Busy Week

This has been a nice and busy week, but sadly I cannot identify with what because of how much of it is under one NDA or another. Finished wrong project, started and finished another, and am still working on a third. Should get back to that too, but I think that first one is the article I am going to be most proud of seeing come out. Well, unless I made significant mistakes in it, but I think I did a fair job at least. The reason I am most proud of it is because it is a project I decided to do myself, under my own initiative. One unfortunate thing about it though is that I would have liked to share it on a job application I sent in on Friday, but I can't because it isn't live yet, and I don't know when it will be. I think I've a healthy portfolio of relevant articles for that application, but every bit helps. We'll just have to see on that, and another thing or two this week.... Busy, busy, busy.

At Long Last

It took a while but I finally finished and published my newest story, Failure (Kindle, paperback). It is a story I am glad I have written, though I cannot say I am glad to have had the story to tell. For just shy of six years now I have been chronically unemployed, and over the years have collected a number of frustrating stories, as employers with little respect for applicants proved as much. These stories along with the general experience and treatment by those around me made me want to write a story to share as much of them as I could. I had that desire for quite some time before I started writing Failure, but it was only after I thought of another component, along with the chronic unemployment of the protagonist that I was able to form a plan. Honestly, I kind of wish I had another thought for this other component, but I think it worked well, so giving the character super-abilities is what I did. If nothing else, I enjoy the irony of the situation that someone with such great power is so routinely ignored and rejected by others. Maybe if someone ever reads it they will start to wonder how much potentially they have passed on without good reason. If anyone reads it, I hope there will be a number of things they consider because it is not much fun to be so marginalized by others for something I, and others, cannot control. (I can apply for a job but I cannot force anyone to hire me.)
Now I can move on with some other story ideas I have, along with some other projects.

In addition to that, which is probably the biggest news of late, I have also set up some stuff with The Body on Games, including a Patreon in case there are any people out there who would like to support the channel. It would be nice, but I have my doubts that it will happen. Still though, it could not happen before and now it can. I've also set some stuff up for presenting graphs of the data from the videos, but that is all on The Body on Games blog.

This Week had Ups and Downs

Initially this week was going pretty well, as I was learning how to use R so I could process some frametime data for efficiently than Excel allows, some other related data, and the heart-rate data I have from The Body on Games. (Not sure how I will use them, but I can now generate histograms very easily from that data.) So all of that was a lot of fun, as I enjoy playing around with new tools like this, and getting to see some of the data represented graphical was also enlightening.
And then Don Rickles died. That definitely turned the week down for me as I am fortunate enough to know him for more than his voice in Toy Story. He was a much funnier man than many of my generation, I wager, recognize.
Goodbye, Mr. Warmth.

I'll Join In On the 'Debate'

It is interesting how low journalistic or news reporting standards have dropped in recent years, and yes I feel like going that far. So many people are approaching the FCC privacy rule blocking as though it is the end of privacy on the Internet and that's like the end of the world! Back in reality though, with a bit more research and less sensationalism, we find that the rule was never in effect to begin with, which means nothing changes. There is no loss of privacy for anyone, and therefore the world is not ending and people can stop hyperventilating. Now this has been covered in some reports I have seen, often in the last few paragraphs, but there are two other points also often left to the end or left out. One is that it has been the FTC that regulates companies on how information considered private is used/sold, not the FCC. This means that by the FCC granting itself these powers, ISPs were given rules from competing bodies to deal with and navigate. Second is that the FCC can only issue rules for telecommunication companies, but those like Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. that in fact have profit models based on the collection and sale of private information, such as browser history, would have continued to be free to do with the data as they wish. For example, just yesterday my mother was looking at toasters on Amazon and then Facebook popped up an ad for a toaster. This tracking would not be affected by the rules at all, and is there a conversation or call on the FTC to block this? No, there isn't, and there also will not be, because that means the likes of Facebook and Google will either need to start charging for their various services, or collapse and no one wants that. However, ISPs that do not even collect this information to sell it, but to better target their own services, have become the Internet's privacy bogeyman. There are far bigger offenders out there, if indeed they are considered offenders, and nobody cares about them.
Why is that? My guess is because people forget the role their ISP plays in their life because it is always present, or it is not so they hate them. But Facebook they log into and check every day and they search with Google every day as well. A positive experience with Facebook and Google you notice, but a positive experience with an ISP should be invisible to you, because it means things are behaving as expected and desired. Easy to forget and easy to misunderstand. Ripe breeding grounds for people to hype a half-story into something it is not.