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Why is Microsoft so hell bent on making this security nightmare?

Like, even putting the security dangers aside, it's such a weird usability misthink (IMO; I'm sure some segment of users would appreciate it.) Like, you sort of need to embrace the ephemeral nature of day-to-day digital, and take steps to recognize what you want to preserve, and come up with a mechanism and structure that works for you to preserve it. Leaning on the computer playing "Little Big Brother" as a convenience feature is no way to live.

I think of parallel examples from a simpler age: bookmark managers. Every browser would like to be your main bookmark repository, since that increase the browsers value (and "stickiness") to you. But early on, I took the HTML page that Netscape Navigator was using internally to store your bookmarks (yes I'm old) and put that on my rented webspace. (yes I'm an old geek) Then I could use any browser at work or home and do my own conscious curation of what bookmarks were worth keeping.

(As an old geek aside: I am appalled at the universality of linkrot. A Good URL can and should live forever, us old school geeks thought, and I try to live up to that with my personal sites - but this seems to be an increasingly rare approach, and maybe one in fifteen links I have on my old 90s bookmarks page still works)

Similarly, a lot of product lines try to lure users with being able to pick up on one device where another one leaves off - like handing off from a phone's browser to the laptop or vice versa. I'm not a purist against cross-device sharing - I rely on Apple's shared clipboard fairly often - but making a "seamless" handoff seems like a fool's errand to me, and as likely to startle the user as to be helpful - they are different devices with different use modes, and when the need to transfer does occur.... I mean that's what URLs have always been for.

This isn't a black and white issue. There are some kind of "ease of use" features I depend on - like I don't usually need my browser to record my bookmarks, but I DO lean on autocomplete for website URLs pretty heavily, and if i switch to a completely new machine it's a pain in the butt for a few days. But recording all my activity via screengrabs (and recording lots of stuff as plain text?) What a disastrous mixup of "can" and "should", one of the most idiotic paths in the current AI arms race.

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Interesting exercise tips for us olds. This space left blank. But there's too much intentionality in the world as it is. good lord cora's new bunny is a ball, with a face from the mouse in Spirited Away

Intelligence is to win an argument. Wisdom is to not argue in the first place.

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Progressives can often get jealous of other countries - stuff like universal health care, sane gun laws, etc. But here's a fun list of 25 Random Things Americans Didn't Know The Rest Of The World Was Jealous Of...

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so we're just powering through hot drunk trainwreck summer without processing all the grief, I love this for us it's like Hemingway going to the French Riviera after WWI

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via

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Reading about Weirdest Things Escape Room Employees have Witnessed, it sort of reminds me - I don't think I'll ever have an urge to do an Escape Room. (Yeah, I might be persuaded someyear, but just to be social.)

Mid-career and the trajectory seemingly established, comfortable in a role that's generally as "senior independent contributor" and not a manager... at my last job I was reporting to people significantly younger than myself. An anecdote about those young, more ambitious folks - beyond the way they seemed willing to devote more time and after hours attention to their jobs, one time when we were setting up crude online Pictionary for quarantine fun, they seemed more inclined to crank up the difficulty even before they knew what the game was.

I consider it a bit of a weakness that I am challenge adverse and prefer tasks that don't risk deflating my puffed up ego, but I still just don't deeply get "challenge for its own sake". Challenge for the sake of some other creative goal, yes.

Conversely, "challenge for its own sake" is good because then you get practice at standing up to those other more meaningful challenges. So there's something to it. Still, I prefer games and interactions that encourage creativity and innovation in myself and others.

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Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

Tying into the last ramble, I apply that same lens to games. A think-y strategy board game is generally less interesting than a nice conversation over beers.

What seems to have changed in our psyches was a great catastrophic event--probably related to climate change--that decimated our ranks about 135,000 years ago. At that time, the entire population of the subspecies that we now call human plummeted to just six hundred.

Man that is a crazy scary number!

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The creative adult is the child who has survived.

Le Guin resents the misattribution and considers the sentiment vapid, which kind of bums me out because I like it, for sometimes all too obvious reasons. I have to think a bit about Latitude and Longitude to do Porchfest website maps - especially when I try to tweak their position in an X/Y axis kind of way. The other day I posted on FB (and here)

Honestly the only way I keep track of Latitude vs Longitude is the old beer commercial (Corona?) that says "change your latitude", i.e. think in a more southernly climes way...

Some of my friends responded with some interesting devices to remember which is which:

• Liz: "Longitude is long. Latitude is Fat."
• Dave A: "Latitude lines are horizontal like the rungs of a ladder. That's how I have always remembered it, even though that's a stretch of a mnemonic."
• Tim: I remember learning it with the second-letter correspondence... L(A)ttitue runs e(A)st to west. L(O)ngitue runs n(O)rth to s(O)uth.

I tried visualizing all of these, but none of them seem helpful. I realize maybe it's because I'm a "interactional" thinker - each of these describe how the lines look when inscribed on a globe (latitude is fAT, or like lAdder rungs, or running EAst to West) but my visualization is more "what number changes as I travel north to south, say?" - kind of the exact opposite of Tim's method.

I think this may be an example of "nouns vs verbs" thinking. I feel it's a spectrum for many folks - probably "bathtub curve" shaped. It's pretty abstract, but I think many programmers think in nouns, and they're the ones who love Object Oriented programming, and Declarative program -- "lets start with what you are, and then fill in what you do, or how you do it" while I'm always more concerned with "what are we doing, how are we interacting". Second Best Photos of 2016 - though to be honest I think some of these might be better than some of the "Best" I posted yesterday...

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via @chapien who calls it the Tumblr Thread to End All Tumblr Threads RIP Muhammad Ali... (I respect his change of name and identity, but Cassius Clay was the coolest name I've ever heard...)
It's amazing how many of these are so poetic... like to us, they're just cliches, but when you think about using them for the first time, so many are really beautiful.
Ben Fry, as one of the inventors of the toolkit Processing (the thing I make so many of my toys and games in) is kind of a hero of mine. He currently runs Fathom, a company that does awesome interactive data visualizations. I got to see him speaking at a Thomson Reuters "Knowledge Worker Innovation" series:

(a 2 minute tl;dr highlights version is available as well.)

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Saw a firefly on the bike ride back from the UU tonight. Fireflies and daylight that lasts and lasts and lasts; the 2 things I really miss about summers in Cleveland.
A form of digital signage new to me, on NJ Transit-- dig the font!
--via Man, I am generally helpless without a bottle opener.

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Some things I know and some things I don't.

I loved Boingboing's response:

Man. And you know, it's not just the ignorance, it's the ignorance warped by political agenda.

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Vehicles Built and Driven by Animals. Nature is amazing. A classic routine of Bob Newhart's:

Hello, Mr. Nelson. This is Sam Hennessy, the new guard. Sir, I hate to bother you at home like this on my first night, but, uh, something's come up and it's not covered in the guard's manual... Yeah, I looked in the index, yes, sir. I looked under unauthorized personnel and people without passes and apes and apes' toes...Apes and apes' toes, yes, sir. There's an ape's toe sticking through the window, sir... See, this isn't your standard ape, sir. He's between eighteen and nineteen stories high, depending on whether there is a thirteenth floor or not... Sir, I'm sure there's a rule against apes shaking the building... There is, yes, sir. So I yelled at his feet. I said, "Shoo, ape," and "I'm sorry but you are going to have to leave."... I know how like the new men to think on their feet, so I went to the broom closet and I got out a broom without signing out a requisition on it... I will tomorrow, yes sir... And I started hitting him on the toes with it. It didn't bother him much... See, there are these planes and they are flying around and shooting at him and they only seem to be bothering him a little bit, so I figured I wasn't doing too much good with a broom. Did I try swatting him in the face with it? Well, I was going to take the elevator up to his head, but my jurisdiction only extends to his navel. You don't care what I do... just get the ape off the building. This may complicate things a little--he's carrying a women in his hand, sir... No, I don't think she works in the building, no, sir... As he passed by my floor... she has kind of a negligee on, so I doubt very much she's one of the cleaning women. Well, sir, the first thing I did was I filled out a report on it. Well, I don't want to give the building a bad name either, sir, but I doubt very much if we can cover it up, sir. The planes are shooting at him, and people are going to come to work in the morning and some of them are going to notice the ape in the street and the broken window, and they will start putting two and two together. I think we're safe on that score, sir. I doubt very much if he signed the book downstairs. You don't care what I do... just get the ape off the building. Well, I came up with one idea. I thought maybe I could smear the Chrysler Building with bananas...

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Can barely believe the downpour I was caught in last evening. Ran 100 yards and got drenched through. Forgot rain can work like that.

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[Books] are sad as zeppelins are sad; they wish to soar, but they are using a technology that is old, largely forgotten, and highly flammable.

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My secret unlikely hope for a WWDC announcement: GarageBand for iPad. (I'd be happy for some other roughly equivalent app...)
--A little Weird Al "Polka Party"-ish, but fun!

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et another RIP for David Carradine - though I gotta say, if Uma Thurman did the five point palm exploding heart technique on me and I was sitting, I'd try to put off those "five steps ('til DEATH)" for as long as I could. Hope I liked the chair! (oh wait, he might've committed suicide... er, guess I shouldn't be so flippant)

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Bought a box of TuffStuff Tall Kitchen Bags (Family Dollar) - Wish I knew why they are strongly scented with vanilla. But I do like vanilla!

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Love is two crickets hopping in the same direction.

Old quote rediscovered from an old love letter

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Cleavage is not a substitute for decorum.

So Obama looks ready to claim it.

I have mixed feelings about Hillary Clinton as VP. For the most part I don't find her politics disagreeable (though I have my doubts about her Lieberman-esque puritanism) and I dig the idea of making the highest offices of the land not male-exclusive territory, but I worry about her as a lightning rod for the right, that her presence (along with "Clinton" being to right wingers what "Reagan" was to previous generations of lefties) might help McCain gather in conservatives who would otherwise look elsewhere.

At the risk of beating a dead horse, I really do wonder what life would be like with a Gore victory in 2000, what the nation's response to WTC would have been. Would we have invaded Afghanistan even? Had the same economic ups and downs, and inflation now? How would we have worked to contain Saddam? I don't want to play as if I think it'd be an unmitigated paradise, these are challenging times. But you gotta wonder, because thinking about that alternate history might provide some insight to what an Obama presidency will look like.

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Line of the Moment

Q: What's dark energy?
A: The ninety percent of everything that's crap.

Found in Crummy.com, one of the few personal blogs I've been keeping up with lately. ...

The guy intermittently writes "Medi-Yorkers" (a pun on mediocres), like

This one uses the "cocktail party" New Yorker cartoon graphic. One guy says to the other: "So, what do you drink to forget?"

which brings me to my other link, Slate on how to win the New Yorker caption contest.

Man. Those things aren't all that funny, are they? It's as bad as things that have haiku contests.

Now a good limerick contest, I can get behind. Recent one by me:

a techie whose name was jacques, it
seemed like gals wanted his rock-et
try to reach his domain
but they'd always complain
'Fatal error: Could not create socket'"

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Birthday of the Moment

--Yesterday was Mr. Ibis birthday and rather than trying to swing a trip to Florida I drew a cartoon. The joke "hippo birdy two ewe" is straight outta Hallmark but it IS personalized with an Ibis.

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Thinking about the "36 basic plots"... I have trouble thinking that abstractly, I'd love to see a list showing what real movies used which

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I find people in scrubs kind of hot. Now that I live near some big hospitals, this can be, you know, awkward.

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The Spanish Consulate is in my building... is the Spain->Mexico "feeling" similar to UK->USA? The folks have that euro-elegance...

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I carry my camera all the time as kind of totem to jujitsu murphy's law; it wards off "chinese curse" interesting/photogenic events.

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Oh for pete's sake! stupid cheap Papermate Profiles camouflaged as decent Pilot G-2s... grrr. I have to admit my study and application of Zen is laughably half-assed; maybe more like quarter-assed, given that I haven't even set myself to any kind of zazen meditation practice. In fact, I'd like to write more about it but I'm having trouble getting my thoughts in order, which is probably rather un-Zen-like in itself.

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Quote of the Moment

Not that we weren't awesome. We wrote the Constitution in the time it takes you nimrods to figure out which is the aye button and which is the nay. But we weren't gods. We were men. We had flaws. Adams was an unbearable prick and squealed girlishly whenever he saw a bug. And Ben Franklin? If crack existed in our day, that boozed-up snuff machine would weigh 80 pounds and live outside the Port Authority. And I had slaves! Damn, I can't believe I had slaves!

"America (The Book)" , a faux textbook that was really making the rounds a few years ago when I got it as a gift, but I'm only getting to it now...

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Article of the Moment
More from the War Nerd; mostly about the Tamils and their relatively low-tech air raids, and how have such a larger impact than the hardware they're using should be able to. Being so low and slow they're hard to hunt down, the enemy AA probably does more damage to the city its meant to protect than the bombs do, and the blackout is probably the most pointless aspect of it all. It reminds me a bit of a "War World" sci-fi story where the super future high tech air fighters had trouble coping with the rather retro-technology of the lost colony; specifically, the wood-and-canvas biplanes were invisible to the detection systems, and one biplane managed to take down a much superior craft by going kamikaze and getting swept into the air intake.

I like his take on the A-10 Warthog:

Take America's own A-10 Warthog. I remember back when it was in the procurement cycle, the USAF hated the A-10, bad-mouthed it every chance they got. One fighter jock said, "It's built to take a lot of hits and boy is it going to take a lot of hits." A lot of other pilots just said out loud, "It's ugly." The AF wanted to invest in another generation of flying Porsches, and the Army, naturally, tried to drag the money into up-armored choppers, resulting in the AH-64, the Y2K of attack aircraft - all hype, no kills. Little Orphan A-10, the Warthog nobody loved, ended up saving Christmas for everybody, becoming the best CAS aircraft in the world.

I think (not quite sure) that the Army is prohibited from flying its own fixed-wing attack aircraft, it being the Air Force's bailiwick, which is why they are stuck with helicopters.

Weekends can slip by so quickly.

No news yet on the EBbaby front.

For what it's worth (I noticed it didn't drum up a lot of interest, but I guess that's not too surprising) my diet continues well, and seems to have survived a birthday dinner with Ksenia's family intact.

Today I created the first version of a small web app to record and sum up daily foods and calories, which beats utlizing this site's content managment scratchpad and Windows' calculator application. I made it so that if I ever feel like having the app generate weighted moving average graphs I could ditch the Hacker's Diet Palm application entirely.

Since I name most of my little web apps "k/something", this one is "k/alorie".

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Quote of the Moment

I need to get to a library - fast

Unfortunately no one online is quite sure of the exact transcription. I love the sense of urgency to it, it gets my vote for most unlikely line so far this year.

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Site of the Moment
Patent Silly has found some very silly patents. Of course, there's always a certain percentage of these that actually might be decent patents, but only if you understand more details of the situation... still good for a grin.

Windows Hints of the Moment
Sometimes when I'm doing a lot of file manipulation from a specific folder in Windows, I find it useful to have a shortcut that opens up that folder directly. However, when I right drag with the mouse and say "Create Shortcut Here" over the start button, it tends to creat an "inplace" shortcut...an alternate view of the current contents of the folder, in a grey pane of the Start menu itself. But that view is a lot harder to work with than a usual explorer window...I want to go to the folder IN explorer itself. The easiest way to do that seems to be to rightdrag "Create a shortcut" to the desktop, then regular drag and drop that onto the start button.

Another idea: I've been trying to sometimes use the two paned explorer view (right click on a file and hit "Explore") but folders aren't always to relocate even after they're opened...in this case sometimes it's useful to rightclick on the folder in the left pane, hit "Properties", go to "Customize", click "Change Icon"...the "power (|) symbol on a red button" icon is often covenient to click on here, and easy to pick out from back in Explorer.

Hope somebody finds this vageuly useful...

First, I'd like to apologize to Peterman. I was pretty harsh yesterday. That came from a lot of pain, as well as being upset with him (and myself) even though his intentions were good and he was working to help me out. And there's even a chance it wasn't the bins that set this off, though it seems far and away the most likely suspect.

You know, I think one problem I'm going to have in the world of human interaction is I really like and enjoy sarcastic remarks and the occasional diatribe. I don't mind receiving them and I think they're a funny way of expressing feelings.

I'm not sure where that came from. I don't remember my upbringing as being that harsh-tongued.

UPDATE: I wrote the preceding, and the following, last night and pre-published. At this point I'm not all better, might even be worse. My first tries at getting out of bed ended up with me on the floor and it took me a lesuirely half hour to get to the bathroom and then down the stairs. I also got to play a game called "figure out a way to flush without leaning over or raising your knee too much", solving this puzzle by making a kind of figure-4 with my legs as I stood there and using the foot of the 4's "crossbar". (It was a low-water-usage toilet with the handle at knee rather than hip level.)

It's less severe right now, I can sit in my computer chair and stand and walk around, but I'm getting a little worried.

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Small Gif Cinema of the Moment

spin, sit

Yesterday I mentioned my new nifty phone...this Small Gif Cinema was inspired by the way the phone's video recorder uses the outer miniscreen as a viewfinder when it's closed, it just invites playing in the little "mirror" with lots of movement.

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Essay of the Moment
Put out a new issue of the Blender of Love digest last night. It included a half review, half very personal rambling essay about where I am about Me and Mo, relative to this book called "How Can I Get Through To You?" by Terrence Real. Check it out if you're so inclined.

Cheer of the Moment

Fight, fight, inner light,
Kill, quakers, kill!
Knock 'em down, beat 'em senseless,
Do it till we reach consensus!

I've only been to one Quaker meeting, alas. It reminded me of this Quaker joke I posted during the early days of kisrael.com, when I was still doing little cartoons a lot. I liked that the joke mentioned my dad's hometown of Coshocton, Ohio. Travel Photo of the Moment

I loved the curved buildings of Regent Street...

• Not quite as interesting an essay as I'd hoped, Is It Rational To Fear Death?
• Odd video game reviews and I'm not sure what else at zeroes.overclocked.org.
• Javascript geeks! View source to learn how to add this modern wonder of debugging help, the Inspector Gadget, to your own webpage! Put the name of any javascript object, and it will evaluate it, giving you a list of a compound objects component members.

• Plant a turnip
  Get a turnip
  Maybe you'll get two

  I was surprised to realize it is indeed THAT Tom Jones (2019 UPDATE: no it isn't)
• NPR had some great coverage of the body language of Senators. It's so tribal and pack oriented, it's a bit disturbing. Play the home version (well, work version) and observe this stuff in your own life!

Image of the Moment

From my old Tufts homepage. A guy at the Mac lab helped me cut out my picture (from a photo of me on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty) and came up with the weird idea for the background. I don't think the word "paradigm" was quite so overused in those pre-dotcom days

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Link of the Moment
Interesting tool at the U.S. Census Bureau that lets find the ranking of first and last names. "Israel" is the 2962th most popular last name in the United States, and "Kirk" is 288th for guys...(edged out by "Kurt" at 249...is that why people keep folding my name into that?) (via Bill the Splut)

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Quote of the Moment

Albert Camus won the Nobel Prize for his novel The Stranger, which says, in effect, that life is meaningless. But that novel's dust jacket carried a paragraph reporting that Camus died in a car wreck in 1960. It should have added, "Not that it matters."

Guess all the work going into this month's Blender Digest didn't give me much time for the journal today...

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Quote of the Moment

Broken hearts are broken open, at least for a while.