Carpet Bomberz Inc.

It happens so often and ends up being blogged that I’ve tagged this phenomenon freetousewonders. I open a new browser tab in Chrome and the… 560 more words

Mimetically Yours, Weird Buildings — CogDogBlog

Mimesis: that old saw from my class in Aesthetics circa 1992

When I was in college I had to take a class in Aesthetics to finish out a degree program. It was interesting, one of those type classes that people “avoid” because it requires reading and writing, and occasional trips to the library to look something up. Suffice to say, it introduced me to the idea in philosophy of “Mimesis” and it’s role in art. For thousands of years philosophy has attempted to define why we do art, the motivations, etc. And as you look WAAAaay back, it’s all about representation, rooted in experience, but not always “photographically realistic”. The fantasy, the dream also are “experience” albeit, more fleeting, cursory less rooted than the “world” as we would name it. So what made me think of this was the old picture I remember bumping into, a drawing in fact made by Robert Venturi for his book: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. In that book appears an argument that “Roadside America” type buildings, so-called “Mimetic Architecture” is in many ways tied to the “International Style” or “Modern Architecture” as extolled and practiced starting in Europe around the beginning of the 20th Century. A building as an “object” let’s say. Here’s Venturi’s drawing:

Venturi wanted to draw the comparison to say Modern Architecture or the International Style treated buildings as “objects”, almost like sculpture. Representative of “something else” other than it’s physical, actual function as a building. And the spectacle of this is made more apparent when you hastily throw them up together with an equals sign in between. This was meant to convey Venturi’s beliefs regarding the disconnect between Modern Architecture and “what it does”. And further to emphasize how big a disconnect Modern Architecture tried to achieve with its past history to pursue the original and novel as an end in itself. This is what I really think of when I see Mimetic Architecture, duck buildings and Roadside America. Novel and new might get people to stop and look. But you also have to ask yourself, “what does it do?” I think that’s the real benefit to the ideas Venturi, Scott-Brown & Associates brought to the table when they first started getting commissions and when Robert and Denise started teaching at University. It’s valuable even today.

So Fox decided to queue up last years race (2019) and obscure the fact that the real race hasn’t even started yet. We’re watching last year’s 2019 race on broadcast TV. This sux. How are they going to get the season opener done? Are they running it tomorrow? seems like they shoulda started the race early, say 1:30 instead of waiting for all the pomp/circumstance of POTUS coming up from Mar-A-Lago to insert himself and Melania into the 2020 Daytona 500. That guy has been Prez for 4 years now and NEVER attended a race. LAME!

The search service built into Windows 10 appears to be malfunctioning. Microsoft has yet to issue a fix.

Another Windows 10 bug: Now it seems the search bar doesn’t work – CNET — CNET News

Funny thing happened at work today for me. At ~10:00am EST my Search Box stopped working. The thing MS got me addicted to, looking things up no matter what, well that broke utterly. Meaning, I no longer know where to look for and find the CMD command. Instead I just type right into the Search Box and MS presents it too me. Asks me “Do you want to launch it as Administrator?” etc. But that came to a screeching halt when all I could see, all I was presented was a big old dumb grey rectangle with no links, no recent activities, no “suggestions”. Worse yet as you typed into the box, NOTHING happened.

I restarted. Nothing happened. I ran full runs of System Checker (sfc /scannow) also the DISM.exe /restorehealth. NOTHING fixed it. In desperation I started looking up the problem, seeing everything from what I had already done (reboot/sfc/dism) or worse suggestions like editing the registry. But fact is, I couldn’t do that simple step because I don’t know the path to the regedit.exe command anymore because Windows Search was supposed to remember that FOR ME!

And now I’m reading this article from C|NET and find out it was a “thing”. Eventually I got clued into the fact SearchUI.exe was suspended for some unknown reason. I went to Task Manager and stopped it, then killed the whole process tree. That force it to restart, but the SearchUI went right back into “suspended” mode. Then all the time I spent (30 minutes or more) passed without anything working and magically SearchUI.exe went into start mode around 10:30AM EST and it all just came back on it’s own miraculously. So weird, so bizarre, and I thought I was the only one experiencing the problem today. Thanks CNET!

This just in,…
And just now I read this little missive in The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/5/21124204/windows-search-down-blank-results-issues-microsoft-bing-outage. It appears the issue started at 8AM EST (before I arrived at work) and cleared up when MS remediated the issue by 11:35AM. My issues seemed to clear up at 10:30. So I guess I got lucky. But I was certain I broke my OS and was getting ready to backup data and re-install the OS. Man that’s frightening to see happen without anything so much as a MS announcement to sit and wait.

The police service in Scotland has posted a video showing a Cellebrite device in action, accessing text messages, photos, and calendar entries from a smartphone. The same device is used by many US law enforcement agencies… more… The post Police video shows Cellebrite device in action, says it ‘minimizes intrusion’ appeared first on 9to5Mac.

Police video shows Cellebrite device in action, says it ‘minimizes intrusion’ — 9to5Mac

Cellebrite and GrayKey are the 2 Eight hundred pound gorillas in the room when it comes to Law Enforcement absconding and cracking mobile devices. Between this and facial recognition and a multitude of other persistent strongly identifying characteristics, there are no more secrets. And know this too, what’s good for the private citizen is equally good for law enforcement. Who watches teh Watchmenz? These same “tools” and toyz will fall into the hands of non-Law Enforcement entities and actors and eventually the contracted security companies (think Booz Allen Hamilton et. al.) Just because you can create a product that breaks into mobile devices doesn’t mean you should, even if the entrepreneurial opportunity outweigh possible negative outcomes. It’s not a suitcase nuclear weapon, but that’s not an absolute. it’s a sliding scale on the spectrum of weapons. And as police depts. get more militarized, Cellebrite and GrayKey will find their way further down into your local constabulary.