Wisdom or Folly?
A thought just came to mind:
The best thing you can do with a man who drills holes in boats is to find him his own boat.
A thought just came to mind:
The best thing you can do with a man who drills holes in boats is to find him his own boat.
“That statement is an embarrassment. That is a hostage statement. That’s a mob of al-Qaeda sympathizers in Egypt, forcing the United States make a statement essentially of apology, on 9⁄11 of all days, for something we’re not responsible. I would issue a statement saying to the mob, ‘go to hell.’ The way America works, the way democracy works is that everybody has a right to express themselves. We don’t police our speech. And you ought to apologize to the United States for storming the embassy and the violation of the ultimate sacred principle of democracy, which is protecting embassies and missions abroad. For the U.S. to essentially issue a veiled apology, I think is disgraceful.”
- Charles Krauthammer
I finally had my fill of my random “force close” events in Gingerbread on my Samsung. Force close when unplugging from a wall charger, force close sometimes when plugging and unplugging from a computer, browser crashes on image-heavy sites, pull-battery-to-revive freezes coming off of the lockscreen, camera taking three seconds to shoot the picture after pressing the button.
Complete nonsense. Much of this was brought about when I upgraded from Froyo to Gingerbread, but unfortunately this upgrade also fixed several issues that I was happy to have behind me.
Throwing caution to the wind from a warranty standpoint, I started playing around with rooting my phone. I rooted easily and successfully, only to discover that it really didn’t get me where I wanted to go. I could pay $4 for Titanium Backup and “freeze” the “Tethering Manager” system app to prevent - hopefully - the force closes when messing with anything USB.
But it certainly wasn’t going to fix my latency/stability issues and didn’t open up the treasure trove of options I had hoped.
So I started down the process of flashing my ROM. I loaded on a “flashing kernel,” booted into recovery mode, and then had some serious trouble flashing a ROM. Turned out the ROM I had selected wasn’t actually meant to be installed that way. This wouldn’t have been a huge deal except that the kernel I flashed didn’t allow the phone to boot normally.
The biggest and dumbest risk I took was at this moment, since I switched over to having the #1 priority to get my phone to boot to its existing ROM. I should have either persisted in getting a third party ROM in place, or tried to flash back to stock (an image of the Android 2.1 that came with the phone originally). Instead, I tried flashing another flashing kernel that was actually a bit worse.
I then learned that as long as you can get to “Download Mode” using a special button pressing combination during boot, you can always fix the phone. I put my phone into download mode and flashed back to 2.1 stock. Then, I upgraded back to Gingerbread the standard way, then flashed a different and better flashing kernel, then flashed CyanogenMod 9 (Ice Cream Sandwich) with no issues.
It is fantastic. It’s like I have a new phone. Faster, prettier, more features, less bugs. Even the battery is hanging in there, probably doing as well as stock.
From all the reading I did during the inoperable “soft brick” stage of my journey, I discovered that it’s hard for people to remember how weird it all is coming for the first time from stock to something different. Also, the ability to go back to stock with literally one click should be emphasized (assuming it’s possible for that specific phone), as should be the fairly standard reality that some stages in the process will leave your phone practically inoperable until the next step is reached, or you give up and flash back to stock.
It’s also very hard to separate device-specific instructions from distribution-specific instructions. In many cases they conflict. For example, Samsung phones do not have the ability to install the flashing kernel from an app on the phone, like the Nexus does, for example. This makes things really confusing.
But, it was totally worth the risk (I was ready to pay to replace the phone rather than put up with its stock quirks), and I’m having fun tweaking the new system now. It’s really great to have no AT&T apps installed on the phone.
Taylor Swift - We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together:
Oooh we called it off again last night
But Oooh, this time I’m telling you, I’m telling you
We are never ever ever getting back together
We are never ever ever getting back together
You go talk to your friends talk
To my friends talk to me
But we are never ever ever ever getting back together
Peter Bradley Adams - Under My Skin:
And if I say no, she kisses the scar on my chin
And before I can speak, we’re dancing again
We turn, and spin right out of control
Wherever she goes, she carries a smile in her hand
Like a thief, she can steal any grin that she can
And I watch, I wait, to see her again
For the non-country listeners, there’s a new song called “Pontoon” that is pretty much as awful as it gets for Nashville-style summer anthem output. I was wondering how long it would manage to gasp and wheeze on the radio, only to find out that it hit #1 a while back. I read through YouTube comments and Amazon reviews, and people are just falling all over themselves loving it. Shocking.
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift releases something that finally has no perceptible country influence, but it still gets serious play on the country stations. I’m fine with it living on 96.5, but she’s really stretching her ability to stay “crossover” with some of this stuff. I’m normally a defender of hers, but I can’t defend this kind of claptrap.
While not specifically a summer anthem, this summertime gem from last year far exceeds this year’s slate, although the video does take the song in a cheaty direction that wasn’t really prescribed by the songwriting:
While I know that in real life the two kissers in the video are married (clever work there), it always seemed to me that there’s an invisible back story that in-character Josh Abbott is too tied up in his music to notice the obvious melting adulterous passion going on with his in-character girl. Anyway.
In other irritating music “news,” MGMT apparently refers to themselves as “musical terrorists.” Which I suppose would make me a “dance terrorist,” if terrorism now means being bad at something people want you to do anyway. They just hate our freedom, you see.
I for one am taking my bag of cookies and listening to Josh Abbott strum while his marriage burns, and to Peter Bradley Adams do pop-folk right. Humbug.
For a while I almost felt a sense of sick urgency to find a different place to live. Then, when I found a place or two I kind of liked, I started feeling more at peace with where we are, at least for a little while longer.
Then I have this song on that I just bought a while back, and it’s kind of funny how the lyrics go:
If I wander ‘til I die
May I know whose hand I’m in
If my home I’ll never find
And let me live again.
I think the absence of what I perceived as good choices was bothering me more than our present arrangements.
My supervisor had never heard the phrase “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.” Somebody needs to watch Spaceballs. A surprising many of my favorite movie references are from that movie, including my most favorite, “Even in the future nothing works.”
This has been a pretty bad week, with a really bad yesterday, that is about to come to a quiet and probably pleasant end.
My forehead muscles are twitching involuntarily today. Afraid someone will interpret it as incredulity.
Should have used this for Clarity. It’s based on the library I use for my Python web apps.
Watching all the G4S Security nonsense going on in the London Olympics, it’s kind of cathartic given a weird little experience I had in Turkey. We were mandated to switch to G4S security due to a global sourcing initiative, or some buzzword like that. A dispute broke out between the local person responsible for securing the Turkish contract and the G4S sales rep. I was pulled in to be an arbitrator, reviewing old e-mails and essentially fact-checking both sides as a neutral observer.
I reviewed everything in detail and reconstructed their cost models, issuing a finding somewhere in the middle ground between the two sides. I definitely can’t say I liked the company after what I saw, but it was - in the end - more of a minor personality clash than a real blowup. Kind of amusing I got pulled into things like that. That would never happen here.