It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything here (insert no one being surprised about anything here) and the world has completely and utterly fallen apart over the past six months. My kid and I were talking about how odd it was to think about just walking into a restaurant, without any planning or forethought, to pick up something to eat. It seems like years have passed over this handful of months and I can still remember the conversation I had with my manager at work a few days before Denver basically shut all the way down for a few months. Both of us were a bit skeptical about how severe the impact of Covid-19 would actually be and verbally walked through a few different possibilities that largely ended up with everyone rolling back into the office in a month’s time. Sometimes I’m really, really wrong. As I go from the realm of ironically referring to myself as an old man to teetering on the precipice of actually being that point of reference, I’m more comfortable with admissions of ineptitude than I’ve ever been. It’s hardly upsetting any more.
If you are one of the zero or less people who actually read the old Team Murder that was active between 2002-2010 then you might detect a slight change in my perspective. This is not just years at work but over the past 2-3 years I’ve moved through a towering pile of changes and things are vastly improved and more stable these days, plague times withstanding and all. Since the last time I wrote anything on this domain with any earnest a healthy number of things that I felt were foundationally defining in my life sprouted legs (or wrote themselves a blank check with ‘Midlife crisis’ on the memo line) and Riverdanced the fuck off the map on into the great hereafter. While the majority of the more jarring changes were happening, I tried to make myself feel better by doing stupid yet outwardly invisible things that mostly didn’t stay with me. I used to try to ingest some variety of hallucinogen every few years because it would give my increasingly fixed perspective a necessary slap upside its metaphorical head and jolt me into cognizance of the narrowing circles I was pacing around in. I haven’t felt that need recently perhaps because it’s legal(-ish) in this state now and doesn’t have the urban legends of potentially losing your mind or whatever. The appeal is missing now, I think, because I was unstable for a couple of years. Of course, my idea of instability is pretty pedestrian and points to how much of a privileged wuss I am: I had a semi-amiable divorce, I moved into a very nice if depressing apartment, I discovered that being a part time parent makes me a much better and more engaged parent, I got married again and now I’m a step parent, and I bought yet another overly large house in the suburbs without feeling the slightest twinge of ex-urban angst while I post this over a 1G/1G fiber internet connection that costs less a month that the PPPoE aDSL internet connection that I had when I first started posting things on this domain.
What’s new with you?
Outside of this site which I abandoned entirely for something like six years I’ve never been one to document all that much of my life and even less so with the intent of being consumed by a public audience, imagined or otherwise. The obsessive selfie takers have always annoyed me and before that the person in a group who wanted everyone in that group to pose in front of things to get group photos while the remainder of us were happy to just walk around and be there in the place we were visiting. My former family-in-law were very much like this and trips would be spent dutifully marching from one spot to pose in front of to another and I’m very glad that I’m not obligated to do this anymore despite being completely impatient with the practice and idea when I was participating in it.
As disinterested as I typically am in photography (the practice not the product) article about the destructive and egotistical practice of forcibly inserting your looking glass self into everything you do was well worth reading. The separation between whatever thing you do with your spare moments and your identity is one I think is healthy.
Due to the unwillingness of our old pal Google and my hated phone carrier Sprint to work together, I’ve been without a phone for about 12 days now. The short story is that Sprint wouldn’t exchange phones under the Google warranty and since I didn’t purchase my Pixel 3 XL directly from the mothership, Google did the standard 2 day shipping warranty return which isn’t spectacular given the 7-10 days that they guarantee. I’m bitter about both of these blockages but the plain simple fact is that I haven’t had a phone for a very long time and I’m getting impatient with all parties involved.
This will be my very last phone with Sprint since they’ve gotten considerably less inexpensive and replaced by other carriers with unlimited data. Plus, I’m hoping to never have a representative, who was otherwise very nice, tell me that despite the fact that my phone is not in working order that I’m just going to have to mail it back to Google and wait patiently while I pay for phone service that I’m unable to use. Fuck every little part of that excepting the part that will motivate me to jump providers after six years. I also hope to never see these particular words together again:
Please be assured that the process will be completed withing the specified time frame of 5-10 business days from start to finish.
. Again, very nice but not helping with all the compliance required MFA that I’m not capable of doing. Sigh.
One of the internal dev servers at work got bitten by this old Jenkins bug that I noticed a month or so because it popped up in the firewall logs. Because this isn’t a production machine and is mainly used as an internal testing server (it’s also running a pmta server which is pretty scary), we just shut it down and disconnected it from the network. I assumed the developers would probably torch the entire machine and start over. They didn’t and I had to find the offending lurkers and rescue this box. I’ll admit that I did it the laziest way: I just installed Sophos and waited for the client to either confirm that I had an admittedly tentative false positive or start crap bombing the cloud console with notifications. The crap bombing commenced about 75 seconds after the client piece was finished installing. It managed to open about 12 cases in our ticketing system before I could even disconnect the network.
Once the AV picked up on it I at least knew which file was being obnoxious and could go clobber it and make sure it hadn’t set up any cron jobs to reestablish itself afterwards. The path was something like /tmp/.jenkins/jenkins/-bash. Yup: -bash. It was the end of a pretty long day and it took forever for me to remember how delete a file like this in bash. I hadn’t actually considered that when I first started sawing on it. The remember this idiot from this particular situation is that bash assumed everything that begins with a hyphen is going to be an argument. I futzed around with quotation marks and backticks for a while and got nowhere but frustrated. The oddly easy answer was this: rm -v — -bash. That didn’t come from memory or anything like that but a frustrating round of trying to google up a solution with every query I could think of that didn’t actually use a hyphen which becomes an exclusion argument for that search. So, the short story is that everything after the double hyphen becomes a filename that bash no longer cares about evaluating. In retrospect, I probably should have renamed it and taken a look at what it was actually doing. It was the end of a long day though so I just nuked it from ssh. It was the only way to be sure. Actually, I wasn’t ever sure so I yanked the network again and kicked off an AV scan before I left. A learning experience, yet again, that wasn’t a whole lotta fun especially when my load average is above 4 on an already aging server that I apparently need to preserve.
I am generally opposed to invasive advertising and not for the reasons that you might suspect. Like Doc Searls, I believe that news organizations have the right to generate money to pay their bills and all of the usual justifications and if the aforementioned media outlets don’t try to draw me into some horrific listicle/slideshow layered in trashy js or attempt to hijack every cookie in my browser then I’m okay with letting that stuff load. If you don’t actively interfere with my ability to read text then I don’t get upset at you. I am getting tired to the excessive attempts to get me to subscribe to the dead letter version of a publication in order to read more than excerpts online or the siren call of logging in with another authentication network so the page can reload without delivering the thing I actually came to the site to read. I love Doc’s savage and apt characterization of that variety of advertising:
Tracking-based ads, generally called adtech, do not sponsor publications. They use publications as holding pens in which human cattle can be injected with uninvited and unwelcome tracking files (generally called cookies) so their tracked eyeballs can be shot, wherever they might show up, with ads aimed by whatever surveillance data has been gleaned from those eyeballs’ travels about the Net.
It sums up very concisely the feeling that you get when you realize that as meaningless as the website that its advertising is hosted on is to the ad networks and that they’re only interested in the dim and distant possibility that you might click on one of their advertisements accidentally which will then tally a meaningless click that will eventually demand payment.
Long winded and vindictive as all of the above might be towards being annoyed and inconvenienced by much of the methodology twiddled over above, that brand of advertising which is rapidly becoming (already is?) the predominant source of advertising revenue is completely ineffectual. It’s a shell game where the potential reader, the publisher, and the entity trying to actually get the word out about something they’re selling are all being ripped off and categorized in the most meaningless and superficial way. In the interest of avoiding participation in this circus of stupid I’ve stopped reading or linking to WaPo or the NYT because they aren’t interested in returning readers but a few potential pennies from a herded set of eyeballs. It just makes the experience of trying to read important bits of journalism feel like you’re being hard sold by a carnival barker. I’m more than finished feeling that degree of condescension without wanting to lash out at the source of it. I’m a nonparticipant in it not because I feel like I’m going to fundamentally change anything by removing a ghostly pixel of demographic from the sea of other poorly categorized junk data but because I don’t want to have anything to do with any part of it. It’s the same reason that I’m vegan: I’m not going to change a damn thing but I do not want to be part of any of it.
Man, this autopsy on the last great internet breakage was definitely a breath of fresh air when it comes to public disclosure of mistakes companies with thumbs in a great deal of interwebs infrastructure have made. Again, like most of the major outages (remember the S3 one a few years ago?) it came down to a single mistake that cascaded out to wreak havoc and, at least in this write up, the person responsible wasn’t thrown under any buses because regular expressions are hard and difficult to test definitively in many cases. This also reminds me of how easy it is to break many things at great speed when you have a pile of automation in your stack and that automation not only doesn’t fix everything but can make small issues global pretty quickly.
Anyway, it was nice to see a comprehensive write up of what happened that didn’t lay blame on any individual human or service. Reading this also made me clench with fear since I have the opportunity to make mistakes like this, albeit nowhere near the scale of this one, all the time and often under pressure.
Ok, so the title is a bit misleading. I do object to huge scale companies crushing smaller and nimbler competitors out of existence to quash any competition and doing so with the size and influence that comes with that size instead of making a better product. As someone who touches the administrator back end of Office 365 every day at work, Microsoft is pushing Teams absurdly hard right now. The popular opinion right now is that Microsoft is trying to smoosh Slack into grease. That doesn’t seem unrealistic but after using their sterile and half baked product in a test drive I have to say that Slack at least feels like does what it was intended to do. In my case means that my co-workers can skirt any ticketing/change management process and just bombard me with requests that it would be awesome if I could “just do real quick.”
I wish I could say that I was surprised by the outcry over the fact that digital assistants like the Google Home actually record audio of your requests. I don’t actually have a problem with this in my own house since I’ve largely transitioned over from Amazon devices to Google devices that have a mechanism for disabling listening for wake words. Google filled in some of the blanks about how this data is used so hopefully people are a little less afraid of the all hearing ports of our robot overlords for the moment.
I overslept a bit this morning because my phone stopped being a phone and became a shiny black paperweight. After putting my phone on Pixel Stand last night and falling asleep, my phone decided to take a dirt nap about 3 hours later. I was incredibly frustrated as my super expensive flagship phone turned into garbage for what seems like software reasons. If I actually owned this phone it likely would’ve ended up smashed into malfunctional pieces. I don’t so I took my angst out on other things.
I woke up and decided that I was super tired of dealing with modern blogging software since most kinds have turned into CMS projects that I am completely disinterested in hammering into something resembling a blog. I was using Textpattern but didn’t feel like spending a bunch of time retooling the entire application just to suit my needs. I’m not really that interested in PHP development so my eyes glaze over pretty quickly. I took a quick trip to Anchor CMS land and didn’t like that so much either. I ended up on Serendipity because it did most of what I wanted straight out of the box and is much easier to modify than any of the others that I’ve rolled out albeit temporarily. I’m not super crazy about Markdown either so having issues just toggled to a code view was a deal breaker for me. This just does what I want it to and I can change the things I don’t like. Win!
So, much later today, I discovered that I’m going to be phoneless for something around 10 days which would be painful enough by itself but is made agonizing by the fact that I fucking live in systems connected to mandatory MFA these days. The Google support person I interacted with was completely nice but ultimately both Google and Sprint completely failed me.
Ah, I finally got an answer to whether needing to power wash my Pixelbook was my fault or something screwy in the Beta channel. I got bit by Play Store claims it has no network connection issue that I didn’t really see in any of the Android apps that I use. It was a nuisance though and something I probably wouldn’t have bothered working my way through if I wasn’t too exhausted to leave my couch last night. I’m mostly at fault for running the beta channel but I’m on board with being able to postpone updates in ChromeOS until I have time to research whether crazy amounts of shit is going to break. I’m back on the Stable channel for the moment. We’ll see how long that lasts.