plaid was a show that i was looking forward to, and had planned around, so the weather was a necessary peril, and i had to just deal with it. i was hoping to get in a little early and maybe find some legal marijuana, as well as set up a bank account with a driver's license that i don't have yet, but that wasn't available, yet. so, instead, i ended up dragging myself through the cold for a still pretty early entry, around 22:30. that meant that i missed most of dave shettler's set.

i actually like ambient music, and i've enjoyed his sets before; i think maybe what i missed was very similar to something i had caught while on edibles during plug, based on the similarities at the end. i intended to catch the set, i was just late through a cold walk.

i would have caught the 8:30 bus if i would have just gone to the bus station to get tickets, but i was apprehensive about my payment method and the only store i was sure took the prepaid mastercard and sold tickets was shoppers. so, i took a mild detour to the shopper's around the corner, only to find out that they don't sell tunnel bus tickets - surprisingly. so, i went down to the shopper's at ouellette, another detour around the greyhound station, only to find out that they closed at 20:00! it was around 20:40. so, i checked the convenience stores and asked around and was left with the only remaining option being the station itself, which was thankfully open. so, i started off by touring around in the cold for an extra half hour, and was already pretty cold by the time i got over the border.

and, then i walked to marble, which was a colder and lengthier walk than i remembered it being. see, i've been on my bicycle through detroit for months, and it's not far on a bike up to trumbull & grand. it's a hefty walk, though. it was just too cold to bike and end up anywhere, presentable. but, i still haven't fixed my tube, yet.

it took roughly an hour, an hour spent consuming a lemonish liquid while juggling cigarettes, and with neither hat nor gloves, through -15 C windchills, although the ambient temperature itself was merely hovering around zero. it was like a blizzard without any actual snow. i knew i was getting in somewhere, but that could have been a dangerous night to get stuck out in.

i was happy to find a heater to warm up beside when i got in, found some pot, and found the set ending right when i was about to start listening. as mentioned, it sounded familiar to me, so it was no doubt part of the set he played there behind plug.

the next thing up was daedalus, who i knew nothing about other than that they were on ninja tune, and that that's a label that i have some healthy respect for - they tend to release interesting music. there was a discussion about how to classify it, but i didn't find it that daunting - it was a kind of dubstep/idm. i found it moderately interesting, and might check out some more of it if the opportunity arises.

this is a few years old, but it's not dissimilar:

plaid was kind of really plaid, it's almost like they were more plaid than plaid. if i could imagine what a plaid show would be like, it would be pretty much that. an interesting quirk to the show was that they had a live violin player playing segments of sound that were then cut up and manipulated into loops, in real time. so, what you were actually experiencing was often this group of like sound engineers messing with live sound. sonically, it was kind of very plaid - a mix of lush atmospheric ambience with jittery and sometimes plodding beats, along with some strategic melodic programming. if you always wanted to experience plaid, that was exactly what the show was.

a plaid fan youtube site seems to have a recent set from istanbul that appears to be very similar to the detroit set:

however, this is the only footage that i could find of the live violin player:

there was a dj afterwards that allowed for some dancing.

this bar is hit and miss in terms of closing times. they're sometimes open until the afternoon, and sometimes closed at 3:00. i was hoping to stretch this night out a little so that i could just go straight to the tunnel, but they were shutting the place down by 3:01. so, i had to find somewhere to eat.

first, i had to get to my jacket, which i left outside the bar and required a small journey outside to retrieve. this time spent outside in a tshirt should not have been particularly damaging to me, given that the temperature was still hovering around freezing, but with the windchill the cold was flat out dangerous, so i actually had to stop there for a few minutes and warm-up before i carried on. i ended up with a small amount of frostbite on my left thumb, but i can't tie it directly to that moment.

it was still only 3:30 at that point, roughly two hours earlier than i wanted it to be, so i had to make a choice to go to the diner, with the hopes that they'd allow me to eat there. it's a funny thing, actually - the diner was an entirely different experience, all of a sudden. rather than handing everything out via takeout, they actually had two servers that were taking orders, like an actual restaurant. i ordered some bacon & eggs, got a refill on the coffee, and paid the bill without experiencing any negativity at all. i hope that this is indicative of future experiences at the diner.

hey, i don't recall ever starting any trouble at this place, and all i ever wanted out of it was some breakfast, and maybe a place to sip coffee and/or doze off at while i'm waiting for a bus or a show. the premise of my reaction was that i was taken aback by the hostility and ultimately didn't understand it; the preferred outcome is to annihilate the hostility as counter-productive to everybody's interests, but first to understand the causes of it, and try to determine if they're rooted in factual perceptions or not. for example, if somebody thought i was a prostitute, that would be false. we haven't got there yet, and maybe we never will, but if the issue just evaporates, that's fine, too.

by the time i'd finished the refill on the coffee, i'd actually missed the early bus. but, i caught the second bus back in, and had to stop for timmy's on the way back - i just needed some warmth for my hands. and, i had no choice but to shower almost immediately, to counteract the onset of hypothermia - a shower that it took me some time to warm up in, despite the scalding temperatures.

after warming up, i actually slept nicely until late in the afternoon.

i know that people are kind of upset that the quebec court could rule that the law is oppressing people, and then not invalidate it. but, that's a peculiar part of the canadian system in itself.

i've been clear that i think this law can withstand a legal challenge, and that the quebec government should have made better use of the expertise of the judiciary as a reference source, rather than try to cut it out of the process. i've pointed to bans on political activities by civil servants as a precedent for a valid restriction on expression, within the confines of the dress code. but, the government doesn't want the debate.

what people are forgetting is that a court in canada can, and often does, rule that a law is unconstitutional, but then save it via something called the oakes test. that is, we're allowed to have unconstitutional laws, in canada, if the balance is in the public good. and, if the quebec government won't argue the case in the way that i'm proposing, it's brandishing of the notwithstanding clause as a trump card, and somewhat frivolously given that a legal argument exists, could very well lead to exactly that decision, which it seems to be perfectly ok with. they're happy to make a mockery of the law.

but, this is a point that outside observers need to understand about our court system. in canada, it's not enough to show that a law infringes on somebody's rights, that's just the first step in the process. after you've shown that a right has been infringed upon, you have to run it through an oakes test, which questions whether the law can still be justified, despite infringing on some people's rights. and, it's not hard to come up with uncontroversial examples of laws that infringe the rights of some for the greater good; that's not that controversial of an idea at all. our legal framework explicitly forces the jurisprudence to consider the question; a judge must place the individual's rights in a social context, and must rule the individual's rights subservient to the social good, if the evidence compels it to. that is how canadian law interprets this kind of thing.

this is in contrast to american law, which has no real legal counterargument to individual rights, and which liberally grants injunctions when constitutional rights issues are raised. in the end, canadian judges wield a large amount of power to declare legislation void, but the precedent is set at a high bar in meeting the grounds of the oakes test, first.

so, in context, the democratic will is a valid argument in canada to overturn constitutionally-protected rights, in ways that wouldn't be raised in the american courts. and, americans that are following this case may find the language used by the canadian courts to be galling to the point of shocking. but, we'll see what the outcome is.

if the quebec government refuses to present an actual legal case, the court may be forced to make some pretty brutal rulings.

so, i needed to sleep this evening.

i was back on wednesday morning, slept the day, then was about to get started on thursday afternoon, when the machine crashed with an 0x6b, which appears to have been caused by being unable to access specific files in the catroot directory as a part of the windows activation process. it took me until friday evening to figure that out and adjust to it. i now have what i think is a clean image to redeploy with. but, i had to sleep shortly afterwards, as the 0x6b had kept me up on thursday night. now, i'm moving on.

what i wanted to do on thursday evening was write reviews for the last week, stop to eat and then get to cleaning up and publishing the liner notes for the 2013 releases over the night. so, that's what i'm getting back to this morning, and let's hope there's some published material on it's way up by the end of the weekend.

so, the drive is backed up in as clean a state as i could imagine it, although that may fade as more is learned.

i think i should be back up soon.

meaning i lost a day.

yeah, i think that was much faster than i imagined it would be. everything just copied over neatly.

i'm going to leave the catroot files in place. i think they ought to be unnecessary, but i can't stop random processes like windows activation from happening. that's what i'm going with right now - the activation runs as an update locally, and causes internal havoc by running roughshod over the broken update files. so, the operating system goes looking for a file in the activation process, and it can't find it, and it bluescreens; i may claim that i wouldn't otherwise need to look for that file, but as i can't turn the activation off, i'm forced to leave the file in place.

i'm otherwise going to load the thing back up on the laptop, tweak it as best as i can and then clone it away somewhere. 

i'm not a slow learner - i understand that i need to get used to this. so, hopefully that image will be easy to clone and easy to reinsert, so that when i do need to do this again, it's a thoughtless process.

to be clear.

they ended chapter 11, which is in truth because the jurisdiction is better in the wto. what the end of chapter 11 means is that the wto is taking over that role.

but, they kept chapter 19, which the canadian side actually insisted on. 

so, yeah, i know they ended chapter 11. sort of. but, i actually meant 19.

let me clarify a point.

i'm not saying we should try to squirm our way out of nafta, or something. i fully grasp the importance of nafta to the economy, for better or worse. i grasp the imperative to not end nafta.

but, i think we could have waited this out, and i think our timing for ratification is based more around the personal ambitions of the actors than the actual interests of the country. this could have been an election issue, and might still be one. there may be a better deal at the end of this.

i mentioned before that, from what i can see of it, it's a wash - the focus on lifting mexican labour standards is long overdue, but the continued insistence on these investor-state dispute mechanisms, instead of courts, could threaten local sovereignty near the border(s), which are also disproportionately indigenous. you would have to do some complex modelling to try to balance these things, and the few studies i've seen essentially do balance them out - i think the general perception is that mexico will be a tad better off and canada a tad worse, but it's round-off error on both sides. so, you have to just kind of go along with it. as mentioned, the important thing is making sure the deal doesn't collapse.

i'm still in favour of moving slowly on ratification, and letting the process play out, fully.

so, boris johnson won a majority government and andrew scheer resigned in a money funneling scandal. hey, maybe he could use tax dollars to buy his kids spots in universities, when he's prime minister. i meant scheer, not johnson. 

the things you miss when you're under cyberattack. yikes.

listen, maybe i should put this down - i don't care that much about any of this shit. i don't post on brexit, and i don't care about the impeachment. the ongoing story for me is the democratic primary. and maybe nafta.

but, like, i can post from here.

you've stopped nothing.

so, i seem to have come up cleaner than i expected to.

the thing that i did immediately before the update, which i know happened after 14:00 due to the timestamp in the catroot directory, was clear the registry out of an rdp listener that was running at startup, and for who knows how long. it was just corporate microsoft listening software, for like a domain server, which goes together well with the general feeling that the laptop has been slaved to a domain, somehow. i cleared out the executable and a number of drivers with names that i didn't like, and i suspect in some subset and combination were being utilized by the executable. so, you could imagine that i thought that the registry was a likely cause. but, replacing the registry didn't recreate the bluescreen; it was only being recreated when i removed specific nt* files from the f-key in the catroot directory. 

so, i saved my registry, actually, and everything that was in it. that means this should hopefully be quicker to reconstruct. all the missing services are already gone, for instance. the firewall might even still be in place.

i'm also toying with a naturalistic explanation to that update process. the one thing that i do always run when i come up is the activation plugin, which insists on connecting to the internet via firefox, but it always errors out. if the activation process utilizes firefox as a download manager, and it is the default browser, then that could explain the traces of hex - and could explain why it's erroring out in the catroot, or what it's doing running an update at all. i was able to verify that the activation process does utilize files in the catroot folder.

that's not what these files in the catroot directory look like though, they look like server files. 

i'm going to try to put this back together as best as i can, then. hopefully, it's not too long.

should i even redeploy every morning, pre-emptively?

i do have to make this point clear though, don't i - what i'm saying must be worthwhile on some deeper level if they're going to such extremes to shut me down.

i've been fighting with this now for months.

and, i mean, it's not like it's hard to get back up.

it's just a constant annoyance.

what i should do for now is take a backup image of the drive before i go back online, and then have it ready for a quick deploy for the next time.

if i need to reinstall every other day until whoever's bothering me goes away, i can script the machine to make that easier.

it seems clear to me that i'm dealing with a cyberattack.

my best guess is that the cops think i'm some kind of spy, and i'm essentially being shut down by the military.

the fact of the matter is that i'm a disabled artist on welfare that's just trying to get some work done. and, this is your tax money at work, people - this is who they go after.

am i potentially being targeted by somebody else? again: i don't have anything to steal. and, if somebody is trying to knock me offline, all i can do is point out that it won't work.

but, i don't want to play this game. i want to get some work done. and, all i can do is make it clear - i'm not having fun, and i'm going to go out of my way to make this process unfun.

so, don't expect me to do anything. don't expect me to retaliate - i wouldn't know how to, even if i'd want to. expect me to take my time getting back online, and hope that the problem is fixed, this time.

or, i suppose, have to do it all over again.

and again.

and again...

*sigh*

so, i got up yesterday afternoon to roll a joint, with the intent to get to writing the reviews when i came in. but, the machine was stuck at a blue screen when i got back, one that i don't remember seeing before and didn't know how to fix.

as mentioned: i don't want to run generalized scans on my machine, i want to figure out what happened and undo it. so, the internet wanted to tell me to do things like run a sfc scan, which i'd throw the machine through a window before i actually did. i don't want to load the defaults and forget about it. thanks.

as i really hadn't the slightest idea what had happened when i was out, i decided that the only thing i could really do was to reinstall to the drive, then slowly copy over data from the broken partition until i found the culprit, which it turned out was in the catroot folder. 

and, i was able to figure out that there was indeed some kind of update process that happened when i was out smoking.

that took until early this morning, and i've been in a sort of a rage. see, what i'm stuck with now is the task of finding out how to undo this update that i went to such great lengths to stop from happening. why did it happen when i went for a walk?

i spent all night hoping i could salvage the install, but now that i'm sure that the blue screen was caused by something in the catroot folder, that is something update related, i feel like i have no choice but to start over again from where i was at last week, and try and do a little better with it this time.

so, i'm reformatting the drive and copying over the install from early november, again. i'll keep my tabs and a few other things in separate copy processes. then, i'll need to spend another day or two trying to lock the machine down better than i did before...

it seems to either be an error with windows update, or some kind of backdoor that wants me to think that's what it is. the installation files seem to have come in via firefox, and then evaporated. and, the error i'm getting is something along the lines of that the setup files are corrupted.

listen: windows update does not work on this machine. those kinds of errors are the inevitable outcome of trying to update this machine, and that's by design. it's broken on purpose. it's never going to work; stop pretending that it will.

if i can get the copy over by mid-morning, i could conceivably be back online tomorrow or the next day.

and, yes, i'm angry and frustrated but i have to just keep going.

what i will say is this, though.

i need to get the liner notes for the november sequence done, and i might decide that the answer to this problem is to keep the laptop offline until it's done. i need internet access on my main machine. but, if i'm going to be constantly targeted by the cops, or some idiot kids that act like cops, then i'm going to have to find a way to get out of the way.

again: i'm never leaving the internet. but, if i have to find some other way to post for a bit, so be it.

so, i found another pile of weird remote desktop stuff in the registry, and this time it allowed me to actually delete some device drivers, so hopefully that's another step in securing this thing.

all i can do is keep reacting...

i should get to the reviews this afternoon.

see, this is interesting.

i set the firewall to only grant access to firefox, and disabled as many of the updates tools as i could find. but, i had a hard reset this morning, and look what i found on the reboot:

those folders were created this morning; they're empty.

there would only be one way to download files, and there we have it. and, i have no idea what the "updates" were because they left no trace of themselves, which is maybe actually just evidence that they didn't happen. that is, if there was some update, it didn't update any of the system files directly in any obvious way. the update would have to be in the files that were running and saving anyways, like maybe in the registry. so, if this is a trace of anything, it's a trace of something that's been inserted into the running system, and has otherwise deleted itself. it seems to not want to get caught...

the shutdown itself seems to have been a kernel error of some sort.

i do suspect that trouble is coming, but i have no way to trace what happened, and so no way to know what to expect. i'll just have to keep an eye out for symptoms and react to them.

no, i'm glad that the great messianic christian president decided to spend advent attacking the media's construction of this joan of arc archetype, like the evil capitalist pig that he is.

a sadistic enjoyment of making fun of autistic little girls is exactly the kind of quality that you hope for in a good president.

but, the elite keeps over-valuing and over-estimating the importance of catholicism in understanding western behaviours. i'd guess that few people are even getting the reference.

our archetypes are more classical and more roman, even if the truth is that the romans wiped us out of history. the romans and celts were at least mirror images of each other, before christianity. europe resisted christianity so violently because it was so foreign to it....

so, i'll say more or less the same thing i said previously: it's a sad reflection, all around.

i was in at about 5:00 am and i'm going to spend a few days putting together loose ends before i pivot. i have a small amount of marijuana to smoke this week (away from the house.), but i'm otherwise expecting to be in for most of the next three-four months.

barring no unforeseen circumstances, i should hope to have a productive solstice period.

this article seems to imply a winner-take-all delegate outcome; the democratic primaries award delegates proportionally, so you don't "win california" so much as you split the delegates. so, what this polling is actually suggesting is that the split field will render california and texas meaningless to the top candidates - even as they strike a death blow to smaller ones, perhaps including buttigieg. buttigieg will need either warren or biden to drop, but the same could be said of warren or biden - they need other candidates to drop. it's currently a stalemate.

by the time march comes around, a lot of the smaller candidates will have no doubt dropped. but, that's really all that you get of value out of this polling - the obvious statement that you should expect that the smaller candidates will end up mathematically eliminated by this stage, or very close to it.

my own feeling is that texas is a loose cannon in the democratic party. it's such a conservative place, obviously. so, it's split between, on the one hand, this conservative and catholic latin-speaking minority, which is not dissimilar to other latin-speaking populations in the western hemisphere, and should probably lean republican in a sane reality, and, on the other hand, this geography-less young generation of hipster kids that is like urban kids everywhere else in the country, with the exception that it's actually substantially more wealthy. if the texas democratic party ends up dominated by the artist-driven politics that you see in places like austin, it could be an interesting laboratory to try out new theories in. if it ends up driven by the more conservative instincts of the latin-speaking population, it could revert to the kind of insular backwardsness that has marred the region since the waning years of the mexican empire. for right now, i don't see how a clear winner emerges out of this field in texas, or at least not in any way that isn't determined beforehand - none of these candidates will sweep either of these demographics, unless one or more of them drops. if somebody wins texas, they'll have already won, anyways.

likewise, i'd expect california to split. if the outcome of the 2016 primaries wasn't sobering enough to remind everybody of where the centre of california politics really is, i guess there's some people that'll just keep dreaming through anything. there's a lot of money in california, as well, and it knows what it's self-interests are. so, a candidate like biden will have a strong base in california that will not be interested in sanders or warren, and it is going to be strong enough to ensure that the vote splits. you should not hope for a big sanders or warren victory in california - that won't happen. however, the one candidate that may actually have a chance at winning california is buttigieg, if biden drops and buttigieg gets most of his support. buttigieg could conceivably convince cultural liberals to vote for him in a way that sanders could never succeed in doing to the bourgeoisie. but, i would consider this obscure - expect california to split

this is why areas with more homogeneous populations are targeted by campaigns - they are selected for by the rules. you'll never get 80% of the vote in california by dominating with a single demographic like you will in south carolina or minnesota.

if there was a place in the united states where the latin-speaking population truly dominated the primary, it would no doubt develop the same kind of strategic importance. however, it doesn't currently exist, and current trends in the southwest might actually lean towards asian culture being the longer term winner in terms of demography - so it's not clear that it will ever happen, either.

what we've seen in the primaries for a long time is the strategic importance of winning homogeneously black areas in the southeast. i'm suggesting - and trump proved it - that the only real strategic counterfoil to this is to win homogeneously white areas by similarly large margins. if there were enough states that had latin-speakers voting in similar proportions in the primaries, sweeping those states could conceivably act as a comparable counterfoil, sure. but, that doesn't exist. what exists are more diverse states that render themselves irrelevant by splitting the vote up within their diversity.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/11/politics/cnn-polls-california-texas/index.html

so, fearful that the brexit party might merely elect jeremy corbyn, brits appear to have retreated to the safety of the pitbull tory mother.

the bastard children of the ghost of ms. thatcher, i see.

there's just not enough votes against the tories there any more, are there?

but, listen, you old bastards - if you don't get the tories out soon, there's not going to be much left, is there?

you lib dems need to think it through. if there's a time to vote labour to remove an incompetent buffoon from power, it's now.

people vote for the democrats because they want them to pass bills that make their lives better. it's supposed to be the party of change, of activist government, of progress in legislation.

but, all anybody's seen under the pelosi dictatorship is a do-nothing congress that sits on it's hands, or plays political games with the time it should be using to govern with. how many bills have they passed? so, why the fuck would you keep voting for them?

i wouldn't be an "independent", exactly. i'd be a partisan green supporter that might consider voting democrat from time to time. but, i'll tell you - if i had voted democrat in 2018 and what i got from it was somebody to keep the chair warm while pelosi plays cynical political games to prevent herself from having to govern, i'd be back to the greens pretty fast in 2020.

again - while i would rather it didn't happen, trump has essentially left congress no choice but to impeach him.

this is a political loser, for the democrats. it distracts from policy issues, it distracts from the debates, it distracts from the primary and it makes them look small-minded and petty, all around.

but, they have to do it anyways.

i'll argue that it was obvious that this was a political loser, and the people arguing for it were either idiots (if they thought it would legitimately hurt trump) or actually trying to distract from governing (that is a more likely reason behind pelosi supporting it, imo - it means she doesn't have to be house leader in a substantive sense for a few months). but, if there was some thinking that the democrats would benefit from this, i hope that the data dispels with that ridiculous notion rather swiftly. it's hurting them. already. and badly.

so, please, house leadership - just get this through as quickly as you can before it sinks you in the general, unless that's what you actually want? well, if you're 55-65, and you want to run next time, you don't completely want to see a democrat win this cycle, do you?

and, please, stop listening to the idiots that talked you into doing this as a pr stunt.

again: they have to do it. but, it's a dry legal formality with little actual consequence that is going to give trump a lifeline when he doesn't deserve one, and they should push it through as fast as they can.

i've got a long day coming up and am kind of nursing a hangover, still. sleep is important just right now. but, it's time to get up soon, too.

i got the printing done. $0.07/page, actually. remember - it's $0.25/page at the public library. so, that's a third of the price, which means i got to print three for the price of one, if you want to imagine it like that.

and, i have the card there now if i need it....even if the fact that the public library is across the street often overpowers.

i'm going to try to wake up, but i'm not going to try too hard.

well, i called ahead and they're telling me i can buy the card for a $1 and it's $0.08/pg to print.

let's hope it works out.

so, i've got everything in order, including my three cd-rs, i just need to find a printer.

application record - 74 pages
book of authorities - 9 pages
factum - 6 pages
certificate - 1 page
========================
90 pages

90x3 = 270.

i'm realizing that the website i found that claimed pages were $0.08 is from 2013. it's on the library's main site, but is it current? let's hope so. if it is, i should be able to do this for less than $22. and, i'll need to print the bus tickets, too.

it would be almost $70 to print that at the public library, which is too expensive. if we have to do it like that, i'm going to end up doing one copy and feigning ignorance.

i do think it's silly to have to waste so much paper....

it's raining right now, and i'm going to have to wait it out, so i might do some reviews. i'm not going to be out until the afternoon. but, let's see if i can figure out what the costs are, first...

it's the point i was trying to make leading up to and during the election: the country is being run by a bunch of overgrown children.

listen...

what you saw in that video with trudeau & macron was not a hot mic, it was a planned stunt by a pmo that operates at the maturity level of a bunch of high school students. they basically thought it would be "cool" if they caught trudeau on film making fun of trump. the intent was to flog it for personal political gain.

this is a part of the reason i'm not bothering with this - i know better. this was a stunt, and it's in a long line of similar stunts.

does it reflect poorly on the prime minister? well, the guy's a complete idiot, and that's been obvious since he first opened his mouth. there's a point where you've done everything you can do to yourself, and you can't really defame yourself any further.

he thinks he's really cool, though. he really does.

but, whoever you are, and however you're approaching this, you have to understand the point - this wasn't an accident. he did this on purpose...

so, i hit plaid on friday night and the armed on saturday night, and the combination of things (it's been too cold to bicycle, so i walked in the cold) has knocked me on my ass. i left the armed show before 1:00, hoping i could get to the bus stop in time, but had to double back to the city club and wait for the 8:30 bus. i should have stayed at trumbullplex. *shrug*.

so, i need to do some cleaning in here, and get things ready for tuesday. if i have time, i'll do a review.

after tuesday, it is very likely that i'll be in for the rest of the year, and potentially until the spring.

i'm not the first person to point out that jagmeet singh does not appear to be very good at playing chess.

i'm going to give him a little advice.

being the leader of the ndp in a minority parliament is a hard job in any circumstance, and even harder given that they don't actually have the balance of power right now. if the ndp supports the government with too much enthusiasm, then what's the point of voting ndp? why not vote liberal, if you get a liberal anyway....or green if you want a real protest? on the other hand, if they're too aggressive, they do run the risk of being seen as running interference, of being perceived as disinterested in actually governing.

jack layton actually ran a lot of interference, and he was rewarded for it, but it's because he was up against not one but two prime ministers that had a lot of entrenched opposition on the left. more to the point for today, layton could vote against martin's budget because he was paul martin - somebody that the left side of the liberal party had spent years pushing back against. it's not clear that trudeau is going to generate that kind of backlash any time soon.

rather, the mood in the country, foolishly or not, seems to be to give him another chance and hope he does a better job, this time, which is a level of goodwill that probably originates with his father and is probably going to be more seriously tested before the next election.

the ndp are not getting anywhere by being pliable - they will need to stand up for their principles when they are challenged, or they will need to cede their position as the party of principles. after mulcair & notley, as well as darrell dexter and a few others, their reputation for being principled has been severely damaged.

but, if this is the best argument they have for voting against the speech, it's not very compelling.

blanchet is actually doing this right - you start off by broadcasting a desire for co-operation, by taking them at face value, by indicating a desire for compromise, and then you viciously attack them when they break their promises. that way, you can go to liberal voters and say "they promised us this and this and this, and then they betrayed all of us.".

the cynical analysis is that the ndp doesn't think it even has the strength to run against the liberals as the hypocrites that they are, that it's essentially trying to prevent itself from being a factor in the operation of parliament. but, if that's the case, then they should just disband. if they're not going to show up, they're wasting everybody's time, and it won't work out for them - not with the greens coming up behind them, like they are.

back at the beginning of the nafta negotiations, i tried to suggest in this space that the liberals should spend some time reading or watching some dawkins, as he's done a lot of important work on evolutionary strategies that is keenly relevant, in context. we then got completely embarrassed at the nafta negotiations, and signed a deal we really shouldn't have. i have to wonder if the outcome would have been a bit better if we had a better negotiation team in place, one that was more focused on game theory as an optimization tool.

i'm going to repeat the suggestion to mr. singh and the ndp. there's a gentle introduction in the form of a film called nice guys finish first.

as of right now, blanchet is following the correct strategy and singh is following an incorrect one.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/singh-says-bloc-won-t-push-government-after-supporting-throne-speech-1.4719205

the whiteness of the remaining primary candidates is getting a lot of media attention, which is mostly really just a shit shot by the corporate media.

listen - if there was some governing entity hovering over the process, arbitrarily deciding who can and can't talk, and they picked a bunch of white guys, then i could see some pushback on some structural racism.

but, what's happening is literally the result of actual polling. and, while i actually think that kamala harris made the right choice in pulling out of a race that she'd already lost quite some time ago, maybe there's some basis in giving her shit for stranding some identity voters without a candidate.

so, there is still time for some of that vote to reorganize itself, i guess. but, there's not much evidence that harris' withdraw is going to help a candidate like booker, who is just not polling above 2-3% at all, all that much.

and, it's maybe another example of the media spinning reality on it's head rather than accepting that it's analysis is so horrible. the media has been telling us for so long and for so often that the democrats are a majority-minority party, and there's basically no future for white people on the pseudo-left, that it can't grapple with what the actual evidence produces out of the actual process. what they want is a race war with the white republicans on one side and the brown democrats on the other, and all of their messaging promotes that, always. so, when the democrats pick a bunch of white people, the narrative implodes.

but, of course, this is the democratic process unfolding, and if the top five or six candidates all end up being white, then maybe that's reflective of the voting base, just a little bit? maybe the actual truth is that a more careful analysis of the demographics suggests that "liberal" white democrats are not just an important voting bloc, but still the dominant one. that would be a nice, easy explanation.

instead, we're told that the field isn't representative of voters, despite the fact that the voters chose them.

ok, so it took me a little longer to catch up on most of the things, but i think i have.

i simply don't have time to get to the printer today before plaid, and i hope i don't regret it. i'm sure they're open monday, actually. so, i'm going to need to put that stuff off until tomorrow or maybe sunday. i also have a few reviews left to finish in my tabs. and, i'll have to wait until after the 20th to get my g1.

the schedules being as they are, i simply have to take a nap before the show tonight.

but, i think i've put the loose ends in order, at least.

i just want to add a weather update.

i have not been to detroit since oct 4/5/6th. i nearly went a few times after that, but i was sick, or something else. i made it to the bus stop on nov 7th for black midi, but turned around, unprepared to weather the overnight. i was in toronto on nov 19th. plaid is tonight.

the first few weeks after i got back weren't so bad, but november was broadly terrible. the funny thing is, though, that, since the beginning of november, the calendar has largely caught up.

it has not been that bad the last few days, and the longterm is not very scary, right now. it's detroit in december, mind you - don't go out in a tshirt, or at least not for too long. it's going to hover around or dip below freezing, sure. but, it's not awful, and it's not even unseasonable; if you crunch the numbers, the averages may even turn out on the + side.

what's going on? well, it has to be all of that hot air in the ocean.

...even as the forecast is warning us that it's -40 in northern canada, right now.

i suggested that we'd have a cold start to the winter, and i was right. but, i pointed out that we're bottoming out, right now. it's going to get better. really. so, i held out hope for an early spring.

it's still too early. that vortex could still roll right through here like bernie sanders looking for a hot meal. but, the solstice is only two weeks away, now, and it's starting to look like it might not be so bad, once the days start getting longer again.

i noticed some strange logs, so i pulled the wireless card out of this thing after i ate.

without looking at it that much more carefully, i can't know for sure. it could have been loading the driver into memory without using it, and i do actually have a very low-bandwidth wireless keyboard running via usb, but the device otherwise has no actual use; it's disabled in device manager, disabled on the front panel and was disabled in the bios until i had to reset it.

more generally, the laptop needs an external monitor, so it's not very mobile.

and i can put it back in later if i really want to...

with the exception of the chromebook, and the infected chinese phone that i never use, that would actually be the last wireless card i have down here. i took the wireless out of the other laptop quite some time ago, and the 90s laptop didn't ship with one. i have three motherboards down here, none of which have wireless chips in them, which was a conscious choice. i simply wouldn't buy a motherboard with a wireless chip in it.

so, i've got a start on the reconstruction, and i'm feeling less overwhelmed.

i'm back to listening to schubert for the night.

and, i'm hoping i can get things in order by sunrise.

so, some time this morning, i stopped myself from pushing forward with the tweaks, put the thing back together and went to sleep. i was up about 17:30 and have been typing a little since. i'm going to stop, get something to eat, clean up the mess from the last few days and try to focus for tomorrow.

i just lost a week that i didn't want to lose. so be it.

what did i do to the machine?

- the firewall is locked down.
- i removed as much of the remote assistance software as i could. i'll have to keep an eye on that
- windows update, which was the direct recent problem, is uninstalled. the catroot is wiped. task scheduler is also uninstalled. i've uninstalled a large number of other services, as well.
- i've installed a detailed group policy that should block remote attackers, police or otherwise, from doing most things.
- i'm going to be running the process monitor essentially all of the time.

as a local admin, i can only take so much control over this machine. linux opens up a can of worms - i know i have a learning curve if i'm going to get into a fight. but, with windows, you don't know what the fuck the machine is actually doing. so, i need to be empirical about what's actually happening.

the procmon is the log i want, the log i was looking for. and, if there's anything going on, i'll find out.

for now, i think that this is enough and i'm willing to get back to work.

i was just about done. really.

i locked the firewall right down - only firefox can access the network. i deleted all kinds of services. i locked the group policy editor down. 

i was just going to check my email, and i wanted to figure out how to fix this nagging task manager error first, which is something that i've fixed before but can't get right now. so, i loaded up process monitor and rebooted a few times and scared the hell out of myself.

what is it doing in the catroot folder? it shouldn't be in there.

and, why is it installing registry keys to the terminal service?

on a whim, without thinking, i just undid it - i deleted it. and, the thing came up to a blank screen. in hindsight, it's obvious that i deleted the logon.

i was able to fix it by copying it over from the other control set. so, i'll have to double check what i did, and i realized i've still got services sitting.

but, i think i stumbled upon what needs to happen - i need to just let the process monitor run constantly and react to it as shit happens.

i should be up within a few hours. i'm sure of it. and, i don't intend to go back down any time soon. if there's somebody hacking in here, i'm going to catch them. so, be warned - you're on notice.

how long are you going to waste your own time on this for?

and i'm going to state this clearly.

a big part of the reason that i've been just fixing this and moving on is that i'm assuming that whoever's doing it will get bored.

if that person or organization doesn't back off soon, and i'm able to gather more and more information regarding remote access requests, i'm going to have to get the police involved. 

this has been going on for far too long.

it seems to have picked up.

let's hope it's not much longer.

as mentioned repeatedly, my sites are on the side.

if it's not on the side? it's not my site.

i *am* finding bad clusters, specifically in the recycle bin, and i do think it was creating access issues. i don't think this is pointless.

i spend essentially my whole life in front of the computer, don't i? and, i'm not particularly upset or concerned about it. it's what i do, and when the devices are functioning, i tend to be fairly productive. i've just been dealing with these constant attacks now, for months, and don't actually know what the point of them even is.

as we can see, i don't have difficult getting back on the internet. i'm still blogging. if the purpose of this is to shut me down, it's not working.

if the purpose of it is to spy on me, i'm baffled as to why when i post most of my life to the internet. you don't need to spy on me - i'm volunteering the information. 

is what i'm volunteering not enough? well, according to who? you'd think i get to determine what's enough and what isn't, and that anybody trying to interfere with my choices is trampling all over my privacy rights. but, regardless, this isn't working out so well, is it? the machine just keeps shutting down, and i keep formatting the drive. by trying to gather more information than i'm volunteering, you're actually getting less than you'd get in the first place. and, you're just slowing everything down.

but, i mean, i don't know what they're looking for. i'm a disabled person with no friends or family, by choice. i prefer to spend 95% of my time alone. that's a choice. i don't like being around people, except when i'm experiencing live music. and, as mentioned, everything i do on he internet is centralized at a blog.

there's nothing further to gather....

the bottom line is that it's not up to anybody except me to determine what i'm posting wherever i'm posting it. these are my sites. if you don't like my viewpoints, i don't give a fuck, and you can fuck off. there's absolutely nothing you can do to shut me down, and it's better if you just accept it.

and, the other bottom line is that i'm very transparent and open. i'm not hiding anything. there's no secret life of jessica - what you see is really what you get.

if you want me to hurry up, there are two things you can do:

1) back off and let me work.

2) send me money so i'm stable.

distracting me or fucking with me or trying to gather more information than i'm volunteering is not helping anybody, it's just slowing me down and wasting everybody's time.

i'm actually sort of feeling overwhelmed, like i've got a million things to do and can't do any of them. and i want to push forward, i want to get things done...but i'm stuck with the bottleneck of this broken machine, which is essentially rendering me useless.

so, i'm tempted to start making lists, and plans for when the machine comes back up, but i know better. i'd be getting ahead of myself.

so, i'm going to be spending the night staring at the ceiling waiting for the chkdsk to finish and trying to calm down and refocus and center.

i moved the chkdsk to the pc, and it's looking like it's going to take all night.

and, i essentially have nothing to do. i'm wide awake, and bored as hell...

what i want to be doing is getting back to the journals, but the data is on the drive i'm doing a chkdsk on. i have no option but to wait.

i don't want to read. i'm not interested in the news cycle. and, i don't want to just aimlessly jam - i want my musical energy to be strictly focused on completing old projects. and, i'm sick of fixing computers.

as mentioned, there are not going to be any new projects - my musical career ended in 2013.

so, i'm stuck. 

i'm not even hungry,

i just want the machine to work :(.

seems like the headache is back.

there's no solution, i need to sleep.

canadian liberals, in general, have a reputation for telling you what you want to hear, campaigning on the left and governing on the right or, as trump would put it, being two-faced.

clinton called it having a public opinion and a private opinion.

it's a fundamental component of the political ideology.

canadians don't want to send their taxes to raytheon and lockheed martin, and the government is well aware of the unpopularity of funding the american military-industrial complex. but, we also want to keep norad. 

this is one of the hard parts about being prime minister, it's a perpetual balancing act, and it does require putting on different faces for different audiences.

so, i got some rest. worst things could happen.

the machine is still up, and i'm doing things like running chkdsks and setting group policy and fixing security descriptors. i want to be sure that it's as good as i can get it before i expose myself to the police harassment again.

i can't imagine it taking all night.

but, that's what i'm doing. still.

as i've now wasted four more days on this, i have little choice but to get out to print and stuff tomorrow.

the machine is up, but i'm deeply hesitant about joining the network.

it's slower and buggier than usual, as well.

i think i'm going to lose the day. that's ok.

to be clear: there was an attempt the last time i did this to try and get the machine to "work normally".

we're back to making sure the machine is broken, now, so that the windows scripts (amongst other things) cannot run....

as far as i can tell, i seem to be back up and everything seems to be back to normal. but i have a lot of stuff to do before i consider reconnecting that machine to the internet.

i've got a fresh pot of coffee.

and, i want to be back up by noon at the latest, so i don't lose the day.

the install is done. now, to copy the install from last month over...

so, i'm starting the reinstall.

i'd like to be back up by the morning, so i can get on with things.

i've otherwise spent the evening catching up on the vlogs.

i don't know why the updates turned on all of a sudden, but i'm suspecting it had to do with turning the task scheduler back on, which i turned on to get the event log working again. i didn't learn anything useful from the event log, really. so, i'm leaning towards just turning that back off.

but, what i'm going to do, after i copy the install from early november back, is just inspect the install directory. are there glaring differences? recent changes? what the fuck?

i'm wondering.

is there some misunderstanding that i'm going to change my gateway? well, you're not providing very strong incentives for me to do so....

i've been as clear as i can be that i will not be putting any computer that is of any value on the internet ever again, because it's not a safe place to put nice things. my recording pc will never be online ever again. 

so, it is true that i have a new machine that i haven't had time to set up yet. but, that machine will never connect to the internet. ever. 

the machines that will have network access will exclusively be older and less expensive ones, like this chromebook, or the 90s laptop, or the laptops with broken lamps.

so, yes, i want to shift gears. but, i will not be updating my gateway, as i do so, and if you're upset about that, you should blame yourself - look at what you're doing.

based on her policies, warren is in fact in the same lane as buttigieg and biden. she's only mildly to their left.

sanders is in his own lane, and second choices are largely irrelevant. so, you would expect biden would come out second, as a balance of probability, due to name recognition.

stated differently: if sanders supporters truly have no second choice, you would expect the surveys to list biden second most often, based on the fact that he's winning. 

so, the data is not confusing, you just need to undo the propaganda to understand it.

it's classic mainstream media, though, isn't?

they set up ridiculous strawmen, and then when the evidence demonstrates how absurd they're really being, they use that evidence to argue against the strawmen, rather than to debunk their absurdity.

so, when it turns out that warren supporters are moderates (as should have been obvious, based on the content of her policies.) rather than socialists (which nobody would have thought if they were being evidence-based to start with), it follows that voters don't care about ideology, and not that warren's supporters actually align with her policies, in the spectrum.

and, i'l tell you why. it's not a horrible conspiracy, or at least not how you think. it's just that they want the ratings. they want to be able to paint the democratic candidate as a socialist, but they don't want the candidate to actually be a socialist. 

so, they can't print that warren is a moderate conservative, even though everybody knows that she is, just like everybody knew that obama was. they have to keep printing that she's a psychotic socialist, because she has that D. evidence means nothing, to these people, except in terms of how to get around it.

no. it has to be that voters don't care about policy...

but, we do care about policy.

and, we know where warren sits in the spectrum.

and, we're adjusting ourselves accordingly.

well, i've spent a lot of time analyzing this in this space, and i've argued pretty forcefully that warren is on the right of the spectrum.

so, when i consistently refuse to rank her near the top, it's always with the argument - she's a conservative. if i identify as way to the left of sanders then, looking at the candidates, warren is not an obvious second choice for me at all, because it's not obvious that she's on that side of the spectrum.

but, that's not the media narrative, which isn't particularly attached to reality.

i'm sure that if you were to look at this more rigorously, you'd realize that people's choices are consistent with their own perceptions. what's been clear from the start, though, is that voters seem to be unwilling nowadays to allow the corporate media to determine their perceptions for them - that just because the media is insistent that warren is on the left doesn't mean that people are going to actually interpret her that way.

and, that's a good thing, after 2008, when the media sold us some magic beans.

i'm not happy about bernie's recent swing to the right on social issues, and his misreading of the electorate around it, and am retreating to the greens as a result of it. but, he's still far and away the most appealing candidate. and, if i were to list a second choice, it wouldn't be warren - because she's the most pro-market and most pro-capitalist of the bunch. it might even be biden if i have to site down and carefully work it through, but it's not an endorsement so much as it's a denunciation of the field.

my ranked ballot choices are really this:

1. greens

2. sanders

3. the rest of them are all the same. biden? whatever. sure.

but, what i'm doing here is rejecting the idea that elizabeth warren is left-wing, which is something i've been doing for years, and not embracing biden on some level of identity, that i don't even have.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/12/02/surprising-second-choices-democratic-primary-voters-upend-political-cliches/

and, to be clear - kamala harris has been out of contention for a long time, to the point that she doesn't even have enough supporters to wonder where they're going to go.

we're copying to the temp drive. 

i have a lot of space there, and am not worried about it. it's going to take most of the night, though. and, i don't really have a good idea as to what to do while i'm waiting, except maybe to try to plan out what happens when the machine comes back up. i could maybe get to the dmv in the morning, but this is more important in terms of focus. i should probably get to printing tomorrow or the next day, but i need to get back into my email, first.

how about this for weird - i opened the chromebook back up and the battery came back up to 91%. i dunno. so, if i'm testing to see what it is that drained the battery, the answer is that it didn't?

i guess that's something i can spend some time with tonight, too.

but, what i'm going to do is

1) get some fruit

2) sit down and sort through my blog and try to get a narrative of the last few weeks, for a vlog update.

3) work out what happens next, and make sure i'm not missing anything. like, i know i wanted to shift focus after i updated my liner notes for the november releases, and got journals up for december and january. and, i've just had computer problems for weeks. is that what's next? am i skipping anything?

i want to get back to the alter-reality for christmas. if i can get the machine up by the morning, maybe i can work out a plan for the next few weeks.

otherwise, this is life in late capitalism, and what i have to do survive in it, and if it's slowing me down, it sucks, but at least it's better than wage slavery.

if i don't have to appeal the divisional court ruling - and the oiprd doesn't - then i should be able to get that constitutional challenge in by mid-2020, along with my millions of dollars in requested compensation for the illegal arrest, search and detainment.

so, it slowly fell from 99% to 91% over weeks of use, and then crashed to 26% in 45 minutes when i put it to sleep, and is now at 26% solid, with no drain.

at least something was able to drain it!

but, i can find no evidence that it connected anywhere when it was down.

let me test this - what happens if i disable wireless (as i have, now) and then put it to sleep. does the battery drain?

my deduction that it was using power for wireless came from the wireless lights being on when it was asleep. but, what if it just suspended itself, and the power loss in the battery was from the suspend state? 

i'm going to get to the reinstall on the other machine now, and we'll leave this in sleep mode while i do it.

so, i just closed the lid on this laptop for about an hour, and the battery went from 91% to 26%, indicating that something - apparently the wireless - was using it.

now that i've opened it back up again, it's stopped draining,

this was kind of my suspicion from the start - that i essentially don't have access to the battery, somehow.

i'm logged into this machine from a guest account, and posting from a fake account, so i again don't know what the point is. but, if somebody is trying to hack this machine over wireless, it would indicate that they're not very far from here.

everything consistently leads back to the idea that the guy upstairs is a cop.

and, it's clear enough that i'm going to have to find a way to completely reprogram this thing.

twenty minutes before show time....

i'm going to be 39 next month, and a lot of people want to call me a millennial (i'd self-identify as gen x).

he will need to at least try to win votes around the mason-dixon line.

but, he should focus his resources in the midwest, not the deep south.

listen, i'm not going to shed a tear if buttigieg makes the same mistakes that sanders did, although i suspect that he won't.

they want to make it about age, and there's probably something to it, but i think the dominant factor is geography, rather than age. he can win votes in chicago and detroit and milwaukee and philadelphia - black voters in these cities are not going to care much, even if they are a little older. to use a canadian cliche, it's 2019. you'd have to be really old to live in chicago at this point and still be dragging around attitudes from before the sexual revolution, so old that you'd be getting into a statistical tail end. in major american cities, the cut-off age for modern views on homosexuality isn't 50 at this point - that's gen x - it's 75 or 80. it's only the very oldest black voters that are going to get pissy about this...

but, the south is different all around.

and, pete is wasting his time and his resources campaigning in atlanta or nashville.

he wrote a paper on sanders when he was a kid. he can ask him. bernie just spent years trying to break through to them, and they just see him as a jew from new york.

to southern conservative voters, both black and white, pete's never going to be anything more than the gay kid from canada.

(with a healthcare plan that's to the right of the conservative party)

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/whats-really-behind-pete-buttigiegs-lack-of-support-among-black-voters/

so, what am i doing tonight?

i'm going to copy everything off of the install partition, format the drive, reinstall clean, delete the clean partition and then copy an older version of the install partition from last month that i still have backed up. 

then, i'll need to copy a few things from the newer partition, like the firefox user directory and the virtual machines.

but, i want the actual structure of the install from last month to get restored.

there are things i've done since then that i'll want to redo, after that.

and, then can i finally get back to working on my art, again?

why do this? because i'm convinced that the thing that happened last night was the update, and i'm not confident i can undo it.

it seems like i'd need to have a newer bios to do what i want on this machine.

and, note that i can't see the bios at all due to the burnt out backlight.

what i've seen of windows post-7 is a non-starter, so it's a matter of time, but not yet. 

i got a little sleep, and i've been thinking in bed since i woke up.

am i fed up with windows?

well, it's not like i really have a choice - i need windows for my internet gateway and typing machine. but, i can't have it updating when i've told it not to. i turned all of that stuff off because i don't want it.

the other option is that i could load a barebones linux install - something like puppy linux - as a bootstrap, and launch windows in a virtual machine from there. that will essentially give me the option to reset the machine if it gets compromised.

the cops are not going to go away. this is what happens when you become an activist, kids - the cops will harass you for the rest of your life. and, this has been happening for a long time. so, i need to find a way to adjust.

i will need to have to be able to clone the archived 64-bit windows 7 machine (as it exists on my desktop's hard drive) into a vm i can boot from inside a barebones linux.

and, i'll need to put time aside for it that i don't have.

i'm going to spend a few hours doing basic research on this and see if it's plausible or not.

i'm just very upset about these windows updates coming down. i don't want that. at all. ever.

i don't want a clean install, like i don't want a clean install, i want the machine to be a little bit broken, but what happened on sunday night was too much and is going to require me to wipe it and rebuild it.

ok.

so, as i sort through more and more of this, i'm coming to the conclusion that, for whatever reason, a windows update was pushed down on the night of the second, and it's had some pretty disastrous consequences that are continuing to unfold and are requiring i do things like run hotfixes, which i don't want to do.

i don't want to run updates.

i don't want to run hotfixes.

and, i don't want to want run "fix it tools", either.

what i want to do is roll back this update. of course, i don't have system restore on, either.

i'm just not going to feel comfortable with this system the way it is. there's something not right, here.

so, i'm going to format the drive again, rebuild the files and copy a registry from last month over. i won't be able to start that until after 19:00.

for now, i'm going to take a short nap.

there is no recent update in the install list.

the general feeling is that i've been placed on some kind of domain, and the machine has been slaved to some kind of network. i'm also getting a proxy autoconfig on the ipconfig.

so, i guess somebody would have pushed down an update in order to try to install something, and it seems like it errored out.

like, fuck off. i run a half broken machine on purpose, precisely so you can't do this. and, yes, we'll both be frustrated into perpetuity - or you can find somebody else to bother.

i'm not going to turn windows update on.

i'm not going to run a system file checker.

and, i'm not going to buy a fucking mac, either.

i'm going to keep nursing this half broken, fifteen year old laptop until it's unusable, and when it finally is i'll buy another one in the pawn shop.

you're answering your own question - this is exactly why.

but, how do i get the thing off the domain that i didn't sign up for in the first place?

i tried to lock the machine down in gpedit and i did it a little too well. so, i'm going to have to undo it. that's ok.

but, i've found a cbs log from last night that appears to have gotten me to the cause of the problem - an update. from windows.

but, i disable updates for exactly this reason; i haven't updated this machine since 2014, and am not sure if windows 7 can even receive updates anymore.

but, this is the entry that appears to be the root cause: "there has been a change in the health of windows update". this was accompanied by a lot of creepy messages about IIS servers, but that could just be how microsoft does it..

the problem is that i've explicitly told it not to do that.

and, it hasn't tried to do it since 2014. why now? if i can figure that out, i'm sure i'll be able to figure out why the machine rebooted, as well as why the firewall broke.

so, i'm starting to get a better understanding of what happened, although it's not helping me understand what happened.

i have fixed the issue with the firewall, which was an access issue in the registry related to something called internet connection sharing, which i deleted myself quite some time ago. sort of. there may be some compound issues, here.

yes, i deleted it. i didn't want it. but, it was fine.

more confusing, if i go through the event viewer, i can see that this error goes back to more or less the start of the logs, which is nov 15th - after i realized they'd been shut down and turned them back on. it seems to happen fairly regularly, on restart.

however, i know that the firewall was actually loading because:

(1) i'm sure i would have noticed it. i check running services quite frequently. i was turning the spooler off and on all week.

(2) i *did* notice it *was* on as recently as saturday night, because i turned it off to reset the connection. 

(3) there are events as recently as the 28th that indicate that the settings for the firewall have been updated, and i remember doing it. i had to load the service to change the settings.

(4) i've actually been in and out of the virtual machine a couple of times this month, including around 6:00 am sunday morning, and i'm sure that the firewall worked because the computer browser seems to rely on it. that's what tipped me off this afternoon - the browser wouldn't load, so i went to check the services and "shit".

to be clear: i transferred some files on sunday morning. so, the firewall was working sunday morning.

then, i put the machine to sleep, slept for a few hours in the morning, finished what i was doing and stopped to eat.

then it rebooted when i was eating, and went into a loop overnight, to come back up with the busted firewall.

so, it *seems* like somebody targeted the machine yesterday afternoon when i was eating. what did they do?

well, it's ambiguous. but, i'm leaning towards the answer being deeper than i'd like.

i deleted the ics weeks ago and the firewall worked just fine. for it to come up now and tell me "you need ics to connect to the firewall" is exceedingly shady, imo. 

what i did should be benign, but it should also be unnecessary. i should not have to give the firewall service access to ics in the registry, even if it's empty, and even if it's banned. so, before i connect to the internet on this machine again, i'm going to need to be certain that i didn't just open up a back door for the cops to spy on me with.

i could check the logs, right? they're off by default. they're on, now.

i'm going to stop to eat and get back to it after. and, this time, we're going into hibernation.

so, i understand that it's telling me it can't find the files to the remote access software on startup.

but, i can't find the place in the startup sequence where it goes looking for the files.

it just comes up as an error in the task scheduler. hrmmmn.

i'm going to put that aside and go on to the firewall stuff.

"task scheduler service failed to launch tasks triggered by computer startup"

ok.

but, what are the tasks being triggered?

again - going through, i'm noticing a large number of remote connection references. but, now, what i think they're telling me is that they can't find their payloads.

i think what it's saying is "we tried to run the remote connection software, but we couldn't find the executable".

it's also telling me it's trying to run tasks, but can't find them.

so, it's easy enough to understand why somebody tried to disable the firewall.

but, i can't find the information i'm really looking for - even if i'm now convinced that the officer that's trying to hack into the machine is reading this site.

error #2 would have to do with the cryptographic system.

we're just going to let windows rebuild that.

this is the first error to fix.

i don't think that has anything to do with anything, but ok.

https://www.techyv.com/questions/session-ready-boot-stopped-due-to-the-following-error-0x0000188/

at least i have an event viewer, this time.

what i should do is go through and figure out each error one by one, and see if they can help me understand anything about whatever's responsible for this.

aaaaaaaaaactually, it would seem as though the situation is quite a bit worse than i thought. i'm on the chromebook.

it's still useless. it will always be useless. it's intended solely for emergencies.

but, i went to install dropbox in a virtual machine (i don't want that software on my laptop.) and realized i can't turn the firewall on. after taking a look around, it seems like the thing has been completely pulled out of the registry altogether.

there was a restart last night around 17:30, which was a few minutes after i got up to eat, indicating somebody is casing me. was the firewall running last night when i got back on?

i'm disabled. i get $1200/month to live on. i have no further income. i'm $100,000 in debt. i'm not of any use to any thieves - i don't have any money. i mean, if somebody is trying to steal my money, they're the dumbest thief of all time - they're casing a person on welfare.

rather, the only potential suspect is that i'm under cyberattack by the police, who are trying to stop me from suing them for illegally arresting me.

get your head around that.

obviously, that machine can't go on the internet until i'm able to get the firewall back up. but, how bad is it? what is the extent of what happened last night?

the legal stuff is done. and, i didn't really want to go anywhere today anyways.

but, it's going to be a long night.

and, so long as this continues, i'm going to have to continue wasting a lot of time trying to understand it.

as of right now, i have very little understanding of what happened.

how do i keep them off this thing, though?

i noticed last night that the machine rebooted when i was eating. this is consistent with bad ram, but it brings up the question.

i need to be extra careful about not leaving the machine online and unattended.

how many times has my computer shut off right after i've sent something to the cops?

i was just about to get started on the next thing, and the machine went into a reboot loop. what do you do?

reboot loops are nasty things, but there's four reasons this happens:

1) your bios is fucked.
2) the circuitry in your board is fucked
3) it's overheating, turning off, overheating - that would be the least bad option
4) bad ram

i mentioned i was kind of sleepy, anyways. so, i let it cycle for a while, turned everything off and went to bed early.

when i woke up, it stopped cycling, but i was back to the pause screen i cannot see, which i must again suggest is profound in weird ways. so, i took everything back out again, and unplugged the bios.

this time, i was able to isolate the issue to a questionable stick of ram. luckily, i had a replacement stick. and, i'm back up.

i've been dealing with random restarts for quite a while now, so a bad stick of ram is not that out to lunch. i can believe that.

but, why does this always happen when it does?

it seemed for a while like they (read: the cops) were to trying to take me out by breaking my boot sector, but when they realized i can fix that, they seemed to target the bios. i've got a fresh stick of ram in there, and let's hope it's stable for a while. but, i'm still more than a little uneasy.

the oiprd wants me to use dropbox instead of google drive. that's fine. and, i'll need to call the dmv before they close.

i didn't want to go anywhere today anyways. so, i got some sleep, and maybe lost a few hours, at most.

i have in fact mailed the stuff to both the cops and the oiprd.

the attorney general is an annoyance in every way. if they don't respond, i'll just fax it near the end of the week. they should really have a submissions email line open...

as it is, i've also got my iso file done up and certificate ready to go.

what i will need to bring to toronto is:

1) three paper copies
2) three cd-rs

they should stamp some things relatively quickly and that'll be that, really.

what i need to do here over the next few days, then, is:

(1) print
(2) get to the dmv & write the test
(3) get to detroit and open an account
(4) actually get back to work?

i'm going to stop and do an overdue vlog, take a shower and potentially sleep for much of the day. i'll need to make some calls tomorrow...

the site still works.

so, i've got the factum and book of authorities up here, now.

it's done. i think.

i'm going to get something to eat, then take a final look over it. i'll need to mail it in the morning...

then, what?

well, i'll need to file it in toronto with the certificate on the 10th.

but, i can put it aside for a bit. i hope.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GWzQ7vN2GNpUOoV2SOpltb2QgWdyDcyT

this wouldn't convert this morning, and i had to nap before i got it.

the answer was to split it in half, convert each half separately and then paste them back together. pdfs are weird things.

i'll have to double check that i'm meeting all of the statutory requirements, but i think this document is done. so, i am posting it here, as per the public interest, as previously promised.

there are three versions. they're all the same, although they self-reference themselves differently. the first is the full document, which is nearly 140 pages. the minimal version is roughly half that length, but i probably won't print it. i'll probably print the middle version. we'll see what happens.

my website still works.

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1fNToDeWcTspzp_DDZl8K0klmFjo-0WyX

you know, i've actually never really listened to a lot of schubert. it's in this huge pile of stuff that i've just written off as "beethoven lite", which isn't to say that i wouldn't vote for infinite beethoven, so much as it is to point out that i'd rather listen to the real thing.

i'm going to give schubert's ninth a chance tonight, though. can he prove to me that he's adding something worthwhile to beethoven's stylistic revolution? or will he just further perpetuate my low expectations?

so, i've got all of the emails in the document, now.

it's pushing 140 pages.

i'm just going to double check it, and see if i can can find some ways to pare it down, make sure the numbers are all right, all that kind of stuff.

when it's done done done, i'll put it up on google drive for the public interest.

my web site still works...

so, what's going on?

i was up around 13:00, got something to eat, did some cleaning and put together some loose ends regarding some planning.

i got an email from a lawyer that will be representing the city of windsor regarding the judicial review, meaning i won't need to snail mail it, and that should save me a few bucks. great.

the cheapest way for me to print is probably going to be at the university of windsor library, which i haven't been to, yet. $0.08/pg. it's $0.25/pg at the public library. the application is going to be about 130 pages, so cutting printing costs by two thirds sounds like a good idea to me. 130*3 = 390. the factum has to be short, by law, but if i end up printing around 450 pages at $0.25/page, that's going to cost me over $100. at $0.08/page, i can hopefully keep it to around $30.

the appspot site is still up, for now. i'll have to get my g1 next week, once i get the printing dealt with.

i'm supposed to be getting back to the recording tomorrow. *shrug*. the sooner i get this dealt with, the sooner i can get back to work. but, i'm going to be off by a few days now, regardless.

so, i'm back to working on this for the night, and i hope it's not too much longer before i can put this aside for a bit.

where'd i go?

i made some eggs this morning and took what i wanted to be a nap around 6:00, but i wasn't up again until after noon. so, i checked my account, to make sure i didn't get paid, before getting back...

nope. got paid.

it's true that i had to get some food, but what i really had to get was a prepaid mastercard, before i missed my chance on cheap tickets to toronto. they don't take paypal. and, my debit doesn't have a credit card. sound familiar? but, unlike google, they'll take the gift cards.

i really wasn't supposed to get paid until tomorrow, but, as mentioned, those holidays in the states can make the banks act funny, sometimes. that would suggest that the canadian bankers in charge of my account took american thanksgiving off, or that odsp is otherwise routing through yankee financial channels. this is all being secretly run by charles koch....

so, i wasn't planning on leaving the house today.

but, on the news of early payment, i rushed out of the house in a dirty mess (well. i bought plaid tickets, first.) and down to the closest store where...they wouldn't scan it. they had them, in the store. i brought one to the cash, even. no scan. it was a clerical error, on their behalf.

what next? well, i got some fruit (kiwis & blueberries were on sale) and some peppers and some pens and went home. it's, like, 14:30. i can try the far store, i'm thinking.

so, i got some salami at the wholesale shop down the street, finished my extra large timmy's, bummed a few more smokes and made it to the far store, where i got some cherry ice cream, some creamy ceasar salad dressing, four cartons of vanilla soy, five "forever raspberry" air fresheners (i guess the raspberry fields were gone) and one $100 prepaid mastercard.

i wasn't home until nearly 17:00, which meant it was too late to get to the library to print, but i did indeed get a greyhound ticket to go back to toronto to drop off the application record & factum, which is something that i didn't know enough to do when i was there. hey, i'm figuring this out, still. i'll add the costs to the application record.

i wasn't done with my black friday shopping, though. the fresh mart closest to me doesn't stock the cherry ice cream i like, and the far store only had one (i needed at least two.), and i couldn't find any strawberries anywhere, so i decided to take a walk to the previous "store#2", which is now the really far store. i'll still go to store #1 when i'm downtown, but i'm very rarely at the ol' store #2 nowadays. but, a girl needs her cherry ice cream, so what can i say? task accomplished, even if i still had no strawberries.

and, i had to go back to the closest food basics to get the strawberries in the end. they were mildly overpriced, but they look ok. if it works out, it's fine.

i took a last run out to get some vodka, which i likely won't open until plaid and will likely last me the rest of the winter. i picked up a sub, as well. i took the sub home and i ate it. it was good.

i spent the night doing things like cleaning fruit.

a shower also happened...

....and, there's my day,  and the reason i didn't spend it ranting here about nothing.

this inevitably happens around this time of the month, and i have to spend the day doing it. i've ruled out dancing tonight. it's the rain. so, let's get some sleep and get this finished in the morning...

i'm up to the review on the emails, which is most of it, but if i don't stop to eat, i'm going to run out of time.

i was considering maybe going dancing tomorrow night, but the rain looks pretty hefty, so it seems like i'm in until monday, anyways.

but i'm well past due on this.

food, first.

so, i'm back up in my primary typing environment, and where were we?

i did not get paid last night, so i didn't blow the opportunity to get tickets and stuff. and, i am trying to save on the electrical...

i just lost 24 hours, though. what happened?

well, i stopped around 17:00 to take a nap due to a migraine. it was getting to the point that i couldn't see; i didn't have the choice, i had to stop. this is rare, but it's become a known issue for me since moving to windsor (and i'm sure it's the pollution). this was after having really been up all night the day before, so, whatever the primary cause was, i'm sure the lack of sleep wasn't helping.

i got up a little after 19:00 and the power in half the building was out, but i was able to connect to the internet by plugging the power bar for the modem & router into the stove (despite the stove not working). i also plugged the fridge into the stove. it's the end of the month, but the eggs and bread and cheese and salami i've got left in there seem to be ok.

i tried to focus, but the headache was too much, and i took a shower instead. then, i spent some time thinking about the electrical.

this was good until about 23:30, when the power went out entirely, taking everything - including the fridge - with it. so, i napped until it came back on around 1:00.

i noticed that the battery wasn't charging. so, i took it out and rebooted and the thing wouldn't get a video out through the port. i did some testing with the pc, and concluded the drive was fine. did the surge fry the battery? i spent the next several hours fighting with this.

what fixed it?

i don't know, but i think it was power related.

by close to 7:00, which was bed time, i'd decided that i was probably dealing with some combo ram/power issue. i had managed to get the thing to boot, but it was by mashing buttons on an imaginary pause screen that i didn't understand - and could never experience, because the backlight is burnt out. so, it was kind of like operating on faith, and i don't like doing that.

before i went to sleep, i took everything out of the back panel of the machine - hard drive, battery, ram, cmos, wireless - and just let it sit until i woke up. i think it was about 15:00 when i got up, indicating i slept well, but there wasn't a reprogrammed clock in the apartment to check the time for until i could get the machine back up. well, i could have launched the chromebook. i didn't.

but, i started slowly putting the machine back together and a problem didn't present itself - it just worked.

if all of the hardware is actually fine, could i have fucked something up in the registry? if i did, i didn't actually undo it.

i think the thing just got zapped and needed some time to balance out into equilibrium - to lose it's charge, to drain it's capacitors, to become one with the environment around it. electricity is inherently holistic, actually. and, large amounts of physics and chemistry are intrinsically about trying to find that balance....

this is what i thought the problem with the chromebook was, and what i did to try to fix it, but it didn't work - if there was some excess charge in the electrical components then that charge needed to be pushed out or otherwise just dissipate before the components would work properly again. and, while i wish there was a better answer, there doesn't appear to be one.

the battery is back to charging again, too.

so, what am i doing now? well, as before, i have to clean up last night's mess. then, i need to finish the last part of the application, which is piecing together emails between myself and the various police organizations. that's what i was doing last night before i stopped...

i haven't updated the vlog in a while either, and that's what the next part is for:

- slept all night wednesday
- was up early thursday morning. smoked. got info on po box from money mart. went home. ate. vegged. smoked a second time. slept very quickly.
- was up (very) early friday morning. smoked the last of it. came home. slept all day.
- tried to wake myself up with large amounts of fruit on saturday, but still slept.
- finished the form 10 on sunday. got some more fruit.
- had trouble getting started on monday, but got my head around the process, and did the concert look ahead over the evening.
- i got started more seriously on tuesday.
- i got mostly done on wednesday.
- and, now i've slept all day thursday - but am confident i'll be done in the morning.

yeah. that seemed to get stuck on the login page, actually, and if there's a power problem, it's on the whole side of the device.....

i'm going to swap a few power settings, change the time, etc.

wait.

i seemed to need to unplug the video and plug it back in. is that it? let's try another reboot...

but, i mean...

i don't want to use my brain at work at all. if i have to go to work, i just want to go in and do something stupid and go home and read and think by myself.

i'd rather be a dishwasher than a lawyer or a computer scientist or a mathematician.

it's not booting. ugh. i'm going to see if i can figure out how to change the cmos in a laptop, because i've never done that before.

broadly speaking, i have very little interest in computer science as a topic.

i did it because i was a kid, and when you're a kid, you do what you're told.

but, my disinterest is why i avoided it for ten years, and dropped out a half credit before finishing it, in the end.

my degree is in mathematics, not computer science.

i would be miserable working in the field - that's why i switched into law, because i knew i'd be happier in that field.

well....

i don't completely understand how i got the thing to boot, but i did.

albeit dated to jan 1, 2001.

i suspect i reset something, but i don't know where or how. i've been kind of smashing buttons, looking at lights, until it worked.

i disconnected the wireless and took out some of the ram, but i don't think that's it.

i may need to swap the bios chip. or, it may be that virus, again.

but, i've pretty much concluded that i don't have time to concern myself with this for right now.

and, i went to try and reboot and it didn't work again, indicating that whatever the magic keys were were important...

what if that machine is down for a while? i have no intention of moving to the chromebook - i just don't want to, i want to use windows as the gateway. and, the pcs are not allowed on the internet, because it's not safe. clearly.

so, i dunno.

i don't have the cash to buy a new windows laptop, right now. 

i wanted to replace the board in the newer laptop and use it for editing. i don't know if i can even get it to work.

and, i've mused about it, but i'm not going to pretend i can get the 90s laptop to work for this task.

i may have to use the windows machines at the library, i guess. 

i just have no interest in doing this in anything but word.

but, i mean...

word 2003 is probably the best word processor of all time, too.

being rich doesn't mean you're smart. and, my experience is usually kind of the opposite.

so, macs are for rich people, but they're also kind of for dumb people, too.

the blunt reality is that macs are for rich people.

i'm poor. i use word.

i can convert it to pdf in a printer, but i don't have the software to create pdf files natively, except through using crappy software in the cloud.

i don't know what i did this time, but i think it's stuck on a screen.

the power went out completely around 11:30 and came back a bit before 1:00. i noticed that the battery wasn't charging, so i thought maybe something got stuck and i could drain the capacitor....

the machine rebooted a few times just fine, but wouldn't come back after a few tries.

the drive is fine - i can load it in the pc. but, the laptop just won't boot. like, at all. and i don't actually really know where to begin, because i can't get a screen on the device. i have to wait for windows to load to get the video drivers out through the projector out, and i'm not getting that far.

i tried a boot log, and it's not loading, indicating it's not getting there. but, it isn't beeping. it's not shutting down. i don't get it.

it kind of seems like a bios, but i'd need a bios emulator to try to do it blind.

so, i don't know. is it possible that the boot database is fine for the pc but corrupted for the laptop? if so, i don't have time to work that out.

like i say: i don't actually know what happened, but i'm a little worried that the power outage may have fried the board. i just don't understand why it's not beeping, if that's the case.

so, i'm going to run a startup repair and otherwise see if i can get some kind of way to get the bios to read the projector out so i can see what it's actually doing.

with the american holiday this week (it's not a holiday in canada.), it's not clear when i'll get paid, but i'm going to need to get this stuff mailed or faxed by monday at the latest. i wanted this done by (last) monday. i'm not spending days and days fucking around. the chromebook is useless for this; i bought it for blogging. i'll have to install word 2003 on the 90s laptop, if it comes down to it...