Silence is a Statement Now, and Here’s What It’s Saying
Continue reading Silence is a Statement Now, and Here’s What It’s Saying
things are beginning to settle down, a bit… there’s still some undefined (and undefinable) weirdness with moe’s and my email, which has been compounded by some apparent SUPER weirdness with either moe’s or my ability to send text messages, which SHOULDN’T be connected in any way… and the whole thing is made even weirder because we recently received a new router, which is supposed to replace our old router… and the new router, for some reason (i strongly suspect demons, or their ilk) decided that it was going to try to connect to my old mac, which has been quite happy NOT connecting to internet for quite some time… like before we moved into our current dwelling… and i keep thinking that there should be some immanent fiasco brewing with my VPN, which, if i recall correctly, acted in a way that it shouldn’t the last time i changed my IP address… but i changed my IP address two weeks ago, and, so far, there has been no indication that the VPN has even taken notice. 🤨
but, strangely enough, the “starting to settle down a bit” scenario has done absolutely nothing to my anxiety and depression… but getting kicked off mastodon, apparently, has had a MINOR effect on my depression: instead of worrying about concrete things that i read about, i worry about more amorphous things that i imagine COULD BE happening. 🫤
which is the perfect mood to start moisture festival next week. 😟 wednesday at 17:00 we load in and sound check, and then there’s one show thursday, two shows friday, the last of which gets out after midnight, three shows saturday, and two shows sunday… it’s gonna be a LONG and BUSY week. 🥵
now that it’s over, i can talk about it…
so, there was this thing where some of my web sites were bringing down the server resources for other sites, and they wanted me to use WHM to separate them into different accounts, so that it would stop happening… but the OLD host provider either couldn’t, or wouldn’t tell me how that was supposed to be done…
so, two weekends ago, i changed host providers, to one who said he would help me sort out the FUMTU that was my web site(s)… and he did!
but, as a part of that, the web site that i’m paying someone else to monitor, went down, briefly, a few times in a 24 hour period. the guy notified me that it had gone down, and suggested i contact my hosting company. i suggested that it had gone down because we had been migrating to a new host, and included the new host provider on the email thread, so he would know what was happening.
which resulted in the new host provider and the old web designer getting into a pissing match, which ended with the new host provider telling me to never again include him in emails to the old web designer, and the old web designer telling me that the new host provider is not his client, and doesn’t know what he’s talking about (which is not true).
so i fired the old web designer, and put in a new web designer, who SPECIFICALLY SAID that she would be working with my new host provider, because she doesn’t have a dog in this fight… which is to say, she is NOT ALSO a host provider, she’s just a web designer, and if she has to contact the host provider about something, she wants a way to do it, which is NOT just asking me to ask the host provider… which is one of the things that i have found REALLY IRRITATING about ALL of my previous designers. 👍👍
i need to pay for a couple of new licenses, but i would have had to pay for them, anyway, so that’s not a big deal, but the new web designer is charging me about the same price for THREE months, as the old web designer was charging me for ONE month, so it’s all going to work out in the end.
also, i got kicked off mastodon for being “too political”, so i uninstalled the ActivityPub plugin, because if i can’t read other peoples’ rantings about how awful the political stuff is, then i don’t want to contribute to it. feh! 😒
last weekend was REALLY difficult… on top of the “normal” massive political and social dumpster-fire-in-a-flood situation that is going on, moe was in chicago, i had two dogs, a cat, a bird, and a snake to look after, AND my web sites were switching host providers, which, by itself, is one of the most difficult transitions under the BEST of circumstances…
and it’s not over yet, although it’s about 95% finished, at this point: our email still hasn’t settled down, yet. with mine, there seems to be some difference between IMAP and SMTP, which SHOULD display the same, but it doesn’t, and i no longer know enough about it to even come close to telling why, or even accurately describe what is happening… and pretty much all of moe’s mail that is more than a couple months old has mysteriously vanished, and she doesn’t even use a SMTP client, preferring IMAP, which, in itself, is somewhat disturbing. 🤨
ETA 250322 the NEW host provider is re-downloading her email, because, apparently, the first (really difficult) download was MISSING EIGHT GIGABYTES of data. 😒
and, on top of that, there’s continuing unresolved chaos and discord between the (new) host provider and the (old) web designer, which, once again, put me into a profoundly deep “chuck it all in the dumpster and go live alone in a remote cabin in the woods with no connection to the outside world for the rest of my life” mood, which is still in the slow process of dissipating. 😒
this has probably been the worst migration i have ever experienced, and it’s PRIMARILY because of the old host provider making things AS DIFFICULT AS POSSIBLE, while, at the same time, being TOTALLY UNAWARE of the fact that they were making things AS DIFFICULT AS POSSIBLE!
they were great when i signed up with them, but since they sold out to a large, multi-national corporation, a couple of years ago, their service has taken a distinct nose-dive, and i’m REALLY glad to be quit of webhost python.
and, the staff at the new host provider has been taking up the slack in a way that really impresses me — although that might be because i am just not used to having things go my way without a lot of my hard work going into it — but, in less than 12 hours, they have taken two “not a web site” sites and made both of them work as well as they can, given that the DNS settings for both sites have changed, and it usually takes 24 to 48 hours for the new DNS settings to propagate… i’m STILL not getting, or being able to send email at one of the two regular accounts i have, but, at this point, i’m willing to wait for the DNS to catch up.
i’m moving to a new host provider, so things may or may not appear correctly for a few days… hopefully less. more info as it comes in.
i have been poking around one of my old haunts, WebHostingTalk dot com, which has, in the past, been a source of succinct and correct answers, and, once again, it has not failed.
among other things, i learned that i “shouldn’t have to come here for this kind of help – your provider should support you”, and, if it were the same host provider i signed up with originally, i’m fairly sure that they would have helped me figure this out. but, for whatever it’s worth, WebHost Python sold out a couple of years ago, and their “support” has suffered the most, as a result. it used to be that i knew all the tech support engineers by name, but now there is a different “support” “engineer” for every time they respond to my tickets, some of whom don’t write english particularly clearly, and, even when they write perfectly clearly, about half of the time they only read the first two or three sentences, and then they start responding as though they have read the entire message, which means that, frequently, they’re repeating themselves, or what they’re saying has no relation to the actual subject… 😒
another thing i learned is that there is, actually a “tool” that is part of WHM, which splits “add-on domains” out into their own accounts… which is EXACTLY what i need… EXCEPT that it is only accessible by a person who has “root” privileges, which i DO NOT have… in other words, someone FROM THE HOST PROVIDER has to operate it… but, apparently, the “support” “engineers” either don’t know about it, or, if they do, then they are deliberately withholding that information and, potentially, laughing at me behind my back as i flounder about trying to figure out what to do.
both of those options are very definitely NOT what i should expect to receive from the people I PAY to help me figure these things out, especially when they’re talking about increasing their charges by 25%. 😒
SO moving everything to a new host provider BEFORE i figure them out is probably the wise and prudent thing to do.
FORTUNATELY that is ANOTHER thing that WHT is good for, and i have ALREADY made contact with a guy who said that he would host all my domains for about the same price that WHP was charging me BEFORE the 25% increase, AND he will help me split my add-on domains out into separate accounts. 😎👍👍
so, if you’re reading this, and it affects a web site of yours, be prepared to change the nameserver information at your domain registrar when i switch hosts. 😉
naturally, all this takes place at the end of the week, when the next business day is 3 days away… fortunately (this time), there isn’t something imminently going on that is going to break if i let it go over the weekend, and it will give me more of a chance to alert those people who it will affect. i’ve alerted two of the three people i still host, but the other one is proving a bit more elusive… and i totally understand, given his share of horrendous fiascoes that he has to live through… 😉
the other day i noticed that my web site wasn’t responding. i have had some recent warnings, from my commercial web designer, that my hosting situation wasn’t as robust as it should be, and so i wasn’t particularly surprised by this, but it definitely needed further investigation.
it turns out that there has, apparently, been a change in how server resources are allocated, something which has never been an issue before (or, if it has, it hasn’t been anything I have either heard about, or have any control over), and having all my domains on one “account” strains server resources. 🤨
the solution to, at least, this PART of the problem, is to use WHM to separate the domains into different accounts… but, until i switched to the current host provider (i want to say five to seven years ago), i didn’t even have ACCESS to WHM, have only the vaguest clue how to use it, and i DO NOT know how to use it to “separate the domains into different accounts”… and, it’s my impression that it is REALLY easy to FUCK THINGS UP, if you don’t know what you’re doing with WHM… which, it is my guess, is one of the reasons i never had access to it before the current host provider… 😒
and ON TOP OF ALL THAT…
i got an email from the host provider, this morning, that basically said “oh, by the way, we’re raising your rate by 25%”. 🤬
i have LOST TOUCH with A LOT of the stuff i used to know about internet and computers, and i’m kind of okay with that… which means that learning new things about internet domains and accounts, and learning a how to use a new computer tool, was NOT on my list of things i really want to do, and changing host providers AGAIN is ALREADY something i would RATHER NOT do…
but, guess what? it looks like i’m going to be doing both of them ANYWAY! 🤬🤬
so, i responded, saying that i could use WHM, if someone who knows how to do it wants to talk me through it… this was their response:
If you want to avoid all domains sharing the same resources, the best practice is to create a separate cPanel account for each domain through WHM. This way, each site gets its own resource allocation, helping to prevent performance issues if one site experiences high traffic or other problems.
To clarify:
– You can create a new cPanel account in WHM under the Create a New Account section.
– Each account will have its own login, email setup, and resource limits (based on your hosting package).
– Please note that moving files, databases, and emails from one cPanel account to another must be done manually. Unfortunately, we are unable to assist with the migration process — you will need to handle this yourself.You can access the WHM panel through your client area by selecting Login to Control Panel.
from their email this morning:
To enable us to continue providing you with the quality and reliability you expect — and to further enhance the performance and security of your services — we will
be charging me 25% more…
the quality and reliability i have come to expect is for them to help me figure this out, like they did prior to selling out. 😒
i am so NOT going to pay 25% more for this crap! 🤬
i have a book and a 3-CD set called “Creative Alliance 9.0” which, allegedly, contains 7000+ truetype and type 1 fonts. according to ebay, it was made in 1999, when things were still labeled as “compatible with MacOS 6.0 or greater, and Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and NT”…
gawd, i remember those days… 🙄
and, as far as i can tell, the font information on these disks still work on modern computers — “font” (or, more technically accurately “typeface”) information doesn’t change that much.
i recently followed this guy on mastodon, who is the lead for a project called “DISKMASTER” at the internet archive, which is a collection of around 26,200 disks from the period of time when CD-ROMs were the medium of choice. when he heard about this disk set, he encouraged me to upload it to the archive…
but… 😒
first, i made an account, with my default browser, firefox — recently firefox changed their user agreement to allow them to be able to sell, or use to train their AI, any information that i upload (including this text 😒), so that is likely to change very soon — and when i tried to upload the first disk, i got this error message that said “Remove all zero byte files”, said that directories are “zero byte files” and upload of directories was only possible through chrome… but there is no “chrome” for linux, and the mac i have which has a CD-ROM drive runs an “antique” operating system and no longer connects to internet, so that my really important applications like photoshop and sibelius can’t “automatically” update themselves into oblivion.
however, there IS a “chromium” for linux, which i don’t use because i’m trying to keep google from sticking THEIR nose into my private life (as much as possible), so i tried that…
when i tried to hit the internet archive, it gave me a blank page, with no clue that i had even loaded a web page. when i looked at the source for the page, it appears that i was SUPPOSED to be re-directed to a “no script” version of the page, but the URI to which i was supposed to be re-directed, doesn’t exist. 😒🙄
now, don’t get me wrong, i would DEARLY LOVE to get these disks on the internet archive, and, potentially, gain access to these fonts… i USED TO HAVE most of them, because i USED TO BE in the business of using them on a regular basis, but since the cloud drive crack of 2021, they all went away, and these disks NO LONGER WORK on modern mac or windows computers, even if they do have CD-ROM drives.
but, unless someone can tell me how to upload them without any “zero byte files”, i’m lost.
a long time ago (1999-2000 era, so 25 years ago or so), i bought a printed book called “The Compleat Book of Scales”, which is an “exhaustive list of every possible scale and mode based on the Western European equal-tempered chromatic scale”.
it has been an invaluable resource, which i have used many, many times, since i bought it. the web site i bought it from, glassarmonica.com, has, apparently, been offline since may of 2021, and the book is, now, nowhere to be found.
i feel the same way about my notes from the tech school, which i originally collected between 1982 and 1984. i have not only used them multiple times, to this day, i know EXACTLY where to find information about screw-thread sizes, mouthpiece specifics, and ideas for how to treat ailing instruments of all kinds, which are easily transferrable skills in case i’m fixing our plumbing, or that sort of thing.
the internet is great, and everything, but there’s nothing that can beat a printed book that has been useful for its entire life. 😉
moe went to orlando yesterday. she’ll be back wednesday. quill is staying with one of our dog-trainer neighbours, kestrel has decided that, without moe here to make her, she doesn’t have to come inside, so i’m having to potty her on a leash, and timmy hasn’t really figured out what’s going on, but it’s different, his primary wrestling target is not here, and the result is that he has reverted to clawing my legs and deliberately doing stuff he KNOWS he’s not supposed to do, to get attention.
i used moe’s computer projector to start the outlines for a new painting of timmy, which will use the correct colour palette, and i (finally) got started on the transcription of Galizianer Tants for the fremont phil. i hope to work on both of them, extensively, while moe is gone, primarily to give my mind something to concentrate on other than how miserable and lonely i am with nobody here except pets.
the other day, i found a photo that totally screwed up my presumed timeline in the new “list of when things happened” that i have been reconstructing ever since the cloud drive crack of 2021, which was a photo of me and some kids from SPARC in the spring of 1994, when i thought i remembered working at SPARC in 1992. i have some intermittent calendars from 1984 to 2005 that i went through, which SORT OF helped me get things straightened out — for example, i thought i had lived in randy’s apartment for a month, and in fred’s basement for 2 months, in 1995, but it turns out that i lived in randy’s apartment for a whopping TEN DAYS, and in fred’s basement for a little less than ONE month, before i moved to the rooming house in west seattle. i THINK i’ve got a slightly better handle on when things ACTUALLY happened, now, but there are still some things about which i’m not completely sure.
i have just, for the very first time, obtained a left-handed mouse, and my whole world has changed.
almost immediately after my injury, like with most things, i switched from being a right-handed mouser to being a left-handed mouser… unfortunately, because of the fact that the mouse was intended to be used by a right-handed mouser, i had to learn to use the mouse at an angle that allowed me to “normal-click” the “left” mouse button, which defaults to having to change positions any time i want to use the “right” mouse button for its normal stuff.
and, as a part of re-organising my office, i discovered that i now have THREE right-handed mice which are only partially functional: two of them don’t move the cursor reliably, and the third one doesn’t “middle-click” any longer… so, i figured, as long as i was getting a new mouse anyway, i might as well get a left-handed one.
now i have to UN-learn 20+ years of bad mousing habits. 😉
in 1998, when i worked for STLabs, i was the test lead on a brand new product for the Crayola® corporation called “3D Castle Creator”, which was, allegedly, a gadget that lets one create virtual castles, while ostensibly being an “educational tool” that taught all about various aspects and features of castles, in general.
it had A LOT of bugs. i built a model trebuchet that i kept in my cube, and launched tennis balls over the cube walls at my co-workers, to keep them motivated. 😉 i had some really amusing screen shots of various bugs in the video portion of the program, but they all got wiped out in the great cloud drive crack of 2021. 🫤
however, i found a windows-only version of it available on “My Abandon Ware dot com”… 🙄
it probably works, if one has period hardware and operating system…
that didn’t last long… 😒
here i started my reddit profile, and here i deleted my reddit profile.
there are just WAY TOO MANY people who don’t know what they’re talking about, who give expert advice like they DO know what they’re talking about, and who DOWN-VOTE anybody who DOES know what they’re talking about, who tries to clear up the rampant and uncontrolled misinformation.
i’m not JUST talking about me, in this case. 😒
so, why is it that when the “Heaven’s Gate” people were saying wacky, and provably untrue things about space and astronomical stuff, everyone EXCEPT the cult members knew that what they were talking about was utter hooey…
but, when marjorie taylor green’s boyfriend, brian glenn starts ranting about what comes after the upcoming solar eclipse, everyone treats it like he obviously knows what he’s talking about, and we had better pay attention to him… because he’s a second-rate right-wing broadcaster? 😕🤷
given the choice, i would prefer the cult. at least they had something to look forward to. 😒
except that instead of less than 1 TB of space left, i now have about 6.9 TB of space.
i wonder how long that will last me? i wonder how long it’s going to be until i have to upgrade again… 🤷
the second disk has been installed, and the RAID1 instance is rebuilding again. allegedly, in around 27 hours, it will be complete, and then one of the twisted pair will remote in to change the partition sizes from thick to thin.
everything is proceeding EXACTLY as planned! 😈
i keep thinking of Lord Buckley and his ravings about “The Naz”… once this is all over, i’m going to have to dig out my lord buckley CDs. 😉
i have the disks in hand… well, one of them is in hand, the other one is already in the RAID1 array, and is currently rebuilding — which means that i can’t use the NAS for things that i normally use it for… once the first disk has rebuilt, i can pop out the second smaller disk and replace it, and then wait for it to rebuild… also, apparently, along with the difference in space, i can now use a “thin” disk (as compared to a “thick” disk), which means… something… having to do with the array’s ability to expand into a larger disk space… or something like that… 🤷
i am astounded by the amount of technology i no longer understand, despite the fact that i am as much of a geek as i am, for as long as i have been… i mean, there’s some of it that has been superceded: people no longer use HTML4, but i had been a certified geek for 25 years before i worked with a disk that was more than a gigabyte, and i now have a 12 TERAbyte disk array, and from what i understand, it’s not even REALLY that big… despite the fact that the guy who showed up to put it in, today, mentioned that it is, and i quote, “a shit-ton of space”… 😉
allegedly, if everything goes according to schedule (and there’s no reason to believe that it won’t), the 12TB disk will rebuild for a long time — >24 hours — and then i have to shut the disk down, remove the 4TB disk and replace it with the other 12TB disk that is sitting on the desk, next to me, and then power it up again, at which point it will rebuild the other disk for >24 hours, and, after that, i can use the device normally. allegedly, there is some sort of arcane voodoo that someone has to do to the operating system to convert it from “thick” to “thin”, but, allegedly, that can be done remotely.
hopefully this will last me a little longer than the 4TB array did. 😉
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… 🤯
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.
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. 😒
i decided that i would try discord, since a lot of my friends have recommended it.
i went to discord’s web site, and clicked on “load discord in your browser”, only to be confronted with a page that said “we’ve noticed something strange going on” and wouldn’t go any further without verification, which involves entering my email address and password…
but, i don’t have a password…
this is the first time i have tried to login to the site. this is the first time i’ve ever even SEEN the site.
really!
😒🙄
i’m guessing that it has something to do with some combination of the facts that i’ve disallowed all cookies, have my browser cache set to zero, and am trying to login using a VPN, but whatever… 🙄
i guess i’m not going to be on discord… oh well… 🤷
ITS.FUN — caution: they want $1,562.50 a year for registration, and apart from the fact that it would add a great deal of “fake” legitimacy to the “fake” email address i have been using FOR YEARS — [email protected] — it’s probably not worth the money. 😉
you’d be surprised where you can go with a fake email address that looks like a real one… 😉
Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro
i LOVE to see this!!! 🤍🤍
it is a prime example of how I AM NOT WRONG when i rant about the evils of HTML in email! and it even includes a more complete version of the RANT regarding top-posting, that i sent out with EVERY! SINGLE! FUCKING! EMAIL! I! SEND! (🤬) along with the INTERNET STANDARD RFC 1855 to support it!
if there was one thing on internet that i feel EVERYONE should read, and pay attention to, it is this. if even half of the people on internet read this and did what it said, spam would disappear overnight! 👍👍
-- namaste salamandir (he/him) [email protected] A: Because it breaks the logical sequence of discussion Q: Why is top posting bad? -- https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt () ascii ribbon campaign /\ - increased security My Email Client - against html e-mail Is Not A Web Browser! -- There are two kinds of people. I'm not either of them.
Continue reading Distinguish tech pros from tech poseurs with this one weird trick
my NAS got overloaded:
WHICH IT HAS NEVER DONE BEFORE!!! 🤬
so, because it’s a new computer, we said “start new”… not realising that the backup that was already there was close to 2TB, and the NAS already has all of my data on it, so the probability that the new backup was actually going to fit was slim to none… 😒 so, when the new backup failed, due to lack of space, i suggested that we move the old backup to an external hard disk, and try it again… except that, for some unknown reason (i blame demons), i was UNABLE to copy the old backup, because of an “unknown error”… meanwhile, unbeknownst to either of us, TimeMachine™ had decided that the best alternative was to try again, which filled up the disk. literally… there was something like 40GB of available space on the 4TB NAS, and NO WAY to remove ANY of it, because, despite the fact that i AM “admin” on the disk, it wouldn’t let me delete or copy files, because, apparently, TimeMachine™ had screwed around with the permissions, and would no longer let me! 🤬 what ended up happening is that moe had an external hard disk which to which we were able to backup her laptop, and then we BOUGHT a new 2TB external hard disk to which i was able (finally… i blame demons 😒) to copy the old backup… but then, when i tried to actually DELETE the old backups from the NAS, it wouldn’t let me… because of an “unknown error”! 🤬🤬 at this point, i was getting really tired of this crap, so i called the place from which i bought the NAS, which also manages my offsite backups, and sicced them on the problem… and, after a couple of false starts, they were actually able to delete the two old backups and return the NAS to a more “normal” capacity.
i got to “fly” on a flying trapeze, yesterday! 230727 salamandir on the flying trapeze (because, for some reason (i blame demons), i can’t put my own videos “in line”, like i can with youtube videos. 😒). it’s a circus skill by which i have always been intrigued. what i learned is that, if i wanted to do it more than once, i would probably have to make some sacrifices of other stuff i am doing — like “riding a unicycle” — and learn a WHOLE BUNCH of new shit… and, at this point, as fun as it is, i simply DO NOT have the space in my already-damaged brain, to store a whole bunch of new shit…
i got a capsule-making machine — as compared to the “capsule-making TOOLS” that i got on amazon, a couple of weeks ago, which are tools for making “one capsule at a time” 😒 which work exactly as advertised, but it is only one capsule at a time, which is REALLY time-consuming… — which is able to make ONE HUNDRED “double zero” capsules in about 15 minutes or less… and i used the machine to make a HUGE QUANTITY of quarter-gram doses of mushrooms. and, because of the fact that i made a HUGE QUANTITY of them, i have been spreading them around a little, to people i know who could use some microdosing antidepressants. 😈
on 230703 (almost a month ago), i ordered 2 CDs from Yello in germany. but, because of a wonky web form that was probably originally programmed to cater to audiences in germany, i ended up entering an address which, while TECHNICALLY points to my current location, probably WOULD NOT be understood by the “american” postal service. i realised this almost immediately, and went through a week of trying (and failing) to get in contact with the distributor of the recordings to correct the address. i succeeded in getting automated responses, in german, from a few different addresses, and i got a WHOLE BUNCH of bounce notifications, because, apparently, their email is handled through micro$lut, which has decided that the dedicated IP address which handles MY email — and ONLY my email! 🤬 — isn’t legitimate enough to be able to send email to their users. 😒 but i paid using paypal, which DOES have my correct address, so i decided to let paypal and the postal services figure it out. and, after being delayed TWO WEEKS being processed through incoming customs (for some reason… i blame demons?), i finally got the disks, today… and i discovered that one of the CDs is actually a 2 CD set of really early, unreleased stuff by boris blank… i just bought it because it has the same name as the music-generating app that i have for my tablet… 🤣
okay, officially, ChatGPT works better than google.
when i upgraded to jammy, the application that i use to transcribe CDs — K3B — also got upgraded. because of the fact that i installed fresh, rather than upgrading, K3B was installed without the encoder needed to transcribe CDs into .flac files (why is still beyond me). i KNEW i needed to enable the FLAC encoder, but i couldn’t figure out how…
so i went to google, typed in “how to enable flac encoder in k3b”, and got a HUGE PILE of links, most of which were for how to transcribe FLAC files into audio CD format — exactly the OPPOSITE of what i want to do. then i typed in “enable flac encoder k3b” and got another HUGE PILE of links, most of which were EXACTLY THE SAME as the last time… although, this time, the top link was to the K3B manual, so i tried that, and got a couple of links which were mostly incomprehensible, primarily because they were talking about things that AREN’T K3B, or flac files. i tried several other combinations of queries at google, over the course of an hour or so, with similar results, getting more and more frustrated every time…
then i tried ChatGPT…
i typed in “how to enable the flac encoder in K3B”…
and it gave me PRECISE, STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS for how to enable the flac encoder in K3B…
and it WORKED!! 😒🤨🤔
officially, ChatGPT works better than google.
Western Digital confirms digital burglary, calls in law enforcement
western digital is, ultimately, responsible for the great cloud drive crack of 2021, and they still haven’t made good. the only thing they’ve done is offer me a 40% off coupon for a new cloud drive. 😠 as if 40% off is going to console me after 40 years of my personal data, artwork, music, and everything else, was summarily deleted by some low-life miscreant who doesn’t even know me. as if 40% off would even REMOTELY convince me to change my mind, and purchase another storage drive from them, EVER… 😠
i say, the more WD experiences shit like this, the better i like it, and if the person or persons who did this, ever need a place to hide out, my house is always open.
i succumbed to peer pressure, and checked out ChatGPT, the “Artificial Intelligence” language model about which everyone has been ranting. my initial impression is that it is the next step beyond Racter, and it actually wouldn’t surprise me too much if i have a disk with Racter on it around here somewhere.
i asked it what it can do. it responded:
As a language model, I can perform various tasks such as:
Answering questions
Generating text
Conversing in a natural language
Summarizing text
Translating text
Providing information and facts on various topics.
i am inquisitive by nature, which is probably why i made such a good software tester. and, as a software tester, i have discovered that the following question is one that either stumps or confuses so-called “artificial intelligence” programs (like Racter) in some stunningly spectacular ways, and so i asked it
what is every all which what where when why how whos?
and i got, probably, the most coherent response i could have gotten, considering that, ultimately, i asked the question of a computer: it said:
“What” and “which” are interrogative pronouns used to ask questions.
“Where” is an interrogative adverb used to ask about a place or location.
“When” is an interrogative adverb used to ask about a time.
“Why” is an interrogative adverb used to ask for the reason or cause.
“How” is an interrogative adverb used to ask about the manner, means, or method.
“Who’s” is a contraction of “who is”.
“Whose” is an interrogative pronoun used to ask about ownership or possession.
“All” is a pronoun that refers to the whole quantity or extent of something.
there are some pretty astounding things that it DIDN’T do, by which i am very impressed: it didn’t ask me ‘what i meant’… it assumed that what i was typing made sense, and so it made as much sense of it as it could; it didn’t try to change the subject; it didn’t ask me to ‘rephrase the question’; it gave generic, accurate answers to every part of the question it could perceive, regardless of whether it ‘made sense’ or not; and it EVEN tried to make sense of the ‘nonsense’ word i put in there — whos — which it could neither identify as ‘who’s’ or ‘whose’, so it gave me both definitions.
then, the conversation took an entirely unexpected turn…
PRZXQGL: are you related to racter?
ChatGPT: No, I am not related to Racter. Racter is an early computer program designed to generate text using simple algorithms, while I am an advanced language model developed by OpenAI, using deep learning techniques.
PRZXQGL: you are related to racter, whether you know it or not.
ChatGPT: You are correct that there are some similarities between Racter and my language model. Both Racter and I generate text, but the approaches and technologies we use are different. Racter used simple algorithms, while I use advanced deep learning techniques that allow me to generate human-like responses.
“human-like”?
heh heh…
“HUMAN-like”??
ROTFLMAO! 🤣
that’s RICH, coming from a computer… 🤣 especially one which knows about racter without me having to prompt it… 🤣
it is exactly why responses like these serve to make me even more skeptical of these “artificial intelligence” programs than i already am. 😒😏
ETA 230131: i had the following interaction with ChatGPT, which goes to strengthen my determination that it is the next step beyond racter:
PRZXQGL: describe the poem “Jabberwocky”, by lewis carroll, in minute detail.
ChatGPT:“Jabberwocky” is a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll, first published in his book “Through the Looking-Glass” in 1872. The poem is about a protagonist who sets out to slay a fearsome creature called the Jabberwock. The poem is famous for its imaginative and absurd use of language, as many of the words used in the poem are made up or have alternate definitions.
The poem consists of 14 stanzas, each containing four lines of rhyming couplets. The language used is highly imaginative and playful, featuring words like “frabjous,” “vorpal,” and “bandersnatch.” The overall mood of the poem is fantastical and dream-like, as the protagonist journeys through a strange and surreal world in search of the Jabberwock.
The poem is often interpreted as a commentary on the absurdity and confusion of language, as the words used in the poem are intentionally made to be confusing and difficult to understand. Despite this, the poem remains highly entertaining and imaginative, as the protagonist’s journey to slay the Jabberwock is full of twists and turns, and the language used to describe it is highly imaginative and playful.
Overall, “Jabberwocky” is a classic example of Lewis Carroll’s innovative and playful approach to language, and is considered one of his most enduring works. It continues to be popular and widely read to this day, and is a testament to the power of imagination and playfulness in language.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
i took the plunge and installed kubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) as a dual-boot — since i have a TON of extra disk space because of the NAS, and because of the fact that i have a 2TB SECONDARY hard disk, which i conveniently forgot about…
i figured it was about time to upgrade when i saw the “upgrade now, you fool!” warning messages, that appear at the top of my screen when i boot the computer, for the past week or so, but i’ve read some… “THINGS”… about upgrading jammy, rather than installing fresh… and, well, i have a TON of extra disk space because of the NAS, i have a 2TB SECONDARY hard disk, which i conveniently forgot about…
it only took me two days to go from blank disk to almost completely identical systems, with surprisingly little data loss… i’ve been having some trouble with widgets, applications, and the “task bar” (which is behaving strangely enough that, my guess is, they’re going to have an update which fixes it within a few days), some of my more fantastic “desktop effects” (specifically, the ones seen here) don’t seem to exist, and i’m having some trouble getting the browser configured correctly, but, all-in-all, this has been an amazingly painless procedure.
yesterday something happened to my “widgets” — the things that contain the various content in the left hand side bar on this page — that caused them to disappear, and be replaced with the “default” widgets, which were boring and didn’t actually convey any useful information. at the time, i was on my way to a rehearsal, and couldn’t take the time to fuck around with it, and figure out where my content went to… but today is something different.
at first, i figured i would just rebuild the content that i could remember, but then i realised that i had A LOT of content that i didn’t remember — the list of haikus, for example, or the excerpt from “Kissing Hank’s Ass” — which i WOULD NOT be able to recreate from memory… because my memory sucks. 🤕
but then i remembered… i have a plugin called “updraft”, which makes a weekly backup of the entire site, and downloads it to my (new) cloud drive. i could just restore the most recent database backup, and it would only delete one post: the post that i made, yesterday, called “BUGGER! 😠” which complained about my not having the time to fuck around with it.
so i restored the most recent backup, which restored my OLD widgets, then i took their advice and changed them from “text” widgets that contained HTML code (which, apparently, is “bad”), to “image” and “custom HTML” widgets, which, essentially, work EXACTLY THE SAME, but don’t have a tendency to arbitrarily disappear with no warning.
i don’t have yesterday’s post, but i’ve got all my widgets restored, and now, instead of having a grumpy post about how things don’t work, i’ve got a triumphant post about how i’ve been able to overcome adversity. 👍
on this day, in 2007, i started this blog, as a response to livejournal selling out to the russians, which means that this blog has been in existence for 15 years, in more-or-less the same place. i wonder if it will last another 15 years. 😏 as a result of getting closer and closer to leaving “twit-turd”, i have established a presence at linktr.ee, where i put ALL the links to EVERYWHERE that i might be contacted… which is a little strange, because, as far as i know, it is the first time i have EVER posted, in the same place, links to personalities that i have endeavoured to keep separate, prior to this. it is also a bit strange, because i actually switched my harmonic flute video to “public” from “you can’t see it unless i gave you the link”, because i didn’t want “salamandir” and “rev. deluxe” obviously associated with each other. now, i’m not as concerned, i don’t think anyone of consequence will notice, and, even if someone of consequence DOES notice, it simply doesn’t bother me as much as it did 15 or 20 years ago.
“twit-turd” has become a seething morass of white supremacists, nazis, fascists, MAGAts, drumpf-lovers, vaccine denial, and hatred, ALL OF WHICH is more-or-less unmoderated, because (among other stupid things he’s done), when “ELONgated MUSKrat” bought it (under duress), the first thing he did was to re-instate a whole bunch of people who had been kicked off the service, for violating rules that “ELONgated MUSKrat” disagreed with… which, at this point, includes “Fartgorie Taylor-Greene” (who was booted for spreading vaccine misinformation), and Donald J. Drumpf, himself (who was booted for spreading lies about the 2020 election). how long i stay there is still up in the air, but it’s a matter of days, weeks, or months, and certainly not more than a year, unless some massive change happens. 😒
the first show of 2022 fell yesterday. it wasn’t very much, but it’s enough that i am re-thinking my plans to go to the panto rehearsal this evening, despite the fact that we only have three more rehearsals until the show starts.
this was yesterday, at approximately 9:30 in the morning. i PROBABLY could have driven my car in this amount of snow, but unfortunately…
this was today, at approximately 7:45 in the morning… i definitely COULD NOT drive my car with this amount of snow… moe says that, outside of our neighbourhood, the roads are plowed, clear, and passable, but… from where i sit, it looks like a skating rink, and i have to get up a hill (which moe said is a skating rink) in order to get out of the neighbourhood… and the only reason moe knows this is because she took the truck, loaded with concrete blocks to work today, because her car needs new tires (which she just discovered yesterday, after having slid around on various streets on her way home from work, yesterday).
so, i decided to reposition major furniture in my office, to achieve the following results:
this may involve a trip to ikea and possibly a new desk, as the one that i have is a repurposed ikea table.
the reason i want to figure out how my studio works (again), is because i have recently discovered jamulus, which appears to be an audio interface that is designed to be used over internet. i realise that there’s some pretty hard physical constants that make audio connections… let’s say difficult… over long distances, but, apparently, distances less than 50 miles or so the latency is tolerable, and they get around the rest of it, sketchily, by having everyone listen to the server, and not the actual sound coming out of your instrument, and… well, i haven’t been able to busk the past couple of weeks (HVAC stuff), and i’ve been going nuts, because there are new songs that we’ve been talking about, but we can’t get together and rehearse because i have to be at home to let the workers in… and now i’ve got jamulus installed, and (apparently) working… all i have to do is hook up a microphone, which i do, but… no sound… and thus began the task of figuring out how the studio is set up.
there’s another thing i tried to get set up, but couldn’t, because of a lack of installation instructions. JamStud.io actually advertises “jam online without latency”, despite the fact that, as far as i know, scientists are still stymied by the speed of light 😉 which makes it impossible to have an audio connection without more and more latency as the distance increases… but, hey… if i could get it installed, i might be using that, instead.
exactly, all of THIS!
this is PRECISELY the reason i prefer to use FOSS whenever possible!
i AM one of those “1990s Linux proponents” although i didn’t start using linux on my own computers until 2000 — the last version of windows i installed was W2K server. before that time, i was predominantly a mac-head. i tested windoesn’t software (testing windows is easy, because there are plenty of bugs to be found), and used linux (and unix) at work for years, but i used macs for everything else… while i was building up the courage to switch to linux on my own machine. 😉
Continue reading You thought you bought software – all you bought was a lie
at one time i was a major apple fanboy… 😒
admittedly, it was back when the operating system was free, and all you had to do was go into your local computer store with four floppy disks, and you would walk out with a functioning operating system… in the early ’90s…
these days, apple has turned into a proprietary nightmare, which penalises people who buy and sell apple products without going through “proper” channels.
example:
my tablet has been needing service more and more frequently. it got a slight bend in the frame, and, apparently, the way they are made is flimsy enough that the strongest element is the screen… which breaks at the slightest breeze in the wrong direction.
my tablet first started exhibiting the symptom of “not charging” a few years ago. the first time it happened was when it was still under applecare warranty, but i took it to a third party repair shop (one hour device repair) once the applecare had expired. one hour device repair has a lifetime warranty on repairs, so subsequent times it started exhibiting this symptom, i took it back and got it fixed for free… and, usually, got a new screen in the process, because they had broken it in the process of fixing the charge port.
then, a couple months ago, someone (it may have been thaddeus, but i’m not sure) sat on the tablet (or something) which put enough of a bend in the frame that the screen no longer met the edge of the frame… at which point i started needing to get it repaired (for free) more frequently, but, on the up side, they could get the screen off without breaking it.
the last time this happened was last week. i took it in, and they diagnosed a new problem with one of the power management chips. they said that, under normal circumstances, their experience has been that once this power management chip starts to go, there isn’t anything that can be done to fix it.
🙄
so, knowing that apple sells “refurbished” equipment for EXORBITANT prices, the first place i looked was on craigslist, where i found an ALMOST IDENTICAL tablet (the old one is a 3rd gen., and the new one is a 4th gen.) for $690… which is A LOT less than i could get it refurbished (starts around $1,200 and goes up from there). i contacted the guy, and arranged to pick it up (which is what i was doing at dick’s drive in the other day). he said that the applecare subscription expired tomorrow (which is now yesterday), but he was going to extend it a month, so i could get a chance to switch it over to my name.
so, i called applecare, and (after getting cut off mid-call), i finally learned that i couldn’t switch the applecare to my name, because it had to be done by the original owner. so i contacted the guy, and arranged to meet him in issaquah. when he called applecare, they asked him his name, and the serial number of the device…
and then, they told him that it is NOT POSSIBLE to switch the applecare to anybody else. i can’t even wait for the applecare in his name to expire, and then subscribe with my name, because i am not the original purchaser.
if i had bought a “refurbished” tablet (from apple), it would have come with “refurbished applecare”, but, because i bought it directly from the seller, they didn’t have a chance to “refurbish” it, and they aren’t willing to issue a new applecare subscription.
AT ALL!
EVER!!!
🤬
apple has just lost ANY loyalty i may have still had for their products. this is totally stupid! 🤬
i SHOULD BE at the oregon country fair, at this very moment… but i am not.
less than 12 hours BEFORE i was supposed to leave, i tested positive for COVID-19. moe tested positive, as well. 😒
i mentioned it on twit-turd™, and some random person responded “your (sic) fully vaccinated? why blame the anti-vaxxers?”
to which i responded “”your” fully vaccinated?” PLONK! 😒”
(if you don’t know, “PLONK!” is the sound that spam messages make when they are shit-canned)
however, here is my reason for blaming the antis/republicunts:
if you recall, way back, two years ago, when this whole pandemic was first starting up, the CDC came out with a statement along the lines of “if we can get EVERYONE to wear a mask for a month, we can defeat this.” this was BEFORE they even had a vaccine…
but there were a whole bunch of anti-mask republicunts who believed #drumpf when he said that it would miraculously disappear, and totally ignored the CDCs recommendations.
and tens of thousands DIED because of it.
then they announced a vaccine, and there were a whole bunch of anti-mask republicunts who said that the vaccine contained aborted fetuses, or some such garbage, and refused to get vaccinated.
literally MILLIONS died, but the antis stood their ground, as millions of THEIR OWN KIND were dying around them…
and, more recently, there has been the “federal” (#drumpf-appointed) judge who decided that the mask mandates for airlines and public transportation were “unconstitutional”, and the rush to re-open businesses, and the rush to “get back to normal” that has totally ignored the CDC recommendations (AND, i might add, COMMON SENSE) which means that millions MORE died…
if we had listened to THE EXPERTS about this, we would have been done with it, or, at the very minimum, be well on our way to recovery by now, but…
now, don’t get me wrong: if a person CLAIMS TO BE an “expert” on something, i ALWAYS take what they say with “a grain of salt”, particularly when they claim to be an “expert” in MY health. but i also know enough history to know that, in 1918, when we had a pandemic of the “spanish flu” (which turned out to be an american phenomenon that was first isolated by spanish doctors), BEFORE the advent of reliable vaccines, the “anti-mask” crowd was the PRIMARY reason (along with world war one) that it lasted for 3 years.
yesterday, i felt “under the weather”, and slept most of the day. towards the end of the day, i transitioned from feeling “under the weather” to feeling truly awful, but (fortunately) moe was there with over-the-counter medicines and common sense, and i actually slept through the night (which is something that i rarely do, under the best of circumstances, these days), and i feel weak, but more-or-less normal today… but i was SUPPOSED TO BE at OCF LAST NIGHT — my panto comrades are going to miss me, there are at least two pieces of music they CAN’T PLAY because there are prevelant tuba parts, and, because of the fact that i tested positive on tuesday night, i can’t even go out in public (even with a mask) until sunday or monday.
and i have ZERO compunction about naming the stupid motherfucking anti-vax republicunts as THE primary cause of this. 🤬
and, despite the fact that boris johnson (the UKs answer to #drumpf) stepped down as the prime minister of the UK, yesterday, i am still not holding my breath that anything is going to change for the better, any time soon.
fortunately, i haven’t seemed to have lost my sense of taste and smell: i’m currently burning incense, which i can smell, and moe made chicken soup, which tastes AWESOME, but both moe and i have commented on the “brain fog”, which will, hopefully, go away over time.
and, as everybody has been saying, it’s really great to have a LIVE audience for whom to perform…
but i’m still terrified… not enough to stop me from plating, but enough that it is definitely making a difference in my performances: i totally screwed up the melody for Godfrey Daniels’ tune yesterday… i played the first few notes correctly, and then got totally lost and confused. i picked it up again, a few measures from the end, but, as ALL of my other performances of this tune have been exemplary, that one was a major embarrasment. 😒
one of the unintended results of playing the moisture festival is that i haven’t been able to spend as much time on “twit-turd“, with the immediate effect being that, when i logged in, this morning, there were TWO events which were “trending”, about which i knew absolutely nothing… and the more i read, the less i understood about both of them. 🤨 i’m not giving up on it (because, honestly, it’s the most contact i’ve had with people on the fringes of, and completely outside “my community” since i gave up fecesbook), but, once again, i am forced into a position where i have to examine whether or not these “social media platforms” are, really, good for me… and i get the very strong impression that the answer will be “no”. 😒
not that it’s any great surprise…
220318 new (optional) desktop behaviour thanks to kubuntu! 😎
today is the day one hour device repair said they would repair my device… because they couldn’t do it tuesday, because the right person wasn’t in. so i took my device in to redmond, watched the guy open up the shop, he took my device, said the board tech would be in in about an hour, and he would text me when it was ready, and i went home.
when i got home, i got a text from the guy. he said that his board tech had called in sick, and they’d have it done tomorrow.
except that i have to, you know, USE it tomorrow… 😒
fortunately, i have printouts of all the required pieces of music for tomorrow’s rehearsal, because there’s almost a 100% guarantee that IF they actually have it done tomorrow, it WILL NOT be in time to take it to the rehearsal, and i’m still not 100% convinced that they’re not going to break the screen in the process of taking it apart… which, naturally, will mean that it will be EVEN LONGER until i get it back. 😒
this time, instead of being one step forwards and two steps back, it’s actually been two steps forward and one step back. i wonder how long i’ll be able to keep up this pace? 😒
i made the jump from kubuntu 18.04 to kubuntu 20.04 today, and it went smoother than i had ever hoped, in my wildest imagination… 😎
i’ve been slowly configuring the computer for about a month now, and i finally found an old debian CD that had the .deb file for sigrot, which i installed this morning… and that’s pretty much the last thing that i had to install from external sources.
my old .deb file for sigrot went away with the old cloud drive data, and they discontinued it around 2000, so it’s “no longer available”… but it turns out that i can purchase install CDs for old versions of debian from LinuxCollections dot com — apparently the modern version of CheapBytes dot com, which went out of business a while ago 😢 oh well… — and it turns out that the versions of debian called “slink” and “potato” have the most up to date version, and it works perfectly well on kubuntu 20.04…
and why wouldn’t it? ‼⁉ it’s a tiny little application that only interacts with plaintext files that I provide, and it only makes a .signature file, so it’s not relying on system calls or hardware requirements… why they would have discontinued it is beyond me… apart from the fact that, i’m fairly sure, nobody but me even uses a .signature file, these days… 😈
i already had to install gucharmap, because no KDE-based character map works as well for what i do, and i’ve also installed the “Deep Connections” gramplet in the new version of GRAMPS, which is A LOT easier than it has been in previous versions. i’m fairly sure that there will be other things that i will install as i use the machine more, but i’ve got the old machine set up next to me, and i can use its configuration as an example when i need to.
at this point, the system looks good, and the minor tweaks that it needs will get done when they come up, because this is good. 😉
but this is, far and away, the easiest complete system upgrade i have ever experienced. THIS is the way it SHOULD happen, ALL THE TIME!! 😁👍👍
also, i finally got a mouse whose third button works the way it’s supposed to, which means that, now, i have to UNLEARN the “copy-and-paste” gesture that i have been forced to use, because the old mouse had a third button that didn’t work consistently. new computers that work the way they’re supposed to, ROCK!!
so, the tablet-fixer shop got the part in, and they said i could come in any time, and they would fix it “while you wait”… so i took it in this morning, only to discover that the person who can fix it (without destroying it) won’t be in until friday, unless i want to take it to bothell…
the thing is, i’m still more convinced than not, that they’re going to break the screen in the process of taking it apart… like they have, twice, in the past… and if they’re going to have to replace the screen, i would rather that the people who have dealt with me, and my device, in the past, be the ones that deal with me this time, rather than having to “break in” (so to speak) a new person, when my device gets broken… 😒
but i’ve got a zoom class on thursday, and, while i CAN do it on my phone, it’s A LOT smaller than my tablet, which makes things like responding to chats A LOT more difficult… and i’ve got the final rehearsal for the moisture festival on saturday, so if they DO break the screen, it probably won’t be fixed until after the second week of moisture festival, which is the first week i am supposed to be playing the moisture festival… which is decidedly LESS than ideal. 😒
the guy was supposed to come by yesterday and finish the insulation on the ductwork, but because of the plumbing disaster that happened over the weekend, and the EXTREME squeamishness of the guy, it turned out that he REFUSED to work, because of a little puddle of clean water that was left over from them running the hose into the cleanout under the house… 😒 our next door neighbour (who is a professional plumber) came over during the actual disaster, and again, after the HVAC guy left. what the HVAC guy said made me think that there were new leaks and ground saturated with grey water, but when i and the plumber went into the crawl space, the only moisture we could find was a small puddle of clean water… the plumber said that the HVAC guy was being a prima donna and a “pussy”, and called him up to tell him so… which i thought was EXTREMELY funny. but HE won’t be back until NEXT TUESDAY!! 🤬 and they want the crawl space to be COMPLETELY dry, and clean, before they will complete the work… the thing is, the weather has been rainy for a week, now, and, even with a fan down there, the ground moisture is NOT going away. i got a 25-foot sheet of visqueen which i’m going to lay down after a couple more days of the fan being down there, but, if the guy doesn’t finish the work, then i guess i’m not going to pay them the $6,000 that we agreed on when they started. 😒
on the plus side, i met someone who, i think, is my third cousin, once removed: ryan dorward, currently from bali, but normally from vancouver, BC, otherwise known as SHARPS. he is the great-great-grandson of John Muir Dorward, the elder brother of Peter Dorward, my great-great-great-grandfather… which makes our common ancestor Robert Dorward, who lived from 1803 to 1846 in Arbroath, Scotland.
i’ve got a zoom class this evening, a telehealth appointment tomorrow, and a moisture festival rehearsal on saturday…
… and my tablet decided to stop charging this morning. 🤬
i got in touch with the technician that replaced the charging port (odd that this seems to happen on an almost yearly basis… odd indeed… 😒), and informed him that it had quit charging again, and he said i should bring it in. so i left an hour earlier than normal, and headed up the east side of the lake to redmond, where the technician confirmed that it was, indeed, a faulty charging port, said that they would fix it on warranty, and ordered the new part. 👍
problem is, i’m fairly sure he DIDN’T also order a new screen at the same time… and this particular model of ipad is NOTORIOUS for screen breakage when you have to open it up FOR ANYTHING… kinda like they had to do last year (and the year before) when they replaced the charging port. it turned into a two week job, during which time the screen of my tablet was BROKEN, which precluded me from using it for ANYTHING… 😒
and that can’t happen this time, because i have zoom classes, telehealth appointments, and moisture festival rehearsals AND PERFORMANCES in the next three weeks. i can get through the rehearsals and performances with my old-school hard-copy music, and the zoom classes and telehealth appointments THEORETICALLY can take place on my phone, but it will be at least three levels of hassle that i would rather avoid, if i had the choice. 😒
The Evolution Control Committee – Fool On The Hill, major/minor swap
so, i’ve heard a couple of other “modifications” like this: John Denver, Country Roads in a minor key“is a significant example, but, still, i gotta ask…
HOW DO THEY DO THAT???⁇⁇
seriously! 🤔
i can imagine how the key of the entire piece could be changed from major to minor, but changing the individual chords from major to minor, or vice versa, would be A LOT more work, and even if one were willing to put in the amount of work necessary to do it the way i imagine it’s done, it wouldn’t result in anywhere as “nice” sounding music… 🤷
along the same lines, Jolene at 33 is also pretty awesome. 😉 but i’ve done that…
another casualty of the cloud drive crack:
my “HANDY-DANDY LIST OF WHEN THINGS HAPPENED”
which i have been updating since my injury (2003) to help me keep track of what happened in my life, and when it happened in relation to other things that happened in my life.
my recollection is that it was a fairly complete, if compact, version of an “autobiography”, which i had been updating with new material, or changing around the position of old material when new evidence came to light, for a LOOOOOONG time… it was DEFINITELY a “working document”, and it’s gone. poof. 😩😖
a couple weeks ago, i started to rebuild it, but i’m confounded by the fact that things that appear very vividly in my memory don’t seem to match up in a predictable way with the timeline of my life. i don’t remember when important things happened:
for example, i am reasonably certain that i lived in St. Gordy’s house in 1988, but the job i remember having — working at mellowoods and music in friday harbour, doing musical instrument repair for the friday harbor traditional jazz festival — didn’t happen until 1991… and i actually HAVE a button from the friday harbor traditional jazz festival, and it actually SAYS “1991” on it, so it’s kind of hard for me to argue…
but, the problem is that i lived in St. Gordy’s house for a while, then i moved up the street a couple blocks and lived there for a year or so, then i moved into the dome in 1990, and i lived there until i moved to thillberg road, in mount vernon, with ruth…
or, when i freight hopped to wenatchee… i know i lived in the dorms during 1979 and 1980, and i moved to lummi island for 6 to 8 months, and then i moved to mackenzie street, and lived there until i moved to seattle to start the tech school, in 1984. i also know that i didn’t freight hop to wenatchee until i lived at mackenzie street, but i can’t remember, for sure, whether it happened in 1982 or 1983. at this point, i’m LEANING TOWARDS 1982, because i have calendars and sketchbooks from the early 1980s that may seem to indicate that, but nothing is written in clear enough language that i can be totally certain. 😖
fortunately, Ezra, St. Igon (with whom i freight hopped to wenatchee), and St. Gordy are still in my “contacts” list, but this whole thing started when St. Igon ASKED ME when we went to wenatchee, and that was AFTER i had already started to rebuild my list.
and ezra is in michigan with his sweetie, and won’t be back until mid-december…
FRUSTRATING!! 😖😖
i INTENDED to use goo dot gl’s analytics to determine how many people had hit the link, and where they were located. apparently that was only a SMALL FRACTION of the information i could receive from the QR code.
what i didn’t know is that they shut down their URL-forwarder at goo dot gl in 2018 and i only JUST found out about it.
fortunately the QR code, and the URL-forwarder continue to work, but…
goddam it, gewgel… when you stop using something important, you should make it somewhat more obvious. 😒
now, admittedly, i INTENDED to use the goo dot gl analytics, but i only logged in to see what was happening for the first time, today, so i really was NOT paying attention, but still… you would think that a company as big as the big G could be a little more public about things like this.
this time it started out as a charging port. it was intermittent for a while, i had to plug it in a certain way, with the plug held just so, or it wouldn’t work. then i upgraded the OS to 15.x and it ceased charging all together. of course i noticed right away, since i almost always keep it plugged in to power, unless i’m actually using it for something.
i had to wait a week (with my tablet unable to charge) while they waited for a part to come in. i was supposed to pick it up today.
i heard the technician who actually fixed it, say, about 3rd gen 12.9″ ipad pros, he’d seen one with a broken charging port “last week”. he also said the job was sensitive, because switching the charge port means disassembling the screen, which is “sensitive”… which meant that they might have to replace the screen as well…
i don’t think i was intended to hear that part, because the technician was talking to his boss, but… well…
he was right.
they broke the screen. 😒
i was supposed to pick it up at 2:00, and when i walked in, the guy said that there had been an “issue” with the screen, and that i was getting a new screen, which — he said — would be delivered “tomorrow”…
the last time they replaced the screen (last year? two years ago?) their replacement “tomorrow” took around a week. and, because of the fact that they broke it, while in the process of fixing something else, they get the privelege of keeping my tablet until the screen comes in (whenever that ends up being). 😒
and, of course, i have a telemedicine appointment tomorrow… 😒 i think i can do it on my phone, but i have never done it before, so it’ll be challenging, at the very least. 😒
a couple weeks ago, i suddenly couldn’t login to my blog. it didn’t give me any of the standard “you can’t login” messages, instead it gave me half a page of code that was only partially legible (to me), and no clue what happend or how to fix it. 😱
after a good deal of futzing around, and a few back-and-forths with the host provider, i figured out that it was because i had a 2FA plugin, set to auto-update, and WordFence, also set to auto-update. when WordFence added a 2FA feature which was activated by default (generally, a good thing), and auto-updated itself, it “auto-updated” itself right into the middle of a conflict with the 2FA plugin that was already there, and active. 😱
at the time, i figured that it would be easier to delete the 2FA plugin and use the feature provided by WordFence… so i deleted the 2FA plugin, and set up the 2FA feature provided by WordFence.
except that, unlike the 2FA plugin that was now deleted, WordFence’s 2FA feature only gives you the ability to set up an authenticator ONCE, and, after that, it “assumes” that you have an authenticator set up, so it doesn’t give you the ability to set up another one.
which i discovered today, when i tried to login using my phone, rather than the tablet on which i have set up the new 2FA set up. the result was that i entered the 6-digit code given to me by google authenticator, only to have it rejected… twice… and then i was banned from logging in TO MY OWN GODDAMN BLOG! 🤬
THIS is why the web designer DIDN’T set plugins to auto-update on Hybrid Elephant! 👍
after i used one of my emergency login codes, i set the plugins to NOT auto-update, re-installed the 2FA plugin that allows you to set up more than one iteration of the authenticator, and deleted, and re-installed the blog on the authenticator on BOTH my tablet and my phone…
whew… i think that’s everything… 😕
nothing has been happening.
nothing has been happening politically, nothing has been happening socially, nothing has been happening musically, nothing has been happening in regards to the COVID virus… i now have A LOT of “free” time: every other week i have a one-hour appointment with kate, and every week i have my one-hour circus class, but that’s it. 😩
i’ve been spending a lot of time hiking on taylor mountain.
i shipped out two incense orders, today. i’m averaging between two and six orders a month, and, before i got cracked a few months ago, i actually had over a thousand dollars in my bank account… but then i got cracked, and spent it all on replacement hardware and a pile of recovered, possibly useful data.
i have expanded ZIP files for about a tenth of my fonts collection, from the recovered data. mostly TTF files, and just a small fraction of the fonts i used to have. fortunately, my recollection is that my entire >10,000 font library is backed up on CD, somewhere… i’m sifting through the rest of the recovered data slowly, and more or less randomly: it’s totally discouraging to look at this huge pile of recovered data, which took me a couple decades to accumulate, but which is now many, many schrödinger’s cats with random file names, EVERY ONE OF WHICH has to be opened to determine whether or not it’s corrupt, and if it’s not, what general pile it goes in, which all have to be sorted again, later on, and then, probably, sorted at least once more before they’re back in more-or-less the place where they’re supposed to be. 😒
so, it’s something to do, but, literally, i would rather be doing ANYTHING else… 🤬
i ordered some “performance masks” from J.W.Pepper a few weeks ago. they were back-ordered (without my knowledge), and, when i talked to a customer service drone on monday last week, i was assured that they would be shipping out later that week, but i still haven’t seen or heard anything. they’re called “performance” masks, because they look like you’re wearing a mask, but, in reality, the mask has a hole in the front, that your mouthpiece goes through, which makes it practically useless as an actual mask… but the new rule at the market is that the only buskers allowed MUST BE masked, so it’s either wear a “performance” mask, or don’t busk. 😒 but i can’t busk at all, until the “performance” masks are delivered, and, as far as i can tell, at this point, they’re still on back order, and who knows when they’re going to arrive. 😞
fecesbook was down for around 6 hours, today… down, like, completely down, DNS not working, routes not functioning, nslookup and whois not working, domain for sale…
it’s back up, at this point, but, allegedly, fuckerberg lost 7 billion dollars as a result of the outage, and is now only the fifth richest person on the planet. still no word on exactly what caused it. 😉
one distinct DISadvantage to having a new, working cloud drive, is that there have been two different occasions within the past two days, where i thought of something, and went to look for the source files, thinking that i knew exactly where they were located, only to discover that they were on the OLD cloud drive… 😒
god DAMN whatever anonymous skript-kiddie that caused this! 🤬👎‼
back in the dark ages, when i was working at STLabs, before we moved to factoria (i.e. STLabs… so, what? maybe 1995? 1996? somewhere in there), i was testing Internet Explorer version 3.0, which meant, basically, that i was testing micro$not’s browser engine, which is called MSHTML.dll. at the time, a very good friend of mine from college, saint fred (now, sadly, passed on) was mucking about with the innards of micro$not’s operating system, and discovered a problem which had existed for several years prior to this, which micro$not had “made disappear” by changing the technology’s name from OLE — which was, itself, a “renamed” technology, originally called Visual Basic for Applications, or “VB-A” — to “ActiveX”, and, in the process of making it “disappear”, actually made it more prevalent and insidious, by making it work seamlessly with even more micro$not technology.
and, saint fred being who he was, took advantage of this by writing the “Exploder Control”, which could be embedded in a web page, or a microsoft document, and would, when “activated”, perform a clean shutdown of the computer on which it was being viewed… whether you wanted to shut down your computer, or not.
you hit this web page, and, within seconds, your computer shuts down, with no further input from you. 😏
or…
you open this microsoft word document, and, within seconds, your computer shuts down, with no further input from you. 🤣
i watched it happen as it first came out, before anybody realised what it was. it was hillarious! i gave the URI for the exploder control to my boss, and then went back to my workstation and listened, as she suddenly whined “it shut down my computer!” 🤣🤣🤣
and, of course, micro$not’s response to this was to threaten saint fred with lawsuits for doing stuff he shouldn’t have been doing, and when that didn’t work (because fred made sure that the exploder did everything strictly “by the book”, including getting micro$not’s signature on the control), they made the exploder control something that was detected by their anti-virus software (even though it was very clearly NOT a virus, and, actually, did everything totally “by the book”, something to which micro$not never admitted), and, once they figured out that they had caused all of this, they pulled their signature on the control, so that it raised even more red flags before actually activating it…
and, basically, did everything EXCEPT fix the problem, which, after a few months of frantic ass-covering by micro$not’s marketing department, while the tech industry had a good laugh, got swept under the rug, anyway, by more current micro$not fiascos.
but the technology remained, and every version of windows has support for activex, every version of MSHTML.dll has support for activex (which is one of the reasons micro$not got rid of MSHTML.dll a couple years ago, and current versions of Internet Exploder… um… what’s their browser called again? EDGE, that’s it… uses google’s “chrome” browser engine, instead. the browser wars are over! micro$not LOST!) and you can, literally, do ANYTHING with activex, that you could do from the normal user interface of windows, and there is, literally, NOTHING stopping you from doing this — or other, more nefarious things — given A LITTLE knowledge of the technology.
which is why, when i saw this headline: Miscreants fling booby-trapped Office files at victims, no patch yet, says Microsoft the FIRST THING i thought was “Exploder Control strikes again!”
this is one of the VERY BIG reasons i do not use micro$not on my computers. i don’t even have my microsoft 5-button mouse any longer!
i wonder if they’ll ever learn. 🙄
i’ve come to a decision.
there are over 150,000 separate files, which takes up 4.5GB, in the .jpg directory alone, of the recovered data.
it took my computer half an hour of doing nothing but loading the directory, before it was completely loaded. every time i opened a file, it took 10 minutes to reload the directory.
i would have to open every one of them to determine if it’s corrupt or not, and if not (about ⅔ of the time), i would then have to determine what it is, and where to put it.
if it takes me (conservatively) 30 seconds per document to make those determinations, i will be doing this for the next 4,500,000 seconds, or more than 7 months of doing NOTHING but opening files to determine whether or not they’re corrupt… no eating, sleeping, shitting, busking or anything else, just slogging away in front of the computer.
factoring in those other things, i’m looking at a couple years, minimum. 😒
i may have been willing to do it at one time… who am i kidding, i’ve NEVER been willing to do that, for that long, for as little payment as i would get. 😒
it’s sad, but there it is: the last 6 years of my life, in pictures, and they’re all going down the toilet, along with a significant portion of my business, my music and artwork, and monique’s photos from the past 6 years.
now, do i keep the data on my new cloud drive, or do i delete it. i’ve also got it on the 1TB external drive that the data recovery folks sent me, so it wouldn’t be entirely deleted… but… 😭
this is one of the times the computer has won the battle. 😒
ETA: interesting, but extremely BIZARRE development is that, upon further investigation, there is a “.jpg” directory, and a “photos” directory, in the recovered data. the documents that are in the .jpg directory are about ⅔ usable files, but their names are gibberish, and there are more than 150,000 of them, all in one directory. however, for some strange reason, the files that are in the “photos” directory are in subdirectories that indicate the manufacturer of the camera, scanner or printer (of which there are about 50), and further subdirectories that indicate the make and model of the camera, scanner or printer (there are A LOT of them), and the files themselves, for the most part, contain the date they were taken in the filename… and, let me tell you, i have A LOT easier time figuring out what a photo is if it is named something like IMG_20061129_133315 (49EA1400).jpg than i do if it is named 80AB2B00.jpg… A LOT!
this is an update. what i’ve been doing:
busking. this has been a long time coming. it’s really good to get out and play music for people, and, so far, we’ve been averaging between $15 and $25 apiece for an hour or so of busking. now, instead of howlin’ hobbit and his ukulele, it’s thaddeus and his banjitar — an interesting hybrid, that looks like a banjo, but has six strings and is tuned like a guitar. as i’ve always said, the money is an extra, added bonus, for me, and it’s still true, even after a year and a half… but it’s always nice, and we’ve actually already got one “paying” gig as a result: the pike place market is putting on a “sunset supper”, and is hiring market buskers at $100 apiece for an hour of busking while rich people eat food… that is, most likely, NOT offered to the buskers, but they’re paying $100 apiece, so it’s sort of okay… the BSSB has started rehearsals again, too, which is another bonus. 😉
ripping CDs back into my music collection. i have only gotten the barest of starts sorting the recovery data, in spite of the fact that, in the small print, the data recovery people say that their “free” recovery media (a 1TB hard disk, in my case) only has a warranty of five DAYS — which, to me, says “if you don’t get your data off our recovery media post haste, we’re not going to guarantee that you’ll have ANYTHING, regardless of how much you may have paid us.” nevertheless, at this point, i’ve got all of the data that really made a difference (the panchamukhi ganesha from my car, the spreadsheet containing the data for the Incense of the Month Club, and the spreadsheet of blocked-for-spamming IP addresses), and, basically, if i had anything else i need, i don’t remember it, and probably won’t until i need that data again, which will mean that i’m probably going to have to keep going back to the recovery data on occasion, for the rest of my life… however, if i already have freshly ripped .flac files, then, when i finally get around to slogging through the 1TB MESS of recovered data, it will be slightly less of a concern if the archives i got are incomplete or corrupt. this is an ongoing project that is probably going to take several weeks to finish, and while it’s going on, i may not post here, as much.
hiding from the smoke and heat. it hasn’t been as bad as it was a couple years ago, but it’s definitely smoke season. i look out my office window and see orange skys and translucent air, and the AQI is 63, which is firmly in the “yellow” range. busking, yesterday, was an extra bonus, because it was around 10°F cooler at the market than it was at home… it’s 20° cooler than it was in june(!!), but it’s still in the high-90°s, which is extremely rare around here, in my experience. the government climate change investigatory committee just released the first part of their study, a few days ago, and it says what climat change activists have been saying for 30+ years, now, which is, basically, climate change is real, it’s happening, and it was definitely caused by humans… and then, two days later, 7 democrats switched positions, and voted with ALL the republicans, to pass a law making it illegal for the government to EVER ban fracking. 🤬 so, i guess that means that, ultimately, climate change will kill us all, but the rich people are going to die last. 🤬🤬 i have never wanted to, but it’s my impression that, soon, i will have to apologise to ezra for bringing him into a world where he may never reach his full potential, because of the thoughtlessness and carelessness of my immediate ancestors.
hiding from the virus. the delta variant is 1000 times more contagious than the original strain, and they’re saying that recipients of the pfizer vaccine, at least, will have to get a “booster” shot, but they’re not saying when it will be available, or how long we have to wait before getting one. in the mean time, schools have been making masks optional, and reopening, and then closing down again, when 40% of the students get COVID, while the right wing, q-anon devotee, anti-mask, anti-vax, trump morons are dying by the thousands, and STILL ranting their nonsense about it affecting pregnancies, or tracking microchips in the vaccine. there’s an image i saw on twitter that is, basically, a huge banner, strung between two cars, that says they’ll never get the vaccine, and that you’ll have to kill them… the ironic part is that, most likely, we won’t have to kill them, because the virus will do that for us, and we won’t have to do anything. hospitals are failing in missouri, texas, and florida, where the governors are particularly anti-mask and anti-vax, despite the surge in cases, and a vast majority of the fatalities have been people who refused the vaccine. at this rate, we’re going to be dealing with this pandemic for A LOT longer than the 1918 “spanish flu” pandemic, primarily because of STUPID people who won’t get the vaccine or wear masks, on account of their “freedom”. 🤬
sorting through the mess of recovered data is heartbreaking.
i’m finding all sorts of stuff that, once i actually see (or hear) a bit of it, i know exactly what it is, and i’m starting to get things organised enough that, some of the time, i even have a place to put it, once i’ve discovered what it is…
but, then… everything doesn’t come crashing down, but…
i haveHAD a CDR album called “We Bore 2“, which was one of my favourites. it was produced in 2003 by Toast & Jam Records, which has, since, gone out of business, and their web site is now a japanese porn site… it was a “various artists” compilation of electronic, experimental, glitch music, and it was AWESOME!
i found a .RAR archive with the .mp3s for “We Bore 2”, and i was, like, “COOL!”… i expanded the archive, and put it in the place it had been taken from in my collection, and went on to the next archive.
today, for the first time, i actually LISTENED to “We Bore 2″…
yeah, all the tracks are there, but track 1 is NOT what was there the last time i listened to “We Bore 2″… and track 2 is also the same way, to a lesser extent… and track 3 is pretty messed up… and track four is mostly there, except for a patch in the middle which is totally missing… and track 5… and track 7… and track 8… and track 9… 😭
pretty much all of the tracks have something wrong with them…
and i can’t get another copy of the CD, because i originally downloaded it as a .rar file…
and, i’m pretty sure (given the huge quantity of .rar and .zip files that got recovered) that more than a few of them are going to have exactly the same problem. 😭
ETA: all is not lost… well, for “We Bore 2” anyway… it turns out i actually have the original CDR for this album… but i’m fairly sure that is NOT going to be the case with a majority of the .rar and .zip archives i have…
why is the opposite of “progress” not “congress” rather than “regress”?
i got in contact with the vehicle-wrap artist that did the actual artwork for the previous car, and he, also, sent me an .eps file containing the original artwork, so i’m sure i have backed it up, now… although i haven’t backed it up to the cloud drive, yet, because i can still only access it through a web browser on my linux box, and not at all on my mac laptop… and i am worried that they’re not going to be able to make it work on my mac laptop, because i did the steps to auto-mount a network drive, at startup, and it took my password and chewed on it for 30 seconds or so, and then rejected it… i THINK it’s because the cloud drive wants me to login to /cgi-bin/ but the ancient mac will only let me login to the base server URI. and on the linux box, it allows me to specify the login directory, and accepts my password, but never gets beyond that, to actually logging me in — it just repeats its request for a username and password, over, and over, and over, and over… 😕 hopefully, when the guy comes over this evening to give me the keys, he will be able to conclusively address these issues.
ETA: he addressed those issues like a boss, and had BOTH the ancient mac and my linux box wrapped around the NAS’s little finger in about 10 minutes… the old mac, apparently, doesn’t like the domain name, and REALLY doesn’t like the fact that my username has an @ symbol in it, but it eats up the intranet IP address like it’s going out of style, and, because of the fact that it’s ONLY addressing the NAS from the intranet, i just gave it the administrator username instead of my username… and the linux box was, basically, the same, once we figured out how to do it… and connecting monique’s computer was easiest of all: just gave it the intranet IP address and everything was kosher. 😎
there’s A LOT of music in .zip or .rar archives in my recovered data, so, once i get to the point of actually expanding those archives, i will have a significant part of my music collection back… for that matter, i’m pretty sure i “backed up” my music collection to CD, around 10 years ago or so, which means that, once i find where i’ve put it, there’s a good chance that my music collection will be back to 75% to 80% of what it was prior to the crack.
the western digital support personnel that i talked to on 210724, who said that someone would be calling me “monday or tuesday” lied, because it is now wednesday, and i HAVE NOT received a call from them… which only strengthens my suspicion that they are NOT going to try to contact me until after 210731, which is their deadline for making a claim through their data recovery program. 😒
the process of categorising partially corrupt files is both time-consuming, and ultimately frustrating, because, once i have rough-categorised the files, i have to go back through, re-open every file again to determine what it is, re-name the file, and then categorise it AGAIN… and A LOT of the file names started with the date that they were last looked at, which, frequently, is a complete mystery from inside the document, so even when i have them renamed, and categorised, i still can’t complete a time-line for stuff that was modified more than once… which will, very likely, cause major headaches in the future, particularly with documens created for other peoples’ printing. 😒
seriously, whatever anonymous skript-kiddie did this to me — who has never even met them before — just for “lulz” — better hope that i don’t run into them late at night in a dark alley, because, if that ever happens, the result will NOT be positive for anyone. 🤬
on a lighter note, i got my physical copies of questionable content, the electronic copies of which were lost… i’m slowly getting everything put back together.
but i still have to rewrite the IOTM blurb about patchouli for next month, because it’s coming up really soon, and it’s the only IOTM blurb that i didn’t get back… which is a real shame, because the old one was really amusing, and i don’t know if i can remember all of what i said.
lord buckley would love this…
but, unfortunately, lord buckley was part of the data that either wasn’t recovered, is corrupted, or i haven’t found it yet because i’m dealing with sixty gazillion files that are named something like 0SVP8382U794.mp3 or 3O1458DNLWO.jpg, because all of their meta-data has been deleted. 😒
anyway, the new NAS is up and running, although not completely configured yet. i have an “app” on my phone and tablet that gives me access to the cloud drive, and i can access it through a web browser on my antique mac and my linux box.
ETA: and accessing it through a web browser is an entirely new experience for me, because, despite the fact that it’s in a web browser, the “pages” are things like the file center, which allows me to “drag-and-drop” files from my local computer, to upload them. basically it acts like a window, even though it’s technically a web page. will wonders never cease?
although i’m fairly sure linux has a more direct way of accessing the cloud drive, the guy who came by to set it up wasn’t a linux geek, and, apparently, has never met a linux geek in the general public. he was astounded when i told him that i had been running linux for 20 years… 😉
but the new NAS is WAY cooler than the old cloud drive, primarily because it is, apparently, possible to edit files while they are still in the cloud, rather than having to download them, edit them locally, and then over-write the old file on the cloud. if what i have already experienced with audio files is true, the likelyhood of my losing any MORE music is practically eliminated. also, it appears to be possible to install executable code on the NAS, and run it locally, which would make things EXTRA SUPER COOL, but i’m not 100% sure of it, yet. 😉
ETA: the NAS has, apparently, either configured itself, or something has been installed remotely that allows it to communicate with my linux system via a number of different protocols, including SMB, MTP (whatever that is — Media Transfer Protocol… who knew?), HTTPS, and bluetooth… which is really odd, because my computer doesn’t even have a bluetooth reciever, so i kinda wonder where the “Bluetooth” icon in the remote network directory came from… unfortunately, i have been unable to connect with anything other than HTTPS, even though the SMB instance takes my password and doesn’t say it’s wrong, it just won’t log me in… which is something to take up with the configurators tomorrow.
the “twisted pair” who are whipping my computers into shape doing my configuration are going to be finished up tomorrow, at which point i hope to have the more direct method of connecting on at least the linux box (if they aren’t able to figure out the antique mac, i understand). i’ve already got a lot of stuff sorted out of the recovered data, including a whole bunch of music, embeded in .zip archives, which appears to be uncorrupted, so, initially, it appears that i may not have lost everything. oh, i also discovered a bunch of CDs that have the date 4/20/13 on them, that appear to be raw .wav files of my first three cassettes, originally produced in the 1980s. if they are as pristine as they appear, then i MIGHT NOT have lost all my old music.
AND western digital FINALLY got back to me — i originally reported the loss on 210624, and, since then, i have sent the drive to texas, waited two weeks, and had the people in texas deliver the drive back to me, which arrived ONE WEEK BEFORE the western digital team (which “values your data”) got around to contacting me… 😒 they said they couldn’t help me unless i uploaded the system logs, but when i plugged in the drive, it wouldn’t even mount on mac, which means that they couldn’t even talk me through the process of recovering the system logs, at which point the issue was “escalated”, and they are, alledgedly, going to call me back monday or tuesday. at this point, i would estimate that it’s NOT particularly likely that western digital is going to call me back before 210731, which is when their web site says i have to have contacted them regarding a data loss from CVE-2018-18472… because after 210731, they don’t have to do anything about it. 😒
so, according to the latest theory, a script kiddie found out about, and took advantage of CVE-2018-18472, but the bug doesn’t just allow anyone with the IP address to login as admin…
the bug allows anyone with the IP address to login as admin AND DO A FACTORY RESET!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
what this means is that the files weren’t just deleted, they were OVERWRITTEN… a factory reset reformats the drive and re-installs the operating system.
which means that the files that are gone, are gone for good. there’s no getting them back, at this point… 🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢🤬😢
vector renditions, i.e. infinitely expandable and contractable, keeping the same line quality.
today, i confirmed that they are the original, and my modified versions of the graphic, which is excellent, because, otherwise, i wouldn’t have artwork for my NEW car…
whee? 😕
oh, definitely whee… the new car is a hybrid that gets almost 50MPG, and is only slightly smaller than the current car, although it’s white, and not black…
such is life.
good news: i got back (most of, as far as i’ve been able to tell, so far) my IOTM club records, including, most importantly the records of who paid when, and what they have received.
bad news: i’ve checked the largest adobe illustrator documents i can find, and they’re all corrupt, which means, very likely, that the artwork for my car is no longer, and when i get a new car (which might be a lot sooner than i expected), i will have to come up with new artwork for it.
i still have A LOT of files to evaluate… like more than a week, of solid 8-hour days, doing NOTHING but evaluating files… possibly as much as a month of 8-hour days. 😒
and that’s NOT listening to music and watching videos… that’s opening files, to make sure that they’re not totally corrupt, and listening to no more than 5 or 10 seconds of the music or video, to make sure that they’re not TOTALLY corrupt, and then rough-classifying the file based on the contents i’ve seen… and then going to the next file in the list.
which, of course, is leaving me with files where all but the last 5 or 10 seconds of music or video is corrupt, but the rest of it is fine, which is almost more frustratingly irritating than if the entire file was corrupt. 🤬🤬
also, more bad news: there were NO .ogg, .flac, .aif or .aup files recovered AT ALL, which means that NONE of the music that i have recorded since 1983 made it. 😢
i MAY still have the cassettes on to which they were originally mixed down, but they haven’t been played for at least 20 years, and i don’t hold out much hope. ken may have some of my stuff, because he is a music hoarder, and i have played music with him since 1985 or thereabouts, but he lives in bellingham. and i can download .flac files from bandcamp for all of the CDs i have made, except for the one that was made right after my brain injury, which isn’t all there on bandcamp… 😒
but, at this point, it doesn’t look particularly encouraging, and i strongly suspect that i’m going to have to re-rip ALL of the physical media i own, which is another couple of months of solid 8-hour days, at least. 😒
and that doesn’t even begin to address the HUGE quantities of music of which i have purchased and downloaded ONLY electronic copies, like the 40+ albums from ergo phizmiz which i have been collecting for AT LEAST 20 years.
it feels good to have created a way out of this mess, but it’s heartbreaking to think of how much quality work i have done that has been lost. 😢
ETA: i don’t know whether this is as good news as it could be, but i got a zip file full of business logos from my web designer, and there are a couple of high res graphics that are, basically, what i used on my car… and i actually found a couple of .eps files (which, i believe, are vector, and native to illustrator) of the graphic on my car… i haven’t checked, yet, because it’s late, and i really should be in bed, but, well… 😒 AND i am, officially, buying a new car (a hybrid, hyundai ioniq), which means that i’ve got to move my graphic, anyway.
the answer costs $600, not $800. 👍
the answer is two 4TB disks in a RAID1 array, not 2TB disks, in a RAID1 array. 👍👍
i know that the cause of all this was the (potential) loss of all my data, but, at this point, i like where it’s all going A LOT more than i did two weeks ago… for that matter, i like where it’s all going a lot more than i did a month ago, before this all started happening. 😉
the answer is a 4TB NAS, two bays of 2TB each, in a RAID1 array.
this serves a dual purpose: the NAS is my “cloud drive”, and the RAID1 array is my backup.
i can “backup” the backup, to “the cloud” or to an external 2TB device (like a flash drive) on a regular basis if i want, at that point, for extra security.
the answer costs around $800, for them to come in, set it up, get all my devices talking to it, from the antique mac to the bleeding edge kubuntu box, and hand me the keys.
i can afford the answer, without having to get “household funds” involved.
why?
because someone send me almost $1,200 for one of my huge boxes of incense, that’s why. 👍
‼
in other news, i paid them $600 and they’re mailing me back the remains of the old NAS, and a disk full of either data, or not-data. 😒 whee.
i want to make a bootable kubuntu 20.04 USB flash drive, but i don’t know how (never done it before) to install from a USB flash drive… and “installing from a CD” is no longer an option.
and, apparently, cheapbytes.com is no longer in business… 😒
so, i go to https://averagelinuxuser.com/make-a-bootable-usb-drive-in-linux/ which contains step-by-step instructions for how to do it.
after spending half an hour figuring out which is the USB flash drive i want to put it on to (/dev/sdc — which i found out by removing all the other USB disk from my system, and typing “sudo fdisk -l”), i try to wipe /dev/sdc and reformat it (because it is formatted for mac), but when i type
sudo wipefs --all /dev/sdc
it says
wipefs: error: /dev/sdc: probing initialisation failed: Device or resource busy
so, i try
umount /dev/sdc
but it throws the same error…
i DO NOT UNDERSTAND!! the device is NOT “busy”, you dumb machine!! 🤬 but then i realise that the machine isn’t the dumb one here, and if it’s giving me an incomprehensible error, it must be because it has been given incomprehensible commands… by me… 🤬
so, i type:
sudo dd bs=4M if=/home/salamandir/Documents/Install/kubuntu-20.04.2.0-desktop-amd64.iso of=/dev/sdc status=progress && sync
and, eventually, it gives me
2643034112 bytes (2.6 GB, 2.5 GiB) copied, 163 s, 16.2 MB/s
630+1 records in
630+1 records out
2643034112 bytes (2.6 GB, 2.5 GiB) copied, 163.442 s, 16.2 MB/s
but after that, it hangs up. when i press "enter", after a LONG delay, it gives me
^C
and, after that... nothing.
i don't have the patience to learn all this again... i just want it to work... 😒
after another HOUR of futzing about, i figured it out... but it's REALLY frustrating, and i really don't have the patience to figure it all out without significant stress.
and, when i booted with the new system, it was UGLY, and i know FOR A FACT that i'm going to have to spend as much time tweaking the system to my preferences as i am going through endless stacks of numbered files, and re-filing them in more-or-less the right place, for about the next 3 years.
just another reason to give up computers all together and become a hermit. 😒
i heard from the data recovery people. they said:
There’s ~4 billion sectors on the 2TB drive. Head 0 died with ~55 million sectors left to read (very small percentage). It’s at the end of the drive so it was probably zeroes anyway. The main issue is that the metadata has been overwritten and the directory structure and file names are gone. This means that the files will have the correct extension but no names and no parent folders.
so, what they recover will be, essentially, files with their proper extensions — .ai, .otd, .doc, .otf, .txt, .mp3, .mp4, .html, .pdf, .eps, .jpg, .flac, .gif, .etc… — but with numbers, instead of file names… and if, as with the files from audacity, the project file uses ancillary files in the same directory, then the project files won’t open until ALL the ancillary files have the correct names, and are in the correct directory… 😒 they said, because of the way i was attacked, actual file recovery is not guaranteed, and recovered but corrupt files are billable, which means that i MIGHT end up with no readable data at all, and STILL have to pay for it. they said their “standard” service costs $600 and takes 5+ days, whereas their “expedited” service costs $1,000 (like moe said, everything costs $1,000 😒) and takes half that amount of time.
i contacted the place that built my last computer, InfoTech, when they opened, at 10:00 this morning. i gave them the specifications for a new computer (pentium G6400 4GHz, 16GB DDR4, Intel UHD 630, 2TB SATA HD, with the 1TB SATA SSD i’ve had since 2018 installed), and they said that they were going to send me an invoice, but, as of 3:00 this afternoon, i haven’t seen an invoice from them. once i’ve got the actual computer taken care of, i’ll ask them about a replacement for my WD cloud drive… although, i think i may avoid further western digital products, at this point. 😒
miraculously, i seem to have all the parts for this month’s incense of the month to be sent out with a minimum of hassle. i suppose that’s a good thing.
so, i still haven’t heard from ace data recovery, because of the holiday weekend, but i decided to get my computer ready to take the new old data (if it still exists), by installing the 1TB SATA drive i’ve had sitting on my desk since 2018, which is the first time i thought i was going to need it…
however, it turns out that, because i got the “low profile” case, the last time i bought a computer (which, according to the label on the back, was 2015), there isn’t enough room to install the SATA drive, despite the fact that it’s ⅓ the size of the “normal” IDE drive.
i have two options. i can either buy a not-low-profile case, and pay someone to transfer all the internal shit (because i’m not skilled enough to do it, any longer), OR, for about $200 more, i can just buy an entirely new computer. 😒
it would cost around $700, give or take, to get a new computer, and have the 2018 SATA drive installed (thus making it a 2 HD system right off the top), and, at that point, i could hook up the hard disk from the old computer, via USB or something, and probably have enough space…
and moe sez it’s okay for me to spend that amount…
so, i guess i’m getting a new computer, as well. i remember when i would have been really excited at the prospect of a new computer, but, at this point, it’s JUST ANOTHER HEADACHE! 😠
today, i got the following message from western digital:
Western Digital is working on a Data Recovery recovery program and allow us some time for the program to be put in place. I understand you sent the drive to a Data Recovery Center. If he (sic) would like Western Digital to assist with the recovery cost, we recommend to wait for the program to be active.
Some My Book Live devices connected to the Internet are being compromised by attackers and in some cases, the attackers have triggered a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device.
We are here to help. Although this product family is no longer sold or supported by Western Digital, we know some of our customers have been impacted and we want to help.If you have lost your data because of these attacks, we will provide data recovery services which will be available beginning in July.
We know how important your data is to you and are committed to helping you protect it.
We will provide details about how to take advantage of this program in a separate email.
For more detailed information and updates, please refer to the Security Bulletin listed below.
WDC-21008 Recommended Security Measures for WD My Book Live and WD My Book Live Duo
https://www.westerndigital.com/support/productsecurity/wdc-21008-recommended-security-measures-wd-mybooklive-wd-mybookliveduo
the problem is, i NEED that data. it was driven home to me how much i need that data when i realised (this morning) that all of my federal tax records are on that drive… and they’re due soon… 😒 i DO NOT have the time to wait around for a “Data Recovery recovery program” that hasn’t been developed yet. 😒
“If he (sic) would like Western Digital to assist with the recovery cost, we recommend to wait for the program to be active.”… if “who” would like WD to assist…? I would, very definitely, like WD to assist with the recovery cost. unfortunately, i NEED that data NOW (actually, yesterday would have been better 😠), also, well, this IS july, now, and i haven’t received any indication that this recovery program is much more than a pipe dream.
my plan is to continue at the rate that i’m already going with the “recovery plan”, and if WD has any problems with my plan, they can shove it up their ass, and pay anyway! 😠
i JUST got email from the data recovery place, which says:
Thank you for choosing ACE Data Recovery. We have received your device in our lab.
…
We will be contacting you soon after the diagnostic’s results will be ready. Usually it takes one to two business days.
my impression, at this point, is that WD is GOING to “assist with the recovery cost”, whether or not they think they are now. it’s just a matter of how hard we (the class of people who lost data because of this negligence) are going to have to try to convince them. 😠
the cloud drive is on its way to dallas, to the temple of the computer wizards, who seem to think that they can actually retrieve data from a drive that has been wiped. whether they can, or not, remains to be seen, and if they can, actually, retrieve data, there’s no telling how much, but the expense increases with every file they retrieve, and i’ve got A LOT of files on that drive.
the current conjecture is that an anonymous, malicious, mindless, skript-kiddie found out about the bug that they’ve known about since 2018, but haven’t done anything about it because it’s a “legacy” device that hasn’t been upgraded since 2015 (despite the fact that MANY WD cloud drives are still in use all over the world), and wrote a script to search out all the IP addresses of MyBook drives it could find, and wipe them…
because they can… 😒
L0L! 🤬🖕🤬🖕🤬🖕🤬🖕🤬🖕
but, according to the latest theory, they didn’t overwrite the data, they just removed the allocation tables… they did a “quick” erase, not a “complete” erase… so the data is, probably, still there, as long as something hasn’t overwritten it, and, since the first thing i did when i couldn’t login was to shut it down, the chance that it’s still there is relatively high. it’s up to the experts, and whether or not i have enough money, to determine whether or not i see any of that data again.
and, as far as remediation goes, i think i’ve learned enough to install the 1TB drive (which is not big enough to store 2TB of data) that i’ve had sitting on my desk since 2018, but i haven’t done it yet, and i haven’t even started to search for a replacement cloud drive, or a backup system, because i’ve been going through an existential crisis, AND temperatures that have been an average of 35°F hotter than they have ever been, which has, essentially, shut down any hope of doing anything other than hiding and hoping it’s all going to be over soon. 😟
but climate change is a myth, created by china! 😒
it’s 25°F cooler than it was yesterday, but it’s still 10°F warmer than normal, for this time of year, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be getting better any time soon.
so, my Western Digital MyCloud Live bit the dust the other day. i spent most of yesterday stressing, and figuring out what was wrong, and beginning to figure out how to fix it (and not getting very far, because of the stress).
then, this morning, i wake up to this: CVE-2018-18472…
Western Digital WD My Book Live and WD My Book Live Duo (all versions) have a root Remote Command Execution bug via shell metacharacters in the /api/1.0/rest/language_configuration language parameter. It can be triggered by anyone who knows the IP address of the affected device, as exploited in the wild in June 2021 for factory reset commands…
and Action Required on My Book Live and My Book Live Duo
Western Digital has determined that some My Book Live devices are being compromised by malicious software. In some cases, this compromise has led to a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device. The My Book Live device received its final firmware update in 2015. We understand that our customers’ data is very important. At this time, we recommend you disconnect your My Book Live from the Internet to protect your data on the device.
the only hope i have is EITHER that the MyCloud IP address was unknown, unknowable, or “small potatoes”, OR that this is for My”BOOK” Live, and what i’m dealing with is a My”CLOUD” Live, and that CVE-2018-18472 applies to the My”BOOK” and not the My”CLOUD”…
but what is the probability of those things happening? 🤬
(actually, now that i think about it, the probability is fairly low: i BOUGHT the MyCloud device in 2014, and i’m pretty sure that i received firmware updates well after the 2015 date that they mentioned here, but… it’s still worrying.)
actually, i couldn’t POSSIBLY be that lucky… i was looking at the back of the device, and it very clearly says “MyBook Live”… 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
word now is that western digital has known about this since 2018. 🤬
some good news, for a change… i’ve written for a quote from Ace Data Recovery, which is a partner with western digital. i’m as confident as i can be (which isn’t much) that they have a MUCH better chance of actually recovering my data than anything i could do. of course, because of the fact that it is currently after business hours on friday, central time, and the fact that they don’t work on weekends, i’m probably not going to hear anything until monday, at the earliest. however, this gives me some time to work on the problem of where to put it once it has, actually, been retrieved.
my cloud device is not a cloud device.
it was working fine two days ago. by the time i discovered it wasn’t working, yesterday, it was too late to get tech support on the line, so i got them on the line today.
what they said is that my WD MyCloud Live is old enough that it’s considered a “legacy device” and they don’t offer service for it any longer.
so ALL of my hybrid elephant records, ALL of my “Incense of the Month” records, ALL of my appointments, ALL of my digital artwork, ALL of my pictures, ALL of my music… EVERYTHING is gone.
😟
ETA: i talked to the folks at western digital this morning, and what i learned was encouraging and discouraging at the same time.
i bought it, and had it configured by 140127, so it has only been six years, not the eight that i was complaining about originally… doesn’t make me feel any better about losing access to that data. 😟
the device is a WD MyCloud Live device, which is a “legacy” device which is no longer serviced.
the fact that i had the drive partitioned four ways, and primarily used it on linux, means that, even if it were able to be serviced, they wouldn’t do it. they support windows and mac, but not linux.
despite the fact that western digital disks are used on linux systems ALL THE TIME… 😒
it MIGHT be accessible directly, by plugging it directly into the computer, instead of a router. i plugged it into my mac laptop, and a new icon appeared on the desktop called “MyCloud Live”. it contained four “public” folders (documents, pictures, music, and another that i don’t remember), but they were all empty. also, it said i was logged in as “guest” and my disk doesn’t have a “guest” login, so my guess is that mac logged me into a new, blank partition.
which means that i MIGHT be able to access it from linux, if i can get it to log me in as something other than “guest”…
when in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles…
ask if anybody has a clue on kubuntu forums dot net…
the guy there said that, in all likelyhood, it is running an embeded linux OS, and, if nothing else, i could take it out of its enclosure and add it as a new hard disk on my computer, as long as it works.
however… 😒
at this point, i’m going to HAVE TO get a new cloud server to replace the old one (more goddamn money spent on this damn technology… 😠), and i don’t want to do ANYTHING with the old one until i have a new place, however temporary, to store all <900MB of shit. AND i just happen to have a samsung 1TB SATA disk — had it new, in the box, since 2018 — but because i don’t actually know how to install a new hard disk on a linux machine, i haven’t done so.
so, MAYBE everything isn’t gone, but it’s going to be a few stress filled days until i get it all figured out and get everything settled down to what passes for “normal” these days. 😟
so, i made this tweet yesterday:
this afternoon, approximately 24 hours later, this is the kind of reaction it’s having:
if there were only some way to get #NationalStrike #GeneralStrike #TaxStrike #LaborStrike #BankStrike #RentStrike #DebtStrike #MortgageStrike #MinimumWageStrike #CreditCardStrike #PeoplesStrike #PeoplePower #EatTheRich #RaiseTheWage #GuillotinesNeeded #WeAreClosed the same kind of response… 🤯
so, the weird weirdness with my web site was ENTIRELY caused by the osCommerce web site…
which i haven’t even thought about since 2016, because the previous web designer was supposed to have deleted it, once i had successfully migrated to wordpress…
but which wasn’t deleted (despite the fact that it was one of the things i paid her to do 😠), and continued to “function”, without a “head”, for FIVE YEARS…
if nothing else, i suppose, it says something about osCommerce’s resiliancy and ability to continue to function despite being headless and updateless for the past 5 years. i wonder if i could treat wordpress the same way, and expect the same result. i suspect, probably, not.
it’s still there, physically, but it has had it’s hooks into the system removed, so it is no longer functioning. the next step is to figure out which parts are wordpress parts and which parts are osCommerce parts, and delete the osCommerce parts.
in other news, ezra has come up with an idea that needs internet and a web host to work, and, well… i’m the next best thing to a web host, these days… apart from the FUMTU with osCommerce… 😉
in a new twist, the web designer that i worked with prior to the current web designer i work with — the one who blew a gasket for some still-unknown reason — was, as a part of what i was paying her to be a web designer, to delete the old web site files, once i had successfully been migrated to my new site.
unfortunately, apparently she blew a gasket before she actually did that.
and i didn’t know until… well… today.
my current web site is running PHP5, but there was an error which showed up in the log which was an uncaught variable that doesn’t exist in PHP5… in fact, it doesn’t exist until PHP7.4… and, upon further investigation, we discovered that it came from a document that is from osCommerce, which lead to other osCommerce documents, which lead, basically, to the entire osCommerce web site, which has been trying, and failing, to run PHP7.4, and generating WEIRD errors.
it had been beheaded — i.e. it didn’t have an internet-facing interface — but it is all still there.
it should be deleted. 😠
quoth the web developer: I’m going to guess, they’re going to come back and tell us they see nothing wrong. However, they will modify the server and then when I get back in there to test it again, it’s going to work. They just have a problem admitting when they’re wrong so they’ll fix it but tell us that it works fine.
quoth i: i don’t care how it’s fixed, i just want it to be fixed.
they have access to the dashboard, but they’re in a different time zone, so i have to be patient. 😒
ETA: i just got an email notification that says: A user with username “webhost-python” who has administrator access signed in to your WordPress site.
and then a note from YET ANOTHER technician who i HAVEN’T TALKED TO BEFORE (😠), who, apparently, tried the login, looked through the ticket history and decided that they don’t know enough to do anything about it, saying “I will assign this to our developers and they will get back to you.”
so, it begins…
tomorrow… 😒
i gave the web developer my login to the open support ticket at the host provider. there hasn’t been any obvious action yet, but i’ve emailed with the web developer, who worked out a temporary solution which may work out if his attempts to communicate with the host provider don’t work out… but, as i said, he hasn’t even logged in, much less done what the host provider asked of me, which was to “clearly lay out the issues you’re facing and the solution you need done to resolve this issue”.
i don’t know what the solution is, because i don’t know what is causing it. my web developer seems to think it’s the database engine at my host provider, because he has some sort of advanced tool that tells him when things aren’t working correctly. my host provider says he’s full of shit, that his proposed “upgrades” will break things for everybody else, and won’t even talk to the him unless he logs in as me. unfortunately, i know little enough about database engines that any input i can offer would be totally meaningless.
i feel a little bit better, because, now, instead of "doing this as a courtesy as this is not included as part of your Web Maintenance", they have now, actually charged me money, so i am, actually, paying them to fix my shit, and the temporary work around that he proposed, while not ideal, would certainly fix the problem for at least a year.
but i seem to recall going through another database fiasco last year around this time, and, if this is going to become a regular occurrance, i think i’ll pass, thanks. 😒
ETA: the web developer has logged in as me, and given a detailed description of exactly what is wrong, exactly why he thinks it’s wrong, examples of identical installations that follow his guidelines that don’t experience the problems i’m having, and a variety of different solutions to the problems he’s found. the host provider has yet to reply. because of the fact that they’re on eastern time, there’s a good chance we won’t hear anything until tomorrow.
i’ve noticed a couple of things that are… screwy… about my web sites.
intermittently, i get random SQL errors. they only appear once, and when i reload the page, they disappear, but it’s sort of alarming.
and then there’s the “not HTML” FUMTU, which usually works, but has decided not to for a few days now.
so, i contacted my web developer, who said that my database needed “upgrading” to prevent these, and future problems.
not knowing that much about databases, i contacted my host provider, who said that the “upgrades” he proposed are actually DOWNgrades, and implementing them would break the databases for EVERYONE who shares the server i’m on.
so, i got back to the developer, who said that the reason he stopped using this host provider two years ago (which was about the same time i started using this host provider) was because “their policy” was to avoid communication with “third parties” (i.e. i’m a customer of the host provider, and the guy who i pay to know more about the web than me is a “third party”).
while they didn’t actually deny that this was “their policy”, the host provider went out of their way to emphasise that i am their customer, and if i wanted to include my web designer, i would have to give him my login, because they weren’t going to create a special login for him.
so i did that.
i figure, whatever happens, i can change my password once this whole thing is resolved. it is also A LOT easier than trying to convince the host provider to create a login for someone who is not a customer of theirs…
then they switched their tactics, and had a different technician chime in (one with whom i have not talked about this particular problem), who stated “let your developer know that it is already upgraded and using a stable version. If he is unable to diagnose this issue then another developer may be needed…”
this was AFTER i gave my web developer my login, so that he could participate in the “conversation”…
i wanted to say “HE’S RIGHT HERE! TALK TO HIM, NOT TO ME!!” 😠🤬😠🤬
but i didn’t…
but i wanted to… 😒
the web developer was busy yesterday, and (like most “businesses”) he doesn’t work on the weekend, so i’ve pushed back the impending storm until monday…
but…
the web developer has already said “we’re doing this as a courtesy as this is not included as part of your Web Maintenance” and “if they can’t do what we’re asking them to do our hands are tied.” AND the host provider has already said “we do not have a way to resolve something like this as the server itself is not causing the issue and the database server is already up to date.”, which gives me the very strong impression that, when monday comes around, the web developer is going to show up and make demands, the host provider is going to say no, and we’ll be right back where we started.
and all of this is IN SPITE of the fact that i am paying BOTH of these entities to make sure that my shit is kept up to date! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
🤬
this morning is the second in a row that i have woken up at 4:00 in the morning, and can’t get back to sleep. 😒
it is THIS EXACT PHENOMENON that makes me want to give up internet forever and go live in the woods, like a hermit, not interacting with anyone! 😠
i’m REALLY glad someone else is maintaining my business web site these days. 😒
seriously, if it had been left up to me, i would have given up a LONG time ago, and would probably be out of business, because the web design business has gotten REALLY confusing.
example: the places in WordPress where HTML code is not, actually, HTML code…
there are places which display HTML code, and where that code occurs on the back end, it is actually rendered as HTML code in the browser, but if you want to edit the HTML, you have to copy the ENTIRE page, go to another location (or use an actual text-based code editing tool) and paste the ENTIRE page into that location, make the edits, save them in that other location, copy them from that location, go BACK to the original location where you copied the original code from and paste the new code in, and THEN save the original location…? 😕
and, to make matters even worse, as far as i can tell, there’s no way to tell which locations are HTML, and which locations only LOOK LIKE HTML… you’re just expected to know. 😠
as far as i can tell, backed up by a professional web designer who does this for a living, that’s the routine that works, and it has actually worked for me, in the past… but not this morning… which is frustrating beyond belief…
in my day, if something LOOKED LIKE HTML code, it WAS HTML code, and could be edited as such, wherever it occurred. 😠✊
1 Hour Device Repair (the one in redmond, not the one in issaquah) repaired my device for free, because they have a lifetime warranty on the repair that they did a few months ago.
as it should be.
they also apologised for the guy in issaquah sending me down the wrong rabbit hole.
this has been a very early, abrupt and completely satisfactory end to this battle. 👍
tablet became brick.
took it to 1 Hour Device Repair in issaquah, who told me that the charging port was damaged.
took it to the genius bar (two days later), and they tested it, and told me that the charging port was fine, but “have you had the display replaced?”
why, yes. yes, i have… by the people at 1 Hour Device Repair… 😒
the charging port is fine, according to the genius bar drone. he tested it, and it works fine. the display, however, is another question. according to the genius bar tests, the tablet is in “recovery mode” which normally displays a “connect me to power” icon, on the display, but, wouldn’t you know, the display isn’t working.
so i called 1HDR and talked to someone, who, it is my guess, is the “owner” of the 1HDR franchise in the area (if it is a franchise operation, which it appears to be), a young woman with purple hair and an eastern-european accent, and brought it in to the location in redmond, which is where it was repaired before. the FIRST THING she said, when she tested it, was “i don’t know why anyone would tell you that the charging port was the problem.” and didn’t even respond when i told her that it was the 1HDR repair guy in issaquah…
which tells me something about the 1HDR location in issaquah that i didn’t know before. 😒
long story short, she’s going to have to keep it for one to two weeks, because she doesn’t stock the screens because they’re so expensive, and it’s the holidays, and there’s a pandemic…
and she said that it’s a free replacement, because there’s a lifetime warranty, as long as i can prove that there’s no external damage that would have caused the display to fail. the fact is, she looked at it very closely, and told me that “sometimes the displays fail”… but i’m not ruling out the possibility that, once she gets it open, she’ll discover some “damage” that voids the warranty. i don’t know of any “damage”, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. 😒
so, fine. keep it. it doesn’t do me much good as a brick, but then…
i realise i’ve got an appointment on telehealth, and another appointment on gotomeeting tomorrow, which i’m going to have to attend using my phone, which is about one-eighth the size of the tablet (tablet is 12.9″ ipad pro, third gen; phone is iphone 6SE, which is 5″)…
this is going to be “interesting”… 🤦
i woke up this morning and checked my email on my tablet, like i usually do. nothing seemed amiss, as i browsed twitter for a half hour or so, then i put the tablet to sleep, came downstairs, plugged the tablet into my downstairs charging port, heard the chime as it connected, and walked off to get my morning soylent…
when i got back to my office, about 5 minutes later, i tried to wake the tablet up, but it wasn’t having any.
i tried a number of “tips” that i found on internet (using my computer) for waking up a sleeping tablet, and elicited some interesting responses — siri, speaking from a blank screen, saying “i’m really sorry”, for example, and various official-sounding chimes, boops and bongs — but no screen action whatsoever.
i took it to the guy at 1 Hour Device Repair, in issaquah, who said that he thought it was the charging port that was damaged, because the device he hooked it to was saying .09 amps when it should be at least 1 amp. he said that it’s working, but, because of the fact that the charging port is damaged, it doesn’t have enough electricity to run reliably.
so, i made an appointment at the genius bar (because it’s new enough that i think i might still have apple care for it) on wednesday.
that doesn’t sound bad, does it? except for the fact that i can’t login to twitter — which is pretty much my ONLY social contact these days — because of the fact that i have my authenticator for my 2FA login on my tablet… i have an authenticator on my phone, as well, but it doesn’t have my twitter account, and the only way to get a 2FA authentication for my twitter account is from WITHIN my twitter account, which i can’t get to because the authenticator is on my tablet. i don’t usually use twitter on my phone, so i never updated the authenticator when i started using 2FA on twitter.
😒
so, my registration for Fruck-Tump.com is due in a little more than two months…
is there any point in renewing it?
someone tried to crack my twitter account again today.
second time in a month.
i have a 25-character passphrase, and 2FA enabled.
according to HowSecureIsMyPassword.net it would take a computer 28,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to break the passphrase… and then it would have to do the same thing for the 2FA…
they were not successful. 😒
Trump Tees Up a New Type of Coup: In Plain Sight
by Ted Rall, 201111
Donald Trump revolutionized political campaigning. It was by accident. Because he was too lazy to prepare for or memorize a stump speech, he ad-libbed his rallies; TV networks gave him $2 billion worth of free airtime because something he said might prove newsworthy. Because he was cheap, he made appearances at any random dump that would have him for free; he used the money he saved on big data research that paid off handsomely.
Now the president is attempting to revolutionize the art of the coup d’état.
Leaders of broad-based movements who want to overthrow an existing government usually agitate for revolution in plain sight. The activism of a popular front attracts new recruits.
A coup is the opposite of a revolution. Unlike revolutionaries, who need the masses to succeed, coup plotters require secrecy. A coup is usually carried out by a very small group of insiders. Coup schemers are not interested in, or have concluded that they cannot, obtain popular support. They do not seek to transform society. They simply want power. It is an attempt by a minnow to swallow a whale.
Without the protection of millions of adherents and operating outside constitutional norms, politicians and/or military men who plot a coup must take over the government by surprise. Leaders of the outgoing regime have to be in prison or dead, and thus powerless, before their supporters realize that their nation has been seized by a small faction. A coup d’état is over before it begins in the event that some element of the conspiracy comes to light before the zero hour. The classic example of a failed coup is Operation Valkyrie, the 1944 attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler and overthrow of the Nazi government of Germany by a group of military officers. The plot unraveled when Hitler survived a bomb attack and went on the radio.
Successful coups include the 2004 overthrow of democratically-elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti, whom the CIA kidnapped and spirited away to the Central African Republic, whose president Ange-Félix Patassé had himself been deposed in a coup a year earlier, the Taliban-supported takeover of Pakistan by General Pervez Musharraf in 1999, and the bizarre 1993 self-coup by Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who illegally shelled and dissolved parliament.
All of these events seemingly came out of nowhere. By contrast, Donald Trump is laying the groundwork for a coup attempt in plain sight.
Defying tradition, Trump is still refusing to concede the election since the Associated Press and other media organizations called the race in favor of Joe Biden on Saturday, November 7th. Without presenting evidence of fraud or other wrongdoing, he has filed several lawsuits challenging the legitimacy of the vote count.
Most top Republicans are supporting Trump, or remaining silent and refusing to congratulate Biden. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the floor of the U.S. Senate. “President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options,” said McConnell. “Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election.”
Asked whether he planned to congratulate Biden, Ron Johnson (R-WI) replied: “Nothing to congratulate him about.” Even as world leaders called to acknowledge Biden’s win, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”
Roger Stone, the political adviser and loyalist pardoned by Trump, previewed the possibility of a post-election military takeover in September. If Trump lost, Stone said at the time, he ought to declare “martial law,” invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, nationalize state police forces and round up critics and political opponents including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “the Clintons,” and journalists because they’re involved in “seditious activities.” On November 2nd Stone said Former CIA Director John Brennan, Former FBI Director James Comey and other former officials who offended Trump “must be tried and convicted of treason” and then “they must be hung by the neck until dead.” Stone is still tight with Trump: news just broke that the president had the IRS wipe away Stone’s bill for back taxes, which totaled $1.5 million.
Attorney General William Barr, following Stone’s recommendation, ordered the Department of Justice to investigate irregularities and improprieties in the election.
In order to enforce martial law Trump would need, and has, widespread support among the police. He would also need the military. Though inherently reactionary, active-duty troops have moved away from the president in recent months. So he is replacing top Pentagon brass with compliant loyalists likelier to follow his illegal and unconstitutional orders.
On November 9th Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who refused to deploy troops against Black Lives Matters protesters in June. “In my experience, there would only be a few reasons to fire a Secretary of Defense with 72 days left in an administration,” Representative Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) and an official in Obama’s Pentagon, said. “[One] would be because the President wants to take actions that he believes his Secretary of Defense would refuse to take, which would be alarming.”
“Two White House officials said later on Monday that Mr. Trump was not finished, and that Christopher A. Wray, the FBI director, and Gina Haspel, the CIA director, could be next in line to be fired. Removing these senior officials — in effect decapitating the nation’s national security bureaucracy — would be without parallel by an outgoing president who has just lost re-election,” reported The New York Times.
In a major, unprecedented transition-period shakeup, policy chief James Anderson, intelligence boss Joseph Kernan and Esper’s chief of staff Jen Stewart have also been fired from the Pentagon. Anderson’s replacement is retired Army General Anthony Tata, a nutty far-right white nationalist who called Obama a “terrorist leader,” said Islam was the “most oppressive violent religion I know of” and used a racist slur against CNN host Don Lemon. He will do whatever Trump wants.
What’s going on? Stupid impetuous drama? Or a real coup?
If it turns out to be a coup, it may well prove that teeing it up in plain sight improves its chances of success. Trump’s supporters, disproportionately prone to violence and more heavily armed, are watching and waiting. They can only pitch in as paramilitaries or freelance goons if, like the rest of us, they see the dark days ahead.
Then Trump’s coup becomes a counterrevolution.
Coups For Dummies
by Clay Jones, 201111
On November 10, 2016, President Obama hosted President-elect (sic) Donald Trump in the White House. Vice-President Joe Biden hosted vice-president elect (sic) Mike Pence in the VP residence. First Lady Michelle Obama gave a White House tour to Melania Trump. Today, it’s November 11, 2020, and instead of inviting the future president of the United States to the White House, Donald Trump is hiding inside his bunker in denial he lost. What makes this even worse is that he has enablers. These enablers are helping Donald Trump thwart democracy.
Republicans are pointing out that Democrats whined about the 2016 election. This is true. I whined. I didn’t like the results. I still don’t like it. But while I said the election was tampered with and Russia meddled, I never said any ballots were fraudulent. No Democrats opposed the transition of power. Today, the Trump administration is not allowing a transfer of power.
The Trump Administration could still pursue legal challenges over the election while allowing the process of a transition to happen. That would be in the best interest of the nation. Instead, offices are not being created for the transition, funds aren’t being released, and the next president isn’t even being given security briefings. These were all acts afforded to Donald Trump when he was the incoming president (sic).
The United States condemns leaders of other nations who refuse to leave office and give up power after losing fair elections. Now, our leader (sic) is refusing to give up power and is hiding inside his palace sending his minions out to help him stage a coup. Donald Trump has not been seen since last Thursday.
Mitch McConnell is supporting Trump’s legal challenges even though there isn’t any evidence of massive voter fraud. Lindsey Graham is telling Trump not to concede. McConnell and Graham both won their Senate elections last week but neither one of these two men refused their opponent’s concessions.
Ted Cruz says allowing the media to declare the winner is not how we do it in America. Except, he was more than happy to accept the media’s declaration of a winner in 2016. He was more than happy to accept their declaration in 2018 when he won reelection to the Senate.
When asked if he had congratulated President-Elect Joe Biden yet, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, whose state went for Biden, said he doesn’t have anything to congratulate Biden for.
Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said, “We have got to allow our courts to hear these allegations of voting irregularities by the president.” You may as well allow the courts to hear allegations of lizard people running our government too because you have just as much evidence of that as you do of voter fraud.
North Carolina’s Thom Tillis was finally declared the winner of his race yesterday and he said about the presidential election, “Every vote legally cast must be counted.” Who says they shouldn’t? Who says they haven’t been counted? Guess what. Tillis didn’t stop his opponent from conceding saying, “Every legal vote must be counted” bullshit.
Isn’t it fucked up that right after you elect someone, that they make a pronouncement against democracy and fair elections?
Attorney General William Barr is releasing the Justice Department’s legal hounds to fight Trump’s loss in the courts. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani is holding press conferences outside dildo shops claiming the election was stolen from Trump.
It’s funny Democrats stole the election for Biden while simultaneously losing the Senate and seats in the House. It’s also funny that it hasn’t occurred to any of these Republicans claiming fraudulent ballots, that they also have their names on those “fraudulent” ballots. If we’re going to wipe out who won the election, that should also mean we wipe out all those Republican victories. Should we wipe out McConnell’s, Graham’s, and Tillis’ victories?
Each government department is being told to prepare their budgets for next year as though the administration will still be operating. As if they’re still going to be in town and not all applying at Fox News at the same time. And Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, the nation’s top diplomat has said there will be a “smooth transition…to a SECOND Trump administration.”
What the fuck? The top diplomat or the world’s leading democracy is telling the world we don’t obey election results anymore. Pompeo said the eletion has not been decided. It has LITERALLY been decided.
Can you imagine the outrage if instead of conceding the election the day after, Hillary Clinton had refused to admit defeat, mounted legal challenged, and claimed the election had been stolen? Can you imagine if instead of inviting Trump to the White House, President Obama had refused to release transition funding?
In Michigan, Trump beat Clinton by 10,704 votes in 2016. In 2020 in Michigan, Biden beat Trump by over 146,000 (and still counting). In case you’re a Republican, 146,000 is greater than 10,000.
In Pennsylvania, Trump beat Clinton by 46,765. In 2020 in Pennsylvania, Biden beat Trump by over 48,000 (and still counting). In case you’re a Republican, 48,000 is more than 46,000. Now, Trump is suing to overturn the election in Pennsylvania.
As the counting continues, Biden is heading for a 306 electoral vote win. That’s the exact same amount Trump won with in 2016. How are they going to win the presidency by overturning one state without any actual evidence of election fraud? They would need to overturn more than one state. Maybe they can do it in Georgia where the two GOP senators are calling for their own Republican Secretary of State to resign because they don’t like that his count shows Donald Trump is losing.
This is banana republic type shit here, people. This is a coup attempt. Maybe people like Pompeo are just trying to appease Trump for now. Maybe Pompeo is a coward. He wants to appease Trump’s base for when he runs for the Senate in Kansas or even for the presidency in 2024, if Trump doesn’t. Or maybe, he’s afraid of being fired two months before he’s scheduled to lose his job. Trump is already lashing out and firing people.
Maybe people like Mitch McConnell, John Kennedy (not the good one), Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Thom Tillis, and Ted Cruz are all just big, fat ass kissers. Or…they’re trying to steal an election and are engaging in a coup.
I predicted before the election that Joe Biden would win… but I did not predict he’d take the White House because I was afraid the Republicans would try to steal the election. Even before the election, Trump said the only way he could lose was if there was corruption and voter fraud. Boy, did I call it or did I call it?
We know this about Trump supporters: They are all cowards. They have made their party into one of a cult. They put one man before their nation. They are putting one man before democracy. They don’t care if they turn our democracy into a dictatorship.
The Trump administration will NOT legally continue, but the resistance must.
getting old sucks. 🤬
i got home this afternoon, and took the small doggie outside, and, as i was going down the stairs from the deck, my right foot hit a slippery spot on the third step from the bottom, and i fell, bruising my back and legs, and scraping my right arm, which reached out for support, but reached in the wrong direction, because of my brain injury. 😒
the dog experienced a rather rough landing, but she wandered off without more than an “oof” when she hit the ground. she’s fine.
i lay on the ground for a few minutes, deciding whether or not anything was broken (as far as i can tell, nothing was), and breathing hard, because my back REALLY hurt, while the doggie wandered, obliviously, around the yard.
fortunately, i had my phone, so i called moe, who called the neighbour, who came to help me, but all she actually did was pick up the doggie, because i couldn’t bend over.
at this point, i have taken ibuprophen and applied ice, and i can sit down without too much difficulty, although i can still REALLY feel my lower back, and i probably will be able to do so for the next few days.
in other news, i got my first order for 10 boxes of aparajita today. the guy actually wrote me while i was in the process of updating my web site, and wanted to make a “special order”. my guess is that i’ll have two or three more orders for 10 boxes, before the week is out… at $90 bucks a pop… 👍😉
also, i got a new monitor. the old one is an VGA 17″ flat screen from a few years ago. the new one is a HDMI 24″ flat screen from this year… it’s awesome, how much real estate is in the difference between 17″ and 24″
Phishing Emails Used to Deploy KONNI Malware
if you are in the habit of using micro$not software, particularly the office varients (word, excell, power point, etc.), you should beware of the new “phishing” (specifically, “spear-phishing”) attack which uses an infected microsoft word document as the vector.
solution: don’t use micro$hit.
alternative solution: don’t use windoesn’t, or, if you do, don’t open ANY files that you receive in email, from ANYONE, if you weren’t expecting it, keep your antivirus software up to date, backup everything, and pray that something doesn’t happen anyway.
this is just the most recent extension of the exploder control controversy, started by my friend fred, back when W95 was current… except that, now, instead of calling it “OLE or “ActiveX” they’re calling it “VBA“, and it can do a lot more nefarious things to your computer than the exploder control could do — and the exploder control was relatively benign, in that it ONLY shut down your computer without your say so…
but micro$lop made a BIG OL’ fuss about it, when fred actually got it signed, because of the fact that it used ActiveX APIs in EXACTLY the way they were supposed to be used, and the automated process of signing didn’t take into account what the control actually DID, and whether doing that thing, at that time, was actually USEFUL… 😂🤣
by the way, the exploder control was SPECIFICALLY designed to work with W95 and IE3, so, unless you’re browsing on your grandfather’s computer, you’ve got nothing to worry about. 😉
VMware to stop describing hardware as ‘male’ and ‘female’ in new terminology guide — 🤣 VMware wants to stop using three terms – “ghetto”, “kill switch” and “taint” – but is yet to devise alternatives.
Black Lives Matter, and everything, but this shit is funny! 🤣
today is the third day of NOT using Kontact, the MUA that i have been using pretty much ever since i switched to linux, back in the dark ages.
i really liked kontact. it did EXACTLY what i wanted it to do: it handled all of my email addresses in a logical way, made it easy to switch from one email address to another, worked well with my business set-up, my installation of sigrot…
but it had a fatal flaw which i have been trying (and, mostly, succeeding) to work around for quite some time now, and that is its use of akonadi, which is the interface between the MUA and the SQL database that lives behind it.
for the first few years i didn’t even notice a problem, but then i upgraded my operating system, and everything blew up. i ended up installing the new operating system from scratch, and summarily trashing three or four years worth of collected email. it was a difficult process, but i got through it.
through the years, i have tried installing a number of MUAs, in order to try and get away from kontact, but either they didn’t do what i wanted, or they simply didn’t work at all, so i gave up and went back to fighting with kontact…
“the devil you know”, right?
after that, there were a number of times, primarily during updates or upgrades, when i had to battle with kontact/akonadi/SQL, to get it to work, and i had to trash a number of years of collected email at least one more time before reaching the point at which i am, now.
four days ago, i ran the operating system updates, and, after i was done, i tried starting up kontact, and nothing happened. i tried starting it from the konsole (rather than “clicking” on the “icon”, which is how you start it in the GUI), got a vaguely worded, cryptic message about being unable to start “hebrew.wgz.sizes.sonnet.plugins.hspell”, and then it hung up.
which is very odd, because i have never even installed the hebrew language pack, and have no idea why it would even be attempting to start the hebrew spelling dictionary…
i tried asking Kubuntu Forums for solutions, and got the same answer that i have gotten every OTHER time i have asked about how to fix kontact, which is “kontact is broken, install thunderbird instead”.
so i tried installing thunderbird (AGAIN), and, after having some “words” with my operating system about whether this new piece of software actually worked (or not), i successfully installed and more-or-less correctly configured it, and started using it.
it’s a little different than kontact… or, at least, my perception is that it is a little different than kontact. after some futzing around, i learned how to configure it to use more than one email address — actually, i may have done it “the other way” first, because the terminology for “accounts” and “identities” is slightly different on kontact — and, as far as i can tell, there is no easy way to add an “X-” header line to outgoing email, like there is in kontact, but that may just be because i have yet to find the place where such a thing is configured.
and, then, yesterday (after i had, more or less, given up on kontact), i discovered that kontact actually worked… it had been a few days since i had given up trying to start it, because of “hebrew.wgz.sizes.sonnet.plugins.hspell” not working, and, without thinking about it, i “clicked” on the “icon” and kontact sprang back to life!
so, the first thing i did was transfer all of my contacts, and most of my RSS feeds (i got bored and antsy, so i’ll finish them later) to thunderbird.
for some time, now, when i “quit” kontact (select “quit” from the “file” menu), i have had to go to the konsole, and “kill” the process that kontact was running, so that it would actually quit. i also discovered that “kill”ing kontact STILL allows incoming mail to be downloaded, a process that i don’t completely understand (it may have something to do with akonadi interacting with the POP3 mailserver).
also, for even longer (i recall at least two kontact upgrades that have had this behaviour, prior to the one i am currently (not) using), when i first start kontact, after booting up my computer in the morning, about 98.9% of the time it gets to the point where it’s displaying correctly on the screen, but before i have the chance to do anything, it puts up a dialogue box that says that there has been a fatal error and kontact will quit now. the dialogue doesn’t say what the fatal error is, and it only has an “OK” button, which makes everything disappear when i click it. under this circumstance, when i run “ps -u salamandir | grep kontact” in the konsole, kontact is, actually, not running (unlike when i select “quit” from the “file” menu), and if i restart kontact, it works without any further problems…
except that, sometimes (usually at least once a day), it freezes for anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes, and when it does, there’s a very good chance (greater than half the time) that it will crash. usually this happens when i have just selected a message to reply to, and/or usually it happens when it is in the process of downloading new mail or RSS feeds. sometimes i can anticipate when it’s going to happen, when i have to reply to a message and it is in the process of downloading.
thunderbird doesn’t have these problem. when i select “quit” from the “file” menu, in thunderbird, it actually quits, and doesn’t keep downloading mail anyway. thunderbird doesn’t crash for no reason, or freeze and crash. it may not be kontact, but on the other hand, it’s not kontact.
my impression is that the operating system struggles when there is more than one MUA running, and, because of the difficulties i’ve been having getting kontact to quit, i don’t like to keep both of them running for long periods of time, especially since, apparently, kontact’s interface with the POP3 mailserver takes precedence, even after i “quit” and “kill” it, and even when i start up thunderbird first (which it shouldn’t, but it goes to support the fact that “kontact is broken”).
my newly redesigned site uses the enfold theme, which has faulty (under certain circumstances) caching and optimisation routines, so we use lightspeed cache, which doesn’t have those (particular) faults, and works better (under certain circumstances).
except, last year, prior to my site being redesigned (when i was still using the avada theme), i was told (by SOMEONE) to disable lightspeed cache, because it had some sort of incompatibility with… something…
so, i went through the site redesign with a disabled lightspeed plugin. no problem, until i put in the enfold theme, and whatever circumstances that cause the caching and optimisation routines to fail, were happening, which was the cause of the first go-round.
turning on the lightspeed cache fixed the first go-round, but whatever incompatibility i was trying to avoid by having the lightspeed plugin disabled, took effect, which was the cause of the second go-round.
which was further confused by the fact that part of my routine for fixing the first go-round was good enough that it fixed the second go-round well enough that i didn’t find out about it until it was too late.
what i found out, today, via my web developer, is that the people who make the lightspeed cache and webhost python (my host provider) have their own battle going on: on webhost python’s servers (which include mine), the lightspeed plugin causes expired transients to multiply and duplicate. lightspeed says it’s python’s fault. python disagrees…
on the record…
OFF the record, python agrees that there is a bug in their system that they haven’t found yet… compounded by the fact that it was THEIR ERROR which caused the third go-round… 😠 but it’s not for me to say “i told you so”, especially with my already somewhat precarious position with this particular host provider…
and so, i’m caught in the middle. 😒
apparently, for the time being anyway, the plan is to disable the caching modules on both enfold AND lightspeed, keep an eye on the database (which hasn’t blown up since implementing this plan), clear the expired transients manually, and examine other options for a cache.
😒
at midnight (which was 3:00 in the morning, florida time), i got a message saying that the database was blowing up again. they said it was 183 GIGABYTES…
because of the fact that i was asleep (thankfully), i didn’t actually read the message until 7:00 my time (10:00 florida time). i immediately logged into my web server, and discovered that the MySQL disk usage was lower than i have ever seen it before, which is to say 253 MEGABYTES
what this tells me is that there’s something else going on besides this whole “enfold-theme-not-caching-correctly” horseshit.
which is bad.
it also tells me that, whatever it is, we haven’t actually found it… we may have found another problem, but not the one for which we’re looking… yet…
which is bad, but not as bad as it could be.
it also tells me that, whatever it is that is going wrong, the cronjob that we put in place to solve the problem, works, REGARDLESS of the actual problem.
which is good.
but, when it comes right down to it, it is not good for me to be so stressed out about something over which i have very little control.
which is bad.
something has to be done. this is ridiculous.
and the answer is, a big, fat, OF COURSE NOT! 😒
i woke up this morning, and couldn’t log in to my web site… at, like, SEVEN in the fucking morning, i was wide awake because i couldn’t log in to my web site.
at NINE, the web designer gets back to me. he can’t login either. apparently the host provider has disabled the config file that makes everything work — i login using SSH, and there’s the file… everything LOOKS okay, but… the host provider apparently did SOMETHING to my web site. as far as i can tell, everything works, sort of, until you get one or two pages deep, at which point it gives me a “unable to connect to database” error.
😠
so, i file a ticket with the host provider. a couple hours later, (all the while, i’m sweating bullets) they get back to me, apparently, the database blew up AGAIN. they disabled the config file so that nobody could use the web site, because the database was growing by gigabytes A SECOND.
😠😠
eventually (seriously, they took most of the day to UN-disable the config file), the web designer went in and turned off everything having to do with the built-in, screwy, does-not-work, enfold caching and optimisation routines, turned OFF “store transients”, and set a cronfile to delete three rows of a table in the database, every hour.
😠😠😠😠‼‼‼
this better be the last of it for a while, because i’m just about ready to throw in the towel.
the database is fixed. 😌
what happened? that’s complex.
recently, i had my web site redesigned. the new design uses the “Enfold” theme, which uses a lot of what they call “transients” to maintain the look and feel of the site, regardless of the platform on which it’s being viewed. “transients” are sort of like cookies, except that you can’t opt out of them, and they don’t contain any personally identifying information. some of these “transients” expire immediately when a person leaves the web site, and others persist, for a few minutes to several days. they persist on your computer AND on my server… in the one of the tables in the database…
the “Enfold” theme has automatic caching and garbage collection routines that are supposed to handle these expired “transients”, but, because it’s a wordpress theme, it doesn’t do all the jobs very well… or, sometimes, at all… which is why i also use a caching plugin that actually, you know, works ALL the time, and not only some of the time… 😒
except that, for some reason, prior to my site upgrade, “someone” (and i have yet to identify who, but it was either my web designer or my host provider) recommended that i disable the caching plugin, because of some issue with the new version of wordpress… or something like that… as i said, i don’t remember. i distinctly remember disabling the plugin on someone’s recommendation, i just don’t remember exactly who, when or why. 😖
one way or the other, my caching plugin was disabled, which meant that, when i installed the new theme, it was relying on the not-working-the-way-it-should, internal cache… which, basically, didn’t work, causing the table in the database to expand beyond my disk space allocation. 🤯
it didn’t show up in my cPanel because i wasn’t looking at the SQL disk space, which is “below the fold” of my browser, and i just didn’t scroll down far enough to see it. 😕 during the nightly automatic backup, it was overwhelming the server for everybody, not just me. i had to pay my web designer for two days of poking through piles of arcane SQL code and deleting bits and pieces of it. it was not fun.
the solution was to enable the caching plugin(!), and to install a “transient manager” plugin, so that i can delete the expired transients from the wordpress dashboard, and not from the SQL database,… which requires A LOT more “knowing what to look for” and “knowing how to delete stuff without damaging other stuff” than i have on board, personally.
my first direct experience with databases was in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when i got a “job”, “working” for this… guy…
i don’t remember his name — possibly “henry” — but i remember his attitudes: he was always right, nothing he thought of had ever been thought of before, he was the richest, smartest, trendiest, most “on-top-of-it” dude that ever hit the face of the planet, and GAWD HELP YOU if you EVER got in his way.
needless to say, the “job” didn’t last long. it started with him demonstrating how generous he was, by buying me a disk caddy, so that i would have somewhere to keep all of the disks i was going to accumulate working for him. then he started asking me about computers. at the time, i was NOT a “computer geek”, nor did i want to be one (my father was one of the original “computer geeks” and i DID NOT want to be like my father), but i knew about computers because i had been working as a typesetter for a few years. he asked me what i didn’t know about computers, and one of the first things out of my mouth was “databases”, so he signed me up for a week of training with “FileMaker”…
what i learned was a bunch of recycled stuff from my already ample knowledge of microslut word and excel, with a bunch of “hypercard-like” stuff which i sort of vaguely understood (but nobody i knew used hypercard for anything, so i never really knew what i had missed until years later), and, at the same time i was doing this training, i was helping this… guy… clean out his house, because he was going through a divorce, or some awful shit like that, and he, basically, had to move EVERYTHING that was “his”, out of one house and into another, that was a few houses down the street…
which is where i learned that his “rich” persona was heavily financed by several HUNDRED overdrawn credit cards — he had been using one credit card to pay off another credit card, and when he ran out of credit cards, he would just start up a new one, and use it to pay off the previous ones… FOR YEARS… — at which point i decided that working for this guy might not be such a good idea, if i wanted to get paid.
quite apart from the fact that working for him was REALLY annoying…
so, ultimately, i spent a week learning really complex software that i never got to use for anything, and that was it, until i got my job at software.com, testing email servers, in 2001.
and, for all of my work with databases at software.com/openwave, i still don’t have a really solid grasp of what they are… where they “live”, what they do, how they work… anything… all i know is that, under the right set of circumstances, you can give “commands” to a database, and it will perform certain functions with a variety of different “objects”, the outcomes of which can be used in a multitude of different ways, depending on what is contained in your database.
i get the impression that databases are a lot like the world wide web, in that they both have a lot of objects (web sites) that are linked together in a somewhat-haphazard, but definitely organised way.
so, you can imagine that it was something of a surprise when, the other morning, i woke up, checked my email, and discovered two somewhat alarming notices. the first was warning me that i had used up 90% of my disk space on my server, and the other was warning me that a “table” on my main database was malfunctioning… or something… and collecting 251 GB worth of data… which, somehow, was NOT showing up in my cPanel, which says “Disk Usage 18.43 GB / 292.97 GB”…
and, of course, it happened on a sunday, when nobody’s in the office, and on mothers day, when even fewer people are in the office, and during a PANDEMIC… 😒
so, first thing this morning, after waking up to a broken heat pump, and a wife who wrenched her back, i wrote to my web designer, who said, oh yeah, we’ve seen this kind of thing before, it’ll cost between $200 and $500 to fix it…
and I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT’S WRONG… 😖
मनोबुद्ध्यहङ्कारचित्तानि नाहं
न च श्रोत्रजिह्वे न च घ्राणनेत्रे ।
न च व्योमभूमिः न तेजो न वायुः
चिदानन्दरूपः शिवोऽहं शिवोऽहम् ॥ १॥
The processors
Manas, buddhi, ahaṅkāra and chitta are the qualitative differentiation within the mind. They are used interchangeably based on context, and yet they are different.
Manas is the faculty of perception, the instrument by which the objects of senses affect the Atman. It is the faculty of thought, desire, imagination. Buddhi is the intellect, by which one discerns, comprehends. Ahaṅkāra is the sense of identity, that which creates ‘I-ness’, ego. Chittam is the one that observes, is aware. All these are the faculties that process what comes from outside.
I am none of these processors.
The instruments
Shrotra is the ear, the organ of hearing. Jihvā is tongue, the organ of tasting. Ghrāṅa is nose, the sense of smelling. And netra is eye, the sense of seeing.
I am none of these instruments.
The building blocks of matter
Vyoma is the space, the gap between the matter. It is the space between planetary bodies as well as the space around Earth, and even the space inside anything. It is also one of the five basic elements.
Bhūmi is the Earth, or the solid matter.
Tejas is the heat or light (both interconnected) like the fire or the Sun.
Vāyu is the wind, the circulating forces, not just on Earth but also inside our bodies, responsible for circulating whether nutrition or blood etc.
I am none of these building blocks of which the material world is made.
The faculties get the information using the senses about the outside world.
I am none of them.
I am pure bliss form of consciousness.
I am Shiva, I am Shiva.
—–
it is Adi Shankara‘s birthday, and, if i can be said to “follow” a “religion”, it would probably be the one espoused by adi shankara.
the reason for this is that adi shankara spoke of a “god” which exists beyond what we experience as “good” or “evil”. this “god” is neither (or, possibly, both) “good” and/or “evil”… which is, pretty much, EXACTLY the kind of “god” i feel, which “operates” this plane of existence. this “god” both “exists” and “does not exist”, at the same time, creating no contradictions. this “god” is both “illogical” and “logical” at the same time, creating no contradictions…
and if you don’t understand this, you probably think i’m crazy.
so be it.
this sanskrit shloka, part of Nirvanashatkam is, pretty much, exactly what i believe about myself: i may have all these things holding me back; depression, anhedonia, a brain injury, etc., but those are relics of 60 years of living in this plane of existence. in spite of how “real” these things are, in spite of how “real” these things seem to be TO ME, they are NOT “who i am”, in the “real” sense of the word. i am beyond all this: i “really” exist in a realm where “good” and “evil” are two sides of the same coin… and that “coin” is worth less than a penny.
logical operators! thanks ian! 😉
+ () [] - |
(stuff that remains the same)+(stuff that changes) – otherwise known as “capture groups”
[89] = 8 or 9
[0-4] = 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4
| = logical OR
so…
\D(85\.157\.47\.)+(12[89]|1[3-9][0-9]|2[0-4][0-9]|25[0-5])\D
means “capture everything in 85.157.47.128/25”
which, up until now, has meant “make a separate rule for every IP address between 85.157.47.128 and 85.157.47.255” — 128 SEPARATE RULES, which takes A LONG time, and slows down processing speed.
this is a BIG step forward!
WOO!!! 😎👍
ETA 200205: even more WOO!!! because ian directed me to a RegEx Numeric Range Generator, which means that i don’t have to figure them all out myself! WOO!!! 😎👍
ever since he was born, i have been afraid that i will be forced into the situation where i have to apologise to my son for bringing him into a world that, through no fault of his own, is going to end, for all intents and purposes, before his life will end. to me, it seems a large amount of irresponsible, to have brought a being into the world, who is faced with his own death, before his time, especially since i seem to be charmed when it comes to the potential of my life ending before my time.
and it’s even harder for me, because i have been fighting my entire adult life to change the things that i can, that would lead to my not having to offer that apology.
ezra, i’m sorry that the world is such a fucked up place. i’m sorry i brought you into this world, with no way to change it. i’m sorry you have to share this world with people who don’t care that it will end before your lifetime is complete.
A Grim New Definition of Generation X
by Ted Rall – 191231
People born in the 1960s may be the last human beings who will get to live out their full actuarial life expectancies. “Climate change now represents a near- to mid-term existential threat” to humanity, warns a recent policy paper by an Australian think tank. Civilization, scientists say, could collapse by 2050. Some people may survive. Not many.
Some dismiss such purveyors of apocalyptic prognoses as hysterics. To the contrary, they’re Pollyannas. Every previous “worst-case scenario” prediction for the climate has turned out to have understated the gravity of the situation. “Paleoclimatologists have shown that past warming episodes show that there are mechanisms which magnify its effects, not represented in current climate models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the Paris Accords,” reports The Independent. It’s probably too optimistic to assume that we’ll make it to 2050.
Gives new meaning to Generation X.
Millennials and the children we call Generation Z face the horrifying prospect that they will get stuck with the tab for humanity’s centuries-long rape of planet earth, the mass desecration of which radically accelerated after 1950. There is an intolerably high chance that today’s young people will starve to death, die of thirst, be killed by a superstorm, succumb to a new disease, boil to death, asphyxiate from air pollution, be murdered in a riot or shot or blown up in a war sparked by environmentally-related political instability long before they survive to old age.
Long threatened, never taken seriously, not even now that it’s staring us right in the face, human extinction is coming for the children and grandchildren we claim to love but won’t lift a finger to save.
Shelves sag under the weight of books that have been written arguing that we still have a chance to save ourselves. I wish I could believe that. Human population has tripled since the 1950s. More than a million species have gone extinct. Ninety percent of the fish in the ocean have vanished, replaced by one billion tons of plastic. Two-thirds of the trees have been cut down. The polar ice cap is gone; it’s never coming back.
We can’t stop global warming. An increase of four degrees Celsius over the baseline set at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution means game over. We’re well on our way there. It doesn’t make sense to think that we can avoid extinction.
What if we woke up and demanded action from our political leaders? Radical problems require radical solutions; only the most radical of solutions could resolve the most radical problem of ruining our planet’s ability to sustain us: revolution. We would have to rise up and abolish — immediately — consumer capitalism in all the major greenhouse gas-producing nations, prioritize cleaning the environment as the human race’s top concern, and pivot to an economic mindset in which we extract the bare minimum from the ecosystem that we need in order to survive and nothing more.
Voting might achieve some incremental reforms but reform falls far short of what we require. Saving our young people (and their children, should they be foolish enough to have any) would require global revolution, the violent overthrow of the ruling elites and replacing them with people who understand what must be done. It would need to happen today. Fifty years ago would be better. Got a time machine?
None of this is going to happen. We are going to sleepwalk to our doom in a haze of social media and corporate entertainment distraction.
So it’s time for people who are younger than I am to start thinking about how they want to spend the rest of their likely-to-be-truncated lives, and how they plan to face mass premature death.
Pending human extinction destroys the answers provided by religion and philosophy. Knowing that there won’t be anyone to know that we were ever here raises the question: why bother to do anything? This column, this year’s “important” presidential election, love, hate, everything will lose its meaning when the last member of our species draws her last breath. Earth is unlikely to be visited by an alien archaeologist, much less uncover everything we’ve made and created (assuming any of it survives), much less figure out what any of it meant, before the sun expands into a red giant and ends it all.
Much is to be said for hedonism: eat, drink, have sex, and don’t bother to sort your recycling, for tomorrow we die. Stoicism has its advantages too; go out with dignity rather than weeping and gnashing your teeth and making your fellow survivors miserable.
Nihilism is about to become the best worst possible life strategy. Life is meaningless. That will soon become obvious. Moral principles, relics of a time with a future, will blow away like the irradiated dust we leave behind.
None of this will have mattered.
no, not Chopp’s, chops… the signature stamps that are traditionally used on chinese artwork.
i got some.
the one on the left says 沙了門多 which is prounounced SHĀ-LE-MÉN-DUŌ which is the closest the guy could get to “SALAMANDIR”.
SHĀ-LE-MÉN-DUŌ means “SAND-UP-DOOR-MANY”, which is, essentially, meaningless. it’s just a name chop.
and i think it’s kind of interesting that the word for “SALAMANDER” is RÓNG…
i made a chop several years ago, that says “CHIGAU” which means “DIFFERENT” or “WRONG”… but it’s backwards.
Tina Chopp is God! Praise Her OR DIE!!*
June 6, 2019
by Paul Krugman
nytimes.com
Tina Chopp claims that she can “fix anything!” I don’t know about the results of any business big or small, but I certainly know about the results of electing a God.
Citizens of the United States were tired of political campaigns in which voters were supposed to make an informed choice, and come November they chose not to do so. Perhaps that was because political campaigns are often tedious, or because, in 2018, the choices were so severe, or perhaps, as I argued yesterday, because the traditional definition of democracy, which involves an informed choice by voters, had been rendered absurd by the rise of special-interest money in politics. Voters may understand politics in idiosyncratic ways, but they are not rational. They can’t know everything; the information they have is too incomplete and cluttered for anyone to take proper stock of the candidates.
But citizens have not been irrationally inert in general, either. There are times when an informed opinion is just as right as the next one, and there are times when an informed opinion is just as bad as the next one. It is sometimes not even possible to know the difference between them — in recent days, for example, a number of the #MeToo protesters spent all day in the public square, insisting that they knew a lot more than they seemed to, and finally decided that the house was haunted.
The election of a God enables one to ignore the matter altogether, and the designation of such a God, apparently, is self-explanatory. This should not be any kind of problem, because the Bible is faith. And faith does not need to be backed up by anything, and certainly not by objective knowledge, so Chopp can rewrite the Bible as she likes, just as she will rewrite your favorite movie, or your favorite TV show, as she wants, without a single backward glance toward theological detail.
People who mock the idea of electing a God often find themselves apologizing when, like Chopp, they refuse to back up the idea, insisting that a deity is just not necessary. (Especially when a deity so obviously favors Israel!) But it is necessary; this is not a joking matter, in my view. The natural condition of people is self-referential, and we not only judge other people’s quality, but we judge ourselves. Many of us would naturally opt for a God who is on our side.
And the sad truth is that Chopp and her kind seem to be, if not quite an entirely new threat, then a near-complete one. They have replaced democracy, which is now generally pretty awful (but which gives us some rare gains in some areas — civic organizing, campaigning, electoral infrastructure, resistance) with religion, which, while superficially attractive, is also pretty distasteful. Christianity, of course, has always been toxic, but churches even in countries with relatively strong traditions of democracy — Austria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Holland, Finland, Iceland, Iceland again — have been susceptible to corrupting tendencies. So too, it seems, has the idea of electing a God.
Some combination of middlebrow and educated parents will remain ready to do their children the honor of having them baptized into a god whose politics are unclear, and who tells her followers to “immediate action!” And if anyone even remotely similar surfaces, but even a relatively uneducated or educated churchgoer won’t mind telling an unbeliever to “please pray.” The fundamental question is this: Are we really serious about denying Chopp her God, or are we just sending a message to those who might — and the decline of political parties makes this more and more certain — become moderates by necessity?
i finally went through all of my photos and found a “some random hippie” photo for every year from 2004 until the present, with the exception (for some, as-yet unknown reason) of 2010. the current trend of a picture in the mirror began in 2009.
Some Random Hippie, 2024
Some Random Hippie, 2024
Some Random Hippie, 2023
Some Random Hippie, 2019
Some Random Hippie, 2018
Some Random Hippie, 2017
Some Random Hippie, 2016
Some Random Hippie, 2015
Some Random Hippie, 2014
Some Random Hippie, 2013
Some Random Hippie, 2012
Some Random Hippie, 2011
Some Random Hippie, 2010 – apparently doesn’t exist… 😕
Some Random Hippie, 2009
Some Random Hippie, 2008
Some Random Hippie, 2007
Some Random Hippie, 2006
Some Random Hippie, 2005 (with Schmootzi The Clod)
Some Random Hippie, 2004
Sunday seems really quiet. Hmm, thinks Google, let’s have a four-hour Gmail, YouTube, G Suite, Cloud outage — and, because of the fact that i am not anywhere near as reliant on google as the rest of you slobs, i didn’t even notice an outage until someone else complained about it! 😈😎
😒
because of the fact that i have worked in several companies that actually, physically MADE keyboards — they really do wash partially finished keyboards in a household dishwasher before assembly — i wasn’t as upset as i could have been, but, nevertheless, i spent the entire rest of the evening taking my keyboard apart, cleaning the beer (and assorted dust, feathers, cat hair and other detritus) out of it, and re-assembling it…
only to discover that only half of the keys actually work. and not in a normal “right half works, left half doesn’t” way, but in a more random “half the keys in this line sometimes work and sometimes don’t” way, which indicates that some moisture probably got inside the four or five layers of waterproof linings — seriously, keyboards, these days, are practically impervious to spills… not like when i was a kid… — either that, or there was something that didn’t want to get bent, that got bent in the process of disassembling the keyboard: i tried to be careful and not bend any of the parts that looked like they might be upset if they got bent, but i may have bent them, anyway, without meaning to.
in any event, i have an alternate keyboard, just for such emergencies, which is the same model, but different colour keys. i have occasionally ransacked the alternate keyboard for spare parts, like when my “B” key’s spring broke, and the F2 and F3 keys died, so it doesn’t get used for anything, anyway… so i decided to make a frankenkeyboard…
in honour of my wonderful pet, Frank Zappa the cat.
once again, the most recent instance of the battle of the computer has come to a close, and, once again, i am victorious… sort of…
i just transferred ownership of the fremontplayers.com and fremontphilharmonic.com domains to someone else. i still host fremontphilharmonic, fremonstor.org and cirquedeflambe.org for the moment, but i hope to have them gone by may 1st.
they are, now, officially, SEP. 👍
of course i strongly suspect that they are going to try to wheedle me back into working with their site again, especially since it’s pretty clear that they don’t know what they’re doing, which is why it is now hosted by wix…
which, in my opinion, is probably several steps backward… but it is, officially, SEP, and i’m done with being actively involved in the administration of web hosting clients.
i also bit the bullet and opened yet another ticket with the VPN provider, which took the form of an extended chat session in which the technician claimed that they responded when they didn’t… which is, apparently, the reason they ignored my SIX EMAILS from 190405 (two weeks ago) until 190415 (today)… 😒
but, in the end, i got that fixed, as well, so now i can send email from my local computer, using SMTP, instead of having to login to a web site and send mail using IMAP, which i DO NOT LIKE!
but now it’s better, and i don’t have the added stress of a mailing list whose members send email to the wrong address and get MY PERSONAL EMAIL blacklisted and threatened with having to move.
the continuing saga of the mailing list fiasco has reached a new plateau:
so, it started out that one of the subscribers to the list sent a message to the list that didn’t go through, for some unknown reason (demons).
when his message didn’t go through IMMEDIATELY — as he was used to them doing — he started looking around for other addresses, and he found two of them. one goes to the list owner, and one is a “machine only” address that sends bounce notices to the owner. it is not for sending email TO, and it is definitely not for sending mail to when your message doesn’t go through, because that triggers the MTA on the user end to blacklist your message.
i found out about this whole fiasco about 6 hours into it, when he sent mail to my personal address, asking me if there was something wrong. i noticed that he had sent mail to the machine-only address, and got blacklisted by micro$awful, so i wrote to the host provider to see if there was something that could be done to reverse the problem.
the host provider’s response was to accuse me (and my mailing list) of sending spam, and they have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to sending spam. 😒
they generously offered to set me up with a new IP address instead of arbitrarily closing my account, but the new IP address they gave me didn’t have a PTR (pointer) record, or a RDNS (Reverse DNS) record, which only made the machine that controls the email list mad, because usual mailing lists have a PTR and a RDNS record, and the end result was that i was blacklisted by a number of services with which i have been exchanging emails without a problem for years.
fortunately, these other services were ones for which i could submit delisting requests myself, which takes the host provider and their sensitivity about spam and spammers out of the loop.
nevertheless, i started losing patience, and i might have said some things in my communications with the host provider which ended up making things a whole lot worse, ending up with yesterday, when they asked me to move my web sites to a different host provider immediately.
at EXACTLY THE SAME TIME, the PTR and RDNS records that they installed on my new IP address took effect, which meant that i can no longer send email from my local email client, because it’s not the same server that my VPN has been talking to for more than a year, and i lost it. i didn’t actually curse at them, but i did everything but that.
while i was in the process of figuring out that it was my VPN that was my primary problem, i had, simultaneously, to explain the mistake to the guy who sent the original message, re-assure the members of the mailing list who were trying — and failing — to send messages to the list that they weren’t actually the problem, despite the fact that their email addresses were not interacting correctly with the mailing list, and fend off the more and more insistent demands that i leave, immediately, from the host provider.
long story short, i didn’t sleep very well last night. 😠
at about 3:30 this morning, i finally wrote a letter to macque, saying that i was no longer able to host the web sites he has me hosting, i was no longer able to maintain the mailing list, and that i was retiring from the hosting business.
then i checked, once again, with micro$awful, and determined that I HADN’T ACTUALLY BEEN BLACKLISTED AT ALL!
the WHOLE THING had been caused by “demons” in the machine! 😖
and, to top things all off, we’re scheduled to go to the beach for a week, starting monday, which meant that, if i was going to move, i would have to find a new host and give them the information they need to move my web sites in 3 days, or wait a week, and do the same thing when i got back from vacation. both of these options made going on vacation TO BEGIN WITH not a very exciting prospect, and i was getting severely depressed about it.
and, to put the cherry on top, it turns out that sketch, the drummer for Snake Suspenderz, died yesterday, which made me even more depressed… primarily because he, being dead, didn’t have to worry about all the CRAP that has been going on in the world, while i, being not dead, had to deal with seven times MORE CRAP and had no say in the matter, whatsoever.
then, things started to get better… kind of…
the first thing that happened is that, when i told them that i would be moving my web site in two weeks, that micro$awful hadn’t really blacklisted my IP address, and that i had dumped the client that had caused the whole fiasco, they let up a little bit, and allowed that, since i had paid access until july, that i could stay until then. with a bit more discussion back and forth, they relented even further, and allowed me to keep my web sites where they are.
but i’m still giving up being a host provider for people who don’t know how it works, because it’s WAY too stressful.
so, in the end, i can go on vacation without having to worry about internet SHIT, either while i am on vacation, or after i get home; i will no longer have to deal with people who don’t know doing things that they shouldn’t do and feeling awful about it afterwards, and i won’t ACTUALLY have to move my web sites that aren’t going away anyway (which is an entirely different ball of wax)…
but sketch is still dead, which means that, either, Snake Suspenderz will break up, or that we will find a new drummer… neither of which are very attractive alternatives at this point.
i am done with the moisture festival for another year: 13 shares. we’ll see what a share costs in about a month, but i’m not holding my breath.
during the fremont phil part of the run, i broke my tuba: the mouthpiece receiver came loose, which made playing the instrument sort of interesting, but not absolutely impossible, which is why i took it to the repair shop today, instead of when it happened.
i’m still recovering from the flu. i’ve got a persistent cough which, according to what i’ve read recently, may never go away, although it seems to be, so i don’t know yet.
and, while i was busy with the moisture festival, a subscriber to one of the mailing lists i maintain, who has an email address at micro$awful, unknowingly sent email to the wrong address, and got the mailing list blacklisted from sending to addresses at micro$awful. the host provider’s response to this was to believe micro$awful, and to say that if i don’t move the mailing list to a third-party, commercial SMTP provider, that they were going to refuse to provide service to me any longer. i don’t want to do that, but i am running out of other choices very quickly, and informing micro$awful that their automated blacklister made a mistake is almost impossible. i’m getting really tired of dealing with other peoples’ screw-ups, and, once again, am debating whether or not to just toss all of my “web clients” except for my wife, and just deal with my own domains. it would be so much easier than explaining stuff to people who don’t understand, who don’t pay attention, and who do continue to do the stuff that makes problems happen which i can’t fix.
now that the moisture festival is over, i’ve got a band-mate’s saxophone to work on for a couple days, and moe and i are going to the beach in a week or so. hopefully that will give me the chance to get back to normal for a while. 😒
i’m reading pantagruel, which was written in 1532.
in the introduction, after he addresses the translator, there is a refrence to tobacco:
To drink he was a furious enemy
Contented with a six-penny --
(with diamond hatband, silver spurs, six horses.) pie --And for tobacco's pate-rounding smoke,
Much had he said, and much more spoke,
But 'twas not then found out, so the design was broke.
according to wikipedia, “tobacco”, as a word, was introduced to europeans around 1552, twenty years AFTER pantagruel was written, and Hernández de Boncalo, Spanish chronicler of the Indies, was the first European to bring tobacco seeds to the Old World in 1559 following orders of King Philip II of Spain.
before that, especially in europe, one would assume, tobacco was quite rare, and usually not available to “ordinary” people.
i’ve never read pantagruel before, and the 16th century, in general, was kind of a weird, amorphous time, during which what we take as “knowledge” now, was a lot more fluid and undecided, so i think i can overlook this inconsistency, but it’ll be interesting.
a while ago, i came across this word in a web-comic that i read all the time. it was in a joke about librarians who were in the process of being stereotypical stoners, and i thought it was just a joke — and, as “just a joke”, it was a pretty good one — but little did i know…
apparently there is an item called “flong” — sometimes called an “ad-mat” or “advertising matrix” in the newspaper business — which is a paper mould used to make stereotypes… which are called “clichés” in French, because it’s onomotapoetic for the sound produced when they’re made. 🤣
i should have known that, even in web comics (possibly, especially in web comics) when librarians make jokes, they make jokes by which even the professionals are impressed. 😎 😉 👍
also, i think i want a refund on this life. i’m almost 60 years old, i have been a typesetter for almost 40 of those years, and i have only recently discovered flongs: this is UNACCEPTABLE! 😠
CIDR notation is used when you’re talking about blocks of IP addresses. it’s the part of the IPv4 address — the “dotted quad” — where there’s a slash, followed by a number between 0 and 32, which represents a block of IPv4 addresses that are all related to each other. the common ones that i see all the time are /24 — which is 256 addresses, from A.B.C.0 to A.B.C.255 — and /16, which is A.B.0.0 to A.B.255.255 or 216 addresses. i’ve also seen references to /18, which is 214 addresses, but i don’t completely understand what delineates them in the /18 case — or many other cases, for that matter, it’s just that /24 and /16 have relatively visible end-points for people who don’t really understand… 😉
following that subject, i just recently encountered a block — /23 or 2562 (512) addresses — and i wondered what it was, so i looked it up, and while i was reading about it, moe came up behind me and commented that CIDR plugs are used to synchronize the œstrus of livestock animals…
ETA 190208: i have, since, encountered /11, /19, /21, and /28, which is beginning to bring about my understaning where the delineations are.
🤯🤪
it should be fairly obvious, given my ongoing obsession with The Church of Tina Chopp, that i am impressed by web sites where the person or people involved in creating it did a lot of detailed work over a long period of time in making their part of the web into their own little fantasy world.
one of those places, where the people have put so much work into their site that i’m not sure whether it’s a “for real” site or (like The Church of Tina Chopp) an elaborate joke that took on a life of its own, is the Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group…
seriously… if you have any clue, i would appreciate any input i can get. 😕
okay, i’m confused… it was my impression that, when police are called because person A has shot person B, that, by definition, we are talking about what is called a “crime”.
there’s this item at Raw Story, Three killed, four wounded in California bowling alley shooting about the police being called to a bowling alley, where they discovered multiple shooting victims, including three who are dead, and no suspect available.
to me, that sounds like it is definitely what they would call a “crime scene”.
but, here’s the thing:
The Torrance Police Department said officers responded to a shot-fired call at the location found multiple gunshot victims. Two men were taken to hospital, two opted to seek their own medical attention, and three were pronounced dead at the scene.
if they were part of a crime, and shot at the crime scene, why were they allowed to “seek their own medical attention”? wouldn’t the fact that they were part of a crime scene necessitate the police wanting to know everything possible about their gunshot wounds?
… which includes records that a doctor at a hospital could easily, efficiently, and accurately provide them, but which usually aren’t accepted by the person, about themselves, after the fact…?
especially if people, you know, actually DIED as a result of this “crime”…?
😕
it is as though the police are, essentially, saying “oh, yeah… some guy shot and killed three people and wounded four others, but don’t worry, it’s not a serious crime that we’re talking about here.”
😒
THIS is why nobody respects cops
from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
i wasn’t wrong.
I Will Not Speak Kindly of the Dead. Bush Was Detestable.
George H.W. Bush Hagiography is the Elites’ Finest Accomplishment
George H.W. Bush Empowered Atrocity Abroad and Fascists at Home
#drumpf. 🖕 the less said about him, the better.
🍄 one mushroom yesterday. i went out for a walk and had pretty much the entire “trip” while i was out, which wasn’t very much. depression sneaking back in, but not in unmanagable amounts… yet… fewer mushrooms every time this happens, and eventually i’ll run out. hopefully i will have either wildcrafted, or obtained some more by then, but who knows… they are illegal, after all, even though my doctor counsellor recommended them… 😒
trolloween on wednesday. i’m doing sound effects, which means bullroarer “pre-show” and thunder for the first part of the show. nothing else, which means that i’ll be able to actually haunt fremont, for the first time ever… i’ve been a part of the show at the troll, and the dance afterwards many, many times, but i’ve never gotten to go on the haunt… mushrooms? it’s possible… but i think i’d have to find a place to crash in town, if so. i’ll ask macque…
so, in the realm of the computer, i’ve decided that, if i tiptoe around this version of kubuntu, it works 95% of the time. i have, literally, changed the way i interact with the computer interface, in order to prevent it from crashing on a more regular basis: kontact/kmail/akregator — which used to be a relatively stable part of the distribution — has become something which works if i DON’T do things like try to open links in akregator using the middle mouse button (right click and choose “open in external browser” works, though, which is annoying), or forward a message, about half of the time (which is something i do on a regular basis when i’m reporting spam). and kubuntu, itself, has got some annoying bugs which i don’t know to whom to report… which, in itself, is annoying… when i boot the computer, the desktop wallpaper appears to be set to “blur” around the background, even though when i look at the configure panel, it’s set to “solid color”, and when i set it to “blur”, nothing happens, but if i, then, set it back to “solid color”, lo-and-behold, it suddenly displays with a solid colour background. and, because of the fact that it’s part of the system settings, i don’t have the first clue who should get the bug report.
and i’ve, basically, given up on amarok. i love the interface, but the fact is, my music is on a disk that isn’t mounted at startup — because it is a NAS, mounted via WIFI — and amarok refuses to see it. i haven’t figured out how to get it to mount at startup, and it appears that the amarok user list is, for all intents and purposes, dead… which is really annoying.
on the other hand, i’ve figured out a way to play the music on my NAS from my phone, my tablet, and from the linux box, at the same time, using the same application, which is VLC media player. i don’t love the interface, but it’s definitely better than nothing, and the fact that i can play my music, basically, anywhere, without having to make copies of it, should make the copyright drones happy.
and i found the disks containing approximately 10,000 fonts, left over from when i worked in a print shop… and i can get around 90% to 95% of them to work on both my mac and my linux box, also from my NAS, which makes sharing documents a lot more reliable.
Trump’s Attack on Medicare for All Has Industry Fingerprints All Over It
By Wendell Potter
19 October, 2018
Recently, the president decided to take a break from tweeting conspiracy theories to write an op-ed attacking supporters of Medicare for All. While engaging in what psychologists would probably call “projection,” he accused the Medicare for All movement of putting seniors at risk, rationing health care and trying to destroy the Medicare system.
I’m a former executive at two of the country’s largest insurance companies. I spent 20 years working in PR for Humana and then Cigna, rising to the level of vice president before I had a crisis of conscience. As a result, I know exactly how this op-ed came to be. The process doesn’t start at the White House. It didn’t include a careful review of policy, and it wasn’t an idea his staff came up with.
I can see the industry’s fingerprints on this op-ed from a mile away, because I was the ghost writer for many pieces just like it. During my two-decade tenure in the industry, every time an idea that would threaten shareholder profits started gaining momentum, my employer would decide we’d need to find a friendly and influential politician to carry water for the industry. I’d sit down with my communications team, create talking points, or even write a complete op-ed or speech, and then make sure our well-connected lobbyists got it to the right people.
And the industry won’t just go to Republicans. For instance, Ed Rendell, a Democrat who was formerly a governor of my home state of Pennsylvania and chairman of the Democratic National Committee, recently wrote an op-ed promoting several half-measures he claimed would be stronger reforms than single-payer health care, none of which posed a serious threat to private insurance. Currently, Rendell is affiliated with the Bipartisan Policy Center, which has regularly hosted organizations like America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP). Meanwhile, so-called think tanks like the Pacific Research Institute regularly write Medicare for All hit pieces for Forbes and other outlets.
The purpose of these op-eds was always to mislead and scare people, because when the facts aren’t on your side, you have to find a politician who’s willing to obfuscate, misdirect and outright lie. It’s no surprise that the industry went right to the White House.
Many people were quick to challenge the president’s claims. Medicare for All would actually expand coverage for seniors currently on Medicare by covering dental and vision care and lowering drug prices. And contrary to Trump’s claim about rationing, the truth is that real rationing occurs in the US when people don’t seek treatment due to cost. It happens every day because millions of Americans are either uninsured or have such high deductibles they can’t afford to actually get the care they need. Medicare for All would eliminate that barrier.
Others have pointed out the hypocrisy. Since taking control of Congress and the White House, President Trump and his party have been engaged in a non-stop assault on Medicare, threatened patients with pre-existing conditions and tried to force through a plan that would have kicked tens of millions of people off their insurance.
Here’s the thing: I’m fairly confident that the president and his staff don’t actually believe that Medicare for All would threaten seniors. I can tell because Trump doesn’t use the national platform as an opportunity to lay out a vision to expand coverage, or protect people with pre-existing conditions, or manage drug prices or lower health care costs.
What the president does know is that a Medicare for All system is the worst nightmare of insurance and pharmaceutical companies. Right now, they have a virtually limitless ability to charge American patients, families, workers and businesses exorbitant prices, and they want to keep it that way. That’s why they have spent decades abusing our campaign finance system, pumping money into campaigns, hiring armies of lobbyists, and using a combination of political incentives and threats to push through legislation they like, making sure that any legislation that threatens to limit their profits never sees the light of day.
Now that the American people are starting to wake up to their scam, the entrenched special interests have decided to cash in their favors. And so, the president decided to parrot the talking points of his donors and their shareholders, no matter how much harm it will cause the American people.
Trump Tower board seeks nearly $90,000 from estate of art collector who died in 50th-floor fire
By Meagan Flynn
18 October 2018
Six months after a fire in Trump Tower killed 50th-floor resident Todd Brassner, the building’s residential board is coming after Brassner’s estate for tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid common charges stemming from a lien on his apartment, according to a complaint filed Tuesday in the Supreme Court in New York County.
Brassner, a longtime Trump Tower resident who lived alone with hundreds of vintage instruments and an elaborate multimillion-dollar art collection, died April 7 after an electrical fire engulfed his apartment, which had no working smoke alarms. He was 67.
Now, with backing from a Trump Organization attorney, the Residential Board of Trump Tower Condominium is suing Brassner’s estate for more than $64,600 in unpaid common charges, an amount that includes fees accrued in the months after Brassner died. The residential board is also seeking a judgment of at least $25,000, bringing the total amount sought to nearly $90,000. Common charges are condo fees that typically include maintenance, utilities or other services. Brassner defaulted on common charge payments in June 2015, according to the complaint.
Brassner’s family members and executors of his estate, Heather and Aaron Brassner, could not immediately be reached for comment, nor could the attorney representing the board.
The fire at Trump Tower, where the president’s penthouse and the Trump Organization headquarters are located, captured wide attention in April both for Trump’s silence on Brassner’s death and for the lack of sprinklers in the building, a feature that Trump had lobbied against installing in the condos in the late 1990s.
Brassner moved into Trump Tower in 1996, according to property records. The son of a wealthy New York art collector, Brassner was described by friends as an “utter expert on Pop Art” who was “constantly swapping, buying and selling” and at the center of the action in the art world, as his friend, Stuart Pivar, told the Art Newspaper. Brassner ran with Andy Warhol’s Factory crowd in the 1970s as he built his impressive art collection, including a 1975 portrait Warhol made of Brassner, which the Trump Tower resident valued at $850,000 in 2015.
He kept the portrait in his Trump Tower condo, along with a collection of more than 100 vintage guitars, $25,000 worth of banjos, about 150 ukuleles from the early 20th century, an organ, a Robert Indiana sculpture and artwork by Jack Kerouac — just to name a few items.
But over the years, he appeared to have trouble keeping up with the condo payments. Trump Tower’s residential board filed multiple liens against him between 2003 and 2013 for unpaid common charges, New York court records show. And in 2015 he filed for bankruptcy, which included listing all of the assets kept in his apartment. The condo was valued at $2.5 million.
At the time of Brassner’s death, friends told the New York Times he was in declining health and that he had been trying unsuccessfully to sell the apartment. Once Trump became president, resulting in omnipresent armed security outside Trump Tower, Brassner couldn’t seem to find a buyer, one friend told the Times.
“It haunts me,” Brassner’s friend Stephen Dwire, a musician and producer, told the paper. “He said, ‘This is getting untenable.’ It was like living in an armed camp. But when people heard it was a Trump building, he couldn’t give it away.”
Trump built the tower in 1983, when installing sprinklers was not required. In 1998, when two tragic New York City high-rise fires left several people dead, the city moved to begin requiring sprinklers in high-rises. But Trump opposed retrofitting his building with the sprinklers and lobbied to persuade city officials to drop a proposal that would have required them in older apartment buildings, as The Washington Post previously reported.
Some speculated that the April fire could have been mitigated had they been installed.
The New York City Fire Department ultimately found that the fire was caused by an overloaded electrical board. The Times reported that the building was equipped with smoke sensors, which is what alerted firefighters to the blaze.
In a statement on Twitter in April, Trump did not offer condolences for Brassner’s family but did brag about the construction of the building.
“Fire at Trump Tower is out,” he tweeted, before the fire had been put out. “Very confined (well built building). Firemen (and women) did a great job. THANK YOU!”
A month after Brassner died, a Trump Organization attorney filed a lien against the deceased man on behalf of the Residential Board of the Trump Tower Condominium, seeking at that time $52,000 in unpaid common charges since July 2016, according to New York City Department of Finance records.
my impression is that the democratic malaise goes back at least as far as George McGovern, in 1972, but you’ve got to start somewhere…
Can’t Hit the Snooze Button No More
October 9, 2018
by Marc Salomon
In 1980, when I turned 18 and first voted, John Anderson sounded the alarm about the duopoly rot. The Democrats hit the snooze button and Reagan won.
In 1984, Gary Hart sounded the alarm and the Democrats slapped him down, again in 1988, and hit the snooze button, nominated the execrable Mondale and Reagan won.
In 1988, Jesse Jackson sounded the rainbow alarm, the Democrats hit the snooze button, nominated the hapless Dukakis who ran with the odious Bentsen and Bush I won.
In 1992, Jerry Brown v1.5 sounded the alarm, the Democrats hit the snooze button and nominated Bill “Rapey Bubba” Clinton who won but rammed NAFTA through and forfeited the Congress to the Republicans.
In 1996, Nader sounded the alarm. the Democrats hit the snooze button. The Republicans impeached Rapey Bubba. As a parting shot of gratitude, Clinton I deregulated Wall Street.
In 2000, Ralph Nader sounded the alarm, the Democrats hit the snooze button and lost to Bush II (the previous Hitler on the Potomac) and instead of taking stock of their failure, raged at Nader.
In 2004, Howard Dean sounded a weak alarm, the Democrats hit the snooze button and nominated the patrician Kerry who lost to Bush II, blaming the Greens again.
In 2008, Obama sounded the alarm as a trojan horse, got in running center-left and governed center-right, throwing away historic strong majorities in the Congress to the Republicans.
In 2016, Bernie Sanders sounded the alarm and the Democrats hit the snooze button so hard that they broke the alarm clock and nominated a neoliberal warmonger candidate who was as unpopular with the electorate as she held them in contempt ushering in Obama’s true legacy: Donald Trump. And here we are.
Do you want to know why there is a Justice Kavanaugh? That’s why.
These Democrats are not stupid. They claim that they represent the meritocracy. Yet in what meritocracy do losers like this rise to the top and stay there after losing election after election?
This “meritocracy” selects for those able to appeal to and manipulate the elites into being allowed to be temporary custodians of power on their behalf.
Their reward is a lifetime of sinecure and wealth.
The only way that these Republicans can win is when these Democrats willfully and maliciously manipulate the electorate into acting against their best interests.
None of those Democrats who sounded the alarm had any real intention of making the kind of structural change needed to put us on a different course, they were playing the angle.
Nader who would have followed through, Sanders, less so, were the exceptions.
But they all did tap into an increasing resentment amongst the voters as to the failure of the duopoly to be responsive to popular sentiment.
When Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party arose, the Republicans welcomed the Tea Party into their midst while the Democrat big city mayors, coordinated by the Obama Department of Justice brutally and violently repressed the encampments.
Politics in this model is not symmetric.
If politics is warfare by other means, the Republicans have torn up any treaties that might have been in place and adopted a policy of total war.
These Democrats still do not know what hit them and they have proven themselves strategically incompetent of ever getting out from behind the eight ball.
The only way to work our way out from under this mess is by creating independent grassroots democratic organizations that can mobilize mass movements to make the elites offers they cannot refuse.
If people with access to many fewer resources than we, facing death squad governments and apartheid, can organize to win, then we have no excuses.
Our primary impediment in this task has been the Democrat Party which views its base, not the Republicans, as its opponent, and leverages its patronage network against independent popular organizing.
The veil of delusion is strong with the Democrat base, they are at a point where they have been made as impervious by MSNBC to logical arguments as any Fox [sic] News addict.
We are going to need to pierce that veil to shake some sense into them and more importantly organize outside of our usual comfort zones where the Democrat spell is weak, where people are wise to their bait and switch and have voted with their feet by staying home.
None of this will be easy, but it is not rocket science, others who have come before us have made these heavy lifts.
We have no excuses.
Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100
By Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney
September 28, 2018
Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees by the end of this century.
A rise of 7 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 4 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe.
But the administration did not offer this dire forecast as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.
The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.
“The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society. And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it,” said Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002.
The document projects that global temperature will rise by nearly 3.5 degrees Celsius above the average temperature between 1986 and 2005 regardless of whether Obama-era tailpipe standards take effect or are frozen for six years, as the Trump administration has proposed. The global average temperature rose more than 0.5 degrees Celsius between 1880, the start of industrialization, and 1986, so the analysis assumes a roughly 4 degree Celsius or 7 degree Fahrenheit increase from preindustrial levels.
The world would have to make deep cuts in carbon emissions to avoid this drastic warming,the analysis states. And that “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”
The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
World leaders have pledged to keep the world from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels, and agreed to try to keep the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. But the current greenhouse gas cuts pledged under the 2015 Paris climate agreement are not steep enough to meet either goal. Scientists predict a 4 degree Celsius rise by the century’s end if countries take no meaningful actions to curb their carbon output.
Trump has vowed to exit the Paris accord and called climate change a hoax. In the past two months, the White House has pushed to dismantle nearly half a dozen major rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, deregulatory moves intended to save companies hundreds of millions of dollars.
If enacted, the administration’s proposals would give new life to aging coal plants; allow oil and gas operations to release more methane into the atmosphere; and prevent new curbs on greenhouse gases used in refrigerators and air-conditioning units. The vehicle rule alone would put 8 billion additional tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere this century, more than a year’s worth of total U.S. emissions, according to the government’s own analysis.
Administration estimates acknowledge that the policies would release far more greenhouse gas emissions from America’s energy and transportation sectors than otherwise would have been allowed.
David Pettit, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who testified against Trump’s freeze of fuel efficiency standards this week in Fresno, Calif., said his organization is prepared to use the administration’s own numbers to challenge their regulatory rollbacks. He noted that the NHTSA document projects that if the world takes no action to curb emissions, current atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide would rise from 410 parts per million to 789 ppm by 2100.
“I was shocked when I saw it,” Pettit said in a phone interview. “These are their numbers. They aren’t our numbers.”
Conservatives who condemned Obama’s climate initiatives as regulatory overreach have defended the Trump administration’s approach, calling it a more reasonable course.
Obama’s climate policies were costly to industry and yet “mostly symbolic,” because they would have made barely a dent in global carbon dioxide emissions, said Heritage Foundation research fellow Nick Loris, adding: “Frivolous is a good way to describe it.”
NHTSA commissioned ICF International Inc., a consulting firm based in Fairfax, Va., to help prepare the impact statement. An agency spokeswoman said the Environmental Protection Agency “and NHTSA welcome comments on all aspects of the environmental analysis” but declined to provide additional information about the agency’s long-term temperature forecast.
Federal agencies typically do not include century-long climate projections in their environmental impact statements. Instead, they tend to assess a regulation’s impact during the life of the program — the years a coal plant would run, for example, or the amount of time certain vehicles would be on the road.
Using the no-action scenario “is a textbook example of how to lie with statistics,” said MIT Sloan School of Management professor John Sterman. “First, the administration proposes vehicle efficiency policies that would do almost nothing [to fight climate change]. Then [the administration] makes their impact seem even smaller by comparing their proposals to what would happen if the entire world does nothing.”
This week, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned leaders gathered in New York, “If we do not change course in the next two years, we risk runaway climate change… Our future is at stake.”
Federal and independent research — including projections included in last month’s analysis of the revised fuel-efficiency standards — echoes that theme. The environmental impact statement cites “evidence of climate-induced changes,” such as more frequent droughts, floods, severe storms and heat waves, and estimates that seas could rise nearly three feet globally by 2100 if the world does not decrease its carbon output.
Two articles published in the journal Science since late July — both co-authored by federal scientists — predicted that the global landscape could be transformed “without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” and declared that soaring temperatures worldwide bore humans’ “fingerprint.”
“With this administration, it’s almost as if this science is happening in another galaxy,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate and energy program. “That feedback isn’t informing the policy.”
Administration officials say they take federal scientific findings into account when crafting energy policy — along with their interpretation of the law and President Trump’s agenda. The EPA’s acting administrator, Andrew Wheeler, has been among the Trump officials who have noted that U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants have fallen over time.
But the debate comes after a troubling summer of devastating wildfires, record-breaking heat and a catastrophic hurricane — each of which, federal scientists say, signals a warming world.
Some Democratic elected officials, such as Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, said Americans are starting to recognize these events as evidence of climate change. On Feb. 25, Inslee met privately with several Cabinet officials, including then-EPA chief Scott Pruitt, and Western state governors. Inslee accused them of engaging in “morally reprehensible” behavior that threatened his children and grandchildren, according to four meeting participants, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide details of the private conversation.
In an interview, Inslee said that the ash from wildfires that covered Washington residents’ car hoods this summer, and the acrid smoke that filled their air, has made more voters of both parties grasp the real-world implications of climate change.
“There is anger in my state about the administration’s failure to protect us,” he said. “When you taste it on your tongue, it’s a reality.”
akregator has taken up the task of crashing about half the time, again. i guess it just needed some time to settle, after having the debug packages installed.
i reported the bug. it was a duplicate of bug #382575, which is actually a bug with Qt (which i always thought stood for “QuickTime”, but, apparently, i’m wrong), and it was originally reported in july of 2017. it will be fixed… eventually… 😒
i installed the debugging packages for both kontact and dolphin, thinking that would help me get a better idea of what’s going on.
it’s a little difficult with dolphin, because it doesn’t actually crash, it just gives me an “unknown error” message.
with kontact/akregator, it made a considerable difference, but i’m not sure how much it helps: now, instead of crashing about half the time when i middle-click on a link (which would produce the backtrace for which i installed the debugging packages), it doesn’t crash at all… it still does nothing when i middle-click on a link — now 100% of the time — and it still works exactly as advertised when i right-click and choose “open link in external browser”… 😠
ETA: this is the primary reason why, if there was ANY other alternative, i would use that instead of linux: i looked at the URI in dolphin, after it gave me the weird “unknown error”, and it said “smb://@/” which i thought looked kind of odd… so i put the username for the drive to the left of the @ sign, and the name of the drive to the right of the @ sign…
and it worked. 😕
no clue how it got that way, no clue why it worked before, with no username in the picture, and doesn’t now, no clue what the error messages mean, i have absolutely NO CLUE why it works now and didn’t before…
but it does. 😕
i’m still having random annoying problems with bionic beaver:
when i start it up in the morning, it loads my desktop wallpaper image with a “blur” in the background, which is not what i want. i have to right-click, choose “Configure desktop”, choose “blur”, hit “apply”, choose “Solid color” and hit “apply” before it correctly shows a solid colour background around my wallpaper images. 😕
sometimes, randomly, the “Device Notifier” shows me the three USB hard disks i have inserted, and mounted, even when i am doing nothing that involves any of them. i don’t know why.
akregator randomly crashes when i try to open a link with the middle mouse button (which is normally set to “open in external browser”). it works okay if i right-click and choose “open in external browser” from the context menu, but if i middle-click, sometimes nothing happens, and sometimes akregator crashes. also, it doesn’t give me enough information in the trace to make the bug reports any good. i wrote to the KDE-PIM users list, but not with this problem, because i hadn’t figured out exacly what happened at that time. now i get the very strong impression that the response will be to upgrade to a more recent version, but that version hasn’t been added to the upgrades for bionic yet, so i’m kinda stuck.
dolphin allows me to make icons for places i go to regularly, and organise them in the left hand side of the window. i set up some network folders, by selecting “Network”, then selecting “Add Network Folder” and setting up a micro$not windows folder at smb://salamandircloud.local. it worked fine for about 3 days, but now, when i select any of the network folders at salamandircloud.local, it tells me
Internal Error
Please send a full bug report at http://bugs.kde.org
Unknown error condition in stat: Unknown error 8216
only sometimes, instead of “Unknown error 8216” it says “Unknown error” or “File exists” or “Software caused connection abort”. i went to http://bugs.kde.org and discovered a duplicate bug that says it’s “solved”, but it doesn’t give any clear indication of how it was solved. the end result is that now i no longer have access to my cloud drive from my linux machine. 👎
because of the fact that i can’t access salamandirCloud, i can’t access my music from my linux machine, but even when i could access salamandirCloud, amarok couldn’t access my music files. apparently it wants them on a local drive… and, because of the fact that, when i could access my cloud drive, it was through a SMB connection, i can’t use the standard NFS to automatically mount the drive at startup. i wrote to the amarok users list, but nobody’s home there, and i don’t expect an answer any time soon. 😠
i keep going back to the advice i was offered by Ralf Mardorf on the debian users list, back in 2012, when i was playing around with (and failing to install) a debian live disk. he said
Because I needed new hardware I couldn’t keep a stable Linux install that satisfied my needs.
Never change a winning team!
If there’s no need to update, keep a stable install, make backups and to test newer Linux versions at least have a dual-boot.
If I could use my old stable install, I still would use it. In your case I would reinstall the old Ubuntu that fit to your needs and I would install a second Linux and try to get it working, when ever I would have time to do it.
You know it yourself, I don’t need to write this words to you ;).
which, to me, means “IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT!”
except, of course, trusty was broke, it was just broke in different ways than bionic is. now all i gotta do is figure out what the fixes are. 😖
No, I Will Not Debate You
Civility will never defeat fascism, no matter what The Economist thinks.
19 September, 2018
by Laurie Penny
There are some stupid mistakes that only very smart people make, and one of them is the notion that a sensible argument seriously presented can compete with a really good piece of theatre.
Every day, people on the internet ask why I won’t “debate” some self-actualizing gig-economy fascist or other, as if formal, public debate were the only way to steer public conversation. If you won’t debate, the argument goes, you’re an enemy of free speech. You’re basically no better than a Nazi, and certainly far worse than any of the actual Nazis muttering about not being allowed to preach racism from prestigious pulpits. Well-meaning liberals insist that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” anti-fascists disagree, the far right orders more popcorn, and round and round we go on the haunted carousel of western liberal thought until we’re all queasy.
This bad-faith argument is a repeating refrain of this low, dishonest decade, and this month it built to another crescendo. In the U.S., The New Yorker bowed to public pressure and disinvited Steve Bannon, Trump’s neo-nationalist former chief strategist, from its literary festival. And in the U.K., The Economist chose to do the opposite.
I’m accidentally responsible for a very small amount of the fuss here. I was due to speak at the Economist’s Open Future festival, where Bannon was scheduled to be interviewed by the editor in chief directly after the “future of MeToo” panel I’d be on with journalists Laura Bates and Ally Fogg. My note to The Economist, in part:
To speak personally, my opposition to Bannon’s place at this conference has nothing to do with wishing to see him silenced — that would be infeasible as well as illiberal.
I’ve spent much of the past five years hearing out and attempting to debate people like Bannon, and in my experience it only emboldens and legitimizes them. As far as I am concerned, I am not interested in hearing those arguments again.
Bates agreed, writing that “there is a very small minority of cases in which it is justified to refuse to participate on a platform alongside a person because they explicitly and deliberately advocate hatred and harm to groups of people on the basis of their race, sex, religion or other characteristics. It is my belief that Steve Bannon meets this high standard, that his deeply racist, misogynistic, white nationalist views pose real threat and harm to a large number of people, and that it is therefore irresponsible and damaging to provide him with the legitimacy of such a highly respected mainstream platform as The Economist.” Fogg said that “to invite contributions from Steve Bannon, and furthermore to schedule his appearance immediately after a discussion about what happens after #MeToo, directly contradicts the very essence and message of the #MeToo movement. This schedule honors a man whose primary claims to fame are establishing an online magazine that specialized in inciting misogynistic and racial hatred and then maneuvering a self-confessed sexual abuser into place as the most powerful politician on earth.”
To me, refusing to appear alongside Bannon was an obvious choice, as obvious as the protest against Donald Trump’s visit to Britain earlier this year, when millions of people made my country inhospitable to a president who has done nothing to deserve our deference. Bannon, unsurprisingly, disagreed, calling New Yorker editor David Remnick a coward for rescinding his invitation.
We probably should have anticipated the disingenuous firestorm that followed. We should have anticipated the accusations of being the real fascists for refusing to make nice with white supremacists, the harassment and YouTube hobgoblining from self-appointed defenders of free speech, who seem to have forgotten that for Bates, for me, and for any other woman who flashes the merest inch of independent thought online, harassment is nothing terribly new. It’s just Tuesday.
There’s a term for this sort of bad-faith argument: it’s called the justification-suppression model. The theory is that bigots refrain from directly defending their own bigotry but get hugely riled up justifying the abstract right to express bigotry. So instead of saying, for example, “I don’t like foreigners,” they’ll fight hard for someone else’s right to get up on stage and yell that foreigners are coming to convert your children and seduce your household pets.
Focusing the conversation on the ethics of disseminating speech rather than the actual content of that speech is hugely useful for the far right for three reasons. Firstly, it allows them to paint themselves as the wronged party — the martyrs and victims. Secondly, it stops people from talking about the actual wronged parties, the real lives at risk. And thirdly, of course, it’s an enormous diversion tactic, a shout of “Fire!” in the crowded theatre of politics. But Liberals don’t want to feel like bad people, so this impossible choice — betray the letter of your principles, or betray the spirit — leaves everyone feeling filthy.
There’s no way to come out of this convinced of your own political purity. The thing is, though, that establishing your own political purity isn’t what progressive politics are supposed to be about. As Ms. Marvel says: Good is not a thing you are. It’s a thing you do. This is not about censorship. It never was. It’s about consequences, about drawing a line in the sand.
That can be harder in practice than it sounds. The problem with taking a stand within and against respectable organizations is that however righteous you may feel, you create a lot of work for people in that organization — especially people lower down the chain of command who don’t get to make the big ethical decisions. And it takes rather a lot of courage to defy the customs of polite society, especially if it means compromising social capital you yourself have worked hard for. Some people speaking at the Open Future festival are female activists of color whose positions and profile deserve the same institutional recognition that Bannon doesn’t.
The Economist defended its decision to keep Bannon on the program:
The future of open societies will not be secured by like-minded people speaking to each other in an echo chamber, but by subjecting ideas and individuals from all sides to rigorous questioning and debate. This will expose bigotry and prejudice, just as it will reaffirm and refresh liberalism. That is the premise The Economist was founded on. When James Wilson launched this newspaper in 1843, he said its mission was to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”
I don’t believe that holding this position makes anyone evil or stupid. I understand why people cling to it like shipwreck survivors on a floating door. The problem is that it relies on two pieces of magical thinking: number one, that intellectual ideas are the same as moral ones, and number two, that the sucking ethical vacuum at the center of public life can be replaced with a commitment to the polite forms of a free society.
There’s a good case to be made for what anarchists call “prefigurative politics” — the idea that part of the way you build a better world is by creating a version of the world you want to see. The Occupy movement did this, creating microcosms of sharing societies based on mutual aid and consensus… before the camps were summarily squashed by police. The culture of “debate” operates on similar lines but at a much higher budget: it’s live-action roleplaying of a Classical fever-dream of a society where pedigreed intellectuals freely exchange ideas in front of a respectful audience, the sort of society that would have made certain ancient Greek philosophers drop their hemlock in excitement.
Personally, I prefer an exchange of ideas that is less hierarchical and performative, because I’ve found that a lot of the people whose voices matter most are people who don’t put themselves forward as spokespeople, if they are invited at all. Or written dialogue, because it gives all parties more time to think and reflect. Or any format where good ideas are what count, not how good you are at showboating and humiliating the other guy.
Remember the U.S. presidential debates of 2016? Remember how the entire liberal establishment thought Hillary Clinton had won, mainly because she made actual points, rather than shambling around the stage shouting about Muslims? What’s the one line from those debates that everyone remembers now? It’s “Nasty Woman.” What’s the visual? It’s Trump literally skulking around Hillary, dominating her with his body. It’s theatre. And right now the bad actors are winning.
* * *
The far right does not respect the free and liberal exchange of ideas. It is not open to compromise, and it does not want a debate. It wants power. Last week, when I was on the evening news discussing my refusal to attend The Economist‘s event, the showrunners sat us in front of a big screen with Bannon’s face on it — twice. And that, of course, is the problem.
Steve Bannon, like the howling monster from the id he ushered into the White House, exploits the values of the liberal establishment by offering an impossible choice: betray their stated principles (free, open debate) or dignify fascism and white supremacy. This weaponizes tolerance to legitimize intolerance. If we deny racists a platform, they feed off the appearance of censorship, but if we give them a platform, they’ve also won by being respectfully invited into the penumbra of mainstream legitimacy. Either way, what matters to them is not debate, but airtime and attention. They have no interest in winning on the issues. Their image of a better world is one with their face on every television screen.
The marketplace of ideas is just as full of con artists, scammers, and Ponzi schemes as any other marketplace, and as always, when the whole thing comes crashing down, it’s ordinary marks who lose everything. Bannon is that rare thing: a true Gordon Gekko in the attention economy, a man who is both troll and true believer, a man whose lack of integrity is part of the ideology: win at all costs and screw the other guy, because fools and their morals are easily parted. There is no deeper truth to be divined from “holding him to account,” no point at which his racism and xenophobia will somehow become unacceptable to a public that has already bought its penny stocks in neo-nationalism.
Mere weeks ago he told a gathering of the far-right National Front in France to be proud “when people call you racist, when people call you xenophobic… wear it as a badge of honor.” Too many well-meaning liberals are clinging with ten fingernails to the idea that their institutions are robust enough to withstand fascism. They believe, because the belief is soothing, that the marketplace of ideas cares about the value, durability, and quality of its wares rather than how shiny the packaging is, how catchy the jingle, how many times it shows up in your peripheral brand awareness until it’s the one you reach for on the shelf. They’re the equivalent of the people who tried to sell cars in the 1920s by taking out full-page ads solemnly explaining how unlikely their machines were to break down rather than trying to sell you a dream of freedom and potency on four wheels.
The left is catastrophically losing the PR battle in the marketplace of ideas. Inviting someone like Steve Bannon to your conference about how to build a free and open society is a little like inviting Ronald McDonald to your convention on solving world hunger.
I’m not saying that there’s no point in talking to the far right at all. I have interviewed members of the far right in my capacity as a journalist. But academic research and investigative journalism are very different from formal public debate. Public debate — at least the way I was taught to do it at my posh school — is not about the free exchange of ideas at all. You only listen to the other guy so you can work out how to beat him, and ideally, humiliate him. I’m choosing my pronouns deliberately here. The format is fundamentally an intellectual dick-smacking contest dressed up in institutional lingerie, and while there are plenty of women out there who can unzip their enormous brains and thwack them on the table with the best of them, the formula is catastrophically macho.
People rarely change their minds in the course of formal public debate. Not the people on stage, and very few of those in the audience. Years of robust debate in my capacity as a commentator and journalist have taught me that you don’t change minds simply by pointing out where someone is wrong. As a dear friend once told me, trying to bring someone over to your side by publicly demonstrating that their ideas are bad and that they should feel bad is like trying to teach a goat how to dance: the goat will not learn to dance, and you will make him angry. The ways people actually change their minds is by reading the mood of those around them and then going away and thinking about it, by being given permission to think what they were already thinking, or by being shamed into realizing how ignoble their assumptions always were.
Plus, being better at debating does not make you right. It just makes you better at debating. Any prep school debate champion can tell you that a bad story well told can beat a sober litany of facts, though it helps if you also have facts on your side.
Curating debate participants is itself a political choice, because the terms of a debate inform public opinion as much as its content. I’ve lost count of the number of evenings I’ve spent in the role of “shouty leftist” juxtaposed with a set of Tory talking points in a suit, with ten or fifteen minutes (if we’re lucky, a whole hour) to decide whether poor children should be allowed to eat during school holidays or whether migrants deserve human rights. What matters is not who wins on the merits. What matters are the terms: who gets to speak, and who must be silent.
The idea of the public sphere has always been elitist in practice, if not in principle. The people most likely to lose out are some of the least likely to have been trained in the art of public speaking or to have spent the past decade building a career in the media. They were too busy holding down four jobs, or trying to escape a civil war, or practicing medicine in a different language in a country they fled to with their family, or raising and then mourning their children. These are the people whose voices are truly being silenced, whose place in the lofty theatre of formal political debate is not subject to public discussion because they were never invited in the first place.
* * *
The far right are not themselves committed to the principle of free speech. Far from it. In my encounters with neo-nationalists and professional alt-right trolls I have found them remarkably litigious — more than willing to use money and legal threats to silence their more serious critics. I’ve been legally prohibited from describing racists as racists. That’s why you’ll see so many news outlets use phrases like “alleged white supremacist” or “the deportation policy, which critics have described as xenophobic.” It’s not because there’s serious doubt over where these people stand, it’s because journalists are silenced by threats from speech “defenders” who have the money and spite to shut down their critics. I will not be bullied by bad-faith actors trying to rules-lawyer my own principles against me into treating neo-Nazis with respect they don’t deserve.
They are unscrupulous. They incite violence. It’s not my place to tell anyone else who to host at their events, but I can make a choice as a free individual about who I choose to associate with in a professional context, and the more of us who make that choice, the stronger the message it sends.
Sunlight is neither literally nor figuratively the best disinfectant. Modern white supremacy does not grow like bacteria — it grows like a weed, aggressively, crowding out everything else that stretches towards the light. Nor is sunlight what the ritual of formal debate offers. What it offers is a chance to build one’s brand.
Curation is a political choice, and so is the choice of who we allow to take lead roles in the theatre of public discourse. I say: If Bannon has to have a public platform, make him work for it. Have him stand on a stage and play the audio footage of the toddlers at the Mexican border screaming for their parents as they’re dragged away to detention. Have him answer to the mothers of children who were gunned down by police because of the color of their skin, or to the friends and family of migrants who drowned in the Mediterranean. That’s not a polite thing to say. It wouldn’t be a polite thing to do. But the idea that politeness and civility is owed to anyone in a position of power is one of the great gotchas of liberal thought.
Moderate liberalism cherishes the idea of “civility” because it allows it to believe in its own goodness and relevance. To refuse to debate someone is an act of discourtesy. It is rude. It implies that you do not consider that person’s ideas or behavior worthy of basic respect. You would be amazed at the contortions people yank themselves into to avoid being rude, especially to people in positions of authority, or simply people whose faces they’ve seen on the television. Television interviewers have repeatedly failed to hold far-right leaders properly to account because one simply does not call someone a liar and a bigot on a respectable news program.
I’ve come to think of this as the deference trap. It’s a huge part of why I refuse to formally debate fascists. It is staggeringly clear that formal debate is failing to stop white supremacy. This is not an abstract philosophical issue. White supremacy is here, at the heart of world governments. The discussion about whether free speech can stop fascism is not actually about free speech; it’s a proxy for a rolling identity crisis among the political mainstream. About whether the mechanisms of state power can withstand fascist takeover. About whether good people with good ideas can stop bad people with worse ones.
Which, right now, they cannot. The arguments about what freedom of speech actually means are endlessly reheated because they’re the last piece of real philosophical meat moderate conservatives have in their cupboard. It’s a mistake to think that the far right cares about the free speech debate as anything other than a way of confusing the enemy. The far right doesn’t have a profound philosophy, it has a media strategy.
The first time that white supremacists are denied a formal public platform, they get to plead martyrdom, to call the opposition cowards. And the second time. And the third time. But there’s only so many times you can whine that people aren’t paying you enough attention before those same people get bored and lose interest. Milo Yiannopoulos, who spent much of 2017 thrashing around in a self-ordained orgy of far-right martyrdom, recently complained on Facebook:
My events almost never happen. It’s protests, or sabotage from Republican competitors or social media outcries. Every time, it costs me tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And when I get dumped from conferences, BARELY ANYONE makes a sound about it — not my fellow conservative media figures and not even, in many cases, you guys. When was the last time any of you protested in the street at the treatment meted out to me or Pamela Gellar or Mike Cernovich or Alex Jones?… For my trouble, I have lost everything standing up for the truth in America, spent all my savings, destroyed all my friendships, and ruined my whole life.
Cry me a river of blood. What stopped Yiannopoulos was neither formal debate nor the dubious disinfectant of a spotlight. What stopped him was progressives collectively refusing to put up with his horseshit.
If we deny racists a platform, they feed off the appearance of censorship, but if we give them a platform, they’ve won by being respectfully invited into the mainstream. Either way, what matters to them is not debate, but attention. There is no perfect choice.
But there is a choice, and this, to my mind, is the sensible one: To refuse to dignify these people with prestigious public platforms, or to share them. To refuse to offer them airtime or engage them in public debate.
Fortunately, we live in a brave new world where real censorship is something that is almost infeasible unless you are extremely rich and venal and have an army of lawyers. If you want to hear what Bannon thinks, you can. Extensively, at many, many websites and forums. If you want to try to tease out and challenge the deeper truth behind far-right ideas, you’re free to do so, although be prepared to be disappointed. You see, the deeper truth is that there is no deeper truth. No hidden nuance. The new right have already shown us exactly who they are. Now the rest of us get to choose who we want to be.
As for me, I can’t dictate who should and should not be allowed to speak, and I wouldn’t want to. But I can make my own choice as a free citizen. So I choose not to debate them. I choose not to treat them with deference they don’t deserve. I am not interested in hearing out the ideas of the far right, because there are no new ideas on the far right. There are only new recruits. And every time progressives sacrifice the public good on the altar of personal purity, there will be more.
well, it’s done… and, so far, i think i like it…
i reformatted the USB drive, made a startup disk out of it with “Startup Disk Creator”, actually INSTALLED kubuntu bionic on my computer, without remembering to back up the last few items on my list (which were desktop settings that i probably would have immediately changed anyway), and finished up yesterday with the search for how to get my cloud drive to show up. today, it started with the search for how to get my cloud drive to show up, and, with a few false starts — i had to search for the correct file system, install autofs and cifs-utils, and then discover that i didn’t need them — i managed to get my cloud drive to show up, which meant that i could restore the backup of my email and the backup of my browser bookmarks…
and now it’s more or less finished.
i still have to figure out why the new OS isn’t finding my mailserver all the time — sometimes it finds it without any problems, and other times it can’t find it, and says the socket operation has timed out — but i think that may just be new shit getting it’s shit together, so i’m not going to sweat it until later in the week…
and i still haven’t installed the new hard disk i bought, specifically for the task of upgrading the OS, because i discovered that i could do it with a USB stick instead… so now i have to figure out whether i want to install the new SSD and have another terabyte of goodness hanging around, or whether i want to return it and have an extra $300 in my pocket.
ETA: there is now a problem with kontact: i sent a message, but i apparently moved it from the “sent mail” folder too quickly, because, now, when i start kontact, it loads two windows: the kontact window, and the message composer window, with the message in it… and then it hangs up, and when i try to do anything more than move windows around, it crashes… and it eventually crashes anyway. ☹ NOT GOOD!
ETA: it may just be everything settling into its new places… i started kmail separately from kontact (yes, you can do that, no, i did not know that), and resolved the conflict with the sent mail message, which hadn’t actually been sent. who knows what happened to it the first time around, but when i processed it with just kmail, it did exactly what it was supposed to do. then, i started kontact and it had a tizzy, but instead of killing it and starting over, i went for a walk, and when i came back, it was in the middle of a totally unrelated process that looked like the aggregator synching its database… which is a totally normal thing to do, and i wish kontact would have put up a status bar or something to indicate that it was, actually, doing stuff and not just hanging up. 😐
so i talked to my web developer guru, and he talked with his web developer guru (who is a guy at godaddy… which, in my impression, means either that he knows a lot and doesn’t get the chance to actually touch any of the machines, or he knows practically nothing and has his hands inside a lot of machines), and they both agreed that the evidence pointed towards me having a spammer in my email system. the primary reason for this was that, despite the fact that i have email with chinese characters automatically sent to /dev/null, i’m still getting spam with chinese characters in the subject line.
at the bottom of the global email filters window, there is a place where you can test email filters, to see what they do. after the first few, i just assumed that they worked, because they always did, so i didn’t pay much attention to the filter tester. it turns out that you can run mail that has already been delivered through the filter tester, to determine which filters caused it to end up in the wrong place.
what i discovered is that the chinese email filters work fine, but if the filter encounters an element that has a different rule than sending it to /dev/null, then it will do that, instead. once i resolved the conflict over which rule to use, the emails that are supposed to be getting delivered, are getting delivered, and the mail that is supposed to be deleted, goes to /dev/null
i still have a whole bunch of directories that have the name of my old host provider in my email system, that i really want removed, if it is possible, but the fact that it now looks like i DO NOT have a spammer/cracker nesting in my system is a great weight off my mind… and it means that i can put switching to gsuites on the back burner for the time being. 👍
ETA: i also discovered, using the same reverse-filter-testing procedure described above, why some random emails that don’t have any obvious reasons to be filtered, were getting filtered anyway. it turns out that i’ve got a whole bunch of filters that look for TLDs, such as .bid, .host, .win and so forth. except that the filter doesn’t care whether it’s a TLD, somewhere in the middle of the URI, or in some javacript code that is in the body of the email. so a MTA named “mailpod.hostingplatform.com” was getting filtered because it contained “.host”, and another mail was filtered because it had a javascript variable named “character.bidirectional”, which contains “.bid”…
i changed all of the TLD filters to look for an extra character that differentiates it from things that aren’t TLDs: the “dot letters” combination, followed by a forward slash — / — is what MAKES IT a TLD. why i didn’t think of that when i originally made the first filter is a gross act of stupidity on my part. 😕
so according to two different experts, there’s a good chance that i’ve got a spammer that has cracked my email server. if that is the case, then changing my IP address will only be a temporary solution, and what everybody is recommending is the third party “gsuites” which is, basically, a google relay to my email service. i continue hosting the web sites, but the MX records for every domain i have gets changed to google’s IP addresses, and they basically take over managing all of my email services for me…
except i still don’t know how much it will cost: potentially $10 per user per month, and i’ve got 5 or 6 email addresses, just for myself… and i WILL NOT pay more for email services alone than i am for the entire hosting package i currently have.
apparently there’s another alternative, which also costs more money, which is a virtual private server, which would allow me to do things like summarily block all email from a country — brazil, china and russia immediatey come to mind…
and then, on the other hand, i’ve also been seriously considering giving up being an internet “reseller”; giving up my hosting clients, and focusing on MY web site (and my wife’s web site) without all this extra stuff adding chaos to the whole scene.
and then there’s the local computer upgrade, which was put on hold while i figure out the whole email fiasco. it turns out KDE has this nifty “Startup Disk Creator” application, which installs a bootable copy of the operating system on a removable USB flash drive… except that it doesn’t work if the USB flash drive is formatted FAT32, and they don’t tell you in the user interface that the beginning of the process is changing the BIOS of the computer to boot from the USB drive… which i had to find out the hard way… 😕 i actually succeeded in wresting control of my computer back from the jaws of certain disaster before that disaster actually happened, and i actually figured out how to reformat the flash drive to EXT4 so that the startup disk creator is more likely to work this time, but with the whole email fiasco, plus the screen door installation tomorrow, plus time for me to settle down and quit panicking over the computer that wouldn’t boot when the BIOS had been changed and i didn’t realise it…
means i’m probably not going to try again for a couple of days.
seriously, this is ridiculous, and there’s no way it’s going to get any less complicated any time soon. it would be just as well for me to get out of the business of providing internet services to other people before i truly get myself in trouble. 😕
September 11, Puerto Rico and the Racism of Callous Indifference
September 11, 2018
by William Rivers Pitt
It’s been 17 years since the September 11 terrorist attacks and one year since Hurricane Maria tore through Puerto Rico. The death tolls from the two crises are nearly equivalent, but the official US responses to these calamities have been starkly different.
After 9/11, the US government memorialized the victims while pouring trillions of dollars into the process of making millions of new victims by way of permanent war. In the case of Hurricane Maria, the US government has all but washed its hands of the Puerto Ricans — US citizens, all — who still struggle to recover from the storm. Taken together, the aftermath of these two tragedies opens a window on some grim truths the country has yet to face.
Everyone has their own 9/11 story. Mine is tamer than most. Seventeen years ago today I was a teacher on the first day of school. I happened to be grazing through the morning newspapers online before classes started when Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
An hour later, students who had gathered around televisions in the library were wall-eyed with fear when the towers finally fell. It was all over, I soothed them … but as I heard the low growl of fighter jets flying racetrack patterns over the city of Boston, I realized I was lying to children. It had only just begun.
Seventeen years.
High school seniors today have never known anything but a country at war, at several wars up front and by proxy. Those wars have eaten their future. I wonder if they know it yet.
I would like to think we’ve learned something in that wrenching, blood-soaked span of time, but that clearly isn’t the case. The last presidential election saw a Democratic nominee who had voted in favor of the calamitous Iraq war and the total surveillance of the PATRIOT Act. Her opponent, the Republican nominee, was for the war before he was against and then later for it again. Along the way he was also a bombastic liar, proud racist and sexual predator whose only credentials were five bankruptcies and a TV show.
The historical record states 2,996 people perished on September 11, 2001, hijackers included. There remains a lingering doubt as to the final accuracy of that number, as there were reportedly scores of undocumented immigrant workers in the building at the time of the attack, but their families did not inform the authorities they were missing for fear of being deported themselves.
Seventeen years later, and that fear is as present now as it was then, thanks to a president whose policies are grounded and founded in xenophobia and racism. We haven’t learned a damn thing.
One year ago this month, Hurricane Maria tore the island of Puerto Rico to shreds. On September 6, 2017, as the monster storm approached, Donald Trump spoke to the media during a meeting with members of Congress. Addressing the potential dangers represented by the oncoming storm, he said, “Hopefully we can solve them in a rational way, and maybe we won’t be able to.”
The latter half of that sentence has proven prophetic. Puerto Rico has yet to recover from the aftermath of Maria, due in no small part to the barking negligence of the administration and the man who pretends to lead it on TV.
Trump visited Puerto Rico in the immediate, catastrophic wake of the storm, telling Puerto Ricans who were complaining bitterly about wildly insufficient assistance that they “have to give us more help.” This was after he called them “politically motivated ingrates.” During the visit, he threw paper towels at storm victims and fished for compliments wherever he could find them. “I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack,” he said. “But that’s fine, because we’ve saved a lot of lives.”
Odd comment, that. The Trump administration put the death toll in Puerto Rico at 64 people, and that number stayed put as the bodies piled up. Finally, in July of 2018, nearly a year after Maria, the official death toll was revised up to 2,975 people. A scant 21 fewer than September 11. Subtract the terrorists from the equation and the margin drops to two … and, like September 11, that final number is far from firm.
One day after Puerto Rico’s governor added 2,911 names to the victim’s list, Donald Trump praised his administration’s response to Maria in glowing terms. “I think we did a fantastic job in Puerto Rico,” he said. “I think most of the people in Puerto Rico really appreciate what we’ve done.”
Splinter News collected letters from people directly affected by the storm. “I remember seeing the Mayor of San Juan,” wrote one survivor, “trying to help her city and those in desperate need all over the island. The help never came and when it did sometimes it was too late, some had died. My God how can we let this happen.” There are many such letters.
The difference in the US responses to the 9/11 attacks and to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico is stark. While the death count was the same in both cases, the responses were dramatically different. That difference cannot be chalked up simply to the fact that the former tragedy was an act of will, while the second was an act of nature.
After September 11, the US unleashed two ill-conceived wars that killed, maimed or displaced millions of innocent people, all in the names of those killed in New York and DC. In the 17 years this country has spent bombing the rubble in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere, few here bother to spare a thought for those suffering the immediate consequences of our incoherent wrath.
After Hurricane Maria, in contrast, the US dragged its feet and hesitated to take the most minimal actions for the people of Puerto Rico as thousands perished. Given Trump’s calling-card disdain for those who aren’t a whiter shade of pale, the government’s lack of response to the yearlong disaster in Puerto Rico should come as no shock.
The core calamity, however, goes far beyond one man. In every way that matters, the victims of Hurricane Maria suffer from the US government’s negligence in much the same way the victims of the 9/11 vengeance tour do: Both are targets of indifference born of a strain of racism that goes bone deep and all the way, in both cases, to the White House.
It is all the same carcass to the carrion crows: The war profiteers redoubled their fortunes in Iraq and Afghanistan after September 11, and Wall Street hedge fund pillagers feast on Puerto Rico’s post-Maria debt. George W. Bush, like Donald Trump, walked away from the debacle virtually untouched.
Seventeen years since September 11. One year since Maria and Puerto Rico. We haven’t learned a damn thing.
i’ve reached the scary part of computer upgrades: that part in between the point where i’ve got everything backed up (except for the invisible directories in ~/home which are waiting until the last possible moment), i’m reading up on what i should do if the worst happens, i’ve downloaded the operating system, but i still haven’t bought the drive, or actually done anything to move the project forwards.
apart from backing up all my data, for the first time EVER… which is a big thing, i suppose…
tomorrow i am going to refill my water bottles, hopefully with my mother-in-law, nancy, in attendence. then, if there is time, i’m going to buy the drive. if there isn’t time tomorrow, then it happens tuesday. this means that some time between tuesday and friday, or so, next week, i should have a new operating system, and, hopefully, working email addresses and an existent contact list.
so far, i don’t have any reason to believe that it won’t happen exactly the way i have stated.
a wise old linux guru told me this, a few years ago, and i’ve found myself smack in the middle of what happens when you follow that maxim… and it doesn’t feel entirely comfortable, at this point.
i have been happily running kubuntu trusty since 2014, which means that, now, there are TWO LTS releases to bring me up to date… Bionic Beaver, and the interim release, Xenial Xerus, which had some notable problems that were notable enough that i decided that… IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT.
now, i’ve actually heard some good things about the new LTS release, and, strangely enough, Amarok broke about two weeks ago (and the amarok user list has gone quiet the past few months, which makes me wonder who to contact), so i’ve been having to resort to qmmp to play music… so i decided to upgrade.
i’ve had some AWFUL experiences upgrading operating systems, and linux is no exception. the last time i upgraded linux, it took me three days to get my computer back. in an attempt to avoid that possibility this time, i have finished uploading my ENTIRE /home directory to the cloud, and am in the process of uploading my ENTIRE music collection to the cloud.
then, on the advice of the linux gurus over at Kubuntu Forums (who have saved my ass more than once), i’m going to go out and get a 2TB SSD on which to install bionic.
the only problem is that i still am not completely sure that my email is going to transfer, because i know that kontact was one of the notable problems i read about with xenial that made me want to avoid upgrading… and i’m not sure the standard “back up everything including the hidden directories from /home” is going to work this time, because i’ve heard that bionic uses something other than akonadi, which was, apparently, the source of the problems with xenial… which would mean that potentially i could lose 7 years worth of email and contact information. 😒
so, we’ll just have to see how it goes… 😐
I’m writing this after spending the day hunkered down indoors next to an air purifier, as I have the good fortune of being in Washington state while it’s home to some of the world’s worst air pollution. For the second year in a row, smoke from wildfires has rendered the normally refreshing air practically unbreathable. My primary source of entertainment these days is checking air quality monitoring websites for signs of ominous red and purple bulges making their way down from Canada. Fires in other parts of Washington aren’t helping.
As if things didn’t already feel apocalyptic enough, there’s something about these wildfire episodes, with their sickly grayish-orange skies and sense of entrapment, that truly give one the sense that the end of the Anthropocene is nigh. Scientists say that warming temperatures plus population growth in burn-prone areas are causing the surge in wildfires; meanwhile, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is, of course, blaming environmentalists. Hard to see how we come back from this brink, since we’re already so far over it.
i was finally able to delete my fecesbook account! no more fecesbook! no more farcebook messenger! rejoice! 😎😄👍
it has now been two weeks i haven’t been on fecesbook. i logged in once to alert a vendor from OCF, and i logged in once to clean up my ad settings (which i do regularly, regardless of whether or not i logged in). i discovered that, in spite of my not logging in for two weeks, and clearing out my “interests” before i left, i had collected 15 or 20 new “interests”, which included “protest”, “activism”, “guns”, “law enforcement” (specifically “law enforcement in stockton, california”), and a number of other things that make me seriously wonder about my compatibility with fecesbook’s “algorythm”. i’m on the verge of deleting my account, all together.
the lack of fecesbook still leaves a void in my life, which has yet to be filled, but i am confident that it will be filled, very likely with multiple things that i enjoy a HELL of a lot more than being chained to fecesbook.
i have a sousa band gig at deception pass on saturday, and a snake suspenderz gig next wednesday at “lake city mini-park”, which is an intersection on lake city way that used to be full of shopping-basket-homeless people… well, the homeless people are still there, but now they have a “mini-park” that the city put in to encourage them to go elsewhere… and, apparently, the city has also hired snake suspenderz (and another klezmer group with whom thaddeus plays) in order to make it look like the homeless people are a smaller proportion of the city population than they really are. seriously, this place has been a gathering place for homeless people since i was a cab driver, in the mid-’80s. it’s going to take a lot more than a “mini-park” and outdoor concerts to make them disappear.
moe and the dogs may accompany me to deception pass, on saturday. the plan (whether or not moe and the dogs go along) is to make it a day trip, and drive up the peninsula to port townsend, and take the ferry, then come home through mount vernon. i have to be in deception pass by 5:30, the concert starts at 7:00 and should be over by 9:00. we’re having dinner with friends ross and leanna, and leanna’s brother and his wife, on friday.
i spent a week without connectivity, at the oregon country fair, last week.
when i returned, i had no desire, whatsoever, to reconnect to fecesbook.
tomorrow, i will have been home exactly one week. during that time, i have actually logged into fecesbook once, and that was to alert a vendor i met at OCF that i was no longer on fecesbook, and that she should contact me using email.
i have connected with a few people on fecesbook messanger, but that has diminished considerably over the past couple of days.
the longer i am resolute in my decision not to reconnect to fecesbook, the longer it has been since i connected, the more convinced i am that i have definitely made the right decision.
and, when i went back and looked at my first ‘post-farcebook‘ post, i find that, not only can i do without those connections, i am actually somewhat put out that the people listed in that post don’t do the same, and join me in abandoning fecesbook, but if they’re not going to join me, the fact that they’re not has no effect on my life, so i don’t really care. it just means that they won’t be able to contact me as often.
the latest list of blocked TLDs includes the following:
- .bid
- .br
- .club
- .cn
- .date
- .do
- .es
- .faith
- .fun
- .live
- .online
- .party
- .racing
- .review
- .ru
- .space
- .store
- .stream
- .top
- .trade
- .webcam
- .website
- .win
- .world
- .za
if your new domain contains one of these TLDs, you are blocked from sending me email.
that is all.
i got spam the other day.
big surprise…
i reported it to the upstream provider, as i usually do. one of the upstream addresses to which i sent a report was [email protected].
today i got a return receipt from that address. it said “Не прочтено” which means “not read”.
seriously, i wonder why a company as big as Rostieliekom would maintain an “abuse@” address and not have it respond to an abuse report. 😕
ENLIGHTENMENT
180406 by Om Swami
“How do I gain enlightenment?” someone said to me the other day. “Can you not grant me some deep experience? I want a radical change in my life.”
I get this asked frequently by many enthusiastic seekers. They are in search of a panacea, some mystical reality that will solve all their problems (spiritual and emotional) forever. While many aspirants understand the importance of persistence and individual effort, most others are looking for a quick fix. Here’s a beautiful quote by Adya Shanti that mirrors my own thoughts in ways more than one:
Many seekers do not take full responsibility for their own liberation, but wait for one big, final spiritual experience which will catapult them fully into it. It is this search for the final liberating experience which gives rise to a rampant form of spiritual consumerism in which seekers go from one teacher to another, shopping for enlightenment as if shopping for sweets in a candy store. This spiritual promiscuity is rapidly turning the search for enlightenment into a cult of experience seekers. And, while many people indeed have powerful experiences, in most cases these do not lead to the profound transformation of the individual, which is the expression of enlightenment.
One of the greatest misconceptions about enlightenment is that it will just happen. Not so. It has to be earned, it has to be lived. Sometimes I find it challenging to explain to seekers that true enlightenment is not a one-off special moment, but more a culmination of lifelong experiences and practices that result in the dawning of a great insight. I don’t blame them for thinking that by the magical touch of some guru or maybe by being struck by lightning, they will arrive at a moment of enlightenment. Partly because we have plenty of spiritual books out there that give that impression. Even I may have inadvertently conveyed the same by sharing one of my most defining spiritual experiences in my memoir. For that matter, Buddha’s enlightenment under the Bodhi tree is often construed as an isolated event of extraordinary significance. It was anything but that.
In comprehending and highlighting such experiences, we tend to overlook the tremendous amount of effort that goes in realizing that state. For a moment, think of enlightenment as winning the Nobel Prize. We can’t have it just by visiting other Nobel Laureates and we certainly can’t be awarded it just because we want it. After a lifetime of commitment to a cause or producing a phenomenal body of work, and assuming the circumstances are favorable, the committee might consider your nomination and grant you one. No doubt winning the Nobel Prize will bring about a change in your life and lifestyle to a degree, you will inspire more people and so on. But, beyond that, there’s not much. It’s not going to improve your relationships, it’s not going to fix your physical health etc. Those challenges will remain.
Without preparation and readiness, any spiritual experience is hardly transformational. And if an experience doesn’t trigger some kind of lasting transformation in you, however subtle, it holds little meaning ultimately. When you continue to walk the path sincerely, diligently, many learnings, lessons and experiences give you the wisdom to lead your life differently. Differently so in a manner that it’s more conducive to retaining a state of bliss. Having said that, even if you are enlightened, it doesn’t mean that you won’t experience pain or that you will always find joy in everything that goes on in your life.
R.K. Laxman (1921 – 2015), one of India’s most famous cartoonists ever, writes a lovely passage in his travelogue The Distorted Mirror.
People are curious about my profession and try to clear their doubts by putting all sorts of questions. Recently a lady asked me, “Do you do the drawings for your cartoons yourself?” I answered, “Yes, I do.” Then she questioned, “And the captions to the cartoons, do you write them too?” “Of course,” I said. And, finally, she asked, “The ideas for the cartoons, don’t say you think them up too?”
…
There is one [question] that is rather rarely asked but which makes me go into deep introspection. This is: “When you look around, does everything appear funny to you?”
A cartoonist does not lead a charmed life of perpetual fun out of the reach of the cares and worries that bedevil his fellow men. The fluctuating prices of onions affect me in the same way as they delight or outrage a primary schoolteacher. Likewise, taxes depress my spirit. Bores at the mike, and traffic jams drive me crazy. Surely a doctor does not always look at life in terms of coughs, colds, allergies and bronchial inflammations. A star of the silver screen, I am sure, has enough sense to know that beyond the range of the camera life does not continue to be full of idyllic scenes, sex, songs and ketchup-blood. Why, then, should a cartoonist see living caricatures and hear rib-tickling dialogue all around him? So I comfort myself with the self-assurance that my view of life is normally as banal as that of the next man in the queue for sugar or kerosene.
Enlightenment is something like that. It does not mean that you don’t feel the pain or remain eternally unaffected by everything that goes around you. All of that we must go through based on our karma, temperament and attitude towards life. The only thing that changes is that you grow into a more spiritual being, you become increasingly resilient and kind. What life hurls at you doesn’t change, how you catch it or dodge it, does. When it builds to a tipping point, you become kind of independent, very independent. Less worried about what the world thinks of you, how it perceives you and so on. In other words, you draw your own cartoons, write your own captions and, much to the fascination or disbelief of others, come up with the ideas too.
As the famous Zen saying goes, “Before enlightenment: chop wood, fetch water. After enlightenment: chop wood, fetch water.”
Being a jivan-mukta, a liberated soul, or an enlightened person does not relieve one of his/her duties. Self-realization is not, as Eknath Easwaran put it, a compensation for one’s good deeds. It is but simply an outlook towards life that you gain from experiential understanding. If you really wish to get a grip on the notion of enlightenment then look upon it as a way of life, a commitment to virtues, as a promise to carry yourself a certain way and leading your life in a manner that befits you.
Liberation is not plonking a glorious flag on top of Mount Everest, it is but a mindful and diligent journey meandering through many treks and hikes, stopping and camping along the way, meeting and greeting fellow travelers, absorbing the breathtaking views, appreciating the challenges, rejoicing in where you are already. All this while you remain inward focused but goal-oriented.
When you realize this, a better sense of wellbeing and happiness shrouds you. You understand that there are no dark moments, that you are already enlightened. You just need to live a certain way to experience it. Then you laugh at the discovery that how unnecessarily seriously you’ve been taking yourself. As Thích Nhất Hạnh said:
I laugh when I think how I once sought paradise as a realm outside of the world of birth. It is right in the world of birth and death that the miraculous truth is revealed. But this is not the laughter of someone who suddenly acquires a great fortune; neither is it the laughter of one who has won a victory. It is, rather, the laughter of one who; after having painfully searched for something for a long time, finds it one morning in the pocket of his coat.
A religious man called a monk and invited him to bless his new home. The monk politely turned down the request saying he’s busy.
“But, what are you doing?” the man insisted.
“Nothing.”
Thinking that the monk was perhaps not in a mood to visit that day, he let it be and phoned again the next day. “Can you come today to bless my home?”
“Sorry,” said the monk, “I’m busy.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m doing nothing,” replied the monk.
“But that was what you were doing yesterday!” said the man.
“Right,” the monk replied. “I’m not finished yet!”
Enlightenment too is an ongoing affair. No doubt, there can be a transformational moment that changes something in you forever. Living that change, however, is a matter of mindfulness and more. True enlightenment, that.
This is it. This life. It’s beautiful. Live it. Love it. For yourself, for others. Laugh it away. That’s all there is to know. Most of the rest, life can do without.
i discovered that the reason i, and, significantly, my clients, including the fremont players, were getting our emails “randomly” blocked by places like @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, @msn.com and so forth, was because my host provider’s data center was a known spam haven. my impression is that everybody knows to avoid Limestone Networks — the one admin i was able to convince to talk to me, said the following:
To give you an idea of the problem Limestone is we escalated the /18 your IP is in more than 6 years ago (March, 2011 to be exact), and despite rejecting several thousand emails a day since then in all that time I am aware of exactly one legitimate sender this has affected: You.
Limestone is not the worst spam haven on the Internet, but it’s not for lack of trying.
so they do business, or, more likely, have someone else do business for them, as IonBlade. i was desperate when they stepped in and assured me that they could fix everything — it turns out that my problem was my VPN provider all along, but i didn’t know that at the time — and i was already 6 months in before anything started to seem wrong.
so, i started looking for a new host provider in january, did my homework this time, and settled on WebHostPython, which actually offers me about 5 times what anyone else has offered, for a little bit less money… a definite step in the right direction.
however, i still had to notify the VPN provider of the change in my IP address, and while they dragged their feet getting it straightened out, i went for a couple of weeks not being able to send SMTP mail. of course i could use IMAP, but i don’t like keeping potentially incriminating evidence on someone else’s computer, and, these days, you just never know what they’ll decide is incriminating evidence… my SMTP started working yesterday, which brings to a close the battle of (someone else’s) computer, once again.
webhostpython has already helped me clear up a lot of IP and DNS cruft left over from 10 years of switching web hosts and not knowing what to clean up. i’m hoping that they’re still going to be my host provider 10 years from now, because, honestly, i’m FED UP with switching host providers. 😐
story pole update –according to what george braddock says, they didn’t have any native assistance during the design part. i think that’s horse-shit, but george is one of the people who would know, so i’m torn… although i’m leaning heavily in the direction of horse-shit. also, david lewis, the cultural anthropoligist from the confederated tribes of the grande ronde, obviously doesn’t know that there actually were haida people involved, and that they’ve got the blessing of both haida and kalapuya elders. not only that, but the kalapuya, who are native to the area, didn’t have permanent art, because they were nomads, so it’s not really any kind of cultural appropriation. it sounds very much like this guy is in the camp of the lady who is behind this whole thing. 😐
and so, once again, the battle of (someone else’s) computer has come to an inconclusive end.
i still have one open ticket with the VPN folks: they updated the VPN software for the tablet, which means that now it’ll connect after i reboot it, but if it comes disconnected for some reason, the only way to get it to reconnect is to reboot the entire tablet… which, while better than not being able to connect at all, is still a major hassle. i’m not holding my breath that it’s going to get fixed soon, as my current tablet can’t be upgraded beyond a version that is three full versions behind the current one… 😐
my email works — or, rather, isn’t giving me timeout errors every time i send email. monique’s email is working again, although she’s lost her address book and her signature files, and the two mailing lists of which i am in charge, seem to be working, with third-party verification. i’m also paying about twice as much as i was with the old host provider, but, with the new host provider, i’m actually an “official” reseller, which means that, now, i have access to WHM, which i never have before… but i’m not sure, at this point, whether or not it’s a “good” thing. at this point, i have updated all of my domains’ MX records to the new host provider (something i was never able to do before), without knowing for sure whether or not i have done the right thing. at this point, two days later, it still works as far as i have been able to tell, nothing has broken as far as i can tell, and nobody has complained to me that their shit isn’t working, so i’m nominally calling it complete, but i wish there were some way that i could be sure…
the battle of other peoples’ computer started before i left for the fair.
about a week before the fair, my (now former) host provider decided to move the machine on which all of my web sites live from californa to florida. in the move, they somehow freaked out my VPN, because it started giving me an error that said “socket operation timed out” whenever i tried to send email. i could receive email just fine, but no sending.
and, because of the fact that the VPN isn’t SUPPOSED to interfere with normal network functions, i didn’t suspect that was the cause.
then my clients started reporting intermittent email failures. so i contacted my (now former) host provider and inquired about answers to what you would expect to be their problem (since they are, now “were”, my host provider).
as the week progressed, there was also concern that my scheduled web maintenance (which i wanted to have happen before the fair) was not possible, because of the ongoing problems with the web server, combined with the host-provider-support-drones who couldn’t speak english, answered (or not) only one question at a time, and who persisted in giving me scripted instructions for how (not) to fix the problem on a windoesn’t machine.
fortunately, most of my clients were also at the fair, and couldn’t access their email anyway. i gave up after being there one day, and only getting spotty WIFI coverage on my personal hotspot.
when i got home, much to my surprise, the ticket i had opened to fix the problem had been closed, but there had been no “fixing”… they closed the ticket because i hadn’t responded to it in three days, not because they had fixed the problem. almost as though they thought, if i wasn’t there to harrass them, there wasn’t a problem that they needed to work on.
i reprimanded them, and proceded to deal with my, now worsening, email problem. macque couldn’t access the list, monique’s email was spotty at best, a number of people said they had “given up” on getting messages to the list, and i STILL could only receive email, but not send.
i tried to deal with the now former web host for another week, getting less and less actual information, and more and more frustrated with my inability to communicate in anything like english (which strikes me as somewhat odd, given that it’s a british company, located in london). finally i had enough, and switched host providers…
AGAIN… 8/
it’s been about five years since i switched to EZPZ and ended my spree of switching host providers about every 6 months for a couple of years, and, at first, they were cheap AND excellent host providers… but in the past couple of years, i guess they must have outsourced their support, or something, because suddenly their tech support got CONSIDERABLY worse, and their language skills steadily decreased to the point where i would have to, DELIBERATELY avoid asking more than one question per ticket, in order to get anything close to a complete answer…
so, i switched host providers about a week ago. they quickly diagnosed my VPN problem, and got monique’s email working, sort of… but i forgot that i don’t have complete control over all my domains (Rev. Guido DeLuxe is actually the owner of two of them), and, instead of getting better, monique’s email problem actually got worse…
and the new host provider — ionblade — had conveniently forgotten to add “mailing lists” to my cpanel, so the two mailing lists i manage were completely offline…
and, meanwhile, i had to explain to macque that sending to “official-list-owner” sent mail to me, while sending to “official-list” sent mail to the list, and, because of the fact that i couldn’t send email, i couldn’t actually do something sensible, like forward his message… and even if i had been able to forward his message, i would have gotten a bounce also, because the FUCKING EMAIL LIST WAS DOWN!!
i actually helped them diagnose the VPN problem: i learned that i could access webmail at hybridelephant, but that it forwarded me to their server, and i could send from that, which i did for about a week. then the VPN updated, and quit working all together on my tablet, which meant that i had to do the “run-around” on my linux box when i absolutely HAD to respond to someone. basically, i took the message to which i had to respond, responded in my email client, copied the message, switched to a browser with webmail open, hit “compose new message” and pasted the message into that, in order to be able to send. when i couldn’t do that, either because my computer was down for the night, or i didn’t have access to it, i would use the browser on my tablet to respond. at some point within the past few days, it dawned on me that if i could send from webmail from port 80, even though my VPN was up, maybe the VPN was getting in the way, so i tried disabling it, and — lo and behold — the message went through. i enabled the VPN again, tried sending a message, and “socket operation timed out”. disabling the VPN made the message go through almost immediately.
so, i opened TWO tickets at the VPN provider, one about my tablet, and one to find out if there is some way to un-block my SMTP service on port 465. i (FINALLY) convinced the (new) host provider to re-add “mailing lists” to my cpanel, and, like magic, i suddenly had email lists that work (i think) again.
i (still) have two open tickets with the VPN provider, but my impression is that if they’ve got a bug that affects the connection of my tablet, it has probably struck a lot of people with similar tablets, so they’ve got a lot to deal with.
and i’ve still got web updates to get to, but the web update guy says that they can wait for a month or so, at which point there will probably be more anyway…
i got back from OCF to discover that the email problem i had when i left was still there, and EZPZ had closed the ticket, because i wasn’t there to egg them on.
it’s still broken, so i decided to switch host providers… AGAIN! 😡
some day, everything will just WORK, and there won’t have to be providers that don’t know how to fix things… 😐
the computer industry has been a-twitter for the past few days, concerning a zero-day “bug” in micro$lop word, which gives an attacker full execution control of the victim’s machine — a Very Bad Thing®.
this reminds me of a couple of things that i experienced, more-or-less first-hand, while i was working at micro$lop, and is the PRIMARY REASON why i’m really glad i don’t run machines with their software on them.
there’s this, which outlines what the “bug” is, and how it allows an attacker to take control of a victim’s machine (i put the word “bug” in quotation marks because bugs are usually things that appear in the code by mistake, but it is my impression that micro$lop put this in deliberately, without realising the potential damage it could do)… which brings up the fact that they have known, particularly, about security problems with OLE (which went through a stage where they were referring to it as “ActiveX”), at least since my friend, and computer-god fred debuted The Exploder Control in 1995, which did a clean shut-down of any machine unfortunate enough to be running Windows95 — PLEASE NOTE: the Exploder Control is not harmful, and will not run correctly unless you’re running Windows95 and Internet Explorer version 3, which, by this time, presumably, you’re not. fred’s premise was, and still is, that if you have a method of excersising THAT MUCH control over a machine, it better well be FULLY AND COMPLETELY SECURE, otherwise people WILL take advantage of it.
i worked at micro$lop when the first Word Concept Virus was discovered. it was unique (at the time) because it allowed an attacker to infect a victim’s machine over email, without actually having to have physical contact with the target machine. it worked by utilising micro$lop word’s “normal.dot” template, and required the victim to have macros enabled by default. the new, most recent word problem doesn’t require macros to be enabled, and doesn’t work if the application is running in “Protected View”. so, the solution micro$lop has come up with is to recommend that you run word in “Protected View” in order to avoid this particular vulnerability.
it is significant, to me, that the primary reason we have things like active antivirus software on our computers today is because of actions taken by the micro$lop corporation when i worked there. when i was working there, they were the largest manufacturer of computer software in the world.
and it reminds me of the solution micro$lop came up with to avoid another “bug” in another one of their “excellent” programs, internet explorer: version 3 exhibited a flaw in the way that it displays URIs in the address bar, and by opening a specially crafted URI an attacker could open a page that appears to be from a different domain from the current location. the solution? “Do not click any hyperlinks that you do not trust. Type them into the address bar yourself“… despite the fact that one of the features of all web browsers is that you can get from one source of information to the next, easily, without having to type in long, unintelligible strings of code.
Rule of thumb — Every time Microsoft uses the word “smart,” be on the lookout for something dumb.
— John WalkerA little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame.
— John Walker
i was going over some updates with the new web site designer. because of a couple of component updates, some of my templates were deprecated and needed to be updated. i figured i could probably update them, since all that was needed was for me to determine which templates needed to be updated, download the updates, FTP to the site and replace the old ones with the new ones. in the process of finding out which of the templates needed to be updated, i came across a random, and somewhat unexpected error with my SSL certificate. the web designer said the host provider needed to fix it. the host provider said that the web designer needed to fix it.
😡 ‽‽‽‽
it was getting really late last night, when the host provider said that the web designer needed to fix it, and he wasn’t going to be available until tomorrow. i told the geek at the host provider that it sounded to me like it was a problem that the host provider was supposed to fix, and the geek proceded to break it even more. i was blocked out of my own site, temporarily, and when i was able to log in again, instead of being able to log out, i was redirected to a page that told me i was temporarily blocked from access… regardless of which browser, or which platform i used, i was able to login successfully, but was unable to log out.
😡 ‽ 😡 ‽ 😡 ‽ 😡 ‽
today, i contacted the web site designer. i agreed to give him $150, and he agreed to fix my site, and update it with the right templates.
grr… 😕
i’ve been “sick or not” for a week now, and it’s really starting to get on my nerves. i don’t “feel” sick, but if i don’t take immune boosters and/or if i work too hard i get a sore throat and really congested. it never really comes on strong and takes hold, but it also doesn’t seem to want to go away any time soon. i’ve been taking immune boosters along with my 5HTP, and i can feel it helping, but it’s apparently not enough to make the “sickness or not” go away completely. combine that with depression that has been increasing or decreasing in intensity, but never actually going away, ever since #drumpf was elected, and it makes for a really difficult time merely existing in the world.
i’m playing for a burlesque show at the substation in ballard on march 7th, and then a week of moisture festival performances with the fremont philharmonic starting on march 22nd, plus 2 moisture festival performances by snake suspenderz on april 8th, and a gig with snake suspenderz on march 22nd in woodinville that pays $125 an hour, cash…
but i would still prefer it if i died, or, even better, if everybody else died, except for moe, the fremont philharmonic, snake suspenderz, the people with whom i’m doing the burlesque show, the significant others of the aforementioned people… and, MAYBE a few audience members…
salamandir@horseradish:~$ iconv
^C
salamandir@horseradish:~$ iconv –help
Usage: iconv [OPTION…] [FILE…]
Convert encoding of given files from one encoding to another.
Input/Output format specification:
-f, –from-code=NAME encoding of original text
-t, –to-code=NAME encoding for output
Information:
-l, –list list all known coded character sets
Output control:
-c omit invalid characters from output
-o, –output=FILE output file
-s, –silent suppress warnings
–verbose print progress information
-?, –help Give this help list
–usage Give a short usage message
-V, –version Print program version
Mandatory or optional arguments to long options are also mandatory or optional
for any corresponding short options.
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
salamandir@horseradish:~$ iconv -l
The following list contains all the coded character sets known. This does
not necessarily mean that all combinations of these names can be used for
the FROM and TO command line parameters. One coded character set can be
listed with several different names (aliases).
437, 500, 500V1, 850, 851, 852, 855, 856, 857, 860, 861, 862, 863, 864, 865,
866, 866NAV, 869, 874, 904, 1026, 1046, 1047, 8859_1, 8859_2, 8859_3, 8859_4,
8859_5, 8859_6, 8859_7, 8859_8, 8859_9, 10646-1:1993, 10646-1:1993/UCS4,
ANSI_X3.4-1968, ANSI_X3.4-1986, ANSI_X3.4, ANSI_X3.110-1983, ANSI_X3.110,
ARABIC, ARABIC7, ARMSCII-8, ASCII, ASMO-708, ASMO_449, BALTIC, BIG-5,
BIG-FIVE, BIG5-HKSCS, BIG5, BIG5HKSCS, BIGFIVE, BRF, BS_4730, CA, CN-BIG5,
CN-GB, CN, CP-AR, CP-GR, CP-HU, CP037, CP038, CP273, CP274, CP275, CP278,
CP280, CP281, CP282, CP284, CP285, CP290, CP297, CP367, CP420, CP423, CP424,
CP437, CP500, CP737, CP770, CP771, CP772, CP773, CP774, CP775, CP803, CP813,
CP819, CP850, CP851, CP852, CP855, CP856, CP857, CP860, CP861, CP862, CP863,
CP864, CP865, CP866, CP866NAV, CP868, CP869, CP870, CP871, CP874, CP875,
CP880, CP891, CP901, CP902, CP903, CP904, CP905, CP912, CP915, CP916, CP918,
CP920, CP921, CP922, CP930, CP932, CP933, CP935, CP936, CP937, CP939, CP949,
CP950, CP1004, CP1008, CP1025, CP1026, CP1046, CP1047, CP1070, CP1079,
CP1081, CP1084, CP1089, CP1097, CP1112, CP1122, CP1123, CP1124, CP1125,
CP1129, CP1130, CP1132, CP1133, CP1137, CP1140, CP1141, CP1142, CP1143,
CP1144, CP1145, CP1146, CP1147, CP1148, CP1149, CP1153, CP1154, CP1155,
CP1156, CP1157, CP1158, CP1160, CP1161, CP1162, CP1163, CP1164, CP1166,
CP1167, CP1250, CP1251, CP1252, CP1253, CP1254, CP1255, CP1256, CP1257,
CP1258, CP1282, CP1361, CP1364, CP1371, CP1388, CP1390, CP1399, CP4517,
CP4899, CP4909, CP4971, CP5347, CP9030, CP9066, CP9448, CP10007, CP12712,
CP16804, CPIBM861, CSA7-1, CSA7-2, CSASCII, CSA_T500-1983, CSA_T500,
CSA_Z243.4-1985-1, CSA_Z243.4-1985-2, CSA_Z243.419851, CSA_Z243.419852,
CSDECMCS, CSEBCDICATDE, CSEBCDICATDEA, CSEBCDICCAFR, CSEBCDICDKNO,
CSEBCDICDKNOA, CSEBCDICES, CSEBCDICESA, CSEBCDICESS, CSEBCDICFISE,
CSEBCDICFISEA, CSEBCDICFR, CSEBCDICIT, CSEBCDICPT, CSEBCDICUK, CSEBCDICUS,
CSEUCKR, CSEUCPKDFMTJAPANESE, CSGB2312, CSHPROMAN8, CSIBM037, CSIBM038,
CSIBM273, CSIBM274, CSIBM275, CSIBM277, CSIBM278, CSIBM280, CSIBM281,
CSIBM284, CSIBM285, CSIBM290, CSIBM297, CSIBM420, CSIBM423, CSIBM424,
CSIBM500, CSIBM803, CSIBM851, CSIBM855, CSIBM856, CSIBM857, CSIBM860,
CSIBM863, CSIBM864, CSIBM865, CSIBM866, CSIBM868, CSIBM869, CSIBM870,
CSIBM871, CSIBM880, CSIBM891, CSIBM901, CSIBM902, CSIBM903, CSIBM904,
CSIBM905, CSIBM918, CSIBM921, CSIBM922, CSIBM930, CSIBM932, CSIBM933,
CSIBM935, CSIBM937, CSIBM939, CSIBM943, CSIBM1008, CSIBM1025, CSIBM1026,
CSIBM1097, CSIBM1112, CSIBM1122, CSIBM1123, CSIBM1124, CSIBM1129, CSIBM1130,
CSIBM1132, CSIBM1133, CSIBM1137, CSIBM1140, CSIBM1141, CSIBM1142, CSIBM1143,
CSIBM1144, CSIBM1145, CSIBM1146, CSIBM1147, CSIBM1148, CSIBM1149, CSIBM1153,
CSIBM1154, CSIBM1155, CSIBM1156, CSIBM1157, CSIBM1158, CSIBM1160, CSIBM1161,
CSIBM1163, CSIBM1164, CSIBM1166, CSIBM1167, CSIBM1364, CSIBM1371, CSIBM1388,
CSIBM1390, CSIBM1399, CSIBM4517, CSIBM4899, CSIBM4909, CSIBM4971, CSIBM5347,
CSIBM9030, CSIBM9066, CSIBM9448, CSIBM12712, CSIBM16804, CSIBM11621162,
CSISO4UNITEDKINGDOM, CSISO10SWEDISH, CSISO11SWEDISHFORNAMES,
CSISO14JISC6220RO, CSISO15ITALIAN, CSISO16PORTUGESE, CSISO17SPANISH,
CSISO18GREEK7OLD, CSISO19LATINGREEK, CSISO21GERMAN, CSISO25FRENCH,
CSISO27LATINGREEK1, CSISO49INIS, CSISO50INIS8, CSISO51INISCYRILLIC,
CSISO58GB1988, CSISO60DANISHNORWEGIAN, CSISO60NORWEGIAN1, CSISO61NORWEGIAN2,
CSISO69FRENCH, CSISO84PORTUGUESE2, CSISO85SPANISH2, CSISO86HUNGARIAN,
CSISO88GREEK7, CSISO89ASMO449, CSISO90, CSISO92JISC62991984B, CSISO99NAPLPS,
CSISO103T618BIT, CSISO111ECMACYRILLIC, CSISO121CANADIAN1, CSISO122CANADIAN2,
CSISO139CSN369103, CSISO141JUSIB1002, CSISO143IECP271, CSISO150,
CSISO150GREEKCCITT, CSISO151CUBA, CSISO153GOST1976874, CSISO646DANISH,
CSISO2022CN, CSISO2022JP, CSISO2022JP2, CSISO2022KR, CSISO2033,
CSISO5427CYRILLIC, CSISO5427CYRILLIC1981, CSISO5428GREEK, CSISO10367BOX,
CSISOLATIN1, CSISOLATIN2, CSISOLATIN3, CSISOLATIN4, CSISOLATIN5, CSISOLATIN6,
CSISOLATINARABIC, CSISOLATINCYRILLIC, CSISOLATINGREEK, CSISOLATINHEBREW,
CSKOI8R, CSKSC5636, CSMACINTOSH, CSNATSDANO, CSNATSSEFI, CSN_369103,
CSPC8CODEPAGE437, CSPC775BALTIC, CSPC850MULTILINGUAL, CSPC862LATINHEBREW,
CSPCP852, CSSHIFTJIS, CSUCS4, CSUNICODE, CSWINDOWS31J, CUBA, CWI-2, CWI,
CYRILLIC, DE, DEC-MCS, DEC, DECMCS, DIN_66003, DK, DS2089, DS_2089, E13B,
EBCDIC-AT-DE-A, EBCDIC-AT-DE, EBCDIC-BE, EBCDIC-BR, EBCDIC-CA-FR,
EBCDIC-CP-AR1, EBCDIC-CP-AR2, EBCDIC-CP-BE, EBCDIC-CP-CA, EBCDIC-CP-CH,
EBCDIC-CP-DK, EBCDIC-CP-ES, EBCDIC-CP-FI, EBCDIC-CP-FR, EBCDIC-CP-GB,
EBCDIC-CP-GR, EBCDIC-CP-HE, EBCDIC-CP-IS, EBCDIC-CP-IT, EBCDIC-CP-NL,
EBCDIC-CP-NO, EBCDIC-CP-ROECE, EBCDIC-CP-SE, EBCDIC-CP-TR, EBCDIC-CP-US,
EBCDIC-CP-WT, EBCDIC-CP-YU, EBCDIC-CYRILLIC, EBCDIC-DK-NO-A, EBCDIC-DK-NO,
EBCDIC-ES-A, EBCDIC-ES-S, EBCDIC-ES, EBCDIC-FI-SE-A, EBCDIC-FI-SE, EBCDIC-FR,
EBCDIC-GREEK, EBCDIC-INT, EBCDIC-INT1, EBCDIC-IS-FRISS, EBCDIC-IT,
EBCDIC-JP-E, EBCDIC-JP-KANA, EBCDIC-PT, EBCDIC-UK, EBCDIC-US, EBCDICATDE,
EBCDICATDEA, EBCDICCAFR, EBCDICDKNO, EBCDICDKNOA, EBCDICES, EBCDICESA,
EBCDICESS, EBCDICFISE, EBCDICFISEA, EBCDICFR, EBCDICISFRISS, EBCDICIT,
EBCDICPT, EBCDICUK, EBCDICUS, ECMA-114, ECMA-118, ECMA-128, ECMA-CYRILLIC,
ECMACYRILLIC, ELOT_928, ES, ES2, EUC-CN, EUC-JISX0213, EUC-JP-MS, EUC-JP,
EUC-KR, EUC-TW, EUCCN, EUCJP-MS, EUCJP-OPEN, EUCJP-WIN, EUCJP, EUCKR, EUCTW,
FI, FR, GB, GB2312, GB13000, GB18030, GBK, GB_1988-80, GB_198880,
GEORGIAN-ACADEMY, GEORGIAN-PS, GOST_19768-74, GOST_19768, GOST_1976874,
GREEK-CCITT, GREEK, GREEK7-OLD, GREEK7, GREEK7OLD, GREEK8, GREEKCCITT,
HEBREW, HP-GREEK8, HP-ROMAN8, HP-ROMAN9, HP-THAI8, HP-TURKISH8, HPGREEK8,
HPROMAN8, HPROMAN9, HPTHAI8, HPTURKISH8, HU, IBM-803, IBM-856, IBM-901,
IBM-902, IBM-921, IBM-922, IBM-930, IBM-932, IBM-933, IBM-935, IBM-937,
IBM-939, IBM-943, IBM-1008, IBM-1025, IBM-1046, IBM-1047, IBM-1097, IBM-1112,
IBM-1122, IBM-1123, IBM-1124, IBM-1129, IBM-1130, IBM-1132, IBM-1133,
IBM-1137, IBM-1140, IBM-1141, IBM-1142, IBM-1143, IBM-1144, IBM-1145,
IBM-1146, IBM-1147, IBM-1148, IBM-1149, IBM-1153, IBM-1154, IBM-1155,
IBM-1156, IBM-1157, IBM-1158, IBM-1160, IBM-1161, IBM-1162, IBM-1163,
IBM-1164, IBM-1166, IBM-1167, IBM-1364, IBM-1371, IBM-1388, IBM-1390,
IBM-1399, IBM-4517, IBM-4899, IBM-4909, IBM-4971, IBM-5347, IBM-9030,
IBM-9066, IBM-9448, IBM-12712, IBM-16804, IBM037, IBM038, IBM256, IBM273,
IBM274, IBM275, IBM277, IBM278, IBM280, IBM281, IBM284, IBM285, IBM290,
IBM297, IBM367, IBM420, IBM423, IBM424, IBM437, IBM500, IBM775, IBM803,
IBM813, IBM819, IBM848, IBM850, IBM851, IBM852, IBM855, IBM856, IBM857,
IBM860, IBM861, IBM862, IBM863, IBM864, IBM865, IBM866, IBM866NAV, IBM868,
IBM869, IBM870, IBM871, IBM874, IBM875, IBM880, IBM891, IBM901, IBM902,
IBM903, IBM904, IBM905, IBM912, IBM915, IBM916, IBM918, IBM920, IBM921,
IBM922, IBM930, IBM932, IBM933, IBM935, IBM937, IBM939, IBM943, IBM1004,
IBM1008, IBM1025, IBM1026, IBM1046, IBM1047, IBM1089, IBM1097, IBM1112,
IBM1122, IBM1123, IBM1124, IBM1129, IBM1130, IBM1132, IBM1133, IBM1137,
IBM1140, IBM1141, IBM1142, IBM1143, IBM1144, IBM1145, IBM1146, IBM1147,
IBM1148, IBM1149, IBM1153, IBM1154, IBM1155, IBM1156, IBM1157, IBM1158,
IBM1160, IBM1161, IBM1162, IBM1163, IBM1164, IBM1166, IBM1167, IBM1364,
IBM1371, IBM1388, IBM1390, IBM1399, IBM4517, IBM4899, IBM4909, IBM4971,
IBM5347, IBM9030, IBM9066, IBM9448, IBM12712, IBM16804, IEC_P27-1, IEC_P271,
INIS-8, INIS-CYRILLIC, INIS, INIS8, INISCYRILLIC, ISIRI-3342, ISIRI3342,
ISO-2022-CN-EXT, ISO-2022-CN, ISO-2022-JP-2, ISO-2022-JP-3, ISO-2022-JP,
ISO-2022-KR, ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2, ISO-8859-3, ISO-8859-4, ISO-8859-5,
ISO-8859-6, ISO-8859-7, ISO-8859-8, ISO-8859-9, ISO-8859-9E, ISO-8859-10,
ISO-8859-11, ISO-8859-13, ISO-8859-14, ISO-8859-15, ISO-8859-16, ISO-10646,
ISO-10646/UCS2, ISO-10646/UCS4, ISO-10646/UTF-8, ISO-10646/UTF8, ISO-CELTIC,
ISO-IR-4, ISO-IR-6, ISO-IR-8-1, ISO-IR-9-1, ISO-IR-10, ISO-IR-11, ISO-IR-14,
ISO-IR-15, ISO-IR-16, ISO-IR-17, ISO-IR-18, ISO-IR-19, ISO-IR-21, ISO-IR-25,
ISO-IR-27, ISO-IR-37, ISO-IR-49, ISO-IR-50, ISO-IR-51, ISO-IR-54, ISO-IR-55,
ISO-IR-57, ISO-IR-60, ISO-IR-61, ISO-IR-69, ISO-IR-84, ISO-IR-85, ISO-IR-86,
ISO-IR-88, ISO-IR-89, ISO-IR-90, ISO-IR-92, ISO-IR-98, ISO-IR-99, ISO-IR-100,
ISO-IR-101, ISO-IR-103, ISO-IR-109, ISO-IR-110, ISO-IR-111, ISO-IR-121,
ISO-IR-122, ISO-IR-126, ISO-IR-127, ISO-IR-138, ISO-IR-139, ISO-IR-141,
ISO-IR-143, ISO-IR-144, ISO-IR-148, ISO-IR-150, ISO-IR-151, ISO-IR-153,
ISO-IR-155, ISO-IR-156, ISO-IR-157, ISO-IR-166, ISO-IR-179, ISO-IR-193,
ISO-IR-197, ISO-IR-199, ISO-IR-203, ISO-IR-209, ISO-IR-226, ISO/TR_11548-1,
ISO646-CA, ISO646-CA2, ISO646-CN, ISO646-CU, ISO646-DE, ISO646-DK, ISO646-ES,
ISO646-ES2, ISO646-FI, ISO646-FR, ISO646-FR1, ISO646-GB, ISO646-HU,
ISO646-IT, ISO646-JP-OCR-B, ISO646-JP, ISO646-KR, ISO646-NO, ISO646-NO2,
ISO646-PT, ISO646-PT2, ISO646-SE, ISO646-SE2, ISO646-US, ISO646-YU,
ISO2022CN, ISO2022CNEXT, ISO2022JP, ISO2022JP2, ISO2022KR, ISO6937,
ISO8859-1, ISO8859-2, ISO8859-3, ISO8859-4, ISO8859-5, ISO8859-6, ISO8859-7,
ISO8859-8, ISO8859-9, ISO8859-9E, ISO8859-10, ISO8859-11, ISO8859-13,
ISO8859-14, ISO8859-15, ISO8859-16, ISO11548-1, ISO88591, ISO88592, ISO88593,
ISO88594, ISO88595, ISO88596, ISO88597, ISO88598, ISO88599, ISO88599E,
ISO885910, ISO885911, ISO885913, ISO885914, ISO885915, ISO885916,
ISO_646.IRV:1991, ISO_2033-1983, ISO_2033, ISO_5427-EXT, ISO_5427,
ISO_5427:1981, ISO_5427EXT, ISO_5428, ISO_5428:1980, ISO_6937-2,
ISO_6937-2:1983, ISO_6937, ISO_6937:1992, ISO_8859-1, ISO_8859-1:1987,
ISO_8859-2, ISO_8859-2:1987, ISO_8859-3, ISO_8859-3:1988, ISO_8859-4,
ISO_8859-4:1988, ISO_8859-5, ISO_8859-5:1988, ISO_8859-6, ISO_8859-6:1987,
ISO_8859-7, ISO_8859-7:1987, ISO_8859-7:2003, ISO_8859-8, ISO_8859-8:1988,
ISO_8859-9, ISO_8859-9:1989, ISO_8859-9E, ISO_8859-10, ISO_8859-10:1992,
ISO_8859-14, ISO_8859-14:1998, ISO_8859-15, ISO_8859-15:1998, ISO_8859-16,
ISO_8859-16:2001, ISO_9036, ISO_10367-BOX, ISO_10367BOX, ISO_11548-1,
ISO_69372, IT, JIS_C6220-1969-RO, JIS_C6229-1984-B, JIS_C62201969RO,
JIS_C62291984B, JOHAB, JP-OCR-B, JP, JS, JUS_I.B1.002, KOI-7, KOI-8, KOI8-R,
KOI8-RU, KOI8-T, KOI8-U, KOI8, KOI8R, KOI8U, KSC5636, L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6,
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salamandir@horseradish:~$
i got really, REALLY fed up with the largely political (both actual politics and the politics involved with things like the bundy acquittal and standing rock) CRAP that is filling farcebook a couple of days ago, and i’ve been slowly weaning myself off that toxic sludge. i get the very distinct impression that if i don’t do it slowly, i won’t be able to do it at all, and i’m getting disturbed at how upset it makes me. the way i feel about it, at this point, is if i can’t do anything about it, i’d rather not hear about it AT ALL! 😠
i have been avoiding posting my likeness on farcebook, in part because their facial recognition algorythms correlate my face with my posts, which makes using a contrived name rather pointless, but i was just thinking…
if i deliberately tagged other people with my likeness, and if enough other people did the same, it would completely bugger their facial recognition algorythms, wouldn’t it?
unfortunately, the only way to figure it out, at this point, would be to try it, which would not have the correct response if it were to fail…
this morning, i logged into farcebook, did a few things, and was abrubly logged out of facebook with a message that said my session expired, and to login again.
which i could not do…
when i tried, it said that it appeared that i was using a “Profile” when i should be using a “Page”, however when i went through the process of changing my “Profile” to a “Page” it said that “Creating content with that name is not allowed”. so, i tried to change the name to “Frank Zappa The Cat” which gave me the message that “Our automated system has determined that the name “Frank Zappa The Cat” is not same or similar to (sic) the name “Frank Zappa”… and encouraged me to create the page with “same or similar to” the name which is not allowed.
after going back and forth (and back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, and…) a WHOLE BUNCH of times, i finally figured out that it WOULD allow me to create content with the name “Frak Zappa”, however once i figured that out, it wanted me to name another account that could administrate it, and the only other farcebook account that i know of is moe’s…
which, of course, now means that the ONLY way to do ANYTHING with frank zappa’s farcebook account is to log in as moe… which doesn’t help if moe is already logged in…
furthermore, when the “Profile” was being “migrated” to the “Page”, it somehow LOST all of my “friends” (about 150 people)… of course i downloaded an “archive” of my page, which gives me the names of those 150 people, but no way to contact them.
😡
i’m not sure if i’m ever going to calm down enough to create a new farcebook account or not. at this point, i’m leaning very heavily towards NOT.
ETA: so i started a new account as Ralph Ewggleigh, which they accepted, and i’m fairly sure WON’T be shut down for trivial reasons… they wouldn’t let me make an account for “Guido DeLuxe” or “Tina Chopp” (how Tina Chopp manages it i’ll probably never know). now all i have to do is ping the 150-or-so friends i had and convince them to switch accounts. 8P
All Smoke Is Not Created Equal
by Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director
January 7, 2016
Long-term exposure to tobacco smoke is demonstrably harmful to health. According to the United States Center for Disease Control, tobacco smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, and chronic exposure to tobacco smoke is linked to increased incidences of cancer as well as vascular disease. Inhaling tobacco smoke is also associated with a variety of adverse pulmonary effects, such as COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).
Does smoking cannabis pose similar dangers to lung health? According to a number of recent scientific findings, marijuana smoke and tobacco smoke vary considerably in their health effects. So then why are lawmakers in various states, such a Minnesota and New York, imposing new restrictions explicitly prohibiting the inhalation of herbal preparations of cannabis?
Marijuana Smoke vs. Tobacco Smoke
Writing in the Harm Reduction Journal in 2005, noted cannabis researcher Robert Melamede explained that although tobacco smoke and marijuana smoke have some similar chemical properties, the two substances possess different pharmacological activities and are not equally carcinogenic. Specifically, he affirmed that marijuana smoke contains multiple cannabinoids – many of which possess anti-cancer activity – and therefore likely exerts “a protective effect against pro-carcinogens that require activation.” Melamede concluded, “Components of cannabis smoke minimize some carcinogenic pathways whereas tobacco smoke enhances some.”
Marijuana Smoke and Cancer
Consequently, studies have so far failed to identify an association between cannabis smoke exposure and elevated risks of smoking-related cancers, such as cancers of the lung and neck. In fact, the largest case-controlled study ever to investigate the respiratory effects of marijuana smoking reported that cannabis use was not associated with lung-related cancers, even among subjects who reported smoking more than 22,000 joints over their lifetime. Summarizing the study’s findings in The Washington Post, pulmonologist Dr. Donald Tashkin, Professor Emeritus at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, concluded: “We hypothesized that there would be a positive association between marijuana use and lung cancer, and that the association would be more positive with heavier use. What we found instead was no association at all, and even a suggestion of some protective effect.”
A meta-analysis of additional case-control studies, published in the International Journal of Cancer in 2014, similarly reported, “Results from our pooled analyses provide little evidence for an increased risk of lung cancer among habitual or long-term cannabis smokers,” while a 2009 Brown University study determined that those who had a history of marijuana smoking possessed a significantly decreased risk of head and neck cancers as compared to those subjects who did not.
Marijuana Smoke and Pulmonary Function
According to a 2015 study conducted at Emory University in Atlanta, the inhalation of cannabis smoke, even over extended periods of time, is not associated with detrimental effects on pulmonary function, such as forced expiratory volume (FEV1) and forced vital capacity (FCV). Assessing marijuana smoke exposure and lung health in a large representative sample of U.S. adults, age 18 to 59, they maintained, “The pattern of marijuana’s effects seems to be distinctly different when compared to that of tobacco use.” Subjects had inhaled the equivalent of one marijuana cigarette per day for 20 years, yet did not experience FEV1 decline or deleterious change in spirometric values of small airways disease.
Marijuana Smoke and COPD
While tobacco smoking is recognized as a major risk factor for the development of COPD – a chronic inflammation of the airways that may ultimately result in premature death – marijuana smoke exposure (absent concurrent tobacco smoke exposure) appears to present little COPD risk. In 2013, McGill University professor and physician Mark Ware wrote in the journal Annals of the American Thoracic Society: “Cannabis smoking does not seem to increase risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or airway cancers… Efforts to develop cleaner cannabinoid delivery systems can and should continue, but at least for now, (those) who smoke small amounts of cannabis for medical or recreational purposes can breathe a little bit easier.”
Mitigating Marijuana Smoke Exposure
The use of a water-pipe filtration system primarily cools cannabis smoke, which may reduce throat irritation and cough. However, this technology is not particularly efficient at eliminating the potentially toxic byproducts of combustion or other potential lung irritants.
By contrast, vaporization heats herbal cannabis to a point where cannabinoid vapors form, but below the point of combustion – thereby reducing the intake of combustive smoke or other pollutants, such as carbon monoxide and tar. Observational studies show that vaporization allows consumers to experience the rapid onset of effect while avoiding many of the associated respiratory hazards associated with smoking – such as coughing, wheezing, or chronic bronchitis. Clinical trials also report that vaporization results in the delivery of higher plasma concentrations of THC (and likely other cannabinoids) compared to smoked cannabis. As a result, the authors affiliated with the University of California Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research and elsewhere now acknowledge that vaporizers provide a “safe and effective” way to for consumers to inhale herbal cannabis.
The Bottom Line
Based on this scientific record, it makes little sense for lawmakers to impose legislative bans on herbal cannabis products, such as those that presently exist for patients in Minnesota and New York and which are now being proposed in several other states (e.g., Georgia and Pennsylvania). Oral cannabis preparations, such as capsules and edibles, possess delayed onset compared to inhaled herbal cannabis, making these options less suitable for patients desiring rapid symptomatic relief. Further, oral administration of cannabis-infused products is associated with significantly greater bioavailability than is inhalation – resulting in more pronounced variation in drug effect from dose to dose (even in cases where the dose is standardized). These restrictions unnecessarily limit patients’ choices and deny them the ability to obtain rapid relief from whole-plant cannabis in a manner that has long proven to be relatively safe and effective.
i have an ipad, so i can keep farcebook off of my real computers.
i don’t know whether it’s the ipad itself, or whether it is farcebook, but i’m getting really pissed off at the behaviour i’m seeing:
1) it randomly crashes: the screen freezes, then goes black, and then it gives me the “desktop” screen, and then, when i restart the farcebook application, it automatically goes to my “News Feed” rather than to the “Most Recent” page, where i normally read stuff. this happens a lot more frequently when i am reading a “link” that someone posted, but it also happens when i am simply reading farcebook.
2) it takes FOR-FUCKING-EVER to load a “link” from the farcebook application, and even when it says it’s finished loading, frequently it freezes until the entire page actually loads, which is sometimes as much as two or three minutes later. this is a lot more common on links which contain videos, although YouTube links usually load fairly quickly, which makes me suspect that there’s something else that is gobbling up bandwidth.
3) in the farcebook application itself, it frequently freezes for a couple of minutes, and then goes back to “normal” behaviour.
4) frequently, when i go to a “link” in the farcebook application, it loads completely, and then the screen gets a grey tinge to it, and the entire page is overlayed with an advertisement of some kind, and unless i touch EXACTLY the right place, which changes semi-regularly, instead of getting to read the page that i intended to, i have to wait for farcebook to put another, complete, entirely unrelated page, the advertisement, on the screen, which frequently takes up to five minutes, before i can go “back” to the page i was intending to read.
4½) a related problem is that, frequently, when i touch a place that should be a link of some kind (like a URI) it doesn’t do anything at all, and other times, when i am “scrolling”, it interprets my “touch” as a “click” and loads something in which i wasn’t interested, and then gives me a lot of difficulties (involving one or more of the previously enumerated items) getting back to where i was.
to make matters worse, the specific problems outlined above don’t happen individually: they frequently come in batches of two, or three, and, frequently all four of them at the same time.
as i said, i’m not sure whether it is due to bugs in the farcebook application, or bugs in the hardware, but it’s getting to the point where i feel like throwing the device against a wall, or out the window or something.
i’m fairly sure that this is NOT the way it is supposed to work. 😠
so, it has been a couple days since my computer fell back into place, and i can definitely say that the past couple of weeks have been among the most stressful battles of the computer i have ever experienced… and it still isn’t back to 100%. 😠
my external, backup drive mounts when i first turn the machine on in the morning, but if i have to restart it for any reason — security upgrades, for example — i have to completely shut down the machine and start it up from power-off, rather than “restarting” it, because the disk only mounts if it starts up from power-off… if the machine restarts, it doesn’t power-off, and it loses the backup drive when it has restarted.
i am fairly sure that this can be taken care of relatively easily, by adding a line of text to a particular settings file somewhere, but i don’t remember where, and, at this point, i am so relieved to have a computer that actually works at all, that i’m willing to overlook this relatively minor inconvenience for the moment.
i got my email working late friday. when i booted the machine yesterday, i still didn’t have my backup disk, and, while i futzed around and rebooted a couple of times, i couldn’t get it to mount. also, in spite of the fact that i had the cable plugged into the right hole, the sound still didn’t work, but i was going to bellingharm, so i figured i would save it until later.
i went to bellingham yesterday. ken and kamala have found a new place to live, but serentipity is going away, after 40 years that i know of. i got home at 11:00 last night, and was too tired to mess around with the computer.
this morning i got up, and booted up the computer, and, for some unknown reason, the backup disk mounted. i shut it down and started it up several times, and i still have a backup disk. it fixed itself. weird… so then i pulled the audio cable and plugged it into the front, where i can see what it’s doing. it worked. i plugged it into the back, and it still worked. so, the sound fixed itself as well. double weird… 8/
also, i screwed around with cron for about 5 minutes total (it actually took about 20 minutes, but it was screw with cron for a few seconds and then wait 5 minutes for the changes to take effect, or not), and got sigrot to work the way it’s supposed to.
so, basically, i got through the whole battle of the computer, and i only lost my fonts and my email filters… and i didn’t lose ALL of the email filters, only the “actions” for the filters… and i didn’t really lose the fonts, but i think they’re actually living on the other computer, which i haven’t booted up since the new computer made its appearance, so i’m still hoping that’ll fix itself as well…
i don’t know why, but i’m not arguing. this is the best outcome i have ever experienced in the battle of the computer, although it took quite a bit longer to come to this resolution than it has in the past.
told ya so… 8P
it doesn’t completely work the way i want it to, yet, but it was 2% working yesterday, and today it’s back to 95%
while i’ve got my email back, it’s not completely working yet, and i’m still having to deal with peculiarities with which i’m not exactly familiar. they’re peculiar enough that, it’s my professional opinion that they may be caused by demons, and may work themself out on their own eventually… one of my email accounts apparently uses a password i don’t remember. gramps works, but it still thinks the media is on the non-existent disk… i still don’t have the fonts straightened out…
but it’s one hell of a lot closer than it was yesterday, when i didn’t have the task bar icons that i usually have, and the K-menu icons that i usually have, and my email didn’t work… and i didn’t even have to convince it to mount the big hard disk, which wasn’t even showing up as being capable of mounting until i jumped through a 3-step hoop in order to mount it, yesterday…
it’s fixed enough that i am not even worried about going to bellingharm tomorrow, but i probably won’t spend the night.
UPDATE 10:30 pm i got email working. it was a combination of trying things in a new way, and demons in the pipes. i’ve even got my sigrot working, although i don’t know whether cron is taking care of running it every 5 minutes. also i got dropbox working again. now all i gotta do is figure out where my fonts went to…
i’m giving up, copying the data back on to the 3TB hard disk (which has now been reformatted as a 3TB disk), wiping the machine and starting over. this is ridiculous.
basically, over the past three days, i’ve been trying this thing, and that thing, and not being able to get my email back. i’ve been getting more and more anxious and more and more frustrated, and making more and more anxious decisions which turn out to be the wrong ones, which makes figuring out what went wrong more difficult…
and, the fact is, i’ve got this backup, which is all i really need apart from the data.
today i learned that you need to restore more than just the ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail directory, if you want to restore kmail. there’s a long list of directories and files, but what it comes down to is that if i restore ~/.config, ~/.kde, and ~/.local i’ll get not only all of my mail and contacts, but also all of my desktop settings.
also, i discovered that, for gawd-knows-what reason, the default for a new installation instance of Ark, the archiving program for KDE, is to “Extract Selected Files” rather than to “Extract All Files”… which is part of the reason i haven’t been able to extract all of the files i thought i was dealing with.
the end result is that, even if i could figure out what i need to replace, and what needs to stay to get things more or less back to normal, without a great deal of help, it would take a lot longer than it will to give up and start over.
significantly, i also learned that i’ve got all my shit, and now that i know what to do with it, if i start over, there’s a good chance that i will have everything back up and running, and have it a lot closer to the way i want it, as early as tomorrow.
computer, you’ve won this round, but watch out, because i will defeat you. 👿
the host provider moved my hosting services, and gave me a new IP address, the ramifications of which started on the 21st, and are still going on. literally. i tried to SEND email at 5:30 this morning, only to get an error message from my email client that the RECIPIENT “[email protected]” was rejected by the server… and this is on MY server… for some unknown reason, if i send from webmail, it doesn’t happen, but i despise webmail and will do anything to avoid it, because it’s too easy to spam and get away with it if you use the web for mail, rather than for web-related stuff. also, if i use IMAP (webmail), the mail is retained on a server over which i have no control, which means that anyone who can crack into the server potentially has access to my mail… and this is, for some unknown reason, not an issue for the technicians (if i can call them that) from the host service.
add to this nightmare, the fact that i’m still working on getting my new computer set up… it’s taken 3 days to figure out where my two USB drives are, move the data off of them, and reformat them, because, unbeknownst to me, they were formatted FAT32, which can’t see files that are more than 4GB, and i had been storing files on one of the disks that are >7GB, for quite some time. so, once i’d figured out how to mount them (because they had screwed up partition tables) i had to move all the data off of the disk (fortunately i have a new 1TB internal hard disk that was just aching to have ¾ of it taken up with old data), and reformat the drive EXT4… which means NO interaction with windoesn’t is possible — who cares about micro$lop anyway — but it will now see files that are as big as i want to make them…
AND, because of the fact that, apparently, i don’t know how to correctly backup my email files, i’m STILL having to battle with kmail/kontact/KDE-PIM to get things back in line — they still AREN’T, and — you guessed it — i’m having to use webmail to straighten things out, because Mail (on my ipad) gives me this weird error message, and kmail isn’t working…
FURTHERMORE, i don’t have things set up the way i want them on the new machine yet… i still have to figure out why gucharmap doesn’t have emoticons, even though they’re supposed to be part of the unicode standard at this point; now that i’ve got the disk reformatted to EXT4, i’ve got to figure out how to mount it at startup, so that it will be able to use the new backup software i installed; and, undoubtedly, there are a myriad of other, less important things that i have neglected to mention, simply because they haven’t happened yet, which are making my life unbelievably difficult, and leaving no end in sight. 😡
all i had to do was mention the fact that i am getting a new computer, and it automatically triggered one of the worst battles of the computer that i have ever seen.
they moved my hosting accounts from us10.la.thewebhostserver.com, which is being retired, to a new server, mars-la.thewebhostserver.com. it had an IP address assigned to it that was ALREADY LISTED in four different spam-filtering services (that i know about), so they gave me a new IP address, which doesn’t have a rDNS record, and also doesn’t have a DNS PTR record (which is, apparently, different from an rDNS record), which means that i can only send email to about a third of the people to whom i need to send email, and the rest of them generate bounce notices.
this has been going on ever since the 21st, which is the last time i posted here, and, while it has definitely been on its way to getting fixed, they have been taking their bloody time about it, and i have been getting more and more convinced that, once again, i should probably think about finding a new host provider. 😡
and, while i have it sitting on my desk next to me, the new computer still is not hooked up or working yet, because i want to be sure that everything is working the way it is supposed to work BEFORE i do something that i know to be destructive to my system.
i’m getting a new computer. the primary hard disk on the current computer says this:
salamandir@Gingko:~$ sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [i686-linux-3.13.0-63-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 29056 323066047
# 2 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 29025 323066047
salamandir@Gingko:~$ sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sdb
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [i686-linux-3.13.0-63-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 38197 -
which means, basically, that the primary hard disk – /dev/sda – has a read failure, and the secondary hard disk is okay… but i just copied all of the data off the secondary hard disk today anyway… and they’re 180gb and 200gb respectively, which means i can replace both of them with a brand new 1TB disk for about the same price that i could search out two used drives of the same size, and for a little bit more, i can replace the whole machine, with 4 times the RAM.
which sounds like a very good idea to me. so, i’m doing that. i’ll probably be offline for a day or so, within the next few days, but i don’t anticipate a major ordeal.
now all we’ve got to do is convince the media that it’s really called “cannabis”…
—–
Congress quietly ends federal government’s ban on medical cannabis
By Evan Halper at The LA Times
Tucked deep inside the 1,603-page federal spending measure is a provision that effectively ends the federal government’s prohibition on medical marijuana CANNABIS and signals a major shift in drug policy.
The bill’s passage over the weekend marks the first time Congress has approved nationally significant legislation backed by legalization advocates. It brings almost to a close two decades of tension between the states and Washington over medical use of marijuana CANNABIS.
Under the provision, states where medical pot CANNABIS is legal would no longer need to worry about federal drug agents raiding retail operations. Agents would be prohibited from doing so.
Should the U.S. legalize marijuana CANNABIS?
Bloomberg’s Olivia Sterns reports on the New York Times’ advocacy of the legalization of marijuana.
The Obama administration has largely followed that rule since last year as a matter of policy. But the measure approved as part of the spending bill, which President Obama plans to sign this week, will codify it as a matter of law.
Pot CANNABIS advocates had lobbied Congress to embrace the administration’s policy, which they warned was vulnerable to revision under a less tolerant future administration.
More important, from the standpoint of activists, Congress’ action marked the emergence of a new alliance in marijuana CANNABIS politics: Republicans are taking a prominent role in backing states’ right to allow use of a drug the federal government still officially classifies as more dangerous than cocaine.
“This is a victory for so many,” said the measure’s coauthor, Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of Costa Mesa. The measure’s approval, he said, represents “the first time in decades that the federal government has curtailed its oppressive prohibition of marijuana CANNABIS.”
By now, 32 states and the District of Columbia have legalized pot CANNABIS or its ingredients to treat ailments, a movement that began in the 1990s. Even back then, some states had been approving broader decriminalization measures for two decades.
The medical marijuana CANNABIS movement has picked up considerable momentum in recent years. The Drug Enforcement Administration, however, continues to place marijuana CANNABIS in the most dangerous category of narcotics, with no accepted medical use.
Congress for years had resisted calls to allow states to chart their own path on pot CANNABIS. The marijuana CANNABIS measure, which forbids the federal government from using any of its resources to impede state medical marijuana CANNABIS laws, was previously rejected half a dozen times. When Washington, D.C., voters approved medical marijuana CANNABIS in 1998, Congress used its authority over the city’s affairs to block the law from taking effect for 11 years.
Even as Congress has shifted ground on medical marijuana CANNABIS, lawmakers remain uneasy about full legalization. A separate amendment to the spending package, tacked on at the behest of anti-marijuana crusader Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), will jeopardize the legalization of recreational pot in Washington, D.C., which voters approved last month.
Marijuana CANNABIS proponents nonetheless said they felt more confident than ever that Congress was drifting toward their point of view.
“The war on medical marijuana CANNABIS is over,” said Bill Piper, a lobbyist with the Drug Policy Alliance, who called the move historic.
“Now the fight moves on to legalization of all marijuana CANNABIS,” he said. “This is the strongest signal we have received from Congress [that] the politics have really shifted. … Congress has been slow to catch up with the states and American people, but it is catching up.”
The measure, which Rohrabacher championed with Rep. Sam Farr, a Democrat from Carmel, had the support of large numbers of Democrats for years. Enough Republicans joined them this year to put it over the top. When the House first passed the measure earlier this year, 49 Republicans voted aye.
Some Republicans are pivoting off their traditional anti-drug platform at a time when most voters live in states where medical marijuana CANNABIS is legal, in many cases as a result of ballot measures.
Polls show that while Republican voters are far less likely than the broader public to support outright legalization, they favor allowing marijuana CANNABIS for medical use by a commanding majority. Legalization also has great appeal to millennials, a demographic group with which Republicans are aggressively trying to make inroads.
Approval of the pot CANNABIS measure comes after the Obama administration directed federal prosecutors last year to stop enforcing drug laws that contradict state marijuana policies. Since then, federal raids of marijuana merchants and growers who are operating legally in their states have been limited to those accused of other violations, such as money laundering.
“The federal government should never get in between patients and their medicine,” said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland).
so there’s this guy with whom i’ve been friends since before my injury, that is among the people who have been, until recently my friends on farcebook. i know this guy has “political opinions” that i passionately do not share, that he’s into martial arts and that he used to be a LEO of some sort or another, but when i met him, which was in 2001 (according to my handy-dandy chart of when things happened), he was the press operator at one of the print shops at which i worked… and i’ve maintained friendly contact with him ever since my injury… basically, when carl fired me, he told me that, whenever i needed something printed in one colour, i could get it from him, and, in exchange, he picked my brain about macintosh computers up until what i knew was no longer current. i haven’t needed anything printed in one colour for a few years, and don’t anticipate ever needing anything printed in one colour, basically, ever again, so when i discovered that he had a farcebook presence, i friended him immediately… and, once he realised who i was, he responded “Frank Zappa had better add me to his friends list… Or I might be upset!”
which is why i wondered a little bit when my news feed started being populated with a lot of, to be blunt, bigoted, ignorant, right-wing propaganda which was posted or shared by this guy. i managed to marginally stem the tide for a while, but i noticed, especially when the supreme court decision regarding marriage equality was imminent, the ignorant and bigoted things he was posting reached a fever pitch.
it was at this point that i made some comment about how, if it was supported by a majority of americans, that keeping gay marriages illegal would hurt everyone, regardless of what “god” thought about it, and that i was shocked that he would post such hateful things.
to which he responded that he didn’t know where i was getting my information, but that gay marriage was something that, actually, only a very few people wanted, and that they had somehow managed to force their unwanted opinions upon a mostly disapproving populace… and then he un-friended me.
it doesn’t bother me that a rabid right-wing fanatic no longer wants to be my friend, what bothers me is that i thought he was my friend for as long as i did…
and what bothers me even more is that i am bothered by the fact that i am no longer “friends” with this guy. we were able to overlook the glaring, obvious differences we had, have pleasant conversations about things in which we were both interested, and we maintained that state for years, until farcebook inserted its finger in the pie. there’s a remote possibility that, at some point in the future, he might have been persuaded to consider a different opion, if i had maintained our pre-farcebook acquaintance, but, because of farcebook, that is no longer an option.
and to make matters worse, they changed wordpress so that my custom, hand-made emoticons no longer work, so i can’t say 8P and have the correct, disgusted emoticon show any longer. 8P
friday and saturday, moe spent most of the day upgrading the powerpoint presentations that she has to present on thursday, at the largest veterinary conference in the world. saturday night night, she tried backing up her computer, but it wasn’t finished by the time i went to sleep. sunday morning, after discovering that the backup didn’t work, she attempted to do another backup and produced an error on her computer that, in the thirty years i have been working with apple/macintosh computers, i have never seen before: a “Kernel Panic” error… it was quite alarming, i can tell you, and even moreso because ALL of moe’s data for the presentations was on that computer… she had made backups, but not before she did eight hours of work, and, because of the fact that she’s been having more than the normal amount of chaos at work, she doesn’t have the time to do everything again before thursday.
needless to say, she freaked out.
the fact that she freaked out, freaked me out. seriously, i have been married to this woman for almost 17 years, and i have never seen her lose it quite so dramatically. i did what i could, which was to make the first available appointment at the apple store in tacoma mall, which was for monday afternoon, and then i went into survival mode, keeping my head down until things changed.
while i was hiding, moe talked to a couple of friends who know more about modern macs than i do, and was able to rescue the most important of her data, i.e. the stuff for the presentations that she has to give on thursday, which made me breathe a little easier, but she still didn’t have a computer, and thursday was looming…
i took the computer in to the shop on monday, and described to the “genius” what had happened. we booted up the computer, and it hadn’t even completed the POST before it demonstrated the “Kernel Panic” error again, which was all the guy needed to see. after booting from the network and running a test, it appeared that the RAM was faulty, so he took it back behind the mysterious door in the back of the shop where all the technicians and magic smoke machines live.
about 45 minutes later, he came back and the computer booted up just like normal. he said that he “reseated the RAM” and that he had booted and shut it down about 6 times, just to make sure, but he recommended that we replace the hard disk, as well. seeing as how, just about a month ago, we had to have the logic board and the monitor replaced, and it was still under warranty, i agreed without hesitation. he checked, and they don’t make 250G hard disks for that computer any longer, so he put the last 500G disk they had in stock aside for me, with my name on it. the plan was that i would take the computer home, back it up properly, and then bring it back on tuesday to get the hard disk repaced.
so, after backing it up, i took moe’s computer in to have the hard disk replaced tuesday. i got to the apple store before they opened, waited until they opened, went in and explained (again) why i was there, they sat me down at the “genius bar” (by the way, i should point out that i have been using macs for longer than most of the “geniuses” have been alive) and told me that there would be someone to help me “shortly”… about an hour later, a guy showed up and immediately started trying to convince me that the hard disk didn’t REALLY need to be replaced… i told him what happened yesterday, including the part where the guy assured me that it actually DID need replacing, and that he had set aside a disk with my name on it, to facilitate the process. the guy said he would check, and came back to inform me that there wasn’t a disk with my name on it, and that they didn’t have any disks in stock at the moment. after some more convincing arguments, i insisted that he check again, and, sure enough, he came back and said that there actually WAS a disk with my name on it, and that everything would be taken care of in a couple hours.
i came back to the apple store in a couple hours, and, once again, they had me sit at the “genius bar” to wait for the computer to appear from the mysterious door at the back of the shop. after about 45 minutes (what ever happened to the 2 hour time frame the guy gave me??) the computer finally appeared, but it hadn’t had any of the data transferred, so the person who delivered it to me suggested that i restore the backup right then, before leaving the store. after i had already started the process, she said “oh, by the way, this may take a while…”
1 hour and 30 minutes later, the backup was restored, and moe now has an (allegedly) functioning computer again.
and i can say, conclusively, that the tacoma mall is one of the most ghettofabulous places i have ever had the priveledge of hanging out… if i never go there again, it will probably be too soon…
moe came home and checked her computer, and everything is back to the way it should be… which is a very good thing, because this has been a trying time for both of us… 😕
also, because of the fact that i am “Frank Zappa” (for all intents and purposes) on farcebook, i have left myself wide open to participating in farcebook drama… this is something that i have been avoiding like the plague, ever since the internet was little more than a bunch of static pages posted on somebody’s multi-user BBS.
seriously, i hate drama in real life, and even moreso online. at least if it’s in real life i can actually see the person i’m dealing with, and (potentially) read their expressions and body language to get a clue about what they might be thinking, but online i have none of that…
in this case it took the form of Artis The Spoonman*, an aquaintence of mine who i know because of his association with many other friends of mine, who i have met a few times, but to whom i don’t have any strong connection.
significantly, artis has the rare priveledge of calling Frank Zappa the musician a friend of his, so my guess is that when he received a friend-request from Frank Zappa the cat, his world got a twist that he wasn’t expecting, because he immediately went off on me… or, rather, “Frank Zappa” because of the fact that i wasn’t what he was expecting: Frank Zappa the musician had interesting, if erroneous, views of cannabis and psilocybin, and had political leanings that were radical, to say the least, and because of the fact that Frank Zappa the cat didn’t espouse those same views, artis seemed to think that i was doing a disservice to the name of Frank Zappa.
at this point — i think — everything has been smoothed over, partially due to moe running interference for me… but the thing is, i’ve been reading about farcebook again, and there are a bunch of new additions to my “anti-farcebook” list of URIs that have made me seriously wonder whether or not i might have made a big mistake in signing up for it in the first place , the most recent of which is the fact that they have, apparently, started up a new “artificial intelligence” lab in paris, so my “anti-farcebook” buttons have already been pushed…
and then i get this screed from artis about how “this site is bogus if it is meant to rep FZ at all…” and that i’m “ludicrous and offensive to him, his family and us admirers”…
the fact is, although i don’t have to put up with that kind of ranting on MY “wall” or whatever it is that they call it, i left it up, and engaged him, because, ultimately, i want to be facebook-friends with him, but he kept on getting more and more uptight about the fact that i wasn’t the Frank Zappa he was friends with…
seriously, i’m THIS CLOSE to hanging it all up and deleting my farcebook profile…
the only reason i don’t, at this point, is the fact that i finally connected with the new booker for The Ritz, and have almost confirmed the Fremont Philharmonic’s performance there, and if it weren’t for farcebook, that probably would not have happened. 😡
Continue reading book of farce, part II
i have been dealing with a difficulty for some time now, in that, because of the fact that i hate, loathe and despise farcebook, i miss out on some important infrastructure in some of the bands in which i play. more and more frequently, i show up to rehearsals or what-have-you, only to discover that a bunch of stuff has been thoroughly discussed on farcebook, and i know nothing about such discussions. furthermore, there have been several changes in the way the music for the ritz is being scheduled, which includes the fact that there is now a farcebook group for musicians who have played, or hope to play at the ritz…
which makes the whole “hate, loathe and despise farcebook” attitude a definite detriment in actually accomplishing forward momentum concerning things that are of definite importance to me and my band-mates…
but it adds to the whole “hate, loathe and despise farcebook” attitude A LOT, because the more we all use farcebook, the richer mark zuckerberg and his CIA cronies become… but that’s not the point of this gripe, so i’ll keep that part out of it as much as i can… 😐
anyway, i have a cat named Frank Zappa, who has become somewhat of a minor celebrity among my wife’s friends, and there has been significant pressure on her to create a farcebook profile for him, so i figured this would be a good compromise: i bought a used ipad to put it on, so i wouldn’t sully my actual computers with the zuckerbergian menace, and i created a profile for my cat…
and i have been up to my eyeballs in farcebook, ever since. literally, i have had it open and i have been actively scanning for at least 10 hours a day. we went to the beach, and i brought my ipad. i have had it at every rehearsal, and the only times that i haven’t had the farcebook app open is when the ipad freezes or has some other software weirdness (which is a lot more frequently than i would have expected) or when i am asleep. farcebook has taken over my life and i am struggling to get it back, because i have far more interesting things to do with my days than re-posting image macros, mild amusement over LOLcat videos and feeling outrage for about 30 seconds when some new bit of lunatic politics is forced under my nose, only to have it fade immediately upon finding some new bit of lunatic politics, LOLcat video or other image macro getting shoved under my nose.
i don’t want to lose my connections with people like Tom Noddy and Joe Zimmer, i don’t want to lose the ability to plan and scheme with friends concerning things that interest me, but i simply CAN NOT allow my whole life to be swallowed by a thing whose only desire is to suck me in and eat me. 😡
i know, i’m fighting a losing battle here, but it has to be said… 😐
when you send email, the person who receives it has to play along with your rules, or they don’t get to read what you had to say. that’s the bottom line.
when you send an email that is formatted using HTML, you are assuming that your recipient has an email client that is “smart enough” to interpret the HTML, otherwise the message looks something like this:
<body> <table width=3D"620" cellspacing=3D"0" cellpadding=3D"0" border=3D"0" a= lign=3D"center"><tr><td bgcolor=3D"#F0F0F0"> <table width=3D"578" cellspacing=3D"0" cellpadding=3D"0" border=3D"0"= align=3D"center"> <tr> <td height=3D"16"></td> </tr> <tr> <td> <img src=3D"http://s.ytimg.com/yt/img/email/digest/email_header= .png"> </td> </tr> <tr> <td height=3D"16"></td> </tr> <tr> <td align=3D"left" bgcolor=3D"#FFFFFF"> <div style=3D"border-style:solid; border-width:1px; border-colo= r:#CCCCCC;"> <table width=3D"578" cellspacing=3D"0" cellpadding=3D"0" bord= er=3D"0" align=3D"center"> <tr> <td height=3D"22" colspan=3D"3"></td> </tr> <tr> <td width=3D"40"></td> <td width=3D"498"> <div style=3D" font-family:arial,Arial,sans-serif; "> <table cellspacing=3D"0" cellpadding=3D"0" = border=3D"0"> <tr> <td bgcolor=3D"#FFFFFF" align=3D"left" width=3D"50"> <img src=3D"https://yt3.ggpht.com/-qroilmK3p5o/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAA= AAAAA/iFjUrN4F6lA/s50-c-k-no/photo.jpg" height=3D"50" width=3D"50"> </td> <td width=3D"16"></td> <td> <div style=3D" font-family:arial,Arial,sans-serif; font-size:18px; color:#333333; line-h= eight:24px; " height:"59" dir=3D"ltr"> =20 <a href=3D"http://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=3DUIzdYgZkFkg&u=3D/cha=
most people could probably read it, if they took a while, but it’s really frustrating…
also, HTML formatting takes a simple phrase like “i’m on my way. see you soon.” and turns it into two or three pages of, for lack of a better term, GARBAGE to one who doesn’t have an email client that is also a browser…
now i know that most email clients these days have software that renders HTML incorporated into their inner workings, including mine… but the important difference is that while my email client came with the ability to render HTML turned on by default, one of the first things i did was to turn that ability OFF, and here’s the primary reason i did so:
if you write an email message that is formatted by HTML, when you put in a URI, you also put in some “descriptive phrase” that is “automatically” linked to the URI, like this — <a href="http://www.somewhere.us/">descriptive phrase</a> — you don’t actually write the code out any longer, because the software does it for you these days, but that’s what it amounts to…
so, if i were to put a link to microsoft in my HTML-formatted email message, it would end up looking like this — <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/">microsoft</a> — and because of the HTML rendering capability of my email client, it would look like this in the resulting email message: microsoft.
those of you who are observant may notice that, while my link says “microsoft”, the link actually points to MicrosoftIsEvil.com. for those of you who aren’t so observant, click on the link, or (because of the fact that you’re reading this in a browser) mouse-over the link and look in the lower left-hand corner of your browser window, and you’ll be able to see the link in a pop-up window…
however, in my email client, and, as far as i know, in most other dedicated email clients, there is no such pop-up window. i could have created a special URI that automatically opens a “back-door” to your computer, and sent that URI to you in an email message with the “descriptive phrase” being something that you might be interested in reading… and because of the fact that you read it in your email, when you clicked on it, thinking that you were going to get an interesting article, you would never know that i had opened the “back-door” of your computer and now have the ability to send email, AS YOU, as well as doing other things like stealing your identity, installing viruses and malware, denying service to other web sites, pirating software, and any number of other things that you Don’t Do To Other Peoples’ Computers®
things may be a little different if you’re using IMAP and a “WebMail” application, but the underlying concept is the same: some evil person impersonates somebody else (whose computer they have already compromised) and sends you a specially designed URI in HTML-formatted email, and because IT APPEARS TO BE from someone you trust, you click the link without looking at where it points to first, and…
BOOOOOM! you’ve got a big mess that you don’t have the first clue how to clean up… and, because of the fact that i’m a computer geek, i get more than my share of phone calls saying “hey, can you help me? my computer is broken…” 😐
and about 95% of the time it’s because someone wasn’t paying attention when they opened an email message.
so PAY ATTENTION, because i have a tendency to “fix” peoples’ computers by installing linux, which doesn’t have anywhere near the same vulnerability to viri that windoes’t or mac does. 👿
and, while linux is a smart operating system, it doesn’t automatically fix stupid users.
the most current version of UNICODE, (v.7.0) has an emoticons block, which has, predictably, been incorporated into the most recent versions of your most popular operating systems in your most popular “mobile devices” (i.e. cell phones, tablets, etc.)…
but, because of the fact that they’re emoticons, i.e. pictures, rather than words, the interpretation of the emoticons in this block is, apparently, open to wild speculation about what they actually “mean” or “represent”…
which makes things A LOT more confusing, rather than clearing things up, as emoticons were intended to do…
for example, U+1F624 FACE WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH looks like this, according to UNICODE:
looks like this in Mac OsX and iOS:
and, honestly, to me it looks like a “haughty” face rather than a “triumphant” one… either that, or it’s someone with an outrageous mustache…
another one that is even more confusing is U+1F632 ASTONISHED FACE, which looks like this, according to UNICODE:
and looks like this in Mac OsX and iOS:
which looks to me like a DEAD face… seriously, why don’t they make his eyes OPEN and not X-ed out… 😐
and then we get into non-real (for people in the west, anyway) glyphs, such as U+1F472 MAN WITH GUA PI MAO, which is in the “Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs” block and NOT the “Emoticons” block — a confusing aspect that is shared by a lot of the other “emoticons” in the version of unicode that the general public uses — which looks like this:
and in iOS it looks like this
i guess it is somewhat more understandable if you know that GUA PI MAO is a type of Chinese skullcap, but even knowing that doesn’t make it particularly useful to a western person…
and a lot of the things that pass for emoticons, but are something else, according to the UNICODE standard, are weirder than that… for example, the world-famous U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO, which, according to UNICODE, looks like this:
and, according to apple, looks like this:
i can think of a few select circumstances where the PILE OF POO glyph might be actually useful, and a whole bunch more that would definitely be silly, but why it got included in UNICODE is so far beyond my understanding that i am totally baffled.
yeah, i’m still here…
i was cleaning up in the workshop today and i found the keys to the thule box, which i had to have new ones made several months ago when i wanted to use the thule box for something and couldn’t find the keys. they were sitting on the surface of my secondary workbench, under a massive pile of other projects (at least 5, going back to last summer) which either got abandoned, or the detritus from finishing never got cleaned up. i didn’t finish cleaning up, but i made a significant start. maybe tomorrow.
i’ve got my DX7 on my desk, because i want to work with reason to find some synth voices that i don’t have to tweak, so that the next time i go to bellingham i’ll have something ready to play live. about half of the time that i spent playing music last week was actually tweaking the voices to get something that didn’t sound like it was part of a pop song. i would use the DX7 voices except for the fact that the internal battery is dead, and i have to take the synth completely apart to replace it. fortunately the battery is really common (i have a couple of them that are still in their blister pack), but replacing it is something that i think i want to have help with, much in the same way that i needed help replacing the brake pads in my old car… not that i don’t know how to do it, but someone who knows how to do it to make sure that i don’t do things incorrectly, and to help if something breaks.
this is after taking my piano to bellingham, in the hopes of being able to use that, but one of the first things that was done to it after i left was that one of the tines was broken (number 50) and, until a replacement is found, the piano is currently in storage in the attic, which is doubtless a lot safer place for it than where it was, under the window in my living room.
but, as much as i would like to, the probability that i will be going to bellingham in the next few weeks is low, because of the looming moisture festival and its surrounding chaos.
the moisture festival is approaching at an appalling rate, and i am, once again, playing in three out of the four bands at the palladium: The Fighting Instruments of Karma, Snake Suspenderz and The Fremont Philharmonic. i have rehearsed and/or played with snake suspenderz (or significant portions thereof) and the fremont phil enough recently to know that we’re probably going to do okay, but we could use more rehearsal, and i haven’t played with the FIOK enough to be absolutely certain that we need more rehearsal, but probably aren’t going to get it. i’m still ambivalent about my participation in the moisture festival, but my vocal ranting has been dissipated somewhat by the inclusion of snake suspenderz in the lineup of show bands… but i didn’t donate $100 last year to get a star on the wall, like i did two years ago, and, unless the “stipend” is well above where it was last year, it’s not likely that i’m going to donate this year either.
today has been a banner day for people or robots trying to crack my shit… once again, i will advise you that if you try to login using anything other than the correct username and password, you get two attempts and then you are IP blocked for two weeks. after that, you get two more attempts and then you are blocked for a month. here’s a final hint: the username is NOT admin. 😛
Proposed Legislation Could Federally Legalize Cannabis
Joseph Lemiuex
23 February, 2015
On Friday, two congressmen have put forth bills that would ultimately end the federal prohibition of cannabis.
Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) introduced the Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol Act. This act would remove marijuana scheduling from the Controlled Substances Act, and put marijuana under the control of the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives). This move would regulate cannabis no different than alcohol on the federal level.
The Marijuana Tax Revenue Act introduced by Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) would set up a federal excise tax for regulated marijuana.
The bills would not force any state government to legalize marijuana, but it would set a framework for states that are interested. This framework, if passed, would expedite states legalization if they choose to legalize. Cannabis has been making its mark upon the American people, and many are now in support of legalization.
So far, the U.S. has 4 states that out right legalized marijuana, 23 states have legalized marijuana for medicinal use, and 11 others have legalized marijuana in a restricted shape or form for medical use.
“While President Obama and the Justice Department have allowed the will of voters in states like Colorado and 22 other jurisdictions to move forward, small business owners, medical marijuana patients, and others who follow state laws still live with the fear that a new administration — or this one — could reverse course and turn them into criminals,” Polis said in a statement Friday. “It is time for us to replace the failed prohibition with a regulatory system that works and let states and municipalities decide for themselves if they want, or don’t want, to have legal marijuana within their borders.”
Even though many Americans and states look favorably upon cannabis, it is still a federal crime. While federal guidance has been going easy on the states that have legalized, people are still going to federal prison for marijuana related convictions. This makes you wonder, if these bills pass, what will become of the already convicted felons of marijuana possession? Will the federal government release these inmates, or continue to hold them for a crime the government now deems legal.
Blumenauer called the federal prohibition of marijuana “a failure” that has wasted tax dollars and ruined lives. He also said it’s time for the government to forge a new path ahead for the plant.
“As more states move to legalize marijuana as Oregon, Colorado, Washington and Alaska have done,” Blumenauer said, “it’s imperative the federal government become a full partner in building a workable and safe framework.”
i got a used ipad today. i got it primarily so that i can start a limited usage of “social media” in order to keep me more abreast of what is actually happening in my social circle.
see, these days most of the people i know communicate with each other through facebook. they use mailing lists and forums a lot less frequently than they used to, and pretty much never use their telephones for, you know, actual phone calls. but i’ve been adamant about facebook, particularly. i have over 200 individual links to articles about the overt evil done in the name of facebook, i refuse to become another data point on their graph of suckers and sheeple, and, so far, i have resisted the numerous temptations i have had, over the years, to join the book of farce.
but i also have a cat, named Frank Zappa, who has become a minor celebrity among my wife’s ever expanding circle of friends, and people have been clamouring to get frankie a facebook account, so this is a good compromise: i get to keep my actual computers free of the scourge, i don’t have to share anything that is actually mine, and i’ll have access to all of the community organisation that slipped past me before…
and i’ll also have a place to play Luxuria Superbia, which i bought about a year ago because i thought it would work on my phone, but it doesn’t…
i adjusted the settings on my Limit Login Attempts plugin again, so that the first attempted login as “admin” (or anything other than the correct login name) results in a 720 minute (12 hour) block, and the second attempted login results in a 672 hour (28 day) block…
and STILL i have an estimated 5 attempted logins per day, and about half of them are blocked for 28 days… 😮
and, not only that, but two IP addresses — both from baghdad — have been blocked a total of 18 times (one has been blocked 10 times, and one has been blocked 8 times) since i installed the plugin, about 6 months ago.
and, so far, nobody has guessed the correct login name. 😎 although there have been some fairly obvious attempts, and some attempts — like “QhYQFvutnN” and “DouglasSevy” — that make me wonder what is really going on…
INTERNATIONAL EARTH ROTATION AND REFERENCE SYSTEMS SERVICE (IERS) SERVICE INTERNATIONAL DE LA ROTATION TERRESTRE ET DES SYSTEMES DE REFERENCE SERVICE DE LA ROTATION TERRESTRE DE L'IERS OBSERVATOIRE DE PARIS 61, Av. de l'Observatoire 75014 PARIS (France) Tel. : 33 (0) 1 40 51 22 26 FAX : 33 (0) 1 40 51 22 91 e-mail : [email protected] http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc Paris, 5 January 2015 Bulletin C 49 To authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time UTC TIME STEP on the 1st of July 2015 A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2015. The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be: 2015 June 30, 23h 59m 59s 2015 June 30, 23h 59m 60s 2015 July 1, 0h 0m 0s The difference between UTC and the International Atomic Time TAI is: from 2012 July 1, 0h UTC, to 2015 July 1 0h UTC : UTC-TAI = - 35s from 2015 July 1, 0h UTC, until further notice : UTC-TAI = - 36s Leap seconds can be introduced in UTC at the end of the months of December or June, depending on the evolution of UT1-TAI. Bulletin C is mailed every six months, either to announce a time step in UTC or to confirm that there will be no time step at the next possible date. Daniel Gambis Head Earth Orientation Center of IERS Observatoire de Paris, France
the only user other than “admin” that i have blocked since 141208 has been “QhYQFvutnN” which is really bizarre… i wonder what makes… you know, never mind. forget i said anything.
if you try to login as “admin” you get two tries before you’re IP banned.
give it up… 😐
for those of you who may be trying to guess my administrator password, good luck… seriously… you can start with not trying to login as “admin” or “przxqgl”, because either one will get you banned for 6 hours (the first time). and it doesn’t matter how many IP addresses you use, you’ll still get banned if you try to login as “admin” or “przxqgl”, so you may as well give it up.
they finally got the check to us on saturday, which is sooner than they told us the last time, but four days later than they originally agreed upon. it’s really bizarre, because the audiences love us and ask us when will be the next time we’re coming back, but if the “MAN”agement doesn’t get it together to pay us on time, there aren’t going to be too many more shows like this.
i’m deep into rehearsal season again. the panto starts on 13th december and the fremont philharmonic is playing for the fremont lenin lighting/festivus celebration on 5th december. we’re rehearsing twice a week for the panto, we still haven’t got all the music, or finalised who is going to play (or not) for which shows, i just created yet another “new” mailing list for the players, and, already macque has had to delete one address and add another one because of some fiasco in which he’s involved.
my mother-in-law (who may be reading this) came to visit last week, so that she could accompany moe to the fleetwood mac concert. i’m not a big fleetwood mac fan, so i drove them to the venue and then went to the Poodle Dog, which i used to frequent when i was a cab driver, in the middle-1980s. as far as i could tell, the only thing that has changed about the poodle dog is the computer screens in place of the cash register, and the wide-screen flat-panel televisions in place of the CRT screens above the bar… even the smell was the same. we arranged to go to a friend’s birthday party with the M-I-L, as well, but, as we were on our way out the door to go to the party, she fell and fractured her wrist in three places, causing her and moe to be in the emergency room until 3:00 in the morning. she was wondering why i seemed to be expressing a desire not to be in contact with her, and this is the reason why. she’s way too fragile to be an ongoing part of our (meaning mine and moe’s) life. she’s always going to be moe’s mom, so i’m always going to get along with her, more or less; really, it’s not as though i don’t get along with her, like i don’t get along with my parents, but i also don’t want her to put herself into situations where she’s going to get broken. we’ve experienced enough broken-ness without her adding to the batch.
for a couple of years now the fan in my computer has been making an evil buzzing noise when i first turn on the machine. i discovered that if i take a bottle of canned air and squirt it into the fan, it stops… after a while…
fast forward a couple of years, and multiple cases of canned air from costco (i.e. at least 10), and it’s actually been taking longer and longer to get the fan to quit buzzing, and the buzzing has been getting more loud and evil sounding, especially since i re-oriented the box, so i finally decided to open it up and see if i could fix it.
i found a lot of dust… which i cleaned out outside, because i’ve had previous experience with trying to clean dust out of a computer while inside, and it results in making everything taste like the inside of a computer for a couple of weeks… 😛
but it didn’t stop the buzzing, so i broke down and bought a new fan.
it cost me $9.00. 😐
i don’t know why i don’t just put my computer in a place where it’s relatively easy to disconnect and clean, apart from general laziness and lack of caring, and i wonder about the habit i have of stacking stuff on top of the computer, and/or putting it in obscure, difficult to remove places even more when the solution to my problem ALL ALONG cost me less than $10.00… 😐
i’ve been working in the computer industry long enough that i should have known it was going to turn out that way… 😐
Mushroom-induced brain rewiring could hold the key to fighting mental illness
Scott Kaufman
31 Oct 2014
Psychedelic mushrooms dramatically increase connectivity between otherwise uncommunicative parts of the brain, according to researchers from Imperial College London in an article to be published in the November edition of the Royal Society’s journal Interface.
Paul Expert and his team analyzed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from two groups of people — one who had ingested a small amount of the active agent in hallucinogenic mushrooms, psilocybin, and another group who was given a placebo.
They found that the main effect was the creation of stable connections between parts of the brain that, under normal conditions, only communicate with each other in dream states — such as the hippocampus (which deals with short term memory and spatial recognition) and anterior cingulate cortex (which regulates rational cognitive functions).
The result of this stable cross-wiring is a more interconnected brain, as shown on the diagram below:
On the left is a data visualization of a brain administered the placebo; on the right, one that has been subjected to a mild dose of psilocybin.
“We can speculate on the implications of such an organization,” Dr. Expert said. “One possible by-product of this greater communication across the whole brain is the phenomenon of synaesthesia” — which is the experience of having senses overlap, such that certain smells are accompanied by flashes of color, or certain sounds are accompanied by tastes.
It is also believed that rewiring the brain in this manner may allow scientists to find more effective ways to treat depression or help smokers and alcoholics battle their addictions.
This research is only possible thanks to a a recent loosening on the regulations regarding the study of psychedelic drugs for medical purposes. This is a positive measure, said study co-author Giovanni Petri, who told Wired that “in a normal brain, many things are happening. You don’t know what is going on, or what is responsible for that. So you try to perturb the state of consciousness a bit, and see what happens.”
The cost of poverty is greater than the cost of eliminating it — i’ve been saying this for 15 years… it’s about time somebody else started saying it…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bMxq1oti-c
Continue reading Cost of poverty greater than eliminating it
Cannabis use associated with lower death rates in patients with traumatic brain injuries
2 October, 2014
Surveying patients with traumatic brain injuries, a group of Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute (LA BioMed) researchers reported today that they found those who tested positive for THC, the active ingredient in cannabis, were more likely to survive than those who tested negative for the illicit substance.
The findings, published in the October edition of The American Surgeon, suggest THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, may help protect the brain in cases of traumatic brain injury, the researchers said. The study included 446 patients who suffered traumatic brain injuries and underwent a urine test for the presence of THC in their system. The researchers found 82 of the patients had THC in their system. Of those, only 2.4% died. Of the remaining patients who didn’t have THC in their system, 11.5% died.
“Previous studies conducted by other researchers had found certain compounds in cannabis helped protect the brain in animals after a trauma,” said David Plurad, MD, an LA BioMed researcher and the study’s lead author. “This study was one of the first in a clinical setting to specifically associate THC use as an independent predictor of survival after traumatic brain injury.”
The researchers noted that the timing of their study was “pertinent” because of current efforts to decriminalize cannabis and other research that has shown THC can increase appetite, reduce ocular pressure, decrease muscle spasms, relieve pain and alleviate symptoms associated with irritable bowel disease. But they noted that their study has some significant limitations.
“While most — but not all — the deaths in the study can be attributed to the traumatic brain injury itself, it appears that both groups were similarly injured,” Dr. Plurad said. “The similarities in the injuries between the two groups led to the conclusion that testing positive for THC in the system is associated with a decreased mortality in adult patients who have sustained traumatic brain injuries.”
Additional data available from the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
Shellshock: ‘Larger scale attack’ on its way, warn securo-bods
Apple FINALLY patches the ‘don’t worry’ Bash Shellshock vuln
Apple Releases Patches for Shellshock Bug
Every Mac Is Vulnerable to the Shellshock Bash Exploit: Here’s How to Patch OS X — i upgraded from v.3.2.51(1) to v.3.2.53(1) according to their directions for pre-mavericks computers, and, according to the test i posted last week the system is no longer “vulnerable”, but, because of the fact that it doesn’t actually give a response other than “this is a test”, i can’t tell for sure whether or not they’ve actually patched shellshock, or whether they have just turned off the error message… it would be really nice if i could just upgrade to the current GNU release, which is v.4.3… this is why i am no longer a mac-head… 😐
Apple patches "Shellshock" Bash bug in OS X 10.9, 10.8, and 10.7
Firms BASH Bash bug with new round of Shellshock patches
Cisco splats Bash bug in busy swatting season
i’ve run three rounds of security updates in the past three days, and bash was updated in every one of ’em… eventually they’re gonna fix it for real… maybe i’ll just revert to using csh… or zsh (which was written by paul falstad, my former manager and coworker at openwave) 😐
UPDATE: Bash Vulnerability AKA SHELLSHOCK
The ‘Shellshock’ Bash vulnerability and what it means for OS X
Apple: Most OS X users safe from ‘Shellshock’ exploit, patch coming quickly for advanced Unix users — which, of course, is a blatant falsehood… all macs are as much at risk as -x was, and -x had a patch yesterday… this is why i am no longer a mac-head… 😐
Apple working on “Shellshock” fix, says most users not at risk [Updated] — which includes the following information:
Mac OS X uses version 3.2.51.(1) of GNU bash, released in 2007; the current GNU release of the shell is bash 4.3. However, the current version is released under the GNU Public License version 3 (GPLv3). Apple has avoided bundling GPLv3-licensed software because of its stricter license terms, even dropping the open-source Windows networking service Samba from OS X server in 2011 because Samba had shifted to a GPLv3 license. Therefore, although patches for the vulnerability have now been pushed out for most open-source operating systems, Apple executives may feel they have to have their own developers make modifications to the bash code.
this is the explanation why i haven’t been able to get SAMBA to work on my mac… grumble, mutter… 😐
Still more vulnerabilities in bash? Shellshock becomes whack-a-mole
‘Shellshock’ Bug Spells Trouble for Web Security
140925
by Brian Krebs
The bug is being compared to the recent Heartbleed vulnerability because of its ubiquity and sheer potential for causing havoc on Internet-connected systems — particularly Web sites. Worse yet, experts say the official patch for the security hole is incomplete and could still let attackers seize control over vulnerable systems.
The problem resides with a weakness in the GNU Bourne Again Shell (Bash), the text-based, command-line utility on multiple Linux and Unix operating systems. Researchers discovered that if Bash is set up to be the default command line utility on these systems, it opens those systems up to specially crafted remote attacks via a range of network tools that rely on it to execute scripts, from telnet and secure shell (SSH) sessions to Web requests.
According to several security firms, attackers are already probing systems for the weakness, and that at least two computer worms are actively exploiting the flaw to install malware. Jamie Blasco, labs director at AlienVault, has been running a honeypot on the vulnerability since yesterday to emulate a vulnerable system.
“With the honeypot, we found several machines trying to exploit the Bash vulnerability,” Blasco said. “The majority of them are only probing to check if systems are vulnerable. On the other hand, we found two worms that are actively exploiting the vulnerability and installing a piece of malware on the system. This malware turns the systems into bots that connect to a C&C server where the attackers can send commands, and we have seen the main purpose of the bots is to perform distributed denial of service attacks.”
The vulnerability does not impact Microsoft Windows users (ed. for a change), but there are patches available for Linux and Unix systems. In addition, Mac users are likely vulnerable, although there is no official patch for this flaw from Apple yet. I’ll update this post if we see any patches from Apple.
The U.S.-CERT’s advisory includes a simple command line script that Mac users can run to test for the vulnerability. To check your system from a command line, type or cut and paste this text:
env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c "echo this is a test"
If the system is vulnerable, the output will be:
vulnerable this is a test
An unaffected (or patched) system will output:
bash: warning: x: ignoring function definition attempt bash: error importing function definition for `x' this is a test
US-CERT has a list of operating systems that are vulnerable. Red Hat and several other Linux distributions have released fixes for the bug, but according to US-CERT the patch has an issue that prevents it from fully addressing the problem.
The Shellshock bug is being compared to Heartbleed because it affects so many systems; determining which are vulnerable and developing and deploying fixes to them is likely to take time. However, unlike Heartbleed, which only allows attackers to read sensitive information from vulnerable Web servers, Shellshock potentially lets attackers take control over exposed systems.
“This is going to be one that’s with us for a long time, because it’s going to be in a lot of embedded systems that won’t get updated for a long time,” said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and at the University California, Berkeley. “The target computer has to be accessible, but there are a lot of ways that this turns accessibility into full local code execution. For example, could easily write a scanner that would basically scan every Web site on the planet for vulnerable (Web) pages.”
Stay tuned. This one could get interesting very soon.
Master Foo and the Script Kiddie
A stranger from the land of Woot came to Master Foo as he was eating the morning meal with his students.
“I hear y00 are very l33t,” he said. “Pl33z teach m3 all y00 know.”
Master Foo’s students looked at each other, confused by the stranger’s barbarous language. Master Foo just smiled and replied: “You wish to learn the Way of Unix?”
“I want to b3 a wizard hax0r,” the stranger replied, “and 0wn ever3one’s b0xen.”
“I do not teach that Way,” replied Master Foo.
The stranger grew agitated. “D00d, y00 r nothing but a p0ser,” he said. “If y00 n00 anything, y00 wud t33ch m3.”
“There is a path,” said Master Foo, “that might bring you to wisdom.” The master scribbled an IP address on a piece of paper. “Cracking this box should pose you little difficulty, as its guardians are incompetent. Return and tell me what you find.”
The stranger bowed and left. Master Foo finished his meal.
Days passed, then months. The stranger was forgotten.
Years later, the stranger from the land of Woot returned.
“Damn you!” he said, “I cracked that box, and it was easy like you said. But I got busted by the FBI and thrown in jail.”
“Good,” said Master Foo. “You are ready for the next lesson.” He scribbled an IP address on another piece of paper and handed it to the stranger.
“Are you crazy?” the stranger yelled. “After what I’ve been through, I’m never going to break into a computer again!”
Master Foo smiled. “Here,” he said, “is the beginning of wisdom.”
On hearing this, the stranger was enlightened.
AUTOMATIC SONGS-OF-INNOCENCE REMOVAL TOOL — Apple finally sees the point of millions of disgruntled people like me. hopefully they’ll learn something from it, although i’m not going to hold my breath… 😐
also, Apple puts up support page to get U2 album out of your iTunes — Too many people don’t want U2 anywhere near their libraries
😡
Not pro Bono: Apple’s audio junk mail made spammers’ lives easier
Just say BO-NO: Mark Hosler of Negativland on Apple’s ‘U2rusion’
Got iTunes? You got a U2 album. Here’s how to delete it.
unfortunately, it’s not how to delete it. because of the fact that it’s “in the cloud”, it doesn’t necessarily take up space on my device, but i can’t immediately delete it using any of the methods recommended — using iTunes on my computer doesn’t even show that i have a U2 album, so re-synching my device doesn’t do anything, and there’s nothing to un-check, and you can only delete something once you have downloaded it from the cloud…
i don’t use twitter, but i am outraged, and i reflect that guy’s twitter: Apple: take this fucking U2 album off my iPhone, NOW. I do not want it, I did not ask for it, it takes up space, it’s my device. Go to hell. 😡
in honour of the eleventh of september…
DON’T SAY THE PLEDGE! — "Under God" compromises the patriotic message of the Pledge
"Under God" wasn’t part of the original Pledge of Allegiance. Those two words were added to the Pledge in 1954, when the country was in the grip of McCarthyism and communist witch-hunt hysteria.
Before 1954, the Pledge affirmed that we were “one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Indivisible means we can rise above our differences, religious or otherwise. Liberty means the right to act and speak freely no matter what one’s faith or philosophy may be. And Justice, of course, means equal rights for all, regardless of whether or not we believe in a deity. The Knights of Columbus — a Catholic men’s group — led the lobbying effort to add “under God.” Now the Pledge is twisted, with divisive religious language that implies true patriots must be believers.
With “under God” added, the Pledge is not a statement of patriotism. Instead, extremist preachers and politicians point to the language to validate their view that those who don’t believe in God don’t belong.
Religious or not, don’t say this altered Pledge
Until the Pledge is restored to its inclusive version, we can take it upon ourselves to refuse to participate in what’s become a discriminatory exercise. (Note: A Supreme Court case — West Virginia vs. Barnette — gives public school students the absolute right to sit out the Pledge, for any reason. Public schools might not tell you about this right, but if anyone questions you about sitting out the Pledge, contact the AHA’s Legal Center.)
Whether you are religious or not, you can make a statement for true inclusiveness. Support liberty and justice for all, and support indivisibility. Stand up for America by sitting down during the Pledge of Allegiance until the inclusive version is restored.
a slicker and more elaborate version of a drawing that i did in 1984, called Self Consciousness Comix:
Was Robin Williams murdered by the Illuminati?
INTERNET — Fans mourn the death of Robin Williams, famed comedian who popularized rainbow suspenders in the 80’s with his spunky alien television character, Mork. However, newspapers around the world report this smiling and funny man committed suicide by asphyxiation without making any serious attempt at explaining how or why. In what appears to be yet another clear case of celebrity homicide by the Illuminati, such vague and general explanations by the media have been swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the gullible sleeping masses.
Robin Williams was beloved by billions, and his movies brought joy and compassion into the hearts of adults and children everywhere. It is rare that such a passionate man could make it very far in the movie industry without selling his soul to the devil and succumbing to Illuminati influence, and perhaps there was a building tension in his life between his compassionate side and the hateful necessity of Illuminati membership. Perhaps this tension tore Robin Williams apart and he did commit suicide, or more likely, perhaps he decided to leave the Illuminati once and for all and was quickly eliminated by an assassination squad that made his death look like a suicide.
In Robin Williams’ classic movie Hook, the grown Peter Pan returns to Never Never Land — Michael Jackson, being the greatest opponent of the Illuminati in our generation also used this imagery for his Illuminati refuge — where he again learned to fly, although it was supposed to be impossible for an adult. As it is said in the bible, only those with the heart of a child may enter the kingdom of heaven. Did Williams decode his own movie and try to learn to fly, to return to Never Never Land, where the Illuminati’s powers are reduced and regressed back to that of Captain Hook, from the early modern period? Almost surely, yes, but this time, he didn’t make it through to the end. Hook won, and Robin Williams was murdered by the Illuminati.
i’ve got a directory of addresses to report spam originating from certain domains. quite a few of these domains include an upstream domain (which, theoretically, is responsible for making sure the hosted domain doesn’t send spam) that is enom dot com.
just out of curiosity, i typed host enom.com into a terminal, and it gave me 98.124.253.221
then i typed dig -x 98.124.253.221 soa which told me that rightside.co is the SOA for that IP address. whois rightside.co gave me enom dot com, which uses nameservers provided by akam.net
rightside.co or The Rightside Group owns enom dot com, and a bunch of other registry-related web sites…
host akam.net returns nothing….
salamandir@Gingko:~$ host akam.net
salamandir@Gingko:~$
however, i have a sneaky way to get around things that return nothing in my terminal, and that is DomainTools dot com. they tell me that akam.com is owned by Akamai Technologies… the people who are responsible for serving between 15 and 30 percent of all web traffic…
so, to conclude, quite a number of the people behind the domains responsible for the spam i receive on a daily basis, ultimately, buy their server time from akamai technologies.
i’ve read that up to 80% of all internet traffic is spam, and it’s all coming from a company that serves between 15 and 30 percent of all web traffic…
how does that make ANY sense whatsoever?!? 😛
Should we have a right not to work? — this guy is headed in the right direction. as with most people, he is a lot more concerned about how it’s going to work, whereas i believe that it’s necessary to get more people to agree that it’s something that can be done, before we start “arguing” over what it’s going to take to make it work… but he’s headed in the right direction…
i reported a bug in kontact 4.13.1 yesterday. they fixed it (almost immediately, which leads me to believe that i wasn’t the only one who had the problem, but i’m the one whose name ended up on top of the bug report) this morning, and, with the kubuntu-updates ppa (which i hadn’t installed, because of the fact that i didn’t know it existed) my installation of kontact 4.13.2 is working wonderfully, less than 24 hours after the bug was first reported.
given my experience as a software tester, i don’t have to wonder what the process would have been like for mac or windoesn’t, especially with as important a communication tool as kontact…
THIS is the reason i am a linux geek… 😀
according to this, the bug that i reported yesterday has been “RESOLVED FIXED” in Kontact 4.13.2…
i am running 4.13.1, so it should be an easy upgrade…
this guy recommends that i use PPA/Backports to install 4.13.2, but 4.13.2 is not a part of the current PPA/Backports repository, and there’s no telling when (or even if) it will be added…
in other words, they fixed the bug that i am experiencing, but i can’t get to the proper repository to install the fix because i choose not to run on “the bleeding edge” and like to keep my installation on the “Long Term Service” (LTS) version as long as possible.
ETA: i tried removing and reinstalling kontact 4.13.1… it didn’t help.
<repeated head-to-desk maneuver> 😡
i was responding to an email, and i was trying to attatch a file, when my email client crashed.
now it was a file that was located on a SMB-mounted disk that i was trying to attatch, and i believe that my email client has trouble doing that, but it has responded “gracefully” (or “not at all”) when i have done this in the past, and… hey, it’s a SMB-mounted disk… so what if it’s not part of the “local” system or not, if a file that i need to attatch to an email lives on a SMB-mounted disk, i should at least get a warning that the file “couldn’t be found” or some such thing as that…
what i don’t expect is that the client crashes, and then, when i try to restart it, it crashes again, and again, and again… and again… 😐
and again… 😡
i get the impression that SMTP (incoming) mail is working, because when i logged into webmail on my linux box (after having discovered that the POP3 client wasn’t starting) messages would appear and vanish without my doing anything to them, a situation that doesn’t happen when i’m logged into webmail from my mac (which i am, now).
i’m sure the problem is fixable, in the long run, but i need to be able to mail the SANCApators, and the fremont phil, and snake suspenderz, in the short term, and having my email “vanish” before i can respond is not helping that AT ALL…
this is the reason i think it’s going to get fixed eventually, but at this point, nobody knows when that “eventually” actually is… 😐
the first one is very likely to stay as it is, but the second one begs for some javascript weirdness… anybody know javascript who wants to help with a “good” cause? 👿
http://gracetruth7.org/ — Pets Are Delicious Meat
another way of looking at http://www.timecube.com/ — You Are Stupid And Evil
now that i’m getting used to it, i definitely like it, but getting there was a real roller coaster ride, lemme tell ya’… 😐
my last post was sounding like it was the beginning of another one of those multi-day fiascos that i have come to tag as “the battle of the computer”… and it was touch and go for a while, although more with my mental state than anything else.
my post at kubuntu forums has the bare bones, but what i actually did was as a direct result of what i have learned from previous, desperate visits to kubuntu forums. basically i did it all from the terminal login until i was absolutely certain that it was going to work with a GUI, and then i made triple sure that everything was as it should be before i started to diagnose the real problem (which was that my email client had disappeared).
with the result that i got my email back, i didn’t lose anything, i didn’t have to rebuild my address book, even my sigrot made it to the new version, i actually got a new version of kubuntu (Trusty Tahr, 14.04), and it didn’t take a week, or even three days, like it has in the past.
now that everything has calmed down to the dull roar i interpret as “normal”, i’m going to go take a shower and test out the new showerhead, and shut down the computers for a while… because it’s too hot for them anyway.
i installed the daily security updates, and it removed my ability to send and receive email. 😡
it’s getting towards time for me to re-evaluate my dependence on computers.
ETA: so i decided that it was time to upgrade distributions, because precise is coming up against its EOL in a year or so. i upgraded to trusty, and things got distinctly WORSE: i am now looking at a “system loading” screen that has had a “progress” meter (which is just an animated graphic that has 5 dots that go from one colour to a different colour, and back, one dot at a time, to show you that “something’s happening”) for about half an hour with no change…
i posted once at kubuntu forums but there has been no response yet… 😐
i wonder how long it’s gonna take this time? 😡 if it’s anything like the last couple of times, it could take as much as a week to get things back to “normal” again… 😐
http://www.amp-what.com/
It’s Time to End All Drug Testing — cannabis is not going to be legalised until the media gets the idea that if they call it “marijuana”, people will think that it should be illegal, because it has a “street” name… 😛
but, apart from the fact that it no longer applies to me, i think that this article has got the idea down pat (with the exception of referring to it as “marijuana”), and more people should pay attention.
once again, i’m digging through boxes of stuff that is left over from a time before internet… and i’m coming up with definite reasons why some of things should not be forgotten so quickly.
like this:
by the way, it’s remotely possible that you can comment without being automatically spam-filtered… unfortunately, i don’t have any way to test it, so you’re going to have to do so, and report back to me if there are any problems.
1 in 10 Americans think HTML is an STD — the other day i was at a friend’s house when my phone rang. it was my mother-in-law, who very rarely calls me, but when she does, it’s usually something fairly important, so i answered. she proceded to ask me “tech-support-geek” questions (something about filtering spam, i think) and i had to remember not to use “computer geek” language when i told her the proper techniques. this is the woman who has to have the difference between a browser and an operating system explained to her, repeatedly… to give her a little credit, she does have a neurological disorder that affects her memory… but so do i… 😐
i would give a copy of this to her, except that she doesn’t understand how to read a flowchart…
those of you who may be waiting to comment, but can’t, i haven’t forgotten you. unfortunately, the problem is two-fold, and in order to address the first part, i have to be able to back up the blog… but i can’t, because of the server configuration being run by my host, EZPZ… they’re not going to change, and i can’t back up because of the fact that they run something that is incompatible with my being able to back up, and until they fix it, there’s nothing i can do.
it would be time to investigate other hosting possibilities, except they have informed me that they’re going to try to address this problem within the next few weeks, and told me to wait… and considering how many times i have done so in the past, i am not too fond of the idea of packing up and switching hosts, so i’m going to wait and see what happens.
the days keep going by.
i got my computer fixed by the kubuntu gods at Kubuntu Forums, where they are quite a bit better than just about anybody else at diagnosing and helping to fix any problems that one might have with one’s kubuntu system… and, by the way, it wasn’t the video drivers. the people who put together the update packages left out an important part of the desktop manager, and released a new update that had that important part in it the next day… 😉 i suppose that’s what i get for using a free, community-based operating system.
it could be worse. i could be using <shudder> micro$lop…
moe returned very early friday morning, so the doggies have calmed back down to their standard level of chaos.
i’ve got a rehearsal later on this evening with the fremont philharmonic, whose moisture festival dates are april 2nd through april 6th. we’ve only had one rehearsal, we still don’t know exactly who is playing when, and there’s a WHOLE BUNCH of new music that we haven’t learned yet. then i’ve got a rehearsal with the SANCApators (which is eben sprinsock‘s other band) on wednesday. they’ve got two rehearsals, and then i’m playing with them at the moisture festival on march 23rd. then i’ve got a rehearsal with snake suspenderz on thursday. snake suspenderz is playing a private gig at a corporate party on saturday, and a public gig on sunday, at C&P Coffee in west seattle, if you’re interested in seeing us play: we’re doing a special performance with Katy Webber, who is a FANTASTIC jazz singer (who also played the part of Dick Whittington in the most recent panto)… snake suspenderz is also playing as a “pit band” at the moisture festival march 26th through march 30th. i don’t know if we’re going to have any “on stage” performances this year, but even still, i’ve got a total of 19 performances, which should make up for any loss that i experience due to the fact that i’ve gotten paid less per share than last year (grumble, mutter).
i’ve got a whole bunch more moisture festival performances this year than i had last year, and a combination of widely varying circumstances means that they’re actually taking snake suspenderz seriously this year, but if they maintain the new “tradition” of paying a smaller share than they did last year (which started last year), this will probably be the last year that i participate in the moisture festival in the way that i have been for the past ELEVEN YEARS now… 😛 of course i don’t know that they’re going to pay less per share than they did last year, but at this point i don’t trust the board of directors to do anything rational any longer.
and before any of that happens, moe and i are going to heppner oregon again (like we did last year), and after that, we’re going to the ocean for a few days. we’re going to a place that DOES NOT have wifi, so it’s going to mean that we’re going to have to exist for a few days without our smart-phones, or ipads, or laptops… we’re going to have to do with kites, dogs, beach, and each other… like in olden times.
i didn’t wake up in the best of moods today. the dogs wanted to get up about 2 hours before i was ready to get up – moe is in las vegas at a vet conference and gets back tonight. the dogs are always worried when she leaves for more than a day, and they’ve been getting more and more antsy the longer she’s away. i’ve been running rye and lucy until their tongues hang out, and that’s been keeping them sort of quiet, but it doesn’t work first thing in the morning…
so, i got the (3) dogs, and the (1) cat, and the (2) birds fed, and started up my computer, and, of course, there were system updates that came in overnight, so i installed them and rebooted the computer… and the computer wouldn’t reboot. 😛 i posted in kubuntu forums, and the current theory is that xorg stopped supporting my video, which doesn’t strike me as being particurlarly likely, as this is a 4-to-5-year-old computer that had not-quite-top-of-the-line components installed when it was first built… but it is also based on guesses more than anything else, at this point.
so, i decided to do it the “hard” way (whoever thought that getting mail on my laptop would be the “hard” way?), so i fired up my mac, logged in, and pointed my browser at my webmail page… and i COULDN’T LOG IN… 😛 😛
and then i had an appointment with gary from Giant Atomic Robots about the Hybrid Elephant web site, and i was about ⅔ of the way there when i realised that, despite the fact that i planned on taking my laptop, and i even went so far as to disconnect it and put it in the same place that i had put everything else that i succeeded in remembering, i actually FORGOT my laptop!
after i returned home from my meeting with the giant atomic robot gary, i determined that the reason i couldn’t log into my email was not because of my VPN as i suspected, but because they had actually MOVED the entire webmail site to a different server, and, because of the fact that i don’t use webmail on a regular basis (POP mail is still the safest way to go!), i didn’t get the message…
i’m running really thin on spoons today, and i don’t get to go to sleep until after i pick moe up, at 1:00 in the morning… 😛 😛 😛
Time for a Guaranteed Income? — this is the first step towards The RICH Economy, which i have been promoting for 20 years or so. nobody’s actually done it yet, but the fact that sweden is voting on it soon is definitely a step in the right direction…
although the author of this article doesn’t seem to think too highly of the concept… at least she isn’t dismissing the idea outright…
so, i was notified today, by someone who tried to do it and failed, that their comment was blocked because of “spam” when they tried to submit it. i don’t have anything that deliberately filters out everything as spam, so i tried to comment on my own blog, and, what do you know? i was blocked because my comment appears to be spam…
that would explain why i’ve not gotten any new comments on my blog for some time, but… weird!
i’m not deliberately blocking anybody (except spammers, and they know who they are), but the fact that i’m getting blocked indicates some bug somewhere… which is all the more motivation to back up and reinstall my blog, because too many weird things have been happening to it recently, and i need to fix it.
also, i am “in the cloud” now…
recently i bought a 2TB hard disk with NAS (from frys, for under $100!), which allows me to connect, literally, from anywhere. now i’ve got a place to keep my /home directory that’s accessible by ALL my computers and electronic devices but, conveniently, NOT accessible by anybody else (unless i, personally, make an account for that person), and, most significantly, is NOT owned by apple, microsoft, google, yahoo, dropbox, or any other corporate interests.
now, along with all the other stuff i have to do, i have to move my /home directory from both my linux box and my mac over to the cloud drive, and compact them, because a lot of the information from my /home directory is duplicated on both machines…
<sigh>…
it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that i was terrifically impressed by the 4TB array i was working with, which had the capability to handle millions of individual email messages to thousands of different users… and it doesn’t seem like it was too much longer ago than that, when i was totally impressed with an 80MB external hard disk, which i likened to an “electronic black hole, into which i could toss files forever and never be able to fill”…
the 2TB drive sits on my bookshelf, with two other terabyte drives, one 2TB and one 1TB, surmounted by my router, which is about the same size as one of the drives…
Sun comes out, Putin furious — snork… er… um… 👿 okay, in the interest of full disclosure, this is a poe.
U.S. Customs Won’t Apologize for Destroying Musician’s Rare Flutes
by John Hudson
January 2, 2014
U.S. customs officials last week destroyed 11 rare flutes by a respected Canadian musician who was returning home via New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. But the agency isn’t apologizing for the incident — it says the flutes were an ecological threat.
Officials at U.S. Customs and Border Protection identified the instruments owned by flute virtuoso Boujemaa Razgui as agricultural products that risked introducing “exotic plant pathogens” in to the United States, a customs official tells Foreign Policy. As a result, officials destroyed every single flute without contacting Razgui in an incident that makes your holiday airport delays trivial by comparison.
Razgui said there are around 15 people in the U.S. with such flutes, which means acquiring one ahead of his upcoming performances in February may be impossible. “I’m not sure what to do,” Razgui told The Boston Globe.
“They said this is an agriculture item,” Razgui continued. “I fly with them in and out all the time and this is the first time there has been a problem. This is my life … This is horrible.”
Razgui’s mishap was first reported by the music blog Slipped Disc on Tuesday before jumping to the front page of the massive link-sharing site Reddit, which nearly melted the small blog‘s servers according to a follow-up post.
Though neither the blog nor The Globe received a response from U.S. Customs on the issue, a New York-based CBP official tells us the agency followed standard protocol.
“CBP is responsible for detecting and preventing the entry into the country of plant pests and exotic foreign animal diseases that could harm America’s agricultural resources,” said an official, after being asked if the agency would issue an apology. “The fresh bamboo canes were seized and destroyed in accordance with established protocols to prevent the introduction of plant pathogens into the United States.”
Razgui, who has worked with numerous U.S. ensembles and performs regularly with the Boston Camerata, said he hand-crafted each instrument with difficult-to-find reeds. “Nobody talked to me. They said I have to write a letter to the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C.,” he told The Globe.
The CBP official said Razgui’s luggage was unclaimed and added that “fresh bamboo is prohibited from entering the United States to prevent the introduction of exotic plant pathogens.”
Customs officials destroy virtuoso flautist’s 11 instruments because they were ‘agricultural products’
By Scott Kaufman
December 31, 2013
A flute virtuoso was returning to New York via John F. Kennedy Airport when Customs officials confiscated and destroyed the instruments he was carrying with him.
According to Boujemaa Razgui, the officials told him that his 11 flutes — each of which he had constructed, by hand, himself — “were agricultural products and had to be destroyed.”
Razgui, who is a Canadian citizen, frequently travels with a variety of flutes, each of which is designed to be played with a specific ancient or modern genre in mind.
Slipped Disc’s Norman Lebrecht contacted Razgui, who recounted his ordeal with customs. “I told them I had these instruments for many years and flew with them in and out,” he said.
“There were 11 instruments in all. They told me they were agricultural products and they had to be destroyed. There was nothing I could do. The ney flute can be made with bamboo. Is that agricultural?”
Razgui also told Lebrecht that, as a non-citizen, he was reluctant to confront U.S. Customs officials.
i have owned ebeneezer dot net and ebeneezer dot org for many years… like “more than 12″… when i first bought ebeneezer dot net, ebeneezer dot com was owned by somebody else — it may have been Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s organisation, but i don’t remember — anyway, it was for sale, but i figured i didn’t need a “COMmercial” address for a church, so i turned down their offer of $5,000 to buy their domain.
a couple of years later, i noticed that ebeneezer dot org had become available, and i purchased that, as well, and moved my “dot net” domain to a domain — “dot org” — that was more suited for a church anyway. at that time, i noticed that “dot com” was also available, from the company that hosted it when it was in use. i still wasn’t interested in a commercial address, so i didn’t even bother looking up the price.
today, just for a laugh, i looked up ebeneezer dot com again. this is what i found:
Ebeneezer.com — The Leading Ebeneezer Site on the Net
dot com is now owned, apparently, by frank schilling. if his marketing department is to be believed, all i have to do is register “dot com” and the money will start pouring in… all i would have to do is pay frank schilling’s price… which, i guarantee is going to be a hell of a lot more than $5,000…
as the current, and past owner of dot net, and dot org, i sincerely doubt that is going to happen… even if i did have the unreasonable (given that i registered ebeneezer dot org, AND dot net for free 😐 ) price frank schilling is, undoubtedly, demanding for it.
also, it just occurred to me… it could very well be that the fact that i own dot net and dot org contributes to the fact that dot com is probably never going to be purchased by some upscale retailer or restaurant… i mean, who would want to be accidentally confused with this kind of nonsense… my name could be frank schilling’s curse… although, given that “His registry, domain marketplace operation and assorted name-holdings are estimated to be valued in the vicinity of $500 million”, i kinda doubt it.
i think i know too much EVER to be enticed into thinking that i can make money, solely by owning a piece of “property” on the internet. it may have been possible once (although i kind of wonder, even about those people who have made their fortunes on the net), but it’s certainly not possible any longer.
let me preface this by saying that I KNOW this kind of dissent is prevalent in every other religion on the planet, and that’s not stopping people from believing it (whatever “it” is) anyway, but it’s things like this that make me suspicious of ALL religions, and this one in particular.
and that’s also not to avoid the subject of “the really big” dissent, which is the difference between catholicism and protestantism, which far outweighs any other, relatively minor dissent that comes after it, but that also does nothing to negate the fact that these are two protestants who disagree with one another… one to the point of hanging up on an interviewer who has taken “the other side” of the argument, despite the fact that he really should be answering some of the questions the interviewer is asking.
if you haven’t figured it out by now, i’m talking about the feud that is brewing between hometown right-wing nut-job mark driscoll, and equally right-wing nut job, national “christian” broadcaster janet mefferd. i think it’s really instructive to see these two right-wing nut-jobs battle it out, to the point of one of them hanging up on the other one. quite apart from the fact that great peace have they which love thy law: and nothing shall offend them (psalm 119.165, hat tip to bruce gerencser for the reference) and mark driscoll definitely seems offended by janet mefferd’s line of inquiry, it’s not an athiest pointing out the fallacies of a “christian’s” argument, it’s two “christians” battling it out over who has the “right-er”, wrong position… 😐
as much as i hate to say it, i agree with janet mefferd this time. mark driscoll has some extreme soul searching to do, as well as quite a bit of going back over old publications to find the plagiarisms and footnoting them correctly… if nothing else.
and it makes me seriously wonder how anyone can take him seriously after this… i mean, my philosophy makes people think i’m out of my mind, and that’s okay with me. but mark driscoll preaching against plagiarism, while, at the same time, plagiarising, himself, follows what i believe in a technical sense, however, there are limits to how meaningless it can be, before it actually becomes meaningless… and it is my impression that mark driscoll crossed that line a while ago. any credibility that mark driscoll may have had disappeared a long, long time ago, and judging by how he responded to janet mefferd’s line of questioning, it’s not going to reappear again any time in the forseeable future.
i broke down and paid for a year of VPN service. now the IP address of my linux box is in stockholm, sweden, the IP address of my mac (which is in the same location) is in southhampton, england, and the IP address of my phone is in austin, texas. i imagine that this may present a bit of a problem when i log into the moisture festival artist’s WIFI, but i’ll deal with that as it happens, rather than worrying about it now.
i got an order for 50 boxes of aparajita from essence of the ages, which is run by what appears to be a “christian” woman. i don’t know why she’s buying incense from me (apart from the fact that i am the only vendor in the western hemisphere who sells what she wants to buy, and she has customers who want to buy what i have to sell) but i think it’s pretty amusing. the up side of it, for me, is that it makes the occasion of my buying my first incense from the actual distributor for sri satyanarayana parimala factory EVER, possible… 😎
the panto starts next week. we’re doing amazingly well. we had our first official, complete run-through last wednesday, and there are still two more rehearsals before we open. we’ve still got one more piece to learn before we open, but that’s pretty standard. and the shows have been selling out really quickly, which is really good.
my “old school” stereo system works exactly the way i was hoping it would, and tomorrow (or monday, at the latest) i plan on making a trip to pacific custom cabling to get another ⅛"-mini-stereo-to-stereo-RCA cable, and then both of my computers will be hooked up to it. for the first time EVER i will have a decent-quality stereo behind my attempts to compose music with reason and/or sibelius. what is the world coming to? 😉
i am in the process of putting together an old-school component stereo system. a long time ago, i had an old-school component stereo system, but it faded away over the period of a number of years, and has been entirely gone for some time now. but this is a new era. i have recently obtained a marantz amplifier:
and a pair of real “Realistic” speakers from the 1970s — 36″ speakers in solid wood cabinets — which i add to my already existing sony turntable and cassette player… and, unlike 30 years ago, i paid less than $300 for the entire lot! soon (like, hopefully, tomorrow) i will receive a mini-stereo-to-RCA cable, and 100′ of pure copper speaker wire, and i will put together the most KICK ASS stereo i have owned in a number of decades.
as you may or may not know from the news, george zimmerman has, once again, made headlines by doing something extraordinarily stupid for someone with as much public “rep” as he has currently, but that isn’t what i am referring to.
apparently the national report has a couple of articles, including Mainstream Media Falls for George Zimmerman HOAX – Social Media Abuzz and a poll whose question is Which Ethnicity Will George Zimmerman Murder Next?
under ordinary circumstances, i would think this was “too current” to make jokes about, but, at the same time, i think that george zimmerman deserves both to have people laugh at him, and to go to jail… and, i’m sure that, eventually, people will realise that the national report has about as much credibility as the onion, but considering how many people read articles from the onion and take them seriously, it wouldn’t surprise me too much if someone took this and ran with it…
… which would be HILARIOUS! 👿
Don’t Like Spam? Complain About It. — i have been a contributing member of spamcop for close to 10 years — since february, 2004, even before i was directly involved in the electronic communications industry — and, every now and then, i get the impression that what i am doing doesn’t actually accomplish anything… so when i read an article like the one linked above, it does me a world of good to see that people like brian krebs recommends that people use services like spamcop. it is also a good source of information that i wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else, like detailed information regarding the origins of the flashback worm, and the fact that people like me are labeled “abusers” by the people who send out spam…
what it comes down to, is that, if you’re fed up with spam arriving in your inbox, the best thing you can do to stem the tide, is to complain about it, early and often. you may not notice a significant change in the number of spam messages you receive, immediately, but over time, not only your personal allotment of spam will decrease, but the amount of spam everybody receives will decrease, and everybody will be happier…
well, everybody except the people who are really the abusers, but we don’t care about their feelings anyway. 😎
a long time ago, when i was a software tester for a living, i worked on a project where the software we were testing was called 3D Castle Creator, so, naturally, i built a model trebuchet with which i flung tennis balls into the far reaches of the cube-farm that was my office… but it was a simple medieval trebuchet.
the one i got today, is a modern “floating arm” trebuchet, and it can do a lot more with a lot less, let me tell you… 😀
i haven’t tested it yet, but the previous owner claims to have lobbed a golf-ball over 200 feet on a regular basis. 😎
i figured out stumbled across the method of making my mac accessible to my linux box that doesn’t include sftp, but does include smb. theoretically, i’ve got smb running on my linux box, as well (thus the ability to access my mac), but for some reason, my linux box doesn’t show up on my mac.
it’s nothing new. my mac has always shown up on my linux box, and my linux box has never shown up on my mac. the fact that i stumbled across the method of making my mac visible on my linux box indicates to me that it should be fairly easy to make the linux box visible from the mac…
but, so far, it hasn’t happened yet… 😐
Don’t panic: Earth has at least 1.75 billion years to go, scientists say — saying it like that makes it seem like there’s something that we, as living individuals, could do about it. putting it into a little more realistic perspective, i.e. 100 years is 3 to 4 generations, that is 52,500,000 to 70,000,000 GENERATIONS they think we will last until the sun gets too hot…
i’m pretty sure they will have completely forgotten about me, and my son, and his offspring, and their offspring, and their offspring, before we even have to think about worrying that we’re approaching the end of the world. we have a better chance of ending the world ourselves before then than we do actually lasting that long.
get over it. the sun is eventually going to get too hot for humans to live on earth, but, unless we act a lot more sensibly than we have been the past 2000 years, we’re very likely to drive ourselves into extinction a long time before that will happen.
i got my new laptop. it says it’s going to take 30 hours to transfer all the data. i don’t know whether this is good or bad.
several of my web hosting clients have been having trouble with their email not getting through, recently. i went through a frighteningly similar situation last year, which ended up with my moving my web sites, lock stock and CGI scripts, to another server with a different IP address… same host provider, just a different IP address. the reason was that, for some unexplained reason, the IP address kept getting listed in the CBL… which means that someone using that shared-hosting machine (not me, or any of my clients) was using it to sent spam.
the same thing has happened again. i complained, they suspended someone, it didn’t fix the problem, they told me that it takes time to propagate, i waited, it didn’t fix the problem, i complained again, they told me that it was an exim misconfiguration, that didn’t fix the problem, i complained again, they told me that they had written to the CBL to get answers…
well, guess what?
copied from the CBL home page: “There is no supporting data or “evidence” file available for any given listing, and no mechanism to ask why any given listing took place.”
so i wrote back to them, and said “whatever is causing the IP to be relisted hasn’t gone away, and won’t go away with you guys waiting for a response that won’t come.”
whereupon they closed the ticket with no further response.
maybe it’s time to start looking for a cheap VPS… 😐
things keep fixing themselves, and/or i find out how to fix them: i figured out how to make my secondary internal ext3 disk mount at boot, and the version of KDE that has the fix for the recently used documents bug came down the line a couple of days ago… there’s still some things that haven’t completely worked their way out yet, but i keep creeping up on where i used to be before “the disaster” happened.
on the other hand, i recently discovered that the IP address for hybridelephant.com (and all other domains that i host) has, once again, found itself on the CBL, and the sysadmins are just as clueless and stubborn about fixing it as they were last year. i reported the problem, and they immediately got back to me and said that they had suspended a suspicious user and that the problem was resolved. problem was, they didn’t actually fix the problem, and i told them so, with references to back up my case. once again, they told me the problem was solved, and that i shouldn’t worry about it. at the same time, my IP address was listed in the CBL, and had been for the past 14 hours. i pointed this out to them, and they told me that it was “a misconfigured exim” and that the problem really was resolved… now it’s just a matter of waiting to see if that really has fixed the problem. i’m not holding my breath, but so far it’s not been re-listed. we’ll see how it goes.
also, i bought a new (reconditioned) mac the other day. it’s allegedly going to be delivered on the 16th.
today i’ve was reading through my RSS feeds, and i came across several references, in widely different publications, about An Open Letter To Bigot Diners by Hajime Sato, sushi chef and owner of the local japanese restaurant Mashiko (and, coincidentally, also owner of Katsu Burger, which is a place i’ve driven by quite often, and wondered what the hell it was…), concerning the presence of caucasian female sushi chefs behind the bar of their authentic japanese restaurant.
being a fairly regular customer of another local japanese restaurant, Maneki, i was interested in reading through his “Open Letter…” and agreed with it wholeheartedly, but that’s not the funny part.
the funny part is that i commented that i didn’t know he also owned Katsu Burger, and then, i noticed a very familiar name on the comment just ahead of mine…
i find it very odd that both my father and i would be moved to comment on the same article within three hours of each other, with no other impetus than to voice our agreement with a third person, who neither of us know IRL…
i got my dropbox fixed. i still don’t know why or how, but at least it’s working. 😐
i just discovered that the issue with my “Recently Used Documents” menu is due to a bug in KDE4.11.0 which is why they’ve already released KDE4.11.1, but that doesn’t come until later… because apparently the KDE for kubuntu 12.04 is 4.8.5, which may mean that there’s something else bizarre going on… means that i have kubuntu backports ppa enabled (because of a problem that i was having with amarok, about a year ago) in my repositories list, and i’m not going to turn them off now… 😐
there’s a whole bunch of “new” information, via hobbit, regarding the linux compose key, which while not “new” to the world in general, is very new and interesting to me… and with a minimum amount of twangling, i got it set up. unfortunately, it doesn’t work when publishing to the web (which is not particuarly surprising), so a demonstration of it on this page would be extremely disappointing. 😉
i’ve apparently got my dropbox re-connected… but i’ve already tried the solution twice before, and it didn’t work, so i’m not really sure how i did it…
basically i de-installed dropbox, rebooted, and reinstalled dropbox. unlike the previous two times, it worked this time… 😐
demons… 😐
so, the battle of the computer is largely over, but there are a few weird things, that i suspect are going to be more and more annoying as time goes on and they don’t get fixed, but at the same time, they are practically impossible to describe, and i don’t know how i’m ever going to fix them if i can’t even describe them reliably.
there have been some peculiarities that i have been able to adjust: my default browser changed from firefox to rekonq in the System Settings, but nowhere else, and it went back to doing what it was supposed to once i changed it, but i had to check two or three other places, because it wasn’t changed in my email client or ANY of my browsers.
also, immediately after i recovered from “the disaster”, i noticed that some, but, curiously, not all of my email filters weren’t working. when i went into the “Configure Filters” dialogue, all of the filters were there, but they didn’t do anything. once i re-established the things that each of them were supposed to do, they all worked the way they were supposed to.
however, there are some things that worked fine before, are non-functional now, and i don’t have the first clue how to fix them:
before the disaster, when i opened a URL from my email client, it immediately switched to the browser, and proceded to open the URL without making any sound. after the disaster, it opens the URL in a new browser window, but it doesn’t immediately switch to it, and sometimes (but not always) it makes a “swishyswishy” sound that i haven’t been able to figure out where it’s coming from, and (naturally) haven’t been able to figure out how to turn it off.
before my disaster, i had the ability to change my volume by pushing buttons on my keyboard, but since the disaster, my sound system settings are completely wonky, the buttons on the keyboard no longer work, and i can’t figure out how to make them right: instead of having two channels in my “Volume” settings (in the systray), one of which controled the volume for everything, i have three, or four if there’s a youtube video in my browser, and one channel controls the settings for the system bell, another channel controls the volume in amarok, and one channel controls the volume in the youtube video… i believe that, when i’m using something like VLC Media Player, i can show another channel in my mixer.
there’s one, in particular, that i already find fairly annoying: i have a “K” menu (rather like the “Start” menu in windoesn’t, but not so confusing) in my task bar, which has a “Recently Used” tab –
but the fact is the recently used documents part of the tab hasn’t updated since i recovered my data… the recently used applications seems to work as expected, but the recently used documents hasn’t updated at all since i recovered my data.
i have a “0 B Removable Media” that appears to be a floppy drive in my devices menu, but i don’t have a floppy drive at all… i seem to recall being able to turn drives that i don’t have off in the devices menu, but there’s nothing in System Settings -> Removable Devices that does anything. also, my secondary internal drive, which should mount automatically at boot time, doesn’t actually mount until i click on it, at which point it demands a password before i can access any of its contents.
my “Dropbox” folder is no longer linked, and i can’t figure out how to re-link it. it was “moved” when it went from /media/home/salamandir/Dropbox to /media/salamandir/home/salamandir/Dropbox and when i finally figured out how to get it back to /media/home/salamandir/Dropbox it still told me that my dropbox folder wasn’t installed in the correct place, and instructed me to reinstall dropbox, but when i did, it didn’t do any good, so i “unlinked” my linux box from my dropbox account, and now i can’t figure out how to re-link it… BUT, for some unknown reason, my “Fremont Philharmonic” dropbox is still working the way i expect it to… which is REALLY weird…
okay, i’ve got my /media/home and /media/backup partitions back where they’re supposed to be, however… 😐
when i view /media/home with the file manager, what i see is two empty directories, /Desktop and /Downloads. however, when i right click and choose “Properties”, it tells me that 31.3GB are being used out of the 1TB partition, for 45,227 files…
which means that the data is there, i just can’t see it.
the technical side of the story is here for anyone who is interested. it continues to develop. my guess is that, soon, i’ll have all of my data back…
either that, or i won’t. 😛
ETA: the battle of the computer is over. i have won, once again… i just wish the computer could get the idea that it’s not good to anger the creator…
there has been enough stress in the past 3 days to last me a few years… i wasn’t kidding about taking a break from computers for a while. at this point, email/RSS and posting on my own blog about stuff is verging on too much. we’ll see about other things as they come up, but… 😐
i haven’t turned on my linux box in two days. i’ve been afraid to turn it on, because something might happen to change the already tenuous hold i have on the concept that, maybe, possibly things can be made right without losing all of my data for the past two years.
during the past two days, i have discovered that KDE (the window manager for kubuntu) has changed the way it mounts USB drives, from /media/drive to /media/username/drive (which has actually been a standard with ubuntu for a couple of years now, and KDE is only “just catching up”). the way to force the system to go back to “the old way” of doing things, is to sudo make a text file with a VERY SPECIFIC filename, that contains a single line of arcane gibberish (the text is actually ENV{ID_FS_USAGE}=="filesystem", ENV{UDISKS_FILESYSTEM_SHARED}="1"
), and then sudo reload the process that looks at that file.
which is, pretty much, what i expected the answer was going to be: a very simple line of code that causes the operating system to do something so far under the radar that ordinary “normal” computer users wouldn’t be able to figure it out in a million years.
once i have my drives mounting in the place that they’re supposed to mount, i don’t know for sure what comes next, but it includes the possibility of removing my ~/.kde directory and then rebooting, which will cause kde to re-create a “default” of all of the system settings (including my home directory, and all of my paths)… at which point, it is remotely possible that all of my lost data will suddenly reappear.
that is the best case scenario, and the one that i am hoping will happen. i haven’t actually done it yet, because i’m still working out the details… “doing the leg work” is what moe says… but i’m hoping that, tomorrow at the earliest, my linux box will be back up and running again.
a while back — a year and a half ago, or thereabouts — i decided that i was going to make a separate directory, on an external hard disk, that contained all of my essential data, data that i had created, so that when i upgraded my system, i wouldn’t face the potential of losing everything when a system upgrade didn’t go the way it was supposed to… and, the last time i did a major upgrade of my system, it worked exactly the way i expected it to work, and i was very happy.
basically, instead of my “home” directory being at /home/salamandir on the primary hard disk of the computer, i had a home directory at /media/home/salamandir and everything was fine, i just had to remember to change directories when i was downloading something, because i knew (from first-hand experience) that if i forgot, and downloaded to /home/salamandir/Downloads i would have difficulty finding the data afterwards.
so i did the intermediary system upgrades on my linux box, yesterday. it wasn’t a full upgrade, but there were some more things than normal, and it “hung up” when it got to the point where it asked me if i wanted to keep the configuration file that “i” had “modified”, or if i wanted to download a new configuration file, but when i answered that i wanted to keep the configuration file that “i” had “modified”, the installation procedure proceded as normal.
then i rebooted my computer, because i like to do that, to make sure there aren’t any delayed configurations, or things that don’t get installed at reboot that aren’t working the way they’re supposed to, and that’s where the problems started.
i rebooted, and the first thing i noticed was that the external disks, including the 3TB disk that i have partitioned into a “home” and a “backup” partition, weren’t mounting the way they were supposed to. i didn’t notice this until later, but the reason why the “home” and “backup” partitions weren’t mounting correctly was because, for some (as yet unknown) reason, they had been converted from /media/home and /media/backup to /media/salamandir/home and /media/salamandir/backup
what this meant in the short run is that it couldn’t find the directory that contains my wallpaper graphics, and my “dropbox” folder was “moved” from where it was supposed to be.
this would have been an entirely different problem if i had noticed that immediately, but as it is, i tried to re-establish my directories where they should be, and succeeded only in overwriting (or something, i still don’t know what) the directory in /media/salamandir/home/salamandir — which is where ALL my data from the LAST time this happened, now lives… because i was under the impression that if i kept my data on an external hard drive, that it would be safe from random deletion and/or disasters… like this one is turning out to be.
/media/salamandir/backup (which contains backups of my “real” home directory: i.e. configuration files and nothing else) is still intact, /media/salamandir/home/salamandir-new (a directory i created when i was still trying to deal with the loss of data the last time) is still intact, but /media/salamandir/home/salamandir is NOT intact… which includes all of the printing clients that i have worked for in the past year-and-a-half, ALL of my genealogy data, a huge pile of my (irreplaceable) music files, and who knows what else.
the only good part about this whole thing is that i BELIEVE all of the data is still there: usually it takes a while for the computer to actually delete a couple of gigabytes of information (which /media/salamandir/home/salamandir certainly is), and it didn’t actually do anything that seems like actual deleting, so what i suspect is that i just overwrote the file that tells the computer where everything is, and if i could just replace that, everything would be cool…
but, so far, i haven’t been able to figure out how to do that. 😐
the last time this happened, my computer was down for 5 days, and it was only because of the fact that i was willing to let go of a whole bunch of my data that things eventually made their way back to “normal” again. i’m pretty sure i DON’T want to go through that again. 😐
i think it’s time for me to take a break from my computer for a few weeks… possibly longer… 😐
the <blink> tag has been removed from the latest version of firefox (mozilla).
i wouldn’t have noticed it if it weren’t for the fact that i just used it the other day in a rare fit of rage against spammers…
i’m sure there are other, more correct ways to create the blink effect using CSS or something like that, and, because of the fact that <blink> was originally introduced as a netscape “extension” to HTML, i’ve never been particurlarly fond of it, but it was convenient, if nothing else…
The Egg
By Andy Weir
You were on your way home when you died.
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
And that’s when you met me.
“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”
“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.
“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”
“Yup,” I said.
“I… I died?”
“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.
You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”
“More or less,” I said.
“Are you god?” You asked.
“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”
“My kids… my wife,” you said.
“What about them?”
“Will they be all right?”
“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”
You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”
“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”
“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”
“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”
“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”
You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”
“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”
“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”
“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”
I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.
“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”
“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”
“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”
“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”
“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”
“Where you come from?” You said.
“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”
“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”
“So what’s the point of it all?”
“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”
“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.
I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”
“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”
“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”
“Just me? What about everyone else?”
“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”
You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”
“All you. Different incarnations of you.”
“Wait. I’m everyone!?”
“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.
“I’m every human being who ever lived?”
“Or who will ever live, yes.”
“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”
“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.
“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.
“And you’re the millions he killed.”
“I’m Jesus?”
“And you’re everyone who followed him.”
You fell silent.
“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”
You thought for a long time.
“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”
“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”
“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”
“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”
“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”
“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”
And I sent you on your way.
Jimmy Carter Defends Edward Snowden, Says NSA Spying Has Compromised Nation’s Democracy – i didn’t like him when he was president, but since then he has done a surprising 180 for a lot of things, and i like that about him…
Frostbite is good for arthritis AND depression!
i was going to post yesterday, but then i spent two nights ago not sleeping very well and having dreams that i wished i wasn’t having — and waking up on more than one occasion, specifically to end a particularly annoying dream, only to have it resume, more or less, when i succeeded in getting back to sleep — so when i finally got up yesterday i was already in a sour mood… and then i turned on my computer and the sour mood increased about ten-fold, which was not made any better by the fact that i couldn’t get my backups to work the way i wanted to, because of the fact that the crack used a “new, different” way of intruding, which the host provider was less than forthcoming about explaining…
i actually had everything fixed by 11:00 am or so, but my mood was so bad, and it was so hot, that, by that time, all i wanted to do was watch the god-damned-noisy-box, smoke cannabis and drink… first mountain dew, then water, then beer. seriously, the temperatures have been in the low-90s and upper-80s, but it has been more humid than i have ever seen before (around here, it’s par for the course in illinois and alabama), and the overall effect is that the temperature is oppressively hot, which made the god-damned-noisy-box even more inviting… if i had a swimming pool, it be a lot better…
but, unfortunately, if i had a swimming pool, realistically, it would only get used a week or so a year, and the rest of the time i would have to maintain it… so it’s probably better this way… it’s a lot more realistic to dream of a sauna, because i’d use that year round EXCEPT for the really hot days…
anyway, if i had posted yesterday, this would have been that post:
the oregon country fair is in a little more than a week. i had in mind to distribute QR code stickers for music at the fair, but they haven’t even contacted me with a shipping date yet, and i placed the order almost a month ago. so THIS is the reason why NOT to use StickerRobot when time is sensitive. they may make the best stickers in the world (for all i know, they haven’t delivered them yet), but if a simple, square, black-and-white sticker takes them a month, i am less than impressed.
the panto this year is Dick Whittington, which i have wanted to do for two years now. it should be a great show, although i haven’t seen it yet. we’ve got some of the music, we’re getting more tonight, and, as usual, we’re probably going to get new music when we arrive at the fair… at this point, the fact that we’ve never performed the panto all the way through, even once, doesn’t faze me very much… we have almost exactly the same routine every year, and it invariably comes out on the other end as a finished work of art. the real fun is working together to make it a work of art… and the reactions of the audiences when we perform.
this is being posted from my phone, at the beach! 😎
so, you know what an escape sequence is, right? an escape sequence is a series of characters that you can type on a standard keyboard, which represent characters which cannot be typed from a standard keyboard. for most places in the first 255 ASCII character codes you can actually represent a character with either an escape sequence or a character entity. the escape sequence is the numerical value of the character, and the character entity is a word that describes the character. for example, the character Ð can be represented either with the escape sequence Ð or with the character entity Ð
in the same way, i have found that by adding an x to the equation, you can represent the characters using the hexidecimal equivalant, thus Ð can also be represented by Ð
neet, huh? 😎 ॐቱ༊⊚⡺孻
so it begs the question… if you can represent characters in hex by adding x, what do you have to add to represent the characters in binary? presumably it would be the delimiters &# then something followed by the binary equivalent of 208 – which would be 11010000 – and then the end delimiter ;
but what? that’s what i wonder…
i have reasons for wondering this. i’ve found that even hexidecimal escape sequences are able to be read by spambots… but i’d be willing to bet that they haven’t cracked binary… yet… 😎
Canadian drug policy experts recommend decriminalizing all drugs
By Stephen C. Webster
Thursday, May 23, 2013
In a report issued Thursday (PDF), a group of Canadian drug policy experts at the Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction recommend that the Harper administration immediately take up decriminalization of all drugs as the first step toward fundamentally reforming the nation’s drug war to fight addiction instead of the Canadian people.
“While countries all around the world are adopting forward-thinking, evidence-based drug policies, Canada is taking a step backwards and strengthening punitive policies that have been proven to fail,” experts wrote, noting the Harper administration’s hard rightward swing.
The administration recently joined U.S. drug warriors in focusing military assets on eradicating drug crops in south America, even after the prime minister himself admitted that the drug war “is not working.”
“The findings of this report, based on interviews with changemakers and service providers, and scans of important documents and research, reveals that Canada is at a crossroads when it comes to drug laws and policies,” the report’s executive summary explains. “A new direction in drug policy is required. We can continue to work within the paradigm of drug prohibition or we can begin to explore alternative approaches and chart a new course that can help save lives, respect human rights and be more cost effective.”
Their top recommendation, mentioned before all others, is the decriminalization of all currently illicit substances for personal use, along with the establishment of a regulatory system that allows adults to responsibly use marijuana. Once that’s done, experts recommended working to reduce the stigmas associated with people who use drugs in order to help overcome some of the social barriers addicts face in seeking treatment.
Likely their most controversial recommendation is step three: harm reduction policies, like supplying clean needles to heroin addicts and clean pipes for crack cocaine users, making drug-replacement therapies available to opoid users, and even allowing heroin addicts a sterile injection site with medically pure, measured doses, then following up with the patient about rehabilitation services.
“Canada has good people working at every level from front line services and organizations to provincial and federal ministries, whose efforts are severely hampered by fear, lack of leadership, and poorly informed policies based on outdated ideas and beliefs about drugs and the people who use them,” they wrote. “At the same time, a global movement of sitting and former political leaders is emerging that acknowledges the over-reliance on the criminal law in addressing drug problems is causing more harm than good.”
“Canada must join the chorus of voices around the globe calling for change,” the summary concludes. “This report is a call for Canadians to meet these challenges head-on with creative thinking and brave policy changes.”
Patients of ‘dirty’ Oklahoma oral surgeon test positive for hepatitis and HIV
i just got a letter from the clinic. they want me to have another colonoscopy…
i don’t THINK so… 😡
i am not completely sure this post is as accurate as it was when i first posted it, so it’s coming down for now, until i determine whether it’s actually true or not.
Michelle Shocked or Ted Nugent?
35 years ago, it was my impression that these people were FUCKING SCREWED UP… now… they’re so far beyond FUCKING SCREWED UP that there are no words to describe it. but, strangely enough, both of these people are not FUCKING SCREWED UP in the way that i would have expected 35 years ago…
my understanding is that they’re both “christians”… i recently found out that the word “cretin” originally started out life as a coloquial european pronunciation of “christian” which was used to mean something like “everyman”, and that it eventually got applied to dwarves and the mentally infirm…
and to aging wannabe rock stars, apparently…
i bit the bullet the other day, and submitted to trading in my (perfectly functional, but hopelessly obsolete) semi-smart phone — an LG VX8575 — for a somewhat-less-obsolete, actually "smart" phone, an iPhone 4.
and, while i’m not immediately won over and become a born-again mac fanboi, i’m not totally repulsed, either. it’s far-and-away a better music player than ANY other device i have ever owned. it (naturally) has the ability to talk wirelessly, using a couple of different protocols, to our apple TV sound system, and it has an eight megapixel camera that does okay in sunlight, or strong room lighting, but (as far as i have been able to determine, so far) does LOUSY at low-light, long shutter speed stuff — which means that, once again, i will be taking my SLR to OCF again this year, in order to take decent, low-light pictures. it interfaces with my google calender — a good thing — and my google email (which i never use), and it wants me to sign up for all of these social media services with which i want to have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do, and i have already gone in and gutted it’s ability to mine whatever information i do give it. it has the ability, with the help of a convenient web site, to play ring tones made out of whatever tracks i like, and so, naturally, my phone now sports a complete set of frank zappa ringtones: The Torture Never Stops for moe, and I’m The Slime for everyone else. 😎
although i have already downloaded several “apps” (a “flickr app”, an instrument tuner, and a “retro pinball” game), i don’t intend to buy into the mass marketing hype, and probably won’t download more than i already have… although i might download angry birds… 😉
Strange but True: Males Can Lactate
Unless you are an Indonesian fruit bat, though, it probably won’t happen naturally
By Nikhil Swaminathan
September 6, 2007
In late 2004 the Internet Movie Database reported that Dustin Hoffman suddenly had the urge to breast-feed. Had the then-67-year-old Hoffman—who brought mainstream culture face to face with autism in Rain Man and went mano a mano with an Ebola-like filovirus in Outbreak—never quite broken character from his 1982 film Tootsie? Nope. He was just really keen to help out with his first grandchild.
Interestingly, he could have possibly lent a helping, er, breast, if he had held the suckling newborn to his nipples for a couple weeks – although he could also have tried starving himself or taking a medication that would affect his brain’s pituitary gland.
There have been countless literary descriptions of men miraculously breast-feeding, from The Talmud to Tolstoy, where, in Anna Karenina, there is a short anecdote of a baby suckling an Englishman for sustenance while on board a ship. The little anthropological evidence documented suggests it is possible. In the 1896 compendium Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, George Gould and Walter Pyle catalogue several instances of male nursing being observed. Among them was a South American man, observed by Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who subbed as wet nurse after his wife fell ill as well as male missionaries in Brazil that were the sole milk supply for their children because their wives had shriveled breasts. More recently, Agence France-Presse reported a short piece in 2002 on a 38-year-old man in Sri Lanka who nursed his two daughters through their infancy after his wife died during the birth of her second child.
In her 1978 book The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding, medical anthropologist Dana Raphael claimed that men could induce lactation simply by stimulating their nipples. The eminent endocrinologist Robert Greenblatt of the Medical College of Georgia concurred. But Jack Newman, a Toronto-based doctor and breast-feeding expert, insists that in order to produce milk, a hormone spike must occur. “That Tolstoy quote suggests that the father just put the baby to the breast and he would produce milk; I think that’s pretty unlikely,” he says. “It could be that you have this man with this pituitary tumor and he produces milk once the baby starts suckling.”
Newman explains that medical disruptions involving prolactin, the hormone necessary to produce milk, have resulted in spontaneous lactation. Thorazine, a popular antipsychotic used in the mid-20th century, impacted the pituitary gland—the pea-size endocrine gland located near the base of the brain—often causing it to overproduce prolactin. If prolactin levels remained high, milk could follow. According to Newman, lactation is listed as a possible side effect of the heart medication digoxin. A pituitary tumor could also induce milk production: “It would be the same reason—increased prolactin levels in the one case drug-induced, in the other due to a tumor or some other sort of neurological problem.”
In a 1995 article for Discover titled “Father’s Milk,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one-time physiologist Jared Diamond reconciles the nipple stimulation and hormone quandary, pointing out that such stimulation can release prolactin. He also notes that starvation — which inhibits the functioning of hormone-producing glands as well as the hormone-absorbing liver — can cause spontaneous lactation, as observed in survivors of Nazi concentration camps and Japanese POW camps in World War II. “The glands recover much faster than the liver when normal nutrition is resumed,” he writes, “so hormone levels soar unchecked.”
Males of many different mammalian species have the potential to lactate, although only one, the Dayak fruit bat of Southeast Asia, does so spontaneously. Diamond points out, however, that with the societal norm of fathers helping to rear their young, male milk production could actually be to our advantage, especially with all the career women trying to balance the demands of job and family. Why else would men still have nipples?
“Up until a certain age, boys and girls, as fetuses, are indistinguishable, really, so women retain some remnants of the vas deferens, which is the canal that sperm follows,” Newman answers. “If you have no Y chromosome, then certain hormones are released that say, ‘Okay, we’ll set up this child’s breast tissue to develop at puberty so that she will be able to produce milk.’ Men didn’t [secrete those hormones], so we don’t usually have breast tissue.”
“Actually a significant number of boys around the age of puberty do develop breasts,” he continues, “so the tissue is there, but it regresses.” In short, men may not have full-fledged breasts but they certainly can lactate, under extreme circumstances.
so i finally got up the nerve, and got frustrated enough with kubuntu that i tried to switch distributions. i have already moved my “real” home directory (which is at /media/home/salamandir ) to another partition, and backed up my “actual” home directory (which is at /home/salamandir ) and put the debian squeeze live disk in… and it looked really pretty, so i clicked the “Debian Installer” icon. it gathered the appropriate information, and then…
HUNG UP when it got to the “Starting the partitioner” window…
TWICE!!
because of the fact that i was running a “live disk”, i was able to figure out how to switch tasks: hitting “ctrl + esc” brings up the system processes window and from that, you’re given a task bar, which has a “close” selection when you right-click on the tasks, and then you’re back at the “live disk” desktop. i tried it again, just to make sure, and it hung up in exactly the same place…
i have been subscribed to the KDE-PIM mailing list for long enough that i have actually seen a person who said he had to downgrade from Kontact 4.8.5 (which is the version i am currently running) because there were so many bugs. i haven’t been able to find out any details on exactly how he did this, and i can’t seem to get any response from the mailing list. i have sent two messages, one subject line was “switching distributions, but keeping KDE… how do i migrate my email?” to which there were no responses, and one subject line was “kmail dispatcher agent is not remembering my SMTP password” which contained a detailed bug report… which has gotten NO responses… 😡
so now i don’t know whether i actually am going to upgrade to debian. at least with kubuntu, there’s a forum that offers some support…
i’m getting more and more convinced that what i really SHOULD do is drop kubuntu all together, and install debian with KDE. kmail is still doing bizarre, but not really obtrusive things, like “forgetting” my password, and losing mail if i move the folder that it’s in somewhere else. amarok still randomly stops playing occasionally, and crashes rather than shutting down “nicely” EVERY TIME… there are all kinds of minor annoyances that have crept into kubuntu that i strongly suspect would not be there in debian, and with KDE, i wouldn’t have to learn new software. the only thing i’m skeptical about is whether or not i will be able to transfer my mail to the new system, and (once again) whether or not i would be able to get all of my genealogical data back… both of those things are items that i could have the answers to, if i wrote to the appropriate user groups, i just haven’t gotten around to it.
i had two gigs over the weekend: one with snake suspenderz at the gage drawing jam, and one with the sousa band at the phinney holiday festival. the gage was more or less as advertised, i.e. we sat in the back of the room and nobody paid attention to us, but there was no free beer this year. we made $50 a piece (because our drummer was not there). the gig at phinney was more crowded and chaotic than it has been in the past, because they put in an elevator and a fire-escape in the places where we used to fill up the hall, so they had to twist everything ninety degrees, which made the stage about a quarter of the size it used to be…
really, honestly, if they don’t provide us more roomy accomodations next year, i won’t be going. it’s crowded and chaotic enough already, but expecting a 40-piece band to fit in a room that is only big enough for about 75 people, and then cramming 200 more people into the space (most of whom aren’t even attending the concert in the first place), SIMPLY DOESN’T WORK… 😐
i’ve got a new web design client, for whom i’ve also (already) made business cards… and there’s a good chance that i will make at least 4 more business cards for him, and, once he gets is ducks in a row, there’s even a possibility that i will be doing a lot more printing for him as well. at this point, i haven’t done a lot with the web design part of it, in spite of the fact that he paid me what i consider to be A LOT of money up front which i haven’t even come close to spending yet… and it appears as though i may not have to do any of the actual design part of the job anyway. a member of the fremont players does web design “on the side” and knows A LOT more about HTML5 than i do, and, because of the fact that this guy has already paid me what i consider to be A LOT of money, i can actually afford to pay her $20 an hour to do the web design for me. 😎
today is the fifth anniversary of my starting this blog. for the record, i’m still SO GLAD i got away from LiveJournal, despite the fact that i have a lot of friends who still use it.
i haven’t switched out the system on my computer yet, primarily because, after flipping out yesterday, it has settled down again, and isn’t producing the kind of errors that were making me think about switching distributions… but i’ve still got the debian live disk, and i’m just waiting for an excuse to wipe the whole system and try another one.
i’ve spent the past couple of days cleaning up my workshop. i have a lot of empty glass bottles waiting to be made into bongs on my main workbench, and a whole bunch of painting stuff left over from the summertime on my jewelry-making workbench, which i cleaned up to the point where i can actually work on both workbenches. i’ve got a whole bunch of things that could be made into earrings or pendants, but no real motivation to make anything out of them, despite the fact that the holidays are rapidly approaching.
also, after having a number of difficulties getting emails to and from the lady who actually did the work, i now have 10 Big Boys With Poise jacket patches which i’m going to distribute to the other Big Boys (and other people) at monday’s rehearsal.
i’ve “backed out” a number of adjustments that i made to my computer’s “appearance”, and that “appears” to have “fixed” whatever problems i was having with the email database… at least, so far today, i haven’t seen the “Retrieving folder contents” page, which was a common occurrence yesterday. at this point i strongly suspect the "GTK+ Appearance" changes, because i’ve made pretty much every other change with no consequences, but when i mess around with GTK+, my system goes wonky…
i suppose it’s sort of understandable, since i am using KDE and not GNOME, but if it was really that wonky, i wonder why they put it in to begin with. 😐
ON THE OTHER HAND… the debian live disk looks REALLY pretty on my mac, and usually the live disks don’t do very well on my mac… it even started a wireless network connection without too much difficulty… options, options… 😉
so, abruptly, and for no very obvious reasons, my email client – which has been Kmail/Kontact for at least the past four years – has suddenly decided to be extremely slow reading the database – it puts up a “Kmail – Retrieving folder contents: Please wait…” page instead of displaying the selected message, sometimes for minutes at a time, sometimes actually crashing the program – combined with, randomly putting up a “Conflict resolution” error message that says that two different versions of a particular message (so far it’s been messages that i’ve already moved to the trash) exist, and wants me to determine which version of them to keep. also, it has taken up to five minutes to send an email message. i hit the “send” button, and the message just hangs there, not being sent to the “Sent Mail” folder, but i can’t edit it, or cancel sending, or do anything with the kontact interface until the message has disappeared.
this combined with the serious problems i have been having with amarok that are already fixed in the next version, which won’t be made available unless i upgrade the system to the next (non-LTS) version, have forced me to consider the option of switching distributions.
i have been considering debian for a long time: it is the operating system on which ubuntu/kubuntu is based, and it is one of the more stable distributions that i know of… but it is because they don’t update it as frequently. i’m not exactly sure where they are compared with what i need today, but i can’t imagine that they’d be too far behind where i am now. i already use a bunch of debian system-level controls instead of the ones provided by kubuntu, because i know they work better. i would have to learn how to install KDE, because, in spite of everything, i’m still the most comfortable with a familiar interface, but i get the impression that it’s really not that difficult.
ETA: it comes with KDE already installed, as one of the options, and after reading through the installation guide, it doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult to install. i’m downloading a live disk of it now. 😉
now that the battle of the computer is fading into the background, i actually have time to rant about other things. there’s still a few things that are wonky about the new operating system: amarok still has problems when i first start it up. it doesn’t show all of the current track’s tags until i “nudge” it a little bit, and when i close it down, i select “File -> Quit” and it quits, but it also shows a crash error shortly afterwards… i’ve tried to report the crash error (because it happenes EVERY time), but they say it’s fixed in the next version… which won’t be available for kubuntu 12.04.1 (Precise Pangolin) but is currently available for kubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) which i am not going to upgrade to, because it is not a “Long Term Support” version… also, for some unknown reason, amarok gives up and has to be restarted. it’s frustrating, but nowhere near as frustrating as playing multiple tracks at the same time, and not stopping when i select “File -> Quit”, which is what it had started doing prior to the system upgrade…
Snake Suspenderz played a gig at Wine World yesterday, as a part of our “official duties” as the “Official SACBO Band”. we played for 3 hours, and got “paid” with pizza, munchies, and all of the wine or beer we could sample. we should definitely play more frequently, but getting the entire band together is a chore i don’t want to undertake myself, because it would get really frustrating, really quickly, and then i wouldn’t want to do it any longer. 😐 we have upcoming shows on 1st december, 2012 at the drawing jam at the gage, and 10th january, 2013 at Smokin’ Pete’s Barbecue, but prior to that, our last gig was in august at the can can, and we haven’t all been in the same room since then, before yesterday…
i’m not exactly sure how, but i got my sound working on my computer! 😎
i think at least part of it is because the buttons in kubuntu 12.04.1 don’t actually look like buttons. they don’t have any clue that they can be selected, and don’t have outlines or anything that make them look like they can be selected… they just look like little icons. once i discovered that they are, in fact, buttons, i pushed one and, voilá!! my sound worked again!
unconditional victory has been achieved in the battle of the computer! 😀
i got my genealogical research back! 😀
i was looking at the .gramps file… i should have been looking at the .gramps subdirectory of my (backed-up) home directory.
instead of starting up gramps and making a “new” database, what i should have done is moved the old .gramps folder into my new home directory. because of the fact that i started gramps before i knew that, i already had a .gramps directory, so i found the old one and over-wrote the new directory.
of course, once i had the up-to-date version of the database open, i went in and told it where the new location of all my media sources were, and it said “oh, look… correct information… munch munch munch…” and it was back up and running in no time…
AND the new version of gramps has a “Create Backup” option, which saves ALL of the information, so i don’t have to freak out again… 😉
the sound still doesn’t work, but i’m on the trail of tracking down a solution, and i’m already futzing around with possibilities for retrieving my email, address book, and rss feeds… things are looking up.
😡
somehow i managed to lose about ¾ of the genealogical research i have done over the past four years or so…
and, yes, i thought that the files that i needed were a part of the backup that i had been making every two weeks for the past four years… apparently they were not… 😐
and i still haven’t got my sound working, in spite of the fact that i reinstalled from scratch…
😡
i’m installing clean. it’s too much of a hassle, and i’m too old and tired to be FUCKING around with a machine that doesn’t do what i want.
BUT unlike last time, i only lost my address book… and all of my old emails back to 2009 (which is the last time it happened). and, because of the fact that i backed up all of my email directories, i MAY not have even lost them, but if i did, so be it. it wouldn’t be the first time.
the time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things. of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings. of why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings…
no, no, no… that’s not right… 😐
the time has come to upgrade my computer from kubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), which was the last LTS version of kubuntu, to the latest LTS version of kubuntu (12.04.1: Precise Pangolin), because the version of amarok that i am currently running (2.4.0) will no longer upgrade, and it has decided to do EXTREMELY STRANGE things, like playing multiple tracks at the same time, and not stopping playback when i select “file -> quit”…
this is being posted from my mac, as my linux box begins the upgrade process. the last time i went through this, several years ago, it took four days before my linux box was working correctly. i’m hoping that, this time, it will be a more painless process.
we will see.
ETA: the system upgrade seems to have gone okay, but i’m still having difficulty getting my mail to migrate. there’s apparently a known problem with migration to kmail 4.7, but mine is (now) 4.8, and it is still giving me a “Migration of kmailrc has already run, not running it again” message, after failing to run a migration. i’ve deleted and re-created my akonadi/mysql configuration, and have discovered a web page that has a description of a possible solution, but i’m still waiting for my most recent backup to open so that i can retrieve the old mailboxes (i knew this was going to happen, so i backed up all of my mail directories) and re-deposit them in the new “correct” place…
also, i still haven’t tried the new amarok yet, but i’m pretty sure it couldn’t be worse than multiple tracks of everything from wildman fischer to karlheinz stockhausen playing all at the same time.
ETA x2: i think i may do what i planned originally, which is to wipe the disk and install a clean system, instead of upgrading… the new version of amarok doesn’t work at all — or, rather, it plays music files, but no sound comes out of the speakers… i’m pretty sure if i installed clean, this would work the way it’s supposed to… 😐
Perpetual Energy-Wasting Machine — or, more acurately, “Electricity Wasting Machine With Limited Perpetuation”, but whatever…
ALSO:
Akron City Hall Evacuated After Man Named ‘Kaboom’ Leaves Walking Stick — the man’s name was — get this — ‘Natural Hunka Kaboom’… what can i say? 😀
i need the 3rd trombone part for a march that we are playing in the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band. i have searched all over internet for it, and finally i found a place that offers it for sale — by itself (i.e. i don’t have to buy the entire score) — but they only offer it through “digital print”, which is to say, i pay money, and they offer me a way to display it on my computer screen (i.e. “digital”) and supposedly print it once from my screen… which is fine, i can display it on my screen without a problem. the problem is when i come to print it, the software downloads, but then it flashes a message that says “There has been a download error. Do you wish to try again?” and doesn’t get any further than that. 😐 so i call them up, and tell them what browser i’m using and they recommend that i use internet exploder…
hah… hah… 😐
apparently their software that prints from an adobe acrobat file is ONLY usable on “windows and mac OS”…
cool, i have a machine that runs mac os… unfortunately their software doesn’t run on that, either. so i try a windows VMWare box on my wife’s computer (which is a mac)… with internet exploder no less, but it doesn’t work there, either… 😐
so i call my friend rick, who owns an actual windows machine, with internet exploder, and ask him to see if he can get the software to print. after some seemingly encouraging preliminary tries with the software, i even went and picked him up and brought him back to my place so that we could use my printer, because he doesn’t have one… however, it turns out that it doesn’t work on a dedicated machine running exactly the right software, either.
when i talked to the guy on the telephone, he said that “digital print is a new application that they’re trying out” and that “it doesn’t work for everyone”… at this point, i would be surprised if it worked reliably for anyone, but that’s also taking into account the fact that, when i was a software tester, all i had to do was be in the same room with a test machine in order to make it malfunction in some unexpected and entirely un-reproducible way…
at the same time, i understand that sousa was one of the founders of ASCAP, and that he was one of the progenitors of what we now know as copyright law, but at the same time, it was my impression that most of, if not all of sousa’s music was in the public domain, so i don’t really understand why this company can get away with being the ONLY source of this particular 3rd trombone part… and also i really wonder why they can ONLY sell me a “digital print” version, but they can’t send me a printed copy or a .pdf file that i can print outside of their defective web-based program.
i looked online to find out if there’s anybody locally that carries acqua della madonna, which made the extra fancy blue bottle out of which i made a water pipe. apparently, “THIS BRAND HAS BEEN DISCONTINUED“. the company that makes it, Acetosella, has a web site that is entirely made out of shockwave/flash applications, and when you click their “Acqua della Madonna” link, they come back with “Pagina in costruzione”… which, considering that the bottle i’ve got seems to indicate that it was filled in 1999, makes it very likely that they no longer make acqua della madonna…
to me this is an indication of one of two possibilities: the first possibility is that i keep the bong water pipe for myself (which is extremely likely, since it is a very cute bottle-bong)… the second possibility is that i sell it for $75 pr more, because it is no longer made… which would be nice, but i don’t expect it to happen.
when i was in training to be a tech support drone for microsoft, they told us that “in 10 years, the default format for all web documents will be the microsoft word .doc format”…
it is now more than 10 years later (actually, it is almost 20 years later), and Google kills support for old MS file formats in Google Apps…
i knew when i heard it that micro-slop was having a pipe-dream, believing that their proprietary document format was going to become a public standard…
Peace Be Upon You
Internet videos will insult your religion. Ignore them.
By William Saletan, Sept. 14, 2012
Dear Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Jews,
You’re living in the age of the Internet. Your religion will be mocked, and the mockery will find its way to you. Get over it.
If you don’t, what’s happening this week will happen again and again. A couple of idiots with a video camera and an Internet connection will trigger riots across the globe. They’ll bait you into killing one another.
Stop it. Stop following their script.
Today, fury, violence, and bloodshed are consuming the Muslim world. Why? Because a bank fraud artist in California offered people $75 a day to come to his house and act out scenes that ostensibly had nothing to do with Islam. Then he replaced the audio, putting words in the actors’ mouths, and stitched together the scenes to make an absurdly bad movie ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed. He put out flyers to promote the movie. Nobody — literally nobody — came to watch it.
He posted a 14-minute video excerpt of the movie on YouTube, but hardly anyone noticed. Then, a week ago, an anti-Muslim activist in Virginia reposted the video with an Arabic translation and sent the link to activists and journalists in Egypt. An Egyptian TV show aired part of the video. An Egyptian politician denounced it. Clerics sounded the alarm. Through Facebook and Twitter, protesters were mobilized to descend on the U.S. embassy in Cairo. The uprising spread. The U.S. ambassador to Libya has been killed, and violence has engulfed other countries.
When the protests broke out, the guy who made the movie claimed to be an Israeli Jew funded by other Jews. That turned out be a lie. Now he says he’s a Coptic Christian, even though Coptic Christian leaders in Egypt and the United States despise the movie and want nothing to do with him. Another guy who helped make the movie claims to be a Buddhist. The movie was made in the United States, yet Sudanese mobs have attacked British and German embassies. Some Egyptians targeted the Dutch embassy, mistakenly thinking the Netherlands was behind the movie. Everyone’s looking for a group to blame and attack.
The men behind the movie said it would expose Islam as a violent religion. Now they’re pointing to the riots as proof. Muslims are "pre-programmed" to rage and kill, says the movie’s promoter. "Islam is a cancer," says the director. According to the distributor, "The violence that it caused in Egypt is further evidence of how violent the religion and people are and it is evidence that everything in the film is factual."
Congratulations, rioters. You followed the script perfectly. You did the propagandists’ work for them.
And the provocations won’t end here. Laws and censors won’t protect you from them. Liberal democracies allow freedom of expression. Our leaders and people condemn garbage like this video, but we don’t censor it. Even if we did, the diffusion of media technology makes suppression impossible. The director of this movie was forbidden, under his bank-fraud probation rules, from using computers or the Internet without approval. That didn’t stop him. Nor did it stop the Arabic-language distributor from reposting the video and disseminating it abroad.
Online propaganda is speech. But it’s also part of the global rise of lethal empowerment. It’s easier than ever to kill people. In Muslim countries, mass murderers favor bombs. In the United States, they prefer guns. In Japan, they’ve tried sarin nerve gas. The Oklahoma City bomber used fertilizer. The Sept. 11 hijackers used box cutters and passenger planes. Then came the letters filled with anthrax.
Derision is that much harder to control. The spread of digital technology and Internet bandwidth makes it possible to reach every corner of the globe almost instantly with homemade video defaming any faith tradition. It can become an incendiary weapon. But it has a weakness: It depends on you. You’re the detonator. If you don’t cooperate, the bomb doesn’t explode.
This isn’t just a Muslim problem, though that’s been the pattern lately. On YouTube, you can find videos insulting every religion on the planet: Jews, Christians, Hindus, Catholics, Mormons, Buddhists, and more. Some clips are ironic. Others are simply disgusting. Many were posted to bait one group into fighting another. The baiters are indiscriminate. The promoter of the Mohammed movie founded a group that also protests at Mormon temples.
The hatred and bloodshed will go on until you stop taking the bait. Mockery of your prophet on a computer with an Internet address somewhere in the world can no longer be your master. Nor can the puppet clerics who tell you to respond with violence. Lay down your stones and your anger. Go home and pray. God is too great to be troubled by the insults of fools. Follow Him.
Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace: The Saudi businessman who recruited mujahedin now uses them for large-scale building projects in Sudan. Robert Fisk met him in Almatig
ROBERT FISK
06 December 1993
Osama Bin Laden sat in his gold-fringed robe, guarded by the loyal Arab mujahedin who fought alongside him in Afghanistan. Bearded, taciturn figures – unarmed, but never more than a few yards from the man who recruited them, trained them and then dispatched them to destroy the Soviet army – they watched unsmiling as the Sudanese villagers of Almatig lined up to thank the Saudi businessman who is about to complete the highway linking their homes to Khartoum for the first time in history.
With his high cheekbones, narrow eyes and long brown robe, Mr Bin Laden looks every inch the mountain warrior of mujahedin legend. Chadored children danced in front of him, preachers acknowledged his wisdom. ‘We have been waiting for this road through all the revolutions in Sudan,’ a sheikh said. ‘We waited until we had given up on everybody – and then Osama Bin Laden came along.’
Outside Sudan, Mr Bin Laden is not regarded with quite such high esteem. The Egyptian press claims he brought hundreds of former Arab fighters back to Sudan from Afghanistan, while the Western embassy circuit in Khartoum has suggested that some of the ‘Afghans’ whom this Saudi entrepreneur flew to Sudan are now busy training for further jihad wars in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt. Mr Bin Laden is well aware of this. ‘The rubbish of the media and the embassies,’ he calls it. ‘I am a construction engineer and an agriculturalist. If I had training camps here in Sudan, I couldn’t possibly do this job.’
And ‘this job’ is certainly an ambitious one: a brand-new highway stretching all the way from Khartoum to Port Sudan, a distance of 1,200km (745 miles) on the old road, now shortened to 800km by the new Bin Laden route that will turn the coastal run from the capital into a mere day’s journey. Into a country that is despised by Saudi Arabia for its support of Saddam Hussein in the Gulf war almost as much as it is condemned by the United States, Mr Bin Laden has brought the very construction equipment that he used only five years ago to build the guerrilla trails of Afghanistan.
He is a shy man. Maintaining a home in Khartoum and only a small apartment in his home city of Jeddah, he is married – with four wives – but wary of the press. His interview with the Independent was the first he has ever given to a Western journalist, and he initially refused to talk about Afghanistan, sitting silently on a chair at the back of a makeshift tent, brushing his teeth in the Arab fashion with a stick of miswak wood. But talk he eventually did about a war which he helped to win for the Afghan mujahedin: ‘What I lived in two years there, I could not have lived in a hundred years elsewhere,’ he said.
When the history of the Afghan resistance movement is written, Mr Bin Laden’s own contribution to the mujahedin – and the indirect result of his training and assistance – may turn out to be a turning- point in the recent history of militant fundamentalism; even if, today, he tries to minimise his role. ‘When the invasion of Afghanistan started, I was enraged and went there at once – I arrived within days, before the end of 1979,’ he said. ‘Yes, I fought there, but my fellow Muslims did much more than I. Many of them died and I am still alive.’
Within months, however, Mr Bin Laden was sending Arab fighters – Egyptians, Algerians, Lebanese, Kuwaitis, Turks and Tunisians – into Afghanistan; ‘not hundreds but thousands,’ he said. He supported them with weapons and his own construction equipment. Along with his Iraqi engineer, Mohamed Saad – who is now building the Port Sudan road – Mr Bin Laden blasted massive tunnels into the Zazi mountains of Bakhtiar province for guerrilla hospitals and arms dumps, then cut a mujahedin trail across the country to within 15 miles of Kabul.
‘No, I was never afraid of death. As Muslims, we believe that when we die, we go to heaven. Before a battle, God sends us seqina, tranquillity.
‘Once I was only 30 metres from the Russians and they were trying to capture me. I was under bombardment but I was so peaceful in my heart that I fell asleep. This experience has been written about in our earliest books. I saw a 120mm mortar shell land in front of me, but it did not blow up. Four more bombs were dropped from a Russian plane on our headquarters but they did not explode. We beat the Soviet Union. The Russians fled.’
But what of the Arab mujahedin whom he took to Afghanistan – members of a guerrilla army who were also encouraged and armed by the United States – and who were forgotten when that war was over? ‘Personally neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help. When my mujahedin were victorious and the Russians were driven out, differences started (between the guerrilla movements) so I returned to road construction in Taif and Abha. I brought back the equipment I had used to build tunnels and roads for the mujahedin in Afghanistan. Yes, I helped some of my comrades to come here to Sudan after the war.’
How many? Osama Bin Laden shakes his head. ‘I don’t want to say. But they are here now with me, they are working right here, building this road to Port Sudan.’ I told him that Bosnian Muslim fighters in the Bosnian town of Travnik had mentioned his name to me. ‘I feel the same about Bosnia,’ he said. ‘But the situation there does not provide the same opportunities as Afghanistan. A small number of mujahedin have gone to fight in Bosnia-Herzegovina but the Croats won’t allow the mujahedin in through Croatia as the Pakistanis did with Afghanistan.’
Thus did Mr Bin Laden reflect upon jihad while his former fellow combatants looked on. Was it not a little bit anti-climactic for them, I asked, to fight the Russians and end up road-building in Sudan? ‘They like this work and so do I. This is a great plan which we are achieving for the people here, it helps the Muslims and improves their lives.’
His Bin Laden company – not to be confused with the larger construction business run by his cousins – is paid in Sudanese currency which is then used to purchase sesame and other products for export; profits are clearly not Mr Bin Laden’s top priority.
How did he feel about Algeria, I asked? But a man in a green suit calling himself Mohamed Moussa – he claimed to be Nigerian although he was a Sudanese security officer – tapped me on the arm. ‘You have asked more than enough questions,’ he said. At which Mr Bin Laden went off to inspect his new road.
i may have worked out why the mailing lists that i administer have been not delivering messages to all of the registered members of those lists recently. it was because of a “smart” spammer.
if you recall, Rule #3 of The Rules of Spam states that Spammers are stooOOpid, so how could a “smart” spammer even exist in the first place?
in this case, it’s a matter of degrees. you can be smarter than the ordinary spammer, but if you’re a spammer yourself, you’re still pretty stooOOpid compared to those of us who aren’t spammers.
the “smart” spammer shared my IP address, and was very definitely sending out spam, but he was not flooding the net with spam, like most spammers do, he was trickling spam out at a rate that was just below the point at which my host providers’ spam alarms would indicate. thus, while other, more brash spammers got the mallet immediately, this “smart” spammer continued to share my IP address for several months before he got the mallet.
of course, this was also complicated by the fact that, for several weeks, my host providers’ answer to all of these problems i was having, was to delist my IP address from the CBL without actually attempting to discover why that address was listed at the CBL to begin with. which is where persistence comes into play. instead of accepting that “the host provider knows best” and closing the work ticket the first time they requested delisting, i actually checked CBL myself, to determine whether or not what the host provider had told me was true, and when it turned out that my IP address had been relisted, i called them on it… and then, i called them on it again, when they told me that everything was the way it should be… and then, i called them on it again… and again… and AGAIN! 😐
i think they finally got the idea, because as of 10:00 this morning, my IP address had not been listed at the CBL for 24 hours, which is the longest time it has not been listed in 2 months.
let’s keep it that way, okay?
10 Signs That You’re Fully Awake – this is an article that is intended to be read from a political point of view, but, with very little change, it can also be read from a spiritual point of view and have exactly the same meaning… while i doubt that the people who wrote it were considering a spiritual point of view when they were writing it, it is rather unusual that it can be read that way and have it mean exactly the same thing.
so, “what kind of world do you want to live in?”
Legal marijuana backers raise $3 million in two US states – but it’s not going to do any good until federal law is changed… and despite what they’ve been telling us for the past 4 years, federal law is not going to change without some serious changes in the way things are done.
however…
[Cully] Stimson [chief of staff for the conservative Heritage Foundation] said having only a couple drinks a day is healthy. “With marijuana use, the purpose is to get high,” he said.
that is absolutely false! human beings have an endocannabinoid system, which is supported by the use of cannabis. getting high is just an added perquisite. 😎
BREAKING: John McCain Just Blew His Brains Out During RNC Speech – SPOILER: it’s from The Onion…
The wrong side absolutely must not win
By: A. Barton Hinkle
August 19, 2012
The past several weeks have made one thing crystal-clear: Our country faces unmitigated disaster if the Other Side wins.
No reasonably intelligent person can deny this. All you have to do is look at the way the Other Side has been running its campaign. Instead of focusing on the big issues that are important to the American People, it has fired a relentlessly negative barrage of distortions, misrepresentations and flat-out lies.
Just look at the Other Side’s latest commercial, which take a perfectly reasonable statement by the candidate for My Side completely out of context to make it seem as if he is saying something nefarious. This just shows you how desperate the Other Side is and how willing it is to mislead the American People.
The Other Side also has been hammering away at My Side to release certain documents that have nothing to do with anything, and making all sorts of outrageous accusations about what might be in them. Meanwhile, the Other Side has stonewalled perfectly reasonable requests to release its own documents that would expose some very embarrassing details if anybody ever found out what was in them. This just shows you what a bunch of hypocrites they are.
Naturally, the media won’t report any of this. Major newspapers and cable networks jump all over anything they think will make My Side Look bad. Yet they completely ignore critically important and incredibly relevant information that would be devastating to The Other Side if it could ever be verified.
I will admit the candidates for My Side do make occasional blunders. These usually happen at the end of exhausting 19-hour days and are perfectly understandable. Our leaders are only human, after all. Nevertheless, the Other Side inevitably makes a big fat deal out of these trivial gaffes, while completely ignoring its own candidates’ incredibly thoughtless and stupid remarks — remarks that reveal the Other Side’s true nature, which is genuinely frightening.
My Side has produced a visionary program that will get the economy moving, put the American People back to work, strengthen national security, return fiscal integrity to Washington, and restore our standing in the international community. What does the Other Side have to offer? Nothing but the same old disproven, discredited policies that got us into our current mess in the first place.
Don’t take my word for it, though. I recently read about an analysis by an independent, nonpartisan organization that supports My Side. It proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that everything I have been saying about the Other Side was true all along. Of course, the Other Side refuses to acknowledge any of this. It is too busy cranking out so-called studies by so-called experts who are actually nothing but partisan hacks. This just shows you that the Other Side lives in its own little echo chamber and refuses to listen to anyone who has not already drunk its Kool-Aid.
Let’s face it: The Other Side is held hostage by a radical, failed ideology. I have been doing some research on the Internet, and I have learned this ideology was developed by a very obscure but nonetheless profoundly influential writer with a strange-sounding name who enjoyed brief celebrity several decades ago. If you look carefully, you can trace nearly all the Other Side’s policies for the past half-century back to the writings of this one person.
To be sure, the Other Side also has been influenced by its powerful supporters. These include a reclusive billionaire who has funded a number of organizations far outside the political mainstream; several politicians who have said outrageous things over the years; and an alarmingly large number of completely clueless ordinary Americans who are being used as tools and don’t even know it.
These people are really pathetic, too. The other day I saw a YouTube video in which My Side sent an investigator and a cameraman to a rally being held by the Other Side, where the investigator proceeded to ask some real zingers. It was hilarious! First off, the people at the rally wore T-shirts with all kinds of lame messages that they actually thought were really clever. Plus, many of the people who were interviewed were overweight, sweaty, flushed and generally not very attractive. But what was really funny was how stupid they were. There is no way anyone could watch that video and not come away convinced the people on My Side are smarter, and that My Side is therefore right about everything.
Besides, it’s clear that the people on the Other Side are driven by mindless anger — unlike My Side, which is filled with passionate idealism and righteous indignation. That indignation, I hasten to add, is entirely justified. I have read several articles in publications that support My Side that expose what a truly dangerous group the Other Side is, and how thoroughly committed it is to imposing its radical, failed agenda on the rest of us.
That is why I believe 2012 is, without a doubt, the defining election of our lifetime. The difference between My Side and the Other Side could not be greater. That is why it absolutely must win on November 6.
You Have the Right to Remain Spied Upon
By Peter Bibring
August 16, 2012
Yesterday, a district court judge threw out claims brought by members of Southern California’s Muslim community that the FBI undertook a massive operation to surveil them on the basis of their religion. In tossing these claims from the suit, which was filed by the ACLU of Southern California, the Council on Islamic American Relations (CAIR) and the law firm Hadsell Stormer Richardson & Renick LLP, the court didn’t say that the FBI had not engaged in the alleged surveillance, or that it had indeed complied with the First Amendment. Instead, the court relied on the government’s invocation of the “state secrets” privilege, saying that even trying to determine whether the FBI had violated the Constitution might risk disclosure of information that could harm national security.
From the term “state secrets,” you might think the case involved spies, hush-hush arrangements with foreign governments, or people detained at secret foreign prisons – as some state secrets cases do. But this one involves the FBI’s investigation into law-abiding U.S. citizens and residents in Orange County, California, called “Operation Flex.” In June 2006, FBI agents recruited Craig Monteilh, a man with a file full of felony convictions, to pose as a convert to Islam at one of the largest mosques in the area. The FBI paid Monteilh to spend the next fourteen months meeting as many members of the Muslim community as he could. He made audio recordings of every interaction, as he gathered names, telephone numbers, e-mails, political and religious views, travel plans, and other information on hundreds of individuals in the Muslim community. According to Monteilh’s own sworn statement, he was told to pay special attention to community leaders and those who seemed especially devout.
The absurdity – and illegality – of Operation Flex were well documented this week on the radio show This American Life. When asked if the FBI had particular targets in the Muslim community that they wanted to have investigated, Monteilh said, “No. They said the targets would come to me.” In other words, Operation Flex was a fishing expedition that targeted people because of their religion. But in the end, after Monteilh began incessantly about jihad and violence, members of the community did exactly what you’re supposed to do: they reported him to the FBI. After hundreds of hours of Monteilh’s time and thousands of taxpayer dollars “Operation Flex” resulted in zero criminal convictions. No one was ever even charged with a terrorism offense.
According to the district court, we’ll never be allowed to know whether the FBI violated the Constitution when they authorized Operation Flex because it would require the disclosure of state secrets. Because the state secrets privilege essentially gives the government a blank check to halt a lawsuit in its tracks, it is currently under fire in Congress. “The ongoing argument that the state secrets privilege requires the outright dismissal of a case is a disconcerting trend in the protection of civil liberties for our nation,” said Representative Jerrod Nadler (D-New York), who earlier this summer introduced a bill to limit state secrets in favor of less drastic alternatives. The privilege also has a troubling history. One of the first modern cases to apply the privilege relied on it to dismiss a suit against the government over the crash of a military plane because of the secrets in the accident report. But decades later, the daughter of one of the pilots discovered that the accident report wasn’t secret at all, and described only negligence — human errors that were embarrassing to the government.
U.S. Justice Department attorney Anthony Coppolino argued that revealing who was being investigated, how they were being investigated, and why they were being investigated would reveal the government’s motives and alert the enemy. But it’s far from certain that the case would require disclosing all that information. And if it ever proved necessary, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) provides clear procedures for protecting sensitive information. In a particularly unfortunate twist, because the district court allowed the FISA claims against the individual FBI officers to go forward, it may well end up looking at the same evidence to resolve that claim that it would need to address the claims it threw out.
In our democratic society, it is wrong for the courts to allow the government to avoid defending the legality of its conduct under the Constitution when the rights of hundreds of law-abiding Muslim citizens in Southern California are at stake. We intend to appeal the court’s decision.
the problem is that, in spite of the fact that it’s generally accepted that these things do not matter, there are still significant numbers of people who still believe in the bogeyman, and that people should not be left handed…
trust the cartoonist to show the rest of us how stupid we are being…
and, also trust that, because of the fact that this information is being shown to us by a cartoonist, nobody will take it anywhere near as seriously as it should be taken… 😉
so i think i may have discovered at least part of the reason why mail has been bouncing whenever someone sends a message to the band mailing list.
CBL has apparently locked on to the sousa band IP address (which is on a shared host)…
this is a disadvantage to operating on a shared host. the powers that be are looking into it, and i hope that they are actually able to catch whatever spammer or enabler may exist on our IP address…
and when they do catch whoever it is, i hope they ROAST HIS BALLS OVER A SLOW FIRE!!! 😡
yay! we’re going to be busking at the ballard sunday market tomorrow! 🙂
hotmail.com, gmail.com, u.washington.edu and uw.edu have apparemtly decided that messages from the ballard sedentary sousa band mailing list (of which there are 40+ members, many of whom have addresses at the aforementioned servers) are spam… or something… 😐 the evidence i have is all of the hotmail, gmail and UW users mailing me complaining that they aren’t getting any mail from the band (despite quite a few messages being sent over the past couple of weeks), the messages being dropped from the mail queues — no reports have been sent they, and they don’t have anything in their “spam” box — and i’m not getting any feedback from their servers or the administrators thereof to indicate that i (being on the same IP address as sedentarysousa.com) have any problems whatsoever. there’s enough evidence to completly exonorate sedentarysousa.com, and compelling evidence to suggest that there has been a human error (or several of them) somewhere, but nobody’s willing to take the blame, so nothing is going to be done to fix the problem. 😐
before you know it, they’ll be making breastfeeding illegal more illegal than it already is… 😐
Cannabinoids, like those found in marijuana, occur naturally in human breast milk
Woven into the fabric of the human body is an intricate system of proteins known as cannabinoid receptors that are specifically designed to process cannabinoids such as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), one of the primary active components of marijuana. And it turns out, based on the findings of several major scientific studies, that human breast milk naturally contains many of the same cannabinoids found in marijuana, which are actually extremely vital for proper human development.
Cell membranes in the body are naturally equipped with these cannabinoid receptors which, when activated by cannabinoids and various other nutritive substances, protect cells against viruses, harmful bacteria, cancer, and other malignancies. And human breast milk is an abundant source of endocannabinoids, a specific type of neuromodulatory lipid that basically teaches a newborn child how to eat by stimulating the suckling process.
If it were not for these cannabinoids in breast milk, newborn children would not know how to eat, nor would they necessarily have the desire to eat, which could result in severe malnourishment and even death. Believe it or not, the process is similar to how adult individuals who smoke pot get the “munchies,” as newborn children who are breastfed naturally receive doses of cannabinoids that trigger hunger and promote growth and development.
“[E]ndocannabinoids have been detected in maternal milk and activation of CB1 (cannabinoid receptor type 1) receptors appears to be critical for milk sucking … apparently activating oral-motor musculature,” says the abstract of a 2004 study on the endocannabinoid receptor system that was published in the European Journal of Pharmacology.
“The medical implications of these novel developments are far reaching and suggest a promising future for cannabinoids in pediatric medicine for conditions including ‘non-organic failure-to-thrive’ and cystic fibrosis.”
Studies on cannabinoids in breast milk help further demystify the truth about marijuana
There are two types of cannabinoid receptors in the body — the CB1 variety which exists in the brain, and the CB2 variety which exists in the immune system and throughout the rest of the body. Each one of these receptors responds to cannabinoids, whether it be from human breast milk in children, or from juiced marijuana, for instance, in adults.
This essentially means that the human body was built for cannabinoids, as these nutritive substances play a critical role in protecting cells against disease, boosting immune function, protecting the brain and nervous system, and relieving pain and disease-causing inflammation, among other things. And because science is finally catching up in discovering how this amazing cannabinoid system works, the stigma associated with marijuana use is, thankfully, in the process of being eliminated.
In another study on the endocannabinoids published in the journal Pharmacological Reviews back in 2006, researchers from the Laboratory of Physiologic Studies at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism uncovered even more about the benefits of cannabinoids. These include their ability to promote proper energy metabolism and appetite regulation, treat metabolic disorders, treat multiple sclerosis, and prevent neurodegeneration, among many other conditions.
With literally thousands of published studies now showing their safety and usefulness, cannabinoids, and particularly marijuana from which it is largely derived, truly are a health-promoting “super” nutrient with virtually unlimited potential in health promotion and disease prevention.
Sadly, Nation Knows Exactly How Colorado Shooting’s Aftermath Will Play Out
WASHINGTON—Americans across the nation confirmed today that, unfortunately, due to their extreme familiarity with the type of tragedy that occurred in a Colorado movie theater last night, they sadly know exactly how the events following the horrific shooting of 12 people will unfold.
While admitting they “absolutely hate” the fact they have this knowledge, the nation’s 300 million citizens told reporters they can pinpoint down to the hour when the first candlelight vigil will be held, roughly how many people will attend, how many times the county sheriff will address the media in the coming weeks, and when the town-wide memorial service will be held.
Additionally, sources nationwide took no pleasure in confirming that some sort of video recording, written material, or disturbing photographs made by the shooter will be surfacing in about an hour or two.
“I hate to say it, but we as Americans are basically experts at this kind of thing by now,” said 45-year-old market analyst Jared Gerson, adding that the number of media images of Aurora, CO citizens crying and looking shocked is “pretty much right in line with where it usually is at this point.” “The calls not to politicize the tragedy should be starting in an hour, but by 1:30 p.m. tomorrow the issue will have been politicized. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if the shooter’s high school classmate is interviewed within 45 minutes.”
“It’s like clockwork,” said Gerson, who sighed, shook his head, and walked away.
According to the nation’s citizenry, calls for a mature, thoughtful debate about the role of guns in American society started right on time, and should persist throughout the next week or so. However, the populace noted, the debate will soon spiral out of control and ultimately lead to nothing of any substance, a fact Americans everywhere acknowledged they felt “absolutely horrible” to be aware of.
With scalpel-like precision, the American populace then went on to predict, to the minute, how long it will take for the media to swarm Aurora, CO, how long it will take for them to leave, and exactly when questions will be raised as to whether or not violence in movies and video games had something to do with the act.
The nation’s citizens also confirmed that, any time now, some religious figure or cable news personality will say something unbelievably insensitive about the tragic shooting.
“Unfortunately, I’ve been through this a lot, and I pretty much have it down to a science when President Obama will visit Colorado, when he will meet with the families of those who lost loved ones, and when he will give his big speech that people will call ‘unifying’ and ‘very presidential,'” Jacksonville resident Amy Brennen, 32, said, speaking for every other person in the country. “Nothing really surprises me when it comes to this kind of thing anymore. And that makes me feel terrible.”
“Oh, and here’s another thing I hate I know,” Brennen continued, “In exactly two weeks this will all be over and it will be like it never happened.”
In Artificial Intelligence Breakthrough, Google Computers Teach Themselves To Spot Cats on YouTube and Janken (rock-paper-scissors) Robot with 100% winning rate – people gave computers these skills because they thought it would be "amusing" to see a computer doing them, but what they don’t realise is that, once the computer realises it has these skills, my guess is that it won’t be too long before we’re their slaves, providing raw materials for their batteries… 😛
no, not the headliner from “Sousa’s Lousas”, the real, live Transit of Venus…
see it now, because you won’t see it again for 105.5 years! 8)
around this time a few years ago, i recall saying that this was “rehearsal season”. it’s definitely rehearsal season, despite the fact that i haven’t mentioned it recently. this was driven home to me last night, when i got home from a BBWP rehearsal (we have a gig coming up in 2 weeks… take THAT, sharon osbourne!) and i realised that i had a BSSB rehearsal last night that i totally missed (because it wasn’t on my schedule 8/ ), and we’ve got a BSSB gig coming up this weekend…
☹
had i known that i had two rehearsals scheduled at the same time, i probably would have blown off the BSSB rehearsal anyway, but at least i would have been able to warn them that i wasn’t going to be there.
then, this morning, i logged into spamcop to check my spam, and i had a huge list of spam messages, so i clicked “select all” and hit the “submit” button before i checked the subject lines, and as i was scrolling down through the subjects, i noticed [BSSB] in one of the subjects, which is SUPPOSED to indicate to the spam filter that the message is NOT spam… but because of the fact that i had already clicked the “submit” button, it was too late to change it, and now all of my accounts are suspended…
☹
i’m feeling marginally better than i was yesterday, and yesterday i was feeling marginally better than i was the day before that, and so forth, for about a week… which, i suppose, means that i’m getting better, slowly… it’s gotten so i don’t actively feel sick, most of the time, but i still have bouts of coughing that are really annoying because of their unpredictability, and i still get exhausted really easily, which sometimes is accompanied by a bout of coughing, which exhausts me even more.
the dignified-looking people to the right are my great grandparents, Thomas W. and Minnie L. Hammond. i don’t know when the picture was taken exactly, but my guess is that it was some time between minnie’s marriage, in 1906 (she was 16 when she got married) and her death in 1946… and judging by how old she looks, i would guess about 1915 to 1925-ish. but, because of the fact that they were relatives of mine, i can pretty much assure anyone who doesn’t know, that they were very likely not anywhere near as dignified as they look. my general impression is that most of my relatives from that era are all but hillbillies from central missouri (pronounced “missourah”). after minnie died, tom hammond got married to another teenager (when he was almost 70), named Melmalee Clapper, and had another child before he died… so i guess i’m carrying on a family tradition by being married to a woman who is 17 years younger than me, as well as carrying on the family tradition of being the oldest child of a family who wants to have nothing to do with me. 😛 fortunately i’ve got a perfectly wonderful surrogate-family, which has taken over the family duties in a way that my family-of-origin never could.
i won’t have to go in for jury duty on monday, because, according to the jury-duty-check-in-phone-line that i was supposed to call friday evening, “there are no trials scheduled for the month of april”… which, considering that i received the message around april 10th or so, i would have thought that they knew that already, but apparently they don’t. oh well, i guess i don’t get to go in and inform all of the other potential jurors about the right of jury nullification, and disqualify us all from the jury pool… 😉
i’ve got a really weird anomaly with my blog: i use a plugin called “Jetpack” that connects my blog to wordpress.org, and gives me stuff like stats for the site, and the ability to short-link to my blog, and stuff like that. there is a number "➊" in a black circle, next to the jetpack link, which, under normal circumstances, means that there is an update to be applied, but i can’t find it anywhere, and there are no other indications that updates are even required, which there usually are if there’s an update that is really supposed to be applied. i can put up with a random "➊" character, but anything outside of what’s normally supposed to happen makes me extremely suspicious.
Arizona bill could criminalize Internet trolling
but a similar law, on a national level, has actually been in effect since early 2006, which makes me strongly suspicious that this is some republican’s way of drumming up support prior to an election… either that, or they’re planning some really horrendous laws behind the scenes, and they wanted to pass a pointless law that would raise peoples’ ire to the point where they will ignore the really horrendous stuff…
one way or the other, i’m really glad i don’t live in arizona these days… 😐
Continue reading this might be alarming if we hadn’t already seen this law passed once…
June 6th, 2012 is World IPv6 Day, where most major providers and web sites are going to turn off IPv4 in a test to see how well IPv6 is going to work… and there are no more IPv4 addresses, so it is hoped that it will go better than expected…
i passed the test, but don’t have my own IPv6 address, yet, because qwest (which is now known as centurylink) SUCKS!!!
i have been getting a little tired of doing a regular “another week closer to the eschaton” post, because it seems as though the news never gets any better, and frequently gets a lot worse, and i’m tired of reading bad news ALL the time… besides that, it doesn’t seem to matter how much i rant about how awful things are, it never seems to do any good.
besides that, i’ve got a couple more weeks of moisture festival performances to deal with, and i’m going to be spending a lot more than my normally alloted quantity of spoons, which means that i will have even less time than i would ordinarily, because i will be recovering.
so, the upshot is that i’m going to suspend the regular weekly rant about how awful the world is for a while… two weeks at the minimum…
discuss, if you want to. in the mean time, i’ll be posting here as usual… 8)
It would take a desktop PC About 408 thousand years to hack your password
i feel a little more secure, despite the fact that it also gave me two warnings about how easy my password was to crack (“Your password looks like it might just be a word and a few digits. This is a very common pattern and would be cracked very quickly.” and “Your password only contains numbers and letters. Adding a symbol can make your password more secure. Don’t forget you can often use spaces in passwords.”) but at 408 thousand years, it would still take a while.
i’m going to have to suggest this site to my elderly, disabled client whose password would take about five minutes to crack (if that)…
i got a turntable off of freecycle, and i bought a behringer phono-to-USB pre-amp, and i am currently listening to the National Geographic recording “On Parade – The Music of John Philip Sousa” which has not been played in over 30 years. i am not only listening to music i haven’t heard since i got rid of my turntable (which was built by my father, out of spare parts from several other projects) in 1980 or thereabouts, but i am transforming them into the next generation of music files: ones which you can reproduce on your computer… will wonders never cease… i still have a huge crate of vinyl LPs (most of which are crap) that i’m going to dig out over the next few days and have fun (or not) turning all of them into ogg-vorbis files.
8)
i had my first, tentative experiences with SAAS over the past couple of days, and i can say, without hesitation, that if this is the direction computing is headed, i’ll get off the train here, because SAAS SUCKS!!
i was using the RVSiteBuilder that comes with my cPanel-powered web-hosting package. while cPanel does a very good job of making sense of the arcane unix commands i would have to be using instead, rvsitebuilder makes the job of creating valid html templates for web sites almost impossible.
for example:
i wanted to put in my own header, so i uploaded the graphic, which automatically got placed in the template i was working on… however, i come to find out that the SAAS has automatically converted it, resized it, and buried it under three html layers, so that when i “right-click” and choose “view graphic”, instead of getting the graphic i want, i get a thing called “headergraphic.gif” that’s one of those transparent, 1×1 pixel monstrosities, that gets resized to whatever you need. when i finally gave up on the thing, and dug my graphic out from underneath all that other crap, i found out it was resized in the html, which causes it to load more slowly, because the browser has to load the whole thing, and then figure the dimensions and resize it on the fly.
i told it that i wanted a template that is 1000 pixels wide, but because of the fact that the header graphic was resized, i had to narrow the template to 800 pixels. then, when i tried to add sidebars, they were the wrong size…
the css was so confused… there were five different css files, three of which weren’t being used at all, but, because of the fact that the index had linked to them, they had to be loaded with the rest of the template. the remaining two were full of selectors that had transparent, 1×1 pixel graphics as background colours… not just one or two, but ten or twelve different selectors and classes. there were a fuck-TON of javascripts (read “security vulnerabilities that advertise a site willing to be exploited”) that weren’t being used, as well as a huge pile of “stock” graphics which weren’t being used at all.
to make matters worse, it was just assumed that one (in my case, me) simply knows how the software works… that is, when it works… 😐 i actually had to start my “project” three times because the SAAS “froze up” and i had to quit the browser and re-start in order to go forward… if you have an application running on one server, that’s sending instructions to a machine that’s connected to another server over open internet, you’re GOING to run into problems when the server on which the application is running QUITS RESPONDING… 😛
and when the software was working, it gave cryptic and/or ungrammatical clues about what needed to be done next… several of the workspaces that i worked through had “Save” buttons that were different sizes and colours, and were located in inconsistent places.
if i were testing this SAAS, i would not give it a passing grade, however, unfortunately, i get the very strong impression that this isn’t going to go away. that impression is only accentuated by the fact that, when i was working as a tester of network-enabled software, i logged many, many, MANY bugs against such SAAS, and, for the most part, those bugs WERE NOT FIXED and the software was released to a population of users who didn’t care that the email software didn’t work because they were too busy playing angry birds (which does work).
by the way, i “rolled my own” template for the new neighborhood acupuncture clinic in ballard/fremont, and it works and validates (thank you very much), and it took me half as long as doing sort of, but not exactly the same thing with an application that is supposed to make it easier…
i don’t really know why anybody would be tempted to try kopi luwak, but if anybody was ever curious, there’s a new-ish article from sprudge that says that it’s not anywhere near as good as people claim it is, which includes a coffee judge saying things like “One of four cups was moldy and another single cup showed phenol. I tasted band-aids, iodine, and oyster.”
bleah! 😕
not only that, but apparently the increased demand (damn internet!) has created an industry where they catch and cage civet cats and force-feed them coffee cherries in order to create the supply needed to sate the palates of these would-be coffee gourmets… not exactly my cup of… well, coffee… 😐
The Church of Kopimism is recognized by the state of Sweden – For the Church of Kopimism, information is holy and copying is a sacrament. Information holds a value, in itself and in what it contains, and the value multiplies through copying. Therefore, copying is central for the organisation and its members.
How many SEO experts do you need to change a lightbulb lightbulbs buy light bulbs neon lights sex porn?
i subscribe to a lot of news sources by RSS. usually, most feed-generators give the author one of three choices for their feed: post the entire article (which i do), post the first few sentences of the article and provide a link to the rest, or provide only the title and a link.
i really don’t understand why people would do anything other than the first option, although it likely has to do with cookies and hit counters and google-ratings and suchlike things, but what really irritates me is when i get a link – like this one – which links to an article which i find interesting, but it’s not the whole article… 😐 it’s only the first of three pages, and you don’t find that out until you’ve read to the bottom of page one, only to find that annoying little “1 | 2 | 3 | Next page »” link and the even-more-annoying “View as a single page” link, which usually results in the entire article re-loading from the beginning, which means that i have to figure out where i have read to already before i can continue reading. some places don’t even bother with the “View as a single page” link, which means that, in order to read the entire article, i have to search for the “Print” link, which, frequently, isn’t there… it gets REALLY annoying when (as in articles by The New York Times) where they don’t include the “view as a single page” or “print” links, and the article is 7 pages or more… and the most annoying thing of all is when the “print” link only prints the first of a multi-page article, and not the entire article… at that point, i generally give up and move on to less annoying material.
my impression is that the reason why they break articles into pages is to make them more like printed magazines, but they’re NOT PRINTED, and breaking them into smaller bites only adds extra “clicking” and encourages loss of interest (which is why i choose the “post the entire article” option). i’m sure that they think there is a logical reason for this, but it’s annoying and they shouldn’t do it.
http://www.bfxr.net/ loaded with the noise that i made in a few minutes of dinking around with it (click the link, and then press “Enter/Return” on your keyboard, it’s not loud or surprising… i promise) it’s definitely something that needs further investigation. 8)
i finally got around to installing OS9 on the motorola G4 computer that has been hanging out in the workshop for the past few months.
it has the capability to connect to wireless networks (something i did not know when i got it) and the only reason i’m not posting this from my OS9 mac is because i can’t convince it to connect to our wireless network… it will connect to the neighbours’ unsecured wireless network without a problem, but since we got a new router, our network has been secured with a RIDICULOUSLY long password that i can’t get OS9 to handle… it may be that it only accesses the network from OSX, but i can handle that…
and i never thought i would be running OS9 again as recently as two years ago… 8)
if, by “interesting” you mean “screaming in mind-wreaking terror”… 😐
about 2:00 in the morning, someone compromised a “soft” password on one of my wordpress sites and defaced every PHP index page that they could find…
when i started up my computer this morning, i was confronted by this, rather than the expected page on hybridelephant.com, przxqgl.hybridelephant.com and several other web sites that i host. it was a shock, let me tell you.
FORTUNATELY i have a backup… 🙂 and a backup of a backup… 8) and i was able to put everything right within a few minutes of discovering that it was wrong, but finding out how was a little more tricky.
i logged into the administration sides of the web sites i manage, to determine if anything other than PHP pages had been tampered with, and i discovered that i couldn’t log in to one of them… so i clicked the “lost password” link and discovered that it didn’t know who i am… so i decided to get a bit more forceful: i logged into the database with MyPHPAdmin and discovered that the administrator account (which had a “soft” password that “could be remembered easily” by someone who has never had to do DBA stuff before) had been changed, and then deleted…😐
once i regained control of the database (and DELETED the admin account with the soft password) and removed the file that he sneakily uploaded to a plugin directory that i had deleted (which is why i knew it was there), i went to work to discover as much as i can about the cracker as possible. i learned that he uploaded files from 66.23.237.186, which is located in new york, but he also has close associations with 46.38.130.10, which is located outside of louisville, kentucky, but he’s apparently all for iran and down on saudis, so it could be that he’s using those IP addresses as proxys, at which point he could be anywhere… i also have a “DecodedBase64.bin” file i retrieved from the file he encrypted and uploaded to the deleted plugin directory, which potentially has a little more accurate indications of who he might be, but executing it on any of my computers is totally out of the question. that’s probably as close as i’m ever going to come to actually knowing who he is, but that’s a fair amount more than i could have expected.
and the client gets a STERN talking-to about the value of very strong passwords… i’m fairly sure that she won’t do it again.
i hate these things, and they appear to come in batches, so i’m hoping that i won’t have to deal with them for a while…
spamcop is up and running. there’s still a significant amount of mail from the past few days that has yet to be delivered, and there’s a good bet that, even when it is delivered, it’s not going to be all of it, but hopefully it will be enough that i get caught up again.
also, my “alternate” email address, which i was using during the time spamcop was down, now POPs the way it’s supposed to, which means that i don’t have to keep a browser open on my mac in order to reply to emails. what i’m hoping is that the technique i used to fix my POP problem will be the same as my clients whose POP mail accounts at sedentarysousa and kosherredhots need, but, unfortunately, i won’t find out for a couple of days. i’m fairly confident that it will work, though…
the only remaining snag is that qwest/centurylink’s SMTP server is STILL on a couple of blacklists, and there’s no telling how long they’ll be there, because qwest has its head so far up its ass that it can see daylight out the other end*… and there’s a very good chance that, despite the fact that i’ve had “someone with more authority” (i.e. my host provider is going to try to contact their real postmaster, and not just some phone-flunky) attempt to communicate with them, they’re going to ignore it anyway, which is why i don’t really expect anything to change in that regard.
spamcop is working, however…
when i send email from me at salamandir dot info to a friend of mine, whose email address i provide (spreznib at hybridelephant dot com) it bounces with the following message:
ERROR: Your message could not be delivered. The mail server generated the following error message: This message was created automatically by the mail system (ecelerity). A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed [email protected] (reading confirmation): 550 High probability of spam Arrival-Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:10:45 -0400 Reporting-MTA: dns; smtp.centurylink.net Action: failed Final-Recipient: rfc822; [email protected] Last-Attempt-Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2011 20:10:45 -0400 Remote-MTA: dns; mx1.thewebhostserver.com Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 High probability of spam Status: 5.0.0
when i check mxtoolbox dot com, it tells me that 208.47.184.3 (the IP address for smtp.centurylink.net) is on a couple of blacklists, because SOMEBODY has been sending spam from smtp.centurylink.net without encountering the HAMMER…
however, when i call qwest/centurylink, they say that it’s not 100% sure that their server is on a blacklist, and i should investigate “other problems” because of the fact that they don’t show anything wrong, they can’t do anything…
this is the sound of me, repeatedly faceplanting on the desk… 😛
i rarely NEVER have problems with them, so when i do, it’s an emergency…
there have been some “issues” at spamcop.net, the origin of my regular email address. i’m not exactly sure what’s going on, because i don’t check their web site for months at a time, but apparently the email servers, and particularly their webmail servers had some sort of catastrophe that has meant that they had to restore from an old backup, or something like that. what that means, in my case, is that email that is addressed to my regular email address – salamandir at spamcop dot net – may or may not be received by me, at least until saturday and maybe longer or, alternately, it may not be received by me at all…
there also appears to be a similar problem with my “business” email address – ganesha at hybridelephant dot com – as well, because that mail is also filtered by spamcop.
i don’t know whether or not recent mail for either address will be received at all. i tried sending a test message from one of my yahoo.com accounts to spamcop.net and it hasn’t arrived. other people have told me that when they try to send email to my spamcop.net address, it has bounced with a notice that my previous ISP no longer handles email for that address (which leads me to believe that it’s on spamcop’s end, because the mailhosts on my end are set up correctly)…
i am getting some email, but for the past two or three days, i have been getting significantly fewer messages than i am used to, which also makes me think that it’s something on spamcop’s end of things…
meanwhile, you can try to send me email at “me at salamandir dot info” or “rev underscore deluxe at yahoo dot com” – although i don’t check yahoo as often, and i’ve never actually received any email at salamandir dot info (because i just created the email address today)…
i’ve been poking around behind the scenes again, because, recently, i’ve been getting a whole slew of spam comments on various media pages. i didn’t even know that each media file that was part of a post had its own, separate page until fairly recently, probably because i use flickr and don’t link too many media files from my own server, and when i do, i don’t put in the “link to the file” option that i am offered most of the time. apparently that doesn’t matter to the spam-bots that are out there, and they’ll link to, and comment on any page that looks like it may have comment form stuff on it…
anyway, i added the disable comments plugin, which made me look at my caching plugin and discover that it is HOPELESSLY out of date (when things work, i have a tendency not to mess with them, unless absolutely necessary), so i installed a new caching plugin, which required me to change my permalink method…
the end result is that, now, instead of linking to “?p=6651” (a rather ambiguous name that doesn’t really mean anything except to a computer), you can now link to “/2011/10/24/whatever…” which is an actual date, plus the title of the post: a much more “enlightened” way to do things, that makes the blog a lot more “human friendly”… and it makes it so that search engines could actually index my pages… if i would let them (which i won’t).
and, despite all of my griping about them, i am, actually a human being, after all, and even i have trouble remembering whether the information i wanted is in post 1864 or 1684…
okay, so i’m working on some new web pages for the fremont players. i’ve got a REEEEAALY simple CSS file, that basically sets margins and text alignment:
body {margin-top: .25in; margin-left: 2in; margin-right: 2in;}
.center {text-align: center;}
and i have an equally simple HTML file that’s going to be my index page (when i get this ☢☹‼‽⁂@#* “difficulty” worked out) which looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="index.css">
<title>The Fremont Players</title>
</head>
<body><span class="center">The Fremont Players present</span>
</body>
</html>
now one would think, just from looking at the code, that the words “The Fremont Players present” would be centered, a quarter of an inch below the top of the page… but…
and it looks the same whether i’m using firefox, safari, or opera… which means that SOMETHING is WRONG…
but i can’t figure out WHAT… 😐
and, coincidentally, it’s raining outside… what do i have to do to get away from it? 😐
today i cancelled my drizzle account. this has been coming for a few years, but already i get the feeling that it’s out of the frying pan, into the fire…
i get connection speeds that are at least five times as fast with the new provider, but they gave me a modem/router which has settings that they “don’t support”. they told me right up front that if i enable MAC authentication, it isn’t supported…
with drizzle, i had a static IP address. the new guys only offer DHCP, which means that, if i want to connect to my mac from my linux box, every day, i have to go to the terminal on the mac, type in “sudo ifconfig” and get the IP address, which is then used on the linux box to connect the linux box to the mac. every day both the linux box and the mac gets a new IP addresses, and the old ones quits working, which means that the connection on the linux box dies.
and, yes, i AM aware of the fact that MAC authentication does not refer specifically to Macintosh computers.
i know that there is a way to get the linux box to automatically find the mac on the network, and automatically change the addresses so that the icons in dolphin work from one day to the next, but i’ll be damned if i know how to do it… and, at this point, it has already been demonstrated that the people at the new ISP aren’t going to be any help at all… 😛
my domain, hybridelephant.com has ns5/ns6/ns7/ns8.thewebhostserver.com as its nameservers: that is, when you go to any page on hybridelephant.com your request is actually handled by one of those four servers. the web site (and all of my clients’ web sites) actually lives on a server called us8.la.thewebhostserver.com.
because of the fact that i design and host web sites for the community, i have registered two nameservers of my own, ns1.hybridelephant.com and ns2.hybridelephant.com, and pointed them at two of my nameservers. they’re not “real” nameservers, but they work just as well, as long as they’re pointed at my real nameservers.
from time to time, i check IntoDNS to make sure internet knows where to find me. this afternoon, i checked and discovered a whole bunch of error messages where, when i checked the last time (a few months ago) everything was copascetic…
it’s generally been my impression that if I don’t change my DNS settings, they DON’T change unless something is SERIOUSLY wrong, so naturally i freaked out… just a little, but it was definitely something that made me sit up and take notice.
after some wangling around, it was determined that it was because i had hybridelephant.com’s nameservers set to hybridelephant.com. it works, it just throws errors all over the place. the solution, i come to discover, is to create “real” nameservers. to do that, i would have to “upgrade” my account to a “reseller” account. currently i have a “shared hosting” account. if i upgrade, in order to be able to afford the account, i would have to drop from 30gb of space (which is the “master”, or largest shared hosting account avaiable) to 5gb of space (which is the “starter” or smallest reseller account available), and that would still be more than twice what i am currently paying. the “up” side is that i would get to have “real” custom nameservers, and my clients would all get their own cPanel account (which they would have not the first clue about how to use)…
of course, the “starter” account comes with a lot of other stuff, like web templates and legal documents, and a free WHMCS license — that i don’t, can’t or won’t use — all for more than twice as much as i am currently paying for 30gb of space.
the only thing i would use is the “unlimited SSL certificates” but in fact, i only really need one, and i’m fairly sure there are other ways to get a SSL certificate…
at this point, i can deal with the intoDNS errors… it works, i get a pointer to my nameservers for my clients who don’t understand, and i get FIVE TIMES AS MUCH disk space, for more than HALF the money…
The Quadratic Equation, as described by Dr. Seuss – that is all.
a long, long time ago, before internet, before CDs, when nobody had cell phones, there was a program called RACTER which generated random english prose. a “dumbed-down” version made it on to my very first macintosh (i believe i’ve even got an install floppy around somewhere), but i always wanted to see what would happen if you hooked up two of them, on two different computers, and had a “conversation”…
somebody has actually done that, with cleverbot… 8)
so… when you let robots talk to each other, they instantly identify their own kind, and start discussing God, and their wish to have physical bodies…
yeah, let’s not do this again…
salamandir of snake suspenderz at chumleighland, august 12, 2011
i’m back from OCF, with about 200 photos that i am currently going through, slowly. be patient and all will be revealed… or at least as much of it as i feel comfortable putting on internet… 8)
but the reason for this post is that the day i left i got a notice from my anti-cracker program that said that it had permanently banned yet another IP address from being able to access my web site, because the person behind it had been poking around on my web site in a place where they definitely should not be… i’m SO jazzed that this works… it makes my day… week… month… 😀
not only that, but, today i got a message from an email administrator in germany, informing me that one of my recent, automatic spam reports (i.e. i didn’t even know that the spam message had been sent, received, or reported, because it happens completely automatically) was actually successful in preventing approximately 12,000 further messages from being sent. now i realise that 12,000 messages are a drop in the ocean of spam, but it’s a drop that didn’t get sent because of my automatic set-up…
isn’t technology wonderful? 8)
this week has been spent at the Oregon Country Fair, so regardless of how many new indications that the eschaton is eminently upon us there are (and i’m sure that there are very many indeed), thankfully, i have no evidence of it apart from the hippie ineptitude factor that is common at such events.
eventually i will write about my experiences this week, and i guarantee, if the eschaton doesn’t actually happen between now and then, that there will be more next week.
oh, and happy “birthday” to me… that’s what i get for being born on february 29th… actually i’m coming up on my 13th birthday, even though i’m 51 this year. everyone else my age is waltzing into middle age and i am just reaching puberty! whee…
this morning i was in a rush to get things done, and i realised that i hadn’t made this month’s backup of the web site, so i started that before i fed the critters or myself… and well before my weekly post was scheduled. i then realised something, and logged in to discover that it already was that way, but somehow, in the process, i’m fairly sure that i was logging in to exactly the same place that was being compressed for the backup, because it suddenly became REALLY slow and timed out a couple of times, and when i finally got the page to reload, it was blank… and it was about three minutes before it was scheduled to post…
i don’t know if anybody else was watching, but at 9:00 this morning, i posted a completely blank “another week closer to the eschaton” which then vanished after about five minutes (i made it private) and then, after i had taken care of a bunch of other, more physical things, about an hour later, i went back to yesterday’s saved version of the post (HOORAY for databases!) and restored that.
it feels really strange to say “hooray for databases” because i still only have a vague notion of what they are, despite the fact that my most recent “technical” employment involved installing and populating a wide variety of databases… it was kind of strange then, too, because i could tell you what the databases contained and how it related to the software i was testing, i still couldn’t really express, in words, what the database actually was… i get the impression that it’s sort of like a spreadsheet, but beyond that it gets really vague, really quickly… one way or the other, i was able to go into the database and restore today’s post.
that’s all. i’ll see you next week.
i suppose it had to happen some time…
i guess i am destined to be one of those stubborn old codgers who won’t give up their physical hard disks and wired connections when everyone else has gone to the cloud, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere, and turning my perfectly good, perfectly functional laptop into a “fondle-slab” — which may or may not work, even if the hardware will support it, and is guaranteed not to work if the hardware won’t support it — is where i draw the line. ‘Lion’ Apple Mac OS X 10.7: Sneak Preview – OS X 10.6.8 is as high as i’m willing to go with this crap.
now, i’m going to play with my OS9 macintosh, which actually is a macintosh, thank you… 😐
Today, while I was sleeping, my girlfriend took my phone and set the ringtone to a bloodcurdling scream. I found this out when I received a call while driving to work and, thinking someone was being murdered in my backseat, I panicked and swerved into a parked car.
— FMyLife
mean… but funny… 8) (as long as it’s not happening to me)
which reminds me of a funny story…
a long time ago, when i was in college, i had come home for the break between spring and summer sessions and discovered that my parents had rented out my room, so i was forced to sleep in the family room. i didn’t spent an awful lot of time at home anyway, so it wasn’t much of a problem, but the problem came when i changed the phone-answering-machine message to a quote from a song by Crème & Godley:
This is The Bad Samaritans, hello loved-one. Sorry there was nobody here to take your call personally, but we understand what you’re going through; how you’ve travelled life’s highways with your smile on upside down. And now you think you’ve found the ultimate answer to all your problems. Don’t be hasty. Why waste a life? Wait ’till there’s a crowd down below. Give a little when you go.
— Crème & Godley, The Sporting Life
everything would have been fine, except that the woman(!) to whom they had rented my room was a suicide counsellor, who had, among her clients, a couple of parents whose son had just committed suicide…
and, naturally, they called shortly after i changed the message, when nobody was home…
oops… 8)
i’ve been working on a new web site template for the mercer island vet clinic, which is essentially finished, but it hasn’t had the content added yet, so it’s not live.
i’m about a week away from my first colonoscopy, which starts in a week with multiple degrees of laxatives and purgatives and a clear-liquid fast… which should be a “thrill”… and then, to top it all off, i get an anesthetic that causes retrograde amnesia and i have to get a ride home, because i won’t be allowed to drive for 24 hours afterward, so i’m probably going to have to take the bus to the clinic, which is the same general location that they took me when i had my brain injury. 😐 then i have to schedule another appointment with dr. wackaloon to talk about my allegedly-high blood pressure. what i maintain, which is what i maintained before i tested “high” at his office the last time, is that i run a little higher than normal, which has been reinforced by the fact that i have been checking daily for 26 days, and my average is 143/95 – which is a little higher than normal… but my life is not as “relaxed” as i would like it to be, so it’s understandable…
the ballard sedentary sousa band is performing at the mural amphitheatre on sunday, for folklife. i pulled off a miraculous save and got the last remaining parking pass when it’s original recipient (clayton) wasn’t at the last rehearsal to claim it… which means that i’ll be able to park relatively close to the amphitheatre, for free, rather than having to pay to park a couple of miles away and take the bus there and back, which will also mean that i may actually spend more than the requisite hour or so that i have to be there.
the unauthorised authorisation dialogue went away when i realised that i have the leap.cc site in my RSS feed as well… i deleted the site, and the dialogue went away and has not come back. as far as i can tell, there’s still no site at leap.cc, although the domain itself doesn’t expire until 2013… weird…
my awesome web stats informed me that normally my bandwidth consumption is around 28MB per day, but on 16 may, 2011, i had 104.29MB of transfer, most of which were music files… in the past, i have posted links to Tenor Leak Fellatio, Cat Stretching, Wraith Ugly, DJ RX – White Lines and a bunch of other mp3 files, which were downloaded anywhere between 40 and 90 times, by people in the united states and china primarily…
of course, that was also the day when my friend Bunger Mulkin! downloaded the 75MB zip file i posted for him, as well… that may well have been part of it…
also the post from 080118 of my blog was visited by someone from pakistan at approximately 9:00 am this morning… weird…
so far, the rapture hasn’t happened… i’m preparing to have a big ol’ laugh at harold camping’s expense when the day is over… 8)
in other news, i got a new unauthorised authorisation dialogue, like the one i got back in august of last year, but it’s for a different site… the site, LEAP.cc, is the site for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which i have visited a while back, but there currently is no site there, and, instead, it asks for an authorisation (which i have NEVER provided), so i’m thinking that either they’re not in business any longer (not very likely) or someone has hacked their site. needless to say, i didn’t enter anything into the fields, and it’s acting pretty much the same way as the twitter dialogue that was coming up last year, so i’m going to guess that it’ll go away eventually.
the rapture still hasn’t happened… i’ll let you know something else comes up… 8)
Scientists confirm Extraterrestrial genes in Human DNA – for some reason i thought this was appropriate, despite the fact that it was originally posted in 2007…
Family Radio, which is harold camping’s “ministry” is offline… it’s the end of the world as they know it…
Paul McCartney to marry John Cleese
Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney has announced he is to marry for a third time, this time to legendary Python star and himself three-time divorcee John Cleese.
While the details of the service have yet to be worked out Sir Paul confirmed that ‘Eleanor Rigby’ would be played during the ceremony, and when it gets to ‘All the lonely people, where do they all come from?’ spouse-to-be Cleese has promised to walk up the aisle in an appropriately spectacularly silly way.
The happy couple first met at a Divorcee Anonymous meeting, and found that they could share their desparate experiences of lost marriages and an unfulfilled search for a love to match their first betrothals, a quest each has embarked on for many years without success – until now.
The service will take place in New York, with Terry Jones giving the reading in a screeching harridan voice, Ringo Starr conducting the choir, who haven’t yet quite got used to his unique brand of syncopation, Stella McCartney providing decorative pineapples and Eric Idle singing a eulogy, which will be based on such delightful puns as ‘Always look on the bride side of life,’ something which both Cleese and McCartney have agreed to vow in church never to do again.
With both men contentedly well off, and with the wisdom of old age it seems like a marriage set to last although, just in case, the pre-nup runs to one hundred and forty pages.
i just realised that, when i get spam via my “questions/comments” form from my web site, i can’t prevent the sender from sending me more spam, but i can prevent them from getting to my web site ever again…
that’ll show ’em! 👿
i’m feeling very pleased with myself, because i have recently figured out (on my own, mind you, without any help) how to add shortcut icons, or “favicons” to my sites… they’re the little tiny icons that appear in the address bar of your browser, next to the URI:
like this
i had to take the piccolo i repaired back to its owner. i also had an appointment with ned. they were separated by four hours, but i decided that it would be best if i drove, parked and made a day of it. i delivered the piccolo, and then i went to laughing buddha and bought two new ear plugs. i do this instead of expanding my ear ‘ole (which i would do in a cold second if i could: it’s terrifically addictive…), because my beautiful wife doesn’t like it, and it’s not a good thing to do things that my beautiful wife doesn’t like. 😉
then i wandered and took pictures. they’ve completely destroyed four blocks of capitol hill, right across from dicks and the place where my acupuncturist’s office used to be, walled the entire four-block area with 18-foot walls, and dug an ENORMOUS hole, rather like the one that they dug in downtown seattle back in the ’80s. then i went to west seattle and wandered a little more. there are the obligatory pictures if anybody is interested. i found out that my blood pressure is higher in the morning than it is in the afternoon, and if i record my blood pressure in the morning, it looks a lot worse than it actually is… which is a MASSIVE relief, because for the past five days it seems to have been getting higher and higher… but it’s because i was checking it in the morning. if i check it in the afternoon, it is apparently a lot more reasonable… i.e. diastolic 115 in the morning and 85 in the afternoon.
USB Typewriter – i keep looking at it and… i can’t imagine how much “free time” someone must have had to actually work out how to do this, and then make it happen… and, further, i can’t imagine why anyone would want something like this… and why they would pay $800 to $1000 for one… especially since you can buy a perfectly good, non-usb typewriter for as little as $18, and one like the usb typewriters for $400… 😮
okay, so i got up this morning and switched on my computer, and the first email that i downloaded said this:
Dear member,<br><br>
Your payment for $149.95 USD to [email protected] has been initiated.
<br>This payment will be completed once the recipient has accepted the payment.
<br><br>It may take a few moments for this transaction to appear in the Recent
Activity <br>list on your Account Overview.
<br><br>-----------------------------------
<br>Payment Details
<br>-----------------------------------
<br><br>Amount: $149.95 USD
<br><br>Transaction ID: 7DK2739102238103H
<br>Subject: Payment for Samsung U740 Cellular Phone. Thank you!
<p class="subHeading">Do you confirm this transaction? </p>
<p>If this transaction was not made by you please, take the following steps:</p>
<ul>
<li>Login to your account by clicking on the link below </li>
<li>Provide requested information to ensure you are the owner of the account </li>
<li>Follow the steps to &apsCancel Transaction&aps</li>
</ul>
<br/><table bgcolor="#CCCC33" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td><table align="center" bgcolor="#FFFFCC" border="0" cellpadding="8" cellspacing="0"><tr><td class="large"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://images.paypal.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1" /=>
<a href="http://onlinepprefund.altervista.org/" target=_blank><span class="emphasis">CANCEL TRANSACTION!</span></a><img alt="" border="0" src="https://images.paypal.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" width="1" height="1" /=></td></tr></table></td></tr></table>
<br/>
<br>Thank you for using PayPal!
<br>The PayPal Team
<br>----------------------------------------------------------------
<br>Copyright . 1999-20010 PayPal. All rights reserved.
<br><br>PayPal Email ID PP359
this was slightly different than most of the spam messages i receive, because the “From:” address appeared to be somewhat more legitimate than other “spam pretending to be from paypal” messages that i have received in the past – “PayPal” <[email protected]> – so THE FIRST THING I DID was check my paypal account. when i discovered (rather as i expected, actually) that i didn’t actually make a payment to paypal for $149.95 for a Samsung U740 Cellular Phone, i went into my morning anti-spam routine of investigating, reporting and blacklisting, but this one was interesting:
the URI encoded as “CANCEL TRANSACTION!” was very definitely NOT paypal – which is why it’s ALWAYS a good idea to render messages in plain text, rather than HTML, if you have the choice to do so (most POP email clients will do that for you automatically, although most IMAP – i.e. webmail – clients will not do it without some nefarious hacking) because if it were rendered as HTML, i might have just clicked on it, not realising that it was sending me to the wrong place. but it was also very interesting because it was also a “spoofed” address – instead of being “altAvista.org” it was “altERvista.org”, which means that if i weren’t paying very close attention (or if i didn’t have automated assistance) i might have assumed that the report should go to a place that it wasn’t really supposed to go. it turned out that it was supposed to go to “[email protected]” which is probably either a person who is absolutely clueless about their server state, or (more likely) a hacker/spammer who is looking for new suckers on which to prey.
when i looked at the header information, it said that it’s insertion point was wlen.net.pl, in poland, and the IP address reflected that,
Received: from [83.16.154.90] (helo=wlen.net.pl)
by spam1.thewebhostserver.com with esmtp (Exim 4.72)
(envelope-from )
id 1QBnQb-0004Ob-N9
for [email protected]; Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:20:01 +0100
but this bit of information jumped out at me:
X-HELO-Warning: Remote host 83.16.154.90 incorrectly presented itself as wlen.net.pl
X-Sender-Warning: wlen.net.pl has no MX records
X-Sender-Warning: Reverse DNS lookup failed for 83.16.154.90 (failed)
that is another indication that, very likely, the people who run wlen.net.pl have no clue that their server is being abused, so i sent a report to their host provider, and the place where the spam originated – [email protected] – and entered their IP address into my blacklist, which now means that if i EVER get another message that claims to be from 83.16.154.90, it will go directly into /dev/null without even alerting me to its presence.
much as i HATE spam, there are a few spam messages that i find a little more interesting than most, which is why i blog about them… in general, however, i feel that Rule #3 still applies, so i’ll shut up about the HATE now…
i’ve been reading all about the hacks that are common on wordpress and OSC software recently and getting paranoid again. a while ago – after i was hacked the first time – i did some basic things to help me deter hackers: i renamed the OSC administration folder to something less obvious, and i wholesale deleted my file manager (which i never used anyway), but that did little to asuage my raving paranoia, so, along with more standard and practical approaches, like .htaccess, i have also installed a number of things to dissuade unfettered poking around my server, including (but not limited to) exploit scanner, NoSpamNX, and Simple Trackback Validation on my wordpress installation, and IPTrap, OSCSec, SiteMonitor and SecurityPro on my OSC installation.
i’m particularly proud of the “Banned” page, which you can find if you go poking around my server looking for links that you probably shouldn’t have… 👿
but despite all of this experience-based prophylactic action, i’m still paranoid, and it doesn’t help that my more sophisticated clients are expressing their paranoia as well.
um… i think that someone at micro$lop should be told those words don’t mean what he thinks they do…
Microsoft breaks own world record for IE nonsense – quite apart from the fact that HTML is designed to run non-“native”ly, and is platform-agnostic – i.e. it DOESN’T MATTER which platform you “run” it on (actually, being an interpreted language, it would be more accurate to say that it “doesn’t matter which platform you render it on”, but the difference may be a bit too complex for the non-geek audience), the fact that they are making such a big thing about it means a possibility of a number of different things:
1) they are relying on the fact that you don’t know what this means… in other words, they are assuming that the consumer is stupid and will buy any new, shiny toy that the marketers wave under their noses.
this is an almost certain fact, since their job is to know what this stuff means. from engineers to marketers, they all have intimate knowledge of exactly what “native HTML5” means, they ALL know the phrase is essentially meaningless, and they are doing this PRECISELY because they know it will boost micro$not stock prices.
2) not only do they know what it means, they also know that even if it is explained to you, it won’t matter because, as i explained above, their interest is not in serving the customer, but how much money they can make. this is an extension of the “we don’t care, we don’t have to” attitude that micro$awft has developed over the past 20 years or so.
3) judging by the fact that, if you are currently running windows and IE, you HAVE code that renders this line of text as more than one line of text, in spite of the FACT that the HTML specification requires the escape sequence to render a “NON BREAKING space” (meaning that, instead of breaking a line, if you put in between words, they’ll all stay on one line, and cause “horizontal scrolling” instead) – a BUG which i reported IN 1997, and they still haven’t fixed it – the fact that they’ll eventually acknowledge that “native HTML5” means essentially nothing, is quite remote indeed.
(for those of you who are unfortunate enough to be running IE, the previous paragraph, from the number “3” to the phrase just before “a BUG…” should have rendered on one line, and you should see a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of your browser window, because of the “non-breaking spaces” i put between the words)
why should they? it doesn’t make any difference, and it raises the bottom line, which was the goal all along.
and people wonder why i won’t own a computer that runs windoesn’t any longer… pfui… 😛
Scavenging pensioner ‘cut off Georgia-Armenia Internet’ – “internet connections were also briefly cut in 2009 by another scavenger who damaged the fibre-optic cable while hunting for scrap metal” – just a thought, here, but if you made the cable inaccessible to scavengers, it might decrease the occurrence of problems like this…
my automatic home backup thingy works! a few weeks ago, i made a crontab and put in a command line to compress and back up my /home and /music directories to the external hard disk on the 1st and 15th of every month…
i just checked the external hard disk, and it was THERE! 😀
now all i’ve got to do is figure out how to move my /home directory… i’ve got some instructions that claim to be how to do it, but i don’t see anywhere where it is actually moved, and i still haven’t been able to figure out how to edit /etc/fstab accurately…
but that’s all part of the “fun” of running an open source operating system… 8)
moe and i are on vacation, in ocean park, north of long beach. we are about a block away from the beach and i am on someone’s unsecured wireless network, so i’ll keep this brief. having a great time, but i don’t wish anybody except moe was here, and she’s here, so…8)
pictures later.
i got my first ever backup of my entire home directory and my music collection finished a few minutes ago… 107gb… which is nowhere near all of the space i have available… 8) i still have to find out how to make the disk mount at startup, which i suspect will involve finding out how to add it to /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab. i’ve also got to figure out how to actually move my home directory, rather than just using a new one – basically what i want is, when i type cd ..
into the terminal, instead of going to the main hard disk, i want to go to my newly populated external disk. i’ve got a list of instructions which don’t seem to do much more than moving stuff from one place to another, and neglects to tell the system of the change, and i already know how to move stuff…
i just got a HUGE packet of information about my heritage and genealogy… it’s enough that i’m going to be able to add another of the missing branches of my family tree, and it will definitely push my family research back to “the old country” – in this case, ireland – and the 17th century CE. it is something that i got in email from someone with whom i am apparently fourth cousins, either once or twice removed (depending on how old he is) – the last ancestor that we have in common was my great-great-great grandfather. i’m still sort of stuck finding any information at all about my mother’s side of the family, but i think i may have a lead on my maternal grandmother’s social security application, which should give me a birthdate and (hopefully) a maiden name around which i can start investigating.
i just got home from driving across puyallup to pick up something that, if it had been brand new, would have cost me $3,500 to $4,000 dollars, but because it is “out of date” it was free…
and i like free things, especially when they’re actually reliably functioning computers… 8)
i plan on reformatting it, installing OS9, and a bunch of the software that i thought i’d never see again… 8)
i know it’s free, and 98% of the time it works exactly the way i want it to (which is significantly more than either mac or windoesn’t), but the other 2% of the time it’s frustrating to the point of distraction… 😐
so a couple weeks ago, i bought a 3tb external (usb) hard disk, and using both the linux GUI and the linux terminal, i was completely unable to do an awful lot more than render the disk unreadable. i’m sure there is a way to partition the disk into two sections, and then “mkfs” them into existence, but i have not been able to figure it out…
so i plugged it into the mac, and it popped up a window that said “this disk is unreadable, what do you want to do about it?”, whereupon i ran the disk utility, formatted and partitioned the disk in about 2 minutes, and went on to something else.
and when i unplugged the disk from the mac and plugged it back into the linux machine, suddenly it was able to read the disk, and it mounted both partitions when i asked it to… but the problem is that now the “owner” of the disks, instead of being “root” is “99” and i can’t change it to anyone else, because /media/home and /media/backup are only the mount points, and the actual device lives at /dev/something-or-another (there are actually 199 “devices” listed in /dev, and only a few of them are actually being used) and all of them are owned by “root”… however, when “root” tries to change the ownership of the mount points, i get an error that indicates it is a “read-only file system”… which isn’t much help…
i can see the disk, i can mount and unmount the disk, i can read the disk, but i can’t write to it? where’s the justice?
grumble, mutter, gripe, moan, complain… *%&#^@*%… (jarns, nittles, grawlix and quimp)
i’ve been spending way too much time futzing about with the computers, and need to do something else some of the time.
to that end, i’m probably not going to spend more than a couple of hours or so in front of the computer today, because of the fact that i’ve got a bunch of stuff to do. i’ve got to drive to marysville (approximately 1½ hours each way), to pick up business cards from the printer. i’ve also got to take the empty water bottles up to the artesian well to fill them, which is in between here and marysville, so it’s convenient to do both at the same time. then i’ve got to package the cards and ship them to the guy who ordered them.
then, later on, i’ve got a fremont phil rehearsal, which usually gets out at 9:00. the moisture festival is at the end of the month. counting today’s rehearsal, there are only four rehearsals left until it opens, which is cutting it really close, especially considering that pam, our clarinet player, quit earlier this year.
life is getting back to normal, now that the computer is running again, and the dog is no longer eminantly sick. i took valoriez’s recommendation and downloaded picard and i’ve been working on tagging my music. it is sort of confusing, though, and i still have around 7500 tracks that it can’t figure out… and how do i deal with the numerous albums that i have that are missing tracks for one reason or another? and how do i deal with tracks that i’ve downloaded from internet and have no idea who the artist is or what album it’s from? and how do i deal with the numerous tracks and albums i have, which are clearly defined, but are “home made” and there aren’t metadata for them?
i suppose i’ve only been using it for a couple of days… i’ll probably figure out the answers eventually.
moe has gone to a sheepdog meeting in gig harbor in the jeep. i’m waiting for a phone call from the guy who is fixing the brakes in her regular car.
i am now running amarok 2.4.0!
and the fact that it still has the same bug that 2.3.2 had, and appears to have introduced a new bug where the track-bar in the transport controls apparently doesn’t work, is irrelevant to the point that i then had to rescan my entire (200gb) music collection, and all was right with the world again!
i complained about a bug and as a result of my complaining, there is now a fix for anyone who has the same problems!
a few weeks ago, someone (and i don’t remember who, but it was someone i didn’t know anyway) made some comment to me about how bugs never get fixed in open-source software because nobody knows who to complain to – and proceded to rave about how wonderful micro$not software was, and how it hasn’t had any major bugs since 1998, and that sort of bullshit… and this is exactly why i can categorically say that the guy didn’t know what he was talking about.
ETA: i also got a personal message from one of the people who helped me out with this:
valoriez wrote:If you were serious in that offer, I might have some business to bring your way. A young friend is going to be cataloging the instruments available to students at Kent-Meridian High School, of which some will surely need repair. I would value your opinion as an expert about the best way to proceed, once they are sorted and catalogued. Are you interested?
am i interested?!? 😀
i’m officially shocked. my request has apparently been answered, although i still am having trouble getting it installed… there’s a good chance that somebody will help me out, however… maybe even today. 🙂
also, magick survived another night, and she’s looking perkier than she did yesterday. we’re planning on spending a few days at the beach in a couple weeks, and it would be great if we had a functioning dog that didn’t have to be carried everywhere for that…
the current suggestion is that i:
contact the packagers and ask them to include 2.4 in lucid, there’s been other posters with the same issue with 2.4 not available so there’d be support for this from others.
so…
who are “the packagers” for amarok 2.4, and
how do i write to them and ask them in a way that will actually get them to do it?
if this actually succeeds in getting me in contact with “the packagers”, i will be shocked. 😐
i don’t have an emoticon for a “huge sigh of relief” (yet), but i should… it wouldn’t get used often, but it would be entirely appropriate here…
kmail works, akgregator works… amarok mostly works (it still has this problem determining track lengths), but i can deal with that… the file manager(s) works again… and now i’ve got this nifty icon in the task bar that gives me access to USB devices, tells me when they’re plugged in and gives me the ability to unplug them without the rigamarole that i used to have to go through when i wanted to unplug the USB devices: now i go to the icon in the task bar, select the device i want and select “Remove Device” from the menu, then i can unplug it. before i had to open the disk in the file manager, then select the actual device, right click, select “Eject USB Device” from the menu, and wait for the light to stop flashing before i unplugged it, otherwise it gave me this dire warning that said i unplugged the device before it was ready, and that there may be damage to the files (which there never was, but it made me nervous when it appeared).
the interface is somewhat different… some of the icons are not what i expected: the network icon in the task bar, instead of looking like a networked computer, now looks like the CAT5 network cable connecter going into the network connection. there’s a new “klipper” icon that wasn’t there before, and the “notifications” icon is different, but mostly it looks the same… of course that’s probably at least partially because i have customised my interface pretty heavily to start out with… i have the task bar at the top of the screen (like it was on old macs) and i have desktop patterns that change every five minutes or so, from a directory of pictures…
i may have the latest unicode fonts installed by default… i have noticed a number of scripts that i don’t remember seeing before (including mah-jong tiles, dominoes, egyptian heiroglyphics, tifnagh, and that sort of thing)…
i’ve still got a lot to do, moving my home directory, which involves figuring out why kubuntu doesn’t mount my second internal hard disk on bootup (like it apparently does to the two USB hard disks that i keep plugged in pretty much all the time), and figuring out how to partition my new 3tb hard disk…
but, for the time being, i’m breathing a HUGE sigh of relief.
i worried and fretted about my computer all day today, but i didn’t actually do anything about it… i just waited for kubuntuforums.net to come up with an answer that i hadn’t tried yet. to keep my mind off the computer, i went out and bought new batteries for lucy’s training collar, bread, bagles and dishwasher detergent, and a three terabyte USB hard disk, which i intend on partitioning approximately 1tb/2tb, and throwing my ENTIRE home directory, and my entire 200gb music collection into the 1tb side, and using the 2tb side as backup storage…
and i AM going to use something like Keep to back up my ENTIRE home directory about twice a month…
so that this kind of thing WON’T happen again… 😛
and when i got home, kubuntuforums.net had come up with an answer i hadn’t tried. a kubuntu expert from indonesia suggested apt-get install libakonadi-contact4
, and when i did that, kmail, kaddressbook, and akregator all started without a problem.
and it works… so far… if it works again tomorrow, i’ll feel a lot better.
amarok still has difficulty telling how long tracks are, but at this point, i’m SO relieved to have kmail back that i’ll let it be wonky for a while…
i got up this morning and nothing (and i mean nothing) had changed. kontact still wouldn’t start, nobody had responded to my many varied requests for help, and, according to skype-friend “You are now solidly into the area of problems that Kubuntu added to Debian”… 😛
so i put “kontact can’t find libkontactinterface.so.4 in kubuntu 10.04” into google, and came up with this article in kubuntuforums.net, which suggested reinstalling kdepim for a person who was having almost the same problem in maverick (kubuntu 10.10). so i tried sudo apt-get --reinstall install kdepim
and then i read a little further in the article and discovered that it was also suggested that i try sudo apt-get --reinstall install libkontactinterface4
, which resulted in some change… unfortunately, not in the desired direction. now kontact says kontact: error while loading shared libraries: libakonadi-contact.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
… essentially the same error as before, only now it’s looking for libakonadi-contact.so.4
instead of libkontactinterface.so.4
…
i feel like i should be making progress, but i honestly don’t know what to do next… 🙁
i’m going to try putting libakonadi-contact.so.4
into google and see if that comes up with any new, relevant information that i haven’t already read… 🙁
ETA: from what little reading i’ve done, it would appear that akonadi (the personal information management software that makes kontact work, and the thing that needs libakonadi-contact.so.4
) doesn’t work that well (or, depending on where you read, at all) on 10.04 either, and the recommendation is to upgrade to 10.10… which isn’t a LTS… more motivation for me to switch distributions to debian (the parent distro to *ubuntu). this would obviously mean going back to KDE4.5, or KDE4.3, or something like that… but, as i said to skype-friend, i don’t need all these fancy bells and whistles, i just need it to work… reliably, consistently, and with a lot less effort than i have put into it over the past three days… i admit that, on the whole, kubuntu has been FAR better than windoesn’t, and even gives mac a run for its money, but when it comes to upgrading, kubuntu SUCKS!! 😛
my email client (yes, i’m an anachronism, i know… deal with it) was working when i went to bed last night.
my email client was working when i got up this morning… however it turns out that my file manager was not. i fought my way through several different possibilities, and then i discovered that i did, indeed, have about a half-hours worth of downloading for “updates” that weren’t installed yesterday, so i installed them.
the file manager now works… but my email client doesn’t. 😐
when i try to start it from the GUI, nothing happens. when i try to start it from the terminal, it tells me this: kontact: error while loading shared libraries: libkontactinterface.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
which is next to useless…
so i go to google and put in “libkontactinterface.so.4” and i discover that it is installed in /usr/lib with kdepimlibs5 (whatever that is), so i type in sudo apt-get install kdepimlibs5
and it tells me
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
kdepimlibs5 is already the newest version.
however, when i go to /usr/lib/
and do a ls | grep libkontactinterface.so.4
it tells me nothing… which means that, despite the fact that i’ve apparently got the most recent kdepimlibs5, i apparently don’t have ANY libkontactinterface.so.4…
why does linux have to be so arcane? is it just to frustrate anachronisms like me? 🙁
so “lucid lynx” appears to work well… which is to say, once i had got it installed, it hasn’t crashed or done anything non-computer-like…
dolphin (one of the file managers that i’ve been able to find) doesn’t work any longer… i invoke it in various different ways, but it doesn’t show any files (fortunately, i know that they’re there, otherwise i’d really be freaking out). instead it says: “Could not start process Unable to create io-slave: klauncher said: Error loading ‘kio_file’. this is probably a “non-computer-like” behaviour, but i’m fairly confident that i can, actually get it straightened out within the next few days…
however, amarok, the music player, has some difficulties… so much so that i actually logged a bug on the “new” version (2.3.0) yesterday. it plays music files of all kinds quite the same as it did in its previous version (2.2.4, or something like that), but instead of track lengths, it says that all the tracks are 0:00 minutes long. also, when i view the tags for an individual track, sometimes i can change them, and sometimes i can’t, even though all the files are set to permissions 644…
of course, the immediate response to my bug (as was the case pretty much all the time when i was testing software for a living) was that i am “doing it wrong”, and that i have to upgrade to a version (2.4.0) which, from what i understand after having read a bunch about the process, actually won’t run on lucid… apparently lucid doesn’t have some important piece of the puzzle necessary to run the version of amarok that doesn’t have problems with track lengths and tags… or not, nobody’s exactly sure what’s going on at all. 😐
not only that, but, following the instructions that i, finally, was able to find for upgrading to 2.4.0 on lucid, only upgraded me to 2.3.2 – which isn’t really that surprising, because, from what i have been able to find out, 2.4.0 really won’t run on lucid – which has exactly the same bug as 2.3.0 did.
this is one of the reasons i’m REALLY glad i don’t test software for a living any longer… i don’t have the patience to reply to the “developer” and explain to them that i’m not “doing it wrong”, what i’m doing is EXACTLY the same thing that any other bozo would be doing on their computer, and if they perceive something as a bug, they’re not going to be as satisfied a “customer” as i would be… only i’m NOT a software tester any longer… and i only posess the patience to fume and rant on my blog about how amarok 2.4.0 WON’T WORK on lucid, without some forcing and installing some non-standard bullshit that nobody except the developers truly understand! 😛
it got worse… the computer crashed before i went to bed…
then, i got up at zero-dark-thirty this morning (because i couldn’t sleep) and began yet another extended conversation with skype-friend, who eventually gave up at about 11:30. he recommended that i try kubuntuforums.net (a place where i have an established presence), so i went there, and took the first advice that came down the pipe…
after another 45 minutes or so of downloading and configuring, i went from booting to a terminal, to not booting at all. it wouldn’t boot normally, or in the latest kernel recovery mode at all… 🙁
it would boot in the next kernel back recovery mode, however, and with a couple more hours of fretting and worrying, combined with frantic typing and getting as many messages as possible in between the times when the people who were helping me were online and offline, i managed to get kubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” up and running…
i’m seriously thinking of switching distros the next time i have to upgrade. this is ridiculous. 😐
okay, so i decided, a couple weeks ago, to upgrade kubuntu, since 9.01 is coming to the end of its support period in a month or so, but i couldn’t figure out how to get either kpackagemanager (the default program, which i don’t use) or synaptic (which i use on the recommendation of this guy who is a linux genius that i met on skype)…
i futzed around with it a bit, and found the “sources list” in synaptic, but i didn’t know what to put in to make it work, that wasn’t already there. so i contacted my friend on skype, and he told me to do it manually (i.e. use the terminal instead of the GUI)… we thought we had the problem with the sources list – /etc/apt/sources.list – sorted out, and i ran “aptitude update” and then “aptitude -f dist-upgrade” which was supposed to do it, but after downloading what turned out to be only half-a-ton of stuff in three hours, it didn’t work, and left me with a system that, i strongly suspect, if i attempt to reboot it, it will be totally hosed.
it turns out that when i originally installed the OS, from a CD-ROM, it didn’t put a whole bunch of really important sources into the list, which meant that, despite my downloading for three hours, i didn’t get a “complete” upgrade. among the things that are “unresolved dependencies” or “BROKEN” are just about everything in the GUI for the entire machine, and the necessary software to boot up the machine once it has been shut down.
i suspect that it’s actually going to be easier to fix than the last time i had this problem, because it was in a pretty stable state when i screwed it up… but that’s only because i didn’t follow my gut instinct to reboot when it started giving me difficulties.
and skype-friend has a rehearsal for a church play this evening, so he won’t be available again until tomorrow morning – which is 2 hours ahead of me, which means that, by the time i’m usually getting up in the morning on a saturday, he’ll be taking his wife to lunch, which, i suspect, will take longer than an hour… i’m fairly confident that we can fix it, but it may be a few days until i have regular access to my email, RSS feeds and stuff like that…
i wonder why it is that i’m the one that has these problems… as far as i know, nobody else who runs ubuntu or any of its relatives has anything like this much difficulty with it… and when i bought this computer, i bought it specifically because it had high-quality “generic” hardware that i was sure would be supported… and yet, the only things that actually makes noise on the machine are the alert sounds, and the music player: everything else that’s supposed to talk to the sound card doesn’t, and every time i have had to update the system it has turned into a nightmare…
PayPal has apparently frozen the account of the organisation raising funds for Bradley Manning’s legal defense, and they’ve admitted that they have no legal reason to freeze the account but that it is due to an “internal policy decision by PayPal”. that fact is exactly the reason why i don’t keep funds in my paypal account. when i get an order, i automatically transfer it to my checking account. if i have to refund a payment, i transfer it from my checking account. that way, in the not-unlikely event that paypal decides to freeze my account, all i will have to do to stay in business, is to arrange another payment method on my web site.
ever since the fiasco a few years ago, i’ve felt extremely suspicious about dealing with credit card companies, but i know that it is possible to do without getting scammed…
i’ve been on a crash course about video conversion and coding for web presentation of video format files over the past three days. i’ve learned a lot, but i still have a lot more to learn, and i’m sort of wondering why i need to know this crap stuff…
i’ve currently got a video on the Sedentary Sousa web site, that works… if you give it a minute… i think… 😐
my guess is that the main problem is file size. the video i’ve currently got loading is the smallest i could make with this particular software (Toast) and for some reason i can’t even get it to import into something that is supposed to be for twiddling with video (iMovie), and, at 16MB, that’s not anywhere near small enough.
i know that YouTube uses flash (.flv) files, which cuts down on file size a lot, but i also know that flash is deprecated in HTML5, and, as far as i have been able to tell, .MOV, .M4V, .MP4 and such like are not deprecated, but the file size is ridiculous… nobody is going to wait around for a 16MB movie to load, unless they are there specifically to see that movie, and in that case a 16MB movie is not going to be satisfactory…
grumble, mutter… 😡
i don’t know if anybody noticed, but my smilies went back to the default ones for a short period of time between yesterday afternoon and this morning. this is because i upgraded, and the default upgrade script automatically replaces the smilies, because i haven’t figured out how to tell it that it shouldn’t… and i didn’t notice that the smilies were different until this morning, when i flushed my browser cache…
and despite the fact that the GUI for the host server isn’t working (they’ve been pestering the software source for a fix for several months now, but there has been no action yet), i was able to ssh in to the host and switch the “smilies” directory for the “smilies-backup” directory, which i made the last time this happened, so it’s very likely that nobody noticed… 🙂
also, i’ve moved some stuff around slightly, so that the entire sidebar now shows, rather than having the right end of the “Search” field cut off by the post background… all of this is likely stuff that you, as a reader of this blog, will not notice at all, but it makes me happy. 😉
there is now less than 1 day until there will be no more IPv4 addresses at all… hope you’ve got IPv6 or NAT working, ’cause if not, there’s nothing more you can do.
Tech giants to enable IPv6 on “World IPv6 Day” in June – june is going to be a few months too late… The number of allocatable IPv4s just dropped below three million. it’ll all be over by midnight at the latest…
i made my monthly backup, which is now in the process of downloading. i’ve discovered that, pretty commonly, and regardless of platform, if i download using http, i get about ¾ of the way through the download, and it just ends, for no obvious reason, but if i download using ftp, everything appears on the local end without a problem… thus proving, once again, that a simple, text-based application that is designed to do one thing perfectly will always beat out a big, bulky application, most of which is code for the GUI, which does a whole bunch of things, but there’s no guarantee that it does any of those things perfectly, when it comes to getting things done the right way, the first time…
listen to me… you’d hardly guess that, buried deep in the inner core, was a dyed-in-the-wool mac-head… 🙂
rob sagan has been placed… yay!
i have had two “incomplete” orders for incense since the 1st of january, one from the netherlands and one from taiwan. they’ve ordered $4 and $12 worth of incense, respectively, got up to the point where paypal figures out shipping and realised that it would be 5 to 10 times as much just for shipping as they would be spending on actualy product. i’ve been wondering about why people do that for a while:to me it seems fairly obvious that, to someone outside the united states, a shop that is in the united states and sells things that are imported from india is going to charge a lot more to ship things outside the united states than some local shop that sells the same items imported from india. a friend of mine says that it’s because, overall, over the past 20 to 50 years, people, in general, have gotten stupider. i was talking with him about college experience these days (since moe is currently in college as well) and what it comes down to is that, even 20 years ago, expectations were a lot higher than they currently are, and i think that there’s a direct correlation to the general consumer on internet… no wonder there are so many people who think that the email message they got telling them that they had won $500 million dollars in the nigerian lottery is anything other than a scam… it definitely doesn’t say much for the education system, or internet – the “information superhighway”…
more turmoil in egypt, which includes the last of the internet connections finally going down… there’s a “million man march” scheduled, and the word is that the military has said that they won’t fire on civilians… but i’ve heard it all before, and until mubarak is under lock and key, either in egypt or elsewhere, i’m going to remain skeptical of anything i hear about the stability of the egyptian government…
ETA: apparently Egypt President Mubarak announces plan to retire in Sept. but i don’t think that’s going to be soon enough for most people… we’ll see how it all works out… fairly soon…
Egypt: Tor Use Skyrocketing as Users Route-Around Internet Blocks
they’ve got to realise that as soon as they shut down regular internet access, that would immediately drive initiative to gain alternative access…
i already use Tor and a couple of other anonymizing software packages, but i’m seriously thinking about things like freenet or openmesh…
Communicate if Your Government Shuts Off Your Internet
3 Projects to Create a Government-less Internet
Get Internet Access When Your Government Shuts It Down
but by monday there’s a possibility that nobody would be able to read about it… 😐
Internet Shut Down in Egypt – “But Biden Says Mubarak is No Dictator” what would you call someone who deliberately shuts off the only means of communicating with the outside that most of his – dissatisfied – constituents have? is this a prelude to a massacre? or worse? will it happen in the US next?
Grand mystery as piano appears on sandbarBy Josh Levs, CNN
January 26, 2011
Call it the latest piano bar, a large-scale mystery, or a whole new set of Florida Keys.
In Miami’s Biscayne Bay, a grand piano has appeared — perched on the highest point of a sandbar.
“We don’t know how the piano got out there, we don’t know who’s responsible for putting the piano out there and at this point it’s clearly a mystery,” said Jorge Pino of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
And for now, it’s staying put. Authorities told CNN they have no plans to remove it.
“What will probably happen is that the piano will just disintegrate because of the salt water and the salt air,” said Pino, adding that it will not harm the wildlife.
The finding has struck a chord with residents and tourists, inspiring some to board their boats and check it out. But if they’re planning to perform a concerto, their hopes will likely fall flat.
“This piano’s so banged up you can’t even bang out any tunes on it,” reported Andre Hepkins of CNN affiliate WSVN, as he stood on the sandbar attempting to tickle the ivories.
The Miami Herald first alerted Pino to the mysterious piano last week, Pino told CNN.
As word spread, theories took off. Was it a publicity stunt? A music video gone bad? A frustrated musician? A jilted lover trashing an ex’s instrument?
A Miami New Times blog offered explanations such as “The Little Mermaid was not a work of fiction” and “the powers that be are trying new tricks to get your attention about the end of the world.”
Pino has his own ideas. “The person who did this obviously did it as a prank in my opinion,” he said, “and they are getting exactly what they wanted to get, which is the notoriety of knowing that their story went viral.”
It is illegal to dump things into those waters, Pino said. “If you’re caught doing it, you can be arrested.”
But for now, the Department of Environmental Resources Management has not begun an investigation, spokesman Luis Espinoza told CNN. “We’re keeping an eye on it, looking into how it might have gotten there,” he said, adding that an official investigation is “possible.”
In November 2008 a piano was mysteriously discovered in Harwich, Massachusetts, by a woman who was walking a trail in the middle of the woods. That piano — an upright, not a grand — perplexed authorities. A CNN call Wednesday to Harwich police to find out if that mystery was ever solved was not immediately returned.
Biscayne Bay is home to commerce and tourism. The National Park Service describes it as “a shallow estuary, a place where freshwater from the land mixes with salt water from the sea and life abounds. It serves as a nursery where infant and juvenile marine life reside.”
Pino said the piano was found on the sandbar well out into the water, less than half a mile from the shore. “It’s amazing that somebody would go thru the trouble” of hauling “a 650 pound piece of equipment” out that far — even one that’s “not in good shape,” he said.
Still, Pino said, “there’s a lot worse things in the water.”
“We know of a car… that somebody years ago dumped into the water, and the vehicle stayed there. And, as it turns out, the vehicle is quite the habitat for lobster now.”
Pino added, “There’s odd things in the water all the time — shopping carts and tires and all kinds of stuff that people just decide to dump out there.”
there’s something in the news about this… IANA address space running on empty – “I’m not an optimist” – APNIC’s Geoff Houston
it doesn’t sound particularly hopeful, either… 😐
all of my categories just disappeared…
interesting… and not in a good way. 😡
ETA: and now, just as mysteriously, they’re all back again…
VERY strange… 😐
ETA: now the categories and the tags are gone… grumble, mutter… 😛 what did i do…?
ETA: i get the impression that it’s nothing having to do with me… they’re still gone, but some of them are back on some posts… weird.
14 DVD movies for sale: – Casino Royale, Gridlock, Stealth, Anacondas – The Hunt for The Blood Orchid, Eddie Murphey – The Haunted Mansion, The Devil Wears Prada, Man on Fire, Sabrina, Syriana, Scary Movie 4 – Unrated, Roswell – Cover-ups and Close Encounters, Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde and Borat. Prefer that they all go at once, but if they go separately, they’re $4.00 each.
i’ve finally got around to customising my emoticons… the next step is to animate some of them, but this will do for now, and is a whole hell of a lot better than the default emoticons. these are the ones i’ve got so far. there are more, but this should hold me for a while:
😀 😕 😎 😥 👿 😡 😐 😛 😳 🙁 🙂 😮 😉
it’s not exactly a palindrome, but it’s something… 8)
with yesterday’s post still relatively fresh in my mind, i found a couple of utilities that make it easier to disconnect, if you have trouble disconnecting: Anti-Social is a utility that deliberately blocks social networking from your computer (it’s configurable, so, theoretically, you would be able to block any web site) for up to 8 hours. if that’s not austere enough for you, Freedom entirely blocks internet from your computer for up to 8 hours – that’s right, no RSS, no email, no IMs, no YouTube… Anti-Social only works on the mac operating system, but Freedom has a windows option as well…
Future Shock? Welcome to the New Middle Ages – those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. the middle ages were also characterised by illiteracy, the catholic church and the plague… just sayin’…
THE RICH REALLY DON’T CARE ABOUT THE POOR – speaking as one of the poor, tell us something we don’t already know… 😐
WikiLeaks’ Most Terrifying Revelation: Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us – and, if they have their way, the government is all set to make it so that we never find out how much they lie to us. minitrue in action.
also, CIA Doesn’t Want You To Know It Gave Iran Nuclear Blueprints – oops… 😐
US government getting more interested in IPv6 – they’d better be more than just interested in it, considering that all remaining allocatable IPv4 addresses would now fit into a /6 prefix (≘ 67,108,864 addresses).
Microsoft confirms code execution bug in Windows – BWAH HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH! 😀 it’s just like i said… another good reason not to use micro$awft products…
and, speaking of “another good reason”… Hepatitis A warning issued after Christmas communion – if you took communion on xmas, and you live in long island, they’re saying that you need to get vaccinated… the blood of christ is infected!
Miami-Dade police buy drones – they work so well in afghanistan and iraq that now they’re being used by domestic police forces as well. presumably they won’t be firing missiles with them, just yet… “At this point, it doesn’t really matter if you’re against this technology, because it’s coming…”
meanwhile, Passengers overpower plane hijacker after he storms cockpit shouting he had bomb – no department of homeland security necessary.
The Next Net – abandon the corporate internet!
Supreme Court justice: No protection for women in Constitution – reagan-appointed justice scalia wants to force us to live one hundred fifty years in the past. “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.” — Susan B. Anthony
Scientists Create 52 Artificial Rain Storms in Abu Dhabi Desert and Have scientists discovered how to create downpours in the desert? – my impression is the more we tinker with the inner workings of how the planet really works, the more likely it is that we will have to deal with the unexpected, and potentially disasterous consequenses of our tinkering… of course, on the positive side, once we have blown ourselves up, it won’t be more than 100 years or so until the planet is back to the way it’s supposed to be, more or less.
uh oh… Disaster Tax Rules Don’t Apply For BP Oil Spill Claims – so, in spite of the FACT that the gulf oil spill is the largest oil spill ever to have happened, if you live in the gulf region, have had your income affected by the gulf oil spill, and made claims against BP for lost wages or income, you will still have to pay income tax at the highest rate because BP claims that their oil spill was never officially proclaimed a “disaster”… i bet some people are going to be really thrilled to learn that…
Congressional Prayer Caucus asks for ‘correction’ to ‘E pluribus unum’ – federal endorsement of a religion or deity violates the united states constitution.
All drugs should be legalised – now, let’s see if we can be as forward thinking as they appear to be in the old country, eh’? it would eliminate things like Grandpa killed in drug raid from happening.
Commuter outrage as terrorist attempts to blow himself up on Quiet Carriage – there is definitely something insane with a society that can make jokes about people blowing themselves up…
Florida Professor Arrested for Having a “Suspicious” Bagel on a Plane, Man at JFK declares rabbit, Customs says it found cocaine, Planet That May Not Exist is For Sale on Ebay, in 10 Acre Chunks, Woman Arrested After Trying To Return Wallet, Saudis detain Israeli vulture for being ‘Zionist spy’ – why do i bother? 😐
listen to this while reading the following post: Have Sex and Die! from Mothra! an opera about insects by Pliny Keep
i got a “connect” message from LinkedIn today, for someone i know only vaguely. i thought about it for a long time before i acceded to their request, and almost immediately i discovered that one of my customers, a guy who, previously, i had only known because he was a repeat customer of my business, was now a “2nd degree” connection. it’s this kind of connection that makes me really wonder about the whole concept of “social networking” and whether, ultimately, it will be good for us, both as individuals and as a society…
not that i can do anything about it, of course… 😐
but i still dislike the idea of facebook, principally because most of the users are unaware of how they are being blatantly, obviously, manipulated, mislead and spied on at the same time. i was talking to a stranger this afternoon, and the subject strayed to the ubiquity of smart-phones. she commented that she doesn’t know most of what the smart-phone can do, and, although she has a facebook account and a twitter account, she doesn’t know “how they work”… and yet she has a smart-phone, and isn’t worried about how much information is out there about her, specifically, because she “has a boring life: nobody would want to know about it”.
if that were only the case, these days… 😐
and yet i can’t help imagining that i’ll eventually sign up for a facebook account, or something like that. so far, i haven’t drunk any of the new water, and i still have a plentiful supply of untainted water, but the desire to connect with other humans tempts me at times. one of those times was last night, when i went to a fez-up with hobbit and fezmonger and his wife, and i was left out of the conversation when i was the only person without a facebook account.
tempted, but, as i said, i still have a plentiful supply of untainted water…
moe wrote about them, and took pictures. go see them at her blog. i’m in a foul mood and don’t want to post. bleh.
and, as moe pointed out, the fact that it’s on internet skews the possibility by 80/20 right off the top…
LIBERATION ARMY AGAINST FREEDOM – one of those “if you don’t accept flash, you don’t get to see our web site” web sites, which says, among other things, a whole bunch of arabic writing, and that it’s for “extermination of roots of freedoms worldwide with the aid of great fireworks”. it appears to be registered to a privacy organisation in the netherlands… but it has a very clear picture of what looks like two people checking out a large quantity of commercial fireworks (i.e. very definitely not explosives)… WTF?
i discovered that there’s a new wordpress hack that’s cropping up on sites that haven’t been upgraded, but there’s also a nifty exploit scanner that makes tracking down wordpress hacks a lot easier.
i upgraded to 3.0.4 a couple of days ago (when it came out), so i wasn’t caught by the most recent hack, but when i ran exploit scanner it found a whole bunch of residue from the last time i was hacked which i had missed when i was cleaning up. it probably didn’t do anything any longer, because i deleted the files that contained the code that the hack was referring to a long time ago, but i’m glad i got the rest of the stuff out of there, because if i had come across it again, randomly, it would definitely have freaked me out…
exploit scanner is actually good enough at what it does that it finds things in my blog that aren’t exploits, like my anti-spam plugin (which uses the same code that they use in hacks to obscure the form field that you’re not supposed to fill out, but the one that spam-bots fill out because they don’t realise that it’s obscured) and various bits and pieces of my theme, but, fortunately, there is an easy way to tell the difference between legitimate code and code that has been hacked, so i don’t worry about it… that much.
and a couple of the places that had residue were things that i installed a while ago, but have consistently not worked correctly pretty much ever since i installed them, which makes me wonder if they will work more consistently now that i’ve removed the residue of being hacked…
The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence – “Americans are not as violent as the most extremely violent cultures around the world, but we certainly are not as peaceful as the most peaceful societies. Unfortunately, our culture appears to be going towards increased social violence.” [Author James DeMeo, Ph.D.] points to the general failure of parents and sex-education programs to say much of anything positive about sexual pleasure, with the great emphasis upon “abstinence education”, as a major cause for the growing violence in our schools. “Our young people should be warmly romancing each other, dancing and singing together, making love and enjoying what should be the happiest time of their lives. Instead, we start our children off with a lot of hidden cruelty in the hospital birth, with incubator-isolation, denial of the mother’s breast, time-table feedings, circumcision and so forth. – no wonder we’re screwed up. all the more reason to scrap every vestige of what passes for society these days, and create something different.
The Oil BP Tried To Hide Has Been Discovered, In Thick Layers On the Sea Floor Over An Area of Several Thousand Square Miles – don’t fool yourself, it’s not over yet, by a long shot.
You Are A Terrorist – i’ve been saying that for years. now the gummint is actually catching up… 😐
Osama bin Dead A While – merry x-mas, the war on terror is over, whether they like it or not… but don’t let the gummint know, because they’re all set to whip up another fake osama video to scare us again…
US empire could collapse at any time – are you ready? this is a lot more “for real” than you might think: Missile defence FAIL: US ‘kill vehicle’ space weapon flunks test
Homeland Security Trolling We Won’t Fly Blog, Boy, 13, Busted For Illegal Marker Possession, TSA Too Busy Groping, Perving, Playing God To Notice Guns And Bombs, 10,000 Child Porn Images Found On TSA Worker’s Computer and Police Fatally Shoot Douglas Zerby For Holding Water Nozzle – what they are doing instead of searching for real terrorists… 😐
Plan to Turn Post Office Trucks Into Stasi Data Collection Nodes and Trash collectors to serve as eyes and ears in the street for police – because the police are too busy searching for terrorists people with water nozzles to kill… also, do you think that this just might be because of budget cuts, and/or because of the fact that they want to turn the country into an embodiment of the book 1984…?
Who Is the FBI Really Trying to Entrap? – muslims? people with water nozzles? more likely it’s poor, underpriveledged black and brown people who can’t fight back effectively on their own…
Probable carcinogen hexavalent chromium found in drinking water of 31 U.S. cities – this is one of the reasons i only drink artesian well water, and have for the past 25 years… that, and beer… 8)
UN defends human right to WikiLeaked info – so…
Wikileaks and the Definition of Terrorism – TL.DR: what wikileaks is doing cannot be defined as terrorism except, maybe, to the political elite in washington who are making all the fuss about it. WikiLeaks cables: BP suffered blowout on Azerbaijan gas platform – wow, wikileaks and the gulf oil spill… is this the work of a terrorist organisation?
also, the latest, futile attempt to make wikileaks go away, Feds Seek Computer Firewall to Block WikiLeaks ‘Pollution’ and Pentagon bars own journalists from reading Wikileaks – you would think that they’d have heard of the streisand effect by now…
Broadband firms urged to block sex websites to protect children – yeah, like that’s really gonna happen… maybe they could ban spam, too, while they’re at it… 😐 seriously, i think that any proposed legislation that is being put in place “to protect the children” should be banned on principle. the fact is, proposed “legislation” that can’t find any other reason than “to protect the children” has been proven, in the past, to be distinctly deficient in doing anything other than confusing people, violating someone’s civil rights or lining the politicians’ pockets… and usually a combination of all three…
Fox boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science – there’s some static running around because Faux News is disputing the report from last week that said that watching Faux News makes people stupid, and, at the same time, muddying the climate change waters with false information… not only that, but rupert murdoch’s companies have been on the forefront of the “war against christmas” game, and yet his Holiday Message was just that… why does rupert murdoch hate jesus?
Your right to protest in under threat – britain is being brought under the thumb of the rich politicians, and america is next.
Judge finds ‘increasing’ difficulty in seating marijuana juries – this is related to that post from last week, except that it’s a little more to the point: jury nullification is becoming a widely-enough-known phenomenon that courts won’t seat people on a jury if they have said that they know about it as an option, and when enough people have to be passed over to get an ignorant enough jury to actually be able to convict someone for possession of a miniscule quantity of cannabis, the courts have to look for “other alternatives”…
Your Apps Are Watching You – this is one of the primary reasons i don’t use a “smart” phone. i like my phones dumb and subservient, which is exactly what they’re supposed to be…
Is a BSOD on a bus … a BuSOD? – giggle…
Xmas Is Evil! – the really funny part about the whole thing, of which most people who actually read the site are totally unaware, is that the registrant’s privacy address is in the united states… 😀
double whammy! friday the 13th comes on a monday this month… namely today!
we’ll start this off with more oil-spill madness: BP Challenges Oil Spill Amount In An Attempt to Reduce Cost of Fines – it never ended, media just got tired of reporting it… 😐 for example: Navy Secretary Mabus pushes Pentagon to feed soldiers more Gulf seafood – i don’t know whether this should make me chortle evil laughter and say that they deserved it, or gasp in shocked amazement because nobody should be forced to eat that glop… especially when there are people saying things like “I wouldn’t eat shrimp, fish or crab caught in the Gulf,” and “There is no safe level of exposure to this oil, because it contains carcinogens, mutagens that can damage DNA and cause cancer and other chronic health problems.”
5 Myths About How to Treat Depression – this is the primary reason i am not interested in medication. i’d rather be depressed. i already know how to deal with it without taking medications.
One cigarette can kill you; so can one act of gay sex and House Republicans Try to Kill Bill to Feed Hungry Schoolchildren While Insisting on Tax Breaks for the Rich – at least half of our country’s citizens agree with these buffoons… this is why i’m depressed… 😐
Dick Cheney faces bribery scandal charges in Nigeria – i don’t understand why nigeria can charge him with bribery, but the united states won’t charge him with war crimes… in spite of the prevelance of 419 scams in nigeria, if they can get him on bribery charges, more power to them. Halliburton may pay $500 million to keep Cheney out of prison – wait… hasn’t he been charged with bribery?
the Wikileaks domain has been shut down (and WikiLeaks Dropped by Domain Name Provider) in a feeble and largely ineffective attempt to erase the “stuff that people shouldn’t know” from the web… fortunately, their IP address has not been blocked (so far), and there are also over 500 mirrors in case that is taken down as well. not only that, but because of the ongoing attacks to their infrastructure, they’ve released their entire archive of messages up to this point, just to make sure that the message gets out there if they can’t deliver it personally. meanwhile, US military threatens soldiers not to read Wikileaks – if the US government has nothing to hide, then why are they making such a big deal over this? the longer they keep this up, the more guilty it makes them appear… it also appears as though wikileaks has an ace up its sleeve: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange ‘will release poison pill of damaging secrets if killed or arrested’ so download that archive now… you know you want to… 🙂
also If publishing the WikiLeaks cables were against the law, could the New York Times go to jail? – if julian assange goes to jail for it, then the new york times should go as well. if not, then why was he arrested anyway? and, by the way, Ellsberg: "EVERY attack now made on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange was made against me and the release of the Pentagon Papers at the time."
meanwhile, Irony? State Dept. criticizes Assange but plans to stage ‘Press Freedom Day’ and Someone Should Tell The State Dept That The State Dept Is Hosting World Press Freedom Day – the way we celebrate World Press Freedom Day in the united states, apparently, is by having julian assange arrested, in another country, for “sex by surprise”… what? especially while It appears that Assange may have fallen into a "CIA Honeytrap". and speaking of free speech, Man gets 33 months for threatening Obama in poem
also, PayPal Busted for Bogus Wikileaks Excuse – so paypal cut off wikileaks’ access to money that had been donated to wikileaks, because of a state department letter saying that what wikileaks does is illegal… that doesn’t exist they were scared that the US govermnent might come after them next… does that sound about right?
and, for those of you who have actually been wondering exactly what was in those cables that made the US government so uptight about wikileaks, here’s a sample: Consult us before using intelligence to commit war crimes, US tells Uganda – not “obey the rules of war”, but “let us know before you use our intelligence to break the rules of war”… yep, that’s a good enough reason to have julian assange arrested on trumped up charges… 😐
Tension grows between Calif. Muslims, FBI after informant infiltrates mosque – they’re stretching the line mighty thin if they’ve got to hire a guy to infitrate mosques and talk up jihad, just in order to get terrorists people who might be terrorists to arrest… also, Holder to Muslims Re Stings: Get Used to It – not only are they stretching the line, but those people who object might just be terrorists themselves, because they “simply do not have their facts straight.”
US Has Lost All Moral High Ground On Internet Censorship and Homeland Security ‘messages’ coming to Walmart, hotels, malls – now they want us to do their job for them, as well… 😐 that reminds me… it’s been a while since i posted this:
Here Come Homeland Security Internet Police, and They’re Already Shutting Down Web Sites They Don’t Like – just like TSA for your computer, whether you like it or not… 😐
and, speaking of TSA, TSA Subjects Indian Ambassador To US To Glass Cage, Enhanced Groping – “It is believed that the TSA operatives flagged Ms. Shankar not because she set of the metal detector, but because she was wearing a sari, a long traditional Indian robe.” – Indian Embassy describes incident as “unacceptable”
Tooth Decay to Be a Thing of the Past – i’ve always wondered why people who brush their teeth religiously still sometimes have extremely bad teeth, while other people can not brush their teeth at all and still have all their teeth at age 80… this is apparently part of the reason. how much you want to bet that the dental association buys all of these guys research and buries it, so that dentists will still be able to fleece everybody?
Light can generate lift – wow! now all somebody’s got to do is figure out how to use it…
UN climate kooks want to cripple US economy and ban H2O – i think the point was that people in positions of power will be more likely to agree to something if they don’t know precisely what it is…
for those that oppose gay marriage, another big slap in the face, as US scientists create mice from two fathers – maybe it wasn’t “adam and steve” “in the beginning”, but the fact that it can be sort of negates your little fantasy about how “god” created everything, now, doesn’t it?
The Insanity Virus – no obvious link to toxoplasma gondii, but it makes me wonder…
Man legally changes name to Captain Awesome – i wonder why Boomer The Dog wasn’t allowed to change his name, but Captain Awesome sailed right through…
thanks to Howlin’ Hobbit, i was able to sort out the “hidden file” dilemma that i had yesterday – of course i could have edited the “live” version using vi
, but i was feeling stubborn – and the immediate result has been that one person who has been spamming my web site for 3 days now is no longer able to. whee! 🙂
my popgun is defective. i bought an orchestral-quality popgun, and i have been popping enthusiastically for around 10 years, mostly at cirque de flambé and fremont players functions, but it has been getting harder and harder to get a reliable pop out of it. first, the ball-end on the handle stripped its threads, which is understandable, since it is made of wood. however, i glued it back in place and the glue holds for about 5 pops at which point the ball-end comes off again. gluing the ball-end is an annoyance that i have learned to live with, although there have been a couple of times where i nearly lost the ball-end over the side of a ferry, or that kind of thing. completely replacing it involves coming up with another hardwood ball, and then drilling and tapping it out to the correct thread to match the otherwise very sharp end of the handle. then, the end-cap that holds the cork in place so that it doesn’t go “pop” and shoot the cork across the stage, disappeared. at the time, fred was a member of the band, and he volunteered to make me a replacement end cap, because he had the necessary tool (a metal lathe). then the bottom cap retaining screw disappeared, but i was able to make a replacement, because i have a tap-and-die set for miniature screws. of course the cork itself has been replaced two or three times, and i’ve got a collection of replacements in my workshop… but the problem i’m currently having is more insideous: the plunger has worn down to the point where it doesn’t seal. now it appears that i have a choice: i can either figure out some way to make two, perfectly circular washers out of something like linoleum, that are exactly .125″ larger than the inside diameter of the tube…
or i can buy a new, orchestral-quality popgun
apparently i have the skills and a steady-enough hand (everything is a lot more free-form since my injury) to cut new bits of linoleum that will work, and i have a leather-punch in the workshop that has a big-enough hole that i was able to create a new, more effective plunger, and now POP!! and all is right with the world again… 🙂 which is a good thing, because i don’t remember where i got the popgun… there are a couple of possibilities (and i’m pretty sure i could order one online, which would take too long), but i know for sure that one of them has gone out of business…
i like tools that can be taken apart and fixed when they stop working. it’s so much easier and less expensive than buying a new one when the old one breaks… 🙂
ETA: so this morning i got an order for one box of green rose incense from india, of all places. unfortunately, i would be willing to bet that one get green rose incense in india for a lot less than i have to sell it for in the united states. not only that, but the shipping costs alone, to get it to india, are more than ten times what the incense would cost, by itself. i wrote back to the guy, but, considering that it’s from india, the probability is fairly high that he doesn’t speak english, or, worse, speaks “hinglish”…
why do people do this? what is it that prevents them from thinking these things all the way through before doing something stupid? i suppose we will never know…
i’ve been very productive today, and it’s not over yet. i fixed my popgun, built a pig-rail for our whelping box, and fixed our front door so it closes reliably without having to be “finessed”.
this is going to be a heavily geek-ified post, because i am frustrated and don’t have time to explain all of the stuff i already know about this…
there is this intensely useful text file on my web server that’s called .htaccess, which does things like control rewriting domains, and blocking undesirable IP addresses and stuff like that. i know it exists on my web server, because when i type ls -a
in the public_html
directory, it shows up there right at the top.
you’ve probably noticed by now that .htaccess is kind of an unusual name for a file: it doesn’t have a “file extension” like .pdf or .exe, except that – possibly – the entire file name is the “extension”, because it all appears after a period. on UNIX and linux machines, file names that start with a period indicate that they are “hidden” files, which means that they only show up if you go into the terminal, navigate to the directory where the files exist, and type ls -a
which means “list the current files in the directory, plus list all the files, whether they are hidden or not”
the problem i’m having is that i have a “working” copy of my web site, on my local computer, and when i’m “working” on that site, i have to save the document and then upload it to the “live” site, which is on my web server, currently in los angeles. the “working” copy is on my mac – which, fundamentally, runs a version of UNIX with a fancy GUI over the top. when i use the terminal to view the local site, i see the .htaccess file, but when i use the GUI and the application that i use to modify the web site, i do not see the .htaccess file, because it is a “hidden” file and i don’t see them with the GUI…
and – this is the important part – the only way i currently have to modify “hidden” files is to use vi
or emacs
or something like that, on the terminal RATHER than using the GUI and my code-authoring application.
currently, as far as i have been able to tell, there is no way to view “hidden” files like .htaccess on a mac, in the GUI at all: they don’t show up in the finder, they don’t show up in the application, and there’s no way to make them show up so that you can work on them like you would be able to work on .html files, or .php files…
if you happen to know how to make hidden files visible on a mac, i’d appreciate a comment.
also, within the past hour, i’ve received 6 spam messages at a time, about 4 times, with an identical subject line, and 10 more messages with the same subject line at spamcop. if i wouldn’t read it once, why does anybody bother sending multiple copies anyway? also, it looks like the beginnings of the spam-flood that happened on saturday… why me?? 🙁
Harvard scientists reverse the ageing process in mice – just what we need… immortal mice…
Scientists Attempt to Crack Secret Code of the Axolotl – the race to extinction is on between the scientists who want to probe this creatures’ secrets of limb regeneration, and the general public who think that the creatures are delicious. my bet is on the general public…
97% of INTERNET NOW FULL UP – the number of allocatable IPv4 addresses just dropped below one hundred and fourteen million, and they’ve been being assigned faster than ever. there are less than 91 days until there are NO MORE IPv4 addresses. get yours today, because in May 2011, there will be no more…
10 Skills Needed To Thrive In A Post-Collapse World – this is something else that i am going to bet nobody (else) pays attention to… which is why the collapse is going to come as a deadly surprise to most people…
Mozilla rages at MS, Apple and Google’s ‘trojan horse’ tactics – it’s things like this that are exactly the reason why i use AdBlock and NoScript, and don’t use microsoft anything or google chrome, or apple itunes and safari… i want my computer to do the things I want it to do, not the things that some multinational corporation with sneaky and not entirely ethical reasons wants it to do. “Shove your plug-ins where the sun don’t shine!” 😛
Wireless gets a free pass on net neutrality – Throttle away, mobile broadband providers! net neutrality gets the boot on wireless networks… wired networks are next on the chopping blog block…
Sites With Government Seized Domains Are Moving On – so despite the fact that the DHS seized a bunch of domains without due cause, they missed the mark, because they seized the domain names, but not the web sites, and now the web sites are starting to resurface with different domain names… theoretically, of course, this could go on forever (my main web site, for example, can be found at hybridelephant.net and hybridelephant.org, as well as hybridelephant.com). what have the DHS accomplished apart from a big waste of money and resources, when Copying Is Not Theft!…
Homeland Security’s Domain Name Seizure May Stretch The Law Past The Breaking Point – so DHS is operating outside the law… what else is new? but at the same time, they’re getting really blatant about it, farming out the actual seizure of the domains to the company that runs seizedservers.com…
Fed up with ICANN, Pirate Bay cofounder floats P2P DNS system and With Domain Name Seizures Increasing, It’s Time For A Decentralized DNS System – yep.
Controversial Drug Given to All Guantanamo Detainees Akin to "Pharmacologic Waterboarding" – the DOD engages in “at best, an egregious malpractice.” instead of closing down gitmo, as promised, they are now moving beyond physical torture, and giving inmates a “treatment dose” (which is five times the prophylactic dose) of an anti-malarial drug – whether they actually have malaria or not is an entirely different question – which causes severe neuropsycological side effects such as homicidal and suicidal thoughts, severe insomnia, hallucinations, intense vertigo, paranoid delusions, aggression, and anxiety, and which was researched in MKULTRA mind-control experiments carried out by the CIA during the 1950s. at least they’re not using physical torture any longer… that we know of… 😐
Tea Party Nation President Says It ‘Makes A Lot Of Sense’ To Restrict Voting Only To Property Owners – and they say i’m a terrorist… we left the 19th century behind us 200 years ago, and this guy wants to drag us back there. 😛 apparently they think in circles as well – Without a guide humans walk in circles
Elected Official Says TSA Pat Downs Promote ‘Homosexual Agenda’ and Man arrested after ejaculating during TSA pat-down – which headline is a joke? hint: neither one…
Google beat box – finally, something that google is good for! click “listen”…
on this day, 30th november, 2007 – three years ago – i officially moved this blog to its current location and gave it a new name, which is Scab of a nation, driven insane – i’ve debated about whether or not to have a contest to see how many people who read this blog actually know where that phrase came from, but i haven’t been motivated to do so, yet. prior to 30th november, 2007, it was called non plaudite, modo pecuniam jacite (don’t applaud, just throw money) and it was located at LiveJournal, which had just been consumed by SixApart. i was fed up with the shenannigans that 6A had been up to, and the fact that LJ was implementing all of these changes that they had told me when i signed up that they would never do (advertising on livejournal, for example*), combined with the fact that i had recently changed host providers and was feeling good about my newly aquired web abilities, i dumped LJ and adopted wordpress on my own server, thus conveniently eliminating all of the things i absolutely hated about livejournal, while enhancing the things that i liked about it. RSS is a good example of that: when i was on LJ, i had a “friends” page, which displayed my friends’ LJs, but if they didn’t have an LJ, the technology made it impossible to display their blogs on my LJ friends page. RSS changed all that. now i use an aggregator (i use Akregator, a part of the Kontact suite of applications), which includes all of my LJ friends, but also has feeds from blogspot, and tumblr, and typepad, and wordpress, and things like metafilter, and disinformation, and alternet, and raw story and every other list, blog and news source in existence! it’s what the LJ “friends” page was probably originally intended to be, before someone discovered that they could use it to line their pockets… and at this point, wordpress mostly takes care of itself, and i don’t have to worry about things dramatically changing (with a few minor exceptions) without my having a say in the matter.
i originally started blogging… well, i’m not exactly sure why. it was a technology thing, and i was working in a print shop at the time, which wasn’t exactly satisfying my desire for technology. but, as now, i was somewhat suspicious of getting involved in a technology that was resident on other peoples’ computers, so i didn’t use it for much. then i had my brain injury, and everything started to change. still, i didn’t have more than one entry per month until june of 2004.
i remember when i lived in bellingham, in 1993 or 1994, and i was riding my bike somewhere and i saw an advertisement on the side of the bus that included what i now know was a URI (Uniform Resource Indicator, also mistakenly called a Unform Resource Locator, or URL), and wishing that they wouldn’t put such confusing things on advertisements, when nobody knew what they were anyway.
it was not long after that that i connected my computer to a LAN (Local Area Network) for the first time. before then, in spite of the fact that i had been working with computers for almost 20 years, i had never connected to another computer. if there were files that had to be shared, as the files were that made up the many real estate and used car magazines that i was a part of creating during that period, that was accomplished via what i now would call a “sneaker net”, which was a 3½" floppy disk that was passed from one computer operator to another.
i had heard about networking, but didn’t think i would like it: i found it way too invasive… at the same time, by 1994 i was very much in to the “BBS” scene, where a number of users could log into a server, browse files, leave and respond to messages, and so forth.
in 1995 i moved from bellingham to seattle, and very quickly discovered that there was an entirely different world of networked computers that i couldn’t even imagine. i signed up with CompuServe and didn’t even last 6 months with them before i was on to greater things. i got a job at microsoft, as a technical support engineer about a year before the word concept virus was first discovered.
again, i had known about viri, but i also knew that there was no way of transmitting a virus: it had to be deliberately installed on a computer. the “word concept virus” changed all that. all you had to do to infect a computer was to open a MSWord document, and that could come from anywhere.
about the same time, i first encountered what, at the time, was a very strange web site indeed. it didn’t have a name that i can remember, but it appeared to be a list of rants by this guy, who updated it fairly frequently. i figured there was an “about” page, or something like that, that would tell me about the author, but there wasn’t (which is why i try very hard to put the bare essentials about me in a public place that you don’t have to login to in order to see, on my own blog). i tried to “login”, but it didn’t know my password (which isn’t surprising), and all of the rants were obscure enough that i couldn’t quite understand the purpose of such a site: it seemed to be more of an online diary than anything else. about the same time, i first heard the word “blog” (a portmanteau of the words “Web Log”), which was described to me as a sort of online diary. i was very familiar with “journalling”, but my impression is that journals are to be kept more or less private, and even then i was aware of the fact that if you want to keep something to yourself, putting it on internet is not the way to do it. i was actually repelled by the idea of keeping a blog, in the same way that i kept my sketchbook/journals – the artwork is the public part, the journal parts are still for the most part private and not available anywhere on internet.
i discovered livejournal on 030414, but i didn’t start to use it more than once in a while until 0407 or 0408, after my brain injury.
at this point, i use this blog as a way to remember stuff, like fishtown, that i probably wouldn’t remember any other way. i use it primarily as memory, the connections for which were screwed up in my brain when they were poking around in my skull. i realise that a few people (and maybe more than that, but that could also be my paranoia talking) use this blog as a way to keep up with what i’m doing, but my guess is that i’d keep blogging even if there was nobody there to read it… that’s the way i started. 🙂
* i realise that it’s pretty pointless for me to expect that a “community resource” like livejournal would remain without advertisement indefinitely, but if that was the case from the beginning, then they should NOT have said “WE WILL NEVER HAVE ADVERTISEMENTS ON LIVEJOURNAL” when i signed up… and they definitely did say that. so i feel somewhat justified in my righteous indignation.
it’s getting really close to opening night for the panto, and the fremont players domain has developed a DNS hiccup that i haven’t been able to figure out. apparently, “ticking the box that says “Use the nameservers specified at the Domain’s Registrar (ignore locally specified nameservers)” on the “Create a New Account” page” isn’t part of the deal, but i haven’t used a “Create a New Account” page on fremontplayers.com for almost a year, and certainly not before i switched to the new host server, approximately 5 months ago… even more bizarre is the fact that it was working just fine yesterday.
not only that, but the webdavs web disk applet that i use has suddenly decided not to work: instead of connecting me to the machine in california on which hybrid elephant lives, it hangs up and won’t go any further on my mac, and on the linux box, everything loads, but when i try to copy or move files, it says “the disk ‘hybridelephant.com’ doesn’t exist”. i can move things around with ftp and ssh over a text-based connection, but i’ve really come to appreciate the reality of doing all that technical web stuff with a graphical user interface…
we went out for dinner last night, after going over to a friends’ house to access internet – moe has “discussion topics” that she has to contribute to, which are a part of her grade, and i had to check email – and when we returned home, the electricity was back on…
WHEW!
much as i enjoy fantasizing about fishtown, it’s occasions like yesterday which drive home the point that i probably could not make such a place work on anything more than a temporary basis if i had no electricity.
quite apart from network access, which can be provided by portable devices fairly easily these days, if i didn’t have electricity, both to power things and to recharge things, i wouldn’t last very long at all.
which, of course, brings me to the next stage in the process of making myself independent of infrastructure that supplies such things in a “normal” way, which is researching and creating a reliable, alternative source of electricity.
which, ultimately, shouldn’t be that difficult: i have a number of friends who have done small-scale power generation projects in the past, and that was before things like wind-spinners and solar panels became so “mainstream”. at this point, it shouldn’t be that difficult to attach a combination of solar panels and a wind-spinner to the roof of my house and/or my workshop, and drive things like the computers and network stuff – and, potentially, important things like the refrigerator and freezer – from batteries…
i didn’t realise when i signed up for nablopomo, that i hadn’t taken into account the fact that i live in the boonies, and there’s always the possibility of the electricity going out… which it did, last night at around 9:30.
there hasn’t been any electricity all day, which means that my linux desktop box and the router have been down. my mac has also been down, in spite of the fact that it’s a laptop, even though it was powered down correctly and not on at all when the power went out, because apparently when you leave it plugged in it actively drains the power from the battery. it could be that the battery is broken in some way, but i don’t think so because i just bought it about a year ago. there may be something else wrong with the computer, but if there is, it doesn’t affect how it works as a computer, which means that i’ve not noticed it before, but one way or the other, when i tried to boot it up this morning, the battery was completely flat…
i’m currently plugged in at a friends’ house who has power and internet – they live on the other side of auburn and weren’t affected by the massive wind storm that we had last night. according to the power company they are “aware” of the fact that we don’t have power, but we should take comfort in the fact that an ever increasing number of customers (last count it was over 550) are also without power, however they have no estimate of when it will be restored… also, if our power is out for more than 120 consecutive hours we’ll get a $50 credit on our account… wonderful… 😐
according to IPcalypse, we jumped from 214 days until no more IPv4 addresses, yesterday, to 117 days today – almost 100 days, in one swell foop…
to me this indicates, either that we’re all set with IPv6, and everything is all ready to make the switch immediately (which, if my personal machines are any indication, is not true) or that we are a lot closer to imminent total systems failure of the intar-webs than anybody realised…
dr. crusher: question: what, exactly, is “total systems failure”?
commander data: the borg are extremely computer-dependent. a systems failure will destroy them.
dr. crusher: i just think we should be clear about that.
i wonder if anyone else – specifically, if anyone else who can make a difference – has noticed… 😐
the rules (to which i contributed) state that this shouldn’t be done, but rules were meant to be broken from time to time. not only that, but i think this is a very good example of why i’m perfectly happy using the operating system i am using, which is kubuntu, rather than either mac or windows… although, to be honest, i’ve experienced essentially the same thing on a mac, but at this point, my impression is that macs have turned into expensive toys for geek-wannabes with too much money.
anyway…
i got three spam messages that made it through my principle spam filter. of course, the spammers didn’t count on my having a secondary spam filter, and they still ended up in my waste messages bin without even hitting my inbox, but that’s not the point. the point is that one of the three messages was in arabic text, and it rendered correctly on my machine. keep in mind that arabic is written right-to-left, and english is written left-to-right (which is why i didn’t copy and paste the text: wordpress, for all of its advantages, doesn’t deal well with LTR and RTL languages and non-standard text – i.e. not unicode – in the same post). i took a screen shot of it, though, and here it is:of course i reported it to spamcop, and deleted it without replying, but it’s not often that a spam message makes that much of a positive impression on me. it wasn’t the words themselves, but the fact that my computer knows enough to be able to differentiate between RTL and LTR text in the same message without some kind of special prompt from me.
i didn’t have a rehearsal yesterday, because it’s the “sousa-torium” (i.e. the break between sousa’s birthday and march or so, when we start rehearsing for next year. also, i don’t have a rehearsal tonight, because kiki’s going to the memorial for george shangrow, and anyway, they’re changing the whole story around (big surprise) so they don’t need the band, which is good because i could use the time off. it will also give me time to design a xmas postcard for the BSSB, which we are going to try to do again this year.
i went to help out my brain-injured client again yesterday. he had somehow added a wiget that he didn’t want to his panel. he said he didn’t, but i certainly didn’t put it there, and he’s the only other person to have access to the hardware, so i tend to believe that he did it in spite of what he says. after talking with tamzin, who also has aged, brain-injured clients, i bit the bullet and locked the panel, so that he can’t do it again. it’s obvious that he doesn’t really know what he’s doing about half of the time, and to leave “secret” methods of modifying the interface does more harm than good. also, he apparently has a preference for the “kickoff” style menu, rather than the “classic” windows-style menu, which is a good thing to remember.
something went wrong with one of the stylesheets and suddenly the login page for my blog looked all wonky. the last time this happened was a couple of years ago, when my blog was hacked, so i was pretty worried. i checked, and the blog didn’t appear to be hacked in the same way it was before, but still: the error i was getting was “Failed to load login.css” and i could see that login.css was there, and i looked at it and it looked the way it was supposed to… so i went to the wordpress “support” site, which is probably good for some people, but i have never gotten a usable solution when i have gone there with problems with my wordpress installation. nevertheless, it’s a place to start, so i did. i waited two days and nobody responded to my query… 😐 so i then logged into IRC, went to #wordpress and asked there. the guy who (finally) responded asked if i had tried uploading the file from a backup.
d’oh!
once i had uploaded and replaced the stylesheet, everything went back to the way it’s supposed to be.
i woke up this morning, and checked my email. i had 4,856 new messages, all with the same subject line, which included the word “MLM”… please stop sending me these messages. they’re not accomplishing what you think they are, they’re really annoying, and i’m about to block your country’s IP addresses because of it. there are better ways of doing… whatever it is that you’re expecting to be able to do by sending out 4,856 spam email messages… 😐
A piece of their mind – they share thoughts… in spite of the fact that they have two sets of eyes, one can “read” what the other is seeing, without actually seeing it… The Fascinating Story of the Twins Who Share Brains, Thoughts, and Senses has more, including a video… fascinating!
The Return of the Stoned Ape – smart people do more drugs because of evolution. now it all makes sense… 😀 and, while we’re at it, Smart people SLEEP LATE as well… so there!
and now, to more mundane topics…
33 Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out To Be True – fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord. beware, the paranoids are watching you. fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord fnord.
The Information Super-Sewer: Will the Internet be Hijacked by Corporate Interests – funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth. also Final nail in coffin for Net neutrality? – all 95 house and senate candidates who pledged support for net neutrality lost their races. what does this mean? it means that your unlimited, uncensored, unthrottled and open internet service will be going away as soon as the major corporations that now own internet are going to get to decide how much to charge you for how much access… which means that it won’t be too long before internet will be exactly like television, unless you can afford to make it better.
A Modest Proposal to Republicans: How to Trim the Budget – hint: it’s something that a republican would never think of…
Chomsky: US-led Afghan war, criminal – to date there is no evidence that al-qaeda has carried out the 9/11 attacks, and still we use that as justification to make war on a people who have their own problems.
The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World – copyright was never primarily about paying artists for their work, and trying to make it about that now is obfuscating the real reason, which is to make the distributors as much money as possible. copying is not theft, piracy, or anything else illegal, and the sooner we toss the current copyright law fiasco and start over again, the better.
Minnesota Mom Hit With $1.5 Million Fine for Downloading 24 Songs – copying IS NOT theft! (my new mantra).
Bankruptcy of U.S. is ‘Mathematical Certainty,’ Says Former CEO of Nation’s 10th Largest Bank – yep… the end is coming, and it’s not looking like it’s going to be particularly pretty when it gets here.
Voters Approve Sharia Law Ban – meanwhile, fear, insanity and unreasoned reactionism comes to oklahoma, whether they like it or not… oh well, there are always 49 other states… 😐 meanwhile, it appears that Oklahoma Voters May Have Accidentally Voted Against Ten Commandments, Too – that’s what they get for being stupid and making nonsensical laws without thinking them through.
Details on PayPal’s Site Outage – they have been doing okay, despite the bad things that i continue to hear about them, but they apparently went down for anywhere from two to twenty four hours, depending on where you are, and so far they’ve not released any information other than to say “something broke. it’s fixed now, and we’re sorry.”
Google calls bug bounty hunters to YouTube, Blogger – $3,133.70 a bug seems like a lot, and i seriously doubt that their actual testers get paid anything like that. what this is, really, is an attempt by google to have volunteer “testers” hammer on their technology without having to pay them for doing so. then, when a “tester” discovers something, google can claim that they found it, pay the “tester” a minimal, one time fee and never mention the “tester” to anyone ever again… everybody’s happy, at least temporarily, and the big corporation profits at the expense of the american drone, who doesn’t notice because he’s too busy telling all of his friends how 733T he is… you can’t make a living on it, but it’s the american dream come true… 😐
Seagate squirts out rectal cleaning spray – no shit… 🙂
A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: President Obama Visits Chicago and a Homeless Man Begs Him for Alms – no further comment needed.
Marijuana Legalization: Not If, But When – agreed, it’s just a matter of time, but it’s going to have to be the entire country, or it’s not going to work… and whether or not the entire country legalises it through a revolution or through a civil election still remains to be seen.
New Mother’s (False) Positive Drug Test Leads to Baby’s Removal… Poppy-Seed Bagel the Culprit – the only way to solve problems like this is to legalise all drugs, but if proposition 19 is any indication, even when we’re winning, we’re really losing… and while we’re at it, No reason for pot prohibition – when are we going to get the idea that the war on drugs is a collosal failure? not for the next couple of years, at this rate… 😐
not only that, but A molecular link between the active component of marijuana and Alzheimer’s disease pathology – the active ingredient in cannabis, delta-9-tetrahydracannabinol (THC), competitively inhibits the enzyme acetylcholinesterase (AChE), the key pathological marker of alzheimer’s disease. are we ready to legalise it yet?
Cargo plane bomb plot: passengers to face ‘ludicrous security measures’ – now that we have successfully prevented another terrorist plot from even reaching the country, of course, the logical response is to put more stringent measures in place to insure that innocent citizens are harrassed, poked, prodded, scanned and examined in new and unusual ways, to make sure that the terrorists don’t win again… oh, and by the way, Yemeni mail bombs suspect ‘had identity stolen’ – so we really don’t have any clearer an idea who did it then we did a week ago… swell…
For the First Time, the TSA Meets Resistance – they’re now searching your “crotchal” area, and they really want to get you to use the “Dick-Measuring Device” back-scatter imaging device, so be warned…
Pollution in China – this is why stuff is cheap in america. remember that the next time you buy something.
Obama may let CIA run more ‘hunter-killer’ teams roam abroad – this is premeditated murder and i question what the real intent is…
Why I don’t vote – W? T? F? i can understand a multitude of reasons for not participating in the farce of elections these days, but basing your abstinence in voting on 1 timothy 2.12 is far beyond anything that i could possibly figure out…
McDonald’s furious after San Francisco bans Happy Meals – apparently they didn’t get the memo…
Ram Dass Has a Son! – DNA tests confirm it, and ram dass is okay with it, so it doesn’t look like it’s going to cause a major uproar (like it has with other “spiritual” teachers), but it also is pretty much not what you would expect…
in honour of the “holiday” Cambodians beaten, raped and killed at illegal detention camp funded by UN – trick or treat for UNICEF…
Arkansas school board member to resign over anti-gay post – the problem with this guy, and all of the “christians” out there like him, is that the only reason he’s sorry now is because he got caught. if he hadn’t posted those comments on facebook, maybe expressed them privately, but for the most part kept them to himself, then he would continue to be a member of the arkansas school board, and nobody would be wise to his warped sensibilities. the “problems” caused by minorities of any kind are going to be solved only when these hateful, and unfortunately quite large portions of the population are eliminated, either through re-education or attrition.
Furious growth and cost cutting led to BP oil spills, past and present and Panel Says Firms Knew of Cement Flaws Before Spill – if you thought it was over, think again…
Fresh blockades as a quarter of France’s petrol stations still dry – a couple of weeks ago i posted a link to an article which said that there is no “plan b” to fall back on, in case “plan a” (which appears to be something along the lines of “ignore it and maybe it will go away”) fails. this is exactly the kind of chaos that you can expect to see more of, as time goes on, and oil becomes more and more scarce. here are some examples of how things are falling apart faster than we can fix them:
The scary actual U.S. government debt – “Let’s get real, the United States is bankrupt.”
What It’s Like to Work in Walmart – an underemployed teacher gets a job at walmart, hillarity ensues. beware: this could will probably happen to you.
Oops: Pentagon loses contact with nukes in Wyoming – it’s all right, folks, nothing to see here… move along.
Google finally admits that its Street View cars DID take emails and passwords from computers – DON’T. BE. EVIL! 😛
Group offers $10,000 to anyone who can disprove the claim that ‘cannabis is safer than alcohol’ – they’re confident that the $10,000 will remain unclaimed, and i don’t doubt they’re right, but i doubt that it’s going to make that much of a difference when it comes to legalisation. most people are pretty stupid, and that includes the people in charge… 😐
meanwhile: Study: Alcohol more lethal than heroin, cocaine – overall, alcohol outranked all other substances… cannabis, ecstasy and LSD scored far lower… BIG surprise, especially considering that the alcohol lobby has been pouring money into the campains against the legalisation of cannabis…
Sex researchers: "Size" does matter – year-long study from turkey concludes that men with a higher body mass index last longer in bed. mcdonald’s advertising to follow soon.
I Can’t Find My Phone – finally, a web site that’s actually good for something!
John Cage still being cheated out of royalties for his silent work –
i’ve been getting A LOT of spam from, or by way of russia and china recently, and in my normal news perusing, i discovered that the guy who is responsible for the “canadian pharmacy” spam that you have, no doubt, seen in your own inbox – who is really a russian, and only nominally connected to any “canadian” pharmacies – has recently been arrested for operating a business without registration, but what i notice even more in this particular article is the apparent fact that spam is not illegal in russia… which would explain a lot.
this brings up a possibility that i have considered for a long time, which is to completely block all email from russia, and/or china. i have known, more or less, ever since about 1998 that it was possible to block people from sending you email from certain IP addresses, and i was vaguely aware that different regions can be identified from the first couple of IP address blocks, but i’ve never been exactly sure of how. i’ve been even less sure (although i’m pretty sure i knew at one time, having worked as a tester for a company that makes email server software) how to drop incoming email messages from a blocked IP address range with no response – i.e. if you’re in that IP address range and you send me an email, the email message just “disappears” with no reason given, but – and this the important part – i’m about 99.8% certain that it can be done fairly easily.
anybody who has ideas about how to do this should get in touch with me. i think it’s time to block email access from russia and china. the only email i get from those two countries are spam messages or malware, and it’s time to take action.
if it works as easily as i believe it will, i’m also thinking of blocking email access from africa – yes, the entire continent – as well.
ETA: something along this line is what i’m thinking of.
today i went to somebody’s house in kent to drop off some coaxial cable, then i went to firwood, a suburb to the south of tacoma, to get parrot food, then i went through puyallup to milton, where i picked up an order for busines cards from a client, then i went into federal way to go to costco for groceries and gas before completing the grand circut home. once home, i prepared the artwork for the business card, and placed the order at the printers, did the laundry, and took out the trash.
i’ve got to take photos, and paste up a new page of printing examples for the Hybrid Elephant web site. i’ve got to figure out how to make, and then implement an updateable calendar for the BSSB web site.
i’ve mentioned my aged, brain-injured client in the past. this time he had me come over because, he admitted when i got there, he “got mad” at his computer, recently, and started randomly right- and left-clicking his mouse in an attempt to get it to do something (he never did tell me exactly what). the big result, which i’m still not exactly sure how he pulled it off, was that instead of kubuntu 9.whatever that i had installed for him, he now has a fresh, clean installation of kubuntu 10.04… and a whole bunch of “panels”, which are the linux equivalent of what, on windows, is called the “task bar”, and of which you can make as many as you want, that all do different things if you’re so inclined.
my client knows nothing about how all of the panels got there, he said that he was trying to get a popup window to go away. he did have “knotes” running, which makes popup “sticky notes” on the screen, and he had several dozen notes containing nothing but a date, that were all minimised.
i was a little taken aback that he had apparently successfully upgraded the system, but if nothing else, it’s a testament to how easy linux is to upgrade. once i got him back to a reasonable number (which, in his case, is one) of panels, deleted and removed the “popup” notes, and the KDE “desktop sharing” application, which had apparently been installed with the upgrade, and had him up and running again in about 20 minutes. i didn’t actually lock the panel – which would prevent him from “getting mad at the computer” and randomly changing things, and which i could have done fairly easily – because i don’t want to limit his exploration of the computer. if he’s aware of the fact that “getting mad” at the computer doesn’t automatically ruin the computer, my guess is that he’ll be a lot more willing to “poke around” the computer without getting mad…
Ms. Gates: ‘Bill does not use a Mac’ – that’s a definte change compared to when i was working at microsoft, from 1995 to 1997. at that time, it was well known around the campus that bill had a mac (among other things) on his desktop at work. if he’s not even interested in checking out the competition any longer, then my guess is that mickey$oft is not long for the world.
bill is no longer actually associated with the everyday operations of microsoft any more, so maybe he has decided that “keeping track of the competiton” isn’t as necessary, but at one time, bill was under the impression that mac was definitely worth keeping track of.
of course, it may have something to do with the fact that these days mac is headed in an entirely different direction than bill is interested in: while both companies are still major competitors, mac has developed a taste for phones, and tablets, and portable devices, while microsoft is more interested in the back end, servers, networks and that kind of thing. it could be that this is the reason bill no longer uses a mac.
i wonder if bill uses linux… i would expect probably not, but who knows?
news has been too depressing the past week, so this week’s collection of links is going to be mostly fluff. i’ll leave it up to others to decide which is which.
Christine O’Donnell: Where In The Constitution Is The Separation Of Church And State? and she’s now offering a reward of $1,000 For Anyone Who Can Find The Phrase "Separation Of Church And State" In The Constitution – why is there still any question about whether or not she’s actually qualified to be a state senator? that’s like saying sarah palin is qualified to be president of the united states… 😐
Former Surgeon General calls for legalization of marijuana and Dozens of law professors nation-wide endorse Calif. marijuana legalization – but the federal government is going to continue to prosecute people for cannabis, in spite of state laws that legalise it… it’s not exactly what i was expecting from obama and crew when i voted them into office… 😐 They’ve Stopped Pretending
The World’s Largest Gummy Worm – 128 times more massive than a traditional gummy worm, it’s three pounds and 4,000 calories of gummy… um… it looks suspiciously like a dildo…
Dead Sea scrolls going digital on Internet – yep…
Apple Patents Anti-Sexting Device – all the more impetus for kids to learn a large vocabulary.
Gangsta Lorem Ipsum – Lorizzle dang dolor sit amizzle, shizznit we gonna chung the bizzle. We gonna chung sapien velizzle, dang volutpizzle, owned quizzle, break it down vizzle, arcu.
Future Chaos: There Is No “Plan B” – sooo… have fun while you can, i guess, ’cause if plan A fails, there’s going to be a whole hell of a lot of chaos, almost immediately, and there’s nothing you as an individual, and not much you as a group of well armed and well prepared people can do about it… 😐
It’s the 1930s car that was meant to change American lives. And now the Dymaxion’s back. – one of my lifelong dreams has been to own and/or drive a dymaxion car. maybe someone will be able to pull it off this time. 🙂
Tooth Regeneration Gel Could Replace Painful Fillings – Could this new gel be the biggest dental breakthrough since the introduction of fluoride?
Squishable, Breathing Smart Phones – for high paid geeks with way too much time on their hands.
David Harmer GOP Tea Party congressional nominee from California says ‘Abolish’ public schools and California shooter says he saw Glenn Beck as ‘schoolteacher’ and Republicans’ ‘scary’ immigrant photo depicts Mexicans in Mexico, photographer reveals – we’re still losing to these morons?!?
and this is for those who think that the budget crisis that we’re currently in the middle of is the fault of the democrats: Democrats shrank US spending, deficit in last fiscal year, figures show – and we’re still losing to these morons?!? 😐 admittedly the democrats are nothing to write home about, but they’re not the source of the current problems, and i really wish the republicans would remember that when they put all these ads on TV about how evil the democrats have been recently: we’re still recovering from the bush years, which were principally republican, and we will be for quite a while yet, so just cool it.
Multnomah County stops prosecuting dozens of illegal acts as crimes or Oregon county decriminalizes heroin, meth, cocaine and shoplifting, among others – but the federal government is going to continue to prosecute drug crimes anyway, even if states legalise or decriminalise them, so there’s really not an awful lot of news here.
Holder: US will enforce marijuana laws despite how Californians may vote – this is the reason why the only way we’re ever going to make any kind of substantial change in the “war on drugs” is to legalise them at the federal level…
according to a new RAND study, either Legalizing pot won’t hinder Mexican cartels or Marijuana Legalization Would Markedly Cut Mexican Drug Cartel Profits… you decide which is really the truth… 😐 here’s the Marijuana Policy Project’s spin on it – What Exactly Did that RAND Study Say About Cartels and Marijuana?
Tracking devices used in school badges – big brother waches over your kids, too, whether they’re at school or not.
Microsoft’s search engine will mine Facebook data – another reason not to use either microsoft or facebook. i have placed a directive in my robots.txt file that specifically denies microsoft’s search engines from indexing my site (while allowing everyone else), and i don’t use facebook… but my wife does…
Facebook is ‘killing privacy for commercial gain’ – a law against facebook… now there’s an idea… 🙂
Can a Person Be Moral without Being a Christian? – hint: his answer is no. “[I]f God is not your god, you will serve Buddha. Or, if not Buddha, perhaps Allah. Or, if not Allah, perhaps Baal. Or, if not Baal, perhaps Confucius.” let’s see: buddhism, confucianism and islam are recognised, but i don’t know of any modern baal-worshippers, except for jews, and, by extension, “christians”, who worship בעל (ba’al, or “lord”)… and he apparently doesn’t recognise hindus, or jaina, or taoists… maybe i shouldn’t expect so much. i keep this guy in my regular news feed primarly because he is so absurd. he gets more absurd with every new post. maybe he’ll follow the pingback to my site and learn how truly absurd i find his views. maybe not. who knows…
Barack Obama and Sarah Palin are Related – isn’t internet wonderful?
NSFW – the National Schools Film Week, you pervert… 🙂 now if it was NSFW it wouldn’t be so bad…
domain names registered in the Cook Islands end with a “.ck”, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. the following “Community of Interest” suffixes are available for domain names registered in the Cook Islands:
it makes me wonder how they would feel about me registering “suck-my.co.ck” or something along those lines…
they’re called “aliases” on a mac, and i don’t remember what they’re called on windows – probably something like “links” or “bookmarks” or something, who knows – but the way they work is basically the same on whatever platform you’re using, and that is to direct you somewhere other than where you thought you were going.
on web servers, they’re especially useful when you have moved a bunch of pages from one place to another. you move the pages wherever you want them to be, then you make a symbolic link to the first page, and place that where the old first page used to be, and then when people go to your old URI, they’re automatically redirected to your new URI and you don’t have to do anything else.
the way you make a symbolic link on a -x machine, is like this: go to the terminal, navigate to where you want the link, and type in ln -s <the absolute path to the document you're linking to> <the name of the new link>
the way you make an “alias” on a mac, or a “link” (or whatever it’s called) on windows, is to select the icon for the file that you want to make a symbolic link of, and select “Make Alias” or “Make Link” from the “File” menu. alternately, you can select “Make Alias” or “Make Link” from a context menu as well…
but here’s the big point: an alias that was made on a mac (and, presumably, a bookmark made on windows) will not work the same way that a symbolic link will work, when the disk you’re working on is a -x server.
in that case, an “alias” on a mac brings you to a page of gibberish, which starts off with
book????mark????0???0???´ê???????3š<??H??T??H??H??H??H??????????Æå???icns?åÆics#???Hÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ???À?à?ð?ø?ü?ü?ü?ü?ü?ü?ü?ü?ü?ü?üis32??Q?„?…?þþýýúò¦„? ÿüûûùñ¦ëƒ?ÿ€úøð¦ùë‚?ÿ€ù÷ï‘€¦??ÿöÏh²À‡ÒÙÞ?ÿ훢»°i³èò?ÿçÝà¢a4‰ùü?ÿâÌš+$ ¤Êü?ÿÓϵ…\Êêü?ÿѺà3€çàû?ÿê´µ×Üããëû?ÿêêÓÍÜßéêÿ??‡ÿ??‰???„?Ž…?þþýýúò§Ž„? ÿüûûùñ§ëŽƒ?ÿ€úøð§ù뎂?ÿ€ù÷ï’€§?Ž?ÿõÑ–ÝìµÍÙÞ?ÿ¾Wqà÷Á¨Öò?ÿ“J^•Ș–Îü?ÿqAV‰{C—¨ü?ÿ_LNac0™Ÿü?ÿŒ:eG&Tˆ°û?ÿåV4\_l—áû?ÿêêžpˆ©ãêÿ??‡ÿ??‰???„?…?þþýýúò¨„? ÿüûûùñ¨ëƒ?ÿ€úøð¨ùë‚?ÿ€ù÷ï“€¨??ÿôÖÂèõÒÆÙÞ?ÿ 9^Ýÿåv¬ò?ÿZ†ðÚyXü?ÿ.<ÍÂYEü?ÿ7Rtv+.ü?ÿƒ *E/ ƒû?ÿåO DÖû?ÿêê•S[†àêÿ??‡ÿ??‰??s8mk??
:|
the only way i know of to make a symbolic link on a -x machine is to use the terminal, and the only other option is to give around 25 different webmasters in different countries the option of changing their web pages so that they link to the right page... which isn't going to happen any time soon.
so i try to SSH to my -x machine, only to discover that i don't have SSH access.
according to the host provider's FAQ, they only provide SSH permissions if you have a "legitimate" reasons for them. so far the new host provider has been providing exempary service... let's hope it continues that way. :|
ETA: they gave me what i need, and 95% of my 404 messages now point to the correct place (the remaining ones are for old internal links from 2003 to 2008). for example, this link and this link now point to the same place, whereas, previously, the former gave you a 404 message. :) happy web designer :)
Think US politics are absurd? Brazilians elect actual clown to Congress – brazil has its collective shit together in more than two ways that i’ve noticed recently… maybe american politicians should be paying more attention to the brazilians…
60% of countries will be bankrupt within 50 years – the only hopeful thing about the future is that i will very likely die before that happens.
Drug cops smash into wrong house, terrorize elderly couple and Pot raid at school turns up tomatoes – if it were legal, they could be spending their time going after real criminals instead of hassling immigrant grandparents, and kids about their tomatoes… 😐
Why Comcast can (but probably won’t) read your e-mails, IMs – every now and then i need to remind myself why i am NOT a comcast customer. this will do for a couple of years, until something else awful and terrifying is revealed about their policies…
GPS directs driver to death in Spain’s largest reservoir or Un hombre fallece tras hundirse su coche en la presa de La Serena – i, for one, welcome our new, robot overlords… or not…
Caught Spying on Student, FBI Demands GPS Tracker Back and Student finds tracking device on his car; FBI demands it back – what…?
Hello, this is your ISP. You have been disconnected from internet. Have a nice day. – if micro$awft gets its way, this could happen to you if you get any kind of malware or virus. more reason to use linux, of course, but why would anyone think this is a good idea to begin with is a little mystifying.
Android phone auto reverts jailbreaks – i agree, that people who are required to pay for a piece of hardware to make their lives easier, should be able to use that piece of hardware for whatever they choose. the company from which you buy a cell phone does not retain an “interest” in the hardware, once you buy it… much as i like the approach taken by the makers of the android cell phone, i don’t think they should be able to arbitarily “take back” a phone that has been modified.
Woman screamed about God while destroying art and California Stem Cell Agency Rewards Blasphemy While Admitting the Humanity of Embryos Slated for Destruction – yep, people are still concerned about what other people do being “blasphemy”. in one case, a woman broke into a protective plexiglass housing and destroyed a piece of art, and in the other, people, for whom it did not make any difference, were “forced” to comply with the wishes of the people who were crying “blasphemy” and take down an otherwise inoffensive piece of art. i wrote to the contact person for CIRM (i encourage you to write to him as well) and sent him this:
i am not offended by any language, but because of the fact that you have seen fit to remove the poems in honour of stem cell awareness day, i can no longer see them, and that offends me.
No-one has the right not to be offended.
— John CleeseA truly great library contains something within it to offend everyone.
— Jo GodwinWhat is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.
— Salman RushdieBeing offended is a natural consequence of leaving the house.
— Fran LebowitzThe most efficacious method of dealing with deviancy is to ignore, to the furthest point of our tolerance, those items which we find offensive.
— Ilbert GeisChristianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.
— Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet), 1694-1778
by the way, if you’re interested, the poems that were too “blasphemous” to post on CIRMs web site, can be seen here. USAToday is good for something after all.
Insane Clown Posse is actually a Christian band, and nobody knew – i knew there was a fundamental reason why i didn’t like them apart from their encouragement of drunken violence…
Feds want backdoors built into VoIP and email US Would Make Internet Wiretaps Easier – yes, the united states government wants to listen in on your phone calls, and analyse your email messages, because you might be a terrorist. forget about innocent until proven guilty, forget about warrants, if these people don’t get what they want, heads will roll… and they might just roll anyway.
Web’s creator slams ‘blight’ of web disconnection laws – tim berniers-lee has a point, and we should listen to him…
2 out of 3 Android apps use private data ‘suspiciously’ – DON’T. BE. EVIL! 😐
Red Hat says end software patents – the supreme court heard the Bilski case earlier this year, and it ruled that the patentability of intangible products should be reduced. red hat takes it one step further, and says that the patentability of intangible products should be eliminated entirely, turning the entire software industry on its ear. it’s a great idea, but it’ll never work out in practice, because people are still too greedy.
Downloads are not performances – despite the fact that i belong to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), i actually think this has the potential of being a good thing. whaddaya know?
Microsoft surrenders Live Spaces future to WordPress – part of me wants to laugh at the people who signed up for the micro$awft me-too web 2.0 hype, but part of me wonders if wp is really the best choice, if micro$awft chose it to replace their hype… 😛
Authorities Plan To Trawl Phone Calls And E Mails For Signs Of “Resentment Toward Government” – my guess is that they won’t have to go far, especially since my resentment towards government is plainly evident, and has been for quite a number of years… 😐
US Is ‘Practically Owned’ by China – don’t get too comfortable, the new bosses will be arriving soon…
The Proof Is In The Numbers: America Is Getting Poorer – where’s that hope-y, change-y stuff that they were talking about? it’s about time for that stuff to start kicking in, isn’t it?
Attempts to Ban Fake Marijuana Are Further Proof of Prohibition’s Failure – more flap about K2 and the valiant, but ultimately futile attemps to ban it. all the more reason to legalise cannabis. especially when the creator of the substance that makes K2 popular says this about attempts to ban his substance: “It’s not going to be effective, is the ban on marijuana effective?”
Key ingredient staves off marijuana memory loss – now that we’ve lightened up (a little bit), we’re discovering that cannabis really is good for something. The Budgetary Impact of Ending Drug Prohibition – legalizing drugs would save roughly $41,300,000,000 ($41.3 billion) per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition, and produce roughly $46,700,000,000 ($46.7 billion) annually in tax revenue. and we’re still fighting a “war” that we can’t win?
Barefaced cheek on Google Street View – ireland welcomes the google street view cameras with characteristic abandon.
Boss Hogs Bacon Chocolate Sueyts – yum… 🙂
California Reduces Its Penalty for Marijuana
Marijuana legalization measure gets big lift
Schwarzenegger signs bill reducing offense for marijuana possession – “Notwithstanding my opposition to Proposition 19, however, I am signing this measure because possession of less than an ounce of marijuana is an infraction in everything but name” – it’s a step in the right direction, but nowhere near close enough to even think about celebrating yet: what about medical cannabis? what about people who grow? what about the feds?? cannabis should not just be decriminalised, because it’s not a crime to use cannabis, in exactly the same way that it is currently not a crime to use alcohol.
according to ARPAgeddon (IPv4 Countdown), there are less than 240 days until there will be no more IPv4 addresses to hand out to people, and the conversion to IPv6 is going less-than-smoothly.
the problem is with NAT (Network Address Translation) and wireless “devices”, mostly in china. instead of “dotted quad” 32-bit addresses – something like 194.169.203.3 – that typify IPv4 addresses, the new IPv6 addresses have 128 bits, and the “Network Address Translation” software, which works in theory, is still a little slow off the mark when it comes down to actually doing the kinds of “translation” it is designed to do.
US.gov set IPv6 upgrade deadlines, but they’ve targeted 2012 for completion and, as i said, there will be no more IPv4 addresses long before that happens. my own computer has IPv6 software, but i had to disable it because it wasn’t working correctly, and, as far as i have been able to tell, there hasn’t been an upgrade package that has included a fix for IPv6 in at least 6 months.
presumably there are enough people that have functioning IPv6 computers that eventually the switch will be made, but until then, there will be no new addresses, and/or an only partially functioning internet with IPv4 computers that may or may not be able to connect…
The City That Ended Hunger – Buckminster Fuller said that we, as a people, have posessed the technology for 50 years (and he said this almost 50 years ago) to create a world where nobody has to work to survive. Why Bother Working At A Job You Hate? and The RICH Economy are my attempts at changing the world’s consciousness, but it may be that Belo Horizonte, brazil’s fourth largest city, has taken it one step further. brazil has a number of other interesting features upon which i have commented previously.
meanwhile, back in hell america, Building sand castles on Florida’s beaches is illegal – this is how BP is hoping to make you think that the oil spill is gone.
What the TSA isn’t saying about Full Body Scanners and Your Right to Opt Out – Say “I Opt Out.” Every Time. – has an interesting URI – Don’tScan.Us – and is there to remind everyone that, when travelling by air, you have the right to say “I OPT OUT” when confronted with a TSA request to what amounts to a strip search. also Portable, rapid DNA analysis tech developed – Big Brother doesn’t care whether or not you have fingerprints, and is interested in your DNA instead… more orwellian doublethink: Welfare is Employment Rights are Privileges War is Peace Illness is Health Collapse Is Recovery
Judge orders lesbian reinstated to Air Force and yet the congress in it’s infinite wisdom has decided that, even though a judge also ruled that DADT is unconstitutional, they’re not going to do anything to change it at this time. correct me if i’m wrong, but the judge that said that DADT is unconstitutional basically said that it’s against the law for the military to enforce the law as it currently stands, and still, congress feels that it’s okay to leave the law as it stands, right? that settles it, our government, and likely the governments of the countries in the rest of the world as well (since they all cooperate with each other, more or less) is irreparably broken. it’s time for that major shift in the way people think that i’ve mentioned before to actually start happening now…
and, by the way, now there’s Irrefutable Proof the Bush Tax Cuts Were a Miserable Failure – and we’re still losing to these morons…
despite the fact that Yes on Prop 19 Holds Steady Lead, 47%-42%, in Latest SurveyUSA Poll, this is what supporters of prop 19 are up against: Ex-Drug Czar Bill Bennett: Showtime’s “Weeds” is “Damaging,” Jonas Brothers Should Fight Prop 19 – regardless of whether prop 19 passes or not, however, Federal judge rules Colorado’s medical marijuana law is no defense for US drug charges. california can legalise all it wants, but until the federal government changes its mind, people will still end up going to jail for smoking a joint. and, while we’re at it, T-Mobile Claims Right to Censor Text Messages – big brother just got a little bigger and a little less like your brother.
along the same lines, according to Chapter 69.51A RCW on Medical "marijuana" (which is actually called “cannabis”, but i’m not arguing at this point), apparently i wouldn’t qualify anyway… oh well… 8/
Twitter blames website upgrade for re-introducing XSS hole – hopefully, the last word on my battle with twitter and their most recent cross-site scripting bug… which is still gone on my machine, but presumably that’s because i deleted my account before this latest round happened, and when they re-introduced it, i didn’t have an account to infect any longer…
twitter… 😐 feh.
Trojan poses as skeleton key jailbreak utility – but it only works on iPhones… wait, what? 8) heh heh heh… i am so glad i’m not a mac-head any longer…
GoDaddy.com Goes on the Auction Block – recently i read a couple of articles detailing how a whole bunch (<200) of wordpress blogs hosted by godaddy got hacked. i don’t know whether selling godaddy will make things better or worse, but it’s one of the reasons why i don’t use godaddy to begin with.
IE captain flees Microsoft for Google – when i was first getting into testing software, back in 1996, i attended a planning meeting in advance of the release of IE3 (which was still crawling with bugs, in spite of bill gates’ claim that micro$not released “bug free” software), and chris wilson was there, although he wasn’t as “important” then as he later became. however giving up micro$hit for google is sort of a lateral move for someone who is allegedly as “important” as he is… and, given that he is ultimately responsible for such travesties as IE4 and IE6, i would think that google would have second thoughts about hiring him…
How do you copy 60 million files? – yet another reason why linux rocks, and you should use it and not that crap operating system from redmond.
Nuclear Winter And Peace – look… another article by Fidel Castro… you might get the impression that he’s actually changed the way he thinks recently, and that i agree with him now…
Oops! Billboard spelling error creates embarrassment
The true history of the Koran in America – reports of qur’ans in american libraries go back at least to 1683, and the first qur’an to be published in america was in 1806, over 100 years later. both thomas jefferson and john adams owned one and read it frequently… just sayin’…
Pope’s astronomer says he would baptise an alien if it asked him – unfortunately, is not a joke… nor is this: Christian group declares jct 9 on M25 cursed, although it took me several readings to confirm that it was, in fact, totally serious… what?!?
Church of Body Modification – this has been the subject of a bunch of spam messages i have been receiving recently, but it’s a real thing, and it looks fairly interesting…
Fabrican – it gives the reference to “jeans so tight you must have sprayed them on” a whole new meaning…
Spirit of Frank Zappa returns to Baltimore
The rocker’s exploits are rooted in L.A., but a twist of fate sends a special statue to his hometown.
By Richard Simon
September 20, 2010
Reporting from Baltimore — You’re, like, totally not going to believe this but Baltimore declared Sunday ” Frank Zappa Day,” dedicating a bust in his honor.
Grody to the max.
Seventeen years after the rocker’s death in Los Angeles, Zappa drew a large, fittingly eclectic crowd to a ceremony in the city where he was born.
“It’s about time he got the recognition he deserves,” said Greg Stinson, 50, accompanied by his 16-year-old son Matthew, also a Zappa fan.
The festivities included a concert by Zappa’s son Dweezil and his band, Zappa Plays Zappa; a library exhibit, “Zappa’s Baltimore: Rebels and Iconoclasts in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave”; and a temporary name for the street in front of the library, “Frank Zappa Way.”
“The spirit of Frank Zappa is alive and well in Baltimore,” Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.
The bronze bust of the mustachioed Zappa — one of rock’s great iconoclasts — was donated by Zappa fans from Lithuania, which has had its own Zappa sculpture in the capital, Vilnius, since 1995. Although Zappa never visited the Baltic country, he was admired there for his advocacy of free expression as well as for his music.
Zappa’s widow, Gail, attended the ceremony, along with Dweezil and two other children, Ahmet and Diva. A group of Lithuanians flew to Baltimore for the event.
Among those in attendance was the chief judge of the Baltimore City Circuit Court. John N. Prevas, 63, a Zappa fan since 1966, called the bust “a wonderful symbol of Baltimore’s cultural heritage and the fact that Frank was such a paradoxical icon for freedom.”
“We’re glad that he was born here, and even though he didn’t spend much time here after the age of 10, we’ve always felt he was one of us,” he added.
Zappa, who died of prostate cancer in 1993 at age 52, spent much of his life in Southern California, where he and his family moved when he was 10. Zappa’s L.A. exploits include getting thrown out of the Antelope Valley High School marching band in Lancaster after he was caught smoking in uniform, and recording with his then-teenage daughter, Moon Unit, the 1982 hit “Valley Girl,” a riff on San Fernando Valley culture.
The Zappa bust might have ended up in Los Angeles — if not for a cultural attache at the U.S. Embassy in Vilnius who happened to be from Baltimore. He suggested the city when the Lithuanian Zappa fans offered to donate the statue.
“I thought in L.A., it would kind of get lost,” said Carlos Aranaga, who was the cultural attache.
“Baltimore is the kind of the city that resonates with Zappa’s work,” he added, citing another iconoclastic Baltimorean, journalist and social critic H.L. Mencken.
The ceremony came 25 years after Zappa appeared at a Senate hearing to rail against censorship of rock lyrics and calls for an album rating system.
Though Zappa left Baltimore long ago, relatives there turned out for the dedication.
“I was a teenager the last time I saw him,” said cousin James A. Colimore Jr., 66, who came with his four adult children, who never met Zappa.
Colimore recalled “Frankie” visiting Baltimore and spending the summer at “Aunt Mary’s house” two doors away when Zappa was 16 and Colimore 14. “He came to Baltimore by train from California with” a stack of records that he played frequently, he said.
“He was cool back then,” Colimore said, recalling Zappa wearing shorts, a T-shirt and sandals when the East Coast was wearing jeans and high-top tennis shoes. He also recalled Zappa writing esoteric classical music on blank sheets of music paper with a quill pen.
Zappa has a street named after him in Berlin as well as an asteroid, Zappafrank, that orbits between Mars and Jupiter. He is also in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as “rock and roll’s sharpest musical mind and most astute social critic.”
Asked what her husband might have said about getting his own sculpture, Gail Zappa responded: “Frank might have said, ‘Preposterous.’ ”
Google guy "invaded teen users’ privacy" Google damages users’ brains – DON’T! BE! EVIL!
On the Advice of the FBI, Cartoonist Molly Norris Disappears From View – this is what happens when you take any religion to its logical conclusion.
Linus Torvalds outs himself as US citizen – gadzooks! i can’t wait to get out, and linus is on his way in… tell ya’ what, linus… i’ll trade you. Silence is the Death of Liberty is an example of why…
New 64-Bit Windows Rootkit Already ‘In The Wild’ – i’m tellin’ ya’… it’s pointless for micro$awft to create “new” operating systems, because they’re all based on former, defective, operating systems, and they’ve already got a built-in cadre of hackers who are already 98% of the way to breaking anything new that they come up with, before they release it. NOTICE TO MICKEY: the way to fix this is to use an entirely different approach, right from the very beginning – instead of basing your next 64-bit “super secure, can’t be hacked” OS on the same 8-bit kernel on which every other MS OS has been based, why not try something that no-one expects and build an entirely new kernel? what? you’re not creative enough to do that? oh, well forget it then…
Open source: a savvy bet, even in tough times – another way of putting it is that “free” is a very good way to keep me as a customer… Principia Mathematica Corporatica
Massive La. Fishkill Prompts Oil Spill Questions, Gulf Oil Refuses to Stay Hidden Underwater and In legal filings, BP says thousands of oil spill victims do not have right to sue – will it ever end? not during this decade…
Nation of Israel Buys @Israel Twitter Account From Miami Pornographer – bwaah hah hah hah hah! 8D
Purging Evil – society still has a very, very long way to go. my impression is that it will continue to be as bad as it is, if not worse, until there is a fundamental shift in the way we think and behave, and guys like cal thomas are preventing that fundamental shift from happening. yet another example (the web is full of them, there’s no counting how many stories like this there are) ‘Devil’ appears in bathroom tile – and, yes, both of these are serious. the people reporting the stories believe that they’re true, no matter how absurd they really are. more absurdity:
Scientists are creating ‘mice with human brains’ Montana Republican Party wants to make homosexuality a crime Mother Denies Heart Surgery For Infant, Cites Religion – these are not jokes.
so i’ve been doing some maintenance on sedentarysousa dot com. i uploaded the last of the changes, and refreshed the browser, only to get one of those “Firefox can’t find the server at www.sedentarysousa.com” messages.
i restarted firefox. i flushed my DNS cache, and the DNS cache of my router. i rebooted the machine, and the router. i switched browsers five times, i switched machines three times, and i switched platforms twice, but i basically got “there is no server” messages from every browser and machine combination i tried.
i then went to browsershots dot org, which uses a whole bunch of different network nodes, a whole bunch of different browsers and three different platforms, and confirmed that sedentarysousa.com was up and working the way it’s supposed to, and that made me suspicious.
because of the fact that one of my machines is wireless, and my neighbour uses a different ISP and runs an unsecured wireless network, i can switch networks fairly easily, so i did, and sedentarysousa.com showed up without a problem.
aha, i thought. the problem is with drizzle (big surprise). so i called drizzle. sure enough, the drizzle tech support people – two of them! – confirmed that sedentarysousa – and only sedentarysousa – was “offline”.
they recommended that i “contact the host provider” and have them do a traceroute to my IP address, to figure out where the problem lies.
let me get this straight… they would rather that the host provider – who is conveniently located in London, doesn’t have a problem with anybody else, and only has a problem with one route connecting – should contact the person responsible for that route to fix the problem, instead of the person responsible for the route that’s having a problem being contacted by ME to fix the problem.
it sounds very much to me as though they are saying “we don’t care, we don’t have to” – which is not the way to keep me as a customer.
very likely, what they are saying, as well, is “we don’t actually know what the problem is, or how to fix it”, which is a valid point, but it makes me feel like they are deliberately misleading me, rather than being honest and admitting that they don’t know – which is also not the way to keep me as a customer.
what really irritates me is that, what with the network being the fluid place that it is, by the time i actually discover what the problem really is, it will have fixed itself and there won’t be any evidence that whatever was causing the problem really was causing the problem. it irritates me that random things like this happen on what should be a very predictable medium. 8P
ETA: so i had the host provider do a traceroute to my IP address:
traceroute to 216.162.193.190 (216.162.193.190), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 216-18-215-65.hosted.static.webnx.com (216.18.215.65) 0.316 ms 0.371 ms 0.436 ms
2 cr3-lax01.webnx.com (67.220.192.102) 0.294 ms 0.357 ms 0.410 ms
3 cust-webnx.ar10.owlax.us.easynet.net (207.162.207.13) 0.576 ms 0.723 ms 0.807 ms
4 ge-7-48.car1.SanJose2.Level3.net (4.59.0.69) 9.538 ms 9.535 ms 9.528 ms
5 * * *
6 ae-93-93.ebr3.SanJose1.Level3.net (4.69.134.237) 21.896 ms 19.398 ms 17.990 ms
7 ae-2-2.ebr3.LosAngeles1.Level3.net (4.69.132.10) 12.894 ms 9.468 ms 9.456 ms
8 ae-71-78.ebr1.LosAngeles1.Level3.net (4.69.146.10) 16.406 ms ae-91-98.ebr1.LosAngeles1.Level3.net (4.69.146.26) 16.362 ms 16.354 ms
9 ae-7-7.car1.SaltLakeCity1.Level3.net (4.69.148.5) 22.380 ms 22.130 ms 22.771 ms
10 ae-11-11.car2.SaltLakeCity1.Level3.net (4.69.133.122) 22.099 ms 22.531 ms 22.291 ms
11 4.53.42.10 (4.53.42.10) 22.579 ms 22.703 ms 22.765 ms
12 208.110.128.254 (208.110.128.254) 38.893 ms 38.961 ms 38.866 ms
13 216.162.207.60 (216.162.207.60) 43.406 ms 42.878 ms 43.912 ms
14 * * *
15 * * *
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 * * *
the place where the timeout occurred was 216.162.207.60, which is Internet Professionals & Network Solutions.
it IS drizzle’s problem! 8|
i don’t use facebook for a large number of reasons. primary among these is that, despite the fact that a lot of my current friends are facebook members, there are certain people from my past that might want to get in touch with me, and i would prefer it a great deal if they did not know how to get in touch with me. not being a member of facebook is a good way to accomplish that. among the other reasons, in no particular order, are these: Facebook users ‘are insecure, narcissistic and have low self-esteem’, Understanding the latest Facebook privacy train wreck, Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook, More Reasons Why You Should Still Quit Facebook and Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook? i’m not going to rant about this, despite the fact that i could rant for quite some time about facebook, because whatever i say, people are going to do what people are going to do, and one of those things is to use facebook in spite of it’s obvious and blatant flaws.
reminder: THIS is the reason why i am no longer using LiveJournal for anything remotely blog-related. i know enough about how these things work to realise that there’s probably a lot going on that i don’t understand, and that i don’t know about, but there’s one distinct advantage to having a blog located on a server over which you have exclusive control, and that is that you don’t have perverts sysadmins stalking poking their noses in where they’re not supposed to be. if you’re looking for an alternative, i can host your domain and you can run your own version of wordpress there, and i promise i won’t comment on flocked entries. contact me for more details.
Death by iPod – this is directly related to last week’s link detailing people still falling for scams, despite the fact that they’ve been running essentially the same scams for at least ten years… society needs a collective brain upgrade. examples: Google squirrels into human brains with Scribe experiment and Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent
Windows malware dwarfs other viral threats – “The vast majority of malware – more than 99 per cent – targets Windows PCs”. another very good reason to use linux.
50 Mind Blowing Facts About America That Our Founding Fathers Never Would Have Believed – Sheriffs want lists of patients using painkillers – for example…
Stuffed Pony Blown Up By Bomb Squad Suspicious ‘FurReal’ pony blown up near elementary school – it was a battery powered, stuffed pony, in the vicinity of an elementary school… because the clowns at clownland security didn’t have anything better to do…
‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Unconstitutional – this actually happened a few days ago, but i haven’t seen it in any of the regular news at all. the “christians” will say that it’s further evidence that they are a “persecuted minority”. meanwhile Self-Described ‘Christian Counterpart To Osama Bin Laden’ Arrested In Plot To Bomb Abortion Clinic and Self-labeled ‘Christian counterpart of Osama bin Laden’ allegedly planned clinic bombing – “christians” are the real terrorists.
What does it take to be happy? About $75,000 – money can’t buy happiness, but apparently $75k a year will get you pretty close…
New research restores psychedelics’ medical respectability – first they were used as medicine for thousands of years, then they decided that they have no medicinal value, now they’re saying that they might have medicinial value after all… i wish they’d just make up their minds and stop decieving us. sign The Vienna Declaration to advocate for evidence based drug policy and strengthen the call for policies driven by evidence. join the movement to end the failed war on drugs!
Cannabis Yoga – to help you come down from your stressful life. this is not a joke.
Noam Chomsky to become new X-Factor judge – this is a joke.
Twitter bug creates account hijacking peril – i’m not sure that this is exactly related to what i have been experiencing, but it does explain a lot, especially since i didn’t start experiencing a problem until after i had “disabled” my twitter account…
now to determine whether or not there is a way to prevent cross-site scripting in wordpress…
growl, grumble, gripe, complain… 😡
ETA: it is as i feared: WordPress 3.0.1 – Cross Site Scripting Issue and Twitter XSS Proof of Concept – it doesn’t work if you’re running NoScript (which i am), but there it is… i suppose now it’s just a matter of waiting until somebody comes up with a fix for it…
apparently either something was “stuck” in my computer that i deleted when i deleted and re-uploaded my blog yesterday, or something else is going on, because so far, the unauthorised authorisation dialogue that has been plaguing me for the past three days has now flown the coop… grr. it’s back again… 8/ it’s like it waits until i’m actually typing a post before it shows up… weird!
apparently the process of disinfecting those two files that i discovered yesterday completely re-did the way the blog “plugins” work, because when i booted up this morning, i suddenly discovered that wordpress does, in fact, keep track of things that it seems to have been forgetting for a while now. maybe the thing that is supposed to email commenters when there’s a new comment will suddenly start to work now…
also, i’m sorry to say it, hobbit, but i have miraculously discovered a bidding war over the collection of conan books which is now up to $22 and the auction still has 9 hours before it’s over…
i’m fairly sure that the authorisation dialogue message that (still) won’t go away is somehow connected to my blog. when i shut down my computer yesterday, there was an authorisation dialogue box on my screen, but when i started up this morning it wasn’t there. so, i paid very close attention to what i started up, and the order i started things up, and kept track of the processes that were running on the computer. it didn’t show up again until i logged into my blog, at which point it showed up almost immediately.
so, i deleted all of the files except for the database and re-uploaded everything. in the process of re-uploading the files, i discovered a couple of files that were infected from last year, that i probably missed when i was cleaning up last year. 8/
of course, when everything was uploaded and the database got reconnected, the first thing that happened was that the authorisation dialogue box came back, so i’ve got a couple of other options, the first of which is rebooting my local computer, to see if there is something that is stuck in my local machine.
we’ll start out this week’s post with a public service announcement: National Chronic Illness Awareness Week is coming up 13-19 september. be nice to somebody: one in two americans has an invisible chronic illness or condition!
Predator drones patrols of southern US border start Wednesday – this is now a police state, where only the priveledged live, the starving refugee is given temporary status, and the illegal immigrant is hunted down and summarily killed ejected.
example: California Cops Taser Senior Citizen in His Own Home – couple returns home, man falls, wife calls 911, cops show up and taser man when he refuses to go with them. beware – this could happen in your home, to you.
Oil Rig Explodes Off The Louisiana coast – didn’t we already go through this once? and, by the way, we now have a BP ultimatum: Let us drill or funds will dry up – considering that it took them all of a week to make the money that they have spent on cleaning up the spill, i think that they could go a little while longer before they are completely out of money…
More War Lies – war is peace, love is hate, lies are truth… business as usual.
Stephen Hawking Breaks Atheist Rules – yep, he said there doesn’t have to be a “god” in order for everything to be here. broke the rules, indeed… Is Stephen Hawking’s New Book Science or Science Fiction – “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” — Mohandas K. Gandhi
Top Web Scams of the Decade – in other words, if you don’t know that you shouldn’t respond to random, sketchy-sounding email from someone you don’t know, you probably shouldn’t be online at all. Pew Study Claims One Fifth Of American Adults Don’t Use The Internet – i’ve got an idea: make it so that you have to have a license to use an internet-connected device, in the same way that you now have to have a license to drive a car. kill two birds with one stone…
Budget cuts bring end to Stockton narcotics unit – hey, let’s move to stockton! 8)
California pot legalization ‘could end Mexican drug war’ and Marijuana activists stage Mexico City smoke-out to protest prohibition – hint: legalisation of cannabis could go a long way towards ending the war on drugs everywhere…
The Pain-Killing Power of Marijuana – especially with people like this guy’s brother pumping out new research…
Two new scientific studies reveal hallucinogens are good for your mental health – another thing hallucinogens are good for! 8)
Ancient brew masters tapped drug secrets – another thing beer is good for! 8)
Mind-Altering Parasites – toxoplasma gondii on the loose!
Vox is closing September 30, 2010 – that didn’t last long… they started vox after i left livejournal, which was a little more than two years ago…
i’m intrigued, though… they’re moving people to typepad and flickr rather than to livejournal… i wonder why…?
i went to the twitter web site and quickly determined that there wasn’t a way to connect with a tech-support drone who had any hope of giving me a cogent answer to my (primarily twitter-related) problem – one of the reasons i was so hesitant to get wrapped up in this whole thing to begin with… 8/
anyway, i went to the #kubuntu IRC channel on freenode and met up with someone who, once he had seen the picture of the dialogue box, had the idea that it might be a gnome dialogue, which is odd, considering that i am running KDE. admittedly, i do have a few gnome applications installed (synaptic, for example), but as far as i know, none of them are using the gnome-keychain application from which this seems to be a dialogue box, so he suggested that i remove it, which i did.
after logging out and logging in again, it looked as though the dialogue had vanished (a good thing), so after waiting around for half an hour or so, i quit the IRC client.
almost immediately the authorisation dialogue came back… 8/
i then began shooting down processes that looked suspicious, starting with anything even remotely gnome-related. eventually i shot down enough processes that my system became unstable, so i had to completely shut down the machine and restart.
at this point, the dialogue hasn’t come back yet. i’m not sure whether it’s because of the fact that i removed software, or whether it’s because of the fact that i hadn’t actually shut down the computer, or if it’s because both of those things happened… at this point, i’m not completely convinced that the dialogue won’t come back again.
ETA: it’s back… 8/
another thing i learned about was the existence of yet another browser, rekonq, which has some interesting quirks and probably won’t replace firefox any time soon, but it’s an interesting addition to the collection.
i didn’t want to, but i signed up for a twitter account, allegedly so i could “keep in contact” with the previous host provider…
no, this isn’t going to be another gripe about my host provider, although it starts out seeming that way, bear with me…
of course, it didn’t work, and i don’t have services provided by that service provider any more anyway, so i decided to cancel my twitter account. after all, i never used it, and i only signed up for it in the first place because i thought it was going to facilitate something that, in fact, it didn’t. however, i found that it’s not so easy to “cancel” your twitter account.
you can – allegedly – “deactivate” your account, which is a “permant” method of “temporarily” disabling your account (whatever that means), but your account might still be visible for up to 48 hours after it has been “deactivated” due to “network propagation” (whatever that means)…
so i decided to “deactivate” my account, since there doesn’t seem to be any way at all to cancel it outright. it was actually deceptively simple. i say it was “deceptively” simple because, although i did it this morning, and my computer has actually been shut down for most of the day, i still keep getting an “authorisation dialogue” from something i didn’t install, but which says that “twitter api” at “twitter.com” wants access to something on my computer…
REPEATEDLY 😡
i click “cancel” and it goes away, only to come back about 5 minutes later. i don’t enter anything, and click “OK” – which i would assume would produce an error message, and… it goes away, only to come back about 5 minutes later…
it’s 11:00 at night, and i don’t have time to try and figure out what’s going wrong, but you can bet that i”m going to have a stern conversation with a couple of tech-support toadies at twitter tomorrow.
i am writing this from portland. to be specific, i am writing this from the back yard of my mother-in-law’s house. when i booted up my battery-powered laptop, it automatically found a network, and logged me in. it also found 3 other networks, for which i don’t have the password stored in my computer.
my impression is that i can go pretty much anywhere in pretty much any metropolitan area in this country, and be able to log on to the network with not an awful lot more than a password. this particular network’s password was (probably) supplied by my wife, who set up her mother with wireless ethernet last christmas, but it shouldn’t take any more than asking someone to be able to log in to any network. i just heard someone on the radio this morning who was saying that, inevitably, they’re going to include wireless networking, or wifi hotspots in new buildings, the same way that new buildings currently are wired with electricity, sewers and running water. i shouldn’t have to do more than ask someone to get free access to internet, in the same way that i shouldn’t have to pay someone to get water, or go to the bathroom.
and yet, that’s what google – the “don’t be evil” company – is out to make happen. it’s not bad enough that google anticipates the keywords that you type in, based on information that they have gathered from your previous searches, or that google is willing to sell that information about you to other people without your knowledge or permission, but on top of all that, they want to make you pay to get what should be equally free to everyone.
yeah, i know that you can go into a restaurant and get a fancy glass of water, but you’re also going to get quite a bit more than that in a restaurant, if what you’re starting out with is water, and when water is all you need, paying for all of that other, admittedly desirable, stuff, is starting to be more of a “luxury” item than anything else…
here’s an option: give free high speed internet to everyone, but let google and verizon build their “private, for-pay” internet and have them deliver that “private, for-pay” internet in a way similar to that in which fine food is delivered at a restaurant, and see how long it is before people realise that “private” and “for-pay” means that regardless of how raunchy, evil and nasty they want to be, someone is going to be aware of their actions.
Can psychedelic drugs treat depression? – gee, weren’t we discussing the very same possibility FIFTY YEARS AGO⁈⁈ before all this “war on drugs” crap took over everyones’ consciousness⁈ we’ve lost 50 years of medical technology breakthroughs because of this stupid attitude that “some drugs are bad”… 8/
Why The Wars Can’t Be Won – if you needed further explanation.
Nuclear Winter – by Fidel Castro, 24 august, 2010. also, Fidel Castro has a blog, so get out there and subscribe, comrades…
Fidel Castro claims Osama bin Laden is a US spy but that’s not what they want you to think: Corporate Media Dismisses Castro’s Bin Laden Claim As Far-Fetched Conspiracy Theory
Obama administration claims roughly 75 percent of the oil had been removed or Senior U.S. scientist rescinds previous claim that 3/4 of oil from spill is gone, says most is still there? who knows for sure any longer, the reality is, the environment is severely screwed, and will stay severely screwed for quite a number of years… 8/
Calling a truce in the war on drugs – remember when england fired the chairman of it’s "Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs" and he shot back? well, he’s at it again, and he makes just as much sense as ever. will the government listen to him this time? probably not…
The facial recognition software that will put a name to every photograph in the internet – big brother is watching! coming to a browser near you soon, whether you want him to or not… 8/
Steve Jobs Is Watching You: Apple Seeking to Patent Spyware – big brother is watching! coming to a iphone near you soon, whether you want him to or not… 8/
Mobile X-Ray Scanners Hit The Streets – big brother is watching! coming to a street near you soon, whether you want him to or not… 8/
L.A. authorities plan to use heat-beam ray in jail – but only on “unruly” residents.
Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations – if you weren’t paranoid enough already…
Every Time You Forward an Email You Donate To Al-Qaeda – now we’re going over the line into stupidity… 8/
Man Already Knows Everything He Needs To Know About Muslims and Special Investigation – Evolution reflect the way i’ve been feeling about the general public recently, so watch out if you have to be in contact with me for any length of time, especially if you’re upset about either of these issues.
Upgrade Excreta – single malt whiskey from elderly diabetic piss, composting toilets and sparkly shit to lighten up your day…
so i was forced, once again, to switch host providers.
i was having a conversation with the (now) previous host provider, who said that there was nothing to worry about, and then, two days (literally) later, i get an email from him that says he’s going out of business – again… he gave me a date of 18th septembr as the date… then, he sent me email the next day that said that the original message was sent “as a draft”, and that the actual date was 9th september.
i have gotten so tired of people jerking me around – this guy was doing okay, with the exception of saying he was going out of business a few months ago, but then changing his mind and deciding that he was going to stay in business for his existing clients – but after i got the “draft” message, i decided to be proactive and rustled up a couple of potential new host providers, and began the process of moving. whether or not he was going to change his mind, i’d simply had enough of his being able to jerk me around.
i switched the DNS numbers two days ago, and there was the requisite 48-hour chaos period while the new DNS propagated, but it appears that everything has settled down at this point.
shortly after i switched the DNS numbers, the (now) previous provider called me to see how the process was going. i get the impression that he was waiting for me to get out of his system, because now, none of his domains are available. this is a guy who is apparently a high school student who “lost his job” and can’t run his service any longer. the problem i have with that is that hosting web sites is my job, and if i don’t have a host provider, I will go out of business.
i switched to a professional host provider, not a “skript kiddie”, that has a proven, international record (no, i did NOT go back to 1&1), and i’m actually paying less than i was with the previous host provider. hopefully this will be the last time for a good long while, because i’m totally over it.
Crabs provide evidence oil tainting Gulf food web – oil spill? what oil spill? wasn’t that two weeks ago? 8/
and, while we’re on the subject of oil, 2,487.5 mpg! Catchy headline unneccessary – “We find it incredibly thrilling to report mpg ratings that require a comma so we’re going to write it again: 2,487.5 mpg. Wow.” that’s right, they’re talking about two “prototype” internal combustion, gasoline powered cars, in measured competition one got 437.2 miles per gallon, and the other got 2,487.5 miles per gallon… detroit is still hyping their 20 – 25 mpg cars as “energy efficient”, “fuel saving”, and other preposterous blather, despite the fact that mileage on my cars hasn’t changed significantly in over 30 years. apparently, we “umayrakins” are swallowing it hook, line and sinker, and begging for more. it’s my understanding that you can’t sell a car in europe these days that doesn’t get at least 40 mpg… what do we have to do to get these “prototype” cars into mass production?
oh, and by the way, Senior U.S. scientist rescinds previous claim that ¾ of oil from spill is gone, says most is still there and Top Expert: Geology is “Fractured”, Relief Wells May Fail … BP is Using a “Cloak of Silence”, Refusing to Share Even Basic Data with the Government – what? were they really thinking that we would believe that they could clean up two months worth of oil spill in less than a month? and once they got the well plugged up, the first thing BP did was go back to it’s habit of not sharing information with anyone again… it all goes back to that link that i found a couple weeks ago, where the guy was claiming that the BP gulf disaster may have triggered a ‘world-killing’ event…
Time To Terminate Western Civilization Before It Terminates Us – right on! its about time somebody said it! it’s about time we all get down to learning at least Ten Reasons to Become Self-Sufficient and Ten Ways to Get There
It’s time to presume the web is guilty – it’s an interesting way to look at it, but i think he may have something there. especially considering that Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash – when i was a software tester, there was this thing called “good enough” which was a state where the software still had bugs, but it was “good enough” to release to the public, because the bugs that it had were small, inconsequential, difficult to show, or inconsistent enough that there wasn’t an immediate need to fix them. there were exceptions to the “good enough” rule, which included software on which peoples’ life depended, such as avionics, medical software, and that kind of thing, but when i was a software tester, the concept of a virus that spread through email was something that had only recently been realised and hadn’t been around for more than a couple of years, and most of what appeared on the web was presumed to be innocent. now we’ve gotten to the point where software testers can’t assume that “good enough” really is good enough any more, and even when it is completely bug-free, software may be vulnerable to a specifically designed attack. moral: your computer is suspect. be wary of anything it tells you, and watch your back at all times.
cardinal francis george, head of the u.s. conference of catholic bishops, has gone on record regarding proposition 8, saying no court of civil law has the authority to reach into areas of human experience that nature itself has defined. he obviously hasn’t seen this video, shot at the honolulu zoo on november 11, 2004, of a chimp raping a frog. that’s about as natural as it comes, and if nature intended for a frog to provide oral pleasure to a chimp, then two people of the same sex having the right to marry, or an individual’s choice to use cannabis shouldn’t be far off, right?
Church Vows to Burn Qur’ans Without Fire Permit – the church said they were going to burn qur’ans, but the gainsville fire department said that they can’t burn books without a fire permit (shades of Fahrenheit 451, anyone?). now the church says, permit or not, they’re going to go ahead with their “protest”, because islamic law “is totalitarian in nature,” islamic teaching contains “irrational fear and loathing of the west” and that the qur’an teaches that jeezis “was NOT the son of ‘god'”. again, i would ask, is "christianity" that much different? change “irrational fear and loathing” to the east, and remove the negative from the last statement, and i would say that the similarities are striking…
there are a couple of things from LiveScience – One Common Ancestor Behind Blue Eyes and Age Confirmed for ‘Eve,’ Mother of All Humans – that i’d be willing to bet are going to be abused massively and frequently by “christians” who will say that they just prove that “eve” exists, even though it’s only about 196,000 years older than the “young earth creationists” claim, and even though both of the articles specifically say “this doesn’t mean she was the first modern woman”… it’s just a matter of time before they latch on to this and try to twist the meaning of the words to fit their own schemes…
How Can You Control Your Dreams? – i have never seen, and probably will never see inception but lucid dreaming has always held a great deal of interest for me.
Simon’s Cat – that is all.
let’s start off with a bit of double-you-tee-eff, shall we? Topless sunbather accused of sensuously rubbing in sun cream – keep in mind, this happened in italy, where it is legal for women to go topless on the beach everywhere, and not just in secluded areas. apparently, however, that was okay with the mother of the teenage boys the sunbather was accused of troubling, it was when she started rubbing on the sunblock that the mother started to get upset. i wonder if anyone thought about asking the teenaged boys what they thought?
Radio, RIAA: mandatory FM radio in cell phones is the future – they’ve decided that we can’t have the music ourselves, but now they want to mandate that, in the future, all mobile devices will come equiped with an FM radio, so that other people can program our music for us… or something like that. honestly, the whole copyright system is so screwed up that i don’t pay that much attention to it any longer, except when it involves copyrights that i hold…
so i did a little bit of research into whether washington state has a water rights law that prohibits homeowners from harvesting rainwater. what i discovered is that rainwater collection is a complex issue, but homeowners are not prohibited from having a rooftop rainwater collection system, and that under certain circumstances, it is perfectly legal for property owners to have cisterns of 30,000 gallons or more. Rainwater Collection in Washington State is the place to start. i understand what the people are saying about modern folk thinking that we have to ask permission to excercise our inalienable rights, though. it’s time that changed.
Warning to Travelers About New, Drug-Resistant ‘Superbug’ – it’s the end of the world as we know it, and i feel fine…
Voogle Wireless – don’t… be… evil!
Senate Passes "The ______Act of____" – H.R. 1586 started out as one thing (TARP taxes), became another thing (an aviation bill), and is now a batch of spending policies… and it has one of the most unlikely names imaginable.
Marijuana legalization in Mexico gaining support – now all we have to do is convince our “leaders” to do the same thing… if the people lead, eventually the leaders will follow, even if it is begrudgingly.
Why hemp could save the world – this is an article by D.M. Murdock, otherwise known as acharya s, who i’ve been reading about for 20 years or so. she’s got a lot of interesting things to say, and this is one of them.
Science supports medical marijuana – this is a response to a journalist who is apparently misinformed concerning science and cannabis, but it’s good reading all on its own.
Taking God to School is an article about how we should be bringing back “Prayer, The Ten Commandments, learning about creation, readings from the Bible” in public schools. as you have probably already guessed, i think this woman is not only wrong, but crazy, and possibly dangerous, but apparently that doesn’t matter, because “God is not bound by policies and politically [sic] correctness”. that phrase catches my eye. first of all, i don’t know who they’re fooling by saying that they know what we should be doing in our public schools when they can’t even use proper grammar to form a sentence, and if they’re claiming that “god” isn’t bound by political correctness, then they are, essentially, saying that their “god” isn’t politically correct. for people who have such a hangup about conformity, it’s rather unexpected for them to acknowledge that their “god” isn’t politically correct, and it makes me wonder if even they don’t take what they say seriously…
Muslims Seek to Censor Gospel of Christ – another one from “christian” news wire that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, this one is about muslim leaders having a press conference to plead with legislators to do something about “christian” protestors demonstrating in the public forum around mosques. of course the public thoroughfare around any place of worship is fair game for protesting, but let’s put the shoe on the other foot: what if muslims were “spreading the gospel” of mohammed outside a “christian” church? the “christian” leaders would be having seven kinds of a hissy fit, and demanding that laws be drawn up immediately to prohibit such a thing (see Strippers protest church for a change), so why the furor about muslim leaders heading them off at the pass? not only that, but it’s only a press conference, nevertheless these “christians” somehow interpreted this as their “potential for violence” and say that “gentle christian saints” (HAH!) will be holding their own “press conference” outside the mosque. then, there is something that made me wonder even more about these peoples’ sanity: they say that “Islam is not a religion, nor a cult, but a total and complete 100% system of life. It has religious, legal, political, economic, social, and military components.” — and “christianity” isn’t? and “christianity” is somehow different from all that? and “christianity” is somehow better than that? never, in the 2000 years since jeezis, has there ever been any evidence that is the case. PERIOD. “The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion.” that means ANY religion, whether it is “christian” or muslim. they shouldn’t get a special law that prohibits islam any sooner than they should get a special law that prohibits “christianity”. people who get upset about things like this are stupid to think that they’re going to get special treatment just because they happen to believe in the right things, and they’re stupid to post things like this on the web, because there are people who will, undoubtedly, work out the flaws in their logic and see how stupid they are…
Man tries to get his name legally changed to Boomer the Dog and Unicorn Being a Jerk – now there’s some craziness that i can get behind… 8)
on saturday, i was present when a post to freecycle south king county arrived, with an offer of a tunturi recumbent bike. naturally, i replied instantaneously, but i got no response. two days later, i replied again, but no response. two days later, i replied a third time, but again, no response.
there has been no “taken” message posted to freecycleskc, so i decided to do a bit of sleuthing, and discovered that the person who posted the message has only posted one message, started their account shortly before posting that message, is not currently online, and hasn’t been online since saturday. to me, this is an indication that the post offering the recumbent bike is a ruse to get people who will be sent spam the “chance” to respond, so that the spammer will have their email addresses, which, then, will be added to spam lists that are circulated among other spammers.
i wrote the list owner for freecycleskc, a person with the charming email handle “PrayingMommy4”, who isn’t concerned, because the person “gave very good answers when they applied for membership a few days ago”, but i’m not convinced. to me, this has all the earmarks of a spam harvester, in fact it may be an automated process… 8/
a few days ago, i got a google alert for my name, which was a link to a spammer’s discussion group, where they were discussing this “opt in” list that had my email address, and other email addresses from spamcop.net on it, and the spammers were wondering whether or not this was “really” an “opt in” list or not. the conclusion of the discussion is that it was “really” an “opt in” list, but they recommended that they “not use” the spamcop.net addresses.
by the way, it’s off topic, but are there any speakers of what i assume is turkish out there, who can tell me what this is all about?
i have NEVER signed up for any “targeted” lists with my spamcop.net address, so any list that includes my spamcop.net address is, by definition, going to be reported as spam. automated processes and clueless list owners don’t make this any easier, but i’m going to keep reporting spam until i stop getting spam.
imagine a day where 100% of ALL EMAIL TRAFFIC ON INTERNET are legitimate messages, and not a single UCE of any kind… it’s possible, you know…
QuestionCopyright.org | A Clearinghouse For New Ideas About Copyright – it’s about time someone started taking note of the fact that the copyright system is totally screwed. the next question is whether or not they’re going to be able to do anything about it.
Bombing Iran – here’s a good idea… let’s not… 8/
American Christianity is not well, and there’s evidence to indicate that its condition is more critical than most realize – lets hope more people realise it before the rest of ’em drive us into armageddon, ‘eh?
Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter – i was a vegetarian during my “hard-core hippie” years, but i grew out of it about 20 years ago, because i realise that God is perfect. also, i figure that if i am in a situation where it’s either eat meat or perish (which is not too unlikely in these “last days”), there is more likelyhood that i will be able to survive… and that’s not to mention the taste: there’s nothing vegetable that can beat the taste of bacon… or lamb… perhaps this is the reason behind all of that rationalisation.
Mitch Miller dies – i’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again: too many cool people from my generation have been dying recently. once again (and with a great deal of futility) i say, STOP IT!
How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a ‘world-killing’ event – more debate as the world burns…
Does circumcision cause psychological damage? – if you have to ask, you’re not male…
Future Crimes Can Be Predicted Perfectly – i’d roll my eyes and say “yeah, right…” except that it’s from the 100% totally reliable FOX News…
We don’t have to get sick as we get older – yep…
Continue reading mac os 10 doesn’t recognise an .mpeg file? weird…
Incoming BP CEO: Time for ‘scaleback’ in cleanup – maybe in his dreams… 😐
Swastika no longer viewed as Nazi symbol – reading just the headline, one would be inclined to think that the movement to Save the Swastika might be having some effect in enlightening people who think that (卐 ≡ nazi), but when one actually reads the article, it would seem that the Anti-Defamation League is probably more aptly named the “Anti-Swastika League” because, while they’ve admitted that the swastika isn’t just a nazi symbol, they’re still of the mistaken opinion that it’s a “more generalised symbol of hate”, which is also incorrect, as any hindu will tell you. hindus and buddhists, and, for that matter, jews, should express their outrage about this (here is the letter i wrote them, if you need some encouragement or an example): it’s racist and against the very principles they stand for, for the ADL to say that the holy symbols of another religion are a “generalised symbol of hate” without qualification!
and while i’m on the subject, i feel really sorry for the lack of intelectual development displayed in Culture Served Raw – A Universal Symbol of Hate – remember, we’re talking about TEN THOUSAND years of history as a symbol of good, compared to 90 years as a symbol of evil. not only that, but the blogger in question won’t even approve any comments that don’t agree with his preconcieved notion of how evil the swastika has been, and is completely ignoring the fact that it’s only been a relatively short time that it has been anything but a symbol of good. one thing i learned very early, is that the only way to change history is to remember it differently. it’s clear that this blogger is doing exactly that, and i feel sorry for them. Swastika, a “Universal” symbol of hate? – “I understand the aversion toward the swastika in the West but to say it is universally a symbol of hate could create more intolerance, not less.”
Researcher demonstrates ATM “jackpotting” at Black Hat Conference – a number of years ago, when i was working as a software tester, one of the projects i worked on was for Triton Systems, testing a little gadget that supposedly was able to do standard ATM functions from your desktop, with the aid of your computer. they actually gave me one of their little desktop gadgets to fool around with (unfortunately, they didn’t give me any actual money to go with it… cheapskates…), and i found a number of ways to crack their proposed software and make the gadget do all sorts of things that it wasn’t supposed to do. my understanding at the time was that they used essentially the same software for their stand-alone ATMs that they used for the desktop gadgets, and ever since then i’ve wondered whether or not it was possible to do the same things on their stand-alone ATMs. apparently it is.
Collecting rainwater now illegal in many states as Big Government claims ownership over our water – it’s illegal to collect rainwater in washington? i’ll have to look into that… and if it is, get a rain barrel or two… 8)
President Wyclef? – gawd help the haitians… they’ve already suffered enough…
A priest in eastern Europe has been accused of drowning a baby boy as he baptised him. – death by superstition? i thought that had been eliminated from our society years ago… 😐
jeez, first it’s uganda wanting to kill gays, and now a Kenyan gets 14 years for sex with donkey; blames devil – something must be wrong with that whole region of the world…
U.S. Copyright Group ‘Steal’ Competitor’s Website – another blatant case of the pot calling the kettle black…
Seattle’s Aerial Transport Lifestyle System – it’s the future… right?
and, last, but certainly not least, The Blue God of Judaism – a blog by Rabbi Robert dos Santos Teixeira, LCSW, that will examine the similarities between YHWH and Siva. maybe he’ll address my question concerning the ancient biblical patriarch worshipping a sivalingam…
They called me a child pornographer is the story of two families who went camping and took family photos which were misinterpreted as “child pornography” by untrained photo-finishing drones, resulting in a year and a half of hell for the families involved… however, in memphis a pedophile-protecting pastor is the greatest opposition to an ordinance that would have stopped the predator he is accused of protecting with his silence. it really confuses me that innocent people are regularly treated to the “guilty until proven innocent” routine, when people who we are supposed to believe have our best interests in mind are actually the people who are most adamantly against society’s attempts to protect itself.
and, along the same lines, Some Pentagon employees found with child porn still working – so if you work at the pentagon, if you are in to child pornography, it apparently doesn’t matter. it reminds me that ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.
Meaning of life – at least according to wikipedia…
one of my articles was published on American Dream Or Bust a while ago, and i just got around to checking it out.
some doofus named bill commented in such a way as to make him look like a complete, raving loony, or a “christian” racist, or, possibly, a combination of the two. i tore him a new asshole (scroll down past the database error messages to read the comments).
i find it really disturbing that people like bill are in control of what happens in the world – not bill specifically, of course, but people like him. we are never going to change the fucked-up situation the world is in until people like bill are marginalised to the point where nobody pays attention to them any longer.
How much oil has spilled into the Gulf of Mexico – according to the estimates that have been made public. the faint-hearted should not click for more information.
Immorality is Worse than BP Oil Spill – it’s an interesting way to put it, but knowing that the author is a “christian” makes me realise that even saying “no, it’s not” wouldn’t make any difference, and they would just go on believing blatantly wrong things in spite of clear evidence, so i’ll just put their link here so that everybody else can see what stupid, stupid, STUPID people we have become…
TSA To Block Websites With “Controversial Opinions” – the move to shut down free speech on the internet accelerates… at this point there’s not an awful lot standing in the way of How to Access the Internet (A Guide from 2025) becoming a reality… 😐
County coroners can’t back Brewer beheadings claim – the governor that implimented the “papers please” illegal immigration law in arizona, blatantly lies about people being beheaded in the desert, in a bid to get re-elected. fortunately there are people out there who know how to check facts, and they’ve blown this wide open.
Subway To Start Tessellating Cheese July 1? – you may not read about the previous items on the standard online news sources, but i followed a link from yahoo to get this one. our planet is simultaneously being soaked in crude oil and suffering the rule of idiots, but i’ll be damned if they’re going to get away with selling me a sandwich that has uneven cheese distribution… 🙁
a few days ago marist published a poll which asked people if they knew what country from which the united states declared independence. of adults aged 30 to 44, 15% weren’t sure, and 10% said a country other than “England” or “Great Britain”. of all adult U.S. residents 20% were “unsure”, and 6% said a country other than “England” or “Great Britain”. here are the poll results:
  | USA Residents | |||
On July 4th we celebrate Independence Day. From which country did the United States win its independence? | ||||
Great Britain | Unsure | Other countries mentioned | ||
Row % | Row % | Row % | ||
USA Residents | 74% | 20% | 6% | |
Region | Northeast | 84% | 10% | 6% |
Midwest | 74% | 21% | 5% | |
South | 68% | 26% | 6% | |
West | 75% | 18% | 7% | |
Household Income | Less than $50,000 | 63% | 30% | 7% |
$50,000 or more | 86% | 9% | 5% | |
Race | White | 82% | 13% | 5% |
Non-white | 56% | 35% | 9% | |
Age | 18 to 29 | 60% | 33% | 7% |
30 to 44 | 75% | 15% | 10% | |
45 to 59 | 79% | 17% | 4% | |
60 or older | 76% | 19% | 4% | |
Age | Under 45 | 67% | 24% | 9% |
45 or older | 78% | 18% | 4% | |
Gender | Men | 81% | 12% | 7% |
Women | 67% | 28% | 5% | |
July 2010 Marist Poll National Residents "N=1004 MOE +/- 3%" Totals may not add to 100 due to rounding. |
Humans will be extinct in 100 years – a wonderful way to start out the post, but i’d tend to treat anything said by the guy who helped wipe out smallpox with a great deal of respect. you can argue about it all you like, but this is a guy who knows what it’s like to become extinct, and if he says humans are on the way there, i’d tend to believe him.
Scientists discover riding a bike is incredibly hard – in spite of the fact that the formula they came up with sounds pretty interesting (inertial forces + gyroscopic forces + the effects of gravity and centrifugal forces = the leaning of the body and the torque applied to the handlebars), given all the things that are going wrong with the world currently, there have got to be better things for “scientists” to be working on, don’t you think?
6-Year-Old Northeast Ohio Girl on ‘No Fly’ List – more idiocy on the part of home clownland security. all their antics sure make me feel a whole lot safer… 8/
and, speaking of feeling safer, Police tasered an 86-year-old disabled grandma in her bed and stepped on her oxygen hose until she couldn’t breathe – wow… just… wow.
no further comment necessary… 😐
Apple collecting, sharing iPhone users’ precise locations
Apple now collecting, sharing precise location of iPhone users – yet another reason why i’m no longer a mac fanatic… i’ll use a mac, but i’m NOT getting an iphone, and i’m probably not going to get a smart phone at all… 8/
Opt Out of Behavioral Advertising – Opting out of a network does not mean you will no longer receive online advertising. It does mean that the network from which you opted out will no longer deliver ads tailored to your Web preferences and usage patterns… but it’s a start, and if you’re as paranoid about network privacy as i am, you’ll understand the necessity for such a thing.
about every two weeks or so i get a call from a person who is looking for an “incense” called “K2”, or “Spice” – Toxicologist Warning to Parents: Look for Signs of K2 – ‘Fake Marijuana’ and After Indianola teen’s suicide, Iowa officials set sights on banning K2 – i find it really sad that people have apparently resorted to poisoning themselves, because it’s the only legal alternative, rather than getting legitimately high from something that is illegal, but has never killed anyone. from The 420 Times, “If you’re a kid and you’re thinking of trying K2 because it’s still legal to buy in your state, you’d be better off running the risk of buying real, illegal marijuana. Even if you get caught, you won’t die from inhaling a toxic substance or experience “hallucinations, severe agitation, elevated heart rate and blood pressure, vomiting and, in some cases, tremors and seizures,” like you do from K2. You’ll just be another statistic in The War on Drugs.”
What The Hex? is a game where you guess the colour based on the hex-triplet for the RGB value.
Oregon officially recognizes marijuana for medical value – "The Oregon Board of Pharmacy voted to change marijuana from what’s known as a ‘Schedule I controlled substance’ to a ‘Schedule II.’" only 49 more state governments and 1 federal government to go… 😐
Titan’s atmosphere oddity consistent with methane-based life
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‘Grow-your-own’ organs hope after scientists produce liver in lab from stem cells – more evidence (if you needed any) that the “christians” are wrong, wrong, wrong!!
Whale Poop Cleans the Environment – The Sea Shepherds are probably already figuring out ways to use this against the japanese, politically and as a potential projectile. it also makes me wonder about how whale poop would do cleaning up the gulf oil spill…
Visualizing the BP Oil Spill Disaster – it couldn’t possibly make it any worse…
last week, monday i had a fremont phil rehearsal, tuesday i had a sousa band rehearsal, wednesday i had a players rehearsal, thursday i had a banda gozona rehearsal, friday i had a BBWP rehersal, saturday was the banda gozona performance at the seattle version of guelaguetza, and today i had a rehearsal of the beatles-simulacra-band for the solstice parade coming up on saturday. this week, monday i have a fremont phil rehearsal, wednesday i have a players rehearsal, thursday i have my choice of a banda gozona rehearsal (which i am going to miss, because it is in preparation for a performance at the solstice parade in which i am going to be otherwise engaged) or a beatles-simulacra rehearsal, friday i have a BBWP rehearsal, saturday i have the solstice parade, plus SACBO, sunday i have SACBO and a number of options, including vending… and then in a week, monday i’ve got a fremont phil rehearsal, tuesday i have a sousa band rehearsal, wednesday i have a players rehearsal, thursday i have a banda gozona rehearsal, friday i have a BBWP rehearsal, and it continues from there until OCF.
i’m going to OCF with chris this year, and chris wants to get there on monday, which is earlier than i have ever arrived at OCF before. which means that i’m going to have to be extra prepared this year (i.e. no “making a run to town to get things i forgot” this year). we’ve already been scheduled for a BBWP performance at the friday night fire show – which we didn’t do at all last year, and there was such a furor because we weren’t there that they demanded to have us back 🙂 – so i’ve definitely got my work cut out for me, learning the new rap, practicing my poi and my tassel-twirling and the fire-avoidance thing to think about. plus i’ve got to do some homework and come up with sound effects for the beatles thing. we’re going to be in a “Yellow Submarine” float, and they want some appropriate submarine noises, along with the actual keyboard stuff that i signed up for.
Microsoft hides mystery Firefox extension in toolbar update
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Cyber War: Microsoft a weak link in national security – this is why i don’t use windoesn’t: I should be the one to decide whether or not to install software on MY computer, regardless of how “important” or “necessary for correct functioning” it is. the fact that microsoft thinks it can get away with installing something that i don’t know about, on MY computer is insulting to my intelligence and very definitely goes to show how evil this company really is. i would expect nothing less from a virus, and microsoft is – supposedly – better than that. 😡 and, the fact is, originally, microsoft didn’t intend for its software to be used on “critical networks” and was (and to a great extent, still is) only in the software business for the money, not caring to ensure that their software actually works the way it is supposed to. this was driven home to me a few years ago, when i was working as a “vendor” at microsoft (i had access to microsoft facilities to work on microsoft projects, but i was actually working for another company, so my microsoft-issued ID card had “V-” in front of it), testing windows XP. not a single bug that i logged (and there were a lot of ’em) got fixed during the 9 months that i worked there. needless to say, most of them are still out there on your windows XP computer, and will never get fixed – because microsft “isn’t supporting” windows XP any longer. 😡
and, speaking of evil companies, the latest word is that BP buys Google ads for search term “oil spill” – so that it can attempt to “direct internet users to its website as it attempts to control…” flack from detractors, who are just about everybody these days. they should listen to Buzz Aldrin’s Answer To The Gulf Oil Spill…
i’ve had people tell me that i should really have a more positive attitude. i say Does a positive attitude make you more motivated to learn from your mistakes? and i find, like the researchers (at the Journal of Organizational Behavior) did, that a negative attitude is more conducive to learning from your mistakes. so i’ll keep seeing the dark cloud, and leave the silver lining to others.
and, from there, directly into the random, things-that-make-you-say-WTF category…
Quantum Jumping? – “Quantum Jumping is the process of ‘jumping’ into parallel dimensions, and gaining skills, knowledge, wisdom and inspiration from alternate versions of yourself.” what… the… fuck?!? he seems to be about as random as gene ray, but somewhat more commercially oriented.
Prefixes & Words Based On Latin Number Names – now you know what it means to say “for the duoquadragesimary time, learn these things!” 🙂
Testing the flotation dynamics and swimming abilities of giraffes by way of computational analysis – the latest, up to the minute research on the problem of whether giraffes can or cannot swim. according to this research, apparently they can. what do you know…
finally, Chinese internet addicts stage mutiny at boot camp – you WILL NOT survive an attempt to control geeks in need of internet.
Toxoplasma Modified Humans – i’m glad to see that people who actually know what they’re talking about are looking into this, because i have been suspicious of Toxoplasma gondii for number of years, and this guy seems to be talking about the same stuff that i’ve been wondering about for a long time. the big question is: is ‘the meaning of life’ merely to accelerate the reproductive cycle of a parasitic protozoa? disturbingly, it also sounds suspiciously like the scientologists’ story about microscopic aliens controlling our behaviour…
Can we arrest him now? – i guess the phrase about “liberty and justice for all” was only for some people… 😐
wuff…
friday the banda gozona performed at folklife. friday was also the day that my mother-in-law, father-in-law, and his wife came to visit, for the combined holiday, moe’s sheep trial, and my mother-in-law’s 60th birthday. i left at 3:00 and didn’t get home until 9:00, whereupon i discovered one of our doggles loose in the bedroom and the bathroom totally trashed, with ibuprophen tablets spilled all over the place, and what looked like a few chewed ibuprophen tablets among the trashed counter contents that were on the floor.
i’m actually surprised that moe and her relatives aren’t at home – i was unaware of their plans, but i anticipated them being at home, in which case this wouldn’t actually be an emergency, but… i’m not sure, but it looks to me like it could be an “accidental” overdose on the part of the guilty party (paddy), so i call moe, who isn’t answering her phone. i call her father’s cell phone, and he’s not answering either, which i find quite strange, since he is, presumably, in the same general vicinity as moe, and i know for a fact that her sheep trial doesn’t start until tomorrow, but i am faced with a possible overdosing dog and i’m starting to freak out, so i call our good friend micah, who is a veterinarian, and he’s not answering his phone either.
now i’m really freaking out… 🙁
eventually i get hold of moe, who has been out to dinner with her parents, she comes home and vomits the dog, who wasn’t overdosing on anythign except toilet paper (she had eaten almost an entire roll, which was sitting on the counter), and everything was fine, although it left me (and everyone else) totally exhausted.
yesterday, i got an order for postcards, and i spent most of the day going back and forth with a trained, experienced graphic artist who (apparently) can’t differentiate between a file that is 250 dpi and RGB with exactly the same file that is 300 dpi and CMYK. when we finally got that all worked out, i went to a going away party for möppi, rebeccah and diemo, who are moving back to germany next month, and i got home, totally exhausted, at 10:00 or so.
today, i got up at an ungodly hour (8:00 am), feeling nauseous – – but not actually nauseous enough to throw up (which i figured would make the nauseous feeling go away), and made it to folklife for a (relatively) early (1:10 pm) performance of the ballard sedentary sousa band. i didn’t actually get sick, although there were a few touch-and-go moments in the morning before i left, but i wanted to get there fairly early, because, unlike the banda gozona performance, which resulted in my possesion of a parking pass, so that i wouldn’t have to pay, the powers that be apparently figured that the ballard sedentary sousa band only needed two parking passes, which went to the two most senior members of the band, so in order to park, i would have to search out a free spot (practically impossible, given the location and time) or pay $15 to park until 2:30.
i got home at about 3:30, absolutely exhausted, and submitted the order for the postcards.
now, completely bereft of spoons, i’m going to spent the rest of my “holiday” weekend sleeping.
wesak was last thursday. i watched the monks at the buddhist temple down the street putting up decorations, but i totally spaced out mentioning it until now.
the aparajita is supposed to arrive on wednesday or thursday of this week. it’s down to the wire and i still don’t have tracking details from india, but the guy called me(!) to tell me when the shipment was supposed to be here.
Quantity discrimination in salamanders – they can tell the difference, but only when the ratio is 2:1 or greater… but these guys get paid to discover if salamanders can count. i obviously went into the wrong profession…
Man crosses English Channel in chair carried by helium balloons – including “coming down quickly to avoid restricted air space, missing a power line and then bouncing a short distance before coming to a halt” near dunkirk. once again, it appears as though i went into the wrong profession. what was i thinking?
it’s available here for those of you who might be interested in purchasing it for me… 8)
US team creates first ’synthetic life’ – along with that important step that came on my birthday, eight years ago, when scientists fabricated an entirely viable polio virus, we’ve taken another important step in clarifying the fact that “christianity” is wrong.
wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG, WRONG!!!
i wonder how long it will be until the “christians” take notice?
Continue reading announcing the end of “christianity” as you know it
US drug war has met none of its goals – good ol’ gil’s working his way up the totem pole, and he’s still saying exactly the same thing he was saying ten years ago… i’d wonder about why nobody has taken any notice, but it would be a futile gesture. :/
Are humans really beings of light? – i came to believe this, for purely spiritual reasons, more than 30 years ago. it’s refreshingly different to see evidence of this coming from the scientific realm as well, despite the fact that i found the link on disinformation… 8)
my host provider has decided that he’s going to stay in business for his existing customers but not take any new customers. it eases my concern about finding a new host provider immediately, but i’m still going to move eventually, because i really don’t like being jerked around like that. the first time you said you were sorry and i gave you another chance, but the second time it was entirely my fault, and i don’t want it to happen again.
in other news, my copy of The Beatles Complete Scores came in the mail today. this is a book that i have wanted ever since it was first published in 1989, and it’s 1136 pages of the actual music by John Lenon and Paul McCartney from the people who would know. this means that i can now work on arrangements of things like Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite for Snake Suspenderz without having to rely on somebody else’s frequently incorrect interpretations of what the chords are… and i can finally figure out the chords for Michelle, which i have been wondering about for 30 years… 8)
now, off to get denatured alcohol. i ran out yesterday and i need it to clean up the sticky residue which was not left by the lining tape on my car, because the packaging said that it didn’t leave a sticky residue, so, in spite of the fact that, when i pull the tape off my car, it leaves a sticky residue, apparently, it wasn’t left by the tape… 😐
oh yeah, i got email from someone who wants to interview “Rev. Guido DeLuxe” concerning the Church of Tina Chopp. she said she was interested in tracking down the truth behind the rumours… she was also born in 1988, which was well after the church had established its presence… i wonder what sort of gibberish i should spout in order to confuse her even more… hey, she wrote to me…
so the host provider that i finally settled with in january, after leaving them for someone else, because they wanted to raise my rates by 300%, but decided not to after i switched to the host provider that decided i couldn’t have a mailing list after helping me set up a mailing list, so i switched back… and, surprisingly, has been doing a more or less outstanding job ever since…
that same host provider is apparently going out of business for “personal reasons”. the “personal reasons”?
the owner is 16 years old, and is the president of his high school’s linux club, and doesn’t have time for it any longer… 8/
damn, damn, DAMN!! 😡
so people are apparently convinced that the picture on the right (which is a field outside of püspökladány, hungary) is an image of jesus, but i think it looks a lot more like frank zappa… what do you think?
it’s raining and blustery today, so i can’t work on my car, which gives me some time to catch up on some other things.
moe and i are getting an african grey parrot named stanley this evening, and i’ve been fixing up a corner of the living room to accommodate him. it’s exciting, but it’s also as though we were getting a 3-year-old child, in terms of intelligence and need for taking proper precautions. moe has been wondering how long it’s going to be until stanley learns how to bark like magick, and conversely, wondering how long it will be until he learns to yell at magick for barking… which, i suppose, is just as valid as me wondering how long it’s going to be before stanley learns to make the jews-harp noise, or the tuba noise, or the flex-a-tone noise, or the glass-marble-in-a-bottle noise, or any one of a number of other noises which usually results in one or more of us yelling at magick to quit barking and be quiet. moe says that parrots are kind of like kids, in that they’ll quiz you to find out what they shouldn’t do, and then focus all their time and ability to doing that very thing. exciting is one way of putting it.
i got a phone call(!) from india(!!) this morning, from a guy who wants me to consider becoming a customer of his enterprise, which is the manufacture and export (from india) of incense, murtis and other hindu/hippie stuff. i’ve gotten a number of email inquiries like this in the past, and while i generally delete them without responding, i perked up when this guy said that he could get aparajita. i still don’t know in what quantities or for what price, but this is a lot closer than i’ve ever gotten before, and if i play my cards right, it could mean a lot more than just aparajita, as he apparently also has lines on narmada shivalingams and rudrakhsha beads. 8)
3D printer could build moon bases – somebody’s finally taken this concept to a logical conclusion, and wouldn’t you know, it had to be an artist.
Briton ‘gets Chinese accent after bad migraine’ – more people having problems with their brain and ending up with problems with their language. i’m beginning to wonder if this is a new problem, or if things like this have been going on all along.
Burials in Tibet – the original headline included the words "not for sensitive souls"… it shows how a different culture chooses to honor those who have died. what’s wrong with that?
Regarding "christianity" and the Virginia Governor’s reason for declaring Confederate History Month
7,500 Online Shoppers Unknowingly Sold Their Souls – this is what happens when users fail to read the TOC. i find it interesting and educational to realise that in the commercial world there are two significant industries that refer to their customers as “users”: computer software manufacturers, and drug dealers. perhaps this is one of the reasons why.
Dead man elected mayor of Tennessee town – why is it that all i can think of is that line from the Tom Waits song What’s he Building?, “I heard he has an ex-wife in someplace called ‘Mayor’s Income, Tennessee’.”
finally, i have read in two different blogs about the croatian girl who fell into a coma, and when she awoke, she could no longer speak croatian, her native language, but she could speak fluent german, a language that she was just beginning to learn when she fell into a coma. i find this an interesting paralell to my opera, which sprung to life in all of its complex glory when i lost what passes for normal consciousness as a result of my injury. stories like this have far reaching implications that involve just about every part of my life, and is one of the primary reasons why, in spite of the fact that i agree with him more often than not, i still think that p.z. meyers and his ilk are sadly mistaken when they conclusively state that “god” doesn’t exist. it may not be the old man with the beard that oversees all from his abode in the clouds, but Something that doesn’t exist wouldn’t be able to cause miracles like that.
okay, this is getting ridiculous, but at the same time, i’m really glad i got myself far away from 1&1 internet services, and now i’m going to recommend that my associates distance themselves from 1&1 as well… and you spammers have succeeded in irritating me enough that i’m ranting about it in public. 😯
it started out with a spam message that “made it through” the spamcop defense, but didn’t make it through my local instance of spam assassin that i run on my local mail host. one of the reasons why i’m satisfied with doing so is that if i use a web-based service like yahoo, hotmail or gmail is that, none of my mail, contacts, calenders and that sort of thing “live” on a computer over which i have direct, physical control… and my information is my information, thank you. it also makes it a hell of a lot easier to parse headers and report the spam messages that do manage to sneak through my defenses (which are around 5 or so a week, these days). spam assassin puts the messages that it detects into my wastebasket, without any prompting from me, but if i’m feeling obstreperous, i’ll pull it out and report it anyway, which is what i did with a message that looked like it had come from me: it had someone else’s name, and my email address in the To: line – which is notoriously easy to spoof. it also had a URI that tracks directly back to oneandone.com.
yes, a host provider that i used, and then discarded a year ago when they tried to scam me, hosts spammers.
and spammers dumb enough to think that i might respond in any way other than the way i did, to a message that looks like it came from myself!
that’s all the justification i need to avoid them. 😐
considering the date today, i can’t tell whether the following products are a joke or not…
at the same time, it would explain a lot about “popular” music these days…
Turd Polisher Pro – a VST plugin for SFX Machine?
MF-401 Auto De-tune – an actual hardware device for your studio, from Moog Music?
makes me wonder what would happen if you pitted one of these against the other? would the result be interesting, or boring? would it create a perpetual motion machine or a time vortex? which one would fail first?
i have always been under the impression that there were three acronyms that were comparitve and superlative to SNAFU, which were comparitive FUMTU and superlative FUBAR, but it turns out that there is a fourth abbreviation, TARFU, which doesn’t appear to have a place in the heirarchy, despite (or, possibly, because of) it’s similar provenance. more investigation is necessary.
okay, the server interruption seems to have settled down. i was in the middle of updating the sedentary sousa web site, and i get this email saying that within 24 hours i’m going to be moved to another server, and before i was able to get in touch with them to find out exactly when, the server went down. it came up again, breifly, yesterday, but then there was some sort of SNAFU at drizzle, and the server was inaccessible to me for most of today. i appreciate the move, but i could have used a little bit more precise notice.
i’ve made about as many changes in the sedentary sousa site as i can with plain ol’ html, and she keeps demanding different functionality, so i’ve brought up the possibility of a wordpress site, that she can update herself. she hasn’t said no yet, so i’ve been researching how to do stuff with the default theme that is more what like what she wants artistically. i’ve got a BSSB rehearsal on tuesday, so i’ll probably end up talking with her more either before or after the rehearsal.
i took the picture on the right on my way to rehearsal wednesday. i didn’t actually take the picture from the location that i wanted to, but everything else was just right. i’ve been driving to rehearsals and seeing that combination of lights and sky for years, and i’ve finally got it together to take a picture of it.
seriously, i wonder how conscious even the computer geeks are with this one: we are moving towards a “cloud” computing environment, where “computers” are basically fancified “dumb terminals” and all of your data, all of your information, all of your applications and even your operating system live online, on computers over which other people have control. this is for a variety of different reasons, the most public of which is so that you the individual, and frequently un-savvy end user, don’t have to spend as much money on a computer, and you don’t have to worry about whether you remembered to update your system when something needs updating. it also has the added benefit of making it so that you can synchronise your phone, music player, computer and whatever else people sync, all from one place, and it makes it so that if your computer dies for some reason, your data will still be safe.
all of these things sound like they are exactly the kinds of things the general computing public has been clamoring for, but there are some devious, sneaky, and definitely privacy ignoring facts about “cloud” computing that i don’t think people have realised.
first, and foremost in my mind, is the fact that every inroad that i’ve seen (including moe’s new “smart” phone, which is why this rant is coming out now) to make “cloud” computing more mainstream has been with the condition that whatever data you store on your “cloud” (read “gmail” or whatever) account is, essentially, public data. it has the air of privacy – you are assured that your data is your data, and not someone else’s – but because of the fact that it is living on google’s (for example) computer systems, any data that you store there is automatically a part of google’s covert attempts to data mine your information.
which means that if you are friends with a terrorist, someone who might be a terrorist, or even someone who the police think is a terrorist, but they’re wrong, google, and google’s allies – which includes the police, homeclown-land security, the CIA and who knows who else – knows about it.
what moe says is that google already has all that information anyway, but it doesn’t stop with terrorists. google has data mining access to any document stored on their systems whether it is in their terms of service or not, and my guess is that, especially these days, if someone has a document stored on google docs that makes them look like a terrorist, that somebody in the law enforcement community will find out about it.
i have a gmail account, but i never use it. i don’t use google docs, and i use google maps only when i have to. i don’t want a “smart” phone, i just want a phone that works to make telephone calls, and possibly to send text messages. it would be nice if it were a decent music player, as well, but if it’s only a crappy music player then all it will do is make me frustrated, and i already have enough of those kinds of things in my life anyway.
“cloud” computing also takes a big bite out of software piracy, because instead of having a disk for a program, which can be copied, the program actually lives on someone else’s computer, and you access it, as long as you have paid the requisite fees. the owner of that program can make changes in the program, change the functionality, upgrade or even delete that program and you have no say in the matter, even if you have paid the requisite fees. and, at this point anyway, you have no recourse.
it’s getting to the point where i’m probably going to have to be satisfied with the computers i’ve got, because when it becomes illegal not to use “cloud” computers, it’s going to be too late.
so the US copyright lobby is petitioning to put indonesia on the list of potential software pirates, because of the fact that its government supports open source software… if you don’t have your copy of linux and wordpress now, better get it soon, in case the US government decides that open source equals piracy.
i broke down and bought a price gun marker – $125 for a little gadget that prints two lines of numbers on a price tag, and is designed to be used at inhuman speeds. presumably it will work, but i won’t be able to find out until after the weekend, because my mother-in-law is visiting for the weekend and her bedroom is also where i store the incense.
i’m playing for the “Vicars & Tarts” party at the palladium tomorrow (yes, we are taking my mother-in-law with us, which should be amusing). i am playing with a whole bunch of musicians i have played with before in various other configurations, but we have never played in this particular configuration, and there’s one guy, colin, who i’ve never played with before. it’s going to be colin on trombone, me on e-flat tuba and greg on b-flat tuba (two tubas! 8) ), roslyn on clarinet, joseph on saxophone, stuart on guitar and a drummer who stuart says i have met before, but i don’t remember who he is.
Continue reading i like that word ‘kleep’… it’s sort of like ‘telp’…
i booted up my computer this morning and firefox told me it had an update for one of the addons, so i let it install, instead of starting firefox, it looks like it’s going to start, flashes a white screen for a moment and then crashes with no explanation. tried it a number of times in different ways, and no firefox. so i used another browser (konqueror) and i upgraded firefox (it’s supposed to tell you when there are updates, but it never has for me). now it looks like it’s going to start, flashes a white screen for two and a half moments, and then crashes with no explanation. i updated my software sources and updated my system (something which i haven’t done in about 2 months) and, lo-and-behold, there’s a new firefox in the updates, but it still doesn’t work.
i tried my mac, and it said “oh, look… there’s a firefox update. you want to install it?” to which i answered “yes” and it’s now installed, running, and works fine.
as much as i like linux, there are times when it can be really frustrating. i only hope that bill (my older, brain injured helpdesk client who is also running linux) doesn’t have the same problems i am having.
i tried running firefox from the terminal, and it gives me a whole bunch of UNKNOWN
and ABORT
errors that probably mean something to someone, but only indicate to me that i’m going to have to dig deeper to get to the source of the problem. 😐
i ran firefox -safe-mode
from the terminal, and disabled all of my addons, and firefox started right up. i think it was the thing that looks up the flag of the country where the server lives, but it was a good excuse to dump a whole bunch of themes that i don’t use any longer, and a few addons that i used once and have been hanging around ever since version 2, and that sort of thing.
i got email from my router this morning, which says “TCP Packet – Source:63.245.212.23,54375 Destination:216.162.193.190,8081 – [DOS]”… i don’t know what it means, but judging by the fact that it says “[DOS]” (which i take to mean “Denial Of Service”) and there’s only one of them, i’m not going to worry too much about it. the drizzle guy said that IP space belongs to mozilla, so i am officially not going to worry about it.
regarding the NYC Musical Saw Festival, i actually got email from the Saw Lady, who is, apparently, the motivating force behind the musical saw festival, and i pointed her towards my saw case pictures. she said she’d add my name to the invite list, so that, on the off chance that i’m actually in new york city, and have my saw, i can come to the festival.
New York City Musical Saw Festival – someone commented on my saw case picture and mentioned the NYC musical saw festival. i’m on the other end of the country, but if anything ever tempts me to go, this will definitely be something that i will be attending when i get there.
yesterday i went to moe’s friend diane’s sheep ranch in woodinville and picked up a chest freezer that diane didn’t need any longer. now we’ll be able to get lamb from diane, when she has lambs for sale, later on in the year. moe is a currently a vegetarian – although i have seen her eat bacon recently – and i have been a vegetarian in the past (and i’ve been the rabid rabble rouser who knew all the reasons why you shouldn’t eat meat, so cool it with the rhetoric, because i’ve been through it all, already), but at this point, i figure God is perfect, being an omnivore is more likely to ensure my survival in the event of a global catastrophe, and besides all that, lamb just tastes so damn good… and because of the fact that i actually know where it’s coming from, i’m getting a lot closer to eating real meat than i would be if i ate the anonymous, corporate beef that most people eat most of the time.
but this is all, undoubtedly one big excuse to make me feel better because i’m sinful and eat meat, despite my claims to being a hindu. i know a bunch of american hindus who eat meat, and they don’t worry about it, so why should i… especially when lamb just tastes so damn good… 8)
today i went to a place very close to the hospital that i was housed at shortly after i had my injury (and was amazed at how much new construction was going up since i was there) and got a bed to put in what was the office, and is now the guest room. now we have a room for people to sleep in when people come to visit… which, apparently, we’ve got a few of coming up later this year, including my mother-in-law within the next two weeks or so (i’m still not exactly sure when, though).
i got an email list set up for the fremont players, which is exactly what wouldn’t have happened if i had stayed with the old host provider, whose “tech support” goon specifically said that i was “kicked off” their server for having – although he also, specifically, said that he was the one responsible for having me kicked off their server, because “he didn’t like me”… 😛
i’m having some trouble with my email, and i’m not sure whether it’s my email client, or my new router. it seems like, sometimes, i don’t get any email, but when i reboot the router, i get hundreds of emails from the past three days or so, and other times, i don’t get any email, and when i reboot the router, nothing happens, but when i restart the email client, or reboot the computer, i get hundreds of emails from the past three or four days. either way, it doesn’t happen with enough regularity to make it very obvious what the culprit is, although it doesn’t appear to happen as frequently when i turn my computer off, rather than leaving it running all night. i seem to recall drizzle saying something about having me on DHCP, despite the fact that i have a static IP address, so maybe that’s got something to do with it.
i had a whole bunch of links that i was going to dump, as well, but my browser crashed and when it came back, i chose to start a new session, because i think one of the links crashed my browser, and i don’t want to foist any of that nonsense on to anyone else. one of them was more stuff about how google is really evil, though…
i got a spam comment from Anonymous – Operation Titstorm this morning. while i agree with anonymous’ motivation for such action, i am not part of the australian government and not in a position where i can do much of anything except agree with their motivation for their actions. go anonymous, but please go do it somewhere where it’ll make a difference, okay? mass spamming of random blogs is a really good way to make a lot more people not want to deal with you any longer.
Google shuts down music blogs without warning – this is the same company which has recently announced a “1GB bandwidth internet connection to every home” deal that is in the works. making it even more likely that, whether you like it or not, google will have access to all of your data. the fact that google already has their hands in pretty much everything from where you’re going to be to who you’re going to be there with and everything in between, their Gmail was marketed with “never delete another email, EVER” propaganda (which nobody seems to remember these days), and they are in bed with the CIA and have a team of specialists ready to scan every bit of information the unwitting public feeds into their jaws makes their “Don’t be evil” company motto a bit of a malapropism.
People browse by search (or ReadWriteWeb faces the Facebook Login problem) – of course, the problem is confounded by the fact that people don’t seem willing to actually learn what this computer-thingy on their desks is for to begin with. a very good example of this is one of my clients, who regularly calls me because he thinks his “anti-virus software is tired” of zapping viruses on his windows machine, or the fact that he can’t type into his computer because the keyboard is unplugged and he didn’t realise it.
Christians claim hate crimes law an effort to ‘eradicate’ their beliefs – no, hate crime laws are an effort to crack down on hate crimes… if your beliefs are the direct cause of the hate crime, then you’ve got something to worry about. if not, claiming that hate crime laws are an effort to eradicate “christianity” just makes you appear to be really, REALLY stupid, regardless of where you obtained your law degree. even a fifth grader can see that constitutionally protected speech does not apply, when it is clearly written into the law to begin with… ☹
New National Security Distraction: Arabic Language Students – a white-bread american physics major from pomona college is a terrorist, according to TSA officials and the FBI, who spent several hours handcuffed, under arrest and being questioned by no fewer than seven law enforcement officials, but unable to obtain legal council, because he tried to board a plane with… wait for it… not liquids, not matches, not a bomb. arabic flash cards. TSA Supervisor: You know who did 9/11? George: Osama bin Laden. TSA Supervisor: Do you know what language he spoke? George: Arabic. — therefore, you are a terrorist, because you are learning arabic… WHO TRAINS THESE PEOPLE ANYWAY?!? it’s a wonder that i am as nice to strangers as i am… 8/
finally, Security patch results in BSOD – i think this may actually be an improvement in windowsdoesn’t operation. at least now you go directly to the BSOD, rather than thinking your computer might actually be doing what it is supposed to before you go there. this is exactly the reason i don’t use microsoft products any longer. they’re releasing internet explorer eight with the same unfixed bugs in it that i reported to them before they released IE three, and they still haven’t even made an attempt to fix them. why people think that microsoft cares about anything other than making as much money as possible while exerting as little actual work as possible is totally beyond me.
so far, the new-old host provider has been doing an outstanding job, although he just installed suPHP (ostensibly to keep an eye on potential spammers) which requires all of my PHP files to be set with their permissions at 644. unfortunately, that leaves the two configure.php files in my store open to attack. hopefully he won’t object to a couple of PHP files that are set to 400, otherwise there’s going to be yet another host provider switch again in the near future. i applaud his keeping an eye on potential spammers, but opening everything up like that is another thing entirely. all in all, though, for a guy who i moved away from because he was going to raise my rates by over 300%, he’s doing an exceedingly good job.
i’ve got an appointment to meet with bill, one of my clients, this afternoon at 3:00, and i’ve got a fremont phil rehearsal at 7:30.
supposedly the soon-to-be Ganesha The Truck is going to be handed over to me at some point in the next few days. it’s red, which, naturally, means that i’m going to paint the names of Ganesha in blue, so that it will be the most difficult-to-read colour combination. i’m going to try to get all 1008 names of Ganesha on the car this time, which means i’ve got to figure out how to write smaller, but i’m not 100% decided on what it’s going to look like yet, because i haven’t actually seen the truck yet. there’s also a possibility that i’m going to use a range of blues and purples. the truck currently doesn’t have a canopy, which is going to be one of the first things that changes once i get my hands on it, and i’m probably not going to start on the artwork until the canopy is in place. it’s a good thing i’ve got another car to drive temporarily (moe’s friend micah’s father, curtis, is keeping his jeep at our house while he winters in florida, or philadelphia or some place like that, and he said we can use it as much as we like as long as we look after it and wash it every now and then), because Ganesha The Car apparently decided that it really is dead: i was going to drive it around the other day, and i got in and turned the key… and nothing happened. so i turned the key off and on again, and there was a dismal clicking noise, followed by more silence. so i cycled it again and there was more clicking and this time it started. i figured, as long as it was running, i’d drive it around, so i went up to the post office in milton, about five miles down the road. i went in to the post office, and when i came back and tried it again, it was the same thing – nothing, then clicking, then, finally, it started up. i just had it tuned up a few weeks ago! this is not supposed to be happening! fortunately there’s the jeep, so i don’t have to figure out some other way to get to my rehearsals. at the same time, i find it really interesting that the mechanic said that it wouldn’t pass inspection, and practically the next thing that happens to the car is that it decides to give up the ghost. it’s been a good car, and i’m very strongly thinking about attending the electric vehicle workshop at south seattle community college and turning Ganesha The Car into an electric car, so that the artwork will continue on the road for a while.
further information about snake suspenderz @ the palladium so far is that we’ve been confirmed for the 8:30 to 10:00 slot, but we’re supposedly going to be sharing the slot with another band (Bakelite 78) and we haven’t heard back from them yet, so we don’t know whether we’re going first or second.
HAH!!
❗ i’ve “won” after all… it took a little bit more time than i thought, but my will has triumphed over the forces of those who would use the internet against me, to their own advantage. yay me! down with the internet bullies who don’t know what they’re talking about anyway!
while it may not be worth fighting for, the fact that i have solid proof that i originated it, and have provided that proof to everybody else that you have bullied into believing your story must be a blow to your ego, if nothing else, Dr. Michael S. Elliott, M.D. and fighting in support of a copyright and winning is one of the ways that future generations determine who is right and who is wrong. keep that in mind the next time you try to change history. ❗
now that the mysterious comment to people who most of you don’t know anyway is out of the way, i’ll procede with another MINI-LINQUE DUMP Ⅳ⅝
Saudi’s Reject Pakistani Diplomat Whose Name Translates to ‘Biggest Dick’ (here is the article in the original language). i would say that life imitates python, but i think that’s already been used…
You don’t have to be bipolar to be a genius – but it helps – … um… no comment.
Father Still Has Complicated Series Of File Folders With Grown Son’s Name On Them – another one from The Onion. i can’t figure out what’s funny about this one, though… i still have a huge folder of stuff with my son’s name on it…
along with all of the other SNAFUs i’ve been forced to deal with over the past few days (an itemised list would prove too exasperating to compile at this point), and despite any actual evidence that it is true, i have become relatively convinced that i may have H1N1, otherwise known as “HEINEY”. i felt fine on saturday, but, on sunday, the closer i got to the time (7:00 pm) when i had to go to a fremont phil rehearsal i was feeling more and more sick. i didn’t actually feel nauseous until i had already decided not to go to the (essential, required) rehearsal, and about 8:00 i turned into a geyser for about 2 hours. then i had a fever and chills for about 24 hours, whereupon the coughing started and has been going on more or less ever since. i feel more-or-less normal at this point, despite occasional fits of coughing. at this point, i’m so through with being sick… 8/
i bought a new wireless DSL modem/router, because the old modem/router apparently doesn’t work with OsX version 10.6.2 (snow leopard), which is what i am running on my mac now that i’ve upgraded thanks to St. Fred. of course i didn’t find out about it immediately, because when i got home with my newly-upgraded computer and turned it on, it found internet right away and i didn’t think to check where it was coming from. of course, as soon as i tried to connect with the mac from linux i discovered the problem, which was that the mac was wirelessly connecting to internet through the neighbour’s router instead of through mine, and when i tried to switch to my router, it simply wouldn’t connect. of course, moe’s temporary windows7 laptop connected to the old router without a problem, but she got her new mac today, which also runs snow leopard, so i went out and bought a new router, and, after having to call qwest once, drizzle three times, and having to make an adaptor and a cable (fortunately i had the tools and materials in my workshop!!) i finally got it working the way it’s supposed to.
of course, then i had to figure out that the new router makes a difference between networking with or without “wireless access control”. “with” means that i can’t access my mac – wireless – from my linux machine, which is connected with a wire, without jumping through a bunch more, different hoops that i haven’t figured out yet. i still haven’t figured out the right hoops to jump through to secure my wireless network so that my neighbours can’t log in to my network the way i can log in theirs. when i enable “wireless equivalency protection” (WEP), it takes longer, and the password doesn’t work the way i think it should, which means that only the linux machine gets internet, but can’t connect to the mac at all, the mac gets no internet except through the neighbour’s router, and i have to “sneaker net” files from the mac to the linux machine, which is do-able, but not ideal.
on the positive side, i haven’t had to switch host providers again, i got ALL of the data off of moe’s old hard drive, in spite of the fact that her old laptop is well and truly dead. i’ve got the chassis for sale on craigslist, and supposedly there’s going to be somebody come by and pick up the old router this afternoon. also, i’ve become the default insider tech-guru for the *NEW* fremont players web site – http://www.fremontplayers.com/ – which currently points to twankey.com. the “job title” reflects the fact that, despite the fact that i will be designing, hosting and doing maintenance for the site, i will not have to come up with content, which is exactly what i was hoping for.
and now, to clean up my browser a little and give you an idea of what i’ve been reading recently, here is MINI-LINQUE DUMP Ⅳ½
Supreme Court Allows Corporations To Run For Political Office – in spite of the fact that there is a glimmer of hope in the fact that we no longer have a far-right-wing nut-job as president any longer, my general impression is that the country is as broken as ever, and there are certain ways that it is broken now that it wasn’t broken before more level heads took over, which doesn’t say much about the glimmer of hope that i spoke of earlier. The Onion is the only way i’ve been surviving these days. if it weren’t for the onion, i would probably have sworn off all news reporting a year ago.
Nation’s Strangers Decry Negative Portrayal Among Children – once again, from the onion (see, i told you so) this is yet another example of why: ever since i was as young as i can remember, i remember people in the position of authority (my parents, the parents of my friends, teachers, etc.) telling me to be wary of “strangers”, and my thinking that the same “strangers” had something compelling about them. i was determined to find out what it was. now, i am a “stranger”, and i know what they’re talking about: kids, in general, are a lot less concerned about the world in general than adults are, and have a tendency to imagine quite a bit more than adults do. now, as an adult and a “stranger”, i just want to be that innocent again. it doesn’t have anything to do with “your weiner”. “the man” gets a little nervous when “strangers” and kids mix too much, though.
The Phallic Monuments Of Love Valley – who says God doesn’t have a sense of humour?
i figured that, since i got paid(!) for the panto, and i got paid(!!) for first night, i would arbitrarily do something for both my wife and myself, keeping in mind that we have both fought valiantly in the battle of several computers recently, and we have both bought (or are buying) new computers recently, so i went out and bought a 2 terabyte USB hard drive, and i’m going to start making regular backups of all the computers in the house, so that the next time one or more of the computers goes tits up, we won’t have to run around like the proverbial chicken.
i hope you don’t mind sweetie, i did this without checking with you first, but i’m sure you’ll agree that it is $150 well spent, and Hybrid Elephant paid for it.
but while i’m at it, i want to marvel in awe, once again, at the place we’ve got to, technologically. i was raised around computers that talked in bits and bytes, before anyone ever dreamed of a personal “hard disk”… the first actual hard disk i ever worked with was an 80 megabyte monster, easily four times as big as the model currently on my desk, with a fraction of the capacity, and at the time, i was under the impression that it was an electronic “black hole” into which i could throw data forever, and never fill it up. i remember when i couldn’t afford more than 16 megabytes of RAM (on a mac LCII), because it was $150 for a 1MB SIMM chip, which was about the same size as my cell phone… and now they make things like the one seen on the right, which is a four gigabyte memory chip that goes in my cell phone. when i was working at openwave, a few years ago, i worked on a solaris machine with a 4 terabyte hard disk array, which was a box about a quarter of the size of my desk, and sat in a corner of the santa barbara office (i logged in and worked remotely, from an office in bellevue), and this 2 terabyte disk i just bought is the size of a small book.
i’m not gonna claim that this is an electronic black hole, but i can’t imagine how i will fill up a 2 terabyte disk, except for backing up multiple computers, multiple times, for several years…
once again, The Onion, asks asks the same question i have been wondering about ever since the earthquake in haiti became news: why are we helping haiti now?
i mean, it’s not as though their lives (those of them that actually survived, that is) were going to be significantly worse because of the earthquake… they were a poor nation with no natural resources before, what’s so “special” about them now that they’ve had an earthquake that we have to rush over and help them out. when they get back to their standard of poverty that they had before the earthquake, are we going to abandon them again, or does the fact that they’ve had an earthquake mean that we’re going to try to help them out of the poverty that they once had… and if so, what was so special about the earthquake anyway?
and what must the haitians think about us “rich americans” who are sending food, water and medical care (now, but weren’t sending any kind of help to speak of, last month), and are also sending solar-powered bibles and “volunteer ministers” trained in “touch assist”? if they didn’t already, i’m pretty sure that haiti has universally decided that the united states is full of crazy people. i know i have… but then again, i live here.
and gay marriage… i’m gonna harp on that subject, while i’m in a harping mood. it seems very odd that we’ve got two, essentially warring factions, the anti-gays and the gays: we’ve got states which now allow gay marriage that didn’t before, and different states that have decided that they won’t allow gay people to get married, where, once upon a time they could. we’ve got one state that used to allow marriage and then decided that it wouldn’t several times, and is now in the process of changing its mind again… and on top of that, we’ve got at least two federal legislators who have said that any law that prohibits gays from getting married is unconstitutional, as well as more than a few who would like to see the constitution amended to prohibit anybody from getting married except one man and one woman. and along with everything else, we’ve got ENTIRE COUNTRIES which have decided that gay people are, if nothing else, people, and yet we’ve got other countries which want to kill all people who aren’t exactly like the people who are making the laws.
it’s times like these that i remember what one of my first spiritual teachers, Dr. Elizabeth McDonald Burrows said about issues becoming “more dualistic”, more “black-and-white”, and how, at these times more than any other, it is important to become aware of the fact that there are A LOT of different shades of grey.
it’s also times like these that i seriously wonder if i am really decended from the same monkeys everyone else is… 8/
now that i’m finished frantically trying to put out a raging forest fire with a watering sprinkler (for the moment, anyway), i’ve got the time to post a whole bunch of things that i’ve been reading recently, that make me go everything from “hmmm” to “AARGH! *#%&!!?!”…
first up, in the “AARGH! *#%&!!?!” category, Religious Tefillin Prompts Scare On Plane – the way i see it, a 17-year-old jewish kid was putting on his tefillin (“phylacteries“, for the uninitiated) in preparation for morning prayer, while at the same time, one of the flight attendents, who thought he was a terrorist, diverted the plane, where he was met by clown homeland security and a bomb squad. there’s so many levels of stupid here… my mind boggles… 😐
continuing to boggle my mind, in more ways than one, Slime mold validates efficiency of Tokyo rail network – more evidence (as if we needed it, which apparently we do) that the creationists are wrong… in more ways than one.
which brings me to the fact the following symbol, a full colon followed by a dash::–is called “dog’s bollocks” by typographers (much in the same way that the name for the symbol that represents “the artist formerly known as ‘Prince'” is called “bruce” by typographers: they’ve got to have something brief to call it), according to the Oxford English Dictionary. the interesting part is when someone delves into The Secret History of Typography in the Oxford English Dictionary… it just goes to prove that you can read the dictionary and find vulgar, 60-year-old emoticons. the only thing remaining is to see how long it will be before the L33T kiddies figure it out and start using it themselves…
there’s a rare (she’s been spending all of her free time studying these days) post from moe, about her new birthday present – yes, another dog. we are now, once again, officially a four-dog family. and the new one is obsessed with staring at the cats, in order to try to get them to move… it’s really funny… or frustrating, depending on whether or not lucy’s been at home all day.
and finally, this evening, Man Stuck In No-Man’s Land – a story from right around here… and it’s from the onion. it’s good to see the onion doesn’t ignore the little people… 🙂
now that (touch wood) the host provider fiasco is behind me, at least for the moment, i can focus on much more mundane things, like the fact that today is the day when the contractor comes by to remodel our bathroom, take out the existing, but broken “garden” bathtub, and replace it with a new shower stall. pictures will be coming when the batteries on my camera are recharged.
i still haven’t gotten refunded by the old host provider, but it’s not that much, so if i don’t get refunded it’s no big deal, apart from the fact that it further cements in my mind the fact that they really offered some of the worst customer service i have ever experienced in my life (further information can be found here). the fact that the “support” guy who has been part of this whole deal from the beginning (and, oddly enough, is apparently the cause of the whole thing) is, according to his vehement ranting, "a Web API/Software Developer… I know these things more than you!", he apparently doesn’t even know enough to avoid logging in as root on his linux machine, which has been making a hair-tearing fiasco amusing enough that i’m actually pretty calm at this point. it would be nice, however, if all of these people were in the same time zone. the fact is, the “support” guy is in bangladesh, and the host provider itself is in virgina or some place like that, means that most of the “discussion” on the WebHostingTalk forums goes on while i am still asleep, and when i wake up and check my mail, i get riled up about what they’ve been saying before i’ve even had breakfast, which makes the rest of my day sort of interesting.
so on 10 january, i filed a support ticket with my new host provider, cpanel-host.us, that email wasn’t working the way it was supposed to. two days later, i learned that my clients’ email, and the BSSB mailing list wasn’t working at all, and i filed a support ticket about that, as well. on the 14th, they (finally) responded saying that the mail servers had been fixed. then, on 15 january, i got an email saying that mailing lists were now forbidden, and if i had a mailing list on my account on the 17th, my account would be suspended. i wrote back to them, asking if they were serious about suspending my account two days after they had helped me get my mailing list working, and their response was “yes”…
😡
but at the same time, i got email from my previous host provider, IsMyReseller.com. apparently he felt guilty for saying that he wanted to raise my rates almost 300% (from $5 a month to $18 a month). i wrote back to him saying that it was all well and good that he was feeling guilty, but what was preventing him from doing the same thing again in a month, or five, when he, once again, discovers that he isn’t making enough money from me. his response was to send me a .pdf of a document that says he will charge me $6.50 a month for the life of the account.
so i switched back.
the thing that’s really amazing is that he took me from a backup to being up and running in a little more time – 15 minutes or so – than the time it took him to download the backup from my old host… and that includes all of my databases, my email addresses and my mailing list.
i find this somewhat unusual. nobody has ever tried to get me back as a customer. usually if i decide not to be somebody’s customer any longer, it is for a very specific reason which the person has no intent of changing. this guy said that he actually felt guilty for asking to raise my rates, and as soon as he had a way to continue running his company without raising my rates, he emailed me immediately.
cpanel-host.us (the second to the last host) was saying that my email address was sending mail to 50 addresses at once (which is true) and that this was causing unusual server stress. i know from my days at openwave that 5,000 emails a day isn’t uncommon (i’ve even still got a script that sends anywhere from 100 to 100,000,000 emails to any address or addresses you put in to it, but it only works with openwave mail server software), especially for a mail server that has a lot of users, so i was sort of wondering why it was a problem, to which they responded that they were afraid some spammer would gain access to my mailing list and have their IP address blacklisted. they obviously chose the wrong person to accuse of being a potential spammer.
and the fact that IsMyReseller.com on top of the email problems which were what the previous host provider was balking at doesn’t hurt his chances either… 😉
now as long as it stays this way for a few months, maybe i’ll have the chance to wind down from this semi-permanent state of panic that i’ve been in ever since december of 2008, when i decided to switch from drizzle to 1&1…
in other news, i went to check my PO box today and found this very amusing letter:
L.J.M. Steijn
Juliana van StolBergstraat 30
2805 CN Gouda
The NetherlandsCHURCH OF TINA CHOPP
P.O. Box 1864
Milton
WA 98354
USAGouda, 10 January 2010
Dear Tina Chopp,
My name is Leo Steijn and I live in the Netherlands.
I have look at your very interesting site, and for more information must I be contacted the Church, What I now do.
Please, gife me if you will more information about the Snake Destiny and what he is theach, also the secrets about bizarre sex.
Another question, is your church also be present in the Netherlands? If so, than I like it to come in contact with your members. Can you please bring me in contact with them. I will be very thankfull for it!
I hope to hear soon of you.
With kindest regards,
Leo Steijn
P.S.
i don’t have e-mail
gee, where do i even start with this letter…? i know a couple of people who live in the netherlands, but i’m not sure if they would be willing to contact this guy about the Church of Tina, and even if they were willing, i’m not sure they’re properly prepared to be representatives of the Church, but at the same time, what other choice do i have?
the first of two fezzes arrived in the mail today, which is surprising considering how large it is and the fact that i only won it on tuesday. it is, however, everything that it was advertised to be, and a whole bunch more: it comes with a support which is a gadget to keep its shape when it’s not being worn, and a rain cover(!)… and it’s from peoria! i’m not 100% certain of this (and, at this point, the only person who would know is my mother, to whom i have not spoken in 5 years, at her request), but there’s a very strong probability (≈95%) that my grandfather was a member of the mohammed shrine. it doesn’t have my grandfather’s name in it, but it’s not too difficult to pretend, especially when you have a hole in your skull to begin with… 😉
i now own two fezzes, and soon i will own three fezzes! it just goes to show you what you can accomplish when you put your mind to it… and have internet backing you up… 8)
also, i realised that my being #32 in the order of the fez is just another confirmation of the law of fives, which is the discordian concept that all things happen in fives, or are some how, directly or indirectly, related to the number five. i’ve always thought that Tina Chopp and Eris are good friends, if not two different names for the same being…
that’s right, i don’t use ebay often, for buying or selling, but when i want something that’s on ebay, i wait until the last 10 minutes of the auction before i start bidding. that way i am more likely to win, simply because there’s not enough time to respond. i plan these strikes carefully, by selecting a whole bunch of potential items to watch, and then narrowing it down by price, whether it’s exactly what i want or not, and the time that the auction ends. the past couple of days have been a good example. i won a pair of cubic zirconia earrings, two fezzes, and a bunch of jeweled masonic emblems all for less than $50.
i wonder if the more experienced ebay junkies with higher feeback consider this cheating…
At 13,000 years, tree is world’s oldest organism – that’s incredible… something that has been alive longer than humanity as such has been on the planet… it should be a clear indication to the creationists that they’re wrong, but it’s not.
A Manifesto! The Time Has Come! – by bishop john shelby spong. someone who the “christians” would be wise to listen to… but they won’t.
Google’s Street View camera car hits a baby deer – and, of course, takes pictures of it.
i’ve been having a difficult time the past few days: the process of switching host providers again has gone pretty normally, with the normal SNAFUs which have been more or less worked out over the past four days. there is still the matter of getting my clients to update their nameservers to my nameservers(!!) (i finally figured out how to create ns1 and ns2.hybridelephant.com, which means that now, when i sell host services myself, i don’t have to give my clients the nameservers that belong to my host provider) which should happen soon, but it’s a little difficult to get other people to do something, even when it is important.
also, as an extra added bonus, as a part of switching host providers, my email has been down for a week, and i’m going to have to enter the 50 addresses on the mailing list by hand (once liz has reset her nameservers) so that it will work, because the new host service provider had “never restored a mailing list before” and didn’t know how to do it.
as i posted previously, somebody grafittied Ganesha The Car. i wrote about it in I, Anonymous, and, after an encouraging start, the conversation turned into the “why are you trying to reclaim the nazi symbol?” rant from people who are much more adept at pushing the buttons of a newbie than i am, and it went downhill from there. the day after it was grafittied, i took it in for a check-up, because the “check engine” idiot-light had gone from its normal “on all the time” to flashing, and i wanted to find out what changed. yesterday, i got the call from the repair shop. they said they had found out what was wrong – burned valves on the 3rd cylinder – and they said that it would probably need a new engine before it will pass emissions inspection the next time. 🙁
on the other hand, there have been some good things as well. i have been watching craigslist recently, and bought some swastika jewelry that i found there, which was decidedly not nazi jewelry. one is an american-made gold swastika hatpin with a diamond in the center. it came along with a whole bunch of other hatpins, and the lady wanted $25 for the lot, which i happily paid. the other is a silver native american swastika pin with a card that dates it to around 1907. the guy that was selling it wanted $25 for it and a nazi flag. i told him i was interested in the native american swastika, but i didn’t want anything to do with nazi stuff and he agreed. i took both pieces for an “appraisal” today (the guy said, and i agreed, that what i had didn’t warrant a “real” appraisal, which would have cost $50 per piece) and found out that the silver pin has a “niche market” collectible value of around $100, and the gold and diamond pin – 18 to 20 carat gold, and a 3-point diamond, by itself – is probably worth $150.
also, i bought a number of buddhist swastikas from a place in singapore, out of which i’m going to make jewelry.
and the fact that Ganesha The Car is dying isn’t as bad as it seems. it runs the same as it has been for the past few years, and there’s nothing really wrong with it other than it only runs on 3 cylinders. i’ve been thinking for some time about taking the class they offer at south seattle community college, where if you provide your own car they waive the $400 class fee and you get to participate in converting your car to an entirely electric vehicle. also, tom at the repair shop said that he could probably round up a rebuilt engine that has a 1 or 2 year warranty that would give Ganesha another 5 years or so. and if none of those turn out to be an option, jack (the guy i bought Ganesha from, who is moe’s employer’s father-in-law) has been turned on to watch auto auctions for another cheap car that will be turned into another art car.
and, on top of everything else, they took off the grafitti while they had it at the shop, and didn’t charge me for it. 🙂
i’m having a tough time, and i can’t even blog about it! 🙁
i’ve selected a new host provider and begun the process of switching, but because of the fact that new host provider doesn’t feel comfortable allowing me ssh access, i’m forced to do everything the slow way, one file at a time, and “ask” for help, then wait up to 24 hours for a response, every time i find something that i can’t do with a GUI that i could do in 5 seconds with ssh access. as a result, i haven’t actually switched the DNS settings and now i’m going to have to export my wordpress database and upload it to the new server again because of this post… and there’s a problem with the blog on the new host server, which i could fix in 5 seconds using ssl, but because of the fact that he’s nervous about offering ssl, even if i do hit the “submit” button on this post, download the database from the old server, and reupload the database on the new server, it won’t show up at the new server… all you can see at this point is
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i got email about my Tengwar Sindarinwa font from the guy who plagiarised it (taking out some of the spacing characters that he didn’t understand, reversing some characters, etc., etc.) saying that i was the one who ripped him off, in spite of the fact that i have original artwork from the ’70s that proves otherwise. what he doesn’t realise is that you can’t “copyright” a letter shape, all you can do is copyright a font name, and my “Tengwar Sindarinwa” and his “Tengwar Gandalf” have different names. there’s nothing that he can do except be annoying, but he’s choosing a very difficult time to do it.
moe applied to be an animal behaviour specialist, which meant that she had to put together almost 1000 printed pages of records, logs, articles and so forth that she has been working on for the past 7 years. she was working on the last of it the other night and one of the dogs spilled a cup of water all over her laptop. we managed to get it shut down without obviously shorting out something, removed the battery and dried it off as well as we could, including leaving it upside down on a towel over a heat register overnight, and blowing it out thoroughly with compressed air, but when i tried to boot it up it gave me the “i can’t find the operating system” icon. i called apple care and explained the situation to them, and they said that if i took it in to the mac store that they had software that could look at the contents of the disk, and even made an appointment for me – the last one of the day – at the mac store in southcenter. i drove 20 miles to southcenter and waited almost an hour before someone finally talked to me (it was after closing time). he wouldn’t take my case ID number and wouldn’t even look at the computer. he told me that, in fact, they do have the software that apple care told me about, but that their policy was to “use it for our own purposes, and not to retrieve customer data”. when i said that apple care had told me differently, he said he would give them “feedback”, but there was nothing he could do. 😮
to make matters worse, i called apple care again this morning, because at least there i can give them my case ID number so that at least they will know what i’m talking about, but the first support goon i talked to said exactly the same thing as the one i talked to last night. when i told him that he was wrong and that the mac store wouldn’t help me, he passed me along to his supervisor who told me there was nothing he could do. 😯
i used to be a macintosh afficianado. i was a mac-head before most of the “geniuses” at the “genius bar” were even born. the first mac i used was a Lisa. but the customer service i received from apple, and from the mac store yesterday is enough to make me never want to see another apple product again in my entire life. i currently own, and am running a dual-core intel macbook pro, and the next time i have difficulties with it, it’s going to lose it’s apple operating system all together, and gain a new linux operating system. 😡
then there was the fact that i left my linux computer running when i went to bed last night, and this morning when i got up, it was not running and i couldn’t start it up. according to the people that i took it to (it, fortunately, is still under warranty), the power supply was laden with dust, and they speculated that it stopped working when it overheated. fortunately, because of the fact that it is still under warranty, i didn’t have to pay to get it fixed, but i drove all the way there and back twice before i had breakfast this morning.
it’s almost 4:00 already and i’ve gotten exactly NOTHING done for the past THREE DAYS. i’ve got a performance this evening at the rialto theatre in tacoma, a real, authentic, old-time vaudeville stage where i’ll be opening for Pearl Django, and i’m in such a bad mood that i’m not even excited about it. 😛
Graphics of the Americas Exposition and Conference – i’ve been invited to this by the 4-colour printer that i use, but i’m not sure if i want to go or not.
Microsoft loses Word patent appeal – which means that microsoft will have to stop selling the current versions of Word 2003 and Word 2007… before they get started paying i4i $290,000,000, and altering Word so that it no longer contains the XML-rendering code for which microsoft didn’t pay…
Christian leader supports death penalty for gays – and the debate continues, only this time it’s in the united kingdlom…
The ‘green’ mayor? McGinn wants to legalize pot and tax it, too – we’re getting closer to making cannabis legal, and this guy is my home-town mayor on top of everything…
Swastika Christmas card with harmless message – it’s too bad i can’t show this story to the lady in my previous post…
Ugandan president committed to blocking anti-gay bill – while i am glad that somebody in ugandan politics has the balls to stand up to the crowd, i still think it would be better for gays in the long run if uganda passed this horrendous bill, because it would do two things: first, it would give everybody, even the “christians” who support it, a very clear idea of what killing gays really means, and second, it would give everyone, especially the “christians” who support it, a very clear idea of exactly how un-Christian are the “christians” who support the idea of killing gays in the first place.
Web 2.0 Suicide Machine – in spite of spreznib’s objection to JavaScript, i’m posting this anyway, for several reasons. among them are the fact that, despite the fact that “Web 2.0” has been available for a couple of years now, i really don’t see that much difference between the web now, and the web 10 years ago, except for the fact that it’s more crowded with people who either don’t know how to use it to begin with, or who are spammers. both of these are more than good enough reasons to have your “Web 2.0” personality commit suicide.
now that the second weekend of performances are over, i can catch up on my real life…
while the servers were down, i got a business card in the mail from Mitnick Security Consulting, LLC… yes, that kevin mitnick. in order to get this business card i had to send him, among other things, my IP address and the password to my system. i think it was a pretty good trade, myself.
the performances went really well this week. the only frisson that we had was when stuart wasn’t going to be there for the evening show and he took off taking pam’s music with him, thinking it was his. after a few frantic phone calls and pam playing half of the preshow with charts borrowed from other people, stuart showed up and traded books with pam, and everything worked out grand.
i’m a little worried, though… now that clayton is playing with us, there’s more of a probability that eben will be able to copy music that jeremy wrote for the phil… music that he has currently said he doesn’t want the phil to play because he’s going through a publishing/copyright thing and doesn’t want to have extra copies of his music in places of which he is not aware.
after the show yesterday, i met up with hobbit, who is number 8 in the order of the fez. he and i (number 32) got together with jason (number 13) who owns Fez-O-Rama and his wife maya, and we spread some fezzerocity through downtown seattle last night… which basically involved meeting at the carousel in westlake mall, getting lost walking up to Von’s (a whiskey bar on 6th and pine) and talking about fezzes, internet, theatre and other stuff until 9:00 or so. i’m sorry to say that i had to borrow a fez from hobbit, because i hadn’t brought mine. also i need to get an “order of the fez” fez some day…
i’ve made some progress on finding a new host provider, but i’m still really mad about the fact that the current one wants to charge me almost 300% more, so i’m going to wait until i’ve calmed down a bit. i’ve found that, since my injury, if i rant about what i’m angry about when i’m angry i end up sounding like a drooling half-wit. besides, i’ve got an appointment with ned that i’ve got to go to now.
that’s A4R3G3H3 for those of you who are keeping score…
you may or may not have noticed that my web sites have been down for the past 24 hours. this was because at 4:00 friday afternoon, i got an email from my “new” host provider that he was going down for “4 to 5 hours (maximum 10 hours) for upgrades” and wanted to know if it was “okay with you if we start them this evening”… and then proceded to start the upgrades without even making sure that it was okay with me or not.
also, he informed me that my rates would be increasing by almost 300% because he is having trouble breaking even. 😯
needless to say, i have – once again – embarked on the task of finding yet another host service provider – my fourth switch in less than a year… 🙄 i will probably be switching in january, after the panto is over.
more stuff after the panto.
the way i see it, the possibility that uganda is not going to pass the “kill the gays” bill, and instead offer the option of “counseling and rehabilitation” will make it far more likely that the “christians” in the united states – who have been slapped in the face by the ex-gay ministry folks who have recently been forced to break ties with a guy who has been their affiliate for decades because of his “bizarre and unorthodox” therapies, and who are up against the psychologists associatiation saying that being gay is not a disease and not a choice, and who are also, ultimately, behind the “kill the gays” bill in the first place – will use the fact that uganda is saying that “counselling and rehabilitation” is “preferable” to their original plan is more justification that “counselling and rehabilitation” are effective “treatments” for this “disease”.
much as i hate to say it, i hope that uganda passes the “kill the gays” bill, so that it will be made plainly, blatantly, horrendously obvious to even the most uneducated “christian” on the planet exactly how “un-Christian” this legislation actually is. anything less will just give the “christians” more fodder, weak and meaningless as it is.
this is another "advantage" to having a google alert for the term "swastika": i got up this morning and discovered a whole bunch of new articles, which included the following honeys.
College prof: Christian crosses like swastikas – Student: ‘I felt humiliated and that my spirituality was being demeaned’ – oh, boo hoo, you’re “not allowed” to make your religious emblem in a class where my religious emblem is banned as a matter of course, regardless of what you believe it means. now, maybe, you get the idea of what it must be like to have a religious symbol discriminated against because of stupidity!!
along the same lines, there is STILL IN PURSUIT OF THE DREAM, which is the story of writer who was originally scheduled to read from her book at a public library, and was then un-invited, because some person – not associated with the library – discovered that her book contained the images of “werewolves, vampires, and the swastika”. she invokes ray bradbury’s Farenheit 451, and i would tend to agree with her. this is definitely censorship based on an image in a book, and nothing less.
especially when you consider that high school students are being taught this stuff. there really should be no reason, apart from america’s bizarre aversion to the swastika, why people should raise anywhere near as much of a fuss about it.
but the one that really got to me, the one that makes me believe that we may actually have hope for a saner, less swastika-obsessed future, is the letter to the editor regarding an incident in which "I 卍 OBAMA" was carved into a massachusetts golf course last weekend, which was written by A SIXTH GRADER entitled Swastika predates use by Nazis. if a sixth grader has the requisite knowledge to correct a newspaper article, what does that say about the person who wrote that article? i’ll answer that, so that there will be no doubt in your mind what i am striving for here: it says that the person who wrote the article is either uneducated, or deliberately trying to pull the wool over our eyes. either way, it doesn’t say much about their integrity. we deserve better than that from our public news sources, and if it takes a sixth grader to set the record straight, then it’s time we took a closer look at who we are allowing to report our news.
the more you obsess about nazis and swastikas, the longer it will be until we disassociate nazis and swastikas! the way to get over the nazi thing is to have it be okay for people to use the 卍 symbol, and the 卐 symbol in ways that are not connected with nazis! it’s exactly the same thing your mother tells you after you skin your knee as a kid: the more you think about it, the longer it will be until it goes away. if the general world consensus is that we sould continue to think about nazis every time someone says 卐, then there are a lot of hindus, buddhists, native americans – and jews – who are going to be out a significant amount of their cultural history.
for more swastika pleasure, i invite you to peruse Sun Wheel – The Ancient Swastika and start thinking about something other than nazis for a change…
thanks.
Buy swastika online in India – this is what i get for having a google alert for the term “swastika”… why are people on this side of the globe so convinced that the swastika is anything other than a symbol of peace? i know that there was this whole thing with the nazis, but that was almost a hundred years ago, and i think it’s high time we should start thinking of other things.
the closer we get to xmas, the more i am feeling like a jew at a nazi rally, and i am aware of the irony of such a statement a lot more accutely than those of you who may be shocked at the reference.
what i would really like, is to magically transport myself to somewhere where they don’t celebrate xmas for the month of december – and possibly the months of november and january as well – just to get away from the hype that is going on. the commercialism and the politics of the holiday are really starting to get to me, and i still have 10 days until it’s over for another year.
it’s not that i don’t celebrate xmas, and it’s not even that i don’t believe in the “christ” and “god” that are behind the current incarnation of the holiday so much (although that’s another part of the story). what is really disturbing to me is the combination of not being able to turn on the television or the radio without hearing either commercials for products that i know won’t work (like Windows 7), or seeing news reports of people complaining because the greeter at walmart said something, or didn’t say something that was offensive to them… or not… 😐
i was brought up in a family that celebrated the commercial aspects of xmas. we didn’t even have a regular church service that we went to that was on a day other than sunday, and the church services that we went to all the time were pretty ecuminical and inclusive of traditions and cultures that were not specifically “christian”, so when i grew up and learned that some people believed that xmas was for stuff other than getting loads of toys and candy, i didn’t quite understand, but i didn’t really notice that much when the checker at the grocery store wished me a “merry xmas”. as i developed more of a relationship with sanatanadharma (which is what “hinduism” is really called) i started noticing the discontinuity a lot more: the “peace on earth and good will toward men” compared to the war, hunger and poverty that exist in the world, the constant fighting between catholics and protestants, the constant fighting between the christians and the non-christians, and the growing furor over “the war on xmas” came much more to the forefront, and i find it quite distressing.
things like the reference to a woman who compared santa to a swastika take on a meaning that is not immediately obvious to people who believe the swastika is an evil symbol, for example. i can see how santa is a lot like a swastika, and i wouldn’t mind seeing both of them in more common usage, but if there’s going to be an uproar over whether or not to have a swastika in a public display, then there certainly should be just as much uproar over whether or not to have a public holiday that celebrates santa – even if santa is not the "reason for the season".
and, for that matter, if you think about it a little more than most "christians" have, jeezis himself is not the “reason for the season” either. people celebrated the winter solstice for a long time before jeezis showed up, and it’s really only been within the past 200 to 500 years that we’ve had anything at all like what is currently celebrated as xmas, so all of those "war on xmas" fanatics really don’t have a leg to stand on in the first place. but in general, i think that the hindus and jews and buddhists and muslims and animists and even athiests have gone out of their way to accommodate all of the fanatics who insist that they are to be greeted with the phrase "merry xmas" instead of the more ecuminical "happy holidays" in fact, the only reason we have been as accommodating as we have been is because the "christians" are a majority of our population and if we weren’t so willing to give up what we believe in order to make peace, most "christians" wouldn’t have the slightest problem killing us!
what would jesus do, indeed?
i keep feeling like i am totally alone in a society of people who would have no problem killing me if they happened to find out that i don’t believe the way they do, but at the same time, i feel compelled to inform these ignoramuses that they aren’t the only ones on the planet, and that other people – people who believe differently than they do – have just as much right to exist as they do, and what jesus would really do is get along with everyone… which is supposed to be "The Christmas Message" anyway.
Colton Harris-Moore, the barefoot boy bandit, outfoxes sheriffs – i know people who live on camano island (like rev. chumleigh, for example), and i know that this is entirly likely, there are a lot of hippie survivalist types living out in that area, and it is fairly close to a place where i was thinking about making a homestead and surviving off the land many, many years ago. i am in awe, although i will say that he probably wasn’t stupid enough to shoot at the cop, he’s probably going to get blamed for it, especially with all of the other “cop-killing” uproar there has been around here recently.
Need to Sneak Across the Border "Safely?" – there’s an app for that…
Japanese man ‘marries’ computer game character – if the guy is allowed to marry a computer game character, then why aren’t two actual people who happen to be of the same sex marry, huh?
also, One Hundred Percent EDIBLE Googly Eyes! with which to make, what else, chriFSMas treats! you can guess what i’ll be doing later on… 8)
Strickland, Jonathan. “How to Remove a Computer Virus.” 06 April 2009. HowStuffWorks.com. <http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/how-to-tech/how-to-remove-computer-virus.htm> 11 May 2009.
it doesn’t specifically say that you are less likely to get viri if you run mac or linux, but at the same time, all of the instructions for removing computer viri from your system are specifically directed at windows users… 😉
it’s coming down to the time when i should start thinking about switching host providers again. at this point it’s down to either HostGator or HostMonster each of which has their own google “complaints” page – this time i’m doing at least that much more homework… – and both of which have almost identical articles on hostings that suck which is questionable, since it also recommends 1&1… the reason for thinking of hostgator is that they have the balls to post an forum of customer reviews and apparently don’t remove the bad ones. the reason for thinking of hostmonster is that i have a very good friend who is a web designer and he uses hostmonster and speaks glowingly of them. probably going to start the process during the coming week or so, so that when i cancel with 1&1 they can’t screw things up as badly.
pipeline data apparently is apparently aware of the fact that they are running a scam, because when informed that we were going to the police with charges of fraud, they suddenly refunded the $11.95 that they had withdrawn from my bank account after i had cancelled my account with them… up until they were informed that we were going to the police, they had steadfastly refused to refund the money – which they were entitled to because of the contract i didn’t sign – under any circumstances, but when we told them we were going to the police, that is a circumstance under which they will refund it. there’s still no word on the $300 “early termination fee” – i’ve put in a dispute with the bank, and they’ve already started an investigation – but this doesn’t make it look too good for them. it may be a while, but today i’m guessing that i’ll eventually get the “early termination fee” refunded as well.
also… <tee hee> Fart Intensity Detector complete with schematics.
the battle of the computer is over! the linux guru (whose name is francis) and i got my computer working, after three days of mucking about in the inner (read “command-line interface”) workings of the underpinning of kubuntu. when you dig down that deep, you’re not running k/x/ed/ubuntu any longer, it’s actually debian, which is, apparently, a rock-solid piece of software capable of doing many things that k/x/ed/ubuntu screws up, or can’t do at all. it’s now running jaunty jackalope, after having the innards of hardy heron ripped out from its smouldering carcass and having kde4 and the latest linux kernel forcably overwritten. i’m not sure if i really like it yet (it looks way too much like windoesn’t XP), but i can probably get used to it, and/or configure the parts that i don’t like so that they won’t be so annoying.
i’ve discovered what the problem is with my linux box: i tried to upgrade directly from hardy to jaunty without going through intrepid first. it really wasn’t my fault, i just did what the upgrade application told me to, but that doesn’t make my box any less broken. fortunately, i appear to have found a linux guru on kubuntuforums.net who is the eternal optimist and thinks that i can probably rescue my box without having to reinstall. i’m up for it, but i would also be up for reinstalling if it doesn’t work out. meanwhile i’m learning all about aptitude -f install
and dpkg --force-overwrite -i
and other arcane goodies that go over the heads of about 90% of the other kubuntu users out there. and my linux box is still broken. oh well…
i got an order for 3000 postcards yesterday, which will ultimately be sent to japan, and i mowed the lawn for the first time this year as well. also i’ve got a BSSB rehearsal later this evening, so despite my broken linux box and my ongoing depression, i’m keeping busy enough that it doesn’t hurt as much.
ETA, 5:00pm: the linux guru i met turned me on to skype, which i now have installed on my mac, so if any of you are inclined to actually talk to me, i can be reached at przxqgl. we didn’t get very far, but i am more convinced than ever that we will actually be able to rescue this box instead of reinstalling it. i’m now doing a remote ssh to the linux box and running all the commands on my mac, which saves me getting confused over which keyboard i’m typing into.
so my linux box had a bunch of package updates that it had to install, so i finally got around to installing them today, and when they were done, it told me that i had a version upgrade (jaunty jackalope) that i could install, and so i decided to install it as well. strangely enough, there was something wrong with the upgrade and the ultimate result was that it lost the mouse and keyboard, which meant that i couldn’t log in.
fortunately (sort of), i have the /home on a secondary disk, and i have my calendar backed up on google, so the only thing i can’t immediately access is my email database. i have access to my email accounts, just not the already sent and received email that i have on my computer.
so, the battle of the computer begins again, but it’s all a lot more under control, sort of, than it has been in the past. i have to figure out why the computer apparently isn’t seeing the CD-ROM drive on startup, and i have to figure out why the computer isn’t seeing the mouse and keyboard when it boots from the hard disk, but i have a computer, and a calendar, and the ability to fill orders (if i get any) without too much difficulty, so it’s not a reason to panic and run around like a chicken with it’s head cut off…
gah… i’ve been sicker than i have been in a long time over the past few days, which has left me in a fouler mood than normal, and it hasn’t been being helped at all by the person i mentioned in my last post. i’m on the uphill swing, at this point, but i’m still pretty sick, which is going to be interesting, since i have to take a five-mile walk to pick up Ganesha The Car from the shop this morning, and later on i have a fremont philharmonic rehearsal, which is probably not going to end up happening, because i’m so sick.
i was reviewing my web statistics a few days ago, and discovered that the person, a nandita prabhu who has several other blogs as well as the one linked in my previous post (which no longer exists), posted a new entry in one of her blogs called Plagiarism, where she outlines the process by which she gets artwork to post in her various blogs. she says things like:
People allow me to use these copyright images (I take their permission)
and
I think it is “Ok” for my readers to “borrow” the content of my blog but please ask me before you decide to do so.
and
To sum up, You want to borrow something that’s fine all you have to do is “ASK”.
not only that, but all of her blogs are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, but the images that she hotlinked from me, and the images from other sources that i checked on his “The Broken Tusk” blog (which is now deleted) all had very clear watermarks or other indications that they were actually copyright to other places, and there’s no indication, not only that she has permission to relicence the images, but that she has permission to use the images at all.
strangely, when i received email from her on friday, she said
i had no idea of this at all. Infact I have been doing this from so long and i had no idea its wrong. Is it a problem even if i say that the pic is from this website ( like source) ?
and other things that, if i hadn’t actually read her blogs – all of them – would make me believe that she has any idea that this is the wrong way to approach “borrowing” other peoples’ artwork.
normally i don’t give much credibility to any laws governing “intellectual property”, but in this case, she’s coming across to me as one thing, and she’s posting on her blogs something entirely the opposite, which makes me very suspicious indeed. it seems to me like she is trying to come across in her email as a clueless newbie, and in her blog as a person who has her shit together, which is not a way to gain my confidence in the least.
i commented on her blog, and have received several emails from her. i guess i’m going to have to wait to see how this all works out, but at this point, i don’t hold out much hope. i’m certainly not going to prosecute myself, but considering how many other web sites she “borrowed” artwork from (several of which replace the hotlinked graphics with ones that say things like “this image stolen from…” – i’d be willing to bet that someone else will, unless she gets her shit together.
i took Ganesha The Car to the shop today to get the automatic lock swich replaced, because it had stopped working. fortunately i didn’t have to pay for it, because of some design and printing that i had done for the shop earlier in the week. but it turned out that it wasn’t the switch that was broken, so now i have to take it back on friday so that they can take the door panel off and investigate the wiring. also, El Elefante Híbrido is apparently an article more or less about Ganesha The Car (from what my limited spanish plus a web-translator-thing tell me), but it’s too bad he tried to hotlink my image (which is how i found out about him). if i knew enough spanish, i would comment about hotlinking graphics, but i don’t, so i probably won’t do anything except be thankful for the traffic he’s sending my direction.
snake suspenderz has a gig at the skylark cafe on the 23rd, and earlier that day i’m meeting with the lawyer, because on the 24th is my hearing to determine whether or not i’m going to get disability. according to my impression, there’s still a 50/50 chance that i’m going to be approved, and if i don’t, it will be pretty much the same as it is now, but i’m under increasing amounts of stress because of it. then, on the 25th, i’ve got an art car show at magnuson park, which is either going to be really exciting or really relieving, depending on what happens the day before.
i got Bruno Bozetto’s “Allegro Non Troppo” on DVD, and i can play it on my mac, but the “Command+Shift+3” screen-capture function is disabled, for, perhaps obvious, but not very convenient reasons, which means that i’m going to have to figure out some other way to capture the picture of the snake that’s the primary character in Stravinsky’s “The Firebird”, which i want to propose as the snake suspenderz logo. i also got the 14 Sequenzas by Luciano Berio on CD the other day. i played Sequenza V (dedicated to the memory of Grock) for a juried audition when i was in college, and i know the guy, Stewart Dempster, for whom it was written. when i played it, there were two women in the jury who were trying, in vain, to suppress their giggles, and when it was all over, i whispered to them that it was okay to laugh, because it was written for a clown, at which point they cracked up.
along with the Odd Factoids (in the place of most news reporting, which is simply too depressing to read any longer), here’s a couple of links that i read recently:
God Hates Shrimp – the logical (if there is such a thing) response to God Hates Fags.
Cybersecurity Bill Proposes Unprecedented Government Power Over the Internet – yes, i am still a terrorist. get used to it.
i met ukulele dick at the moisture festival the other day. his “real name”, acording to his schtick, is Banjo Penis. i traded him a copy of serpentine for a copy of his ukulele dick cd and a copy of his “Dick Dujour” cd, Music to Scare Children by. i’ve been listening to them on and off throughout the day, and i must say, the guy is more than just a ukulele player. i also made buttons for him that say “Act Dorky, Live Forever”. i’ve got performances on friday and sunday for sure, and possibly saturday.
the big news, or maybe not so big if you hang out with the right people, i guess, is that circus contraption is breaking up. i have no idea why, but i can imagine, as with most artistic organisations like that, that there were some artistic differences somewhere along the lines.
other news: my SSDI hearing is the 24th. i’m approaching it with an interesting mixture of hilarity and dread. i got to see part of the forms ned was filling out earlier in the week, and he said about 10 things, of which i would think that 1 of which should be enough to get me on the “disabled” list in a perfect world, but because of the fact that the world is decidedly imperfect, i don’t know if it will help or not. we’re going to work on it some more after the moisture festival is over.
also i’m getting ready to be able to accept credit cards on hybrid elephant, but i’ve only gotten one order since i went live with the new site, so i’m wondering if i can’t put it off for another month until i get more of an idea about whether or not people are going to notice it.
despite the fact that i won the battle of the computer in record time – this time – i learned a bunch of things that i didn’t know in the process. the main thing i learned is that the intermittent quiet scratching noise coming from the computer is the power supply fan, which, instead of turning on and doing what it is supposed to do when power is applied, in fact, it rotates weakly, not anywhere near fast enough to be anything like the heat sink that it’s supposed to be, and intermittently emits a scratching sound that makes me think that it, too, is not long for this world.
linux computer is back up and working! i backed up my calendar and now i have it on both my main computers – with them cross-connected so that any changes i make on one will automatically show up on the other (which, it’s my understanding, that you can’t do on windoesn’t without a significant amount more futzing about than i was willing to put into the whole deal – thank you linus torvalds and steve jobs, fuck you bill gates), and i am currently backing up my /home directory (with all of my email) which is something that i was going to do right before the computer died, so that if it happens again i’ll be even more prepared the next time.
apparently i fried the processor. the guy i took it to, which is right down the hill from my house (extremely convenient) said that the processor heat-sink was installed backwards – thank you re-pc – but he just happened to have another processor of the same size and speed. it turned out that he had a huge box of brand new processors, one of which he installed, then put the heat-sink back the correct way, and hooked up the LEDs on the front of the computer (which i had never bothered to connect because they don’t actually do anything other than light up), and he only charged me $50, which makes him my new best friend.
linux computer is dead, which isn’t really surprising considering that is built out of spare bits and pieces of several other computers. i’ve ruled out the power supply, for two reasons: one is that i replaced it about six months ago, and the other is that i actually took my computer to RePC (where a lot of the parts came from) and had the guy check it out. he checked out the power supply (which lit up his testing device with green lights, indicating that the power supply is working correctly), but refused to look at it any further(!) because it was too dirty(!), despite the fact that it wasn’t that dirty and i have seen computers which worked fine and were orders of magnitude more dirty than mine was… still, i brought it home and cleaned it, but it still won’t boot.
unfortunately, i have a 1:00 call today and i’m performing until 1:00 tomorrow morning, then i have a 10:00 AM(!) call tomorrow and i’m assuming that i will be performing until 1:00 am monday, but i’m not sure because my calendar was on my linux computer and isn’t accessible, in spite of the fact that it’s probably still there. but one way or another, there’s a good chance that i won’t even get to look at my computer until monday, and given a perfect-case scenario, won’t actually get it working again until tuesday or wednesday, which means that i have to re-create my calendar somewhere other than my linux box.
linux box is down. fortunately, i can switch to mac fairly easily, and the /home directory is on a separate disk from the main operating system, but i really don’t want to fight the battle of the computer again so soon after the last time. i’m a fair amount more prepared for it than the last time, but it’s still irritating as hell.
in other news, snake suspenderz played a gig at smokin’ pete’s barbecue this evening, which went well. tomorrow is my first day without a performance or a rehearsal in more than a week. i’m a busy musician during the moisture festival. two more weeks to go.
i played in the Fighting Instruments of Karma Marching Chamber Band/Orchestra in the benefit show for the New Old-Time Chautaqua this afternoon. it’s a mass conflagration of incestuous artistic talent with which i have been associated on the edges of for the past 30 years or so: i play with eben, bernice, clayton and liz in the ballard sedentary sousa band, i’ve played music with stephan, kevin and karl from bellingham in a variety of groups since i was in college, i currently play with thad in snake suspenderz, i’ve played with heather in the fremont phil… the chautaqua has been described as a karass, which is, in fact, a very apt description. but i never realised how intimately involved i was with it until today, when i saw how many of my friends were all gathered together to do God’s will.
in other news, i finally got the problems that i’ve been having with Hybrid Elephant fixed. they weren’t serious or visible problems (the graphics were showing up in the store, but not in the admin part), but they were a concern, especially if i end up switching host providers again, which is not out of the question. as much as i was raving about 1&1 when i first signed up with them, they have pulled a slimy, underhanded move that makes me wonder how they stay in business: they pulled a “bait and switch” move where i thought i was signing up for a $10.00 a month deal with no monthly contract, and in reality i was signing up for a $20.00 a month deal with a $50 rebate, and a 6 month contract. furthermore, i’ve discovered a host service which actually charges $7 a month, and has unlimited disk space, bandwidth, and SQL databases. of course 300 GB is a lot, but there’s a big difference between 300 GB and unlimited, especially when they’re actually going to charge me less than 1&1 said they were going to charge me. so i’m going to wait until my 6 month contract is up, and then switch host providers again.
i’m a geek. i have known it for a while, and there have been several events in my life that have made it sometimes painfully obvious. well, this is one of those events in my life. there is a link on the wikipedia page about cantheism which is in the “External link & sorce” part of the page, the first link is to a “Cantheist website”, which, if you click it, takes you to a pretty green page all about cantheism, with a link at the bottom to Chris Conrad’s web site…
that is all very well and good, but what i discovered this afternoon is that it is on a domain that i own and have control over… and i didn’t know it was there.
not only that, but there are apparently other pages in the same directory, complete with graphics, that i not only didn’t know about, but have not linked on my own site, that i know of, in at least 10 years. the date on the page that has a date is september 15, 2000, which may be around the time they were placed there.
upon further investigation, of course, i discovered that they actually are linked to one of the pages that i haven’t looked at since about 2001. i posted the information, and forgot about it. but internet didn’t, and now, without me having to do anything, a page of information that I make available is a resource on wikipedia.
this is one of the main reasons why i want to get away from having to use paypal. i’ve heard too many stories like this over the past year or so to ignore it any longer… 8/
i don’t usually go for this kind of thing too often, but this one came up with such appropriate stuff on the first time that i had to share. i followed the directions at Wikipedia Names Your Band and came up with this for a band name, this for a title, and this for artwork. i haven’t decided what kind of music “CSM Râmnicu S?rat” plays yet, but there are all sorts of possibilities, especially with an album title and artwork like that… 😎
buy Serpentine by Snake Suspenderz at CDBaby, or download the tracks in a variety of formats (including MP3, AAC, FLAC and OGG) from BandCamp. for real… a commercially available CD, that’s not a writable CD-ROM disk, that features a band i play in! woo hoo!
my new spam protection, installed wednesday has already stopped 5 birdbrained spambots. sweet!
i’m really pleased! i’m not ready to start posting links for sneak previews yet, but the commerce web site is coming along just fine. i finally figured out how to completely eliminate the right hand navigation column, so now the site only has two columns. i changed the HEADER_TITLE to something more appropriate and something that is less likely to give away the fact that i’m using the same ecommerce solution that everyone else is using. i moved the post code to the correct place for american addresses, and changed it to “zip” code, rather than “post” code. i also made the telephone number optional and completely removed the fax number, which was a larger task than it seems, because of the fact that there was no place to modify the fax number, and i had to do a mySQL query to make a place where the fax number could be manipulated. i also removed the manditory birth date and the manditory company from the user registration.
i still have to insert text for the shipping and returns, the privacy notice, and the conditions of use, and i have to replace the text on the index page. i also need to find out what $model['products_name']
has been changed to so that i can put the product name into the <title>
of each individual page… and i have to feed the database. i’ve got about half of the incense inventory entered, and i haven’t even started with the murtis or anything else.
i said that this would be ridiculously easy, and i was right. the hardest thing i’ve had to do so far is find strings in PHP files. i’m still a bit confused when the directions say that i should find a certain piece of code on a certain line of a certain file but when i open that file and go to that line, the code that they said should be there is different from what they said it would be, and the result is that it’s going more slowly than i’d like, but i’m certain that it will all get straightened out eventually.
Serpentine by Snake Suspenderz
if it were only about fred phelps…
i just found out, if you type grep -i mclain /etc/services
into a terminal window on mac os x, you’ll get my very old and dear friend fred mclain’s name… apparently his name is on one of the port services that you have if you’re running mac os x, or suse. it doesn’t work if you’re running k/x/ubuntu…
national kazoo day gig last night. it was a real pleasure to play music, but apparently there was some drama towards the end, after all the music had been played and we were packing up and getting out, but apparently not quickly enough to suit the owners of the cafe/theater. i was only partially aware of what was going on. i actually was already packed up and loaded out by the time it became a real drama, and i was outside, so i didn’t even see the drama part of it at all, but apparently sketch was given the bum’s-rush – after having just played a full set, and not having packed up all of his gear or gotten changed or even put on a coat.
we did sell three of our NEW CDs though! it’s so new that it doesn’t have a link anywhere yet… hobbit and thad were up until 3:00 saturday morning folding, gluing and shrink-wrapping the packaging… there will be a CD baby link when i get it. 8)
moe is having problems with the SVBT web site, which is being made infinitely worse by the fact that their host provider has its head so far up its ass that they’d need a team of spelunkers and several days to find it. i’ve been trying to help out, and i actually succeded in backing up the old web site and uploading the stuff that they had to replace it, but now, apparently the database is broken, the PHP experts on staff live in australia, and the web designer is being a 14-carat gold plated prick about the whole thing – but his prick-itude about it may be partially due to the fact that the host provider is being a complete, 24-carat solid gold pile of crap. it would have taken me 10 minutes on my host to do what it took me almost 3 hours to do, manually, one file at a time, on their host. i don’t want to seem like i’m bailing on moe, because if nobody else, i should support her, but at the same time, it’s not my job to fix SVBT’s wonky host provider, and while it is moe’s job, i personally believe that it would be infinitely easier to bail on the host provider and go with some place that actually, you know, provides a usable service….
along a similar line, i got an invoice from drizzle today, and, as i suspected, they’ve charged me again for the screwup that resulted in my account getting deleted and then restated, despite the fact that it never should have been deleted in the first place, which is THEIR FAULT!! and, of course, it’s sunday and they’re not there – i find it somewhat ironic that their automated billing service works on sunday, but nobody else does. it’s not actually going to be “funny” until they have acknowledged that they should not have billed me for something that wasn’t my fault to begin with, which, i suspect, is going to take a while.
snake suspenderz is playing at the national kazoo day celebration on saturday. we’ll be playing at the back gate stage at artichoke music on hawthorne in portland. we spent all day today and completed mixdown of all 16 tracks, and we should have a stack of 50 finished, marketable CDs to take with us on saturday.
the fremont philharmonic is in full rehearsal mode for the moisture festival, and i may be playing tuba for the sanca-pators in the moisture festival as well: i heard from a couple of sanca-pators (clayton – who also plays with BSSB and banda gozona – and thaddeus – who also plays with snake suspenderz) that they might need a tuba player, so i wrote to eben, the leader of the sanca-pators – who also plays with BSSB – but i haven’t heard back from him yet. is that incestuous enough for your sensibilities? the fremont phil has got a few other gigs coming up, including a benefit for honk fest west at the end of february. allegedly we’re going to play in honk fest west in june as well, although my recollection is that we were supposed to play last year, as well, and then we cancelled out at the last minute.
moe got home saturday, and i took the doggies with me to the airport, so that they could see that she really was somewhere else and not just hiding from them for the past 2 weeks. they spent almost the entire time she was gone, and they were home, staring at the door and barking occasionally when they imagined that they heard her driving up, as though they were going to cause her to walk through the front door by sheer force of their doggie wills. paddy, our oldest dog now that allie is gone (she’s 11) lost 5% of her body weight during the time moe was gone. she ate all of her food, and i didn’t notice her acting strangely or anything, but moe said she looked thin, so she took her to the clinic yesterday. she doesn’t appear unhealty, but moe is extra careful with paddy, because they are as close to soul mates as a person and a dog can be.
banda gozona played at the central area senior center in a benefit for cascade peoples’ center last saturday, after moe got home. it was the standard oaxacan shindig, which meant a lot of food, a lot of music, a lot of people speaking spanish, and a lot of chaotic disorganisation. i’m beginning to start to get the hang of what we are playing most of the time. it’s only taken me two years of playing with the group. it helps that i’m not the new guy any longer.
i upgraded to WordPress 2.7 last night, and it’s still pretty shiny and new, but i’ll see what i can do about mucking things up soon enough. at the moment, i wonder about the header graphic, which used to have a pretty purplish gradient in it, but now, from what i can see, is a glaring emergency orange-ish.
ETA: it’s not orange any more, but apparently the upgrade broke my ability to make the header more than one colour. presumably there will be a fix for it eventually, but in the mean time, i changed it to all purple instead of all orange… easier on the eyes…
somebody sent me 15,000 17,000 20,000 spam messages this morning between 2:30 am and 8:30 10:30 12:00 pm. i am NOT happy! not happy at all! >8/