- In the discussion recently about Deepfakes and other manufactured media (link) the idea of political manipulation, propaganda and the like was touched upon. Almost on queue, several stories were in the news documenting such things. In a recent case (link), a fake video surfaced of the Ukrainian president purportedly telling his troops to ‘lay down your weapons and return to your families’ . Unsurprisingly, the video was analyzed by a number of sources and determined to be fake; the quality was notably not the best, but these folks get better at this stuff by the day. Also unsurprisingly, around the same time a fake video of Russian president Putin declaring peace has resurfaced, showing yet again that technology plays no favorites. Corporate IT security folks are losing their minds with worry over the possibility of employees being duped by fake CEO videos and taking some ill-advised action based on these, as if these folks didn’t already have enough to keep them up at night.
- Almost as a gift following my rant about the endless aggravations occasioned by the CapsLock key (link), Microsoft has provided a free utility to remap your keyboard functions (link) including the ability to reassign the CapsLock key in Windows to do something else! I ran to download this reported gem and darned if it doesn’t work exactly as advertised. Bravo! (Sorry Apple computer users; this looks like a Windows-only thing. Your particular suffering continues unabated.)
- In an older rant about NASCAR’s evolving hate of actual racing, and the abundance of caution flag laps (link) I lamented the reduced practice sessions as one example of NASCAR working to reduce the number of laps the fans actually see on race weekend. While I am confident NASCAR doesn’t care a whit about this writer’s opinions on such things, they have made some changes of late. Sadly, these changes are in the wrong direction. In order to ‘counter’ the lost practice time, and the teams’ abilities to improve their cars’ performance, NASCAR has introduced even *more* ‘competition caution’ periods during the actual race for teams to make the adjustments, examine tires and such things as they have traditionally done during practice. Good grief.
- In a post entitled ‘Customer Service…Lives!’ (link) I detailed my experience with the Earthquake log splitter folks and their outstanding efforts to get my issue resolved. Well, the promised repair part arrived (free of charge, as advertised) and, confirming their initial diagnosis, returned my humble log splitter to proper functioning. I remain thrilled at how this experience has rather restored my faith in companies and their efforts to actually make for happy customers. I wish, still, there were more companies like this; kudos to them. There are still plenty of companies who have a well-deserved spot on the wall of shame, though:
- My cell phone company website, that puts up a spinning ‘Thanks for your patience’ before *each* page. Here’s a thought: make it faster.
- My local Department of Motor Vehicles office, which moved to much larger location because it had more room for people to wait. Here’s an idea: make it faster.
- Both organizations would do well to remember that seemingly doing the right thing, if it’s for the wrong reason, is actually doing the wrong thing.
In no particular order 