Steve Jobs and Cultists

Steve Jobs was an innovator whose vision and fortunate partnership changed the way a lot of people use media.

I learned to program on a Mac SE over 25 years ago; I still have my fully functional "banana junior computer" that T constantly threatens to dismantle and turn into a fish bowl. I love my iPod and I love my iPhone and intend to purchase the new one. And guess what? Apple will still make products, and I will either choose to or not to buy them.

I don't know Mr. Jobs personally. I am sure this is a terrible loss for his family and for the people who knew and cared about him. I've lost many people I love and know what they face. It is unfortunate, and it is life.

What I detest is this creepy mourning death cult mentality so many take up every time somebody famous dies. Teddy bear shrines and candles and WTFever at Apple stores is just retarded. Stop it you idiots, it's meaningless. If you want to show support for Mr. Jobs' family, buy a Disney movie then go home and cry your crocodile salty ham tears in private. You're an irrelevant spec on the ass of the world and we don't care about your manufactured pain.

Despite PC society's reactionary anti-religionism, like it or not, people still yearn to be part of something greater than themselves. So instead of finding solace in the divine, they turn to the most frivolous crap that pops up, in a feeble attempt to give their empty existence some meaning. Creepy mourning death cults are fleeting, kiddies. Stop littering in front of retail stores. Do something. Find a real belief system. Try a Church.

Lightning Returns

So, in a bizarre coincidence, lightning hit the tree in front of our neighbor's house, jumped to his house, and from there the magic of telecommunications took over with a vengeance. Loyal readers will recall we faced a similar situation two years ago.

We fared much better this time. Two computers, the X-Box 360 NIC, a NAS power supply, and various and sundry pieces of AT&T hardware went out. Unfortunately, the two computers that fried were my primary desktop and the music server. So instead of thinking up deathless prose to post on the Internet, I've been shopping PC parts.

I'm making some possibly unfounded assumptions about which parts of the two boxes are bad. I have, arguendo, assumed death on the part of the motherboard and processor. The music server is a cheap box running a old AMD chip and mobo combo. I've had no problems with it, so I went with a cheap combo deal from Newegg. A mini ITX board and single core Sempron should do what I need that box to do. Sadly, the initial board had problems with the onboard video, so I RMA'd it and am eagerly awaiting the new board as we speak. If it works well, I may get a small ITX case and stick it downstairs to run a media client on, but that may be asking a bit too much out of it. I'll just have to see.

My primary desktop was more difficult. I don't mind using old stuff for the music server, because it's not doing a lot of processor intensive grunt. I'm enough of a geek that I need a bit more for my primary computer. So I had one simple requirement: go up in specifications. I figured that shouldn't be too difficult with a 2 year old box.

Of course, what I learned is that Intel has gotten awfully proud of their chips. I've been using Intel in my main boxes forever, since when I started doing this AMD wasn't an option. Replacing my old Intel processor with a comparable low-end quad-core Intel ended up being more than I was prepared to spend right now. Hmm. Let's see what AMD has to offer.

Long story short, for about what I would pay for a comparable Intel chip, I can get a faster AMD and a mobo. Of course, this requires a memory upgrade, but other than that, I should be golden. I'm assuming my hard and optical drives aren't fried, which is usually a pretty safe bet. They're more robust pieces of kit, I've found. In any event, I should be up and running as soon as parts get here. Yay me. Boo lightning.

Now all I need is a wireless NIC for the X-Box. I'm just not sufficiently motivated to go digging in the hardware guts of that particular equipment, since all my sources tell me the NIC is part of the board and requires board replacement.

Not Your TV, Monkey

Okay, so I’m a big fan of Make magazine. I’m a charter subscriber, I have all the issues, etc., etc. In general, I find it a pretty neat operation with lots of things to interest me.

One reoccurring theme does bug me, however: the continuing fascination with the TV-B-Gone. In case you’re unfamiliar, I'll give you the condensed backstory. Some nit with no self-control apparently cannot be in a public space with a television on and ignore it. He is compelled by the evil mid control rays emitted by the demon box to sit and stare blankly at the moving pictures and pretty lights. So he invented a device that turns TVs off. Before you ask, I’m not joking. This is his own account, slightly paraphrased, of why he invented the thing in the first place.

Leaving aside the issues the account displays about the inventor, I have no problem with the device. A small remote control cycles through eleventy billion power codes for TVs when you push the button. Neat. There’s some slickness I can admire in the design and execution.

What grates on me is the absolute sense of entitlement the whole episode displays. I don’t like TVs being on in public spaces, so I’ll turn them off. Fuck everybody who might have been watching the TV, it annoys me, so off it goes! The idea that your wants and desires are more important than those of everybody else in the facility makes you a pretentious douchebag with an overdeveloped sense of self-importance.

Here’s a way to deal with it: don’t hang in places that have TVs on all the time. Real hard, right? Alternatively, you can always sit facing away from the TV, ask somebody to turn the volume down, or just ignore the idiot box. Seriously, they’re not magic. You can ignore them.

Honestly, this would be a petty annoyance and all would be well and good except Make keeps beating this horse. Buy a TV-B-Gone! Oh, wait, people notice when you point your remote at the TV and it goes off. They then throw you out of their establishment. Problem solved! Build it into a hat! Or a sweatshirt! So you can turn TVs off and not get caught at it! Because sometimes, that has bad consequences.

Okay, TVs annoy you. I get it. I didn’t own a TV until I got married. TVs are primarily useful to me as display devices for my electronics. If I wasn’t married, I wouldn’t even have cable. I have no problem if you don’t like them either. But guess what? If it’s not your TV in your house, you have as much business turning it off as I do dumping a bottle of water on smokers. Somewhere in your whole solipsistic narrative about how TVs are teh debbil, you missed the point where other people like them. Just because people like or do something you don’t like doesn’t give you the right to interfere with them. Your right to tell people what to do is limited to your property. To turn one of Make’s dicta on ownership upside down, if you don’t own it, don’t open it. How hard is that as a concept?

I’ve read a bunch of bullshit justifications from guerrilla activist culture-jammers about why this is somehow noble and is an attempt to take back public spaces and yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah. If you've written one of these justifications, be honest with yourself. Your high-minded nonsense scribblings are rationalizations to dress up your own prejudices. Bottom line is TVs annoy you and you feel like you should be able to turn them off anytime, anywhere, despite what anybody else thinks. Make spends a lot of time pushing things that are empowering, creative, and return control of technology to the individual. The TV-B-Gone is none of these. The TV-B-Gone in practice runs against everything else Make claims to uphold. Frankly, the continued championing of a device which exists to let you be a controlling asshat is disappointing.

Meditations on Mayhem

So, yesterday I had to show at the courthouse in bustling, scenic downtown Conroe for an abortive attempt at jury duty. Apparently, everybody knew there was not going to be court yesterday except for the dullard who sent all us prospective jurors an email on Saturday. A a result, I basically got a free day off work. Both woo and hoo.

Anyhow, the court is picky about which items you can bring into the building with you. I figured the .45, the pocket knife, and the big multitool were no-gos. I forgot about the smaller implements on my keychain.

The tiny Leatherman that lives on my keychain was unacceptable. I had to walk back to the truck and drop it in the glove box.

On the other hand, (clockwise from left), an Atwood Prybaby, a County Comm Peanut, a Craftsman 4 way screwdriver, and a P-38 were all admitted with no comments or complaints.

Now, I'm not doing anything but making idle speculation here. If I were inclined to commit some form of property damage or injury to personnel during my time in the building, I don't see what the point was. I can inflict as much, if not more, damage on someone with the Prybaby as I can with the Squirt, and I don't need to open it up. Between the three tools and the lighter, I figure there's all the fun you deserve to have in a secured area. I can disassemble just about anything that doesn't require a wrench, and then set the joint on fire.

I am constantly baffled and amazed at the feeble minded nonsense that passes for security in this country. I'm also a tad disgruntled that the county asked me to show up, and then made me empty my pockets of almost everything that might be useful in an emergency. If I'm to be trusted with deciding the fate of my fellow citizens, why won't you trust me with a pocket knife?

Friday Fun Links

I've been at a class the last two days where the amount of information delivered was far more than could have been accommodated in the time allotted. My brain hurts. So I give you links.

Cool clocks.

Make your own proxy server.

I've been using this program for unit conversions for years. If there's a better one, let me know.

Twilight explained.

And I think that's it for the week.

Zap

I will freely admit I think a vast majority of my tax money goes to things that are either constitutionally suspect, generally worthless, or overpriced. However, if the government is going to spend my money on things, I expect results.

I'd say a megawatt class laser destroying a ballistic missile during boost in under 2 minutes qualifies. Besides, it's a megawatt class laser. That's cool in and of itself. For purposes of comparison, the little laser pointers everyone uses to annoy cats are in the milliwatt range. The laser they used on Thursday is a billion times more powerful. I'd like to think Ted Maiman would be impressed.

If that's not enough 'splodey goodness for the morning, somebody went and built himself a gauss pistol. (Thanks Tam!) A little unwieldy and a lot underpowered, but technology proceeds apace. I have confidence that someday we'll get the power density high enough for a smaller and more effective version. We may be building a dystopian nightmare after all, but we'll have some cool guns to enforce and/or revolt against the system.

Paper Rules

I was just reading an article over at New Scientist about the ephemeral nature of all digital data and how this might, in the short or long-term, end up screwing us all if we don't get better archival storage systems. We're currently coping with a variation of the problem at YPS Manor. We have stacks and stacks of 3.5" floppies around, and absolutely no idea what's on them. We have one machine left that even has a 3.5" drive, and its reliability is suspect. So added to the list of things to do is check out the 3.5" disks once we get a drive.

The article also notes the best material for archival purposes is still paper, if kept and stored correctly. Acid-free paper, I assume, but the article makes no mention. I recall somewhere near the end of Schismatrix a similar conclusion being reached about the need for paper as archival storage.

Of course, since I'm not giving up my books anytime soon (read that as "before death") it's not really relevant for me personally. However, it does add to my distrust of the Kindle and other e-books.

No Ports?

I've got a $300 netbook from Acer. It has 3 USB ports, 2 SD cards slots, an Ethernet jack, plus headphone and mic ports. Oh, yeah, it also has a camera and a 160 Gb hard drive.

Apple's newest internet appliance named after a feminine hygiene product has the headphone jack. Oh, yeah, and Apple's magical dock connector. USB port? That's a dongle. SD Card slot? That's a different dongle. Power supply? Uses the same 30 pin connector. So, I can have a USB device, an SD card, or the power hooked up at any one time. Nice. I guess I don't want to hook a USB device up while I'm charging. Why would I? It has 10 hours of battery life, after all.

Magical, Apple says.

All I can say is that touchscreen better make up for a multitude of sins and the UI had better be fan-farking-tastic. Otherwise, I'll stick with my netbook and my iPhone.

The Future Is Still Late

Occasionally at YPS we bemoan the lack of the future we were promised. Having taken academic courses in the study of the future, I can confidently say that's because 95% of the promises were hot air. Of course, some of the futures we were promised are probably not ones you'd want to live in. Anything ever imagined by Philip K. Dick comes to mind, as does John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar.

Which brings us to Geoffrey Hoyle. His version of the future is delightfully odd. Imagine a future where your living space has to make use of every square inch, but you can take the bus down to the Sport and Social Center, which will take you weeks to walk around and has 500,000 seat stadium. As an extra bonus, everyone is wearing jumpsuits. Hmm. Yeah, that's the future from a an early 70s English socialist, all right. I would spoil more, but you really do need to look at his system of distribution yourself to appreciate the totality of his vision.

Most future predictions fail because no one can predict which technology is transformative. A very old Asimov story is about training men to perform calculation rapidly so they won't use computers. The military generals immediately seize upon the concept as a way to guide missiles to their targets. Yeah, Isaac kind of missed the boat on the whole minaturized electronics bit, didn't he? Of course, looking back on much of Asimov's works, computers in their modern form blindsided his future completely. He literally never saw them coming.

Meanwhile, out here in the real world, some of us continue the slightly less fascinating task of making the world run.

Cables

Just an FYI for all you folks considering stringing ethernet cables around your house: Cables have two ends. So the total number of connectors you need is the number of lines x 2. If you change plans in mid-stream, and decide to wire your cable ends in the wiring closet with female connections rather than male connections, this means you need twice as many female connectors as you originally bought.

So, in other news, I'm still not done wiring the new office for ethernet. I am trying a new vendor for my cat5e jacks. We'll see how the new vendor works out.

Random Friday Thoughts

Pantera + Thomas Jefferson = Eternally Fucking Hostile?

When the majority of your job consists of using a computer, when the IT department starts jacking with your computer, it seriously cuts down on your productivity for the day.

As punishment for my laziness in not taking down the Christmas lights last weekend, I now have to do it when the temperature is in the low 30s. Yay!

Why do Cat5E jacks cost more if they're blue? Is adding blue dye to the plastic that much more expensive than adding the white dye?

With A New Year Comes The Same Bad Attitude

So, as we gaze into the shiny new decade that stretches before us, we have come to one inescapable conclusion:

People are morons.

Wait, was that our inescapable conclusion for the new decade, or just a reiteration of one of our founding principles and core beliefs? I think it's more the latter.

Okay, let's try this new decade thing again. As we turn our divination towards the future decade and what it might hold, we at YPS can predict one thing with startling clarity:

We are so fucked.

Is that better? It's not a New Year's Resolution or anything that grand, just an observation based on the current administration and the rest of the fine elected officials we have representing us in DC.

Maybe I'm just bitter that I finally had to sober up and come in to work after half of my friends gave booze for my birthday and the holidays. A couple or three bottles of Gentleman Jack and a bottle of Woodford Reserve certainly helped me get into the holiday spirit, or at least mellow me out enough so that I didn't commit any unnecessary acts of holiday violence. To compensate, my lovely wife gave me a new coffee maker. Woo-hoo! Alcohol and caffeine, the modern wage slave's coping mechanisms. I think I'm going to need a lot of both in the coming decade.

Big Storage Fun

So, a while ago I had some problems with my RAID stack that turned out to be a power supply issue. I went and got a new power supply, which fixed the RAID. The whole incident got me thinking about storage. In an attempt to not freak out when my RAID blows up again, I got two Samsung 1.5TB hard drives to stick in two machines. I mean, hell, adding a hard drive is simple, right?

Well, not so much. Turns out there's a bit of a odd wrinkle when your drives get big. In my attempt to be of use and service to the community, I am passing along this bit of wisdom. Some Nvidia SATA drivers have a problem recognizing more than 1.1 TB of a drive. The symptom manifests during format. You tell the drive to format, and it hangs around the 1.1 TB mark. The solution is to force update your SATA drivers. The problem manifests under Vista 64-bit. So if by some odd chance, your hard drive format hangs, it's something you might consider doing.

Court Pwned

Well, Amazon made a mind-blowingly stupid decision some months ago. Aside from the immediate fallout, the courts have now piled on. Amazon is paying $150,000 to some kid who got his homework ganked along with his copy of 1984. As part of the settlement, Amazon agreed they won't take your books back except in some very limited conditions. This goes some way towards making me think kinder thoughts about the Kindle, but not far enough to make me buy one. Given the initial blunder, this is probably the best recovery Amazon can make. Of course, now that Amazon has entered into an agreement with the court as to the terms of the deletion policy, things will go much worse for them if it happens again.

As an aside, I can't think of any homework assignment I've done in my life that was worth $150,000 dollars. Hell, my entire college education (both degrees) didn't cost that much.

Blew That Foot Clean Off

So, ask yourself a question. As a company engaged in the business of retail sales, who do you depend on for your continued existence: suppliers or customers? If you answered customers, you're absolutely correct.

Amazon just managed to deter, in fell swoop, a huge number of potential customers. I had been eyeing the Kindle simply for convenience. If I can carry around a bunch of books, that'd be pretty cool. I wouldn't have to screw with all the cross platform software issues I do now trying to keep e-books on my netbook. However, if Amazon is going to go into my device after the fact and yank things I've already paid for right off, they're never going to convince me to buy one.

So in an attempt to please a supplier, they've alienated the customer base for one of their flagship products. Way to go! Smart thinking, Amazon.

Light ‘Em Up

Flamethrowers are not covered by any federal firearms statute, nor do they appear to be covered by any state law here in Texas. You may not be able to shoot bullets, but you can spray flaming liquids about!

I bring this up for absolutely no reason at all. Really. Well, other than it gives me an opportunity to mention two of my favorite quotes ever.

It is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

As I recall, the quote is Terry Pratchett from one of the Discworld books. The other one must be sadly unattributed.

If you build a man a fire, he’ll be warm for a day. If you set a man on fire, he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.

So, on that note, I leave you to contemplate the wisdom of strapping a pressurized container of napalm to your back and spraying it around willy-nilly.

Vocabulary Enrichment Day

In a shameless attempt to loaf in the face of looming disaster, we are pleased to bring you yet another installment in the YPS language arts curriculum. Today's lesson is on how to insult people in such a fashion that they suspect strongly you're insulting them, but can't actually prove it without recourse to an unabridged dictionary or the intarwebs. If you're like me, part of the joy of insulting people is the expression after they realize they were just called an offensive little twunt without the good sense given bacteria. It's truly a priceless moment in human interaction, and one I get to experience far too little these days.

I also got to enrich N's vocabulary this weekend. I was working on recovering my old lightning damaged system. Windows XP does not like it when you change a bunch of hardware at one time. She learned all kinds of new phrases as I vigorously lectured my electronic components about the moral and physical shortcomings each possessed. Loudly, at times. I finally gave on up on trying to recover my old XP installation. I'll be installing a clean copy on a new hard drive and using the old hard drive just to recover until I can get everything sorted out. Then I'll wipe it and put Ubuntu on it.

Tecmology

New computers have arrived. I am finally able to stop using my work laptop for everything, which is really quite annoying. J has a shiny new laptop and I have a honking great desktop. I tend to treat computers much like I treat engines: I want as much horsepower as I can afford. This leads me to desktops, because the equivalent laptop usually costs you about 2 to 3 times as much money.

N is the great loser in the YPS technology sweepstakes, since all she got was a replacement laptop docking station. A new TV will be forthcoming when we move, but for now she'll have to suck it up.

Lightning + Network = Bad

So, the final tally on the electronics damaged and/or destroyed by the lightning strike stands at:

DSL Modem
2 Computers
2 Televisions
Laptop Docking Station
Squeezebox
X-Box
24-Port Switch
Router
2 NAS Drives
Wireless Access Point
Pool Pump

Fun stuff. Basically, if the device was connected to the network it's toast. I am so thrilled. Oh, yeah, all the network cabling in the house is fried. It just occurred to me I haven't checked the printer. Fuck.

Whacked-out Gadgety Goodness

This is the most fabulous pocket knife ever. While I'm not a fan of the Swiss Army, being more of a Leatherman guy myself, a little tiny fold-up crossbow would be freakin' sweet. Actually, the traditional Leatherman form factor would work exceptionally well for a crossbow. Probably not for a flamethrower, though.

Keep this in mind should you ever need to send a gift my way.