oregonnerd’s take and differing views

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–Glenn

I made a post earlier about the slow times I was experiencing.  I might add that others have been complaining about this for a long time.  I have a fast computer with lots of RAM (still).  What’s happening is the embedded Java script, the Ajax, and every other f’in widget, gizmo and wizmo on the Net–and that’s just on one page.  Maybe we should have a competition for the slowest-loading page.  This reminds me of the days of dialing long distance for a bulletin board and paying for every second of connection.  Capping might not be a bad idea…except you might go over your limit in one page.

–Glenn

grrr.

Response times have become unbearable all of a sudden.  I may end up experimentally doing a Ghost to an earlier save, but because of performance elsewhere on the internet and on internal programs, I think that Pandora’s servers have just gotten swamped.  It could of course easily be a DoS attack and it would be about the right timeframe, but this also doesn’t look to me like a site where content is easily uploaded.  I was seeing excessive CPU usage during an unbelievably slow connection and some pauses that just aren’t really cool for streaming music.  The “all of a sudden” is as of yesterday, by the way.  There were some sporadic problems before, but I am after all on DSL and share the connection with my wife who does like to stream and so forth.

–Glenn

They are going to institute the cap (don’t worry).  I know I’ll end up doing it.  My social security number is necessary to pay a bill?

The morning started out badly.  A couple of weeks ago I discovered what Mom had been muttering about before she left for Montana.  She’d decided she had to clean the air filter in her little window air conditioner, and she managed to cram it back down in so that the holder was midway down the actual filtering mechanism; in order to remove the filter and get things back in somewhat-working order it was necessary to rip part of the filter.  That is not by the way the end of the world.  She was undoubtedly worried about noxious gasses and the like.  R-22 isn’t pleasant and will displace air but isn’t per se poisonous.

I decided to take the filter out because Rose had decided to leave the air conditioner on, full strength, 24 hours a day.  It tried to turn into a freezer.  So I spent a half an hour or so fixing things (more or less; the holder–a brace, apparently, for something that assuredly didn’t need it–was broken in the process, so there was a wire to get out of the way, to which the holder had been attached).

Today, Rose decides to clean the filter.  And freaks out over the wire.  She was evidently pretty sure it wouldn’t work any more.  She also managed to make chewable coffee and carefully leave it for me (she gets angry if I go to bed too early, late or probably if it’s too, too, well, just too, you know? I don’t).

Then you can’t do the Charter website anymore.  They’ve improved it to unusability.  Rose of course has to have her own password.  It costs two bucks to pay over the phone, which I’ll evidently do.  So I’ll pay two months, I guess.  Jesus.  I am not in a good mood.

–Glenn

Yup.  As foreseen, nearly half an hour to pay a bill.  Just picture me as a happy, smiling old man (I am after all 54 years old).  Well, I am bald.

         rebirth

…in the years of my decline
(i can recall this
 quite clearly, you know)
      i knew visions well.

i would not speak
to strangers: i was
an unruly tyrant
     with my kin.

but i still was
foremost counsellor (though
given to sudden rages, and no one quite dared
     challenge that).

mostly, of course, it was
the unseemly pains of age, acid gut and aching joints,
and other discomforts…

o, but i had my power!
i was dressed in pomp, all attended–for i was,
despite those rages, still wise.
ah, though: reborn, freed
of both pains and pomp, i wonder; who will requite me
  for all the smiles i lost?

———————————————————

Glenn

For the time being I would forbear from using Pandora.  I think they got overwhelmed by their popularity, which I foresaw easily.  Behaviorally-presented music? of course–which means that at least some behavioral sorts of advertising are actually what we want.  That the internet has overwhelmed us with information is old hat.  Creating a sort of avatar that can progressively model our wants unfortunately can only make sense.  And here it’s very much not the data involved (the behavioral aspects) as the way it’s presented.  The world–not of the programmers nor bankers, not even of the doctors or drug companies–but of the admen, where selling your soul is last century’s story.

–Glenn

Have you ever noticed that when someone goes on television to tell us to tighten their belts you know for sure they don’t have to do it?

If the Brits are so great how come they have to have directions for dressing?

Before you make absolutely sure you have the most beautiful teapot in the world, it might be wise to ensure it doesn’t leak.  However, I doubt Microsoft or Apple can ever learn that.

I’m just as disturbed as John Brunner was by the constant misuse of the name Art.  Personally, I’ve just gone back to calling him Arthur.

Nothing can prove causation, either in a single instance or as an operative concept.  It looks fairly likely.  Levels of causation cube the uncertainty factor.  Predictivity based on the model is poor except in mechanical applications.

There is a necessary factor of uncertainty, or error, in any representation of anything.  This is due to the fact that the one doing the representing has to decide what’s important.  Generally she doesn’t bother to take notes on the unimportant stuff.  The one who (poorly) explained what’s important, having had that explained to him by the boss, who nearly listened while the boss of the guy who had the person decide to have someone else do the actual study to determine what’s important…having had the assignment of definition handed to him by someone who had the need explained by a server-side-oriented-consultant…will be the one who’s expected to handle the data for a project which probably never is explained until it’s already underway.  I don’t understand why most people say I have a dour outlook on life.  Maybe it’s because I use Outlook.

It’s been proven as far as it can be that being constipated gives you a shitty outlook on life.  So using Microsoft Office…?

Offhand=someone who’s right-handed trying to masturbate with his left.  Then again, I had someone trying to convince me it stood for military intelligence.

If there was a society that had an observable tendency to increase in population and the society generally tried to defend the tendency in a variety of forms of languages, that could be taken as an indication that there was a disaster a long time ago.  The disaster would probably have come fairly close to wiping out the society, and there would probably be a fairly high childhood mortality rate as it began recovering from it.  Among other things, that society (as it survived) would probably be fairly aggressive.  [In all gamed situations, the first to adopt aggressive tactics AND the best at their tactics wins.  I would assume there are other possible situations.]  Both the aggression and the need to increase population would be at a level where it would be difficult for the individual to manipulate their own feelings.  Basic feelings which form the underpinnings of a society are not easily manipulable by experiential language, and language which sacrifices accuracy for the sake of consistency becomes a statement of religious belief and practice.*

Language first of all presents a set of protocols for described situations.  Secondly, it presents a set of valorizational statements which defend the protocols.  Thirdly, it attempts to thus present a framework of positive and negative motivation, as well as statements as to the “good” of the ruling structure.  There is no possible statement of value which is not relativistically based.

*Restated, that’s something like this.  We’re horny little bastards, but it looks like it’s not instinct.  It’s memories in the forms of values we hardly know how to say.  Most likely, the human race just about got wiped out by a glacial age that came on suddenly, and then there was global warming that occurred suddenly and drastically (it looks right now) about 50,000 years ago.  There was a lot of disease and there was a lot of incest.  More than that, population expanded faster than arable land or easy prey did.  The catastrophe had wiped out the knowledge the human race had except for language and especially chants.

I have never attempted to make any statements about Cro-Magnon humans and their appearance, other than that all transitional skeletal elements thus far are either fakes or vast stretches.

———————————–

Glenn

I’ve been fighting with performance-related issues.  My actual usual choice for posting is an offline document of some sort, and I can see that’s what it will return to.  What prevented me on this return to the blogging venue was the ease of using the WordPress link mechanism.  Part of my problem with performance was Open DNS and Threatfire.  The other and bigger part of it, I’m becoming convinced, is some kind of fairly widespread change through sites.  Probably it’s a security issue and requires more pings, from the looks of it, although that’s merely a guess.  As is, I think I’m also falling asleep.

–Glenn

First of all, I got to the point that system performance was being really degraded by the stuff I had running.  I also watched the degradation.  It wasn’t like I wasn’t aware of it.  I also wanted to find out what the boundaries were, because I’m pretty much where I want to be in terms of tools.  Now I need to figure out things like how I can use them without the degradation, or at least with the potential to turn things off when I want to.

Secondly, I found myself really missing 1-Click Answers, which is answer.com’s attempt to compete in the search market.  That’s belittling, and I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if that’s appropriate.  Jeeves never did well.  It also survived.

I wanted to see what sort of slowdown it might introduce on a blog entry (which was where I had found myself missing it, elsewhere).  Not much.  I’m not seeing any CPU usage…well, much…on the minimized Windows Task Manager…the spikes I believe are from Open DNS, which I need to make an entry about.

So this will pretty much be my task for the day; I will be rebooting immediately after this because of some performance peculiarities and may just take 1-click answer right the f back off.

–glenn

value and information and two kinds of value–one is assigned because of currency, being up to the minute; the other is assigned because of stability, the ability to maintain relativity consistency in information in some respect in changing situations. The second can be assigned to the first, but not vice versa.

The only instinct that humans have that’s been confirmed is the one to copy. We copy whatever is moving around us that seems most like us, as tiny infants. That’s it. We have that in common with most mammals.

———————————————————-

Glenn