Facebook annoyances (again)

I was a member of a Facebook group which focuses on bread machines. A while ago, I got kicked out of the group. I couldn't access it or the administrator from any level. Any connection I had with this group totally disappeared. And I was one of the "Top Contributors" to this group!

I managed to contact the admin, and he said I had been kicked out because I made a posting which contained the word "money" (seriously) so Facebook must have thought I was a spammer. What a joke. Anyway, the admin reinstated me and I posted more for a few more weeks.

But then there were more problems. I posted a message about this particular bread machine, that a new model had been released, and once I did this, I was again kicked out of the group and any connection with it disappeared, just like before. No idea what happened, there was no mention of money in this posting.

However, I think possibly Facebook has it in for me because elsewhere in my Facebook feed, I had posted a couple of links to news and opinion articles about what jerks they are. I had left Facebook after my initial fascination with the place several years ago, and took great pains when I went back on recently to not use any of the information connected with my previous account, though I'm sure they can make the connection.

Perhaps there is another issue, though. Recently Facebook is having a fight with the Canadian government, and they are cutting off all reference to news from Canadian newspapers because the government wants them to compensate the places where they "steal" this news from. Maybe I, being Canadian, am tarnished with this brush, though my recent posting responsible for my banishment was hardly a "news" item in the sense of current events.

I managed again to get in touch with the administrator from the group to investigate my second "disappearance," but I am not encouraged to resume my postings in this group even if I will be allowed back.

Facebook seems to be a horribly paranoid place. I have asked people to contact me via my e-mail outside of Facebook (I have only been on the internet since 1991 and had my own WWW site since 1997) but it is unusual they will do this.

Recently I wanted to send someone a PDF file of this school newspaper that she was involved with many years ago with via the Facebook Messenger. She gave me the usual paranoia, i.e., "I don't feel comfortable when clicking on things in Messenger." But she finally DID reply to me -- not to my e-mail but in Messenger -- and botched up her reply in a spectacular way, ending up in some other message in my Facebook feed which revealed everything she wished to tell me confidentially in a very public way!

If this kind of nonsense persists, I think I am going to abandon Facebook again soon. Every second posting there seems like a commercial, much like the Internet itself these days. Why I am hanging out on Facebook -- mostly in groups which reflect my interests, i.e., film and other music, film technology, my home town, and so forth -- doesn't make sense, since I cut off cut cable TV over 20 years ago because I hated the commercials there so much. The last time I got off Facebook I got fed up with their insidous monetizing everything you are connected with as well as their crappy attitudes reinforcing bourgeois morality (no pictures of nudity, even of famous statues, or breastfeeding women, the picture of the little girl who was bombed with napalm in the Vietnam war and so forth).

Stupid Amazon survey

I was selected to take a survey connected with Amazon. I think this was Amazon.com based on some of the response questions.

Normally I can't stand surveys which has input ranging from bad to good like this:

○ I hate it ○ I sort of hate it ○ I have no opinion ○ I sort of like it ○ I love it.

Seriously, people don't think like this! But I figured, what the heck...

This was one of the first screens, which led to this, a more detailed explanation.

The only one of these tools on Amazon I use with my cell phone is the barcode scanner, which will tell you if the item is available at Amazon ... sometimes. My experience is it doesn't work most of the time, though if you type the actual number under the bar code into the Amazon search engine, it will find the item (if it's in the system) right away.

Of course, when you complain about something in one of these surveys, you get sent off on a tangent with specific questions about what you are complaining about. For example, this screen, this one, and this one.

All of this ended up here. The issue here is not whether I want to use the barcode scanner again or not, but the fact that it doesn't work correctly most of the time, and there is no place to leave specific information about what I find wrong with it aside from a couple of generic text entry boxes in other areas of the survey which I doubt anyone will ever read.

Many of the responses in this survey ranged from annoying to idiotic, like "How often have you had difficulties finding products on Amazon that represent you?" (WHAT?!?!?)

Who comes up with this crap? Do normal people really think about their Amazon experience this way? I finally just chose the most negative response to each question, trying to get to the end of the survey.

I have to wonder if this survey was prepared in some country where English is not the first language after reading "Amazon acknowledges, and correctly interpets your asks."

It ended with ("for statistical purposes only") "Are you of Hispanic or Latino/a descent?" followed by this! Can you believe it? I filled in the blank with "CANADIAN."

Hassles of Everyday Life

If you do a Google search for my cell phone number you will get a few results -- creepy web sites in countries like Turkey, Russia, etc. which compile various phone numbers. If you try and go to these web pages you will get stern warnings from your browser, "don't do this," because they are extremely unsafe.

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Because I have an Android cell phone, the other day I got some message from Google maps which told me all these places I have been recently over a period of several days. For example, the museum in the town where I grew up near Vancouver (I donated a bunch of stuff to them), two Value Village stores, and a restaurant where I had brunch with this old friend of mine. Because I have "location" on with the phone, it knew all these things. If I don't have location on and I lose my phone, it cannot find it.

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I got warnings in both text message and email yesterday that I hadn't paid one of my credit card bills and the amount is due on March 30, hardly enough time to pay it off, because banks don't seem to work on the weekends as far as receiving payments are concerned. The only problem is, I already paid the bill when I got the statement 10 days before and in my account at the bank which issued the card it shows that the payment was received shortly after this.

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Yesterday I got a text from some person in Ohio which looked like it was a wrong number. I said to them, who are you, the person then started to get chatty when I said I was in Vancouver, saying "Oh Canada is a wonderful country, blah blah blah." They sort of apologized for bothering me, but then seemed to be starting a conversation with "what should I call you?" At this point, I blocked the number. I felt like saying, "Oh, I guess you are one of those Internet prostitutes," but they did seem sincere, obviously part of their persona to insinuate their way into my good books. I should have replied, "I am Officer Mike with the Vancouver City Police."

Another example of why Facebook is dumb

On January 17th, 2023, I posted the following on Facebook. It said "Shared with Public," this means "anyone on or off Facebook" can see this posting. Probably not a good idea considering what happened. I only have about 5 dozen friends on FB, these people that I have known in the past, have worked with, etc. I thought only these people would see my posting, which was like this:

"I received e-mail from one of my investment companies that my statement is ready. I don't recall ever receiving something from these people before (this was not a scam). I tried to track down the password, but there was nothing. So I tried the usual "forgot your password" link. When I did this, it says what is your e-mail address, so I entered the address that this document was sent to. Just below this, it asks for your "login name." Now, if I can't remember the password or where it is, why would I know where my "user name" is? DUH!!"

I actually resolved this problem myself. But shortly after posting this, I received a message from some attractive looking woman in SYRIA (seriously, no pun intended for "syria-sly") with advice on contacting a guy called bunyan_assist on Instagram. (Facebook owns Instagram.)

The bunyan_assist person supposedly can help people if you are having trouble connecting to accounts because of login/password issues. But I wondered, how is this relevant to me, because I didn't provide a lot of details about the problem I was having including specific information about the web site I was having the problem with.

In addition to this Instagram account name, a phone number which was in Wisconsin was provided. This Syrian woman had several hundred friends, making me think that her account was hacked. The whole thing was creepy, I just deleted her message.

However, I wanted to post about this experience later. It took a while to find a reference to this bunyan_assist in my Google search history from a couple of weeks prior. When you do the subsequent Google search for this "fixer," the resulting information which you can see on the search results page is very sketchy:

(#1) More I messaged @BUNYAN_ASSIST on Instagram, his a cyber security expert who helped me recovered my account successfully, kindly message or text him on +1...

(#2) But I know you can still get back into your account by direct message (Bunyan_assist) on Instagram now and ask for his help to recover your account text or..

(This what you see when you get the search results, if you go to the place where these results are supposedly located, the above information is not seen.)

So I posted about my experience on FB with much of the same info as above (again, not just to my friends), and almost immediately got multiple responses similar to what I had received before. This was all very weird. Is some scammer scraping every account on Facebook with keywords like "password," "login," "problem(s)," etc.? The whole thing was creepy, I just deleted all of it (again). These are the second batch of responses I got over this issue...

5 comments

Kelly Andrews -- Kindly inbox me immediately for assistance

Brenda Tullock -- I forgot my Facebook password too but got help from meta_generat_cyber on instagram he helped recover my account he can recover your account...

Brenda Tullock -- Just try and message him on Instagram now I'm sure he can help

Evelyn Smith -- You just invoked more of them lol (this woman wanted to become my friend on FB, I declined her request)

Mhiz Golden -- You can get your account back contact mirac Recovery on Instagram

Bread Machine Banana Bread

I have used this recipe many times. For the best bananas, I get bananas which are very ripe, then I put them in the freezer for a while, until they turn BLACK. You take them out of the freezer and then let them come to room temperature and cut the ends off with scissors and squeeze the contents into the mixture as per the instructions in the link below. The recipe asks for 2 bananas, but sometimes I have used three.

If you follow the instructions in the recipe, it's a good idea to take a plastic scraper and, during the initial mixing cycle, make sure there isn't any of the mix on the inner walls of the bread pan. Use the scraper to make sure that the stuff which is being mixed is truly mixed by pushing it from the outer edges of the pan toward the center. If you don't do this, you might end up with a "crust" on the bottom of the bread.

In order to overcome this problem a couple of times, I didn't put the liquid mix into the bread pan and kept it until the "dry" stuff was finished, mixed them together, and then put ALL of that together into the bread pan to be mixed.

https://www.thespruceeats.com/banana-bread-machine-recipe-304378

No Love for Park Royal

I wanted to get a new laptop for my wife, since her old one was as slow as snails having sex in a bowl of molasses on top of a glacier, an expression I once used to described this BBS where I hung out in the 1990s that really pissed off one of the co-owners there.

There were laptop deals at Best Buy on Boxing Day, but I dragged my ass, and the computer I wanted was sold out almost immediately. But just before the sale ended (Dec. 31st), I tried again and there was ONE of these at the West Vancouver Best Buy, which is in the Park Royal Shopping Center, about 15 miles away from my place.

You are probably wondering, "Mike, why didn't you just have this shipped to the Best Buy on Marine Drive near your house [a mere 3 miles away] instead of driving to West Vancouver?" and I would answer "Because my attitude was: Don't ask any questions, they might screw up such a transfer or maybe the order will be cancelled or whatever."

Anyway, a couple of days later, I went to Park Royal South where this Best Buy was supposedly located. I went over the Lions Gate Bridge, and at the first left going south, which is Taylor Way, an extension of the street that goes to the highway up the hill, I turned.

There was a big BEST BUY written on one of the buildings in front of me, but no other information. I pulled into a parking lot for a Dollarama nearby to get my non-existent bearings, and then I mindlessly turned down some street which was like an alley between buildings, going west. This went on for a few blocks, then I saw a Home Depot, which interested me, because I wanted to get some stuff there anyway, and I could kill two birds with one stone.

After I got out of my car, I saw some guy, who was a bus driver, and I asked him if he knew where the Best Buy was. He didn't, but he pulled out his cell phone and looked in Google Maps, and said it was "at the east of the mall" (which is where I started my journey).

Anyway, I wanted to go in to Home Depot, which was not some huge warehouse, but this kind of "cute" brick building. But I was at the back of Home Depot where there was a Starbucks, so I walked about half way there, and then decided to move my car to the parking lot in front of the Home Depot. I backed up carefully, avoiding this McLaren sports car. In the Home Depot parking lot, I asked some other guy who had a wispy beard like the truckers in the protest a year ago if he knew where Best Buy was, and he said words to the effect: "It is over there by the movie theatres," pointing east.

After I got my stuff at Home Depot (where the cashier didn't know where Best Buy was either), I started east on this road which runs south of the mall. There was soon a ramp up to a parking lot, so I went up there. I kept driving and came to the furniture store called The Brick which didn't seem to be open. No luck, so I backtracked and went into a parking lot at the lower level which led to the Osaka Supermarket.

I went up some stairs and when inside the building asked this woman who was cleaning stuff if she knew where Best Buy was. She pointed and said "Around the corner." So I went that way. I eventually ended up at Best Buy, where some guy wanted to help me. I asked him where do I pick up this laptop and he pointed to the other side of the store, which looked like it was about half a mile away. I asked him if there was a parking lot outside the doors over there, and he said yes.

Because I wanted to drive to this parking lot, I went through a nearby Staples, which had an entrance on the outside of the building when I had come in earlier. As I went down stairs to my car, I totally misjudged the last step on the stairway and fell down on my hands and knees. There was no one around, and I picked myself up. This fall resulted in some very nasty bruises on my leg which appeared later. It didn't endear me to Park Royal at all.

I left this parking lot, breaking several rules as to where I shouldn't go and went back to the east of the mall via the south road where it still was not obvious where I should go to get to Best Buy. I drove into this other parking lot which was totally outside of the mall and around in circles, trying to figure out where Best Buy was, annoyed.

I then went back down the alley which took me to the area of Home Depot again. I pitifully asked a couple of people while driving in the alley if they knew where Best Buy was, and they said no. Then I started back eastwards again. I found a parking lot which I figured was below Best Buy, and there was sort of an alcove in this parking lot. At this point, I wanted to just phone the store and ask how the hell do I get to the far-away place I had seen earlier next to the pick-up area from the entrance to the store inside the mall.

Unfortunately, there are no direct phone numbers for any Best Buy stores in Vancouver if you look them up on Google. There is only some 1-800 number where you have to listen to numerous idiotic prompts ... then it said "your waiting time is 8 minutes." By this point, I was getting really fed up, so I went into the mall through some entrance which mentioned the movie theatres.

I wandered around for a while and eventually realized I was totally lost! There were NO MAPS with the usual "YOU ARE HERE" on them anywhere in Park Royal that I had seen. I went up some escalator which brought me beside Osaka Supermarket, but I couldn't remember if this was the same area I was in before. I couldn't figure out where my car was or the door with directions to the movie theatres, but I remembered beside this door was a lot of Sportchek logos, so I went into the Sportchek store and asked if there was an exit on the outside of the building, which there was. I went there and quickly found my car.

I went back to the south road and kept driving to the east of the mall and parked in the parking lot outside the Dollarama again which I figured MUST be below the Best Buy since their sign was up above. I went inside the Dollarama where some tall blonde Russian babe was stocking shelves and asked her where Best Buy was. She said in a Rocky-and-Bullwinkle's Natasha voice: "Up stairs." So I went through the door at the back of the store and up an escalator to the entrance of Best Buy where I had already been, where the guy pointed out the entrance a half a mile away.

I trudged across the store and went out the doors there and noticed there was not only a parking lot in front of me, but a STAIRWAY down to the Dollarama parking lot, duh! So I picked up the laptop and went back to my car down the stairs. Then I noticed this maintenance truck which I had seen earlier when I was in the Dollarama parking lot. There were two lanes, one for up and one for down, both connected with the Best Buy lot upstairs. When I was there before, this maintenance truck was parked in the "up" lane, as if to say "there is some maintenance going on, you can't come up here." Now the maintenance truck was in the "down" lane, where some guy (who I hadn't seen before) was fixing the sign above which says something like the maximum height allowed for cars going up the ramp.

What a huge hassle!!! Of course I got a survey regarding my "Best Buy shopping experience" later which I filled out with a totally hate-filled response.

But the problem isn't just Best Buy, it's the way Park Royal (which is north AND south of the main drag) is laid out. I told a friend of mine who lives in the area of the north part of the mall, "Park Royal is totally crazy. It looks like they made it up as they kept building things without any plan in advance." She replied, "I'm sure that’s the best assessment I’ve heard. It’s a disaster.”

Kitchen Sink Bread

This recipe is for “Kitchen Sink” bread. I have a Hamilton-Beach bread machine now; I wanted to make this bread from my old Black & Decker manual/recipe book which requires Seven Grain Cereal, but I didn’t have any of that. Instead, I had a cupboard full of bags of stuff where I would buy something to use a tablespoon or two of in some bread, but I would never finish the bag.

This recipe is the cousin of another recipe uploaded recently (November 2022) to a Facebook bread machine group which is based on one of Killer Dave’s breads which contains a lot of seeds.

Here is the recipe:

1⅔ cups of water – I heat this up in the microwave using a Pyrex measuring cup for around 30 seconds and dump this into the bread pan. If you think the temperature is too hot, by the time all the ingredients are in the pan, it will be OK, trust me. If your bread machine warms up the liquid at the beginning, you don’t need to do this business with the microwave.

3 TBSP of powdered milk

2 TBSP of shortening (I use vegetable or olive oil)

2 TBSP of honey

2 tsp of salt

1¼ cup of whole wheat flour in Canada; in the USA, use 1 cup of whole wheat flour

2½ cups of bread flour in USA; in Canada, use 2½ cups of all-purpose or bread flour

At this point you are supposed to add ¾ cups of Seven Grain Cereal, but ¾ cups is equivalent to 12 TBSP, so add 12 TBSP of different things. For example: cracked wheat, corn meal, poppy seeds, pumpkin seeds (unsalted), sunflower seeds (unsalted), white sesame seeds, black sesame seeds, triticale flakes, hemp hearts, oats, “healthy” cereal (in Canada, Red River), different types of flour (spelt, triticale, tapioca, rye, etc.). If you don’t have 12 different things, then double up some items so you would have 2 TBSP of some things out of the total 12.

1¼ tsp of yeast (I use bread machine yeast)

Use the Whole Grain or Whole Wheat setting, this recipe is for a 2 lb. loaf. On my machine, there is no option to choose the crust, you may be able to select something here.

On my machine, the bread is first mixed with a chunka-chunka sound (about 2 minutes), and then it is mixed really well, with the blade going non-stop for about 13 minutes. After the non-stop action starts, I open up the machine, and using a plastic scraper, make sure there isn’t any of the mixture on the sides of the pan. I also flick the bread from the corners of the pan into the center using this scraper (there is a certain technique to doing this). Don’t just dump ingredients in the machine and come back 3 hours later, you have to be proactive.

If the mixing bread starts to climb up the wall of the bread pan, I drop a heaping TBSP of some “thickening” flour (I use rye flour, but others would do) right on top of it. This should help the bread to form a nice ball which is bounced around in the bread pan. I wouldn’t recommend doing this for more than two TBSP of the “thickening” flour.

I have made this bread many times, never had a flop!