Month: April 2020

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Comic Relief

Two caterpillars are escaping a spider. They climb up a branch and get to the edge, but realize they are now trapped…

"Hold on tight!" says the first caterpillar and he quickly chews through the branch.

It snaps and they begin to fall, but he grabs two protruding twigs and uses them to steer the branch through the air with grace and finesse.

"That's amazing!!" says the second caterpillar. "How in the hell are you doing that?!"

The first caterpillar scoffs.

"Am I the only one in the whole damn forest who knows how to drive a stick!?"

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Vintage Audio Porn

Teac A-700 Elcaset Deck, 1976-77

Elcaset was a format ahead of its time, and unfortunately supplanted by improvements in regular cassette technology that it was designed to replace. It (and cassettes) were ultimately killed off by the arrival of cheap digital recording, both in the form of CD-R and Minidisc in the 90s.

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Further Adventures in Cluelessness

Skype me Daddy!

And the beat goes on.

It's said some people as adults have the awareness of a typical three-year old; i.e. their awareness extends to a three foot radius around them and then abruptly ends).

About six weeks ago—before the madness started—we got a request to upgrade the a/v equipment in the main conference rooms on three floors. We were all busy at the time so it got put on the back burner and life went on. Well, today we got an email from one of those perpetually-clueless individuals asking when these upgrades were expected to be completed because, "we have meetings with the public coming up."

Excuse me? Meetings with who? Who is this "public" and who, exactly, is going to be physically coming back into the office to conduct these meetings?

My colleagues and I maintain a group chat via Skype during the day, and even before anyone said anything, I could hear their collective eyes rolling. Finally, my supervisor's boss said, "I. just. can't ," immediately followed by, "I'll take care of it." Less than a minute later we all received a cc'd email to the user reminding her that there was a spending freeze in place for all non-essential purchases and laying out exactly why this project was non-esssential and now officially on hold for the foreseeable future.

I swear that some people—even in the midst of this crisis—continue to think only about about themselves and their needs; that everything is still "business as usual."

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He Does Have a Point

Me (after reading yet another whiny email from one of our high-maintenance users who seems to have no clue that things are not business as usual): "There are certain people at work I just want to bitch slap."

Ben: "But then you wouldn't be following social distancing guidelines."

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Done With It

It should come as no surprise that the same people who wait until the last minute to request VPN to work from home are also the most clueless individuals in our organization.

Those higher up the IT chain have decided that in the interest of corporate security, they need to lock things down a bit, so as of last week we were no longer able to request VPN access for users who were using their personal computers to get on the enterprise network via VPN. Makes sense, considering how vulnerable to attack the vast majority of home PCs are.

So the new protocol requires getting the name of the enterprise PC the users will be taking home, their personal cell number (for 2-factor authentication required for the initial install of the client), and a list of applications they need to access that would be inaccessible if they weren't granted VPN access. Simple stuff, right?

In theory, yes. But then I end up with users like the guy I had today who was requesting VPN for three of his direct reports. First email request asking for these three items was returned with only the PC name for one of his reports. Second was only the list of applications that the three employees would be using. Finally, when I told this user his request could not be fulfilled without the other PC names and cell phone numbers did I get all the info required. "I guess you guys are really busy right now, huh?"

Why yes. Yes we are. Because of people like you who can't read an email all the way through.

After the accounts were created, I sent out emails to the employees, telling them they were set up on the back end and providing instructions on how to install the client on their company devices. As a courtesy I cc'd the guy who'd put in the initial request for them.

I immediately get an email from the genius saying, "[Employee Name] isn't in the office today."

So? SO? How does this affect ANYTHING I just emailed you?

But you know what irritates me more than this generic brand of cluelessness? It's the people that somehow think everything is still business as usual and can't understand that certain things they used to take for granted simply cannot be done at the moment.

No Karen, you can't just "stop by and pick up a projector for a meeting."

Firstly, there's a skeleton crew in the office to begin with and absolutely no one in I.T. is onsite, and secondly, who are you scheduling a meeting with considering no one is in the office?!

SMDH.

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I Broke Down Last Night

I thought I'd been handling this self-quarantine, lockdown, whatever-you-wanna-call-it thing pretty well. I'm a homebody at heart, so I figured going into this not leaving the house lifestyle would be a walk in the park.

Well, that was proven wrong last night. It started with a mild headache yesterday afternoon and progressed to an upset stomach. Ben started making dinner and the smells that were coming into the den sent my headache into overdrive. I wanted to wretch. I told him I wasn't at all interested in eating at the time and closed the door.

After Ben had eaten I ventured into the kitchen, where he joined me. I turned to him and started crying. He came in for a hug and I just let loose. I didn't cry when my mom died. I didn't cry when my dad passed. And yet now—for seeming no reason at all, I lost it.

Amazingly after that good cry, the headache was gone as well as my upset stomach.

In his wisdom, Ben suggested we both get out of the house for a while, either together or separately. Cabin Fever was setting in.  And you know I'm stressed when I reach the point I can't spend one more second in front of a screen of any kind, which was exactly where I was.

We didn't make it out last night because it was too late by the time I'd finished dinner, but when we woke today Ben said, "We need to take a drive."

Since the world is on lockdown, we really couldn't—nor did we want to—go anywhere that we'd run into masses of humanity, so we settled on one of the public spaces still open: White Tank Mountain Regional Park.

Back in the early 1970s after moving into our new home at 47th Avenue and Bethany Home Road, my family and I had an unobstructed view of the White Tank Mountains to the west. I often said that once I had my own car, my first destination would be driving out west to see them up close.

You can almost make out the White Tank Mountains through the haze on the horizon. That view doesn't exist any more. (That's my grandfather's 1955 T-Bird that he conveniently got rid of right before I got my drivers's license.)

It took 42-some years to do it, but I finally did when I drove out a few years ago to photograph the White Tank Library. While there I contemplated driving into the park, but for a variety of reasons decided to put it off for another time. It took an additional three and a half years beyond that, but I finally fulfilled my teenage dream of visiting those mountains today.

Deal with it. This is the first new car I've had in thirteen years, and goddamnit, I'm going to photograph the shit out of it.

We both felt much better—much relieved—when we arrived back home this afternoon. Ready to face another week of self-quarantine…

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Boring Car Stuff

TLDR: I discovered where the tow hook was stored and finally got the "entertainment center" to play music from a USB stick since it doesn't work natively with my iPhone without a special adapter.

Rambling Version: The other day the question came up as to the location of Rabbit's tow hook. I didn't need it, obviously, but was curious as to where it was, or if it had gone missing while in the possession of AutoNation like the center console the car supposedly shipped with. (An ongoing story for another time.)

Anderson's tow hook was stowed with the jack and associated paraphernalia under the floor in the rear storage area, but since Rabbit came with run-flat tires, there was no spare tire, and hence no need for a jack. I searched the owner's manual and found no mention of it. That led me to the Google, where I learned it would most likely be under one or the other of the front seats. I checked, and sure enough, it was wedged into a special holder in the floor under the driver's seat.

One disappointment I have with this car (because it's a 2016 model, having come out before total onboard connectivity was a thing) was the inability to play music from my phone natively through the car's built-in Bluetooth (or even through the single USB jack) without the purchase of a special adapter that plugs into both the USB and the AUX IN ports. Ugly.

Apparently I can play music stored on a "usb device" through the USB port, so I tried it yesterday. I copied a couple gig worth of audio files from iTunes to a spare USB key I had, and yes, it worked. Perfect, I thought!

That particular drive was 256GB (overkill for this process), so I mirrored the music collection I had on my iPhone onto a 32GB flash drive, plugged it into the car and…nothing. Wasn't even recognized.

Okay…did I forget to format it as FAT, and had left it as APFS or Mac OS Extended? So I reformatted it in my work laptop running Win10 and copied all the files back. Again, no love.

Turns out the car didn't like (for whatever reason) that particular brand of USB key. I reformatted the original one I'd used, copied the collection again to verify I wasn't losing my mind, and it worked just fine.

Why didn't I just use that one? Well, like I said, it was overkill considering I was only transferring about 16GB of music to begin with, and it was a rather long key that presented the opportunity of getting knocked around and trashing the car's USB port in the process. I had to find another solution (the 32GB stick was much shorter).

So last night I ordered one of those tiny USB sticks (the ones that are the size of a wireless mouse dongle) made by Samsung from Amazon for $10. It arrived today. I loaded up the music collection and it works just fine.