Giving Up on Tech

I disconnected from the World… and I don’t miss it

Clickford, Steven M.

After a stressful week, I said “Eff it, I’m done, I’m turning every devices off for the weekend”. Except for the MacBook, and if it weren’t for the thunderstorms Friday night, I would’ve kept the Mac mini on, I had for all intensive purposes disconnected. And except for Saturday to have my mother be in touch with me, but essentially email, voice and social media was not on my priorities. I am conquering a mess of clutter of paperwork and unorganized stuff that if you got “little things” they pile up very quickly. I also struck out on Saturday not finding anything of value at Michael’s to use a coupon that was in last weeks Sunday News. I was also planning to read some self help books I got over the course of June, but got tied up trying to wrangle the mess of micro clutter.

After this weekend, sometimes you wonder if America was better off breaking up the Bell System all in the name of special snowflake’s narrowed interest of “innovation”.

Continue reading →

Giving up on Tech, part five

Clickford, Steven M.

Earlier I had a few rants against Voice over IP.

One of the things that angers me is how some “VOIP office phones” ring like the sound a caller hears when someone makes a call. Obviously I wanted to have you hear at least one time as opposed to twelve hours.

Grandstream, Polycom and Allworx have this as their ring tone package or is the default ring tone. Never in the history of telephones did an electronic ringer sound like what was heard in the central office until a few boys that were working for datacom decided to do some really stupid things such as making crappy office telephones.

I just so want to GTFO out of this interest.

Giving Up on Tech, part four

Clickford, Steven M.

I hate Voice over IP and it’s “evolution” back to the 1960s in the step by step switching era. It offends me as a phone guy to see how cloud and Asterisk-like VOIP providers LECTURE to the audience about how antiquated the old “digital” telephone systems are and defend a really POS of a phone service. Most Asterisk “PBX” systems scale horrifically, and a lot of the pricky IT weridos think a “PBX” is an “on prem” phone system. NO! This is why I had The Museum of Telephony in the first place! “Features” today are the standard 19 features you can get for your cell or analog phone line, and app integration for your Salesforce, or  other “apps” that do not do call vectoring, advanced call routing, priority ringing, etc.

AND DO NOT GET ME started with how they assume Interactive Voice Response is the VERY SAME THING as an “Auto Attendant”. I so want to scream and strangle these asexual, virgins or rapists – these guys who sell these systems make me want to do a background check. They scream sex offenders!

VOIP is cool, there is a lot of great advantages, but they are doing it in the wrong ways. Latest-and-greatest and fashionable technologies such as Session Initiation Protocol and disgusting “VOIP phones” do SQUAT! Dissing “H323” standards because it’s “not open” shows how close minded “open” minded IT pricks are. There’s a reason why H323 is more reliable, but because you guys are too lazy to learn application specific technologies, well your arrogance is hurting the rest of us!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BjyazEhlzQv/?taken-by=steven.clickford

And what’s so disturbing is how a Polycom phone is almost as dumb as a rotary telephone! There was a time when everyone was drinking the AT&T haterade around 1984, that black rotary telephone was all the anger. Well I find Polycoms and Cisco phones to be s— but yet the communistic Open Source community has raped about 90% of the enterprise or small end voice market and yet no one is bitching about that.

Talk about double standards.

Giving up on Tech, part three

Clickford, Steven M.

The ongoing series of why I have decided I.T. is the worst avenue for just a “job”

Arrogant Sysadmin: If you don’t keep up with the times, then you’re in the past.

Me: That’s so unprofessional, threatening me of a job like that

Moderator: Don’t get personal on our technical fourms

Me: Get me of your freckin site, your’re a rapist, misongyistic  man!

And you wonder why I respect women over these pricks right?

Giving up on Tech, part two

Clickford, Steven M.

I am not one of those cranky sysadmins who denigrate “end users” for being “stupid” or “idiots”, etc. I’ve always believed the best ethic for this profession was to have a deskside manner.

I hold all my patience in, and I sometimes want to loose it.

Especially when this narrative reminds me of the twentysomething dude in an Xifnity commercial where the parents had him come to the house just so he can help them.

My mother is one of those people who wants her sci-fi, all the time on her iPad. I am someone who doesn’t understand consumer grade products or content, (OK I use iPads and iPhones, etc. – just I don’t watch movies, and I only manage my iTunes for music, OK?)

I honestly have no clue how to get those special digital downloads to work, and to be honest to give Big Hollywood my email address to get a login with a DRM type of download and have to haggle with that. My mother needs to be instructed and if there is no instructions, she’s up the creek with no paddle.

So I know only enterprise grade technology. I can attain a three nines reliability. My mother doesn’t understand that half of the servers are for business purposes only. I am a year to two years behind getting a help desk program and a knowledge base system to help her, and several other initiatives.

These systems are not apps, they are servers, providing at least five instances of services. In order for me to attain a three-nine reliability, I need to be in management and not be pulled way when walking down the house hallway to be her “little helper”. I DO NOT LIKE BEING PULLED AWAY OR BE TOLD TO COME OVER, DROP EVERYTHING AND BAIL OUT THE OL WOMAN! 

I DO NOT have the time to drop everything and talk to someone at a basic level and handicap EVERY FRECKIN PROCESS of how something works!

Do not tell me to be patient!

As you know my social circle is very narrow, and that due to a number of reasons.  I do not have relief support, I can’t have friends come over and help me with a DB project while I could do something else. I have to do this all by myself.

 

I am this close to just say you’re on your own. Fictional sh– movies  is not a use-case for the enterprise grade equipment. Get your  own HDD and google how to ingest your own video and put it into iTunes. I never tell someone in their face to “google this” and worse this is my mother.

I don’t understand dumb consumers. Why are they so stupid to not understand a BASIC principal of internetworking and in order to have a healthy and happy network, it requires a well, logical, planned out network?  Why do they feel entitled to believe that IT can be their slaves and bend over backwards and do ad-hoc tasks? I have a f—–g door and yet no one respects it. I do not tolerate being flagged down.

I’m done being the sysadmin for my household. I’ll leave the semi secure Netgear Prosafe Firewall as a thank you, because according to FBI, we are supposed to listen them for cybersecurity advice, when if you had some enterprise gear, this was no-news, but it got your mother all sensed up.

I cannot stand parents and their exploitation of their sons with IT without IS backgrounds. I cannot be your hand holder forever!