Author: Mark Alexander

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Diving Headlong into the Past

One of the guys I follow on Instagram posts nothing but what look to be scans of old found photos; the kind you run across in antique shops. I also spend way too much time visiting the Shorpy Historical Photo Archive. I love these voyeuristic glimpses into the past, especially the ones that record the most mundane of daily activities. While looking at scenes from the 50s, 60s, and 70s, I often catch myself thinking, “Wow. That looks like something that I’d see in my family’s photo albums.”

When my mom and dad divorced in the 80s, they split up the family albums. There were lots of duplicates in my grandmother’s collection that they threw into the mix to help ensure the split was mostly equitable, but not everything is in both sets of albums, and it has been my long term goal to get everything scanned and put back into a single unified virtual album that both my sister and I can have.

After Mom’s passing, I started that project, but was so overwhelmed by the sheer number of photos involved in her collection I gave up and returned all the physical media to my sister.

About a year before Ben and I left Phoenix, I got the urge to revisit this project and made off with my dad’s albums (with his permission, of course), intending to scan and return them within a couple months.

Like so many of these well-intentioned projects, life intervened and even this modest beginning was put on the back burner. Oh hell…it was shelved and pretty much forgotten about until Dad’s passing a month ago when my sister started cleaning out his place and asked if I had them.

So a couple weeks ago I jumped back into it, and unlike times past, I have not given up. I’m nearly finished with Dad’s albums and will swap them for Mom’s when I see my sister in October. What struck me the most about all this is how so many of these photos really could easily appear on Retronaut or show up in that found-photos Instagram feed:

Mom, me, and our next door neighbor “Gammy” Johnson, 1960

I’m also surprised at how well Photoshop is able to bring so many of these faded shots back to life. It doesn’t always work, but when it does it’s amazing. The original prints have been faded for so long that it’s how they’re burned into my memory, so in many cases it’s like I’m seeing them for the very first time.

One of the saddest things about looking over all these photos is the realization that since neither my sister or I have children to inherit them, it’s quite likely that all them will one day end up in an antique shop as mere curiosities of a time long gone.

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Preach It, Sister

This sums up almost exactly where I am in regard to technology these days and kind of a followup to my post from a couple days ago.

“Over the years I’ve spent far more time than I care to count compiling scripts, screwing hardware into place and generally tinkering with technology.

“But then I got tired of it.

“I had reached the point to where, when I turned on a device, I just wanted it to work. I didn’t want things to break so that I could find out how to fix them. I no longer wanted to play with my phone, my computer or my iPad. They were tools, to be used to complete a job. Sometimes they are in use as entertainment devices, but even then the entertainment is the content that they allowed me to access, rather than the devices themselves.” ~ Brad McCarty,  The Next Web Top Stories

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I Just Don’t Care Any More

About anything Microsoft says or does, that is.

This, of course, does not bode well for my continued employment in this field. I’ve been doing PC tech support full time since 1996 and as part of other job duties for an additional ten years prior to that. Obviously there was something that kept me engaged for all those years, but it’s long gone.

For years I dealt with the continual patches and updates, the virus outbreaks, the malware, and the ever increasing bloat that was Windows and MS Office. The annoyance with all things Microsoft began several years ago, but was manageable and really didn’t come to a head until I started running Windows 7 on my personal laptop back in the summer of 2009. One day, for no reason whatsoever, it simply refused to display my chosen wallpaper. No amount of cajoling or voodoo worked to rectify the situation, and faced with the prospect of wiping everything and reinstalling Windows again, I said ENOUGH. That was it; I was through with Microsoft. I had to deal with this crap at work; I didn’t have to at home.

Within a week I was a Mac owner. I’d be lying if I said the transition was painless, and I am not afraid to admit that Apple does have issues—but they’re nothing compared with what I’ve had to deal with from pretty much anything coming out of Redmond.

For the last year I’ve been running Windows 7 on my work PC. About three weeks ago it started refusing to do something with Internet Explorer (to be honest I don’t remember what it was at this point—not worth committing to memory), so I wiped the damn thing and loaded XP.

I was amazed at how much faster the machine ran. This confirms my belief that despite the 120+ patches and fixes that came out after SP3, Microsoft basically got it right with XP.

I’ve been able to keep my disgust and ever increasing apathy toward all things Microsoft (and Dell) concealed on a professional level since then, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult. During meetings with our network consultants, they’re rattling off architectures and protocols and how the next big thing from Dell—or whoever—is going to fundamentally change our lives. Seriously dudes? Years ago I might’ve actually been interested enough to ask what all this meant (or at least research it myself later), but at this point I simply don’t care.

Don’t even get me started on the total lack of even he most elementary of computer skills in the workers my company hires (a despair I share with more than one of the managers). For example, today I got an email from one woman who wrote, “It never prompted me to change my password. How do I do that?”

Seriously.

I replied, “Knowing how to change one’s Windows password is a basic computer skill,” and then wrote out the steps to do it. I’m sure I’m going to get feedback on that.

But I don’t care.

And for some reason, people never think of rebooting when they encounter a problem. No, it’s so much easier to call me so I can tell them to reboot.

And then they give me attitude. “You always tell me to do that!” Well yeah, it’s because it fixes whatever’s wrong 90% of the time, asshole.

There’s a reason your I.T. guy is surly. We don’t start out this way. Like a clogged pipe, it takes years to get to this level of contempt for the people you’re supposed to support.

So what’s the solution?

I’m not sure. If I knew I wouldn’t be still hanging around the place I am.

I would like to find an Apple shop; some business that uses Macs and OS X instead of plastic Dell crap running Windows. I think that might rekindle my interest in this technology. I once thought about applying to work at an Apple store, but while I was once able to feign caring, compassionate customer service, I can’t even fake it any more and I wouldn’t last a day in that environment.

 

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Skank

My prediction? Dead by 30 from a drug overdose, or more likely, a self-inflicted accidental gunshot wound, since he’s apparently trying to be all gangsta these days…

Which of course, is laughable.

Hey Justin, reality called. Your fifteen minutes is up.

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Why Your God Doesn’t Exist

Stolen in full from Rosa Rubicondior:

It’s quite easy to prove logically that your god doesn’t exist.

The proof is a simple deduction from certain basic assumptions which themselves are only assumptions in the sense of assuming the description you use for your god is true in the first instance. It goes without saying that if your description of your god is false then the god you are describing is also false.

Let’s assume your god is real and has the following notional characteristics.

God is:

  • Omnipotent – all powerful – there is nothing your god can’t do.
  • Omniscient – all knowing – there is nothing your god doesn’t know.
  • Omni-benevolent – all-loving – there is nothing your god wouldn’t do to defend and protect its creation.

Okay so far? Is there anything you disagree with here? Is there something your god can’t do if it has a mind to? Is there anything your god doesn’t know? How about all loving? Is there anything or anyone your god doesn’t love and for whom it has anything less than the greatest possible concern?

And yet we can see suffering exists.

For suffering to exist, your god must be deficient in at least one of the above. At least one of the following must be true. God is:

  • Unable to prevent it, so it isn’t omnipotent.
  • Unaware of it, so it isn’t omniscient.
  • Unconcerned about it, so it isn’t all-loving

So, the existence of suffering in the world proves your god as described above does not exist.

Strange then that so much of your time is spent asking your god to either stop, reduce or prevent suffering, which is nothing more than tacit acceptance that an omniscience, omnipotent, omni-benevolent god doesn’t exist.

Of course, you can escape the above logic by saying your god isn’t omnipotent, isn’t omniscience and/or isn’t omni-benevolent, but a god who can’t change things, doesn’t know when they need to be changed and/or isn’t bothered anyway isn’t much of a god and certainly not one worthy of worship. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how we could distinguish such a god from a non-existent one.

I love these simple little proofs that gods don’t exist. They are so much more elegant and simple than the cumbersome, convoluted and illogical ‘proofs’ which religious apologists have to try to get away with. That’s the great thing about being supported by evidence, reason, logic and truth, and so not needing to fall back on the fallacy of faith and having to employ charlatans to make you feel better about being superstitious.

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I am Officially Irrelevant

I’d never even heard—much less knew the definitions—of more than half of these (in red)…

Oxford Word Additions for February 2013

appletini
Baggy Green
biosimilar
blootered
braggadocious
burrata
cane corso
cruft
dumbphone
feature-complete
flexitarian
FOSS
friend zone
hump day
metabolic syndrome
omnium
range anxiety
schlumpy
sillage
social sharing
SSD
touchless
tray bake
tweetable
upcharge
voluntourism

(Source)

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Meh…

It wasn’t bad. I mean, I knew going in that it wasn’t going to be a life-changing experience, but more just mindless fun; something that both Ben and I desperately needed to get us each out of our own heads for a few hours, and to a large degree it was exactly that. Every alien abduction trope used in the last thirty years was given screen time, with more than one overly obvious nod (that had audience members—all 15 or so of us—giggling) to Close Encounters.

Overall, it really wasn’t anything we hadn’t seen before, but it was entertaining enough—and Josh Hamilton provided enough yummy, scruffy eye candy—that it was worth the $6.50 we paid at the matinee.

My only real complaint was that there were a few glaring continuity issues and that they could’ve easily left off the last ten minutes of the movie. There was enough of a resolution at that point that they should’ve simply walked away and ended it there, making for a much better film. All those additional “three months later” minutes did was leave the door open for a sequel of some kind or another.

So I’d give it a 6 out of 10. Good enough for an afternoon romp, but definitely not worth paying full ticket price if you can avoid it.

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