Sunday Morning Chatter, August 2015

God morning! Come on in and have a cup of your favorite liquid stimulant while we chat.

It’s hot outside these days, but we got a slight break in the temperatures. This allowed me to leave a little later in the morning for a ride around Draper Lake yesterday. It also allowed me to catch a few shots that were previously the wrong sun angle.

There are no natural lakes in Oklahoma. I got my story backwards about the relationship between the Atoka and Draper reservoirs. The surface water in southeastern Oklahoma is far more reliable than other parts of the state, and selling water rights there is a major source of income. Oklahoma City bought and built Atoka Reservoir down below McAlester in the 1950s. Draper came in the early 1960s, in large part as a place to hold Atoka water closer to the city. So back in that time frame a 60-inch pipe (1.5m) was laid cross-country about 100 miles between the two with a half-dozen pump stations to push the water uphill (Oklahoma elevation peaks in the Panhandle and runs down to the southeastern corner). The pipes and pumps were refurbished a few years ago which cut off the main filler to Draper. It’s back up now and I got this picture of the sections from that massive pipeline.

There was a brief period we lived in Salem, Oregon. It was a dreary existence and one of the temporary jobs I found was working to help bury the electric lines owned by the local utility. As a grunt who mostly wielded a shovel, jumping in and out of the trenches made by the full-time equipment operator, I never quite learned as much as I really would have liked about the business itself. The “line gods” wouldn’t tell me much because union policy forbade it. I know even less about the requirements for transmission and distribution of power, and I can’t explain why this massive substation stands out next to Draper. But you can hear the darn thing humming up on Draper Lake Drive a quarter-mile away.

I mentioned previously that my family moved to some rural property on Post Road. My last day there was some forty years ago. This camera was pointed NNE, so the road is on the west side of the ten-acre almost-square plot of land. What you can see of it today bears little resemblance to what we saw back then. That massive cottonwood tree in the lowest part next to the road and near the end of the driveway there was the shade for our mobile home late in the day, as the house was parallel to the road. Our sewage lateral lines ran between the road and the trailer, and the tank was just off the current driveway. I’m willing to bet all that stuff is still in the ground. Meanwhile, the fancy house sits up where we had our pigpen. O, the sun shines bright on my old Post Road home…

It’s even hotter in the virtual world. Win10 is making lots of noise. Of all the various criticism I’ve seen, this list is the best and briefest outline of the worst features. I found it on Bruce Schneier’s blog; the author actually read through the user’s terms and conditions.

• By default, Windows will upload to its servers the user’s web browser history, favorites, open websites, saved apps, mobile hotspot, and Wi-Fi network names & passwords.
• Windows will generate a unique advertising ID for each user on a device. This advertising ID can be passed on to third parties, such as app developers and advertising networks for profiling purposes.
• The BitLocker recovery key for the user’s encrypted device will also be automatically “backed up” online in the Microsoft OneDrive account.
• Windows will routinely collect information “from you and your devices,” including “app use data” and “data about the networks you connect to.”
• The Windows Siri-style personal assistant (Cortana) will routinely collect device location, calendar data, apps used, email and text message data, phone call history, contacts and how often you interact with them on your device, music preferences, alarm settings, whether the lock screen is on, products viewed and purchased, browser history, and more.

Perhaps most worryingly is that, even if you decide that this is unacceptable and steer clear from MS, Windows is still the default OS in >90% of desktop computers bought off the shelf. Chances are that everything listed above will happen whenever your lawyer drafts a letter about your divorce case, whenever your doctor types your blood test results into a MS Office spreadsheet, whenever your hospital processes your CAT scan images, whenever your colleagues type up the results of a multi-million dollar R&D project, whenever your accountant processes your payment details…

An additional comment on the thread refers to the MS fingerprint scheme for that unique advertising ID:

MS has come up with the one cookie nobody will be able to clear from their system (because it *is* the system). Disgusting.

I don’t love Linux, but it sucks less with each passing day simply because everything else is getting worse.