Tag: 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.”

0

ATM

His turn, at last, just when he was about to explode from impatience. That woman ahead of him had taken, like, six minutes.

As soon as she walked away, he strode up. Spreading his fingers, he put his palm to the ATM’s cold, dark screen. A pulse rose through his fingers. Blue light limned his hand. Sharp tingling nibbled at his skin, and the hair everywhere on his body stood on end.

He tapped his foot, waiting for results. Like thirty seconds later, the ATM began printing sounds. More seconds passed. His hair flattened and then the pulsing faded, the light dimmed and disappeared, and the tingling ended. As he removed his hand, a slip of paper scrolled out. Finally.

Taking the paper with, he perused the print out. “You done?” the next person in line said.

Nodding with a grunt, he walked away, perusing his print out as he did. The bottom line was what he first went to read. It said, “Warning: your karma points have reached the minimum balance. Be careful what you do.”

A car horn blew. Looking up and around, he found the offending driver and gave them the finger. As soon as he realized what he’d done, he grimaced. Crumbling the paper up, he shoved it into his pocket and started walking fast. Of course his karma points were low. How the fuck were you supposed to get points in a world like this?

Getting into his car, he started it with a burst of smoky revs, shoved it into reverse, and punched the gas. His rear tires grabbed traction with a chirp. “Hey,” an old man shouted behind him. “Watch it.” Selecting drive, he scattered pedestrians as the car jumped forward. Cutting off another car, he started speeding down the street.

“Minimum balance,” he said, selecting another radio station and turning up the volume. “Fuck that noise.”

Lighting a cigarette, he went on down the road, speeding past a girl in the crosswalk. Minimum balance, right. How was he ever supposed to get karma points when the world was set against him?

As his father always said, there’s just no sense in trying.

0

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.

 

0

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.”

2

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.”

0

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.

0

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.

0

Feeling Dumb

I received a Costco paper thingy in the mail yesterday, one of those things with thin but glossy pages stapled together that show, “Here’s what you can buy!” 

I leafed through the leafs because I’m always looking for things to buy, when what do you think caught my eye?

Yes, that’s right, a smart toilet.

Offered by Ove, the description was pithy. They mentioned that it had memory and a remote control. I thought, WTH? Why would your toilet remember you? Does it say, this guy again, and turn on some air freshener? Or is it a matter of adjusting the toilet height and angle to suit your body for the best experience evacuating bowels? And what the heck was the remote control for?

These questions pushed me to search the net for answers. I found a promotional video so that I can share all of those things with you.

The smart toilet disappointed me in the end. While it was impressive on the surface and intrigued me about what it could do, I thought, what about a phone app for it, and voice control? Does it not interface with Siri or Alexa? I don’t know why you’d want to do any of that, but then, I’m not really sold on a remote control for my toilet.

Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised that the smart toilet has arrived. Smart dildos, smart thermostats, smart phones, and smart toothbrushes have been around for some time. Other smart inventions are arriving every day, like smart sex dolls and smart showers. Naturally, with all this smart stuff, concerns are raised about your smarts being hacked, resulting in unexpected problems. Besides someone else taking control of it, these smart devices are calling back home, reporting on what you’re doing.

It’s another reason to not get a smart appliance. Sooner or later, they’re gonna turn on you.

 

5

The Destination Dream

I was moving again in last night’s dream. My home that I was selling was a large white house. Built circa the 1950s – hey, that’s when I was born – the home featured a large front porch, two sprawling sugar maple trees, and a large green yard with squared off sidewalks.

The dream’s beginning found me doing yard work. I was busy and happy. In a brief aside, I then go to work and tell a woman how to use a specific computer program to conduct a search. She’s mute during the entire exchange, leaving me doubtful about whether she understood what the search could do to save her time, or if she understand what I told her. I would check back on her.

As I returned to yard work, my wife accosted me. She needed to go to an organizing event for some activity that she was involved with, and wanted me to drive her. We argued briefly, but I resigned myself. We would take our truck, I told her, leading her to a small Ford Courier or Chevy LUV sized vehicle, in other words, a small truck. A white tarp covered the truck. When I pulled the tarp aside, I had to dump water off the tarp, and worried about the trunk having water damage. But it seemed fine. Weirdly, the trunk had no top.

I got in one side, and was awaiting my wife. Two other women got in as well. I asked them who they were, and they said that my wife told them that they could get a ride with us. I had not problem with that, but then realized I didn’t have a steering wheel because I was on the wrong side of the truck. After getting out and circling the truck, I told the woman behind the steering wheel that she needed to move. She wanted to know why. I told her that I needed the steering wheel, which made her laugh.

As I waited for her to move, I looked at my sidewalks under the sugar maples. They all ha a green hue. I worried about what caused that and then noticed that my yard needed edging.

My wife arrived, so I jumped in the truck and took off. She didn’t know where the event was, so we started aimlessly driving around. As we did, she got angry, which made me angry. She was angry because we were lost, and I was angry because she didn’t know where we were supposed to go. Eventually, I saw another woman. Pulling over, I asked her if she knew where the event was.

She showed me on a cell phone. She and I then discussed where I was. Her phone showed where I’d driven, depicting my path as a fat red line. I saw how I’d circled around the same area several times. I wasn’t far from my destination but unsure how to get there. I thought I needed to go one way, but the woman corrected me, showing me a quick, direct path on her phone. Meanwhile, my wife and the other two women had left the truck and were walking around. I called out to them that I knew where we needed to go. They finally came over.

Then I paused to go back to the woman that I’d shown how to use the search engine. She still wasn’t using it, so I showed her again. Then she seemed to understand. Feeling pleased that progress was being made, I got into the truck with my wife and the other two women and drove them to their destination.

Lot of women in this dream. I see all sorts of things percolating through my mind in this dream, and it’s very positive. It makes me smile.

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑