Black Cat Blog

Thoughts, Stories, and Ideas

  • Hate and Militia Group Uptick

    I read a rather disturbing story on Mother Jones called The Rapid Rise of Right-Wing Militias. I am not shocked so much as disturbed because history is again repeating itself; at least in the United States. There is a strong correlation between the waxing and waning of hate and militia groups. These groups grow in hard economic times and often fade into the background during times when people are better off. Often these groups engage in both hate and militant activities, not to mention they might mix in Christian Nationalism doctrine into their belief system.

    Arguably, the KKK, the first domestic terrorist organization, came about as a result of the extreme poverty and economic hardship that befell the antebellum southern states. It was a direct reaction out of anger. I believe basic human nature is to sometimes seek a scapegoat for one’s problems. Therefore it is easier to blame others for one’s own situation rather than look inwardly and see what needs to be done to improve things. While it is quite possible that a few of these groups will disband in better times, there are a few that continue on and even grow stronger with age.

    I am left asking the fundamental question about what these groups really offer and they offer camaraderie, mission, and a sense of purpose where members felt like there was none to be had. They blame people different than them for their lot in life. Hate only ends up bringing the person with the hatred further down. The psychology behind these kind of revolutionary groups is, in no small part, fascinating and perhaps a bit on the frightening side. The militia groups are a bunch of rag tag amateurs wielding military grade weapons without the training that military personnel get. It’s tantamount to shoot first, ask questions later.

    As always, education, sympathy, and empathy are the best ways to fight these groups. Hate is won over by kindness every single time. Showing kindness is the quickest way to melt away hate. I am reminded of this very awesome video that shows even the indoctrinated can recover. The video was taken at a pride event which featured a man in a wheel chair offering hugs and apologies for his behavior. I was so struck by the genuineness of it, that of course I could instantly accept him. Kindness wins the day.

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  • Defining Myself

    Throughout my life I have always defined myself by what I did for a living. I think I mostly did this because that’s what society does. We judge people based on what they do to earn money. I am struggling to unlearn defining myself by what I do for a living. It does not matter that I work as a security guard and not in information technology. All that matters is that I show up on time do my job reasonably well and get compensated for it. I will define myself by my passions, my interests, and my personality not by what I do for a living.

    I guess my self-esteem is always been that low that I’ve always had to define myself based on what I do and when I have not been working in information technology I felt like a failure. I have to get over this feeling because the likelihood of me getting back into a technology based career is not real high at 50 years old. But simply because I don’t work in information technology does not mean that I cannot continue to enjoy it. Arguably I like it more now that I don’t have to do it for a living. I don’t really know because it just seems like I’m not happy no matter what I do. I hate my professional life when it is in information technology. I hate my professional life when I’m not working professionally.

    So if I am working on defining myself I am a motorcyclist, a traveler, and experimenter. I am someone with deep-seated passions. I just wish I did not have significant mental and developmental challenges. I wish I were more normal functioning. Autism is kind of a mixed blessing. On one hand I am grateful for the additional intelligence that I have but it seems like that was traded for struggling with what should be common sense for most people.

  • Having An Autistic Day

    Right now everything is overwhelming me from a sensory perspective. I wish I had some silence or at least something to drown out the noise of the world. I am being “barebacked” by 2 people. Barebacking is playing your cell phone out loud without using headphones or earphones. All this is just too much and it is making me angry.

    I really have to try not to explode here. Babies crying, cell phones playing, bad elevator music. All just too damn much. I need to save for a good quality pair of over-the-ear noise cancelling headphones. Something from JBL or to that effect. I need to tone down the over-stimulation somehow. Everything feels like nails to a chalkboard.

    Every little thing definitely did bother me today. I just want to go ballistic with anger. But if I do that I’m going to end up in the nearest jail and/or prison. I desperately need an outlet for my talents. I would like to be able to do something better than simply be a security guard. But on the other hand I know that being a security guard is a nice simple job. My job ends when I clock out and that is not always the case with information technology.

    I wonder what teaching is going to do. I wonder if I will enjoy teaching information technology to recent high School grads or even high school juniors and seniors. Will they have the passion that I have? I guess only time will tell. But teaching is the only career that I could really do that would afford me experimentation with information technology and to still earn a living at it. Most IT jobs don’t want you to experiment because they need the infrastructure reliable and predictable. But when it is treated as an academic problem, the room for innovation vastly grows and the room for experimentation also grows alongside. If I could find some people that are also interested in computers and experimenting with them, I might have something.

  • I Hate My Life

    Yes as the title reads, I am really sick and tired of my life. There’s nothing easy about it and everything is a 10-yard fight. I’ve had enough. At least, I don’t have to work for ops security any longer. I had a surprise inspection and the person doing the inspection took my uniform shirts and I am so grateful for that because I don’t want to deal with them. I really don’t know how I am going to make my life better other than to try and have my own business. But that is easier said than done as everybody knows.

    At least I will have the next 3 days off. I really need them as I am just super exhausted. It is really difficult to keep switching shifts around and it’s exhausting when my bio rhythms keep getting thrown off. It means that I am not sleeping well and I am probably not eating very well either. I had the unfortunate misery of discovering that I have to work an extra hour today. My manager basically said oops I forgot to tell you. What the actual fresh hell?! How do you forget to tell someone that they will be working an extra hour? I just don’t know the answer to that but it confirms that I’ve made the right choice to move on to a new company.

    I just hope that my experience at Allied universal will be okay. I know that it’s not going to be great but I hope it will not be terrible either I just want my new security guard job simply be manageable I hope that this is not asking too much. I wonder when I should start really putting in the effort in earnest towards starting a business. One school of thinking has that if you don’t start now and you don’t get into it you never will. Another school suggests that you should only really do it when you are ready financially emotionally mentally etc

  • Call Out Tomorrow

    Tomorrow is my last official day and I just want to call out and have 4 full days off before starting my new job but I don’t think that would be advisable. I’ll just go in to work tomorrow as expected. I don’t want to go out of my way to make an enemy out of OPS even though they have left me feeling alienated and exhausted. I don’t plan on ever going back but the prevailing wisdom is to not go out of your way to burn bridges. I certainly am not going to do this but I would really like to as I’ve physically had enough and I am exhausted. It might be better to start the new job completely rested. I might just say f*ck it and walk away.

    I wish I could say my experience was good at OPS but it was a 10 yard fight and the company really did not even have much of a veneer of respectability. Bigger and better things await. I just probably won’t see much time off in the future. As this position is new, I might be working some extra days or even hours so I am thinking I might want to have 4 full days off just to recuperate from the constantly changing shifts where I am at now. Yeah, I am calling off. I am physically and mentally done. The 1.5 years of employment at OPS have been anything but a picnic.

    I have to summon up the energy to try and do some content creation as well. I’d like to see if I cannot get a second career as an IT teacher off the ground. To do this, I need curriculum and content. I think I might spend the rest of the last shift of my OPS career doing so curriculum design!

  • Feeling Meh

    Today I feel neither good nor bad. I just feel neutral and I guess that is okay. Yesterday I learned something about performance tuning for VPNs. I managed to drastically improve the performance of the VPN tunnel between my virtual private server in North Carolina and my home lab. I would’ve thought that after glow would carry but it did not. That’s okay. I brought packet latency down from 35ms to < 20ms simply by doing some work.

    Maybe I’m feeling meh because of having to go to work. I’m working the remainder of my notice period as much as I do not want to. I need the cash so it is what it is. On Thursday of next week my new job at Allied begins and I’m looking forward to it. I’ll have more money and (hopefully) less worry.

    Now that my home lab is pretty much complete until I can afford another machine to become a second server, the journey is on hold. Part of me would like to get back into ham radio. My license is still valid. I just haven’t had time or money and the home lab held more interest at the time

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  • Outdated Tech

    Oddly, I miss the pre-IoT days where people weren’t connecting their air fryers and toasters to the Internet. I miss the days of the dumb TVs. These new smart TVs limit consumers to one technology. I’d rather have a dumb TV and plug in an HDMI device of my choice to it. I also miss the good old fashioned carbureted engines. Yes, they’re bad for the environment because they do not have the fancy pollution controls that modern fuel injection has but they were so incredibly easy to work on.

    When I lived in Arizona, I bought a vintage Ford conversion van and I had so much fun with it. You can learn to diagnose engine problems by the sounds they make when the engine starts. No computers, just pure tinkering and fun. Also learning. It was a simple, logical algorithm. If such and such is happening, then do this …. A friend of mine showed me how to rebuild the engine when the head gasket went. I figured I might as well overhaul it.

    How about instead of gasoline, we use hydrogen?! It burns very cleanly!

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  • A Good Zen Quote

    This quote is especially thought provoking to me, especially as someone who has anger issues and a diagnosed mental illness. But I am non-violent. Anyhow, I’ve made many decisions in the past based on anger and they have always been ones I have regretted.

    An action committed in anger is an action doomed to failure.

    Genghis Khan

    I’ve left jobs because I was angry at coworkers or management only to find a new, and sadly, worse job. I’ve lost friends over anger. I’ve lost opportunities too. Thankfully, I have never lost my freedom. I am learning to deprogram the anger through therapy. Although the process is long and hard.

    While Genghis was a master military strategist and student of Sun Tzu, he knew very much that he was anger prone. He learned to step away from making any decisions when emotionally charged. These are lessons I want to learn myself. I am angry at my present employer and co-workers and found a new job.

    This time around I am going to a company that is a known quantity for me so I am hopeful that history will not repeat. I’m ultimately leaving for all of the right reasons however.

    While anger can be a motivator, it should never be the primary reason for a decision. Hell it should never be a reason for a decision that must necessarily be made in a neutral frame of mind.

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  • Changing Jobs Soon

    I have my last 6 days at OPS Security Group and I would be lying if I did not say I feel a bit of mixed emotions. I do like the people I work with but $17/hour is just not enough money. I will miss my colleagues very much, but in a capitalist society, money talks and bull$h1t walks. Unfortunately, OPS as a company has enough bull$sh1t to fill up a large septic tank. The owner does not want to pay his people what they’re worth and as other companies offer more, few people will stay. Employees feel insulted by things like rewards points, pizza, and other gimmicks. They don’t come to work for these things. It’s literally f*ck you, pay me.

    I am excited to start for Allied Universal Security Services again. Yeah, I know they are a mediocre company but they are large and they have plenty of decent opportunities. Employment is more apt to be stable with them than a fly-by-night like OPS. I am grateful to OPS for helping me restart my career in security when it was difficult to get anyone to give me a chance. But that much said, the gratitude quickly wore off when I saw my hard work being rewarded with such low pay. For what I am doing, I am getting scraps returned to me and poverty sucks.

    I decided to take 3 days off in between the end of OPS and the beginning of Allied Universal. That reminds me, at some point I am going to have to sign on to Allied Edge and see what computer-based training modules I need to take. I am sure there are a few out there and I’d originally planned to knock them out (unironically) while on shift for OPS but I am simply too tired right now to think about it. And tomorrow I have to get up early to be back in to work for a 4 hour stint.

    I am hoping that I hear from my friend Matt Yoder tomorrow. I am hoping that he is doing better and thinking of restarting his business. I want to help him out with some IT infrastructure that will not disappoint. That is, if he will even talk to me. I don’t think I am numero uno in his book at the moment.

    I am really ready for this new opportunity. I am just going to embrace the change offered to me and do a decent shift’s work for 22.00/hour. I cannot wait for the weekly pay and even the days when I have to work on a holiday so I can sap up that extra money. Maybe with less financial stress, I’ll be less tired and more idea driven and have more motivation to work on a business. Only time will really tell.

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  • A Book That Inspired Me To Travel.

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a movie or book that inspired you to travel?
    View all responses

    Jame’s Clavell’s Shogun series inspired me to travel. After reading about his take on ancient and modern Japan, I had to go. It just so happened a late friend of mine, Brian Jarrett, and I had some vacation time to burn so we spent New Year’s in Tokyo. Ah the perks of working in Information Technology for a global airline! So both of us went on a little journey together.

    After a New Year’s celebration which I shall bring up later, we did a brief tour by train of the country side. Japan’s rural areas and the Kanto Plain looked nothing like I had imagined – it looked so much better and larger than life. The beautiful and ornate homes outside of the city were stunning. We visited art galleries, tea shops, and ate some of the finest of hand-rolled sushi I had ever eaten. I also had some delicious tempura.

    Now back to New Year’s in Tokyo. For starters, Tokyo has nothing on Las Vegas for sensory overload. It is truly a city that never sleeps. Yet for the hustle and bustle, there is a beautiful kind of order out of the seeming chaos. Also, the politeness of the older generation is exquisite. I remember the stunning fireworks, the bright neon and LCD screens everywhere. I remember staying in one of Tokyo’s capsule hotels because it was the only thing we could afford and even that was luxurious.

    Oh and I should mention, the vacation really began when we boarded our ANA flight to Tokyo from Los Angeles. Since we wore our airline IT polos, the most awesome flight attendant said, “We’ve got a space for you in first class.” OMG! That was an experience. I had steak and shrimp, fine expensive red wines, cordials for dessert … the seat was in a mini-suit with a curtain and decked out entertainment system. Our seats turned into full on beds that included pajamas and robes.

    By the time we arrived in Tokyo in the morning after what was a very long flight, we were rested and ready to go whereas most of our fellow travelers were more bleary eyed and exhausted. On our return home, we got upgraded again. Totally lucked out!

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