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			<h1>Verizon is invading my mother&apos;s privacy again.</h1>
			<p>Day 00596: Sunday, 2016 October 23</p>
		</header>
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2016/10/23.jpg" alt="Red gazebo" class="weblog-header-image" width="811" height="480" />
<p>
	Current countdowns:
</p>
<ul>
	<li>249 scheme-specific <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr>-parsing classes to write and add to <a href="https://git.vola7ileiax4ueow.onion/y.st./include.d/releases">include.d</a></li>
	<li>1 free elective left in my associate degree program</li>
	<li>4 free electives left in my bachelor degree program</li>
</ul>
<p>
	Website cleanup &quot;to do&quot; list:
</p>
<ul>
<li>Remove numeric <abbr title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</abbr> entities; these pages are written in Unicode, non-<abbr title="American Standard Code for Information Interchange">ASCII</abbr> characters can be used directly.</li>
<li>Find and tag any references to <abbr title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</abbr> tags in my journal pages.</li>
<li>Find and tag any references to functions, classes, and constants that can be <code>grep</code>ed for; look for backslashes and empty parentheses.</li>
</ul>
<p>
	<a href="https://marcwithac.bandcamp.com/">Marc With a C</a> seems to have written a few days ago, but I missed it because I&apos;m not as active on Twitter as I could be.
	My copy of CARK has been mailed, and has some stickers thrown in.
	That&apos;s an interesting bonus, I&apos;m curious to see what those look like.
	Furthermore, due to the recent hurricane, things didn&apos;t fall into place with the cassette sale as planned.
	Some people couldn&apos;t make it into the shop the day before the sale, which Marc says hindered the email sales.
	However, the remainder of the unsold tapes will be put on sale in December.
	They won&apos;t go to waste! Assuming that this isn&apos;t another telephone-based sale, I&apos;ll try to spread the word when that happens.
</p>
<p>
	I really, really, really should have worked on schoolwork today, but I didn&apos;t.
	I started the day writing yesterday&apos;s journal entry, due to having gotten home late this morning and not having time to write it yesterday, and I was going to work on my homework after that.
	I&apos;m still feeling a bit mentally tired though from the lack of sleep yesterday, so I instead went with my mother to run errands.
</p>
<p>
	First, we went to an estate sale.
	They didn&apos;t really have anything interesting there, but it was in a nice-looking neighborhood.
	Several large trees dotted the area, so the houses had been there a while.
</p>
<p>
	Next, we went to the Verizon store, which seemed to be our main errand.
	My mother gets some discount on their Verizon service for being an educator.
	Even so, their Verizon bill is through the roof and they should really consider again switching to a better service provider.
	However, they just locked themself in with another two-year contract, so they won&apos;t be switching any time soon.
	In any case, my mother&apos;s had this discount for a while, but Verizon was demanding that my mother reverify their status as a schoolteacher.
	They wanted my mother to upload a photograph or scan of their pay stub.
	Of course, my mother didn&apos;t want to do this because the pay stub has so much personal information.
	That&apos;s the thing with postpaid mobile service though.
	You pay them a higher fee than prepaid customers pay, and you do it for the privilege of handing over your personal information that they don&apos;t honestly need.
	The representative online said that my mother could black out all the numbers first, but when my mother asked to submit only the part of the pay stub that verified who their employer is, the representative insisted that that wouldn&apos;t be acceptable.
	My mother didn&apos;t want an image of their pay stub on file, so we went into the Verizon store in person to handle verification there.
	The person at the door greeted us and asked what we needed help with, then we waited for about half an hour.
	At that point, that same person that had checked us in came to help, but said that the only way that the verification process could be completed was online.
	Why couldn&apos;t they have told us that when they checked us in? It seemed like the person had just blown us off as well.
	Once out the door, I asked if they had thought that we&apos;d been blown off as well, and they&apos;d been thinking the same thing, so we headed back in to complain.
	It turns out that they have no complaint-handling system though, which seems very strange.
	How do you keep customers if you won&apos;t hear them out when there&apos;s a problem? After a bit, the manager was brought in, and they handled the verification process.
	My mother was annoyed that they refused to work on the situation before seeing photo <abbr title="identification">ID</abbr>, as they&apos;d left theirs out in the van and didn&apos;t want to go back out for it, then when the manager took care of the situation, they did so by photographing the pay stub and sending it in online.
	In other words, visiting the store in-person hadn&apos;t accomplished anything over completing the process online themself.
	I swear, mobile carriers walk all over postpaid customers, demanding personal information that they have no business having.
	Why does anyone pay more for such unacceptable treatment?
</p>
<p>
	Next, we went to a store to pick up balloons.
	My mother&apos;s been granted a $100 <abbr title="United States Dollars">USD</abbr> budget for they year by their employer to use for school supplies.
	They can use it for whatever school-related expense that they want to, provided that they keep and submit the receipts.
	Apparently, they&apos;re working on a butterfly unit with their students, and are going to have them work on papier-mâché butterflies.
	These long balloons that they bought, which are the kind you&apos;d see used for balloon modeling, will serve as the bodies of the butterflies.
</p>
<p>
	We stopped for a bite to eat at Carl&apos;s Junior, where we each got an order of their nachos sans meat (mine also without dairy products).
	They&apos;ve made the orders about a third of the size that they were until recently though, but the price hasn&apos;t changed! That&apos;s a rip-off.
	On the positive side though, the bottoms of their new containers are labeled as compostable.
	I&apos;m always happy to see progress made in a more environmentally-friendly direction!
</p>
<p>
	Next, we stopped at the laundromat to dry my mother&apos;s laundry from yesterday.
	I hung my clothing up to dry at home, but my mother doesn&apos;t have that luxury.
	They need to look nice for work, but hang drying leads to wrinkles in the fabric.
	I brought my laptop along on our errands in case there was time to work on my reading assignments while we were there, but I didn&apos;t end up doing that.
</p>
<p>
	Lastly, we headed to the storage unit to look for a stockpile of wire coat hangers that my mother has.
	We couldn&apos;t find them there, but we did remove several other items from the unit which my mother will take to their classroom tomorrow.
	Some of it doesn&apos;t exactly belong there, but it&apos;s school-related, and removing it from the storage unit frees up space to get other things in.
</p>
<p>
	We stopped by home, but only briefly.
	We headed back out, this time, to the forest.
	My mother feels better if they get some time in the woods, so we went out to gather bullet shells.
	I didn&apos;t really feel like gathering shells though, so I mostly slacked off on that.
	Instead, I looked at plants and fungi.
	I ended up finding three chanterelles, which my mother harvested.
	We later took a walk down a very nice trail, mostly visible only by the lack of moss.
	The forest floor in that area was mostly covered in the stuff, with several mushrooms and a few ferns scattered throughout, but the trail was well-traversed enough to have killed the moss.
	Strange-looking mushrooms abounded, though they weren&apos;t very photogenic.
	Being a bright white against a darker background, the camera interpreted the mushroom as a source of light and overcorrected in all the wrong ways.
</p>
<p>
	My GT-i9300 used to have the option to allow access to the camera from the lock screen.
	As I really didn&apos;t use the camera much, I disabled that.
	However, I&apos;ve been using my GT-i9100M&apos;s camera daily over the past two weeks, so I&apos;ve been trying to enable that feature on this device.
	It was enabled by default on the GT-i9300, and the setting for it seems to also be enabled by default on the GT-i9100M.
	However, the camera isn&apos;t accessible from the device&apos;s lock screen.
	I still haven&apos;t managed to figure out how to fix this, but while going through various settings, I found a new camera mode that might be useful to me.
	I&apos;ve been scaling the photographs that I take, because they&apos;re far too large to post on this minimalistic website, then cropping them, because I prefer an aspect ratio with greater width.
	My device&apos;s camera has a <abbr title="Video Graphics Array">VGA</abbr> mode though, that eliminates the need for scaling.
	The images are already nice and small! Even better, <abbr title="Wide Video Graphics Array">WVGA</abbr> mode likewise produces small photographs, but also provides a nice, wide view.
	I&apos;ll try out <abbr title="Wide Video Graphics Array">WVGA</abbr> mode tomorrow and see how well that works for me.
	I&apos;m hoping that this will not only make things easier, but will also provide a standard size and aspect ratio for my photographs.
	Initially, I started cropping my images due to a mistake that I made.
	I held my camera in the wrong orientation all day on the <a href="/en/weblog/2016/10-October/09.xhtml">ninth</a>, when I started this daily photography thing.
	I had stupidly assumed that my camera took square photographs and I wanted them all to be right-side up.
	That resulted in images that were taller than they were wide though, which I really didn&apos;t like for use as webpage header images.
	I scales the image that I chose to use that day both to reduce blur and to reduce file size, then cropped it to look more like a landscape-orientation photograph.
	As I was cropping the image, I had to chose an aspect ratio.
	I could have calculated what the original aspect ratio was, then apply it in the other direction, but instead, I just chose a simple aspect ratio that looked nice: 3:2.
	I applied this same ratio to my later photographs through cropping, despite having held my camera correctly when taking them.
	This was partially for consistency, but partially because the original aspect ratio, while not square, was too close to being square.
	I liked the aspect ratio of that first photograph that I&apos;d cropped.
	This new camera mode though provides an even-wider aspect ratio, so it continues to look nice, and I&apos;m hoping that the smaller size will likewise automatically reduce blur.
</p>
<p>
	Speaking of photographs, my mother had me copy their photographs from their iPhone to their desktop computer.
	Oddly enough, the device appears to communicate using <abbr title="Media Transfer Protocol">MTP</abbr>, but I think that it&apos;s some sort of nonstandard version of <abbr title="Media Transfer Protocol">MTP</abbr>.
	The device refuses to send the photographs to my laptop, though I think that it sends them all to my mother&apos;s desktop.
	Furthermore, the device presents a greatly-different directory structure to my laptop than their desktop.
	On their desktop, only the <code>/DCIM/</code> directory is visible.
	This directory contains four subdirectories, all of which contain photographs.
	However, my laptop sees things very differently.
	For starters, I can see a lot more than just the <code>/DCIM/</code> directory.
	It looks like a regular home directory on a desktop machine or a Replicant/Android device.
	For that reason, I think that my laptop is seeing a more clear view of what&apos;s really on there.
	Secondly, the <code>/DCIM/</code> directory contains many more directories than just the four containing photographs.
	Most of these are empty.
	Strangest of all though, the names of the subdirectories that contain the photographs as seen by my mother&apos;s desktop machine refer to directories that on my laptop, appear to be empty directories.
	Instead, different;y-named subdirectories appear to contain the photographs.
	I&apos;m not sure what sort of nonsense the iPhone is pulling, but it&apos;s probably something stupid that Apple came up with to try to be &quot;better&quot; at the cost of compatibility.
</p>
<p>
	While writing up this journal entry, I realized that going back to work at the pizza place isn&apos;t as simple as it sounds.
	Even if they hire me, they have required uniforms, and they only give you two.
	I don&apos;t have a working washing machine! I&apos;ll need to go to the expensive laundromat every two days if I get this job back.
	I&apos;ll have to see what my mother thinks about that situation tomorrow.
</p>
<p>
	My <a href="/a/canary.txt">canary</a> still sings the tune of freedom and transparency.
</p>
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			Copyright © 2016 Alex Yst;
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			If for some reason you would prefer to modify and/or distribute this document under other free copyleft terms, please ask me via email.
			My address is in the source comments near the top of this document.
			This license also applies to embedded content such as images.
			For more information on that, see <a href="/en/a/licensing.xhtml">licensing</a>.
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