Because high school never ends… I remain puzzled why certain Facebook friends from old days friended me but not other people we know. By way of example, I was friended by Whirlwind. She and I knew one another, but we were never close. Or friends. Or even friendly. She went with Clint for a little while. She knew Excalibur quite well.

I wonder if she kind of looks back on yore with less than positive thoughts. I’d understand. It was not a particularly good time in her life, I kind of gather. By the time the BBS that we were both members of fell by the wayside, I sort of expected things not to end up well for her. She had lost a lot of her popularity and her looks had transitioned from stunning to plain. I didn’t know how well she was doing in school, but I figured it probably wasn’t very well. I was wrong about that last bit, though, as she apparently upped and moved to a state boarding school for the gifted and talented and considering how well she appears to have turned out, I assume that it was a really good thing for her.

But there were people who were friends and who cared about her from that era… and I wasn’t one of them. She was snooty when it came to me. About the only nice things I can say about her is that:

1) There was a time I was in a pretty bad way and I was acting really obnoxiously. She was the ringleader of a group of people that deliberately started to avoid me and were telling other people to do the same because I was such a loser. This actually turned out to be a good thing because when I heard what people were saying, there was too much of it that I couldn’t entirely disagree with. That is to say, I was turning myself into a very unpleasant person. This marked a real turning point for me, making me far more conscientious of how I was coming across to people. So she gets credit for the result, if not the intention.

2) The last year or so she started warming up to me a little. I remember when she and I had a conversation at a party. It was remarkable in the lack of negative undercurrent. That I still remember the conversation, and that the conversation was one of the things I remember from the party it was at, tells you how frequent that was. But I did get the feeling that things between us were going to start being not-so-frosty. But the BBS community fell apart shortly thereafter.

Anyhow, while it would make sense if she wanted to put the whole thing behind her and block out that part of her history, she has done so with the only exceptions being myself and a frivolous old flame from that era.

The most likely explanation is that I was a suggested friend or something through mutual friends… except that we have none except the ex-boyfriend.

I wrote about this previously in Unleaving Las Vegas, wherein Porky friended me one night and unfriended me the next. That one was more easy to dismiss, though, on the possibility that she confused me with somebody else and then unfriended me in horror when she realized her mistake. This time? Whirlwind is very unlikely to have mistaken my identity.

She messaged me shortly after I accepted the request. I wasn’t around, though I wonder if I had been if I’d gotten my answer.

The Internet connection has been absolutely rotten lately. So much so that despite the fact that we’re paying $70 a month for Internet, we’ve been hobbling along by periodically hotspotting my phone and connecting through that.

I’m running through my checklist of things to do before contacting Comcast about the problem. I figured it was one of three things: My router, the cable modem, or something on their end. The most obvious thing to do is replace the router. I’ve gone through three routers or so in the last six years, which is pretty crazy. They gradually lose signal strength until I just can’t use them anymore reliably. But the current one’s predecessor would at least give me an idea of where the problem lies. If only I knew where it was. A lot of my computer stuff is still in boxes. Most of it open as I do my giant sorting of stuff and throwing away stuff I don’t need anymore (not to self, scratch “previous router” off that list).

While in the area, I decided that I wanted to clear the way to the utility room. The big obstacle being the paper shredder which the baby loves to knock over. So I took that and put it on some box, and preceded to look for the router.

An hour later, I found out which box it was in. Want to take a guess?

The process of moving Hit Coffee from WordPress 1.5 to 3.5 was not easy. There was no direct route short of sequentially installing virtually every version in between. The tricky part being the database. What I ended up doing instead was a 32-step process to incorporate the data from 1.5 into the appropriate tables and fields in 3.5. This was a 32-step process. Not just writing the code, but figuring out what the code had to do.

Two of the remaining problems have been the comments on the archives. There were two specific problems: First, the comments were not appearing in order. Second, the number of comments wasn’t showing up. It would say 0 whether there were 0 or 26. And when there were twenty six, they appeared in what seemed to be a random order.

I finally had enough of that this past week and started digging into the guts of the database to figure out what the problem was. Turns out, they were both products based on fields that did not exist in 1.5. In the case of the ordering, it was based on a GMT field independent of the field containing the post’s date and time. In the case of numeration, there is a field on the posts table dedicated to that so that it doesn’t have to be calculated each and every time. I just had to populate the fields and we were good to go.

Long story short, the conversion to HitCoffee.com is a couple steps being closer to complete. The only thing remaining, that I am aware of, are the links to old items. Internally, a link to a post in November of 2007 will work. It someone clicks on a link at Ordinary Times, though, it won’t. The old URL’s included “index.php/” while the new ones do not.

Are there any other lingering issues that you’re aware of that have been nagging at you?

No great surprise: Facebook knows who you’re dating:

Though 27% of Facebook users don’t list their relationship status at all, only about half of those people are single, according to a Men’s Health article. If you’re one of these users committing the crime of omission, Facebook’s team of “in-house sociologists” has been researching ways to find you out. […]

f you’re “friends” with several of your other half’s co-workers, family members and friends, for example, Facebook may deduce that your only mutual link to these profiles is your assumed wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend. Researchers said they had a high success rate in correctly guessing someone’s romantic partner by this method.

Of course, these types of sleuthy Facebook social science projects have been ongoing for some time now. A research project earlier this year from Cambridge claimed it had success detecting non-volunteered information like users’ sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views just from what people “liked” on the site.

This opens up a potentially crucial role for Facebook in the human social domain. You know what I always hated about relationships? I hated trying to nail down where exactly things stood. I’ll bet there is a lot of potential here for Facebook to tell you. Or they can at least give you a heads up. “In case you were unaware, statistically speaking, you are in a relationship with Suzie.” It would be a very helpful pointer for the unaware.

Of course, you could decide that you don’t want to be in a relationship with Suzie at all. And you can say “Facebook! You’re wrong!” But you ought to make sure that Suzie thinks that Facebook is wrong, too. It could have a real positive social impact of making us have the very important conversation that some are too good at avoiding. Among other things, that’s one of the things I consider great about the institution of marriage. It seems to break up more relationships than it saves, sometimes. But! It helps those who were going to break up later realize that they need to break up sooner.

On the other hand, Facebook can’t figure out which movies I want to see. So maybe it would be in over its head here.

On a more serious note, it rather blows my mind that they haven’t gone hog wild of matchmaking. I met Evangeline (as well as Porky, the girl who was way out of my league) on something that was actually somewhat like Facebook, though only a little. It wasn’t a full-on social networking site, but it wasn’t a matchmaking site either. Since it wasn’t the latter, it made trading messages a lot less formal and more friendly than on the matching sites I was on at the time. The creators of that site are probably kicking themselves for falling just shy of what Facebook became. Now it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry and the domain points to Teen.com.

As many of you know, I don’t have a computer. I have an army of computers. I’ve picked them up here and there. I’ve gotten some good deals, inherited them from people who were getting rid of them, and and so on. And I almost never get rid of a computer if it works (and sometimes if it doesn’t) and I am good at keeping computers working. I finally threw away two computers before the cross-country move. I purchased them in 2002. They still worked, but I needed some parts from them. My console has four computers (three operational, one requiring a LiveCD at the moment), soon to be five. I have five laptops in use (one of which with a cracked display), three working ones on stand-by, two semi-functional ones (obscured displays), and two non-functional ones (that, by combining parts, will make a single functional one in the near future).

All but four of them run Windows XP. Which means that this breaks my heart:

On April 8 2014 – exactly 210 days’ time – Microsoft will be putting Windows XP on its ‘end of life’ cycle.

This is not news in itself, yet with pressure ramping up against the near third of users still on the near 13-year-old desktop OS, the clock is ticking for enterprises unwilling to change.

Microsoft has put its cards on the table in this respect. A blog post last month from director Tim Rains warned against the very real dangers of carrying on with XP after support has ceased.

“The very first month that Microsoft releases security updates for supported versions of Windows, attackers will reverse engineer those updates, find the vulnerabilities and test Windows XP to see if it shares those vulnerabilities,” Rains explained, adding: “If it does, attackers will attempt to develop exploit code that can take advantage of those vulnerabilities on Windows XP.”

In case you think this is a marketing ploy to get you to buy new computers, this is a serious security threat. I will not be booting up a networked computer after that date. Which, given my army of computers, presents me with a serious problem. A lot of these computers are not worth what a Windows 7 or Windows 8 license would cost. And that’s if these computers can run Windows 7, which will be a challenge. I have access to Windows Vista licenses for very, very cheap.

Which I guess means that I am about to embark on a Linux the likes of which I never have before. One of the laptops already runs Linux. It’s a computer with good specs that never really lived up to them. A couple of component upgrades helped, but it still struggles. Which could mean that even getting Linux to run on some of these computers may require some tweaking. But my recent experiences have been encouraging that Linux will be the option for many of them.

Some of them are going to be a challenge, though. Mostly because they are specific-use computers. Two, for instance, are attached to television sets. All of my attempts at MythTV have failed. Which isn’t to say that it can’t be done, but it’s going to take some work. Another is on printer duty. Two of its primary jobs are printer-sharing and image manipulation. I haven’t figure out how to share Linux on a primarily Windows network, and I can’t use some of my imaging software on Linux. (Of the three I use – Photoshop, Paint.net, and GIMP, only the last is available on Linux.) One of the primary functions of one of the desktops involves audio and video conversion, which I have specific Windows software for.

So for some of them, I may have to install Vista or upgrade to Windows 7 or 8 (let’s assume 7). And I’ll have to decide whether to install the 32-bit version of Vista or 7, or the more resource-intensive 64-bit*. For the others, it’s created something of an identity crisis for them. Namely, what are they for? These are questions I have not had to ask myself in a while. Typically they sit, gathering dust, right up until I need them for something. Next time I need them, I may or may not be able to use them depending on what OS they have installed.

Not that I can blame Microsoft for this. They gave it their best:

Here’s a fun fact: XP first appeared at the end of 2001. As late as 2010, computers were still sold with XP installed. Windows Vista, which arrived 6 years after XP, only lasted until 2011.
If you think about it, XP will be nearly 13 years old. Like a teenager, it’s having trouble adjusting to the world. In spite of a major overhaul with Service Pack 3, XP just wasn’t built for the modern digital age.

It’s missing key security features introduced in Windows Vista. It can’t support the latest, safest and most Web-compatible versions of Internet Explorer. It can’t take full advantage of the latest hardware advances.

It’s becoming increasingly frustrating for customers and third-party companies. Many third-party companies would love to stop supporting XP. It takes a lot of time and money to make sure programs and hardware work on every version of Windows.

Windows XP is on so many computers because it was such a long-standing, and happy-for-me, operating system. That I am having this problem so many years later is a testament to how valuable it was. Rest in Peace, XP.

* – The rub being with 32-bit, it will only recognize 3GB of RAM. With 64-bit, I will be able to use between four and eight depending on the machine and whether or not I choose to upgrade. I don’t know whether 32-bit Win7 on 3GB of RAM or 64-bit Win7 on 4GB will actually work better.

Due to technical difficulties, posting and commenting has become inordinately difficult. Stay tuned.

Update: Is anyone else having a problem? I am starting to think it is actually just my Internet connection. Try leaving a comment. If it doesn’t work, try again and mention the failure. (it’ll usually work for me after a couple of attempts.)

Shortly before the move, I had to do an format and restore on one of the computers. I was surprised that programs that had not, in the past, been bundled with questionable software had suddenly been bundled with questionable software. And not just that, but the same sort of software. CG Hill had noticed it as well, with OpenOffice and Divx. It turns out, there was a reason for it:

SourceForge, once a mighty force for the good of Open Source, has fallen far from its previous lofty heights.

Dice, the new owners, bribe strongly encourage the top projects to use a new (closed source only) installer that pushes spyware / adware / malware.

Developers using SourceForge should migrate away from it if they want to keep their integrity. End users using projects hosted on SourceForge should immediately find an alternative.

I was quite agitated at first. Though, to be perfectly honest, I decided it wasn’t such a bad thing after that. It seems to have standardized the methodology with which they sneak unwanted software on your computer, thereby actually making it easier to avoid.

I will be downloading OpenOffice and installing OpenOffice 4 soon. I will report anything that transpires.

A report on the Internet, from 1981.

The enthusiasm with which newspapers sought to get their product online was quite progressive.

And suicidal, as it turned out.

As many of you may recall, I have a rather strong aversion to nail polish. I mean, it just drives me batty. Particularly on the fingernails (I am not fond of toenail polish, either, but it’s so ubiquitous that I have become desensitized). It is worse when the nail polish is particularly designy. Black is the least unacceptable, red is next, some other solid color after that. Then the recent trend of painted tips. Then designs.

A friend’s girlfriend – of whom I am extremely fond – has taken to painting her nails in very conspicuous ways. Designs. Glitter. And then showing off her work on Facebook. Which wouldn’t bother an ordinary and sane person. Which I am neither.

I was quite pleasantly surprised when the Obama administration responded quickly for allowing cell phone users to unlock their phones.

There has been some misunderstanding about what unlocking a cell phone means. It basically only means that you can prevent the phone from being carrier-specific as they are manufactured and released to be. This actually has very limited application, however, because in the United States, the carriers are generally incompatible with one another anyway. That’s one of the reasons that despite the current prohibition against unlocking, most of the carriers will let you do it anyway. Most Verizon phones cannot be unlocked to run on AT&T. No AT&T phones can be reworked to get onto Verizon’s network. Really, of the four major carriers, only T-Mobile plays really nice.

Derek Khanna, the GOP wonderkind who was fired from a thinktank for advocating a reworking of copyright laws and who initiated the petition, wrote a follow-up in The Atlantic stating that allowing the unlocking and jailbreaking/rooting* of phones is not enough.

Currently there is an exception for personal jail breaking (allowing individuals to install unapproved applications by altering the OS), but developing, selling, trafficking, or discussing the underlying technology is still illegal and there is no personal exceptions for tablets or other devices. This is unbelievable, especially when according to @Saurik, 23 million iOS devices are running a version of Cydia – a rough barometer of the number of devices jail broken. Until recently, personal jail breaking was illegal as well – meaning that all of the owners of those devices could be criminally liable. Unlocking new phones, as previously explained, is now illegal in all circumstances.

Accessibility technology has received an exception, but it is so narrow that it is nearly useless for persons who are deaf or blind. This exception was not the one requested on behalf of persons who are deaf and blind. And like the jail breaking, while there is a narrow exception for personal use — developing, selling, trafficking, or discussing the underlying technology is still illegal. What use is an exception for accessibility for personal use, if no one can develop the tools?

Technology to backup legally purchased DVDs and Blu-Ray discs for personal use is widely available and widely used but is completely illegal (in the US) – thus making millions of Americans criminals for a what most would consider non-infringing activity (if they own the content).

I agree with every one of his recommendations. I would, however, go a step further. The biggest problem in limiting legitimate smartphone usage is untouched by allowing jailbreaking, rooting, and unlocking. Namely, it’s the degree of control carriers exert over the phones in the first place. Daily Dot touches on it:

There’s another reason why Congress needs to step up to the plate: Open mobile devices and networks are key to future innovation. We’ve seen this before: In the 1960s policymakers finally put a stop to this kind of corporate nonsense in the landline market by allowing customers to attach their own devices to the network. The FCC’s “Carterfone” decision in 1968 ended AT&T’s practice of squelching attempts to innovate on its network or the devices that connected to it. The decision forced AT&T to allow unapproved devices to connect to its network—in this case, a device that helped increase the reach of rural telephone networks. More importantly, the move unleashed a wave of innovation in the U.S. and around the world. Telephone handset prices plummeted, answering machines and cordless phones became commonplace and computer modems were invented, ushering in today’s Internet era.

Once upon a time, I had a job that involved working on prototype smartphones. I primarily worked with devices that were under development from two sources. Both are names you would recognize. Both had a good product. Some of us preferred one, some of us preferred the other. Only one of these two companies would you associate with smartphones. The company that had the phones I preferred never released it in the United States, despite the fact that it was a fully operational device when I tested it. Why did one of these highly successful companies succeed in becoming a fixture in the smartphone world while the other remains just another electronics company? Because one of the companies got their devices onto the carrier networks. The other didn’t. So it wasn’t a question of which one made the better phone. It was a question of the carrier playing favorites.

To some extent, this is unavoidable. Carriers cannot endorse every every phone made by somebody somewhere. Even if they mean well. Except our carriers don’t. Unless you’re Apple, your phone only gets picked up by a carrier if it meets certain requirements that benefit the carrier and not the customer.

But companies that depend on the carriers are forced to play along — and as a result, they’re not allowed to compete on equal footing with giants like Apple and Samsung. The HTC One X is a high-end flagship device designed to compete squarely with the iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S III, but Verizon and Sprint aren’t carrying it: instead, Sprint offers a variant called the Evo 4G LTE, and Verizon is selling a downgraded device called the Droid Incredible 4G that simply doesn’t match up to higher-end competition. How is HTC to compete for Verizon customers with a weaker device? Why should HTC depend on struggling Sprint to market and sell a custom phone when it could just leverage its existing One X campaigns to take on Apple directly?

And because success in the wireless marketplace can only come with carrier support, innovation is stunted as companies design their future products around what they think carriers might want, not where the market or consumer behavior is heading. “Companies build phones that the carriers ask for instead of taking risks and testing new concepts in the marketplace,” says Vizio’s McRae. “The result is a collection of handsets that are fairly homogenous from a small number of brands.”

It’s worth noting here that not all carriers are equally closed. T-Mobile plays nice, by and large. AT&T is also at least somewhat flexible (though it’s tougher to get one with 4G connectivity from a non-approved device). On the other end, Verizon will not let any phone onto their network that isn’t branded for them and they place significant demands on what they’ll activate.

In addition to the innovation issue, there is also the customer freedom angle. Which is to say that the carriers are erecting their own barriers-to-exit. Even if I relocate to an area where T-Mobile is an option, as a Verizon customer I will have to replace all of my phones and tablets to make the transition. That’s a bigger barrier than any contract I’ve signed. It’s not just that my specific phone cannot work with AT&T’s network, but that I couldn’t purchase – and Samsung couldn’t make – one that would allow me to do so. Now, maybe in a competitive market such phones still wouldn’t exist, but cross-network compatibility is not a novel concept and it’s the carriers that have a lot of incentives to prevent it from happening. It doesn’t matter whether T-Mobile plays nice if nobody else does. An open phone is just a T-Mobile phone by default, or a crippled AT&T one.

There are a couple arguments against forcing carriers to open their networks to non-approved phones. The first is one of free markets, the second one of quality assurance.

The free market argument goes that if T-Mobile is playing nice, but Verizon isn’t, if this is important to consumers they will flock to T-Mobile. The market will work itself out. Or, alternately, the government simply shouldn’t get involved because it’s simply not the government’s place. The problem with both of these arguments is that we are facing a natural (though government-assisted) oligopoly. The capital costs are prohibitive for a new entrant to set things right. T-Mobile is open in part because they lack the capital costs to be a technically competitive network. Their policies are, I suspect, borne more of necessity and desperation than actual goodwill. Since we’re stuck with only four carriers, there is a public interest argument for disallowing competitive behavior that is made more strong by the fact that they exist on the shoulders of government-assigned frequency spectrum. It’s hard for a really free market to exist in this sort of environment.

The quality assurance argument is relatively weak and ultimately can be worked out. The argument here goes that Verizon disallows unauthorized phones because it reflects poorly on them if someone buys a cheap phone and thus gets crappy service. This is true, but only to an extent. This, however, applies to a whole bunch of areas where we do trust consumers to know the difference. If I buy a crappy television and DirecTV’s signal looks poor, that may reflect negatively on DirecTV but we wouldn’t allow DirecTV to demand that only their approved TV sets can be used with their service. If they tried to do that, we would probably respond to them the same way we responded when landline telco tried to do that.

I am sympathetic to Verizon et al demanding that phones they don’t approve of can’t be branded with their name. I’d even support some limitations on how those phones can be advertised (perhaps the requirement of a disclaimer stating that while the manufacturer makes the claim that it works on Verizon’s network, Verizon makes no such claim).

There is a third argument, but it’s a non-starter. That argument goes that if people can take their phones from one carrier to the next, it will kill the subsidization model where people pay a steeply discounted price for a phone with the condition of a two year contract. If only this were true! I hate the subsidy model. There are better ways even for cash-strapped customers who cannot easily afford the full price of a new phone. But the primary stick of the carriers is not locked phones, but rather early termination penalties. All they need is for those to reflect the subsidies, or go the T-Mobile route and have people purchase the phone in installments (all payments due upon service termination).

The solution, as far as I am concerned, is that the providers must provide handset makers the technical specs for compatibility with their network and are forced to either rely entirely on a SIM card for operability, or alternately that they have an automatic registration system for devices.

Lenovo is looking at entering the American market. Lenovo is the current maker of ThinkPad computers, of which I am a devotee. Whether Lenovo can succeed here on its merits is an open question. The ThinkPad brand is better known than the Lenovo brand and other computer makers – such as HP and Dell – have tried and failed in the North American market. But whether they succeed or fail should not depend on the customers, not the cooperation of four corporations here.

* – Unlocking means breaking the lock that connects a specific phone to a specific carrier. Often confused with unlocking, jailbreaking and rooting a device removes the barriers that prevent people from making unauthorized customizations of the device, ranging from installing carrier’s software to installing unauthorized or system-modifying software.