Why blogs are being pushed out by microblogs

I put up a new post on my sadly neglected writing blog Frabjous Times and noticed this odd development on the Feedback area of my admin screen.

One post from last February had 2790 comments on it, all of it flagged as likely spam. It is not that Twitter and Friendfeed and the like are free from spam, as any active user of those will tell you. It is that the spammers have not yet figured out how to crank up their engines of war just yet to trash them utterly. I give them a couple more months before they come up with a way to make those services nearly unusable. And then maybe some people will end up going back to their blogs.

Another crop of falling-apart rants averted

fail,
originally uploaded by Sidereal.

• Social bookmarking site ma.gnolia had a catastrophic failure that claimed not only the production database, which would not be unusual, but also apparently all their backups. What, no offsite database dumps? Fortunately, I have been posting my bookmarks also to delicious for the most part, so nothing much lost.
• My laptop at home froze up, then refused to boot, even in Safe Mode. Off I went to my wife's computer to download and burn the latest Knoppix which allowed me to verify that the hard disk was still readable. I brought it in to work the next morning prepared to copy my data files off to an external drive, but somehow the Windows XP installation healed itself, so the retrieval operation changed to one of backup. Gee, and I was all set to install Ubuntu 8.10 on it.
• The new furnace has been working a bit over-well, causing the radiator in the downstairs bathroom to spit out a lot of brown water all over the floor through its vent. We consulted with the plumbing company and it seems as if it's likely not a problem with that expensive unit, but either a problem with the old vents or with some kind of crud in the pipes. So I'll take a shot at saving a couple of hundred bucks by replacing some air vents on my own and seeing what happens.
• The "auxiliary" (12V) battery in our Prius lost nearly all its charge today while we were at church, and was recovering only very slowly over the next half hour, so we called a service station to come and give us a jump start. The verdict is still out on this one, but it seems not to have re-manifested in a handful of starts since, so we'll hope for the best until we can get it in to the dealer's.

Now any one of these can turn back up again (except for the Magnolia one), so this is possibly only a full-blown rant deferred, not avoided. Watch this space.

A small request

Midtown Shadow,
originally uploaded by Automatt.

This weekend's release of Cloverfield reminds me of a little peeve I've had for the past couple of years, echoed by this article: haven't we had enough destruction of New York City up on the screen by now? So, we're still broken up by the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, sure, but there were other places devastated that day, not to mention all the other worthy places which have been visited with catastrophe and at least as photogenic as New York. I'm just asking for a bit of a moratorium, during which time I ask that the screenwriters of Hollywood incorporate a little more variety in their plots, a change of venue, or perhaps a plot where the metropolis is menaced but escapes disaster. (Right after the Writers Guild settles, that is.)

At least Steven Spielberg's H. G. Welles's remake only busted up Bayonne, over on this side of the river.

Oh, and while you're at it, could you maybe leave Ms. Liberty alone? Please?

True, the city in question has some things to answer for (such as the mayor, the former mayor, the crazy team owner, and the mogul), but that doesn't mean you have to keep dropping rocks and other unpleasant objects on the place so regularly.

I don't even get into NYC that often myself, but it's always out there on my horizon, and I know my wife has twinges of worry now and again about making her way back and forth every day. It would make it easier to conduct negotiations on what movies we'd like to go see, that's certain.

I'd like to teach the world to whine

We went on a lightning holiday to western Massachusetts and I came back with threetwo tiny little issues to carp about.

1. I thought I'd be prudent and rotate out the Sprint phone card that I kept with the jump bag I prepared last summer. The idea was to use it to call my parents in California and avoid the extortionate rates commonly charged by the motel we were staying at. Neither the card nor the folder it was attached to had any date on it, but deep in the fine print was a line about how the card expires "15 months from the date of purchase/activation." When I input the number on the card, a synthesized voice informed me that the account I used was "invalid," so I called up the Customer Service number about this. I was prepared to pay some kind of fee or other in order to recoup some of the minutes I thought I'd bought, or at least be told how I could recharge the thing with more minutes, even at a rate just about as exorbitant as the room phone rate. Instead, I got the voice of a rep nearly as cold as the computer voice, informing me that the number was not in the computer and there was no provision for refund.
   I know the Nextel merger was a costly one, but would it really have been too much to expect them to keep the number on record a month or two longer, if only in hopes of extracting more money out of your consumer? Was it so important to take my $20 and run with it with such unseemly haste? Doesn't it actually make good business sense to put an expiration date on the product if only to encourage a repeat sale when the time draws near? But no, the unfeeling telecom sees fit to do none of these things, and for that they deserve my scorn and rancor, now and for a long time to come.
   In the same vein, only with regard to gift cards, I point out the public service announcement: Don't Give Your Friends Fees this Holiday Season!


2. We went out to the movies Thanksgiving evening, and as our group could not reach a consensus choice, split according to gender, the ladies seeing the latest Disney movie and us guys opting for medieval fare.
   Please note, kids, the book is different.
   I give the moviemakers credit for including the side stories about Beowulf's swimming-race early on (gory though the depiction of it was), and didn't even find too much to object to with regard to the repurposing of Grendel's mom which made the final climactic battle a struggle between father and son. The thing I did not much care for was the way Zemeckis mistrusted the audience to pick up the bit of foreshadowing regarding the proper way to dispatch a dragon: the B-man is helped out by having the weak spot picked out in vivid color, as if it were made of the stuff of mood rings perhaps, a "plot point" which by all rights ought to have been labeled "break glass in case of dramatic climax," then having the old hero reach in to fool with his offspring's viscera in a way that reminded me to much of this:
   
   
   
   So actually, that part's not like the original poem. But maybe if this does well at the box office, they'll do a cinematic version of The Elder Edda.
   
   Edited to add: I think this happy fellow has the right idea - don't go into battle with a sword that's too damn short.

Denotatively bankrupt

The other day I went to the bank for some help.

"I have a question about my High Performance Money Market Account (broken link)," says I.

"Surely, sir, what is the question?"

"I'd like to know why it is that I am getting $0.80 a year in interest when I think I should be making $80 instead."

It turned out not to be a data entry error, as I'd hoped, but a pitiful 0.04% APR for deposits under $5000. And if you want to crack the 1% rate of return, you have to put no less than $10000 into the account.

To her credit, the bank representative agreed with me that the cash might be better off stuffed under a mattress.

This, by me, is a sorry way to use the term High Performance and worthy of being mocked. Here for any marketer with the chutzpah to embrace the notion is my list of that choice of words extended to other areas:

• High Performance Windows - panes made of opaque black glass in frames that do not open.


• High Performance Perfume - a small flask of water with a vaguely swampy aroma


• High Performance Air Conditioning - a damp and stale whisper of air, roughly at ambient temperature


• High Performance Camouflage - white fabric with black piping

It's the humidity

The record-setting storm over this last weekend was seriously annoying, with the cold, the driving rain, the streets closed due to flooding, the fifteen-hour long power outage, the portable electric generator which seized up and died, and currently, the lack of Internet access. So, no pictures just now, as I post from The Gym.

My one take-away idea is to go live in a place that has disasters (since every place has disasters) which are just not as damp. I am ready for a dry earthquake or a stretch of drought or something, just to break up the monotony.

Update: Last night they took the power down for about ten minutes and apparently switched over to a new feed which provides a full 120VAC instead of the 110 volts that my DSL modem did not appreciate. So we are back in the 21st century, with pictures.

• 
  
  We got just an inch or two of water in the cellar, rather than the many feet in the next town, so I cannot rant about this too much.


• 
  I will, however, complain bitterly about the design of my little Shop-Vac® that I used to suck the 13 gallons of water up from the floor. It takes only about 30 seconds to fill it to capacity, requiring one to separate the top half from the bottom half
  
  
  … which is inconveniently right where the hose slips in. Or out, as you can see here. I think they should have put a little clip there so that the user would not have to keep sliding the thing back in every time the thing had to be emptied.


• 
  Sitting on the basement steps, I wet myself. (I did change before going out to work.)

Not so intelligent design

The second item on this list of facts about thirst (broken link) makes me even more convinced that the design of human beings is poorly optimized. Consider that one can go only a few days without taking in water, and it would seem as if this would be a high priority item for a designer to get right. Why wouldn't dehydration make us thirsty automatically, instead of making us hungry or tired or forgetful? Even I as designer, non-omniscient as I am, would have taken some care to get that basic drive right before going on to the rest of the creature.

On the other hand, evolution skeptics would cite the same item to point out that if human ancestors developed in the relatively dry African savannah, it would seem as if natural selection ought rightly to have cleared out any individuals who were apt to misidentify the need for seeking out a water hole. Humans who originated in a place with four wholesome rivers, in present-day Iraq might be expected to be more casual about decent hydration. Fallen mankind outside of Eden just inherited a design that was meant for a quite different setting.

All I know is that it's time for a cup of tea while I ponder human shortcomings.

Vroom vroom

More along the lines of things stop working: my 2 year old electric toothbrush started acting weird the night before last.

So it's not just a matter of a short, which would have it running all of the time, or a broken wire, which might make it run none of the time. Instead, it's decided it wants to run all the time whenever it's away from its charger. How does that happen?

So now I pull the tip off while the thing is docked, smush a tiny amount of toothpaste on the brush part, then in one motion pick up the toothbrush and apply it to my teeth before the toothpaste starts flying all over. It still does that little pulse thing at the two minute mark, so the control electronics aren't completely fried. Then I've got to put the thing back on the charger so it'll shut down, pull the tip off for washing, then reassemble it. Or sometimes to avoid the hassle I go into the other bathroom and use my plain old non-electric brush (which would make my hygienist unhappy if she knew).

I was trying to think of some aspect whereby this new behavior might be an advantage, and the only thing I could come up with is that it would be considerably harder for a burglar to steal my toothbrush undetected. Otherwise, nothing.

The winds of entropy blow strong

The following items have broken or gone bad in the last couple of weeks:

1. I was working on someone's furniture, sitting on the floor as usual, when I looked down and saw that the sole of my left shoe, maybe two years old, was completely split crosswise. The thing was being held together by just the upper and insole. So now I'm down to one pair of work shoes in brown.


2. At my latest routine dental appointment, they brought out a new instrument that uses a laser to spot decay in its early stages. For most of my life, I have been pretty fortunate in having pretty good teeth, so I don't think I've ever been diagnosed with two cavities at one time before, in the crowns of my left side molars 18 and 20. I guess the placement was fortunate, as the dentist could install both fillings with a single shot of anesthetic.


3. My Treo 650 has been having fits of madness lately, sometimes spontaneously rebooting (and turning off the phone in the process, which is annoying), and then corrupting the Memos database. When you enter a new memo into it, the first line of the memo becomes the name of the memo. Occasionally, however, this name gets wiped out or altered somehow, so when you pull up the list of memos there's a great big gap where the item should be. It always seems to be the item which I was just working on, so I'm wondering whether it might have been caused by stray keypresses adding onto that important first line, maybe pushing it past its limit.
   
   Anyway, when this happens, what I typed into the body of the memo becomes inaccessible from the handheld, and when I sync it up to my desktop that becomes corrupted so that the Palm Desktop software crashes when I try to bring it up. I tried a bunch of different tricks to try to get it to heal over the damage, even reinstalling the desktop software, but it didn't work.
   
   So, currently everything that I've been entering on the tiny keypad on my Treo, over 200 memos, is stranded there. What I would like to do is to copy all of them over to plain text files, do a hard reset on the Treo to clear the memory, then restore all the ones I want. For some reason, even though the handheld accepts SD memory cards, they did not provide a way to copy memos over. And now that my old laptop died, I can't use the IR link to beam them, since my replacement laptop does not have an IR receiver. So I've picked up a USB Bluetooth adapter at eBay and hope to be able to transfer them that way soon.


4. I brought my work van in for scheduled maintenance with some dread, since the last time I did this the bill came to something like $900+. I mentioned to them the strange grinding sound that would come from the vehicle, especially first thing in the morning. It turned out that the power steering pump had died at around 55000 miles, a $430 part and $250 worth of labor to replace.

I've often noticed that certain kinds of misfortune tend to cluster. I'll lose something, then soon find that all sorts of things are starting to go missing. Some days I am attacked by a case of the "drops" when I'll notice an unusual number of unrelated items falling to the ground all around me. And there are times when directions go crazy and I can't find my way anywhere, even familiar places (a distinct disadvantage in my line of work). This feels like the same kind of thing, in which a spate of things all decide to wear out and die on me.

I think I'll wait a couple of months before booking my routine eye appointment.

Don't they want my money?

I got pretty annoyed the other day at a local Dunkin' Donuts shop for the following reasons:

• There was a long line which went all the way to the entrance, so when we came in, I was right up against the door itself. Popular place on a Saturday morning.


• The counter is way back there, behind the people in line and the high displays on either side of the registers. It's like the order-takers have barricaded themselves against the masses.


• The displays are so high you can't see the products. I wanted a biscuit, but I couldn't tell if they had any until I got to the front of the line. (They didn't.) Pam wanted a pumpkin muffin sans frosting along with her iced coffee. (They had the muffins, but only the frosted kind, and they were kind of low down so you couldn't see them from back in the line.)


• The prices are up high, so at least you can see them, but they don't include everything for sale. Such as biscuits.


• I think there might have been four people working, but taking orders at two registers only, wedged between the aforementioned high displays.


• Once people ordered, they stayed in place in front of the registers while they waited for their food, so the next person was blocked from placing their own order. Every other fast food place has figured out that after the customer has ordered, they should be encouraged to yield their spot to the next customer, picking up their order at a different location. Why hasn't Dunkin' Donuts figured this out?


• We get to the front of the line and I find out the bad news about the biscuits. I order a French Toast stick. "No coffee?" "No, thank you." "You sure?" "No coffee!" I know that they make more money on the coffee than on the baked goods, but they don't have to be quite so pushy about it.


• It was actually so crowded around the register that it was difficult to settle up.

It was fortunate that the food was good (hence the big crowd), but I was fuming about all the obstacles getting in the way of what should have been a simple transaction.