BunkBlog

Following up the earlier post about my cool Christmas present, Sony was showing off a new model at CES last week. It looks considerably heftier than my not-so-tiny Clie, but it includes a camera with the same resolution as my Canon Powershot, as well as built-in Bluetooth (in case you want to use your cellphone to call your ISP I guess). Otherwise, it’s the same machine as mine, both in hardware and software. And how is this appreciably less powerful than a laptop now? Of course, you can get a decent laptop on eBay for less than the $800 this monster is going for. But, for pure geek chic, what could beat having a single pocket-sized (well, big pockets maybe) device that can take good pictures and decent movie clips, voice records, play back MP3 files, control TVs and DVD players, and connect to a wi-fi LAN and surf the web?
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After doing that LJ Analysis thing this weekend, I realized that I skim far too many people’s journals. Unlike many people on LJ, I don’t consider any of you friends if we haven’t shared some deep meaningful moment or some such. There are a few people on here that I’ve exchanged emails with regarding important life matters, some that I know (or at least have met) in real life, and so on. The majority of you, even if I enjoy reading your journals, are not my friends, no matter what the name of the page on the server. I use the “friends” page as a way to aggregate content to read at my leisure (A great example). When I find a feed that I am not overly interested in any longer, I stop reading it. This is in no way a comment on you as a person, nor on the interesting nature of your writing. If I am not commenting, and rarely even reading, your journal, I stop putting it on my friends page.

I rarely post things as “Friends Only” so you’re not missing anything if you are no longer my “friend” on LJ. If you remove me as a friend, I really don’t care (in fact I rarely even notice such things unless brought to my attention). Yes, I could do as does, and make filters for my reading convenience. I actually have filters enabled, and I use them for posting and occasionally filtering out posts so I only read RSS feeds, or only IRL friends, etc. But, I don’t choose to add an extra step to my life just to avoid offending people. If you’re that easily offended, get out more. 🙂
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I fixed the main spelling error from the source, but didn’t proofread the rest. Analasys? Is that supposed to be funny?
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I know I’ve made mention of this before, but I am really curious and very much wonder if it is possible to do some of LJ’s unique functions away from LJ. With little further ado, my query:

Is there a simple RSS/RDF aggregator I can put on my personal website that would be able to act as the LJ “friends” page does? I want to be able to continue to read all these journals as well as the RSS feeds that I have on my friends page, but avoid the central server problem that LJ has.

Just pondering the possibility of maybe someday moving my journal to Movable Type and still maintaining a “friends page” type thing to make weblog-reading easier.
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My mom gave me the Clie NX60 for Christmas (and my next birthday – it’s not cheap). We got to talking about its capabilities compared to my first computer, and compared to my first IBM-clone (which is what they were called 10 years ago).

For comparison purposes, the first computer I had was a Commodore VIC20 in 1981; the first PC I had was a 486 made by CompUSA in 1992.

RAM – VIC20 had 3.5k, PC had 4 megs (I splurged), and the Clie has 16 megs.
CPU Mhz – VIC20 had a 1.01MHz 6502A, PC was 33Mhz 80486, and Clie has a 200 Mhz ARM.
Resolution – VIC20 was 176×184 pixels with 16 colors (or 22×23 text blocks), the PC had VGA standard settings (640×480 at 256 colors and so on), the Clie has 320×480 and 16-bit (65,536 colors).
Storage – VIC20 had a tape drive (not even going to guess the capacity of that), PC had 120 MB hard drive (I had the upgraded model), Clie can handle a removable 128 MB memory stick.
Cost – VIC20 cost $300 without a monitor or tape drive; PC cost about $2000 with monitor and mouse and all, Clie costs $500 without any storage (add a 128 MB memory stick for 65 bucks from Amazon and it is still under $600).

In pretty much every way, the Clie is more powerful and more upgradeable than the PC ten years ago, and I think my watch is more powerful than the VIC20 from 20 years ago.

Is there any way to extrapolate and guess where things will be in another 10 years? I think we’re going to be surprised.
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Recent conversation:

• What program does your camera use to save the images?
  • I dunno. I’m a complete computer moron.

I was stunned into silence at that point. I mean, the NAME of the PROGRAM is too hard to figure out? Can’t you look at the damned title bar? You know, the thingie at the top of the TV-screen thing that has, like, words, in it? DUH!

Shamelessly stolen from , this bike looks like something from Akira. I think I’d hurt myself with that thing.
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CDNow has joined the Amazon megalith? Will wonders never cease…

More importantly, did my CDnow wishlist and preference migrate? Should have known Amazon would eat CDNow eventually.
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When the message subject line reads, “Remind yourself feels and sences of childhood,” do they expect anyone to open the message? I mean, at least spell the spam SUBJECT right. If you’re going to be an annoying parasitic lifeform siphoning resources from the entire internet, at least have the good grace to have some class about it.

For those watching Salon slowly disintegrate (or barely cling to existence, depending on your point of view), why not pick on MandrakeSoft for wacky business moves? They have gotten to the point of begging their customers to please buy a membership and to not just freely download their free product any more.

Brings to mind the entire Dot-Com concept:

1. Build something cool.
2. Give it away to gain “marketshare”
3. something
4. Profit!

The dot-commers never figured out that third step, and Mandrakesoft is following their footsteps to the quicksand, it seems. How does someone make money selling an operating system which is, by definition, free? Red Hat eked out a tiny profit this quarter, so there may be hope for the Services Model of software development, but how much money has RH actually lost over the years to get to this point? At the rate they “earned” money last quarter, will they ever pay off their old debt before the next century? Will Mandrake ever make money?

Tune in next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel!

If you are thinking of emailing me to ask for a userpic, maybe you should email someone else on the volunteer team. I’m the only one to have listed a completed request since late October, and only did one then. It was another month earlier that anyone else did some. I like to help, but c’mon! Email or somebody!
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Shamelessly ripped off from :

According to the latest Afrobarometer, there’s a growing nostalgia for the days of apartheid in South Africa.

The rise in pro-apartheid sentiments among blacks could reflect both the growing income inequalities within South Africa’s black community — where many have actually grown poorer since the end of apartheid — as well as difficulties in dealing with government bureaucracy.

Surprisingly, even the number of blacks who can think of positive elements of apartheid has grown. 20% of blacks (contrasted with 65% of whites) think that the country was run better 10 years ago.
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My Palm seems to be dead. I’ve tried changing the batteries, recharging the batteries, soft resets, hard resets, everything short of “really hard reset” (i.e., throwing it at a wall), and it refuses to wake back up. This is after 7 months of increasingly erratic behavior, including random resets, data loss, etc. I’m not too surprised that it died, I just wish I could afford a replacement. <sigh>
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Proving that the Defense Information Systems Agency doesn’t have a monopoly on boneheaded IT stuff, I have the following tale to entertain one and all.
Just got an email telling me my password to a site with the Navy is due to expire soon. I go to the site, type in what I think is my password, and find that I have totally forgotten my password to this site. Go to the FAQ to find out how to retrieve the password, and I’m told to contact my registrar, who is listed on a linked document. That document, as you may have guessed, requires my password to access. Huh? “Don’t have your password? Well, just type in your password and we’ll give it to you.” Bright folks, wonder if they ever tried following their own instructions…

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According to this page, I’m well-suited to living in Kent, Bremerton, and other such dank musty spots about the Puget Sound. Strange that Monterey was not listed in the entire 4 pages of other cities, although Athens Georgia was. Like I want to live in the Southeast. Of course, my top 6 listings all had precipitation of 35 inches per year or greater, despite my saying I didn’t seek out rain. The top two are in the Pac NW, despite my saying I would rather not live in the snowier parts of the country. I doubt the veracity of this “predictor” tool…

You know those marvelous pop-up blocking programs that IE users have? The ones Opera and Mozilla/Netscape users don’t need because it’s built into the browser? Well, there’s a company that is campaigning to “raise awareness” of how using a pop-up blocker is thievery. I’d have an easier time taking these guys seriously if they didn’t have at least one egregious English error per paragraph. Not terribly professional.
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Yet another new design in the Andy Social Emporium.

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Every document we create here at the JITC (subsidiary of the Dumbass Information Sabotage Agency) is designed so that, when printed doublesided, every new section starts on an odd page. This is a common convention in reports and books, so no problem. The strange thing to me has been that we never print things double-sided. Oh, we’ve got dozens of duplexing printers, but it has been decreed by our many bosses that they prefer to receive documents that use as much paper as possible.

Last week, the LAN ops guys reset all the duplexing printers so they would duplex by default (the default had been the opposite for years). Now, my cow-orkers are bitching that the damned printer is printing everything doublesided. Do they have difficulty with books, which must be overly complicated to them?

Yet another way in which our tax dollars are wisely shepherded.
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Another wonderful day at the Defense Information Systems Agency. After upgrading the Outlook clients over the weekend, they’ve somehow been able to bring the network down on Monday.

As previously bitched about, all our applications are stored centrally, so as to maximize the likelihood of a network packet collision crashing a program at the most innoportune moment. They have, however, made our Outlook app available via the oh-so-hostile Outlook Web Access system. Can I log into OWA via my personal ISP account? That would be NO.

With no applications available, we may as well not be here. We can’t even open up our contacts and get phone numbers to call, since the contacts list is stored on the same server that is unresponsive.

And this is the same bureaucracy that is in charge of the Homeland Big Brother Agency. Great…
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This article just made me feel so much for Mr. Ralsky. He’s made millions on spam, and yet he feels so harassed by the public that he hides his address and phone number, working from cell phones and unlisted numbers to remain anonymous. He talks of “covering his tracks” and is unapologetic about his earlier convictions for fraud. Dude, if your business resembles the Sopranos in many details, perhaps you are doing something wrong.