The Wandering Minstrel

For several years, I have handled most of my financial stuff on-line. A lot of people do these days.

I have several sites I go to, including three banks, an investment site, my company’s retirements benefits site and the Social Security Administration.

Image - SSA splash page - click on it to see that you can’t log in on the Login page

The user interfaces for those sites are all different, but generally well organized and easy to use - all, that is, except the SSA. All the sites listed other than the SSA have a system of tabs or menus that make navigation fairly straight forward. Not the clunky old SSA, though - I guess you get what you pay for when going to the lowest bidder - the interface is counter intuitive, confusing to navigate through and often takes you in circles trying to find what you’re looking for.

For example, clicking the Login link (which is hard to find until you do it once) from the main SSA page takes you to the Login page - except you can’t log in there. You first have to decide from a list of things you can do if you have a password. Once you click on a link, you get to a page where you have to agree or disagree with the nonsensical rules listed there - still no login available. If you ‘agree,’ then you get to a page where you MUST enter your Social Security Number and a password. None of the other sites I visit allow this because they consider it a security risk. usually a user name and password and sometimes security questions like ‘What was your first dog’s name.’

After you log in, you arrive at a page and a half of stuff that tells you all about the page you selected. This is not a one time thing - every time you log in you have to land there and select a ‘continue’ button hidden at the bottom of the page. When you finally get to the page you chose, you get some funky stock browser form buttons, radio selection buttons, check boxes and such. It looks like shit compared to the commercial bank sites.

I went to the site today to try and change the tax withholding amount for my benefit. After several frustrating tries, I finally decided ‘you can’t get there from here’ and I gave up in disgust. Now riddle me this - how can we expect the morons in congress to do any kind of a decent job with healthcare or any other gubmint run programs when the Social Security and Medicare website is so fucked up?

This week the weather has been less than optimum in our part of the planet. There are lots of things that I need to do around here, but many of those activities require better weather for working outside. So, with a little time on my hands, I have been doing some nerdy scripting stuff that involves content on the web pages here and on the family website. It’s formally called Dynamic HyperText Markup Language programming (DHTML), but includes a host of content engines such as Java, JavaScript, AJAX, Flash™, PHP (hypertext preprocessor) and a number of other DHTML content enablers.

The clock widget above shows the date and time according to your computer. It also appears near the bottom of the left sidebar.

The fruits of all the recent nerdiness can be seen in recent content here:

• Countdown to Election Day, a post with a dynamic NASA-style countdown to next election day
• Sidebar widget showing the number of days left for the Obamination (look left)
• A detailed years/months/days/hours/minutes/seconds Obamination countdown

All of the above are adaptations from Flash™ animations and scripts I have used in the past, both professionally and for personal web content.

Here’s an example. I wrote a script to randomly display some quotes from one of my favorite movies, “Blazing Saddles.” Refresh your browser to get the next random quote.

By the way, if you’re viewing this site with an RSS reader, some of the DHTML may not appear.

Time flies - when you’re having fun. And the last couple of years have been just that - punctuated with some consternation, some disillusionment, some anger and plenty of outright joy and satisfaction.

I have been looking at the on-line archives over the last few days. When I pulled up the first entry to this journal, I noticed that it was posted two years and two days ago. I signed on with a post about the motto I use here: “Si vis pacem, para bellum,” which means “If you seek peace, prepare for war.”

I called the Blog “Wandering Minstrel” after an old laptop computer I had. I gave it that name because it went with us on our travels. In the old days, the home network devices were named after medieval characters: Draco, the dragon of St. George, Lancelot, Minerva and Minstrel. Just a nerdy notion, I suppose.

We set this site up primarily to address our concerns about the Second Amendment and to post about anything else that interested us - all with the intent to leave it open to express ourselves in a non-politically correct and R-Rated manner. We think that we have met that objective and thank our readers for a great two years.

Image: “Cooper’s Hawk,” captured by the Better Half in our back yard.

Never mind the man behind the curtain . . .

Dear Customer:

On Saturday October 17, 2009 at 10:00 am PDT we will be migrating all MySQL databases to a new server. The new server is to alleviate recent issues caused by high load on the current server as well as to upgrade to MySQL version 5.1.

The procedure we will use to migrate will ensure the least amount of downtime per database.

The window for this maintenance is 2 hours. During this time there will be periods of intermittent connectivity errors to MySQL.

Thank you,
Omnis Network, LLC

We got a lot of stuff done today. We got the Better Half’s Car “smogged,” did the on-line auto registration, took some of our usable junk to Goodwill, recycled some of our hazmat items and did some shopping at target. Still, I had enough time to consolidate my laptop ans external monitor on the workstation with the other (slower) computer. The latter is now a file server and the laptop is the primary system.

Pardon the mess, but this is where I wound up after futzing with it for a while (clickable image).

Now that I’m about to retire, I can let some secrets out of the bag. No, not classified or proprietary information, but some of the little things I had to do along the way to override the corporate bullshit. I can reveal them at this time, because I will (hopefully) no longer be needing them.

Take, for example, the corporate directive to the internet Nazis to block all chat room sites like Instant Messenger. Inside the Berlin Wall proxy server, one could not access UDP protocol traffic. No more chat rooms for the incompetent morons at their workstations. Screw that! I undertook a home computer project to write an HTML-based chatroom that could operate in a pop-up window from a browser. After a few evenings of futzing with it, I got it going.

Why do I need a chat room? To keep in touch with the Better Half, of course, for important shit, like this transcript from this afternoon . . .

14:48:04 Better Half: did Hussein sell out Israel today?
14:48:31 Minstrel: i think he did
14:48:38 Better Half: Bolton sez it was very close
14:48:59 Minstrel: fear the 'stache
14:49:48 Better Half: this dumb f**k is gonna get us all killed and hated if its the last thing he does
14:50:12 Minstrel: he wants to destroy America
14:50:25 Minstrel: he's a freakin' extremist leftist
14:52:05 Better Half: thats narsissistic freakin extremist to you
14:52:29 Minstrel: radical
15:15:34 Better Half: just got hotter in here
15:16:15 Minstrel: the three pm effect
15:16:34 Minstrel: wind died down just enough to let the heat build up
15:19:02 Better Half: Sam Adams 10.99
15:19:13 Minstrel: good we could stock up
15:26:18 Minstrel: ran out of Kleenex but don't want to bring a whole box
15:26:27 Minstrel: brought up some from the truck
15:27:00 Better Half: ill bring another for the truck
15:27:10 Minstrel: OK thanks
15:30:08 Better Half: oops don't have any need to get
15:30:41 Minstrel: OK shop on Friday
15:31:00 Better Half: it's on the list
15:31:25 Minstrel: OK
15:31:40 Better Half: bwahahahahah the global warming climate session is making a huge footprint
15:31:56 Better Half: they're buying carbon offsets
15:32:05 Minstrel: yep carbon galore
15:42:23 Better Half: Krauthammer said Hussein's speech bordered on embarrassment and danger
15:42:59 Minstrel: yep it was very disturbing and post American
15:43:08 Minstrel: giving away our sovereignty
15:43:35 Minstrel: he absolutely WANTS to destroy America
15:43:57 Better Half: AARRGGHH!!
15:44:17 Minstrel: but really that wasn't him speaking
15:44:25 Minstrel: it was his teleprompter
15:44:48 Minstrel: he is just a puppet with george soros' hand up his ass
15:44:56 Better Half: cant trust that teleprompter


I woke up this morning, came downstairs to the computer desk and tried to log onto the Internet to do the usual on-line stuff. There was a problem with the network connection.

I tried several things to troubleshoot the system: reboot, reset the cable modem, reset the router and power cycle everything. Nothing worked. The modem lacked it’s usual little twinkling indicator lights and was stuck with one steady light and one steady with an occasional flicker. The cable activity indicator was totally off.

Aha! The cable modem died! Time to call Time Warner and get my Road Runner® technician to bring me a new modem. I called the Road Runner® help line number.

To make a very long and aggravating story short, I waded through telephone tree, three technicians all of who put me through the identical drill of convincing them that I tried everything else that may have caused the symptom. An hour and a half down the rat hole.

Finally, finally, I got the last one to admit that it could be the modem. With that, I was connected with a person to set up the house call. At first I got some bureaucrat underling that wanted to send someone out on the 25th to ‘have a look.’ Sometime between 9AM and 7PM I was told. “Let me talk to the supervisor,” I said.

A man came on the line and tried to convince me that ‘as a courtesy,’ he could send out someone tomorrow with the same 9AM to 7PM time frame. I then told him that I would be prepared to fire Time Warner and go with another ISP after twenty years as a good, regular paying, premium customer, if he couldn’t pin the exact time down - after all, weekends are when I do shopping and other things I can’t do during the week. The best he could do, he told me, was to have the installer call me a half hour prior to the service call so I could be at home for the service.

Fortunately, I have a 3G modem I can install on one of the computers as a work around, but then one of us has to work ‘offline’ while the other has internet access. It’s a pain and a bit slower, but at least we can go online.

I’ll have a follow-up report later.

Now, while I generally think that TWITTER is a solution to no known problem, I have no quarrel with those folks that use it. That’s up to individual preference.

I’m satisfied with internet news and blogs, and the ability to get email on the home and work computer and on my wireless. This meets all my current and post-retirement requirements.

Rich Lowry, of National Review Online, set up a ‘tweet aggregator‘ to display selected tweets on their website. One reader proffered, “Not sure what a tweet aggregator should look like. This is my best guess”.

When we saw this picture, the Better Half and I had to