Category: Hopeful Optimism –

Wednesday – August 24th, 2022 —> +21˚C / +68˚F – cloudy & grey @ 4:00 pm in Atlantic Canada –

– August 21st, 2022 – “Mac Restart Stalled during updates” –

— I’ve spent way too much time in the past few weeks updating, upgrading and tweaking stuff on my computers.

— { I’ve got two Windows 10 or later desktop computers because I need them to connect to the interactive muti-player game I’ve been deigning since 2007 – One to do my ‘heavy lifting’ and the other is good for testing how the game will play for anybody who can’t afford the really expensive stuff I need to build the world and do all the stuff needed to get the game workable – And usually have more than one Mac turned on and connected to the internet almost always because lately Apple is no longer hyper- conscientious about making sure that every new upgrade and update is 100% compatible with all previous versions of its operating system, et cetera – and I’ve got programs and ‘apps’ that won’t run on the latest upgrades – and newer programs & apps that won’t run on the older versions of the operating systems – and I need all that stuff to work – }

— Every time I sat down to do anything – it seemed – one of my ‘apps’ was having an anxiety attack – trembling and pleading with me for their next ‘gotta have’ security update – web browsers, blog software, even operating systems would even freeze my ability to do anything until they got their updates or upgrades.

— Case in point – I have ‘Avast Secure Browser’ that claimed to be the most secure browser on the ‘Free’ market when I thought – okay – let’s see how this goes. The only thing I do with that that browser is sign into and out of my bank account. —> the bank came up with a scheme to try to convince me a couple years ago that I NEED to give it my cell { iPhone } number for security purposes. – This particular bank has been caught ‘with their hand in the cookie jar’ of personal ‘private’ information – using their ‘Web Banking’ “Service” allows them to snoop on all of your browsing, and they can mine all the information on your computer and sell that information to the highest bidder – sounds like a bizarre ‘conspiracy theory’ right? But they were caught – and admitted to misuse of their clients’ personal information and web presence details. – I believed that using a ‘secure browser’ would disable their ability to use their ‘cookies’ to snoop and pry into everything on my computer – the browser deletes cookies when I sign out of the bank site and keeps the information I need to sign back in next time – right? – Or have I been duped into believing I’m safe from the demonic schemes of more than intrusive Big Brother types who want to steal and sell information to insidious advertisers who want to disrupt everything I do on my computer – pop advertising between me and what I’m trying to do and make every session on the computer take  at least twice as long as it should? Gack! —> But wait, there’s more – in the name of ‘Security’ they imposed ‘2 step Verification’ a couple years ago – and they really want access to everybody’s ‘smart’ cell phones – where they can sneak into your privacy and grab every little bit of information on your cell phone – where you’ve been, who you’ve called, everything you’ve posted on social media – who’s in your ‘contacts’ list – what apps you’ve stupidly downloaded – the alternative to allowing them to know everything about you via your smart phone is allowing them to call you on a land line telephone – if you haven’t succumbed to the urge to dump your land line service to avoid all kinds of sick scammers, fraudulent ‘relatives’ of deposed monarchs begging you to help them get their family’s fortunes out of their country with promises to share a large portion of those fortunes with you if you only deposit a couple thousand of your hard earned dollars with them first – and then they disappear into the vaporous atmosphere of the dark web. – the alternative to stupidly setting yourself up for all kids of insanity when all you have to do is make sure you have caller ID and never answer a call where the number is something you don’t recognize or is blocked or spoofed { nefarious con artists can pretend to be your friends – if you don’t answer calls from ‘800’ numbers you don’t recognize they can pretend to be your Aunt Grizelda { who you’ve added to your contact list in first place -} so when someone claiming to be Grizelda Aardvark you know it’s a scam and and ignore the ring and delete the voice mail as soon as the idiot with the disguised voice hangs up and goes on to try to con somebody else out of as much money as they can. *** So – with this 2 step verification process having a robot call your land line, you have to pick up on the first ring and be ready to write down the series of numbers the robot voice gives you and enter them perfectly in the correct order in their ‘security’ form in order to get access to your bank accounts – a mistake like hitting the wrong key or hitting two keys at a time while you’re typing in your verification code might mean you need to wait until the nearest bank branch is open and go stand in line for ten minutes because they’ve laid off as many tellers as they can get away with – and explain to the human teller you finally get to see that you got the verification wrong at three in the morning while you were checking to make sure none of the nonsense like what happened last time when some company in China told your bank you just spent half your pay check on something they spelled wrong and the address they gave never existed … happened again – { Isn’t life in this digital age interesting??? } and I avoid letting the bank call me while the love of my life is getting her much needed rest before she has to get up and deal with a bunch of morons both at her work place and over the phone and internet as part of her high stress job. – *** —> So – if you’re still with me – you just read a lot of words in a long paragraph that should explain why I need that ‘secure’ browser dedicated to one task only – connecting to my bank accounts —> now here’s the punch line —> that secure browser refused to let me do anything until I agreed to stop trying to connect and allowed them to ‘update’ their browser with the latest and greatest must have security update/upgrade – so I twiddled my thumbs and waited until the download and update were finished and then the routine ended with something like “You idiot – this browser can’t function unless you have the updated upgrade to the next generation Operating System on the computer you have, that might not be able to run with that upgraded Operating System —> when buying a new computer that can run that newer operating system might only cost you about $2,500.00 and a lot of frustration when you discover that everything you got for free with this older computer now costs extra for versions that work with the new operating system…. *** —> so I checked with Support dot Apple dot com and discovered that my twelve year old computer can work with the five year old operating system that is the minimum requirement for anybody who wants to use that ‘Secure Browser’ for only one task to minimum waking up tomorrow morning and discovering that some hacker in Russia, Turkey, North Korea or China has emptied your bank account, or sent the SWAT police to your house at three a.m. with bogus information that you’ve kidnapped a ten year old and has him or her locked up in your 1960’s fallout shelter, tied up, naked and terrified. … Yay – so I downloaded and installed the new old operating system and discovered that it wants to have all my apps operating from the iCloud – The free version of the iCloud allows you 5 gigabytes of space. The iCloud wants to store all your information in its virtual real estate and —> ‘Oops – you need more iCloud Space – and that will only cost you more than your computer is worth every month for the rest of your life -‘ { And the microsoft “One Drive” is even worse. It decided to compact graphic projects on me so they wouldn’t work at all when I tried to get them out of the One Drive and back on my Windows computer. Six months of long hours ‘creating’ stuff —> out the windows. } AAAaaaaaaaa! So – because I’m not completely brain dead, { not yet anyway } I discovered a way to get into the iCloud and tell it “NO – I do not want to have all my blasted apps sitting on the iCloud – storing information on the iCloud – costing me more than I can afford twelve times a year  !!!!”  —>And I learned you have to un-check a lot of boxes in three different places – AND – write your blinking Apple ID password in another box – several times – before it lets you tell it “NO I DON”T WANT THE FREAKIN ICLOUD TO STORE EVERY FREAKIN DIGITAL PHOTO I EVER TAKE —> NO – I DON”T WANT THE [ CENSORED } ICLOUD TO STORE EVERY MESSAGE I EVER WRITE DOWN TO REMIND MYSELF I HAVE AN APPOINTMENT OR NEED TO BUY EGGS AND MILK OR BREAK MY SPOUSE’S HEART EVERY MORNING NEXT WEEK WHEN SHE WANTS A STRESS FREE BREAKFAST BEFORE SHE HAS TO DEAL WITH COMPLETE FREAKING “ICE-HOLES” FOR 8  to 12 HOURS WHEN SHE ONLY GETS PAID FOR 8 – !!!” …et cetera …

— The first Word Press Blogs I got were free from WordPress – did not have a complicated or hard learning curve – and did not demand that I sign in to Dream Weaver of one of Microsoft’s useless, complicated, web page ‘creating’ pieces of crap. { I remember when I spent many hours on many days to convert the ‘Green Party Of Connecticut’s web pages from a one page, very long thing with a purple background into a much more ‘professional’ looking thing with ‘tabs’ that contained links to its various pages in the style and colours they had permission to copy from another state’s Green Party web presence – I did that in HTML – After the Green party got links to the ‘upgraded’ web pages before their state meeting {{ several local groups met in their own areas and sent delegates to central cities in the state for their monthly state meetings }} one of the local guys who helped me with information updates that he wanted to appear on their ‘upcoming events’ page and so on – told me that I got a standing ovation at the party’s state meeting – and an invitation to join the party and in lieu of the thirty dollars a year dues they normally charged for membership – they would like me to be their official web guy –  Then, one night around 11:30 pm – I got a call from that guy who wined on the telephone – “Jim – I just updated the events page using Microsoft’s front page and now there’s a wide blue vertical line through the middle of everything on that page and after everything I’ve tried that blue line won’t go away – can you fix it?” —> “Yes – I’ll do it-”  —> It took me all night – but I got it done { trail and error in HTML language } At seven thirty that next morning – the guy -using aol messenger – noticed that I was still on the computer connected through a phone modem – and sent me a message saying, good morning, what’s up? – I told him I just finished fixing what Front Page ‘Fupped’ up – he said ‘Wow – I’m going to go play tennis-” I laughed to myself, signed off and caught a couple hours of sleep before I had to get up and go work the night shift. I was their web guy until a recent university graduate whose parents bought him a copy of then pre-adobe Dream Weaver – that I couldn’t afford at the time – and he looked at the web sign and re-designed it to have the green leaves of a decent representation of a tree hold the links to all the pages and suddenly He was their web guy and I was around only to fix things that he couldn’t fix because he didn’t understand HTML and bugs that weren’t covered in whatever he learned at college were messing up pages he ‘created’ with his spiffy expensive software. {{{ And I didn’t bore you with details like I had finished a temporary job and been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia – treated at the Veterans’ Hospital for free since I had to move back into my parents home and be the default only capable driver and 24/7 unpaid home health care and free driver to get my sick father to the Vets’ Hospital any time he had  one of his very frequent Asthma attacks – and couldn’t work because I never knew when I’d be incapacitated by the condition that my ‘health care professional’ Nurse Practitioner or Physician’s Assistant kept reminding me that most real doctors believed that Fibromyalgia was all in the mind – and maybe the product of an unbalanced { mentally ill? } person’s lack of something that all ‘normal’ people have in their fine, upstanding human constitution.

— Grumble, grumble, grumble …

— The first computer I bought was an Apple IIe – that I had to borrow money from my credit union when I had a decent job with an indecent employer. The computer came with a ‘Duo Disk’ in the days when you had to start the computer with a five and a quarter inch ‘floppy’ in each of the drives to load the operating system. { the floppies had ridiculously small data capacity {{ 354 kilobytes ?  }} according to today’s standards. —> and the computer itself had 64 kilobytes of RAM and needed an extended 80 column card to show as many as 80 green letters and spaces against a black background in their CRT black and  green monitor. The first thing I thought  when I set the thing up and turned it on was, “Holy [ Chips ] this thing is smarter than I am -” and I wondered if I accidentally hit the wrong key combination – would it launch a nuclear strike on the White House? Or start World War The Last {{ after which the next war would be fought with clubs and stone hammers? }} Two weeks later I half convinced myself that I was a genius because I could load in the ‘Apple Writer’ software and write myself a two page excuse for a short short story – but couldn’t print it – and couldn’t do anything with it because I hadn’t ventured into the wonderful world of telephone modems yet. Then Apple works came out.  {{ “The greatest productivity software that nobody every bought.” – because friends could make copies of the software and give them away to their friends. }} The word processor was easier to use than ‘Apple Writer’ had been – the Spread Sheet needed a lot of careful setting up to work – like you had to know the esoteric name of each cell in a row and type it perfectly along with the mathematical equation that would tell that cell – for instance – to add up the numbers entered into the three cells to its left and magically display the total – or it could take the previously added total in a cell above and way to the right and subtract the total in five cells to its left and even more magically —> display the total balance you had left in your checking account after way too much typing and figuring out and double and triple checking that took probably an hour longer than it would have been to do all the adding and subtracting in the form that came with your latest order of bank checks. —> but I really liked the data base – it was simple to set up and you could easily add rows of stuff and keep track of any weird bits of ‘data’ you could imagine. … *** Data Bases lately are either insanely expensive or they’re so hard to figure out and use or so limited in what they can do that you sit there and stare at your computer and wonder how the bleep the people who create those idiotic data bases can stay in business.

— I got my first Macintosh computer from a second hand computer store that got several Mac computers from Yale University because some bum-kissing idiot head of some department at Yale thought that if he got rid of all his department’s Mac computers Bill Gates would fall in love with him and cut him real good deals on a bunch of ‘real’ computers that didn’t have the ‘WIMP’ factor { Windows, Icons, Mice and Pull-down menus } – I don’t think that worked out well for that idiot – but  got myself a fairly inexpensive couple years old computer that looked like a slightly grown up version of the first Macintosh computers, with an 832 x 640 pixel colour screen built in – its own 3.5 inch hard floppy drive built in and no need to load the operating system – it was already there – PLUS! – it came with its own telephone connection that you could plug a ‘CAT-4’ cable into and plug the other end of the cable into a modem – that were zoomingly fast at something like 1200 BAUD in those days. I learned how to make alias and put an alias to the trash can on the left side of the bottom of the screen while the real trash can sat on the bottom right corner – and I discovered weird and wonderful backgrounds for the screen display – a couple years later I gave that computer to my sister who wanted something to keep notes and a personal journal on – I gave it to her at a party at her property in rural Vermont and a drug high friend of hers said, “Oh I can show her how to use this – I know all about computers – took a look at the weird background and the two garbage cans and stared blankly – and spoke a phrase with the the hark ‘K’ version of – “What the Fupp is this????”

— I bought a refurbished 27 inch iMac in 2007 after I got my first paying job in Canada – and with it – bought a database program named ‘Bento 2’ from the wonderful folks who were selling ‘File Maker’ and ‘File Maker Pro’ for a lot more money than it cost to buy and have the ‘Bento’ data base shipped by Purolator Express back then. It wasn’t as easy to use or as versatile as Apple Works Data bases had been – but they could display pictures { photos or ‘Graphics’ like drawings or clips from screen shots } – I didn’t do a heck of a lot with that program – I used the still viable unsupported version of Appleworks for all kinds of things, like keeping track of my characters in computer games and stuff that only I would ever care to keep in a database.

— But then Apple Works wouldn’t work on later versions of Mac OS Xxxx… and the Bento did work – ‘upgrades’ were free and new templates included with those upgrades were cool to look at – so I could keep track of things like passwords to way too many blogs and email accounts —> But – when the wrong hard drive blew up and went irretrievably dead, I lost the upgrade and learned that the upgrade I never downloaded in time was no longer available and had to revert to the older Bento 2 something upgrade and winced and kept working with that. I made myself a database to keep track of my increasing number of necessary daily pills and vitamins – and another to keep track of every transaction in my bank accounts – that the bank will only show the last few months on its web site. – —> Every once in a while I checked eBay to see if anyone was selling one of the Bento upgrade disks with the spiffy new features and found one – and learned that it would no longer upgrade an existing older version of itself because File Maker had joined the League of Beedy Grastards and wouldn’t allow that. They tried to convince anybody who wanted to do that that the only solution to their frustration would be to subscribe to their “Cloud” version of Filemaker for a measly $1,000.00 plus per year. GAAAAA! so I copied everything I thought I’d need to copy from an old Mac Mini’s screen which sat next to my newer Mac Mini’s screen copied stuff from Bento 2 into  nearly identical data base with one or two more fun features on the newer Mac Mini’s { Unsupported } Bento 4 data base.

— Did I start to hint earlier in this epic that I had a couple WordPress blogs? Yeah, I have a few – at first they were only based on WordPress dot com’s proprietary web sites. Then they became available on my Canadian Web Provider’s platform, I had to call in and talk to somebody in Saskatchewan who loaded the WordPress blog into my account with a couple themes that she had me look at and approve of. A couple years later that Web Provider upgraded to a cpanel interface that offered WordPress blogs you could add to your site all by yourself, and they came with hundreds of possible themes, including some that were free and looked as good or sometimes better than the themes that third parties had developed and were selling at moderate to ‘Un-Fupping-Believeable’  prices.  —> a couple years later – ads started showing up on the WordPress blogs ‘hosted’ on WordPress dot com’s site(s?) { I looked at one friend’s ‘Anti-Big Oil’ blog and saw ads for oil company credit cards – and he told me some of the spam comments he got were from jerks who promoted expanding Canada’s oils pipe lines to keep the universe in gas and oil and grow Canada’s flagging economy. {{ One of my favourite books is “The Energy Non-Crisis” by Lindsay Williams, a Baptist Missionary who went to Alaska to minister to ‘those poor lonely men who were endangering their mortal souls by indulging in alcohol and loose women’ why the heck up north in the oil fields, hundreds of miles away from everything but alcohol and loose women for six months at a time – for big bucks – The oil company was so happy with the way he shamed their workers into not drinking themselves half to death – to the point where absenteeism was a major problem – his results were so good – they made him an honorary officer of their corporation. —.> then one day a big high powered executive was scheduled to come all the way up to their operation and the word went out that attendance to that executive’s talk was mandatory for all managers, supervisors and company officers. The ‘Pastor’ went to the meeting. The big shot got up and told them, “There isn’t any oil crisis. There never really was any oil crisis. And with what we know now – there never will be any oil crisis.” – Planet Earth manufactures oil in a process that does not involve decaying dinosaur carcasses – Deep space probes have discovered evidence of oil on planets and moons that could never possibly have supported dinosaurs. The oil industry is all one big collection of lying mudder fuppers – In the Alaskan oil fields alone – they are pumping natural gas back into the ground, that if they collected it and shipped it – they could supply the entire East Coast of the USA with Free power for at least the next three years. Oil drilling operations in either North or South Dakota are burning off hundreds of millions of dollars of natural gas all the time – BECAUSE THEY DON’T WANT TO FLOOD THE MARKET WITH CHEAP GAS THAT WOULD DRIVE THE PRICE OF ENERGY DOWN. … The government of Canada was giving, and might still be giving the Alberta oil sands’ unethical – immoral – lying con artists so much ‘Corporate Welfare’ that they could have stopped supporting the lying ice-holes and with money they really didn’t need and buy every family in Canada an electric vehicle when they were more expensive than they are now. —> A retired US Air Force intelligence officer who gave daily briefings to both pResident { in the white house } Bushes told us in a video conference we had to pay to subscribe to – that the average US Congressman/woman got paid a salary of about $89,000.00 a year with added support for their staff also paid for, not out of their own pockets – but the average real { unreported } income of most of those representatives was more like between 2 and 3 million U$ dollars – when all the hidden gifts and kick backs were figured in.

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I have to quit here – There’s more coming later.