Author: Mark Alexander

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THIS.

At this point I don’t really give a shit about what “the left” wants this election. All this “Hillary isn’t doing exactly what I want her to do so I’m gonna be sad and angry man and I’m not gonna vote cause THE SYSTEM IS SO CORRUPT MAN” shit is so insanely juvenile.

This ain’t 1968, man. The Democratic Party’s platform is the most liberal that it has ever been but I guess the actual substance is too “boring” for some. Some so-called “liberals” are taking this election and this moment in time for granted. Damn shame. Real damn shame. Yeah, you don’t like Hillary because she’s too “detached” and Tim Kaine because he’s “boring.” God, it reminds of the 2004 election when people were like “Yeah, John Kerry is a smart guy but he’s so boring.” Get over it. Why do some of ya’ll need to be constantly cuddled and cajoled into voting? Voting is a civic duty. People marched and died and bled for the right to vote and so many “progressives” are so quick to piss it all away because the Democratic ticket isn’t “exciting” enough for them. It’s all style and no substance for some. DAMN. SHAME.

(Source)

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So This Happened

In response to yesterday’s bout of Apple-induced Robopsychosis, last night Ben told me to charge my camera battery. “You’re going to need it tomorrow.”

I pressed him until I got an answer to what he had planned. “We need a day away from computers.”

And so we took a little road trip to Sedona. (I charged my camera’s battery, but didn’t take it; all these were shot with my iPhone.)












We didn’t really do much, but it was nice to get out of the blistering heat for a while and away from our laptops…

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OMG

My entire collection consists of only 10 of those individual cubes and I have a hard time knowing what’s in that. As for this, I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like. But it’s beautiful, nevertheless.

Reminds me a bit of Barry Walters’ (another story for another time) collection.

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“It Just Works!”

No it doesn’t, Apple. NO. IT. FUCKING. DOESN’T.

I got the bright idea to do some desk cleaning last night, and I ran across three file folders worth of pictures, floor plans, and miscellaneous documents that I wanted to scan. My plan was to do that first thing this morning and then move on to normal my Saturday chores.

So much for those plans.

It has been a day of Apple/Adobe/Canon ROBO-PSYCHOSIS.

I knew that Photoshop had supposedly lost the ability to use a TWAIN scanner driver somewhere between CS6 and the first iteration of CC. (Even with CS6 it required a bit of finagling to get working, but by and large it worked fine.)

I haven’t thought much about it since the arrival of CC, since all the scanning I’ve had to do since that time has been document or line-drawing based. Not exactly rocket science. Apple’s own built-in image capture worked fine for that.

So when I went to scan some magazine photos today, imagine my horror when they came out looking like crap. Apple’s built-in software has no ability to “de-screen,” so everything came out with horrible Moire patterns and no way to get rid of them. FUCK ME SIDEWAYS IN TRAFFIC.

So after doing some Googling, I discovered that there is a fix for even the latest version of Photoshop CC: a TWAIN driver supplied by Adobe themselves! Downloaded, installed where it was supposed to be and…Photoshop immediately crashed when invoking scanning directly from our Canon printer.

GODDAMNIT!

Further Googling suggested a clean reinstall of the printer/scanner drivers. But Apple, being Apple, doesn’t provide ANY mechanism for actually removing old printer drivers. (Just making them disappear from the Scanners and Printers preferences list doesn’t actually delete any files, so you’re left having to go digging all over the hard drive to to rip them out.)

Well, apparently I deleted something I shouldn’t have, because even after reinstallation, not only did TWAIN still cause Photoshop to immediately crash—the scanner option itself was only showing up in the printer configuration when it was physically connected to the laptop via USB—not while it was wireless.

I wasted a good three hours this morning trying to fix this and finally said fuck it and wiped the hard drive, knowing full well that this time I couldn’t just grab my Time Machine to do a full restore; the files had already changed on the latest capture. I could restore my profile, but all my applications would have to be manually reloaded and I was now looking at spending the entire day at this desk and not getting much of anything else accomplished.

THIS IS THE EXACT REASON I GAVE UP ON WINDOWS; THIS SORT OF ROBO-PSYCHOTIC-FUCK-YOUR-ENTIRE-DAY BULLSHIT!

And you know what? When all was said and done and I finally got everything loaded from scratch—the fucking TWAIN still didn’t work with Photoshop. Oh yeah, it worked with Canon’s own proprietary scanning software—a piece of psychedelic-colored crap that looks like it was designed by a six-year old.

And unfortunately, that is what I’m stuck using if I want to get decent scans from magazine or newspaper photos.

At least the scanning option is once again showing on both the wireless and USB versions of the printer, and I have a “clean” install of everything else on my Mac now. BUT GODDAMNIT ALL TO HELL, Apple. THIS is NOT supposed to be how APPLE works!

 

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Eleventh Hour Reprieve

This past weekend Ben and I were discussing my impending return to unemployment, and I said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Tony (my supervisor) pulled some kind of Hail Mary Pass to keep me around.”

Indeed, a Hail Mary Pass was thrown on Monday. “Would you be interested in staying around a little longer—through the end of August—to help Paul retrieve old equipment from out in the field? You guys could go out in the morning while it’s still cool and then do your regular duties in the afternoon.”

Hell yes, I would—especially considering recruiters weren’t exactly knocking down my door and Ben and I been wondering how our little household would survive on me bringing home the measly $240/week (less than minimum wage!) that AZ unemployment would provide while looking for other work.

This offer was not extended to the other contractor who came on the same time I did, and while everyone concerned has done their level best to keep him blissfully unaware of this eleventh-hour development, the fact he didn’t show up for work today or notify anyone that he wouldn’t be coming in (ostensibly our last day here) tells me he might’ve found out…

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It’s Hot Out There

I’d be lying if I said that after only one year I’d fully reacclimated to the Phoenix summertime heat, because I haven’t. It’s damn hot out there.

It doesn’t help that it’s currently about ten degrees F hotter than it was a year ago on this date. Or the year before that. Or the year before that. Or pretty much any time as far back in my lifetime as I want to go.

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that Mother Earth was tired of our shit and is running a fever, hoping to rid herself of the human virus…

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R.I.P.

40 years after the first VHS video cassette recorder rolled off the production line, the last known company making the devices is ceasing production. According to Japanese newspaper Nikkei, Funai Electric, a Japanese consumer electronics company, will give up on the format by the end of the July after 30 years of production.

Declining sales, plus a difficulty in obtaining the necessary parts, prompted Funai Electric to cease production. While the Funai brand might not be well-known in the west, the company sold VCRs under the more familiar Sanyo brand in China and North America.

Funai Electric began production of VCRs in 1983 following the unsuccessful launch of its own CVC format in 1980. While CVC had its strengths—its quarter-inch tape made its machines smaller and lighter than VHS machines, which used half-inch tape—VHS and Betamax were strong competitors.

(Source)

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“Get Away From Her, You BITCH!”

30 years since the world heard Sigourney Weaver utter those immortal words. How time flies.

While Aliens didn’t creep me out nearly as much as the original Alien, I still remember coming home after seeing it opening night and turning on all the lights in my apartment.

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So I Saw My First Trump 2016 Bumper Sticker

So I saw my first Trump 2016 bumper sticker yesterday (kind of odd considering this is Arizona after all). It was on a massive, jacked-up 4×4 truck (of course), and my first thought was, “Nice to let the entire world know you’re a racist, misogynistic, homophobic, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging asshole…and you have a tiny penis!”

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Quote of the Day

A thoughtful, reasoned response to the Republican cray-cray that seems to be spewing from a fire hose lately…

“At the risk of taking Gingrich’s nonsense seriously, just imagine for a moment what translating his proposal into action would mean. The government would round up 3.3 million American Muslims, then “test” them to see “if they believe in Sharia,” a notion about which Gingrich doesn’t have the remotest clue. Sharia is the Arabic word for “law”; there’s no guidebook of official Sharia, and Islamic scholars have a multitude of ideas about how Koranic ideas could or should be translated into civil rules. But even if there were, Gingrich is literally proposing to prosecute thought crimes, as well as jettisoning the First Amendment to throw people in jail for visiting certain web sites. And where is he going to “deport” the Americans whom he decides believe in Sharia to?

Frankly, I think we need to ask just how Newt Gingrich got radicalized, and what caused him to reject the values of the country that gave him so much. Was it some radical cleric who did this to him? Is there a church somewhere in Georgia we need to be monitoring?“ ~ Paul Waldman, The Washington Post

Go read the whole thing. It’s worth your time.

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