chasing after me and Babe as we roam across the landscape and Ruby trying to catch a cow and most specifically I do not want a fucking computer yammering at me.
• At 7:16 in the morning, I want not to be running effing LATE to a business meeting but saddling up Babe for a day-long amble through the back-country of a thousand BLM acres.
• I want to spend the day exploring the back-country by horseback, not exploring the Internet by keyboard.
• I want my effing life NOT to come to an end because Cox’s effing connection to the effing Internet goes down for half a day. Or for any length of time.

My life is wonderful and urban and technologically enhanced and amazing and unimaginable just a couple of decades ago and godDAMN but I hate it.

Is there anyone out there, anywhere, who wants as much as I do to be FREE of the technological glory that is Life in Twenty-First Century America? Am I the only person on this planet who would dare suggest our lives today represent some kind of Hell?

We have, it must be said, devices (naturally…) to help us avoid wasting exorbitant numbers of hours on the Internet.

But I don’t think that’s the issue. To use moi as an example again: Although I do waste a certain amount of time on the Net reading the news and playing repetitive computer games, in fact MOST of the time stolen from my life is devoted to work: writing blog posts; tracking down factoids; downloading, storing, and documenting Shutterstock images; keeping a grip on the vast organizational challenges entailed in coordinating the publishing, editing, writing, and blogging empires; paying bills online; managing blogsites; riding herd on the freaking endlessly fire-hosing e-mail; creating a “presence” on other sites…and on and on. Most of this is work-related or IRS-related.

Most of the time absorbed by Connectivity has to do with business or with attempts to make some kind of profit.

And most of that profit, to the extent it exists at all, is minuscule. The Third-Worldization of educated American workers happens through a computer portal. The miraculous technology that infests our lives has taken us back the the sweatshop.

So I wonder: what would happen if we time-stamped ourselves out of the sweatshop? What if we restricted computer time to once every other day or once every third day? Would we not, given a shorter time frame, accomplish the same amount of online work in fewer hours, simply because we would have to focus on getting through x or y amount of work in half or a third as much time? And would our professional and personal lives come to an end if all we did on the Net was specifically related to a given client or job? And the rest of it went away because we limited the number of hours online?

What I propose is not exactly going off the grid (although just at this moment I would be beside myself with joy to find a practical way to do so). The question is, can we go partly off the grid without watching our lives grind to a halt?

Computer Kudzu

February 13, 2016 by funny

It’s taken two days to prune the computer kudzu out of this little machine. Ever notice that? Files grow like horror-movie vines, shedding endlessly reproducing directories and subdirectories. After awhile you can’t find anything, because whatever it is that you need (right this minute, dammit!) is hidden under impenetrable mounds of digital debris.

Hour after hour of hacking and shoveling left just 12 main directories.

Who’d have thunk it? Two years of nonstop work occupying seven days a week boil down to 12 little computer folders.

…And 52 subdirectories with 118 sub-subdirectories… Ugh.

That doesn’t count the ones I threw out, the ones in the “Archive” folder, the ones in “Dropbox,” the junk that’s settled on the Desktop, and all the mystery files in “Microsoft User Data,” for which I disclaim responsibility. 😀

But the depressing part surfaced in a folder containing a bunch of projects I’d started and imagined working on after quitting the damn teaching job. An elaborate sequel to Fire-Rider involving a tribe of cryptids…a crime novel I drafted in graduate school, unearthed a couple years ago, dreamed up a new plot line for, and had begun revising…a corgi book…several books on nonfiction writing technique…a personal finance book…a science fiction story with an alarmingly clunky opener (gotta write that thing over!)…a book to be titled, creatively enough, I Hate Cats…Notes for the proposed (and long-defunct) boob book, complete with a full-blown proposal including two chapters, two appendices, and an introduction….

Ohhh well.

Really. If I’m going to do this publishing gig for nothing — actually, right now I’m doing it for considerably less than nothing, since the $34 I earned last month hardly comes under the heading of “profit” — then I might as well amuse myself by writing unpublishable books and stories, instead of working my buns off formatting, publishing, and marketing the unsalable. LOL!

In fact, if I pulled down revenue from The Copyeditor’s Desk, an ordinary year’s occasional income would come to just about what adjunct teaching pays for a course load equivalent to a full-time load with honest pay and benefits at the Great Desert University. It ain’t much, but it’s better than nothing. Thirty-four bucks a month makes adjunct teaching look good. Matter of fact, it makes reading Chinese dissertations and math treatises look good.

Editorial work doesn’t exactly overtax one’s skills or time. It would leave plenty of opportunity to write whatever drivel I feel like posting.

Or even to have a life. Can you imagine?

Obnoxious Facebook…

January 17, 2016 by funny

In my old age, the glories of a lot of things the Moderns love do escape me. Facebook? Biggest corporate escape artist in town. Between its habitual invasion of privacy and its faceless corporate obstinacy, I find Facebook utterly obnoxious. I’ve never been able to figure out its appeal, but the more I’m forced to know about it, the less I grasp people’s fascination with it.

Facebook appears to have stopped reposting from Funny about Money. At least, it has if you believe JetPack, whose corporate credibility strikes one as a lot more reliable than Facebook’s.

Because I have no patience with Facebook and do not wish to consume the few hours remaining to me on this earth with learning how to operate a system whose point goes over my head, I hired an ad manager to run a Facebooks Ads campaign to publicize Fire-Rider and the diet/cookbook. She asked for my log-in details so she could set up an ad account for me.

Turns out Facebook, like Big Brother, is always watching you. Its machinery noted that someone was logging in from a different ISP than my Macbook and so they canceled the ad account, took down the ad campaign to which she had devoted a number of hours, and forced me to dream up a new password. When I asked for my money back (turns out the business of spying on your ISP is a known issue with FB — apparently no normal person can be expected to log in to FB from more than one computer), she came up with a workaround. It remains to be seen how long Big Brother is going to let that stay in place.

Understand: the feed from Funny was set up years ago by a long-since retired WordPress guru. She’s not even in the blogging business anymore. I wouldn’t have known how to set up a blog feed into Facebook, nor would I have been inclined to do so without said guru’s prompting — FB doesn’t interest me and I wouldn’t have signed up at all except for the choir’s insistence that everyone must go online.

JetPack makes it easy to feed blog posts to WordPress — thereby increasing everyone’s potential for pointless clutter by vast orders of magnitude. So with the latest update, it asked me to “refresh” FaM’s connection to FB. Obediently, the little sheeple did so.

It — JetPack — seems to have had no problem connecting Writers Plain & Simple to my Facebook feed, but it no longer can get Funny online, apparently because FaM is posted with the old password. I have no idea how to fix this, and I’m pissed.

Not that the world rotates around FaM. But since I’ve drifted away from PF blogging per se, FaM has become my personal blog. The old connection with FB, then, made it easy to update friends about whatever is, famously, “on my mind” (grrrrr! patronizing bastards) without having to log in and upload links or post bleats.

Among the many things I dislike about Facebook is the lack of control you have over what goes up on the thing. Facebook is like the Borg: We will assimilate you. It’s spying on you everywhere you go, and it seems to pick up messages for group B that you really would not like to share with group A among your friends, family and associates.

Why do Facebook’s arrogant developers fail to grasp the possibility that you might not want your church group to know about your spicy publishing venture? I do not publish porn because I so love it. I publish porn because I can’t make a living at teaching, a trade that now pays less than minimum wage. It’s not something I want anyone but porn readers to know about.

Facebook makes it difficult — IMHO probably impossible — to separate out groups of acquaintances and friends. It mandates against setting up more than one “account,” and the thing is set up to confound efforts to send out messages to targeted groups and still actually reach those groups. In theory it’s possible to do so, but who trusts Facebook? The risk that a message for Audience A will end up being shoved in the faces of Audience B is definitely there. And IMHO, any such risk is too much risk.

Brave new world, isn’t it… So we think.

Back up your data…back up back up back up!

January 11, 2016 by funny

I would type LOL but today’s adventure in computer technology was potentially not funny. This morning the editor of an academic journal we edit asked if I still had last year’s bureaucratic paperwork, a PDF time-suck that one has to fill in every. single. goddamn. year. So I go over to DropBox to retrieve the same from the journal’s “GDU Paperwork” subdirectory.

Empty.

Huh?

I start looking in the other subdirectories. “Style Guides”: Empty.

Holy sh!t. I just posted edits for FOUR full-length scholarly articles in that folder! I was in the “Style Guides” subdirectory yesterday, because the journal has a wacky mark-up system that we have to look up and study every time we work on a new issue, and the files were in there as of about 7:00 last night.

Mercifully, the edited articles were still there. I had backed up that DropBox folder to my hard disk some time back, and so the two endless, pointlessly complicated style guides were saved to the laptop. But after two days of plowing through academicese, much of it in Spanglish, I was so glad to be done that I thought nothing of posting the stuff to the editors on DropBox and stumbling away.

Madly copied the surviving files to the hard disk.

Now I’ll have to back up the laptop’s hard disk again. That takes awhile: there are over 18,000 files in the two directories I use all the time. Shee-ut. Just did that a couple days ago.

Well, it’ll have to run while I’m chasing around town today. Thanks to the mail thieves and the credit union’s clunky electronic deposit system, I now have to drive to a post office to pick up packages and to the credit union to deposit checks.

Almost $2,000 worth of Copyeditor’s Desk checks are now in hand, so those need to be schlepped up to the CU. That will keep the publishing business going a little longer, anyway. 😀

Always back everything up. An automatic online back-up such as Carbonite is ideal. Since I try to minimize the endless monthly charges — about the only way to survive on a fixed, limited income — I use Apple’s “Time Machine,” which is built into a Mac and requires only an external hard drive.

The one I have is attached to the desktop, which means anything on DropBox is being backed up automatically. But I need to get a back-up drive for the laptop…another complicated decision I don’t feel like having to figure out and another involved digital task I don’t wanna do.

Don’t computers improve our lives…

Google, GET YOUR NOSE OUT OF MY BUTT!!!!!

January 1, 2016January 1, 2016 by funny

US_Capitol_Building_at_night_Jan_2006 — This?…

How can I do without being spied on by Google at every damn turn? Let me COUNT the ways!!!!!

Really, the invasion of privacy that company inflicts should be prohibited by federal law. It should be effing ILLEGAL to track you around the Internet and track every one of your correspondents, too.

In fact, if Google were a government agency, it would have to get a subpoena to engage in the kind of spying into our personal lives that it does routinely. The reason it gets away with it? It’s a corporation. Because the Founding Fathers could no more have envisioned a world dictated by computer technology than they could have imagined taking a stroll on the moon, it never occurred to them to extend constitutional protections against overweening government to the real government that one day would evolve.

That would be the corporate shadow government, the one that dictates how we live, what we eat, where we work, how much we’re paid, whether we can borrow money and at what rate, whether we can insure ourselves against financial ruin in the event of accident, sickness, or natural disaster…actually, when you think about it, the one that dictates just about every aspect of our daily lives.

This morning I RSVP’ed to an upcoming meeting of a writer’s group I belong to. This group happens to have a Meetup.com site. And Meetup.com is synced with — who else? Google, of course. Within seconds after RSVPing that I would attend, in came an email informing me that Google has automatically installed a notice of the meeting in one of my several Google calendars (all of them, for all I know!) and that it will be sending me an email reminder. Lucky me! Here was a wonderful new G-service!

God damn it. Now I had to get into not one, not two, but three G-mail accounts and disable the damn calendars’ automatic notification. Yet another electronic time-suck. Really: do you need your time wasted that way? I sure don’t, and I’ll bet you don’t, either.

If I wanted Google Calendar to pester me with email reminders, I would proactively ask it to do so. The reason I don’t is that I tried Google Calendar and found it to be an endless hassle and annoyance. Annoyance annoyance ANNOYANCE! I do not WANT to be binged, pinged, and emailed for every deep breath I’m about to take. I don’t WANT Google to record every meeting I attend and every meeting I decline to attend.

So I quit using Google Calendar. I use iCal, which a) is resident on my machine and does not require me to go out on the Net to enter events, b) is easier to control, and c) can be persuaded not to make you crazy. I haven’t used Google Calendar in years.

Wouldn’t you think that would tell them something?

But ohhh no! Willy nilly, whether you love their tool or hate it, they’re going to push it in your face. That’s because they have THEIR corporate face pushed up your butt.

So why, you ask, do I use Gmail at all? No Gmail, no nuisance “calendar,” eh?

Well, because…

• I own a business and need a business address separate from my personal address.
• That business needs two “addresses,” one for the publishing enterprise and one for the editorial business.
• And I have a G-mail address that I use when forced to provide an email address to people I do not wish to share my address with, and to organizations that I believe are going to spam me.
• If you own a small business and can’t afford your own server and an in-house IT team to run it, you don’t have much choice but to use Google. It is, in effect, the only game in town, and because of that, it’s coercive.

One of the biggest mistakes this country has made in recent history was to defang the anti-trust laws. And Google is a prime example of the reason those laws are necessary and should never be watered down.

Consider the aspects of our lives this corporation has its fingers in:

Gmail owns my thermostat, which sends them data (presumably stored someplace) about the amount of electric power I use, the number of hours per day I use the power, and the time of day I use it. Harmless? Maybe. But that’s none of anybody’s business!

Gmail evidently owns Meetup.com, which it markets to just about every volunteer and social group in the country. Every time a group sends out an invite with an RSVP, Google collects data on the group and on every member in the group: who RSVPed and, by extension, who did not RSVP. What groups I belong to and which of their meetings I choose to attend are none of anybody’s business!

Google watches your Web searches, evidently recording those, too, since it never seems to forget what sites you’ve visited in the past. None of anybody’s business!

Google publishes pictures of your home on the Internet, complete with specifics about its location and clearly showing where the doors and windows are, simplifying burglars’ lives. With a vengeance, none of anybody’s business!

Google owns Motorola Mobility, which has to do with your Android phone. How much information that’s none of anybody’s business are they collecting from that?

Google owns YouTube (which, we might add, it has nicely broken). It knows what videos you watch and which you post to your websites. None of anybody’s business!

Come to think of it, Google knows all about what you write on your websites. Of course. What you choose to post to the Internet by default becomes everybody’s business. But that’s about it.

Google owns 180 companies, many of which have reason and capacity to collect and store data about you, your comings, and your goings. It may very well be the largest spy network on the planet.

Soon it will be producing electric cars, which will track and record all your movements about your city, town, and country. Those movements are already being tracked to a degree if you have a newer vehicle that’s “connected” to the Net. But when you’re driving a Google car, bank on it: every trip to the grocery store, every trip to your mother-in-law’s, every visit to your paramour or to the local whorehouse is going to be seen and recorded.

And why is this legal? Why has intrusion into our daily lives become so routine we sheeple hardly even notice it? Pretty obvious, isn’t it: the other 99% of us can’t afford to buy Congressmen and Senators, that’s why.

When corporate America can buy the government, folks, it is the government. If you’re not mad about that, you sure as hell should be!

Images:
U.S. Capitol at night. David Iliff. GNU Free Documentation License.Patio at Googleplex. Jijithecat. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.