trumwill: You know what thought that has been most frequently going through my mind the last couple days?
guiralan: Why would I know what thought that has been most frequently going through your mind the last couple days?
trumwill: I don’t know.
guiralan: Okay, then.
trumwill: …
guiralan: So tell me, Will, what is the thought that has been most frequently going through your mind the last couple days?
trumwill: The thought would be this: It only makes sense if you think it in a southern accent.
guiralan: That’s a lame thought.
trumwill: No, that’s not the thought.
guiralan: You said that was the thought. You used a colon and everything.
trumwill: Okay, let me try that again. The thought that has been most frequently going through my mind (which ought to be read in a southern accent for full affect) is: gawd damn chiggers.
guiralan: That is a very humorous thought. Especially when read in a southern accent as you suggested. It’s almost like you were saying something else. Like a confused racist or one that can’t annunciate the “n” sound. Bravo.
trumwill: It’s funnier when it doesn’t take five exchanges for me to get there.

Just in case you don’t know what a chigger bite looks like, or you have a strange ankle fetish, you can look below the fold:
(more…)

An IM conversation between my coworker Pat and me.

wellpatr: Here’s what I don’t get. If Benoit was going to kill his wife and kid and himself, why do it over an entire weekend?
trumwill: Maybe he killed his kid cause he found out or was going to find out about his mom?
wellpatr: Could be, but if he was going to kill himself anyway why does it matter?
trumwill: It’s possible that he didn’t realize he had to kill himself until after he killed the kid.
wellpatr: He should have gone into this with a plan, decided who needed to die and why, and taken care of it in a much more efficient manner than he did.
trumwill: I think we may just have to accept the fact that when he killed his family and them himself, he may not have been in the most logical frame of mind.
wellpatr: Even so, the inefficiency is disturbing. It’s a good thing that he was a wrestler because he would make a lousy businessman.

Mingle² – Online Dating

It looks like it was primarily my post on the death penalty that did me in. Benoit and the Internet posts didn’t help, either.

According to a new study, young people spend a lot of their online conversation talking about sex and drugs:

A new study by Caron Treatment Centers finds 1 in 10 messages analyzed involved teens seeking advice from their peers on how to take illicit drugs “safely” and without getting caught. {…}

In the messages, teens confessed to destructive behavior while they were under the influence.

“It’s very, very frightening,” said Dr. Harris Stratyner of the Caron Treatment Center.

In the messages, while few teens expressed any regret, many chalked it up to having a good time.

The basic premise behind the article is that online talking is potentially unhealthy and dangerous.

You want to know what’s potentially unhealthy and dangerous? Doing ecstacy and cocaine, and engaging in indiscriminate sex. That’s what’s dangerous, not chatting via instant messenger. The worst that can be said of instant messaging is that it is enabling anti-social behavior. But it does that the same way that a phone does and a car does. By the time the kid is online trolling for cocaine, you’re no longer in prevention mode, you’re in damage control mode. Their unmonitored access to IM is the least of your problems.

I could go on and on about the media’s portrayal that all sorts of problematic behavior also exist online and treat it as a threatening new discovery, but I’ve been doing that for over ten years now. It’s gotten kind of old.

More broadly, I’m tired of parenting culture simultaneously abdicating the uncool portion of their parenting responsibilities and then complaining about what a dangerous world it is out there. If your kid is using cocaine and you don’t realize that something is wrong, that’s not the Internet’s fault. If you realize that something is wrong (even if you don’t know that it’s cocaine) and you do nothing to reign your kid in, that’s not the Internet’s fault.

It seems that the easiest course of action for parents is to give their kids ulimited leeway and then complain about what they do with it while never actually trying to get a handle on the situation. Baby boomer parents have an almost pathalogical aversion to being considered uncool by their kids and a faction of Generation X parents have apparently fallen into that trap. So instead of tightening the screws of a loose, rattling young adult, they complain. Society is forcing them to be the bad guy (to say “no”) and they don’t wanna.

This is all remarkably easy for me to say seeing as how I don’t have any kids and may not ever have them. To be honest, I really can see the other side of the story. I know that if my wife and I did have kids I would almost certainly be the permissive one. I am on the “cool parent” side of every disagreement we’ve had thus far, excluding daughters and nail polish and dating. (a subject for another time)

But my sense of what freedoms a kid should have requires more rather than less monitoring. It means letting them do things that I don’t like, but making sure that they’re still on top of their lives. It means watching them fall even when I can prevent it from happening, but making sure that they’re nowhere near the cliff. Instead, parents seem to want to prevent them from falling when within sight and then giving them unlimited freedom out of sight. A desire to prevent them from hurt but not at the expense of preventing them from getting into situations where they can really hurt themselves.

I’m definitely not saying that it’s the parents fault whenever something bad happens to the kids. That actually represents another cultural problem, in that parents consider themselves absolutely responsible but then render themselves helpless with permissiveness, which creates insanity-inducing anxiety, making them irritating as all heck to backseat driving non-parents such as myself.

Some of you older readers will remember a cease-and-desist letter I got from some company called Dixona Trucking. We more-or-less agreed that I should ignore it because the lawsuit threat was beyond ludicrous. Anyhow, I thought that was the end of it but I was contacted by my domain host a couple days back. Apparently he filed a complaint through their complaint system (he can’t go after me directly because my domain is anonymous). They said that they were looking into it.

Long story short, the whole situation is absolutely ridiculous. But you know what? Dumber things have happened than my identity getting disclosed in this mess. I decided that I would save everyone some time and go through and change all references of Dixona to my new home state name, Delosa. Dixona was obviously a play on “Dixie”. Delosa is apropos nothing except my appreciation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.

While I was going through it, I changed the suburb I was raised in from Tangramayne to Mayne to avoid getting traffic for people looking for Bard’s Tale cheats.

trumwill: Over the weekend the company changed everything on the network. They sent out an email with our new network passwords.

quinkyle: Wait, they sent out *an* email?

quinkyle: with everyone’s password?

trumwill: Everyone’s password being the same, yes. They advised us to create a new one.

quinkyle: wow

trumwill: Which would be possible if we could, you know, log in to see the email. Which of course we couldn’t because our passwords didn’t work.

quinkyle: Oh yeah… there’s that on top of it

quinkyle: hahaha

quinkyle: Jaysus… and they pay your IT department?

trumwill: We figured it out because they used the same default password we get when we first start at the company.

trumwill: Let me tell you, 1234 is an impenetrable password.

quinkyle: Well, it is a big number. If you start at 1 and start going upwards, it would be your 1234th try. My wrist aches just thinking about it.

GMail has apparently “locked down” my email address due to “unusual usage”.

The listed about six things or so that I might have done to incur the wrath of the GMail gods. Of course I am doing none of them. I am not doing anything that I haven’t been doing since I signed on. It won’t even tell me what it thinks that I’m doing.

It says that it may take up to 24 hours to regain access. Email is not something to be messed with like this.

Holy cow am I pissed off. It took a long time to get back confidence in free email providers, but GMail managed to do it. Now maybe I’m going to have to figure something else out.

My coworker Pat is, not unlike a number of my techie coworkers, the tech support for her extended family. Just about any time she goes back home to Apalachia, she is given something to work on and her reward is that whenever a computer is replaced she gets the defective one to repair and use herself. It’s low pay for the hours of support she provides, but family is family.

One such defective computer used to be the computers of her nephew and niece, both under the care of their grandparents, here parents. Once she resurrected the computer she found a bunch of old chatlogs that she couldn’t help but wade through out of morbid curiosity. Unsurprisingly, since both Cali and Carll are in high school, most of the conversations are pretty asinine. Carll takes mostly after his father who was something of a nimrod, so most of his chatlogs are both dull and stupid. Cali, on the other hand, got her mother’s intelligence (but, thankfully, not her propensity for poor lifestyle choices). But alas, she is seventeen and all which that entails.

Cali is dating some guy named Mark and so unsurprisingly they’re trading IM’s often. Reading through the logs (which Pat knows she shouldn’t do but she is a curious cat without much of a life of her own) gives Pat a headache. Cali and Mark are always arguing over something stupid. She’ll get mad at him for not responding to her IM even though the timestamp reads only thirty seconds before. Cali is angry at Mark most of the time and Mark, who seems like a nice enough guy but is probably not the sharpest tool in the shed) is pretty clueless why. Then he’s mad at her, she’ll talk circles around him and explain why he’s wrong, and he won’t be able to keep up with her logic and will just get madder.

Cali also trades messages with a friend of Mark’s Brad. The remarkable thing about those messages is that they’re never bickering. She’s never mad and he’s never defensive. He doesn’t get mad and he actually articulates why Mark is upset better than Mark does and he seems to understand why she’s mad at him when she is. Brad is dating some girl named Marta, with whom he is always fighting.

“I just don’t understand why Cali and Brad don’t just get together,” Pat said.

“Because if they did, Brad and Cali would have to start bickering and huffing and puffing and sobbing the way that Brad and Marta and Cali and Mark do in their relationships.”

“I’ll never understand young people.”

This is one of the more impressive videos that I’ve seen in a while. A guy reproducing the Mona Lisa using MS Paint.

The most impressive part to me is how quickly he knocked down the meadows in the background.

Picture: Ryoga holding a bottle of Vodka, taken in the Summer of 2001.

One of the most frustrating aspects of car ownership is knowing when it’s time to turn it in and get a new one. Many of us form at least some sort of bond with our automobile, but even if we don’t most of us don’t replace a car the first time there is a serious problem. If the cost to fix a car is more than the cost of a new one the choice is simple. But if a new car is eight thousand and the repair bill is five, is it worth it? There are so many factors that it’s difficult to say much of the time.

Even if you fix the car something else may well come down in a few months and you’ve paid more to have the car fixed than it would have cost to replace it. But if nothing is going to go wrong then it feels wasteful to replace it willy-nilly like that.

My car is fine (knock on wood) but I’ve been running into that question with one of my computers with some urgency for weeks and I’ve been battling the question with the little guy for years. In early 2002 over the span of a couple months I bought two computers, Mousse and Ryoga, of almost identical quality with the latter being just a touch faster. But my experiences with the computers have been anything but identical. Mousse has worked nearly flawlessly. The only time I’ve had real trouble with it is when I’m having to mess with it doing some part diagnostic testing for some other computer, usually it’s twin. Ryoga has gone through three cases/power supplies and has eaten up four sticks of RAM over the past five years or so (most of the RAM was pretty old, though) and I’ve probably had to spend three or four hundred hours simply trying to figure out what the problem is with it this time and trying to get it fixed.

-{If you don’t know or care about technical things, you should probably skip over the next four paragraphs and resume reading where noted}-

The problem has been ramped up over the past couple of months when I took Ryoga off of fileserver duty and put it onto general desktop use. The first problem I had was that it would not recognize the 300GB HD that I was putting into it even though that same drive was moved over from the fileserver. It took a few days of after-work care trying to figure out how to get it to recognize the drive. I ultimately installed some jacked up version of Windows and got it working. A week later it started shutting down randomly. After a few days of investigation I determined the problem to be a power supply (even though the power supply it had should have had ample wattage). I replaced the power supply and it started working again.

A week after that the apartment was consumed with the smell of burnt plastic. I isolated the smell to the computer, which had frozen. Actually it hadn’t “frozen” so much as overheated. I don’t know how hot it got but after I let it cool down for five minutes and booted it up it was registering at 118 degrees Celsius. The video card died in the process and the computer was down for over a week for fear of starting a fire. I downloaded the Motherboard Monitor so that I could keep an eye on the temperature and finally got enough faith to get it going again and for most of last week it was overing between 80 and 105 degrees, well above where you want it to be but safe enough to sleep at night.

Then a couple days ago the temperature was registering at 124 degrees. It was still functional I shut it down for a while to let it cool off. When I rebooted one of the hard drives failed. I booted it using Knoppix and the 300GB data drive was in-tact, which it was, and Knoppix did some automatic diagnostic on the harddrive that fixed the hard drive and it was able to boot back into Windows. Unfortunately the case fan seems to be sputtering. The CPU temperature is reading between 100-110 degrees more than I would like, but for the most part it’s settling in the 80-100 range.

I can’t imagine the computer has that much life in it, but it’s been hobbling along in one form or another since it was less than a year old. Nevermind the inconvenience, if it eats anymore hardware then the “repair” bill will far exceed what it would cost me now to replace it. Of course if I replace it after it does eat more hardware, I’ll have to replace not only the computer but the hardware that it kills, too. Additionally if I want to replace it cheaply now would be a better time than a couple years from now. I can probably track down motherboard-processor that has the right slots (AGP and DDR) for my current hardware. A year from now would probably require the purchase of an additional video card and RAM. And I just bought the video card to replace the one it just killed!

-{If computers ain’t your thing, continue reading here}-

The logical part of my brain says that it’s time to bury Ryoga and buy a new processor. A new mobo/processor would cost about $150 and replacing so much as a dead harddrive could cost as much as $140 (nevermind the inconvenience of lost data). But I am extremely reluctant to do it for a couple of reasons.

Primarily I hate to waste. I don’t like the idea of throwing away a computer that works without incident 95% of the time. I was so excited when I last rearranged my computer setup because for the first time in a long time I had use for every computer I have. Nothing was going to waste! It was a wonderful feeling that lasted a week until Ryoga began acting up. I just don’t want to throw away something that works just like I don’t want to retire a car that can still be driven.

But also I’ve formed a bond with it. It’s been with me a very long time and letting it go would mostly close a big chapter in my computing experience. I still have Mousse, but that’s Clancy’s computer so I don’t get to use it very much. Just a few weeks ago I had Ryoga, born in 2001, running a video card born in 1999 and a sound card born in 2000. I took pride in Ryoga’s spry ability to just continue to chug along with my newer and more glamorous machines. If Ryoga were to just die I’d understand it and move on. But instead he continues to just barely chug along, demanding that I euthanize him.