Author: Mark Alexander

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I Am Incorrigible

I was sitting at the same table with this guy and his girlfriend yesterday at CopperStar. We chatted a bit and then went back to our respective tasks. About a half hour later when another guy showed up and introduced himself to a guy at a different table and said, “So nice to finally meet you,” this guy turned to his girlfriend and whispered, “Grindr.” I burst out laughing, leaned over and said “That’s exactly what I was thinking!”

Nice people. Hope to fun into them again.

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Shower Thoughts

When you die, it is entirely plausible that “you” will wake up, take off your high tech VR gear, and say “Wow, that game sucked!”

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It’s About Fuckin’ Time

I just got mine back from repair yesterday afternoon.

Via The Verge:

Apple has officially acknowledged that there are problems with its “butterfly” mechanism built into the keyboards of the recent MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops. The company is now offering an extended keyboard service program for computers affected by the issue, via iMore.

The extended warranty covers replacement of one or more keys or the whole keyboard, depending on the extent of users’ problems, and it covers eligible laptops up to four years after the computer was bought at retail. (Every MacBook and MacBook Pro model with the butterfly switches seems to be included.) That’s dramatically longer than the limited warranty the computers ship with or even Apple’s extended AppleCare Plus.

According to Apple’s service page, the program covers the following issues:

●  Letters or characters repeat unexpectedly
●  Letters or characters do not appear
●  Key(s) feel “sticky” or do not respond in a consistent manner

Complaints from users about Apple’s recent laptop keyboards have grown in the past weeks and months, with people saying that the keyboards tend to fail entirely when encountering dust and the fragile design makes them difficult to repair. And while it’s certainly taken longer than most users would probably have liked, it’s good to see Apple is finally taking steps to solve the problem.

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Sticking My Toe Out Of The Box

I spent the better portion of yesterday with my friend Cindy. We met ten years ago when I was working at the hospital.

You know how once in a blue moon someone enters your life and from the very beginning you know they’re going to be someone special to you? That’s Cindy. We bonded almost immediately.

As I mentioned a couple days ago, when she learned I’d been laid off, she offered to hire me to set up her daughter’s tech and help her retrieve photos from a bunch of old hard drives.

So mid-morning I drove out to her house thinking we’d just dive into it. But she had other plans. “Let’s just sit and talk for a bit.” She wanted to know exactly what happened so I described (to the best of my knowledge) what had gone down and she said, “Well there you go. You stuck your toe out of your box and they cut it off.” She then went on to say that her own experience in healthcare—and she assumed it was the same, if not worse—in government work, taught her that most of the people who work in those fields are perfectly happy to work inside their own little boxes, never deviating from the proscribed script. Considering that “think outside the box” has become such a corporate cliche, the hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance when confronted with what actually happens is absolutely deafening. Do NOT think outside the box. Stay in your lane and don’t deviate. And WHATEVER you do, don’t make anyone else look bad—ESPECIALLY if they’re higher up the food chain and you know more than they do.

That certainly describes my experience since moving from Config and Deploy to PC LAN support eighteen months ago. Instead of “continuous improvement,” the motto at that place should be “If it’s broke, don’t fix it.”

Interestingly, we both feel like this is ultimately going to be a good thing. I was ready to quit more times than I can tell you over the past six months, but never did anything about it because I hate interviewing. But frankly the reaction to being shot down a second time for finding a solution to an ongoing problem was my breaking point and swore that was the last time I was ever going to share anything with the team. Fuck ’em.

“You’ve only got a few more years in the workforce,” she said, “You shouldn’t be miserable every day for those remaining years.”

We both admitted a hard-to-describe feeling that something good is coming from all this. After the initial shock, disbelief, and panic wore off, unlike other times when I’ve been laid off, I’m actually feeling pretty positive about the ultimate outcome.

Or maybe I’m just whistling past the graveyard, but I refuse to go there.

I remember many years ago telling another friend (who has a much more reactive, rather than proactive personality) that if you know changes need to be made in your life and you don’t do anything about it, the Universe will step in and make those changes for you.

Whoopsie.

“You teach best what you need most to learn.” ~ Richard Bach, The Messiah’s Handbook

 

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Maybe a Blessing in Disguise?

My contract at the government agency I’ve called home for the last 28 months was terminated yesterday.

This is not completely surprising. While I’m not sure (and will probably never know) why this happened, I do have my suspicions.

About a month ago I found a solution to the “A referral was returned by the server” as well as “The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation” errors that have been plaguing us on Win10 systems while trying to install some agency-written software since I first started working there. I shared this with the team and thought that was the end of it. Prior to finding the registry modification solution, we had to remove the machine from the domain, perform the installation, and then rejoin it.

Two weeks ago I got an email from my supervisor asking where I found this registry solution. “Google,” was my response.

Then, yesterday morning we all received this email:

Team,

 About a month ago this solution was suggested.   While the solution below helps us to quickly resolve issues for our customers, it is a violation of security policy.

 If you are having problems installing this application or other access issues, please bring it to my attention and I will work with management on getting a resolution for you.

 All possible solutions need to be vetted by IP.

All I can figure out is that because I dared to think outside the box and find a fix (that actually reset to the group policy default after rebooting) to the problem that was not being addressed by Infrastructure Protection, I had committed that violation of security policy—evidently grounds for immediate dismissal.

Anyhow I received a couple of panicked phone calls/texts from my recruiter after I left for the day and finally got in touch with her last night around 8 pm.

Supposedly no reason was given to her for my contract termination. The manner in which this was done was also not surprising; I’d witnessed similar with other contractors. One day they’re there, and the the next they’re gone, followed up by a generic “So and so is no longer employed by the agency.”

My biggest concern was retrieving my personal possessions. The recruiter said, “I’ll coordinate to have your things returned. They don’t want you back on campus.” All she was concerned about was getting my access badge (like it hadn’t been disabled the moment I left the building yesterday) cell phone, and laptop, so after explaining that the phone and laptop were both in my office, we agreed to meet this morning at the local Starbucks to hand off the badge and parking permit.

While waiting for her to arrive, I reached out to my colleagues and asked that they gather my stuff up. Unsurprisingly they hadn’t heard of my dismissal at that point, but after verifying it with our supervisor they went through my desk and got everything together. After coordinating with my department H.R. rep, I was able to pick everything up a couple hours later.

Interestingly, yesterday morning—well ahead of any of this going down—I must’ve tapped into something because after them both laying dormant for the last year, I reactivated both my monster.com and my indeed.com profiles and uploaded new resumes.

I did this because I was so totally disgusted with the official reaction to solving this ongoing problem (this was not the first time a suggestion for improving a process had been shot down in spectacular fashion). I was done.

When my good friend Cindy learned of this turn of events, she extended an offer to hire me to set up her daughter’s home office tech and to help her transfer years of photos from a half dozen naked hard drives onto her Mac. (Something she swears she was thinking of doing prior to any of this happening.) Needless to say, my day is booked tomorrow.

 

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You May Have Noticed

…that I haven’t written much about the tragedy occurring along the Texas border. It’s not because I don’t want to. It’s because I can’t. Since news started breaking of the orange shitgibbon’s tent cities/concentration camps, there has been a knot in my stomach that will not go away. With each passing day’s news of some further atrocity, I am becoming fully convinced that demons are real and they walk among us, circling the dotard like moths to a flame.

People ask how Hitler was allowed to rise to power in Germany. This is how. We are witnessing history repeat itself. It’s not like we weren’t warned. The tiny glimmer of hope is that we do have history to look back on (unlike the Germans), and that this horrific treatment of children is causing a lot of people to wake up and say, “Not only no, but HELL no!”

Cheetolini may—may—have finally overstepped to such a degree that this will be his undoing, and will hopefully bring down the entire Republican party with him.

It can’t happen soon enough.

If the GOP can’t be bothered to care about children being shot dead in school, they certainly aren’t going to worry about a few thousand brown babies being separated from their parents. In fact, they seem to be reveling in it.

I want to go Nuremberg on their asses. I want to see them all swinging from ropes.

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It Finally Happened

It took nearly a decade, but I finally had a truly horrific encounter at Apple’s Genius Bar.

This was the third time the keyboard on my year-old MacBook Pro has gone out. This time it was the “b” and “n” keys. As of yesterday morning, both were either double-typing or not typing at all.

We arrived a few minutes before my scheduled appointment. Our genius acknowledged our presence and a few moments later had us at the Bar. Unfortunately, he was simultaneously servicing four other customers at the same time, and it was nearly 40 minutes before he actually addressed my issue.

Ben had a similar but worse problem with his MBP a few months ago. At that time my faith in Apple had been restored because instead of more bullshit sending the unit out for another top case replacement, the Genius spoke with his manager and simply swapped out the entire laptop. That is the Apple of old.

No such luck with me last night. First, the Genius insisted on taking the laptop to the back to blow out the keys—even though I’d told him I’d already done that multiple times with no improvement. That obviously did not solve the issue, so instead of proposing swapping the machine out, he said it would have to be sent out AGAIN for top case replacement. He didn’t even consider speaking with his manager to get it replaced outright.

Seriously? THIS IS THE THIRD FUCKING TIME IN A YEAR. Am I going to have to go through this every six months? It was obvious the guy was either new or had drunk too deeply of the Apple Kool-Aid. While he admitted that I was having trouble with this keyboard, he refused to acknowledge that this was a systemic problem affecting most of the 2016/2017 models. (Maybe they have a corporate gag order in place since they’ve been slapped multiple class-action lawsuits over the design of this keyboard.) In any case, it was obvious he was simply working from a script and not even considering deviating to “surprise and delight” the way Ben’s Genius had done.

I’m in a quandary about what to do when I get it back from repair (probably next Thurday or Friday). I can either sell it to a local reseller for a third of what I paid for it and possibly get a used 2015 or 2014 model that does not have these keyboard issues for a reasonable amount of money, or I can keep it and probably go through this bullshit every six months until my Apple Care runs out.

Except for the keyboard breaking down, I do genuinely like that laptop. It’s fast. The display is amazing. Touch ID is undeniably convenient. All things that are painfully obvious as I type away on Ben’s old 2010 MBP that I am so incredibly thankful we didn’t sell after he upgraded. (I’ve had to transfer my profile back and forth so many times now I’ve got it down to a science!)

And please, don’t tell me I to buy a Dell or an HP. I support those things at work, and the only thing I hate more than the 2016/17 MBP keyboards is Windows.

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