Category Archives: technology

Waiting for Google+

Posted on by
2

“Don’t mix 2D and 3D!” That’s how it used to be, but with Google+ the so-called Real Life is invading cyberspace, for better and for worse.

It is all over the news, at least the kind of news I read. Google’s new social media will finally challenge Facebook on its home turf. Or rather, Google intends to extend its home turf over to where Facebook is now. Naturally I have requested invites wherever I can, using any tricks I can find, but I’m not getting in.

This may be a good thing, actually, since I may be one of the few humans which the Google+ system does not work well for.

The basic philosophy of Google+ is that we don’t have a big mass of contacts that are all simply “friends”. Rather, we naturally relate differently to people we know, depending on where we know them from. We have something in common with coworkers, but something entirely different in common with relatives. Chances are that the two groups don’t overlap much. While there are some things we want both of these groups to know, there are some we reserve for one of them. Then there are groups connected by a shared hobby, or religious activities, or shared education, neighbors, former neighbors, or interesting people we just stumbled upon on the Net. Parents – or at least mothers – keep tabs on the families of their children’s friends. Over the course of a generation, this can rise to epic proportions, with some otherwise mentally normal people having 4000 contacts in total.

Obviously for those who are not monks or something similar, there is a great boon in sorting these people into groups from the very start. It makes the crowd manageable. It makes it easy to get the right message to the right people. And you can still send important messages to all of them at once. Such as the death of your Significant Other, or the lolcat videos that are a must see. Things like that.

Me, I differ from neurotypicals in two  important aspects here: One, I have very few friends. I don’t easily get to know people, as I generally don’t contact people unless I have some important message that only I can give them. If you know me and are not part of my birth family, you probably contacted me somewhere. I don’t mind that at all, of course. I just don’t do it unto others.

Second difference: I like to learn viewpoints that I don’t necessarily agree with. It is easy for me to hold in my mind quite complex viewpoints that are completely different from what I consider true or even completely sane. A few of my friends are Christian conservatives, a couple others are gay liberals. They would probably mutually enjoy dancing on each other’s graves, so I can see the benefit of keeping them separate. But I don’t want to keep them separate from me. I practice the teaching of Johan Oscar Smith: To listen, even if to a drunk in the street. People are born into this world for a reason, and even if they mess up many things, they all have something to teach someone. That someone might be me.

So what bothers me is that when we all move to Google+, as any reasonable person would do unless they make some disastrous mistake, I may stop seeing many of the messages I see today: Messages that will now be sent only to certain groups where you expect your message to be accepted and lauded. I may not be one of those. The liberals will probably only send me notices of entirely superficial things, not what they really think. Quite possibly, unfortunately, the same may apply to the Christians and the Buddhists. I’m part of nobody’s in-crowd, except my guardian angel I guess.

So, I’m not really in a hurry with the Google+ thing. But I will at least try. I fully expect all of you to move over once you find out how awesome it is. Well, unless the Big Surprise form Facebook is a total revamp after the Google+ model.  We’ll see how it goes. I’ll keep you posted if I get in.

 

A lamentation or three

Posted on by
Reply

Toward the Light…

Today I finally got around to installing Wimp, the extremely legal music streaming service from Norway, on a Linux computer. I had it on my smartphone, but the interface is like an old aunt’s attic where just one look makes you decide to search for something later, if at all. The PC interface is better, mainly by virtue of having more space for the clutter.

And then I found that my only playlist on Wimp was now empty. All music by Knut Avenstroup Haugen was gone, without a trace and without a goodbye.

Knut Avenstroup Haugen is a Norwegian composer, in fact he lived for a while in Kristiansand, the city where I work. He is of the classical (non-crazy) school, making actual music rather than the sound of factory machines or kitchen utensils. And he made the sound track for the online game Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. The game is too evil for me to play in this late stretch of my life, although it certainly showcased the power of the personal computer for gaming. Some of the songs however are in a class of their own. Or at least they are to me.  Three of the songs from the Cimmeria part of the game are lamentations, similar to the classical lamentations once popular in church music, but more direct, more raw, closer to the barbarian dirge which they represent in the game.

Now I probably differ from every one of my readers in my love for a good lamentation. There are few things that can so certainly perk me up if I feel a bit below the top. In all fairness, I used to be immune to sadness for many years and even now rarely feels its touch, even after having recovered it through the mystery of meditation. So this may work entirely opposite in people given to depression. In fact, I suspect it would. But for me, a good lamentation fills me with the joy of beauty. And these are my favorites: ‘Ere The World Crumbles‘, Ascending Cimmeria, and especially Memories of Cimmeria.

They were gone, just like that. Now that is lamentable. I notice that they are also gone from one of the two parent companies of Wimp.no, Platekompaniet. So there seems to be some disagreement, perhaps, between the composer (or the artists, or the publisher) and this particular music chain.

The thought struck me, of course, that maybe Haugen had converted to the One True Faith and retracted all his worldly music. This is the kind of thinking that is never really far from my mind, I guess. Although I have yet to retract all of my worldly entries from my journal.

But the fact that I am right now playing his music on the Swedish competitor, Spotify, kind of goes against the conversion theory.  So I have sent a mail to Wimp and asked for an explanation. Being that they are Norwegian (and labor is extremely expensive in Norway compared to the less successful nations, such as yours) I don’t really expect an answer. Consequently, I don’t really expect to continue to subscribe to Wimp beyond the last month I have already paid for.

***

Now, a few more words about lamentations. As I said, they may be a bit unnerving for the depressed, and I certainly don’t recommend them for the suicidal, for the precise reason that I love them:  To me, the essential beauty of the lamentation is that it lifts the soul toward Heaven. This was presumably why the genre was originally conceived. The primordial dirge may have been just the senseless keening of the bereaved, but it probably evolved even at the dawn of history – if not before – into a religious function.

After all, by the faith of the earlier ages, at the time of death the soul was evicted from the body, but rarely had much idea of what to do next, nor was it usually motivated to move on. People tended to die young, and often senselessly or brutally, in the midst of their attachment to the material world. Their immaterial part, the soul or spirit or shade or whatever people thought it was, therefore was thought to hang around for at least a while after their demise.

This is where the advanced dirge / early lamentation comes in. As the confused and frustrated soul attends its own wake, probably trying in vain to communicate with its family, the ceremonial singers (and instrument players, if available) begins performing this hair-raisingly beautiful song. The soul is touched by its beauty, and lifted on the power of the music and the implicit prayer, it begins to forget the trivial attachments of the world and rise toward the Light. This, then, is the function of the lamentation: To lift the spirits of all who participate, accompanying the soul of the deceased for a ways on its journey toward the blessed afterlife, whatever that might be in that particular culture.

Or perhaps that’s just me. I am not exactly your average human, I guess even when it comes to music…

 

Not losing weight here!

Posted on by
3

“I’ll definitely work out for what I ate later…” This may not be quite as easy as one would believe, even if you really do work out. I speak from experience here.

Today I will write a small article about health and physiology. After all, I assume my reader to have a body and be keenly aware of it. Even though our lives in the body are rather short, we try to make it last a little longer and serve us a little better.

And there’s the small point that for each day you live, life expectancy rises by approximately 5 hours. (That’s in the first world, obviously things are improving faster in the third world.) So, death is approaching, but not by 24 hours a day. The longer you live, the longer your life expectancy. Nifty, huh?

Now, second only to smoking, fat is one of those things people know is Bad For You. There has been so much writing and broadcasting about this, there is hardly anyone in the English-speaking world who does not have a wary eye on their weight, or the weight of others. While some feel it is more important to enjoy life, most people have at least some interest in the issue. So here we go!

***

In official statistics, is is assumed that a grown man will burn about 2400 calories a day, a woman about 2000. The reason why we men burn more calories is that we are larger and have more muscles. The few remaining people who have hard physical work are not counted in these statistics, I believe, and neither are professional athletes. These are people who lie outside the normal range.  There is of course some individual variation.

Now that I walk an hour after work,  I burn 500 calories extra each day (my pulse watch shows 600, but that includes the basic 100 calories I would burn in an hour just by being myself). The smart reader would assume that these calories would be taken from my fat reserves, such as they are. I am not quite overweight, but my normal weight is right on the upper border of the recommended range.  (“Normal” weight in the literature, not that it is normal to be normal these days, it is normal to be moderately overweight.)

I went on the bathroom scales again. There is no sign of losing any weight after over two weeks of this.

Now, two weeks is not a lot. One pound of fat is approximately 3500 calories, which is roughly what I burn extra in a week. Diets or other techniques for rapid weight loss don’t actually reduce your fat very fast, but instead cause you to lose water, which can be lost and gained much faster. Some foods bind more water in the body than others, so it is possible to “lose weight fast” that way. Sweating a lot without drinking more can also cause you to “lose weight”, but is not good for your health at all!

Even if I burn 500 extra calories a day, I won’t lose weight if I eat 500 more calories too. That could easily happen: A large box of yogurt (half a liter is a common size here) contains about that many calories. So it could easily happen if I am just a little more hungry than usual. With light exercise this is very common, unless you also go on a diet and count calories.

Then there is the small detail that “weight” is not the same as “fat”. If I use my muscles more than usual, they may become larger – this happens especially easily to us men – and muscle mass is actually heavier than fat. So a man who is not overweight could easily gain weight by exercising! Obviously this requires that one eats that much protein, which muscles are made from. But there is plenty of protein in the western diet, both from plants and animals.

In my case, there is yet another reason why I might not lose weight: I may be actually burning 3000 calories a day already. This is not so relevant for most of my readers, who get a fairly large percentage of their calories from fat. I did too, until I got a chronic illness that strikes if I eat more than a few grams of fat in each meal. So I cannot eat typical fatty foods like cakes, cookies, sauces, chocolate, butter, margarine, mayonnaise and similar bread spreads, or most meat dinners.

In the first months after I dropped eating fatty foods, I lost weight, and quite a bit of it.  Some of it never came back. But gradually my digestion adjusted so I could eat larger portions of starch and sugary foods, and digest them efficiently. It is entirely possible that I eat 3000 calories a day, I have not sat down and counted them.

You would think that if I actually ate 3000 calories a day, I would have gained weight steadily over the last years.  But it is not that simple. When you eat both fat and carbs, the body will prefer to burn the carbs (it is faster and easier) but store the fat.  If you eat very little fat, the body will not be able to store much.  Carbs cannot be converted to fat easily. It is possible, but unlike some animals, humans really suck at converting sugar to fat. Only a small portion makes it over, almost all of it is lost along the way, and simply becomes waste heat.

(Fructose, which is a common sweetener in the USA, is more readily converted to fat. If I lived in America, I would probably be fatter. But I live in Norway, where fructose is rare. It is mostly found in honey, and I don’t eat much of that.)

So you can see, there are numerous reasons why I may not lose weight even though I burn 500 calories extra on fast walking each day. That is not a tragedy for me, since I am not dangerously fat. And in any case, there are health benefits to being active beyond losing weight. In fact, it is uncertain whether overweight is dangerous at all. Obesity probably is, but moderate overweight may be more a symptom of inactivity rather than a danger in itself.  Danish statistics show that overweight people who bike regularly (a common combination in Denmark, thanks to the flat terrain and delicious pastries) don’t suffer the metabolic syndrome that plagues overweight car drivers.

In other good news, weight loss from exercise is far more likely if you are already unnaturally fat. Obese people will generally not feel hungrier after moderate exercise than without; in fact, most of them will feel less hungry after light or moderate exercise like walking, biking or swimming. This is because this level of activity stimulates the brain centers that regulate the appetite. Moving about is the normal behavior in humans “in the wild”, so the body works best when we do this, including the brain.  So if you fall in that category, you should definitely start walking or something like that, but very moderately at first. Don’t suddenly start running without consulting your doctor!

I, however, may have to start running if I want to lose weight. Or I could eat less, I suppose. I have not really decided whether I should do that, though. I just want to maintain the body so I don’t lose it from sheer negligence.

 

Another computer entry

Posted on by
Reply

The hard disk of my main computer is in bad shape. I am running Spinrite 6 on it each night now, but modern disks are huge compared to what this tool was made for. And this huge disk has lots of bad spots. Spinrite has recovered some lost sectors and rewritten a number of weak ones. But frankly, at this speed it could be weeks or even months of nightly disk recovery before it is back in perfect surface health.

According to my earlier notes, the TERRA is from November 2007, meaning it is over 3 years old. It is not a record exactly, but usually I bought a new one every other year or so. This may be the first time I actually wear out a computer, rather than it breaking down suddenly or (usually) being stowed away while still usable but slow. The computer from 2004 is still workable, but so slow that you can go make some food while it starts a program.

It is not like I could not buy a new computer, I guess.  The price for a similar machine is not too bad by zeroth world standards. But that’s the thing… it is a similar machine. There are small improvements: I can get it with built-in SSD as main disk and the 1TB disk as second disk, which would give a significantly faster machine in some ways. Much faster start, and a small improvement whenever a program calls the operating system and uses a part that is not in memory. Faster swapping, but I already have that now with the add-in SSD. Also, there is USB 3.0, which would allow me to add super fast external hard disks. Because I need those… not really.

That’s it, there is no “killer application”, nothing that would change my life, so to speak. I’m not eager to shell out $1200 (plus the taxi to get it home from the post office…) for a machine that is marginally faster. So I will probably keep this one until either it breaks down or I do. But for now, I’m running Spinrite each night. Over the next few weeks I hope this will restore the hard disk to working order, in which case it will only hang once a day or so from the widescreen driver…

***

If you have an Android phone, you may want to get JuiceDefender, a program that extends battery life by turning off various features that are not in use at any given time. For instance, there is no point in having Internet access running all the time while the phone is in your pocket. It can go online a few seconds every five minutes, for instance, to check for mail, Twitter or Facebook updates. You can set how often, and various other things, but I haven’t. I use the free version with standard settings, and it seems to roughly triple battery life for me, possibly a bit more. I used to have to recharge it for a while in the middle of the day, now it is not even half empty at bedtime. Which, incidentally, is now.

SSD day 2

Posted on by
Reply

I almost thought my main computer was gone (again). Each time it started, it wanted to check the C: disk, and every time it found various errors and then hung up completely. If I skipped the disk check, it started, but crashed after a little while. So, not a pretty sight. I am not sure how much of this came from the bluescreen problems I have had the last few days, and how much from trying to use CCleaner to fix them. But I was seriously wondering if a full reinstall of Windows was in order.

Upgrading to Win7 would anyway wipe my disk, evidently. That’s rather a big difference from upgrading Ubuntu Linux, which may take some hours but leaves pretty much everything running as before (or better) afterwards, no reinstall required for any programs. (Although it will replace some programs with newer if you allow it to.)

Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do before Windows gets as good as Ubuntu Linux. But then, I don’t use Windows because it is a great operating system, but because some of my favorite programs need it to run. Thanks to the fact that most people have bad taste in operating systems (as had I for much of my life), many programs are simply never made for other systems. Hopefully this will change gradually as computing disappears from the desktop and into the clouds on one hand and the smartphones on the other.

Well, the system is running again finally, at no extra cost, for as long as it lasts. And bedtime is approaching.

***

Good news from work: Boss says I can take my laptop home each day so I can work from home if I get sick again.  I would estimate that 14 of the 19 sick days the last year were of a sort where I could have worked from home. In most cases, I simply could not travel too far from the toilet. A 55 minute commute is a bit far in these cases, although I love the commute otherwise. With the new opportunity, my life is even more perfect. Long may it last.

I can’t convert vacation into sick days though. Norwegian law is very strict, you are not allowed to dodge your vacation! If I could, I could have reduced my sick days to zero, and at the same time gotten rid of the excessive vacation. I usually take NaNoWriMo off, of course, but lately that is not enough: Mandatory vacation has increased to 5 weeks a few years ago, and I have reached the limit of how much I can carry over to the next year.

Now that is what I call zeroth world problems! ^_^

***

Edit to add before midnight: Ordered this year’s CD (not sure if there was one last year?), from CDJapan. The beautiful (well, to me at least) lullaby that you can hear here on YouTube until the copyright holders get it removed (and thus stop more people from hearing it and buying it…)

 

SSD day

Posted on by
1

The Intel 80GB Solid State Device that I ordered this weekend arrived today already. Multicom.no are quite fast! So most of the evening was lost to installing it and trying to make use of it.

The SSD is a modern alternative to the hard disk. It uses a bit less power, is faster (at least in reading and in writing randomly) and shock-resistant. The latter part is useful in laptops, not so much in the desktop when I installed it.

The packet contained only the disk itself (2.5″), no cables or brackets or anything. Well, a brief description of how to install it. I snagged a SATA cable from an old computer that melted down years ago, that I had the foresight to bring along when I moved. Well, not had the foresight to throw away really, but it came in handy now.

Once it was properly connected, I started the computer again. It did not show a new drive in “My computer”, but in the hardware part of Control Panel – System, it was said to work properly.

Reading a bit on the Net, I eventually found out that I had to right click on My Computer, Manage, and Disk management. The drive was listed but did not have a letter and was not initialized. I initialized it, formatted it, and let it get the next free letter (L:).

I spent a considerable time trying to clone or copy the C: partition (where Windows is) to the new drive, but it seems not doable. It would have been if the C: drive had been a separate physical drive, but on my computer it is a small part of a 500GB drive, and the cloning programs demand that the receiving drive is as least as big as the source drive (not the source partition). So that dream (and a fast booting Windows) went down the drain.

Fast booting would have become more useful lately, since the computer dies the blue screen of death about once a day, some days two. It seems to happen randomly, sometimes while I sleep at night. The error message this time does not list a driver, just some hexadecimal addresses.

After I gave up that (it was now beginning to become night), I put the Windows swapfile on the SSD. This was a success. After a restart, Windows is now more snappy. Once I have closed a big program, Windows is ready to take my order immediately, where it until now have had to unwind for a bit. Swapping between large programs is also fast now. The max swapfil I was allowed to set was 4095, which is a bit small, but good enough for me. It is also about twice what I had on the C: drive before.

I also moved City of Heroes to the SSD. It starts faster now, and zones load faster, but no faster than on the Vista machine. I suspect the load time now consists of the variable data downloaded from the servers, which would explain why both machines have virtually the same load time. Before, the XP machine was slower.

I’d like to move Dragon NaturallySpeaking also over to the SSD, it is my slowest program not load now. But since it is a major cause of crashes, this may have to wait.

If I can’t figure out the crashes, I may upgrade to Windows 7 soon. Both the widescreen monitor, the video card and now the SSD are from after the time of Windows XP, so the drivers for them don’t really fit with the rest of the system. I suspect either the monitor driver or video card driver (the problem was there before I got the SSD). Win7 is also supposedly faster.  And maybe, just maybe I can get it to install on the SSD. In that case, the new hardware may actually be worth the price. Otherwise, not quite.

I hope this information may be useful for others who pick up a SSD, but I don’t really know.

Datapad 2015

Posted on by
13

Talking to mechanical objects – less embarrassing than you’d think. (Perhaps less than it should be, sometimes…)

I was reading an article in The Economists about Hewlett-Packard and Dell, the two big American PC manufacturers. And I thought: “There probably won’t be much left of them in 5 years.” Because the pads / tablets will likely take over around then.

There are two simultaneous trends that are lifting the tabs: Improved displays, and “cloud” storage. With data stored remotely (and in some cases processed remotely), the tablet becomes mainly an interface, an input / output unit for the invisible “real” computer.

This is pretty much how it is already, and this is fine if you just want to read or watch video or play music. But the third part is on its way to join: Speech recognition technology. Today I can speak to my desktop computer and it correctly guesses 90-95% of my words. For native English speakers, the rate is 98-99%, enough that you can fire off the average email with no mistakes, and certainly fewer mistakes than if you typed it.

In contrast, when I speak English to my Android phone, I might just as well speak Norwegian for all it cares. It seems to react randomly, when it reacts at all. Again, I presume this is different for native English speakers; certainly the cool demonstration on YouTube is very different from my experience. But my point is, once the tablet has the same level of speech recognition as my desktop computer has today, or better, we will no longer depend on our sausage fingers for input.

You may think it is awkward and embarrassing to speak to an inanimate object in public, but a large number of cell phone owners seem to disagree with you. In fact, some of them seem almost immune to embarrassment, but let’s skip that topic for today. I agree that you would probably not want to address your tablet on the subway and say “search Google for Russian bride pictures”, even if you were working on a thesis about the change in Russian wedding customs at the end of the Soviet era. On the other hand, if you are at the office you probably won’t have any problem with saying “open spreadsheet Johnson & Johnson 2015 April summary”.

OK, perhaps 2015 is a bit optimistic. After all, it took more than 4 years for Dragon NaturallySpeaking to reach its current near perfection on the PC, and it was at least good for entertainment when I first got it, even if it wasn’t actually useful if you had hands. But the listening (and hopefully obeying) datapad definitely be in the near future. If we have a future at all… Opinions on this seems to vary lately?

Google 2-step verification

Posted on by
Reply

Some of you may remember that my Google account was hacked some months ago. I am still not sure how. I did suspect an app on my Android phone, where I typed in my password out of habit since it was associated with Google – but actually only displayed Google News, which don’t need the password. However, I am not sure that was the reason, or even that it was my password it asked for – there was just an input box that displayed over the screen.

Another possibility is that the thieves simply assumed that I used the same password on Google as I used everywhere else on the Internet. They were right – at the time I did use the same password pretty much everywhere. Then again I did not register at naughty places, having no need for that. The most dubious were probably the message boards for web comics, and those were already getting old at the time. I am not the kind of user who signs up for free gifts at random places. I am not exactly paranoid, obviously, but generally cautious.  Maybe one of those sites were hacked. I run various anti-spyware program on my Windows machines – Linux don’t need those, and that’s a fact for now at least.

In any case, back then I was lucky: The thieves only sent spam to everyone in my rather small contact list, and mostly just random letters at that. But there is now a more cruel and insidious hacker league on the warpath. Once they have control of your Google account – or Yahoo for those who use that – they send mail telling your friends that you have met some dramatic misfortune abroad and need money to get home, could they please lend you some. They also obtain enough information from your mails to answer any simple request from the cautious friend, rather than relying on a fire and forget approach. Mail the stolen account and they will pretend to be you, to the best of their limited abilities.

I am making it quite a bit harder for them, I think, by enabling the fairly new feature of 2-step verification. There are a couple ways of doing the extra verification, but as I have a smartphone, I downloaded the Google Authenticator. It is a small app that is only used for this purpose, to generate a random 6-digit code that is used in a separate screen after mail address and password.

In other words, after logging in normally to Google, you have to supply this pass code. During setup, the account is tied to this particular phone, so the thief also need your phone in addition to your password, to hack your account. Now I just need to not lose my phone!  People do that a lot, I hear.  I lost a mobile phone some years ago, during a train ride.

However, you don’t need to use this code generator every time you want to check your mail. You do it when you would normally need to sign in: When you start using a new computer, or when you have not used this one for a while, especially if you have used another computer in the meantime. For me, logging on seems to be needed mostly after power outages but otherwise a couple times a week.

As for the phone itself, I had to write in a lengthy one-time password. For good measure, the phone was about to run out of power at the time, after only 17 hours of mostly non-use. If I ever go on a long trip again, I should probably have an extra battery. A bit inconvenient to not be able to access my mail because my phone is out of power.

There are a couple back-up measures. The setup generates a handful of pre-defined codes for your account, that can be used instead of those from the authenticator. So you can print those out and put them in your wallet or purse or shirt pocket for when the smartphone app is not available.

Another option is to get them via text or voicemail to a secondary phone, such as work phone or landline. I don’t have a landline anymore, and to my surprise I had a hard time remembering my work phone number, even though I remember it effortlessly when at work. (I have to enter it daily in a program.) I am also wary because I had my mobile phone as backup last time, when my account was hacked, and they never sent the new password even though the number was right. They said they did, but it never arrived. So I might have lost my account for good, had I thrown away the old computer which I used when I first got my Google account. Luckily I had it, and with it all details of when it was first set up. This convinced Google to give me back my account.  But if I had not descended from packrats, I would have been in trouble.

Anyway, I am not sure I have less chance of losing access to my account now. But I have less chance of sending y’all spam if it happens, and that is good.

To do this yourself, open Gmail and choose Settings (at the top). There, choose Accounts and import, and Other Google account settings. A new page opens, which includes “Using 2-step verification”. Or that’s where I did it.

More fun with surveys

Posted on by
2

“You have to sit in a block of steel which moves at an unbelievable speed.” -This is actually pretty much how I feel about cars. You can probably not even imagine how I feel about TV.  Let us say that references to the Apocalypse come unbidden to my mind…

Synovate, my provider of Norwegian surveys, sent me another one. This time I may win an iPad! Somehow I don’t think that will happen. Actually I suspect all of my surveys are quietly filtered out at the very beginning of the processing. There is probably some algorithm that scans the results and rejects those that are obviously not made by a human. And that’s where I think mine go.

This time it was TV. I managed to answer the two first questions, which were about names of cable TV providers, of which I knew 3. It went downhill from there.
Do you have…
O – Digital TV
O – Analog TV
O – Don’t know
I don’t even have a TV, and I know that quite well! Still, my best hope for the iPad was to pick the least misleading. So from there on and out the survey it was “Don’t know”.

It is not the first time.
What brand of car does your household have? “I don’t know” (don’t have a car).
What part of the world did you go on vacation last year? “I don’t know” (don’t go on vacations).
Which radio programs do you listen to? “I don’t know” (don’t listen to radio).
Which newspapers do you subscribe to? “I don’t know” (none).
Which of the following movie ads have you seen? “I don’t know” (don’t go to the movies).
What do you think of the following soap operas (or something like that)? “I don’t know” (still don’t have a TV).
Which readymade dinner do prefer? “I don’t know” (don’t buy readymade dinner).
Which air plane company did you last use and why? “I don’t know” (it’s been 25 years after all).
And so on and so forth.

It isn’t exactly that I am dead to the world. If they asked me what mobile phones I used, I could answer them. They did in fact once ask me about web services, and I did answer. (But I did not win anything…) I could probably still say something about computers, unless they included the “last 12 months” as they sometimes do. I also once recognized some snacks! Admittedly most of them were familiar names from before the fat intolerance, but I still occasionally buy some small snack.  And I have pretty strong opinions on soda (Pepsi Raw / Natural is The Best!).

So I don’t subsist entirely on water, spiritual books and City of Heroes. But evidently I am still far from normal. I am not sure that is a bad thing, though.

Music, books and countries

Posted on by
16

If you have a PC (or Mac, or Android phone) you can use the Internet to store your music. Actually you can do that anyway – Ubuntu Linux has had this for at least a year – but it is new to Amazon. com. And unlike Ubuntu One, it is for Americans only.

Amazon.com has launched a “cloud drive” service for their MP3 shop. People can save the MP3 files directly to these servers (not actual clouds, luckily) and play them from anywhere. Anywhere in the USA, that is.  Amazon.com does not sell MP3 files overseas, although ironically they sell CDs, which you can then rip and upload to competing “cloud” providers. It’s a good thing sending all those physical objects across the globe does not cause some kind of climate change or anything, since the end result is exactly the same, with the addition of a CD on a landfill.

I think it is safe to assume that the restrictions on export of MP3 files are due to negotiations with the RIAA, the Recording Industry Asses of America or something very similar to that. It bears mention that I have bought several books in electronic form from Amazon, quickly and without hassle, across the Atlantic. This fits with my impression that book publishers may be greedy like the rest of us, but fundamentally sane. The RIAA, on the other hand, systematically comes across as a collective psychiatric basketcase, more exactly organized paranoia. These are the guys, if you remember, who wanted many millions from a single mother for a couple dozen pretty boring music tracks.

Not to sow doubt about their clinical insanity and need for strong medication and straitjackets, but there is a fundamental difference between books and music that may explain their behavior to some small degree. Whereas music has been with us since time immemorial, canned music is a far more recent invention than the written word.  Books, in some form, is a mainstay of civilization. It could even be argued that civilization as we know it would be hard to maintain without them. Certainly a high-level civilization is unlikely to evolve without a lengthy phase of written records.  So basically, we know books, their causes and effects.

And it so happens that people who read books tend to be regarded as civilized. Whether this is cause or effect, or perhaps both, I am not sure.  As a friend likes to quote from The Penultimate Peril: “Wicked people never have time for reading. It’s one of the reasons for their wickedness.” Music, on the other hand, is often seen as loosening the bands of civilization (although this varies with the type of music, I would say.)

It may not always have been exactly like this. During my recent reading of Dante’s Inferno, there was a mention of an adulterous couple who had supposedly fallen in sin by reading a romance novel together, and consequently went to hell as they never repented.  My immediate reaction was “Who the hell would read a romance novel together with someone of the opposite sex if they were not already planning to do that thing?”  But it goes to show that books may once have been viewed with a certain suspicion which is now reserved for more modern technologies.