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Not Known At This Address

Technology

A little while ago, Reader Sam D. had this thought about Amazon’s Alexa:

“Why would anyone WANT his own personal Stasi agent in his home, AND be paying for it?”

Indeed.  Somebody remind me again why I’m not wired into the Internet Of Things:

If you’re a Google user, you probably noticed some trouble last night when trying to access Google-owned services. Last night, Google reported several issues with its Cloud Platform, which made several Google sites slow or inoperable. Because of this, many of Google’s sites and services–including Gmail, G Suite, and YouTube–were slow or completely down for users in the U.S. and Europe.
However, the Google Cloud outage also affected third-party apps and services that use Google Cloud space for hosting. Affected third-party apps and services include Discord, Snapchat, and even Apple’s iCloud services.
But an especially annoying side effect of Google Cloud’s downtime was that Nest-branded smart home products for some users just failed to work. According to reports from Twitter, many people were unable to use their Nest thermostats, Nest smart locks, and Nest cameras during the downtime. This essentially meant that because of a cloud storage outage, people were prevented from getting inside their homes, using their AC, and monitoring their babies.

Don’t think you can escape this bullshit by jumping in your car and getting out of town, either:

Governments are collecting lots of data on the people using roads, trains and buses, and without proper oversight, that information could easily be misused.

(I’ve often wondered, by the way, if my movements are being studied by way of my phone location software.  As I drive for Uber, I bet it’s interesting reading:  “He goes to the airport three or four times a day and never seems to drive back… WTF?”)  And speaking of which:

I wonder why they bother to warn us anymore.

And then there’s this:

Sleep Number, one company that makes beds that can track heart rate, respiration and movement, said it collects more than 8 billion biometric data points every night, gathered each second and sent via an app through the internet to the company’s servers.
“This gives us the intelligence to be able to continue to feed our algorithms,” CEO Shelly Ibach told attendees at a Fortune Brainstorm Health conference in San Diego last month.
Analyzing all that personal data, Ibach continued, not only helps consumers learn more about their health, but also aids the company’s efforts to make a better product.
Still, consumer privacy advocates are increasingly raising concerns about the fate of personal health information — which is potentially valuable to companies that collect and sell it — gathered through a growing number of internet-connected devices.

What I’d like to do is hack into this system, and publish a Wanking Hard Incidence Ranking Report (WHIRR!) for every member of Congress.

Maybe then someone  would take this loss of privacy thing seriously.

The Problem With Bread

Food & Drink

All my life, I’ve loved bread.  As a kid I ate bread with every meal, mostly the commercial white- or brown loaves (called “government bread” in South Africa because the price was kept low by a combination of both subsidy and quota production).  The nearest equivalent today would be the Wonderbread/ Hostess/ generic breads found in supermarkets (U.K. equivalent:  Hovis/ Warburtons/ store brands).

Gradually as I got older and my taste buds matured, I discovered bakery breads, my taste for which became exacerbated by visits to Europe and exposure to wares of the boulangerie  and bäckerei… oy, my mouth waters just thinking  about the Viennese brötchen  I’d gobble down with my morning coffee.

All went well, until my doctor told me that I needed to change my diet (his exact words:  “If you don’t lose weight, you’re going to die, you fat bastard”).  There were other words related to my extreme paucity of exercise (“Get up off your fat ass and start exercising, too.”)

I know that diets don’t work;  only permanent changes in lifestyle and eating habits do.  And the only change that seems to work without being too much work is getting rid of the bad things which cause you to gain weight, chief offenders being starches (grains) and sugars.

Sugars were not too difficult, as long as I cut out stuff like Coke and fruit jams [moan];  but I was never going to eliminate sugar from my diet altogether because I can’t drink coffee without at least a little sugar to cut the bitterness — and I’ll never  give up coffee.

The grains were not altogether difficult to cut back on.  I’ve never cared much for pasta — whatever it’s called, it’s all the same stuff — so Italian dishes like lasagna and macaroni went into the trashcan.  Ditto rice, which I’ve always liked but found easy to drop.

But then comes the worst offender:  bread.  Oh… fuck.  Wait:  you mean no more baguettes?

Non.

What about challah?

Nah.

Croissants?

Pas du tout.

Brötchen?

Bestimmt nicht.

So my all-time favorite, crusty French batard loaf?

Mais non (mon gros cochon).

As I said… fuck.

So here’s what I do.  I limit myself to two slices of toast (or one croissant) on Saturday mornings, and occasionally a toasted sandwich (cheese, or chicken mayonnaise) on Friday nights.  Those are my “cheats” (without which I’d never do any of it).

And I hit the gym — treadmill and stationary bicycle for half an hour — every weekday, religiously.  (When I was still at Doc Russia’s house, I walked about two miles per day, including a quarter-mile up and down Thrombosis Hill*.)  The results have been quite pleasing:  270 lbs in Jan 2017, somewhat south of 230 lbs today, with a goal weight of 205, which was my weight at age 23 in the Army, right after boot camp.  (Some asswipe once suggested that at my height, my goal should be 175, whereupon I chastised him sorely, saying that I hadn’t weighed 175 since 1969 at age 15.  When he got his breath back, he agreed.)

But I still miss — I mean, constantly — my daily bread.  Were it not for that “death” bullshit, I’d dump the whole stupid diet/ fitness lark in an instant and go back to my four slices a day.  I mean, FFS:

*the road up the hill behind Doc’s house, which requires cars to shift into low gear at the base.

A Gun WTF

The Gun Thing

This in my email yesterday from one of the Usual Suspects:

Am I the only one who goes “WTF?” — and the price is only part of the issue.  Let me count the ways:

  • Fugly finish
  • Aluminum grips
  • That stupid extruded grip safety thing
  • A gun called “We The People” from a German  company.

Other than all that, it’s not bad (apart from the price).

Not An Improvement

Modernism

If London is trying to make itself into some kind of copy of Manhattan, it’s looking like a roaring success — if, that is, you’re going for the “soulless, impersonal, could-be-any-city” look.

Of course, I think it looked better back when I were a nipper:

That looks like London.  The other looks like shit.

Life Under The Liberals

Behind Enemy Lines

To the surprise of precisely nobody, a government which welcomes illegal immigrants, allows people to live like animals (under the guise of “compassion”) and muzzles the police from actual policing  ends up with a situation that is (unexpectedly!) dire:

Images from the downtown area show trash piling up as workers struggle to keep the area sanitized. They are pictured wearing face masks among the dirt and grime.
Rows and rows of tents line the sidewalks of Skid Row in the sprawling 50-block area, home to around 4,200 homeless people, many in tents and shantytowns.
Some lay passed out in the street, seemingly from the effects of drugs as others are pictured lugging their property around, in search of the next spot to set up.

I’d post lots more pictures, but I imagine that some of you haven’t had yer breakfast yet, so I’ll content myself with the most inoffensive thereof:

There is no  amount of money that could persuade me ever to visit L.A. again.  I come from the Third World, I’ve been back to it a couple of times, and I have no desire to see it here in the United States.