Author: Mark Alexander

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Late To The Party

Ben and I finally got around to seeing Star Trek Beyond this past weekend. Between procrastination and admittedly a certain amount of apathy, I was beginning to think this was going to the first big-screen Trek that I wasn’t actually going to experience on the big screen.

Before seeing it, I already knew the storyline: malevolent alien, disgruntled former Starfleet Officer, or unknown galactic entity threatens to destroy the entire Federation and only Kirk, the Enterprise and its valiant crew stands between it and total annihilation. (“You’ve seen this before!”)

Was I wrong? No. Did I walk out of the theater feeling like I’d been cheated out of my money? Not at all. It was an enjoyable—albeit fairly predictable in places—two hours of entertainment and something I will no doubt be adding to my collection when it comes available on disk. (Plus, pretty much all the lead actors bring a level of eye candy to the screen that is undeniable.)

But am I the only one to notice how a plot point from the Space Seed episode—that was not really utilized in Star Trek Into Darkness—showed up in a roundabout way in the current film?

I’m speaking about a group of people who for all intents the Federation abandoned. In Space Seed, it was Khan’s group that was left on Ceti Alpha V (which as we all know thanks to Wrath of Khan was a planet devastated by the explosion of Ceti Alpha VI some years after the relocation, rendering it nearly uninhabitable) with the Federation apparently completely forgetting about it—and with Beyond it was the ill-fated crew of the U.S.S. Franklin that was given up for dead.

And the brouha over Sulu being gay? Please, Mary. If you didn’t know to look for it, you wouldn’t even have spotted it.

Quibbles aside, I’ve come to love the “new” crew and it’s obvious the actors are developing that chemistry we have come to expect of the Trek franchise. How they will cope with the loss of Anton Yelchin remains to be seen; I know I felt a pang whenever Checkov was on screen, knowing full well that the fine young man who played him was snatched from our lives far too soon.

It will be interesting to see where future films take us. I’m looking forward to the journey.

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Quote Of The Day

One other thing I’d like to remind people is that the next president could nominate up to four Supreme Court Justices. I know that’s not a sexy issue and it doesn’t tend to dominate the headlines, but it really, really should. Whatever issues you’re passionate about (voting rights, access to abortion, campaign finance, health care, etc.) the Supreme Court wreaks massive influence on them all. The Court is composed of a mere (usually) nine people who together decide things like whether you should be able to vote in Alabama if you’re black or if you should have to drive 300 miles to get an abortion if you’ve been raped. So in the coming weeks and months you have to decide if you’d like Hillary Clinton to nominate the people who make those decisions for you or if you’d prefer Donald Trump to do that. To illustrate, Donald Trump could substantively influence critical decisions your granddaughter has to make about her reproductive health care, long after you’re dead. And that’s not a silly thought exercise, that’s an elementary understanding of how the Supreme Court, whose Justices are appointed for life, shapes American lives through law.” ~ Rob Delaney

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Never Take Naproxen in the Middle of the Night

I woke up with my lower back in pain around 3 am, so I got up, popped a Naproxen, and went back to bed.

The dreams I had thereafter were just bizarre. One in particular I found so weird I had to scribble some notes because if I didn’t I knew I’d completely forget it by morning:

I was at work. I pulled my Mac out of my backpack and realized that somehow I’d grabbed Ben’s old machine that’s currently sitting in a closet. I briefly thought about using it (since I basically just needed it for email and cruising the internet) until I could go home at lunch but then realized it didn’t even have an OS loaded. I told my boss I needed to run home for a few minutes (I live, after all, less then 5 minutes away) and left.

I arrived home to my last apartment in San Francisco, to discover a notice from UPS taped on the door that a delivery had been attempted and that Sparkles water had left a new bottle of water. The UPS guy was still there, saw that I’d come home, and came back to give me a large envelope.

I went in the building and noticed that the door to my apartment was ajar. I knew that the landlord was doing renovations, but she’d mentioned nothing to me about needing to get in my apartment. I walked in and every wall was covered with plaster patches. I thought, “what the hell?” and at that moment she walked in.

The landlord was Joan Rivers. Yes, Joan Rivers. (IRL, Molly, my landlord in SF was just as old and nearly as wealthy—she lived next door to Diane Feinstein—but not anywhere near as funny.)

“What have you done to my apartment?” I asked.

“Your apartment?” This is my apartment. You’re on the wrong floor, silly! I’m renovating this one for me.”

And then I realized that yes, I was in the wrong unit altogether and that the UPS delivery wasn’t for me and neither was the bottle of water.

Interestingly, while this was supposedly my last apartment in San Francisco, it bore very little resemblance to the real thing. IRL, you got to the apartment via an outside balcony that ran the length of the building, and it was a large (for SF, anyway) one bedroom unit. In this dream, it was reached by an interior hallway and the unit I found myself in looked much a standard generic hotel room.

Have I mentioned that the entire time all this was happening, “Singin’ in the Rain” was playing at angelic volume and that somehow I had forgotten all about the Mac—or returning to work—and had come home to watch the movie? (Something I’ve never seen all the way through.)

From there it got even more confusing. Joan had apparently taken over the apartment below mine, but I needed to go the apartment above mine to watch the movie. Joan wanted to see it as well, and while the door to the stairway was blocked by construction stuff, leaving only an opening about six inches wide, she somehow managed to get her skinny ass through but I had to take the elevator (which IRL we all referred to as Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride). Apparently the elevator had been replaced as part of the construction as well, and it was now glass-walled and overlooked the four-story foyer—but still dropped an inch once you got on.

Upon reaching the fourth floor apartment, I realized I was now carrying my Dad’s old flat panel computer monitor (apparently to watch the film on), but Joan was nowhere to be found and the apartment where this was going to happen was occupied by two black guys who had no idea why I was even there.

And then I woke up.

I always hope that by writing these dreams out I’ll gain some understanding of what my subconscious was trying to tell me, but with this one I’ve got nothin’…

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What The FUCK Does This Even Mean?

From the website of one of the neighborhood-razing overpriced apartment complexes going up in central Phoenix:

AUTHENTIC LOCATION

Located in the Midtown neighborhood, it provide[s] easy access to local businesses, art and culture. Residents enjoy authentic experiences and embrace one-of-a-kind events over corporate brands.

What the hell is an “authentic location?” Would someone prefer to live at a fake location? And what about “one-of-a-kind events over corporate brands?” What the FUCK does that even mean?

The website has no floor plans and no pricing info. These are the images in their gallery describing “Bold Progressive Living.”

So in other words, drunk hipsters with more money than sense? I guess that is their target demographic. The only thing missing from those photos are man-buns.

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Me In Social Settings

And it’s gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. But I wasn’t always this way. Yeah, I’d always been somewhat shy, but I was never one to avoid interaction with people. I really think the tipping point was when I lost the full use of my voice and I was no longer able to be heard in loud gatherings. I think that also speaks to my discomfort in large crowds…

That could also be why I took to blogging with such gusto—and against all odds stay with it. In its own twisted way, it allows me to be heard.

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Bitching and Moaning

First off, let me say that I am very grateful to have a job and to be working—even if it is for less money than I was earning ten fifteen years ago.

That being said, working for a government agency these past six months has been an eye opening experience. I have nothing in my work history to compare the level of dysfunction I encounter on a daily basis. Not even DISH was this broken, and that’s saying a lot.

You would think that this agency would’ve learned from the fiasco that was their 3-month new equipment refresh project that was started before Ben and I returned to Phoenix and is just now—more than a year later—wrapping up. Hiring Dell to basically do everything short of placing the new equipment on users’ desks wasn’t their first mistake. That was failing to get the necessary teams in place to do proper testing of the hardware and software before pushing it out to the thousands of employees across the state. If that sort of infrastructure had been in place, then maybe—just maybe—it wouldn’t have been necessary to terminate their contract when Dell failed to live up to the ridiculous expectations and timeline they’d been given…and then turn around and rehire them because it was obvious that without their outside knowledge and assistance the entire project was going to crash and burn in a spectacular fashion.

But no! Get it out, get it out, get it out! NOW NOW NOW.

So six weeks after I came on board and a few hundred Win10 machines had gone out the door, most of those machines started coming back in to be reimaged with Win7. Mission-critical software didn’t work properly. Users hated the OS. The CIO “left to pursue other opportunities” and his replacement immediately announced that unless the hardware wouldn’t support it or there was an overriding business reason for Win10 to be used, all new hardware that went out was to be loaded with Win7.

I can’t tell you how many problems that cleared up—not to mention it cut down our machine prep time by half.

My time here was supposed to have ended when the refresh project wrapped up, but I truly believe my supervisor wants to keep me around long enough to survive the agency’s hiring freeze so he can bring me on as a full time employee. (This would be a huge pay increase, bringing me back in line with what I have been making prior to this.) Thankfully for both of us, a new project was coming online—the replacement of around 250 customer-facing kiosk devices across the state; all of which would need to be imaged and prepped for deployment.

And that is where today’s rant comes in.

Once again we are being told to get something pushed out the door without adequate Q&A testing being performed—even though we know things are not working properly—because apparently it’s more important to show that something is being done rather than wait and make sure what’s being done is right.

With one batch of machines already out the door and in the field, the first time I had to unbox a few dozen other already-imaged machines was when the powers that be realized the assigned computer names were too long and couldn’t properly join the domain. The second time the machines (which thankfully hadn’t gone out yet) were unboxed was because someone realized that from a data security perspective, these very public machines probably shouldn’t have their USB ports active. The third time they were unboxed was because someone else realized that the machines needed to have an auto-login to the service account that ran the kiosk software.

The auto-logon worked sporadically at best, and seemed to be tied to the machines being in the proper group in Active Directory. Once they were in the correct bucket in AD, some worked and some still didn’t. “Oh, it’s a back-end issue they’re working on,” my supervisor said. “Go ahead and box them up and get them ready to go out.”

Against my better judgment, I boxed them up again. My boss returned to the workroom shortly after I’d finished the chore and said, “We need to force group policy again.”

I wonder what stupidity tomorrow will bring?

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