Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Don’t you love it when peruse a webpage for information, and then see a link for “More Information,” and click on it, only to find the link opens a page with the same information, but in a different format, and nothing “more”?
Yeah. Grrr, not helpful.
Don’t you love it when you click on the link, and it takes you to a page that tells you, “That link no longer exists. You need to update your bookmarks.”?
Ahem. I didn’t click on it from a bookmark, fools.
Don’t know why that makes me so irrationally irritated.
My dependencies sicken me.
Here I am, deploring the deplorable state of the net as it drifts in and out of connectivity.
The first thing that jumps to mind is, WTF? Then, of course, I ask myself, is it me? Is it my system? Everything is checked and reset.
But problems continue. It started last Friday and has gone on and on. Finally, Monday, I checked downdetector.com and other sites. They verified, yep, we got problems. You can see the spikes.
Yesterday, the same.
More of it today.
Naturally, the Internet corollary to Murphy’s law specifies 1), your net connection will drop at the ideal time to curtail your momentum, and 2), just when you think it’s all fixed, it will leap up and bite you in the ass one more time.
Because of the commerce implications of outages, you probably won’t know what’s going on for a while. Connectivity, latency and response times equal sales and advertising revenue. Amazon owned up to its error last week because it was human error, something that is less likely to scare off customers than hardware and systems failures where they’re scrambling to figure out what the hell has gone wrong.
Happy birthday, ARPANET. Without you, we would be lacking the Internet.
Some will whisper, this is an anniversary, not a birthday. Maybe they’ll make such a remark on the Internet.
Few realize how long people worked on ARPANET and its principles and processes and what its success actually represents. Like Philo Farnsworth and other inventors, their work is used but rarely remembered and celebrated. Most ARPANET and early Internet pioneers worked in teams. They’re remembered but no celebrated but they had some nifty ideas. Their accomplishments helped drive Internet development. Without them, we’d not have bloggers sharing opinions, dreams, hopes, frustrations and cat photos and videos, and complaining about government, politics, manners and movies. WordPress would probably be a lot smaller and less successful.
Where would Amazon and eBay be without the Internet? What would Facebook be without an Internet?
Seriously, take a moment to imagine a Facebook without an Internet and the web.
I need not add the rhetorical amendment asking where the rest of us would be and what we would be doing, but I kinda did.
Going back to my early Internet and computer learning reminds me minicomputers once roamed the electronic frontier. Remember the Burroughs Corporation?
Sure, some remember. Some also remember the Nash Rambler.
Such is the case with inventors, engineers and their work. Their ingenuity shapes our lives but we remember few of them. As always, the winners shape the marketing we refer to as history.
Ah, it’s all ancient history, way back, like a long time ago. Here we are, on the Internet, clicking, scrolling, and googling away the morning.
Happy New Year.
I’d like to declare a national day free of bullshit. We can call it National No Bullshit Day. NNBD. Although bullshit is spelled as one word, some call it as BS, or more colloquially, B.S.. So we could do NNBSD. Naturally, I like my idea better. We can have shirts and tee shirts, and raise money, or some other bullshit.
You know BS when you hear it and you call it by your expression. Mularky. Bull. Bullshit. B.S. Garbage. Crap.
We were used to it in the military. Bullshit inundated us, which, if you think about it, which I try not to do, is actually a lot of B.S. We had our bullshit meters. Hearing something that we knew as bullshit, we’d say, in a sort of laconic way, “That just pegged my bullshit meter.” That statement meant that the needle went all the way to the right. Another expression used was, “That buried the needle on my bullshit meter.” Buried the needle was an old expression referencing tachometers and opening throttles to the point where the needles entered the red zone or went as far as it could. Of course, the ultimate bullshit expression was, “My bullshit meter just broke.”
Most bullshit meters used to go to ten. Mine, of course, went to eleven. It was the Spinal Tap Special. (rim shot)
I suppose, in this precise digital age, that bullshit meters are way more accurate. They’re probably on a scale of one to a thousand, enabling the ability to assign a more accurate bullshit value to a given statement, action or news. There are probably apps that can be downloaded and installed on your smart phones, iPhones, iPads and tablets. Being sixty, I don’t need a bullshit meter, and will tell you, with a sniff, “I don’t need a meter to tell me when something’s bullshit. I’ve experienced enough bullshit to know bullshit when bullshit is around.”
But many naive and gullibles do not recognize bullshit. They believe you can get something for nothing. I, of course, believe that’s bullshit. Of course, the problem with bullshit is, once it’s in your system, you can’t get it out, debilitating your immunity to bullshit. You soon can’t even detect it.
Still, there times when my bullshit meter gets broke. For example, when a car manufacturer, like Ford, declares they’ve completely re-invented a car, I think, that’s bullshit.
When they announced literally no longer means literally, I shook my head and said, “What bullshit.”
When I see the price of my quad shot mocha is five dollars, I think, that’s outrageous bullshit, even though it’s not, really. Bullshit often depends upon your frame of reference. I have some years behind me so my frame of reference has gotten pretty damn big. First, I would tell you, “Nobody sold mochas when I was a kid. We didn’t have a Starbucks or coffee house on every corner. Coffee houses were part of the beat generation. Only artists and poets went there, not people.”
And then I will tell you, “I remember when a cup of coffee cost less than a dollar.” Someone with a bigger frame of reference will naturally top that and declare, “I remember when it cost ten cents a cup,” and another will say, “I remember when it was free.” I’m not sure if coffee was ever free, so that moves my old bullshit meter needle a little bit, but that’s okay, because they’re old, and it’s honest bullshit.
The Internet doesn’t help. I mean, come on, there is so much bullshit on it that it seems possible that the bullshit will take it down. Which would be a pretty good news lead: “In today’s top story, bullshit broke the worldwide web. More coming up, after this word from your sponsors.” Which is bullshit in its own right, to need to wait to hear about this important news until you’ve heard someone try to sell you something.
I may be showing my age there.
You’d think some tech company could design an application that not only detects bullshit but blocks it, just as intrusion detection and prevention software works. Then, as you’re downloading a page, a little popup arrives on your screen and says, “Warning. Bullshit was detected and blocked.”
We could even assign the bullshit levels of threat: faint, mild, average, serious, dangerous, and OMGWTF infuriating.
I dream of a time when television commercials could contain the disclaimer, “This commercial contains no bullshit,” and you can sit back and listen and know, you’re not hearing any bullshit. Because if they were spreading bullshit when they made the commercial, some great Bullshit God would zap them with a laser and declare in a thunderous voice, “No bullshit allowed. Not on my watch.”
But, yes, that’s a fantasy. For now, I’ll dream of a bullshit free day, or even just, like an hour when I don’t read something and say to the cats, “Can you believe this bullshit?”
I don’t think it’s going to be until after November 8th.
“I’m hungry”, I type, and click on the magnifying glass.
“I have found growing vegetables can help if you’re hungry.”
“If you’re hungry, the problem might be that you haven’t had anything to eat. Check to see if you’ve had something to eat recently.”
“Hungry is a country in Europe.”
“Hunger can be caused by not eating a sufficient amount of food. To fix this, you can grow food, go hunting, or go shopping. Let me know how it turns out.”
“Sign this petition to urge President Obama to end hunger in America NOW.”
“Check listings to see when The Hunger Games are playing.”
“Click here to watch The Hunger on your computer right now!”
“Many people who are hungry have found this website and its diets to be helpful.”
“Get deals on hungry at Overstocked.com.”
Those are satire answers to a simple statement to illuminate how I feel while searching for help on the net. Companies have mostly abdicated responsibility, except where they’ve realized that they can charge you to help you and pad their profits. If you do not pay for help, you’re left to the forums, and the forums give advice, like above, satirized as a response to the input, “I’m hungry.” They don’t address the issues but smather suggestions that might or not relate to your query except in the basest or broadest manner.
Looking for why I’m having Windows 7 issues that result in an ever spinning hard drive that sucks responsiveness out of the system, I’m constantly urged to look for malware, update drivers, or turn off my security software. None of them actually provide intelligent tools for why the hard drive keeps running, especially after all of those issues have already been done and eliminated. Using the computer manufacturer’s tools and windows tool, I’ve confirmed that there’s no hardware issues. And it’s depressing, because I thought, if there is a hardware problem, at least I’ll know what’s wrong. But I can’t find the cause. Don’t tell me to update because I already have.
And now I’m hungry. I can either, eat leftover kibble the cats didn’t finish, rummage through the kitchen pantry and refrigerator, or root around the front yard for bugs.
Or, like the cats, wait for someone else to take care of me and offer me a better solution.
Yesterday was my 60th birthday. I lack the socialization or genes or spirit to celebrate. I just don’t do it, not for holidays, nor my birthday. I will try to celebrate with others but when my spouse asks me what I want to do for my birthday, or what I want, I’m pretty lost about my answer.
And I think it’s been so for a long time. But in thinking about what to do, I reflected on the best birthday celebrations. Three stand out in mind. So in no order, because they are the three best —
My fifteenth birthday. I’d moved in with my father and was living in an apartment by the military installation where he was assigned, in Dayton, Ohio, just him and me. I spent days by myself, which isn’t a bad life for me, as I was active as an artist and created pencil drawings, and I read books. My one friend outside of this was my Dad’s friend, Jim. Jim picked me up once a week to take me fishing. After a few weeks of that, he asked me if I wanted to go home with him for lunch. I did, and ended up meeting my future wife.
The birthday tie-in comes from spending July 4th with her and the rest of Jim’s family. Discovering it was my birthday the next day, my fourteen year old future wife ‘borrowed’ my watch and refused to give it back to me, until midnight struck. Then she presented it to me as a gift. That was a great birthday.
But another great birthday involved my Mom. She asked me what I wanted to do and we ended up going to a steak house, like I was an adult, where I had a New York strip steak. I think it was my first steak and certainly the first time I felt like I was more than a son with my mother, but also a friend. That was a great birthday.
The third came when I was stationed in Germany with the Air Force. I flew to the US to go to a writing conference in Ohio. Since I was in that region of the world, with all the time and expense associated with getting there, I also visited my Mom and sisters in Pittsburgh, PA. Going out of their way, they procured me Penn Pils beer, which was like German beer that was brewed in Pittsburgh, and made my favorite dishes. It wasn’t my birthday but it was in the same time period, and, as I’d left home long before and was rarely back, they treated my visit like a birthday celebration. That was a great birthday.
Like many things in life, I’ve been extremely fortunate. Remembering them, and having all the shout-outs from friends, acquaintances, companions, relatives and former co-workers via the Internet (and an enjoyable day with my wife, who I met forty-five years ago) has made this birthday a wonderful day.
Thanks for a great birthday.
I guess that’s four.
Michael Seidel, writer 