BunkBlog

Ya gotta love Kurt Vonnegut quotes.

bq. Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
Kurt Vonnegut, “Cold Turkey”, In These Times, May 10, 2004

Cats are insane. If a dog is hungry, he’ll slap his food bowl around, making a horrendous noise and letting you know what he wants. If a dog wants to go to the bathroom, he’ll paw at the door and whine.

Now, contrast that with cat behavior. If a cat wants to eat, she’ll do nothing or mewl at some random location, generally nowhere near her food bowl. What the heck?

I’ve got two cats temporarily, instead of the usual one. With one cat, we went through one can of “good” cat food daily, plus a half-bowl of dry food. With two cats, we go through about three cans of the wet food every day. And they still get in my face. My mother-in-law claims her cat doesn’t eat much. That is definitely untrue. Little beggar takes over Holly’s food bowl now.

So, after making sure they have food, water, and a clean place to poop, they still want to mewl at me and imply that I’ve forgotten some important part of their logistal support. Cats are crazy.

While perusing Intelink today, the J2 Daily Briefing included an acronym I wasn’t familiar with: GWOT(Global War On Terror). Now, think for a couple seconds and I’ll bet you’ll get it too. Don’t I feel dumb for not parsing it immediately.

Of course, some of my cow-orkers still aren’t sure what the classification caveat MCF(Multinational Coalition Forces) means, so at least I have them beat there.

Thanks to ThrowingStarDNA on Livejournal for this article:
Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012

An excerpt:

bq. What made this all the more disheartening was the wretched performance of our forces in the Second Gulf War.[73] Consumed with ancillary and nontraditional missions, the military neglected its fundamental raison d’etre. As the Supreme Court succinctly put it more than a half century ago, the “primary business of armies and navies [is] to fight or be ready to fight wars should the occasion arise.”[74] When Iranian armies started pouring into the lower Gulf states in 2010, the US armed forces were ready to do anything but fight.

Preoccupation with humanitarian duties, narcotics interdiction, and all the rest of the peripheral missions left the military unfit to engage an authentic military opponent.

My cow-orkers tend to say some absurd things that they think make sense. Here are a couple from this week.

“I’m ok with Word until you get into the advanced features. How do you delete a page break?” Um, yeah. That’s not really advanced so much as it is blatantly obvious. DELETE key ring a bell?

“I don’t run an antivirus because it would be a step backward for me. As a programmer, I know how things propagate and I’ve got a good router.” Sure you do. The magical kind of router that is not only a stateful packet sniffer but stops trojan horses and updates itself automatically to prevent file corruption on all computers attached to it. Fantastic technology.

Apparently these are two spiders in Iraq. Yet another reason to not go there. Damn.

Suppose her man is at all uncomfortable with Oleg taking this photo of Kit? Just sayin, most guys would be a bit . . . peeved.

What is with American companies and introducing tiny cars that almost nobody will buy? There was the Ford Festiva (Kia Pride), the Ford Aspire (Kia Avella), and now the Chevrolet Aveo (Daewoo Lanos).

These are all Korean cars and so are made for skinny short people, no matter that the latest Aveo commercial shows basketball players getting into one. I’ve ridden in a Daewoo Tico, the Lanos’s predecessor, when I was in Korea. It is most assuredly a lot tinier than you think it is. Think roller skate.

I don’t think anyone can say it better or more succinctly than Illiad:

Monday

I hesitate to call anything that I do by such a lofty term as philosophy, but that seems to fit as well as anything else. Anyone who has any degree of introspection has, at one time or another, thought about how they approach life in general – the basis for their big life decisions. I call my approach the Risk to Reward Ratio method. I suppose others may invoke more-established terms like opportunity cost, but I’m not an economist and I would rather not muddy the waters too much (unless it’s to the strains of Mannish Boy, but I digress).

So, what is the Risk to Reward Ratio, and how does one use it? Simply put, every major decision in life (and most lesser ones) involves a usually-instinctive weighing of the pros and cons. I.e., "If I do X, I’ll lose out on Y."

I recently had to decide the mid-range path of my family’s lives. Would we stay in Arizona, where a company was offering me 10 grand more to do the same job I have done the past 2 years? This job, while dull as an old spoon, is not too difficult and I’m told I do well at it. Personally, I feel that I’ve been thrashing aimlessly the past two years, glad to have avoided detection as a complete fraud out of his depth. The other, non-Arizona, option was to take a job offer to move back to Texas. This other job is building on the job I did the last two years in the army, and I’m sure I’ll do well at it as well.

The pros and cons started to pile up. First, the plusses for each side:

And the negatives of each one:

This turned out to be much easier than I thought. However, in any risk-reward consideration, there are some risks that are larger than others. The house is a big risk: conventional wisdom says you’ll lose money if you sell a house less than 3 years after buying it. Fortunately, the market is wonky right now, and our realtor thinks we’ll be able to break even and maybe even get a nice dinner out of the sale.

Anyone want to buy a house in Southeastern Arizona?

_Tuesday_

Weblogs, blogs, online journals – all the same thing, different ways of referring to the same phenomenon. This phenomenon is not new, although you’d think it was invented in 2001 by the sounds of the media coverage of the blogging revolution, the traditional media way of describing nearly anything they don’t really understand but feel may be destabilizing their way of business. In my opinion, weblogs are part vanity site and part content management.

Like most personal websites, mine has long had a series of personal posts from me to the adoring public. My adoring public tends to be geeks, and not very many of them either. Nor do they seem to adore me too awful much, but I digress. The entire purpose of a vanity site, as personal websites were once called with derision, is to tell the world about yourself, to stake a claim to a tiny piece of the electronic zeitgeist. To that end, we old-school webgeeks painstakingly worked on webpages that looked like parts of a whole, building our own menus of links in text editors with exciting names like vi and notepad. It is a tedious way to update a site, and so many vanity sites tend to fall into disrepair. Fortunately, nothing actually decays online, so long as your host stays viable. There are a plethora of dead sites out there, with “last updated” dates in the last century.

Businesses which publish frequently-changing content online need a way to make that process simple, as well as accessible to the vast majority of their employees who are scared of that whole cyberspace information superhighway thing in the magic box. So, some clever folks came up with content management systems (CMS). The author of a document doesn’t have to know anything about HTML, CSS, tags, links, and other such exciting geek stuff. The author just writes up his story in whatever (usually proprietary but sometimes web-based) interface the CMS uses. This separation of content and format is usually based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which kick serious butt in general.

So, we had serious tools for businesses, costing thousands of dollars, used by CNN and CNet and other big news sites. And, we had the personal users typing away in their text editors, hoping they didn’t miss a closing tag and hose their layout. Along came weblogging tools. The best-known tool is Blogger, and others include Movable Type, Greymatter, PHPNuke, and Livejournal. Livejournal was started in March 1999, Blogger in August 1999, and Movable Type in October 2001; I can’t find authoritative start dates for the Greymatter and PHPNuke projects. For most people, the two big players are the two oldest: Livejournal and Blogger. I’m a big LJ fan, and I’ll try to explain why.

All weblogging tools allow comments, although many users may disable that capability. Although I had a decent number of people coming to my site with my old manual system, I had no way for them to comment aside from email or a guestbook. The guestbook, like most guestbooks, has been largely stagnant for years; almost nobody emailed me from my site. So, interactivity being the hallmark of the web, weblogs allow a discussion to occur centered on any comment you put on your site.

I wanted a way to keep my website looking fresh, without the pain of editing a full page of HTML each time I had something to say. LJ has been very effective in fooling people that come to my site, making them think I actually have new content almost daily. LJ embeds into the HTML of my homepage, allowing me to use it as a CMS for my own page. But, the great thing about LJ is the community.

When you join LJ, your comments are on their servers. This is often a problem, as their servers have issues due to expansion beyond the founder’s wildest dreams. The architecture of the LJ code, some have said, is not really capable of handling the load to which it is subjected, and the servers slow down too often. These are valid complaints, in my experience, but I’m still sticking with the service. The good thing about a central repository is that every LJ user is findable in some way. It may be a tedious way of going through every user, which number is approaching a million, but it is possible to find anyone on LJ. It’s easier if they want to be found, as LJ has “interests” to search, as well as having regional searches. If you want to find everyone in your town that has a journal, you can. The immediate outgrowth of the searchability of LJ is the Friends Page. Rather than visit 10 different blogger sites, you can just go to your own Friends Page, which is in a style you specify, and view all the entries written by people (or communities) that you find interesting. No need to search with Google or wander around Blogspot, you can just hit the Random button on LJ. Or, look at the people that others find interesting. Many times I have added friends that were friends of older friends. Very goofy-sounding, I know, but the web of connections is the big draw to LJ.

When people join LJ and then leave to start a blog on their personal site, I just look at the single line of code it took me to embed my journal on my homepage, and wonder why.

Livejournal – because you like to think people care.

_Thursday_

This turned into a truly random meandering thought, so bear with me. I don’t actually have a point.

I have a story that I’ve been writing since 1987, which I haven’t opened in months. I made character sketches in 1990. I made graphic designs of the hardware involved in 1994, so as to better visualize and explain it and avoid inconsistencies. It doesn’t look like I’ll be submitting that to Aboriginal Science Fiction after all (for those who don’t know, that mag is defunct now). Maybe I’ll finish it someday, but don’t hold your breath.

Funny how dreams and passions get waylaid, isn’t it? 13 years ago, I’d have assumed by now I’d be well-off and working as a computer geek somewhere. The details were unimportant to my 18-year-old self. It’s all about the details. Five years ago, I assumed I’d be single, living in California, being a beach bum and computer geek. I also had rediscovered my interest in writing (not poetry – I was never good at that) as well as my interest in creating graphics, both flat and 3D. I even started working on some new models and produced a corporate logo to spec in 1999. I was envisioning a solitary life of work, geek toys, and the Pacific hitting the rocks outside my house. Well, that didn’t happen. Life never works out as you expect, does it?

Life is good. I have a house of my own (It isn’t as large as my brother’s house, but it’s got a larger yard and I’m allowed to have a garden. Nyah!). My bride is amazing and we get along remarkably well on most days; I trust her with my heart and soul. The boy is the cutest and smartest toddler in the whole world. My job doesn’t make me want to kill people, pays well enough and it’s only 8 hours per day and no weekends (contrast to the previous 12 years). My debt is going down, and I’ve heard that my ex’s debt is going up. Kind of a personal vindication there. We cook varied meals, lots of desserts, and nobody cares if I do any situps or run 2 freakin’ miles ever. Pretty damned good.

Being somewhere you didn’t envision is not a bad thing. If life was predictable, what would be the point in living it? It’s a long and winding road, or the road less-traveled. Whichever allusion you prefer.

I tried being deep and mysterious for a while. It just felt like too much work to put on airs. So many people have a hard time just being themselves. There’s a guy I know named Mathew that I could probably write a good “thought” about someday. Not today though – today is all about me.

Is domesticity a bad thing? I don’t particularly enjoy going out to bars. When I was in the army, I’d go out with coworkers occasionally, but we had decent places to go that included decent food or pool tables sans coin returns. Just going to a bar doesn’t appeal. I’d much rather invite folks over to my house for an evening of drinks and talking. Maybe throw in a veggie platter or something and a party game. I don’t own any party games, but I’ve been told they can be fun.

I like spending time at home, curled up on the couch with a book, watching the boy play with his blocks. I enjoy putting together big towers for him to destroy. Does that make me boring? Well, good thing I don’t care about your opinion then. 😛

Art can sometimes invoke a reconsidering of life. Truly great art, anyway. The movie AI, for instance. Although the reviews belabored the film for its overuse of cliches and the visual bludgeoning at the Flesh Fair (which scene could have been cut a bit), it got people talking about important issues so it counts as good art. The issues that could be discussed include re-examining one’s life to see what’s truly important; looking past superficiality to another’s true intent; how anthropomorphizing objects can be cute in children and disturbing in adults; if people didn’t need other people, would we put up with each other? But, I digress. Wait, I had no point in the first place…

Friday –

My older sister has discovered Instant Messenging finally. Of course, her
daughter has been using it for the past year and more, but you know old people
and technology.

This newfound interest in messenging (Or "using MSN Messenger" in
her case) caused me to evaluate the various IM clients. So, here’s a quick-and-dirty
review of the Big Four: AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, and MSN Messenger (or whatever Microsoft
is calling it this week).

When I started the test, I had 65% Resources free total. I’ll let you know
what the usage of each is and how much they let go when they’re done.

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) v4.3
(62% resources after loading) –
0.9 seconds to load window, 1.2 seconds to populate window

• Features
• Seamless integration with the millions of morons…users on AOL
• Custom Icons per user, including yourself
• Remembers multiple user names and passwords
• Block users
• Save conversations as HTML
• Online alerts – global or individual (not custom per user though)
• Groups of “buddies”
• File transfers
• Limitations
  • No cam
  • Signs you up for Netscape email for some reason
  • Either on or offline or away, global settings only.
  • Closing window just signs off
• (65% free after closing)

Yahoo v5.0
(62% resources after loading) – 7.6 seconds to load window, 7.65 seconds to populate
window

• Features
  • Buddy groups
  • Offline messages
  • Webcam builtin (3% resource hit)
  • Invisible mode (global)
  • Block users
  • Option to auto-archive conversations, or manually save
  • Customizable “Away codes”
  • Links to Yahoo content (News, stocks, etc.)
  • Add personal info to profiles of buddies
  • Ignore filters
  • IMvironments
• Limitations
  • Signs up for Yahoo mail, which you can ignore
  • No individual “visibility” filter
  • The “Close” button minimizes the app only
  • Multiple users have to type in their passwords when changing over
• (65% free after closing)

ICQ 2000b
(59% resources after loading) – 6.5 seconds to load window, 11.1 seconds to populate
window

• Features
  • Dockable window
  • Personalized visibility filters
  • offline messages
  • Block users
  • Remembers multiple user names and passwords
  • Auto-archives all conversations
  • Multi-user Chat
  • Webserver
  • Hooks into other programs
  • Checks any POP3 mailboxes (multiple servers & deletion from a preview)
  • Buddy Groups (toggleable)
  • SMS, PC-PC phonecalls, file transfers
  • Customizable sounds
  • Closing window closes program
• Limitations
  • Nearly useless “find member” features
  • No built-in webcam
  • Can’t close from the tray, have to open the window
• (65% free after closing)

MSN Messenger 3.1(formerly Microsoft Messenger, soon Windows
Messenger or some darned thing)
(63%) – 4.9 seconds to load window, 4.9 seconds to populate window

• Features
  • File transfers
  • Offline messages go to email
  • Link to Netmeeting
  • Block users
  • Manually save conversations as text files
  • Customizable sounds (in Control Panel)
  • Closing window closes program
• Limitations
  • Attempts to sign you up to Hotmail
  • No built-in webcam
  • Global settings, not per-buddy
  • Users have to type usernames and passwords when changing logins
• (63% free after closing)

Let’s see what we can conclude from all this data…

The global vs. per-user functions are a pet peeve of mine, mainly because I
first started using chat clients when ICQ was the only alternative to IRC-Chat
(you newbies might call it mIRC, after the main client used to access it). Here’s
the deal with the difference: in ICQ, I can decide to be invisible, with the
caveat that some selected people can always see me. None of the other major
clients has that option, without removing people from the buddylist entirely.

The MSN client merges with the operating system in the sounds portion of the
Control Panel and when you access Hotmail via MSIE. There are good and bad things
about that, mostly bad.

The biggest things in my mind are speed and features. ICQ has the features
down, but AOL Instant Messenger is the one with the speed, both of loading and
finding your "buddies" online. MSN is next in speed, and right at
the bottom in features. Considering Microsoft’s well-known problems with privacy
and security, you may want to be careful using that one.

MSN has several unique attributes: it is the only one of the four which did not release its requested resources when exited; it is the only one which insists on keeping a task button on the toolbar, as well as the much less-obtrusive notification tray; it is the only one without groups.

Overall, each of the clients has something unique about it. Unfortunately,
since there is no standard for messenging, if you have lots of online friends
you’ll need two or more of these things to keep in touch with them all.

_Thursday_

Ah, the big day has arrived. Yes, boys and girls, Microsoft is finally releasing their new OS, almost on schedule for a change even. This is unlike their X-Box, the great hope of MS for achieving dominance in the game console arena. The X-Box shipped in limited quantities two weeks after its original launch date, and has been underwhelming to all who have seen it. Imagine, if you will, a game console with the stability of Windows ME. Yeah, that’s great. About half the demos that MS has held didn’t work, and the reports from retailers are that about 25% of the X-Box consoles are operational, straight out of the box. heh.

But, back to Windows XP. There are plenty of reasons to avoid this beastie. For starters, the upgrade price has actually gone up while implementing “anti-piracy” measures that should reduce the price. And, those anti-piracy measures are entertaining as hell also. If you’re a business, you just install the OS as usual, although there has been some controversy about “imaging” drives (standard practice in large organizations but apparently prohibited now). If you’re a home user, not only do you pay more per machine than a business does (about 3 times more on average), you have to deal with the dreaded Windows Product Activation system. This thing has been the focus of more hostility than anything in recent memory, and the crackers and warez d00dz have already posted the corporate version on Usenet. So, if you don’t want to deal with WPA, you can grab the pirated corporate version and avoid it. Yep, great anti-piracy measure, Bill.

Then, there’s the push towards .Net… The whole concept behind .Net is vague at best, but it centers around some internet-centric view of computing. When Sun and Oracle attempted such things (Network Computer sound familiar?), they were rightly mocked. When Microsoft restarts a bad idea like this, the media start clamoring that it is the best idea ever and will revitalize the industry. No wonder paranoids think tech journalists are MS hacks. Regardless, if you’re thinking of running programs across the internet, you’re smoking crack. Seriously, have you noticed the lack of broadband access across the nation? If you have broadband, would you consider running MS Word across a network connection? Of course not, that would be stupid. A 100 gigabyte hard drive costs less than $300 nowadays, and memory is less than 50 cents per meg. The computer sitting on the shelf at your local Office Max can look for ET while downloading music and editing photos, and you’d consider giving up control of your machine to Microsoft, of all organizations? Ha!

Wednesday –

Microsoft has a new browser, Internet Explorer 6.0. Netscape has the new Communicator 6.1. Opera has the relatively recent Opera 5.12.

That’s a lot of choices. Not to mention the truly fringe browsers, like the text-only Lynx and the Linux-only Konqueror. Let’s focus on the options available to Windows users; like it or not, they own the market right now.

IE 6.0 and IE 5.5 Service Pack 2 have something in common that is unlike the other two big browsers: no Netscape-style plugin support. Microsoft didn’t announce this new “feature” before implementing it, and included it in a service pack, which normally only includes bugfixes, not significant changes in behavior.

Microsoft also has decided that IE6 will no longer have a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) installed by default. It will have to be downloaded separately. Microsoft blames this on Sun, saying that the lawsuit Sun filed against them requires MS to stop bundling the JVM, and that nobody uses Java anyway. This is blatantly false. Sun sued Microsoft to get MS to honor the contract they had signed. That contract stated that MS will only include Java Virtual Machines that are fully compliant with the Java standard, as defined by Sun.

That does not excuse Microsoft from breaking the contract they voluntarily signed with Sun. Nobody forced MS to promise Java compatibility, they did it on purpose and then broke their promise (contract). When it looked like Java was going to be vitally important, MS pledged allegiance. Now that Java looks more marginal (I know some businesses use it for important functions, but not most consumers), Microsoft sees no gain in going along with someone else’s standards.

Sun didn’t want to make an “open” standard, they wanted a standard. If it were open, they would allow others to change it. Instead, they want others to abide by their agreements.

That way, you could write a Java applet and know it would work on any JVM on any OS/platform. Does “Write once, run anywhere” ring any bells?

ActiveX controls, which were embryonic at best when Java was introduced, are now at the forefront of MS’s plans.

The convenience angle has been what Microsoft has ridden to market dominance. Breaking contracts willy-nilly has been another thing that has helped them, however. Whenever MS has a strong belief they can out-litigate their opponent, they do so, but still scream foul when anyone else takes them to court.

The rather ominous security and privacy problems with Microsoft’s current products are getting a great deal of press, but I wonder how much the average consumer notices.

I personally think that MS will stand firm on their new “no-Java” policy, and we’ll end up with even more of a headache for web developers. Especially with their recent announcement of no non-ActiveX plugins either. Makes most content quite dull, unless you buy into the ActiveX plan, which breaks all cross-platform compatibility, as well as introducing those lovely ActiveX-based virii and such.

We techies can rail against the absurdity of Microsoft’s plans all we like, but “normal” consumers are most concerned with convenience. The business community won’t have to deal with the onerous Activation Wizard, but consumers will. Guess who the bigger cash cow is and win a prize. 🙂

The big problem with Sun’s lawsuit against Microsoft wasn’t that their JVM had Windows-only speed enhancements (it was the fastest JVM for Windows), but that they had extended the language to add commands that only worked in Windows. Obviously, Windows is the biggest part of the market, but it is not the ONLY market.

As a web developer, I’m continually amazed at how the same page renders in different browsers. IE gains some of its ease-of-use at the expense of breaking some web standards (http://w3.org), and creating extensions that aren’t defined by or recognized by W3C. Netscape started that trend, but they’ve begun to play nice with version 6.1 finally.

Opera is the most standards-compliant browser, and I’ve recently adopted it as my primary browser (after using IE exclusively for over a year). I still have to use IE on occasion for some websites that refuse to follow the recognized standards, but it is quite rare now. I think the HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.0 standards are helping make the differences between browsers more negligible. NS 6.1, Opera5.12 and IE5.5 all render my web pages correctly, for instance. That may be because I validate all my pages for standards-compliance, but the differences between the three are minor now. Trying to view my pages with Netscape 4.x, though, will usually cause some non-fatal errors. For one thing, the CSS2-based buttons on my Livejournal page are invisible and non-interactive on NS4, but work fine in the newer version. Also, the “fixed” background works in Netscape 6.1 just as in IE and Opera; this is the first time that NS has supported the “watermark” background that Microsoft introduced years ago.

Even Netscape actually works now, for the first time in 4 years. 🙂

Monday –

This is a favorite anecdote that I share with folks I know. Back in 1992, I was in the Army at Fort Ord, based in lovely Monterey California. There was a junior enlisted fellow that worked in the supply room, and he had been working there before I arrived at the unit. After a few months, I found out his story, and it was a doozy.

This soldier, PV2 Gardner, was not a supply specialist, but a communications specialist. Since we had no commo section in the battalion (they had been moved to higher headquarters two years or so earlier), I inquired as to why Private Gardner was here, issuing paper tablets and computer disks, rather than assigned to a unit where he might have the chance to connect up some radios and telephones.

Well, he had been on assignment to Korea a couple years earlier, leaving at the same time as the rest of the commo folks that had been assigned to the battalion. As he outprocessed the battalion, division, and post, he did everything as normally expected. Then SPC(P) Gardner got to the housing office, and they were in the middle of a big inspection. The housing folks, looking at his ship date, realized he could stand to wait, while the bigwigs that were breathing down their necks would not wait. “Go home and we’ll call you,” he was told. Ever obedient, he went home and waited.

After his report date had passed without incident and he was still at home waiting, he decided he’d been forgotten. Normally, a soldier would be forthright and get back to the offending party as soon as possible, and certainly before he was late for his next assignment. This is referred to as being Absent Without Leave, or AWOL, and is not a good thing. Well, Gardner just stayed home and collected his Army pay for a while, then went out and got a civilian job as well. With his two paychecks, he was doing pretty well for his family. One day he got a phone call.

The Housing Office needed to speak to him. They had some news for him that he’d been waiting on for a while: his new government quarters were ready for occupancy. Yes, this soldier moved from off-post housing to on-post housing while still AWOL from his unit.

After two years or so, the commander wondered why he kept getting Leave and Earning Statements for some guy he’d never heard of named Gardner. He started a low-key investigation, and after 4 months got the answer. Now it gets really weird.

CPT Isham was hoping to get picked up for Major that year, and was doing everything possible to maintain a spotless record of command until the board convened. Obviously, having someone AWOL for 2 years without reporting it would be a bit of a smudge on one’s record. So, when CPT Isham finally caught up with SPC Gardner, he brought him back to the unit and charged him under non-judicial punishment for Failure to Repair. This is the military equivalent of not showing up for work on time, hardly the same thing as being a deserter. Desertion is defined as being AWOL for more than 30 days under normal circumstances (it’s immediate for those in special security positions), and 29 months was certainly more than 30 days by any calendar.

Gardner received a particularly harsh punishment for his actual charge, and was reduced in rank from a promotable Specialist (nearly a Sergeant) down to a Private-2. He was also fined a month’s pay and kept on restriction for 14 days. Since his job had been erased long prior, he was put in the Supply Room to give him gainful employment while he lost weight. You see, he’d put on so much tonnage while he was AWOL that he no longer was anywhere near the weight standards, and you can’t transfer to a new unit when you’re overweight. Or at least, you couldn’t then.

All would have been relatively normal at that point, if Gardner wanted to resume his military career. He didn’t. If a soldier who has been in more than 6 years gets kicked out of the army for being overweight, he gets severance pay. Our intrepid hero just kept that weight on until they had no choice but to send him back to civilian life, a few grand richer even.

All this seems to explain the reason for the title of this essay, but I’m not done yet. His attentive wife, upon looking back on the accumulated earning statements, realized the army had screwed up somewhere back in the beginning of this adventure. While living in an off-post apartment, a soldier is given a set amount of money for his pay grade and an additional amount for the area where he lives. Monterey is an expensive area, and Gardner had not received all the Variable Housing Allowance he was “owed” for his time off-post. Yes, that’s right folks: while spending 2 years sucking up unearned military pay, the boy actually had the gall to ask for some extra money. Since the commander had not charged Gardner with desertion, he was considered to have been on active duty in good standing the entire 2+ years he was playing basketball with his sons all day. The man actually got back pay for the time he was not at work!

Now, if that isn’t a gigantic pair, I don’t know what is.

Friday –

There have been a series of articles on ZDNet (and therefore on Yahoo Tech) about Linux and Open Source vs. Windows and Shared Source.

I am still amazed, after so long using Linux and Windows (as well as Solaris and Xenix) that the two sides are so entrenched that they can’t even have a rational discussion.

The Linux fanatics (not users, just the fanatical ones) automatically associate anyone who doesn’t call Windows Windoze or Windoofs with the evil empire. Apparently it’s some sort of requirement to put dollar signs in all things MS-related in order to show one’s disdain for the company and their (obviously) inferior products.

Meanwhile, the Windows fanatics (same disclaimer) portray all Linux users as programming geeks, with some strange communist or socialist bent. They further seem to believe that Linux users are like children, and should be shown the error of their ways, since they obviously don’t understand how business works.

I think it’s all quite apparent. The two sides have nothing in common. I don’t mean that completely literally, since they obviously both are looking at the prevalence of their favorite operating system in the market (or community, depending on your bent). When I say they have nothing in common, I mean that they are approaching computing from two completely different philosophies, and neither set of fanatics is capable of seeing that there may be others who don’t find their views completely transparent as soon as they’ve been explained forcefully enough (preferably with cursing or semi-random spelling errors).  

Linux is a good OS, and it keeps getting better. It is stable, although not as stable as BSD. It is fast, and it has decent support for hardware and various filetypes. Its adherents are generally propellorheads, but not exclusively. They know it is a solid system, and it can do great server things and decent desktop things. They also are unconcerned with market share, because it fits their needs now, and they don’t care if grandma uses it or not. Basically, there is no desire to dominate the marketplace. To Linux adherents, there is no marketplace

Windows is a decent OS, with an amazing amount of cruft built up over the years of backward-compatibility. Linux does not need to be backward compatible, since it has no “market” to worry about, and there is no company running the show. Windows is slow and unstable, but supports every file format around, and is easy to use. The Windows zealots are sure that Linux is run by some secret communist cabal, and the sole purpose of any software is to own the market. The fact that Linux is not trying overtly to conquer the desktop market just means they don’t have the strength to do so yet.

Where it gets entertaining is when people talk about the “ease of installation” problems with Linux vs. Windows. HA! Linux takes me 30-45 minutes to install, and Windows 2 hours or more. The reason people can continue to get away with claiming Linux is a bear to install is because almost nobody outside of powerusing geeks ever installs Windows. It came on your machine, and it stays there.

But, you must install Linux on most machines, and so you can see how annoying installing an OS can be.

Other fun things to think about are when folks claim that there is no problem with GNU/Linux as an OS, the problems are all in poor support from hardware and software vendors. Sorry to tell you zealots, but that’s irrelevant to Joe User. If he can’t watch 405 the Movie on his system, he doesn’t care that the real blame lies in the patents behind the Sorenson codec. To him, Linux sucks.

That’s about all I can come up with today. Hope you enjoyed this short primer on Linux-vs-Windows.

Saturday

bq. Sorry if this isn’t 100% coherent. I just realized I’ve got thoughts about the RIAA, Napster and other music-related things spread out across too many sites to follow. Here’s a relatively complete posting of what I think about the whole mess.

Those silly silly people running the music "industry" (like there are factories and stuff?) just can’t figure out how to not blow themselves up. Napster offered them 200 million dollars per year for the next 5 years, if the RIAA would just not try to destroy Napster, and maybe even try to play nice with them.

The RIAA, being the old greybeards they are, couldn’t bring themselves to approve such a scheme, so they’ll probably end up winning the court battle and shutting Napster down. Of course, since Fanning and Co. have a deal with BMG records, they’ll stick around as the front end for ONE record company’s electronic distribution system.

Meanwhile, the other companies in the RIAA are working on their own systems, which they’ll probably screw up royally. Anyone else remember the awesome Personics systems from the 80s? You could go to a record store kiosk, choose your personal favorite songs from the playlist, and have a cassette created with only music you wanted, with a nice laser-printed jacket and labels. The record companies made royalties, and the consumer got a product they truly wanted. Of course, the industry let that system die from lack of attention, and it was too late anyway, with the CD revolution in full swing.

This past week, the RIAA started going after OpenNap servers, which are equivalent to Napster, but without any company to sue. Next, I’m sure they’ll attempt to sue the users of Gnutella, who are individuals operating out of their own homes. This is basically the music companies suing their own customers. I wonder how they justify that business model.

Really should have made that deal with Napster, RIAA. It was the best chance of getting any money at all without suing your own customers. This should be an entertaining year.

Just saw the RIAA representative talking outside the courtroom on CNN. She really sounds petulant. Of course, Napster can stop people from trading songs based on a simple filter. But, you willfully ignorant twit, that doesn’t mean people will not just rename files with funky characters to get around the filters. Here, try this example: Prinse n da rebolushun - Boyz und Girlz.mp3 would slip right by the filtering system, but would still be a pirated song. The latest info says the Napster folks will be using "fingerprinting" technology to check on songs regardless of filename. So, if I rip a song at 192kbps, is that the same fingerprint as someone who ripped it at 64kbps or one of the VBR algorithms?

Of course, the RIAA also claims they had a horrible 39% decline in CD sales last year, but it was actually a 39% decline in CD single sales. Um, who buys CD singles anyhow, especially with the ability to preview individual tracks at CDnow, Amazon, or Tower Records stores? Slashdot had a great story that tore apart the RIAA numbers.

Oh, and Courtney Love, after how record companies screw artists, is suing her record company for the indentured servitude forced on her, as with any other artist. But, she can afford to make noise about it. Cool.

According to this article, many car CD players will refuse to play new copy-protected CDs, as will all "multimedia PC" systems. So, let’s assume I’ve got my big Altec Lansing subwoofer hooked up to my PC, and it’s the only CD player I own (not really, but many of my friends in the army only have their PCs to play CDs on, to save space). Now, I can’t play any new CDs on this machine, because I MIGHT copy them? Well, I can’t even listen to them "wherever I like" so I’m not going to buy them either.

If I put this CD in my new RioVolt MP3/CD player (the only CD player in my car), will it cease to function? Now, I’ve got a portable CD player (RioVolt) that can’t play audio CDs of the new style, I’ve got a home audio system (MPC) that can’t play the new CDs. And, this somehow does NOT infringe on fair use?

I know plenty of college students and soldiers that don’t buy stereos, because they have computers. These happen to be the ages that buy the majority of popular music as well. I imagine the RIAA is not so smart on this one.

OK, here is MY EXPERIENCE with MP3s. I can’t possibly speak for everyone, but this is me. I am 30 years old, I was a soldier for 12 years, and I have been a computer geek since I was 10. I listen to MP3s, mainly from Usenet postings of unreleased albums. If I like the album, I buy the CD.

As an example, when the last "No Doubt" album was released, I was at the store on the first day of issue, so I could buy one. Three weeks earlier, I would never have imagined I would buy it, but it was a damned good set of songs. If I had not sampled it via Usenet, I would not have bought the CD. Seriously.

Another example is Metallica. Except for a track here and there, I’ve never been a huge Metallica fan. I grabbed about 3 or 4 tracks from the S&M album off Usenet, and then bought the double-CD set. Even Metallica has made money from MP3s.

If the RIAA would consider MP3s to be advertising, or radio-like, they may have a chance to make money off them. So far, the digital distribution schemes seem to involve charging as much or more for the privelige of downloading the tracks, rather than going to the store and getting cover art and a jewel case. Personally, I’d be very inclined to use an industry-approved download system, if they guaranteed quality-of-service (not an option with the P2P systems obviously), and if they charged LESS than the physical CD.

As it is now, I tend to listen to music from internet radio stations, check out random tracks from Usenet or Gnutella, and buy CDs from CDNow.

I buy a lot of CDs, and I burn many of them to MP3 format to listen to in my MP3/CD player, so I can have 10 or 12 hours of music on one disc. Makes those cross-country car drives much nicer.

So, don’t paint everyone with the same brush, but realize that at least some of us are really not just out to be thieves. YMMV

After a conversation with an old friend today, I revisited Gnutella. There’s a program called BearShare that acts as a frontend for Gnutella, and allows searches to be performed without the pain of a few months ago. Just played with BearShare tonight, looking for common and obscure tunes, including some George Carlin and Bill Cosby tracks. Great selection, which indicates that all the publicity that CNN et al have given Napster has raised awareness of such things to the point that Gnutella is actually useful finally. They have definitely hit the critical mass needed to be a decent search tool.

Even better, the RIAA can now only sue individuals, cuz there’s no server. So, the record companies are going to take their own customers to court? Hehe

As of the middle of April 2001, many (maybe even most) radio stations that stream their signal on the internet are silent. The AFTRA is demanding 300% more money for the stations’ sending audio outside their broadcast area. I don’t get how that makes sense, and it was obvious to anyone that the only result that such a threat would have is the complete shutdown of those streams, meaning that AFTRA members don’t make any money from them anyhow. I’d think you’d negotiate from a position that seemed at least close to reasonable? More here.

It’s not completely new, but I know not everyone reads and pays attention to the latest news from techno-geek lands like Salon and /. Anyway, there’s a new music distribution format that the RIAA (motto: we’re not an evil entity, but we play one on TV) actually likes for a change: Dataplay.

Basically, the DataPlay disks are 500 megabyte CD-R disks that are downsized to a miniscule 1-inch wide platter. BUT, what the RIAA wants to do with them is to put not 500 megabytes of actual CD-DA audio on them, but 500 megabytes of compressed audio, with most of it encrypted when you buy it. Say you buy the latest Madonna album on DataPlay disks (let’s call them DP for short :)). It may well include the Immaculate Collection on it as well as Like a Virgin. But, you can’t hear those other albums until you pay the label for them. You connect the DP to your computer, and send an electronic funds transfer to Warner Bros. In seconds, your DP has had a few more bytes written to it, and now you can listen to all three of those albums, from a disk the size of a quarter. Pretty neat, in my opinion. Obviously, with compressed music you get some lower sound quality, but not enough to hurt sales. After all, MP3 is amazingly popular, and you can fit about 8 albums in 500 megs with that format.

Here’s the deal, though: chicken and egg. When CDs replaced LPs (don’t complain, the vinyl record is as near dead as makes no difference), they had the benefit of being smaller and better-sounding, with no pops or hisses or crackles. They are also, of course, much more durable than vinyl. Although many don’t take care of their CDs very well, if you remember to put them back in their jewel cases instead of using them like coasters, they should last much longer than vinyl would under normal usage. Where are the players for the DP disks? If you look at the DP site, it seems that all the players are portables, and most are made in Korea (whatever that means).

So, is the rationale here that we would use CDs at home, and then burn our own DPs with 5-6 albums on them for our portable use? The RIAA makes money on the blank DPs, I’m guessing, just as they do on blank DAT tapes (a great format that the RIAA nearly killed 15 years ago). (They must, if the disks are going to cost 5-12 bucks each for blanks. Of course, remember when CD-R disks were that expensive?) Sounds good to the RIAA, and maybe it will even work out ok for consumers, so long as we can burn whatever we want to the DPs and not need permission for each file, etc. I’d hate to be strangled by Windows Media Player (wimp) or the abominable SDMI when I just wanted to take my entire Concrete Blonde collection on one disk when I went for a bike ride. Perhaps this is an idea whose time never quite came, and is long since past?

Keep an eye on the DataPlay format, it may turn out to have better legs than MiniDisc and DCC (anyone besides me remember that one?)

Saturday –

There are some strange new businesses popping up in cyber-land. One that I recently became familiar with is Customatix. They make unique shoes. That’s right, they’ll produce a pair of nice comfy new shoes designed just for you, to your specs. I first saw the company named in Wired, and after checking out some of their references, I bought me a pair of shoes. I figure I might as well, I needed new running shoes anyway (shut up Walt), and the company will possibly end up bankrupt and gone in a year like most startups. Gotta strike while the iron is hot, and all that.

So, how’d they do? I ordered them on the 11th, they were shipped on the 15th, and (UPS blows for West Texas) I got them on the 21st. Apparently "2nd Day Air" means something completely foreign to UPS.

But, what do you really want to see, but pictures. So, here is the image that the handy-dandy Customatix Java applet produced:

And, these are the shoes as photographed by my Canon digital camera:

Although I did wear them a bit before I took the photo, you can see they’re pretty close to what the screen showed before I plunked down my credit card. The "royal blue" webbing is a bit less vibrant, and the "navy" soles are not terribly cerulean, but overall it’s a good match. Maybe if the web had a standard for color-matching we’d be good. And, yes, the left shoe does say Andy on the back. 🙂

The shoes are quite comfortable, they came with a second set of laces (in a less vivid shade of blue), and they come with a money-back guarantee if they turn out horrible or the wrong size.

I can’t imagine this business model can be profitable as yet, since the shoes cost about the same as good running shoes in a store, but there is no economy of scale. We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m thinking that I need some new boots too…

Sunday –

OK, here we go. I believe I may have alluded to the fact that I’m attempting
to figure out this whole dating thing. There is something very wrong with dating
in the Naughty Aughties (Hey, somebody has to name this decade). Once upon a
time, guys got women’s phone numbers, and then failed to call the women. This
system seemed to work for years.

But, not today, oh no. With the rise of psycho stalker/rapist types, women
cling to their phone numbers more tightly than to their virginity. In exchange,
we dumb men get to wait by the phone and wonder.

Now, here are some of the excuses for being stood up I’ve heard in the relatively
short time I’ve been out and about, and my smartass responses that I wish I
had thought of at the time.

So, women of West Texas, take this as a warning. I want new excuses. I’ve heard
these, so they shouldn’t work again. At least keep me entertained if you’re
going to be a schmuck.