The Evolution of Science Fiction discussion
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Daily Chit Chat
Peter wrote: "https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvets...[cuteness overload!!]"
That is so cute! I have always wanted to visit that aquarium.
Deborah wrote: "Peter wrote: "https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvets...[cuteness overload!!]"
That is so cute! I have always wanted to visit that aquarium."
I know. I'm *very* impatient to go back!
Jim wrote: "Ed wrote: "I read an article recently about how spam could be greatly reduced here if they'd take the one simple step of requiring validation of e-mail address. Right now spammers can create new ac..."I think Amazon just needs to invest in better moderation tools. So many parts of this site are just crammed with bots, and every single day I get notifications from an interaction with an obviously fake account. I hope it isn't a sign that they just aren't that interested in maintaining this site.
Unfortunately, Amazon isn't very interested in maintaining the site. That's been obvious since they moved the group discussions off the home page & each of their security fixes has made it more difficult for moderators. For instance, only allowing us to make 3 topics per hour. It shouldn't be too tough to allow moderators to make as many as we want & limit everyone else, but that takes some extra work.Their latest one is to change everyone's profile, without their knowledge, to ignore PMs except from friends. You can change it back easily enough by going to your account settings, the settings tab, & change "Who Can Send Me Private Messages:" from "just my friends" to "anyone". The trouble is, few will know to do this. I rarely PM group members, but more often they PM me. It's important that a private line of communication be open, but they cut that line. Worse, this setting keeps anyone who isn't my friend from receiving broadcast messages about polls & other group updates. I recommend changing it if you want to get group messages.
Jim wrote: "Unfortunately, Amazon isn't very interested in maintaining the site. That's been obvious since they moved the group discussions off the home page & each of their security fixes has made it more dif..."Bah. Didn't know it had gotten so bad for our volunteer moderators.
For ordinary, active users like me, the constant RQs to jump through hoops to post --mark all the bicycles, over & over again -- is tiresome & stupid. What you said, means owners just don't give a sh*t. Sad.
on the bright side, I believe a major UI overhaul is getting rolled out this year, which suggests they're at least trying to refurbish and modernise the site a bit. maybe it'll make everything a bit easier to use.
Andy wrote: "on the bright side, I believe a major UI overhaul is getting rolled out this year, which suggests they're at least trying to refurbish and modernise the site a bit. maybe it'll make everything a bi..."Gosh, I hope so. Right now it feels like they are going out of their way to make using the site a PITA!
Andy wrote: "on the bright side, I believe a major UI overhaul is getting rolled out this year, which suggests they're at least trying to refurbish and modernise the site a bit. maybe it'll make everything a bi..."Judging by the debacle they made of the new beta book page, I'm just hoping it's not so bad that I give up trying to use it at all. I really like GR in a lot of ways. I joined the year it started in 2007. Since 2009, I've tracked almost every book I read & posted a lot of book reviews, but I'm getting to the end of my rope with them.
Jim wrote: "I'm just hoping it's not so bad that I give up trying to use it at all. I really like GR in a lot of ways. I joined the year it started in 2007. Since 2009, I've tracked almost every book I read & posted a lot of book reviews, but I'm getting to the end of my rope with them. "Gosh, That bad! I hope they will pay attention to early-user comments, like yours. Bad sign if they don't!
It is an interesting case - Goodreads keeps their highest ranking readers site by number of members, even if other sites like LibraryThing have much better utilities for members
Peter wrote: "Jim wrote: "I'm just hoping it's not so bad that I give up trying to use it at all. I really like GR in a lot of ways. I joined the year it started in 2007. Since 2009, I've tracked almost every bo..."It sure is! I went as far as emailing them. As outlook is not something I use. My confidence is pretty high that we will be ignored, but I hope not.
Oleksandr wrote: "It is an interesting case - Goodreads keeps their highest ranking readers site by number of members, even if other sites like LibraryThing have much better utilities for members"I think we should discuss this in more detail, so I created a topic to do so here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Making the form only work with Outlook is just one more way in which the developers & tech support are showing their thoughtless disdain for their users. I don't have it on my home computer, either. A correct link would have just called the default email client. It's not hard to do.
Jim wrote: "Making the form only work with Outlook is just one more way in which the developers & tech support are showing their thoughtless disdain for their users. I don't have it on my home computer, either..."Yup. It is pretty obvious.
On the plus side, I guess enough of us complained often enough that external links are working again. I don't think they can be pretty, but at least we can post them.
I'm holding off sending the monthly group message until later today or tomorrow so people can change their privacy settings. Please pass the message that group messages won't show unless you change them. Just go to your account settings, the settings tab, & change "Who Can Send Me Private Messages:" from "just my friends" to "anyone". It's really stupid that GR didn't exempt group broadcast messages from this limitation & they've never told us they didn't, but it's become apparent that they didn't. It's really hurting group participation. Personally, I just check the group discussion page which shows all my groups & any topics with new messages. You can find it under "Community" - "Discussions" or use this link:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic?ref=n...
I sent out the monthly group broadcast message last night. I hope everyone got it. If not, here it is.---------
Our Oct 2021 group read is The Scarlet Plague by Jack London. It's only 98 pages & is one of the early post apocalyptic novels. It was written about a century after Mary Shelly's The Last Man & a few decades before Earth Abides, so I think it would be interesting to see his take on it. Discuss it here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Our short story is "Best-Laid Plans" by David D. Levine. As always, it is available for free. Find the link & discuss it here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
The poll for our Nov2021 group read is here:
https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/2...
Right now We by Yevgeny Zamyatin has a commanding lead over the other two nominations.
Nominations for Dec2021 BotM - 1940-1959, the Golden Age are now open. You can find the topic here:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Mod
Both of you are "friends" of Jim. People who are not his "friends" did not get the message. I'm not very bothered that I didn't get messages from the other groups where I'm not friends with the moderator. I can find the activity by myself.
Speaking of "friends". FB is offline today. Is this the start of the end of the world? Surely we can't live without FB.
Ed wrote: "Speaking of "friends". FB is offline today. Is this the start of the end of the world? Surely we can't live without FB"Heh. Mildly annoying, since I had something to share with my brother in law. Now I have to try to remember what!
FB does tend to become a time-sink. When it does, I stop for awhile. Fwtw.
Ed wrote: "Peter wrote: "Got it too! Thanks, Jim"Both of you are "friends" of Jim. People who are not his "friends" did not get the message. I'm not very bothered that I didn't get messages from the other g..."
Lol. I didn't know it was offline until the next day when some one told me it had been. It has gotten to be too annoying, so I only hop on every few days for a few minutes to check a few groups for updates and events.
Mod
Ed wrote: "It was more than FB itself. Also Instagram, WhatsApp and other things owned by that company. For some people, WhatsApp is their main mode of online communication. In some countries, FB is practical..."Mike Elgan mentioned that in his newsletter this morning. I've never tweeted or used Instagram & I'm not even sure what Whatsapp is. Obviously don't care, either.
I do use FB a fair amount just to keep up with family & friends that are spread across the US, but I read more news articles both local & from magazines like Smithsonian.
Ed wrote: "Peter wrote: "Got it too! Thanks, Jim"Both of you are "friends" of Jim. People who are not his "friends" did not get the message. I'm not very bothered that I didn't get messages from the other g..."
I posted this in the announcements, but I just found out that GR has fixed this so broadcast messages go through to all members whether they're my friend or not. It was a stupid move & it took way too long to fix.
Mod
Now I feel like I've won the lottery or something and get to stay at home!
Re: time changeWe have two Kitchen clocks. One in the over-the-stove microwave is very easy to reset. The stove clock, by contrast, is a total PITA. I've been putting off resetting that one as our increasingly-unreliable (& greedy!) utility, PG&E, has afflicted us with freq. outages. By pure chance, the last outage put the stove clock to the correct STD time -- to the minute! My wife remarked on my keeping up....
LOL! That's great, Peter. We went out last night & forgot to set our clocks. I got up at 4:30am as usual & sat down at the PC only to realize it was 3:30. I went back to bed for a while, but could only doze. I detest DST. I wish everyone would just stick with STD time. Trying to remember that part of Indiana & Arizona don't participate, the time off GMT & such is just one more complexity in a world full of them. My car only takes me a few tries, but setting the clock in the truck is practically impossible. I think it requires ruby slippers & spinning windershins a few times to work reliably. We usually just let it stay on DST.
Jim wrote: "I detest DST. I wish everyone would just stick with STD time. Trying to remember that part of Indiana & Arizona don't participate, the time off GMT & such is just one more complexity in a world full of them. My car only takes me a few tries, but setting the clock in the truck is practically impossible. I think it requires ruby slippers & spinning windershins a few times to work reliably. We usually just let it stay on DST. "Fully agree! When we lived in AZ, and especially when I was working on/near the Navajo Nation, it was hopelessly confusing. Especially in the time before ubiquitous mobile phones.
Speaking of mobiles: my first personal encounter with same was at a drilling job in east Tenn: the semi-notorious Bumpass Cove, or near it (45 years ago?) Anyway, Longyear drilling super showed up to check on the job, in a BIG Suburban, the entire ass-end of which was filled with radio gear, including a (then) State of the Art mobile rig, with a whip antenna so long he had to tie it down when not in use! As was common in early mobiles, he had to find a hilltop with few trees -- a trick in E TN -- and try a few times. I recall doing the exact same thing with the early Motorola cellular rigs in northern Mexico in the mid-70s. The "luggable" ones, not unlike the early Luggable PCs. Worked sometimes. Often quicker to find a landline.....
Mod
I wish everyone would stick with Daylight time. California, and 17 other states, have passed laws or resolutions to do that, but cannot do it without federal permission. The feds say you can pick STD time, or twice-yearly changes, but cannot pick year-round daylight time.
I feel your pain guys. In Australia, Queensland does not have daylight saving, but New South Wales does. The border crosses right through the middle of the place I live. For half the year, whenever you book anything from a yoga class to an electrician, the booking comes with the comment " QLD time " or "NSW time " and we all still get it wrong occasionally.
While I agree that DST is PITA, at least closer to the poles it has its pluses for younger generation - to wake up and then go to school in the darkness day after day is not easy, esp. for early grades
Oleksandr wrote: "While I agree that DST is PITA, at least closer to the poles it has its pluses for younger generation - to wake up and then go to school in the darkness day after day is not easy, esp. for early gr..."OTOH, the argument by zealots that DST would somehow save energy was almost completely specious. SFAICT
Ed wrote: "I wish everyone would stick with Daylight time. California, and 17 other states, have passed laws or resolutions to do that, but..."DST really sucks here because we're in the far west of the Eastern time zone. Actually, we're in a western bit that bumps well into the Central time zone. That means we're already almost an hour of daylight off the more populous East Coast. I'm a full hour off my family on Long Island, NY & RI, 45-50 min off that of Maryland. It can still be light out here until almost 10pm, way past my bed time.
Yeah, Daylight saving is a political choice rather than a functional one in many ways. When I lived in Melbourne, I loved Daylight saving because, as Oleksandr pointed out, you spent less time in darkness.Then when I was living up North, Well above the Tropic of Capricorn I met a farmer who had the plaintive comment " I can't explain to my cows that we are on daylight saving." and I kind of got a different perspective.
Deborah wrote: "I can't explain to my cows that we are on daylight saving.""And you can exchange 'farmer' with 'father' and 'cows' with 'little children'. It takes a long time to change the time that they're getting out of their beds.
Leo wrote: "Deborah wrote: "I can't explain to my cows that we are on daylight saving.""And you can exchange 'farmer' with 'father' and 'cows' with 'little children'. It takes a long time to change the time ..."
I totally believe that! I was a nightmare to get up in the morning, as a small kid.
Big Damn Hero, a Firefly book, is on a special sale right now on Blackstone Audio's consumer site, Downpour.com. It's only $3.95. The sale lasts about 7 more hours.https://www.downpour.com/firefly-big-...
Latest annoyance from GR: TWO layers of dumb tiles in their Capcha :feature:, as I found when I went to fix a one-letter typou in a review. How likely is it that a nefarious hacker is going to be copyediting other people's reviews? How much of this pointless, time-wasting HS are we going to put up with? Bah, I say again, BAH!
I agree, Peter.The Boss had the electric go out in one area of the barn today. There are 3 outlets there & one is used for the heater in the horses' water trough, so pretty important now that the nights are down in the 20s. As I suspected, the circuit breaker had gone bad. I have a spare around, but I didn't need it. The electrician had used a double 15 amp breaker (1 slot, 110 volt, but 2 circuits) & one was unused, so I just moved the wire to it. All fixed. I love it when fixes are so easy.
Happy Thanksgiving. We're going to have our dinner tomorrow as the kids are going elsewhere today, so it will be a nice lazy day with a long weekend.
Jim wrote: "Happy Thanksgiving. We're going to have our dinner tomorrow as the kids are going elsewhere today, so it will be a nice lazy day with a long weekend."Enjoy your lazy weekend! We have family company through tomorrow. Mostly fun, and the house & decks are the cleanest they have been in months! I couldn't believe how DIRTY our deck-chairs had gotten....
My wife got a bonus & used the money to buy a robo-vacuum, so we're playing with it today. I'm not sure about it since it seems rather stupid & scattered. The kids have one & says it takes a while to work out efficient patterns & fully clean rooms, so maybe it will improve in time. It would be nice, if it did. Our new dog, Rio, is a Border Collie with really long hair that he tends to leave clumps all around. The robovac just got done with the living room floor & 2 hours later there's more of Rio's hair on the floor. You'd think we never brushed him even though we usually spend at least 15 minutes doing it every night. It takes twice as long when he's gotten into burrs & hitchhikers which he does regularly, too.
Jim wrote: "It would be nice, if it did. Our new dog, Rio, is a Border Collie with really long hair that he tends to leave clumps all around. The robovac just got done with the living room floor & 2 hours later there's more of Rio's hair on the floor. You'd think we never brushed him even though we usually spend at least 15 minutes doing it every night. It takes twice as long when he's gotten into burrs & hitchhikers which he does regularly, too. ..."I remember that feeling. We had a Gordon Setter and she would leave fur tumbleweeds wherever she walked. I remember vacuuming the house one day and my wife asked me if I was going t vacuum. I replied that I just did and she pointed out I must have missed something. There goes the dog with the dust dragons following her.
The joys of Internet accounts & security! Oy!!! I have a few hundred logins & I decided to go through them to make sure they're still active & the passwords are decent. I've found a dozen accounts that have old, bad passwords & as many that are long gone - either the site doesn't exist or it's been so long they've deleted my account. That's fine by me. If I haven't used a site in a few years, I don't need it. Some are still active even after 7 years of inactivity, though. I either deleted the account or changed the password.The worst sites are the 'secure' ones. It took me 30 minutes to login to one credit card account even though I had the correct username & password. I changed computers this summer & the site didn't like that. No security questions, just contact numbers were from 20 years ago, so I had to go through automated menu hell a couple of times to get to the right place to get them changed & get logged in.
I'm going to try to break this job up from now on. Maybe do all the sites in one category per month or something. With all the data breaches going on, having strong unique passwords & as few accounts as possible just makes sense. I'm tempted to pay for a password manager that will automatically alert me when passwords get old or compromised. Lastpass will do it for $36/year. That's 3 times as much as what it was just a couple/few years ago. Quite a jump, even though it's reasonable.
Jim wrote: "The joys of Internet accounts & security! Oy!!! I have a few hundred logins & I decided to go through them to make sure they're still active & the passwords are decent. I've found a dozen accounts ..."I've been using KeePass for nearly 10 years and have few complaints. It's free and open-source, and is local to your machine so it doesn't store all the information in the cloud. LastPass has historically had issues with breaches of its own data, so I feel a bit more confident with this.
If you want to share the passwords between devices you can place the database in a Dropbox; if (like me) you really want to scratch the paranoid itch, you can use a P2P synchronisation tool like SyncThing (also free and open-source).
You can definitely set expiry dates on passwords. I've not actually tried it myself so I don't know whether/how it alerts you when the password expires.
I was mostly whining about just trying to keep up with the number of accounts now. It seems as if a login is required for everything. Email, bank, & health accounts make sense, but then there are all the purchasing, hobby, & fun sites. My 3 kids each used different sites for their wedding plans, so I had to create logins for each & that's just a start. I hate it when a site won't allow you to easily delete or disable your account.I'm quite happy with Lastpass & they've never really been breached. The one time I remember them getting mildly hacked, they were fast to tell everyone the details. It was no big deal. As much as I dislike the cloud, it works in this case since I constantly need access from multiple computers & occasionally my phones.
Best of all, I can keep a folder for my wife to use so my daughter & I can login to her sites to deal with problems she can't. To put it kindly, her computer skills are minimal. My kids can gain access in 24 hours if my main password is lost & they'll have a list of all my accounts when I die, too.
It's really important that accounts get shut down when the owner dies, but too many skip this. There's a whole industry devoted to hacking recently deceased accounts. A guy at work lost several thousand after his wife died & her Amazon account got hacked for a number of gift cards. They were cashed & gone before something tripped an alarm & he found out about it. I think it was the credit card, but since it went through Amazon, he was on the hook for the bill, IIRC. That's just nasty icing on a crappy cake - lose your wife of 40 years & then have to deal with theft on top of it.
Thanks for the tips! I keep thinking about a Password Manager, and never actually get A Round Tuit. I mean, I keep strong p/ws on Bank Accts and stuff like that. But my Wikipedia accts, my public library password -- I mean, do I care if someone tries to, what, put books on reserve in my acct? C'mon. Life is too short.
Actually, you do care about someone getting into any accounts since they often have bits of verifying information like name, address, birthday, mother's maiden name & such. It takes surprisingly little to fool someone at the bank into resetting a password. Those folks can be really bad at security. I had trouble getting into my bank one time & the gal gave me my new password over the phone!One of the nicest features of a password manager is you can keep comments. I use them for remembering the answers to security questions & incorrect information. Since my mother's maiden name got so overused, I never give the correct one any more. They also show how long it's been since a site was last logged into.
I don't know how anyone lives without one. Even my Luddite wife has over 50 sites stashed in our manager. A great feature is that when you install it on a PC, it will scrape all the browsers for sites & their passwords & pull them in. Sorting them out the first time is a drag, but it's a one time deal. You just need to remember &/or set the browser not to store passwords any more. Any data in 2 places will be wrong in one.
The Evolution of Science Fiction
Books mentioned in this topic
A History of the English Speaking Peoples, 4 Vols (other topics)Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (other topics)
A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (other topics)
Bleak House (other topics)
A Night in the Lonesome October (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Winston Churchill (other topics)Roger Zelazny (other topics)
Felix Salten (other topics)
Sam Kean (other topics)
Chuck Tingle (other topics)
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[cuteness overload!!]