" “>

My father being arrested for protesting, something he was quite happy to do. He was staunchly anti-war and would always stand up for the little guy. Well, mostly always…

My sister summed it up best.

“I haven’t seen him in so long, he’s already been dead to me,” she said, or something like it. You get the point.

I was watching a video on YouTube about the new Anbernic RG351M when it paused itself. Then my phone rang. I could see it was my sister from the image that appeared on the display. I knew at that moment that she was calling me to tell me dad had died. She had texted me the day before letting me know that he was in hospice at home.

This was a marked change from years past. When my older sister died in the early …

" “>

The clattering melody the train wheels sang under my feet was hypnotic. It beat a staccato rhythm against the rails, countering the smooth, blur outside the double-pane window upon which I rested my right temple. The car swayed; gently, then roughly, and gently again. Several tons of steel, aluminum, plastic, wood, and fabric played a cacophonous symphony as it hurtled down the misty California coastline. I watched without seeing, my vision blurred as my mind juggled thoughts of indecision and mortality.

“Is anyone sitting here,” said a voice over my left shoulder. I sat alone in a set of four seats arranged to face each other.

“No,” I responded, leaving my head on the chilly glass.

“Indeed,” said the voice.

Santa …

" “>

The following essay is from a Quora comment that I made in response to this honest question:

But I still think it is strange what has happened to the USA. It used to be the country that got together to solve any kind of problem or public need. You had the entire country to have paved roads and everybody had cars way ahead of us even so with electricity and telephones. You invented the Internet. But now it looks like every community expects somebody else “big corporations” to come and sort all problems out. What changed so that the US stopped to be a “let us get together and solve this shit!”. I am by no means complaining to you I just don't get it. It is like the public is afraid of starting or wanting changes. - …

" “>

NOTE: I started writing this earlier this year when I was fired from my first new job in four years after four months. I just got the to the point where I didn't care to tell the tale any more, but now, some months later and more depressed than ever, I wanted to post what I'd written, just to get it out there. I'm no angel. I'm nowhere near perfect. I make mistakes and sometimes I've been fired because it was the right thing to do, but not this time. This is simply a matter of a rich asshole who thinks he's all that and a bag of chips can treat people like shit and it will never touch him. Something similar happened in France a while ago. That didn't end well. -TCR

On July 14th of this year, I will turn 50. That's quite …

" “>

I'm just going to write something directly out of my head, so we'll see how it goes. -TCR

I've always liked the name Larry. It feels old without being stuffy, and there's an inherent jocularity about it. When you hear that you'll be meeting with some dude named Larry it instills in you the idea that the interaction won't be dark or heavy. When I walked into the room to meet my particular Larry, however, things didn't go as expected.

My Larry was a woman and anything but jovial.

"Sit," she said, not looking up from her tablet. I sat.

"Thanks for agreeing to meet with me," I said as I settled into the uncomfortable straight-back chair. I noted that her chair was a large, stuffed leather affair, but pushed away the envy. …

" “>

So, next on the pervert docket we have legendary serious news journalist Charlie Rose...

Wait, what?

So, let's take the list of people called out for being predatory assholes so far: Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, John Besh (supposedly famous chef), Louis C.K., Hadrian Belove and Shadie Einashai (rich assholes with movie theaters), Richard Dreyfuss, Gary Goddard, Andy Henry, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Knepper, Andrew Kreisberg, Jeremy Piven, Brett Ratner, Steven Segal, Tom Sizemore, Jeffrey Tambor, James Toback, Senator Al Franken, and now Charlie Rose. But wait, there's more! Yeah. I mean there's a longer list, but I'm not going to type out any more names. If you want to see the mostly complete list, look here. 

So, I let …

" “>

“It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money.... Let me give you a tip on men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the...bell of an approaching looter.” -Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was special, and not in a good way. She was a caustic, belligerent herald of the apocalypse that is raw, uncontrolled capitalism. And yet, Rand was simply a product of her time. [Keep in mind that this is not supposed to be an exhaustive analysis of the rise of Randian concepts, but just a loose overview of some of the things that led to the …

" “>

Welcome to the brave new world of DESIGN OVER FUNCTION that Jonny Johnnee Jony Ive guy has crafted at Post Jobs Apple where a glass sandwich costs you $1,000 and you must pay for the privilege of using your purchased media in their walled garden. During Apple's unveiling of "One more thing" in the shiny new Steve Jobs Theater on the shiny new Cupertino campus, Craig Federighi tried to use Face ID to unlock the demo phone. It didn't work. Today in The Guardian, there's a convenient PR piece explaining why. 

Apparently, Apple peeps kept fingering the phone before the demo which locked out the Face ID because, well, it's supposed to. 

I don't have an issue with Face ID. What I do have an issue with is the wanton removal of …

" “>

Why'd you have to go and die, man. I get the news this morning from Rima via Telegram. I can't believe it, but it's true. So many people have passed in the last few years, it brings mortality into sharp, unpleasant focus. Since it would be ridiculous for me to suggest that you haven't heard Steely Dan, go ahead and have a fresh listen to an old friend, the Dan's Gaucho, my personal favorite (if you deem valuations based on tenths of a degree valid, otherwise ALL Dan records are my favorite). 

Steely Dan was really two bands. One was the studio iteration where Becker and Fagen crafted their amazingly textured albums, staffed with a never-ending assemblage of guest artists from all walks of music. The other was the band …

" “>

I've talked about this before. I don't talk about being homeless a lot. It's painful, living in hotels for two and a half years. It's a short story if I leave out a lot of the detail. Two and a half years ago, around Christmas, we were evicted from our apartment in Mission Viejo because my publisher sat on their asses getting my advance check to me for my book, Getting An IT Help Desk Job For Dummies (available on Amazon, cheap plug). I worked my ass off to finish that book. 330 pages in three months. They didn't care. Companies don't care, so we were screwed. We figured we'd be out for a month or two then find a new place.

The thing is, nobody would take us.

It's easy. Just have the biggest recession since The Great …

" “>

You might not have noticed, since you’re most likely looking at your smartphone, but a significant amount of time people spend on the internet is through a mobile device, dominantly said smartphone. We’ve got some nifty charts lined up from ComScore so you can see just how much.

[[Had an image here, but need to go track it down. Hopefully I don't forget. ed.]]

As is illustrated in the above chart, things start shifting around 2012 when mobiles started to take over from desktops (this includes laptops, I presume), and that gap continues to widen. In general, this shows what we likely already know just from looking around; when you need the internet, you reach for your phone around two out of every three times. …

" “>On January 8th, ExtremeTech published a piece about Forbes forcing users to disable their ad blockers in order to see any content, and guess what happened. Malware.

For the past few weeks, Forbes.com has been forcing visitors to disable ad blockers if they want to read its content. Visitors to the site with Adblock or uBlock enabled are told they must disable it if they wish to see any Forbes content. Thanks to Forbes’ interstitial ad and quote of the day, Google caching doesn’t capture data properly, either.

What sets Forbes apart, in this case, is that it didn’t just force visitors to disable ad blocking — it actively served them malware as soon as they did. Details were captured by security researcher Brian …