Odds and Ends Again

I once wrote a humorous story about how my opinion might not be worth as much as a rat’s butt. The price of rat’s butt has gone up…

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge: That business in Oregon of militia types holing up in an unused BLM building, supposedly in response to the Feds playing too rough with a rancher and his family, is not what it appears to be. Some of the folks inside that building are known federal agents. Even from a position totally outside the patriot militia movement, or the larger so-called Liberty Movement for that matter, I have no trouble spotting them. This whole thing is drama, and while it is a form of terrorism, some part of the US government is sponsoring both sides. The Cult doesn’t care how it turns out because it’s just one more bump in a long, rough road. Don’t get involved, not even verbally, with what appears to be an actual dispute; there are no good guys in the primary dispute.

As a side note, you won’t hear much about a third party — at least one Native American tribe is affected by all of this. The BLM holds a lot of tribal claims in so-called custodial care. The BLM plays rough with refusing to give the tribes proper access and use, but won’t properly protect their interests by going after violators. Instead, the BLM simply abuses everyone except those inside the federal government. If you can’t understand why a heart-led religion pays so much attention to native tribes, you don’t understand heart-led living itself. On the other hand, I’m not impressed with the rhetoric from the tribal representatives.

It’s not that advertisers don’t get it; they have no intention of listening. You have to be some part psychopath to do what advertisers do, particularly online.

The war against ad blockers didn’t start when users began using the software. It started when online outlets refused to understand that content is advertising and advertising is content, and if any part of that equation is bad, the whole thing falls apart. There’s a reason why users use ad blockers after all: many online ads suck harder than a vacuum cleaner looking for love. But they don’t have to. Everyone has their stories about ads they have liked or loved. Some readers will always block ads, but not most of them. If ads were good and fun, they wouldn’t need to be blocked and users wouldn’t want to block them. Fix that and the war on ad blocking can be retired.

The biggest issue right now is the abuse of online ad services as the vector for malware. The people who run the ad services on the Net generally refuse to make any effort to prevent crooks injecting malware through the service. The technology already exists to block almost all of that. In my opinion, until the “drive-by malware infections” stop entirely, it won’t matter if advertising gets more entertaining. I’ll block as much advertising as I possibly can, and help all my ministry clients do the same.

In the real world, managing apartments can make your hair turn gray early. I consider myself pretty realistic. The maintenance guys recently fixed a leak under my kitchen sink. I started it by replacing the cut-off valve that was leaking. Then a much smaller leak developed in the supply hose attached to it. You start moving that older stuff around and it can break. But they didn’t just fix that little leak; they replaced the faucets and supply lines altogether. On the other hand, they would hardly fix the beat-up facings on the front door-frame. They aren’t paying the electric bill. So some of your donations go for things like wood epoxy putty to rebuild a battered door facing, and new insulation trim around the door frame or on the door itself. The local hardware store takes PayPal for online orders that I can pick up from the store same day. Now the front door is the smallest source of draft air in the place.

Contrast that with Walmart’s online store. They must have out-sourced the whole thing, because I can watch as my browser status bar flashes the bits and pieces feeding into each page on the website, coming from different servers scattered all over the place. One page displaying a selection of products in response to a search term consists of content pulled from over a dozen different servers. And I was hardly surprised when the images failed to match the actual items. Recently the descriptions began mismatching. It starts to look like fraudulent advertising. To beat it all, their checkout engine (“virtual shopping cart”) is provided by someone who created a static-sized splash page that refuses to scroll so that I can find all the controls and actually pay for the merchandise using my netbook. In other words, somewhere in the chain of severs rendering that page on my screen, one or more is completely failing to notice the size of viewing portal. How can they ignore something so fundamental to website development?

Several folks released various kinds of tools that helped get rid of the Win10 harassment on Windows. However, I think this one is actually worth recommending: GWX Control Panel. It’s the simplest to use and does the whole job of removing every part of it, if you so desire. The provider’s blog page offers about as much explanation and guidance as a human could possibly use, and it’s free. This is one of those things about the developer community: They are willing to do the hard work for you in exchange for reputation and venting their own fury at things none of us likes.

Finally, here is another new Windows tool I can recommend after testing it myself: SlimCleaner. The free version does more than you would expect. It does everything CCleaner does and adds a few useful tricks like Defrag (with extra options), checking on updates for stuff you have installed, checks to see if you have any junk services running in the background and something called “Hijack This!” That’s a legendary malware detection tool, with equally legendary complicated scan results. SlimCleaner will parse these rather complicated results and let you know if it finds something suspicious. No, they didn’t pay me to advertise; I like this sucker.