MalwareBytes – Support Beyond and Above

     Yeah, I get that it’s usually above and beyond.  In this case it was beyond really what they had any obligation to do, this was a free version on a machine that is 16 years old, and it was above the support I have gotten from anyone else.

     A recent update of MalwareBytes wouldn’t install on an old machine I use for testing and gaming.  The problems is that they had compiled it to use SSE2 instructions my old Athlon P2400 didn’t have. The 32-bit Athlon processors lacked these.

     I sent an e-mail to support@malwarebytes.com and within 24 hours they had a patch for me that fixed two affected files so the most recent version would again run on my machine.

     MalwareBytes is a tool I’ve used for years because easily 9-out-of-10 malware infections I’ve had to deal with, it has found and eliminated for me.

Waking Up Is Hard

     My wife works nights, came home at 5AM today and woke me up.  Took me an hour and a half to get back to sleep and now I have to be awake again and not really ready.

     Woke up out of a weird dream that made absolutely no sense and yet it seemed to in the dream.

     I was taking part of a class, and I was also responsible for some things like ordering and installing some commercial application, which seemed totally familiar in the dream but now that I’m awake it is not.  I have no idea what was being taught except that it seemed to involve unfamiliar languages.

     For some reason, if you got there before 9AM, the doors would let you in but then you couldn’t open then from the inside until 9AM, you were trapped there except you could ride the freight elevator down into the basement and escape that way.  The freight elevator was monstrous, large than any I’ve ever seen.  It was like moving a good sized room.  It was a bit clunky and 100% manually operated with a big lever that was just up, down, or stop.

     The class was very ad-hoc in nature, we’d decide the next days start time the previous day, and sometimes it would go twelve hours at a stretch.  We were served food in the class room.

     The furniture was also kind of ad-hoc with some people working around tables, others at desks, and shelves around each persons location that could contain many books and other things, almost like a low office cubicle but low enough not to interfere with line of site or communications with other individuals.  We mostly worked together in small groups of two or three.

     We’d just gotten some kind of new wireless power controller that would enable us to turn off or on all the lights individually or individual outlets.  It seemed large and clunky, primitive compared to todays technology where you’d use an app on a smartphone.

     The building was near a salt water beach.  The building from the outside had an appearance similar to an old telephone company building, brick with small windows, three stories high.

     The water was warm enough and clean, not full of algae and seaweed and half processed shit like the water around here is.  It was clear ocean front, no land in sight as you looked out.  Many people swam and played in the water, even at night.

     There was a line of yellow sand on the beach.  Not a natural formation but a line of dyed sand that was placed there.  I don’t know it’s purpose.  People crossed it without issue.

     To wake up out of that dream into this reality is difficult.  I don’t really understand what was going on in the dream but it felt fun, free, liberating.  In this life I feel trapped, suffocating.  It’s an icky evil transition to have to make in the morning.Beach

Waking Up Is Hard

     My wife works nights, came home at 5AM today and woke me up.  Took me an hour and a half to get back to sleep and now I have to be awake again and not really ready.

     Woke up out of a weird dream that made absolutely no sense and yet it seemed to in the dream.

     I was taking part of a class, and I was also responsible for some things like ordering and installing some commercial application, which seemed totally familiar in the dream but now that I’m awake it is not.  I have no idea what was being taught except that it seemed to involve unfamiliar languages.

     For some reason, if you got there before 9AM, the doors would let you in but then you couldn’t open then from the inside until 9AM, you were trapped there except you could ride the freight elevator down into the basement and escape that way.  The freight elevator was monstrous, large than any I’ve ever seen.  It was like moving a good sized room.  It was a bit clunky and 100% manually operated with a big lever that was just up, down, or stop.

     The class was very ad-hoc in nature, we’d decide the next days start time the previous day, and sometimes it would go twelve hours at a stretch.  We were served food in the class room.

     The furniture was also kind of ad-hoc with some people working around tables, others at desks, and shelves around each persons location that could contain many books and other things, almost like a low office cubicle but low enough not to interfere with line of site or communications with other individuals.  We mostly worked together in small groups of two or three.

     We’d just gotten some kind of new wireless power controller that would enable us to turn off or on all the lights individually or individual outlets.  It seemed large and clunky, primitive compared to todays technology where you’d use an app on a smartphone.

     The building was near a salt water beach.  The building from the outside had an appearance similar to an old telephone company building, brick with small windows, three stories high.

     The water was warm enough and clean, not full of algae and seaweed and half processed shit like the water around here is.  It was clear ocean front, no land in sight as you looked out.  Many people swam and played in the water, even at night.

     There was a line of yellow sand on the beach.  Not a natural formation but a line of dyed sand that was placed there.  I don’t know it’s purpose.  People crossed it without issue.

     To wake up out of that dream into this reality is difficult.  I don’t really understand what was going on in the dream but it felt fun, free, liberating.  In this life I feel trapped, suffocating.  It’s an icky evil transition to have to make in the morning.Beach

Thanking God

     I’ve been working on a technical problem for a long time.  Yesterday I finally achieved success at making a web login work with Unix authentication.  I’ve got a lot more to do, get logging on failures to work right so we can block repeated guesses, get it tied into WordPress so I can make use of it from within WordPress for more than controlling access, also for knowing identity so I can do things like adjust a persons spam filters based upon a web form.

     In the past anxiety has prevented me from thinking the issues through, when things didn’t work easily I’d tense up and get flustered.

     It has been the presence of God in my life that has allowed me to not do that, keep trudging, sometimes step back and do something else for a while, then return to the problem.

     It is the knowledge from Romans 8:28, that all things work to the good of those who love God and are called to his purposes, so even when something is frustrating and unpleasant, I can know there is some positive purpose for it.

     Yesterday when nobody showed up to a church based men’s group meeting that I attend Friday mornings, before leaving I sat and read the whole book of Haggai.  It was significant to me in that moment because Haggai deals with people whose lives were unproductive because God wasn’t at the center of their lives, and when they turned back they were blessed.

     I actually started by randomly opening the Bible and reading a verse and it just happened to be right where God was blessing them, so then I went back and read from the beginning of the book to understand how they got there.

     Anyway, I always believe in giving credit where credit is due, and I’d like to think gee, I’m such a clever person for figuring this out but the truth is I’ve always had the intellect but in the past could not apply it because of the lack of inner peace which resulted from the lack of God in my life.  So I want to publicly thank God for that.

     Not like life is perfect, still a long ways but I do feel like I’ve gone from a 40 year down hill slide to an upward trajectory.

Lorn Richey for City Council

     If you are a Shoreline resident less than thrilled by the current city councils refusal to listen to it’s constituents request to not radically rezone the land and avoid turning existing suburban neighborhoods into urban wastelands, Lorn Richey is a citizen presently living on 185th St, the street where the new light rail station will be built, and the center of massive rezoning that turns current suburban neighborhoods into urban wastelands sporting 70 feet tall apartments with no adequate way to accommodate traffic and parking and all the benefits such high density urban disasters inevitably bring with them.

     Elect Lorn Richey!

Everything and Anything

     Something has got my nose doing the irritation drip.  It feels just like when we were getting the smoke from the BC fires except no haze in the air so it’s not that.  This is usually a between allergy seasons time for me but I guess not this year.

     Speaking of irritating.  A neighbor has some kind of hound dog, and it yelps incessantly for hours on end.  Barking I can handle, I’ve got a dog, she barks, that’s what dogs do.  But the yelp this thing makes sounds like it’s got one of it’s legs caught in a meat grinder.  And even though, on a logical level, I know that it is okay, that’s just the sound it makes (else it would have died by now), it still cranks up the anxiety because on an emotional level it registers as an animal in serious pain.

     It’s already exceeded the projected high for the day at 2:30pm.  But 75.9° is a bunch more comfortable than 100.4°.  Yes, I know other parts of the country have it much worse, but they’re equipped with air conditioning.  It didn’t get below 80° in the house, with all the doors and windows open and fans going, until well after midnight last night.

Man’s Upright Posture

     Somewhere I read that our upright posture resulted from coming down out of the trees and needing to run fast in order not to get eaten by predators.

     I thought about this, it made no sense because even relatively slow big cats can run much faster than we can.

     But then, it really wasn’t necessary to run faster than a predator, just faster than whoever is with you at the time.

Tired, Beat Down

     Woke up at 3:50AM Friday, had a group to go to, but was late and only person that showed left before I got there.  So might as well have slept in.  Came back home and tried to sleep but couldn’t.

     There were many updates to apply to all the machines Friday, new kernels, ssh libs, other important stuff.  Was up until 2AM trying to get everything done but didn’t make it.

     Saturday morning, early afternoon, finished what I had started Friday night but the old eskimo.com shell server crashed within seconds of starting backups.  Drove down to the co-lo facility in 90°F stop and creep traffic in a car with a leaky heater core so was worried about over heating but made it there and back.

     Had dinner, Eskimo crashed again, made another trip.  This time took the compression off the backup and it went okay.  The machine has a marginal CPU module, task it too heavily and bad things happen.

The Big Dream

     If we all went to sleep and dreamt a dream wherein we could all encroach upon each others dreams, and at those encroachments were commonalities, often inconvenient and annoying, other times deep and rewarding, but elsewhere in the dream was our own private experiences, well, we’d be here.

     Someday we will awaken but we won’t need to tell each other about our private experiences because we’ll all know each others, and it will all mesh together and make sense.  Right now though it’s rather incomprehensible at times.