Mind you, these people are easily 70+. But i guess this is such a regular occurrence that there’s no need to feign concern.

And then this morning, two cops were in line ahead of me at starbucks made their order. One stayed traditional to the stereotype, ordering a coffee and a couple mini-donuts. The other hewed far from that stereotype, ordering a spinach and feta breakfast wrap, accompanied by a chai latte. I’d never have noted the order if it had been made by a “regular” person, but since it was a police officer (I don’t know if policewoman is a term), it caught my attention. Don’t know why.

Starbucks: Making eat healthier since 1971!

That Massachusetts drivers are called “Massholes” and the drivers in South Florida get off scot-free is baffling. Yes, the Big Dig threw I-93 into chaos for many a year, but that was an external circumstance. Only here have i ever seen (routinely) so much of the following:

* Cars in the HOV lane realizing that they need to exit right NOW, resulting in a swerve across 5 lanes of heavy traffic, sans blinkers.

* Single lane shifts without a blinker are so routine as to be normal. But try wrapping your head around the many drivers who turn on their blinker and then proceed to move to the opposite lane! Again, a common occurrence that I guarantee has happened 8 times in the time it took you to read this.

* There are also, of course, the motorcyclists with death wishes. Not realizing that the drivers of the automobiles they’re sharing the road with can not be made instantly aware of their presence, so many bikers zip by at speeds that must be in excess of 100 MPH. You’re just driving about to switch lanes and blammo! I bike goes flying past. You’re driving there thinking “fuck! I almost just killed someone”. Bikers need to realize that we aren’t out to get them, but they need to make their presense known… that means staying in view of our mirrors, not approaching at double the speed limit while hugging the edge of the lane…

* And on bikers. So many of them do this while wearing shorts, a t-shirt and no helmet. I guess it’s okay – going that speed, if you wipe out there’s no way you’re surviving anyways. Not wearing a helmet just precludes an open casket at the funeral.

* But the real douches among bikers are the guys who recognize that they’re embarking on a dangerous journey (you know, helmet on, sunglasses beneath, leather jacket, jeans, boots, etc) yet forget to take into account the fact, if they crash, they MIGHT just survive (discounting the supposition above), but that the cute girl hanging onto them wearing flip-flops, cutoffs, and a sweater, with long flowing blonde hair flapping unconstrained by something as unsexy as a helmet. To those guys, I can only say: “WTF?!? Reaaally?!?”.

That’s all. I’ve just been on I-95 a few too many times in the last few days and had to vent.

I try to avoid the road at all costs.

apathy [ap-uh-thee]
noun, plural -thies.
lack of interest in or concern for things that others find moving or exciting.

dystopia [dis-toh-pee-uh]
noun
a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

ennui [ahn-wee, ahn-wee]
noun
a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom:

farcical   [fahr-si-kuhl]
adjective
resembling farce; ludicrous; absurd.

inane   [ih-neyn]
adjective
lacking sense, significance, or ideas; silly:

misanthrope [mis-uhn-throhp, miz-]
noun
a hater of humankind.

All from Dictionary.com.

At her ISP, she had a “real” email address and a throwaway address, so i set up the same thing in her new email (which is, incendetially, hosted on Google Apps. It’s free for up to 10 email boxes).

Now, Outlook 2010 has got 4 email addresses for her to handle for the time being. Her two old POP accounts, and two new IMAP accounts. As everyone transitions to the new address, we’ll one day get rid of the old accounts, but not at this point.

After everything was set up, a major headache was encountered. Despite her new email address being set as the “default”, every time Outlook is opened, it defaults to showing her the emails in her old account. True, it’s only one or two clicks to get to the new address, but when you set an account as the default, one would think that that means that that’s the one you want to view by default, not just send from. Just chalk it up to Microsofts inability to look at things from the users perspective, just adhering to checklists (i.e. “Outlook 2010 has got POP, IMAP and Exchange support, it’s fine”).

After a bit of googling, I came upon the solution. It’s not terribly complicated, but honestly, I just don’t think that it was a subject that needed to be looked up in the first place. We set what we intended to be the default account, that setting should have carried over everywhere, not required digging through menu’s to get to.

So the link is here, in case anyone else ever needs to find it.

<<THE END>>

Kim Jong Il is the leader of North Korea. Or rather, was the leader. He died. I learned this from Twitter. This is going to be VERY interesting, as the last time NK transitioned from its Great Leader to its Dear Leader, it was a 4 year transition. They were still one of the biggest armies on earth, but as Bill Hicks once said, there’s a tremendous drop off in capability after the #1 country (US). But back then, they weren’t nuclear armed.

This time, NK is going to have to transition to a new leader, while holding a small stockpile of nuclear weapons. Who, precisely, holds the key to them? Hopefully no one on either side makes any stupid moves. We shall see.

This was just a briefing. I’d had a fascination with North Korea for sometime now, with a hope to visit next year. I’m thinking that this turn of events might not bode well for that idea. But really, there’s so many things to be worrying about now rather than that.

I’ll write more later.

Another Saturday came and went, and another piece of opinion wholly based on revisionist history or plain disregard of the facts was hit the newsstands. This time, it was Ari Fleischer, former President Bush’s spokesperson for many a year. To ask the opinion of a man who straight up lied to the American people for many a year seems a bit off kilter, but then, this is the wing of politics that has elevated Oliver North to the level of a national hero. If you’re unfamiliar, look up references to “Iran Contra” and see what that finds you.

But coming back to the topic at hand. Ari Fleisher, weighing in on the payroll tax cut extension. Before I continue any further, I just want to follow up on the “liar” reference and point you to the words of Mr. Fleischer himself, who said (regarding Saddam Hussein, Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction):

“There is already a mountain of evidence that Saddam Hussein is gathering weapons for the purpose of using them. And adding additional information is like adding a foot to Mount Everest.”

Couple that with the nonsensical stance of the Republican Party united in opposition to a tax cut, and lets turn to his current thoughts on the payroll tax cut extensions.

First off, Mr. Fleischer accurately explains the social security system as being “payroll tax deductions that the government is supposed to hold onto, separated from the rest of the budget, to fund a large portion of that workers … payments upon retirement”. He goes on to explain that “cutting the payroll tax while holding Social Security payments steady means there really is no trust fund”.

When Mr. Fleischer was a public servant, and when his boss was campaigning for his own job, it wasn’t them that fought to preserve the Social Security trust fund. It was their opponent, Al Gore, who described setting aside Social Security’s assets in a “lock box” so that its funds wouldn’t be intermingled with the general funds used to run the country. Meanwhile, Bush and Co. proposed to allow workers to divert some of their monies from the traditional SS program into the stock market instead, meaning they were in favor or reducing Social Security’s inflows while keeping the outflows the same.

In short, the explanation that Ari offers for SS and his criticism of reducing its inflows is in exact opposite to the position that his boss held onto and that he patiently attempted to explain to the public, over and over and over again.

Further, “Clearly, Mr. Obama can’t be trusted with the trust fund. As part of his re-election bid, he is so eager to win votes by handing out money that he is willing to undermine Social Security…”, whereas Mr. Fleischer’s boss, who ran at a time that our government was actually beginning to run a budget surplus, as part of his election bid was so eager to win votes by handing out tax breaks that he was willing to undermine our nation itself.

And his statement that “Unlike the 2001 bipartisan margin income-tax rate cuts, they payroll-tax cut was sold as a one-year tax ‘holiday’”, again snubs reality when discussing the 2001 cuts, which were always explained from the get-go as a temporary measure. When the President, Congress and the Senate keep extending them, they’re doing so because absent their extension, they would disappear, as that’s how they were written. So to say that the 2001 cuts were intended to be permanent, while the 2010 was a stopgap ignores that the 2001 cuts simply weren’t written to be a permanent item either.

“Make no mistake, if the payroll-tax cut is extended, it will become permanent”. Just as has happened to the Bush cuts. If the situation wasn’t so dire, I would say that it’s almost comical the ends to which these people will go to explain away the benefit of a temporary tax cut made to the people who will actually spend their money into the economy while vigorously defending other cuts for people who will simply be able to save that much more.

It’s disingenunity at its finest.

What i say now is that if I hadn’t have moved to Lake Worth, I wouldn’t have stayed here. So much of South Florida is a wasteland comprised of pre-fab developments, strip malls and the like. There are a few bastions of wealth, Palm Beach, areas of Boca Raton and Wellington, but intermingled with those are vast areas of poverty. The contrast, especially having grown up in and moved from Amherst, Massachusetts (a quaint college town in New England) is startling. And the contrast in cultures from a region that places an extremely high emphasis on education, to one that doesn’t is startling, and even after 6 or 7 years, I still don’t feel at ease.

I always say, up North this fascination with “bling” and the like just isn’t what it is here. You don’t see as many fake tans, fake boobs or bleached blonde heads. I think that culturally, we north easterners have developed more of an attachment to what’s on the inside, whereas down here it’s become the opposite.

Even taking the recent economic crisis – in Amherst, you didn’t see the fervor that gripped the real estate markets in many regions. The emphasis there was, and will be, educating yourself and getting a profession and earning your keep that way. Down here, again, no emphasis on education or furtherment. Instead, everyone fell into a get rich quick scheme. I remember when i first moved here, i went to the Cheesecake Factory in City Place, and while he was taking our order, the waiter calmly mentioned that he’d been flipping houses. He’d flipped 10 so far and had just bought 2 more that he was getting ready to flip. Again, mind you, this is a waiter. Nothing against the profession, but it hit me at that moment that something was seriously askew.

As the weeks turned into months, i noted that just about everyone i was meeting was involved in real estate. Real estate agents, mortgage brokers and the like. I was asked repeatedly why i rented, and when i mentioned by credit history, not going to be here for very long, it was explained that my credit history could be bypassed with a no-doc mortgage, and my desire to move would be cured because i could easily “flip” the house (theres that word again!) at a profit.

At this same time, i recall now reading an editorial, either in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times that talked about the boon mortgage securitization had caused for the market. That through securitization using things called CDO’s and CMO’s, banks had figured out how to diversify risk away. They wouldn’t be left holding the bag, and any eventual blow up would be not so bad because, through securitization, risk was spread throughout the globe. It did note that there wasn’t anyway to tell what would happen if there was a disruption in the real estate market, but the view was there was such an outside risk of that, that there wasn’t any point in worrying.

God, I wish i could find that editorial now. The writer probably lobbied to have it erased from every archive known to man, though. Who knows if that’s even possible.

But the end point is this: what happened here with real estate didn’t occur by accident. It happened because an entire society had deprecated intelligence and workmanship as the way to get ahead, and instead had gone in search of the next get rich quick scheme (the previous one having been servicing anybody remotely associated with the cocaine trade). This is why the more developed regions sidestepped most of the run up and run down in the real estate market, whereas south florida, las vegas and a few other areas were decimated by it.

It’s all about intelligence, education and willingness to work to get ahead. And those virtues need to be nurtured in a society, not ignored.

Funniest part of this discourse is that, I myself am a high school dropout. Got a GED, but never went to college. But despite all of that, I’ve been a self-learner for all of my professional life.

Because that was a virtue instilled in me by the society I grew up in.

End of rant.

The US dollar is doomed because it’s got nothing backing it, they say. Like bit coins do. The dollar is prone to inflation, they say.

The US Dollar in the hands of the federal reserve is subject to huge amounts of inflation, they also say. Not to discount that, but fears of inflation have been greatly overstated thus far. And, politicians like Ron Paul not withstanding, I think that there are certain times when things are so dire that giving an agreed upon authority the ability to print extra money can be helpful, if not a life saver. So bit coins with their fixed maximum amount just don’t provide flexibility in that regard.

Then there’s the security issue, where, if a user happened to have their hard drive crash and was without a backup, well, that’s it for those bit coins.

And third worlders? You know, the ones with hardly any electricity, for whom a cellphone and perhaps a solar panel is a luxury? This is useless to them. You can have as many bit coins in your ewallet as you want, but if you’re in subsarahan africa, that does didly for you.

And the irreversibility of the transactions was touted as a plus, in that merchants who accept them would be prone to lower their prices, knowing that they were immune to chargebacks and the like. Except it goes too ways, and after a few publicized instances of hackers emptying out users wallets with no ability for recourse, it doesn’t sound like such a utopian ideal.

Past those obvious issues, the fact that no one even knows who created the system is a bit irksome. Nothing like creating your own currency, making sure you’ve got a lot of it, convincing other people to accept it, and then dumping it and forgetting all about it. It might be that simple. It could be more complex. I for one (and not like my mind means anything since i’m not a programmer) wonder what the point of all the calculations the bit coin miners do is. Is it a quasi-government operation, determined to crack every password hash ever created?

Who knows. It’d be pretty sinister if it was. You know, some people in smokey room note that people are donating their cpu cycles for all sorts of projects, distributed.net, seti@home and the like, find a new universe of codes to be analyzed and foist the idea that people are acquiring a currency when instead they’re sowing the seeds of their own demise. It’s probably not that radical, though i’ve often thought that it was pretty irresponsible of our intelligence agencies to leave it to some harvard kid to create Facebook. Seriously. Since 9/11 the number one goal of law enforcement has seemed to be to get the ability to vacuum up as much information on everybody as possible. So, rather than having to vacuum it up, why not create a website where we all willfully submit our every thought and action to it?

I’ve gotten off course on this. I’m a Facebook user, so i’m obviously not as paranoid as my thoughts suggest. But the point still stands that i feel that bit coin is a worthless idea, based on faulty logic and faulty technology, that’s been pushed forward to benefit someone. Certainly not us end users, because we don’t matter to anybody, except as eyeballs.

The end point of this is that i’ve been involved in many exchanges (over Facebook, no less) about bit coins. in everyone, i land on the side of thinking that they’re a farce, an internet fad and that they in no way will ever supplement the dollar or any other currency. And even if the dollar and euro evaporated, a paper currency, or at least one with the ability to become paper would rise in it’s place.

Sure, trade can be done in bit coins. After all, some people ascribe value to them. But i had zero interest. Until i found that one vendor i use accepts them. They only take 25 bucks a month from me, but if i can give them a payment that they think is worth that much and it only costs me $7 in electricity, it’s a net benefit for me.

So, in learning that, i’ve gone from a bit coin despiser to one who’s anxiously trying to learn how to create bit coins myself. Have a few CPU miners running on computers i have control of, though the set of them only generates around 20 MHash’s a second.

Looks like i’ll be investing in some graphics cards….

Now and then.

I’ve been using them a while. A while, meaning even my friends who are just a few years younger than me don’t understand, and therefore take for granted, how much progress we’ve made over such a short time.

Way back when, in 2nd grade, my handwriting was deemed so poor that the teacher and school decided to forgo teaching me penmanship and cursive, and instead had me yanked out of my class for typing lessons instead. Individual lessons. At a public school. Like that’d ever happen anymore, but this was the early 80′s and it was the public school system in Amherst, MA, the town my mom chose to settle in specifically on account of their school systems.

I was sent to the computer lab to learn to type on the now ancient Apple II+. There may have been a couple of Apple IIe’s in the lab, but i was sat down at a II+.

Wikipedia Article: Apple II+

Though not nearly as robust as the Apple IIe, the II+ was a decent machine back in it’s day. It had a motorolla 6502 processor at most likely 1 MHz. 1 megahertz, kids. Compared to todays CPU’s that have breached the 3 gigahertz (3000 MHz) threshold. Inside, it had 48kb of RAM (again, when new computers now ship with 4 GB of RAM) and several expansion slots. Attatched to it were two floppy disks (each held 143kb if memory serves), so that you could put your program disk in one drive and your data disk in the other to save your files.

All of this seems downright quaint considering a modern analog watch probably has more computational horsepower. I jest, of course. But surely a digital watch will outgun the apple II family.

With a couple of years, most of the computers in the lab were Apple IIe’s (almost identical to the Apple II, save for shipping with 64kb of RAM (i believe. It could have been 128k) and with larger expansion limits. And not only that, many of my friends and two of my cousins had then as well. Apple, then as now, would not allow for clones, but a company ended up producing the Laser 128, which was apparently a workable clone.

But because everyone i knew had these computers, I ended up with a little collection of floppy disks myself. I had copies of all my favorite games, so that i could play them at friends houses, and i had many blank disks so that when i found a game i liked at someones house, i could copy it from them. Many games were copy-protected, which meant there was something going on that stopped disk copying programs from being able to do just that. There was a program though, called Copy II Plus, which allowed you to copy most copy protected games.

Copying disks, back then, was a chore. The computer didn’t have enough RAM to copy the contents disk to it, so if you weren’t fortunate enough to have a dual disk setup, you’d have to swap disks repeatedly, as the program copied a chunk of the disk to RAM and then copied that chunk back to the next disk.

Forget about mice, GUI’s or the like. We had command line interfaces. The Apple series also shipped with Applesoft BASIC built into its ROMs. So even if you had no disk to boot from, you could start your computer, escape out to BASIC and do a little bit. (and just little bit – without a disk in the drive, the computer wouldn’t load its disk operating system and would therefore have no idea how to save back to a disk. Meaning, in short, if you were playing around with your computer’s BASIC without having booted it ti an OS  (either of DOS or ProDOS, neither of which were PC compatible, despite the DOS nomenclature), whatever you created would be lost when you were done, as you couldn’t save it anywhere.

Computing was hardly convenient back then.

]]> http://www.dioxidized.com/blog/2011/12/15/my-history-of-computing-part-i/feed/ 0 http://www.dioxidized.com/blog/2011/12/14/here-in-the-us-we-love-women-human-rights-freedom-of-religion-and-all-that/ http://www.dioxidized.com/blog/2011/12/14/here-in-the-us-we-love-women-human-rights-freedom-of-religion-and-all-that/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 01:22:37 +0000 lucasjkr http://www.dioxidized.com/?p=24 Continue Reading →

Though Airprint seems cool, it seems quite wierd to me that an iPod or iPhone can print wirelessly to specific printers on the network, but not to printers connected directly to your Mac (or even PC, but let’s start with Mac).

I borrowed a windows netbook and ran the airprint update, and the techology works perfectly at home. At the office, where a few of the attorneys have become increasingly reliant on their i-gadgets, a solution needs to be available, one which doesn’t require us replacing an expensive network printer.

Enter: How to enable AirPrint on ANY printer in Mac OSX to allow your iPad/iPhone to use. About to run it…. I’ll check in in a few to let you know if the script works as advertised….

Forget pill mills.

Forget websites.

My cat started acting weird a couple of weeks ago. He’d be an outside (stray) cat who loitered around my old house, and i took him in last winter when the weather got bad. From the first day he slept inside, even though i’d let him out every morning, he would always be waiting for me at the house when i got home.

We moved to a new place last month. Beautiful place. I love it. But the cat lost his access to the outside world. Add to that, he also had to begin sharing his limited indoor space with another cat, who, while declawed and half his size, somehow scares the daylights out of him. But the move was very easy. I’d gotten some of those Feliway plug-in pheromone dispensers and not really associated the two. I just saw that he took just a couple of days to settle in and become a pretty happy kitty.

Fast forward just about a month later. My roommate began complaining that he was peeing where he should be peeing. On the kitchen counter. On her bedroom floor. On her foot. I’d also noted that he had stopped purring, and really, stopped leaving my room.

How does this relate to pill mills? Hold on… I’m getting there.

I got new Feliway plug-in’s on Tuesday, thinking maybe there was an association involved. At 3:30 in the morning, Tuesday/Wednesday, I woke up. I figured the cat must have made noise to wake me, so i picked him up and started petting him, but alas, no purrs. After a bit, I went out for a cigarette and came back in and couldn’t find him. Called his name to make sure i wouldn’t lock him out of my room and he let out a squeak behind me. Turned around and saw him sprawled in front of the bathroom door, as if his legs had given way underneath him.

I picked him up and placed him in front of the litter and he fell over and just started howling non-stop. I about freaked out, thinking he had fallen extremely ill, or maybe eaten something poisonous or worse. Frantically woke up my roommate and we zipped over to the pet ER. After a bit of testing, they couldn’t determine anything wrong with him. But acknowledging that he seemed to be in discomfort, they gave me 10 pre-loaded oral syringes full of Buprenex.

The name “Buprenex” sounded familiar, and i realized i remembered it from the film “Gift” by Perry Farrell of Janes Addiction. Googled it a bit and found that, while it’s not approved by the FDA for use in pets, vets are allowed to prescribe it none the less. Cats are incredibly resilient to pain, so when they do let you know they hurt, they REALLY hurt, making an industrial grade pain killer necessary.

With dogs, there’s an issue that they have very high opiod tolerances. Turns out, it’s happened more than once that a dog has surgery and is sent home with a painkiller. The pets owner, sees the name of the drug and bells go off in their head that they should take it rather than give it to their suffering pet. And here it becomes a problem: the owner, thinking he’s just made a big time score by stealing drugs from his suffering pet, ingests the dose that would be adequate to relieve their animals pain, only to discover that that is MUCH higher than what a human needs. A few people have died this way.

So end of the story is, one day, when all the pill mills here in Flori-duh are shut down, I expect to find a rash of addicts harming their pets in order to get pain pills from vets. It’s like a whack-a-mole situation. Anyways. Back to my cat.

Not being satisfied to just give him his painkillers and leave it at that, i brought him to his regular vet. After a day of observation the vet concluded there wasn’t anything physically wrong with him. He’d had a panic attack, brought on by the return of his craving to get outside because the Feliway dispensers ran out!

Lesson learned: never, ever, ever run out of feliway again!

There isn’t to be any specified topic of this. I may write about goings ons in the world, post reviews about whatever i come across (computer hardware or software, a random restaurant) or anything else that comes to mind.

After a bit of looking around, i decided that I’d go with WordPress because it seems to be the most developed piece of blog software, possessing a huge list of major websites that rely on their technology. Other solutions seemed interesting as well, but, not wanting to get my hands too dirty with the inner workings of the site, I decided that WP is the easiest to start with,Ω and will probably receive the most support in the future.

So that’s that. We’ll see where this heads!

Lucas