Category: Musings

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Happy Sunday

TimeMachine

I’m cleaning up another mess of my own making.

I was in a hurry the other day and I shutdown my computer while it was “Cleaning Up” after a backup to one of my drives.

I was a “BAD BOY”. I figured “cleaning up” was just deleting old outdated files and that by executing a shutdown and letting the computer take a full minute to do so would give the backup time to write a file that would save it’s place and I could do what I needed to do. Like go try to make some money.

I was wrong… Not only was I wrong I was very wrong. It corrupted the backup and now I’ve gotta wait for the backup to be deleted and recreated. Oh Joy!

Don’t get me wrong. I actually like Apples Time Machine.

Albeit less so in the Mountain Lion version than I did in the Snow Leopard version. 

Snow Leopard just freakin worked! never a problem in 5 solid years of operation and really what more can you ask of a backup program? I mean it did it’s job, it was quiet about it, and never once failed to get me the data I needed to restore. I always gave it a 10 out of 10.

The Mountain Lion version is far less reliable.

I find myself often correcting problems that should never have occurred. As I have today…

Not really a big deal per se but annoying.

In this particular case because I’ve lost faith in the backup routine I have the system backing up to 3 different drives. Two of the drives are network drives and the third is a little USB3 1TB pocket drive from WD. 

The really annoying thing is that if one of the backups reports an error, rather that cycling to the next drive sometimes Time Machine will simply stop backing up altogether.

This results in a situation like today when I found that the last backup had actually completed at 2:45am on Thursday.

I miss the old Time Machine but this one is what I’m dealing with so I suck it up and deal with it.

I’m hoping that the next version of OSX “Mavericks” has addressed this problem and that they’ve fixed some other issues they have with the built-in email program.

I like the built-in program better than I like Outlook. It’s a usability thing for me. Outlook is just fine but some of the things that Outlook does are really not that Mac friendly.

I gotta say, I really LIKE Gigabit ethernet. The backup claims it will be complete in approximately one hour. That’s 112.46GB of data. Damn fast, by comparison to 100MB.

I’ve got to find a nice 16port Gigabit ethernet switch and replace my 100mb switch in the wiring closet. I had the house wired with CAT6 and many of the devices on my network are Gigabit capable. They’re being throttled down by the slow switch.

Tuesday is the big day.

We’ll hear and see the new iPhones and know when to line up outside our Apple stores to purchase them! I think the President is speaking about Syria around the same time.

I’ll be watching the Apple presentation.

I’m not really interested in the Presidents justification for attacking another country. Yeah the use of sarin is wrong but it’s an internal situation between the government of Syria and the rebels against that government.

It’s none of our country’s business until the UN or one of our allies asks for our help with the situation. 

I’ve said it before. If the world wants us to become Peace Keepers fine. The world should pay for our services NOT the American Taxpayers. 

Also our Military men & women should be getting damn good salaries for our peace keeping actions. You know, living wages not salaries below the poverty line.

But I realize doing what I’m suggesting would legitimize a mercenary force. And why should the UN actually PAY for services when they can get them for free?

Off to go do some other things then I’ll catch up on the news…

It’s a nice lazy Sunday here in the mountains. Hope yours is as nice where ever you are.

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Welcome back to the Salt Mines

Now GET TO WORK!

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I hope you all had a nice labor day.

Just think, only 364 days to go until the next one. No more white shoes… or Serial Mom will come and find you. (Weird Movie)

Most children are back in school. Parents nationwide are breathing a sigh of relief that they’ll not come home to their kids sitting on the curb in front of the smoldering ruins of their homes.

Here in the mountains there is a feeling of the year winding up. Yep, only 4 months till 2014. I noticed a lone time ago that the sunlight changes during the year. It’s not just the length of the days or the subtle shifting of the rising and setting of the sun. It’s the color of the light itself. It’s subtle and beautiful. In the mountains here the light becomes almost golden at the end of summer as we move into autumn.

Not much happening this month unless you count the iPhone release. I’m a little excited about this. I’m looking for a new phone. My decision to stick with Android or become assimilated into the Apple Collective will be decided based on the new iPhone model.  There are advantages and disadvantages to both platforms, the weight of a feather could tip me either way. 

I am leaning more toward the iPhone, but until I see it I’m not committing.

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Next month we start the inevitable downhill spiral into the holiday season. 

Yes, I know, there are already Christmas decorations out in some of the stores. I miss seeing the Halloween decorations give way to the Thanksgiving decorations and then to the Christmas adornments.

It was cool to see the decorations go up 3 to 4 weeks before a holiday and be able to mark time by their change.

Now, it’s all up at once and the last 4 months of the year blur into THE HOLIDAY SEASON. Lets face it its all about the dollars.

Now this time is punctuated by the various lawsuits filed by offended people who don’t celebrate the holidays, and the astounding thefts committed by people claiming to want to provide Christmas for their kids.

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The former group, file lawsuits because they don’t want to see Christmas Trees or Nativities, or any of the trappings of Christendom. I’ve often wondered if I could file a law suit because I’m offended but Rap music and people with their pants halfway down their behinds? I find lyrics like “Fuck the white women, shoot whitey and I be killin da cops” Really offensive! I should have the right to say no to that.

The latter excuse blows my mind every single time I see or hear it. I really wan to slap those folks and point out that a Better Christmas would be had by their kids if the family was together instead of Mom or Dad being in Jail and the kids possible being in the protective custody of a Child Protective Services prison.

I guess it’s just me!

I’m figuring that Obama will give the Syrians Christmas presents in the form of Drone Strikes. I honestly hope not. I hope that Congress tells him NO and strips him of his ability to issue executive orders.

I’m not holding my breath but I can dream.

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I read the news today.. OH BOY!!!!

Looks like The prez is going to lead us into war in the Middle East and he’s going to do it by touting the Syria has WMDs.

Wait! 

We’ve heard this story before. Where was it? WMD’s allegations of a despot gassing his own people with Sarin… Oh yeah! That was how we got into Iraq.

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Wait, wasn’t Candidate Obama in 2008 talking about the failings in the Bush administration one being a quagmire in Iraq over WMDs that didn’t exist?

Didn’t we know at that time that Syria was one of Iraqs allies?

Hadn’t we seen convoys moving materials from Iraq toward Syria? And what exactly do we classify as a WMD?

Obviously Nuclear Weapons, but I’ve always considered Sarin and other nerve agents WMDs in their own right. The only thing worse than a nuke I can think is a weaponized infectious agent.

Ebola crossed with say, a cold or flu. All the hemorrhagic thrills and the spreadability of someone sneezing and coughing. Wheeeee! Now that’s a WMD!

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Now we have ANOTHER president going to congress asking to start another war!

What? Two fronts aren’t enough? 

Some folks are calling this the beginning of World War III. After checking my Nostradamus Quatrains I’m looking for someone in a blue turban…

As long as I don’t see one of those I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the start of World War III. 

What concerns the hell out of me is, The President, who is supposed to be someone well versed enough in Constitutional law that he taught it at The University of Chicago law school for 14 years, is attempting to declare war on a country who has done us no harm.

This is a civil war in Syria and is an internal matter between the Syrian people and their government. This is absolutely not something that our military (Note, Not Obamas Military… OURS, you know, We The People) should be involved in.

If the legal Syrian government chooses to use Sarin against it’s own people we can, (along with the rest of the world)

Condemn the Syrian government for it’s actions.

We can offer humanitarian aid in the form of medical supplies.

We can work with other countries to provide refugee evacuation.

We cannot arm either side in the conflict.

We should shut off all financial support immediately . As we should have done already in Egypt.

Humanitarian aid can be continued in the form of medical and food supplies, we could also offer negotiators to help settle the conflict.

Nothing else, no money, no weapons, no troops.

We must get out of the Middle East.

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Do you really trust the Internet?

We’ve heard the perennial excuse “It’s Computer Error”.

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I’ve had one too many occasions where I was told something was due to a computer error where I followed on with “So you knew the computer was in error and yet you continued on with … (Whatever the screwup was)?”

Think about it, usually these kind of errors are in a single corporation…

What happens if you magnify that by hundreds of thousands of computers where all of those machines are linked together?

Far from having a “Terminator” or “SkyNet” experience, you have instead a degenerating mass of corrupted data.

One example I can think of are our three major Credit reporting agencies… They share the same data pool.

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The practical upshot of this sharing is that the three systems synchronize to the lowest common denominator. Which means if you have an erroneous black mark on your record appear on one of the services you’ll have that black mark replicated on all the other services. 

Once the black mark appears it can take as many as 12 interventions on your part to have a correction remain permanent. I’ve personally had this happen and spent a year removing the same piece of bad data from each service repeatedly because the services were sharing it back & forth.

But what about other more subtle information?

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Truly, the internet has given voice to all.

It’s pretty easy to figure out when village idiots are speaking in your own village? Folks all know “That Child ain’t right” and they’ll tell you so.

But can you be so certain when the Idiot is from another village? You don’t have access to the common wisdom of the folks from that other village. How do you verify whats being said is really true?

I started thinking about this the other day when I read an article on the web that had been published under the auspices of National Geographic.

The article in question rather loosely tossed around a few terms, fossil being one of them. The writer described Carbon14 dating being done on the Chitin of insect which had been fossilized. Fossilization typically describes the replacement of biomatter with mineral compounds. 

We have discovered badly degraded dinosaur tissues in the fossilized long bones of some of the largest dinosaurs. but the mineralization process seems to work from the outside in.

Insect exoskeletons made of chitin presumably would be the first thing to be mineralized.

Without bio-matter C14 testing doesn’t work.

Which leads inevitably to the conclusion that some of the data the writer was quoting was inaccurate.

I was disappointed because I have pretty high regard for National Geographic publications. I couldn’t help thinking about my nieces and nephews arguing what they read in an article online with their Geologist Grandfather. Their Grandfather would at worst tell them they and their source was full of caca. At best he’d demand to see the article himself and after reading it conclude that the writer was too loose with the language.

Knowing their grandfather as I do, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he wrote National Geographic and demanded they print a properly credited and corrected article.

This morning I was involved in a discussion about the marvels of Tablet computers in our schools and the revolutionary concept of interactive textbooks.

Then I thought of the libraries.

Schools, Elementary through College used to have extensive libraries. I’ve noticed public libraries closing and wondered if the same trend was happening in education.

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It was at this point that I had a slight epiphany. 

A book, a real printed book that sat on a shelf in a library contained “facts”. Those “facts” could be referenced by citing the book, the author, the publication date, revision, chapter, page number,  paragraph, and line.Today textbooks and research materials are available online but they also exist as hardcopies. If publishing moved to an online only paradigm these materials risk becoming ephemeral.

If the “facts” changed, another book was printed that contained all the revisions. It got placed on a shelf next to the previous edition and the world spun on.

If a book exists only as a digital entity, instantly downloadable and revisable online, can you be sure of the “facts” contained in the book? What you read last week, you might be unable to reference this week due to an update.

Within the pages of this blog, with absolutely no regard to the changes in meaning or in fact the subject of a particular piece I’ve made edits to what I’d said previously. I pressed the “Publish Button” overwrote what I’d said and I never gave it a thought. 

What happens if textbooks are treated with the same cavalier attitude?

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Johnny or Jane learn today that Syrias uprising was a completely internal affair. Their textbooks say so. But tomorrow the Syrian uprising is found to be caused by an external player. Johnny or Jane, if they miss the update will be incorrect on their final exam.

This is of course an extreme example but it illustrates the point.

In a completely digital world how do we know a “fact” is a FACT? (No, I’m not suggesting that we live in “The Matrix”) 

It’s said time and again “History is written by the winners.” In the not too distant past, the victors had to go to great lengths to re-write history. In a digital age… all it takes is opening an editor on a computer.

This led me to a disturbing thought

In a society where everything is online… where news is unabridged, unedited, and instantly displayed, we run the risk of being a society of gossip and here-say.

Perhaps, this is why so many people are caught-up in “Reality TV shows”. These are after all nothing more than gossip raised to it’s glitziest form.

The really ironic thing for me to consider is that I never considered the possibilities before now. I played a part in moving this digital age forward and I looked upon those who were not seduced by the promise of technology with some disdain. 

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As I look at it now, perhaps those who were cautionary weren’t Luddites. Perhaps they were simply better acquainted with the lowest common denominator of human behavior.

I can’t help but draw a very loose parallel to the angst Robert Oppenheimer expressed when he understood the full nature of what he had created.

I like digital books, but I think with my favorites… I’m going to buy hard copies. Just to be sure.

FYI I just edited this entry… Mostly for the hell of it.

Have a Great Weekend!

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“All my Classmates are Criminals…”

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Not mine…

I once worked with a woman from Belarus. One day we were chatting about our respective educations and she dropped the bomb that all her classmates and friends were criminals.

I asked how that could be?

Her explanation rebooted my brain.

“The people in power, formerly Party Officials now part of the New Russian Mafia made laws that made everyone criminals”

She went on to explain that the laws making her friends criminals were enacted in response to her friends supporting the opposition party.

In other words if you ran against the old guard officials,  supported candidates that were against the old guard or the mafia you were automatically a criminal and imprisoned.

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I asked, “Didn’t the people object?”

She puffed out a cloud of smoke from her Marlboro with a smile “Sure, and they went to jail too. If anyone in their family objected  their whole family went to jail. Their sisters and Mothers were raped and their Fathers & Brothers beaten and crippled.”

She said it so matter of fact it was so commonplace there wasn’t any emotional impact to her.

In my Amerocentric brain, I was trying to convince myself that this kind of thing could never happen here. Eventually I succeeded in convincing myself that all was well.

Our conversation was in 2000.  

This is the kind of thing that scares the hell out of people like me. Because stuff like this happens all the time in various countries all over the world.

We believed it could never happen here!

My how things changed…

A mere 13 years, a few terrorists attacks, and 2 wars later, and we’re faced with the possibility that in fact it could happen here. 

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All it takes is fear.

All it takes is the belief that the ends justify the means.

All it takes is time. Time for the people to forget how things are supposed to be.

Our government tells us that they’re protecting us and to do that better they need to curtail just a few of our rights. We willingly give up those rights in the name of safety, even when the threats  are not being removed.

How many people who are here on expired student visas has our government not hunted down? How many enemies of our  country that we don’t know about are here?

How many more of our rights, how much more of the constitution will we allow to be thrown away?

California has recently taken steps toward exactly the situation in Belarus.

In past weeks California representatives have essentially tried to make people with a wide variety of firearms criminals. They’ve done this with the stroke of a pen.

Under The Patriot act and subsequent anti-terror acts, all it takes for you to be investigated, searched, wiretapped, detained, or  imprisoned is for you to fall under a guideline that someone in Washington has decided means you’re a terrorist. 

But as we move on we see that abuse of power is expanding.

From the Sargent in TX who was arrested because he was “Rudely” carrying a rifle in a rural area with his son. To the parents of a Maryland child whose home was searched after their child had spent 2 hours or more being interrogated in the principals office because the child had brought a cap-gun to school.

Sure, right now you say “well it’s about the guns.”

You’re thinking what about Sandy Hook?

We have to protect the children…

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Remember this… There is no law in TX that says you can’t have your rifle slung over your shoulder. There is also no law against cap guns. The common thread is that in both cases the 2nd and 4th amendments were left trampled in the dirt. 

But wait, it gets better. 

There’s a guy on twitter who had his home searched because he’s a vocal critic of the Obama Administration. The Article is here

I want you to understand that I as a rule don’t like The Examiner.

In this case it was the only place I could find remnants of the original piece. I couldn’t locate Mr. Francois blog as of this writing. I was able to locate this article which quotes some of the blog piece I read a day or two ago.

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Short version.

This guy is very critical of the Obama Administration.

He Tweets about it, blogs about it and generally gives his First Amendment right a workout. This led to his Fourth Amendment being stomped on.

He opens his door to people claiming to be the police but who were in fact the Secret Service. I suppose they are law enforcement, but I would have expected them to identify themselves properly in the first place.

They didn’t have a warrant, Mr. Francois granted them permission to “Have a look around” because he didn’t want his house trashed while they looked for something that wasn’t there. Besides they could have gotten a warrant with a phone call.  As he points out, then they’d have been pissed and that would have made things worse.

As they leave, one of the SS agents says, “better stay in line”

Then after the secret service was done at his house, they went to his daughters.

This all because someone in power figured that the Constitution doesn’t really matter.

The First, Second, and Fourth amendments have all been violated by the examples listed in this short bit of writing. 

Are we heading for a Police State?

Wikipedia defines Police State as;

“A police state is a state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the population. A police state typically exhibits elements of totalitarianism and social control, and there is usually little or no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive.

The inhabitants of a police state experience restrictions on their mobility, and on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force which operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state.[2]“

Is any of this ringing a bell, Sounding familiar, Grabbing your attention? I hope to god we’re waking up. This isn’t a bad dream, it’s a bad reality and one that we need to stop. 

We don’t want to see it, we don’t want to believe it. But it sure looks like our country is heading down a very dark road.

Our refusal to see it, is providing opportunity to those who have given us the recent spate of scandals all of which lead more or less right to capital hill.

Take this Saturday Morning to make your voice heard.

Please write your representatives. Let them know you’re not pleased with their performance, remind them that you can and will vote them out of office. (Perhaps we should vote them out of office anyway just for good measure) Put them in their place and remind these people 1) They work for us, 2) we’re watching them. and 3) we’re not going to take anymore.