The Night Before Christmas

Okay, it’s actually late afternoon and I’m just relaxing.

This post is going to be a stream of consciousness kind of post to keep me from watching videos all day long.

The Bitlocker Drama

I finally got the Python code and Jupyter notebook loaded onto this machine. This drama began maybe 5 or 6 weeks ago when one night, around 9 or 10 pm, I remembered I needed to do something before I went to bed.

So, I logged onto my old machine that was slowly dying and got a scary screen asking me for bitlocker keys to the machine.

That was a heart stopping moment as it felt like something had gone seriously wrong.

Research on the new machine indicated that either someone hacked my machine or something went wrong with an update on my machine. Regardless, I needed to find the bitlocker numbers for my machine.

Fortunately, I was able to retrieve it. It’s 8 sets of 6 digit numbers separated by hyphens, making in total 48 digits to enter.

I entered the bitlocker key and thought I was done, but no, my machine then asked for the password to my router. But instead of saying password, it said something else which was confusing. I gave it my network password and my machine proceeded to do some diagnostics.

Except it was having trouble connecting somewhere to do diagnostics.

This might have been around 11 pm. I persisted with letting the machine continue to access whatever diagnostic site until 3 or 4 am in morning when I finally decided to call it quits.

That was my drama with the bitlocker: my old machine was still out of commission. Fortunately, I had already backed up most of my files in the Cloud.

A few days later after that drama, some video showed up on my feed discussing about bitlockers. It turns out that I was not the only one to encounter that problem. Apparently, the bitlocker thing was going around and was due to an update snafu.

Internet down

The following week I woke up one morning to find the internet down. This was the week of Thanksgiving. So just before the busy Black Friday shopping ordeal.

By 10 am that morning, I decided to go where there was a public internet available so I could check to see if I got any messages from my ISP about outages.

When I arrived there, it turned out the internet was down also; that public internet was on the same ISP as I was, so I then knew that the outage was not just me, but area-wide.

I felt better but my service told me that the outage was due to an update and it would be a couple of hours before they find a resolution.

Got home and found my internet starting to blink, signaling the beginning of coming back online.

I finally got it back on by evening.

Lost a folder filled with posts

My next drama was losing a folder while I was trying to do a “file-save as”. How I “delete” a folder while doing file-save as, I don’t know. The folder was a large folder and contained templates for LinkedIn image posts, sliders, topic ideas, and historical linkedin posts.

I checked my Cloud to see if I could find the folder there. Nope.

Then I checked the recycle bins, both on the Cloud and on the desktop. Nope.

Now I’m starting to get worried. I hit upon the idea of doing a search using the task bar for the folder and it showed me a directory path. Hmmm, okay, it is somewhere out there. I clicked on it to open it up before permanently losing the folder.

And I began to copy over the files back to where they should be.

By the way, this was about 9 or 10 pm, just when I was wrapping up my image creation for the night. I stayed up until maybe 3:30 am hoping to see the saving all the way through the end.

But nope, by 3:30 am, the machine was still copying over the files. I had to quit then. I left the machine on in hopes that it would finish the task while I slept.

It finally finished maybe around 11 am or noon.

Sketches app crashed

The next week, I was working on developing some images that I could use later. I had done about one hour and a half set of work, making huge progress on developing a set of images. When I went back to continue developing more images, the app crashed.

Oops. I might have lost an hour and half worth of work.

I had to shut that process down and do something else in the hopes that the app will fix itself.

Later that day, I was able to open the app and those pictures were still there. The app must have successfully saved them before crashing.

Back to my old machine

Meanwhile 5 or 6 weeks pass by and I still hadn’t revisited my old machine that had that bitlocker issue. I hadn’t checked to see if I could turn it back on.

It was time to see if maybe perchance Microsoft or whoever went back in and fixed whatever update it did.

I turned on the machine and…it slowly came back on. Microsoft had fixed it in the interim!

The machine ran slowly but it was back in business.

So, it was time to copy over my python files that were not backed up in the Clouds, so I spent Monday saving what I thought were the key files needed to the Cloud.

Yesterday was to copy them down to my new machine.

And today was to figure out why I could not get the Jupyter notebook icon to be saved to the task bar.

Thank goodness for AI now. It definitely helped me understand what I needed to do. Unfortunately for the Jupyter notebook, I really needed to do an install, not copy over files, due to registry purposes and other software necessities.

My final thing to do is to test that my python program can actually run. I was able to open up the Jupyter notebook, but I really didn’t try running the program. I’m hoping that opening the notebook meant the program still works.

So those are my technology problems I faced over the last few weeks.

Last week surprising article drop from Vanity Fair

There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world that I don’t really remark upon mainly because I’m trying to keep the topics topically to this website.

But there are stuff going on and it is the holiday season now.

The Vanity Fair article was the one about Susie Wiles and her opinion about residents in the White House. I couldn’t tell if she was brave or she was just injudicious.

Frankly, I couldn’t see her as sloppy though.

After a period of time and seeing she didn’t suffer any damage, especially from him, I decided that she knew exactly how to go about stating her opinions without affecting her position.

You see, except for one line, she really didn’t say much about him. And that one line must have been something they had discussed before.

But the others, she had some opinions but I don’t think she will suffer because they can’t do anything about it. They don’t have the following as he does.

Besides, I suspect that he might have seen all of the media discussions surrounding her comments to Vanity Fair was entertaining. He probably enjoyed seeing his acolytes being skewered by Susie.

It was kind of entertaining reading the media commentators “oohing” and “aahing” over her comments and wondering what would happen next.

The pictures were even more astonishing because they were very, very unflattering. There were close ups that were right in your face with all of the sunspots, pores and wrinkles. Marco Rubio with his sunspots looked down to the side in the close up, looking very ashamed or guilty. JD Vance, who also had surprising sunspots, had this confused look. Susie Wiles looked wild or some kind of crazy women.

Stephen Miller had one half of his face bathed in shadow and the other side lighted. The thing I saw that nobody else mentioned was that the eye in the shadow was wide opened like some kind of empty window and the other eye in the light was squinting. It was a weird effect.

And Caroline Levitt had very visible lip filler injections around the outer rim of her lips. That was shocking.

So, did the photographer get in trouble for the unflattery photos?

No, and I think that is because the uncompromising look was not on the president but on his acolytes. As long as you don’t affect the president, you should be okay. Because it is not about him, it is about them.

Again, it might have been a form of entertainment as it was for me.

Epstein files

Oh boy, some tranches were released and they suggest a potentially ugly picture.

Now remember, what was released may have been fake and have not gone through a test in the court system to prove the validity of those accusing pictures and emails.

But they are highly suggestive and do paint a damaging picture for the president. Combine that with his behavior surrounding the release, the possible story isn’t good. I think there would not be such intense scrutiny if he had just released the documents.

We have to wait for the court of opinion, or the justice courts, or the Congress body test the validity of the documents before we can deliver our opinion of what they mean.

It looks like those documents will be slowly dripping out.

I will withhold judgement until some kind of trial takes place.

Update 12.28.2025 Epstein Files

Okay, so…I’ve been binge watching the news of various topics, one of which was the Epstein files. What I’m hearing is just sewage!

The QAnon people were kind of right: there was a swamp somewhere but probably not in the government but maybe with a bunch of rich guys.

At this point, everything is just alleged, nothing proven. For instance, those intake/tip calls are best seen as something to be investigated. I only know of two of these tips and neither had supporting documentation of any kind of investigation. It doesn’t mean the FBI did not investigate; it just means that the investigative report did not go out along with the intake tip calls.

The big new takeaway I’m getting is that there is speculation that there were 10 co-conspirators, 3 of whose names were NOT redacted. So, they were Ghislaine Maxwell, who is already in jail and is a known factor, a Jean-Luc Brunel, a modeling agent who committed suicide, and a billionaire who co-founded The Limited (maybe Victoria Secret). If I remember correctly, it has been speculated that this billionaire is the initial source of Epstein’s wealth.

The question has become: why were the other 7 names redacted? The Epstein Transparency Act said that the only names to be redacted were the victims. Or something like that.

But all in all, the stuff coming out is just sewage.

And we’re supposed to get more files out.