More 'Babbling on'....

Reading over my previous rant about Facebook and its users, whoever you may be, I should explain that it's certainly none of my business how you get your jollies or your entertainment, and I'm not trying to be a 'smart-ass'.... actually, that latter is not strictly true - I've always put a conscious effort into trying to use whatever 'smarts' I've got, because ever since I've been a little kid, I've known that there's a lot of smarties out there trying to manipulate us into doing something that works out more to their advantage than to ours. So I've always tended towards being the suspicious type, and asking "Why? What's this all about?" Because, there's a lot of different ways to skin a cat.

My cousins in Atlanta surprised me with their news that they both enjoy spending time on Facebook, and I'd like them to know that I'm not trying to tell them what they ought to be doing. I was surprised, though, because both of them are very well educated, presumably have above-average I.Q.s, and therefore theoretically, should probably not be so susceptible to manipulation by some wet-behind-the-ears youngster like Mark Zuckerberg.

There are aspects to all of that which tend to set off my alarm bells, because in this day and age, far too many of us are becoming reliant upon virtual realities like Facebook, the Internet, Google's Blogger, etc., rather than formerly traditional interpersonal relationships like visiting the neighbors, or attending real live social functions, or gossiping with the kids at the supermarket while we do the shopping. Real human face-to-face interactions, in other words, are now becoming in a very real sense a 'lost art'. And that's something that ought to be really troubling all of us, I think. Why? Because - we're human animals with a built-in 'herd' instinct which has served to nurture and protect us from life's dangers for millennia, and switching to isolated individualism in a world of virtual reality exposes us to the obvious dangers of the old 'divide and conquer' principle.

If you don't think that's happening, take a look around, for example at recent political events. Party lines are blurred, radical factions are finding acceptance where they formerly wouldn't have, and crafty manipulators with too much money are finding it easy to 'buy' their way into positions of influence. And this is in part because we aren't as a society nearly as socially cohesive as in past eras prior to the advent of the personal computer and the Internet and the land of cyberspace, mystery, wonder, fantasy, and yes, just plain bullshit. We're allowing ourselves to be bamboozled into thinking virtual reality beats the honest-to-God real thing - and it doesn't, and it shouldn't, and we ought to be smarter than this. 

And that's why I did the rant about Facebook. It isn't so much Facebook as that whole virtual reality world we're finding so seductively distracting that really worries me. And I'm just as susceptible and just as vulnerable to it as you are.
All I'm saying is, let's recognize this, and try to keep one foot in the real world,
and one eye on the bouncing ball, before something clobbers us from where we aren't looking.   

Tonight's sundown from downtown

'Oldest Living Blogger' babbles on....

I posted a couple of pieces on here today about Facebook, mostly because I had promised a cousin in Atlanta that I'd look into it, with a view to signing on. But after doing some 'homework' on the subject, now I'm not so sure it's my kind of parade. 

Generally speaking, I've resisted becoming a 'groupie' for others' popular causes, and one of the reasons for that is because I've been a 'loner' most of my life. I've lived and worked in remote locations with very few co-workers or companions nearby, and have become accustomed to finding my own amusements and hobbies. I've also been single more often than married, so I've not been completely domesticated nor trained in the arts of compromise required for sharing accommodations with another. For most of my younger years, I was more of a 'fighter' than a 'lover', and being a mean little bastard isn't conducive to warm friendships, as a rule.  I've more often enjoyed casting a jaundiced eye on the passing scene, and offering caustic comments on it. It's only quite recently, in my declining years, that I've mellowed, and tried to learn
how to smile.

All of which is the long way of saying Facebook and its 'friending' and 'following' and mutual-admiration society all seems rather foreign and uncomfortable to me.

And while doing that 'homework' I must confess that the amateur psychiatrist in me took careful note of the remarks about the kinds of characters most attracted to Facebook. It would seem that those are desperately seeking something which they very probably aren't really finding there to the extent which they perhaps had hoped, but continue because something is better than nothing. And I'm not unmindful of the fact that the main object of that whole exercise is to expose the users to advertising which it is hoped they will be sufficiently influenced by to patronize the businesses sponsoring those ads, and thus make money for Zuckerberg and company and the advertisers. In that sense it's similar to Google and its ads for generating revenue. It isn't an altruistic public service, after all. And Mark Zuckerberg doesn't need my help to avoid the unemployment line. He probably doesn't need yours either.
 

Slaves of the Internet....

Read all of it here...

More leaves, in British Properties up the hill...

Traffic chopper circling...

Must be a problem on the bridge at Lions Gate, or this wouldn't be circling...

Morning snow report...

Today's Homework Assignment:-

The complete article can be found here.

The complete text is here.

The full article can be found here.

News from The Twilight Zone

Shopping around...

Remembering the Seventies...

For this one, you need your 3D glasses,

and the effect is better in the small screen

rather than in full screen view.

The music, of course, is great either way. 

The Autobahn - in Saudi Arabia...

Who is this masked driver?

(...and how could we tell?)

The Moon at noon

Fujifilm Finepix SL1000 at 50X optical zoom

Connect the dots.....

Cruz supports the Tea Party, which receives funding from the Koch brothers who are intent on destroying Obamacare, because they're so rich they don't need it.
So Cruz is indirectly working for the Koch brothers, if you connect the dots here.  Is 'government by check-book' what you really want? Think about it. Do the Koch brothers give a damn for the average American in the streets? Can pigs fly?

This loudmouth was endorsed by Sarah Palin. What else do you need to know?

Speaking of Security Programs for Windows 8...

This is one of my favorites, the others being Avast and Superantispyware Lifetime Pro.

Speeding on the Internet...

Windows 8 has a nice App for this, and it might make a great Heads-Up-Display for the Desktop Gadgets with a bit more tweaking.....

But it still can't quite match my all-time favorite, Speakeasy, for real-world data that speaks to me in a language I understand and gives a complete picture.

And if I may be permitted to get 'preachy' for a moment, you know, of course, that the further away from you your chosen testing location, then the more 'hops' or transfer points between servers on various sections of the system there will be. And each of those introduces its own share of 'latency' or delay, expressed in milliseconds. So, for example, if you see a high number listed for 'latency', it either means your chosen test site was far away, across many 'hops', or else it means you don't have a very fast connection from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and you should talk to them for a better plan perhaps.

Bob, the man who runs this ISP, says we should run speed tests from several various sites, to get a better idea of the machine's characteristics and your own connections to the web, to become familiar with what's 'normal' for you. Speeds also vary with different times of day, because the volume of traffic on the system will also affect results. 

Healthcare.gov: Question Everything...

Since March 23, 2010, when this Act was signed into law, it's been 904 working days (excluding weekends and U.S. official holidays) and yet this website isn't functioning properly. The Question Everything is: "Why has it taken over 900 working days to come up with something that isn't yet working properly?"

Mighty Microsoft, bless its collective heart, could design, test, and release to manufacture a whole complete computer operating system in less time, and they have done it. So why can't the U.S. Government, 'the world's greatest superpower', design, test, and release one lousy website in such a time-frame?
This is definitely NOT performance, just in case you hadn't noticed yet. Cutting down on the number of claimants by waiting until most die off isn't what we were expecting, I'm sure.....

Security Software...

Yes, Virginia, you definitely should, and quickly. And if you're using a Mac don't believe all that nonsense about how nobody makes viruses or malware for that.
They do, and they have, and there are security programs to guard against it.

And don't believe that you need to spend big money for protection. Some of the best free programs provide protection on a comparable level to some of their more costly competitors. For example, the free version of Avast among its other features includes an optional Boot Scan. This scan will search all of your files during a reboot or restart operation, and it works in between the time that your
active memory is unloaded on shutdown and is reloaded again during startup, so that means it can look at all your protected operating system files as well as everything else on your hard-drive while nothing is hidden from it. It can take a while to do its thing, but if you suspect a virus which hasn't shown in regular scans, this can dig it out. I've used it and it works.

Also, don't believe the story that you can only have one active antivirus program running on your machine, because there can be conflicts among them. Today's modern antivirus programs are mostly designed to be compatible with each other, and some can be run simultaneously if you wish. For example, I've run scans using Avast, Malwarebytes, and Superantispyware all at the same time, just to see if I could. They all worked very well and were quite compatible. None interfered with any other, and all completed successfully. Running more than one scan at a time though can take longer because it's using a lot more of your available resources. 

Why do that? Because some programs are better at finding certain kinds of malware than others are, so you may want more than one. Also, it makes a difference which browser you're using. Firefox has add-ons like Better Privacy
which can find and remove 'supercookies' called LSOs (for 'Local System Objects') that are like a cookie only bigger, never expire, are invisible to your regular cookie detection, can perform operations like a program would, and last but not least, they call home regularly with your personal data to report what you're doing and when and to whom. Without that add-on, you don't know if they're there or not, and I'll bet you they are. The first time I ran that add-on, it found dozens of them. So that's another side to security.

The old adage 'An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure' still applies. If you want a good security program, try Googling for 'Top Ten Free Security Programs' or something similar. Also, among those that cost you an annual fee, most have a free version which provides the most necessary basic protection without cost, so look at those as well. Surfing the web is like having sex - you shouldn't do it without protection.

This just in from little Prince George...

ABC News: News or History?

Look at the dates on these front-page stories. They're four or five days old! Why? Can't they keep up with the pack? If I want History, I'll try Wikipedia.
In fact, Wikipedia has more recent stuff than some of this. Go figure!