Microwave Ovens, The Internet, Automated Attendants, and Bluetooth

Automated Attendants and the Internet

I have a well-known cable/ISP provider. About 3.5 years back when I moved back to Maryland, I ran into too many interruptions in Internet and/or cable issues which could not be explained by infrequent area outages. I recall back then they explained I was experiencing a cable issue, they did some temp fix and promised to replace the (outside) cable. To this day, I'm not sure that ever happened. I seem to recall their original partner to lay down the replacement had some sort of issue, and the provider never followed up. And when I've inquired about it since, the analysts will not comment.

And I've had spotty service issues on and off since then. Now I really don't watch that much TV, mostly things like "Blue Bloods", live football or baseball, maybe some pro wrestling. But over the last 6 months or so, it seemed after the service did its overnight reset, I would lose my connection on the cable cable box probably once or twice a week. It would eventually reconnect, often after I did the recommended provider suggestion of disconnecting the cable box, pausing for 30 seconds, and reconnecting the power; on occasion it took up to hours to get reconnected. The Internet interruptions weren't quite as bad; I have a Google Hub at my living room computer table, which is my canary in the coal mine. I'll catch it in my peripheral vision switching from a screensaver to a screen where it's lost its connection and cycling to reconnect. (The spooky thing is I experienced one of these glitches seconds after writing the above.) Now weather-related outages are longer but rarer.

So I was regularly calling my cable service with its annoying automated attendant system; it's somewhat sophisticated because it can detect issues with signals getting through to my cable box or modem respectively. At least the interface has limited voice recognition, so you don't have a press a digit on your phone, and it's able to recognize me from my registered cellphone number. But if it detects signals having difficulty getting through, it'll prescribe the reboot regimen earlier discussed and/or remind me to check cable connections, etc. And it'll basically drop the call saying that a live support agent couldn't help me until I did the above; you can argue, "Dude, I did that before I called" to no avail. Sometimes it would promise to text/call 10 minutes later (half the time it never happened); other times it might text me after I finally got a connection, saying "I see you're fixed" as if the provider was taking credit for the fix! Usually though I would call back and finally the attendant would let me through to tech support.

About 2-3 months back I got connected to sort of a sales guy rather than a techie, and when I explained the frequency of my issues, he said, "Dude! Let me schedule a technician; this isn't normal." The technician came days later and said, "Dude! Your outside cable sucks! Let me arrange to get it replaced; they'll be in touch." This was back in October. I got one text to ensure someone would be in my apartment when they replaced the cable and then nothing. So for weeks after the cable was supposedly replaced, I continued having the same old issues; I kept saying "What happened to the cable replacement? Nothing's changed." No comment; I can't even get closure if the cable guys ever came. I finally get a commitment for another technician visit and to bring a replacement cable with him.

For some reason some provider manager (?) started calling me and screaming at me about how it was my responsibility for letting the cable guys leave without getting the job done. Seriously, dude? I never saw or talked to them; I never knew if they ever showed up. I never got an installation date; they don't report to me--they report to you. Long story short, the guy arrives and eventually tells me yes they had installed a fresh cable in October, but they had left a filter in an end of the cable; he said when he checked, his instrument showed all red, meaning little if any signal was getting to me. So he extracted the filter. The question is how they finished laying and attaching the cable without checking on signals getting through the cable effectively.

In the few weeks since then, no major interruptions overnight--I think I was up when the daily reset happened last weekend, and the cable reconnected within a minute or two, which I suspect is normal. Since then just a minor temporary glitch or two, which for all I know is some minor area maintenance, as discussed above.

Alexa, Microwave 3 Minutes

I recently tweeted I never imagined 10 years years ago I would be troubleshooting why my microwave oven wasn't connecting to my WIFI. A couple of months back my old microwave oven finally died. I was well aware as a long-time Amazon customer, they had introduced a budget microwave model (about $60) that came integrated with its infamous Alexa voice recognition interface.

It was surprisingly easy to set the microwave up through the Alexa app assuming you've connected other Amazon devices, e.g., my Amazon Echo Dot. And if you've dealt with traditional microwaves and having to reset the clock after a power blip, the microwave sets the clock when it connects to your WIFI. I  haven't even used the Ask Alexa button. Almost immediately I tested the integration by "Alexa, microwave 1 minute" loud enough for my Echo Dot to hear. Now that's not complicated (some microwaves do that as fast as touching the 1 button), but Alexa could handle "Defrost 1-lb. of frozen sausages" without my having to adjust power et al. I could have sworn I heard someone say Alexa can handle commands like "Warm my coffee"; Alexa seemed confused when I tried to say that, but I could easily give her a command to "microwave X seconds".

Until one day I gave Alexa a microwave command and after a long pause, it come back and told me it couldn't connect to the microwave. There were other indications somehow it had gotten disconnected from WIFI, e.g., the clock was off. Besides the typical timer set for microwave on high, it was not at all clear how to manually do anything beyond that like setting the clock, defrosting, etc. And trying to tweak the current microwave in the Alexa app I found to be frustrating. Online resources at Amazon weren't that helpful other than instructions on resetting the microwave. Long story short, eliminating the existing microwave device in the Alexa app in and creating a new microwave device, in conjunction with a reset seemed to resolve the issue. 

Bluetooth and Windows

I suspected that my old workhorse 2016 laptop that I'm finally transitioning from (long story, but migrating my applications is a hassle, but still the newer laptop has more memory and storage). I knew the new one did have Bluetooth capabilities. Still I was confused by the Windows 10 Bluetooth presentation on the workhorse; I could try (unsuccessfully) to add the new Bluetooth keyboard I bought for the new laptop on my workhorse. The point that confused me was that Windows seemed to allow me to try to add a Bluetooth device in Settings, even if the laptop didn't have Bluetooth capabilities. Why didn't it provide a visual cue, e.g., a grayed-out Bluetooth interface with inputs disabled?

When I looked at the new laptop's Settings, I noticed its Bluetooth settings includes a toggle switch for Bluetooth, while the older laptop doesn't. You really need to know if you don't have a toggle switch, you don't have Bluetooth functionality. I think it would be more usable if the Bluetooth settings had a more consistent appearance and used a visual cue to identify whether Bluetooth is supported. (It does--for Bluetooth-capable laptops.) 

Running a Cygwin Bash Script in Task Scheduler

 Familiar readers may know the context. I have a textfile full of famous/other quotations, one per line. I deployed a freeware product Qliner Quotes which provided a way of generating HTML/other format signature formats which could be used to select a random quote from my custom or other quote files snd to attach the filled boilerplate to the bottom of my Thunderbird emails. I later basically wrote a bash script which could separately fill the html boilerplate file and also would read my latest quote html file into a browser tab and use it to headline my latest daily miscellany political post. I ran the bash script in Windows' Ubuntu interface, later putting it into Windows Task Scheduler to generate a new quote html file every 30 minutes. No major problems but it helped set my expectations into performance.

I'm not sure exactly what happened but probably recent Windows patching caused a functionality problem. I know there was a recent Linux-related patch, but my issue predated that implementation. I recall 2 or 3 weeks back updating my Ubuntu stack. So my scheduled task was no longer working, and I decided to install or reinstall cygwin. (I may have last reinstalled cygwin on an earlier PC.) There were various practical uses for using cygwin, like dealing with naming conflicts in merging file directories, attaching timestamps to certain files, etc. Yes, there are freeware renaming utilities, etc.; Windows has powershell, etc. But there are things I can do in seconds based on writing Unix scripts for over 20 years. I had to slightly tweak the bash script I had written for Windows linux subsystem but no major effort.

What I didn't expect were issues implementing my cygwin shell script into Task Scheduler. There were minor tweaks (like dealing with embedded spaces in directory paths, the arguments to the bash command to use, i.e., -c -l, specification of the target script reference, etc.) But one of the most irritating things was how long it took for the job to run out of the scheduler, e.g., up to an hour or longer vs. several seconds in a regular bash session. While I could launch a bash session if and when I wanted to rotate quotation html files used in emails and blog posts, I don't recall running into these kinds of delays when I was running a similar script in Task Scheduler with the Windows integration of Ubuntu, and I didn't want to  launch a session just to run a script.

I finally got the performance issue resolved using a tip from the third source below: export the task xml file from Task Scheduler, edit the priority from 7 to 4, drop the old task in Scheduler, and import the edited xml file back into Task Scheduler. Now if and when my bash session launches every half hour, the session completes within several seconds.

Note: I found the following sources useful in troubleshooting my issues: 1, 2, 3.

Robocopy and a Weird Quirk in its Utilization

 As a professional (Oracle) database administrator, I'm obsessed with backups, including for my own personal computing. I have a strategy that includes backups across applications (e.g., a permanent email repository for my email client), multiple PC's/external drives/flash drives and multiple cloud storage vendors. Some might call me a digital packrat of sorts. But it does have its positive sides; I occasionally needed to pull up an old proof of payment, my updated Security+ certificate, a software utility I can no longer find online, etc. I have a collection of pdfs, certain video clips, political cartoons, embedded charts, etc. used in my signature political blog.

So frequently I have a cloud source directory including things like email files/folders, podcasts, etc. And usually I want to synchronize these files. Obviously I want to propagate the latest version of my resume and workfiles, emails, etc. On the other hand, once I've heard one of the podcast clips and delete it (I sometimes save a noteworthy episode, but that's the exception), I no longer need the old backup copy.

There are synchronization software products (I still have one or 2 installed on my workhorse PC), but occasionally I ran into usability issues (like the process getting hosed in the middle of a lengthy synchronization). I don't remember when exactly I learned about the Windows utility robocopy (certainly an improvement over my writing complicated XCOPY commands and the like), but I worked with some Windows administrators at work maybe 4 years back who heavily relied on it, and I've used it since then to some extent.

So suppose my C drive folder ccdrive is my source, and I want to synchronize it to my hard drive E. So I would enter a command like robocopy c:\ccdrive  e:\ccdrive /mir.

There is a complication to this strategy when you extend this process to flash drive. I have a large-capacity flash drive on which I've installed a large number of portable applications and various key backups in part designed to get a backup PC up to speed as quickly as possible in the event of a workhorse failure. Naturally, I want a backup of my flash drive, say F.

So I use a command like the one above to backup F: to e:\fdrive. Here's the counterintuitive thing: You can navigate to e:\fdrive just fine postcopy, but you may not see fdrive in Windows Explorer or other tools. You can fix this in two ways: (1) you can add  /A-:SH preventively to your flashdrive robocopy command, and/or (2) attrib -h -s -a  e:\fdrive. (You can find a related discussion here.)

A Quick Followup on Thunderbird 78 and OpenPGP

 I had not tested OpenPGP capabilities in my last post for a new account and suggested a followup. I'm doing so here.

Actually it's fairly straightforward. I clicked on my second gmail account (without a key pair ). I went to the options menu, clicked on OpenPGP key manager and selected Generate on the popup window. It was easy to submit the new key request. Interestingly, I'm not prompted for a passphrase.  (I am if I want to store a backup copy of my key files.) And then I write a new email choosing Security/Require Encryption to one of my other email accounts, and it's a breeze to read at the other end with the lovely padlock in the upper right.

I do believe that you would have had to install OpenPGP for Windows/Kleopatra. And there are still questions, e.g., why my new key didn't appear in Kleopatra although I seemed to be able to import it into Kleopatra?

Thunderbird 78, Enigmail and Secure Emails

 I migrated to Thunderbird after Microsoft desupported Outlook Express around the mid-2000's. Dealing with large email folders in Windows Mail tested my patience. I also didn't want to upgrade to licensed Outlook. So Thunderbird has been my primary desktop email client during the life of this blog, and it's no accident that multiple posts have touched on Thunderbird.

This week I upgraded to Thunderbird 78; upgrades are always risky since some of your add-ons may not be compatible with the new release. So, for example, a plug-in I was using to access at least a half dozen Google calendars isn't currently available. Of course, I can easily check Google Calendar on my desktop or Android, but it's convenient in my email client if I see, say, a grandniece is celebrating her birthday.

One thing I've looked at doing is improving my email security through PKI technology. Basically there are public/private key pairs that you can use to encrypt and/or establish nonrepudiation of an email source. For example, I can use your public key to encrypt an email so only you can view its content, e.g., by providing a correct passcode/PIN. I can also apply my private key to the email which you could use my public key to verify that I sent said email. (For a related discussion, see here.)

Government (especially military) personnel often use smart tokens/smartcards known as CAC's. (I've discussed CAC's in recent posts.) Basically there are PKI certificates which are paired with your passcode/PIN to work with secure emails, network access and/or endpoint devices, etc.,It's a form of multi-factor authentication: something you have (a token), something you know (the passcode).

In legacy Thunderbird one add-on, Enigmail, has provided an implementation of PKI through integration with OpenPGP (pretty good privacy). I muddled through its implementation. All of this is freeware, no out-of-pocket costs including limited-term certificates, Now I have a large number of email accounts for various purposes, but there are 3 external providers I primarily use (an arbitrary order: hormail/outlook.com, gmail, and yahoo). And so I configured key-pairs for each of the accounts, and tested the functionality among the accounts.

The biggest problem I have with the technology is almost no personal contact or other (business) emails deploy PKI. I use it so infrequently (mostly to check functionality after various upgrades), I'll sometimes have to check one of my password stores to recall my different passphrases for the accounts.

One of the key new features of Thunderbird 78 is native support for OpenPGP, which basically means Enigmail is redundant.  It's fairly straightforward to create a new keypair through OpenPGP Kleopatra, but I haven't come across any tutorials on implementing them in Thunderbird. As time permits, I'll try to add a fourth keypair and perhaps document it in a future post.

One nice thing in Thunderbird for past Enigmail users is they provide a migration option I believe in the options menu. At least the initial steps of the migration were fairly obvious; in my case, in the order yahoo, gmail and outlook.com. What completely threw me off was the fourth prompt, which prompted me for the password for a long randomized alphanumeric string. What the hell? Is it prompting me for some password I forgot to capture in configuring Enigmail a while back?

I noticed there \were 3 such prompts\, so the obvious inference is I had to reenter the same passwords. In what order? I guessed in the earlier migration sequence. Good guess. I'm not sure why the interface was designed that way, but it wasn't obvious.

It's fairly easy to toggle on the signature and/or encryption options (I think through a security menu in the compose window), not to mention adding your public key to the email. And when I opened the email at the target I noticed a nice padlock symbol in the message window.

The New Blogger Interface: Some First Impressions

I don't like being forced into an upgrade, especially where it violates expectations of past experience, makes things less convenient, etc. Back in the 1980's, Coca-Cola decided to change the formula of its classic soft drink to a sweeter version and would not allow the customers to choose their preferred option. Consumers rebelled, hoarding supplies of the legacy formula. To its credit, the company quickly relented, relabeling and producing "Coca Cola Classic". New Coke never did catch on and was eventually  dropped; decades later, the company dropped "classic" on packaging of its legacy formula.

Since starting work on this post, I've discussed some of the issues I have with the new Blogger interface in a segment of my signature political blog here. Ironically, one of my chief complaints, which has to do with Blogger's New Coke approach, doesn't apply to this blog; I do have a link for reverting back to Blogger Classic, although only temporarily, for this blog. I don't know why the older blog doesn't have the link. Many of my issues deal with toggling the compose and html mode. In my daily political "miscellany" post, I'll often include a number of embedded objects, primarily video clips. So typically I'll copy and  paste bits of html code from other sources into html mode. Now the classic mode of html did a beautiful job of maintaining separation of html code and preserving text lines between modes, so, for example, I could effectively insert a couple of lines between a video and the next (existing) section header while inside html mode and those blank lines would carry over to compose mode. There were various functional reasons for inserting blank lines in html mode, including it is an easier way to avoid carryover formatting while in compose mode, e.g., from headline format to normal text format. I could more easily adjust the post format without fiddling with formats in compose mode.

It also makes it easier to find and replace html code. An example is that I've sometimes thought I had copied a video's embedded code into clipboard for insertion (replacing the prior video's code) but the copy failed, and I ended up duplicating the video in the post, which I discovered after publishing the post. Under the classic html mode, it was fairly easy to locate the duplicated video code and replace it for updating the post.

Under the new html format, html code becomes more spaghetti-like in a collapsed format and you need to parse the html ball to make your changes. Spacing in draft mode doesn't map to the compose mode. For instance, my miscellany posts usually include a quote for the day and a daily older music video "interlude" at the bottom. But if the first thing I do after adding a quote is to add my music video of the day, I can separate the quote and video segments by 50 lines in html mode, but if I flip back to display mode, the music video section appears immediately after quote and I have to fuss with compose mode settings to insert intervening post segments. It adds to the busy work of writing and publishing a mixed-mode post. (It isn't as much of an issue in drafting a primarily text post like this one.)

One related aspect I didn't discuss earlier is that Blogger Classic would also provide a way of displaying an embedded video (especially Youtube clips). Now you simply see a gray blob. The (earlier) WYSIWYG compose display didn't work for all but most of the clips I would embed. There is a preview post mode (under both versions) which works to the same desired end. Occasionally I'll run into a clip where I can't see if it works until the post is actually posted. But obviously it was easier for me to verify the clip in a WYSIWYG compose view than to preview or publish the post.

There are other minor points, probably idiosyncratic to my blogging activity. One is the fact that there used to be a checkbox in the blog stats page where you could set a blocking cookie so your own pageviews wouldn't inflate statistics. (Technically, I would prefer that to be true by default without having to constantly check if the cookie is still there.) I'll often tweak a published post for various issues like typos or wording, and maybe up to a half-dozen edits (rare, but it happens) would significantly bias my reader stats. (Some of my blogs have 100 or more pageview posts, but say I probably average less than a dozen on my daily blog;) I have an informal preference to see at least double-digits, but "real" double-digits. I have probably dozens that have capped at 9, but I don't want to cheat just by viewing each post in question. So the point is, if there is a block cookie option in the new Blogger I haven't found it yet. I recall recently I had a delayed browser launch of my published post, and the browser eventually responded with 3 or 4 windows; those all factored into the post statistics.

Finally, there are a number of feature inconsistencies, not that difficult but annoying and not necessarily obvious. An example to make the point: I'll often embed a political cartoon in my miscellany daily post and use the caption function to attribute the artist and the source. I normally had to resize the embedded image under the old format and actually like the initial size under new functionality; if I had to tweak the size, the controls are obvious, while the old controls were more of a toggle switch approach. However, somehow I didn't recognize the caption option at first and ended up manually inserting a caption line in a line following the image the first few times I inserted images and eventually discovered the caption option by playing around with the interface. Maybe the interface was more natural to other people.

It Never Seems To Stop

Technical issues. Hardware, software upgrades, misleading technical information, etc. For example, A USB smartcard reader stops working. After some trial and error, I get it working in another USB port. Was it an issue with the original port, with other connected USB devices, say, an external disk drive, affecting it, a problem with the reader itself, some recent updates, e.g., to device drivers?

As I write, my primary PC is making a second attempt at the latest Windows 10 feature update. It had successfully completed on my newer PC, although it seemed to take forever. I knew something had happened when I took a short nap and woke up to find my PC ready for logon and it did not launch into some sort of  "preparing your desktop" step. I quickly confirmed the update had failed by looking at the Update history. No clue as to what happened, but at least the system had reverted to a usable state. [It has since failed again while I composed this post, at about the 58% completion point. I tried running the Updates troubleshooter to no result. This is not the first time I've run into multiple Update failures.] My older devices are "not yet ready" for the update. I know in the past they eventually get usable updates, but I find it annoying to having different versions across my devices. But even launching Setup/Windows Update can be an issue at times.

Then there's Adobe Flash Player. There are a number of issues here, including its use with certain mandating training software I use. A big upcoming issue is the product's end of life at the end of the year, with all major browsers announcing related end of support. There have been some chronic security lag patching, never mind browsers handle Flash Player support differently, e.g., Chrome vs. Firefox. One of the things I found that using the software through Chrome required manually changing the browser window to enable Flash Player; apparently there's no way to whitelist URLs to allow Flash Player. I discovered the Player issue when I got to a simulation exercise in the courseware and it just wouldn't advance--it was just spinning. I had contacted technical support; he didn't seem to run into the issue using my account--and then at some point he mentioned using Firefox. I recall in the past when using cable TV scheduling with Chrome. I would get some "right-click to enable Adobe" thing but at some point it changed to clicking at the start of the address prompt. However, in the case of the training software, I never got a warning to the effect there was a Flash Player issue.

And then I got to this one course where Flash Player was allowed, but I got a warning the courseware required Flash Player to display the screen. Now what? I remember the support guy had initially tested on Firefox. So I launched my copy of Firefox, only to discover Flash Player wasn't installed, and I eventually realized I had to download the player from Adobe. I remember wondering how to verify the software was installed in Firefox. I eventually launched the courseware and saw something to the effect of right-click to use Flash Player.

I know when I wrote my recent posts on issues with government smartcard CAC's I saw an emphasis in other sources on running the 32-bit version of Internet Explorer in order to use ActiveX functionality in order to use PKI for secure email (digital signature and encryption). If you're running a 64-bit OS, like many of my own PC's have, you should have both 64- and 32-bit versions. Long story short, I started launching the 32-bit iexplore. For other reasons, I started looking at Process Explorer from Sysinternals to look at the iexplore process(es) (right-click/Properties to see the executable path name). That's when I discovered 64-bit IE was still being launched concurrently; more to the point, even if I launched 64-bit IE, I could still use secure email functionality; I think I read somewhere that IE-64 will open a frame to support 32-bit requirements when needed.

On a side note, I have discovered that using a VPN can have some unpleasant side effects. For example, I  found sending an email using Gmail was failing but if I momentarily disconnected the VPN, I could connect to the SMTP server. I've also found at least a dozen secure websites balking they don't recognize my IP. From a security standpoint, I appreciate the checks, but it is a usability tradeoff and somewhat defeats the purpose of using a VPN.

Troubleshooting Secure Email Issues With a CAC

I was tempted to simply add a second addendum to my recent CAC post, but I wanted to expand on relevant comments.

To summarize, a (government) CAC smartcard chip contains PKI infrastructure, including private certificates and associated private keys. If I use third-party software, like ActivClient, I can see 3 certificates (identity, signature, and encryption). The identity certificate is used to authenticate, say, to a government website. The email signature is used to provide non-repudiation of the message source  and encryption ensures confidentiality. In practice, the private infrastructure is protected by the CAC PIN. So, for example, in accessing a secure government website, including email, I'll usually get a pop-up to select the (identity) certificate; there's a second step (on my home system) where it's testing the card reader and reading the CAC;  on an intermittent basis I'll sometimes get a garbage popup saying something like it can't use the certificates on the CAC. What this really means in practice is I need to reseat the CAC--remove the card from the CAC reader and reinsert it. (IMPORTANT practical note: if I'm using Internet Explorer 32-bits,  I need to go to Internet Options, Content Panel and clear the SSL state before I can reread the CAC.) Once I get confirmation that the device is ready and click OK, I should be prompted for my CAC PIN. If successful, I'll usually land at a USG warning banner page (in IE, I'll sometimes have to refresh the webpage). Similar PIN entries occur if I sign and/or encrypt outgoing emails for security.

Now I ran into some weird issues soon after installing/testing S/MIME for use in IE-32 as described in the last message (needed for secure email functionality) I recall being able to pull up a digitally signed and/or encrypted email from another person and sending my own signed/encrypted email. A few days later, I tried pulling up another email from the same person, and the entire message body was blank. What the devil? Was he encrypting from an obsolete public certificate? A separate, weird issue: all of a sudden I couldn't send even regular emails from Outlook Web  Access; clicking on the send button didn't do anything.

I really didn't want to contact the government helpdesk on the issues; I did have a contact with the local group servicing the laptop, and he mentioned he had also run into a blank email issue with OWA but not when using the Outlook client on his laptop (not available to me).

I did a Google search on my issues and found this Microsoft webpage where the user's experience exactly matched mine. When I got to Jeremy Nickels' detailed response  and saw 231 readers had endorsed it, I was convinced I had stumbled across a solution for apparently a common problem. The key steps are up to step 10 and involve a number of tweaks to IE settings, and yes, they resolved my functionality issues. I didn't check militarycac.com; I think when I tested that first signed/encrypted email after installing S/MIME via a related note, I assumed no other tweaks were necessary.

Some Notes About Using CAC's on a Home PC

Common Access Cards (CAC's) are government ID smartcards. Basically they come with a chip on which you have some PKI certificates installed (used for network authentication, digital signing and email encryption/decryption in conjunction with a PIN) and is often used as a way to access certain government sites/ or buildings and certain government websites; government employees and contractors may also need additional proximity cards and/or smartcards for access to certain restricted buildings or areas at a government site. (This is not privileged information; in fact, you'll find a Wikipedia page on CAC's, and an Internet search will reveal a number of websites which discuss practical aspects of using CAC's, resolving issues, etc., not requiring access to government networks, including militarycac.com, which I'll briefly describe as a key resource below.)

I've needed CAC's for multiple gigs over the past decade. I say plural because I'm not a civilian (federal employee) and typically they are tied to contract expiration's and also must be surrendered if you quit or otherwise leave your position (need to have basis). It can be painful; for example, in a gig I had from 2017 to 2019, contract option years were figured into CAC expiration, and I had to get mine renewed; there were technical issues because the new CAC certificates were incompatible with old secure emails.

The COVID-19 crisis has backlogged local CAC processing, and so I had to go to a government facility in downtown Baltimore to get my CAC. I had been issued a government laptop off-site; basically the way the process works, my CAC is used to access the notebook and it first needs to be authenticated by connecting securely to the government network, and then authentication is cached to the PC, enabling logon (including without network authentication). Long story short, there's a known technical issue with certain newer CAC certificates from one of a couple of certificate authorities, and the network balked at my CAC because of that problem.

The government laptop comes with a card reader, but it's not usable because I can't logon without the cached CAC authentication (you don't get usable feedback; it simply states it's unable to validate my credentials, not that I entered an invalid PIN). I made an appointment at a desktop support group at the local facility, and the local technician identified the CA issue mentioned earlier.

This puts me in a bind because I needed to access my government email to respond to related service issues, also to do certain required training/certificates to get my own (vs. a visitor) network account, and whereas I didn't have to connect to the government network to access at least some alternatives, the websites typically require CAC authentication. So I had to acquire a USB smartcard reader; you can buy one for about $15 from a variety of vendors at Amazon.com. In addition, in my experience, I also had to buy a licensed copy of ActivClient for about $35 (see militarycac.com for the vendor). (Some sources or experts will tell you that you don't need the software with Windows 10, but in my experience, while Windows 10 could see the smartcard reader, it looked like an empty/inaccessible disk drive.) I also downloaded and installed/ran two executables from militarycac.com: InstallRoot...msi and HomeUserCertTool..zip.

The device "documentation" sucked. Let me quote:

"Red Light = Functional" (will change to blue when inserting CAC card)

Actually, the device comes with two lights, a power light, which is blue, and a second red light which blinks/doesn't change color with CAC insertion.

It also states "For 3rd party software, certificate, see militarycac.com". Presumably they are referring to ActivClient (see above). Once you have ActivClient installed, you should be able to see/open the CAC and see the certificate.

They also provide a URL to download the device driver. No such driver available, but apparently the Microsoft device driver is functional. As I said, the documentation sucks.

Finally, many government websites certify on Internet Explorer for support purposes. I found one training website worked well with Chrome. Some browsers, including Chrome, don't like certificates of other websites and won't let you to the URL. Ironically, I found webmail seems to work well with a Chrome cousin, Brave. [See addendum below.] Be careful with URL's; for example. one site required 'www.' at the beginning of the domain name, and another seemed to require '/owa' at the end. In Internet Explorer you may need to clear (content) state to reread your CAC and/or clear certificates via another security tab in Internet options. Sometimes you will get a failed validation, which can be resolved by removing and reinserting your card and trying to logon by CAC again. In a few cases you may need to refresh your browser to see your USG banner warning page.

Your mileage may vary; I don't know/think all or most will have two lights, one blue or one red. (I still can't forget my Commodore 64 floppy drive documentation back in grad school warned something like "Never insert/remove a floppy with the green light on!" Well, the green light was a power light! It also warned, "Don't power down the drive with a floppy in it!" Okay, how the hell are you supposed to use a program disk? I decided they really meant to say when you were writing to a data disk (say, an amber light blinking), but I really didn't want to lose my $35 program floppy.) Hopefully this guidance helps others; militarycac.com is very good but lacks the context I've provided here.

[Important addendum: 6/2/20.] In using Brave I was referring to regular emails, i.e., not using secured email functionality like signed/encrypted emails. In Windows, this is enabled by S/MIME functionality accessible through and/or installed with 32-bit Internet Explorer (\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe) in conjunction with ActiveX controls. In my system, S/MIME was not installed by default, but a link to the install was available by drilling through the Options menu in Outlook Web App. Note I sometimes have to refresh IE after signing into OWA with my CAC ID/PIN to get the USG banner warning, a prerequisite to opening the mail app.

In Troubleshooting, Question Your Assumptions

I will often use a large number of Internet browsers for a variety of reasons. For example, in my work as an Oracle DBA, I've generally found that Firefox worked better with Oracle web servers. Some browsers will block URLs they consider unsafe, even in a trusted intranet. My current client promotes Internet Explorer as their supported browser. Sometimes add-on's/extensions are exclusive to a particular browser. Others provide better privacy guards, have integrated support for video downloads, etc.

I've generally liked and use Google products; I was one of the earliest gmail users, I've got a Chromecast and Google Hub, I often embed multiple Youtube videos in my daily political posts, and I use Blogger for all my blogs. I was also an early adopter of Google Chrome. As familiar readers know, I have five PC's (long story: 3 of them were brought back from the dead)  plus a Chromebook. I use them for different purposes. But one of the nice features (also implemented by other browsers) is Chrome's Google Sync feature, which includes, but is not limited to bookmarks. I've gathered and organized literally thousands of bookmarks over the years. I like being able to use any of my devices and having and being able to tweak the same bookmarks everywhere. I routinely maintain backups on multiple external hard drives, I've got cloud backups, and I could quickly switch to a backup PC in the event my workhorse PC becomes disabled. Oh, don't get me wrong; I would still need to reinstall certain apps, like my licensed Microsoft Office suite, but I also have flash drives with portable apps (including free open-source office suites, not to mention there's Google Documents and other apps via my Internet browser).

So I had started a new position and quickly gathered a number of links, e.g., to a timesheet system, web-based work email and other applications, an HR URL for paperwork, etc., quickly organized in a company folder. The other day I had switched to one of my backup computers and was working on a blog post when I noticed incidentally I didn't see my new company folder in its expected place. I double-checked: Google Sync was on in Chrome on both PC's. I double-checked setups on my backup PC, thinking maybe it wasn't syncing with the cloud. Nope.

What was wrong? The reader may guess the obvious correct answer, i.e., my workhorse PC wasn't syncing my local bookmarks to the cloud, that the bookmarks sync option had been toggled off. I had initially rejected that notion because I didn't remember going into sync options to toggle off any default option, never mind knowingly turning off a desired option. Well, not only was the bookmarks option toggled off, but all the others as well! So I had the paradox of Google Sync was on but not syncing anything to the cloud since all the options were turned off!

Obviously when I turned everything back on, my bookmarks migrated to my backup desktop, still leaving the mystery of how my sync options were in an interim off status. I did have a Chrome update issue a few weeks back and did a deinstall/reinstall of the browser as per guidance. I'm not sure if my enigmatic situation is an artifact of the reinstall process, but I'm making a mental check to reexamine Google Sync options routinely in the future, including any browser updates or reinstalls.

On a separate Google-related note,  I remembered the Blogger Dashboard for a list of one's blogs and had a stored bookmark to it (see here for a mockup of what I'm describing). So a few weeks back I clicked on the URL--and no dashboard. Now I had noticed on my individual blog all-posts page there was a drop-down menu of my blogs (from the current/working blob ID), including an option to create a new blog. So it's fairly easy to switch among blogs; effectively the dashboard has been integrated into individual blog pages.

I think maybe this 11/22/2016 post explains it:

To kick things off, we’ve taken a crack at simplifying Blogger’s dashboard so that it’s easier for you to get right to the tools you need. Now, whenever you open Blogger, you’ll be taken right to your blog with the most recent post, putting you one click or tap closer to drafting something new

Um, yeah, except I had already bookmarked the posts page for my signature political blog. So I wasn't going to the dashboard to start a new post. I was using the dashboard for a more consolidated view of my blogs. Now I could easily set up an html page to mimic functionality.of the old dashboard; I just wish that Blogger had given us an option to retain the old dashboard.

Tiles and Integration with Google Hub

I love Google products and services. But there are some usability issues that drive me crazy. One recent issue which comes to mind is the Google Nest Thermostat which I described in a recent post. I've unsuccessfully tried to get apartment management to replace what I think is a defective unit (the actual temperature deviates, which I verified from a cheap handheld thermostat I bought from Walmart). Reseeding the device occasionally corrects the temperature but it'll climb (above the real temperature). So I have to do offsets. For example, if I set the heat for 68, and I wake up to 64, and Nest shows 72, I'll reset the heat target to (say) 76. I'll make similar adjustments periodically while I'm in the apartment. It gets particularly annoying because it'll reset your heat target in "energy saving" mode. (I routinely get  utility reports showing my apartment as the most efficient among neighbors, obviously unrelated to Nest.)

Sometime back I bought some Tiles. These are great for relocating items. Now at the risk of oversimplification, there are two types of Tiles, a flat kind (Slim) that you can insert into a wallet and a thicker, small plastic device with a keychain hole (Mate), which sort of reminds me of an iPod Shuffle. I originally bought 2 four-packs of the latter, one for my Mom (who didn't want it, found it insulting). These come with replaceable batteries (which you can buy in multi-unit packs for about $1 each). These need to be set up/registered with a cellphone app and an account with thetileapp.com.

So the Tiles have basically have two-way functionality. (Note the devices have ranges, depending on model from 150-400 feet.) Through the cellphone app, you can click to activate a noise from the target, say, my keys or wallet. And assuming your cellphone has battery power, the Tile app loaded and bluetooth on, you should be able to locate your cellphone from the tile by double-pressing the tile.

I didn't even realize it but my batteries had expired when I tried to use the tiles for the first time in months. I finally shipped my Mom's set and was going to brief my brothers on setup. For the most part, functionality works as expected in testing (e.g., for my wallet or keys). Occasionally it fails for unspecified reasons.

At some point I became aware I should be able to locate my Tiles through my Google Hub after setup, e.g., "Hey Google: ring my keys." I used documentation from the Tile App and Google, but I couldn't get functionality to work properly, and tech support from Google and the Tile App were ineffective (the latter was particularly obnoxious pasting the same setup 3 times, which had been done before my chat session). Somehow the Google Hub didn't think I had turned on the private results option through Google Home. Long story short, I found the Google Hub was linked to two of my gmail accounts. I delinked the less frequently used account, and that seemed to resolve my functionality issues.

Thunderbird; Zombie Windows Application Installs; iTunes

Thunderbird

I've written a lot of post segments about Mozilla Thunderbird, in large part because it's been my primary desktop email client for more than a decade. I do have a licensed copy of Outlook but am wary of the effort in migrating things like folders and related filters.

There are a number of usability issues I've experienced over the years. One is the problem of pop-ups, e.g., noting a long-running process and providing an option to stop the program. I've generally found the application is in an unusable state when that happens (in fact, the popup itself is often hard to use and can crash the application), so I'll often just restart Thunderbird.

Another usability issue involves defaults, especially in the context of add-ons. I'll give examples of 2 add-ons I have implemented over the past year or so: Enigmail and Send Later. Enigmail enables a user to digital sign and/or encrypt emails using PGP (pretty good privacy). The configuration isn't difficult but beyond the scope of this post (see here for more information). Functionally, you'll generate a key/certificate for a given email address with a passphrase/code. In practice, you'll supply the passphrase in signing an outgoing email. (A digitally signed email can be verified by the recipient as coming from you, using your related public key.) I've so far configured 3 of my external email accounts registered in my Thunderbird client to use with Enigmail, mostly using them to test PGP functionality among accounts.

The problem I have in using Enigmail is almost no one I correspond with (including my family/siblings) is set up with their own public/private key pairs for email encryption. Basically I don't really want to enable emails for default digital signing or encryption. There are ways of setting up the email compose (send-attach) toolbar with encryption and digital sign icons/toggle switches (right click/customize) if necessary in conjunction with Account Settings/Open PGP Security settings for relevant email accounts. (Note: there is also a "protect subject line" toggle-switch icon you can drag/drop into the toolbar.) So if I want to encrypt and/or sign individual emails, I can click default(s) off (red x), which should then show green checks.

This is just to set up the anomaly I experienced. I'm not sure when it started happening, maybe after Thunderbird and/or add-on updates, but all of a sudden I started getting queries for passcodes in trying to open up existing email drafts, e.g., to my mother. It wasn't clear why this was happening; I hadn't set up the emails for encryption or signing, and I wasn't getting prompted for passcodes on quick emails to Mom. Long story short, there was a (default?) checked parameter to encrypt email drafts on saving in Account Settings/Open PGP Security.

The second nonintuitive setting on the Send Later add-on. (I misunderstood the purpose of the add-on; I thought it might be a scheduling function (e.g., send this birthday email to my relative at the scheduled time).) Actually this works similar in nature to drafts, except the message is stored in my local outbox (and if I want to edit before sending, I have to right-click, edit (as a new message)). The add-on, however, does not set up the compose email with a "send later" button. As described above for the PGP icons, you have to right-click on the (send-attach) toolbar, and select the customize option, then drag/drop the send later icon to the toolbar

Zombie Windows Installs

To provide context, every once in a while I'll scan Control Panel/Programs on my workhorse PC to scan for unused programs or odd quirks like multiple versions. This recently was motivated by a software update scan, which suggested that I had an old version of Thunderbird. Familiar readers may recall I ran into Thunderbird 68 version update issues, and one thing that I became aware of is a 64-bit version alternative to my legacy 32-bit version. In the process of installing the former, I forgot to check if the legacy version was still installed. But my 64-bit install is patch-current.

So at any rate, my software update software said my x-86 Thunderbird 68.3.1 needed updating. So I went to Control Panel/Programs to right-click/uninstall the relevant client when it became clear it wanted to uninstall from the path of my 64-bit install. HELL NO! I went to Program Files X-86 and noticed, sure enough, the old client was still installed. I manually located and executed the uninstall binary, later clearing away residual traces. But whatever the uninstall binary did, did not affect the relevant listing in Programs. What the hell? As I wrote this segment, I did a regedit and located/deleted any residual references to Thunderbird 68.3.1; I subsequently refreshed Control Panel/Programs and this time the old listing is gone, and my software updater no longer flags it. Generally speaking, though, I don't like having to regedit to maintain programs.

iTunes

Familiar readers may recall a couple of quirks I've referenced in terms of iTunes. One is during the update process where it can't find a target MSI file in the user AppData hierarchy; the other is somewhere after  October, I suddenly found my backlogs for most podcasts suddenly disappeared after the most recent 3 episodes and continued to roll-off the oldest episode when downloading the most recent. This didn't happen for 2 or 3 of my feeds, like Cato Institute, but most of them. I couldn't see a podcast setting where this was being set.

So I just updated to iTunes 12.10.4. Easier said than done: it seemed to hang looking for the MSI file again. I clicked the cancel button and assumed it would rollback its changes, like in the past. But at some point I got a message the update completed and I needed to reboot. Say what? Sure enough, when I later relaunch iTunes and check for updates, it tells me I have the latest release installed. I'm not sure what that stutter step was all about, but I shouldn't have to manually cancel that MSI step.

But now when I right-click on my podcast feeds, I notice a podcast settings option. And sure enough, there's a limit episodes parameter, set to a default of 3 episodes. I quickly turned off that parameter for my podcasts and noted that I should now be able to redownload unheard episodes that rotated out.

Minor Annoyances

There are various issues that I routinely encounter with usability considerations; a small sample follows:

The Latest Thunderbird Update

[Reader note: I started to draft this segment and others several days back. Parts of this first segment may have been similarly posted elsewhere in one of my blogs.]

I've gone through innumerable Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird updates through the years. Normally the upgrades have maintained existing configurations although I did notice a few weeks back I had to reconfigure my browser settings (menu and bookmark bars, reset my bookmarks, download my prior add-ons, etc.)

But every once in while I run into issues (often with the iTunes Win update) where an update fails and I'm advised to download the full product. So this happened with Thunderbird over the past day, and I downloaded the full product--only to find out when I restarted, it was totally unconfigured and blank, wanting me to configure a first email account. DAMN! I know instantly what happened--it created and linked to a new profile. There are some nuances to my configuration, include locating mail storage under a cloud backup directory. So a short-term fix was to archive the new profile and replace its contents with those of my old profile.

I then discovered an unexpected new problem: the newly-installed software wasn't updated--and deja vu I ran into another update issue. This time I noticed there was a 64-bit version at the website and downloaded it. Interestingly, it seemed to want to install in Program Files X86 vs Program Files by default. That seemed odd, but I allowed the default to continue, including any necessary 'cleaning up the bird cage'. It seemed to complete as expected but within a day or two, I saw a notice that an update was needed again--and to be astonishment I was not only running the same version--but the 32-bit version. What the devil happened--did the 64-bit installation fail and/or restore the old 32-bit version?

So this time I went to the custom installation option and  pointed the application to a Program Files folder and made sure a desktop link was generated. This time I could confirm the 64-bit version and software version (via About Thunderbird). However, two recent add-ons I had recently installed (Provider for Google Calendar and Quick Folders (tabbed)) were missing and I installed/configured again without issue.

This is a new update to this segment. I have software version checkers, and one came back and told me Thunderbird needed to be updated. Say what? Usually the Thunderbird interface lets me know of a new version and/or automatically updates it (e.g., I get a notice on startup that Thunderbird is first applying the latest update). So I connect to the update channel via About Thunderbird, and sure enough it identifies an update, downloads and installs it. A subsequent reboot of Thunderbird and version check--what the devil? No change in version; once again, it's downloaded and  applied. This time on restart I get the pop-up bar saying it's applying the update; I get into Thunderbird, check the version (yup, as expected) and the update channel says I have the latest version.

I'm not going to report all the usability issues here, but the initial failed update, having to do updates and add-on installs multiple times, the 64-bit installation path issue, and having to copy over my old profile files to the new profile were all unexpected.

My Infuriating Voice (Tree) Mail Loops

The ISP/Cable Provider Incident

One of my pet peeves deals with service interruptions with power and cable/internet services. I, especially as an IT consultant, do realize crap happens, not to mention occasionally some maintenance interruptions are necessary that are difficult to work around. But in the business world we normally schedule maintenance activities to minimize user inconvenience--like evening, weekend, or holiday times; if and when it cuts into business hours,  we typically promote service interruption schedules days in advance. 

I have dealt with numerous ISP interruptions (over and beyond power interruptions) to the point I know to power cycle the router/disconnect power cables for several seconds during the process. Occasionally they need to send a reset signal from their end.

Cable TV issues occur less frequently. So when both my Internet and cable went out shortly after midnight, no storms in the area, etc. I immediately suspected maintenance was at play. But I got looped into automated voice mail hell. There was no option to bypass to customer service; the system simply said in effect, "We are having trouble getting to your box; let's send a signal to your box; check if you still have a problem in 10 minutes..."  It was clear after 2 or 3 iterations, there was a more general issue, but no reference to outages in my area. After calling back multiple additional times over the coming hour, I finally got a message there was maintenance in my area being done and an expected time for service resumption. You would think that would have been pushed out sooner than later, instead of this absurd "let's test sending a signal to your box" loop; what I really wanted was closure on a time for maintenance completion; I had been convinced about the fact of maintenance being done before I called the first time.

My Utility Auto-Payment Problem

For some routine recurring expenses, there is often an option to auto-pay, e.g., through one's checking account and/or credit card, such as rent, storage rentals, car payments, auto or health insurance payments, cable bills, credit card bills, and utility payments, among other things. I do regularly audit the payments for accuracy and to ensure things like no fraudulent charges. In part, this is to ensure I don't accidentally forget to make a payment. (I have come close on a few occasions, e.g., forgetting to press a payment submit button being interrupted or distracted by phone calls or other things or not getting or overseeing a payment notification.) But I don't really think I should have to double-check auto-payments, which should be highly automated.

So I did a double-take when I got an email for my upcoming utility payment and saw an existing balance line item. Say what? Never mind a late-penalty fee. How the hell did  this happen? I remember contacting customer service; I think at some point I got a general email notification of some sort of systems hiccup affecting some customer accounts and late-payment fees being waived.

When In Doubt, Reboot

The familiar reader knows I currently have 5 PC's (4 notebooks) and a Chromebook. (It's a long story, but my desktop, a backup, was hidden in storage while I lived in West Virginia about 6 years back, and I lost two notebooks (disabled by freak incidents) when I moved to Arizona nearly 4 years back. I bought a new one (with touchscreen and 360 degree display rotation) maybe a year plus back from a Sam's Club, but I haven't transitioned to it yet, mostly because I haven't taken the time to migrate all my applications to the new PC yet. Long story short, I somehow resurrected the 3 dead PC's back to life and they serve as backup or alternative devices. My Arizona PC remains my workhorse, and my WV PC, which replaced a notebook with a failing hard drive, is my go-to backup; it's still a sick puppy with a dead battery which I haven't replaced.

Of course, maintaining 5 PC's takes time (for example, I haven't applied the latest Microsoft patches yet to two of them). What do I do with them? Sometimes I'm doing maintenance on the workhorse PC; in other cases, I might use the backups as de facto second monitors or virtual televisions (e.g., I once had an issue with my cable TV connection)

So the context for the problem is I had booted up my go-to backup intending to use it for Internet purposes--when it gradually dawned on me I didn't have a usual WIFI connection. Not only that, but I couldn't get it to connect from the router or by manually resetting the correct password; I could see the network available, but I simply couldn't connect to it. I had two other PC's connected by WIFI, neither experiencing a functional issue.

It wasn't immediately obvious what the problem was. I did some surfing on the issue; maybe I had a hardware issue involving networking, maybe I had an obsolete driver issue, etc. I tried rebooting the PC. Could I still connect by tethering a 24' patch cable from the router to the PC? Yes, but that was small comfort. I really didn't want to reorganize the apartment to accommodate the patch cable.

At some point, I started running into connection problems with my workhorse PC. This led me to consider that maybe the issue was the router itself. So I rebooted the router. Bingo! I was now able to connect (after any usual setup) from either PC on WIFI. I can only speculate that maybe some patching had happened on the router which required a reboot.

Google Nest and Other Encounters

Google Nest

A few weeks back my apartment complex installed Google Nest thermostats. There was no training or documentation; I was in fact present during the install. It was a basic test of usability because I had to figure out how to switch from cool to heat; long story short, the bottom button  serves to display a settings mode and you use a dial to navigate options and a combination of dial and button to set various options, like target temperature. Still, the thermostat has an annoying tendency to down set your temperature target to "energy-savings" mode like 64 degrees (F). Personally the apartment feels cooler than the temperature suggests. You can reset the target by dial, but it's usually a temporary reset, say for overnight.

Actually my utility provider, even before the thermostat change, has reported for a majority or plurality of months that I'm the most (or occasionally the second) most efficient among my neighbors anyway.

I ran into an unexpected problem TWICE over the recent weekend--a filled white house icon, with the button and dial seeming unresponsive. A Google search and various Youtube videos really didn't provide much usable help except to suggest, as I suspected, the unit needed to be rebooted. I eventually discovered you could set up a chat session with a Nest support analyst. One of the parameters to set a thermostat (e.g., type of model) needed for the chat session wasn't obvious, and the first analyst wanted a serial number, which wasn't present on the back of the device. There was something in illegibly small print; the analyst finally told me to connect the thermostat via USB to my PC; I found an XML file which I loaded into Notepad and found a long serial number, definitely not the tiny print value on the back of the device. Somehow during the process my browser crashed, ending my chat session. I had to wait in another queue, maybe another 40 users. The second analyst was even less helpful if that's possible. (When I finally got past the white house icon, I suspected the smaller white number was the temperature, although it seemed a lot cooler than that, and he wanted a picture of the dial. I lost interest in the chat session with that. I had other issues with my cell phone.)

The reboot process isn't that obvious or maybe is time-consuming  with limited status  readings. I read or heard somewhere you had to hold the button for 30 seconds, but it was some time before I saw some dialogue appear on the dial. Then you have to navigate through about 7 or so parameter phases, including an optional setup for connecting to my WIFI, which I wasn't interested in setting up. I finally got to the expected temperature display.

Then I found another white house icon this morning and muddled  through another setup. Hopefully this isn't part of an ongoing pattern. I have heard the heat cut on once or twice, so it does seem functional but still cooler than expected.

Thunderbird

One of the issues in using the Thunderbird email client is that add-ons may not keep up with host application upgrades. I've deployed a number of add-ons over the years, including sync tools with Google products (gmail, contacts, calendar), dedupping messages, email archiving and import, etc.

I've built up an elaborate set of email folders and filters over the years. But of course I get new emails all the time (e.g., from tech recruiters, new websites I run across, etc.), not to mention I'll sometimes create new folders and filters, e.g., bills related to a recent hospital stay, my purchase of a new auto a few months back and a recent holiday trip or if I'm negotiating with a new client or prospective employer. So, for example, I might get up to a dozen or more unsolicited job descriptions. Many of these are unacceptable, e.g., an undesirable location (overseas or the Left Coast, IL, or the Northeast),  a job description that is sent by multiple recruiters or clearly doesn't fit my background, say I worked with a certain software product 12 years ago on a project, but the client wants 5 years of recent experience; I delete these. Others I might put in my "hot leads" folder or in a more general folder, say, a lower-rate position or something not really a DBA position but focusing on more ancillary skills, like a developer position.

So at any rate, I used an add-on called Nostalgy, which allowed me to select and quick type move downloaded unfiltered messages to target folders. But for whatever reason, Nostalgy has not been upgraded to the latest new, more secure release of Thunderbird and no real discussion of an imminent upgrade I could find. I found a new Quick Folder Move (tabbed interface) (sic) add-on, which similarly allows me to drag-and-drop messages to a folder dragged to a special toolbar above the messages window.

In a similar fashion, during recent upgrades, somehow my integrated Google calendars (including sports schedules like the Minnesota Vikings and Twins and college alma mater football or basketball games) were broken. (I can always access my calendars through the portal or an extension, but since I spend so much time on my email client, it's fairly easy to scan events at the right side of the client without additional effort. I believe the add-on is called something like Provider for Google Calendar and is extremely easy to set up, signing into Google and then checking which calendars you want to access in Thunderbird.

I can't leave this discussion without writing about a truly bizarre upgrade situation. My 32-bit software repeatedly failed to upgrade correctly; the software seemed to point to the general product download page which apparently reflected the base but not the troublesome update because after reinstall I was still getting a message that the step upgrade was failing.

At some point I went to Mozilla's version download page and noticed Thunderbird had a 64-bit release. I downloaded that, but soon ran into an anomaly. Thunderbird wanted to install by default into the (32-bit) Program Files x86 folder. (It didn't have an option for me to change, say, to the 64-bit Program Files folder; I would later find I could do that by choosing a prior customization option. So I assumed when it said it was "cleaning up the birdcage", that it had deleted relevant files in the existing folder, etc. It seemed to conclude normally, but a few days later I noticed that I was running into the step upgrade failure again; I checked "About Thunderbird"  and noticed I was still running on the 32-bit base release. What the hell?

So this time I chose the custom option and pointed installation to Program Files. I watched it conclude, made sure the shortcut referenced the 64-bit path and launched. I double-checked the version number and checked the upgrade channel. I think I may have had to reinstall the above 2 add-ons.

To be honest, if I had been aware there was a 64-bit version available, I would have upgraded to it some time back. The bigger issue is the fact that, in my experience, the 32-bit version repeatedly failed to upgrade on its own, something I don't recall happening, at least in newer updates and upgrades.

Is that the end of my usability issues with Thunderbird? I wish it were. I'll sometimes get a popup to the effect that some long-running script is causing a problem and offers a button to kill it. Let's just say trying to work with or around the popup is all but impossible and usually results in Thunderbird crashing. At some point, I'll be sufficiently annoyed to find/implement a fix.

iTunes

I've had a lot of usability issues over the years with iTunes, especially in doing upgrades, but the latest issue took me completely by surprise. These days I'm mostly using iTunes for playing podcasts. I subscribe principally to a few network Sunday talk soup streams (ABC, NBC, FNC), Cato Institute, Tom Woods, Brion McClanahan, and EconTalk. I often get so bogged with other things that episodes are downloaded and backlogged for months or longer. An example is I'm a fairly new McClanahan listener and decided to download all his episodes.

Well, I suddenly became aware that iTunes seemed to be deleting all except, say, the latest 3 weeks of episodes. (Fortunately, I had an October backup and could restore most of the old episodes.) It's ongoing; I often use ROBOCOPY to backup my Music folder, e.g., ROBOCOPY C:...\MUSIC G:\MUSIC /MIR, so old files on G: no longer on the source are identified as "extra" and dropped. So I'm seeing episodes I haven't watched yet being dropped off the backup. (Now obviously I could tweak my backup command to avoid dropping files and I could play the dropped files from the backup, but as I write, I haven't found where the episode drops are being configured. A general usability principle is to make something destructive more difficult to do, e.g., traditional MS-DOS prompt to check if you really mean "erase *.*" (all files). So I'm somewhat stunned that iTunes for some reason dropped hundreds of EconTalk, Woods and McClanahan episodes without my explicit knowledge and consent. Presumably I could go to some podcast portal and download dropped episodes again, so no damage really done, but it's inconvenient. I suppose someone could argue if I really wanted the podcast I should have listened to it by now, but that should be my decision. When I subscribed to Hulu, I sometimes would engage in binge viewing, and I often do the same thing with podcasts.