I keep trying to find things to get excited about but the thing is, I find none of this new shit either challenging, or when I DO find it challenging, it is challenging in such a way that it feels like the Tech Bros that designed it deliberatley made it impossible to make my own personal choices to fit my own personal use-case without some special "support" from their "team" to alter the product in a way I'd like it to work. A lot of these things being the kinds of options and choices we USED to have as users, power-users, and most especially, tech professionals.

Almost all major corporations are offering *free* web service versions of their consumer SaaS products. So that means anyone with a Microsoft account can have Office without cost, as long as they have a web browser, ditto Google and it's bazillion services, ditto some of Amazon's stuff.

Nobody has to go to a brick and mortar store for anything anymore. We can all sit in our house and get fat sitting on our collective asses ordering anything we want to our heart's content. Groceries, Wal-Mart type stores, clothing, musical instruments, even other technology - we can buy it all online, and it gets delivered within a month to our homes where we can accumulate more crap more than ever now. So much so it leads me to question if people think about their purchases and their environmental, social, and other impacts anymore. No more walking in a guitar store and talking with fellow musicians anymore and forming bands? After all, nobody goes to the bar anymore! Bevmo will just deliver your alcoholic debauchery, and you can watch someone's Cell Phone footage of the concert Ticketmaster could sell you tickets for with more fees than a California Parking garage. No more standing in line talking about the movie or band you're about to see. No more socialization, after all, we all (me too) are pretty much over it.

We get to go to boring, homogenized profiles on social media to get our "socialization" from, while we are bombarded with scammers, advertising, and "influencers" on the frequent so much that it makes us question if it's even worth it, but like a smoker with cigarettes, we return to our social media pages on repeat to try and get a piece of the action from celebrities, while spewing biased trash about politics and social issues to look good, and pretending to be perfect little peons, and if we don't, we get cancelled, banned, or shadow-banned from people who might listen and agree or have better ideas - because the internet is no longer the information superhighway - it's the information superghetto, and just like a ghetto, you've seen one yard with six direlict cars on blocks in it, a stack of tires on fire, and some asshole out front saying "hold my beer" - you've seen all the others. Booooriing!

Even new tech like A.I. is boring. Seriously, let's talk about every advancement like this. A.I. will follow the same trend. A bunch of rich schmucks who stole IP from people much smarter and poorer will sing the high praises of a future where the new technology, in this case, artificial intelligence, and talk about how it will cahnge the world, cure cancer, remove human error, and make the planet a utopia of happy people who don't have to work anymore, we can all just sit in one collective technological campfire circle and sign Kum By Yah. Meanwhile, on the other end, a bunch of poor, tech-challenged nimrods make up stupid conspiracy theories - usually appeasing their dumb orange god - about how this is SkyNet and we're all going to die slaves to robots like some kind of JApanese 70's B-movie. When in actuality, the technology will be tried on everything, be found to suck at most of it, used on a handful of other things with negative social/economical impact that will piss some distinct factions of hte human race off, who will have to find new jobs. Meanwhile, plenty of scandals will happen as Elon/Bill/Satya/Jeff/Steve/whoever continue to create more new versions for their various companies that cause death, destruction, damage, and other small scale scandal-worthy catastrophies in the name of "advancement" that eventually lead to the public just viewing it as "just another stupid thing about modern times I hate", all the while, advertising feeds them endless piles of dreck on how this new technology will "improve" their lives without any actual explaination as to how or why it works. Just get some cute gal who runs a $1.5b art museum from her Microsoft Surface or Chromebook to talk about her Robot A.I. tour guides and everyone will ooh and aah until they realize the new bipedal Roomba tried to vacuum up their cat, and then crashed and leaked oil on the carpet of their apartment when it tried to clean the litterbox. Honestly, I think the most exciting thing about A.I. is it might end up looking like this....

Other than that, nothing new, nothing impressive, a lot of empty promises, bullshit advertising, gatekeeping, and boring superlatives about technology from people with more money than tech skills, and a populace of lamestreamers who fantasize about all these wonderous things doing things for them, but can't even find where the power button is.

The problem is that corporations, politics, security, and ease-of-use cannot co-exist. It's impossible. Corporations bottom line is to make money, a politicians bottom line is to run a sovereign land-mass, security's bottom line is to protect people from bad things, and ease-of-use's bottom line is to make sure EVERYONE can access that which they are authorized to access without jumping through too many hoops.

The Political side is most of these old bozos don't even understand the things they are regulating, whether it's compact pickup trucks, or portable tablets. And those young enough to are going to be stonewalled by old people who are frightened of all this stuff, because when they grew up, their grocery lists were on paper with pen, carried in a car withouta computer and with a carburator, to a grocery store building, that had what you could pick from, and only that, and you got what you could get, you paid for it in cash or check, and left. If you had a computerized anything back then, you worked for NASA or a banking institution. Hell, even back then, if you were in healthcare, you did everything on Paper Charts, and if you were a police officer, you had to drag the suspect to the station before you could look over their "permanant record" for whether they are a repeat offender or not - or make a phone call from a CB radio to the station. And like guys like me, who wish we sitll had Atari, BBS, and concerts without a sea of cell phones recording for later like some kind of bipedal humanoid DVR....they wish they could go back to the time when a tablet was a Mead notebook, driver safety was soley the grey matter between your ears, solitaire was done at a kitchen table with family, and everyone went to bed by 9:00pm, and all the stores were closed on Sunday.

Next are the corporate celebrities, ya' know, those irritating top-tier C-suite guys who are generally a little younger, and equally as stupid. Sure, they achieve great things - but not without a TEAM of other people "beneath" them to achive it, and a lot of their ideas are someone else's anyway. Basically, the talking heads - the Steve Jobs to the Steve Wozniaks of the world, or if we're talking the Talking Heads, the David Byrnes to the Tina Weymouths of the world. So to them, maybe in their own private use case, their idea will work, but what about the rest of us - the regular people who wake up every workday at 5:30a, work until 4-5-6 pm, take care of families, and don't have a endless bank account to pull from? How is this "helping" us. But yet these schmucks - usually through their marketing teams - try and sell us pie-in-the-sky dreams for actual money, some of us don't even have to spend, and are expected to "change" and "move forward" to the future, when we can neither afford it, or have found some comfort in the current methods.

But as a tech myself, it's also irritating because Geek/nerd-dom is a powerful force that is no longer what it once was. Long gone are the days of the underdogs supporting each other, instead, it's just another lamestreamer "keeping up with the Joneses" story - and one I refuse to participate in unless I see an actual benefit for myself in it. Tech should be a personal choice and ala-carte, not some kind of "proving ground" for your own personal holding of a pair of titles that once were not wanted by anyone. Some of these people need to be forced to watch "Revenge of the Nerds parts blah blah blah" Clockwork Orange style! Everything's a marketable lifestyle these days - and I refuse to be a part of any one of them. I refuse ot have an Alexa in my house! I see no point in having a WiFi network big enough for a small business in a 1 bedroom apartment. I'd rather the insurance company keep guessing what my driving habits are rather than me having to have a massive techological debate over an abrupt accident avoidance maneuver that's not my fault because the little black box in my modern shitwagon wants to tattle on me for hitting the brakes "too hard". I don't need another social media platform - THIS here (points at your URL bar) is my "social media" platform! (or the closest thing to it at least). I don't need to prove myself to anyone! I'm sick of the bullshit.

The problem with technology is when we open the gates to the lamestreamers, all the opportunists come knocking to exploit them. Why do you think we need VPNs, firewalls, DMZs (De-Militarized Zones), MFA (Multi-FActor Authentication), VLANs, and passwords in 10,000 places. It's not because we WANT to make your life hell, we have to. Because that's the only way to keep what we in the industry call "bad actors" out! The internet was GREAT in the 1990's. No paywalls, websites did not accept intrusive advertising, and if there was, you knew for a fact it was a bad site and time to leave ASAP and run a virus scanner, most people could not easily communicate with each other. Now EVERYONE has shady looking advertisements: YouTube, Google, Hulu, Netflix, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook,....basically, if it's a platform you need to contact their Development team in order to make an "App" for it (and more on that in a minute), then most likely it's full of shit that makes me wish I could perform a saeance to rise Bill Hicks and George Carlin from the dead, and start a grassroots campaign against Advertising.

So here we have advertisments, some of them 10-15 minutes long, trying to sell us shit that looks like something Ron Popeil would be shilling to us over 30 minutes ago. Mail-order healoth suppliments and medicines, booteek bars of soap, affordable car insurance, government scams, product scams, money scams, pyramid schemes, get rich quick schemes....just YouTube alone looks like the advertising chain for a porn site circa 1997. But yet, comes another irritating thing - CENSORSHIP!

Did we not learn anything from the PMRC hearings in the 1980's? There's no accountability for anything anymore. Everything is "triggering". The Internet was supposed to be like Demilitarized, uncensored, open waters between sovereign countries, but it seems that that vision has been long lost. You have rich people and so-called *smart* people gatekeeping information. You have stupid people airing their voices to which that gate-kept information could be a useful discourse against. You have lamestreamer people who don't even bother to gather any information from the web anymore, hell, they're too damn stupid to use Google even if it IS their friggin homepage.

And these monopolies try to shill you out of money more and more as you subscribe to them with an affordable $80/mo. basic 300mbps broadband connection. They try to rape steal from you annually with various "deals" and "packages", specially choreographed by their marketing companies and the service providers they can get you at a discount to appeal to your average American family with the fat lazy father who drinks beer and watches sports, the nerdy son, the fashionista daughter, and your housewife who supposedly just wants to watch cooking and house renovation. They lie to you, tell you that you are losing money XX month because you just want basic internet and not ESPN, HGTV, TLC, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and whatever other garbage channels they can sell to you - and then tell you you are saving money for $295.96 a month vs $79.99/mo + $4 to "lease" a bunch of glorified network gear from them to use on their network. How is that saving money? I swear, modern ISPs are mathmatically challenged? Is this the result of the *new math* - thank friggin god I did not have any children.

Meanwhile - here's a stressful truth for ANY of you. Each and every internet/technology related company that starts off with slogans like "Do no evil" or "Privacy is our Policy" - well, enjoy it while it lasts, because it won't be forever. As soon as the men in suits and ties come knocking on the door to make a million dollar plus offer the owner can't refuse, it's over. I have watched that happen from age 9 all the way to now. I watched Yahoo! go from a mere search engine of great quality, to a dubious online-service provider with e-mail and once had webhosting (ya' know, Geocities - the place this place is inspired by) now gutted to be basically a news and advertising page with marginal search capabilities.

I have watched Microsoft turn into a legitimate business into a bunch of consumer-oriented shills who roped corporations into their ecosystem for 40 years now leaving them frustrated with bricking patches, lies about final releases, monopolistic practices (IE/EDGE) with web browsers, excellent hardware, but shitty software they do nothing about, and the most ridiculously convoluted and crappy update system this side of manually unzipping files and copying them to folders using the command line. At least Windows 3.1 updates actually worked when they still did it that way! This also includes putting crap like Candy Crush Saga and Facebook in Corporate Enterprise releases of Windows, and generating sistuations that makes I.T. a total pain or choosing the lesser of two evils - kind of like electing a new president.

It's stressful because you need to remember so many bloody passwords for everything. Not everyone has worked out a system like I did since the age of 7. Most people, end users in particular, are bloody aggrivated they need to remember the logins for trash, sewer, electricity, at least 2 different credit cards, taxes, government functions, their home login, their work login, their works' e-mail login, their work's specialized function logins, and then their vpn login, and then remember how to us a Multi-factor Authentication program on their phone to actually use all these bloody things securely - so they don't, then they get hacked, then we get a bunch of opportunists advertising stuff that makes it even LESS secure - ie PAssword Managers - to make things even more bloody worse. It's stressful for I.T. guys like me that people can't get this crap together because it's going to lead to companies like Microsoft and Google strongarming us into a decade where the morons up "top" are in control of our digital destinies instead of ourselves - it's already happening. Microsoft changing all the settings in Windows after an UPdate, Apple doing the same, Google pestering you for a Security Checkup all the time when your account is still safe.....all the commercials pestering you to get a new computer because it's "more secure".

And no matter how much or how easily you explain something to people, some people just can't get it, or they outright refuse. Telling you "it's greek to me" or "I don't really know computers". It's even a catalyst that has continued sexism. If I had a dime for every time some female told me "but I'm a girrrrrl" every time I tried to explain some basic stuff such as clicking on an icon or pressing a power button....I almost with I could have brought JOan Jett with me to slap the shit out of her! Yet most of these women will leave work and be all "I'm woman, hear me roar! I'm a feminist! I don't need no man!" yet the minute they encounter a digital device it turns them into Helen Homemaker circa 1955....and as one who supports women being educated and doing things intelligently, it really, really, really pisses me off. Being female is not an excuse. Please, I work on an I.T. team that's more than 50% female, they know their shit, what's your excuse?

I refuse to have Alexa, or anything like it, in the house. I already have to endure two "smartphones" that decide one day to "come to life" and heckle me and my wife during petty arguements with their advertising and stupid google searches. I have a Smart Thermostat that reminds me of the Stand Up Comedy robot from Garfield...except even more mentally challenged! I have one 4K UHD Smart TV that acts like an insolent teenager, and the other two behave great, but have to be run with annoying as fuck universal remotes because I'm not paying Roku $66 for a replacement the size of a Fun-Size candy bar that will dissappear within 2 months of it's purchase!

I manage an enterprise class server that doubles as a space heater and sucks down electricity like a Tesla Model S driving in the swiss alps in sport mode! I have it locked down like Fort Knox but getting it booted is a nightmare because of a programming error that caused it to get the wrong version of the O/S...so the first two boot options don't work. But when it's up, it's the greatest thing I've ever done next to getting a 486 on the internet in 2001.

It's awesome I can record on my phone any day I wish using Bandlab but it's bloody terrifying that one day Cakewalk could just decide to take ownership of everything I ever made on the platform and turn it into their own personal property. I refuse ot get an O365 subscription, play Call of Duty or World of Warcraft (or anything tha trequires a perpetual internet connection). I like my old Atari 2600 and NES but they keep removing the ports those systems require to be usable in the 21st century - trying to urge me to buy a **new** verson of the console at best 75% compatible, and likely requiring a Streaming account to access all my old games I own on hard cartridges!

I remember more passwords than some Network Administrators, and can't fathom why people have so much trouble with those. I see of it as a good sign to forget and reset them - then it means I'm just being more locked down. I don't hold a single account on the internet that's been caught on "Have I Been Pwned!" in over 10-15 years, not even data breeches. I was the one guy at work with a still active account when the place got hacked - that should say enough.

I'm a 20+ year veteran of the I.T. industry but I get treated like a frickin' kid all the damn time by so many family members and acquaintences outside of work. Like I don't know what I'm doing, yet some of these people get hacked at least once a year by some India douchenozzle pretending to be "Nordstrom Internet Security", LOL. Then they call for my help and wonder why I'm turning blue (trying to hold in my laughter).