niflheim

Every generic news site I’ve visited recently displayed this AS SEEN ON RACHELRAY weight loss ad (”FLAT STOMACH RULE: obey” or similar).  I’ve lost weight and thus know how to do it, so rather than thinking “Wow, this must be a hint!”, I just ignored it like a bright boy.

A few minutes ago, however, for the sheer perversity of it all, I clicked the ad and found myself at “Nicholle’s Weight Loss Blog”.  The very friendly welcome paragraph identified her as “Nicholle Stevenson from Clarksville, TN”.

Now, people from this podunk city have in fact appeared on national talk shows, but, naaaaaaaaah.

So I checked the web page from a datacenter in Texas, and she was “Nicholle Stevenson from Houston, TX”, and I checked the web page from a datacenter at work and she was “Nicholle Stevenson from Uppsala, 21″ (Sweden, she has your number!), and so forth and so on.

Disgusting.  Sadly, unsurprising.

I was tired of writing about Virtual Box 4 months ago, but it keeps coming up.

So, I moved the server on which I typically use VMWare to run my Linux and Solaris applications (and most of my MySQL databases).  Unfortunately, this moved me from a very fast/stable wired connection to a fast but less stable wireless connection via a USB NIC.

I failed to find any means of making the USB NIC visible to my VMWare instances.  It just won’t do it, no matter what I change/try/threaten.

So, on a whim, I booted Virtual Box.  Without changing a single thing, I have complete connectivity.

Go VirtualBox, go.

And thus I am left with basically no reason at all to continue using VMWare.  Which is good, because lately it has begun allocating gigabytes of RAM when I start a VM (for neither an apparent nor good reason), which is “somewhat annoying”.

Now that I’m fully converted, maybe I can finally stop writing about it!

I have to thank Governor Palin for reminding me that I am a Libertarian.

Whew!  Almost voted Republican for the first time in my life, and would have if not for her.

As weird as it seems to think of Barr as in any way supportive of “liberty”, it is great to remember that it is possible to vote in a principled manner rather than feeling pressured to choose between the least dangerous of two very dangerous options.

Thank you, Governor!

So my Macbook Pro has been developing “issues”.  In the midst of some very important work, everything started to run slower until the system was effectively locked up.  Even with a reboot, one could not actually launch applications.

ssh worked, so I was able to copy everything I needed from the machine, but the laptop itself was, in short, hosed.  As it is absolutely vital to work, that posed certain difficulties.

So I drive the hour or so to the nearest Apple Store.  I need service.  They’re it.  What could possibly go wrong?

Glad you asked!  They refuse to talk to me, look at the laptop, or take the laptop from me for later service without an appointment.  I, of course, do not have an appointment.  They, of course, are fresh out of appointments and I will have to come back another day.

Wow.  Just…  Wow.

3 hours of my day gone because I didn’t have one of the precious 15 minute appointments with the Apple Genius who will certainly be unable to determine the problem and will take the laptop from me in order to ship it to someone who can.

If I needed any other reasons to stop using Apple products, and I most assuredly did not need additional reasons to stop using Apple products, this sealed the deal.

Folks at work suggested I call AppleCare directly.  They’ll send me a box/mailer and I won’t have to lose 3 hours of my day hearing about appointments I don’t have.  So, what the heck.  Sounds great to me.

Of course, the laptop is fully functional while I’m on the phone, the hardware tests report no failures while I’m on the phone, the tech won’t simply send me the mailer so they can examine the thing in person because he has to spend an hour with me on the phone…

…and in the middle of it all, he hangs up on me.

No doubt an accident, but I haven’t received a phone call or an email from anyone hoping to resume that conversation, nor will I receive one, and I surely am not going to call them and start the Tech Support for Macbook Pro script all over again.

Thanks Steve.  Real winner, here.  Glad I sold AAPL.

I set out to write about something completely different, but I ran across this article:

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08266/914029-298.stm

Or to quote:

Pittsburgh Public Schools officials say they want to give struggling children a chance, but the district is raising eyebrows with a policy that sets 50 percent as the minimum score a student can receive for assignments, tests and other work.

Even more disconcerting are the willful delusions:

The district and union insist the policy still holds students accountable for performance.

I skipped the first… month… of Calculus I in college.  By the time I elected to arrive, half of the class had withdrawn because it was too difficult.  By the end of the semester, there were only 2 or 3 of us remaining.  I spoke with the professor at the end and complained that the class was too easy, that we hardly covered 1/4 of the available textbook, that in short I had learned almost nothing.

He directed me to a filing cabinet.  6′ tall, old and damaged and intimidating, many drawers, each of them literally stuffed to overflowing with papers.  This, he said, was the lesson plan and coursework he used 30 years previous.  We weren’t even making a dent in a single folder from that filing cabinet.

Why?  Because he had a quota of students to pass.  If he didn’t meet this quota, it meant he was a poor teacher (he was in fact excellent), it meant he taught at a poor school (eh), it meant students would not attend and grants would not be made and so on and so on and he watered it down and watered it down and it didn’t matter at all.

This “Post Gazette” story is the same stupidity driven by an entitlement culture born of that diseased misunderstanding that festers in the American psyche, that “All men are created equal” meant something contrary to the blatant facts of reality.

People “deserve” to pass.  People “deserve” to graduate.  Even if we have to reduce the standards to ensure that we don’t leave any lowest common denominators behind to do it.

Instead of improving education, or hell, instead of even recognizing that some people just aren’t very good at some things and nothing will change that, or any of a number of other things that could be done without ensuring the death of a nation

It’s not new, and that Calculus story is almost 20 years old (*sigh*), but the “50% Minimum” is so shockingly inconceivable I had to spout off about it.

Well, do they?

It must be that time of year.

People with whom I have lost contact (in some cases for 10-20 years) have been reaching out to me recently.  I’m absolutely rotten at maintaining “long distance” relationships these days unless they involve some form of IM/chat/email, but I do seem able to “resume the thread” right away.

My well-deserved reputation as an antisocial hermit be damned: sometimes it just feels good to hear from the people who mattered.

And that’s all Forrest has to say about that.

The market was kind to me last week so we embraced our iTool iLives and iBought iPhones.

I had been waiting for the SDK release, and holding out for GPS (”Late this year” according to “My Sources” who are nameless, faceless and possibly clueless) and 3G (more on that) and “Version 2.0 Hardware”, but service through my Blackberry has been so damnably frustrating lately and overpriced all along that I took the first good opportunity and jumped.

So, a few things:

• SDK, SDK, SDK. The first truly great PDA. Please for the love of your stock valuation let us develop apps for this thing without your updates bricking the device. This is the “mobile platform” we’ve been wanting for years. Let us use it.
• AT&T buying Cingular failed to correct the problem of the Edge network (or at least the Edge network here) being absolute garbage. No idea why I was holding out for 3G, as it is unavailable here and they have yet to seem able to reliably deliver more archaic services.
• My Belkin router’s (there’s a mistake I won’t make twice) funny little feature of randomly rendering wifi-to-wan service inoperable for no reason whatsoever does not play well with the iPhone, which seems to lack the capacity to recognize a busted wifi connection.
• I still hate cameras on phones. It’s not (only) that I prefer my bulkier Nikon (I do), but that so far every phone-camera I have used is junk. I guess I need a point-and-shoot if I’m not carrying the “real camera”.
• Great iPod! I think I may come to appreciate the video capabilities while travelling.
• SDK, SDK, SDK. And SDK.
• I wonder if I would rather read ebooks on this than Amazon’s Kindle (which is almost but not quite really nice)?
• The email client frequently refuses to display emails because they are in “some format” that it feels unable to comprehend. May as well brick the device, really. This is the #2 reason I have considered going back to my Blackberry.
• Touch-screen keyboard. The large version is nice, the small version less nice. Apparent inability to switch between them on demand is violently frustrating, and this is the #1 reason I have considered a return to the Blackberry.
• It needs a stylus and handwriting recognition. Fingerprints/smudges get out of control. Or maybe I’m just a greasy iPig.
• Some apps can kick sideways. Some cannot. Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but (no offense) that’s the market Apple likes, so it would be grand if we could have some consistency in this area. One would think the “system” applications, at least, would all support this.
• Flash. WMV. Flash. …Flash. You know, I still use lynx for browsing the web, but this is a glaring failure. I continue hoping I am only having a momentary bout of iBraindamage and it is all my fault somehow, but it looks like this really is a major “worm in the Apple” mistake.

Call quality is good. I’m enjoying using the device, but whether I continue to do so apparently depends entirely upon Apple’s attitude toward third party software, which it seems I will need in order to accomplish the sort of things I need to accomplish.

I love that phrase. “Harvested out of compliance.”

“What happened in this case was that there were some animals that were harvested out of compliance,” he said.

They also like to use “non-ambulatory” (”Can’t Walk”).  Another choice word.

Putting aside the problems of our mechanized meat manufacturing factory farms (mmmff! cow down!), this sort of safe, sanitized, scientific language sucks the vitality right out of the everything.  That’s the point, of course, but it’s damned dangerous.

Just as any concept pushed to its logical extreme becomes absurd, once we reduce everything to its most basic components we remove all value, all meaning, all life.  Precisely the sort of mental devaluation mass murderers perform on their victims, or in any of a number of other atrocious, horrific things our species has done to itself, directly or indirectly.

I wish a news agency would discuss a “terrorist bombing” in terms of “harvesting out of compliance”.

As some few noticed, I have been hoping to redesign my various websites but have simply been overwhelmed with personal and professional responsibilities and have finally given up on that idea and installed a blog. I am sure to continue tweaking it for years, but here we go.

I retain the front page quotes for kicks:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. All progress, therefore, depends upon the unreasonable man.”
–George Bernard Shaw

“Everyone is convicted in the court of public opinion.”
–Dean Ellis