When it comes to wrong telephone numbers, when I receive the calls, I had originally adopted a policy of blocking the number if I received said call from the same number twice and neither time was left a message. Now, however, with the influx of robocalls, I pretty much just block any number I don’t recognize that doesn’t leave a message. I think I get more robocalls than spam email these days.
C’mon Dustin, you at least have to show up to court
While the majority of these robocalls were scams, and admittedly I’ve called these numbers back and yelled at people for fun, there was a time when I was receiving calls with the caller asking for a Dustin Werner. At the time I had figured these were bill collectors and had given up on the calls ever stopping, because once a debt is sold, the new debt collection company will never stop calling. But on one occasion, someone left a message, and apparently Dustin Werner had missed his court date with the Toledo Municipal Court. This intrigued me.
From 1999-2007 I was a Toledo resident, and my cell phone’s area code is still from Toledo, so I concluded that my phone number was simply in a wrong record somewhere. At the time I received this call, and thereafter having a narrowed range of focus, I Googled this name and found the general profile of a man not terribly versed in contributing to society: something about drugs and theft. Ohio, am I right?
Fast forward to today. Recently I got a rapid batch of robocalls, and this reminded me of good ol’ Dustin. Out of renewed curiosity, I checked Google again. It had been a while, as the articles, courtesy of the Toledo Blade, were dated 2014. Apparently he had been arrested at a Kroger not far from my mom’s house, and has since been sentenced to 4 years 11 months. It looks like I have at least a couple more years before the calls start up again.
Like the title says: there’s gotta be more to this. A picture’s worth a thousand words I hear, yet some photos need further explanation. Sometimes I dwell on one for too long, and to ease the curse, I have to pass it along. Therefore I will provide photos, suggest an explanation, and let the viewer reach their own conclusion:
For months I pondered this hole in the foundation, overlooking the obvious. Then one day as I was working in my drafty basement office, I noticed the hole perfectly aligns with the support I-beam. Following the beam, I see that its other end rests on the foundation. The beam is supported throughout the length of the basement with 3 adjustable columns, the one in this photo being hidden behind laminate. The product description indicates these are for temporary use. Also, why overkill with an I-beam at all if it’s being supported with columns? My conclusion then, based on the state of supports, the overkill beam, and the resting notch in the foundation; is that the beam was cut after the house was completed–presumably for the stairs–as was not part of the original design. It seems to me that the stairwell could have been located elsewhere, somewhere that doesn’t compromise the main support. I suppose I’ll just have to trust in the inspector, because inspectors never miss things…
On a lighter note, I found this. I wonder what was going through my daughter’s mind at the time. What transgression did this Lego man commit that she felt the need to amputate his hands and chain him by the neck? Is he a heretic? We got some Pit and the Pendulum shit going on right here.
That’s actually how a company higher-up referred to it: The Internets and Social Medias. I felt like a kid, talking to some adult who was desperately trying to understand “what the kids are into these days”. It was painful.
Anti-gay chicken sandwich
The point of that particular email communication was to be careful that when you take to the Internet to obnoxiously voice your opinion about something, as we are all apt to do, that you take pains to avoid having your opinion interpreted as a representative of your employer. Remember Chick-fil-A and that comment against homosexuals by whoever that executive was? I get that it’s a Christian company, but it seemed odd to me that we were holding a company accountable for an employee’s personal opinion. I don’t recall the company ever catching flak for refusing to hire homosexuals, or denying them service, so as far as I know, the company itself hadn’t done anything ethically questionable. But it demonstrated that people as a whole didn’t want to make that distinction, and so proved my own employer’s concerns.
My point is that this is one consequence of the Internet, which represents something greater: open access to exercise free speech to a worldwide audience, and the major consequences it can have against a powerful individual, whether or not those consequence are justified. It’s a definite point of concern, but it got me thinking about something even bigger: who specifically would be against this paradigm that we’re in a constant state of disagreement regarding the openness of the Internet?
And my conclusion is simply, that it’s those with the most to lose. Let’s consider some logic: knowledge is obtained through experience and study. Study is written information, vetted and discussed. The Internet is the biggest and most available source of vetted information. The internet is therefore knowledge incarnate. An argument against the openness of the internet, therefore, is an argument for greater widespread ignorance. So who would benefit? I surmise that it would be those who are in power. Why? Because the mere fact that they hold positions of power demonstrates that they have benefited from the existing system to this point, which compared to today’s access to information (courtesy of the Internet), has been a period of relative ignorance.
People fear to lose what they have acquired, even when recognizing it doesn’t benefit the common good. More tangibles means a higher standard of living–something for which we fight tirelessly–human nature. Conclusion: those in power don’t want to lose power, and consequently perceive the Internet as a direct threat to their power.
Enter: government intervention. The trend has been to cripple the Internet where its ubiquity benefits the commoner, without threatening areas in which it benefits commerce (AKA: the flow of money and by proxy, power). This translates to being able to monitor who does what on the Internet. If you can build a profile on every citizen, then through historically successful tactics of government action; such as intimidation, threats, political imprisonment; you can then silence anyone who’s informed enough to be a direct threat without destroying the technology itself, and therefore still capitalize upon it while maintaining the power dynamic.
The first approach was to damage the first threat to surveillance: encryption. In the 1990s there were actual laws which dictated the effectiveness of Internet encryption strength, and even went so far as to classify the technology as a munition, and therefore precluded from international export. Review the history of PGP for an amusing example.
But stifling encryption ultimately harmed commerce, as the Internet became increasingly commerce-centric. Money had to flow and it could only do so with encryption. The restrictions eased, but encryption remained cost-prohibitive to anything outside of commerce, so for a time the government was still in a winning position. More interested in communication and people’s access to information, the government was still comfortable with the fact that while strong encryption existed, nothing they were interested in monitoring was encrypted.
But then, encryption became universal, recently thanks in part to the push for it by companies such as Google, Mozilla, Apple, and the EFF. Suddenly, it became infeasible to police the public based on their Internet traffic. So the government responded with what they tried before: breaking encryption. Except this time, the commercial Internet entities were no longer solely comprised of companies who unquestionably took the government’s side in all matters. Encountering resistance by these powerful companies, attempts to renew similar legislation have so far failed (in the US, anyway–Brazil and Britain are two notable counterexamples).
So the power play has taken a new approach. If you can’t control the technology that runs the Internet, control the infrastructure itself. In order to do that, it needs to be consolidated–monopolized. Enter the era of mega-mergers.
Remember?
Time Warner/Comcast/Charter/Verizon/Level 3/AOL–the Internet backbones of the country are quickly becoming one. In a closed-door tit-for-tat arrangement, these companies assuaged the government leaders’ fear, by providing all the financial incentive required to keep these leaders in power, while the leaders responded by further de-regulating legal restrictions, allowing these companies to squeeze additional capital from it’s customer base. But as stated, there’s a bigger plan. This mutually-beneficial arrangement extended to ignore antitrust regulations, giving companies the monopolistic power they wanted to maximize revenue from a competition-less industry, while becoming unofficially indebted to the government, true, but the government will then will exercise its power to regulate these indebted monopolies for its own purposes, finding away around the technology to access customer data through the gatekeepers themselves. And once the industry is monopolized, there will be no fringe competitors available to offer alternatives.
So what is the next step? I will theorize. Ultimately we’ll end up with one or two ISPs. We’ll pay increasingly exorbitant prices for Internet access. Then they’ll leverage their monopoly over the Internet backbone itself to force a technological loophole. ISPs may require that customers install an ISP-provided encryption certificate, which would break encryption to the ISPs while still maintaining secure communications for commercial purposes. They may require customers to use ISP equipment, designed for a similar middle-box proxy service. They may require something at their business customers’ end, such as logging and surrendering customer information. There are many specific possibilities, but what’s important is that we as the customer, with no other ISP alternative, will be in no position to refuse. And the pseudo-anonymity, open exchange of ideas, and access to the world’s repository of knowledge; will gradually be lost to the ages until the next violent revolution.
Standing desks are hippie-dippie crap. Just because you want to lessen your chances of fatal cardiac arrest one day, I have to hear you and your stupid call as you talk way too loudly over the cubicle walls.
That is not the topic of this post, but a mere introduction. I, too, feel my fragile physical form atrophying as I sit in a chair for hours. And so, partially out of concern for my musculature, partially because I can’t bear to hear standing desk guy talking loudly on his eternal call anymore, I venture forth into the harsh and unforgiving wilderness that is the paved perimeter of the building.
I started taking walks whenever I had the time very early in my employ at this company. And now, years later, I again went walking, but this time with someone else. I’ve done that before of course–I’m not an antisocial weirdo. But apparently I always take the lead, for on this occasion, upon our mutual egress from the edifice, she turned right–a direction I had never considered. She wished to circumnavigate the building in a clockwise direction. I implored her to rethink her rash and unwise decision, but nay said she, for the wild called to her in that direction.
Actually I think she just said she wanted to go that way, followed by a rhetorical question along the lines of what the hell was wrong with me. And I, being the eternal gentlemen, acquiesced. Then, 10 steps into the walk, I collapsed from an anxiety attack.
Which brings me to my question: why are sporting events which involve circular autotransference always done so in a counterclockwise direction? Once again I sought the Holy Oracle for its wisdom of the collective consciousness.
Google quickly directed me to several sites, wherein the answers were many. Explanations included but were not limited to: Coriolis effect, faster movement in relation to the planet’s rotation, more natural for the majority right-foot dominated athletes, and the interpretation of chronology as athletes moved from left to right from the perspective of the spectators.
But I recall an X-Files episode in which a buried naval antenna, miles long, generated ultra-low frequency radio waves for communication with deep-sea submarines. Except, this being the X-Files, there were unanticipated consequences, and local residents suffered some sort of explosive decompression of their inner ear if they stopped moving–some sort of bone-resonance in relation to the antenna. The guest actor was the guy who played the Breaking Bad dude. Anyway, things didn’t turn out so well for Breaking Bad dude, the navy denied any wrongdoing but mysteriously shut down the antenna, and Mulder got the usual berating from FBI Assistant Director Skinner (or maybe it was his new boss after he was officially removed from the X-Files).
It is therefore my preferred theory that my panic attack was not due to some simple neurological disorder like OCD, but rather that, let’s say, the gel in my inner-ear is in resonance with the earth’s rotation and it causes me physical pain to travel clockwise. One day, I will travel to the southern hemisphere to confirm this theory.
I think I shortened my lifespan this weekend. There were certainly moments when I wanted to lay down and expire. But rather than make individual posts and cloud the feed, I’ll make a multi-purpose single post instead to feed the cloud (heh, nerd jokes):
You Say Tomato
Yes, I removed more sod. And I think I’ve finally had it with that. There will be no more garden installation this year. Seriously, I hate removing sod.
Grass is kind of just wasted space
Note that old cable box from a defunct cable company. I’m going to have to rip that off the wall one day. Anyway, when the house’s seller (the son of the former owner) haphazardly threw down mulch to gain a +10 curb appeal, for some reason he made this side organically-shaped. It’s the only “garden” that wasn’t rectangular. Maybe he got creative. Maybe he ran out of mulch. Who knows? But, this is the SW side of the house, and the ideal location for a vegetable garden. So I had to widen it anyway.
A more efficient design
We argued over the tomato-securing system. I wanted to use trellis netting and just have a row of tomatoes. Apparently Liz had experienced that before with her parents and the results were not as expected. But the peculiarities of any garden are unique to their specific circumstances, so this will be an experiment anyway. This year, we’ll try the bamboo poles. Planting to come this weekend.
Mobile Foodies
I admit–food is not my drug. Therefore, the many joys of food novelty are lost on me. Among these is the influx of food trucks. It isn’t really much cheaper, I have to yell over the sound of generators to place my order, and as the customer I’m tasked with finding my own improvised seating arrangements.
It’s hard to smile with a mouth full of hotdog
But, it is an opportunity to quickly try a variety of food options. And those spicy Caribbean tacos I had were pretty darn good. And it was a fun new experience for the kid, so win.
…Comes Tumblin’ Down
Look at this pine tree:
It appears unimportant to me, priority-wise. It isn’t dying, nor is it leaning dangerously. But my neighbor hated it, and my wife hated it. As I spent my childhood on the Great Plains, it’s still fascinating to me that trees can grow naturally, and not have to be attended to constantly. I like trees, but native Ohioans seem to revel in deforestation for some reason. Ultimately, I conceded to having this one tree removed, were we to need to remove a tree to satisfy the boiling desire of my Ohioan wife to kill a tree.
My neighbor, in his excitement upon hearing word of my concession, and apparently having recently gotten his chainsaw in working order, ran over to greet us with said chainsaw, and expressed his willingness to cut the tree down at that moment–to which my wife readily agreed.
It may be just a tree, but I still have trouble with needlessly extinguishing a life
I also have many a memory of the trees in Lubbock dying, and needing to be chopped down. And while my youthful memory likely exaggerates the negatives, I recall dad borrowing a chainsaw to fell the trees, followed by me spending hours with the pruners and bow saw, chopping and cutting, chopping and cutting…
This tree was no exception. 3-4 hours later, and we had grown the firewood supply. And for whatever reason, the women of the neighborhood found it hilarious that I was butchering the tree with a reciprocating saw. I guess, compared to the chainsaw, there was a penis joke in there somewhere.
What the Duck?
Ending on a happy note, a duck and her ducklings wandered down the gutter.
I wonder where she was leading them. I’m not aware of any nearby ponds. But last year I almost hit a duck with the mower in my front yard, so apparently we’re good duck territory despite the lack of ponds…and mechanical chopping machines.
But I recall an X-Files episode in which a buried naval antenna, miles long, generated ultra-low frequency radio waves for communication with deep-sea submarines. Except, this being the X-Files, there were unanticipated consequences, and local residents suffered some sort of explosive decompression of their inner ear if they stopped moving–some sort of bone-resonance in relation to the antenna. The guest actor was the guy who played the Breaking Bad dude. Anyway, things didn’t turn out so well for Breaking Bad dude, the navy denied any wrongdoing but mysteriously shut down the antenna, and Mulder got the usual berating from FBI Assistant Director Skinner (or maybe it was his new boss after he was officially removed from the X-Files).
