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I wouldn’t blast this podcast at work, but it’s well worth a humorous listen.
I wouldn’t blast this podcast at work, but it’s well worth a humorous listen.
I have finally fixed my blasted foreign credit card usage issue. I set up a proxy server on joey that I can route my network connection through from here. The credit card authentication sees the purchase as being from Dallas (where the Linode server farm is located), so the charges are going through fine now.
I rigged the proxy server to only start up manually when I need it, so no security concerns.
Today is pretty soft on work, so I had a chance to think over and diagram something about this office’s setup that has been bugging me for a long while.
We have a big spiral staircase that winds up the middle of the building. This staircase is right-handed in the physics/mathematics sense, meaning when viewed downward from the roof of the building, people ascending the staircase would appear to be traveling counter-clockwise.
This is fine for Great Britain, but in a right-side driving country this means people ascending the stairs take the outside segment of the spiral. Since spiral staircases have an inevitably fan-shaped pattern to the stairs, people walking up the stairs have much better footing (wider footfalls) than those descending.
I think walking down a staircase is a lot more dangerous than walking up, since falling forward is a particularly bad thing when descending.
This should really be considered when designing buildings. Just like you don’t really think of which way you’re winding down one of those helix-shaped parking garage ramps, people really wouldn’t notice which way their rotation vector is pointing. They might just subtly notice it feels more secure when they’re going down the stairs.
Having worked my way through just about every SNES RPG of note to me, I have taken on the task of beating all four Dragon Warrior games for the original NES. I managed to beat the first one this weekend. That game is the definition of tedious, but there’s still some subtle charm to it. I need to finish off the Playstation 2 DW game sometime as well.
Let’s see, to list the SNES games I can remember I’ve played since Turkey: Secret of Mana (together with Kristin, why don’t they make more co-op games?), Final Fantasy 2, Final Fantasy 3, Seiken Densetsu, Breath of Fire, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, and Inindo: Way of the Ninja. The time required for each was significantly reduced by the fabulous capability of emulators to speed up games while grinding for levels. I knocked out Earthbound in a week or so thanks to this benefit. And that’s a seriously big game.
Dragon Warrior I is a much better game sped up. I turned the speed down to normal after narrowly defeating the Dragonlord. It felt like I was swimming in pancake syrup.
Dragon Warrior II seems pretty bad. I never got too far with it before (we only ever rented it), but you basically have a magic-free tank with a pansy warrior-cleric hybrid and a basically pathetically hopeless pure black mage girl who can’t even hold a leather shield. Even sped up to 200 fps (over 3 times the natural speed of 60fps) it’s even more tedious than Dragon Warrior I, because now you have the overhead of directing multiple attacks and trying to keep your flunkies alive long enough to level them out of their miserable starting state.
And, in classical Enix style, if something dies or runs away between scheduling the attack or spell and executing it, you waste the round. It also lets you cast unfunctional spells without warning. I think by DW IV, at latest, these are largely corrected to the vast benefit of the game experience. Not nearly as much as the infamous “wha ha ha” of the Adventures of Link (Zelda 2) NES game, but the archaic “Thou art dead.” stings a little more than a standard RPG death.
Knocking out DW II (hopefully quickly, as it seems like a small game) opens the way to DW III, which I have also never gotten very far with. It introduces an evolving class system a la Neverwinter Nights that reportedly produces a really awesome and somewhat adaptive game experience. I’m excited to get started with that.
DW IV (one of my all-time favorite games) abandons the multi-class system but replaces it with a ton of characters who ride around with you in a wagon, ship, and hot air balloon. Very Final Fantasy-esque. You also get to develop these characters in four pre-chapters before entering the main storyline. Seriously maybe the best RPG for NES. This includes getting to be a shopkeeper for a while, as much as you want… wait until I get my 200 fps pointed that way!
It might also be nice to play Final Fantasy 1 for the NES while I’m bashing my way through difficult primitive games. I could never get past buying magic, but it would be fun to round out that collection.
No commentary here, just a very good article.
The tech world of today is somewhat locked in a struggle of ideal versus available. And, “available” tends to illustrate the limiting factor of some awful, inefficient, regulated monopoly/oligopoly like the cellular phone industry.
I could bang the cell phone drum all day to illustrate this. People are employing a fairly sophisticated wireless personal area network technology (Bluetooth) to very slowly transfer files and music between computer and cellphone, principally because USB cables for phones run something like $20 for the proprietary connector and a flimsy stack of software, probably on one of those annoying little CDs that jam a MacBook if you feed them into the drive.
People expend a lot of effort and money to convert good things into bad things to make these various piles of locked-in crap work on a semi-acceptable basis. This product should not exist, for example. This converts a perfectly good 802.11 wireless internet connection into a cruddy 3G signal that allows an AT&T phone to have voice service in a poorly-covered area.
This is something like rigging up a distillery to extract the water out of a bottle of Coca Cola to feed into a double-boiler that produces a sugar syrup used to make some kind of dangerous, methanol-laden bathtub RC Cola. Which you then pour onto your flower garden to water your plants.
If there was justice and reason in the world, a cell phone wouldn’t particularly care what network it was using (be it a nice 802.11 network or a so-so 3G network). It would just fire up Voice Over IP and make the call, at some fine-tuned quality depending on the connection quality. The concept of “voice” and “data” is but an illusion in the digital world, and this is more and more true as we go. This is coming, but the cell industry is fighting it all the way. Because that luxury-priced $30 “unlimited” data plan add-on of yours will suddenly become a complete replacement for the $100 wireless bill.
A more flippant example might be those ridiculous $30 “iCable”-type things they sell at Best Buy (right next to the Monster Cable 1 Jigawatt surge protectors) to patch your audio to your car in style (meaning, color-matching iPod-white cabling). The same cable can be bought at a more reasonable 200% markup at RadioShack for a mere $5, if you can deal with the pedestrian home stereo black styling.
It’s amazing to think about those cassette form-factor audio line-out adapters that were so popular when the Discman models were first coming out. Well, at least once they made the anti-skip models. These things were a work of art (they didn’t really work all that well… but still). They converted a headphone-out signal into whatever magnetic characteristic a tape deck picks up off an audio tape, which then fed into the car stereo so you could get the Discman output into the car speakers.
This was an early example of modern technological asymmetry. It was so expensive to install a CD player into a car that it was cheaper to buy a portable player, a cigarette lighter power adapter, and one of these venerable tape deck adapters… and monkey them all together.
Fast forward to now, where Ford, and now everybody else, is selling cars based on having a line-in 1⁄8” jack on the front of the car radio. This is the Russian’s pencil to NASA’s zero-gravity pen. The engineer who devised that elegant little tape adapter could have saved all that time if they just put a jack on the front of the radios. And, in many cases, radios (especially aftermarket ones) have this input capability, but on the back side of the unit. All those years…
Of course, why provide a jack that makes the pricey CD player upgrade less relevant? Oligopoly strikes again. It took the iPod to finally wipe out this resistance.
Users are employing all this new technology against the traditionally locked-in enablers of that technology. This may be why “disruptive” is becoming such a buzzword in research and product promotion.
Android is getting ready to obsolete traditional wireless voice calling, search engines obsoleted desk-set encyclopedias, Facebook obsoleted the phone book, and Twitter obsoleted the conventional stalker.
What will happen to the whining giants? I think mainly they will slowly be taken over by the government, stripped of their customer-facing profit motives, and become cost-plus infrastructure maintainers. In other words, AT&T will become something like a public utilities company.
The news seems remarkably not so focused on the health care bill today or yesterday. I thought this article was a nice chunk of real journalism. I appreciated the perspective.
I know I’m not supposed to like the bill. I don’t like the part where the government forces you to buy insurance in the private market for something you can’t help (I can avoid being forced to buy liability car insurance by not owning a car, but this is something I have to do because I am a citizen).
But, the basic principle of medical care is to treat the sick and do no harm. The sick will be treated, insurance or not. If they’re not treated, we have a lot more problems in our society than insurance reform.
Many people can’t buy reasonable insurance in the open market now because of the classical moral hazard: among the pool of uninsured, the ones looking for insurance are the ones who expect to need it.
If you force everyone to buy insurance, the moral hazard breaks down somewhat. You probably still could see that the pool of currently uninsured is on average in worse shape than the currently insured. I assume we have more sick people than healthy college students skipping out on the extra expense.
The fortunate chunk of the population has nice insurance subsized by their employers in a tax-advantaged way. The subsidy makes the offer very attractive to the employees, so you have a high purchase percentage inside a relatively large pool of risk. This is the insurer’s dream. They make good money here.
Basically, the way I see it, this bill kind of allows the government to pretend it’s employing everybody not already in a nice risk pool. The government subsidizes, regulates, or coerces the premium costs down to attractive levels on the behalf of these people.
The anti-liberty aspect is that instead of relying on people’s good sense and attractive economics, the government then puts a big penalty-shooting gun to everybody’s head and says “buy.” But is this a necessary and proper violation of rights?
It may be. Insurance is costly to the individual, but uninsuredness is incredibly costly to society.
While you can administer it some places, I think a full-public option would be a disaster in the States. We need the private sector insurers to keep the private sector hospitals in check. We need Medicare to fight hard to cut down the bad behavior in that area, as well.
This may be the best American solution, at least in principle. If insurers are already getting ready to raise premiums, the free market is still alive. Now let’s see how good the government is at working out an option for those who have not fared so well in the past.
A thought: if the government reinstitutes the draft for some reason, it’s in some ways an affront to force people to go and join the military. But it’s for a reason. If there is a strong reason to force people to stop dirt-bagging and buy insurance even if they don’t think they need it, maybe it needs to be done. Because I’ll tell you what, right now these folks’ insurance is bankruptcy court.
Taxing the fortunate is the other leg on this table. So it goes. In my view we should seek to reduce costs elsewhere. This one is important.
Plus, if you need an upside, this should raise the value of municipal bonds, allowing local governments to borrow more cheaply to improve infrastructure and schools. Just a little sunshine to your high taxes day.
To follow up on my travails with iTunes, I probably should have used the Mac, but I dislike iTunes so much I wanted to keep the purchases sandboxed away from the Mac’s main library of unencumbered and reasonably-sized mp3 files. So, I’m paying dearly for my neuroses.
What’s my workflow? It’s painful. Downloads flow into a folder outside of My Music. Unfortunately, Windows iTunes does not allow its library file to also be located outside My Music, so I still have to delete the iTunes folder each time I close the program despite my caution in tuning the music directory placement.
Anyway, the m4a files are ungodly huge at this point (maybe to encourage sale of larger-capacity iPods to those without interest in video?), so I am doubly motivated to get them into classic 128k mp3.
I wrote a Python script that traverses the current directory identifying m4a files and sending them to ffmpeg for conversion to mp3. Once this is finished, I run the beautiful mp3tag software to clean everything up. It can use several album information databases (most notably freedb and MusicBrainz), and most importantly it’s the only id3 editor I can find that consistently embeds album art in a Walkman-friendly format.
I then use the new and impressive Sony “Content Transfer” application, which should be renamed the Sony “Sorry for Screwing You with Bad Audio Software and Infrastructure for Ten Years, and Especially for ATRAC, Boy We Really Screwed the Pooch On That One, So Anyway This One Works and Doesn’t Lock You Into Anything Or Take Over Your System” software.
I just found this tool today, and it removes all the apparent bugs in the “drag-and-drop” method of loading content (which was used in the marketing literature for the Walkman as a major selling point). In the final result, I can finally now see the release year of my songs, which sounds trivial but has some nice benefits in the Walkman’s software.
I copy my new mp3 versions over to my actual My Music folder and back up to an external hard drive that acts as the authoritative seed for any computer that needs music loaded.
This is painstaking, but, honestly, the tag and file naming quality in iTunes is questionable at times, and this gives me the chance to intervene when necessary and get rid of things like truncated names and those goofy [Bonus Tracks]-type appendages.
In other news, Nickel Creek’s This Side is a surprising but really fun album. Less bluegrass, a little heavier mix toward vocals (Nickel Creek had a really mellowed under-mix of the lead vocals). I hope they start up again, but I really respect the decision to suspend operations when it feels laborious. As close as they are (two of the three are siblings), it’s good to press pause rather than stop.
It’s funny to note the vocal mixing as a standout characteristic, since the side project Mutual Admiration Society was so over-mixed toward vocals you couldn’t even pick up the instruments at times. Of course, the lead singer for Toad the Wet Sprocket has a much “louder” voice than these guys.
If you ever get an iTunes gift card whose gummy gray scratch-off material has fossilized, loosen it up with a coin and then take some water to it before rubbing it firmly with your thumb. It won’t damage the card, and you have a better chance of seeing the numbers than if you go after it hardcore with a coin and scratch all the way through the top layer of the card’s surface. At least using a 50 kuruş coin, I can’t speak for quarters.
Having resurrected any troubled cards, I’m proud to say I have completed my Nickel Creek collection and vastly expanded my Alison Krauss and Union Station corpus.
iTunes is nice and all, but I think in the future I’m going to request Amazon MP3 credit instead. It’s ridiculous to have to download a 100 MB file for a frigging media player, forcing the installation of Quicktime and the satanic Apple Update (which can offer to “update” software you don’t have on your computer; honestly, how many people really want Safari on a Windows computer when Chrome runs off the same renderer?).
Bonjour is also now a forced installation, adding Apple networking sharing services to the vast array of things in that 100 MB that I wish I didn’t have. Plus, my poor netbook is gasping for air just keeping the store open and downloading. Chrome (not exactly known for being a resource hog or heavyweight) was struggling to load my website thumbnails on the startup page concurrently with an idling iTunes. Inexcusable.
Plus, as soon as I buy the songs I just convert them to mp3 with ffmpeg, tag them manually, embed album art manually, and merge them into my outside-iTunes collection. So, after all, I’m not exactly pitching my tent in the reality distortion field.
I just implemented a formatting language that turns:
[AGO]+20;[VP97]<:100>%10;[VP97]<100:200>%20;[VP97]<200:>%30
into:
For all diesel volumes, apply a 20 TL/m3 rebate
For all V-Power volumes, apply a 10% discount to all volumes up to 100 m3, a 20% discount to volumes between 100 m3 and 200 m3, and a 30% discount to volumes in excess of 200 m3
I will regret this one day.