Random randomness

[Scuzz]

My idea to replace our current phone system with CB radios is not getting the serious attention I expected.

Maybe they would prefer pagers?

[Daehawk]

Or fax.

[hepcat]

I just wanna be at my desk and use the radio to say things like, "Breaker breaker, Big Poppa, we got UPS in the lobby, 10-4".

[LordMortis]

Tell 'em Large Marge sent ya'.

[Sudy]

Some months ago I lost one of my credit cards. I knew it wasn't stolen... I'd just misplaced it. But despite searching everywhere, I couldn't find it.

After endless procrastination, I finally called in to the credit card company this afternoon to have a replacement sent to me.

I just found the card.

I am, however, pleased to announce that I didn't have to buy a second Chromecast for the one I spent all night searching for to turn up. Because that hunt was nearly as frustrating.

[Zarathud]

A cheap pair of walkie talkies could be just as fun. And annoying.

[Isgrimnur]

A cheap pair of walkie talkies could be just as fun. And annoying.

Make sure they have a Morse code button.

[Daehawk]

That takes me back.

[Daehawk]

The contrast of old style lighting bulbs to more modern ones in West and East Berlin.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... sions.html

[AWS260]

CRTs in 2018.

Ian Primus, an IT repair technician and CRT aficionado, has amassed a basement and storage unit full of old TVs. He has a reputation as one of the increasingly few people who will take CRTs off people’s hands. “If you let people know that you’re looking for old TVs, suddenly you’ve got three or four people calling you,” he says. He gives out his number to thrift stores that have decided the bulky sets are more trouble than they’re worth and want to direct donors elsewhere. Sometimes he simply drives around at night before garbage collection, looking for castoffs.

Primus says he doesn’t just hoard old TVs; he uses them constantly in his daily life. “I don’t have an LCD computer monitor, and I don’t have an LCD TV. Everything is CRTs,” he says. “I know I’m crazy.” Most new devices exclusively support current TVs, including one of Primus’ newer tech purchases — Nintendo’s NES Classic — which, ironically for such a retro-looking device, only features a modern HDMI adapter. But it’s still possible to use adapters with many of them. As long as that’s true, Primus says he’ll probably stick with CRTs.

[Trent Steel]

CRTs in 2018.

Ian Primus, an IT repair technician and CRT aficionado, has amassed a basement and storage unit full of old TVs. He has a reputation as one of the increasingly few people who will take CRTs off people’s hands. “If you let people know that you’re looking for old TVs, suddenly you’ve got three or four people calling you,” he says. He gives out his number to thrift stores that have decided the bulky sets are more trouble than they’re worth and want to direct donors elsewhere. Sometimes he simply drives around at night before garbage collection, looking for castoffs.

Primus says he doesn’t just hoard old TVs; he uses them constantly in his daily life. “I don’t have an LCD computer monitor, and I don’t have an LCD TV. Everything is CRTs,” he says. “I know I’m crazy.” Most new devices exclusively support current TVs, including one of Primus’ newer tech purchases — Nintendo’s NES Classic — which, ironically for such a retro-looking device, only features a modern HDMI adapter. But it’s still possible to use adapters with many of them. As long as that’s true, Primus says he’ll probably stick with CRTs.

My hero.

[morlac]

.
... ... America’s Top 20 most-hated companies

List (without verbage)

Spoiler:

20. The Weinstein Company
19. United Airlines
18. Facebook
17. CenturyLink
16. Monsanto
15. Comcast
14. Uber
13. Sears Holdings
12. The Trump Organization
11. Wells Fargo
10. Cigna
9. Spirit Airlines
8. Vice Media
7. Sprint
6. Foxconn Technology Group
5. Electronic Arts
4. University of Phoenix
3. NFL
2. Fox Entertainment Group
1. Equifax

A few surprises on that list, more with the rankings than with the contents. I find it hard to believe that more people hate EA than Cigna, for example, and I expected to see Comcast nearer the top. I've never heard an approving word for Comcast.

Any yet, not a single one of them appears to be in any danger of going out of business soon. The Corporations truly do run the world. Rise up Sheeple!

[morlac]

Some months ago I lost one of my credit cards. I knew it wasn't stolen... I'd just misplaced it. But despite searching everywhere, I couldn't find it.

After endless procrastination, I finally called in to the credit card company this afternoon to have a replacement sent to me.

I just found the card.

My mother in law got robbed at the grocery store yesterday. Nice little 2 woman operation. 1st distracted her and the 2nd stole her wallet out of her purse. Anyhow, she had to reorder all her cards. Working with Wells Fargo on her new bankcard she told them how bad/quickly she needed a new one due to stuff. The lady said it would take up to 10 business days to get her a new one. When asked about an expedite and over nighting one she was told that yes they could. When asked what it would cost she was told nothing. So I guess she just needed to beg more?

[morlac]

McDonalds fries help cure baldness? Sorta..a chemical in them might do just that.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medica ... ar-BBIJqnv

At least you wont be Bald and Fat anymore!

[Isgrimnur]

Which is sad, considering that I work for one credit union and am a member of a second one that perform debit card instant issue. I can have a new debit card with an EMV chip in my hands in probably 15 minutes.

[morlac]

In case you could not tell; I don't feel like working today....so Random. I suppose after lunch I will have to cram 8 hours of work into the 2- 3 hours left. Or I could just keep posting in this random thread.

[ImLawBoy]

Any yet, not a single one of them appears to be in any danger of going out of business soon. The Corporations truly do run the world. Rise up Sheeple!

13. Sears Holdings

[morlac]

Which is sad, considering that I work for one credit union and am a member of a second one that perform debit card instant issue. I can have a new debit card with an EMV chip in my hands in probably 15 minutes.

Normally, I would just assume this was a bad employee but it being Wells Fargo I suspect they are trained to give No Quarter(s)!

[morlac]

Any yet, not a single one of them appears to be in any danger of going out of business soon. The Corporations truly do run the world. Rise up Sheeple!

13. Sears Holdings

They still have over 1,000 stores but they are hemorrhaging for sure. Not sure why they are on the list but it appears to be more employee dissatisfaction and less consumer hate (Walmart and Ross rated lower with consumers). As much as we love kicking a man while he is down, they should be spared our pitchforks. God Knows I love(ed) me a blue light special.

[Kraken]

Which is sad, considering that I work for one credit union and am a member of a second one that perform debit card instant issue. I can have a new debit card with an EMV chip in my hands in probably 15 minutes.

My bank wanted $12 for the FedEx 2-day option. I declined, so I'll be without a debit card for 5-7 days. Using cash again feels so primitive.

[Isgrimnur]

Wells Fargo Instant Issue, which are apparently temporary cards only.

[dbt1949]

The other day while driving on the interstate somebody decided to talegate me for some distance. I hadn't pissed them off or anything. Anyrate I remembered about turning on your windshield washers to spray the tailgater behind. I tried it and it actually worked! I chuckled to myself the rest of the drive.

[Daehawk]

Today I will be cooking cheap home made Salisbury steaks with onion brown gravy along with home style mashed potatoes. I just wish I had some sour cream to add to the potatoes.

[morlac]

[Sudy]

My mother in law got robbed at the grocery store yesterday. Nice little 2 woman operation. 1st distracted her and the 2nd stole her wallet out of her purse. Anyhow, she had to reorder all her cards. Working with Wells Fargo on her new bankcard she told them how bad/quickly she needed a new one due to stuff. The lady said it would take up to 10 business days to get her a new one. When asked about an expedite and over nighting one she was told that yes they could. When asked what it would cost she was told nothing. So I guess she just needed to beg more?

Geez, sorry to hear that. Even if she wasn't shaken up, I'm sure it must be extremely frustrating.

Yeah, I got told 10 business days too. Though I suspect that's an overestimation. It's possible I could walk in to a local branch (this card's through my bank) to get it replaced immediately, but I'm not in a hurry. Mrs. Nym has wanted to find a good credit union so that we don't have to be loyal to the big Canadian banks anymore, but we haven't found one with a convenient location.

[Anonymous Bosch]

Mrs. Nym has wanted to find a good credit union so that we don't have to be loyal to the big Canadian banks anymore, but we haven't found one with a convenient location.

Try using the CCUA locator.

[Daehawk]

[Holman]

NYT: This Mutant Crayfish Clones Itself, and It’s Taking Over Europe

Before about 25 years ago, the species simply did not exist. A single drastic mutation in a single crayfish produced the marbled crayfish in an instant.

The mutation made it possible for the creature to clone itself, and now it has spread across much of Europe and gained a toehold on other continents. In Madagascar, where it arrived about 2007, it now numbers in the millions and threatens native crayfish.

“We may never have caught the genome of a species so soon after it became a species,” said Zen Faulkes, a biologist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who was not involved in the new study.

As marmorkrebs became more popular, owners grew increasingly puzzled. The crayfish seemed to be laying eggs without mating. The progeny were all female, and each one grew up ready to reproduce.

The scientists concluded that the new species got its start when two slough crayfish mated. One of them had a mutation in a sex cell — whether it was an egg or sperm, the scientists can’t tell.

Normal sex cells contain a single copy of each chromosome. But the mutant crayfish sex cell had two.

Somehow the two sex cells fused and produced a female crayfish embryo with three copies of each chromosome instead of the normal two. Somehow, too, the new crayfish didn’t suffer any deformities as a result of all that extra DNA.

It grew and thrived. But instead of reproducing sexually, the first marbled crayfish was able to induce her own eggs to start dividing into embryos. The offspring, all females, inherited identical copies of her three sets of chromosomes. They were clones.

[dbt1949]

Mutant Ninja Crayfish.

[Holman]

Vulture.com's sit-down Q&A with Quincy Jones is all the rage today. It is crazy good fun.

It’s such a strange juxtaposition — how Michael’s music was so joyous, but his life just seems sadder and more odd as time goes by.
Yes, but at the end Michael’s problem was Propofol, and that problem affects everyone — doesn’t matter if you’re famous. Big Pharma making OxyContin and all that shit is a serious thing. I was around the White House for eight years with the Clintons, and I’d learn about how much influence Big Pharma has. It’s no joke. What’s your sign, man?

Pisces.
Me too. It’s a great sign.

You just mentioned the Clintons, who are friends of yours. Why is there still such visceral dislike of them? What are other people not seeing in Hillary, for example, that you see?
It’s because there’s a side of her — when you keep secrets, they backfire.

Like what secrets?
This is something else I shouldn’t be talking about.

You sure seem to know a lot.
I know too much, man.

What’s something you wish you didn’t know?
Who killed Kennedy.

What’s stirred everything up? Is it all about Trumpism?
It’s Trump and uneducated rednecks. Trump is just telling them what they want to hear. I used to hang out with him. He’s a crazy motherfucker. Limited mentally — a megalomaniac, narcissistic. I can’t stand him. I used to date Ivanka, you know.

Wait, really?
Yes, sir. Twelve years ago. Tommy Hilfiger, who was working with my daughter Kidada, said, “Ivanka wants to have dinner with you.” I said, “No problem. She’s a fine motherfucker.” She had the most beautiful legs I ever saw in my life. Wrong father, though.

Maybe not the cha-cha.
[Marlon] Brando used to go cha-cha dancing with us. He could dance his ass off. He was the most charming motherfucker you ever met. He’d fuck anything. Anything! He’d fuck a mailbox. James Baldwin. Richard Pryor. Marvin Gaye.

He slept with them? How do you know that?
[Frowns.] Come on, man. He did not give a fuck! You like Brazilian music?

Oh, and the Beatles were apparently the worst musicians in the world.

[KDH]

.
... Beware the looming Google Chrome HTTPS certificate apocalypse!

In April, Google-Chrome will stop trusting Symantec Certificates of Trustworthyness (of a certain date) ... In October, All Symantec certs


9 out of 10 mathematicians say that having to click thru all of those warnings dialogs will cause the increased failure of computer mice, leading to an overfilling of landfills worldwide by 2019



... ok, I made that last bit up

[Daehawk]

What should your fantasy eye color really be

My result


My wife got gold eyes.

[dbt1949]

I got Golden Eye too.
That sounds like a good name for a movie.

[gilraen]

What should your fantasy eye color really be

My result

I got Cosmos Eyes too.

Time travel FTW!

[Daehawk]

hahaha ya! I thought about healing but figured it was only for myself like Wolverine and I could go to the future for that.

[GreenGoo]

.
... Beware the looming Google Chrome HTTPS certificate apocalypse!

In April, Google-Chrome will stop trusting Symantec Certificates of Trustworthyness (of a certain date) ... In October, All Symantec certs

Ok, I didn't read your article but the headline is click bait and inaccurate.

Symantec was issues certs without proper security, as well as delegating cert issuing authority to 3rd parties without the necessary oversight. This is kind of a big deal, since certs is how we do things like online banking.

Since the announcement (last Jan 2017?) Google and Symantec have come up with a plan:

From December 1, 2017, all Symantec certificate brands (Symantec, GeoTrust, Thawte and RapidSSL) will be issued from DigiCert’s validation platform and Chrome will trust those certificates. For clarity: the Symantec certificate brands will continue to exist after December 2017, they will only be issued from a different, upgraded validation platform. Google will continue to trust all Symantec certificates that have been issued from this new platform after December 1st, 2017.

From an average user perspective, this should be invisible to you. For people who have Symantec issued certs that expire after the Mar 31st 2018 deadline, they will need to dump their cert and get a new one issued (by Sept 2018 I think?). Anyone with a Symantec cert that expires before the Mar 2017 deadline will just need to get a new cert from the new 3rd party with approved infrastructure. I don't know the details, but it's possible there will be a new cert application process or maybe it'll be just as easy as getting the same cert renewed. Certs expire, so getting a new cert/reissued cert is completely normal so there shouldn't be a problem getting a new approved cert, except maybe because of the deadline, there might be more cert applications than the systems can handle, since many will now expire at the same time. This might cause excessive load or long (comparatively) waits for the new cert.

A browser comes with defined trust of many cert issuers. Chrome will issue a patch (could already be done nope, build 66 in April) that stops trusting Symantec on the deadline and starts trusting new 3rd party (they named the company, I don't remember name) certs. Again, this should be invisible to the average browser user.

If all this was in your article my apologies. "Chrome certificate Apocalypse" was excessive rhetoric which made me shy away from the article.

edit: Skimming your article, while yes, you will come across websites that your browser used to trust but now doesn't, but that's not the users' fault. In theory, an actively managed website will take care of this ahead of time. Old, unmanaged websites probably shouldn't be trusted anyway. I would assume that Symantec has a list of all the certs it issued and the new company could in theory automatically reissue new, approved certs and send them out to the owners of the old certs. Certs issued by Symantec delegated companies are probably out of luck, although a really diligent company (the new 3rd party issuer) would track them down too.

In short, it's true some sites will cause Chrome to tell you they aren't trusted. These sites aren't on top of their security needs so I have little sympathy for them.

Attn: Kraken, I didn't look, but you should check your cert and make sure your issuer is not affected by this problem. If no one else has looked for you by tonight, I'll take a look myself, but it wouldn't hurt for you to know what's coming down the pipe, if anything.

Finally, this only affects Chrome and certs issued by Symantec right now, although I would expect other browsers to follow suit.

[GreenGoo]

Hey Kraken, your cert is Geotrust, and while I haven't dug deep, I see it's part of the Symantec group. You'll need to update your cert as per the post above.

I'm sending you a PM just to make sure you hear this. Kind of important to get ahead of this. Being surprised on April 1st is not the kind of April Fool you want to be.

Your cert expires in October of 2018.

edit: So I'm reading up on the GeoTrust plan, and earlier last year they said they hoped to have issued new certs from the new infrastructure by September 11,2017. Your current cert was issued on Sept 11, 2017. Give me a sec to see if I can figure out if it's from the new or old infrastructure. My guess is that you're ready to roll. Nope.

edit2: The new 3rd party issuer for Symantec is DigiCert. It is unclear to me at this time whether new certs will show as issued by DigiCert or Symantec (or one of their owned companies such as GeoTrust). While I can do this kind of work in a pinch, I'm not the TLS guy in my shop. Some of the questions I have might be obvious to a more experienced admin. Still reading.

edit3: Ok, I'm pretty sure I've figured out your situation Kraken. Here's a link to GeoTrust's own notification about the problem and how to deal with it:

GeoTrust plan for Chrome distrust

There is a table at that link, and the last entry applies to you.

In effect, you're the worst case scenario, with a cert issued after April 2016, but before Dec 1 2017, and yours expires after September 13, 2018.

All that means is that you'll have to manually request a new cert from GeoTrust. You can do this any time between Dec 1, 2017 and Sept 13, 2018. i.e. now.

This is the only part of my rambling that matters to you Kraken:

ACTION Kraken should: contact GeoTrust and ask for a new cert. If you have someone managing your website for you, email them, tell them that your cert is going to be distrusted by Chrome (and other browsers are going to follow, almost certainly) and you need a new cert.

That's it.

[Isgrimnur]

That may end up being his retirement day.

[Kraken]

edit3: Ok, I'm pretty sure I've figured out your situation Kraken. Here's a link to GeoTrust's own notification about the problem and how to deal with it:

GeoTrust plan for Chrome distrust

There is a table at that link, and the last entry applies to you.

In effect, you're the worst case scenario, with a cert issued after April 2016, but before Dec 1 2017, and yours expires after September 13, 2018.

All that means is that you'll have to manually request a new cert from GeoTrust. You can do this any time between Dec 1, 2017 and Sept 13, 2018. i.e. now.

This is the only part of my rambling that matters to you Kraken:

ACTION Kraken should: contact GeoTrust and ask for a new cert. If you have someone managing your website for you, email them, tell them that your cert is going to be distrusted by Chrome (and other browsers are going to follow, almost certainly) and you need a new cert.

That's it.

Thanks for doing all that legwork! I buy my cert through my webhost, who also takes care of installing it. I will pass this along to them the next time I have time for Curio City. MDD Hosting is pretty responsive and will probably handle it for me. Lately I've been pouring all of my attention into Blue Hills Editorial. I'm planning to fold Curio City this year anyway, possibly as early as September or as late as December, depending on how the summer goes. If you hadn't done that, though, I would've been blindsided on April 1...and since it only affects Chrome users, I might not have figured it out for some weeks after that.

[GreenGoo]

Ok, I admit I hadn't been following your Curio Escapades lately, although I do like to check up on it every now and then to see how it's going. If the plan for Curio City is to close before September 13th, 2018, you literally have to do nothing about your cert.

I should really track down what is happening with you and your shop. In the meantime I'll offer my condolences on your business closing. Or congratulations. Whichever applies. I know it was often a struggle to stay afloat with December paying for the entire rest of the year, and I admired your efforts in running your own business.

Again, just ignore all this cert nonsense if CC is closing before September 13, 2018.

Edit: Ah, here you are http://bluehillsedit.com/home/about-us/. A new business! Congrats! I believe the other editor is your wife? Reading her bio seems to match up with what I vaguely remember from you posting here about her job trials and tribulations.

Good luck!