Posted by haltse on December 20, 2005 – 11:35 pm
We’re down, been ill for a a few days, nothing serious enough to stop going to work but damn it’s slowing my brain down. I’m going to call it the stopped clock syndrome, I’m giving right answers but their relevance to the question asked is often questionable:
My work blog, or least more related to work items is up and running at blog.john-paxton.com ( Crap, now you know my name)
Ok a round-up..
New sound processor arrived, psu was the wrong one.. Merry Xmas
Amazon Order: Still waiting for it.
Oh great, if this is truly in the wild it’s going to make for a very interesting time In short if people can have illegal material surrepticiously placed on their system that would require a fair amount of technical proficiency to detect and neutralize it’s going to make it hard to prove innocence should the state chose to take a dim view of alledged movies, music or porn on your system. The defense of n00b is hardly going to fly, then again this proof of concept is enough reasonable doubt , or should be, for any sane jury in absence of other evidence.
Posted by haltse on December 20, 2005 – 12:26 pm
CNN.com – Judge rules against ‘intelligent design’ in science class – Dec 20, 2005
Sometimes even the non believers get a Christmas present. Note , not ID itself, just the enforced worldview of one group taking precedent over another in the public square.
Posted by haltse on December 18, 2005 – 12:38 pm
I have the strangest friends: Going to relate a fun chat I had after my all too apparent glee today at a trifecta of ‘setbacks’ to Leviation.. these being..
Maybe torture isn’t the best pr move
Maybe the misnomer of the millenium, the Patriot act, isn’t
And using the CIA/NSA to circumvent judicial reviews before spying on citizens is not flying too well either.
So, as all arguments starting from any one of these points is a mere step away from “if you having nothing to hide” school of non thought. It’s odd, nearly all the arguments that interest me have already been resolved to my sastisfaction, myself being on the winning side, naturally:). This is one of them, I don’t see how one can live in a Brave new world where “everybody belongs to everyone else” I belong to me, if I didn’t “belong” to me then I really think I should be suing the lease holders for damage to the top carpet and flooding the mid section….
Nothing to hide from whom? Like most of these perpetual war phrases that filter out to the masses “if you have nothing to hide..” doesn’t seem to be examined on any level.. Having nothing to hide means you really had nothing to begin with, literally you’re not taking your freedom seriously. Instead you are having the gov approved simulacra played back against your cave wall piped in with lcd projection.The denominator of the common, the morass of anonimity that you so desperately want to shake can be acheived by opening your life up to these goons.
Posted by haltse on December 16, 2005 – 3:49 pm
At last.. Quick Blog, Go Daddy’s blogging tool is out in the wild. The first post has been made. Obviously I urge you all to go renew your domains, heck buy a new one, with Godaddy and set yourself up a free blog.
Posted by haltse on December 15, 2005 – 6:00 pm
Anticlimatic day.
The newest, ergo best, my fellow neophiles ( and I don’t mean those that would do a wooden ‘actor’ ) blog to hit the public is being shy, attempts to talk it down from the ceiling are ongoing,and it’s probably going to remain so for a few more hours. Really wanted to show you what the annoyingly talented group have brought forth over the past few months.. Now it’s off to the office party. I used to dread these with other companies but not this one.
[The views expressed on this blog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy Software, Inc.]
Posted by haltse on December 14, 2005 – 10:19 pm
Three out of five years I have had issues ordering from Amazon during mid December: Wrong item shipped, items shipped to wrong place and tonight’s fun? They have an offer for free sd memory card with the digital camera I was buying as a gift, don’t worry the person doesn’t read the blog:), it’s out of stock, the alternate is they give you a 24 dollar credit to apply to other memory except their site does seem to know about the offer, their CS doesn’t seem to know what qualifies They can’t find me by email, prior rep could, phone number, prior rep did and hey looky here they can’t pull up the product with their ASIN number…
I just found it by typing lz2.. it’s not hard, really.. So to save $10 on a camera, and $25 on a memory card I have spend 30 minutes with customer no service trying to locate the item.. I didn’t buy from Amazon for two years re their screwup of sending gifts to the wrong state and then refusing to refund my expedited shipping .. they had after all shipped it to Kansas on time.. I live in Phoenix, Arizona which was entirely my fault. That accounts for 2 out the 5 they didn’t screw up:D
I don’t fear outsourcing if this is the competition .. bring it on.
Posted by haltse on December 14, 2005 – 12:07 am
Nope it’s not just the title of a rather interesting “chixploitation” Martial arts /matrix HK mov it was a good review of my day at work.. I feel like I am living in a Slartibartfast “joke”
The movie is well worth the two hours , if Asian females kicking ass appeals , Yes the story is ridiculous, the physics implausible, but it wouldn’t have taken these women a sequel to Kill Bill!
Tonight was a fun night, attended my monthly AA meeting, yep I’ve been spirit free for .. ever:) So a group of non theists gather with like minded individuals for a few hours a month to laugh at the 80 plus percent of people that are seemingly losing the “War on Christmas” to us when we don’t have a god in that race .
Mostly the topic revolved around Google and their perceived, and in others opinon unassailable ,hegemony over the web: This goes back to an earlier discussion I had on a friends blog with regards to a movie called “Epic 2015″ which was a brief history of the web to present day and projecting forward to the year 2015 where Google trumps old media and we all live happily ever after in an EFF approved “E-Topia”
I don’t buy it, sadly the reference escapes me I’m not sure if I got the thought from a Searls’ post or comments spawning from the recent discussion on “Saving the net” but maybe I’ll back fill that info when it crosses my mind again .. Google is not an efficient way of buying advertisements. That doesn’t mean that their CPM isn’t a better bang for the buck than other forms of media it certainly seems to be ..It’s just not given that this is a sustainable model.
On a gut level I can tell you that adverts in my Gmail, and on many of the sites I visit are totally irrelevant. When I do get a hit, the hit’s are for people I have heard about. So maybe I shop in a weird manner? Is it axiomatic Google will solve that step? Maybe we should search on Altavista for the answer:D The point I don’t have the time to make properly 
When more efficient ways to advertise appear you need less of it, put away the shotgun and pull out the laser rifle. Advertising to eyeballs is out.. Try engaging our brains.
In the can’t wait for Santa Department..
Posted by haltse on December 11, 2005 – 10:05 pm
Rummaging through the mental baggage of all the ‘cool’ toys that my parents didn’t purchase me Operation! ,Buckaroo or Mousetrap.. The kind of games were manual dexterity was foremost and a slip up would result, in many cases, in a mess which had to be reset..
Today I think I’ve worked out a new variant of this game:
“Candy from a baby”
Quite simple: find a baby, find some tootsie pops or similar lollypops and a clear playing area. Once baby is asleep lick the lollypop and gently affix it to the kids head, add a few more. If your child looks like Pinhead you ought to back off a pop or two.
Start the round with a quiet baby, then each person takes a turn to take the candy from the baby… First one to rouse the baby loses.
Posted by haltse on December 10, 2005 – 10:08 pm
Filed under General, rants
Another day lost to Windows XP home: Erin’s pc died with the graphics card, seemingly the idea that you can lose a peripheral and not have the OS fall over is anathema to XP, usual tricks to get it into safe mode, kill old drivers, make friends with new cards failed. Damn thing was BSOD city. I think I’m truly fed up of this shit not working in a manner that can be repaired without major PC surgery. Prior to 2k I never lost a machine that couldn’t be brought back with the tools that came with the OS or bootdisk. I have never had any 2k / xp self repair work it always required a hunt for the right file to get you to the next error.
Ie Windows will sit there saying, yeah I can’t fix this installation as this file here on the C drive is corrupted, the same file that I manually expand and put in place on the C drive from the damn rom that’s telling me this. I detest computers telling me that, hey see that action you asked me to do, well it’s not working.. I .. “could” fix it but nah fuck you , you could do with the mental excercise.
I am uber ticked off, this is prior to the realisation that some DRM’s like say Buymusic want to call this a ‘new computer’ In short.. You buy music, pc fails, you no longer can play the song, even with the song and the licence back up. Somedays it’s not hard to see the attractions of piracy:)
Posted by haltse on December 9, 2005 – 9:52 am
It’s that time of the year where thoughts turn to the little baby Jesus and what kind of firewire recording interface he’d use.. What would Jesus loop? I am guessing that he would be using a Presonus firebox and a Korg electribe es1 mk2 but I’ m not much for theology.
What I am doing is re reading The Cluetrain Manifesto. Just taking the first few steps here shows an alien landscape to most large corporations, playing with the mac to make sure we’re still friends.. I want one though their impending architecture change is holding me back, seems to be holding a lot of people back.
So.. First 6 .. When axioms , to me, sound like radical ideas to others it’s time to wonder just how sane the society you are living in is
1 Markets are conversations.
2 Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3 Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4 Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5 People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6 The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
Posted by haltse on December 4, 2005 – 5:24 pm
Filed under Bad CS, General
I needed new glasses, my last pair made it just over the four year mark which isn’t that bad for a fragile object that’s in daily use. So the new pair, oh,
One they didn’t call to say they had arrived. I called, and yes they have them. I should have asked Do you have a completed pair of prescription lenses within the frame I selected available for pickup: Since I didn’t we come to,
Two The left lens is way out, not even close, and I do not buy their wait a day or two and it will start working, my existing broken pair I can hold in front of the new lens and insantly see small details from far off.. Want to know why? They gave me the mock up pair for sizing, the lens has no corrective ability, so now I feel like a flaming idiot for not noticing this earlier. Obviously I have to channel this feeling of incompetence into rage against the store.
Posted by haltse on December 3, 2005 – 7:59 pm
I’m having an libertarian epistemological crisis as well suffering from an egregious case of sesquipedalianism. Why is it that advocating for people to be treated as adults leads many to treat you as a spoiled child? Nothing groundbreaking follows, in fact the ground has been so broken that there’s barely a place to stand without sinking down into the morass of anonymity into which all the trite blog posts descend.
So .. Over the next few weeks .
I’m going to start investigating creating a pod-cast that unlike most of the output in the libertarian sphere is not 200 years long, doesn’t included large gaps, buzz or frankly turn off further listening …and I’m interested in it… For casual listeners there’s no way in hell they will listen to sixty minutes of minutiae on the monetary supply..
So if after a week or two I have enough ideas to take on 6 x 10 minute shows and the people to fill em with look for it in Q1 
To help me in this , probably portable endeavor I bought a new friend. 
Posted by haltse on December 2, 2005 – 9:12 am
There’s nothing like ending the week on a low note than managing to sink further into the mire Monday morning Dobh was insanly clingly all weekend resulting in crying the moment I stepped out the room, or even outwith his playpen, for the bulk of both days he barely slept. Nor did I.
