i’m trying to make the title say “the date of dn” because “dn”, upside down, is “up”… but i can’t find a unicode “d” that will stay a lower-case “d” when the rest of the title is forced upper-case… and, naturally, i don’t remember the html and/or css to make it ignore the forced capitalisation for the title, so i’m giving up. the title of the post is “THE DATE OF dn” and you can safely ignore whatever it says on the actual title line, this time. 😕

i just enabled three PHP modules that have not been enabled previously. as far as i can tell, they don’t make any difference, but having them enabled makes the annoying reminder in the wordpress admin section go away.

since the 2nd of july i have collected 26 dated folders, with anywhere from one to ten recordings, each, of me calling so-called “helpdesk” numbers — mostly claiming to come from micro$oft (naturally), norton (naturally), paypal (naturally), apple, amazon, fedex, or geek-squad — and saying “i wonder if you can tell me what it feels like to steal money from people?” probably 90% to 95% of the people on the other end have indian accents, but they give suspiciously american sounding names like “max” or “mike” or “jason” or “mary” or “sarah”, and about half of them are OBVIOUSLY in a “call center”, somewhere, where i can hear a whole bunch of other people getting scammed in a whole bunch of other languages. about a third of them respond by saying that they’re not stealing money from people, trying to convince me that they are, actually, representatives of a legitimate business, another third of them just hang up with no further comment, and the final third of them say things like “oh my god”, or “shut the fuck up, motherfucker”, or “i’ll fuck your wife”, or “suck your dad’s cock”, or “oldie, black, nigger from nigeria, hanging ass” or other such racist and seemingly offensive things — — which a REAL representative of a REAL legitimate company would lose their job INSTANTANEOUSLY for uttering over the telephone to a customer (and, honestly, i could care less what any of them say, because THEY ARE SCAMMERS, which is worse 😒)… but every now and then, i’ll ask the question and their response will be “fantastic” or “wonderful”, which makes me wonder what kind of interview actually passes these people.

moe went to chicago yesterday, and returns tomorrow, meaning that i have to take care of the dogs and the birds, as well as my usual nursery, laundry, and groceries for three days.

i replaced the GFI outlet under the deck with a non-GFI model, and, so far, the shed has NOT blown any circuits, whereas, before i replaced it, i had to reset the circuit no less than three times in five days. whether this is a good thing or not remains to be seen, but if it is, it has saved me a bunch of money in the short term, and if it isn’t, then the shed is far enough away from our house that any resulting fire probably won’t harm anything of importance.