Author: Mark Alexander

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How Much Longer?

Humor is one thing, but now it’s increasingly obvious that he is BAT. SHIT. INSANE, how much longer do we have to suffer through this Trump nightmare?

It’s going to be a miracle if 3/4 of the country (your host included) isn’t diagnosed and being treated for varying degrees of clinical PTSD when it’s all over.

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Quote of the Day

Sometimes I think it’s useful to think of this presidency as a hostage-taking situation. We have a president holding liberal democracy hostage, empowered by a cult following. The goal is to get through this without killing any hostages, i.e., without irreparable breaches in our democratic system. Come at him too directly and you might provoke the very thing you are trying to avoid. Somehow, we have to get the nut job to put the gun down and let the hostages go, without giving in to any of his demands. From the moment Trump took office, we were in this emergency. All that we now know, in a way we didn’t, say, a year ago, is that the chances of a successful resolution are close to zero.” ~Andrew Sullivan

When Andrew Sullivan starts sounding sane, you know we’re in trouble.

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Bat. Shit. Insane.

Too crazy to go under oath and speak to Mueller, but somehow okay to run the country. SMH.

From John Gruber at Daring Fireball:

The Washington Post, with highlights from Bob Woodward’s Fear, which comes out next week:

Cohn, a Wall Street veteran, tried to tamp down Trump’s strident nationalism regarding trade. According to Woodward, Cohn “stole a letter off Trump’s desk” that the president was intending to sign to formally withdraw the United States from a trade agreement with South Korea. Cohn later told an associate that he removed the letter to protect national security and that Trump did not notice that it was missing.

Cohn made a similar play to prevent Trump from pulling the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, something the president has long threatened to do. […] Under orders from the president, Porter drafted a notification letter withdrawing from NAFTA. But he and other advisers worried that it could trigger an economic and foreign relations crisis. So Porter consulted Cohn, who told him, according to Woodward: “I can stop this. I’ll just take the paper off his desk.”

Defense Secretary James Mattis ignores him too:

After Syrian President Bashar al-Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called Mattis and said he wanted to assassinate the dictator. “Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump said, according to Woodward.

Mattis told the president that he would get right on it. But after hanging up the phone, he told a senior aide: “We’re not going to do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” The national security team developed options for the more conventional airstrike that Trump ultimately ordered.

These officials get away with disregarding Trump’s orders — with literally stealing letters off his desk — because Trump is a nitwit. He’s just dumb. His own lawyer thinks he’s an idiot:

Dowd then explained to Mueller and Quarles why he was trying to keep the president from testifying: “I’m not going to sit there and let him look like an idiot. And you publish that transcript, because everything leaks in Washington, and the guys overseas are going to say, ‘I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for?’ ”

“John, I understand,” Mueller replied, according to Woodward.

Later that month, Dowd told Trump: “Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jumpsuit.”

When Trump was elected I wrote that “Trump voters are ignoramuses, bigots, and/or fools.” Everything that’s gone so horribly awry with his presidency was easily predictable. Anyone who still supports him today must be at least two out of three.

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The Interview

It was a good interview. It wasn’t the slam-dunk I had been hoping for, and the role itself is a bit more than I had been initially led to believe, but it was a good interview nonetheless.

I met with the two main IT guys from Kansas City whom I’d spoken with on the phone interview two weeks ago and the two principal architects from this office.

I did okay on the technical questions. When asked about something I had no experience with, I was honest and told them as much, which they seemed to appreciate—and something I learned from my initial interview at ADOT was always preferred over some lame attempt to bullshit your way through it.

I got the sense they’re looking for someone with more networking and experience with VMs than I possess, but at the same time they made a point of saying they’re not fully up to speed either on running the number of VMs they’re attempting, and are willing to train as we go along. This reminded me when I initially interviewed at the hospital back in 2004 and was asked if I had any AD experience. I truthfully answered I did not, and was told, “None of us really do yet. We’re all learning.”

Overall, this role sounds a lot more like what I was doing at my first job in Denver than just a straightforward desktop support position. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, that situation forced me to learn a lot of new things that go on “behind the wall” that I otherwise might not have been exposed to. On the other, it was extremely stressful at times, with management often expecting me to just know things that I didn’t.

I also don’t know how I feel about returning to a 24/7 operation. They told me after-hours calls or late nights didn’t occur that often, but they did happen now and then when something goes down.

They are looking for someone with a passion about learning new things and thinking outside the box. You know, the kind of things that were actively discouraged at my last position. I made it a point of highlighting not only my passion with the Mac, but also the fact I garnered a lot of my tech knowledge through plain old curiosity.

The positives that stand out about this gig are it’s an architectural office. Just walking in and smelling that distinctive odor was like an aphrodisiac. You could almost feel the creativity pulsing within the space. (And what a beautiful, open, funky, warehouse space it is!) There are only 40 users at this particular location, half of whom are on Macs. The total number on the payroll is about 250 spread across five offices. It’s a full time, permanent position with full benefits. The money is good; not as much as the gig that was cancelled on me at the last minute a couple months ago, but more than I’ve earned since we left Phoenix and moved to Denver. The commute doesn’t seem like it will be horrible. I would be the only onsite IT guy and on my own for most of the time, but backup would only be an IM away.

In short, as I’m writing this, I’m realizing this is almost exactly what I asked the Universe for three weeks ago.

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Some Thoughts About That Company in Cupertino

Mojave

For the past couple months I’ve been playing around with the beta versions of Apple’s latest OS, “Mojave.” I smartly installed it on an external SSD drive instead of mucking up my main drive like I did years ago with Yosemite. The problem with this approach is that my external drive won’t hold all my data, so I’m kind of limited in what I can test.

Since Mojave is currently up to Beta 9, and based on Apple’s history, the final version will be probably be released in the next couple weeks, last night I backed up my main drive and pulled the trigger.

All this little exercise did was confirm my initial impression that this may be the first macOS update that I skip.

There’s just something off about it. I can’t put my finger on any one thing, but it just feels wrong. It’s not dark mode, the fact that you can now change the highlight color to a virtual rainbow of tones, the convoluted way of making screen shots, the dynamically-changing wallpaper, or any of the other new “features” in and of themselves. It’s the sum total. To me, none of these things are wanted or needed, and once again, in Apple’s infinite wisdom, they chose to remove features I actually used.

The laptop also ran slower. “Oh don’t worry about that. Everything will return to normal as soon as Spotlight if finished reindexing your files.”

(Warning: First World Problems)

With the full implementation of dark mode, they’ve taken away the ability to have a dark title bar and dock while retaining the regular light mode everywhere else. This is something I’ve used for years, since most of my wallpapers tend to the dark side (Do I hear mechanical breathing?), and in my opinion it just looks better. But now it’s gone. All dark or all light is your only choice and I don’t care for the all dark mode in its current iteration. There is a workaround via a Terminal command that will restore that dark title/light window functionality—to a degree—but it really screws with the shading of the light windows once in place: none of them seem to match any more.

Because Apple.

I used a program called cDock for years to customize the appearance of the dock. Since Yosemite I’ve hated the default Apple dock. Among other things, cDock allows you to kill the dock background altogether; to make it “transparent.” It also has dozens of various other combinations, each of which can be tweaked to get the exact look you desire. To be honest, ever since Apple implemented SIP it’s been a bit of a pain in the ass to set up, but at least by temporarily disabling SIP you could install the program, re-enable SIP afterward, and it would run fine. Now SIP needs to be permanently disabled (which isn’t a good idea from a security standpoint) in order for cDock to run at all.

Because Apple.

Safari initially refused to load the AdBlock plus extension which really pissed me off, but when I finally got it running, it nagged that it would slow down my browsing.

Because Apple.

Adobe Bridge came up…with a completely black screen, something it never did when I was running Mojave from the external drive.

I’m not going to bitch about that too much because this is beta software and I’m sure that particular glitch will be worked out before release day.

But it was at that point that I’d had enough of new-and-improved. I shut the machine down, rebooted, wiped the drive, and restored my backup. I’m such a Luddite.

Hardware

The last MacBook I owned that still had a removable SSD was the MacBook Air in 2012. Yes, it was prohibitively expensive to replace the drive with a bigger one, but at least I knew I could do it if I ever wanted to.

Beginning in 2013 however, everything was soldered in place. I was okay with that, since I was now on a regular backup schedule so in case anything did go south at most I’d lose a day’s worth of data.

I learned recently from getting lost in Louis Rossmann videos (yes, I watch more online than guys banging each other) that up until the 2018 models, all MacBook Pros with soldered-in SSDs had a special port on the system board that would (at least theoretically) allow a technician to transfer data off a SSD even if the rest of the system board was toast.

Well, Apple has now removed that since everything is now encrypted as it passes through the T2 chip. Better pray that you’re backing up nightly and you don’t have any issues with said backup.

Remember when everything “just worked?” Yeah. Good times.

While it looks like the butterfly keyboard issue has been resolved (we won’t know for sure until the 2018 models age a bit more), there’s no chance Apple will ever go back to their much-loved previous design. And that’s the crux of a lot of my beef with Apple these days. They will never admit they made a mistake on anything and go back to earlier tech that worked perfectly well. Build a MacBook that’s 1mm thicker so the old keyboard design can be put back into use? NEVER.

So why do I keep buying Apple products? Because I like their design and overall build quality enough to justify their premium price. And despite what I just wrote about Mojave, I do still prefer the Mac OS over anything else out there. And lastly, I trust Apple with my offsite data a hell of a lot more than I do Microsoft. I realize they are not the same company they were in 2009 when I initially joined the legion of fanboys. They’re far bigger, have many more customers, and frankly, screwups happen. But they can’t coast on goodwill forever if these type of QA and design problems continue.

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The Republican Hell List

Axios reports:

Congressional Republicans are getting ready for hell. Axios has obtained a spreadsheet that’s circulated through Republican circles on and off Capitol Hill — including at least one leadership office — that meticulously previews the investigations Democrats will likely launch if they flip the House.

Why this matters: Publicly, House Republicans are putting on a brave face about the midterms. But privately, they are scrambling to prepare for the worst. This document, which catalogs requests Democrats have already made, is part of that effort.

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