Times of Israel on the Molotov cocktail/flamethrower attack on a Jewish march in Boulder. I can't help noticing how extremely pale - even compared to me - many of these terrorists of color are. I wonder how the advocates of color-based morality square their support for people like him with their race convictions.
I don't know why people of pallor get so much hate: Our mascot of Casper the Friendly Ghost!
As for the loser who committed an act of terror, He's not going to be working on his tan anytime soon. He'll get a max security jail, probably isolation...In ten years he'll look back and ask if it was worth it.
Earlier today, a man went into a bank branch not far from here, beat up his ex-girlfriend, a teller there, and then dragged her out of the bank into his car and drove away. It seems nobody in the bank at the time did anything (except call 911, I guess).
The agency in charge of telling the public, "Look for this missing person!" issued an "Ashanti Alert" on this young woman, whose name is Amber.
Amber has been found. Her ex is still at large.
"Ashanti Alerts provide for rapid dissemination of information to law enforcement agencies, media and the public about adults who have been reported missing along with suspect information in cases of suspected abduction."
B. Hello, this is the US Department of Justice, Fraud line. Your office is under subpoena. Please stand and step back from your keyboard. Touch nothing. Agents are arriving.
B1. I happen to have a deep sonourous voice and decades of public speaking. 🫣
C1. After a hundred calls haha, I Created an address at a vacant lot in a town in Michigan. And agree to meet them at the window or security system appointment.
D. Apply C to Yes!!! For the 19th time, I want a dinner to learn how to sell my never existed time-share!
E. Or be courteous like Ms Pinki with the medical testing, Medicare enrollment fraudsters
Sigh...
Worse today are the text messages with downloads, fraudulent LinkedIn... and the important and also helpful email nonsense.
I just observed a bird at my 2nd floor window bird feeder. The bad news was he was rapping on the window! A nice drum beat.
We replaced windows in the house 2 years ago (NOTE TO ANDERSON: WE"RE NOT DUE FOR NEW ONES YET!), the new ones slide down, so I can fill the bird feeder hopper. I am toying with adding one to my UD office window. I might. It's 60 years old, the type you turn a lever and it opens in for a few inches. I gotta measure if I can make it work or not.
Son F just applied for a weeklong camp and environmental education program that is FREE ($50 deposit, and you get it back if you show up, sort of like when I went to Sustainable Forestry class last summer.) Who knows if he'll be accepted, but it didn't cost anything to apply. I'm being a selfish mom and not telling the rest of the Envirothon group about it. If they get the emails from Catawba Riverkeeper and read them, they'll know ;-).
Thank you. I was amazed that this exists. We've already done water quality biotic indexing using macroinvertebrate sampling, but review is always good. It's got practice in other water quality tests, reptile and amphibian trapping, data interpretation and presentation, State Park conservation and management, even an art project. And the people he would meet are the kind that could offer an internship or just a summer job that doesn't involve lawn mowing.
Aquatic resources isn't his favorite subject, but since it's fieldwork instead of memorizing, it would be great.
"....water quality biotic indexing using macroinvertebrate sampling...."
Thank God someone is doing it because I don't know what it is and would probably delete the email telling me to do it. Compounding the confusion, the spell checker says macroinvertebrate isn't a word.
Aquatic macroinvertebrates are little animals such as insect larvae, crustaceans, snails, small insects, etc. Some are more tolerant of water pollution, higher temperature, and other features than others. You collect them all from a stream, and then you sort them according to high, moderate, or low tolerance. Then, based on the number of species in each category, you calculate a "Biotic Index" that indicates excellent, good, fair, or poor water quality.
Most of the macroinvertebrates are very small, so we eat the fish that eat them, rather than eating them directly. Crayfish are the exception, and I'd go heavy on the garlic.
Good morning. I thought yesterday’s post was going to cover today? Anyway, 46 degrees, with a high in the 70s.
PGA champ Scott Scheffler won the Memorial yesterday, repeating his win of last year. The last golfer to win back-to-back Memorials was Tiger Woods, some 20 years ago.
The mothership is covering the decision by the Court of International Trade that strikes down the series of “trade deficit” tariffs imposed by Trump. The FP headlines “”Free Palestine’ terrorism”.
Apple is pretty good at patching security holes quickly, but there’s no guarantee. It’s still worth having an ad blocker. And the firewall should be on, as well as drive/file encryption if you want to be extra cautious. I’ve never turned on encryption, because reasons I can’t remember any more. I think it used to slow system performance and cost storage space…
I recommend keeping sensitive files like financial and tax files either on removable media or an encrypted disk or virtual disk. I use a free/open source software package called VeraCrypt which is an encrypted virtual disk -- a large file that, with a passphrase, can be mounted and used as a disk device. Versions exist for Windows and MacOS. https://veracrypt.io
This book review makes its subject sound very intriguing, moreso if you’re a fan of Bourdain and some of the Food Network celebrity types. It’s a memoir of Bourdain’s sometime co-author and ghost writer.
"The journey is relatable, with poverty wages, bed bugs, and morning bong hits."
I don't find that "relatable," unless by "relatable" the writer means "able to be related (i.e., told)".
Based on her college graduation date, Ms. Woolover, the book author, is at least 10 years younger than I am, which suggests that what the review writer calls "poverty wages" is more than I was making as a waitress or a typist.
Yeah, I can’t entirely relate to that type of rude, boorish person, either… The book sounds as if it promises lots and lots of drama, though, which can make for good stories if told capably.
A person - Anthony Bourdain, for instance - can be interesting without being either likeable or anything like oneself, which seems to be what "relatable" is supposed to mean. Ms. Woolover may also be interesting, but it doesn't look like her life experiences intersect with mine other than on the one point of low-wage employment.
If Dante were alive today, he would have created a special circle of Hell to hold scammers.
A few days ago, I had a call from someone who told me that they represented an astrology service and their astrologers had identified me as someone special who deserved a unique "free" reading.
I pointed out to them that if their astrologers were really any good, they would have known that I would reject this offer and saved them the time of making this call.
The mass adoption of auto-dialers that wait for a live human to answer, ignoring voicemail greetings, before they will connect to a live human on their end, has driven the cost of phone solicitation way down and opened the floodgates to phone scammers. This is the same dynamic nvolved in the rise of spam emails as soon as email became a thing. If the cost of unsuccessful solicitations is low enough, then why not make thousand of them, if one sucker buying it pays for then all?
Question... Does one check the box that has only the teeniest sliver of a bicycle wheel when it's asking us to check all boxes with bicycles? Or the bus...if the rear view mirror is the only thing in the box, do you check that box? It's not a bus, it's a mirror detached from the bus in a box...(?) I had one yesterday...check all boxes with mountains or hills...(what?!?)...and one of the boxes is a landscaped large flight of steps...is that a hill or a flight of steps?
Planted roof tomatoes yesterday. It's been very cool, in the lower 50's at night.
Oh, those things are so stooopid. Some of them are so dark you can't see what the heck you are looking at. Various vehicles and street fixtures often don't look anything like the ones we see every day in our town (or our country, even), so how are we supposed to know? Captcha delenda est.
If a captcha doesn't work on the first try, I leave the page. But usually before I get a captcha, I get an "I'm not a robot" and those usually work. As I check the box, I say "I'm not a robot, are you?" It doesn't answer.
Rooftop frost here with a low this morning of 38ºF. No sign of frost on the ground, though, which may be radiating too much warmth now for frost to set.
I guess that’s the main objective: To get us to make human-like decisions rather than computer-like ones… I’m not sure I would answer some of them the same way several times in a row, although I sort of assume I would.
"Does one check the box that has only the teeniest sliver of a bicycle wheel when it's asking us to check all boxes with bicycles?"
I have trouble with that, too. Whatever you're supposed to do, I do it wrong, and they keep giving me other pictures until I manage to guess right on one.
With those kinds of puzzles, I usually have to do it several times before they're convinced I'm real. I'm not very good with spotting pieces of things.
Coincidentally, Son F just had to do a "find the bicycles" Captcha in order to submit an application for a summer camp program. He did it right the first time.
Yeah. Pretty soon they'll be asking you to solve the purple box in Connections. You know: PEOPLE WHO WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL IN BEND, OREGON MINUS THE THIRD LETTER. Or some such thing.
That video while informative, used an example that was not a spurious login attempt, but a set of key commands (specific to Windows) that results in a malware download. A valid CAPTCHA should not require any actions except clicking or mouse movements within the displayed graphic itself.
That type of instruction (if not Win specific) would normally have caused me to google the keyboard combination. Although if scammers had hacked the user login page of a site I trusted, and assuming they didn’t alter the expected GUI, I might have followed the instructions.
It’s really helpful to hear confirmation from someone else that, No, you really shouldn’t be following instructions to type any keyboard commands as a test to get past a Captcha.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/colorado-attacker-held-on-preliminary-murder-charges-though-cops-say-none-dead-as-of-now/
Times of Israel on the Molotov cocktail/flamethrower attack on a Jewish march in Boulder. I can't help noticing how extremely pale - even compared to me - many of these terrorists of color are. I wonder how the advocates of color-based morality square their support for people like him with their race convictions.
I don't know why people of pallor get so much hate: Our mascot of Casper the Friendly Ghost!
As for the loser who committed an act of terror, He's not going to be working on his tan anytime soon. He'll get a max security jail, probably isolation...In ten years he'll look back and ask if it was worth it.
Earlier today, a man went into a bank branch not far from here, beat up his ex-girlfriend, a teller there, and then dragged her out of the bank into his car and drove away. It seems nobody in the bank at the time did anything (except call 911, I guess).
The agency in charge of telling the public, "Look for this missing person!" issued an "Ashanti Alert" on this young woman, whose name is Amber.
Amber has been found. Her ex is still at large.
"Ashanti Alerts provide for rapid dissemination of information to law enforcement agencies, media and the public about adults who have been reported missing along with suspect information in cases of suspected abduction."
Fighting scammers, Advanced course 3.14159
A. Listen. Analyze voice. Yes this is profiling.
A.1 we are not inactive enforcement!
B. Hello, this is the US Department of Justice, Fraud line. Your office is under subpoena. Please stand and step back from your keyboard. Touch nothing. Agents are arriving.
B1. I happen to have a deep sonourous voice and decades of public speaking. 🫣
C. Yes, I need those new windows! My cell phone has a Michigan area code because I got this number in 1987 or 88. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DynaTAC
C1. After a hundred calls haha, I Created an address at a vacant lot in a town in Michigan. And agree to meet them at the window or security system appointment.
D. Apply C to Yes!!! For the 19th time, I want a dinner to learn how to sell my never existed time-share!
E. Or be courteous like Ms Pinki with the medical testing, Medicare enrollment fraudsters
Sigh...
Worse today are the text messages with downloads, fraudulent LinkedIn... and the important and also helpful email nonsense.
Inventive!
The scam texts for outstanding highway tolls seem to have abated recently…
Wierd... 62 comments and all I see are 2 by Cynthia. And I've been good !! 🫡🫡🫡🐾🐾🐾🐾🦔
We had 0.67" of H⅔O⅓ last night!
Maybe try refreshing the page. I’ve had to do that with the Substack comments from time to time.
I just observed a bird at my 2nd floor window bird feeder. The bad news was he was rapping on the window! A nice drum beat.
We replaced windows in the house 2 years ago (NOTE TO ANDERSON: WE"RE NOT DUE FOR NEW ONES YET!), the new ones slide down, so I can fill the bird feeder hopper. I am toying with adding one to my UD office window. I might. It's 60 years old, the type you turn a lever and it opens in for a few inches. I gotta measure if I can make it work or not.
I’m so glad I put up a bird feeder for the first time in my life. Have had a hummingbird feeder for nearly 40 years now. Daily doses of joy.
Son F just applied for a weeklong camp and environmental education program that is FREE ($50 deposit, and you get it back if you show up, sort of like when I went to Sustainable Forestry class last summer.) Who knows if he'll be accepted, but it didn't cost anything to apply. I'm being a selfish mom and not telling the rest of the Envirothon group about it. If they get the emails from Catawba Riverkeeper and read them, they'll know ;-).
https://www.ljea.org/watershed-programs/wwa-wilderness-watershed-adventure/
So who will replace Epic Fail Lawn Service?
It's the first week of August, and the grass is usually not growing much at that point. If necessary, we can coerce Fang or Vlad to do it, for a fee.
It’s June not August. 🙂
I meant the date of the camp. Epic Fail is mowing the lawn as I type.
My prayers are that he gets accepted, and that he loves it. Oh, and he mows before he goes.
Thank you. I was amazed that this exists. We've already done water quality biotic indexing using macroinvertebrate sampling, but review is always good. It's got practice in other water quality tests, reptile and amphibian trapping, data interpretation and presentation, State Park conservation and management, even an art project. And the people he would meet are the kind that could offer an internship or just a summer job that doesn't involve lawn mowing.
Aquatic resources isn't his favorite subject, but since it's fieldwork instead of memorizing, it would be great.
"....water quality biotic indexing using macroinvertebrate sampling...."
Thank God someone is doing it because I don't know what it is and would probably delete the email telling me to do it. Compounding the confusion, the spell checker says macroinvertebrate isn't a word.
Aquatic macroinvertebrates are little animals such as insect larvae, crustaceans, snails, small insects, etc. Some are more tolerant of water pollution, higher temperature, and other features than others. You collect them all from a stream, and then you sort them according to high, moderate, or low tolerance. Then, based on the number of species in each category, you calculate a "Biotic Index" that indicates excellent, good, fair, or poor water quality.
Thank you, that's very interesting. I had no idea.
How do you decide which ones to eat? Is there an indexing method to determine the appropriate ratio of butter to garlic?
Most of the macroinvertebrates are very small, so we eat the fish that eat them, rather than eating them directly. Crayfish are the exception, and I'd go heavy on the garlic.
I'm always suspicious when they ask me to identify which of the squares contain a Finnish sniper, when it's just a winter forest scene.
Good morning. I thought yesterday’s post was going to cover today? Anyway, 46 degrees, with a high in the 70s.
PGA champ Scott Scheffler won the Memorial yesterday, repeating his win of last year. The last golfer to win back-to-back Memorials was Tiger Woods, some 20 years ago.
The mothership is covering the decision by the Court of International Trade that strikes down the series of “trade deficit” tariffs imposed by Trump. The FP headlines “”Free Palestine’ terrorism”.
Highly recommend the FP article. It’s well done and informative.
I have believed for 70 years that while antisemitism existed in US soil, “it couldn’t happen here.”
Think of it as a bonus for premium subscribers.
Do us Mac users need to worry? I have a pretty good spidey sense for such things.
Apple is pretty good at patching security holes quickly, but there’s no guarantee. It’s still worth having an ad blocker. And the firewall should be on, as well as drive/file encryption if you want to be extra cautious. I’ve never turned on encryption, because reasons I can’t remember any more. I think it used to slow system performance and cost storage space…
I recommend keeping sensitive files like financial and tax files either on removable media or an encrypted disk or virtual disk. I use a free/open source software package called VeraCrypt which is an encrypted virtual disk -- a large file that, with a passphrase, can be mounted and used as a disk device. Versions exist for Windows and MacOS. https://veracrypt.io
Wow, nifty!
I turned mine off so long ago I forget when. If something bad happens, I'll tell folks the dog ate my computer.
Thanks for the alert, MG68 (or IG).
This book review makes its subject sound very intriguing, moreso if you’re a fan of Bourdain and some of the Food Network celebrity types. It’s a memoir of Bourdain’s sometime co-author and ghost writer.
https://freebeacon.com/culture/on-benders-batali-and-bourdain/
The review is very good in that it makes clear I don't want to read the book.
Batali is hanging around Traverse City nowadays, up in the tip of the little pinky portion of the Michigan Hand Map.
"The journey is relatable, with poverty wages, bed bugs, and morning bong hits."
I don't find that "relatable," unless by "relatable" the writer means "able to be related (i.e., told)".
Based on her college graduation date, Ms. Woolover, the book author, is at least 10 years younger than I am, which suggests that what the review writer calls "poverty wages" is more than I was making as a waitress or a typist.
Who of us can relate to "morning bong hits"?
I know what it means, at least. I'm not a complete cultural recluse.
Yeah, I can’t entirely relate to that type of rude, boorish person, either… The book sounds as if it promises lots and lots of drama, though, which can make for good stories if told capably.
A person - Anthony Bourdain, for instance - can be interesting without being either likeable or anything like oneself, which seems to be what "relatable" is supposed to mean. Ms. Woolover may also be interesting, but it doesn't look like her life experiences intersect with mine other than on the one point of low-wage employment.
If Dante were alive today, he would have created a special circle of Hell to hold scammers.
A few days ago, I had a call from someone who told me that they represented an astrology service and their astrologers had identified me as someone special who deserved a unique "free" reading.
I pointed out to them that if their astrologers were really any good, they would have known that I would reject this offer and saved them the time of making this call.
They didn't get it.
The mass adoption of auto-dialers that wait for a live human to answer, ignoring voicemail greetings, before they will connect to a live human on their end, has driven the cost of phone solicitation way down and opened the floodgates to phone scammers. This is the same dynamic nvolved in the rise of spam emails as soon as email became a thing. If the cost of unsuccessful solicitations is low enough, then why not make thousand of them, if one sucker buying it pays for then all?
Yes, the low cost of trying is the key factor.
“Can you predict how long it will take me to hang up?” [click]
I've noticed a few. They're everywhere.
Question... Does one check the box that has only the teeniest sliver of a bicycle wheel when it's asking us to check all boxes with bicycles? Or the bus...if the rear view mirror is the only thing in the box, do you check that box? It's not a bus, it's a mirror detached from the bus in a box...(?) I had one yesterday...check all boxes with mountains or hills...(what?!?)...and one of the boxes is a landscaped large flight of steps...is that a hill or a flight of steps?
Planted roof tomatoes yesterday. It's been very cool, in the lower 50's at night.
Oh, those things are so stooopid. Some of them are so dark you can't see what the heck you are looking at. Various vehicles and street fixtures often don't look anything like the ones we see every day in our town (or our country, even), so how are we supposed to know? Captcha delenda est.
If a captcha doesn't work on the first try, I leave the page. But usually before I get a captcha, I get an "I'm not a robot" and those usually work. As I check the box, I say "I'm not a robot, are you?" It doesn't answer.
It's good to know I'm not the only one who can't get it right.
As a general rule of thumb, if in doubt, 3 checked boxes seems sufficient, most of the time.
"Most of the time..."
I had one the other day where it just wouldn't let me in. I went about 8 rounds of bicycles and busses, became irate, and closed the tab.
I’ve seen one or the other like that. It had caused me to wonder if the Captcha might be a scammer’s spoof page malfunctioning…
Rooftop frost here with a low this morning of 38ºF. No sign of frost on the ground, though, which may be radiating too much warmth now for frost to set.
I guess that’s the main objective: To get us to make human-like decisions rather than computer-like ones… I’m not sure I would answer some of them the same way several times in a row, although I sort of assume I would.
"Does one check the box that has only the teeniest sliver of a bicycle wheel when it's asking us to check all boxes with bicycles?"
I have trouble with that, too. Whatever you're supposed to do, I do it wrong, and they keep giving me other pictures until I manage to guess right on one.
I so wish there was a field where I could type in a message to Captcha.
With those kinds of puzzles, I usually have to do it several times before they're convinced I'm real. I'm not very good with spotting pieces of things.
Coincidentally, Son F just had to do a "find the bicycles" Captcha in order to submit an application for a summer camp program. He did it right the first time.
Their brains are wired different from ours.
They also have better eyesight. Most of the time the images are to small for me to be confident I see what I think I see.
That is also true!
We both puzzled a bit over a night photo, but we agreed it was a motorcycle and not a "bike" for purposes of the exercise.
We all do. In fact, I’m suspicious of everyone in here. How do I know you’re really a church lady in NC if you can’t check the right box?
"On the Internet, nobody nows that you are a dog." Old Internet meme, supposedly from a New Yorker cartoon years ago.
I could be a cat, or an old man who lives in a basement in Pittsburgh, or a Russian troll farm.
Or…(cue Church Lady) could it be…Satan?!?
I remember Satan!
I remember the Moody Blues singing about them. What a gawdawful sickening treacle of a chorus! 🤢
'Cause I love you
Yes, I love you
Oh, how I love you
Aah, aah, aah, aah
Aah, aah, aah, aah
Gotta admit, I was never a fan of their glam rock: too pretentious, even for me!
Nowadays, both "Satin" and "Stan" are in use, because the world can't spell.
Yeah. Pretty soon they'll be asking you to solve the purple box in Connections. You know: PEOPLE WHO WENT TO HIGH SCHOOL IN BEND, OREGON MINUS THE THIRD LETTER. Or some such thing.
If it means I end up not using computers, I'd accept that.
#MeToo
I'm getting there.
#MeToo
Useful! thanks!
Good morning. Thank you for this potentially helpful notice.
Morning. You’re welcome.
That video while informative, used an example that was not a spurious login attempt, but a set of key commands (specific to Windows) that results in a malware download. A valid CAPTCHA should not require any actions except clicking or mouse movements within the displayed graphic itself.
That type of instruction (if not Win specific) would normally have caused me to google the keyboard combination. Although if scammers had hacked the user login page of a site I trusted, and assuming they didn’t alter the expected GUI, I might have followed the instructions.
It’s really helpful to hear confirmation from someone else that, No, you really shouldn’t be following instructions to type any keyboard commands as a test to get past a Captcha.