Author: Mark Alexander

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Done With It

It should come as no surprise that the same people who wait until the last minute to request VPN to work from home are also the most clueless individuals in our organization.

Those higher up the IT chain have decided that in the interest of corporate security, they need to lock things down a bit, so as of last week we were no longer able to request VPN access for users who were using their personal computers to get on the enterprise network via VPN. Makes sense, considering how vulnerable to attack the vast majority of home PCs are.

So the new protocol requires getting the name of the enterprise PC the users will be taking home, their personal cell number (for 2-factor authentication required for the initial install of the client), and a list of applications they need to access that would be inaccessible if they weren’t granted VPN access. Simple stuff, right?

In theory, yes. But then I end up with users like the guy I had today who was requesting VPN for three of his direct reports. First email request asking for these three items was returned with only the PC name for one of his reports. Second was only the list of applications that the three employees would be using. Finally, when I told this user his request could not be fulfilled without the other PC names and cell phone numbers did I get all the info required. “I guess you guys are really busy right now, huh?”

Why yes. Yes we are. Because of people like you who can’t read an email all the way through.

After the accounts were created, I sent out emails to the employees, telling them they were set up on the back end and providing instructions on how to install the client on their company devices. As a courtesy I cc’d the guy who’d put in the initial request for them.

I immediately get an email from the genius saying, “[Employee Name] isn’t in the office today.”

So? SO? How does this affect ANYTHING I just emailed you?

But you know what irritates me more than this generic brand of cluelessness? It’s the people that somehow think everything is still business as usual and can’t understand that certain things they used to take for granted simply cannot be done at the moment.

No Karen, you can’t just “stop by and pick up a projector for a meeting.”

Firstly, there’s a skeleton crew in the office to begin with and absolutely no one in I.T. is onsite, and secondly, who are you scheduling a meeting with considering no one is in the office?!

SMDH.

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I Broke Down Last Night

I thought I’d been handling this self-quarantine, lockdown, whatever-you-wanna-call-it thing pretty well. I’m a homebody at heart, so I figured going into this not leaving the house lifestyle would be a walk in the park.

Well, that was proven wrong last night. It started with a mild headache yesterday afternoon and progressed to an upset stomach. Ben started making dinner and the smells that were coming into the den sent my headache into overdrive. I wanted to wretch. I told him I wasn’t at all interested in eating at the time and closed the door.

After Ben had eaten I ventured into the kitchen, where he joined me. I turned to him and started crying. He came in for a hug and I just let loose. I didn’t cry when my mom died. I didn’t cry when my dad passed. And yet now—for seeming no reason at all, I lost it.

Amazingly after that good cry, the headache was gone as well as my upset stomach.

In his wisdom, Ben suggested we both get out of the house for a while, either together or separately. Cabin Fever was setting in.  And you know I’m stressed when I reach the point I can’t spend one more second in front of a screen of any kind, which was exactly where I was.

We didn’t make it out last night because it was too late by the time I’d finished dinner, but when we woke today Ben said, “We need to take a drive.”

Since the world is on lockdown, we really couldn’t—nor did we want to—go anywhere that we’d run into masses of humanity, so we settled on one of the public spaces still open: White Tank Mountain Regional Park.

Back in the early 1970s after moving into our new home at 47th Avenue and Bethany Home Road, my family and I had an unobstructed view of the White Tank Mountains to the west. I often said that once I had my own car, my first destination would be driving out west to see them up close.

You can almost make out the White Tank Mountains through the haze on the horizon. That view doesn’t exist any more. (That’s my grandfather’s 1955 T-Bird that he conveniently got rid of right before I got my drivers’s license.)

It took 42-some years to do it, but I finally did when I drove out a few years ago to photograph the White Tank Library. While there I contemplated driving into the park, but for a variety of reasons decided to put it off for another time. It took an additional three and a half years beyond that, but I finally fulfilled my teenage dream of visiting those mountains today.

Deal with it. This is the first new car I’ve had in thirteen years, and goddamnit, I’m going to photograph the shit out of it.

We both felt much better—much relieved—when we arrived back home this afternoon. Ready to face another week of self-quarantine…

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Boring Car Stuff

TLDR: I discovered where the tow hook was stored and finally got the “entertainment center” to play music from a USB stick since it doesn’t work natively with my iPhone without a special adapter.

Rambling Version: The other day the question came up as to the location of Rabbit’s tow hook. I didn’t need it, obviously, but was curious as to where it was, or if it had gone missing while in the possession of AutoNation like the center console the car supposedly shipped with. (An ongoing story for another time.)

Anderson’s tow hook was stowed with the jack and associated paraphernalia under the floor in the rear storage area, but since Rabbit came with run-flat tires, there was no spare tire, and hence no need for a jack. I searched the owner’s manual and found no mention of it. That led me to the Google, where I learned it would most likely be under one or the other of the front seats. I checked, and sure enough, it was wedged into a special holder in the floor under the driver’s seat.

One disappointment I have with this car (because it’s a 2016 model, having come out before total onboard connectivity was a thing) was the inability to play music from my phone natively through the car’s built-in Bluetooth (or even through the single USB jack) without the purchase of a special adapter that plugs into both the USB and the AUX IN ports. Ugly.

Apparently I can play music stored on a “usb device” through the USB port, so I tried it yesterday. I copied a couple gig worth of audio files from iTunes to a spare USB key I had, and yes, it worked. Perfect, I thought!

That particular drive was 256GB (overkill for this process), so I mirrored the music collection I had on my iPhone onto a 32GB flash drive, plugged it into the car and…nothing. Wasn’t even recognized.

Okay…did I forget to format it as FAT, and had left it as APFS or Mac OS Extended? So I reformatted it in my work laptop running Win10 and copied all the files back. Again, no love.

Turns out the car didn’t like (for whatever reason) that particular brand of USB key. I reformatted the original one I’d used, copied the collection again to verify I wasn’t losing my mind, and it worked just fine.

Why didn’t I just use that one? Well, like I said, it was overkill considering I was only transferring about 16GB of music to begin with, and it was a rather long key that presented the opportunity of getting knocked around and trashing the car’s USB port in the process. I had to find another solution (the 32GB stick was much shorter).

So last night I ordered one of those tiny USB sticks (the ones that are the size of a wireless mouse dongle) made by Samsung from Amazon for $10. It arrived today. I loaded up the music collection and it works just fine.

 

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Just Putting This Out Here

Being a photographer is making people see what I want them to see.” ~ Ruth Orkin

I’m not saying the City is totally deserted as this video would have you believe, but unless I hear differently from someone with actual boots on the ground, I’m taking this with a small grain of salt.

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Quote Of The Day

Well, it finally isn’t funny anymore—the grandiosity, the ignorance, the cruelty, the bullying, the racism, the petty insults and incessant stupidity. But especially the non-stop lying. The greatest asset that a president can bring to a crisis is credibility. On Day One of his presidency, Donald Trumpchose to pick a fight with the media about the size of his inaugural crowd … The very next day, Kellyanne Conway let Americans know of the existence of something called “alternative facts.” Oh. So, that’s how it’s going to be, huh? Since then, the lies have come so fast and furious that keeping track has been impossible. How do you remember the last one when three or four equally ridiculous lies are almost certain to follow that day? ‘Don’t take him literally,’ his supporters insisted. ‘Take him seriously.’ Really? Well, no. What they really were saying was how happy they were that he would be appointing pro-life, pro-corporate Federalist Society judges, cutting taxes to benefit the wealthy, undoing regulations to help corporations exploit their employees and destroy our environment, and pulling us out of the Paris Agreement and the Iran Nuclear Deal. That the President of the United States is a malignant narcissist who could allow no fact to stand that contradicted his insatiable need for self-aggrandizement has been of little concern to establishment Republicans. The stock market was climbing. They were getting richer. And they had cover from the right-wing media to fool enough of his base into believing his limitless dishonesty. At this year’s State of the Union, the First Lady bestowed upon Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor he now shares with Mother Teresa, Cesar Chavez, and the crew of Apollo 13 … Until this crisis, Trump has paid no real price for his constant, pathological mendacity. Before politics, the man had spent his entire career in a business where, evidently, there was no accountability for inveterate lying. But for this crisis there is accountability. And instead of leading, Donald Trump’s focus has been where it always has been—on Donald Trump. ‘I give myself a ten out of ten.’ ‘We are very close to a vaccine.’ ‘I don’t take responsibility at all.’ ‘Anybody who needs a test can get a test. And the tests are perfect. Like the letter was perfect. The transcript was perfect.’ Of course, no leader could have prevented the devastation that this virus has and will continue to exact. But because Trump’s focus has been on himself, his reelection, and his fragile self-image, our federal government squandered our most valuable commodity. And the amount of suffering which that lost time will cost our nation is as tragic as it is unknowable. Trump will not step away. He will continue to take the stage and our focus—but he will not be able to claim the credibility he never earned. We are left to proceed despite our president and find the leadership we need elsewhere. From governors and mayors and other civil servants. From health care professionals and scientists and economists. From community leaders and each other. It is time for each of us to step up and fill the vacuum at the top—first by staying home. And for those fortunate enough to weather this storm financially—to help those who cannot. Lest we forget Trump’s Houdini-like ability to escape the traps he’s set for himself, it is also time for us to commit to his defeat in November. For now, find a way to do that from home. But when it’s time to come out into the light, it must be our collective mission to make this godawful human being pay the price for every lie he has ever uttered.” ~ Al Franken