Not one damn thing of interest here, move along please...

 

Well so much for my daily forage into the world of blogging, writing witty, pithy and insightful comments for the masses to consider, giggle at and then discard like a virtual newspaper containing fat free virtual fish'n'chips. Which of course would be the only type of fish'n'chips as wrapping up fish'n'chips in a real newspaper was outlawed some decades ago. Even though the rational for banning the practice changed before the law really took hold. Anyway, most people that read a blog have absolutely no understanding of what any of that is about. That's why I call what I write, wittering. I witter. Not even that well, not county class for instance, I know some county class witterers and they really do witter!

Once upon a time I was going to write a book. How did that work out for you, I hear you ask. Not well! I did, many years ago now, in fact, if I am forced to think about it, at least a decade ago now, write some short stories. I mean these were short (is ten thousand words short?) and they are all lost in the mists of electronic ephemeral time, or some such nonsense. In  other words, I don't know where they might be now. I don't think they are retained on any of my backups because I chose not to and the websites they existed upon possibly don't exist or if they do they have been subsumed by some such behemoth of an organisation that eats smaller sites like a whale eats plankton! Not all whales you understand, only the plankton eating varieties like the blue whale...possibly that's the only whale that does! Hmm interesting!

Anyway, they were written and they are gone. Probably for the best are the collection of circa twelve erotica novelletes that I wrote. The less said about them the better. They were well received in certain dark corners of the web and I even had a self appointed content/copywriter! And not just some crazy that claimed to be a copywriter but a genuine real employed copywriter who asked only that she got to see the material first before anything was published! Kind of the basics of the job I had always assumed and so she was 'hired' free of charge to do the proofing! Not that it lasted long, I mean I was already half way through when she approached me and then there were only maybe five or six left in the pipeline! Anyway, that was long long ago in a town far far away! Probably one of those midlife things.

They do say that a sports car is a midlife crisis kind of thing. Which is odd because I think I kind of mix and matched throughout life. All my early cars were fast sports type cars for their day and had the dents and insurance claims to prove it! By the time I reached midlife I think I had pretty boring cars, apart from one. And now, well, I am well passed midlife, crisis or not, and I have the fastest car I have ever had. But being fast nowadays is a futile exercise given the ever increasing digital surveilling that happens on the modern road system. However, apart from being blisteringly fast, it is also the most comfortable car I think I have ever owned, although the Recaro seats I had in an RS Mexico were very comfortable and also a guy at an MoT station queried whether they were actually aircraft seats which would have been illegal although a common practice amongst those practicing car mods in the early days before the laws were changed to stop non standard changes. Ah, the good old days, how crazy they were. Anyway, it is both fast and comfortable and a ridiculous amount to insure and tax every year!

I'm sure I had a point before I started typing. Maybe it was just that I needed to write something. I don't know why. I just felt the urge. I have an urge to write some poetry. But I mainly hide my poetry because I do it for me, mainly, sometimes for someone else, but mainly for me. And then I find that others like to offer critique and comment, which is nice, but I don't need it, so there is a website, that I own, and it's super super secret and that's where I put my poetry! One day, that too will disappear, and that will be the right thing for it!

Anyway, I mentioned somewhere at sometime about the new surveillance culture that we have all sleep walked into, well, most of you, I on the other hand have had my own involvement in it so... anyway, even I forget just how pervasive it is nowadays. For instance, I just switched on Google enhanced spell check. It warns you that everything you write will be sent to Google to be checked by a program/algorithm to provide the enhanced service. 

That's all fine, but it really is pointless. You see, first, I am writing this in Blogger and that resides on Google servers anyway, plus I am writing in a Chrome browser and everything I write is being sent to several places through some naughty background processes that Google sometimes deny, sometimes explain, sometimes just ignore etc. And it doesn't stop there, my location is being tracked so Google knows where I am when I write this as Maps is tracking me, it knows the other things I am doing, it knows that I am expecting some parcels today because the info is in Gmail.

 Not to mention when I last looked on my router I have a frightening number of connected devices and each one of them is pretty consistently sending data to servers somewhere and an awful lot of that data is going to multiple servers. Think about Facebook, if you write a comment is Facebook where does it go, just FB, nah. Before we even get to the whole data extraction and selling that FB does, if you wrote the comment on an android device or in Chrome then I assure you Google also knows what you wrote. And if you think Amazon are any better, you would be wrong, they're just keeping a lower profile in the AWS background. And if you forgot about MS, don't, they also have monitoring tools and code and most of the time we agree to them seeing everything we do on their o/s by clicking a box that says we accept the t&cs of service provision. 

Sometimes, for the lawyers sake, they even make us scroll through several thousand lines of legalese to click a button and/or tick a box to confirm we read the above and wish to continue. Which we did not but do wish... and hence, here we are trapped inside a glass microscope plate, being observed. Personally I don't care too much, I am past many of the needs of caring, but if I were twenty again, then I'd be asking more questions, being more concerned because everything you do will be stored, forever and will be packaged and resold like a shabby suit on a collateralised debt obligation. 

And don't count on the law to keep you safe. My favourite threesome declared decades ago that law and governments were obstacles to get around and that getting around them was a simple process. They were right, they have been proved right time and again. Only now, they are so 'behind the scenes' powerful that if they don't get their way, they potentially have the power to simply change the elected powers to something that better suits them. Most people think this is just crazy talk. Again, I do not care lol. But if you care, you should at least take more time to familiarise yourself with the organisations that are more familiar with you than you are! 

On the plus side, Google employees just announced the formation of a new internal union! You have to love that. The biggest surveillance organisation in the world bar none, has a union inside! You think Schmidt and the other two stooges did not know it was being proposed, who was leading it, what it is planning to do next week. Of course they did. They permitted it to happen, it provides good optics for us outside. Do I think that the three stooges will permit an internal union get in the way of its plans, nah! It will manage and corral the union and keep it under control, and if it finds it cannot do that, it will off shore their jobs! To a country were the population do more as they are told. I might be wrong, but we'll see.

Ah, I feel satiated now! Until the next time!