ozma914 | Entries tagged with computers

Somebody must have signed me up for something, because I've been getting a lot more junk e-mails lately. The disadvantage: I have to go through and make sure there aren't any legitimate communications among the junk.

The advantage: I can make fun of them.

Sometimes it can be a little difficult to tell the difference between the real stuff and the scams. For instance, in the last batch I got a notification from Google Drive, which informed me a file had been successfully shared.

Yay! But wait ... I've never shared Google Drive files.

Pay no attention to the scam behind the e-mail.

That could be a clue. And sure enough, the return e-mail address has absolutely nothing to do with Google.

Another example is the survey I got from Netflix, which wants me to fill it out and enter a drawing. Yay!

But I don't subscribe the Netflix, and never have.

Of the 27 e-mails in the latest haul, exactly one was legitimate. And that one was from AARP, wanting to remind me I'm now old enough to get e-mails from AARP. I don't want the reminder.

Some of the e-mails look pretty boring at first glance. They're from Amy P., Julie L.,. Natalie, Kathleen, Stacy, Betsy, Kristina, and of course my favorite, Eleanor Gibbs. I just realized ... I should keep track of the ones that could make good character names for future novels. Eleanor Gibbs, Beverly Bailey, not to mention Vanda. How many Vandas do you know?

And they're all women. Where were all these women when I was single?

Of course, chances are they're a 55 year old Russian male who hasn't exercised since 1997, but hope springs eternal.

Hi, I'm Uri ... I mean, Amy. How about a chat?

They get more interesting when you see what the "women" have typed into the subject field of their e-mails.

"No questions or stories, just make me obey."

Yes, dear.

"I have crzy wishes."

I wish you could spell.

"I'm agile but fraagile so be nice ;0"

Brittle bone disease is a terrible thing for gymnasts.

"It was the best night ever!"

Sadly, I wasn't there.

"Video with me and you"

So, you were the one who photobombed me at Indiana Beach.

"Are you excited?"

Do you have chocolate?

"Should I send one more photo?"

Well, you haven't sent the first one yet, so ... (That one was from "Iowa". The entire state apparently thinks it sent me a photo.)

"Can I be useful for you? Pleeease!"

Okay, since you're so eager. We'll start in the bedroom ... then you can clean the kitchen.

"Are you excited?"

What, still? Now that someone else is cleaning the kitchen, yes.

"No panties video"

Sounds great, until you remember it was typed by a middle aged Russian couch potato.

"I am so disobedient at this video..."

That's okay, I can point you to the obedience school my dog went at.

Meanwhile, I also got e-mails from Flawless, PerfectLips, ColorfulDes'lres, Hedon1stlc, and, yes, CornLover. That last one, at least, was original. Cream or whole kernel?

By the way, Eleanor Gibbs sent me an e-mail with the headline, "I love to play with fire". This is not something firefighters generally want to hear.

Finally, the unoriginal ColorfulDes'lres also asked: "Are you excited?"

Well, I just wasted ten minutes that could have been used for writing fiction. Or looking at cute puppy videos. So no ... no, I'm not. But it's starting to remind me of the other question I've been hearing a lot lately: "Have you tested positive for COVID?"

I'm excited to say no.

Honey, look at this! A Nigerian Price wants to party with us.

http://markrhunter.com/
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

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Remember when cars didn't have starters, and you used to have to crank them to start?

Okay, neither do I. But I'll bet a lot of you remember a time before cars were mostly computers. On my first car, the starter was about the only thing electric, let alone electronic. On my current car, you quite literally can't operate it without the help of a little brain. No, not that little brain.

If all the computer stuff in my car stopped working I'd not only be out my radio (excuse me, entertainment system), but I'd have no way of knowing my speed or how much fuel I had. I mean, I could get a dipstick, but don't we have enough dispsticks on the roads? My car's abilities are awesome, but also scary to a science fiction fan like me.

So it should have come as no surprise when I got into the car awhile back and saw this:

Yeah, my car was installing updates. I kept waiting for it to restart all by itself.

And how do I know what new program was loading? Cylon? Terminator? Didn't Stephen King write a whole story about this? Someday I may not be able to escape from my Escape. It's the carpocalypse.

I suppose the survivors will have to go back to the crank start.

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I totally loved my last car, so it’s ironic that it got totaled, which I didn’t love.

Normally I’m not one of those who falls madly in love with automobiles. They’re just something to get me from one place to another until they don’t anymore, which with my track record happens sooner, rather than later. My first car exploded; a wheel fell off my second; my third died at a rest stop outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee; my fourth froze solid on a snow swept rural road half a mile from the nearest phone.

And so on.

So when a car comes along that does me good, I appreciate it. So it was with my Ford Focus, which lasted over ten years despite … well, me. Yes, it had its problems, but it was as reliable as the American election cycle, and way more fun. It was easy to drive, had great brakes, accelerated me out of trouble more than once, and the back seat was kind of comfortable to sleep in as long you curled up. (That’s another story.)

Then, like a vampire, it was killed by sunlight.

Well, it was killed by another driver who was blinded by sunlight. To be honest, we grieved: because it was a great car, and because it was paid off. But life goes on, so my wife, who was laid up with a broken foot (see above about the blinded driver killing the car), started researching a replacement.

We wanted a domestic model, which is silly because these days half of American cars are built in other countries, and half of foreign cars are built in America. Still, I never forgot the time the transmission broke in my Renault Alliance (see car #3), and they had to order a new part—from France. I’ve bought American ever since (except for car# 8), which didn’t save me from the Chevy Chevette (see car #4).

We also wanted something that could transport both of us, plus our dog and the grand-twins. A 95 pound dog and two kids in one back seat adds up to someone being crushed.

We wanted something that would get us around a little better in an Indiana winter (see car # … well, all of them), but that would still get decent gas mileage. (Car #5 got awesome gas mileage, because engines don’t burn gas when they never start.) The answer: a mid-size SUV.

We picked out a Ford Escape before discovering that it was built on the same chassis as the … wait for it … Ford Focus. Maybe that’s part of the reason why we fell in love with the car. (Can I call an SUV a car? Too late.) It’s burgundy, although it has one of those non-color names, like pink grapefruit, or tangerine, or something else with vitamin C.

It's not made of rubies. That's my wife behind the wheel, and she's not made of money.

Oh, ruby red, that’s it. Where did I get food from? I’ve hated that trend ever since I accidentally ate a macaroni and cheese crayon.

There was one problem. (Well, two, as we had to start making car payments again.) Our old car was over ten years old, which in terms of today’s electronics meant it was about eighty.

Things had, to put it mildly, changed. And not because I’d never owned a sport utility vehicle. I don’t even like sports.

To this day I’m always a little surprised not to find preset buttons on my car radio. You know what I found when we got into a 2014 SUV? A TV screen. That’s sixties-era science fiction movie stuff.

“Look at this!” I said.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” the car replied.

Because you can talk to the car. And it can talk back. You can use it as a phone, or an internet hot spot. Also, you can use the car to get music and news from a satellite orbiting the Earth. In space.

Think about that.

When I was a kid, you could barely hear the radio station during a thunderstorm. We could pull in three AM stations: country, NPR, and WOWO radio 1190, which was the top 40 rock station. Now some guy was downloading all Beatles songs into a computer in London and beaming them to a satellite thirty thousand miles in space, which was then sending them straight to my friggin’ car.

I don’t care if you’re a millennial or not: If you stop to really think about this, how can you not be amazed? (In case you’re wondering, no, we didn’t continue the satellite service after the free trial was over. I wasn’t that amazed.)

You touched the screen to change radio stations. Then you touched it again to turn on the air conditioning. You can set a different temperature for each side of the car. You know what the air conditioning was on my first four cars? Rolling the windows down (with a hand crank) and driving real fast.

If it’s a nice day, we can now push a button and open the roof. Dude.

So we were test driving the Escape, and I put it in reverse, and the “environmental” information on the screen disappeared. Instead, I saw what was behind me. ON A TV SCREEN.

A little voice said, “What are you doing, Mark?”

“Um … I’m backing up.”

“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that. There’s a car three blocks away that will go by when you’re four feet onto the roadway. Please wait until it passes.”

“But … how do you know my name?”

“I knew it as soon as you sat down. Butt cheek recognition software.”

Okay, I might have been making up that last bit. But the seats are all electric, so who knows what they’re feeling?

Next thing you know, cars will be driving themselves.

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I can’t help thinking it’s no coincidence that my laptop stopped working on February 29^th: It’s the last “screw you” from a bad month.

But in fairness, it’s also a first world problem. I still have a tablet, which I’d intended to only use when away from home and electricity. I also still have a Mac laptop, effectively my desktop computer because it’s allergic to batteries. As is often the case with modern society, we shouldn’t complain—but will anyway.

Anyway, that means it’s March, which means my pause in promotion is over. I’ll let you know the results later, but meanwhile … buy my books!

Postscript: Just after I wrote this, at about 1:30 a.m. March 1^st, I received a rejection e-mail for Radio Red. This tells us two things: Editors are overworked, and things aren’t looking up for March.

If your keyboard stops working, there are certain things you don't want to look down and see.

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SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

A computer genius/loser at life recently spent several months slaving away, night and day, to hack into the iCloud service and swipe nude photos of numerous celebrities.

This goes to show you, some guys will do anything to see women nude. You know it was a guy. And apparently a guy who wasn’t satisfied seeing most of these people nude—or close enough to nude—o n movies or cable TV.

I’ve never cared for this “cloud” idea, in which you send all your important computer stuff somewhere else so it doesn’t get lost if your computer crashes. So, where’s somewhere else? What is the cloud, really?

More computers. Someone else’s computers.

( While putting your stuff on numerous different computers makes it less likely to be lost, it makes it easier to be found. )

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SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

I have a bad habit of being optimistic about humanity.

Oh, in theory that’s a good thing. Let’s all think the best of people! Shouldn’t it be that way? Sure it should. Chamberlain thought the best of Hitler. So did Stalin, who was certain Hitler wouldn’t be dumb enough to invade Russia and stick around through winter. Come to think of it, just the word “Hitler” is a good hint that thinking the best of people might be a mistake.

But this isn’t about mass-killing despots. This is about passwords.

Hitler would have had a very secure password. He didn’t think the best of people.

According to researchers, in 2013 internet users finally got smart, and stopped using “password” as their #1 password when dealing with computers and internet sites. Finally, some sanity!

It dropped to number two.

Number one is now “123456”. Yeah.

It would be 12345, but so many sites require six digits.

Another team of security researchers uncovered a cache of two million login credentials, and according to their research, “password” was far down in fourth position, after, “123456”, “123456789”, and “1234”.

Next came “12345” and, yes, “12345678”.

After that, in a sudden desire to be different, came: “admin”.

And so my optimism is defeated.

( Yahoo Tech … excuse me, Yahoo! Tech points out that you can’t get much worse than “password”. It has no numbers, no capital letters, and no unusual symbols, and can be guessed pretty easily. It reminds me a lot of my first computer password, which if I recall correctly was “Mark”. No, worse: It was “mark”. )

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Slightly Off the Mark

The Highlights of the Junk Mail Folder. Or Is That Lowlights?

Booting Up the Carpocalypse

When Your Car Is Smarter Than You

leap Day Laptop

Hacking Up An Internet Sickness

A Simple Look At Passwords

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