12/20/2007 #
Gimmee! It's Mine!
Just in time for the Holiday season (don’t know why that particularly matters, but it seems right to say) some Native Americans are pulling out of the Union.
I guess that’s fine. However, they stole the term “critical mass” from a bunch of predominantly white German or American scientists, and in the name of these groups I request that they cease and desist. I don’t play the “same birthday as Fermi” card too often, but today merits the escalation of force.
I always imagined that if anyone were to try this we would just wheel a Howlitzer up to their border and wait until everyone cleared the area so we could run the Stars and Stripes up the flagpole. However, things are obviously touchier here than with nutjobs in Kansas or something.
12/20/2007 #
Chad?
Ocho cinco is featured in ads for GoDaddy.com. This is insane.
Not that I’m about to be a customer or anything. Cough. Cough.
12/19/2007 #
My Originality Suffers
I have a weird “dupe prescience” (otherwise known as deja vu, I suppose) regarding many of my posts recently. Like saying internally, “Hey self, you’re about to write something you’ve written before.”
Is that really prescience, then?
It’s more like foreknowing a thought itself. But is that re-thinking?
Is it a thought if it’s already known? Likely yes.
But they may not be dupes, which makes it more of a post-supposition. But not “post” as in blog post… “post” as in “after.” …Eh?
Anyway, I thought the term “prog-bluegrass” was my own, but it apparently is not. Nickel Creek helps me survive 45 minutes on the elliptical, nonetheless. And, I wrote it before I read it. So there.
“Nonetheless,” as an aside, is one of the words I feel somewhat fulfilled in a day if I manage to use properly within a steady stream of consciousness (“unscripted,” to use a television term). “Insofar” is like the Holy Grail of these types of terms.
Here’s a question for you: if you invent a term, such as “insofar,” that requires “as” to complete a proper sentence, why not just write it “insofaras?” Double plus gooder?
I remember bits of 1984 that suggested stealing the precision and variance of language would be a nice paving to the road to absolute power. This probably is sound reasoning. Although many politicians do overuse absolutes and generality, imagine if there was simply no word to permit any further elaboration or specification.
Remember the OJ trial? Where the Spanish-speaking maid had trouble distinguishing between “wristwatch” and “wall clock” because Spanish failed to distinguish between them? What a mess!
12/17/2007 #
Saudi
Hard to really comment much on this story, given how utterly repugnant it is.
Perhaps President Bush can look into these men and get a sense of their souls. Seems to work well with human rights violators.
12/17/2007 #
Recovering the Satellites
As a committed Counting Crows fan, I have trouble picking second-favorites (August and Everything After is an uncontested favorite). This morning I put safety first and had a ten minute rock concert in my rent car as the windows defrosted. The source material was Recovering the Satellites, which doesn’t make a lot of sense in the overall corpus of the Counting Crows’ library.
What you basically have here is a previously folky, morose, introverted band coming out with something very much in-your-face light alternative. Hard to place it, but something certainly less peppy than Blues Traveler, but less grungy than Pearl Jam. Not as poppy as Matchbox 20. I give up…
The best way to put it is that Satellites is more fun than August, but perhaps just not as good. It makes for good road music, aside from the constant mood changes.
12/17/2007 #
Quote of the Day
Richard, you are wrong. You said very clearly in your interview that the ports tree contains non-free software. It does not. It is just a scaffold of Makefiles containing URLs, and an occasional patch here or there. You are just plain wrong. And you are not enough of a man to admit that you are wrong. I may be unfriendly at times, but you are a power-misusing hypocritical liar who attacks projects that try harder than any others to only make free software available. Shame on you.
- Theo De Raadt, to Richard Stallman
Context: This is in-fighting within the open source world. Stallman accused OpenBSD of packaging non-free software (which they quite obviously didn’t do). Theo wrote back to call him out on the carpet.
12/14/2007 #
Terminology
The Slashdot level of user tends to heckle the use of “the Internet is down” or “my Internet is down” as being ignorant of the mechanisms through which all this magic works. Yes, one can avoid this situation by using something to the effect of “my uplink is down” (despite the linguistic dido involved), or “my internet connection is down.”
Personally, I don’t have a big problem with the use of the “my Internet is down.” “The Internet is down” goes a bit too far for my taste.
I think being this pedantic is precarious. Consider the example:
“My hot water is down.”
“No, idiot. It’s your hot water HEATER that is down.”
The problem here is that it may not be your water heater. It may, in fact, be the natural gas line, or some problem with piping (valves, faucets, etc.). It could be that someone else is using the hot water elsewhere in the building. But now you’ve created a monster, as everyone might start blaming their hot water heater in order to appear competent and in-the-know.
Selecting terminology based on the user’s perspective (even with concepts such as a sunrise), serves the language and the people well enough to permit some standing problems with precision.
Terminology-wise, we have seen a similar situation with the whole computer case debacle. We had people calling their “boxen” (to be 1337 about it) “hard drives,” which is hard-pressed not to rankle the disposition of the hardware guy.
As an aside, perhaps this became prevalent due to the hard drive activity light being the only continuously-operational varying indicator on the front face of a computer?
Anyway, I have noticed a trend of referring to the “box” as a “CPU,” which – to me – is more justifiable due to the heaping stack of informative “What is a computer?” diagrams out there that essentially promote this behavior. While technically incorrect, it won’t make me shift in my seat as badly because, at a “thar she blows” arms-length vantage point, the “box” is the unit of central processing.
If you run servers or use a KVM switch at any time, you quickly realize that a computer doesn’t really include a monitor or input devices. These, all together, might best be called a “desktop computer kit.” It’s basically safe to call a computer a “computer,” unless you run into scope ambiguity.
This scope ambiguity leads me to conclude that hobbyists should call computer cases and their accompanying contents “boxes” (“boxen,” despite my jest, is tired at this point), and IT/corporate types should call them “machines.” Neutral people should match their terminology to their audience on a best-fit basis.
Calling a computer a “box” is affectionate down-talk, somewhat like calling a grown cat a “kitty.” “Machine” invokes exactly what it should: is a mouse a machine? Is an LCD a machine? Not really.
As an additional aside, I’ve noticed something watching a certain set of people shop for computers at big box retailers. This set is the group of people just above the “how much does one of those computer things cost?” level of competence. They measure the entire capability of the system in gigabytes of hard drive space. This is funny because, aside from a new digital camcorder person, the capability to produce large quantities of data is a function of competence, for low values of competence.
Nowadays, I think low-end computers should be rated on the basis of how much crapware they “feature” on first boot. The ability to buy oneself out of said crapware would be a great upgrade. Heck, you could even feature some sort of activation code that determines what gets installed via script on first boot.
Anyway, the reason for all this blathering is that the Internet is down here (ha!) and it got me thinking. This is a stunningly quiet day at work, and I’m fairly ahead on things. It’s a good chance to take things slow and think about projects that can get done before the end of next week.
[This post was composed in MS Word, but I used 10pt Tahoma to make it feel cooler.]
12/13/2007 #
Early Errors
When I first got my desktop account for work, I was clicking through various things (all those “Are you sure?” things that only come up once when you’re breaking in a new web browser). Not remembering the IE version of this rigor very well, I accidently clicked through an option, “Do you want to view this media in the media side pane?” or whatever. In other words, “Would you like us to put Windows Media Player in a stamp-sized inset of an MSN music advertisement whenever you watch a video?”
The really fun part is that the standard IE option for this is disabled based on my user security policy.
So, there’s this little button I found to get the thing back in Media Player, but it’s a hassle and a bit of an embarassment.
Anyway, things are going remarkably well, given the level of hustle and bustle around here at work.