Category: tech

Game

A very kind reader of my blog sent me a free download to the Destiny game. I thought that was very sweet considering the game is not cheap. Said person didn’t use any emails that have previously been associated with my blog [1]I looked! lol so they truly are anonymous. dang it! lol Since I can’t figure out who you are, dear anonymous benefactor, thank you very much for such a kind gift.

I’ve lamented since Shawn and I started playing that I wish I could transfer my game play from PS4 to XOne. The game came bundled with the PS4 so it didn’t make sense to buy it again. The game is not cross-platform so I stuck with playing it on the PS4. I’m already back up to level 29.

When Shawn and I played the demo, it was on the One. When I popped the game in the server apparently remembered and gave me a free legendary heavy weapon right off the bat. Said weapon couldn’t be used until I got back to at least level 20 but it was a nice surprise. The games are pretty much identical in game play, as they should be. I’ve noticed slight differences in the shading but beyond that visually it seems the same. I will say the game seems smoother and slightly faster on the One. The load times are slightly faster and the response from the controls seems a little more fluid. Otherwise, there is very little difference.

If you play, I’m not big on the Vault of Glass (VOG) battle but always like Strike missions. I help or don’t mind being helped on strike missions and/or daily/weekly missions. My handle on both One and PS4 is ibod8x5. [2]As it is pretty much anywhere online. Remind me to tell you the story about my coworkers discovering my online handle. heehee If you want to join a game or me to join you and are not on my friend list, please message me first. I ignore random game/friend invites from people I don’t recognize. This is primarily to avoid much of the juvenile behavior from a lot of online gamers. Since VOG requires 6 players, you’ll also get flooded with requests once you hit level 29 or 30.

So thanks again dear anonymous. As you can tell, your gift is not going to waste.

References

References
↑1 I looked! lol
↑2 As it is pretty much anywhere online. Remind me to tell you the story about my coworkers discovering my online handle. heehee

Attack

My blog has been under a brute force attack for over a week now. Several foreign bots have been hard at work trying to break into my WordPress software. Sadly, for them, that is all but impossible. I use several layers of security to protect WP. One of those layers locks any user account, including myself, after more than 5 failed log in attempts. [1]I also deleted my default admin account ages ago  The user must then go thru the password recovery process.  However, the brute force can bring down the server itself. Even with site-caching, the server has to respond to every request.

Most bots make a concentrated effort for minutes and/or hours and then usually move on when they complete (or fail at) their task. This was much more focused and indicates a deliberate attempt. My blog is not overly popular so I’m a little surprised. Dedicated attacks usually target big sites or at the ISP level. The rest of us fall into the “search and conquer” category described above.

I’ve had to take more direct action now and start blocking bots at the server level. It is often a cat-and-mouse game because said baddies often use already compromised or spoofed IP addresses. They rotate them quickly so blocking doesn’t last long. However, for bots it’s a wee bit easier as they usually carry distinctive names that can be blocked using the .htaccess file.

For my readers, hopefully you won’t see any error pages. On the odd chance you do, please email me and I’ll get you restored. An easy way to tell is by accessing my site from different connections. The chances of both being blocked are extremely rare.

The attack already seems to be waning. The CPU drain from my account on the server is down within acceptable levels for my ISP. It is still higher than normal but going down. Wish me luck. hehehe

References

References
↑1 I also deleted my default admin account ages ago

Bait

No, I’m not dredging up stories of child hood fishing trips or late night trolling for booty. I am referring to the out of control click-bait you see polluting most social media sites these days.

Headlines are written to provoke a click. It doesn’t matter if the headline isn’t true or so twisted to barely represent the story, as long as you ‘submit’. [1]Reference to a very funny Simpsons episode btw Most of the time said person sharing the click-bait hasn’t even read the link. It it is annoying to the point that I’ve started unfollowing people who do it a lot.

It is one thing if it is specifically related to you or your life. Beyond that, I don’t care what animal you are. I don’t care what cartoon character you are. I don’t care what your wanna be porn name is. I don’t care what character in any movie ever made is. I don’t care if you are a unicorn who burps glitter and shits rainbows. And here is a news flash, no one else does either!

And you people who share fake stories or scams “just to be safe” need to be punched in the dick!  Knock. It. Off!  No Bill Gates and Yahoo are not joining forces. No, the IRS is not sending the sheriffs to your house to arrest you unless you send them money. No, the quadrillionaire in [insert county here] did not die and leave all his money in limbo so his [insert relative or estated holder] can ask your help in getting the money. No, VI@gR@ will not help you ‘get the girl.’ No, “if you are a real ______, you will share this like I did.”  And for fuck’s sake, NO YOU WILL NOT RECEIVE A LOT OF MONEY BY MAGIC IF YOU POST THIS TO 10 OTHER PEOPLE’S PROFILES.

Now get off my lawn!

References

References
↑1 Reference to a very funny Simpsons episode btw

Domain

I recently recovered the .com version of my domain. I originally registered it, forgot about it and when it expired someone tried to squat on it for a paycheck. I guess they finally gave up. lol Bitches thought they could get blood out of a turnip! heehee

Anyway, I originally purchased it to use it as a photoblog. Now that I have it back I am doing just that. Let’s face it, I’m all over the web and it gets confusing at times to keep track of things. lol Not to mention, there are often a ton of pics I never post to social media. I either get distracted or am on the go and I just forget. How dare I deprive you of such things, right?

Of course, I also want to get cross posts of pics from the various social media sites in one location. Doing it manually of course isn’t an option. The goal is to automate the process as the tediousness quickly kills the desire. Most of my FB and twitter posts come from Google+. Getting them to WordPress from there isn’t overly difficult except most plugins support all or nothing methods. Well, I just want the pics to go.

The easiest method so far is to push from Google+, even it is rather convoluted at times. And as you can see, I still have some holes.

Pic > Google+ > FB, twitter, Tumblr (via friendsplus.me)

Pic > Tumblr > Photoblog (so indirectly I can push from Google+)

Pic > Instagram > Tumblr > Photobog

Pic > Foursquare (swarm) > ? > Photoblog

Pic > twitter only > ? > Photoblog

Pic > FB only ? > ? > Photoblog

The only drawback so far is posts that get created from social media show up with no-name. It’s not the end of the world for a photo blog but I’d like to change that at some point. I’m sure there are work arounds for twitter and FB only posts but I then I have to avoid infinity loops.

All that madness aside, and if you care, pop over to www.sfmoby.com and check it out. It is still on a basic template for now but it is up and running. I plan to merge more stuff in from my archives (if I can) as well as load a snazzier template. Some of the older pics might be a tad on the R-rated side but most are work safe. If you are a coworker reading this, you have been warned.

Stat

Sooooo, in all the domestic bliss, I forgot to mention I’m moving into year 11 of this here blog thingy. Eleven years. Other than masturbation, I don’t think I’ve kept up with anything in my life that long before. (You laugh, but I am not joking.) All these years later and I’m still at it. Granted, not as fast and steady as I used to be, but that is ok.

I was pleasantly suprised to see I still get a decent chuck of blog traffic, even with my lower postings as of late. Ironically, posts about Cooper often get the most hits. [1]Being upstaged by my own dog! The nerve. Google has updated their analytics engine and it is truly amazing the scope of data they capture now. Most of my traffic is still direct, meaning people load my feed or come directly to my site. This one stat was the most surprising and humbling. Thanks for reading my madness. Really, I’m tickled people still enjoy my rants. Sadly, brettcajun is STILL the best referral source within the blogosphere. How that dirty cajun manages it is beyond me. A big surprise was Joe.my.god’s blog. Apparently, I’ve been getting a ton of new referrals from his blog. I read him daily (and so should you). Towleroad made the top 10 for what I think is the first time ever. I attribute the later two gains to my increase in comments on their sites. My lack of interest on FB has to be captured somewhere.

Out of social media referrals I got another surprise. I get almost as many clicks from Google+ as I do FB. twitter is a very distant third. FB used to dominate this area. I’m glad to see a more even shift as I continue to use FB less and less. When I factor in the referrals between blogger and plus, Google dominates.

My keywords are always a hodge podge as my blog tends to jump all over. Let me just list the top 10 for the past 30 days …

Eye problems behind a computer
vision problems optometrist
SF Moby
Moby zipper
Sex with Moby
Grindr Rules
Gubbmint
adult archives
Ok porn
bloggers in SF

Yes, that is the top 10 ways new vistors have found me in the last 30 days. lol To be fair, the ratio drops significantly after Sex with Moby. The latter I assume relates to the other Moby btw.

Yeah, I continue to blog and yeah I know it’s probably considered passe now but I never did respond well to peer pressure. Le blog continues to enrich my life and is my chronicle in attempting a life well lived.

References

References
↑1 Being upstaged by my own dog! The nerve.

Duty

​I’ve gotten more than a few inquiries on my thoughts regarding the Missouri incident.  In a word, it’s a mess. You have a citizenry that is under-educated and have all but abandoned their civic duties. Granted, they can’t be blamed so much for that but looting your own community demonstrates a level of ignorance that is becoming more and mor prevelant in this country.

I come from very poor means. It is hard to care about community involvement when your sole existence is about survival. But, if we hope to stop problems like this we have to encourage said communities to be and do better. We need to shift our priorities away from the accumulation of wealth and to the betterment of people. Education is a huge component. An educated community is often more involved. Of course, the powers that be want you to be dumb because you are easier to control.

Then you have a police force in a small town that has all the authority and very little oversight. This is not unusual per se. Visit any small rural area and you’ll see similar stories. Does that mean all rural depts are bad? No, of course not. But as the facts unfold, it is glaringly obvious the agency is lacking in any sort of oversight or accountability from its citizens. The abundance of hard-core military grade gadgets is simply crazy.

At the end of the day a young man lost his life. His implied guilt or innocence is not a valid reason on its own for his death. And as the facts are told and clarified, there is a larger cloud over the agency vs the officer involved. The often inflammatory (and even sometimes inaccurate) reporting from many media outlets hasn’t helped the situation. And of course, the emergent mob-mentality of our social media commentary is just icing on the cake. If social media is your only source of news, you are part of the problem. If you don’t know the details of a story or incident, keep your mouth shut until you do. Don’t share links you haven’t read because of a link-baiting headline. And you f**kers who share every story with the idea “it can’t hurt“, need a serious ass-whooping. /rant

Are there bad officers? Of course there are. But for every bad cop, there are easily 100 more you never hear about. Why? Because cops doing their duty don’t generate sensational headlines or ad-clicks. [1]Poor comparison but I see the same mis-characterization in my volunteer work with animals regarding pitbulls.  A few bad cops do not make them all bad and isolated stories of abuse do not paint an accurate picture.  Yes, our law-enforcement should be held to a higher standard, but humans are fallible no matter their position in life. To avoid the corruption we as the citizenry must be involved.

And speaking of, our citizenry is becoming ill-educated every day it seems. Subjective validation is often more important than facts or reason. Religious fanatacism and personal greed have trumped our morals. We’ve gone from ‘what can I do for my society‘ to ‘what can society do for me?‘ The idea of civic duty or responsibility is a foreign idea to most folks these days. A citizenry that abandons it’s overseers is quickly overrun by their own indifference. Absolute power corrupts absolute as the old adage goes. You cannot give away your power thru inaction and then wonder why the abuses keep happening. Proclaming your outrage on social media and demanding change does nothing to help and only serves to feed the problem.

Perform your civic duties. Vote, serve on jury duty and most of all, be involved in your community. Go to community meetings. Know your local policy makers and pay attention to their actions. Only then will your actions carry weight and effect change. Otherwise, you end up just being another sheep being guided by those in power, often to your detriment.

References

References
↑1 Poor comparison but I see the same mis-characterization in my volunteer work with animals regarding pitbulls.

Less

I find that I spend less time on social-media sites these days. One, I’ve been super busy so less time and two, it just seems to be more and more tedious and boring. There is so much crap and filler meant to generate ad-clicks, it just gets to a point where the purpose is lost. It is no secret I loathe FB but it does allow a connection of sorts to friends. I’ve threatened to dump FB in the past and still might but it is more likely I’ll just end up posting less and less until it becomes a place-holder.

Part of my frustration is witnessing the dumbing down of America. And it is getting worse. Our indifference to anything outside our immediate environment is contributing to the decay of our society. Integrity, honor, respect, honesty, truth, it’s all becoming buzz-words. Social media was meant to unite and bring us together and it seems to be doing just the opposite. I can’t say I wanna be a part of that. Don’t even get me started on the whole anti-intellectualism movement again. OMFG! 

Then you have the “stories” that often catch on like wild-fire that turn out to be hoaxes or flat out lies. Almost every day now I encounter stories that are fake or have just enough of the truth to seem plausible. And of course, no one can be bothered to check around or fact find, they just read a story and assume it is true and then continue to spread the ignorance. Even credible news outlets have been falling prey to this. [1]One has to look at the recent Turing Test story going around about a supercomputer finally crossing a threshold of believability as a human. Total fabricated story but it spread to even many of the … Continue reading  As my maw-maw always used to say, “…believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see.”

Unlike previous moods, I’m not saying I’m leaving vs just expressing a growing dislike for said sites. They have some use but I’m finding the cons are out-weighing the pros more and more.

References

References
↑1 One has to look at the recent Turing Test story going around about a supercomputer finally crossing a threshold of believability as a human. Total fabricated story but it spread to even many of the tech sites

Filter

As previously mentioned, I’ve been doing some cleaning on the blog. As of today, I switched off my beloved SK2 junk comment filter. I’ve been threatening to do so for some time now. t hasn’t been supported in years but continued to chug along doing admirably at blocking unwanted comments.

Sadly, as WP has continues to grow and evolve it’s code the filter was becoming too much to manage. It would break as much as it fixed so I finally axed it.

I switched over to Akismet. If you find your comments aren’t getting thru, please email me or contact me via social media to advise. I’ll try to keep a good eye on it for a few weeks to make sure everything is functioning as planned.

More to come!

Tinker 2.0

Many of you have probably noticed I’ve been tinkering with the blog theme and formats a bit. As the push for integration becomes higher, newer better
image

features become available to perform many of the functions I hack together thru various plug-ins from time to time. Normally, I wouldn’t blather on about it however some of the changes might affect registered users.

Subscriptions: I’m phasing out the old plug-in for a newer simpler one. You won’t notice much for existing subscriptions. However, if you notice you are no longer getting updates by email, you should resubscribe. Anytime you post a comment, click the option that applies. If you are itching to be proactive, you can follow the link on the email to unsubscribe. Then the next time you leave a new comment, simply click the appropriate check-box. This does not affect the existence of your user account.

Social log-ins: One of the open-id providers has ceased operations. Another provider allegedly picked up their user base but time will tell. I’m also switching to a new log-in module for social site IDs like FB, twitter, Google, etc. Again, you’ll be presented with an option to log in anytime you try to leave a comment . I’ve phased out Yahoo as no one has used it, not even once. lol  Anyway, the option to log-in with social media from the registered user page is currently disabled until I have a chance to test how the two plug-ins work together. I’m assuming it is seamless but we know where that gets us…

Social Comments: If you reply or leave a comment regarding a post via Facebook or twitter, it does get pulled into the blog. It doesn’t happen immediately so no need to email me. It runs as a cron-job on my server every so often. If you get notified your comment was labeled as junk, just email me and I’ll fix it.

Theme: I’ve removed the static mobile theme in favor of responsive theme that adapts to a mobile display automatically. I’m still searching for one I like best so the theme may change a few more times. The one I have now is OK but not quite a good fit. Suggestions are appreciated.

I’m also taking recommendations on a new junk filter. I’ve been using SK2 for years. I keep threatening to dump it but it’s been my favorite. It is no longer supported and sadly becoming less and less effective.

Delish

image

I sometimes stop by Delish for lunch when I neglect to bring food or am too lazy to prepare some. The other day I opted to have my sandwich there. Being somewhat a creature of habit these days, I got the same thing I always get, the grilled pesto chicken pannini. I ran off and left my wallet sitting in my chair. [1]Don’t ask me how I accomplished that and someone was kind of enough to turn it in.

I freak out about an hour later, call, they have it, I run back by. One of the employees had gone out of his way to find me and try to get it back to me. Sadly, I don’t keep any phone number references in my wallet. (Maybe I should?) Anyway, I was touched that in this day and age, there is still some honesty in the world. I had about $60 in cash in the wallet, and it was still there. Not a dollar was missing. [2]Yes, I gave them a fat tip for being so honest. 

So, not only is the food good and the staff friendly, they’re honest! They’ve definitely earned a loyal customer and I am calling the owner so he knows of the good deed!

If you’re local, it’s on Van Ness right next to the somewhat new Phil’s coffee shop. Stop by sometime. Tell’em Moby sent ya!

References

References
↑1 Don’t ask me how I accomplished that
↑2 Yes, I gave them a fat tip for being so honest.