My wife is looking for a Wifi network security camera for the daycare. Ideally, we want one that we can set up an account on a remote server with a username and password that we share with parents.
Anybody have any suggestions?
I visit a few threads here, on reasonable topics - like Barrett Brown case, etc.
The level of discourse has really troughed. It's like "conversation" between the Dufflepuds..
It's not worth even trolling these people. There isn't enough signal-to-noise for this to even register.
When people complain about Facebook, for example, I have basically no idea what they're talking about, because I've never been on it. I avoided Myspace, and Linkedin, and whatever else. The good thing about being very late to jump on trends is that you can avoid some entirely. I'm glad I'm not on any of those services because I've heard (later on that) they're sleazy.
FASHION
I still have a CRT (non-digital) television set. That's my only one. I still get non-digital, standard-def cable TV. I still record all my desired stuff on a VCR. The thing is, all that stuff still works, so I'm loathe to chuck it just because it's comically out of touch. Still, it's 2015 and the thought's crossed my mind, I might move it all to the bedroom and buy myself an HD screen for downstairs, and then figure out if a DVR is something you buy in a store or if it's something you can only rent via your cable co. or if it's something that's not a box in your home but a service you stream from you cable co.
At least then I wouldn't sound like an idiot talking with coworkers sometimes. Many of my adoptions of trends have been based on that. I was the last of my friends to get an answering machine. Remember those? I still have one. No not the tapes kind; I didn't jump on these until they were all non-mechanical by then. You might remember them associated with those old land line things, that we all used to have. Still have a land line. And still pay for long distance service, now that I think about it, and not sure why.
I was the last of my cohorts to get a cell phone, a small Nokia brickphone that everyone had (for a year or better) at the time. Then I was last to have that, and even though it worked fine, I spent $99 to move to a basic flipphone, only because everyone had those by then, and I was starting a new job, and didn't want to look like an idiot. What a reason to spend $100!
I plan on looking for a new job this spring, so just a few weeks ago I got my first ever smartphone. (Which one? Let's just say that I've now joined all the iDiots, I'm sorry to say.) The flipphone isn't broken, it's just unfashionable! So now I've gone from a $100 phone to a $650 one, and a little more than doubled my monthly service payment for it, just to learn about the smartphone world so I don't say something and reveal myself to be too far behind the times at a next job.
I got a netbook at the very end of that trend. But short-sightedly, I got one with Windows XP instead of Vista Home, for performance reasons, and now while it works just fine, I can't use it for anything serious because it's unsecured. And now that I have a smartphone, which boots to being able to check something on the web even faster, dunno what I'll use a perfectly good netbook for. It did get a fair amount of use for note-taking in classes (it's a Sammy 12" with a near-laptop-sized keyboard, which I needed to be able to touch type on it), so maybe I got my money's worth. (But how will I get my money's worth on the smartphone?)
AHEAD
I have been ahead of trends a couple of times in my life. In college I bought myself a Hayes 1200 baud modem (around $400 at the time; a *lot* for a ramen-eating [I miss those] starving college student back then) and was one of only a few at my college who did their homework on their home computer and then dialed in to upload it and, re-run it already developed and debugged on the school's system, and print it on the campus main printer. The only time I was in computer labs after my freshman year was to work (paid) in them. (Okay and for late-night study/party sesssions with my homies if I had been scheduled for some closing shifts and it was nearish the end of the semester.)
I also got the idea from a coworker at my first job back in the early 90's to fax one's resume to places. I know for a fact that that technique got me one of my jobs, as after I started there I found out the lady who placed the ad, with her company email address, promptly left, and no one was checking that account for resumes! But faxing resumes may not have ever gotten wildly popular, so what it was I was ahead of might not qualify as a trend I guess.
INVISIBLE
The good thing about not having gotten caught up in the social media trend is that I'm invisible on the interwebs. I use a robots meta tag with noindex/nofollow in my personal web space, that I only remove for the duration of looking for another job. I may be getting dinged in a job search by not being findable on social media, but at least then I can have *some* (controlled) web presence. Hopefully that's okay going forward.
I don't use my real name here, and have never revealed any personally identifiable info, such as things that would give away what city I live in or where I work. Since [goes and looks it up] 2004 the Slashdot journal system has enabled me to say what I really think (I mean politically; I'm a not necrophiliac or some other kind of societally-shunned weirdo besides being Conservative), without it possibly affecting hiring decisions. Just have to exercise a little care, and think before hitting Submit.
Actually I can be found, with some political/religious views exposed, in Usenet archives. At least in the programming forums on Usenet, back then, if you used a pseudonym you weren't taken seriously.
But it's near impossible to get that far in a web search, because, luckily, there's someone with my name and middle initial, in my region, who's a prolific writer. And later hits show someone who has their own business. So I got lucky in having a shadow for my name that seems to go on and on in the search results.
Who knows how exposed I am on Monster and Dice. They don't let you actually delete your account, just flag that you're not actively looking, as I recall. Some of my spam may be from any schlub with a few bucks creating a faux employer's account and trawling for victims. Same if I decide to try one or more dating sites this year. I'll have to really think hard about what I want to put out there (but to still make it hopefully worthwhile). Not that I think Monster and Dice and eHarmony and Match would sell me directly, like I've heard Facebook and Linkedin have, but that they'd not worry about being too careful about who they sell privileges to view my account to.
Beyond that Amazon knows tons about me. Probably Google as well, as I had to sign up for Google Groups once for a class, which tied my name to my IP address at the time. Probably browser fingerprinting, in my IP block, continues to identify me after my ISP issues me a new dynamic address. So I started using Bing last year, but I don't always remember to.
THE BAD
Being late to trends means, well, when I had hair on my head to really speak of, I was usually behind in hairstyles. In elementary school I just had a mop head of hair, but then in jr high I noticed everyone had moved to a center part. Who knows how long before that had happened. Then in high school a side part came in, so before I went off to college I figured I'd better finally lose my center parting.
Until last year when I said eff it and am now buzzing the top of my head, my side part had turned into a comb-over, without me noticing it, as my hair gradually thinned on top. So I had the side part for almost 30 years, completely skipping the moussed front sticking up thing. And of course then the Justin Bieber swirlie thing, although which I guess no one my age ever went to.
And I've skipped the goatee thing, retaining the moustache that my face started growing in 7th grade. So I've looked like a 70's porn star all this time (I would imagine!). No bit of fuzz growing under the bottom lip. Thought that may have been a short and/or non-widespread trend.
No tattoos or piercings. I think that makes me really behind the times. After watching a few seasons of Naked and Afraid, it's occurred to me that basically *everyone* now has a tattoo.
Clothing styles don't permeate my brain until they've been around long enough that they're just about to die off. I still wear polos to work. I still wear very light blue jeans and white tennis shoes on Fridays, even though I think that pristine look went out long ago. Everything's dark colors now. I'm so sick of black (especially in car interiors). I need to wear light, bright things half the time or it's depressing. And my dark colors load gets too big and the light colors cold load too small.
And finally another bad thing about being late to trends is, I hate pop songs when they first come out, and I don't give popular TV shows a chance. Their overwhelming popularity overwhelms me and makes me revulse. But then years later I get in to a show in re-runs, and then no one gets my references! Or I hear a song from a prior era, that's pathetically locked style-wise in that era, and it's stuck in my head and I hum it and people think I'm dangerous.
I noticed I was asked to meta-moderate. I thought I had turned both M1 and M2 off. Anyone remember how to get to that screen?
For that matter, anyone remember how to get to the screen where you can adjust +/- modifiers on posts, based on various criteria?
I had saved some links in the old URL format (/x.pl?op=y), but apparently not these.
Ah yes, we've just completed the boring off-year political cycle, which means it's time for the billion dollar roller coaster ride that is the quadrennial US presidential contest.
Except that, thanks to the right-wing retards, all the excitement has been well and truly drained out of what used to be one of my favourite pastimes. Their race to the bottom, still unchecked, means that Hillary Rodham Clinton is your next Oval Office Occupant. How the fuck am I supposed to enjoy the ups and downs of what used to be way more of an "Any Given Sunday" situation when the results are so predictable?
"Bu...but...but", I hear you say.
Oh fine, I'll humour your delusional asses.
HILLARY CAN BE PRIMARIED FROM THE LEFT. "It happened before! Liberals aren't fond of hawks!" And who the fuck is gonna primary her? Biden? Warren? Cuomo? Don't make me laugh.
A LOT CAN HAPPEN IN 2 YEARS! Sure it can. But apart form the fact that that argument cuts all kinds of ways and is thus useless, the "something" that's going to need to happen for HRC not to be elected Prez is going to have to be Extinction-Level Event sized. You go ahead and count your black swans before they hatch, see what that gets you.
PEOPLE JUST DON'T LIKE HER. Well yeah, if you're Railgunner. Meanwhile, to ordinary people, she's just a high-visibility politician.
YEAH BUT $REPUBLICAN CONTENDER CAN TAKE HER! Really? Let's see who's currently in the lineup:
Rick Perry: Either he's burnishing his stock to improve his post-political career earnings, or one of his advisers thinks they've ironed out all those glitches that made him a laughingstock even to members of his own party. The only way he makes it past Super Tuesday is because he has a nice smile.
Scott Walker: The stunning thing about the Wisconsin Governor is that he's somehow managed to convince donors that winning over white people in a medium-size state as well as surviving a recall election makes him both unstoppable on the way to the White House, and secretly the most amazing potential president EVAR. I really hope he does run, watching the 'electability' bloom come off that rose will be fun to read about.
Jeb Bush: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. The base won't even touch him with a ten foot pole, and the general electorate, faced with two different versions of recycled crap, will always vote for the one they remember more fondly.
Chris Christie: Oooooh, a Republican even Democrats could vote for! Yeah, maybe 10 or 20 years ago. Anyway, forgetting the millions of problems that would hound a Christie run, I suspect his biggest will be he doesn't' have the stomach or the endurance to really go the distance. In fact, I think he's also smart enough to know not to run, which is sad, because he'd be the only one with any moderate cred, and non-crazy Republicans are already feeling pretty unloved these days.
Rand Paul: Never thought I'd see the day when a presidential candidate came along that would make Ron Paul look sane. I guess crazy is contagious.
Ted Cruz: Let's pretend for a minute that Ted isn't the poster child for everything that's wrong about the GOP these days, the US electorate will never overwhelmingly vote for a Canadian with a whiny voice.
Paul Ryan: Remember Sarah Palin? You don't? There you go.
Marco Rubio: Theoretically, he's almost perfect. And in a non-insane world, he would be the man to beat this cycle. And even then, a disciplined Clinton machine could still keep him 5 points away.
Someone wake me for 2024. maybe things will get interesting again.
As seen on TV just tonight, proof that zombies have now gone mainstream in our culture: Restless Arm, Creepy Holden, and Lifeless Lisa.
It's a pretty standard trope, but one that libertarians do not seem to believe can possibly exist. And it is a blind spot in economic justice in the United States of America.
The Lion and his Fellow Hunters, By Aesop
Once, a lion, a fox, a jackal, and a wolf went hunting. They caught a stag and killed it, and quartered the meat. "This quarter," said the lion, "is for me, as I am the King of Beasts. And this quarter is mine as the arbiter of the spoils. The third quarter is mine because of my part in chasing down the stag. And as for the fourth â" well, I'd like to see any of you dare to put so much as a paw on it." The other three animals were bitterly disappointed, but they slunk away, unwilling or unable to fight for their share of the meat.Just because you help a lion doesn't mean he'll share.
So remember boys and girls, just because you help a rich man to run his business, does not mean he'll share the profits with you. Which leads us right back to an entirely Different Leo and his successors.
So I'm waiting in the Wendy's drive-thru after work tonight, and there's an ad on the radio I guess from the BSA. It said software piracy is not only wrong, it's illegal.
Doesn't "not only x, but also y" mean "as if x wasn't bad enough, there's also y"? When you use that rhetorical structure, aren't you going in increasing badness about something? Saving the worst for last, for the most dramatic effect and hopefully to seal the persuasion deal?
So now something being against the law carries more convincing force than something being wrong. I guess the needles of the moral compasses of most these days spin wildly instead of track steady. And without the force of government we'd be ethically lost.
Reminds of seeing on Cops a few weeks ago, teen gets arrested for taking a gun to an argument, luckily the cops stop things before anyone gets hurt, and dad is at the station talking to the young lad, very disappointed, and says son, don't you know you could get tried as an adult for killing someone? WTF? Because that's worse than ending another human being's life?!? That's why you shouldn't murder people?!?
p.s. Also heard on the radio tonight some announcer pronounce the TLD of that web site as oh arr gee. Made me think, I want a
Rights are distributive (with our Freedom of Association).
A x C + B x C = (A + B) x C
A = me
B = you
C = the right of Free Speech, in this example
Us speaking together is the same as you and I speaking separately, as far as the government should be concerned. To remove the C factor from the rhs, is to also remove it from the left.
An AC posted to my last JE, a kind of user I don't normally read posts from, but I was convinced he is someone who is on my Friends list. Because my response got long, and by posting AC he might not see it and notice the opportunity to say how I'm wrong about something, I've just made a new JE out of it.
If an entity doesn't get to vote in the ballot, that entity has no business influencing votes.
But the entities we're talking about here are not some kind of disembodied mysteries. They're us. It's a violation of my rights to have to shut up because I formed a business with someone or joined a union or a church or whatever. I as a legal citizen of the U.S. have the God-given right to free speech, of which political speech is especially "sacred" (in a democracy), no matter my associations.
Okay, that is, except in the capacity of an agent of the government. Our rights (are designed to) protect us from government, so if you take a job with the government, that's voluntary, and you don't have free speech on the job. So cops can't proselytize while they're writing you a ticket, and teachers, well, shouldn't be allowed to brainwash kids with their Leftist garbage. But if I want to run a grocery store where the check-out people try to convert you, or tell you who to vote for, that's my right. (And then you can decide whether to shop there or not.)
I'm okay with politicians being beholden to corporations. Or unions. Or environmental groups. Or the NRA. Or the Mormon Church (I'm not Mormon). As long as that makes them also aligned with their constituents. And if it's not, then bad on the voters. How can we expect accountability for politicians when we won't hold ourselves accountable?
A politician comes into office with (hopefully) some dead-set beliefs, and some that they haven't gotten all the information on yet and are potentially swayable (or are issues they just don't care about either way). The most concerned about an issue raise it with their representative, and attempt to persuade him/her. Those that aren't really concerned about an issue, don't. So the politician decides based on which side of the issue seems the most important to his/her constituents.
Lobbying is pure, wholesome Americana. You can pay someone to do it, or do it yourself(s). On an FNC special one weekend during one of the more recent times the EPA or whatever was trying to make life hard for a rancher, members of the family flew to D.C. to speak to someone to state their case. I personally think it's ridiculous that they couldn't get time while their rep was in town, and that legislators should be part-timers somehow, but I haven't thought that completely through and it's a separate issue.
But special interests, despite thinking certain ones are okay and others are not, is what we all are, and is not a reason to shut people up in violation of their rights. I for example am a walking set of special interests like, as a male I would like to see equality in reproductive rights among others, as a programmer I want the importation of competing slave labor stopped, etc. If I form a software business with some people, I would want those who would apply progressively more and more costly regulations on that venture with my life's savings at risk to not be elected. Denying me free speech, in whichever of my private capacities I'm engaging in, is immoral.
Without knowing the person, if someone says free speech is okay only except for corporations, to me that's not so much a position on speech as it is on corporations. If someone thinks corporations are evil and therefore should be excluded from x (among others), well, to me that's not a reason. I don't like the vast millions that the unions donate or that George Soros' various front groups donate, but I believe they have the right.
p.s. On a much less serious note, in case anyone reading this missed it, a couple of funnies (well of course I think the first one was funny): http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=6180957&cid=48459463
New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman
