One careless moment

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I’m quick to judge (and harshly) those who get scammed by email. I never download attachments or click links in emails from people I don’t know. I often check email headers or URLs to see if they’ve been spoofed. As for giving out my credit card info over the phone… never! And then I did.

I got a phone call one morning this past week from a woman who works in the billing department of the health care provider I use. Said they’d received a payment slip from me (USPS) but I had failed to enter the credit card number. She knew the amount. I said I was busy at the moment but would call back. I did, by hitting that number in the RECENTS list on my phone. Asked for her by name and gave her the card number.

Dumb. Turned out she was legit but dumb none the less.

When discussing this with my less-dumb friends we theorized how a scammer could have known the exact amount of the payment in question. Since I mailed it, someone could have intercepted that piece of mail and gotten the amount. Or, in theory, they could have social engineered the info from the health care provider. My obvious mistake was not verifying the correct phone number and placing the call instead of clicking the RECENTS link on my phone.

Surely, I cried, there must be a way to use my high tech smart phone to protect from such carelessness in the future. Turns out there are less than a dozen people who I would want/need to immediately take a call from. I’ve added those to my FAVORITES list in the iPhone and everyone else automatically goes to voice mail. Where they’re informed the best way to reach me is IM or email. And if they don’t already have my address or number, they’re SOL.

I’m still a little stunned I could have been so careless.

Surveillance Capitalism

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“What if, when I write down a thought on my phone to remember it later, what I am actually doing is extending my mind, and thereby extending my self using the phone. […] we extend our biological capabilities using technology. We are sharded beings; with parts of our selves spread across and augmented by our everyday things.”

“My iPhone is not like a safe any more than my brain is like a safe. It is a part of my self. In which case, if you want to get into my iPhone, what you really want to do is to violate my self.”

“Personal data isn’t the new oil, personal data is people. […] The business model of mainstream technology today is to monetise everything about you that makes you who are apart from your body.”

The nature of the self in the digital age » – Surveillance Capitalism – Part 2 »

The Evangelical Brand

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“A generation ago, the Republican Party realized that Evangelical Christianity could be a valuable acquisition. “Evangelical” had righteous, “family values” brand associations, the unassailable name of Jesus, the authority of the Bible, and the organizing infrastructure and social capital of Evangelical churches. Republican operatives courted Evangelical leaders and promised them power and money—the power to turn back the clock on equal rights for women and queers, and the glitter of government subsidies for church enterprises including religious education, real estate speculation, and marketing campaigns that pair social services with evangelism.”

“As in any story about selling your soul, Evangelical leaders largely got what they bargained for, but at a price that only the devil fully understood in advance. Internally, Evangelical communities can be wonderfully kind, generous and mutually supportive. But today, few people other than Evangelical Christians themselves associate the term “Evangelical” with words like generous and kind. In fact, a secular person is likely to see a kind, generous Evangelical neighbor as a decent person in spite of their Christian beliefs, not because of them.”

Evangelical Christianity destroyed its own brand »

68 and counting

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In truth, I’ve pretty much stopped counting. Celebrating that date of one’s birth seems… arbitrary. If one had a big party on August 10th for fifty years and then discovered there had been a mix-up on the birth certificate and you were born on August 11th… what? See? Arbitrary. But a party is a party, if that’s your thing. I really don’t need much of an excuse to drink too many beers. But, like January 1, it’s a good benchmark. For some, a day to look back. Or ahead. But I’m doing less of that these days, so… let’s just say I’m happy to be here.

“Individual humans are merely temporary forms taken by the single, shifting web of life on earth. If humans are not really separate things, then their births and deaths are also not real, but simply one way of seeing the rhythms of life.” (Immortality by Stephen Cave). My favorite excerpts (PDF) from the book: Immortality (Stephen Cave)

What Made The Aeron Chair An Icon

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Screen Shot 2016-03-03 at 9.44.21 AMI don’t think much about office chairs these days but when I did I was of the opinion there were only two kinds: really bad ones and really good ones. And like most companies, the two I worked for purchased the bad ones because they were cheap. And before the Aeron, I suspect most of the expensive ones were pretty bad as well. Wheels always falling off or locking up; the seats were wobbly; hard to adjust.

A few years before I retired took some of my savings and bought myself an Aeron chair to use in my office at work. I think I paid north of $1,000 for the thing but I’ve never regretted it. It’s as good as its reputation. The design is based on the following tenants:

  1. A chair should be perceived as comfortable before, during, and after sitting upon it. Comfort is as much a matter of the mind as of the body.
  2. A chair should enhance the appearance of the person sitting upon it.
  3. While allowing postural movement, the chair should also embrace the body.
  4. The chair should provide correct support for the sacrum as well as the lumbar region of the spine.
  5. The chair should provide a simple means for height and angular adjustments. A chair should be friendly to all parts of the body that touch it.

My Aeron is in my home office now.

Early Elvis contract

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ElvisGoblerContractKBOA

In 1955 Elvis Presley appeared at a little honky tonk called the B & B Club, in Gobler, MO. Not far from my hometown of Kennett, MO. More information here, including an audio clip with my father who was working at the local radio station. The contract above is between Elvis and Jimmy Haggett, who also worked at KBOA and booked entertainers on the side. If you look closely you’ll see Elvis was to receive 75% of the gate to be paid “after dance.”

Eternal Now

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string

“The days and nights of Brahman are spread out in time in rather the same way as a ball of thread an inch in diameter is unrolled to the length of a hundred yards. Its real state resembles the ball but to be presented to the human mind it has to be unrolled. For our idea of time is spatial; it has length, which is a spatial dimension. But eternity has no length, and the nearest thing to it in our experience is what we call the present moment. It cannot be measured, but it is always here.”

My favorite excerpts from Become What You Are (Alan Watts) (PDF)