Author: Clickford, Steven M.

Now Hiring – Technical Support Specialist

Clickford, Steven M.

CliMS – On Site – Information Systems & Technology

THE ROLE

* Migrating to automation and scripting when needed

* Manages about 10 different microcomputer servers and workstations

* Manages about 3 mobile devices

* Oversees a 3-subnet LAN, with multiple various VLANs; VLANs exposed to the Internet, some have no routing.

* Supervises traffic amongst 50 to 70 known IP connections * Manages multiple different platforms (Windows, Macs and Linux)

* Managing operating systems primarily on virtualization (VirtualBox and VMware)

* Many of the systems are legacy (OS X, Windows 2008, Windows 7)

* Coordinating, planning, and ensuring security on the critical/production systems * handling training for users of the system

* Attempts to document and log systems

* Projects that take years because of day to day user bailouts.

*  Managing Voice over IP Telephony and Unified Communications platforms (VOIP and IPT)

* Specific Applications (IBM Lotus Domino, Apple’s File Maker Pro), and custom FMP code (ERP, customer database, video and media logs)

IDEAL SKILLS:

Previous experience of a small work environment with enterprise class technology (Netgear PROSAFE, Cisco IOS) and a working knowledge of streaming and media management is a plus. Ability to work with users and help desk skills is helpful.

REQUIREMENTS
A New Hampshire Drivers License, be willing to have a background check. An experience of 5 years in technology, preferably the same amount of time related to media production. The willingness of working in a startup environment. No group think mentality. Ability to multi task on multiple systems at once. Understanding QoS and packet prioritization is mandatory. Candidate is willing to work without benefits, and be able to be paid per hour on projects, and is willing to learn a startup’s own workflow. Must be a selfless professional.

 

Techie No-Nos – On DNS…

Clickford, Steven M.

For security purposes and ensuring you’re not clogging your own low voltage pipes, your “DNS address” should be local. If you use Google or your ISP’s DNS address any connection to your local devices can only be accessed by IP addresses because you have no way to have a DNS point to a name to a host with an numeric IP address.

Local IP addresses are kinda like the FRS radio bands, ones that ISPs are expected to not route for the purposes of having a local area networks routable.

Anything from:

  • 10.0.0.0 to 10.0.0.255
  • 172.16.0.0. 172.24.255.255
  • And 192.168.1.0 192.168.254.255

The local DNS address should point out to the firewall or wireless router. Many smaller end devices have the ability to basic DNS if you have a few devices where you want to connect them by domain-name.

With all these cyber attacks, it’s best to separate what’s exposed to the overall Internet, and what should be local. Computing devices should be connected with a local IP and DNS address and appliances that help route local devices to the overall Internet should be the ones with the most exposure like having the Google DNS address.

Just do the right thing, and keep your devices protected with a better structured local network

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A #LondonderryLoveStory?

Clickford, Steven M.

I grew up in my entire life from 1987-2010 in #LondonderryNH, one of the largest towns in New Hampshire by population, a town no less than 50 miles to the Zakim Bridge in Downtown Boston, Massachusetts. The town once prided itself for “rural values”. Meh!

I tell two stories of the closest things to romance. One I “missed the signal, not the noise” to only find your’s truly going through the same thing the following school year.

Windows 11 & macOS Monterey…

Clickford, Steven M.

… I am in no business in wanting to use a workstation anymore.

Windows 11 is coming out soon, CNET reported today you could get the version – now! Whatever that means, a beta, pre Service Pack 2, etc. Last week, it was reported that Windows would discontinue support for Windows 10 in 2025. What does that mean, will that mean that I may get locked out of using Windows 10 past it’s End of Life?

Windows 11 is yet again another hot mess, of rebadging features and relocating things, of which in Windows 10, features within it’s lifecycle changed dramatically.

It’s unclear if the mandatory updates will disappear. Or that god-awful mandatory lock screen of the time of day that is so Orwellian.

Over at macOS, on the theme of Craig Federighi’s favorite California destinations, it’s where the late Gary Killdall called home, Monterey [Beach]. As much as I like iOS and iPadOS and the clustereff of separate but united systems, I do not, and fully do not think that having a Mac desktop acting like a touchless iPad is an intelligent “evolution”. Apple is not a “Pro” brand anymore, it’s just another English word masquerading as special brand.

There are parts where it’s perfectly good, like Messages, and FaceTime but changing the macOS interface to pander to the teeny-boppers of Gen Z is an insult to an on and off Mac user of 30 years. Apple is totally disrespecting their elders.

For anyone to compare this outrage from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X is fooling themselves, leaving OS 9 to OS X was a major upgrade making the Mac indefinitely in par with a PC; in fact that was real progress on a technological sense. A computer that is simple as a toaster couldn’t fly in the age of security standards, etc. Those old farts that whined about the death of Classic Mac OS was clearly true pricks. the macOS today is more of a regressive move back to the days of Classic Mac OS and moving the Mac into an appliance.

Again, do I need to repeat the audience, that an operating system does not need to be released as a full new version every year on the 365th day after the “current release”? I get all the “security” nonsense, but things should be firewalled in the first place! This is invisible consumerism, with more disposing of cash for “new” things that don’t need to be replaced.

Excuse me while I upgrade (since “updating” is too simple for my workflow) to Sierra on the mini for the Fourth of July week, since High Sierra was a joke and not open to Mojave anytime soon.

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So IBM/Red Hat Killed Centos…and Fedora what the hell?

Clickford, Steven M.

This was never finished until June of 2021… was written around Christmas time (last draft on December 21st), then I got COVID and ran 10 days behind and whole slew of backlogs in life…

In the acquisition of Red Hat by IBM recently, they didn’t really wait to cut off community support for their free and open source operating systems.

Red Hat, is one of the largest mass producers of commercial Linux operating systems. Their flagship product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is sold to either enterprises or other corporations who will then resell the operating system as part of their own software (think of Cisco’s Communications Manager, or Avaya’s older AUDIX software.) There was two offsprings to a free but non commercial, non critical or be able to profit off their own code. There were two versions outside of Red Hat they had targeted, Fedora for desktops, and Centos (as in Community Enterprise Operating System) for enterprises and desktops.

One of the reasons why Linux or open source was better than commercial software was their alleged lifespan. End of life cycles were very long. Now what would be the last final support to Centos is now going to be within the next year, as opposed to 2028, in the old arraingment.

The issues of Linux as a desktop or a more mainstream server systems was the lack of unity. In a Live Free or Die technical state, there is a lot of us-vs-them from within the non-comm coders world. Think of KDE vs. GNOME; Mandrake vs Knopix, CENTOS vs. Debian, etc.

Like in the real commercial world, there is a lifecycle of a release. And given how insecure UNIX can be to run scripts, it’s not OK in their world to run vintage versions of Linux in production, or even in an isolated LAN. The selling point of Linux for vintage was for the hardware it could theoretically run, where commercial systems wouldn’t support 3 to 5 year old hardware.

The other issues I’ve spoken in the past is the lack of empathy of the overall user from the open source world. A lot of software packages are half-rate from the commercial world because it literally what most users want. Coders, like rapists think they are above all rules and they think if they know what’s best, then you are not to question them, and if you do you’ll be belittled and verbally abused.

While the so-called end user experience differs between the “distros”, Linux’s big failure is the ability to settle on one platform and stick with it with the hopes the group-think of Free and Open Source Software.

For some of my experiences with Linux, I preferred CENTOS over the other distros. The way IBM bought a big software company and is using their revenue to pay off debt that has nothing to do with Red Hat, that goes back decades. This lack of financial literacy of techies, leads them to think IBM is the worst “companies” (techies poor English trying to elaborate “Corporate America”) to exist. The problem is most Linux and FOSS people live off something or someone else and expect to have a free lunch, and someone has to feed their family. Now I am not sounding like Microsoft, M$ies, tend to say “we put a lot of hard work of blood sweat and tears [shoplifting others codes like DOS, the Macintosh, VMS etc.] creating DOS, and Windows and Windows NT”.

Corporations that are to provide a service (that is an easy to distribute version of Linux) has to pay debt, and other costs other than just people. They have to break even. Red Hat was fine, but IBM wanted to make quick buck to pay off debt from other failed acquisitions or financing bleeding entities, that techies think is perfectly OK.

Why should the mainframe business have x amount of employees at a declining y revenue stream? That is not how a capitalistic system is support to work. Notice I refrained from stating capitalism  which are two different meanings.

This is what people sign up to live. On the edge, unsure what the next sustainable path both financially and technologically. This is one of the reasons why I checked out of high tech.

Why Rural America is often Joked Upon

Clickford, Steven M.

I have thought this a lot over the last few years, especially after the rise of the Tea Party and the party of Donald Trump to see why people are who they are emotionally, intellectually and worse politically, and the areas with less people tend to have these usual suspects. I find Rural America to be the rot to the decay of this country. I outline them below:

  • They lack emotional intelligence. You rarely hear about low EQ people in sub/urban areas, but I find that in rural America, people tend to make more emotional decisions, are subjected to misinformation because of their emotions, they can’t take reasonable criticism and on a completely different level, they put faces to business owners, and  have more attachment to business on an emotional level, which is never appropriate on the enterprise.
  • They are not “dumb” per se, they lack high volumes of information. Conservatives or people who live in the south or the rural America are not dumb. They appear to have rotten brains because their schooling was either subpar or they refused to apply any skills they learned in “skool”, as many rural Americans like to pronounce in the phonetic sense.  They choose to refuse to get new information. They lack information because they preach on the same gospel since they graduated high school. This may explain why they tend to say “this isn’t what I learned in school”. Likewise in sub/urban locales, thirtysomethings insist they have to go back to college to learn things, when it’s not the classroom where you learn the most stuff.
  • Politics is all D.C. (where all the fun is) Rural America is also the locale where politics and sports seems to be synonymous. In municipalities where there are town meeting governments, these people tend to be quiet and shy, but are very outspoken to close family members when it comes to national politics. It’s like the 1940s, there is a silent government (state and local) and a loud government (federal) the ones that they are most interested is the one that they think they can fight, the federal. At the same time, the sub/urban liberal types tend to focus on federal government/elections over state and local, or the main goal is to get to the federal level ASAP after doing their time for a term or two on the state and local.
  • They are very prejudicial to anyone that isn’t one of them. In smaller towns where tolerance is so low (this is very typical in any rural American town); so anyone whose from the next state over must be some bad person, because of the underlying tones that gets projected by the low information, and low emotionally intelligent people.

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Women Avoiding Their Lane (Women Speaking on Men’s Issues) – Brittney Sellner

Clickford, Steven M.

Brittney Sellner, an American YouTuber is part of this alt-right movement, of populism over facts, and using emotions to scare her audience. Ironically masculine men would preach “facts over emotions”. I guess that applies if the person is a philosophical  (or a “liberal”) person. But it’s a female not a masculine men that is preaching unhealthy information. She was born in America in 1992 (makes her a younger Millenial… which means she’s not only self-centered, but considered to be dumber than her older counterparts.) She married an Austrian (via the fan Wiki sites – a groom with Neo-Nazi ties… going to leave it at that. The reader should now know how bad she is.)

Her editing is lousy. It’s often shot on a webcam, and cut every five seconds as if she was talking for over an hour. Her dB reads are often very hot, peaking at 11 in most videos. Her anger and fast talking really causes a passerby to get highly anxious. Two of the most absurd videos of late was her views on sexuality…

According to her logic, “the media” and our culture is “obsessed”. When you cut her self-pimping book, this goes down faster than 8 minutes. If you have low tolerance, I’ll just give you the jist:

  • Uses celebrities as the scapegoat for the hyper-sexualizing “in the last few decades a-ago” – is she implying like 5 since the 1960s?
  • Bashes OnlyFans, which is a niche platform to pay to view more raunchier content
  • Refers to the Kardashians phonetically as “Kardashins”. Wow is she living in Austria?
  • “Its the norm to be hyper sexual”
  • She tries to talk like a non-American intellectual by phonetically saying “ta-boo”, and “Holy-wood”. (Her backdrop on her YouTube looks like it was taken in Austria… need I say more?)
  • Starts to throw porn under the bus (claims that “inceset-porn” is on the rise)
  • She starts to make unreferenced claims about a rise of PornHub… OK???
  • She attacks the music industry’s sexualization
  • “Once a ta-boo [sic] is normalized…and people need to take it a step further”
  • Claims porn is destructive to society, but yet rhetoric isn’t?
  • 9:25 she goes way down… wait for it…uses some Vice News articles to back that up.

Still porn apparently is hurting society and yet POTUS Trump, Mr. Holier Than Thou was completely morally perfect in his governance. Makes a lot of sense.

My Core Values (to other people I care about)

Clickford, Steven M.
Part of Defining Me, and Man-O-Festo
This disposability should never be expected at all, and that’s very demoralizing. I have felt like a cute little puppy where suddenly one day, the ol people in my life didn’t feel I was worth anything; throw “it”  (that’s me) to the curb, on a low traffic road – hoping no one would even notice what would become an abandoned object.  It seems like it’s legitimate behavior amongst the adults-in-the-room.
This could be long enough to be in a bio on a Match-type of dating site or app, but with the way women are narcissists, they wouldn’t give a damn reading a bio, that’s well written!
 I am not someone who waits by the telephone unless I am standing by for someone who agreed to reach out to me. While other people text message 3 short messages impulsively, I am someone who will put together a tightly-written message in a single instance, rather than hearing my phone go off 3 times for pointless thoughts. If I don’t respond within a couple hours, I have not forgotten them, I’m busy, but I always get back to people within 24 hours, because I would expect the same as well.  I never leave people that I know hanging. 
 
If I was to meet someone in person, I would meet them at the mutually agreed upon place and time. I am very punctual, sometimes late by seconds not by minutes or hours. I always try to come prepared in any situation. Somedays I come off selfish, but that’s a misunderstanding, somedays I miss other people’s points, concerns, etc. 
 
I do look out for the people I care about, therefore I am not selfish,  I see peers getting the short end of the stick, and people think I can’t see that. I often will stick up for the people I value with actions and constructive language (when possible.) I’ve since noticed over the years, that many of these negative individuals will dispose individuals like me; use cheap and destructive language – worse write someone like me off as if I have no future or growth. This is repeated fears of having any types of close relationships outside of family that was out of my control! This disposability should never be expected at all, and that’s very demoralizing. I have felt like a cute little puppy where suddenly one day, the ol people in my life didn’t feel I was worth anything; throw “it”  (that’s me) to the curb, on a low traffic road – hoping no one would even notice what would become an abandoned object.  It seems like it’s legitimate behavior amongst the adults-in-the-room.
 
The ideals of a person that I longed look for, are the opposite of the examples of past experiences, hence I was treated all along. I’ve learned the hard way good people are much harder to find than saying the cliche over and over.
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Suriving from Narcissistic Relationships from a Victim of One (Defining ME)

Clickford, Steven M.

Part of the Man-O-Festo series, in a way

I am a recovering survivor of psychological abuse of said groups (SPED and even the adult day program personnel of late) that seemingly have alarming amounts of narcissistic qualities. In simplicity, if you were to superimpose narcissistic traits against people whom I should trust in a professional sense, I would say the mix of the two would cause a very toxic relationship.

The war for power and control to an individual’s freedom is something that no one wants to admit at all (which in itself is like malignant-narcissism…)

Malignant narcissism is a hypothetical, experimental diagnostic category. Narcissistic personality disorder is found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR), while malignant narcissism is not. As a hypothetical syndrome, malignant narcissism could include aspects of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) alongside a mix of antisocial, paranoid and sadistic personality disorder traits. The importance of malignant narcissism and of projection as a defense mechanism has been confirmed in paranoia, as well as “the patient’s vulnerability to malignant narcissistic regression”.[3]

From Wikipedia on Malignant narcissism

 

In context, I have been subjected to

  • Being the object one’s grandiosity
  • Being used as an object to project the offending person’s ego
  • Gaslighting is almost an SOP for the extreme narcissist
  • My safety could’ve been at risk because the malignant narcissistic had no regards to other people’s well-being because all they cared was themselves
  • Sadistic natures could be classified as low-tolerance for what could be slightly atypical behavior, and can be used for domination and punishment. (Others may had been literally sexually abused or verbally attacked by a typical professional in the world I once was entirely exposed.)

  And what’s very alarming is how little things have or never will change in the future. I know recent college grads that gone into SPED field with a very controlling, manipulative and gas lighting attitude and are unafraid to “punish” children or even adult that are much older than themselves. Noticing the same repetition of the professionals farming out into the real world, is extremely depressing. 

I want to be treated like how I should’ve been in the first place

With these experiences turned into treat yourself the way you wished you were treated. My philosophical views of my life is based off my in experiences. 

 

  • I value people if there is anyone to respect in the first place; I am not a pessimist, nor that I am as cynical when I was a child, but more skeptical and hopeful that not everyone is intending to be a bad-person. 
  • To feel of purpose – not of service.  
  • To have a meaningful and a reasonably casual relationship, and not to check one’s box. 
  • I like to be in a “safe space”, not from the popular physical-danger sense, but in a healthy social environment where any individual should be able to runaway and have conversations or express thoughts where someone like me could both feel like I am heard, and someone is listening, and the back and forth can be as reciprocal as possible. 
  • Responsibility by default should start and end with you. That word that should be implicit (not spoken out) and not explicit (where it’s said out loud)  “We” should be based on a group of individuals from the start but it’s best to say “you and me” or “you and I”. If this boundary doesn’t in the beginning, when things hit the fan, it becomes sad game of hot-potato, a simple finger-pointing thing uttering words that start and end with “you” which goes back to gas lighting and throwing people under the bus. You and I may just have a few more letters but it has more meaning over “we” and it draws a line of responsibility and it also enhances groups as individuals. You may read this for larger groups like teams, but even for a 1 on 1 friendship; I still think if people would apply personal responsibility, maybe people would stay friends longer, or even extend to marriages, etc. (the only thing you hear from the Jordan Petersons of the world is the “individual as a unit of people” however the collectivism is a nice way to write off a clusterf— of lacking accountability.)
  • Most often in my life, I had to “listen” to the self-centered professional and was expected to, while they would  choose not “hear” my concerns and rational opinions; in this way broke a “safe-space” concept of the ideal engagement by lacking validation and acknowledgement – because these people are expecting my groups of people have no potential to be engaging than interacting. “Interacting” is a low-level form of engagement you expect at your local Early Education Program – not for an adult!
  • When Adele’s Hello was popular circa 2016, I had resonated with a lot of the underlying lyrics. If you figured out by now, you’d know why I was singing this song out loud.

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Why I am not in High Tech (Man-O-Festo)

Clickford, Steven M.

An ongoing series called Man-O-Festo, basically inventorying my personal experience as an adult male in a man’s world. 

I’ve been kicked out of a numerous of male-centric Facebook groups as well as the over Web groups over the years. I’ve been blaintely kicked out of the TCI Facebook Group, a broadcast interest Facebook group, my reputation on a Reddit account was lowered because I had been lectured, and I had challenged the arrogant IT type, and I have gotten comments removed on Tek-Tips because I was “emotional on our technical forums”.

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