You Can't Silence Us

Flying sucks

I hate flying. Not because of a fear of flying or crashing. I hate flying because it is a truly horrid experience. Let me tell all of you why:

I arrived at the McCarron airport in Las Vegas yesterday at 4 pm, Pacific time. I have TSA Pre-check, which supposedly means that I have passed a background check that allows me to fly without removing my shoes or belt, among other things. Except the TSA has their metal detector turned to its most sensitive setting, which requires me to remove my wedding ring, watch, and belt EVERY. STINKING. TIME. This REALLY pisses me off. Do you want to know why?

Because on more than one occasion I have had 2- TWO- pepper spray dispensers and a push dagger in my carry on. Once, it was an industrial sized can of bear mace that I had forgotten was in my bag when I flew home from Alaska. The TSA is a bunch of incompetent asshats.

With that out of the way, my flight boarded at 5:30 for a 6:05 departure. With a flight time of four and a half hours, plus a triple time zone change, we were scheduled to arrive in Orlando at 1:40 in the morning.

We were initially delayed because a suitcase had been checked on board by a passenger who was not onboard the flight. Big no-no. So we had to delay while they located the asshole in one of the airport bars. By the time that was sorted out, Southwest airlines had a computer failure that grounded all of the company’s aircraft. We sat at the gate with no air conditioning for over two hours.

The guy in my row, a black man, decided to take off his shirt and socks. He began rubbing his feet and fanning himself with the plane brochure. The smell was horrific. As time marched on, some people left the plane. The guy finally went to a row with open seats.

We finally left the gate at 8:15. There were crying babies in the rows behind me, so I put on my noise cancelling headset. The WiFi in the plane was broken, so no in flight movies, music, or entertainment of any kind. Southwest doesn’t sell or allow any alcohol on their aircraft, so I decided to try for some sleep. You know how that goes.

We landed in Orlando at 3:30, and by the time I collected my bags from the carousel and my car from long term parking, it was 4:30. I finally got home at 5:45, to collapse in my bed until 10 o’clock.

Southwest had another ground stop caused by another computer issue less than 18 hours later. In all, the two delays cancelled or delayed over 2,800 flights.

Have I mentioned how much I hate the entire experience of flying? I will say that, other than flying, it was a very relaxing and much needed week of R&R. Back to work in the morning.

People who have read this post: 437
By Divemedic, ago

In practice

So to sum up my strategy for gambling, the way to maximize my time at the table for the amount I am losing is to put a limit on daily losses. As an example, I will use my just completed trip to Las Vegas as an example. My limit for this trip was $300 a day.

So day one, I played for 2 hours and lost $40 before getting tired and going to bed.

Day two, we went to watch a hockey game at a sports bar before hitting the casino. At the casino, I lost $300 in a total of four hours of play. My total loss for the trip is $340.

Day three, we played Craps for 2 hours after breakfast. I won $300 in that morning session before losing $400 in the afternoon. That means I am down a total of $440.

Day four was Saturday. I wound up losing my full $300, meaning I was down $740 for the trip.

On Sunday, I needed to play slots to earn some comps. I wound up winning $182 on slots before we had to go pickup my mother in law at the airport, and her flight was delayed by 4 and a half hours due to storms in Orlando. I found a Craps table at NYNY and won nearly $1,500.

On day six, I played for just a little bit before heading to the airport and won another $100 and change.

So I began the trip with $1,500 in gambling funds and got back on the plane home with just under $2,400. Not bad for a 6 day trip.

We flew from Orlando to Las Vegas for $400 each, round trip. We checked into the Park MGM. The first four nights were free because of comps.

In total, we spent about $750 in food and alcohol, mostly because we had some comps.

One thing that I want to mention is comps. Those are the free perks that you get for gambling. We stick with the one that gives us the best offers. In our case, that is MGM Resorts.

In this case, we stayed in the hotel for 5 nights at a total cost of $223. I had gotten comped 4 nights for just the cost of resort fees. We also got $200 in free slot play and $100 in free food and drink. I get offers for comped stays 4 or 5 times a year. Sometimes with comped resort fees, sometimes not.

What this means is that we spent under $1,800 for a 6 day, 5 night vacation. Factor in the money won at the table and it was even cheaper.

We went to street party for the Las Vegas hockey team and ate some pretty good BBQ ribs, saw a couple of shows, and did a bit of sightseeing. I got to see an obviously rich Chinese guy take out a $100,000 loan from the casino to gamble with. Saw a fight, got in a fight, and had a pretty good time.

Now I am getting on the plane to go home back to work while my wife is staying in Vegas with her mother for a few more days of mother/daughter time. Now to get some sleep on the plane. I won’t be home until 4 am.

People who have read this post: 657
By Divemedic, ago

Use of Force

I just had the oddest experience that I have ever had in Las Vegas. It ended in a use of force incident.

My wife and I were playing Craps at Harrah’s this morning. My wife was standing to my left. We were at the end of the table and a woman walked up to the table on my right and tried to buy in with $25 cash and a slot machine ticket worth $77. The dealer told the woman that tickets were not accepted at the tables, and directed her to the cashier’s cage that was 20 feet away. The woman left the $25 in chips on the table and headed that way.

She returned 10 minutes later, and I pointed out to her that the chips she had left behind were still there. She said “I don’t care about that, it’s chump change,” then put the chips on the field. I was the shooter and rolled a 6. Her money was taken by the dealer. She asked the dealer to place another bet, the dealer asked for money, the woman again tried to use the slot machine ticket. My wife helpfully told her that she needed to use cash. She left. After she was gone, I made a joke: “That’s what happens when you legalize pot.” The entire table laughed, dealers included.

She came back a third time, about 15 minutes later. She stood so close to me that our shoulders were touching, despite the fact that no one else was at our end of the table. I slid my chips to my left, away from her and closer to my wife. It made me nervous. The woman said, pointing to my wife,”She isn’t helping me. I should just punch her.” I told the woman that this would be a bad idea and that she needed to leave. I asked the dealer to call security. I couldn’t leave, because I had about $200 in play. The woman left, and the dealer said, “She is someone else’s problem now.”

You guessed it- she was back 5 minutes later. The stupid ass tried using the slot ticket again. She said, “I don’t have any circle things (meaning chips?) to play with, so I will just take some of his.” She then reached in and grabbed a handful of my chips with her right hand.

I grabbed the offending hand HARD and twisted towards me as I stepped to my right, into her, planting my foot behind her. At the same time, I lifted her arm and pushed. Off balance, she started to fall and I was just starting to finish the move when my wife yelled “stop.” I eased up and let the woman keep her feet. Security was there pretty quickly. They removed her from the property. As they were doing so, she insisted that security get a supervisor and “fully document” the incident. She will be lucky if they don’t have her arrested.

My wife later said she was worried that I would be the one who got in trouble. She also said that she wasn’t sure that I needed to use force. I explained that the woman had already verbally signaled her willingness to get violent and was in the act of committing robbery. What I did was a clear case of the lawful use of force in self defense.

First time I have ever had to use force in my wife’s presence.

People who have read this post: 5,436
By Divemedic, ago

Las Vegas

I am in Las Vegas. Just a few minutes ago (1230 Pacific time) a pair of Blackhawk helicopters (the variant with the refueling probe on the front) flew from the west and made a left to fly north, directly above the Las Vegas strip. Altitude was less than 300 feet, as they were below the level of my hotel.

Doors were open, and personnel were seen inside. Seems kind of odd, but not the first time seeing spooky stuff here.

People who have read this post: 821
By Divemedic, ago

Intel

The ransomware attacks continue. There are several hospitals (at least five) that are rumored to have been attacked by ransomware in the past two weeks. They are trying to keep it quiet, but the attacks were largely successful in at least a few of the attacks. Two hospitals are known to have been without computer support for over a week. I know, because one of them is the one where I work.

Some systems were not affected because they were on different servers, but the common thread here is that all of the hospitals that were attacked used the same medical record reporting software. That may or may not be important. At any rate, the loss of this server affected everything: medical records, prescription tracking, payroll, scheduling, email, you name it, it has all been down for over a week. They can’t even make people pay for food from the cafeteria because the POS system isn’t working. No cash register means that they are letting us eat for free.

Payday is Thursday, and we are already wondering if we are going to get paid. We can’t issue new account numbers to patients, and everything is being done on paper. We are tracking patient location and status by writing on windows with dry erase markers. everything has been reduced to using pen and paper. My unit alone has three people per shift, and we are generating over 800 pieces of paper during every 12 hour shift. That works out to each of us filling out one form every 23 seconds. Every second for 12 straight hours. We aren’t administrative- we are a clinical unit. Those papers are there to document what we are doing. I don’t even know how we are getting anything done with patient care because we are so buried in paperwork.

Some people are being furloughed because their jobs are completely dependent on computer technology. Other departments (mine included) are working overtime to handle the additional workload. I suggested that it would be cheaper to send people with nothing to do up to the departments that need help with paperwork, rather than pay people overtime. That suggestion was ignored. The extra paperwork doesn’t require technical or medical training, it simply needs hands and a functioning brain. Instead, my unit is working overtime. I worked 60 hours last week, and 60 hours the week before. So yeah, I really hope that we DO get paid.

That has cut into my personal time, as well as into my blogging.

The other thing that I wonder is why are all of these ransomware attacks happening all of a sudden? In this case, the hackers are demanding $5 million from EACH hospital that has been hacked. Is it money? Some other motivation? Why now? Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. The question is: Who is the enemy? Are we at war? Is this China? Russia? Iran? Or is it the Democrats trying to sow confusion? All of those sound farfetched, but what events of the last two years haven’t seemed even more unlikely?

We have already seen a bioweapon unleashed on the world, only to find out that our own government not only knew about the virus, they instructed us on countermeasures that they KNEW were untrue, but also that the guy in charge of responding was part of the team that developed it, and that our own government sponsored it. Then a part of our government used it as cover to rig a national election. I don’t thing anything is impossible at this point.

People who have read this post: 1,529
By Divemedic, ago

No one available

Years ago, I used to live in an apartment. I came home one night to see that my neighbor’s apartment appeared to have been broken into while he was out of town. The front door had been kicked in. I called 911. The operator told me that it was a busy night, a burglary of an unoccupied dwelling was low priority, and it would therefore be an hour or so before police would arrive.

I told them that I understood, described what I was wearing, told the operator that I would be clearing the apartment of any criminals with my firearm, and asked her to relay that to responding officers, so that I wouldn’t be shot.

Less than five minutes later, 6 officers arrived, lights and sirens on. I got the standard lecture about taking the law into my own hands. I told them that SOMEONE has to stop criminals, and since they were busy writing reports of crimes that were over, the people themselves would stop crime.

They were not amused.

It looks like the citizens of Asheville, NC will be having to do the same for themselves. Here are ten crimes that the Asheville police will stop responding to:

  • Theft under $1,000 where there is no suspect information (this does not include stolen vehicles or guns)
  • Theft from a vehicle where there is no suspect information
  • Minimal damage and/or graffiti to property where there is no suspect information
  • Non-life-threatening harassing phone calls (does not include incidents that are related to domestic violence and/or stalking)
  • Fraud, scams, or identity theft
  • Simple assaults that are reported after they have occurred
  • Reports that do not require immediate police actions and/or enforcement (information only reports)
  • Funeral escorts
  • Lost/found property
  • Trespassing where the property owner does not want to press charges
  • In addition, noise complaints made during normal business hours and after-hours may have a significant delay in response…
People who have read this post: 775
By Divemedic, ago

NJ socializes property

The New Jersey governor just signed a law which extends the state’s eviction moratorium to January of 2022. This means that owners of residential rental property in New Jersey have not collected rent in nearly two years. At what point is this an unconstitutional taking of private property for public use?

The only way out for these property owners is either bankruptcy, which means the state gets the property, or a mysterious fire, which gets the owner an insurance check.

People who have read this post: 638
By Divemedic, ago

McAfee

I bought a new laptop last year. It came with McAfee antivirus. Because I was working from home, I got an email virus from a work email. I don’t think I was the target, I think the hackers were trying to target my school district. The payload was the ech0raix malware. McAfee never detected the virus, and didn’t do a thing to clean the computer.

I lost everything. All of my data. The weakness of the virus is that it saves an encrypted version of all of your files using a randomly generated key. No one with the possible exception of the NSA can decrypt it. Then it deletes the original. That was the weakness that my IT friend was able to exploit. We got the files back, but filenames and metadata was lost. So now I have a couple of hundred thousand files without names. The only way to find out what a file is, is to open it and then rename the file. I gave up on that about 11 months ago. Tedious.

Why do I mention this now?

Because McAffee is telling me that my year subscription is up, and is asking me to renew. They have a money back guarantee that, if you get a virus and they cannot retrieve your data, they will refund you the purchase price of their software.

Being a gambler, I can tell you that this is a sucker’s bet. The overwhelming majority of their users won’t get a virus, thus making you the loser of the bet and McAfee the winner. Those who DO get the virus must send the computer in to be ‘cleaned’ and data recovered, if possible. Those who can’t be cleaned, McAfee ‘loses’ the bet, and you ‘win’ your money back- a push.

This virus software is not very good, and their “guarantee” is a sucker’s bet- a gimmick designed to take your money.

People who have read this post: 947
By Divemedic, ago