June 2011

Sun Jun 05 11:28:03 PDT 2011

Visiting the Flea MarketMuseum

The annual SEA-PAC Hamfest is virtually in my backyard right now, and it’s happening this weekend. So I’d have to be a fool not to take the short drive to Seaside and attend it.

Currently, I do not have a lot of personal space to my name, so the absolute last thing I need to do is collect a bunch more old electronics. As such, I don’t view flea markets as markets anymore, I view them as temporary museums where the exhibits just happen to be on sale.

So I wandered around the tables armed with my compact digital camera, taking pictures of the things that caught my eye. The vacuum-tube era I prefer is far enough in the past now that most of the used gear you see these days is solid state. But there is still a fair amount of old “boat anchors” to be seen.

Gallery here.

Sun Jun 05 12:44:30 PDT 2011

Back to (Sur)Reality

I dreamt last night I awoke on Anarres.

I was in the infirmary of a small collective that manufactured irrigation pumps, in a valley surrounded by an arid landscape and watered by a small stream. Most of the valley was still in its natural state (an open forest of elm and cottonwood trees), and an irrigation ditch passed by outside the window. It was early spring and the trees were just starting to leaf out, giving the woods a subtle but very vibrant pale green tint.

All of my life on planet Earth up to this point had just been a dream that I was awakening from, in a room full of my relieved comrades. It turns out that I had contracted some sort of brain infection that causes its patients to lose consciousness. I had been “out” for two days, which was nearing the point at which people never awaken from this condition.

Despite all that, the doctor was pleased with my state of mind and saw it as evidence that I was recovering nicely. When I mentioned the dream, he said that long, complex, very detailed dreams were sometimes reported by patients experiencing my condition.

Everyone in the room was most amused by the absurdities of the dream world I related: one whose forests were immeasurably beautiful yet were being cut down and turned into tree farms, one on the verge of a climate catastrophe yet where “reality” in political discussions meant the artificial economic system instead of the imperiled natural world, one where peoples’ behavior was filled with psychoses as a result of the system they were trapped in being so ill-suited to human nature yet where that same system was commonly described as resulting from “human nature.” And so on. I felt sort of silly for not realizing such an absurd world was not just a dream while it was happening to me.

I was glad to be home, yet I would miss those incredible forests. In my dream, I had taken a walk in one just the day before. There was a plant you would sometimes find in them which had the most incredible fragrance, a combination of minty, sweet and piney with a touch of spice to it. Despite that, it was not admired much by the people of my dream world because their society was focused on the visual sense, and indoctrinated its members to mostly ignore the others, particularly the olfactory one. To add insult to injury, they called the wonderful plant “stink currant,” as if it were ill-smelling, yet their huge factories produced all sorts of ill-smelling artificially-scented soaps and other products that smelled truly vile and utterly unnatural.

Then I wake up a second time and am back here. Anarres was a dream, a place in a science fiction novel. Dammit.

Given that I seem to be stuck here, might as well continue to fight the system as best I can.

Sun Jun 05 13:54:26 PDT 2011

To Hell with Farmers Insurance

It will be a cold day in Hades before I every buy a policy from these sleazebags.

Every time I update my résumé on CareerBuilder, they (Farmers) spam me about job opportunities completely unrelated to the skills listed therein. So this time I put a disclaimer at the front of it saying I am not interested in sales jobs and/or jobs with the insurance industry.

And what do I see in my inbox the next morning? You guessed it: an e-mail from a recruiter at Farmers, with information about sales positions. Yes, that’s right, a job that matches both of the categories I explicitly said I was not interested in. Moreover, both the postmaster and abuse e-mail addresses at the host the message was from bounce as undeliverable.

Which all makes it pretty much definitive that Farmers engages in spamming. To hell with Farmers Insurance.

Tue Jun 21 20:58:02 PDT 2011

Mission Accomplished

I had set a goal of adding a second feature to my hobby web site before the month is over. Mission accomplished, and over a week early.

And that was even with an unexpected wrinkle today: I discovered my site had been hacked, and an obscure directory had been created and used to host porn. So I had to clean that off, change all my passwords, and make sure the damned Front Page extensions were disabled (why were they even enabled by default?).

And even that wasn’t the end of it. I reported the intrusion to the hosting company, of course. That caused them to run a security audit on the box that hosts my site this afternoon. They discovered that the SSH server was configured more permissively than is their standard, and promptly rectified that. Unfortunately, I had been relying on that configuration to SSH in, so when I tried to download my files this afternoon, I got the cyber equivalent of a door slammed in my face.

Yet, despite all that, here I am, done early. Maybe I should shut my trap now, given how gloating ends up being a good way to tempt fate.

Tue Jun 21 21:12:00 PDT 2011

And Now for Act Two

Given that odds are I will have a significant amount of time to work on programming projects (i.e. I become unemployed at the end of this week, and I don’t have another job on the line), I think my next project is going to be getting this blog moved somewhere else.

I’ve been wanting to do that for some time. For openers, it doesn’t offer an RSS feed (RSS was in its infancy when I wrote the software that powers this blog, and the design of the data files it uses makes it difficult to RSSify). Alas, that also makes it something of a pain to convert to another blog format, too. Which is precisely why I’ve not done that.

The data conversion aspect is the extent of the programming effort. I am not going to attempt to write some sort of blogging software myself. That would be reinventing the wheel. I’ll probably just choose Wordpress and be done with it, since it is the market leader.

After that (and probably in parallel with it) I want to get up to speed on the Crabgrass project so I can help out with something socially useful. And, yes, providing alternatives to commercial social networking sites is socially useful. Corporate America is just too willing to sit up and bark on command to the even the most dubious requests to betray the privacy of those who use their systems; there need to be alternatives.

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Last updated: Tue Sep 13 16:14:12 PDT 2011