Fox News and women

This was hard to watch but kind of important.  I know too many women who are -- in an ongoing way -- catching this same crap on a daily basis in areas where you'd expect professionalism.

If I were one of the (as of today) 23 women running Fortune 500 companies, I definitely wouldn't think this was funny.

Quitting Facebook

Although I'd backed down to essentially just listing my name on the service, I finally took the lat step and deleted my account.  Recognizing that the privacy situation is only going to get worse and never better, it was time.

(Note that I couldn't find another article that I wanted to add to this post on the astonishing amount of data Facebook kept on a single user.)

Anyway, it's been a few months now and I haven't regretted it at all. 

The catch here of course is that I'm still using a lot of free services that trade on user data (including blogger where this is posted, owned by Google) but the sort of see/speak/hear-no-evil approach that Facebook carries in an ongoing way just seemed like a recipe for disaster.

User disagreement

I really wasn't much for reading user agreements, but I've been paying more attention to things like "mandatory arbitration" and "class action waiver".  I get why an Internet company that's a "Freemium" service like Meetup would put this in their user agreement, but our increasing reliance on Internet services suggests these restrictions are going to hit everyone sooner or later.  As a result, it will get harder and harder to have your "day in court" for companies who legitimately screw up.

More politics with bite

An article from the L.A. Times on the train wreck presidency and another one from Bill Maher

On a lighter note, an analysis of the growing importance of clear satire in a culture of political obfuscation.

Making better passwords: length vs. complexity

A really great idea on handling good passwords.  They take longer to type in but it doesn't mean much if you're forgetting them.

Not what I ordered

Another look at what was promised versus what was delivered in 2017 for the American presidency from Bill Maher and Maureen Dowd.

The dangers of arbitration contracts

Having known someone who ran into this, I was especially bothered by the recent story of alleged wide-scale sexual harassment issues left unresolved for years.  An increasing number of companies afraid of lengthy and public legal battles use a legal arbitration service that's appears to them an island to dump and ignore problems.

Unfortunately, this problem appears to be on track for even less accountability.

More on this: fairarbitrationnow.org

The party double-standard

I think I reference Maher too much, but I was pleased with someone drawing from a wide history of American politics to make a case against the current political climate.

Buying a laptop off Craigslist

I was looking for a used machine and couldn't find anything online until I saw a great deal on Craigslist.  As I was having a really intense week, I wrote up a breakdown on stuff to do so I didn't skip any steps.  There's no question there are scams and I didn't want to get caught holding the bag.

Arrival.  Before you get out of the car, leave cash in the car.  Do not take it out without holding the laptop.

• Remember: this isn't nice, this is a business transaction.  Unexpected weirdness may mean a real negotiation.
• Ask: did this come with anything?  Cables, CDs, cards, data, box, anything?  Ask a few questions and see if you feel comfortable proceeding.  The owner's behavior may tell you the history of the device.
• Exit strategy: if you don't feel comfortable with the sale, just say so.  Offer to buy him some coffee for the drive up or pay his gas money and walk away.

If you see anything wrong, stop and walk away to check your cell phone or something.  Come back with a number in your mind that you think is fair.  Tell him or her that they should have listed any problems right up front and that this is a waste of time.  Don't be afraid to walk away.  If the person complains, say that this isn't a small purchase and he should have listed it the product description.

Things to check

• External
• Check for scratches, obvious problems.
• Press the battery button and see how high the green lights go.
• Look at the power supply plug and make sure it's good.  If it's an off-brand thing, ask for a lower price since from experience those things fail after about a year.

• Open the device
• On Mac, check either the "About This Mac" menu or the "Control Panel – System" tool on Windows to verify the processor and RAM
• Open device manager and look for anything out of the ordinary
• Test all keyboard keys
  
• Look for dead pixels (open a window of one color and move it around the screen)
• Look at the disk health (SMART) in config window
• If present, try the multi-touch functions on the mouse pad
• Push all the buttons on the keyboard and make sure they work.
• Insert a keydrive and play a movie
• Get it to go online
• Download and run a CPU test.  The main thing to test here is the fan that should kick on to deal with the higher temperature.
• Set it to sleep

• Plug in:
• A tested USB device to any available ports
• Your earphones and play audio with and without sound
• A disk in the DVD drive (if present) and make sure it functions (erase something)

 

Crop your images

Maye it's just me, but a huge percentage of screenshots I see have some amount of space around them.  Here are a few programs available that do intelligent autocrop:

• GIMP
• Irfanview
• Greenshot (and of course ShareX which contains Greenshot)

I have no idea what I'm doing

It's a comedy show take on really embarrassing politics but part of me is horrified by the clownishness implied by this analysis.  There's not being diplomatic, there's being uninformed, there's being kind of a dick and then there's this.  Just astonishing.

Something else I watched did make me feel a bit better, if only a little.

Fixing MS Office 2013

I've been really surprised with some of the frustrating updates to Microsoft Office 2013.  I've already had issues with Microsoft Word going way back but this was several additional stages of unpleasant.

PCWorld put out a breakdown on the problems and available cures but one one not mentioned in this list was setting up to auto-save to .doc rather than deal with checking "compatibility mode" on every single save.

Microsoft's insistence on adding pointless additional format updates that don't work with earlier programs helps sell software but doesn't help users.  While Excel and PowerPoint keep getting better, Word hasn't seen any dramatic feature updates (that I've seen) since 2003.  On average I use Word at least an hour a day so I feel like I would have seen something in the past 8 years.  Here's a breakdown on all the compatibility oddities.

Give me your tired, your poor ... or nevermind

Bad news from President Trump.  I can't remember how many times I read an article or heard some argument about how he was actually going to end up being a centrist.  Instead, we have replaced a reasonable immigration policy with xenophobia.

More election views

Various looks at the recent election from a satire track:

• Colbert's Pizzagate
• Electoral Confidence

Other views

• Trump as magician

More academic approaches

• Chomsky
• Cornell West