Least of All Evils, All the Time

It's unfortunate that life these days is seemingly constantly choosing from the least of all evils.  Let's just start with something fairly popular, then ease into something more esoteric.

I believe there are quite a few people who do not particularly like Donald Trump; I really am one of them.  He is often well-meaning, but the presentation is very unpolished and quite rough.  Still, it's tough to argue with the results.  I generally liked the course of the USA from early 2017 to early 2021.  I learned my lesson from 1992 though.  I really thought the best thing for our country was H. Ross Perot, so I voted for him.  My second choice would have been George H. W. Bush, and my last choice was Bill Clinton.  Effectively, I believe Perot drained away far more Bush votes than Clinton votes, ergo Clinton won.  As I believe CGP Grey amply demonstrated though, first-past-the-post voting, as we have in the vast majority of the US, ultimately and unchangingly devolves into two (and realistically, no more than two) party voting.  So despite the voting system supposing to be affirmative, there are quite a few people who cast their votes "against" someone, in my case against Joe Biden.  Trump is just the lesser of two evils, not the best person for the job.  In my opinion, Vivek Ramaswamy would be that, with Ron DeSantis an extremely close second.  However, voting for anyone other than the Republican nominee to me would be counterproductive, as was the case in 1992.

To delve now into the more esoteric, I'm finding the same ultra-depressing issue with UI/UX design these days.  The most frequent offenders are Web sites.  As a stellar example, the Web is almost exclusively the place where you will find menus which will pop strictly because one places one's pointer over the top level item.  I can't think of a single desktop program (which is not based on a Web framework, like Electron for example) which does not require a click to activate a menu.  To me, that is the only sane way to roll, because I'm tired of randomly moving my pointer/cursor around a Web page, only to have the content I'm ATTEMPTING to view being obscured by a popup.  I also loathe having to navigate these monstrosities, because the slightest deviation from the exact path needed for the next level very often causes the menu to un-pop.  How people with even worse motor control than me are supposed to navigate these sites is way beyond me.

Another fairly common "sin" is obscuration of content until :hover, which is actually the trigger causing me to start writing this post.  Once again, some Web designers seem to think it's a useful thing to obscure content which has to be randomly divined by the happenstance of placing my pointer within these objects.  Even if I randomly discover one of these "hidden gems" on the page, I'm supposed to somehow infer that there are other elements somewhere on the page which serve the same purpose, but are likewise hidden until I move my pointer.  It's not as if this space were used for some other purpose that these elements are hidden until "hovered;" no, the Web designer figures I'll just magically "figure it out."  For these people, I refer you to cognitive workload, which, had you not done this, would be less.

Another somewhat surprising UI/UX blunder is constantly "shouting" at people that they are wrong.  You would think people would not take too kindly to constant correction, yet it is getting disturbingly common for form designers to shout at you nearly continuously with often red error messages until form fields are filled in with "correct" text.  And I put "correct" in quotes because a fairly common mistake is email address validation; you can be putting in a totally correct, perfectly working email address such as john.q.public+homedepot@gmail.com yet their parser will claim all day long that the LHS cannot possibly have a "+". If it were a person sitting next the user constantly saying "wrong!" on every keypress, I doubt such a person would be tolerated by most for very long at all.

With me, those three are probably the most egregious of the UI/UX mistakes, but there are plenty more.  Don't even get me started on almost all animations, which are more "look, Mom, see what I can do?" than anything else; they add nothing for me except annoyance and waste my time.  Carousels are another stupidity; they frustrate all but a narrow few who read near the pace of the designer; for those who read (and comprehend) quickly, they're too slow, and for those like myself who read more slowly than average, the slide is changing before I can even read all of it.

For all that is holy and sacred, can you PLEASE not make the title of your sign-in page "login?"  Do you not know there are several password managers which can select an entry based on the window title?  So if your site shows just 'login," how is that supposed to be distinguished from the 50 other sites which were similarly not at all creative?

Today, I simply wanted to find a site which will sell me some eyeglasses, preferrably at an affordable price.  But one by one, as I'm going through Google's results, each site has one or more of these stupidities.  To a certain extent, I can use browser extensions like uBlock Origin, Tampermonkey, or Stylus to modify how these pages look or behave, but there comes a point on each where I find myself saying to myself, this isn't worth the effort, let's move on to some other site; there HAS to be a sane one somewhere. But alas, surely as COVID-19 spread around the entire world, UI/UX stupidities are infecting nearly every Web site.

Some so far are immune.  Discover Card for example is actually fairly well thought out, for example requiring clicks to pop menus.  I shudder at the thought that one day this will be taken over by Capital One and be ruined.

A sad counterexample is Western Division Credit Union, or more accurately, their subcontractor itsme247.  One of the reasons I became and have remained there was the simplicity of the site, no animations, no menus popped for just hovering over the lead, nice, clean, sane design.  But alas, someone somewhere within the company must have gotten infected, and the UI/UX went downhill very quickly.  The cognitive load went up considerably (let's see...was Bill Pay under "move money" or "member services"?).  Menus now pop just for putting the pointer over them.  Heaven help you if your hand (or thumb on a trackball) wanders too far so that your pointer is not on the popup, it will un-pop.  Worse still, there are SOME menus which DO pop only when clicked, such as the accounts list, where it asks what you want to do with that account.

So...after describing all this, what do I have to do?  I am just worn down, sick of trying to compensate for the escapees of the mental asyla who design these pages.  Instead of choosing one I can enjoy, I have to choose one which offends me the least.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!

There was "RIF"; Now I Tell You "WIF"

While growing up, I heard many ads for RIF, the organization Reading Is Fundamental.  Darned right it is!  I thought just about everybody in the U.S. could read, simply because of my experience.  I never knew anybody who was illiterate until into my late fourties when I helped present an Alpha course.

However, more and more these days, I realize writing should be fundamental as well, or...well..."WIF".  Maryvale (in Cheektowaga, NY, US) has taught me well, as I think most of the public education institutions in my era have.  Unfortunately, I think that standards have slipped dramatically.  It seems fewer and fewer people are able to identify parts of speech properly, and realize for what each is supposed to be used.  A huge example is the blurring of the use of adjectives and adverbs.  So many want to press adjectives into an adverbial role.

For a starting example, let's take an organization which should know better: Apple.  "Think different", so they say.  No!  It's supposed to be "think differently."  You're commanding me (imperative tense) to modify how I'm doing something (thinking), which requires an adverb.  Adjectives are not supposed to fill that role, but apparently people are getting mentally lazy (or, I don't know, maybe they were just poorly educated).

The same applies so many times to how the word "slow" is used by many.  "This line is moving so slow."  Ummmm, no, it is moving slowly.  Again, to me, there is no doubt about it, the words being modified are "is moving", which demands an adverb.

Look...I'm not against language evolution.  Years ago, "googol" was only a noun.  When what is now Alphabet decided to morph that into their product name, "Google," that was still just a noun.  Eventually, "googling," a verb, came to mean the same thing as using a World Wide Web search engine, roughly speaking probably using Google, but could be another such as Yahoo!, Bing, Duck Duck Go, or others.  That's a perfectly understandable evolution of language, but the principal difference is that it really doesn't break any syntax or grammar rules.

Before you say something like "you know what I mean (or meant)", or "you're just being pedantic," please check my ".sig" block.  To me, the more closely we follow the well-established rules, the less we will have ambiguity of expression to one another, and hopefully the least misunderstandings.  It might be an extreme example, but what if we did talk to our kids badly, like in Steve Martin's little comedy bit?  When we just make it up as we go along, not bothering to follow the rules, we will be misunderstanding each other more and more, thereby causing more tensions, mistrust, and so much more, which would be unnecessary had we only been more careful.

I will cite another example from the elections which were held a few months ago, where the Republican challenger sent out a mailing to me which was in "randomcaps" as I like to call it.  It must have been the author just thought "it looked good" to have almost every word capitalized.  "You know what he meant;" yes, I really did.  There are a few places words should be capitalized: titles, proper nouns, the pronoun "I" and so on.  Your instances were not places where any rule applied.  If you're unwilling to supervise your promotional staff properly so that you send out English instead of quasi-English mail, what else am I going to see from you that is written poorly?  I would rather abstain from the election than vote for you.

As it turns out, my vote would not have mattered in the least; he got trounced by the incument Democrat.

That brings me to the mail piece I received today which caused me to start writing this post: the NY registration for the used vehicle I purchased recently.  (As an aside, I do not know why the NYS DMV sent it to West Herr instead of to me directly, thus West Herr needing to spend some of money on an envelope, postage, and somebody's time to stuff that envelope.  I know, it's not even a drop but only a few molecules in the bucket compared to the money I gave them for the car, but still...it's the principle.)  On the back of the window sticker portion of the registration, Erie County Clerk Michael P. Kearns put his own sticker on it, proclaiming "RENEW LOCAL."  Guess what, Mickey?  No, I won't.  I will be renewing directly with the State.  Why?  "RENEW LOCALLY", that's why.  Plus, why are you spending money on these stickers?

Why, o why, are we not more selective with our elected officials?  We should be holding them to the highest standards.  I'll just close by asking this question: If you sent out that mailing with (the right capitalization, the adverb), how many people do you think would be inclined to say it should have been sent out as you had sent it out, versus the number of people like me who see you not following the rules, and therefore refuse to do what you asked?  Since you would have been following the well-established rules, I'll bet the number of people refusing due to not knowing the rules would be far smaller.  So you might as well hire someone who knows what they're doing.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!

More to be Peeved at Alphabet (but What Else is New?)

Alphabet, a.k.a. Google, a.k.a. YouTube, to me have a thin veneer of caring about security.  I think I understand their motivations for no longer allowing one to log in only for a browser session, they want to have you authenticated (identified) for all the processing they do on their backend, ostensibly wherever you visit the WWW.  But it's a dimunition of security.  If I close (exit) any of my browsers, I expect to be logged out. One used to be able to check/uncheck a box on the login page to have to log back in again. Except that for a couple of years now, all the cookies behind the scenes that make that tolerable (i.e., not having to authenticate for each and every page visited) are now persistent instead of temporary.  Although I have devised methods of detecting which ones these are, such as "diffing" dumps of browsers' SQLite databases, I have not yet bothered to write anything (Tampermonkey code, browser extensions) to make them nonpersistent again.  Nor have I found any cookie extensions that will do what I want, at least not automatically (basically, change the expiration date/time on them).

Today, I went to log in, and I thought I would make sure my "backup" Yubikey (YK) works.  Hmmm....Chrome says that key does not look familiar.  Wow.  Uhhh....OK.  After logging in with my "primary" key, I looked at the list of 4 keys associated with the account.  Huh, that's odd, the one I labelled "work-1" says it's never been used.  That's kind of weird for two reasons: I suspect I've used it at least once, and how is it that it's not recognized at login time?  I very well could have reset the YK after some experimentation gone wrong, which would have invalidated anyplace it had been registered.  No matter, I deleted it (as I do not know which YK that is, the one I have in my hand is the only one I would think to label it that way).  Great...let's (re?)enroll this key.

...Except apparently with Alphabet, you can't simply enroll a Yubikey anymore.  You have to enroll a "passkey."  I don't want to enroll a passkey.  I just want to insert my key in a USB port and touch it.  If I enroll it as a passkey, I have to enter a PIN.  I don't want to enter a PIN.  I just want to touch the darned key!  Alphabet, considering you have such weak stuff as SMS as second factor, why are you insisting I set up a passkey rather than just accepting a touch on a YK?

I will say, Alphabet are not totally uncaring about users' opinions about their products.  I'm not sure; on this blog I may have previously mentioned my utter disdain and loathing of animations.  Thankfully, the Android developer options have three settings which allow one to disable animations.  But unfortunately, this is not implemented in a way that enforces this for all applications; they must choose to observe these settings.  A case in point is the Google Play app.  A couple of years ago, its whimsical developers thought it was a good idea to have dots whiz around an app's icon while it is queued for update.  It struck me as the sort of thing that might trigger epileptic seizures in individuals who are sensitive to flashing lights.  Actually, I complained about it.  In prose, I told them exactly how to reproduce the "issue"--what things to tap in what order.  They asked for (a) screenshot(s).  I was dumbfounded.  As this was an animation, WTF would a screenshot tell you?  If anything, it would have to be video.  (And BTW, if they wanted video, they should have asked for video.)  For the time, I dropped it, figuring there was little I could do to communicate this properly.  But....lo and behold, many moons later, I was updating apps, and there were no disgusting "I am queued for update" animations.  I guess I'll take small victories where I can get them.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!

The amount of squatter stories I'm finding out about now is disturbing.  Tenants' rights have gone way too far.  I have to wonder just how many people have been crudely treated by landlords for this to have even become law.  I'm glad that Florida has somewhat famously decided to restore some sanity by enacting some law so that these trespassers are ejected as they should be.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!

An Update to the YouTube Update

I spoke/wrote too soon.  The stupid confetti anim is back for the video thumbs up.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!

An Update to "Three MORE Reasons to Hate Alphabet/YouTube"

just a quick one today

Today, while looking square at a YouTube video thumbs up button and clicking it, it....holy cow...it didn't move.  Its thumb didn't rotate towards pointing "northwest" like it had started doing many months ago. It didn't change colors, other than from background of black to white.  No "confetti" spewed forth.  Honestly, I don't know at this point whether it's one of my Stylus styles or if Alphabet has finally gotten the message that so many people think their former animation is an abomination on mankind.  At any rate, I'm glad that appears to be gone.

I also noticed one other thing.  Like virtually all other animations, I got sick and tired of their animated numbers, from the number of likes, to the number of views.  So I wrote some Stylus CSS to hide them.  Because my CSS is not too selective, this has the unfortunate effect of hiding them both.  If I want to see them, I can always use Stylus' checkbox to turn all (Stylus added) styles off, or uncheck the specific one which hides these.  And mind you, I see that these animations do not appear on every single viewing page; not sure what criteria are used to utilize the animated digits.  Now I don't really need to do that.  What I noticed is that hovering one's pointer (mouse) over those sections shows those figures in the title text.

Next, I might look into whether their two stupid subscription animations have been nixed too.  YT is better without either.  It's a stupid attempt at giving people a little dopamine hit when they click the button, or draw attention to the subscribe button itself (as if people don't already know where the subscribe button is or what it's for).

Now...if Alphabet would only get rid of the other animations they're doing on their other products, like the blooming background on Gmail buttons to indicate when they're sort-of ready for clicking, I'd be nearly ecstatic.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!

Getting Let Go Is Never Pleasant, but Don't TikTok it for Heaven's Sake!

As I have explained in a previous blog post about being injected for COVID-19, my life's journey has taught me that jobs are an extraordinarily precious thing.  Except for maybe when I was young (and inexperienced), and except for April 2023, losing work has been very dread-inducing for me.  Whether it has been more shocking to me compared to average people is tough to gauge, but I think it has been.

Matt Walsh over at The Daily Wire made a YouTube video about a recent Cloudflare dismissal, which was some commentary about a surreptitiously recorded video of the separation posted to TikTok.  Some  of his points deserve retelling and amplification.  I will acknowledge though that this very blog post bears some resemblance in spirit to Brittany's actions, although this is more a reflection on the past rather than an attempt to keep my current job or besmirch my former employers.

Probably the most prominent or manifest point is, by the time you're being told this, the decision has been made, and there is asymptotic to zero chance that anything said at that point will change your separation.  Self esteem will generally make you want to argue your case, and explain why the employer is quite wrong.  But it will, in general, be a waste of time and effort.

I will relate one such seemingly unjust dismissal of mine, Tandy (the Radio Shack people).  The management must have taken a look at the sales figures, and I must have been low guy on the totem pole after the Christmas rush.  Never mind that they were an electronics goods sales outlet, and my hobby since childhood has been electronics, so therefore I have great technical background for the very things they sold.  Never mind that at least I perceived that I spent proportionally more time on support tasks, such as boxing up repairs, contacting people when their repaired items arrived back at our store, and the like.  (It's what I learned later in college in an econmics class, those would be opportunity costs.)  Like Brittany, I was not hired for those ancillary support things, I was hired to sell.  And besides maybe the manager, whose job responsibility it was to do those things, I did not sell well enough to justify my continued presence there.  I don't remember if I tried pointing those things out at the time, similar to how Britt tried to say she helped out on the sales that did occur but never received any "credit" for them.

My separation in 2023 was similar in some respects, but really, the writing had been on the wall for months prior.  To the credit of the health insurance company, I was even in an "improvement plan" and given every opportunity to meet their expectations.  It felt great to be given a chance to continue to help them out, and avoid the unpleasantries of termination.  It's just that although I was optimistic I could continue on, at a very low level, I expected that things wouldn't change significantly, and that parting ways was almost mutual.

Nonetheless, I thought they seemed to be making a mistake by not playing to my strengths, with fairly broad experience and knowledge of IT, but instead expected "the complete package" of mini-project manager, time accountant, bureaucract of sorts, quasi-architect, and so on.  This is not to say they didn't have actual PMs, architects, etc., just that they wanted everyone to do these things to some extent, kind of like e.g. "PM-lite."  I'm a technician/engineer.  I solve problems.  I suggest things from my experiences which would be good ways of  applying technology to meet objectives.  I know how a lot of things can be implemented or improved.  Instead of being a standout at anything in particular, I'm more of an IT utility player, always ready to help out a teammate.  I found it difficult to tell someone, "no, I can't now, I have things I have to do."  After all, it is admittedly more exciting and interesting to help several people with several different problems rather than concentrate on something specifc.  And it's difficult for management to justify such an employee, so I really don't fault them.

As an example where we disagreed, they insisted that I should come up with estimates on how long things would take, even things which I've never done before but were thought similar enough to things I have done that I should be able to come up with a number or date.  Quite a bit more often than not, (other) things would break that needed immediate fixing, or some other priorities would arise, and the time estimates I did give became utter rubbish.  Whenever I was forced into giving an hours estimate or date, it always seemed like I was handing them a cudgel to beat me over the head when the date came around and whatever I said would be done was not done.  I mean, to me, it was Hofstadter's law, approximately cubed.

A good example of that was the PKI improvement initiative, where in meeting after meeting, the PM was getting upset, saying he has to escalate to management, and on and on, when we would tell him such-and-such was not done.  It wasn't just me either.  My peer Anthony also had to report time after time that the things we were working on were not completed.  And I get it; it would be one thing if it were just Anthony and me, or our dozen or so member team, but it's quite another that maybe all told a hundred or so IT people throughout the organization need to be coordinated to get things accomplished properly.  Taking the Paul Masson attitude of "it'll be ready when it's ready" doesn't work nearly as well as one would hope for such large groups.

The thing is, in some sense, I was just a scapegoat for stuff not getting accomplished on time.  I think not hitting date targets was endemic to the entire organization.  As an example, for one cluster of systems I administered, the company decided not to renew their support contract for the software about mid-year, for a product that needed to be upgraded to its replacement, because its end-of-life was the end of that year.  The (separate) team responsible for the programming on that platform was supposed to have its AWS replacement in place by that end-of-life time, but in reality, it was nearly half a year late.

I was told that I gave up too easily on working problems, that I was too quick to call tech support for the products that were "misbehaving."  Part and parcel of working with software with a support contract is knowing when you've reached the limits of your knowledge of the product, and calling in "the cavalry" at the appropriate time.  It's quite another thing if it's a product for which you don't have formal support (e.g., a contract), because there isn't another avenue.  I don't think I said directly to my supervisor (but definitely to my peers), what in tarnations do you think I should do?  Stare at my screen until The Deity implants the solution to the issue in my brain, like Neo learning Kung Fu in "The Matrix?" I dunno...maybe I'm overrating myself as an engineer, though I think I'm better than the average bear.  Despite my supervisor seeing so on several occasions, or maybe because of it, it seemed as if I was being accused of being lazy or something, and that calling tech support was not the fastest means to get things working again.

Honestly though, to be fair to them too, there were some times where my supervisor came up with some fairly obvious points (in hindsight) which for whatever reasons, I didn't think of.  So to a certain extent, I don't blame them, my skills aren't as sharp some days.  Also, from time to time I had some particularly stressful tasks to do where I requested somebody to help me out, where normally it would be a one-person job.  It's just that if something really wrong happened, I wanted backup.  Still, from the feedback I got from my peers, it seemed as if I was a valued member of the team.

Still, there is one instance of a fine example of the blind men and an elephant where I remember things quite differently.  To lay out some background, for the first couple of my 5.25 years there, like most comapnies at the time, we had an office where we were generally expected to be every day, and could work from home a minority of the time.  The only person I remember working from home a lot, about half and half (i.e., every other day) was my good friend who basically got me the job there.  To my recollection, the only other person who spent a majority of time at home was the guy whose desk was next to mine, after he had become injured.  Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.  We transitioned quite rapidly to everybody working from home all the time.  When the pandemic seemed under control, their stance changed to "work from home with in-office capabilities"...which meant noone really had their own desk anymore. Instead it was replaced by a "hotelling" Web app.  My friend and I preferred the in-person experience, and tried to be leaders in coming to the office at least one day per week.  The thing is, that doesn't really have much benefit if we're the only two people from our group doing that on a consistent basis.  Still, my supervisor's supervisor remembers it as, before the pandemic, the majority of us were already working from home.  So, out of a 10 or 11 person department, two people at home constitutes most of us.

As an aside, I felt a little bad for management.  They likely went through great expense to re-equip a lot of the desks and to lease the hotelling app service. Just before the pandemic hit, they were in the process of upgrading their Avaya system to IP phones, but pivotted to using a cloud telephony provider afterwards.  I don't know if they were able to repurpose the Avaya desk phones to use the cloud, but I'm leaning towards "no."

The best I could tell from being there, the actual day-to-day usage of the desks was maybe 5%, and would only get substantial use, maybe 25%, if there were some sort of on-campus event.  Additionally, those two levels of managers mentioned above did indeed offer, probably because the uptake/utilization was so low, for me to have a desk again--my desk, not one that was subject to "hotelling."  While the offer was quite appealing, it made no practical sense due to noone else making it to the office with any regularity (except of course my good friend).  What made sense was the nearly instantaneous interactions, the overhearing of things, pre-pandemic when everyone was more-or-less required to be there, and WFH was a rarity.

My cheese had been moved in a massive way.  Pre-pandemic, I was doing fairly well.  My talents were well utilized.  Honestly, the job requirements didn't change all that much, but obviously the environment for accomplishing them changed radically.  In an in-office environment, things were relatively easy.  When they were no longer, I did not fit in as well.

So....this is a very long way of saying, although at the time I would have slightly preferred not being let go, I understand why they did what they did, and the decision was almost mutual.  We just assigned different merits to different aspects of what I was doing for them.

To return to Matt's commentary, if you're kinda not doing what you were hired to do, it does make sense to be let go.  Britt was a salesperson, but admitted to not closing any sales.  Similarly, I was underperforming for Tandy.  Despite doing potentially important, useful, and valuable support work, those were not really our missions, our reasons for being there.

I also have to thank Matt for providing some context, some humbling.  It rubs me the wrong way, with respect to work, to point out that I'm single. But at the same time, it's very valid to state that me getting laid off or fired affects only me.  There isn't a spouse, or kids, or an elderly parent depending on me to provide for them.  At the same time, it'd be offputting if someone were to justify that I should have unusual duties because of that, such as disproportionate on-call time.  That's a very murky, grey area to call somebody's time with their kids, for example, more important than whatever I might want to do instead.

Finally, Matt may be very right when he brings up that we are, unfortunately, a  litigious society, whereby if Britt were given more specific answers, it may open up Cloudflare for a wrongful termination lawsuit.  Of course, it doesn't  suck any less not to have specificity and clarity.  But there may be a knock-on effect when making your firing so much more public (I know, ironic I'm doing much the same thing, right?) such that in the future, employers have a lot of incentive to be even more vague.  But as I said,  my dismissals were justified, and at least for the 2023 one, it was kind of a mutual decsion. It seemed more like Britt was trying to portray herself as blameless and still valuable to Cloudflare.  It also might be worth pointing out that rationalizing your (poor) performance by bringing up things like, "part of that time was holiday time," might be problematic.  Closer to the truth, it was holiday time for everyone, not just you.

Metaphorically, I am a blind man.  Tandy management were blind people.  The management of the health insurance company are blind men.  Brittany is a blind...well, not man, but woman.  Cloudflare management are blind people.  We each have our different perspectives on why remaining or parting ways was good or bad; appropriate or stupid; right or wrong.   But as Matt points out, you have to be extraordinarily careful about disclosing details of your separation without the knowledge or consent of your employers.  Future employers can, and often will, find them out and likely look askance at you when making a hiring decision.  I think this blog post differs substantially from Britt's TikTok in that I'm genuinely not trying to smear my previous employers or attempting to gain sympathy, but reflecting on why what happened, happend, and why, in hindsight, were the rational things to be done.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!

Three MORE Reasons to Hate Alphabet/YouTube

For those techies who converse with me often, they have likely heard how averse I am to Web page animations.  As if the recent YouTube ad blocker countermeasures weren't bad enough, there are three recent additions to their pages which, to me, required fixing with a CSS injector.  And I still haven't satisfactorily fixed one of them.

The first and most egregious one I noticed many months ago was animating the like/thumbs up button with a silly burst of colors and confetti.  I guess they thought the little hit of domamine one might get from affirming an artist's work wasn't quite enough, and it had to be intensified somehow.  Well, that just serves to anger me, like any other CSS eye candy.  It's novel for the first couple times it happens, then it becomes unnecessary, distracting dreck much like the vast majority of other Web page animations.  In fact, almost always now, I try to position my pointer over the like button with as much pointer obscuring it as practical, so I see as little of that idiocy as possible.  In fact, I almost always deliberately look away before clicking it, so that I don't see even the little bit that squirts out around the pointer/cursor.  Apparently I'm not alone in disliking this. When I Googled for how to get rid of this, one result was a userscript that would change the appearance (I forget how) to the unselected graphic every 10th of a second (or something like that).  As I really want to see whether it is filled in or not, I elected not to add this to my collection full-time.  I don't know CSS and/or JavaScript/ECMAScript well enough to prevent it, but I sure do wish I did.  This one I'm just grinning and bearing, although it is somewhat difficult to describe to you just how much I loathe and detest it (but yes, I will admit, apparently not enough for me to quit using YouTube altogether).

Similarly, they have somehow thought it is a good idea to animate the like count.  They're not all that critical to me, so that is CSS-injection hidden outright.  If I want to see it badly enough, I can bring up the enable/disable checkbox list of my chosen CSS injector, and either disable all CSS injection (easier), or just that one rule.

What was the final straw, and therefore the impetus for today's blog post, is the animated colors cycling around the perimeter of the Subscribe button whenever "subscribe" is pronounced in the video.  I don't know, and I don't much care, whether the channel artist enables it, or if there are automation conditions for it (like it being in the last N seconds of the video), or if automated voice recognition does it.  Any way you slice it, it disgusts me all the same, for some reason even more than typical animations do.  That is now killed by CSS injection, and if I want, I can click on the channel's link and subscribe on the channel's page.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!

The Price of Chicken with Rice Soup at NYC Delis and Bill O'Reilly

Bill O'Reilly recently has published rants in his podcasts about the price of chicken and rice soup at a deli he really likes.  I don't know precisely where it is, but it is somewhere in the area of New York City, and certainly is in New York State.  We have here a textbook case of economics, where something is worth what someone is willing to pay for it, and Mr. O'Reilly is not willing to pay the $14 price at this particular deli.

I somewhat sympathize with Mr. O'Reilly, but I can't quite agree with his assessment, at least not an overall assessment.  He states that the ingredients likely cost around $1, and that the deli proprietor is marking this up 14x.  While it may be true that this owner is demanding quite a profit in their $14 price, I don't think it's nearly as much profit as Mr. O'Reilly lets on in his podcasts.  He and I live in basically the People's Republic of NY, a State where nobody's ever talked about a law they didn't like ;-).  As I write this, the U.S. minimum wage is $7.25/hr.  For NYC, it's over double, at $15/hr.  Rents, leases, and property taxes in the NYC area are just unbelievable, or at least as I'm told by people who I respect/trust, like Louis Rossmann.  Without thinking too hard, I have to believe there are other fees this deli owner will have to pay, like licenses and such.

I think Bill is a really sharp guy, but somehow on this one, I wonder if he's truly thought this through.  It's rare that businesses do not collect more money for whatever they're selling than it cost them to deliver that product (which would be called loss leaders).  This deli likely has hefty rent to pay on the space they use.  The workers they hire need to be paid.  The gas and electricity used to cook the soup and keep it hot need to be bought.  Multiple entities will want taxes paid on all of that, and again, a corollary to the above, NYC and NYS residents have never seen a tax they didn't like.  It would be truly fascinating if this deli owner would be willing to let the general public look at all the costs which go into selling that $14 serving of chicken'n'rice soup.

 

2023-10-15 ADDENDUM: I listened to more of this podcast now, where Bill further complains about adding on 3 or 4 percent for paying with a credit card.  Bill seems oblivious to how credit card acceptance works.  I know from working for at least one small business (doing nothing more than data entry, but they are good friends) that credit card companies charge transaction fees, which are both some fixed fee (on the order of $0.50 IIRC) plus some percentage of the sale amount (typically 2 to 4 percent), combined.  All that deli owner is doing is passing on these fees, rather than doing some more complicated analysis and trying to average in those fees over all customers, whether they  pay with credit cards or not.  I am not 100% sure, but some localities may have laws against such practices, forcing the business proprietors to do just that, build the costs of credit card acceptance into all sales, not just those specific credit card sales.

Incidentally, this brings to mind recent proposed regulation which would force ISPs to itemize their bills.  The ISPs argue that it would be too complicated for their systems; I think they want to keep things fuzzy and ambiguous so that they can continue to gouge customers.

"We Don't Have To, We're the Phone Company" All Over Again

Remember the old Lily Tomlin skit where she is portraying a phone company employee, and ends with, we don't care, we don't have to, we're the phone company?  It's pretty much alive and still kicking in 2023.  They can't be bothered with such niceties as accurate information.  And why should they? Who's gonna "make" them?

My tale of woe with the behemoth known as Verizon started with their offering of ADSL, way back in the day around when their downstream offering was (IIRC) 640 kbits down and 90 kbits up.  I had what amounted to two accounts with them, one ostensibly dedicated to voice and the other for data (pre-DSL, for anything between V.32 and V.90 modems).  As I recall, they basically had to be ordered separately, because the one line was ready as soon as I moved in, but the second had to be physically connected.  In order to consolidate that from two phone line bills into one though, it required a ridiculously priced "records order change," something on the order of $40, or a little more than one month's bottom line charges (about $35) for one of the two lines.  Like many utility companies at the time, and today, they offered automatic payment.  Not wanting at the time to have yet another bill to worry about paying, I said sure, fine, do that, and gave them checking account information for both accounts.

One fine day, Verizon started offering G.DMT ADSL, with no cost penalties for moving (within their territory), and a discount for ordering a self-install kit online.  To quote They Might Be Giants, on "Apollo 18," that's when all my troubles began.  As the first line, available at move-in, was on pair one of the RJ14 jack, and the later installed line for data (both modems and DSL) was on pair two, I'm guessing the geniuses at Verizon figured that I was incapable of wiring up something from pair 2 on one plug to pair 1 on another jack, so they scheduled, without my consent or notice, a premesis visit (a.k.a in the industry as a truck roll).  And then when I was not around (at my job) for them to do any work, they attempted to charge me a missed premesis visit charge of, IIRC, $70.  When I saw my bill for over $100 instead of my expected $35, I of course called them up and said, in essence, what part of self install did you not understand?  There was no reason you should have dispatched anyone to my apartment.

They were quite concilliatory, saying you're right, you should not have been charged that.  But here's the thing: they immediately lost my trust and, for me, the future privilege of directly debiting my account when they took the full amount of the bill out of my account anyway.  Instead, they chose to have an account credit balance.  So let's see if I have this straight: you admit you should not have been entitled to my money, yet a few days later, you take it anyway, and hold onto it, instead of putting it back.  Granted, you did not charge my account for THAT phone line for the next two months, because I had a credit balance.  You also told me it was impossible to apply that money to my "voice" line, despite billing the exact same name at the exact same address.  And you continued to charge me the $35 or so for that other line.  Mmmmm hmmmm...OKey dokey.

Next, a couple of years later, after a couple rounds of speed upgrades, where Verzon was giving me 1.5Mbits down and 384kbits up service, they gave me a choice: if you wanted to enter into a renewed contract, your billed amount will remain basically the same.  But if instead you wanted to go with our month-to-month policy, we want an additional $8 per month for the privilege.  OK, seeing no reason, no particular additional value at the time for being month-to-month, I said, sure, sign me up for another year.  Then, mysteriously, thousands of additional feet of wire got added to my loop...overnight!  I kinda had a Dorothy Gale experience, my apartment building magically travelled something like 4000 more feet away from their CO.  Suddenly, according to them, my loop was not capable of (reliably) carrying better than 768kbits/sec down, or half the down, nor more than 128k, or one third, up.  A few different phone calls to them promised to restore my service to the previous 1.5M/384k, each time claiming I had to wait for these requests to work their ways through the system so to speak, ostensibly that it couldn't be done right away.  It took the intervention of a sympathetic Verizon employee, who also frequented DSLReports.com, fixing things behind the scenes to restore my service to what it had been for years. It worked just fine before and after, proving that they don't have to care, they can do whatever they want.  Mind you, it's not that I would have gotten any kind of discount for having the slowern 768/128 service, it would be the same as any other ADSL customer.

Let's fast-forward to September 2023.  I finally have had enough of paying an additional $5 per month for the privilege of explicitly paying for FiOS every month instead of auto-paying.  I had gone to my credit union and opened another checking account specifically for this purpose.  The thought was, I should be able to have some sort of control over how much Verizon takes out of my account; theoretically if I only put $72 in there for them to take, they can't take any more.  But, rather than take the chance that I'm going to be charged any overdraft fees, I had them put overdraft protection on that account, linking it to my savings account. I don't know, we'll see how it goes if and when Verizon tries to take too much.  But of course, that's just a mundane story of setting this up from the credit union side, nothing to it from a "we don't have to care" perspective.

When one visits the Verizon site and sets this up on one's (Verizon) account, you enter in all this banking information, and ostensibly apply for your discount.  I think the idea is that you can't "pull a fast one on them" and set up payment from a Privacy Virtual Card (a.k.a. privacy.com) account, so they don't show it as applicable right away.  A Privacy Virtual Card would have my intended effect, them trying to take more than to what they're really entitled, and being denied.  That, of course, is not what they want, the whole idea is to be sure they get the money they deem due, I would think so they don't have to spend anything additional (for collections?).

I got my usual email notice that a new FiOS bill was available, so as usual, I logged onto Verizon to fetch a PDF of my bill, verified the amount, and logged onto my credit union to set up payment.  But then I decided, this is the month to put the plan into action.  So I began the process of setting up autopay.  What they will ask you is what day of the month the funds will be taken from the entered account.  In my case, the bill is due...let's say, the first week of every month.  I chose the day before the due date, because it has not varied.  Since that seemed pretty explicit, I went back to the credit union site and cancelled the future payment I had set up.  But wait...after you compelete your autopay application/setup, a warning comes up stating, in effect, we're not sure we're going to get paid on time, so here's a button you can click to set up payment for your current balance.  Sigh....so I logged back onto the credit union site and repeated my payment request ("Bill Pay").  I get it; much like back in the early oughts, and my "missed premesis visit" billing debacle, I guessed the gears grind very slowly, and accounting would seem to be done only on a monthly basis, meaning any changes would only be applied in the next billing cycle.  Heh heh....if only.

Next, I got an email confirming that I have set up autopay.  What do you know, it says they'll be taking money from the configured account on the configured day, the day before my next bill is due.  Arrrrgggggghhhhh....log back onto the credit union site, RE-cancel my re-set-up payment.  Again, they don't have to.  They can't be bothered to figure out properly that the selected day is several days in the future, and it is before my bill is due.  It's not like I asked them the day before it was to be debited, so therefore their batch processing might miss it.  They knew well and good, ahead of time, that it would be ready to go and in effect.  And I don't mean whether my discount would happen, I mean when the money will transfer. The amount is not in dispute, I still owe the full amount because it's last month's bill.

If I weren't such a cynical person, I wouldn't be thinking they're just trying to trick me into paying my bill, and also taking their autopay, so they can hang onto my money just like they did when they made up their missed premesis charge.  They don't have to have their Web site present accurate information.  They don't care, they don't have to; they're the phone company.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!

Transgenderism in the Current Political and Social Landscape

As the name of my blog implies, being a libertarian, ordinarily I am of the mind to tolerate anything which does not materially affect me.  However, such a simplistic statement would preclude principles important to uphold which don't affect me at all, for example, preventing child abuse (because I have not been a child for several decades).  And this is a hint as to one of the points of this post, that although I struggle with the fact that I want the best life for as many people as possible, we have to be extremely careful when it comes to children.

First, I know the following will be offensive to a certain segment of the general population, but biology can't be ignored.  With some rare, maybe even extremely rare, exceptions, people with XX chromosomes are female and XY are male.  To be clear, this has extremely close to nothing to do with how people perceive themselves, and by extension, how they wish others to perceive them.  A fairly large proportion of people are perfectly happy with their biological gender.  But some others figure they'd be better off leading a life following the norms of the opposite gender.  To me, this is a construct of society, how people want to be treated by others.  Seems this would be driven by that person's life experiences, and their observations of how society interacts with members of some gender (whether the same as their biological gender or their desired gender).

Because intersex people generally speaking are rare, and as a large majority of society are just fine with their biological gender, most of these latter people are conditioned (mostly by society) to think of gender in binary terms, male and female.  It's also ingrained into them that it's undesireable to be/behave like the other gender.  Anyone who does is shunned by them as anathema to their lifetime of experience of this conditioning (for lack of anything better to call it).  Our society typically has some tolerances for atypical behaviors, but it's not particularly broad.  For example, most people do not take too kindly to males in dresses, except for maybe certain circumstances: comedy/theatre/TV (e.g. Corporal/Sergeant Klinger on "M*A*S*H", or Kip/Buffy and Henry/Hildegard on "Bosom Buddies"), Halloween, cosplay, drag shows, etc. 

So in order to be (vastly) more acceptable to society, society sort of by implication demads that at least the external appearance be that of a person's desired gender through sexual reassignment surgery.  Present society sort of demands that if one wants to follow the behavioral norms of being what's generally considered female, you must not have a penis, or if male, you must not have prominent breasts for example.  But an unfortunate consequence of biology stipulates that if treatment to this end is started earlier in life, that is to say, before puberty, the results are typically better.  So of late, there are some physicians who will perform penectomies or double mastectomies on children, and prescribe hormone replacement therapies or puberty blockers.

The heart of the issue is that this is permanent, as in, cannot really be reversed.  Although at this time I do not have statistics to back the following opinion, I imagine quite a few of these folks have feelings of wanting to transition, maybe even quite deeply held feelings, but the majority of them "grow out of it."  I am a personal example of this.  At one time, I identified more with my three sisters rather than my brother.  But it didn't last.  With a few exceptions, I am quite happy to be male.  (As an example, one of those exceptions is that I think it's generally expected that men approach women, and it's less acceptable for women to pursue men.  Although this is changing somewhat over time, it's still mainly the case.  Call it personal experience, I find it extremely difficult to be in that role.)

Although a bit perverse, I have to believe a certain amount of these supposed cases of transgenderism stem from parents who, for whatever reasons, did not get their hoped birth outcomes, that is to say, they really wanted a girl but they got a boy instead (or vice-versa).  So they may subtley or not so subtley suggest to their boy that it would be better if they were a girl.  I (think I) get it, even some elementary schools are teaching kids about transgenderism, I (think) in the name of teaching tolerance (which is GENERALLY good).  And parents might take the slightest agreement by the child as a sign that they should help them achieve what they want (and by "they" I mean both the child and the parents).  The child will naturally want to please their parents, so will be very inclined to go along with this.  To be clear, I think this is PROBABLY rare, but not totally unheard of.

Again, I think it is somewhat normal for some girls to want to be like boys (we even have the term "tomboys" for them) and some boys to be girls for a while, but either through personal choice or societal steering, almost all come to peace with living their lives as their biological gender.  I will again point to the permanence of SRS when I make the statement that SRS on children is child abuse.  There are any number of things we do not allow minors to do, nor allow to be done to minors.  As one very (il)legal example, no minor may be tattooed in New York State. I think SRS on minors most certainly should be one of these prohibitions.  It is a very permanent solution to something which, for the vast majority of people, is temporary.  I will however have to concede that if we only allow adults to transition, the results are poorer.  But at least once one reaches the age of majority, one can be thought as having enough life experience to make such decisions with so far-reaching and permanent consequences.

Another contemporary controversy is allowing transgendered people to be fully their chosen gender, especially with respect to competitions, mostly sports.  Again, this is biology, which has absolutely nothing to do with how society treats a person, or how a person wishes to be perceived.  If we were all equal, there wouldn't even be a difference in sports at all; everything would be mixed with no women's division and men's division in a sport.  Those who advocate for transgender women to participate fully in living the life of their chosen gender, especially with respect to sport, seem to want to ignore this completely.  Men, as a general rule, are bigger, stronger, faster, and so on; I see little point in denying this.  That isn't to say that all men are stronger et al than all women, there will certainly be exceptions when comparing any particular man to some woman.  But it is the very essence of these differences why we separate these into women's competitions and men's competitions.  In no sports do we think of PEDs as acceptable; we must think of male hormones as a performance enhancing drug.  And if as stated previously we only permit adults to make transitioning decisions, by that time it's too late, the (naturally occuring) male hormones have already given that person that biological advantage.  Therefore it serves very little purpose to allow transgender women to participate in women's sports.  Sorry to those who want to advocate otherwise, it's an intractable argument to think social treatment trumps biology.  By the same token, if transgender men want to compete in men's sports, all the more power to them.  Their chance of success, again due to biology, would however seem to be exceedingly slim.

Still, I must emphasize, gender differences are very real and in many cases is biologically determined, but hopefully will be narrowly thought of.  What I mean is, being male or female is undeniably different, but the societal norms surrounding some aspects of living that gender are not immutable as their biological counterparts are.  As an example, for whatever reasons, society places great importance on clothing.  As mentioned above, a majority of society does not want to see men in dresses; about the closest most men come to that is a hospital gown.  If he's wearing a skirt, it better be a kilt.  This sort of thing does change over time, for example it used to be commonplace for men to wear tights, but now mostly only women do, except again for special circumstances; ballet comes to mind.  Who knows, maybe some time in the (probably far distant) future, men in dresses will be as commonplace as seeing men in tights was.

I also have to ask as an open question, why is there an emphasis by many on gender equality?  To what end would making everything equal help us?  As one example I heard, somewhere around 97% of bricklayers are men.  Offhand, I wouldn't think bricklaying is physically demanding, as in, it doesn't require the typically better male strength.  I see no reason why we have to have strive towards 50% of bricklayers to be women. To the 3% of you who are, all the more power to you, it doesn't make any difference to me.  The majority of nurses are women; there's absolutely nothing wrong with men being nurses, but I see no reason why there should be a push for that to be 50/50 either.  Whether societally induced or maybe even biologically influenced, I think it more productive to celebrate the differences in the genders rather than demand equality in everything.  I'm all for relaxing societal thinking on what is a man's job and what is a woman's job (I'd like to see more fellow computer engineers be women :-) ), but at the same time, I don't see any reason for a push towards total equity.  That is, don't be exclusionary, except where biology clearly plays a role.   I mentioned sports before as an example, but that is by consensus of the participants (clearly, because there are some mixed gender sports; volleyball and tennis doubles spring to mind).

We also must be extremely careful when it comes to standards.  What I'm thinking of as an example is, we should not lower the requirements for firefighters.  If there is standard that they're required to be able to carry around some benchmark weight, say in anticipation of being able to perform a rescue successfully by carrying an average someone away from a fire, we can't be lowering that number to accommodate some perception that we need more woman participants.  If they can pass such strength tests, I am extremely grateful that they chose to be one.  Again, statistically men are more likely to be stronger, but there's nothing to say some women can't be just as strong as some men.  But let's not change the standards without some objective reason (like maybe we actually, as a societal average, become healthier and statistically weigh less).

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!

Let Freedom Ring, at Least for Now

Recently the Supreme Court of the United States of America handed down some rulings.  It is, by precedent now, illegal to try to fix discrimination with more discrimination (which is the plain truth about what the euphemism "affirmative action" is) (Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College) , illegal to foist more debt upon the U.S. taxpayers by the mere whim of a President (Biden, President of the United States, et al. v. Nebraska et al.), and illegal to compel someone to express themselves in a way dictated by someone else (303 Creative LLC et al. v. Elenis et al.).

On that last point, what did Elenis et al. think, that there is a cabal of Web site designers who are conspiring to keep them off the Web?  Move on!  Find someone else, it shouldn't be that difficult.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

"Jeopardy!" replies and randomcaps really suck!

Why I Left Verizon Wireless After Less Than a Week

Recently, as a courtesy, my former employer let me keep the cell directory number (DN) I had been using while employed with them.  The idea is that in exchange for paying for the cellular plan and the handset, I would make it my main or sole cell phone.  Basically, this was so they were able to call me when something at the shop went sideways and they needed my help.  As a perk, they also let me keep the cellular handset, a Verizon Wireless Galaxy S21 Plus 5G.  (It's important to understand that Verizon Wireless and some other carriers have mods specific to themselves, so that if for example you have rooting instructions for a Galaxy S21 Plus 5G, it might not work AT ALL on your handset because you acquired it through Verizon Wireless.)  I basically had two choices: port the DN to another carrier, or establish my own Verizon Wireless account.  Either way, my former employer no longer wanted to get billed for the DN.  I will also add that technically, "Verizon" is not "Verizon Wireless," but when speaking of Verizon Wireless (which I will hereafter refer to as the common abbreviation "VZW"), people often only say/write the "Verizon" part.

My use case is extremely modest.  For a great deal of time, I am connected to Wi-Fi.  Therefore almost every month, I was below 2GB of cellular data usage, even when using up data for the former employer.  In fact, most months, I was below 1GB.  The heaviest normal usage was streaming talk radio for stations whose OTA signal is weak (WHAM-AM and WLVL), so not at all bandwidth intensive.  The times I did go over 1 gig were usually when I had to tether the company laptop because my home Internet connection was out (generally due to power failure).  The one time I did break 2 gig was when, for some unknown reason, the Audacy app decided to use about a gigabyte per hour, until I just plain uninstalled it.  As for talking and SMS, I have a Google Voice number, and that forwards calls to a Callcentric number (for about $2/month), which then gets answered by an Obihai ATA, and SMS gets forwarded to email.  Optionally, this also gets forwarded to cellular, although I only forward voice, and only when I have cell service.

If push came to shove in my budget, all I want cell service for is to be able to call more than 9-1-1 if I get stuck on the road (AAA for example).  I can do without the cellular data if I am really in a budgetary pinch, and will try calling 9-1-1 if I were to break down (which, as you probably know, doesn't require paying for a service plan).

I started out by looking at VZW's plans, as this would be the simplest; the former employer would only have to tell VZW to shift billing over to either an existing private, "retail" VZW account (for example, if I wanted to port it to a family plan), or have VZW create a new account for me.  As I had no idea for how long I would be unemployed, I was looking for the least expensive plan available.  The best I could find was shown as $65/month, their "Welcome" plan.  Jeepers!  That's $780/year, not including other charges which I'll cover later.  That's an awful lot for just talking every once in a great while, and streaming less than a gig.  So, what does the Internet recommend as among the best carriers (or MVNOs)?

After a few Google searches and Web site readings, I found Mint Mobile (which I'll refer to as "MM") as a reasonable alternative.  They had an introductory offer of $15/mo. for 4GB (now 5!!), if you prepay for 3 months.  Afterwards, it's $25/mo., or the "same" $15/mo. if you prepay for a year. (And yes, I know they're in the process of being acquired by T-Mobile USA.)  I asked them, would it be OK to port a number later instead of account opening time?  They said that would be just fine, I would be assigned a "temporary" DN which could be used until I'm ready to port.  In like Flynn, I ponied up my $45 or so, they FedEx'ed two SIMs (one for me, one for me to give away to whomever I think would like MM...a genius marketing idea), stick it in the S21+, it works like a charm (although being a VZW-issued phone, it complains about non-VZW SIMs or eSIMs with a useless FUD notification).  I eventually figured out it was MUCH simpler to have MM install an eSIM, because without it, if I ever still wanted to access the VZW DN, I would have to shut down, pop the SIM tray, insert the VZW SIM and boot (and the other way around to switch back to MM).  With MM as an eSIM, it's just toggling a graphical switch within the Android settings app for either carrier.

Finally the day arrived when the handset would no longer be under contract (i.e., had been "paid off" through the former employer maintaining service).  An email from VZW, initiated by former employer commanding the release the DN from their billing, arrived with an identification number of some sort (we'll get to that shortly) and the usual porting PIN.  Great.  I called up MM, read off the ID number and the PIN, and wouldn't you know, it didn't work.  What they need is an account number and the porting PIN; what VZW apparently sent along was some sort of internal transaction ID.  I tried conferencing in VZW to try to clear this up, but after some time, MM hung up and I was speaking only with VZW.

During that conversation, I found out that, rightfully so, I was not entitled to the account number; after all, me knowing former employer's account number could possibly allow me to do untoward things with their VZW service. I wouldn't do that anyway, but the potential is there. So...I asked about the possibilities of creating a personal account instead, and transferring billing to that instead of former employer's account, to which they were of course thrilled...more money for them, right?  So I go about giving them my particulars, address, email address, and so on.  I also made very sure that there would be no contract, no early termination fee, no penalties, no minimum number of months of service, to which the rep replied, no such thing, I am totally free to do as I wish.  Then they got intrusive.  They wanted me to send a photo of an ID (NY driver's license for example) and Social Security card to an email address.  I carefully checked out the MX for vzw.com to make certain it supports STARTTLS (it does), snapped a photo, and sent it via Gmail.  Although I could be assured noone could intercept the email, and that noone should be able to see into my HTTPS session with Gmail, I still have to worry about what Alphabet and Verizon will do with that image.  I can delete it from Gmail, but cannot be assured when, if ever, it will disappear totally from Alphabet's systems.  And what Verizon will do with it is even less clear, unless I want to waste a couple hours of my life reading through Verizon's terms, conditions, policies, etc.

As a small aside, I will give good marks to Verizon for gathering initial data, such as my SSN and a desired initial PIN, via sending an SMS message with an https URI embedded within to the DN in question.  That certainly beats having to tell that rep, who would then also have that oh-so-sensitive SSN.  That, however, broke down later.

The rep with whom I was talking said he would call me back at 18:00 to give me some time to snap the picture and for that email to arrive and be processed.  Mind you, they gave me no direction whatsoever on what should be in the subject line or body of the message, so I had to wing it.  I had the email prepared and sent by about 17:35.  I got an automated reply from Verizon's system with a tracking ID.  When this rep called back at 18:00, surprise, surprise, they had not seen it yet--to me due to lack of anything to tie my submission to my account application.  As I would later find out, this would most likely be due to the fact that, despite spelling out my name with phonetics, they had used the more common (and incorrect) spelling of my surname.  Therefore the name on my driver ID and SS card would not match.  The rep seemed to think on the 18:00 call that I should have gotten another email besides the automated one, confirming procesing of the image.  Thinking it was just slowness of the overall system, the rep said I would be called back at 19:00 to move forward. Ironically to noone but me, one of the last things the rep said was, I was going to be happy with VZW service.  If I'm being totally honest, I knew I was not long for the VZW life.

That 19:00 call never happened.  Mind you, this was the Friday before Memorial Day.  But still, it's a promise broken.

Knowing that former employer would no doubt notice that the DN had not been ported (or otherwise taken off their account), I called up VZW again on Tuesday.  That was a long-ish call, in part once again to them misspelling my surname.  I was also irked that the new rep asked for my SSN.  I thought they had an SMS/HTTPS app to do that so I would not have to recite that verbally.  Oh, well, I went along with it anyway.  Well...long and the short of it, they finally associated that JPEG file from Gmail with me, ran whatever they do (credit check maybe?), and decided I was worthy of my very own VZW account.  And of course, during the process, they sent a message to my handset with a URI pointing to a page for agreeing to terms, conditions, privacy policy, the whole schmeer.  And much as I loathe doing it, I did NOT spend an hour or more reading it, and like most others, handwaved that I agreed.

For those who have not been keeping score, at this point, we're already up to about 6 disagreeable things: difficulty porting to another carrier, asking for highly personal/sensitive information (which no other carrier with whom I've had a relationship demanded), not calling me back when they said they would, asking for SSN verbally when they could have sent another SMS and done it securely, wasting my time because they were trying to do (presumably) a credit check with the wrong data, and making me uneasy about agreeing to something I haven't read.  While we're at it, let's add that the originally quoted $65/mo. wasn't really $65/mo., it was $75/mo. with a $10/mo. discount if you agreed to set up auto-pay.  Verizon lost that privilege with me when they charged me for a missed premesis visit for self-installed DSL, and wouldn't refund my bank account for the mistake.  Yes, overall I'm losing more money than I should, but I don't want them to have that power to reach into my bank account to make mistakes anymore.  I guess they figured I was not adept enough to tap off pair two of an RJ-14 jack for my DSL; they were very much wrong, but I suppose really didn't have any way to know that.

Next, it was my turn to be a slight dunce.  While we were talking, the rep put through the order to port the number from former employer's account to the newly minted VZW account (pun intended).  Because the rep knew it was likely we would become disconnected due to that action (the number being ported being in-use at the time), I gave her my MM number to reach me if we became disconnected.  In hindsight, now they have yet another personal piece of information which, if they were so inclined, they could call or SMS to try to get me back as a customer.  Never having done such things before, during that new call I tried going into (e)SIM setting to toggle the VZW SIM; that does not work.  The Android RIL is a quirky beast; it required a complete handset restart in order for the VZW SIM to become active again, and to gain control of the MM eSIM too.  Well, let's face it, the rep said so, and I thought I would just be clever and toggle the switch in the SIM settings.  Of course, when they called back, I had to hang up on them again because both IDs, VZW and MM, were tied to that handset.  This one's totally on me, nothing for which to fault Verizon.

I should also explain, in most places I am, VZW has only 1 or 2 bars of signal, particularly at my home.  In those same locations, T-Mobile USA (the carrier behind the MM MVNO, for now) gives me 3 or 4 bars, sometimes 5.  And the "5G" logo "lights up" for MM more times than for VZW.  So for me in particular, for the core of their product, VZW just comparatively sucks, let alone all their annoying or dubious practices.

Next, let us delve into the dumpster fire that is the Verizon Web site (which leaving off the "Wireless" is intentional; it is virtually the same for FIOS).  Like many contemporary Web sites, it is thoroughly JavaScript (JS) infested, which in this case breaks one's ability to right click on something and open it in a new tab or window.  They are similarly as lazy as most in that if there is some function they can't perform, they simply put up a generic error message that something went wrong.  If you're going to include JS URI after JS URI, you might want to test if those URIs actually loaded, maybe by doing a try/catch around calling one of the functions in each.  OK, maybe I'm six standard deviations away from a normal user, but I run NoScript and uBlock Origin, because I object to all the inclusions of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. codes, plus clearly ones that, from the names, are ads and trackers.  I whitelist or temporarily whitelist JS URIs in NoScript as they're called for by the page; I want to know everything like this which is going on.  I don't need to be advertised to or tracked any more than absolutely necessary.  You UI/UX folks: it is not always manifest what a user wants.  For example, something on my bill MIGHT be something in the billing section, or it COULD be in the account section.  I will not know a priori.  That is why I want the ability to right-click on something and open it in a new tab!  I don't want to think about how to navigate back to where I am! I just want simply to close the window or tab which proved to be a fruitless navigation.  If you ONLY provide JS click events, you destroy that possibility.

Let's also cover the fact that they never send emails with a text/plain part, only text/html.  Then again, they're not unique in that regard, not by a longshot.  I wish the folks who send these out would realize that HTML email is one of the easiest ways to compromise people, a.k.a. phishing, especially financial institutions!  Also, please don't patronize us by putting something in the text/plain part like, "we tried to send you an email, but your email client is not capable of displaying it.  Please go to this URI."  Strip the formatting junk out of your text, and put that in the text/plain part, like decent human beings would.  It shouldn't be all that difficult.

Now, let's talk about the marketing.  I guess I don't blame them, they want to earn as much money as possible, so they sent some promotional SMS message about discounts on accessories or additional handsets/lines.  Still...having told these folks I'm looking for their cheapest plan which will get the job done, they want me to spend more.  Yeah, not gonna happen.

Also, while I do appreciate sending suveys to ask how they're doing, I'm exceptionally torn in my resonses.  They were basically asking, how was your interaction with our rep today?  They were absolutely stellar, extremely personable, polite, upbeat, patient and everything.  It's just that the company behind them sucks very badly.  I really wanted to reply 1 or 2, but I could not honestly do that because the individuals were just fine.

What was the final, last straw was receiving an SMS that my bill was coming due, and it would be over $81.  So we went from $65, to $75, to >$80.  OK, time to pull the ripcord. I navigated through the Web site (again, slightly painful) to find their Customer Service number, called it, and said I needed to close my account.  The rep noted it was a very new account, and of course asked why.  I went through some of the gems in this blog post: poor signal, objectionable Web site, escalating price quotes, wayyyyyyyyyyyy too expensive, maybe some more thrown in; I don't remember.  I thorougly expected to get some sort of retentions pitch or transfer, but the most he offered is that it would be only 70-something with autopay.  I don't think I said to him, but as previously mentioned, they very much lost me agreeing to that with their PSTN billing snafu.  I suspect they knew there wasn't much they could do about signal strength, or the price, and just said, fine, here you go, a disconnect order has been entered.  I once again confirmed, if I paid this bill, there wouldn't be any other charges; if I paid the $80+ I would be done; he said yes, I would be.

What's a mystery to me is that doing subsequent research, namely Googling for something like "most inexpensive Verizon Wireless plans" and reading the results, they have far cheaper alternatives, albeit they're prepaid instead of postpaid.  You'd think they'd whip that out and offer it to try to retain me as a customer.  No such deal.  Honestly, it wouln't have helped anyway; their rate was on the order of $35/mo., over double MM's rate.  I also wouldn't doubt it if it came with the same autopay caveat.

Well, dear reader, I thank you for reading this far; I hope it was at least entertaining.  I will just add, at the risk of former employer reading this and crying foul (and maybe wanting their S21+ handset back), I had absolutely no interest in the VZW DN; I really couldn't care less if I retained it.  As sort-of mentioned, the DN I hand out to everyone is my GV number, and calls to that get forwarded wherever I want, which can include cellular (at any DN).  If I'm totally honest, all I wanted was not to have to give back the handset and therefore buy another.  It looks like I ended up getting an approximately $1000 cell phone for about $81.  It's possible that I could have had it for nothing or next to nothing, if I just asked them nicely to stop service for the DN, but I'm guessing they would have wanted their Galaxy back instead.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

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Montana: The U.S. Constitution Takes It on the Chin Again

The government of another U.S. State, Montana, has collectively lost their minds by banning the distribution of TikTok.  This seems awfully close to the Nazi book burning campaign.  You are in effect saying that the citizens of your State are far too dumb to handle their own lives in dealing with ByteDance.  So on Amendment I grounds alone, you are de facto making illegal the act of expressing myself on the TikTok service because I won't be able to obtain the app.  This most cerrtainly seems like making a law abridging the freedom of speech.  If you have concerns about government devices, that's fine, you own them, and ought to have absolute control over what they do.  But to extend that to everybody is insane.  It's like the gross overreach of "Brandon" insisting that one of the missions of OSHA is to get every employed person jabbed (I refuse to say/write "vaccinated").  It's fine that you insist federal employees and contractors be jabbed, but trying to extend that to virtually all citizens is ludicrous.

What's next because you don't think we can handle it, prohibiting the sales of Das Kapital?  Mein Kampf?  Sticking your noses in ISPs who do business in your State and erecting the Great Firewall of Montana?

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

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The Recent Rise of Advocacy for a Vehicle AM Radio Regulation

I thought it was just "AM" talk radio hosts such as Clay & Buck trying to make their program sound more important...you know, entertainment and "content."  But during their very show recently, at least on WLVL, there was a sponsored political ad urging people to go to a URI and ultimately e-sign a pettition to demand action, presumably in the form of legislation or regulation, for vehicle manufacturers to include AM radios in their cars.  They even enlisted former US Vice President Mike Pence to help deliver the message.  To paraphrase, Mr. Pence talked about how AM stations are a part of your safety, as participants in the EAS. I think this is quite disingenuous, because that implies FM, or for that matter, any other broadcast station, such as TV, is not part of EAS, whereas by regulation each of them has to be.  I will grant them that MF propagation characteristics (AM broadcast band) are not going to be like VHF (FM broadcast band).  But that's partly why FM is typically allowed more power than AM, to cover more area.

Please give me a break.  Along the lines of terms like "Big Oil," "Big Pharma," etc., this isn't "Big Vehicle" conspiring to silence talk radio, which has its primary home on AM. Automotive electric motor controllers accomplish what they do by turning the current to the motor on and off very rapidly.  This is the very same effect you would have experienced with an AM receiver years ago with cheap incandescent light bulb dimmers (that is to say, cheap because they lack noise suppression circuitry).  It does the very same thing as the EV motor controller, it chops up the current so that the duty cycle is varied, thus ultimately controlling the temperature of the bulb's filament (or the motor's speed).  All those square waves produced are similar to the spark gap transmitters that were used it the very early days of radio, very wide band emissions.  Without specific noise suppression components in the dimmer, the power wiring acts as a transmitting antenna for this broadband noise.  Also keep in mind the scale; a lamp is going to be a few tens or hundreds of watts, whereas an EV motor is typically tens of kilowatts, an order of magnitude or more bigger.  Unless some fairly expensive components are added in the circuit for noise suppression, typically all you're going to hear on that AM radio is hash.  EV manufacturers do not want their customers complaining about how their radio doesn't work, all they hear is noise.

It's the same reason why many mobile SoCs (for phones/tablets) will have an FM radio but not AM; a computer is absolutely chock full of square wave signals, so FM is the only practical reception.

This is also not to mention, by implication, they're making it sound like it's going to be illegal or something to carry your own AM radio into your EV.  Yes, it's less convenient, but if you want to try it, there's really nothing holding you back from bringing your own receiver along for the ride.  You're likely going to be quite disappointed with the results, except maybe if you're within a couple of kilometers of a clear channel station.

I have confidence that the market will sort this out.  If people genuinely want their AM radio without having to carry a portable around with them, EV manufacturers will include an option.  It may be a few hundred dollars, considering the heavy duty chokes, capacitors, and shielding it will likely require, but if you want an AM radio badly enough, you can pay for it.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

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Recent Survey Request From Google About Passkeys

Too bad Google's recent survey which I received was not open-ended, and was restricted to only the answers they thought of; that is, no place to opine in freeform text.  If they want adoption, they have a LOT of work to do.

• They call it "passwordless", but if I have to enter a password (it's called a PIN, but same thing) in order to use my YubiKey, it's not passwordless.  I might as well just use a normal password login and touch my key for MFA, it's more convenient because my password manager fills it in automatically.  I don't know for sure at this point, but I'm going to guess this insistence on having a PIN was part of the FIDO standard for using a hardware key.
• Offhand it doesn't seem infeasible to use a YubiKey for both MFA and passkeys.  They're used at totally different phases of authentication.  Yet you make that clear that there is a MFA section and a separate passkey section on the page, and put up an error if one tries to enroll a YubiKey already registered for MFA as a passkey.
  
• Telling me to "hold my phone closer to my computer" is useless if you don't tell me why.  I could have opened the side panel and chucked it inside, not possible to get any closer, and it still wouldn't have helped.  You have to explain that it is to get a better Bluetooth connection, which was never going to happen because Bluez had not paired my phone at that point.  There comes a point where being nontechnical is highly counterproductive.  "Page cannot be displayed" is extremely unhelpful.  "Name not found in DNS," "DNS lookup failure," or "connection refused" are infinitely more helpful.  Similarly, mentioning Bluetooth on that screen on a phone is vastly more helpful than just asking me to hold it closer.
  
• You listed all sorts of devices, from tablets, to iPhone, to iPad, to Mac desktop, to Chromebooks, but I had to choose "other" because it was a Linux desktop.  Seriously...does not your business rely heavily on Linux, but you can't be bothered to offer that as a possibility of using your Web products??
• You confuse the issue by calling it passwordless login and passkeys in different places.  When I wanted to turn it off (more hassle than it's worth, honestly), I couldn't find it for several minutes because of the dual labelling.  It also wouldn't hurt to put this switch to disable it on the enrollment page, either instead of, or in addition to, where it is now.
  

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

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Wisdom From the Comic Pages - Ep0

Not sure if this will be a continuing feature on this blog or not, but who knows, there may be more, so this is "episode 0" (because we computer types really like our zero-based numbering).

Talk show hosts, political candidates, news programs, special interest groups...they all become successful by reducing debates to the level of shouted rage.  Nothing gets solved, but we're all entertained.

 --Bill Watterson, author of "Calvin and Hobbes," 26-Nov-1995 

That indeed seems to be the business model of many talk shows, including Premiere Networks hosts, WBEN-AM hosts, and many others I know of.  There are some that are much more focused on intrinsically apolitical topics, e.g. home improvement, car repair (miss you, "Car Talk" guys, but I understand everyone wants to retire, and listeng to your "Best of" will do for now; miss you, Tom Torbjornsen), financial/money/planning advice ("The Money Doctors," "Money Talk with Bob Brinker," "Jill on Money," etc.), computers and technology ("Sound Bytes," "Léo Laporte The Tech Guy," "Rich on Tech"), and so on.  Certain others have a strange, interesting mix ("The Financial Guys," "The Home Repair Clinic with Jim Salmon").

I mean, there's little doubt that people to whom I used to listen, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, etc. thoroughly believe in most of what they say.  But sometimes...sometimes my opinion is that they really don't genuinely believe in what they're saying, or believe in it only half-heartedly, and are doing it as schtick to try to gain or retain listeners.  And on some occasions, all the host had in mind was to hammer their point, not to let their guest speak.

But after all, that is their mission: gain as many listeners as possible and retain them for as long as possible, not necessarily have a balanced discussion of any topic.  The late, great Rush Limbaugh said as much during some of his shows.  Don't get me wrong, it can still be worth the listen; I wouldn't want it curtailed.  It's just that Bill was insightful.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

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Slightly Extreme Example of Phisher Fail

Thank you, Google, for tossing this in my Spam folder, where it belongs.  Oh, well, too bad, phishers; it might help to have a better grasp of the language before you send out your messages.  Why in the world would I want to suspend my package?

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

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The Ridiculous Length of Terms and Conditions

I decided I wanted to change cellular carriers recently.  I won't tell you which one I was targetting, but I'll just say I was on their "cart checkout page" and it had the usual something along the lines of "by clicking 'complete purchase,' you agree to our (link)terms of service, our (link) privacy policy," etc., etc.  Now, I like to be a principled person, and do not want to blindly accept things I haven't read.  However, companies make it extremely difficult to follow these principles.

I tend to read slowly compared to most people, mostly because I tend to reread lines and not realize it particularly soon (maybe half way through them in most cases).  This seems to be particularly true for legal documents, as virtually all terms of services/terms and conditions are.  But what will help me immensely is if I have the text read out loud, even if by a TTS package (I like Festival).  So, I set about to copy/paste this prospective cellular carrier's terms and conditions page into a text file.  Then I ran the Festival package's script text2wave on it.

Any guesses as to the size of the resulting .wav file, in terms of time?  How about nearly one and three-quarters hours?  So, in order to conscientiously read these T&Cs to which I'm supposed to be agreeing, and assuming I could read as fast as Festival's output sound, I would be spending over an hour reading it, even if I used some software to read it sped up.

One characteristic of Festival's output is that the tone it uses falls as it continues on throughout a sentence, ostensibly to sound more natural.  What's particularly funny about this cellular carrier's T&Cs verbiage is that the very first paragraph begins with such a run-on sentence that with a male voice, Festival is just more-or-less groaning instead of pronouncing by the end of it.

The lamentable truth is that most of these sites' T&Cs are very similar, with the company's or organization's name substituted in the right spots.  I just wish for a Web site where some standardized ToS, privacy policy, and so on can be posted for all the world to see, and sites/companies/organizations to incorporate them by reference, so that they can be READ ONCE.  Keeping conscientious can therefore be a whole lot less onerous.

I suppose I can sort of rationalize click- or tap-through.  After all, I don't think even lawyers read through every law written for a particular jurisdiction.  Think of it: you could probably spend years if not a decade or more of time dedicated solely to reading, in my example case, international law, U.S. law, New York law, Erie County law, and Cheektowaga law.  The text of this cellular carrier's T&C is about 85 KiB; imagine how much would be required for all laws in all those jurisdictions. Yet somehow we're expected to be bound by and follow all of them.  It's just fairly close to impossible.

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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when the speaker or writer chooses not to follow those rules.

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