Jon Westfall

May 6, 2014

25 Questions to Ask Walt Disney after Watching Cinderella

Yesterday I watched Cinderella for the first time in 20 years. Here’s a list of 25 questions or comments I’d ask Walt Disney regarding this film…

So it’s bad that Cinderella is a servant, but it’s apparently OK to exploit talking animals for slave labor?
Who names anything Lucifer?!?
How does a mouse get enough lower-body strength to kick a cat that hard?
Why carry a tray on your head when you have forearms?
Let me get this straight – the King is mad that the prince is avoiding his responsibilities… and his only responsibility is to have kids so the King can play with them? The king has mental issues.
Why don’t those slave laborer mice and birds help with the house cleaning?
Jaq the super mouse can also kick doors closed? What sorts of steroids have these mice been taking?
The lady mice tell Jaq and Gus to ‘leave the sewing to the women’, which apparently leaves the larceny and vandalism to the men?
Who builds a chateau with elaborate mice doors in the molding and candelabras? The mice obviously didn’t build them – they appear part of the original construction!
At the beginning, we’re lead to believe Cinderella makes the mice their nice little mice clothes (and presumably the clothes for the birds as well). Really though her greatest gift to them is modesty? Why do animals need to wear clothes around her anyway?
Fairy godmother cuts off Cinderella as she says “You’re my…” with “Fairy godmother? Yes”. So the existence of fairy godmothers is known in these parts? I’d be a lot angrier at FG that she just now showed up after being tortured by my family for years.
How do spiral wheels turn anyway?
Where does the Grand Duke get that Monocole Yoyo?
Wow – if the prince doesn’t propose and marry a girl after seeing her once, the King is going to KILL THE GRAND DUKE. Let that set in – this guy is clearly not in his right mind.
In all the singing about love, Cinderella never thinks to mention her name?
At the stroke of 12, Cinderella goes “It’s midnight”, to which the prince replies “You can’t leave, it’s…” It’s what? Early? This guy is going to try to make the argument that midnight isn’t late? Player.
The Grand Duke calls after Cinderella, calling her Mademoiselle (makes sense, they’re in France, even though they’re speaking English), and then calling her Señorita?!? Does he really think she might have been Spanish?
That clock takes forever to ring 12 times.
Magical footwear is apparently immune to time constraints AND unique to the wearer!
Walt, let’s have a talk about the appropriate size of doors and beds, OK?
Why is the King such a deranged pimp? He lights multiple cigars simultaneously with a candelabra!
Wow, the King really was going to kill the Duke. Harsh!
Amazing how that dog we only saw twice saves the day!
An evil stepsister calls the royal “shoe checker” “of all the stupid little idiots” – if not getting the Prince married off is punishable by death, shouldn’t insulting the royal delegation also be somewhat severe?
Apparently the Duke has a supply of those yoyo monocles – where can I get one?

May 5, 2014

Magical Tech Support

Once every few weeks I get a personal request for computer help or troubleshooting. And about 50% of the time, the person starts to show me the issue only to have it not appear. They then exclaim “but it wasn’t working a few minutes ago!” or “Oh wait… that’s the problem!”. I literally don’t say a word, and the problem is fixed.

Afterward I usually make some comment about computers being scared of me, fearing my wrath and thus ‘shaping up’ when I’m called in. I also reassure the person that I don’t think they are crazy – I believe they had a problem. Some of the most vexing problems are the transient ones that pop up, annoy the user, and go away just as mysteriously as they came. And the magical force of Jon is not always permanent – sometimes problems do come back since they never really went away in the first place.

But in that golden time where the solution is immediately clear or the problem vanishes, I’ll gladly appear supremely awesome.

March 28, 2014

Happy 10th Anniversary to JonWestfall.Com

A little over 10 years ago, on March 24, 2004, I posted the first entry on my LiveJournal blog – what would eventually become JonWestfall.com (I actually mentioned in that post that I was trying to figure out how to show the RSS feed from my LiveJournal blog to the relatively static homepage of JonWestfall.Com). 10 years and counting!

March 23, 2014

Coloring as An Adult

One of my favorite smartphone photo editing effects is selective color removal. I used to love Camera360 for this, however they removed this feature a few years ago. Since then I’ve been looking for an app that will automatically select color, not one where I need to “paint” the area I want. The latest contender shows promise, although it isn’t perfect. Enjoy some artsy color selected Jon Masterpieces! (PS – this posts title is in reference to the fact that as a child, I was an atrocious color-er)

[phoneitin]

March 22, 2014

Nudging

“Nudging” refers to subtly prompting someone toward one choice or course of action. In the Choice Architecture world, it’s seen as a way to help those who need it make better decisions, while not heavy-handed-ly dictating what to do. But when does it go from helpful to annoying? 2 words: Facebook Notifications! Yes, I know my wife has been waiting for me to play Words with Friends…and Songpop… Nudging isn’t going to help – I play by my own rules… In my own time!

[phoneitin]

March 20, 2014

Blogging: Does frequency count?

Whenever I start a new blog or section of this blog, I tend to post a lot for the first few days and then slowly trail off. From what I’ve seen on the Internet, this is not uncommon. I feel lucky that I haven’t gone a whole year between blog posts (like a few friends I know), but I certainly understand how that happens.

But with the newness comes the worry of overloading the reader (Even as a published author, I sometimes doubt anyone reads my work – if you wish to prove me wrong, use the contact form and I will amend this post to show a real live person read it. But I digress…). This overload problem is why services like Buffer exist. I am beginning to wonder if it matters though – streakiness versus reliability. I follow streaky blogs and regular blogs daily, and while I revel in the reliability of fresh content, there is something special about a friend’s blog being updated periodically. I guess there are pros and cons to both publishing strategies!

[phoneitin]

March 20, 2014

History

It’s been said that seldom do well behaved women make history. Extending this, rarely do well behaved cats exist in history. In other words, mischievous kitty who innocently sleeps on the bed, I’m keeping my eye on you!

[phoneitin]

March 19, 2014

A New Feature: Phoning It In

Increasingly, the smartphone has become the way that we communicate with each other. And so in that vein, I’ve decided to start a new feature on my blog called phoning it in. All posts here are completely composed via my phone. What will you see here? Short, pithy thoughts, poems, jokes, commentary, and anything else (probably not long form).
Enjoy the randomness,
Jon

February 25, 2014

Automate a Telnet Session with One Command

The Telnet protocol might not be the newest thing on the block, however there is still some legacy network hardware that will only accept Telnet connections and not newer more secure SSH connections. Recently I bought an APC MasterSwitch unit, that allows me to remotely power on and power off my hardware, and I ran into a problem of automation. I wanted to be able to remotely reboot the server every night a little after 3 AM, but there was no schedule capability inside the software that shipped with the decade old unit. The MasterSwitch, however did come with a built-in telnet server that one can remotely access and power on and off each individual outlet.

The problem with automating Telnet, is that the prompts are not always uniform between different Telnet servers as they are with SSH servers. So one needs to know the exact keystrokes used in order to accomplish the task they need to do. However if you know all of the keystrokes you can create a command that will type them directly to the telnet client on an *nix computer. Here is my crontab command that navigates through the menus of the MasterSwitch unit and reboots the selected outlet at 3:16 in the morning:

16 3 * * * { echo "USERNAME"; echo "PASSWORD"; echo "1"; echo "2"; echo "1"; echo "6"; echo "YES"; sleep 1; } | telnet SERVERNAME

You’ll see that this command reads sequential to the actual keys that I put in when accessing the unit, first my username, then my password, then the menu commands which use numbers to drill down to the actual outlet, and then confirm that you would like to reboot it. The sleep 1 command at the end spaces them out so that they don’t overload the client.

There you have it, a quick and dirty way to automate a telnet session!

January 17, 2014

Your Geek Squad Badge Just Isn’t Worth That Much

When will Geek Squad employees (or ex-employees) learn that their badges are not worth > $100, even if…

They were a deputy counter intelligence (While Double Agent badges are most common, deputy badges come up about once every 2 months)
they have a low number (Unless it’s less than 100, nobody cares)

I’ve seen badges like the one below sit on eBay for months until they finally drop the high start bid. In case you’re wondering, Geek Squad badges go for around $60 on average, although I (and I suspect most serious collectors) have gotten them for $25 or so.