shadowspar

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

12: George

I call it a habit of mine that I can make outdated hardware do things it may or may not have ever intended to do. "I" is not quite right in this statement, because much like how my cooking is following recipe and then being surprised that it turns out delicious, much of my computer touchery is following recipe that others have developed, and occasionally deviating from it if I need to for troubleshooting, or to mess about in the thing that the original creator said could be messed with or customized to meet the needs of the person using the software.

Much of the confidence and practice I have with computer touchery comes from having had a machine to experiment on, one specifically designated as the one that if things explode, I can reset back to a working state and then go forward from there. I don't actually want to have to do that kind of thing, because resetting an exploded machine usually means losing progress or having save files get nuked that I want to preserve, but there is a certain amount of risk affordance you can put on your spare machine that your main machine won't get. Spare machines are the best kinds of machines, usually put together from spare parts, or specific small parts that have been purchased to swap out from one thing to another. They're great for people who want to experiment or to learn how to assemble their own machines, or who want to try some other operating system. Everyone should have a spare machine somewhere along the way, preferably one they've assembled or that they've changed some components on, but single-board machines and spare phones are also ways of doing some amount of experimentation, even if you can't change their components quite so easily.

Spare machines are great for working through problems that arise when you do things. Like when I finally saved up enough money to purchase a 3dfx Voodoo2 3D rendering card. I thought I was going to be blazing hard through various games now, with my relatively unimpressive machine (it barely met the specs for Final Fantasy VIII!), but after I'd dropped it in, and tried to boot up my machine, having hooked it all up, the motherboard beeped at me and refused to boot. After a certain amount of troubleshooting, I finally figured out the thing that hadn't been obvious to me at the start: the 3dfx card was a companion to the video card I already had installed, and that other port on the 3dfx card wasn't for show - I needed a specific cable to take the output from my video card and feed it into the 3dfx card, and then after they'd daisy-chained their way merrily through the requirements, they gave me the output I desired. Which made Final Fantasy VIII playable. (And then I would have a bit of a time with the game wondering why I was seeing things like "B6" during Zell's Limit Break instead of the keyboard controls I wanted. Eventually I figured out that I needed to unplug the gamepad that I had connected to the machine and that it was detecting and assuming that I was playing the game on the gamepad primarily. This was back when discrete sound cards were a part of your rig, and they often also had a port on them for gamepad input.)

So I've done a lot with spare machines, tinkering, experimenting, and trying things with them that I wouldn't do to the "family computer" and that I wouldn't do to my work computer. My "spare" machines have proliferated in my adult life, as I continue to move things around and new machines enter my life. But also, so have my appliance machines. Instead of a full tower desktop running in the bedroom, I have a singe-board machine there. Much quieter and less of a power draw, still does all the desktop environment things I want (as well as some other things, like allowing me to remotely control the TV it's attached to, the one without a working IR receiver.) I definitely had a second machine for much of my time in the bad relationship, and for a time, I used a cell phone dock and some nice cabling to turn a single-board machine in to much more of a laptop. It could at least run XChat at a few other things at the time. A secondhand Surface I'd gotten from someone served as my "work" machine during the shutdown, before receiving an official work laptop. (That Surface eventually suffered from the batteries trying to burst forth from the casing and had to be retired, but we salvaged the SSD from it for purposes.) And I kept two desktops working side-by-side as soon as I reclaimed my house, so that one machine could be used for media purposes and Windows stuff, and the other could be used for Linux purposes and handling all the things I was doing with Android phones and other things where it turns out to be easier to do things from a terminal on a Linux box than it is in Windows. And since nothing "vital" was on the Linux box, I could experiment with it, change distributions, and otherwise use it as the spare that it was. This combined with the experience I had from using Linux as a driver since graduate school to make me comfortable enough to use Linux as the driver on my main machine as well. Something that started because one of my classes meant learning a little Ruby on Rails, and it's way easier to run a local Rails server from Linux than Windows has now come around to being a machine that I can watch streams on, game on (all hail Proton), and otherwise continue to give life to, since I wanted a machine that I could buy and hold as much as possible, instead of thinking I needed to change it from one thing to the next.

After purchasing my first phone with an aftermarket OS on it, I have basically been doing the same thing to every phone I've owned since, especially because those phones would otherwise have reached the limit of their manufacturer OS updates, and instead, I can merrily roll along on old hardware until the things physically give out themselves. They do sometimes complain when I try to do things like play Pokemon Go on them, but it's fine. And by the time I have to be in the market for a new phone again, so many of the flagships of a previous time will have come down in price to the point where I might consider them, or consider asking for them as holiday gifts from people who like to spend money on me, despite my clear failures at capitalism.

So as a cheapskate with regard to technology, it's always nice when I can take the old things and make them run smoothly and swiftly with new software or by respecting their limitations enough to not tax them with software that's not suited to them. (One of my next projects, whenever I have actual need to do so, is to do some exploration of software that can be run from the terminal, so that my spare Model B won't feel left out from the fun and can contribute to some important part of house functions.) That cheapskate nature meant that when I got to examine the original model of Chromebook, and was told that I could do what I wanted with it, since the original model Chromebook stopped receiving updates at Chrome 65, I consulted the Internet, and while there wasn't much information available, there was a website that was dedicated to the prospect of converting such a Chromebook into a fully-fledged Linux machine by replacing the firmware on it with a specific kind of compatible BIOS, and then from there making it possible to put a Linux on it. (It's a very nice machine, actually - 64-bit, a couple gigabytes of RAM, and a 5GHz-compatible network card internally.) Well, I should say the website existed at some point in time, but didn't actually do so at the moment I set my mind to it. Thankfully, the Internet Archive had crawled the entire thing, and I could download it into a zip file, giving me the opportunity to follow the instructions and examine the pictures. I was initially stymied by the first instruction of turning the developer switch on, because I couldn't see a developer switch in the spot where the pictures said it was, but once I discovered that it was behind a small bit of electrical tape, we were ready to go. (That piece of electrical tape would come in handy later, as the thing that was used to disable the write protection on the firmware on the laptop.)

Again, low stakes project, no worries if things didn't go according to plan, because it was otherwise not being used, and great potential for use if it succeeds. Which it did! I followed the recipe exactly as the website archive instructed, got the new BIOS in it, and then put a Chromebook-related Linux on it, boggling the developers of it, because their Linux was not meant for a Chromebook that old. They weren't even sure it would run on it, despite me showing up with such a thing. Eventually, I scrapped that project, since it hadn't updated in a very long time, and instead went with the distribution that was powering one of the "spare" work machines that had been designed with Windows XP in mind and had fallen out of use as a mobile reference tool. I had been using those machines for all kinds of shenanigans and other material that official machines were not being used for, and they have served me well, even if only one of the original pair survives.

That Chromebook still runs BunsenLabs, and does so wonderfully. So long as I don't try to tax it too hard by running too many tabs on it, it rewards me with snappiness and speed, and most importantly, a system that can be updated and kept patched against security vulnerabilities. (When the second of the pair of netbooks finally refuses to boot, this Chromebook will likely take its place as machine-outside-of-boundaries.) And having done it once, when I was alerted to the possibility of getting another Chromebook of a later parlance for a little bit of nothing and doing the same thing to it, I jumped at the chance, and with a similar sort of process, and using some scripts developed by others, I now have a compact and useful Linux laptop that I do a lot of composition on, and that I can take with me to events like the local GNU/Linux conference so I can do interactive bits, or run programs, or just hang out in the chat rooms and post on social media my running commentaries about the sessions that I'm listening to. I've also used it as a presentation machine for such things, when I'm the one doing the presenting instead of listening. After trying to run a form of Arch on this Chromebook, and eventually running into the problem of install creep and strict size limitations (as well as the nasty tendency for it to hard freeze at some point when it ran out of memory and swap), I put BunsenLabs on it during this last update cycle, and it's much happier with me and seems to function better. We'll see what happens when BunsenLabs finally makes the jump to a Trixie base instead of a Bookworm one, but I feel pretty confident I'll be able to get all of that to work, and it'll be nice to have old hardware running modern systems.

I'm doing this because of the work that other people have done to port boot systems to Chromebooks and other machines, and to automate the process of installing things to the right places, and the people who build and maintain the packages and the installers so that all I have to do is download the image, run it, install, and then run the update commands on first boot to get to a system that's ready to work. It doesn't feel like computer touchery to do this, because it's just using other people's stuff, but there's the tale of knowing where to make the chalk mark as one side of it, and the other being whatever arguments you want to bring to bear about how "not invented here" is terrible as a practice, and therefore if someone else has created the thing that you want to use, use the thing they've created and spare yourself the turmoil. (Or, in my case, use the thing because you couldn't create it yourself anyway, and be grateful to the people who are using their time and knowledge to make it so that you can do this thing.) Doing things in userspace is still valid, and as an information professional, a lot of my skills are in finding and surfacing the thing that will be useful for the situation, rather than in trying to create the thing completely from scratch, or in trying to get the person I'm helping to do the same. The world is too large and complex for any one person to understand, or even to necessarily understand the entirety of their discipline, and so it should not be a mark of shame to rely on the work of others and to trust that their work will be accurate and not malicious. (It just makes me feel much more like a script kiddie playing in the kiddie pool instead of a Real True Technologist, even if this is another one of those situations where if you press me on the matter and start making me tell stories and explain myself and solve problems, the claims I'm making look flimsier and flimsier, a fig leaf of modesty because I'm still afraid of the reaper looking for tall flowers.)

There's a lot that I have done, and that I can and should justly consider as achievements and Cool Things. Doing things like December Days and the Snowflake / Sunshine Challenges and other such writing prompts are my way of indirectly getting at those and showing them to others. If I came out and said it directly, I'd be worried about it sounding like boasting or penis size comparison, and someone else would come along to put me in my place. But if I'm talking about how there's a wealth of software and instructions out there to extend the life of old technology, and I'm a cheapskate who's willing to invest the time in following those instructions and prolonging the life of that old technology, it doesn't sound like I'm boasting about anything other than getting some extra cycles out of my machines, and that is something I can safely be proud of. (Why? It's not saying I have any particular skills or capacities, just that I know where to look and how to follow recipes.) Indirectness is one of the best ways to get me to show you my actual potential and abilities, and I can do it to myself just as well as anyone. Full understanding may need a little bit of either reading between the lines or knowing me well enough to see what I'm doing, or to ask the right question that makes me squirm or tell stories. (Please do.)

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

10: Accessibility

As you may have gleaned from this series and many others of the type, I am not what you would call typical. This is in some physical manners, because I am Long Being, but mostly, where this is important is in the mental matters, as while I can do most of the necessary functions of life, there are some things, like time and memory, that don't function in "normal" ways. Variable Attention Stimulus Trait means that there are many things that I will tick as done that are not done, but I will only be reminded of that not-done status when it becomes contextually relevant again. Or I will try to remember a thing, and then it will not trigger again until someone else mentions it or there is some other reason for that piece of memory to fire. And sometimes, when I'm doing something that gives me actual dopamine and the feeling of accomplishment, it's not easy to get me to focus on other things. At least, not until I hit some goal of my own and can switch tasks. Which I may not remember the need to, especially if there's been some sort of progression in the game that is now presenting me with new options to explore.

These kinds of situations can happen even in spots where I am attempting to pay attention. So I devised systems to ensure that I had all the things I needed to do done first before engaging in anything that might produce the flow state. And I still use those systems. Even as I type this, there's the lure of other games and things to solve that I would also like to indulge in, but I am refraining because those things are likely to become time sinks, and I want to enjoyably spend my time, rather than recriminate about how I wasted it doing things I enjoyed and neglecting things that should have had higher priority. With appropriate supports and support from other people, I can function as a human being in a society. Mostly, what that takes the form of is "please write the thing down and give it to me, or send me a reminder e-mail or message that I have agreed to this thing, because once I leave this context, I will not remember it until I am in this context again, or at some other random, unhelpful time." This also means a certain amount of not giving me grief about the messiness of my spaces, because my working memory is often embedded in objects that are present in my workspace. They remind me to do certain things when I spot them. Once they are out of my sight, my brain often marks them as completed, even if they're not. Concentration sometimes means having fidgets available to keep the distractions part working on the fidget so that I can concentrate. Or it means taking notes, because taking notes means processing the thing that is happening. Systems at work, and they are always only as good as fixing the last thing that managed to evade or break the system and become a problem, so that will also mean having to be patient with me while I figure out how to prevent the problem from reoccurring. (The solution might very well be, as I wrote above, "please e-mail me when I agree to do a thing.")

Accessibility and accommodation is important to me, because without it, everyone expects me to behave and think and do things the same way they do, and at least one manager tried to fire me because she didn't understand that the things I was doing. She classified them as rude and personal failings, and didn't particularly like my explanations of "I would rather stand up and stay awake than stay seated and fall asleep" (at the time, the things that were interfering with my ability to have restful sleep were not yet diagnosed, so I was working on systems that worked for me at university without understanding why) or "I am paying attention to the participants in the program as I also try to puzzle out this situation in front of me." (Apparently, trusting children and teenagers to be responsible and at least do some amount of managing themselves is completely wrong.) Or even, "I forgot at that moment that this edge case existed to a regular rule, I'm sorry and I have created a flowchart of how the process works to demonstrate to you that I do understand it and I will try not to forget again." (The person being upset at me trumped any and all apology and demonstration that I could put together that this was an honest mistake.) My continued longevity at my place of work in my profession is mostly due to the fact that this manager retired before she could complete the process of getting me fired, and every subsequent manager I have had was either not in place long enough for issues to arise or actually understands that at least some part of your job as a manager is to help your employees do their best work, and sometimes that will mean having to do things in a particular way.

In many other aspects of my life, I benefit greatly from the curb-cut effect, making traversing physical space easier and having greater understanding of what is going on in media programs by being able to turn on subtitling or captioning and read to ensure that what is being said and done matches with what I'm hearing. (I don't use Descriptive Audio, but I think it's great to have available as well.) I can magnify text and pictures so that it's comfortable to view from several feet away, even if I can read it at the smaller, more original size. I have a fair number of tools developed for accessibility that I take advantage of when I get the opportunity to do so, even if they are things that I do not specifically "need" to function. I have not met people who think that I am either somehow taking advantage of something that doesn't belong to me or that I am somehow less human because I use those tools. Not yet, anyway. Most people who have taken me to task do so on the strength or compatibility with their worldview of my ideas and statements, and not because I use certain tools.

Because of the communities I work with, however, and the repeated parts of the instruction that I do on library resources, I am very sensitive to how accessible software packages are, and how many steps it takes to accomplish things, and where there are pain points, annoyance points, or where I end up saying the same things over and over again because they continue to be obstacles and impediments to a successful process. And while I would like to say that any such things that I discover are taken seriously and fixed by the people who make the software, or who control out environment, the reality is that library software and systems is the kind of place where you can count the number of products that do certain tasks on two hands, with some fingers left over, and you can count the number of companies that own those options on one hand and you might still have a finger or two left over. If competition is supposed to be the biggest driver of innovation and the threat of leaving is supposed to be the thing that gets companies to improve their products when there are complaints, then in library systems and software, we don't have enough options to be able to force either of those desired outcomes. And, as both publishing and library systems and services consolidate, we end up with fewer companies in charge of more things, making it even harder to change in the face of a company sucking. In a world where the government was on the lookout for anti-competitive behavior and starting giving serious side-eyes to conglomerates and making menacing gestures with a sledgehammer in hand, we might have that competition, but regulatory capture is a thing, and it's much easier for those who have money to buy politicians and legislation than those without.

So, with the understanding that DRM is an abomination unto Nuggan, but without it, nobody would license material to libraries to lend (and that all of that is basically controlled by one company, Overdrive, even oif other companies and projects exist to try and break that practical monopoly), allow me to complain about the inaccessibility of things that I encounter in my workplace.

First up, Windows. Obviously, our IT department does not want to give us free reign over our staff machines, nor to give the public the ability to make permanent changes to our computers or run or install malware on them. But it appears that their ability to control whether various items in the Control Panel are present is mostly controlled by the categories those items appear in, and perhaps some fine-grained control past that. Which resulted in me filing a ticket with them because the "Do Not Disturb" mode was kicking on while I was doing other things, and it meant I was missing e-mail and chat notifications because the machine assumed that I didn't want to be disturbed. I couldn't turn off DND, it turns out, because DND had been classified by Microsoft as a "Gaming"-related function, and the policy IT set removed the ability to access the Gaming part of the Control Panel. They were able to fix this. This feels like someone at Microsoft said "only the people playing games will use applications in full-screen or maximized modes, and so they're the only ones who will care about whether notifications will interrupt them or not, so stick the do-not-disturb settings in the gaming area," and nobody with the ability to get things changed pointed out that this was a foolish idea and made unfounded assumptions about the users of their product. (The integration of their LLM into basically all Microsoft apps and Windows itself is similarly a foolish decision based on unfounded assumptions about the users of their products, but at least there someone could argue that some people actually do want to use LLMs.)

Another large Windows Accessibility gripe I had is that the Ease of Access features (Microsoft's name for their accessibility features) are not available by default, so that when someone wants to log in to one of our computers, we do not have the option of showing the on-screen keyboard, or several other accessibility features that would make it possible for the machines to be used independently by people with physical disabilities. I had a person with a caregiver who came into the library, who had a USB-A pluggable control mechanism that allowed them to move a mouse cursor without needing their caregiver to do so. But because our Ease of Access functions aren't available by default, this person could not independently sign into our machine. Once the caregiver had typed in the appropriate numbers on the keyboard, then it was possible for the person to navigate merrily along in what they wanted, and to then access some of the Ease of Access features so they could do things independently. I do not know why all of those features are not available right from the jump. Some of them have become so, because I've seen people using the magnifier at the login screen, and then had to undo that work to make the machine ready for the next person. But still no on-screen keyboard toggle anywhere so that a person who can't use the keyboard can still type. (There's probably some sort of security reason to not do this that I don't know about, and I have questions about why we're using software where the presence of an on-screen keyboard somehow introduces a greater security risk than the attached physical keyboard does.)

After a months-long data breach incident, the details of which have not yet been fully revealed to the public or to the staff, we were staring down the barrel of a fair number of paper library card applications that needed to be put into the ILS, once it had been stood back up and the transactions that had been put into it had been run through. I didn't want to spend my time clicking through all of the form fields, so I tried to tab-navigate them, so that I would use as little motion as possible. Which is where I discovered that the form itself is only completely tab-navigable if there's only one entry in the autofill for a given ZIP code. If there more than one option and I have to select from the modal that pops up, the tab navigation resets to the top of the page, and when I get back to that ZIP code, I can't tab through it, even though I've already entered the information, without popping the modal back up and then getting kicked back to the top of the page. I filed a ticket about this, because surely this is a known problem and someone has already figured out how to move the cursor to the next field after the modal has been dismissed. It hasn't been fixed yet, so I still have to do at least one click to do a library card application. I'd hate to have to deal with that as a screen reader user, or someone who doesn't have the ability to consistently click a mouse to the right place.

Most of my accessibility headaches, however, come from the suite that we use to control user access to the computers and that manage the printing from those user accounts. First and foremost among them is the discovery that while the computer access and printing system has to communicate with our ILS, it doesn't actually generate any kind of account on its own systems until the first time that a card number and PIN are used to sign in to a computer, or to make a reservation for a computer. We had a fair number of people who have had cards for a very long time get stymied the first time they try to use our "print from anywhere" option, because the number is right, the PIN is right, and yet the system told them they were an "inactive user." While the fix is relatively simple (make a reservation for them, then cancel that reservation), how much simpler it would be if, say, every day or so, the computer access and printing system would query our ILS for accounts, and then create access and reservation entries in its own system for any numbers that it didn't already have such accounts for. This would not normally be an issue, but the print system runs on a sixty second timer that resets when you press the touchscreen.

Well, I should say that's the only visible timer that runs on the print release station and system. There are several hidden timers running all throughout the printing retrieval process, starting right with the beginning of it. Since we offer such things as print from home, the prompt at the end of the process that involves the person's device is to enter an e-mail address. The print release station is the place where we have an on-screen keyboard, and for people who don't do things particularly quickly, a long e-mail address can take several minutes to type on the keyboard. Several of the people I've been assisting have had their attempts disappear suddenly because we've reached some sort of hidden timeout that starts when the login screen is opened, and which does not reset itself in any way on any kind of keypress on the keyboard. I have been known to type their email addresses in on the second go-round simply because this timer is unforgiving and entirely invisible.

Another hidden timer runs while someone is waiting on various screens to either pay for their printing or use their library card credit, and no, we haven't been allowed to take cash for printing or copying for nearly a decade at this point. (This, too, is a matter of inaccessibility, even though our payment terminals are equipped with NFC readers so that the "tap to pay" options available with various cards or apps all work appropriately. Being cashless has pretty well made us hostile to the unbanked and to those people who would rather flip us a dime for a one-page print, rather than faffing about with a credit card charge of the same amount.) This hidden timer comes into play when we have to activate a supposedly "Inactive" user - even at my fastest, I would still not be able to complete it in the single minute of the visible timer. So I tell the people that they can reset the countdown timer just by pressing on the screen, but at about 45 to 60 seconds of sitting at the payment screen without pressing anything, the system drops back a level to the spot where you would select what you wanted printed from the available options. So, when the user becomes "active," they then have to go back through a couple of procedural steps, including re-scanning their library card and re-inputting their PIN, to get to the spot where they were before and discovered that the system didn't know who they were.

I'm not opposed to timers that exit out automatically and re-set the kiosk for the next person. I am opposed to secret timers that do this, because they create more problems than they solve. And especially secret timers that don't reset themselves.

The interface itself, especially the spot where the payment options are selected, has one glaring inaccessible part to it - only the button is touchable and will engage the labeled function. The text that is next to the button that describes its function is completely not part of the touchable space, and yet, I consistently have to help people who have touched the text, expecting it to be a target space, and who then get confused because something should have happened there. It sometimes takes me an explanation or two of "you have to push the button to the left" before they get to the right target area. And while these are not small buttons, neither are they particularly large, and so I can only imagine what someone with a disability or difficulty with being able to touch the same spot on a screen consistently would experience, in addition to massive frustration that this system doesn't have large enough touch targets for a crucial part of their function.

Oh, and also, apart from the first screen, which can be pinch-zoomed to make the target to start things easier to hit, everything from that point forward is of fixed size and is not zoomable or arrangeable in some form of larger blocks, or otherwise can have a mode for people who need larger touch targets or larger text to read or any other such accessibility concerns. And, while there's supposedly a button to change the language from English to Spanish, the only thing that gets translated is the interface where you put in a library card number and PIN or the e-mail address from the Print from Home option. Once signed in, everything is in English again. I filed a ticket about that, too, and apparently the company came back and told IT, when IT escalated the bug to the software developers, that they only intended to translate that first screen, and not the rest of the options that someone would have to go through to successfully print. That kind of sloppy, inaccessible work would have me advocating really hard for switching to some competitor product that actually gives a single shit about accessibility or language translation. That, of course, assumes there is one. I'm not entirely sure there is, at least with enough corporate support to make it something we would consider purchasing. (If we had an IT department that didn't have all their time consumed by putting out fires, I'd strongly urge us to find solutions that we could basically run and maintain ourselves, so that we could be responsive to comments and queries, instead of expecting and receiving the shrug emoji from the companies that we escalate these issues to.)

So I have multiple complaints about the software that we use, and zero faith that any of the issues that I raise about them will be fixed in any future release. And that's before I start complaining about our website, and our marketing materials, and so many other things that are also probably inaccessible. (although I did finally manage to get the text size bumped up for our digital advertising displays when I pointed it out to the marketing person how small the text was when they were at our location. I think they also need some refreshers on minimum contrast for images.)

The most recent gall for me, however, has been that other IT departments in our public schools have made foolish decisions of their own that render school-issued devices unable to get on our Wi-Fi. Our Wi-Fi uses a captive portal system, which is not my favored way of doing things, but it is at least a system that happens mostly automatically, with the user input needing to be to connect to the network and then to click the "Agree and Connect" button on the captive portal page. For most devices, this works fine, and people can then merrily use the Wi-Fi. For these school-issued devices, however, while they can supposedly connect to the Wi-Fi, they never get the captive portal page to appear, and none of the tricks that I know of to make said page appear work on these devices. As I was helping someone with this particular problem, I think I gained sufficient insight to know what's going on. Both of the sites used to try and generate the captive portal page timed out, and they both wanted to route through the same server and weren't able to do so. Which made me think "oh, no, someone's hard-coded a proxy for all traffic to pass through first." Which would work fine on school networks, or on Wi-Fi networks where you enter a passphrase to connect to the network, and otherwise then have access to the whole Internet from there. But on a captive portal network like ours, we need the connection to go to the captive portal page to start with, and then from there, we can open up the Internet at large. But the computers insist that all traffic has to go through this server first, including the captive portal page, no doubt, and so we have an impasse where the captive portal page needs to be acknowledged first, but the computer has been set up to route through some other server for everything, and therefore it will never let the captive portal appear and be acknowledged.

sigh

So to fix this, we'd have to convince the school IT to let their machines connect to our captive portal (and presumably other ones, too), and then to use their proxy server. There's probably CIPA and/or COPPA compliance issues there somewhere, and other things about who would theoretically be liable if a school computer were used to access age-restricted things, and so forth. Which, since we have trouble connecting with schools anyway, is probably a pipe dream of mine to get these conversations going and the desired result. Our best alternatives here are to use a desktop or library-provided laptop, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's somewhat hard to access your school learning modules and environments from a non school-issued device. So instead our Wi-Fi is inaccessible and students can't do their homework at the library, like they would like to.

And these are the things that I have direct contact with, or that show up in what I work with the public over. I'm sure there are so many other things that are accessibility concerns, or just concerns about whether or not someone feels represented, or safe, or that the library acknowledges their existence. I'd like for use to be better about all of this, but so much of that is in the hands of people with more decision-making power and resource allocation power than I have. And so I don't expect things to get any better any time soon, because the priorities of the library aren't doing a lot of pushing on those things, and the companies that we could be leaning on don't have incentives to improve, because they know we won't really be able to use a competitor product, assuming one exists.

But still I complain, and I file tickets, and I try. That's what I'm supposed to do, and hopefully, one day, things will get fixed. Preferably before someone decides to take us to court over accessibility issues. (This is an exercise in futility sometimes, and it bothers me, but I still try.)

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

09: Instruction

One of the things that was not made clear about what my job would entail was that there would be all kinds of instruction going on with regard to the library's resources. I expected there to be some amount of helping people wring better results out of the databases, or making their search engine queries work better and with the way the engine expected things to work, because that's the sort of thing that I trained on as a professional, and it's not necessarily obvious to the people who are just starting to use databases and search operators how to maximize them for best effect. Or even to know how those operators work and how to put them together so that they will produce something useful. (Yes, despite the understanding that I was not going into either a K-12 or collegiate space, I still held the belief that sometimes someone would seek help from the public librarian about how to do those kinds of schoolwork parts.)

Reality has told me that while those are useful things, it's highly unlikely that the public library user will ever get to the point where they need database tips or search operator optimizations. In the era of slop-generation machines, and the unwanted, forcible integration of those slop-generating functions into things like search machines or other aspects of our technological lives, I imagine that search operators are going to be even less used by the general public as they seek answers for what they are looking for, and are willing to accept slop because it looks correct and reads confidently.

What I spend so very much of my public-facing time doing is instruction, absolutely, but it is instruction of the most basic forms of technology interaction. Our print system, as I lovingly refer to it, is "[z]-teen fiddly steps, all of which have to be done in the right order or it doesn't work." Divided into parts one and two, of course, where part one is ensuring the thing that is desired to be printed has been properly downloaded and is printing the correct thing, because many people want to print the preview that they're being shown on the screen and then are confused when what prints is the e-mail behind it, instead of the document they can see. Or they want to fill out a document and print it, but the document itself does not have fillable fields in it, so instead I end up walking them through the printing process and then through the scanner process so they can scan back the filled-out form and send it to the people who want it.

And sometimes just getting to the document itself can be a real pain. For example, I had a document sealed with Microsoft Azure locks, so it wouldn't open in Chrome at all. The Microsoft website said we had to open it in Edge, which we did, and then signed in, and then it kept telling us that we had to switch to the right profile to open it, even though we were signed in to the right profile on Edge.

So then we opened it in Acrobat Reader, and it spawned an Edge window to ask for permission to open it, and when permission was granted and all the appropriate sign-ins were completed, the window returned an error saying that there wasn't a necessary token available. Nuts. That seems like the rock and the hard place at this point.

But, going back to Acrobat Reader and letting the process finish and close the "Hey, we opened up a pop-up, let us know when you're done" notification that appeared, it turned out we had successfully authorized unlocking the document, and the person was able to print their paperwork from the VA that had been sealed with this Microsoft lock. I strongly suggest involuntary chastity torture be applied to the engineers that inflicted this nonsense on us and made it not work when we did it their way and errored when we did it the way they wanted us to.

Or the countless times where someone has asked me why their form isn't submitting or moving on to the next page, and I scan the document, and point at one thing, saying, "That thing. It needs it in this form." The offender is usually ringed in a small red box, and has some text explaining the problem, but unless that's what you know to look for when something is having an error, you can breeze right by it, because you put in the information that was wanted, why isn't it accepting it?

I have, at least twice, helped people them pull their LLM-generated resume and cover letter out of the interaction phase with the LLM and into an application. That was mostly just e-mailing themselves the chat transcript and then dumping the text into Word documents, but to someone who hasn't done this thing a hundred times every day as part of their work, they need to be walked through the process of giving the transcript a URL to ping against, e-mailing said URL to themselves (a thousand curses upon the engineer at Apple that thinks that "Share" is the right button to hide "Save" operations behind), and then opening the transcript from the URL, copying the text and pasting it into Word, at which point they could start styling it as they wished. I have a certain amount of revulsion about people using those tools to do this work, but I am also somewhat professionally prohibited from giving advice to people on how to build their resume, apart from helping them with formatting or showing them where the templates are that they can paste their information into. We have community partners that can help with that, but those kinds of things usually necessitate a trip to the local metropolis.

It's often software that I have to deal with in one way or another when I'm doing these kinds of instructions, whether it's helping someone take pictures of identity documents and them moving them directly off their iProduct onto the computer so they could then be uploaded to the right site in drag and drop. (Which was the easier way, honestly, than any other available to them.) Or teaching someone, and then letting them practice, how to transfer material from their Macintosh to a storage drive, so they could eliminate it from their iCloud storage. (If my deep loathing for the way that Apple products and iProducts handle things like storage and directories and where something actually is hasn't come through yet, I should probably shout it louder.) When I'm in the weekly "Tech Help" program, there are a lot of things that need explaining, like how to slide a camera cover and make it possible for the camera to work. Or saving documents. Connecting to the Wi-Fi. (And then, occasionally, the secret ways to make the captive portal work properly when it doesn't do it the first time around.) Or helping someone with the apps on their iProduct and doing things with them. It's all stuff that would likely be covered in a class, or learned through experience of use, if you had started either the class or the use when you were younger, but many of the people here have neither had the class nor the long practice, and so I and the other person in the program are helping people as they handwrite the procedure for the thing(s) they have come to the program to learn how to do. This is not a knock on older people - it's just the most effective way for them to retain the knowledge and be able to use it when they're not in the program. (I write stuff down all the time to remember it and seed myself with reminders to do or follow-up on things.)

There's just so much need for what I would consider to be basic instruction in the use of computers that has not been provided, or is only being provided through a paying course, or only provided through situations where someone has to travel to the local metropolis, or it's only offered once a month as a three hour intensive, because that partner is doing the same thing at all of our locations and exhausting your community partners by making them try to sate the insatiable is a bad idea.

Many of these situations are happening with time pressure, as well, because they're running out of computer time and the library is closing and they just need to get this thing done first, why isn't it working! And that kind of panic often makes instruction not possible as much as being very directive about what needs doing. And once the thing is done, the person no longer needs the instruction, because they don't expect to need to do it again.

I've also found that a fair number of the people who are in the library and need assistance with working with the computers fall into one of two camps. The first camp hates computers and the increasing electronic everything and wanting as little to do with it as possible. They have had bad experiences with computers, or bad experiences with people who have said they are good with computers and have not figured out how to avoid looking down their noses at the people who aren't, and they prefer human to human interactions rather than anything mediated by a computer. (They most likely would agree with the maxim "a computer cannot be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision," and then go forward into complaining about how everything has to be mediated through computers, automated assistants, and chatbots when all they want is a telephone number to talk to a human so that the problem can be fixed in five minutes. Because the human will understand what they want.) Much like my younger self, these are not people interested in instruction or in retaining the instructions, because they never want to have to do that thing ever again, period. With enough repetition, I suspect, much like my younger self, it will sink in and they will learn things, but also like my younger self, they will never stop being salty about having learned it in the first place. They are people who will accept the idea that computers are stupid, but they will blame the computer for being stupid when it is a PEBKAC error.

The second camp are people who have become afraid of computers. Those people have often been fed the scary stories about black-hat hackers, and stolen currency, identity theft, and the exfiltration and posting of data, botnets, and all of those things that do happen, absolutely. They also know that phishers and predators are using computers, deepfakery, synthesizers, viruses, and other such things to fool people into giving them sensitive information or to just take it without asking. So they don't like interacting with computers, either, but it's because they've been convinced by a steady stream of media stories that if they press one key wrong, or click in the wrong place, it will mean that they have given access to a criminal organization that will steal their identity and all their money and compromise all of their systems. These are people who are open to instruction, but only so far as it gives them an exact sequence of steps to faithfully replicate, and if at any point, something happens that is not in the sequence, or the sequence produces an error, they have a panic because it's not working like I said it would be. It's a brittle form, because the slightest deviation, or the change of a UI element, or any other such thing is enough to change the entire thing and now they're back to baseline worry that something catastrophic will happen if they deviate even the slightest bit from a known-safe procedure. These people will not accept the idea that computers are stupid, nor are they particularly keen to understand that because of this, the people designing computer software have figured out how to put in all sorts of guardrails around permanent decisions. I try to give this piece of wisdom for the afraid: "If the computer asks if you're sure, and you're not, click the 'cancel' button." (I also try to explain to them that most criminals aren't after them specifically, they're either after the data that the company has, and if they get that, there's nothing you could have done to stop it, or the part where a scammer is trying to get you to do something before you think about it, and so the best way to beat those is to take the information given, and then find some other way to contact the people they claim to be, and confirm with that. I know it doesn't always work, even on people who know that's what's going on, but I try. And so do our community partners.)

Because I do these pieces of instruction so often, I've become a very practiced hand at doing it, and guiding people with all sorts of devices or different scenarios successfully to the result they want. Often times they misattribute this to some form of brilliance, superior intellect, or supernatural beneficial aura that I have and they do not. I usually try to pop that bubble by being honest about how many times a day I do this, and if they had the same amount of experience I did, they'd be just as good at it. I don't think the bubble actually pops all that often, but it very much is having experience in the general form enough, and having seen several of the most common (and a few less common) ways that the process errors or goes slightly sideways that I can course-correct in the moment to keep someone on track. And that also sometimes means knowing when to let go of the part that's saying "they're not doing it right!" or "they're repeating this step unnecessarily!" and focus on making sure that the thing gets done in the end, regardless of whether it was done efficiently or elegantly. Because most of the time, I'm not going to see that person again and they're not going to come back to tell me about what happened because of what we did. They're not interested in perfection, they're interested in satisfaction, and therefore any job that is satisficing is a good job. (Even in some cases where I know that the thing that they want to do, and the thing that would be actually effective toward reaching their goals are two very different things, but they don't want help on doing the effective thing, they want help on doing the thing they want to.)

For example, I was helping someone work through making sure their emails all synced to an iProduct. One of the un-synchronizing accounts just needed to be removed and re-added, and it started syncing again. The other was an account that kept prompting for a password, which we couldn't actually find, remember, or make, but after trying all the things we could to get it work, the person mentioned that everything from this account that was complaining about not having a password forwarded to one of the accounts that was already on and synchronizing to the iProduct ([annoyed grunt]!) So I deleted that account from the phone, and lo and behold, no more password prompts. That doesn't help the underlying problem of not knowing the password to get into that account, but it does accomplish what was asked of me, and the person left happy that I had fixed the problem they wanted help with. Satisfaction achieved.

If I had more time with people, and could guide them through repeated attempts to do the same thing, especially those things that sometimes have slight variances, I could help them build the skills they need to be able to do the more general form of the thing they want to do, but I don't get that. I don't have that for programming time, and I don't have it for those interactions on the public service floor. The best I have is trying to steer someone toward one or the other resources that can help with this, because they know they'll have someone for a class period, or a video that they can watch infinitely until it clicks, or any of the other things that are really needed for any kind of learning that isn't just-in-time learning. For that to happen, the person has to be interested in learning the specifics and the general situations, and most of the people at the library, I suspect, don't want to learn the general pattern of a thing, they want to learn how to do the specific thing they want done and to move on.

What that usually means for me is a lot of repeat instruction. Even though when I signed on to do this job, I didn't think I was going to be doing a lot of teaching. (And I still recoil from being referred to as "Teacher" in any way. I don't have an education degree, please don't call me that.)

Sometimes, though, people do come back, or they do tell me about what happened after they interacted with me. I helped someone put together a huge zip file of pictures and video, then showed them how to upload it to Dropbox and provide a shareable link to those that needed to see it. Then they came back a few days later and needed to add a new picture to the file, so we did that, too, and re-uploaded and re-shared everything just to be sure that it would work properly.

Or they appreciate the care and the rest that goes into the instruction. I helped walk someone through the process of first signing into their e-mail (and walking through the steps for a recovery to make sure they could get in, and gleaning that the person who had set up the account had set themselves as the recovery e-mail and telephone number, which could have made the process a lot shorter—all things that I have done before, but that would (and did) throw someone who hasn't for a loop), and then helping them walk through getting their boarding pass printed and confirmations all sent to the right places. By the end of this process, I was complimented by the person saying "after you've shown me how to do this, I could teach someone else how to do it." Which is certainly a goal of mine when it comes to helping people do these things.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

07: Doppelganger

I am not the only person in the world with my name. I think the first time I realized this was when I was looking at the credits for Eek! the Cat (although I was much more a fan of the Terrible Thunder Lizards), and I saw my own name staring back at me, and went "Huh. That's cool. There's someone else out there in the world that has my name." It probably wasn't my exact name, middle and all, but it did teach me something important about names. (This does come up in my professional life, because the slips we use for holds use a portion of the name, and sometimes we have collisions that have to be handled. We also print some other things on the slip to prevent true collisions, but.)

And, occasionally, because I know that there are other people out there in the world with my name, I run my own name through the search engines and see what comes back from there. In this day and age, I am disappointed that someone who holds my namesake had significant academic credentials and is wasting them writing up books espousing nonsense positions that are all TERF and no substance. This is one of the places in my life where I recognize where the bar is, and am very glad that I'm getting well over that, even as governments around the world, including my own, seem determined to try and match that level or find new ways of digging underneath it. Blargh.

It is interesting, though, that despite the clear and obvious successes that I have with the way that I handle names in the process of creating and updating library records, my methods are not widely adopted or incorporated into the actual policy of the organization. Probably because the way I handle names is somewhat orthogonal to the way that the organization wants names handled. They are at least willing to acknowledge the possibility that the name a person will respond to most quickly is not necessarily the name that is on their identification, but they still seem to insist that if there's a difference between the two, we're supposed to record the name that's on the identification. If I inquired about the why, they'd probably mention something about the need to have the information on the identification in case of lost book charges or something like that. Our organization hasn't used collection agency services for years (this is a good thing), and so it's not like we need to send warrants, court orders, or process servers to someone looking for the reimbursement of our lost materials or other sorts of carceral enforcement mechanisms against people who lose books (which are often children, by the way.) And if someone's going to go to the trouble of trying to evade things to get multiple cards or to try and get rid of previous lost book charges aginst them, then they're probably putting in more effort than we really need to chase down. And, eventually, even the determined run out of aliases, or they get a little too known to the staff, who start pointing out that someone seems to be doing their best to run up lost book charges for whatever reason, and perhaps they will need to manage their other issues before receiving another card.

All of this is to say that a person's name should be whatever the person in front of me says it is, regardless of what's printed on identification or membership cards or other such things. And so, when I'm making library cards, I generally ask, "Is this the correct name for you?" and follow it up with "Is it spelled correctly?" if they say it is. I catch so many incorrect names this way, just by asking. There are some people who go by a nickname, there are some people who don't want to use their full names if they don't have to, some people go by what is supposedly their middle name, some people are either getting married or have stopped being married and therefore have a different last name, and I've seen a lot of people who are trying on new names in anticipation of possibly making other changes, or who are definitely on the way to making other changes and definitely want to use the correct name for themselves, even if they haven't yet had their identifying documents updated to reflect this. The best part about getting someone's name right by asking for it is that I can see the look on someone's face when they understand there's someone in front of them who is trying to get it right, and who is asking them about it, rather than assuming whatever's printed is correct. There are other people who seem genuinely confused about why I might be asking about it, but I'm sure a little bit of thinking about it will produce at least one of the situations I've talked about above, so they can understand why someone might ask. (Or maybe I'm being optimistic about how much people actually want to know the answers to things, or even whether they ask these kinds of questions.)

I've even heard it from my coworkers about how they think it's a good thing that I do these various things where I'm trying to make sure that I get the information. But I don't see a lot of that then getting put into practice. Perhaps because they're used to the routine they have, perhaps because they don't feel like they can deviate from a process that's been laid out in front of them about what needs to be collected. It's one of those things where if I had a useful pathway to the people who set the policy, and a belief that if we raised these kinds of issues with them, they'd listen and adjust based on the feedback they're being given, I'd probably do more advocacy for getting the official processes changed so that we can put down correct names for everyone in our library system. As it is, for some of those things, I have to invoke the Nick Fury rule about foolish rules.

And until then, I can at least have the knowledge and understanding that I'm still better than that other person who has my name and is wasting it by being a professional TERF.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

05: Capitalism

As soon as I decided that I was going to let other people into my life and have them partake of my resources, I failed at capitalism. This is offered not simply as a trite observation or a tautology, but as a condemnation of the system itself, because capitalism as a system is about hoarding and always trying to have your resources be used in a way that produces advantage to you, and usually, it demands that the advantage be financial in some manner. The person with the biggest bank account wins at capitalism, and therefore it can't be anything other than the height of folly to willingly share your resources with other people without expectation of being repaid or otherwise reimbursed for such a thing.

It's why we have corporations that allow humans to evade responsibility and accountability for actions intended to reinforce greed, hoarding, and scarcity, with bad results to everyone else who is caught in this amoral situation.

If I had, instead of taking up with the idea that I might want to have companionship in my life, decided that I was only going to live alone, with my books and my poetry to protect me, then I would not have encountered so many of the expenses that I have in this world, regarding vehicles, and mortgages, and repairs, and replacements, and so many other things. I would probably have a much more comfortable retirement position, and savings, and possibly be wistfully wishing that I could afford a mortgage on a house of my own, but for the entire and complete bubbling of real estate right after the last bubble exploded. Or I might be aggravated about the rent and the presence of all the condos driving the rent up further. Who knows. It certainly would seem like I would be in a far better position with regard to capital and the use thereof if I hadn't embarked upon the choices that I did.

It's possible I could have some of those things to myself at this point if I hadn't made the choices that I did about trying to make a bad relationship work, because I wanted to make it work and ignored signs that it wasn't doing so. And because, as the entries so far have hinted at, I'm not exactly brimming with self-confidence in any domain outside of a space that I have both expertise and a firm understanding of the problem. Except, I guess, in some places where I have the confidence of a mediocre white man and don't notice that I'm outside of my expertise. So, I made bad choices and then continued to suffer from them for a significant amount of time. My failures at capitalism are numerous.

But even before that point, I'd definitely been failing at capitalism before. I decided to go into a profession that requires graduate schooling and that doesn't pay for shit, because it's a profession that's been heavily feminized and therefore discounted and devalued. I took on significant debt for something that wasn't going to give me great returns from it. (And that has an entire awe section about how crass it is to expect to be properly compensated for the job that you do, because if you are in it for money, then you lack the passion and devotion to the profession and should go somewhere else.)

Even before that, of course, I was also making bad decisions at capitalism, choosing to go to the more expensive and prestigious university that had the graduate school I eventually wanted to go to, rather than taking the scholarship offer to a different school for my undergraduate experience and then to go into graduate school with the grades from there and have saved significant money along the way.

It's not hard to set my life up, at least from a certain point, as a series of failures of capitalism and making poor decisions about money and therefore, if I am in a situation where money is tight, stretched, or otherwise a source of stress for me, then it's completely my fault because I made poor decisions. This is the mode that I generally operate on in my life, because I've also internalized the belief that I am the only thing I can control and change in my life, and used it as a way of making sure that I blame myself for everything that happens that may be negative. Other people may have contributed to this, and some of them may, to outside observers, hold significant or even primary responsibility for the situation, but that's not usually something that I will admit to, because to do so would be to let go of the belief that I have total and complete control over my situation and therefore I can simply will myself into a better situation. This is the curse of being brought up in a society that believes I, by privilege of my assigned gender at birth and the membership I have in whiteness, should be the unquestioned ruler of everything around me that is neither my assigned gender at birth and/or those who are not permitted entry into whiteness. It then encourages me, through media accounts, advertisements, and other means to blame those people who are not me and not part of my group as the cause of my unhappiness and lack of comfort. From there, I'm supposed to either vote in politicians who promise to hurt them for having the gall to try and exist or take some part of the resource share that is rightfully mine or to engage in direct action to dominate, control, or remove resources from those other people who have been taking from me through their mere act of existence, or who have been "taking" from me because my government is redistributing my tax dollars to the "undeserving," instead of refunding them back to me to that I can use them more effectively and efficiently on myself.

The choices that I have made that are not according to the dictates of capitalism have had many other benefits for me, of course. As, presumably, they have for you. The decision to go to the more expensive university also came with several years of participation in campus life, including the marching band (where my face was on national television for a brief moment as I marched in a parade), intramural sport and refereeing such sport, which may have further cemented my interesting in the Olympic program, and in several of the things that are charmingly referred to as "non revenue-generating sports" that are equally as excellent to watch, if you have the opportunity), and it likely expedited the process of acceptance into graduate school (as well as giving me the opportunity to understand whether I could function at that level) by making it so that the reviewers were comparing the grades of their own institution, rather than trying to decide whether the other institution has sufficient academic rigor for them to believe that my good grades really do mean that I can hack it at that level.

Choosing the profession that I have, even knowing that the money wouldn't be great, has resulted, all the same, in plenty of opportunities for my mental health to stay good (as well as several opportunities for it to be regularly trashed). Doing programming for tinies is still a thing to look forward to and enjoy. Helping people find things and showing them that we have access to the materials they're interested in is helpful, and sometimes there's a fair amount of appreciation expressed for it. There's something satisfying about being able to help people work through their various issues regarding technology and using it for their purposes, even if there's also sometimes a fair amount of frustration expressed at various entities because they made things obtuse, or because they dumped a device on someone, made some statement about it being intuitive and not needing any learning, and then skipped town instead of supporting the device they had just thrust on someone. Sometimes we get back a little bit of our teens who have gone on to other situations and parts of their lives, and they come back and appreciate what we were trying to do with them, now that they're adults who have to deal with the life outside. And there are always people who use the resources and appreciate that we're still here, even as they are themselves confronting capitalism's failures of them. And doing the work I've done has had me met all kinds of wonderful people and attempt all kinds of things that I might not otherwise do, like practicing my art skills, or penning articles for publication, or presenting at various conferences about the intersections of my profession and the professions and careers of others. Often in a "we should be able to work better together" way, but that working together is often curtailed by lack of resources and by the often aggravating, but very true assertion that a public library that has to be heavily involved in making sure people have basic needs met is not able to sustain more complex and more interesting programming for the majority of their users. (Much as it would be cool to do some of those things.)

The decisions I have made about relationships and about wanting human companionship in my life have resulted in having a house that I can then use to help other people have a house and companionship in their lives. And in pets, who are often yell, but routinely are also love. They have proven to me that there are friends that I still had outside of a bad relationship, and that the worst things that I think about myself are often not as terrible as I might otherwise believe they are, or that what I think about myself is the shadow on the wall being cast by something much smaller and less terrible.

And that some things are forgivable. And that others can be worked through, or around, or with, in a way that results in the thing getting done, instead of a way that results in the thing getting done and me feeling terrible about my failure to be a normal human being who can do all the things that normal human beings do without needing additional assistance from outside sources. Or without building structures and systems of reminders and pathways so that whatever the last mistake is, it won't be made again, making sure that all the mistakes of the future are novel ones. So long, of course, as the system performs flawlessly and I remember to engage it at every juncture that I'm supposed to.

Having other people around can mean articulating to them the secret fears that you have, or the ways that things used to go in other situations, so that they understand why you are expecting them to do one thing, or that you want them to do one thing, because if they do that thing, that will signal to you that there are no further things that will be sprung upon you later.

And, despite all of those things that I have done capitalism wrong with…I keep surviving. I keep finding ways to make the money work, even if it makes me fret a lot about whether or not the whole enterprise is going to hold together long enough to succeed. To me, this seems like standard operations, but to others, it might suggest that there's some sort of financial wizardry involved in here, to keep rolling with life and still managing to stay afloat, even with all the things that have been in my way. To me, it's mostly just persistence and sometimes a fair amount of denying myself anything that might be fun.

The persistence part is probably to good one. The long bouts of self-denial, probably not. But, there's another way in which I'm failing at capitalism, by not choosing to extend myself out to as far on the margins as I can, either in hope of a great payoff or because money is meant for my happiness, and so I should spend it profligately.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

03: Chemistry

If you asked me about whether I can bake or cook, I would tell you no. If you then asked me whether I could follow a recipe, I'd tell you yes, and that I've successfully done it many times. When you point out that following recipe is literally the process of baking or cooking, I'll counter that with the idea that the sign of baking and cooking skill is somehow fixed in my head as being able to look at a basket of ingredients and understand how you could make a tasty meal with them, without the need to refer to recipe, only your own experience and technique. You can tell me that's a ridiculous standard to hold anyone to, and I'll agree with that, as well, and mention that my own head can be stubborn sometimes about what it thinks of as the baseline for being able to claim a skill. Because that kind of skill is not necessarily something that people who can follow recipes deliciously will ever develop, or necessarily desire to develop.

The domestic arts were not being taught that much in schools. There were classes with names like "life skills," which were often about learning how to balance a checkbook and keep track of your accounts, how to calculate what the additional costs of finance charges might be, including the one attached to a revolving credit account (more colloquially known as a credit card), and other skills that were meant to send us out into the world slightly less wide-eyed and terrified at the prospect that we no longer were bound to the school and would be considered, in the eyes of the law, contract or otherwise, as adults who could make life-changing decisions on our own. There were simulations about whether or not someone could live a month on the salary of the career they were thinking about going in to, which were also disguised ever so slightly as recruitment efforts to various places or career options, including the military. But at no point did I learn how to cook things while in school. I learned a little about it, using microwave technology and the conventional oven to do things like cook pot pies or make popcorn or other snack foods, but while I was a child, my stay-at-home mother handled the cooking, and while I was an undergraduate, I was on the dormitory meal plans, which covered most of my meals, and I could use some credit to have sandwiches or other such things for the one meal the dorm plan didn't cover. So, theoretically, I could avoid having to learn how to cook until I left the dormitories, and even then, I could have managed to avoid it by trading out cooking duties for other chores in the arrangements that I had while living with other college students. I didn't do that, but neither did I get much of an education in the arts of cooking and of shopping for myself. Not least because the last place I was in for graduate school had a strong infestation of ants, and those ants liked to turn up in insufficiently sealed cracker and cereal boxes. So I learned which foods not to buy because they attracted the ants to them.

Having left the tender illusions of schooling and moving myself to the Dragon Conspiracy Territory, with a job in hand, and soon, an apartment of my own, the lessons I had learned about frugality and making the dollar stretch meant that not only was I going to consider "eating out" to be a great luxury, it meant that I was going to have to cut back on the amount of already-prepared meals and foods and start using some of my spare time to cook up food that I would take for lunches to work. I had sandwich makings, and my indulgence, such that it was, was frozen pizza with a mozzarella cheese-filled outer crust, and some microwave meals for those nights when I was going to get home from work too tired to do much more than cook up that food and possibly vegetate or otherwise get caught up on the Internet's doings for the day.

(When I was in the relationship that hurt me, it was a point of pride for my ex that she did the cooking and feeding of me, and that I should not have to worry about it. Even when she was doing a fair amount of overspending the budget I vainly kept trying to set and explain to her that we had to adhere to, because my money was not infinite and I knew that if we got in the habit of overspending because she had money to draw on, it would hurt a lot when that money ran out completely. My attempts were all failures, because my ex was looking for excuses not to have to hold to limits and also told me that she believed anything other than a firm no was an invitation for her to more strongly argue her position. After telling me this, she would get unhappy and sulky when I switched to firm nos about things that I had been trying to use polite nos for. The no hadn't changed, but once she told me how to deliver it so that she would listen, that's what I used.)

However, 2dlife took, well, maybe not pity on me, but an interest, because C was skilled in the arts and was willing to teach someone who hadn't collected the necessary parts of being able to follow recipe and understand what techniques were being called for. This was meant both as skill-building and as lowering the intimidation factor toward cooking, because it's much harder to think of cooking as a daunting task when you can keep turning out delicious food by following the instructions in front of you. Under C's direction and instructional material, I made quiche. (The first one was perfect and delicious, and every quiche I made after that was chasing that first perfection. They were all still good, but they weren't exactly like the first perfect one.) I made braised chicken, and I made goulash, and stews, and I tried to make breaded, battered, and fried chicken, which didn't turn out as well as I had hoped, because while I'd made things, I hadn't made them to stick to the chunks of chicken I had as well as I wanted them to. And with each new item, I had learned new technique for preparation or cooking, to the point that by the time C was done walking me through things, I had a repertoire of things that I could make, depending on what I was in the mood for, and I could make them in sufficient quantities that they could serve as components for many different types of meals. The chicken went in lunches, but what accompanied the chicken changed throughout the week, so that I wouldn't get bored of it. And I still had the pizzas and microwave meals for variety and for those days where cooking just was not going to happen.

(Since the dishwasher in the apartment was broken, I also got very good at using the minimum number of pots and pans for these meals, because I dislike doing dishes by hand, and therefore would want to spend as little time on that as I could.)

Fast forward through the harmful relationship, and I am once again on my own and equipped with a kitchen to resume where I left off. Although by this time, C's dropped off the Internet, or at least LiveJournal, so I don't have the entries to refer back to again. What I do have, though, is the Internet itself, and so it's back to meal planning, figuring out what I want to make, and investing in a quality and sharp knife. Maki joined my repertoire of things I could make, and once again, the first one turned out beautifully, and many of the others turned out much less so. Presentation was not that important, however, because I was the one eating it, and therefore if it was delicious, it counted as a success. Shortly afterward, a long-distance relationship became a proximal one, and I returned to the more comfortable role of sous chef, doing prep work and assisting in cleanup while letting the person with confidence, skill, and practice do much of the main cooking work. My skills didn't atrophy, though, because these sessions had the same idea as C's in mind: I was learning things about how to gauge when something was done, I was handling preparation of various things, or at least the first stages of them, or being asked to watch them until they showed the signs of being done, and pretty often, I'd get the instructions on how something was done and the expectation that I would be able to turn out delicious food. And I succeeded in these matters, following recipe and instruction from someone who had the skills to look at a basket of things and figure out something delicious from them.

I'd still tell you no if you asked if I could cook, though. Even though there is one memorable instance in my cooking career where I may have shown up some people who did not have the necessary skills to prepare the food they had obtained for a gathering. Their chef had flaked on them, and so, because I was hungry and I knew how to make the food they wanted to serve, with one pan, a sharp knife, a silicone spatula, time, and spite, I made delicious food. There was definitely some incredulity that someone could just do something like that, but as someone who had trained with C's braised chicken and making C's quiche recipe, the food in question for the gathering was well within my capacity. And there were no complaints about the food that had been promised actually appearing, and being delicious.

(There is a story on my father's side of the family about one of the uncles taking over cooking and baking duties for my grandmother on that side as the cancer that eventually killed her (fuck cancer forever) made her no longer able to handle those duties. "I ain't heard no one complain," he said, when Grandma was trying to help him do things better. Being a person of sharp wit, she replied, "Are you still listening?")

As time has gone on, and other people have joined up with the household, cooking duties have been spread out and sometimes individualized, and sometimes not. I know that I've prepared the red beans and rice specialty from a housemate from recipe and direction, to excellent results, and I have been at last co-head chef for several years of the November feast and its requirements. This year, I flew solo on the November feast, and it was all delicious, and those who partook of the feast all agreed that it was delicious as well, so I suspect that means my cooking skills have significantly leveled up from what they were when I was just starting out with C, both for stunt chefery and feast chefery. I certainly have confidence at this point that I can follow recipe and turn out delicious things. (Chicken carbonara, oh, goodness, that was good, even if it was fiddly as fuck to get right.)

In the other half of chemistry class, most of what I'd learned how to do before University days were no-bakes and other items that required blending, but not necessarily baking and monitoring things until they were properly done, based on both the time that the recipe said and the eyeballing or toothpicking skills needed to ascertain when something is truly done and ready. The shutdown and shift to virtual services gave me a golden opportunity to practice skills that I had been self-conscious about (including art skills like drawing and crafting that I mentioned in the previous entry), and when I suggested to my co-presenters to try kitchen sciences with our child cohort, with the supervision of their adults, they were enthused about it. Which meant rustling up recipes for baked goods that could go from creation to full bake in approximately an hour, and then, live and in front of children and my co-presenter, actually doing the mixing, proving, rising, preparation, and baking for these objects. Shortbread first, then scones, pretzels, biscuits, pizzas, all different kinds of dough with different requirements of time, temperature, kneading, and the rest. I couldn't believe it when the shortbread came out of the oven and was delicious. I didn't believe I could do it well the first time. Some of the recipes I did a practice run with to make sure that they actually would go in the time that they claimed, and even the practice runs turned out well. As with the other things that I had made, I tried to emphasize to the children that if it was delicious, it was a success, no matter whether it looked perfect or not. Because the things I made were not uniform, perfectly-stamped objects all arranged in a row. They were different sizes, some a little looser or tighter than others, and showcased just how much of an amateur I was, and how much I was learning alongside them at doing this. But they were delicious, and the ones the kids made were delicious, as well.

I have had to learn how to adjust my spicing preferences to others' tastes, and to learn when to lean hard into spicing and when to have a lighter touch with it. But I am no longer intimidated by recipe, and the person I consider the cook in the household has been pointing out to me that I am already at the phase of making delicious food based on vaguer instructions than recipe, so I appear to be moving forward in skill and practice, so it's possible for me to make small diversions and adjustments to recipe based on the kitchen I'm in, and the taste of what I want. So, within a narrow band of possible parameters, and with instructions to hand, I can cook and bake, which is a lot more than I could do many years ago.

Let's begin with finally understanding how the Dresden Codex is able to calculate eclipses with exacting accuracy.

Alice Wong, ceaseless activist and person who wanted us to really look at not just the body, but the person behind it, and who often wanted us to know about things that weren't necessarily meant for "polite company" about it, has died. She knew it would happen eventually, but we were always hoping she'd pen a few more things for us to chew upon.

Having banned them completely outside of research studies for the under-18 crowd, the UK is announcing a large-scale clinical trial on the use of puberty blockers in the under-18 cohort. Presumably so they can have their own conclusions about how safe and effective they are, even if that kind of conclusion is unlikely to be tolerated by the ministers who want to use it as a further cudgel.

We must once again stress that all things that are natural are not necessarily good for you, and that people who want to charge you money to give you no information about how to safely have birth, and who will actively encourage you not to seek appropriate care and assistance in the case of complications or emergencies are not trustworthy nor should they receive any kind of money at all. Of course, they're not advertising themselves that way, so it can be harder to spot the fakery until you're in it, and since it also preys upon the vulnerable, it may not be something that you notice is fakery or a problem until something terrible and tragic happens.

Even if the way that can be named is not the eternal Way, being able to identify and label your emotional states can go a significant way toward regulating them.

( The usual: USPol, technological terrors and failures, and the rest )

Last out, the right to say no, and how the increased automation of things that need a human touch continues to erode that right, not the people directing the greater automation necessarily believe that the people they're automating were human in the first place, and the way that tools become integrated into the human experience, and how accepting things like the stochastic parrots in their current form only benefits the people who want to continue the dehumanization process.

And, of course, the Dreamwidth December points sale is on! Support the site with paid services, get 10% of your order in points that you can use to make a later purchase cheaper or free. And if you already have paid services and want Dreamwidth to continue as the best LJ fork created, and to also routinely assist in punching governments in the nose when they try to impose poorly-thought-out laws and rules under the guise of protecting children from adults, consider wither turning communities into paid accounts, adding icon slots, or playing Paid Account Fairy and using the function that allows you to gift paid time to a specific person or to a random active user of the site.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Gods, it's already December, isn't it. Time to talk about myself again, and this year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

There will be a lot of talking about computer touching, but also, likely, art outside of computer applications. Shall we begin?

01: Beginnings

I've told this story before. Several times, in fact. It's appeared in 2024, 2023, 2021, and 2019. This is less a worry about dementia and repeating myself (although I have now discovered there's a family history of this), and more because this story is the launch point for a lot of things involving my technology journey. It's not the earliest computer memory I have. That's Ladders and Hunt the Wumpus on the Kaypro. This memory, however, is the earliest one that I have of taking a piece of technology, and trying to figure out how to make it work for me, rather than accepting that the limitations placed in front of me are the sum total of what is possible.

I'd like to believe that I am at least telling the story with different details each time, so that the composite picture you get, layering each version of the story over each other, in the same way that you might layer up a CYMK printing process, means that more and more of the full truth of the story comes into being. Some parts are always going to be mentioned, are always going to be core, but the things that are relevant to the specific context might change. Or some other piece of the picture gets touched and now adds to the details of the story, refining, highlighting, adding shadows and depth.

As a tiny, I was not permitted to have my own machine. As a teenager, I was not permitted my own Internet access. This was in good parenting practice at the time, which was about monitoring and making sure that the children were not spending all their time on brain rot, and then to make sure that the children were not getting into age-restricted material.

This is the time of the Sierra adventure game, and where games could offer a wide palette of possibilities, between CGA, EGA, and the relatively newfangled VGA offerings, with games designed to be understandable with any of those color combinations in mind. It's also the time of Math Blaster, which I remember playing significant amount of, an EGA colored suite of Jeopardy! games, Avoid the Noid, with its chiptune public domain soundtrack played through the computer speaker, the various Carmen Sandiego games and their associated book where you looked up answers in, a fiendishly difficult Monty Python game that look some significant time to figure out a core component of the game, and of various game packages sold together. It's DOS, and if three's Windows, it's 3.0 or 3.1 at the most.

One of the first things I tried to do while playing a Jeopardy! game was to hit that pause button on the keyboard, which seemed to stop the operation, and then I went to the encyclopedias to look up the answer to a question. Once I had that, I hit pause again to resume, only to find that the pause key did not actually stop the operation of the computer and the timer ticking down to zero. Nuts. This is the first time where I find out that I don't fully understand the thing in front of me.

This was also the era where we made me a name tag for entering school with by designing it in Print Shop Pro and printing it off, rather than hand-lettering it, and that was apparently the thing that distinguished my name tag from everyone else's. There were a lot of things created on Paint Shop Pro in that era.

This was also an era where games often tied their execution to how fast the computer was running, because, in those days, a heady 8 MHz of clock speed was available, and in the family computer case, it could be bumped up to 16 MHz through a "turbo" key combination, and then brought back down again, similarly. This made some games a lot easier to run, or that they could be sped up if necessary or for additional challenge.

Engineer that my dad is, he had installed a program so that when the computer booted up, instead of an unfriendly prompt, we had a friendly menu that we could choose options from. He created pages for the kids so that we could access games and the things we were most interested in, without needing to use the command line for such a situation. This worked, for the most part, because this is also the era where people snark about Bill Gates talking about how 640k of RAM is good enough for everyone, and most programs didn't actually grab a lot of RAM. So the Automenu program and the game could coexist side-by-side without there being any issues of memory work. When there were issues, in the VGA era, we'd have to dispense with Automenu and instead work with boot disks to ensure there was enough RAM available to run the games we wanted to, which usually had helpful utilities for creating such things and ensuring that the bare minimum of useful things were loaded into memory, so as to have enough left over for gaming.

At this particular point in time, however, I was interested in a game called Sharkey's 3D Pool, a billiards simulator. It was fun to watch balls fly around and possibly play a couple of games against various opponents. (Sharkey himself, of course, as befitting a pool shark, was a perfect-play opponent.) However, Sharkey's 3D Pool was one of those games that needed more memory than was available to it with Automenu enabled. I didn't know this at the time, but I would discover it soon enough.

So, in DOS, much like in Linux today, (and UNIX before it, I'm sure), you have what's known as a PATH. PATH is a way of telling a computer "When you receive an input from the command line that you don't understand, search these locations to see if it matches something there. If it does, run that program." So you can make programs callable from anywhere in the file structure of the directory including the program is part of your PATH. Games being installed usually added themselves to the PATH so they could be invoked from anywhere, including by small children who just needed to remember to type the command.

Automenu was, essentially, a graphical representation of batch files, which contained commands to be run in sequence. Batch files and shell scripts are essentially the same thing, it just depends on which environment you're in. Anyway. The point was that the creation of menu entries was essentially putting together a batch file, so that when you selected the menu entry, it would run the commands in sequence. Because it was a relatively sophisticated program, it was also possible to edit and create new menu entries from inside the program itself, and this is where me, an enterprising youngling, starts upon their career of computer touching in earnest.

How much of being a computer toucher is running someone else's software because it's correct for the purpose, how much of it is in poking around in things and changing them to suit your purposes, and how much of it is designing and executing your own software is an exercise to the reader. And also a primary source of conflict with me about how much of the title of computer toucher fits me, and whether I should claim any part of it.

Back to the youngling, who wants to add Sharkey's to the list of possibilities available to them, and therefore goes poking about in the menu editor to see if there's any knowledge to be gleaned from studying the structure of menu entries. This memory is hazy, so the exact details have escaped me, but I do remember that I was able to pick up the syntax of how to create a new entry, and how to indicate what commands should be run when that entry is selected. I put together what I thought would work as a command and tested it. And I think it needed to be tweaked a time or two before I had it pointed in the right direction and getting the right command to run. But I did, at least, get it to the place I was looking for.

However, when trying to run it, Sharkey's kicked back a message to me saying that there wasn't enough memory available to it to run in EGA/VGA mode, and it suggested a command-line parameter to use to lower the graphical quality down a step or two and try it again. Which I did, and I think at CGA, it did run, because there was just enough memory available at that graphical level. However, if you've ever worked with the CGA palette before, "eye-searing" is often a useful descriptor of it, and I didn't want to play the game in that limited color array. I tried everything I could think of to get the program to run through Automenu, and nothing I did worked. (Also, I'm a small child in the pre-Internet era, so exhausting all of my available knowledge is much easier at this point.) Having exhausted my reserves, I turned to the knowledgeable expert (Dad) and showed him what I was doing and what error message I was getting, and asked for help in fixing the problem. So there's my first opportunity to get mentorship and learning.

Dad understood what was going on immediately, and explained to me that if I wanted to play pool, I would have to leave the confines of Automenu and run it directly from the command line. I remember being confused about this, too, because all of my Automenu fiddling was copy and modify, without understanding the principles behind what I was doing, or how I was going about what I was getting to. I think I was doing the equivalent of "C:\Sharkey\shark3d.exe" or that I had copied over a sequence that was "cd jeopardy ; jeopardy" and changing it to "sharkey" or something like that. Accomplishing the thing because the directories and executables were sensibly named (as much as could be in the 8.3 era, anyway), but without understanding what I was doing. So, I fumbled about a bit on the command line, trying to replicate what I had done in Automenu and failing pretty solidly and getting frustrated at my own lack of understanding. Dad helped me one more time with a key piece of information - what the "cd" command actually did. At which point, I understood the file, folder, and directory structure better, and that "cd" was short for "change directory". Once I could use the cd command to get where I wanted to (and "dir" to list what was available), I had the entire directory structure at my fingertips to traverse. And mostly used it to play games after leaving Automenu, because Automenu took up memory that I needed to play games.

That was my first experience with interacting with operating systems and understanding one of the core elements to file organization in a DOS system. I didn't go poking around in things that weren't the games section, because I wasn't interested in poking around in those things. You'll find that a lot of my advancement of knowledge regarding computers is directly or indirectly related to being able to play games on them. It's not a bad motivation, but it's certainly not the kinds where people are looking at a system and getting curious about how it works, or seeing what else is available on a system, or other such things. So that's another reason why "computer toucher" doesn't always sit well with me, because I'm not coming at it from the same place as some of the other people are.

That said, that underlying file, folder, and directory structure is exceedingly helpful to me when it comes to my current work, either because machines still use that structure (Windows does, and so do Android phones), or because I'm about to rain imprecations down on the Apple Corporation for making design decision to obscure that underlying paradigm in favor of saving everything to iCloud, or in not exposing folders, but instead making them links to cloud storage, or only making them accessible through apps. I get the idea. Abstracting away the underlying structure and presenting a user only with "locations" to save to, or something like that is supposed to make things easier to find later, and the abstraction still allows for folders to exist, and the like, but I often have to explain to people that the thing that's attached to the e-mail has to be stored somewhere before it can be uploaded to our print servers. I'm a practiced hand at making this work on all kinds of devices, but there are times where I wish Apple would make "save to local device" much less buried, and also, I want to rain a thousand curses upon whichever engineer decided that the "share" button should also serve as the way of accessing how to save a copy to either a cloud storage account or local storage. At that point, I pretty well believe that their abstractions are making things harder, and are designed to get people to pay for extra iCloud storage, rather than to be able to use the devices that they have in their hands. That's a business decision, but it also makes me strongly dislike iProducts and not want to give them my money.

From these, my beginnings, we go forward in time, but also to situations of different complexity, skill, and problem-solving. Mostly in the service of playing games, or in trying to do things that will keep me from being idle and therefore prone to the difficulties that come from being idle or hyperfocused.