Monthly Archives: February 2024

stupid people, the very big stupid

warum?

why are they called “scholars” and given titles like “doctor”, when what they study is entirely based on easily disprovable lies? why is the study of easily disprovable lies even a thing, much less a thing in which one can get advanced degrees??

why do they CONTINUE TO BE honoured, and (apparently) well paid, to disseminate these easily disprovable lies to gullible and vulnerable people, who (apparently) don’t know any better?

why do we, as a society, encourage this, rather than actively working to eliminate it? 😒

medication, microdosing, mushrooms, pictures, quantity

🍄 capsule update

so i’m going to try a smaller dose for the next 100. i’ve learned a little more about how to make capsules more uniform, and i decided to make 200 milligram doses, rather than the (nominally) 250 milligram doses i’ve been taking. a “microdose”, by definition, is “subperceptual”, and, for the most part these are, but every now and then i get a little twinge of psychedelic-ness, and i KNOW that as little as 50 mg will affect my mood, so i figured why not go lower, just to see what happens.

turns out using a sieve to sift the powdered mushroom filters out the pieces that are big enough to cause problems with consistency, and makes it easier to re-powderise the remainder. i was able to get 100 capsules that range from 190 mg to 210 mg, compared to my last 100, unsifted “250 mg” doses, which were anywhere from 190 mg to 270 mg. i’ll take a 20% margin, but 80% is pretty close to unsatisfactory. 😉

i’m still about halfway through the 250 mg doses, but i’ve got the next 100 doses all ready, plus around another ounce or so of powdered mushrooms, and “30 gram” “ounce” of unpowdered mushrooms…

231106 capsule making in progress
231106 capsule making in progress
231106 capsule making results
231106 capsule making results
forward into the past, geek stuff

other large storage devices i have known…

to continue the nostalgic rambling started here, another large storage device i have known in the past is the “unimaginably large” 4TB hard disk array that i worked on at openwave for three years, from 1998 to 2001… my unwillingness to reformat and reinstall the operating system on said machine was the direct reason i lost my job at openwave, three days before the computer industry crashed… which meant that i got out of there just in time and i got to laugh at my colleagues who still had to go to work, but DID NOT have their shares of stock, while i did not have to go to work, and i DID have my shares of stock! 😉

when i first started working at openwave was before it was called “openwave”… on my end it was called “software.com”, and we made the interfaces for managing email and email accounts on your cell phone, in the early days of internet connectivity on a cell phone. there was another company, called “phone.com” which did… erm… something else with cell phones… i never actually knew what they did… but the big-wigs at software.com and phone.com got together and decided to create a new company called openwave. i had been working for software.com for two and a half years, and got along famously with the people i worked with, but they came in with this new company and decided to shake everybody up, and i was placed with a vietnamese woman manager from san diego (who i never actually met in person), and one of her first tasks for me was to reformat and reinstall the operating system on this machine… but, having worked on the machine for most of the time i had been at software.com, i knew that it was also the machine that was used, internally, to manage the email accounts for everybody at software.com, all over the world, and reformatting the drive would delete all of these peoples’ email. i talked with a few other people from software.com, to confirm that this was, actually, the case, and they were all astounded that this woman would ask me to do that, considering how important that machine was, so when it came time for me to give her an answer, the answer i gave was no, i will not reformat and reinstall the operating system on this machine. i explained precisely why i would not reinstall on this machine, told her there was no more discussion available, and went on with the testing i had been doing for the past three months. three days later, she told me to reinstall or be fired. i said you can’t fire me if i quit, and walked out… three days later, the computer industry crashed and the rest is history.

before i started working there, i took a “field trip” to santa barbara, where the software.com headquarters was, at the time, and i actually saw the “unimaginably large” 4TB hard disk array… it was a big cube-shaped box, on wheels, that sat in the corner… it, too, was an “electronic black hole, into which one could throw data files forever, and not fill up”… it was, literally, THE email server for the entire company, all around the world. there were hundreds of thousands of individual email accounts, and tens of millions of individual email messages, all managed by this one box…

and, soon, i will have a box THREE TIMES AS BIG sitting on the shelf above my desk… 🤯

forward into the past, technology, the cloud drive crack of 2021, the NAS

the NAS

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i remember when i got my first real computer job, after having volunteered as a typesetter for a newsletter for high school students who were planning on visiting the soviet union, back in the late ’70s. my first real computer job, which was in 1987, was for kwik-kopy printing, in the fountain district of bellingham. at the time, there were three local print shops in bellingham, kwik-kopy, minuteman, and kinkos… but kinkos was more of a”copy-only” place, and, in reality, when they got a print job, they would send it out to either kwik-kopy or minuteman. 😉 at the time, my only familiarity with computers apart from working on my father’s dumb terminal, and later his tandy/radio shack computer, was the experience i had on the Lisa that ran PageMaker, at the russian spy newsletter. only Tina knows what my father used it for (he regularly ran jobs that took more than 24 hours to complete, and my recollection is that he deliberately overclocked at least one processor out of existence), but i used it for writing programs that did weird stuff instead of acting like a computer, and, later, i started programming a GOD assistant for a friend’s rôle playing game called “Swords and Machinery” (get it? “S&M”… get it? 🤪)…

but my first actual computer job was using a MacPlus 512k computer with two external floppy drives (one for the system and one for programs and data storage), and an “almost unimaginably large” 80mb hard drive. at the time, i remember thinking that it was like an “electronic black hole, into which i could throw data, literally, forever, and not fill up”… 😒 little did i know… of course, this was also during the time in which you could take four 512k floppy disks to any apple dealer and walk away with a free copy of the operating system. apple computers have changed A LOT in the past 40 years… 😒

the point of all this nostalgic rambling is that my “almost unimaginably large” 4TB NAS, which i couldn’t imagine how i was going to fill up when i got it, a couple years ago, is more than ¾ full, and i need to upgrade, if i’m going to keep ahead of the kinds of problems i had with my previous NAS 😒… so i emailed the twisted pair who whips my computers (and networks) into shape, and asked them about an upgrade to the next logical step above 4TB. the numbers they came back with were for 6TB and 8TB, which were respectable, and would basically double what i’ve got now, but i was talking on the phone with one of them, yesterday, and he said that they had 12TB drives for CHEAPER than 10TB drives, and when i asked him how much a 12TB drive was going for, he said $210… and i was FLABBERGASTED… i was under the impression that drives were A LOT MORE expensive than that… recall that i spent $600 for the 4TB drives i got just two years ago…

and, naturally, since two 12TB drives would come out to $420, i said i had to go for it. 😉

so, in a couple weeks, one of them is going to come by, remove the 4TB disks and replace them with 12TB disks. hopefully, that’ll do us for a little while more, this time.

farcebook, the very big stupid, twit-turd

i’m so tired of so-called “social media”… 😒

so, having given up on farcebook and twit™-turd™ (otherwise known as 𝕏itter — pronounced “shitter”), i decided to try reddit.

after creating an account, i went searching for “sub-reddits” in which i might be interested, and almost immediately i came across r/Incense. however, after only a couple weeks on the sub-reddit, i was permanently banned for “spam”, because i mentioned that i had some particular kind of incense for sale, in response to ONE person. i didn’t include any links or even an indication of what my business name was, i didn’t address large numbers of people, or post indiscriminately, but the moderator wasn’t interested in discussing it because “we both know what spam is”. 😒

another frustrating sub-reddit that i discovered was r/trees, which, oddly enough, is the sub-reddit for marijuana enthusiasts (if you want the sub-reddit for actual “Trees”, try r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts). the majority of the posts in the r/trees sub-reddit can be largely summarized as: 1) “i have taken too much cannabis and think i’m going to die, what do i do?” or “how much is ‘too much’?”; 2) “how do i cheat/pass a drug test” or “i’ve failed a drug test”; or 3) “i’ve decided to quit/cut down smoking weed because of reasons”. i’ve developed a tendency to ignore the posts in the first category, because they’re just too frustrating. in response to comments in the third category, my default response has come to be r/leaves, which is the sub-reddit for people who want to quit smoking weed. however, my default response to posts in the second cateogry — do not work for companies that require a drug test as a condition of employment. 😒👎 — generates A LOT more ‘👎 dislike’ responses than anything else. people seem to believe that it’s okay to ‘cheat’ on a drug test in order to get an ‘ideal’ job, but when i suggest that not submitting to something that is not only wrong, but is, in some cases, illegal, just to get a job that appears to be ideal in the moment, is simply allowing the companies to continue to abuse their “workers” with impunity, and is, very likely, just giving them the opening to inflict further abuse on their “workers” at some indeterminate time in the future, I AM the one who is “crazy”, and people go to great lengths to enumerate the reasons WHY my approach is the wrong one.

fundamentally, we don’t NEED “jobs” — i can authoritatively state this because i have lived significant portions of my life without having had what most ‘normal’ people would think of as a “job” — however, companies NEED people to work for them. if WE decide not to work for companies that require drug testing as a condition of employment, those companies would either IMMEDIATELY STOP requiring a drug test, or THEY WOULD GO OUT OF BUSINESS!!

plain and simple.

similarly, r/PsilocybinMushrooms is full of posts from people who have taken too much and don’t know what to do, or have never done psilocybin, want to start with a heroic dose and want to know EXACTLY what to expect (while refusing to take the advice of people who have a lot of experience and recommend against it), and A LOT of actual misinformation about microdosing and mushrooms that don’t contain psilocybin, like Amanita muscaria, and it is JUST SO FRUSTRATING to attempt to communicate with people who refuse to listen. 😠

i haven’t totally given up on reddit, yet, but my impression is that i will, eventually. and, given my recent interactions with discord, i’m beginning to wonder if what is recognised as “social media” is designed not to be particularly “social” for those of us whose brains don’t fit into the “social” mold. 😒