13-X-2014.: Blackmailed by the google
On 10th, we tried the new barbecue. The old one, from dad, was simply not big enough for the number of people we have around the table when we fire it up. And the shape of its hearth was odd, something like 20x60cm, cinemascope. Couldn't spread the žeravica (will discuss the term on 03-VIII-2017.) properly, there were always cold spots. Found this one through an ad, the guy is a true smuggler - if that word is still applicable today, as I'd say most of what he does is actually legal or below the authorities' radar, nobody cares. His warehouse was in the garage, which was chock full of stuff you can buy in any decent supermarket out there... but not here, because there's insufficient demand and no wholesaler dares be the first with this or that item. (I'll buy another one just like this, perhaps one size smaller, in 2019, just in time for parastos).
On 12th we washed the rear seat in saxo. Took it out, pulled down the cloth, down to the bare sponge, washed the cloth separately, doused the sponge with dish washer liquid, and then Ender and I took turns treading on it. Because it was greasy. It happened, probably this spring, when I was getting it ready for inspection, that they changed oil, and left the plastic bottle with leftover oil in the trunk. At some point the bottle got in the way, the rear seat's backrest was bent forward so I just put the bottle on it... with neck down. The stopper held, quite well, only a little trickled out, for months. Once we noticed a greasy spot on the ground, I took it to get checked, and the guys didn't find anything, it's below the fuel tank, there's no oil there, if it were from the brakes it would be on the sides, and it's not from the tank either, look, the tank top is greasy... and then they guessed it must have been a bottle.
The wash was almost a success, but we kept spreading a blanket over the seat for quite a while.
Tried to send an email to a customer of Firriver, but the SMTP didn't recognize the password... hmm, I'm using the google for that, and it has worked like this for more than seven years, so what's up now?
Here's what I wrote on UA in the evening:
If anyone was so idle as to read my blog, you may have to find some other pastime. The google has behaved very suspiciously, claimed "unusual activity on my account" and basically denied me access to it (includes gmail, blog and some things in a calendar - the panoramio and youtube I have already cleaned up, i.e. deleted). The ransom is my cell phone number, to which I strongly feel the google is not entitled. They offer a well hidden alternative (two pages away, link looks like a policy explanation but actually leads to password help), but there it claims that they don't have my other email in the database. Well I have their email from nine years ago sent to that address, and I don't believe a Gugao can lose data. They may have too much, but never a lack.
Which is all fine and dandy, they can do whatever they want, but if they want my cell phone number, they can shove it, I'm voting with my feet. Whether the blog will reappear elsewhere, I don't know. I'll think about it.
Eventually Nina surrendered her cell phone number (the throwaway one which will be discarded when they travel home), which allowed access, so I retrieved the contents of my blog (since 2006). G'bye, google.
A guy suggested "Why don't you get a pay number for that. I have other mobile numbers like that and they cost me nothing except the initial credit which lasts for years.", to which I responded that "I don't feel like wasting money on the google, really. They already have enough. And maintaining one separate phone just to please them is not the trouble I'm willing to go through. If they're willing to spy on everyone, that's their choice, I'm not helping them."
The trouble is that not helping the google and the facebook spy on everyone is already deemed kind of antisocial. And that kind of social engineering seems to work. Ugly world, indeed.
Otherwise, spent most of the day tracking a congestion problem at Brighton, one of my LI routines was supposed to be moving data between servers every 45 seconds (if anything fresh was found), but it took 2 minutes to do one record... their servers indeed are "suboptimal", as they'd say in Redmond. Though, this was Lab's fault, but I didn't know that then.
The other problem was access to some customer in Belgium, for which I waited for someone from Lab to provide it for me. And on top of that, some other belgian conversion, this time the freezerbox, where the snafu was this time about the meaning of the records - it's not that there was one record per item with just location, it was multiple records with different meanings, about the same item at different times, operations, places, which was documented just about nowhere, so I did as much as I understood. And, of course, the guy I was waiting for will scram straight home when his meeting ends at 16:00, and his colleague won't tell him that I called. And then about Liverpool again, if Jan's brother ain't there, Norman has the other token to generate the six digit code, so I can pull him if needed. Even Mohan was involved in this somehow. And from the Lab guy I actually needed only to access the escuelle server, by connectstring, not the windows authentication, and it wasn't set that way and needed a restart for that. So after lunch I chatted with Tom Roberts from Lab, trying to catch this guy or to catch a good time to restart the server, which was screwy, can't do that if they're working, their app isn't smart enough to delay the write until the server comes around, be it just a minute or two. Eventually had to wait for the end of day to do it.
Fuckit, fifty things on the same day.
Mentions: 03-VIII-2017., Ender Aquila (Ender), Firriver Fertility (Firriver), Gugao, Jan Brenkelen, Lab Intro, LI agent, maturski parastos (parastos), Mohan Merchant, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Norman Shen, saxo, UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian
16-X-2014 - 30-VI-2024