Category: technology

The Internet of Floof (IoF)

The Internet of Floof (IoF) (floofinition) – connecting devices to share information about animals, often focusing on housepets and their antics, or the love relationships between odd animal couples, usually through social-media postings.

In use: “On the Internet of Floof, it’s not surprising to discover dozens of posts a day about a neighborhood saving a cat in a tree, an old dog living on the street being saved and finding the safety and comfort of a home for the first time, or a pig raising orphaned kittens. Anything is possible on the IoF.”

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Tareytons Are Better

Being part of this era of pop-culture and consumer living is wonderful. We witness the rise and fall of trends, and technology grants us visitation rights with what was then and how it was done.

I grew up in the cigarette culture. Born in 1956, the doctors and nurses were probably smoking when I was delivered. Everyone was smoking in the 1960s. Movie and television stars used cigarettes as props for being cool, sophisticated, and fashionable. Mom and Dad smoked while doing everything from working on the car (yeah, that was a thing, then, and it was probably not a safe thing) to entertaining guests. Children stole cigarettes and smoke in secret to be like their parents. A smoky haze filled bars, airplanes, and restaurants.

I didn’t smoke cigarettes. I smoke marijuana, a little hash, and then cigars and pipes, but never cigarettes (yea, me?). I never smoked much of any of it, and quit any smoking thirteen years ago. I have sometimes vaped some marijuana since then.

I was thinking about the cigarette smoking and their commercials, jingles, and slogans. Do you know about those days, when cigarette advertising was as dominant as medicine advertising now is? If not, you should learn about “Tareytons are better, charcoal is why,” and cigarettes that were made for women, or manly cigarettes like Camels and Marlboros, and the meaning behind LSMFT*.

We made fun of it all back then. Winston had a jingle about how good their cigarettes were. I’ve included that below. We sang a different song about Winstons.

“Winstons taste bad, like the one I just had. No filter, no flavor, just toilet paper.”

 

* LSMFT – Lucky Strikes Mean Fine Tobacco.

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Eavesdropping

You ever get sucked into listening to another group’s conversation – people that you don’t know, in a public place – and then they lean in and drop their voices, making it difficult to hear them? Doesn’t that just chap your nose? It chaps my nose because it puts me in a bind. I’m invested in their subject. I want to hear what’s going on. Asking them to speak up usually doesn’t work, and moving closer to them often interrupts the discussion.

Thank the flying spaghetti monster for the technology that lets me listen from a distance. Yes, I mean, bugs. You can just point and hear. Relatively inexpensive, they’re easily found on Amazon, are now so discreet that nobody ever notices.

The things I’m forced to do to satisfy my curiosity.

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Looking Forward

Digging into his pocket, Chasm pulled everything out, dropped it on the counter, and took in the lifetender. Her neck and arms were lean and bare. Alabaster skin and sculpted coal black hair accented her blue eyebrows, green eyes,  red pearl earrings, and brown lips.

Leaning forward, the lifetender watched Chasm’s discs take on green, gold, and silver. Her name holo said she was Kymeri and she was not available.

“You got something,” Kymeri said. Her long, flashing red fingernails raked the discs into order as their denominations came up. “Thousand dollar goldisc, a D, silver century, a wide array of greendiscs.” Her fingernails flashing gold, she tapped the individual discs. Each spoke its value. When she’d tapped the last greendisc, she clicked her fingernails together. Changing to green, her nail said, “Seventeen hundred sixty-seven dollars.”

Just short of a day’s pay, a reflection of the six hours Chasm had worked. “What can I get for that?”

“Night room, joy doll, two squares, dozen drinks, new clothes.”

“What would that leave me?”

“Depends on particulars.”

“Of course. There a budget package?”

Shaking her head, Kymeri said in a low voice, “You don’t want a budget. Get a deluxe, at least. You can afford it. Budget drinks are well liquor or piss beer with compiled food, and the clothes are plastic.”

“Can I budget and then upgrade the drinks to IPA? I don’t need many, maybe three bigs.”

Her fingernails flashing green, the lifetender said, “Okay, a budget room is a bed with a pop out commode, access to the ionizer, private sink, standing space and one chair.”

“Bedding?”

“Included. Joy doll?”

“No. Trade in for the clothes?”

The lifetender shrugged with a dispassionate scan over his black plastic-encased torso. “Your stuff isn’t much. Probably a ten.”

The negotiations were continued. When it was done, Chasm had spent eleven hundred. It scared him to spend so much.

He was ported into his pod. Soft white lights came on. No windows, one large monitor, doublewide bed, chair, sink, port token switch for the ionizer, and popout commode, as promised.

Squirming into the chair, Chasm guzzled his first IPA. Decent stuff, but most importantly, cold. Tension sloughed out of his shoulders. It’d been a good day. He’d found work and was promised more. He was off the street, had a clothing credit, two meals paid for, along with the IPA and water, and still had almost five hundred in discs.

Life was good. Kicking off his shoes, Chasm unfolded his laptop from his hip pocket and plugged it in to play some games.

For the first time in at least a year, he was looking forward to tomorrow.

 

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Compufloof

Compufloof (floofinition) – housepet who is attracted to computers and other technological devices.

In use: “No laptop, iPhone, or smart phone could be set down and left unattended. As soon as they were, one of the resident compufloofs was on it. Even television, entertainment center, and DVR remotes were bait for their Golden Retriever. That compufloof had once collected them all, hiding them in a closet corner.”

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Techno-floof

Techno-floof (floofinition) – a housepet who enjoys interacting with electronic technology or who is fascinated or entranced by electronic technologies such as telephones, televisions, and computers.

In use: “After showing his cat videos of birds and squirrels on the large smart-TV, Cameron was surprised one day when he heard the television go on, apparently by itself, in the living room. When he checked, he found his cat sitting on the sofa beside the remote. It seemed like the little techno-floof had watched him and knew how to turn it on.

“No way, Cameron thought. There had to be another reason for how the television came on.”

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Coming Things

I was watching “Future Man” on Hulu last night. An eHarmony commercial came on. The featured woman said, “I don’t want to waste time with men who aren’t right for me.”

I thought, soon such apps and approaches will expand. What person should I have as a friend? What books should I read, what television shows should I watch, or what movies should I go to?

Apps will tell you which you’re most likely to enjoy, enabling you to avoid wasting time with other people or activities that aren’t right for you.

Sad. You can learn a lot from wasting time with things that aren’t right for you.

You can even have a good time.

Instead, let’s narrow our minds and reduce our bubbles just a little bit more.

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A Little Interruption

I received an email from my wife that her computer had been hacked. It made her a little nervous.

She’d sent the email two hours before. (As an aside, she sent it on one of our other computers. How many do we have? Yes, too many.) I’d been busy writing and didn’t have my email open, so I didn’t see the email. When I saw it, I wrote, “Okay, I’m coming home.” I was almost done with writing like crazy for the day, although I’d wanted to walk to think more about the concept and plot.

Her computer is an Apple Mac. She hadn’t been hacked but was being scammed by a Mad Defender variant, a little surprising. It’s pretend ransom-ware. The Mac Defender scam is about blocking the user from changing tabs and pages in Safari while a warning that spyware has been detected is shown. It then tells you to call a number for Apple support.

From there, several things can happen. One, they can urge the gullible to share computer access. Two, they can be conned into buying a security program that’s not a security program but gives them access to your computer and its files and information. Or, most enticing for them, they get your credit card info and go to town.

It took me about seventy minutes to research her particulars and find and delete the malware app, along with the offending processes. As Mac Defender and the other names it goes by has been around since 2011, they’d changed details to make it more difficult to find and remove. I was surprised that they were using the MS Azurewebsites for this, as MS has been burned by this in the past. That was a big, immediate clue when I opened her computer and saw the message.

Anyone, it was a disruption to writing and posting blog thingies, along with walking and a few other things, but all’s well, and that’s the bottom line in all of this.

Back to our normal programming.

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Macfloofnation

Macfloofnation (floofinition) – a housepet’s scheming or crafty action or artful design to accomplish something it knows it’s not allowed to do; a group of animal lovers who also identify as Apple Mac users; (slang) housepets who enjoy eating food from McDonald’s restaurants.

In use: “As part of his macfloofations to get food off the plate, he put on his cutest face, holding it in place as he edged his paw forward.”

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