Max @max@smeap.com

What most frightens me is that they configured it to auto-escalate Visual Studio. Whatever moron gave them that advice doesn’t understand Visual Studio and flunked their security training.

It gives me anxiety attacks that I can’t open a Visual Studio window without the Admin warning box. I’m increasingly less sure I can build software safely with BeyondTrust installed and configured this way.

It’s proof they fucked up the attack surface real fucking bad.

“We don’t trust people with UAC dialogs so we’re going to use an app that auto-escalates without UAC dialogs, increases our attack surface of number of super-user services running on the machine, but we can ‘audit’ it better for meanings of better in that we can pay HPCs instead of learning UAC auditing correctly.”

How are IT people this fucking stupid? Why does no one listen to the frustrated software developer whose security training says this is fucking dumb?

Last week I finished the spumoni gender.

This week I’m feeling a gender called “Dragon’s Dream”. It’s purple and full of colorful candy bits because it wants to be and tastes like toasted marshmallow.

My first phone slid off a side table cracking the bottom left corner.

Kind of hoping that’s all of my bad luck for 2021 and I can have a year of less anxiety after that.

(I know that is rarely how luck works, but hope springs eternal.)

Should have been *Cervezas. It was a beer joke that autocorrect ruined, sigh.

Had a dream that was vaguely about Martian logistics like The Martian, but the setting was a Martian KFC and most of the logistics problems were about when the next shipment of desserts would be flown out. Also there was a debate on who owned the sports licenses on Mars. (That turned out to be a front company called the Mexican Cervantes y Esportes Company that got most of the rights sorted out cheaply for the cost of a few beers, but was a NASA profit tourism operation.)

I think it is fine that a lot of people didn’t like it as much as the first (or as much as I did), but the echo chambers folks that really disliked the movie are so full of ignorance about what the movie actually said about it that I’m starting to wonder if I’m from a timeline that saw a different movie altogether. Maybe the film was too subtle? I didn’t think it was very subtle at the time, but maybe I had better company watching it and discussing/enjoying it with me it.

I enjoyed the film the other night, but the discourse about it days later has me really surprised. Feel like the movie might a rually have needed a theatrical run because more than half the stuff I see people complaining about my response was “Weren’t you paying attention, they answered that” or “Well, yeah, that was the point, that was a bad thing and you were supposed to realize that, which is why the first fifteen minutes said what they said”. 🙃

Email address associated with account seems to still be correct, and inventory seems untouched.

That previous password was 64 characters and lasted not even a week.

This morning got an email from Steam "Account change successful" saying my email address changed on my account. Missing initiated by IP address/country code fields (just said "ipaddress" and "countryname" instead). I suspected a phish, but if so a damn good one, including passes according to my email provider for SPF/DKIM/et al for the normal noreply@steampowered.com email address such transactional emails come from. Has left me very spooked.

Bonus fun fact: In “it’s a small world” amusements, I was briefly acquainted with in high school a Rumpke with the III appellate to imply a third generation interest in a certain family-owned trash empire. Every so often I wonder what sort of made-for-TV path was followed? Did he see through Business School like a good scion or follow some creative dream to a more family dramatic but overall happier ending? 🤔

Every now and then I’m reminded of how clever the name “Rumpke Mountain Boys” is. It sounds like a perfectly old fashioned bluegrass/folk band named after some scenic or local interest holler or knob in Appalachia, right? Of course some parts of Appalachia (OH/KY/PA thereabouts) will recognize Rumpke (Rump-KEY) as a regional garbage truck conglomerate. It’s a trash mountain joke.

Steam Guard notification this evening of a login attempt from an unfamiliar Russian IP. That password was 56 characters and lasted about 11 days.

Jingle Jangle was essentially a perfect steampunk movie, aesthetically and thematically.

Early this morning I played through AN ending of the game. I don’t know what to think about it, which I guess was the point. Probably doesn’t help that I picked possibly the douchiest ending because RPing my character as an idiot monster.

A package delivery service run entirely by young, eager dogs happy to deliver stuff to the people that need it

You could call the service Puppy United Postal Service (PUPS)

Update on “Badass Mode”: Yesterday I met the pre-reqs to upgrade from Katanas to Mantis Blades (the cyber ones that pop out of the arms). Then I discovered a mod in my backpack to apply fire damage to the mantis blades. Flaming Mantis Blades. My V is absolutely a monster now. (Not just as in “badass” but literally a monster and that’s infecting how I RP it too.)

So far my biggest complaint with the game is I found many aspects of the ripper doc character “Fingers” irritating and very gross. Not just in a “this character was designed to be irritating and gross” but the meta of “this is *how* the character was designed to be irritating and gross by reusing old bad queer coded stereotypes”. It’s a lazy character that would have shown up like that in 80s cyberpunk stuff, sure, but absolutely something that should have been modernized instead.