Watching the Watchers

I'm not paranoid.

I know that's an awfully bold statement, but it's true. If I were paranoid, wouldn't I remove all identification from mail I receive and grind it up in a cross-cut shredder and send the shredded pieces to a bulk shredder for final disposal? 

... Oh, wait, I actually do that.

If I were paranoid, wouldn't I use a whole catalogue of passwords that are so long and so complex that AI would burn out whole circuit boards trying to break it down? ... Hmm, I do that as well. I believe you get the point, I'm careful. Or, I try to be.

One of the groups that worked for me in the far distant past provided the security to protect the clinical data of the patients of our 1,000 client hospitals from all over the United States. It was interesting, in a scary sort of way, to watch the attempts to break into our system. These attempts ranged from quite sophisticated to hopelessly pathetic. The most pathetic and numerous came from Howard University where I believe someone was trying to teach a class in hacking. But if that were true, the teacher was so wretched that the student's feeble attempts didn't warrant a second glance.

So, if I were as paranoid as I should be, I wouldn't be on social media at all. 

But I AM, I AM on social media. This blog thing even qualifies in a bizarre sort of way, along with Facebook and other such things. But with the passage of time, my usage of Facebook, for example, has "simplified over the years…crystallized".

Nowadays, I administer a couple of historical specialty groups and communicate with my family through emojis, memes, photographs and links to mostly cat videos. And what Liam Neeson is telling us here is absolutely true. Facebook watches us like a hawk watches a field mouse running along.

Let me give you an example. I happened to notice an apparent issue with Scarlett Johansson's teeth. 

In a photo of her, they looked a little 'off'. Not a big deal, It may not even be real, but an anomaly of that photo. But since we had otherwise discussed Tom Cruise and his rather obvious misalignment, I posted this photo on the left in our private Facebook group.

Now this is a private group with a grand total of four people, all of whom I know pretty well. I should!

We discussed Scarlett and her teeth at some length and I took it upon myself to further research this matter. When you're retired, an important topic like Scarlett Johansson's teeth can suddenly take precedence over other critical subjects. 

When my study was concluded, the decision was reached that I had not used enough data when I posited my first presumptuous assumption.

She's FINE! Everything is fine, I was just a little too quick off the starting blocks. I'm sorry, Scarlett.

Interesting story, Rich, so what? 

After this exchange, I was inundated with links to Scarlett Johannson pages, Scarlett Johansson images, Scarlett Johansson news and it wouldn't stop! It has been months now and I still see her every day! She may be my best friend!

My daughter, who is much smarter than me, says she uses that Facebook trick by deliberately looking at ultra expensive jewelry so Facebook floods her with beautiful images of jewelry. One must know who one is dealing with.

I was reminded of the joke a friend played on a mutual friend. Whenever the target was away, she would quickly use their computer to look up spoons. It didn't take long for spoons to appear all over the target's computer. Excellent use of machine time.

Still not the worst case scenario. My lovely child-bride recently bought an air fryer which is all the rage now. She likes to look for recipes to use on the air fryer. No problem, except then I started getting air fryer recipes in my Facebook feed. That's malevolent. 

If you're still worrying about Tom Cruise's teeth, the story is that he took a hockey puck to the teeth as a child. That's as good a story as any.

Back From the Netherworld

So, Rich, where've you been? No posts, you don't write, you don't call. Well, I've been ... busy. 

I could give the fabulous but tired-out excuse of recovering from the horrid curse of cancer, but that would be taking the easy way out.

The truth is much more along the lines of sheer laziness. Unmatched, unadulterated laziness. Even my Facebook postings have dropped off precipitously, but really, that's not a bad thing at all.

Okay, the mea culpa is now officially over and I should like to explain what brought me back. It wasn't guilt or longing or the inevitable build-up of having to spill my guts to an invisible but mostly quiet audience.

 No, it was Google.

One of their robots wrote me a robot email that another of their robots had decided to close down the old blogging tool I had been using since I started this Quixotic quest. They had bought the old tool, ran it alongside their own and now it was time to save money. 

If I didn't move to the new blogger, all my work (such as it was) would disappear into the ether where only roaming robots might bump into it now and then. They made me feel better by including a reference to a tool that would facilitate migrating to the Google Blogger. OH! Well, then, I thought, everything will be fine. No, I didn't, this is not my first rodeo, not by a long shot.

I ran the tool and it asked me to log into my old blog. When I logged in it took me to the new, empty Google Blogger. <Enter here a considerable series of cursing, thundering, bumbling and the eventual use of my fifty-five years of computer experience which can be summarized thus: "Strike the offending software and/or hardware with the equivalent of a ball-peen hammer until you make it do what you want.">

This tool has served me very well over the course of my career and it has a remarkable history of success. But when I looked at the fruits of my labor, I found that Google was not referencing the blog I had been keeping for the last 15 years, but a little experimental one-pager that I had played with and rejected.

Undaunted, I went to move the real blog, but found that the 'tool' was a one-time use and one time means one time. Furthermore, as if to taunt me, the tool had included a link within the old one-pager to my full blog, but it was a link to an uneditable snapshot.

Of course I got the job done, if you thought for a second that I didn't have a backup version of my blog saved unto my own personal hardware, then you don't understand the concept of 'fifty-five years of computer experience'.

What we're looking at here is the new blogger with all my old posts after having to correct many of them for font issues, spacing issues, format issues and issue issues. Good luck to us all.

UPDATE December 13, 2023: I happened to stumble across one other unintended consequence of this blog migration. I noticed some of my included images were missing. Just randomly gone. So I had to check them all. Did I mention how much of a pain this migration was? Did I?