fractalnavel : dear diary

attempted selficide

fractalnavel — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:00:27 GMT

so i'm reading around the 'net, innocently, i might add (since all such anecdotal events are required to have occurred innocently), and i run into the following:

...

"The way to stop this collective madness is, of course, to get a committee on that and get a decent standard together. No, wait . . . . you wanted sane.

[kills self]

"The last time we did that we got XML, and no, the pain has not ended. Indeed, I would echo your whole comment, but change “C” to “XML” and poise a knife over my wrist."

...

[dadhacker, 2009.11.17]

NOOoooooo!!! SELF!! he killed self!

i am so depressed.

and here self was, just a minute ago, getting another cup of coffee, and ...

wait a minute - there's self now. grinning as stupidly as usual. well, ok - laughing at me.

self says that everyone has a self - even self has a self. ad infinitum, apparently. more likely, ad nauseum. so i guess it's ok to "kill self", since there are back-up selfs all the way down.

kill self! kill self! kill self!

self just laughs at me. he's holding a knife now...

hitting the spot

fractalnavel — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:28:24 GMT

Look round our world; behold the chain of love.
Confirming all below and all above,
See plastic nature working to this end,
The single atoms each to other tend,
Attract, attracted to, the next in place
Form'd and impell'd its neighbor to embrace.
See matter next, with various life imbued
Press to one center still, the gen'ral good.
See dying vegetables life sustain,
See life dissolving vegetate again;
All forms that perish other forms supply,
(By turns we catch the vital breath and die)
Like bubbles on the sea of matter born,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return.
Nothing is foreign; parts relate to whole;
One all-extending all-preserving soul
Connects each being, greatest with the least;
Made beast in aid of man and man of beast;
All serv'd, all serving: nothing stands alone;
The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.

—Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

(via "The Gripping Hand")

that excerpt fits pretty well, i think. that's all that was in the book; the final text. now i'm thinking i should probably read the whole poem. but i haven't been in that sort of reading mood/mode in a very long time.

ah well; time to finish my coffee and perform some (more) vegetation dissolving in the backyard.

moving right along

fractalnavel — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:57:43 GMT

what the hell happened to ...

... 'summer' ? not just this one, but the season of 'hot'. and what happened to 'Summer', in a personal or cultural sense ? aging is part of it. global realities are also.
... google app engine: maybe they felt that cutting free quotas by 90% earlier this summer wasn't generating enough revenue. recently there was a datastore operation 'anomaly' that lasted twenty-two hours, at the beginning of which the cpu costs associated with certain common data api calls more than tripled. and it has remained that way, without explanation, despite numerous inquiries by gae developers.

gave up on yet another forum. most people don't seem to really want help, they're there for some other reason. a lot of people seem to need help, though. i am not your online therapist. anyway, one to go. and maybe the game one, too.

i was reading a story of poul anderson's the other day in a largely forgettable and forgotten scifi anthology i found at the internet archive. It (the anthology) is still decent reading, containing a few classics, and now carries a bit of historical interest as well, in terms of its contemporary contextual cultural referents.

anderson's story "the man who came early" is about a modern u.s. soldier stationed in reykjavic who is mysteriously thrown 1000 years into the past. the story proceeds from the perspective of the icelandic chieftain that finds him. vintage anderson work, in the historical detail, mood and characterization.

and it's - depressing. the soldier's modern skills, even those he thought were archaic, are useless. not too long ago i was reading a thread on some forum somewhere about "what would you do if you were thrown a thousand years into the past". and in among the usual silliness, there were a number of folk who realized, yes, most modern humans would be largely useless in that situation, and they would be doing well if they could just keep their mouths shut, avoid getting immediately killed, and survive through performing hard labor in exchange for the charity of necessities provided by a contemporary inhabitant. there may be some extraordinary individuals who could thrive in that context; seems doubtful.

and no, my thoughts don't stop there. but this post does.

no middle ground

fractalnavel — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:43:26 GMT

beginning without ending is neither
ending without beginning is death
after the beginning the void is mere curiosity
before the ending it is infinite unknown

left over garlic bread, toasted & buttered, fresh coffee.
couple hundred pounds of old magazines - gone. more to go.
yahoo: replaced nyt with washington post.
ninety days without tv.
old unread books are that way for a reason.
i am my own bot.

aol: well, at least the _lawyers_ aren't going hungry ...

fractalnavel — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:20:00 GMT

a couple of years ago i noticed aol appending advertising to my email, and i sent them a note, and got back nonsense.

now, we get more nonsense in the form of what any reasonable person would have to assume is a pathetic joke - a class action lawsuit over that practice. and here's how the proposed settlement works out:

"... AOL has agreed to pay up to $250,000 in fees and costs, in addition to the $103,000 in charitable donations, and the costs of administering the Settlement, including the notice process. ..."

are you fucking kidding me ?! and it gets better:

"... The Settlement provides that all current AOL Members will be provided e-mail notice of the footers and their ability to discontinue the footers via AOL Keyword: Footer and http://footer.aol.com, and that, if AOL continues to append footers to its Members’ e-mails, such notice will be provided both to all new customers upon their registration of an AOL account and to all current AOL Members on a regular, periodic basis (every six months for two years). ..."

so here's the plan: aol can continue this practice - as long as they spam us even more !

you just know these jackasses are having a good laugh over this one. this shit isn't even pocket change to them.

i went to fight a speeding ticket once. the same sort of mindtwisting bullshit ensued. the cop said i was doing 25 in a 15 zone, for ten over the limit. i said no, the limit was 25 there. the judge said well then, you must have been doing 35, since the cop said ten over. i shut up & stood there. **

assholes.

------------------

** or did the cop say 35 in a 25, i said i was going 25, and the judge said then the speed limit was 15. whatever it was, my head swam as reality shifted.

i made coffee today !!

fractalnavel — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:44:00 GMT

and if you think that's trivial, you clearly hadn't seen my kitchen recently. all it took was a few hours of cleaning sinks, stove tops, counters, dishes, microwave, and stuff, and things, ... so now there's a (mostly) clear floor, and clear counters. still a lot more to do here. step by step, inch by inch ...

motivation ? i got a bag of white castle coffee on my last trip there. dammit, i wanted coffee, and i was going to have coffee - even if it meant cleaning ;-)

dead & dysfunctional thing update rambling:

i found the critter in the garage. the smell had stopped a week or so ago. poor little chipmunk. i need to put a critter door in the garage so any inadvertent captives have a way out. that, or make sure there's always several days supply of water, & perhaps food. i mean, put yourself in the trapped critter's place. jesus.

new router: the expedient thing to do was to cancel the "home wireless networking" package i had subscribed to, and just get the plain ol' cable modem from the store, since otherwise i'd have had to wait for a delivery - they don't stock the one that i had. it was actually very convenient - all in one modem / router / wireless access point. the isp would upgrade the firmware remotely every now & then, which was interesting, because my original 802.11b turned into .11g at some point.

now, i wasn't thinking this thing through. for some reason when i went to get the modem, i thought it would be like my old one, only no wireless - i.e., it would come with firewall & router. and then when i picked up the "wireless router" across the way, i thought it was only going to be a wireless access point. lucky for braindead me, those two mistakes cancelled out nicely. the modem is a plain old modem, and the router is firewall plus five port switch plus wireless (linksys wrt160n, for the geek-curious). which actually put me a bit ahead of the game, as i could retire the plain old switch i had been using.

the nice thing about the old setup was that the only unprotected line was the coax coming into the house. now, the ethernet port out of the modem is also unprotected, which is possible to inadevertently hook up to with an unprotected machine. the other thing i liked about the old device was the dummy lights - more informative than the net total of what i have now. and yes, i used to look over at them quite frequently; it's a reality check along the lines of "ok, nothing is supposed to be accessing the internet right now - so what the hell is that blinking for ?". etc.

pain in the ass reconfiguring again. i duplicated my prior network, which is more work, but this way the individual devices didn't need changing. the xo kept hooking up its wireless mesh networking to the .11n service, which was interesting, but not useful. and then there was the most pathetic hunk of shit software that i've seen in a long time, for its size: that damn auto-setup cvrap that comes with the router - over a gb of sheer uselessness.

on the bright side, i can make better use of opendns now. i still need to run my own dns server since i have a number of internal aliases in use. although - it seems that could be done on the router... hmm.

when i got the orginal "home wireless network" package, they also provided a .11b usb & pci card. i never noticed, but i guess those were outright purchases, since apparently they weren't recorded as leased equipment or anything. not that those things are all that useful now, but in case i (ever) have visitors with laptops & no wireless, those could come in handy.

oh, what else:

was surfing around in the scifi stuff, landed on scalzi's site for a while. remember katrina ? yeah, how soon we forget. well, there was a set of long comment threads on "being poor is ...", with a number of interesting links to other - opinions. something to be absorbed. and more personal motivation.

slowly weaning myself from the last couple of tech forums; these i've been frequenting since may. i had already called it quits on a couple of others that i had hung around on for quite some time. trying to put this summer's project(s?) on auto / unattended mode. this will leave me with one ocassional recreational forum, which i enjoy, actually.

mmm, coffee - second cup ;-)

my other brain is in the shop

fractalnavel — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:37:43 GMT

been running across some really good scifi short stories & related items in online collections lately, thought I'd pass on a few:

they're made out of meat - terry bisson: classic, apparently; pretty straightforward. fermi's paradox solved - one way.
the singularity - t. bisson: (essay) what i've been saying for years - hey, people - it's all over ! and the bit about collective infinite regress navel gazing as well (of course).
a canticle - t. bisson: (story background) bisson's comments on the completion of miller's "canticle" sequel. whets one's appetite, all right.
tva baby - t. bisson: holy cvrap. surreal violence, or violent surrealism ? your choice. personally, i think the whole thing is in his head. or mine.
the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away - cory doctorow: doctorow's themes seem to stay consistent. this has echoes of all kinds of classics. very nice, a few plot & dialog inconsistencies, though. computer style geek ? this one will resonate.
understand - ted chiang: mind blowing. pun? what pun? i can remember a story with a similar theme but completely different context; lost in the mists of memory, ironically. got a few sigma under your hat ? then you'll "get" this.
we haven’t got there yet - harry turtledove: if you like theater & especially shakespeare, you'll love this. very high quality work. well, of course, look who's done writing.
--and he built a crooked house - robert heinlein: an old crusty classic from an old crusty classic.

many more here (where those came from):

the old scifi.com shorts collection - classics & originals, from the internet archive's wayback machine. there are apparently more than is listed; the heinlein one above, from this site, doesn't show up here.
tor.com stories online - i was surprised to run into these, on a publisher's site. some (most?) have audio available.
infinity plus - huge collection of authors & stories.
and don't forget 365 tomorrows - daily scifi short shorts for several years now, has outdone itself.

electronics? _what_ electronics?

fractalnavel — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:21:35 GMT

from: the depths of the dust bunny graveyard in the land of dysfunctional devices
to: perhaps not-so-interested parties
via: dial-up (woohoo! we're blazin' now!)
subject: update on internal landscaping; circle of life; and, wtf?

message follows.

not sure what's with roadrunner lately. for the last several months it seems every little rainstrom drops my cable modem connection. for years this was only a rare event. then yesterday evening, after some storms passed through, same thing. the poor little modem went through it's usual frantic gyrations to call home. except this time, after about an hour of trying, poof - all lights went to black. trying power cycling, only the ethernet indicator light comes on for a few seconds, then goes away. no power light. modem is hot, so is the power supply. i'm thinking, dead supply. well, ok, there's something to be said for consistency - now everything is useless in this place - tv, self, modem, washer, dryer, ... whatever it is better not be contagious. on second thought - too late.

self has been doing a little bit better, though. removed six thirty+ gallon trash cans of beer bottles over the last week. plus two little recycle bins full. sad that they won't take the contents of the trash cans for recycling too. it would take months to get rid of all the bottles in that puny little bin. it cowered in the corner when it saw the task that lay ahead, so the trash cans and i took pity on it. when will they make recycle bins for dedicated beer drinkers / bottle hoarders ? whaddya mean, "no demand" ?

found seven mini-kegs in the rubble. those are gone now too.

the newly freed dust bunnies have been attacking my toes. i mean, perhaps they are just trying to show their gratitude for their new found liberty, providing nice, soft, gritty instant felt slippers as they tend to do, but i find this unnecessary in the summer. i have had to walk outside fairly frequently to clean my feet. glad it had rained; no telling what the neighbors would have thought had they seen the fuzzy footprints on my driveway.

anyway, back to the dead modem - remember the dead modem ? well, i called support after laughing at their online live chat feature sputter incoherently as it tried to load over a dial-up connection. the nice young lady on the phone actually seemed to know what she was doing, and - biggest surprise, come to think of it - she was a local person. either that, or they've started giving excellent american regional accent & micro-geography lessons overseas. after giving me the location of their nearest store where i could trade in the broken modem for a working one, she mentions that she was there the other day, and that the store is between a maternity shop and a victoria's secret. i found this hilarious, and she didn't get why. not really something you explain to strangers over the phone. clearly a young'un, this one. she had called my modem "old" at four years (i still think it's five), and she had not seen this type often before. her youth was not shown so much by her lack of familiarity with somewhat aged equipment (heh), but by the lack of temporal context exhibited in her comments.

continuing on through the piles just a bit, i managed to open some birthday & christmas cards & gifts from the last year or two. thank god there was nothing perishable that would have evolved into something alive. i had my trusty letter opener ready, though - just in case. oh - and thanks, everyone ;-)

speaking of life, something seems to have died in my garage, at least if one can go by smells on this sort of thing. damned if i can find it though, and that's the cleanest space here. well, whatever it is, it will eventually mummify and stop stinking. like last time...

at first i thought maybe jeep was, you know, having - issues - so i pulled out all the carpets and scrubbed those for the first time in years, then took him down to the power wash for a bit of attention: engine, interior, underbelly, everything. strange, though, how that mummified bat stuck to the middle of the radiator just won't come off, even under xxx psi of water pressure. (yeah, most vehicles get insects; jeep gets bats.)

but no, whatever the smell is still remained. i'm afraid to look too hard, though. a few weeks ago the neighbor was worried about her missing cat...

well, that's about it for now. still a lot to do. time to go pick up that new modem.

end of message.

money - goood; mistakes - baad

fractalnavel — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:50:10 GMT

so i get a slightly thick envelope in the mail from the irs. never a good sign.

or so i think. it seems i made a mistake on my return - forgot to include a "Recovery Rebate Credit". what the hell is that ? "that" is $600, according to the treasury dept. huh - ok - works for me.

but how did this happen ? i used an online tax preparer, been using the same one for years, never any problems. now, missing $600 ? shouldn't that have been done automatically ? or, if it needed my intervention, shouldn't a big red flag have been thrown to bring my attention to work that needed doing ?

eh, no biggie, since this is one of those things that the irs says it will calculate for you if you leave it alone. and sure enough, they did. and in a very timely manner too.

they also managed to calculate my penalty for late / missing quarterly estimated payments. which was the same amount i had already calculated & paid. cool. yeah, i was just not sure how much i would work last year, so i let some of that stuff slip. and i could have saved a few bucks by using an annualized income method, but that would have taken extra mailing & potential discussions with the irs - something worth a few dollars to avoid.

and in a separate envelope - the check. dang, our tax dollars at work.

potter three, redux

fractalnavel — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:51:03 GMT

well, looky here, we're going to try again:

Sun, 3 May 2009 00:00:00 UTC
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
******

[141 minutes]

PG

this after just over a year ago it was pulled from the schedule at the last minute. never did find out what had happened there. well, we'll see. at least it appears on today's schedule this time.

woof

fractalnavel — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:03:01 GMT

what's wrong with this picture:

Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2009 15:11

Subject: You have a new bill from Rumpke Consolidated Services.

You have a new e-Bill from Rumpke Consolidated Services

e-Bill Information
Due Date:	04/09/2009

two days ?! really ? hey scout, fetch this ! (insert favorite obscene gesture here)

seriously, i need a new category for this kind of shit.

watch your language

fractalnavel — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:00:55 GMT

this has been going on for far to long now. i think i'm going to loose my mind. it's having a negative affect on me.

and so on. the correct words are "too" (two o's), "lose" (one o) and "effect" (e, not a).

i don't where all of this started, but it has got to stop.

and no, those aren't alternate correct spellings. as you can see from the search links above, these issues have been brought up many times - but for some reason, a lot of people just don't get it.

there's a kind of ego-centric arrogance in internet society, especially among the younger groups, but in no way limited to them. is prior art that hard to recognize or respect ? as always, issues with "authority" are never simple.

i'm not talking about innocent typos here, although who knows, maybe that's where it starts. meanwhile, guess what people ? when you make these and other similar language errors, you come off as fucking morons. right ?

just thought you should know.

garbage in…

fractalnavel — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 07:11:12 GMT

following up on what i was saying about the first local tv channel to stop broadcasting in analog, they stopped altogether after two weeks of that dtv instructional loop. i wasn’t watching at the time, but i suspect it “faded to gray” unceremoniously – pffft!
if you’ve noticed some odd posts here that are sort of coming out of left field, those are picked up from my tumblr site using community server’s “feed mirroring” feature. i’m also picking up my (rather rare) twitter posts (ok, “tweets” – how stupid, i won’t pretend otherwise; everyone else says it with a half embarrassed giggle) in tumblr. not sure if these are also being syndicated there and subsequently ending up here as separate posts. not exactly desirable if so, but i post to twitter so rarely it won’t matter.
“late night with jimmy fallon” is improving, he might make it after all. he’s got to do something about that laugh, though. he may only be able to succeed at that job if he approaches it like a role, not as himself. does he really want to spend the next 15-20 years – or more - there ? the core – or the rest – of his career ? perhaps this will be short term.

i was hoping for hissing and popping

fractalnavel — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:55:21 GMT

From: Craig

Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 10:15

Subject: funeral for a friend...

http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/tvfuneral/

report's of analog tv's demise are premature, if only for a bit. instead, it's going to be a long slow illness, at least until june 12. and if the one local station that did quit analog is any indicator, after june 12 there will be zombie signals, alternating multi-lingual dtv how-to segments with a "blue screen of death" style static announcement display telling you that they are no longer broadcasting analog, go call these numbers for more info. i should get a picture / recording.

so why are they even on the air ? morons. if you're going to continue with that transmitter, why not just feed the normal shows ? otherwise, shut the damn thing off. it's saving no one anything. well, they are also the same station that must hire high school druggies for weekend & late night work, there have been frequent mistakes over the years, problems occurring without fixes, showing movie "reels" out of order, and so on. so I'm not surprised that other things they do make little sense.

i was hoping that the analog signal ended with some recognition. at least play the national anthem like they used to do when stations went off the air nightly back in the 70s, then a test pattern for a few minutes, then static. one of the local pbs stations still does that. not sure if it's only their analog signal; their schedule shows all night programming, but they always did have that habit of going off-air even before this dtv cvrap.

one shutdown tradition i liked was a station (in detroit) that ran a tape of the poem "high flight" being read while a fighter plane (?) was shown going ever higher into the sky. followed by the national anthem, then a test signal, of course.

one might hope for something less ignoble than a dtv transition loop, or a simple switch off - although this latter option still preserves at least some sense of dignity. perhaps just a run-through of old test signal displays. better would be an extended version of the old sign offs that they used to do. best would be some sort of special broadcast, some recognition & dignity for what has probably been the most globally transformative technology to date, internet / world wide web included. this transformative power is still being felt in areas of the world today as broadcasts get up and running ... but those are mainly satellite feeds now. somehow the relatively low-tech radio wave signals seem far more egalitarian, and certainly more accessible.

wonder what the aliens will think. you know, the hypothetical ones watching "i love lucy" re-runs light years away. the move to digital is likely to look like static to them, unless they perform sagan's "contact" routine in reverse. and what is the relative coherence of digital vs. analog signals in such a situation, in terms of snr, etc. ? so they may just think that we've blown ourselves up, turn off their sets, and move on with other pursuits.

which is what i'll be doing when all this draws to an end.

no no no no no no no

fractalnavel — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:20:44 GMT

seriously, what ?! man, got a hankerin' for a loaded pizza - and they can't do it ?! oh, bullshit - it just doesn't fit their standard process, is all.

i just wanna hit someone.