BZ’s Berserk Bobcat Saloon, “The Aftermath,” Thursday, May 4th, 2017

My thanks to the SHR Media Network for allowing me to broadcast in their studio and over their air twice weekly, Tuesdays and Thursdays, as well as appear on the Sack Heads Radio Show™ each Wednesday evening.

This was BZ’s first night running the new SHR laptop, bristling as it does with a full 16 gigs of buttery RAM goodness and a nice sound card. Not particularly adept at technology (but better than Sack Heads Clint), BZ found himself challenged this night.

Tonight in the Saloon we discussed:

  • BZ has to deal with a new laptop, Windows 10, and trying to make Skype work;
  • BZ admits to being your basic Mark I, Model I Techno Luddite;
  • The studio is, oh joy, hot as hell once again;
  • Happy Stories: CCW holder in Texas kills man who murdered a bar employee;
  • Let’s larf our arses off at Leftists: revisiting liberal tears shed on November 9th;
  • President Trump signs religious liberty EO on the National Day of Prayer;
  • House passes AHCA by a squeaker; the good and bad of it all; 20 Republicans vote against it as did every Demorat;
  • Freedom Caucus member Tom Garrett voted for the ACHA; why would he?
  • Will the GOP ACHA screw over employer healthcare accounts?
  • Mike Pasqua and I talk comic books; who is better? DC or Marvel? Marvel, of course;
  • James Comey: “Lordy, that would be really bad;” we need to REMOVE James Comey;
  • I instigate official BZ Overtime in order to make my quite necessary point;
  • Today is Star Wars Day: May the 4th be with you;

Listen to “BZ’s Berserk Bobcat Saloon, “The Aftermath,” Thursday, May 4th, 2017″ on Spreaker.

Please join me, the Bloviating Zeppelin (on Twitter @BZep and on Gab.ai @BZep), every Tuesday and Thursday night on the SHR Media Network from 11 PM to 1 AM Eastern and 8 PM to 10 PM Pacific, at the Berserk Bobcat Saloon — where the speech is free but the drinks are not.

As ever, thank you so kindly for listening, commenting, and interacting in the chat room or listening via podcast. My apologies for not monitoring the chatroom because the second screen wasn’t working yet; it will next week.

Want to listen to all the Berserk Bobcat Saloon archives in podcast? Go here.

BZ

 

Kill Technology?

Hieronymus BoschFirst, the question:

Have you ever wanted to Kill Technology?

I mean, not just killing it, but throttling it unconscious, then pulling out your sturdiest baseball bat and beating it until every last electron has been pummeled mightily, thoroughly, and in a way that all of the involved electrons, its forebears and any future like electrons will never forget, then taking the vestigial cracked skeletons of said Technology and bagging it, throwing it under the tracks of a nearby idling D-9 Caterpillar and compressing until beyond recognizability then — further — dousing liberally with Torco 112 racing fuel and setting aflame with a flare?

Like that?

I have.  Today.  Just now.

Okay, here’s the picture:

I’m a fan of Michael Connelly books, whose main character is Hieronymus Bosch, Michael Connellyknown as Harry Bosch.  He’s a detective who works homicides for LAPD.  In the books, he’s a Vietnam veteran who worked a number of years for the department, once retired, but has come back as something of a retired annuitant, working more homicide cases.  Connelly has 21 books currently published featuring Detective Harry Bosch, with a 22nd due in November of this year.

Titus WelliverThen I heard that Connelly’s Bosch novels were being turned into a series featuring Titus Welliver, an underappreciated actor whom I happen to particularly enjoy.  When you see Mr Welliver, you’ll exclaim to yourself: “yes, I know that guyI’ve seen him before.”  You’ve also heard him in any number of voiceovers for various commercials.

A friend of mine at work had acquired the pilot episode for the series Bosch, which we watched on his tablet.  It should have been a clue but it wasn’t.  That said, however, I knew the series was going to be excellent and remarkably faithful to the work of Michael Connelly, since he was also helping to produce the series and co-wrote the pilot.

I thought: when the first season comes out, I’ve got to see it.  The pilot was vastly entertaining.

I failed to Grok, however, that the series was going to be released on Amazon Prime.

This past weekend I stated to my Wifely Wife: “we need to see the series Bosch,” as she is likewise a great fan of Connelly books.

In order to see the series, which we both committed to do this weekend, we had to figure out if the venues to which we already subscribed, Netflix, Apple’s iTV, Roku, blah blah blah, would enable us to pick up Bosch.

Of course it wouldn’t.  No fucking way.  Everything is going proprietary these days.  That would be way way way too simple.

We went to a Box Store.  “Sure,” the employees said, “you can get it on Amazon Prime.  That’s where it’s released.”  I already was a member of Amazon Prime.  Bingo.  I was In Like Flint.  So we can get that on Netflix, right?  “Of course not,” the employees responded.  “It’s on Amazon.”  We were both proffered the You’re Fucking Blockheads look.  As in: we clearly don’t deserve to draw further breath.

We asked: okay, maybe you can get it on Apple iTV?  The employee clandestinely spoke softy through her in-store comm system.  I’m fairly certain I heard the word “fucktard” used in a sentence.  While waiting, she assured us we could pick it up as an app in the Apple Store, no problem.  One minute later, frowning, she said “nope.  Apple won’t do it.”

About this point the Techno-Savvy amongst you are thinking: “you dolts.  Just hook up through your flatscreen at home.”  And yes, you would be right, my wife has a large, beautiful LG flatscreen I purchased for her a few years ago.  Read: a few years ago.  Unlike today’s flatscreens which hook up to everything but NORAD, hers did not. *** Hence our requiring a Roku box and Apple iTV.

Sufficiently confused yet?

Oboy, I’m just getting started.

“Look,” I whined, “all we want to do is watch the series ‘Bosch‘ this weekend.  That’s my only goal.”

She rolled her eyes.  “Why don’t you just buy ChromeCast?  That will do it.”

I asked, in my all-knowing best sly manner (because I wanted to sound like I actually had a semblance of a brain): “Isn’t that one of those devices that plug into the TV, like a USB?”

Again, more eye-rolling, a blatant You Fucking Blockhead look: “uh, no.  That’s an HDMI.”

One ChromeCast box purchase later, my tail between my legs, we went home.  And, after checking all sorts of thingies on YouTube, the Wifely Wife concluded: “we have to subscribe to a whole bunch of stuff.  That’s why it’s called a ChromeCAST.  It gets sent from your phone to the stick to the TV.”

Huh?

I let her figure it out.  I was beyond facile.  My brain was completely used up at this point.  I barely had locomotor functions.

Yes.  In order to watch one stupid TV series on Amazon Prime, I had to subscribe.  Then your subscription has to be recognized on your Smart Device, like a smart phone or a tablet.  And you have to have wi-fi wired up in your house.  You have to download the app.  You have to download the Amazon Prime app.  Then the ChromeCast app.  Then it gets “cast” from your device to the HDMI device on the back of your TV and then to the flatscreen.

You’re no better than your wi-fi system.  And trust me, it’ll look better on your smart device than it will on your big flatscreen.  On the flatscreen it staggered and pixelated and buffered.

All I wanted to do is watch the TV series Bosch on an actual TV, and have it look good.

Fuck me.

Rabbit ears.

BZ

*** NOTE:

Ol’ BZ does not have a flatscreen TV at home.  Instead, he has a 36″ Toshiba CRT HDTV-capable unit purchased in 2004, which is roughly 3′ deep, weighs about 45,000 pounds and required a Grove TMS9000E crane truck to install.  You can now see that this one fact alone dissuades BZ from upgrading.

 

BZ on Twitter

BZ On TwitterBZ is now on Twitter.

Sort of.  At least I figured out how to reclaim my once-hijacked password, for the time being.  I subscribed in 2009 but had my password hacked about 2.35 seconds later and, with that, cast Twitter aside.  I was uninterested.  My place on Twitter languished for a good five years.

I have, this week, re-upped with Twitter and found myself ablast with persons wishing to follow me and asking me to follow them.  This was a literal digital tsunami the likes of which I was unprepared to handle.

I can see how one could devote their entire lives to Twitter.  There is just so much information crashing about.  But I will not be doing that.  I will be accessing Twitter when it serves me or my agenda.  Can’t be more honest than that.

Now I have to figure out how to put it on my “smart” phone.  Which, frankly, is infinitely smarter than me.

I am: @BZep

Take it away, Twitter.

BZ

 

A brief tech update:

BZ As Druid

BZ’s Druid cowl and analog sword

My wife and I have a pact.

She stays away from plants, because she has what some call the proverbial Black Thumb.  Most plants she touches die.  I handle the plants at the homes.

Conversely, I am the family Druid, the Luddite.  I am as tech-savvy as a pair of worn socks in your dresser drawer.  I stay away from the technology and let her handle the bulk of it.

Recently, for example — on WordPress, which powers this blog — I uploaded one single, solitary plugin.  I’ve loaded plugins before on WordPress but this plugin somehow crashed my entire blog about two weeks ago.  I couldn’t even access the dashboard in order to discover which plugin was responsible.

Luckily, my tech guru is Robert, who is the I.T. expert for the blog consortium of myself, Texas Fred, American & Proud, The Right Handed Cowboy and The O Word.

Robert was able to suss out the problem, un-crash everything, and bring my blog back up.  God bless him.  But absent his intervention, my digital world would have remained shattered.

That said, I’ve had — like most all of you, I suspect — damned near thousands of computers to date.  And today I updated the one at my wife’s house in Ghetto Centrale.

Right now I’m typing my last post, for a while, on my Sony Vaio 15″ laptop.  It’s been a great machine, not a hiccup to it, ever, with a great keyboard.  I really like its keyboard, illuminated as it is in white, with a crisp strike, and very responsive.  But it’s no Toshiba all-in-one, like the 25″ screen I have at the cabin in the Sierra Nevadas.  It’s a remarkably sharp touchscreen with no cables or wires or confusion.  It has a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse.  I, however, dislike touching screens because I have to reach.  And you have to clean the screen.

Samsung-dp700a3d-a01usToday, as a replacement for the Sony Vaio, I purchased a 27″ Samsung Series 7, with an Intel® Core™ i7 processor, 10 gigs of RAM and 2 TB hard drive.  Another all-in-one with a power cord and that’s it.

This will be my new confuser down here in Ghetto Centrale, at my wife’s house.

One niggling little problem: it has Windows 8 loaded.  And, from what I’ve seen, I don’t like Windows 8.  You cannot get any new PC without Windows 8.  But apparently you can revert back to something similar to Windows 7 and the desktop with the START.

For shite’s sake, I don’t want to re-learn some new OS every damned 6 months.

Thoughts, anyone, on my purchases or Windows or PCs or Macs or desktops or all-in-ones or tablets or anything else digital?

BZ