Steven’s Blog

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.
#

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.

#

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”.

Continue reading →

The Man-O-Festo (The Post on Why Men Have Ruined Themselves)

Clickford, Steven M.

Since the 2016 Election, there is a growth of extreme cringy-fringy YouTubers defending chauvinistic ideas to the point you wonder why things happened say January 6th?

To put it in the simplistic sense, I strongly believe if you want equality and fairness women need to accept

  • They need to control their hormones better so men can have some level of emotional expectations (likewise men need to stop acting like a bunch of horny ol men)
  • They need to define themselves, of who they are, and what they should be looking for. The way girls are being positioned to be bullies to guys; and for them they become prey and they go into a rescue-instinct

Men on the other hand (speaking as one) really needs to get their act together as well. They need to throw away two personality and behavior types

  • Aggressive (that is extremely pushy, to the point of bullying, threatening and worse gaslighting)
  • Abusive (completely disrespecting anyone, treating individuals like they are third-rate objects)
  • … and being an asshole, or a dick, or jackass, whatever. Don’t be foolish, don’t play innocent, and don’t be combative! 

Change your attitudes unless you want to be defined as…

  • Deflective (passing-the-buck, deferring to others, or authoritative figures, not owning it)
  • Defensive (that your shit-doesn’t-smell and acting all innocent)
  • Defiant (that your beliefs are all settled, no discussion, that your defensive mechanisms have escalated, and your deflective nature needs to be enhanced to look like a Triple-A behavior)

The Triple-D Demeanor and Triple-A Behavior are what creates Toxic Masculinity. Useful idiots like Jordan Peterson (who to me seems to be pretty gay to begin with) and his followers have caused this issue to accelerate, while Presidant Trump has gotten away with thousands of lies, violated governance laws, and did illegal things for The Trump Organization and while being the sitting president in The White House.  The projection of his narcissism, the authoritative approach to cult of personality, and the us-vs-them demogogary actually has degraded not just democracy, but anyone who would say US is known for being a democratic-republic country, would even degrade the boldface part of our governance.

With the rise of alternative media, sugarcoating critical information as false, and replacing it with gospel in the political sense, what was not appropriate for even an owner of a small business, was legitimized with POTUS Trump’s Triple D and Triple A temperament.

The reason why Americans should avoid hard-right conservative “principals” and “personal-core-beliefs” instead of agreeing on a set of facts, will be a lot worse than if men are soy-boys or “drag-queens” lurking in public schools. Many of these content creators have their priorities backwards, and the worse is they are women! 

Is America Systematically Narcissistic? Should *We* be Concerned?

Clickford, Steven M.

Last night, I believe a guest on Greater Boston had mentioned that the President Trump voters had elected a narcissist and that it reflected on his voters for having narcissism.

What a feedback loop! This is what the GOP has been for over a decade, and the Tea Party in itself has been as well. No one ever seems to take any humility or accountability, or responsibility of any error. Remember “no fault of their own” when POTUS Trump used to say during the CARES Act? Ironically the small business “owners” is so arrogant to take some accountability of mitigation; and snatch those funds to those who had tried to flatten the curve in the first place.

That guest is so right on. I learned during COVID, the true colors of the Red party. It’s all-about-me, my-party, my-president, my-[view of how my] country is. It’s always the “dummycrats” that can’t seem to do anything right… GOP members are the good-innocent-people. Right-wings ar are correctly right, anyone left, must be crookedly wrong.

FFS look at Sean fucking Hannity; verbally assaults President Bide block after block; night after night, by making every nickname possible to harm his political career. For Cripes Sakes alive, his ol liberal sidekick, Alan Colmes must be rolling over his grave. Those two were best friends, and to show how much class has been lost, Colmes last words he said to Hannity, how would his wife, Monica Crowley survive without him? A legendary voice in political broadcasting cared more about his soon to be widow than himself!  A freggin leftie that actually gave a shit about the people he cared about after his life would end! Wonder if Rush Limbaugh felt the same… no wait he’s always been a narcissist!

Did Sean really throw away his sanity?

Then I walked by in earshot of The Five today, and I heard the pretty-boy host, Jesse Watters defending “toxic work cultures” as a form of “competitive workplaces”. This is the same Jesse who interned, and later worked for Bill O’Reilly who had been in a center of some severe sexual harassment claims. The same dick who cheated on his married woman, to later divorce and marry that same girl he cheated on, closer to said biological age than him or his first wife.

Back to my point: the party of personal responsibility, the party accountability, the party of Americans not America, the party of selflessness? These core-valued people made so many of decent, suburban male centrists like me begging the question of where the fuck is my political home? I am so politically homeless! These motherfucking dicks burnt the house they could barely build themselves! 

Oh for anyone who was wondering what happened to the Tea Party, Donald Trump did an LBO around 2015, then maybe for a while we were auditory hearing “T Party” instead as Trump cheapened to brand to save a few letters, and the remaining moral value of the “Tea Party” then just bankrupted the whole thing leading to the mess on January 6th.

Oh what a decade it’s been.

Why Elastix/Issabel for Alternative Telephony?

Clickford, Steven M.

I have p!ssed on Asterisk systems for a number of years, and for rightful reasons. To say it’s an M1 is BSing. A claim it’s a sexier G3si, is screwing with you. Hell, NEC makes a better system… you just have to fork cash.

Ironically, like all other open source projects, they come and go, and the moment you settle on them, they may not settle on you. For instance, Trixbox was cool, in terms of manipulating the Asterisk daemon without attempting to tweak .conf files without taking down a box, was great. Guess who did that, a company who developed FreePBX. But FreePBX was sold off to another company, whom in turn would later buy Digium, the publishers behind the original Asterisk code by the end of the 2010s.

Oh the full circle!

I had downloaded the Free PBX distro circa 2018, and to be blunt, I hated it. One of the biggest turnoffs was you had to register (using a disposable email address) and if you did a full blown register, you can then set it to a static IP LAN address and then it could work without an Internet connection. Wait, this code is supposed to be “free” but it has to yet “phone home” and yet this derivative doesn’t require licenses.

I frankly don’t care for Sagmona, or however the hell you’re supposed to spell it. Their blue colors, the horribly designed IP sets (FFS alive, Digium designed better SIP sets than when they were sold off!) I was like, “there has to be more than FreePBX” and Elastix was so cool for a clear alternative to anything else. Enter Issabel

I had recently downloaded Issabel, and why them?

  • Didn’t I say how much I hated the current version of FreePBX?
  • Trixbox is basically dead (best to use for Museum-grade VOIP sets… yup there’s an age for VOIP sets to die into a isolated LAN for non Internet exposed devices.)
  • Freeswitch could be set to a PBX, but that’s like telling a 5ESS switch to act like an on-prem System 75… and it’s not easy to compile, and there is no distro.
  • If you liked OS X Server’s email and calendar features, and since Apple has taken server features out of the “Server”, Issabel can fill that void*
  • I prefer the older/classic FreePBX GUI.
  • Other than a better HTML5 experience, and you can tweak the system to do things like SCCP (even if people encourage to stick with SIP), when I chose Asterisk 1.6 it came with the Unistim drivers for the Avaya Blue sets; and other little things.

* Actually, it’s believed that most of the OS X installs were under 50 users, and in fact the email and messaging systems were recommended to be more of a “relay” server than a straight up, email storage and forwarding system like in Domino or Exchange install (and be directly exposed to the internet at the server level. In the GUI Wizards, the example in OS X server, was showing the system against another email server, and OS X instance was really just between the client and the bigger mail or calendar server.

Think of this as an always on desktop logged in as a user, times another 49 or so fetching the emails from either a cloud/corporate email. OS X Server would then be the one between the user, by simply forwarding it. Elastix/Issabel’s implementation of it’s email and messaging servers reminds me a lot like what was in the OS X Server  (in that “relay” mode) – including those “mail” servers found in Drobos and Synolgy based NAS; so I would recommend people to not have an Elastix email instance exposed directly to the Internet without some firewall in between to prevent it becoming a host of spam attacks.

In a future Installation Insensation; I’ll show you how the installs work and how they play well.

Elastix PBX Rundown

Clickford, Steven M.

 

I posted this as Vlog/Vlob post recently about this abandoned open source phone system. Elastix was a foreign made fork from Asterisk, that was a cheaper and free equivalent of Microsoft’s Office Communications Server and it’s Exchange server, but unlike MS’ OCS, at least there is a few more telephony features.

While Elastix had Exchange-like features for groupware, it’s PBX functionality is nowhere near an Aura or Cisco UCM. Elastix was unable to survive and was sold to 3CX. 3CX has and probably will still be a joke. What the 3CX people did, was took the brand, and took the 3CX code originally for Windows (because their selling point was it was more user friendly to administer than Asterisk) and ported it to a Linux distro to give the appearance they weren’t missing out.

Not too long after the original Elastix code went end of life, another organization took it’s code and made a fork of it and it’s called Issabel. Similar idea, cheaper Exchange functionality, but more reliable in it’s telephony service.

In this video, I had many of my Mitels I got from Jason via The Museum. Except for the 5207, all the others were capable of SIP. While the proprietary MiNet is preferred, I had decided, well instead of buying newer phones and collecting dust, to just repurpose them. I also noticed another Mitel phone system, the MX5000 (a rebadged InterTel system, after Mitel acquired them) that that phone system uses SIP for the VOIP phones, and while a couple of them I have are 5220s, if I were to get an MX5000 on the Interwebz down the road, it could theoretically work, then gain some Mitel/Intertel features.

This would be all for Media Services. Why?

My family has felt a phone system…

  • was part of the phone company’s “service” (Xfinity/Comcast Business.)
  • that each extension must be physical
  • if someone did a call pickup, bridged appearances, follow-me calling, family would not know where they are calling, and “loose track” of their adult child
  • Forget Do Not Disturb, they’ll think the network went down. (Not so much since March of 2020, where reliability was forced to go up given working from home requirements.)

Where does that leave any mobility? What if I want to park a call? So I decided that I’d use Elastix (and BTW there is no direct Internet exposure, since it’s on a non-routable LAN… and anyone who puts public IP or DNS on a SIP phone directly, is crazy, no matter what setup it is) for my media room and my bedroom. 1300 would be the “main number”, and do a dial-peer to SIP telephone number on the IP address of the Elastix box;  and the Cisco CallManager Express would calling another phone system as if it was an internal extension.

I have not been able to do outbound calling, but given the mandatory ten-digit calling in New Hampshire, this maybe easier. I’ve had issues even with the Avaya (see how I miss Key Phone Systems?)

Later in this video, I had discussed a potential migration to either Elastix and/or Isasbell and have the CME be the backup in case the server went down. In fact I would avoid SRST, and just use straight up CME; with the magic of using a Skinny Call Control Protocol driver. I do not have any spare SCCP sets laying around. This is preliminary and should be taken as speculation. 

 

Entercom Happens – in an “Audacious” Matter

Clickford, Steven M.

An Audacy Station. – New tagline for Entercom stations after legal Top of The Hour Station ID.

This post is pretty “punny”.

Entercom, the second largest radio group (or third depending on the whole Cumulus/Townsquare/threesome is… I honesty lost track) has basically been a poorly run company. While Boston bad boys like Howie Carr and Kirk Minihane (where the latter is nothing but a prick, a pretty-boy, and is an Arbitron addict, and only cares about ratings) piss on Entercom by name and personally attacking, harassing and the upper level management at the company, Entercom traditionally has dual personality disorder, one wants to make profit, the other cares about the content, or should I say “cares” in air-quotes.

If you got fooled on the week of April Fools, it’s not a joke. The company rebranded into Audacy (rhymes with odyssey – like John Sculley’s 1987 memoir!) I am not making this up; there’s even a YouTube clip of the Top of the Hour airchecks indicating the station is owned by a company that rhymes with a title of a memoir; and WCBS radio had the audacity to interview David Fields, the long time CEO of Entercom to talk about horrible rebrand.

Continue reading →

Christianity Taking Over State… will The Constitution be under Siege?

Clickford, Steven M.

“Dang! I’ve not only been persecuted, I’m gettin’ litigated!”

– Jesus Christ sometime in the near future.

 I am a Christian by faith, born as one, baptized as one, a decent of Christianity but I am not a practicing Christian. I know right from wrong. My relationship with God is broken, and my following of Christ is complicated. Ironically, many typical minded Americans who claim to be a “Christian” seem to left their Bibles in some dusty surface, because so many don’t come off as such.

The focus here is on the protestant/Baptist wing of Christianity; since Catholicism, is known to be a centralized, global institution of the Christian faith. The concern is in the last decade, the protestant wing has in a way become centralized; and while thousands and thousands of Baptist churches are not connected as an organization, the messaging itself is kinda blurring the lines between Protestants and Catholics. Either way, it’s turning off American’s core demographic, Pew research notes have indicated steep drops of Americans attending church comparing data from the last 2 decades.

The bottom line is, that The Church will have declare a moral bankruptcy in the Federal court system, and this unique case will probably go to SCOTUS, testing out something I suspect the founding fathers would never had foreseen, the failed nationalization of “The Church”; and testing the First Amendment on the freedom of religion aspect of that bylaw.

Continue reading →