rant and rave

This is where ranting and raving occurs. Venting. Blowing things out of proportion. That kind of thing.

goodbye Firefox, or on Edge

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I’ve given up on something I’ve used for … a long time.

Firefox.

I have my replacement Surface Pro 4 tablet and am setting it up the way I want it.  I installed Firefox ver. 64.x.  It stole half an hour yesterday and 45 minutes of this morning’s time out of my life to figure out why Ctrl + Tab and Ctrl + Shift + Tab was not working.  I went through the web trying things like nVidia / GForce, antivirus, and other software that this tablet does not have.  I finally found a blog somewhere that said I needed to go back to an older version of Firefox to get this feature back.

Well why the hell did they change it in the first place?

Good bye, Firefox.  Last straw.  I’m on Edge now.

a pretty good attempt

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I received an email from “Apple”, or “iTunes” a bit ago.  I have to admit, this is one of the better looking spam emails I’ve gotten.  They even took the time to encode each character so as not to be recognized by Yahoo! Mail as being crap.  However, there is an error.  Can you spot the error?

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NGM Bible hunters

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I got an email today from National Geographic.  They have a series called Bible Hunters.  Some investigative journalism on the history of the Bible, I guess, which is all well and good.  It’s a pretty well-known set of texts (if not accurately known).

But I was also watching a YouTube video produced by National Geographic called The Bible’s Buried Secrets National Geographic Documentary HD.  I very rarely see such bias ‘journalism’ from reputable names like yours.  My comments:

This video begins interesting but not too much later gives a poor impression. At 12:00, the video loses ground (no pun intended). Genesis chapter 8 states the rains lasted 40 days & nights. It says the water subsided, not the rains, after 150 days. These are two different concepts. One sentence states it rain, and one states the waters started receding. As well, it clearly states that first a raven was sent out and then, later, a dove. Why is this contradictory? It seems to me that it isn’t. I thought this documentary would rely on ‘documents’ (“documentary”?), but so far it doesn’t hold water (again, no pun intended). It’s like someone saying, “I ate eggs for breakfast and pasta for lunch,” and someone else saying, “Well which is it – which did you eat – eggs or pasta?”

So forgive me, NGM; although I have thoroughly enjoyed your magazines, have a collection of them in paper and electronic form, and have a library of your videos, your journalism shows your true colours.

National Geographic Magazine collectoin 20181216_145317.jpg
National Geographic Video Collections DVD set 20181216_145439.jpg
National Geographic, 109 Years of National Geographic Magazine on CD-ROM 20181216_145407.jpg

not funny … not at all

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I watch a show or movie to relax, have fun, be happy.  I don’t want more violence.  While watching New Girl S1E12 (comedy on Netflix), a guy in a parking lot pulls a gun and threatens people with violence.  Funny?  Sorry, crossed the line.  Too much s*** like that.  If that’s comedy, then I don’t want it.  Not in my house.  American culture, perhaps.  Not mine.  Last weekend a guy in the States killed 11 people at a synagogue.  Think family members would think this episode is funny?  I cancelled my Netflix account.

 

privacy policy needed, apparently

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I was about to put another entry onto the ongoing letter.  I got a message from WordPress, the software that runs my ongoing letter, saying that I should probably have a ‘privacy policy’.

Personal Data and Privacy

Personal Data Export and Erasure

New Tools have been added to help you with personal data export and erasure requests.

Privacy Policy

Create or select your site’s privacy policy page under Settings > Privacy to keep your users informed and aware.

Bloody hell.  I clicked to view the next page.

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cannabis legalization

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Happy Cannabis Legalization Day, Glenn.

My brother, Glenn, had always been an advocate of this.  I really can’t say when he first started using it.  Near the end of his life, though, he quit for some reason.  He quit alcohol, too.  He continued to smoke cigarettes though.  Nonetheless, ‘pot’ had always been an important part of his life.

It’s hard to know what impact this will have on everyone out there.  I think there are more important concepts for newscasters to cover, but this is the big topic everyone is talking about.  Mom is no longer taking medical cannabis, but she still has a prescription for the next month or so.  No, she won’t start using it again.  She used it for 3 weeks.

I personally will continue to defend my right to clean air.  This basic right overrides any pot smoker’s rights.  If I have a glass of beer, the person next to me won’t get drunk.  It’s contained.  Pot smoke is not, not is cigarette smoke or diesel fumes or farts.  Some things we can’t help, some we can minimize, and some we have to regulate with laws.  The same with noise or light pollution – there are rules.

I was with MV, FM, & their two kids at Waterton, AB, a while back.  There was a guy smoking pot on the beach maybe 150m away from us.  I walked toward to guy and politely asked him to not smoke that here.  “I’m here with a family, with kids.  I don’t want that here.”  “Seriously?” he said aggressively.  “You want me to stop?”  “Yes.”  I stood there while he thought about what he was going to do.  He was twice my size, but right doesn’t care who says it.  Right is right.  That’s it.  There are kids here, and you’re not going to smoke it.  After a few minutes, he and his partner left.

Too bad you’re not around to enjoy this day, Glenn.

driverless cars – seriously?

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I saw an article by BBC on autonomous taxis.

Why you have (probably) already bought your last car

I wrote on Twitter in response:

17 seconds ago

Replying to

How about RV drivers who take their rigs camping? Driving 14 hours from Calgary to Vancouver on mountain highways, dead of winter, 3 feet of snow? How about family trips, stopping at a roadside historic information sign? Not all travel is commute. This utopia does not compute.

I pile camping crap into my car and head off into the hills.  How would that work with an all-electric, self-driving car?  I go off-road in my little Kia, climbing up a mud and gravel hill on a logging road for excitement.  The Kia performs well.  Could an autonomous electric taxi replace my car?  Don’t think so.  I’m accident free since 1987, driving in large cities, on long highways, through blizzard conditions, daytime and at night.  Long time.  Loooong time.  No way in hell an autonomous car will take my license away.

Now if you’re talking about a car that can drive by itself, with the driver taking over at any point he / she wishes to, I’d be into that.  Sure, why not?  But, in a city the size of Lethbridge, I really can’t see how it could be useful.  Downtown Seoul?  Sure.

later

Just curious – Google (advocates of self-driving cars) collects a lot of data from lots of people, like our travel habits.  Does it know how much travel I do that isn’t part of my daily work commute?

Google Console and searches

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It occurred to me a while back that my websites were not searchable in Google, Ask.com, Yahoo!, Duckduckgo, or anything else.  Why?  Didn’t people search for seaweed soup or ESL classes?  Weren’t people interested?  I was hurt!  Not really, but it was weird nonetheless.  Back in the day, when static HTML pages ruled and students logged in, my website was searched for many times.

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the The (the article)

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Long ago someone asked me why I said, “my wife,” as though she belonged to me.  That someone was a man-hating feminist vegan lesbian artist.  I gave her a ride home once.  She seemed nice.  I didn’t know she had a hate-on for men at the time.  I was just offering a ride home.  “Do you own her?  Does she belong to you?” she asked.  I jokingly said, “No, I think she owns me.”  That didn’t go over well.  No, “belong to” in my thinking doesn’t mean “ownership”.  It means “membership”, as in “I belong to this group”.  A member of a team.  Without the team (read: community), I am incomplete.  Without me, the team (again, the community) is incomplete.  I should have started with that!

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