Ah. Peace and quiet again on my browser. Thank you, Flashblock 1.5.17, another fantastic Firefox add-on!
News sites like USA Today have gotten obnoxious, playing video the minute one clicks on an article. They must assume that their guests are lazy. Perhaps that may be so.
When I visit, I don't want my reading interrupted by someone speaking to me. I can acquire more information reading than listening to someone read for me. I don't know what is wrong with the world that people don't want to read. I often find that when I search for things, Youtube videos are at the top of the search rankings. I want to know who has the time to wade through a ten or twenty minute video to learn a piece of information that could be found in thirty seconds in a well-written article?
I wonder if Google Chrome has such a feature as Flashblock? Probably not is my guess. There is so much Chrome cannot do. People claim it's faster playing their precious videos, so I guess that is what is important to them. For my part, I install an add-on to disable videos, because they are annoying.
Monday, June 10, 2013
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Spying on Americans
Snowden confirms what I've suspected for some time. Government is in the hands of the wrong people, those who think lying is a trifle and who don't give a fig for the Bill of Rights. The spies read our private email and monitor our telephone calls--that much is now known. What's next on their agenda? I suppose they also want to hack into our personal web sites, spy on us night and day with cameras (hidden or not), and fly drones over America from coast to coast searching for whatever it is they think is important. Orwell's 1984 gets closer to becoming the status quo in America with every passing year.
I would not put it past these spies to have already hacked our web sites or to have engineered trojan horses already and unleashed them upon America. I think it is very likely that U.S. agents are behind a lot of web site hacks, hacks of sites owned by Americans. After all, they're fightin' terrorism, dontcha know? They have to check up on you, make sure you're not a terrorist. Are you? Well, you can't be believed, anyway. You're probably lying. Everybody's a terrorist, or a potential terrorist, so everybody has to be spied upon, day and night preferably, with a web cam in the bedroom and the bathroom to be absolutely sure.
Terrorists--yeah, sure. A convenient excuse to keep spying and gathering data on Americans. I don't think these foreign wars, which never end, are worth sacrificing our freedom. I don't think they are worth turning government into a spy state. But I never had a high opinion of Mr. Bush's wars in the first place. I think people in government are the reason the economy is in such a poor state. They are more concerned with their foreign wars than they are with the U.S.
Some people wonder whether those drones in Pakistan are just beta versions being tested and refined for use here at home.
I can't remember another issue that irritated more than this revelation that confirms, once and for all, that ordinary Americans are being spied upon. I wasn't even that peeved by Obama's waffling over gay marriage and other gay issues. The reason must be that I have grown accustomed to politicians promising the moon and Stars to gay people, and then once in office turning the other way. I was not accustomed to the idea that secret agents are opening not just my own, but everybody's private mail and reading everybody's correspondence and using that information for unknown ends.
I would not put it past these spies to have already hacked our web sites or to have engineered trojan horses already and unleashed them upon America. I think it is very likely that U.S. agents are behind a lot of web site hacks, hacks of sites owned by Americans. After all, they're fightin' terrorism, dontcha know? They have to check up on you, make sure you're not a terrorist. Are you? Well, you can't be believed, anyway. You're probably lying. Everybody's a terrorist, or a potential terrorist, so everybody has to be spied upon, day and night preferably, with a web cam in the bedroom and the bathroom to be absolutely sure.
Terrorists--yeah, sure. A convenient excuse to keep spying and gathering data on Americans. I don't think these foreign wars, which never end, are worth sacrificing our freedom. I don't think they are worth turning government into a spy state. But I never had a high opinion of Mr. Bush's wars in the first place. I think people in government are the reason the economy is in such a poor state. They are more concerned with their foreign wars than they are with the U.S.
Some people wonder whether those drones in Pakistan are just beta versions being tested and refined for use here at home.
I can't remember another issue that irritated more than this revelation that confirms, once and for all, that ordinary Americans are being spied upon. I wasn't even that peeved by Obama's waffling over gay marriage and other gay issues. The reason must be that I have grown accustomed to politicians promising the moon and Stars to gay people, and then once in office turning the other way. I was not accustomed to the idea that secret agents are opening not just my own, but everybody's private mail and reading everybody's correspondence and using that information for unknown ends.
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Carter was Ethical
I'm old enough to remember President Carter. He was our last President to really care about ethics. There are thorny questions one could pose to the other Presidents that would just dissolve any pretences they might have. I wonder about Obama sometimes, now that we know he approved spying on Americans. I don't believe anything that his spy chief says. They didn't want us to know about their spying. Now they are spending all their passion on vindictiveness, on their plans to punish whoever betrayed their secret. But it should not have been a secret in the first place. They spied on ordinary Americans on a massive scale. Now that they're caught, they say, "Oh, it's not so bad. See, we were doing because of, you know, terrorism and stuff." I just don't believe it. If they had been honest in the first place and told the country what they were doing, then that would be one thing, but they have their hand caught in the cookie jar and are just trying to deflect some heat.
When Reagan ran against Carter in '79, I switched my support to Reagan in alignment with my father, but we were wrong. Carter took the blame for a sour economy and the Iranian hostage crisis. That's why he lost the election. Reagan paid off Iran with weapons to get the hostages back and then spent his way out of the recession. All he did was spend, spend, spend. He paid off the Iranians and paid off private companies to build more bombs.
Carter was special in that he kept on working for the country even out of office. He was not afraid to state his opinions about world issues, even if these opinions sometimes made him unpopular with certain groups like the pro-Israel lobby. I am convinced he spoke from conscience more than any of these other Presidents we have had. I listen to these other Presidents speak and I read quotes from these guys and it seems to me they are calculating every word, even down to the punctuation they use, based upon political factors. They're good at politics, maybe better than Carter on politics, but not so good at ethics.
Is ethics without value? Many people think so, including those that are in positions of authority today. I think having ethics is what distinguishes a great leader from a mediocre one. People do respect ethics. Otherwise all our heroes would be villains, but they're not, are they? Our heroes are people who did what they thought was right. I think ethics bestows a generous reward on those that practice it, because ethics, more times than not, coincides with the wisest course of action. Intelligent, educated fools scoff at ethics and think they know better at their peril, because the world's complexity defeats even the most cunning. It is wise to walk in the way of righteousness and to refuse those opportunities to steal what seem to be trifling advantages.
When Reagan ran against Carter in '79, I switched my support to Reagan in alignment with my father, but we were wrong. Carter took the blame for a sour economy and the Iranian hostage crisis. That's why he lost the election. Reagan paid off Iran with weapons to get the hostages back and then spent his way out of the recession. All he did was spend, spend, spend. He paid off the Iranians and paid off private companies to build more bombs.
Carter was special in that he kept on working for the country even out of office. He was not afraid to state his opinions about world issues, even if these opinions sometimes made him unpopular with certain groups like the pro-Israel lobby. I am convinced he spoke from conscience more than any of these other Presidents we have had. I listen to these other Presidents speak and I read quotes from these guys and it seems to me they are calculating every word, even down to the punctuation they use, based upon political factors. They're good at politics, maybe better than Carter on politics, but not so good at ethics.
Is ethics without value? Many people think so, including those that are in positions of authority today. I think having ethics is what distinguishes a great leader from a mediocre one. People do respect ethics. Otherwise all our heroes would be villains, but they're not, are they? Our heroes are people who did what they thought was right. I think ethics bestows a generous reward on those that practice it, because ethics, more times than not, coincides with the wisest course of action. Intelligent, educated fools scoff at ethics and think they know better at their peril, because the world's complexity defeats even the most cunning. It is wise to walk in the way of righteousness and to refuse those opportunities to steal what seem to be trifling advantages.
Dreaming of My Enemy
I dreamed of my enemy last night. Why, I don't know. I haven't seen him in twenty years. Maybe he died, and his passing somehow touched my unconscious. Don't scoff at my supernatural hypothesis, reader. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy. His father died early of a heart attack, and so perhaps now that he is reaching the same age as his father. . .
He isn't my enemy any longer, of course. Twenty years has a way of erasing such distinctions, at least for me, and for the relatively mild wrongs wrought by that nothing. I don't care enough about him to even search the Internet and find out what he is up to. I've tracked down others--old flames, friends, and acquaintances, out of curiosity in the past, but once my curiosity was sated, I always had the feeling of "so what?" It doesn't really matter what they are doing now, or whether they are not doing at all--whether they are dead. Once so many years pass by, then people are strangers, whatever they might have been before. Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder after all.
He was hell on wheels back in the day, and I used to think of him as my archenemy, as indeed he was for a time, but then we got older and ceased to care. The last interaction I remember with him, he was standing by the side of the road. His car had a flat tire, and he did not know what to do. The fool hadn't carried a spare like I always have done. He probably did not know how to change tires. I said not a word, but kept on walking. He could read the look on my face well enough to gather that I wouldn't have lifted a finger to help him. That was what impressed me the most about him, that he could appreciate the consequences of his past actions.
What was my dream about? I don't recall. Maybe it was an erotic dream. He wasn't bad-looking, as enemies go. I don't remember him having a girlfriend, even though he trumpeted his homophobia to everyone, like a pathetic badge of honor. I thought for sure he was a closet case. He palled around with the best-looking guy in school, his very best friend, and didn't spend any time with girls at all. There always seemed something fake to me about his loud avowals of desire for females. I have known a lot of straight guys in my day, and they didn't feel the need to run down gays.
The night before, I think I dreamed about the upcoming phone interview on Friday. I remember a strong premonition that things would not go well. The tension caused a spasm in my left calf, which woke me up. The muscle was like a rock. It was bruised the next day from the long-lasting spasm. I detest spasms, but they do occur on rare occasion, the body turning on its owner.
I don't think much of that premonition, because almost all phone interviews go ill. Phone interviews are just a quick and cheap way of weeding people out, when somebody has a ton of applications. The odds are all against a phone interview. If somebody is serious, they will meet in person.
What use are premonitions if they foresee likely events? I want a premonition that will make me rich or give me an opportunity to work and earn money. That's the kind of premonition I desire. I don't trust poor psychics. And I don't see why psychics would need to sell their services. I don't want premonitions of unhappy events, either. No more damn spasms. I want premonitions of good things that could happen to me, if I do a, b, and c.
He isn't my enemy any longer, of course. Twenty years has a way of erasing such distinctions, at least for me, and for the relatively mild wrongs wrought by that nothing. I don't care enough about him to even search the Internet and find out what he is up to. I've tracked down others--old flames, friends, and acquaintances, out of curiosity in the past, but once my curiosity was sated, I always had the feeling of "so what?" It doesn't really matter what they are doing now, or whether they are not doing at all--whether they are dead. Once so many years pass by, then people are strangers, whatever they might have been before. Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder after all.
He was hell on wheels back in the day, and I used to think of him as my archenemy, as indeed he was for a time, but then we got older and ceased to care. The last interaction I remember with him, he was standing by the side of the road. His car had a flat tire, and he did not know what to do. The fool hadn't carried a spare like I always have done. He probably did not know how to change tires. I said not a word, but kept on walking. He could read the look on my face well enough to gather that I wouldn't have lifted a finger to help him. That was what impressed me the most about him, that he could appreciate the consequences of his past actions.
What was my dream about? I don't recall. Maybe it was an erotic dream. He wasn't bad-looking, as enemies go. I don't remember him having a girlfriend, even though he trumpeted his homophobia to everyone, like a pathetic badge of honor. I thought for sure he was a closet case. He palled around with the best-looking guy in school, his very best friend, and didn't spend any time with girls at all. There always seemed something fake to me about his loud avowals of desire for females. I have known a lot of straight guys in my day, and they didn't feel the need to run down gays.
The night before, I think I dreamed about the upcoming phone interview on Friday. I remember a strong premonition that things would not go well. The tension caused a spasm in my left calf, which woke me up. The muscle was like a rock. It was bruised the next day from the long-lasting spasm. I detest spasms, but they do occur on rare occasion, the body turning on its owner.
I don't think much of that premonition, because almost all phone interviews go ill. Phone interviews are just a quick and cheap way of weeding people out, when somebody has a ton of applications. The odds are all against a phone interview. If somebody is serious, they will meet in person.
What use are premonitions if they foresee likely events? I want a premonition that will make me rich or give me an opportunity to work and earn money. That's the kind of premonition I desire. I don't trust poor psychics. And I don't see why psychics would need to sell their services. I don't want premonitions of unhappy events, either. No more damn spasms. I want premonitions of good things that could happen to me, if I do a, b, and c.
Friday, June 7, 2013
An Interview
I was told during a phone interview today that I lack administrative experience. This was not volunteered feedback. I extracted it from the interviewer with a direct question: "Do you feel that there is anything that would disqualify me from this position?" Is that a gambit? Perhaps it is. I find directness helpful, because it cuts through the crap. I want useful feedback. If I don't get the job, give me a clue why. Otherwise the interview is of limited value. I am direct in all my questions. All I care about is whether my resume, cover letter, and presentation are okay. The rest has no meaning, because I can research to find the answers to everything else.
Administrating programs and procedures and protocols? Surely I have done that in my life. What the remark suggests however is that there are applicants that are better known to the decision-maker, applicants with what is thought to be "administrative experience," possibly people that are already vouched for by someone known to the interviewer. The selection of that other will be justified by their "administrative experience."
My pride is wounded by applying for humble jobs with modest demands and being told I haven't the right experience for them. What, am I incapable of learning any new skill? Am I fossil already? Do my degrees and experience mean nothing? The answer is yes, my college degrees mean nothing, their value is zero or even less than zero. My experience means nothing either. No one thinks anything about computer programming, no one holds it in any special regard at all. All that matters is who one knows. What one knows is of less importance.
I was told there were hundreds of applicants just for this one little job paying twelve dollar an hour, and I was one of only fifteen called for a phone interview. Should I be flattered by that? Maybe. I'm not though. I'd really prefer not to have wasted my energy upon hoping for a better life. Oh, I had such eagerness--was almost giddy. I felt alert and aware. Yet it seemed that nothing I said impressed the listener, that she had heard it all before and was rather bored and disinterested. Never once did she offer any positive feedback. How I wish I knew someone that was close to her! That would have made all the difference, I'm sure. I could not get through the firewall. I had a strong suspicion she had already made up her mind to choose someone else, and I don't really know why she called in the first place. Perhaps she thought I was female and turned against me upon finding I was not. That seems to me a very likely scenario, because I know how clannish women can be. Many women strongly prefer to work with other women. So what she said was probably a convenient excuse, a white lie. There is really nothing I could have said or done to eliminate such a strong bias.
I am a good listener. I can read into choice of words and tone of voice pretty well, and I felt my chance was over and done. A black wave of despair passed over me the minute I put the phone down. It is times like this that I fear death not at all.
Writing about the experience helps. I feel better here at this last paragraph than I did at the first. Once one confesses to despair, that is the essential lever to lift the heavy burden from consciousness. Do not feed the despair. Do not drink. One must confess. Confession is good for the soul. "Yes, I have this wild feeling that things are hopeless, yes I feel like a drowning rat. Yes I feel that my talents are being wasted." With confession, the despair becomes an interesting unusual thing, like a sombrero, and one's curiosity is piqued. Why am I wearing this sombrero? I don't usually wear a sombrero. I will take it off. The hat fit me half an hour ago, but I think I'm over it now. I have such a good life. Yes, life is good. I do not need to wear the sombrero.
What fits me better is stoicism. We live, we die. That is all. As long as there are still good moments, free of pain, that is all one should expect.
Administrating programs and procedures and protocols? Surely I have done that in my life. What the remark suggests however is that there are applicants that are better known to the decision-maker, applicants with what is thought to be "administrative experience," possibly people that are already vouched for by someone known to the interviewer. The selection of that other will be justified by their "administrative experience."
My pride is wounded by applying for humble jobs with modest demands and being told I haven't the right experience for them. What, am I incapable of learning any new skill? Am I fossil already? Do my degrees and experience mean nothing? The answer is yes, my college degrees mean nothing, their value is zero or even less than zero. My experience means nothing either. No one thinks anything about computer programming, no one holds it in any special regard at all. All that matters is who one knows. What one knows is of less importance.
I was told there were hundreds of applicants just for this one little job paying twelve dollar an hour, and I was one of only fifteen called for a phone interview. Should I be flattered by that? Maybe. I'm not though. I'd really prefer not to have wasted my energy upon hoping for a better life. Oh, I had such eagerness--was almost giddy. I felt alert and aware. Yet it seemed that nothing I said impressed the listener, that she had heard it all before and was rather bored and disinterested. Never once did she offer any positive feedback. How I wish I knew someone that was close to her! That would have made all the difference, I'm sure. I could not get through the firewall. I had a strong suspicion she had already made up her mind to choose someone else, and I don't really know why she called in the first place. Perhaps she thought I was female and turned against me upon finding I was not. That seems to me a very likely scenario, because I know how clannish women can be. Many women strongly prefer to work with other women. So what she said was probably a convenient excuse, a white lie. There is really nothing I could have said or done to eliminate such a strong bias.
I am a good listener. I can read into choice of words and tone of voice pretty well, and I felt my chance was over and done. A black wave of despair passed over me the minute I put the phone down. It is times like this that I fear death not at all.
Writing about the experience helps. I feel better here at this last paragraph than I did at the first. Once one confesses to despair, that is the essential lever to lift the heavy burden from consciousness. Do not feed the despair. Do not drink. One must confess. Confession is good for the soul. "Yes, I have this wild feeling that things are hopeless, yes I feel like a drowning rat. Yes I feel that my talents are being wasted." With confession, the despair becomes an interesting unusual thing, like a sombrero, and one's curiosity is piqued. Why am I wearing this sombrero? I don't usually wear a sombrero. I will take it off. The hat fit me half an hour ago, but I think I'm over it now. I have such a good life. Yes, life is good. I do not need to wear the sombrero.
What fits me better is stoicism. We live, we die. That is all. As long as there are still good moments, free of pain, that is all one should expect.
Jonesin' for Wordpress 3.6
I eagerly await the overdue release of Wordpress 3.6 and moreover the twentythirteen theme. I haven't updated my Wordpress theme in ages, and I feel like now's the time, especially since I have time on my hands. The twentythirteen theme is supposed to offer superior support for mobile devices. I don't use one, but so many people do that of course I want to keep those people happy.
Yet another part of me wonders whether it is wise to join the other lemmings leaping into 3.6. Perhaps it is better to remain with the tried and true 3.5.1 and wait to see how 3.6 pans out in terms of security and stability. Perhaps I should give the hacking community time to find all the weaknesses in the next release. I don't know. I think if I backup on a regular basis, then I can deal with whatever may arise.
Yet another part of me wonders whether it is wise to join the other lemmings leaping into 3.6. Perhaps it is better to remain with the tried and true 3.5.1 and wait to see how 3.6 pans out in terms of security and stability. Perhaps I should give the hacking community time to find all the weaknesses in the next release. I don't know. I think if I backup on a regular basis, then I can deal with whatever may arise.
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Our Government is on the Wrong Track
Some are cynical about everything to do with government. Being a Democrat, I am persuaded that sometimes the government is capable of doing good things and that it acts as a check and balance upon private power. But government's security apparatus certainly has proven itself capable of excess.
The Washington Post posted an article today about how the government has been spying on Americans through the Internet. The Guardian followed up with another article explaining how pervasive the government's spying is. I can't say I was surprised, as I have detected the shadows cast by agents on numerous occasions through the years. I rather suspected that widespread spying was going on, targeting ordinary Americans for a multitude of rationales which all boil down to keeping the poor in their place and bringing more power to those who already have it. Ah, those with power always want more! Is that not an accepted fact of human nature?
Those who believe that their communications on Facebook, Google or other online services are respected as privileged and private are fools. Those who believe the government does not release viruses and spyware are also deluded. There are many undercover agents posing as ordinary people on Facebook, Amazon, Google and every other social media site. To lie is nothing to them--a mere trifle.
The rich and the powerful crapped their pants upon realizing the levelling potential of Internet technology. Now governments around the world, including the U.S., are doing everything they can to subvert the technology in order to enforce the age-old paradigm, wherein the less privileged remain so and the aristocracy hold all the cards.
The Washington Post posted an article today about how the government has been spying on Americans through the Internet. The Guardian followed up with another article explaining how pervasive the government's spying is. I can't say I was surprised, as I have detected the shadows cast by agents on numerous occasions through the years. I rather suspected that widespread spying was going on, targeting ordinary Americans for a multitude of rationales which all boil down to keeping the poor in their place and bringing more power to those who already have it. Ah, those with power always want more! Is that not an accepted fact of human nature?
Those who believe that their communications on Facebook, Google or other online services are respected as privileged and private are fools. Those who believe the government does not release viruses and spyware are also deluded. There are many undercover agents posing as ordinary people on Facebook, Amazon, Google and every other social media site. To lie is nothing to them--a mere trifle.
The rich and the powerful crapped their pants upon realizing the levelling potential of Internet technology. Now governments around the world, including the U.S., are doing everything they can to subvert the technology in order to enforce the age-old paradigm, wherein the less privileged remain so and the aristocracy hold all the cards.
The White House and Civil Liberties
The White House is defending a massive intrusion by the government on civil liberties for political reasons. Whatever the ethics, now that the cat is out of the bag I think that this tactic is of limited use, capable of ensnaring only the careless. Perhaps most criminals and terrorists are careless. Perhaps that is why they resort to criminality and terrorism. I think any intelligent individual could devise a way to disguise the source, destination, content, duration, and frequency of telephone calls. But how intelligent are terrorists, anyway? Not very, one would think.
At any rate, I don't think avoiding terrorism is worth giving the government a blank check on civil liberties, because once such liberty is sacrificed, when is it ever recovered? The government is inclined to take more and more. Where do all these seizures of privileged information end? I don't see any end, and I see rather increasing reliance on eavesdropping. Information makes those in power even more powerful, so it is always tempting to seize more and more information. Power is a drug.
I find the Obama administration just as bone-headed as the Bush administration was on civil liberty. Where is the difference? All of this fear and paranoia to justify the loss of liberty is unbecoming. I find that Obama is too right-wing and too willing to sacrifice individual liberties for what he deems "the good of that state." Perhaps Republicans would fault him for it if he were not so. Perhaps this is another case of Obama playing the politician rather than the great statesman he could have been.
At any rate, I don't think avoiding terrorism is worth giving the government a blank check on civil liberties, because once such liberty is sacrificed, when is it ever recovered? The government is inclined to take more and more. Where do all these seizures of privileged information end? I don't see any end, and I see rather increasing reliance on eavesdropping. Information makes those in power even more powerful, so it is always tempting to seize more and more information. Power is a drug.
I find the Obama administration just as bone-headed as the Bush administration was on civil liberty. Where is the difference? All of this fear and paranoia to justify the loss of liberty is unbecoming. I find that Obama is too right-wing and too willing to sacrifice individual liberties for what he deems "the good of that state." Perhaps Republicans would fault him for it if he were not so. Perhaps this is another case of Obama playing the politician rather than the great statesman he could have been.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Blexbot Content Scraper is Really Nielsen Media Research
I had great difficulty finding detailed information online about an IP address, 216.176.177.162, that appeared in my site log over ten thousand times. But now that IP address is cold busted. It belongs to Nielsen Media Research, a pack of content scrapers. They do not wish to be identified as such, and so they lie, and call themselves a random name like Blexbot. Tomorrow they will be clexbot, and the day after that, wmu-bot. What are Content Scrapers? They are greedy bots that attempt to grab every piece of data from a given site. Interesting bits of this data are then grouped together and sold to companies, governments, or individuals. In short, they grab content and try to profit from it. They do not send traffic. They should be banned by every site, no question about it.
Lookie what the scumbags are doing on a Wordpress site:
Lookie what the scumbags are doing on a Wordpress site:
216.176.177.162 - - [29/May/2013:06:21:13 -0800] "GET /password HTTP/1.1" 404 2438 "-" "BLEXBot"They're not just content scrapers, they're malicious hackers. Those 404's you see above? That code means they're making up links as they go along, running them up the flag pole to see if anybody salutes. Meanwhile, the web admin gets to have fun wondering what's wrong with his web site that all of these 404 errors are popping up. (There were many more than just the above examples.)
216.176.177.162 - - [29/May/2013:06:21:16 -0800] "GET /signup?context=webintent HTTP/1.1" 404 2438 "-" "BLEXBot"
216.176.177.162 - - [29/May/2013:06:21:18 -0800] "GET /reg/join HTTP/1.1" 404 2401 "-" "BLEXBot"
216.176.177.162 - - [29/May/2013:06:21:21 -0800] "GET /forgot_password HTTP/1.1" 404 2438 "-" "BLEXBot"
Subscribing by Email
My mail reader informs me of new messages instantly. Partly for that reason, I never subscribe to newsletters. I never want to receive email from any company unless I have had recent or ongoing business with that company. Amazon sends me email when I write a review, or when someone comments on my review, and that is all right as well. Email in response to recent action is all right. However, companies assume that someone wants a newsletter on the slightest pretext. I left a comment on ZDNET recently, and their morons concluded I wanted a newsletter subscription. ZAP! POW! WRONG! If I want to read something, I will visit a site or subscribe via RSS. Only important matters should be transmitted via email. Email is for friends and business contacts only. Has ZDNET never heard of RSS feeds? What dinosaurs! Actually, I don't use RSS either, but if I were of a mind to want a regular newsletter, then RSS is how I would go about it.
Some outfits require a user to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to unsubscribe. Many require typing in the email address. I don't bother with all of that. The maximum effort I'm willing to put forth to unsubscribe is two clicks. I am doing the sender a favor by actually being nice enough to unsubscribe. If a third click or any typing is required, then I won't unsubscribe. Instead, I'll mark the email as spam. The more people that mark such email as spam, the more likely that the email provider, such as Yahoo, will default all the sender's emails to the spam folder for all users, which is right, because newsletter-pushers are indeed spammers.
Some outfits require a user to jump through a bunch of hoops in order to unsubscribe. Many require typing in the email address. I don't bother with all of that. The maximum effort I'm willing to put forth to unsubscribe is two clicks. I am doing the sender a favor by actually being nice enough to unsubscribe. If a third click or any typing is required, then I won't unsubscribe. Instead, I'll mark the email as spam. The more people that mark such email as spam, the more likely that the email provider, such as Yahoo, will default all the sender's emails to the spam folder for all users, which is right, because newsletter-pushers are indeed spammers.
Bot-Net Attack? What Bot-Net Attack?
I read many articles today about the brute force attack targeting Wordpress sites. My site is secure, and I just laugh at the enormous waste of that stupid bot-net's bandwidth. Each hit taxes my site about 500 bytes, so those scumbags will have to hit my site 2,000,000 times in order to waste one of my gigabytes--but that calculation seems rather liberal to me. After all, my deflate instruction is near the top of my .htaccess file, so I would wager that instead of 500 bytes, the server actually transmits each bot closer to 300 bytes, maybe lower since old 403.html is, after all, mere text, which receives quite optimal compression rates from any compression algorithm worth its salt.
But igor's solution will never be the thing people click on in google. Packaging and appearance are the thing. That is all right, because it is enough for me that my client's site is perfectly impregnable. I want his site to be fast all the time, I want it to look right all the time, and I want black hat hackers and evil bots to fail in everything they attempt.
Upon reflection, I think the stupid brute force attack against wp-login is meant to promote the sales of some cybersecurity firm(s). Let us be clear, it is not a serious attack. It is a stupid and ineffectual waste of bandwidth. Some cunning CEO may have decided to hire a bot-net to launch a stupid, ineffectual attack against everybody, knowing that the ignorant and the easily frightened would shell out money to buy a quick fix, a little band-aid to put on their precious web site to lull them into a false sense of security. I just don't which company(ies) are behind the attack, which stand to gain. There are probably a thousand different suspects.
But igor's solution will never be the thing people click on in google. Packaging and appearance are the thing. That is all right, because it is enough for me that my client's site is perfectly impregnable. I want his site to be fast all the time, I want it to look right all the time, and I want black hat hackers and evil bots to fail in everything they attempt.
Upon reflection, I think the stupid brute force attack against wp-login is meant to promote the sales of some cybersecurity firm(s). Let us be clear, it is not a serious attack. It is a stupid and ineffectual waste of bandwidth. Some cunning CEO may have decided to hire a bot-net to launch a stupid, ineffectual attack against everybody, knowing that the ignorant and the easily frightened would shell out money to buy a quick fix, a little band-aid to put on their precious web site to lull them into a false sense of security. I just don't which company(ies) are behind the attack, which stand to gain. There are probably a thousand different suspects.
Friday, May 31, 2013
The Vikings Are Coming
Vikings is a new show that every student of history should watch. It smacks of historical accuracy to me. The script is fairly well-written, too, depicting a primitive era in European history, the Dark Ages. Christianity and all the other sacred cows of Western civilization are treated in a fair, objective manner. I was skeptical at first, but the show won me over with its good characterizations, realistic action and realistic dialogue.
As a side note, I found it amusing to imagine that Vikings depicts not only our past but our future, after various calamities foreseen and unforeseen descend upon our planet. Such a thought can only amuse one who expects to be dead by such a time. I am an optimist. I expect all now living to be dead before our civilization collapses into barbarism.
As a side note, I found it amusing to imagine that Vikings depicts not only our past but our future, after various calamities foreseen and unforeseen descend upon our planet. Such a thought can only amuse one who expects to be dead by such a time. I am an optimist. I expect all now living to be dead before our civilization collapses into barbarism.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Linux? I Don't Even Know What That Is
I told one of my clients today that I use Linux, and they replied, "I don't even know what that is."
My client was sick of Windows 8 and wanted to dial back to Windows 7, so without thinking twice, she bought a copy from a local retail store. Of course, Microsoft wins; they sold her both Windows 8 and Windows 7, which makes for quite an expensive operating system--about $150, all told. Microsoft is being rewarded for making a turkey out of Windows 8.
In my view, she'd be better off with Linux, but how can I suggest a thing she never even heard of? Linux deserves better name recognition, but what can be done? One can point out that most of the web sites in the world run on Linux, and that mobile devices often use Linux, but that is not quite as apparent as the brand one sees on almost every laptop or desktop.
What deters me from recommending Linux even more is that mainstream Linux distros have little issues, and Linux gurus or even Linux journeymen are thin on the ground. She can't ask her friend, neighbor or nephew for help with a Linux system. That's quite a disadvantage.
Could I in good conscience recommend Kubuntu? Nope. My Kubuntu 13.04 system running KDE 4.10.3 is now booting up with two blankscrn.kss windows for no apparent reason. Do I really want her calling me on the phone asking what is wrong with Kubuntu and how did it get infected by a virus? Then there was the problem I wrestled with where Kubuntu dialed the clock back three hours. I had to use the command line to fix that problem and some pretty arcane syntax, too.
Could I recommend Open Suse 12.3? Nope. Open Suse won't install a printer for anybody but a bonafide geek. Open Suse will give an error message the minute she tries connecting to the Internet. Open Suse will give an error message on her very first update after installation, because even after all these years, the devs haven't learned to remove the dvd from the repository list. I wouldn't recommend Open Suse to anybody.
The only Linux distro I'd feel safe recommending to a low-tech individual would be Linux Mint Xfce or Cinnamon, but there again, Linux users are thin on the ground, so anybody who ventures into the Linux world has to be comfortable browsing and researching online forums and wikis in order to resolve the occasional unforeseen and the unexpected. I am comfortable and I think extremely good at performing online research, but the average user is not. The average user wants to speak to somebody on the phone or better yet, ask someone in person. At least with Windows, everybody and their brother knows a little something and the herd can help each other cope with Windows' eccentricities.
In my view, she'd be better off with Linux, but how can I suggest a thing she never even heard of? Linux deserves better name recognition, but what can be done? One can point out that most of the web sites in the world run on Linux, and that mobile devices often use Linux, but that is not quite as apparent as the brand one sees on almost every laptop or desktop.
What deters me from recommending Linux even more is that mainstream Linux distros have little issues, and Linux gurus or even Linux journeymen are thin on the ground. She can't ask her friend, neighbor or nephew for help with a Linux system. That's quite a disadvantage.
Could I in good conscience recommend Kubuntu? Nope. My Kubuntu 13.04 system running KDE 4.10.3 is now booting up with two blankscrn.kss windows for no apparent reason. Do I really want her calling me on the phone asking what is wrong with Kubuntu and how did it get infected by a virus? Then there was the problem I wrestled with where Kubuntu dialed the clock back three hours. I had to use the command line to fix that problem and some pretty arcane syntax, too.
Could I recommend Open Suse 12.3? Nope. Open Suse won't install a printer for anybody but a bonafide geek. Open Suse will give an error message the minute she tries connecting to the Internet. Open Suse will give an error message on her very first update after installation, because even after all these years, the devs haven't learned to remove the dvd from the repository list. I wouldn't recommend Open Suse to anybody.
The only Linux distro I'd feel safe recommending to a low-tech individual would be Linux Mint Xfce or Cinnamon, but there again, Linux users are thin on the ground, so anybody who ventures into the Linux world has to be comfortable browsing and researching online forums and wikis in order to resolve the occasional unforeseen and the unexpected. I am comfortable and I think extremely good at performing online research, but the average user is not. The average user wants to speak to somebody on the phone or better yet, ask someone in person. At least with Windows, everybody and their brother knows a little something and the herd can help each other cope with Windows' eccentricities.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
I Love Deleting Comments
Out there in Internet-land, SEO scumbags are paying a bunch of needy nerds about ten dollars an hour to leave comments on blogs like mine. I mark such comments as spam and delete them. Ha-ha, game over, wah-wah-wah.
Takes me all of five seconds to clock SEO shills. For the record, igor was not born yesterday.
I see these shady Internet jobs on E-lance all the time. E-lance was made for crap jobs like that. I may be a needy nerd myself, but there are certain jobs I don't deign to do for ethical reasons. The money is beside the point. I can't stomach the thought of ever being a spammer that promotes crap sites on the Internet. Now if the site were worth a damn, that might be another question, but I don't work for the unethical or the ignorant.
I wish more people had scruples about who they work for. The world would be a better place. Homo Sapiens 2.0 needs to have a faculty in the brain that refuses to behave like a slave--refuses to work for evil ends.
Takes me all of five seconds to clock SEO shills. For the record, igor was not born yesterday.
I see these shady Internet jobs on E-lance all the time. E-lance was made for crap jobs like that. I may be a needy nerd myself, but there are certain jobs I don't deign to do for ethical reasons. The money is beside the point. I can't stomach the thought of ever being a spammer that promotes crap sites on the Internet. Now if the site were worth a damn, that might be another question, but I don't work for the unethical or the ignorant.
I wish more people had scruples about who they work for. The world would be a better place. Homo Sapiens 2.0 needs to have a faculty in the brain that refuses to behave like a slave--refuses to work for evil ends.
Attack-bots Hitting Wp-Login on Wordpress Sites
I've noticed in my log recently that thousands of bots have been hitting wp-login.php repeatedly, despite being served 403 pages. I am not sure of the motivation of the attackers. However, thousands of hits on a .php file certainly can be a drain on system resources.
I developed a simple method of reducing the impact of wp-login attackers. After my deny-froms, I placed the following code in my .htaccess file. It is useful for Wordpress sites that do not permit users other than the administrator to log in, and where the admin uses a static IP address, which is an ideal scenario for security purposes. I should note that wp-login is specifically disallowed in my robots.txt and that there is no link to it on the Wordpress site in question. Thus, my code will not ensnare rule-abiding bots such as Google's.
My code is not applicable to all Wordpress sites. Some WP sites let users register and log in. I opted not to go that route, because our site is such a small one that I doubt anyone would remember their password. Our users can leave a comment by logging into a popular social media site.
The first conditional statement checks the IP address. If it does not match (indicated by the exclamation mark), then if the user is requesting the wp-login, wp-admin, or install page, that user is redirected to the 403 page. All of this happens without engaging the database or invoking any php code, so it is fast and efficient and minimizes the toll of the attack bots on system resources. I have banned the IP addresses of the vast majority of these attackers, but I notice a certain percentage do slip through with novel IP addresses, so this is a way of preventing them from forcing the server to load and interpret wp-login.php.
My 403 page consists of a mere 500-odd bytes with links intended to tempt bots to visit various spam-bot hells around the Internet, where they may encounter honeypots, investigators, bogus email addresses, bogus links, and in general waste a lot of their time and effort and generate no data of any use at all to them.
I developed a simple method of reducing the impact of wp-login attackers. After my deny-froms, I placed the following code in my .htaccess file. It is useful for Wordpress sites that do not permit users other than the administrator to log in, and where the admin uses a static IP address, which is an ideal scenario for security purposes. I should note that wp-login is specifically disallowed in my robots.txt and that there is no link to it on the Wordpress site in question. Thus, my code will not ensnare rule-abiding bots such as Google's.
My code is not applicable to all Wordpress sites. Some WP sites let users register and log in. I opted not to go that route, because our site is such a small one that I doubt anyone would remember their password. Our users can leave a comment by logging into a popular social media site.
#Block WP attackersPlace any static IP addresses that admins use in the above code (where www.xxx.yyy.zzz is). The code should exclude the IP addresses of legitimate users--admins--who log-in to the site. One could exclude multiple IP addresses by adding more conditional lines.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %(REMOTE_ADDR) !^www\.xxx\.yyy.\zzz
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/wp-login [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/wp-admin [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/install.php [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]
The first conditional statement checks the IP address. If it does not match (indicated by the exclamation mark), then if the user is requesting the wp-login, wp-admin, or install page, that user is redirected to the 403 page. All of this happens without engaging the database or invoking any php code, so it is fast and efficient and minimizes the toll of the attack bots on system resources. I have banned the IP addresses of the vast majority of these attackers, but I notice a certain percentage do slip through with novel IP addresses, so this is a way of preventing them from forcing the server to load and interpret wp-login.php.
My 403 page consists of a mere 500-odd bytes with links intended to tempt bots to visit various spam-bot hells around the Internet, where they may encounter honeypots, investigators, bogus email addresses, bogus links, and in general waste a lot of their time and effort and generate no data of any use at all to them.
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Game of Thrones Drones
Where did we get so many Game of Thrones drones? I watched the first episode and tuned out. There wasn't a single character on the show whose fate I cared about. The story seemed uninteresting and cliche-ridden. I scarcely remember what the story was about. Something about stupid people scheming and plotting to do wicked things. Yet I hear Game of Thrones and even the pathetic Borgias mentioned in the same article as masterpieces like The Tudors or Rome. And the maddening and repetitive House must be in its tenth season by now. I can't account for the chasm between my tastes and that of the general public. Seems to me that when I love a show, such as Tudors, So You Think You Can Dance, Canada? or Rome, television executives pull the plug. When I hate a show, that's when it becomes such a hit that I can't read an article anywhere without it being praised to the heavens.
For the record, I've watched the U.S. and U.K. versions of So You Think You Can Dance..., and Canada had the best version by far, but it was discontinued after season four, because the other shows were envious of how good it was. Nigel, the judge who appears on both the U.S. and U.K. version, to me is unwatchable, whereas Canada's Jean-Marc and his amiable comrades are easy on the eyes and ears.
For the record, I've watched the U.S. and U.K. versions of So You Think You Can Dance..., and Canada had the best version by far, but it was discontinued after season four, because the other shows were envious of how good it was. Nigel, the judge who appears on both the U.S. and U.K. version, to me is unwatchable, whereas Canada's Jean-Marc and his amiable comrades are easy on the eyes and ears.
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Suffocating Under Prescription Laws
Today, the restrictions on life-saving medicine are an obvious manifestation of Social Darwinism. Medicines such as Albuterol, the rescue inhaler for asthmatics, require a prescription by an expensive medical doctor. Readers unfamiliar with Albuterol should know that is a non-narcotic medicine that asthmatics require on occasion when their asthma acts up. It is not typically something that one takes on a daily basis, but rather as needed, such as during allergy season. Inability to obtain Albuterol can lead to death by suffocation at the utmost, or costly visits to indifferent nurse practitioners at expensive, far-away medical clinics in order to obtain a script for twenty-five doses of the common generic drug, Albuterol. A visit may cost as much as a hundred dollars, not counting the Albuterol itself, which is additional. Always the words on the label read "NO REFILL," guaranteeing another visit a few months down the line and another hundred dollars flushed down the toilet. Making Albuterol difficult to obtain is unethical, because it increases the risk that an asthmatic will die of suffocation.
Why is Albuterol a prescription drug in the first place? That's a good question that would be difficult to answer without cynicism. Almost every drug that does anything requires a prescription. The reason is the government thinks people are idiots. Some people are idiots, sure. But most people would rather be given the benefit of the doubt. I believe one should assume that people will make wise choices, given adequate information, and yet even if they do not, it is better that they should be given a choice. My belief is a natural extension of my bias toward democracy. Those who are authoritarian take the opposite view, that only an authority should decide what is best for an individual. I suppose one's stance on this issue reflects one's political affiliation. There are some that would be happier in Iran or China, being told what to do and what not to do all the time.
In my view, doctors should not have an exclusive monopoly on prescribing life-saving medicine. In order to justify such a monopoly from the ethical perspective, doctors would have to always be available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to instantly write a script to anyone who needs it at no cost. This, of course, is impossible for anyone, let alone a doctor. Doctors are hardly available at all, and when they are seen it is at great cost and at their convenience, not the convenience of the suffering. I conclude that prescription and indeed drug laws in general will have to be revisited in a future society founded upon ethics. I doubt that any change will happen in my lifetime, but perhaps future generations will come around to a similar viewpoint as expressed here.
Why is Albuterol a prescription drug in the first place? That's a good question that would be difficult to answer without cynicism. Almost every drug that does anything requires a prescription. The reason is the government thinks people are idiots. Some people are idiots, sure. But most people would rather be given the benefit of the doubt. I believe one should assume that people will make wise choices, given adequate information, and yet even if they do not, it is better that they should be given a choice. My belief is a natural extension of my bias toward democracy. Those who are authoritarian take the opposite view, that only an authority should decide what is best for an individual. I suppose one's stance on this issue reflects one's political affiliation. There are some that would be happier in Iran or China, being told what to do and what not to do all the time.
In my view, doctors should not have an exclusive monopoly on prescribing life-saving medicine. In order to justify such a monopoly from the ethical perspective, doctors would have to always be available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week to instantly write a script to anyone who needs it at no cost. This, of course, is impossible for anyone, let alone a doctor. Doctors are hardly available at all, and when they are seen it is at great cost and at their convenience, not the convenience of the suffering. I conclude that prescription and indeed drug laws in general will have to be revisited in a future society founded upon ethics. I doubt that any change will happen in my lifetime, but perhaps future generations will come around to a similar viewpoint as expressed here.
No Blog Writer in Linux
Today with my Muon Software Center, I explored Blog Writers in the Linux world. The first one I tried is apparently the flagship blog writer for KDE, Blogilo. Unfortunately development appears to have ended in 2010 from what I observed in the About window. Blogilo doesn't have any help screens despite having help buttons, and won't auto-config Blogger, instead reporting error messages that don't make a whole lot of sense. If Blogilo's devs haven't figured out the auto-config or help screens, but left these options in the program anyway, then maybe they haven't figured out how to keep the password safe either. I wonder whether Blogilo would save me any time at all over writing posts directly in Blogger. I suspect not.
The other apps available seem no better than Blogger itself from what I read in the reviews section on Muon. Come to think of it, using Blogger isn't half bad. The only thing I don't like about it is that Blogger sometimes will erase a line at random. I think this is some kind of bug either in Firefox or KDE. I'm not sure, but I can restore the missing line by highlighting the text, so it is not a severe bug. This problem remains in KDE 4.10.3 and cropped up while I was writing this post. I tried to take a snapshot of the window, but when Ksnapshot popped up, the text was corrected. The bug seems to me to be related to the display driver. Having an AMD/ATI kludge may be the reason I have this issue. AMD/ATI does not provide decent support to the Linux world, which is why I only buy Intel nowadays.
The other apps available seem no better than Blogger itself from what I read in the reviews section on Muon. Come to think of it, using Blogger isn't half bad. The only thing I don't like about it is that Blogger sometimes will erase a line at random. I think this is some kind of bug either in Firefox or KDE. I'm not sure, but I can restore the missing line by highlighting the text, so it is not a severe bug. This problem remains in KDE 4.10.3 and cropped up while I was writing this post. I tried to take a snapshot of the window, but when Ksnapshot popped up, the text was corrected. The bug seems to me to be related to the display driver. Having an AMD/ATI kludge may be the reason I have this issue. AMD/ATI does not provide decent support to the Linux world, which is why I only buy Intel nowadays.
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Kool! KDE 4.10.3 Ready for Kubuntu
Kubuntu has sorted KDE 4.10.3 and released it for all of Kubuntopia, to include Linux Minties, one would assume, although their mileage may vary.
I admit to having been a trifle impatient, but you know what? I'm actually glad Kubuntu waited until they sorted everything out. Rush to release, the developer's version of the classical end user mental disorder upgradeitis, just about kills a KDE system every time. I have learned to prefer taking things slooooooow. Not Debian-slow, as in kernel version 3.2, but slow-er at any rate.
After upgrading and rebooting, my Kubuntu 13.04 greeted me with not one, but four blankscrn.kss windows. As I suspected, a second reboot eliminated the problem. I'm going to upgrade my Linux Mint 14 KDE laptop next. Hm--no updates available for Quantal tonight. Perhaps they found some problems with that.
I admit to having been a trifle impatient, but you know what? I'm actually glad Kubuntu waited until they sorted everything out. Rush to release, the developer's version of the classical end user mental disorder upgradeitis, just about kills a KDE system every time. I have learned to prefer taking things slooooooow. Not Debian-slow, as in kernel version 3.2, but slow-er at any rate.
After upgrading and rebooting, my Kubuntu 13.04 greeted me with not one, but four blankscrn.kss windows. As I suspected, a second reboot eliminated the problem. I'm going to upgrade my Linux Mint 14 KDE laptop next. Hm--no updates available for Quantal tonight. Perhaps they found some problems with that.
Kenmore No More
I was about to buy another Kenmore window air conditioning unit when I noticed, after performing my customary, due-diligence online research, that Sears played switcheroo on their Kenmores. One model received an excellent rating from Consumer Reports. What do you think happened to that model? Sears discontinued it immediately, replacing it with a different model, a cheap, shoddily manufactured model that consumers don't like at all according to reviews. Seems rather sneaky to me and all too familiar. I have a Kenmore air conditioning unit myself, and the touchpad does not work anymore. Indeed, it quit working about a year after purchase. The unit is also noisy, and I had to make a lot of modifications to the side panels to block incoming outdoor air. All in all, I think Consumer Reports must be taken with a grain of salt when a Sears brand is being considered, because Sears likes to play cunning little games in order to save a couple pennies.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Peace Treaty with Spiders
I have known a lot of spider-killers in my day, and I wonder if they realize what good creatures spiders are, taking care of the little bugs for us. I have a peace treaty with spiders. If they are non-poisonous and stay out of the way, live and let live. The only spiders I would kill would be the brown recluse or black widow, which can cause immense suffering to human beings. I look for the hourglass mark, the sign of the black widow. I've found them on rare occasion in the garden. Poisonous spiders seem rare overall. The recluse really is a recluse, after all. However, spiders become annoying when they build webs in the hallways or living room. If spiders can't abide by simple household rules, they have to be ejected to the outdoors.
I saw a centimeter-sized specimen crawling along my wall this afternoon near my water pitcher. The thought occurred to me that perhaps I am not the only user of my water pitcher. I wonder what the water requirements of a spider are. Probably a sip once a month suffices. Upon reflection, I'm not willing to share my water with a spider. I think my open pitcher must be retired. It can be used to water plants, but not for human consumption. Live and let live does not mean we share water together.
I saw a centimeter-sized specimen crawling along my wall this afternoon near my water pitcher. The thought occurred to me that perhaps I am not the only user of my water pitcher. I wonder what the water requirements of a spider are. Probably a sip once a month suffices. Upon reflection, I'm not willing to share my water with a spider. I think my open pitcher must be retired. It can be used to water plants, but not for human consumption. Live and let live does not mean we share water together.
Quantum Computing
I was impressed by Mr. Ross, the founder of D-Wave, who gave an excellent interview about his company's development of the world's first quantum computer. He seems like a smart guy that knows what he's doing, and he explained complicated subjects in an elementary manner suitable for grandma or junior. I hope the Chinese haven't stolen all his company's secrets, but I wouldn't place any bets on that, because while the cat's been away fooling around with Afghanistan and Iraq, China has been stealing cheese left and right. I wish he had explained the reasons why the quantum computer apparently requires near-absolute zero temperature and complete shielding even from the Earth's magnetic fields. I'm not sure how practical that will be for home users, because keeping something that cold would require kilowatts of electricity, and the kind of shielding needed to protect against magnetic fields probably will be expensive as well.
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
The Patrick O'Brian Smart Pill
I think reading Patrick O'Brian on a daily basis boasts intelligence. I'm not sure how, but some of his brains rub off on the reader. He teaches good lessons, good habits, good ways of thinking, I suppose. Wisdom is in his work, and that's why I like him.
I'm sure it would be awfully tempting to write slash fiction depicting romantic intrigue between Stephen Maturin, Jack Aubrey, Preserved Killick, Tom Pullings, and possibly the parson, Martin. I'd do so, but I'm stopped before I begin because I know there must have been a hundred attempts before me. I missed the boat, I'm afraid. No Surprise there. O'Brian is so popular and so good that it stands to reason that dozens of his fans will write slash versions of his stories. Perhaps one day I must read some.
I'm sure it would be awfully tempting to write slash fiction depicting romantic intrigue between Stephen Maturin, Jack Aubrey, Preserved Killick, Tom Pullings, and possibly the parson, Martin. I'd do so, but I'm stopped before I begin because I know there must have been a hundred attempts before me. I missed the boat, I'm afraid. No Surprise there. O'Brian is so popular and so good that it stands to reason that dozens of his fans will write slash versions of his stories. Perhaps one day I must read some.
Post PC May Be OK For Some, Not Me
I often read in the media a premature obituary about the death of the desktop and how mobile gadgets are taking over the world. Maybe that is so. I know that a lot of my friends use mobile phones, although many also use desktops in addition to or instead of mobiles.
Although I'm sure mobile gadgets are useful for highly mobile individuals, such as salesmen and executive types, for the average person, I'm against mobile gadgets. If you invest in one of these traps, have fun buying a new gadget every two years when the old one has a minor glitch and has to be completely replaced with a brand new one. Gadget-makers do not encourage repair or tinkering. Gadget-makers do not design using the modular approach. Gadget-makers manufacture disposable items with planned obsolescence, which is bad for the environment and bad for the economy, because people have to keep buying the same products over and over. Me, I'm sticking with desktops, for several reasons, foremost of which is that if something goes awry, the modular design of the desktop allows me to swap out the bad part, like a bad hard drive, and plug in a good part. So I can "upgrade" for $100, tops, whereas those using mobile devices have to buy a whole new thingamajiggy. I have used the same case, scanner, and printer for over ten years. Ten years! It could have been even longer, because desktop cases simply last forever and ever. My desktop's other parts were not thrown away, but instead sold on Ebay, offsetting the cost of new parts. I never have to buy more than about $100 of parts to maintain my desktop. For the most part, nothing has ever broken--no piece of hardware has ever fried or burned or gone silent. The only reason I swap them out is to improve performance or increase storage. I find that desktops are more reliable because they are based on proven technology that has withstood the test of time. To a certain extent, even laptops enjoy something of this reliability, in comparison to less reliable phones.
My desktop can do about a hundred times more than a mobile ever could, because my desktop has high definition resolution, a real mouse, a real keyboard, real speakers, storage space measured in terabytes, and peripherals such as a printer, scanner, camera, microphone, and a network of other computers. When I go out, I like to experience the world, not tinker with my gadget--I do quite enough of that at home and need a break once in a while. The farthest I've gone towards mobility is buying a used $95 laptop, which works great with Linux Mint 14 KDE.
Although I'm sure mobile gadgets are useful for highly mobile individuals, such as salesmen and executive types, for the average person, I'm against mobile gadgets. If you invest in one of these traps, have fun buying a new gadget every two years when the old one has a minor glitch and has to be completely replaced with a brand new one. Gadget-makers do not encourage repair or tinkering. Gadget-makers do not design using the modular approach. Gadget-makers manufacture disposable items with planned obsolescence, which is bad for the environment and bad for the economy, because people have to keep buying the same products over and over. Me, I'm sticking with desktops, for several reasons, foremost of which is that if something goes awry, the modular design of the desktop allows me to swap out the bad part, like a bad hard drive, and plug in a good part. So I can "upgrade" for $100, tops, whereas those using mobile devices have to buy a whole new thingamajiggy. I have used the same case, scanner, and printer for over ten years. Ten years! It could have been even longer, because desktop cases simply last forever and ever. My desktop's other parts were not thrown away, but instead sold on Ebay, offsetting the cost of new parts. I never have to buy more than about $100 of parts to maintain my desktop. For the most part, nothing has ever broken--no piece of hardware has ever fried or burned or gone silent. The only reason I swap them out is to improve performance or increase storage. I find that desktops are more reliable because they are based on proven technology that has withstood the test of time. To a certain extent, even laptops enjoy something of this reliability, in comparison to less reliable phones.
My desktop can do about a hundred times more than a mobile ever could, because my desktop has high definition resolution, a real mouse, a real keyboard, real speakers, storage space measured in terabytes, and peripherals such as a printer, scanner, camera, microphone, and a network of other computers. When I go out, I like to experience the world, not tinker with my gadget--I do quite enough of that at home and need a break once in a while. The farthest I've gone towards mobility is buying a used $95 laptop, which works great with Linux Mint 14 KDE.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Eavesdropping on Journalists
After Lemonheart, my least favorite Obama administration official is Holder, the Attorney General. Now he's defending the seizure of email records of journalists. The media in this country is in a sorry state as it is, with newspapers and news magazines folding left and right, and here's the Administration hassling the few remaining journalists and undermining their work. I think the Obama administration behaved in a short-sighted and politically naive manner. Don't mess with the media, Mr. Nixon Obama!
Of course, the Republicans were worse under the Bush administration, and that's why the Democratic administration feels like it can get away with dirty tricks like this. That's what's so bad about electing a mediocre President like Bush--the bar is set so low that the next President feels like he can get away with this, that, and the other, because at least he's better than so-and-so. What a lousy state of affairs for a great country like the U.S. That's why we need a third party in this country, a liberal left-wing party to oppose the two conservative, right-wing parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.
The Democrats are conservative right-wingers of the modern era, and the Republicans are conservative right-wingers from the previous century. Stodgy, old-fashioned and out-of-touch doesn't say the half of it. I do like some representatives in Congress, current and former, but they are all Democrats. I don't know of a single senator or representative in the Republican party that fills me with awe, other than possibly Ron Paul on occasion, who is capable of surprising good sense. But when Ron talks about arcane points of economic policy or the value of gold and silver as currency or his opposition to gay marriage, the shine fades from his halo, and one perceives that he, too, is from the previous century, a time traveller just passing through.
Someone in the Obama adminstration was born yesterday. Baby thinks that everybody has one email address and it's their work account. Baby thinks you just spy on that one account and presto, problem fixed. Tee-hee! Baby is so cute.
Guess what, people have a lot of email addresses, because it's plain common sense. One needs an email address to offer up to the big corporations that are always hungry for ways to pestervictims customers. That email account is the designated spam box, which companies can spam all they want, because it is only monitored once in a blue moon. Yahoo is a great choice for disposable email accounts of no importance, because it is easy to sign up for Yahoo. One has an email address for friends and family that the spammers don't know about--that will most likely by the ISP email account, which must be kept private, because once the spammers get hold of it, forget about it. One has an email address for business contacts that are untrusted, new contacts that potentially might be spammers or at any rate unreliable. One has an email address for trusted business contacts, and this email account will be monitored daily--Gmail is the best choice, because Gmail supports a mail reader which alleviates the need for password entry, a key feature of mail readers that is totally beyond the understanding of KDE developers, who think that everyone wants to enter their password each and every time they check their Kmail.
I imagine that the investigators at the Justice Department found a lot of politically useful information that they had no right to find, which they then shared with political operatives in the White House, but did not find the source of the leak, because it also stands to reason that the leaker would have used an untraceable throwaway email address. And I'm not at all persuaded that the Obama administration did not purposefully leak the information about Yemen after all. There is really no excuse for spying on journalists, and those who do so should be prosecuted for first-degree burglary.
Of course, the Republicans were worse under the Bush administration, and that's why the Democratic administration feels like it can get away with dirty tricks like this. That's what's so bad about electing a mediocre President like Bush--the bar is set so low that the next President feels like he can get away with this, that, and the other, because at least he's better than so-and-so. What a lousy state of affairs for a great country like the U.S. That's why we need a third party in this country, a liberal left-wing party to oppose the two conservative, right-wing parties, the Democrats and the Republicans.
The Democrats are conservative right-wingers of the modern era, and the Republicans are conservative right-wingers from the previous century. Stodgy, old-fashioned and out-of-touch doesn't say the half of it. I do like some representatives in Congress, current and former, but they are all Democrats. I don't know of a single senator or representative in the Republican party that fills me with awe, other than possibly Ron Paul on occasion, who is capable of surprising good sense. But when Ron talks about arcane points of economic policy or the value of gold and silver as currency or his opposition to gay marriage, the shine fades from his halo, and one perceives that he, too, is from the previous century, a time traveller just passing through.
Someone in the Obama adminstration was born yesterday. Baby thinks that everybody has one email address and it's their work account. Baby thinks you just spy on that one account and presto, problem fixed. Tee-hee! Baby is so cute.
Guess what, people have a lot of email addresses, because it's plain common sense. One needs an email address to offer up to the big corporations that are always hungry for ways to pester
I imagine that the investigators at the Justice Department found a lot of politically useful information that they had no right to find, which they then shared with political operatives in the White House, but did not find the source of the leak, because it also stands to reason that the leaker would have used an untraceable throwaway email address. And I'm not at all persuaded that the Obama administration did not purposefully leak the information about Yemen after all. There is really no excuse for spying on journalists, and those who do so should be prosecuted for first-degree burglary.
Dear Kubuntu Developers
Dear Kubuntu Developers, if you're going to open a document in read-only mode, don't open it at all. Give an error message explaining about your lack of expertise in creating a desktop environment and suggest that the user delete Kubuntu from the system and install Linux Mint in its place. There's no pointing opening a document in read-only mode. It's a practical joke even to give the option at all. I can't count how many moments I've wasted watching LibreOffice open, only to find that I can't modify a document.
One thing I've decided is that Linux Mint 15 will be the death knell of my Kubuntu install. I'm going to wipe the drive clean of Kubuntu. I don't think the developers actually use the system. They just stick their names on the distro as a bragging point on their resume. If they used the system for more than a day, they would find all these gotcha's that I have found, and they wouldn't put up with it.
I have mixed feelings complaining about a free OS like Kubuntu. On the one hand, I didn't pay anything for it, so do I have the right to complain? With Windows, I have no such compunction, because I paid for Windows, so clearly I have a right to complain about it. I also voted in the Presidential election and every other election, so I feel like I have a right to complain about the President and other elected officials. I suppose in the case of Kubuntu, my complaint is more along the lines of disenchantment and disappointment. I want a Linux-based OS that I can recommend to friends and family. Kubuntu was just so close to being that magic bullet. But when odd screens pop up at boot-time called blankscrn.kss, what is that? That's a support call, that's what that is, and a very confused end user who will wonder how he got infected by a virus. That's how users think the world over--anything amiss is a computer virus. Then they start thinking they can't trust the OS and need to move back to Windows. The other thing about Kubuntu is that it opens documents in read-only mode. That will be a very lengthy support call, and everybody who adopts the OS is going to be asking why does Kubuntu open the document in read-only mode. The reason is Kubuntu is stupid. That's the only reason. When a user double-clicks on a file to open it in LibreOffice, the reason ninety-nine times out of a hundred is that he wants to make a little change. Kubuntu is making the grand assumption that people only want to read files. They never change files. That's a pretty arrogant assumption and an incorrect one, too. The actual result is that users are going to keep using Windows and not try Kubuntu for more than two hours. Users don't want to learn about sudo in order to get work done. They want a GUI that works the first time. If Linux wants the user to enter a password, fine, but at least offer the option to open as root. I think that's a good compromise between paranoid security and usability. And yes, I know there are add-ons available for Dolphin that will do this, but the vanilla install of Kubuntu does not, and that's another support call for every Kubuntu install that is ever used by a friend or family member.
An operating system should be what? An operating system should be elementary to understand and easy to use. That is rule #1. The second rule is to re-read the first rule to make sure it is not forgotten, because it is awfully important. If something is hairy and complicated, geeks might use it, but most people won't. I want an OS that I can recommend to most people, like my mother and my non-techie friends, not one that I have to modify to make usable.
May 16, 2013 Update:
One of Kubuntu's updates apparently fixed the blankscrn.kss issue. Today, the buggy windows didn't pop up. I don't know why, but that's nice, at any rate. My thinking now is I might weather the storm, stick with Kubuntu, and avoid the pain of installing a different distro.
One thing I've decided is that Linux Mint 15 will be the death knell of my Kubuntu install. I'm going to wipe the drive clean of Kubuntu. I don't think the developers actually use the system. They just stick their names on the distro as a bragging point on their resume. If they used the system for more than a day, they would find all these gotcha's that I have found, and they wouldn't put up with it.
I have mixed feelings complaining about a free OS like Kubuntu. On the one hand, I didn't pay anything for it, so do I have the right to complain? With Windows, I have no such compunction, because I paid for Windows, so clearly I have a right to complain about it. I also voted in the Presidential election and every other election, so I feel like I have a right to complain about the President and other elected officials. I suppose in the case of Kubuntu, my complaint is more along the lines of disenchantment and disappointment. I want a Linux-based OS that I can recommend to friends and family. Kubuntu was just so close to being that magic bullet. But when odd screens pop up at boot-time called blankscrn.kss, what is that? That's a support call, that's what that is, and a very confused end user who will wonder how he got infected by a virus. That's how users think the world over--anything amiss is a computer virus. Then they start thinking they can't trust the OS and need to move back to Windows. The other thing about Kubuntu is that it opens documents in read-only mode. That will be a very lengthy support call, and everybody who adopts the OS is going to be asking why does Kubuntu open the document in read-only mode. The reason is Kubuntu is stupid. That's the only reason. When a user double-clicks on a file to open it in LibreOffice, the reason ninety-nine times out of a hundred is that he wants to make a little change. Kubuntu is making the grand assumption that people only want to read files. They never change files. That's a pretty arrogant assumption and an incorrect one, too. The actual result is that users are going to keep using Windows and not try Kubuntu for more than two hours. Users don't want to learn about sudo in order to get work done. They want a GUI that works the first time. If Linux wants the user to enter a password, fine, but at least offer the option to open as root. I think that's a good compromise between paranoid security and usability. And yes, I know there are add-ons available for Dolphin that will do this, but the vanilla install of Kubuntu does not, and that's another support call for every Kubuntu install that is ever used by a friend or family member.
An operating system should be what? An operating system should be elementary to understand and easy to use. That is rule #1. The second rule is to re-read the first rule to make sure it is not forgotten, because it is awfully important. If something is hairy and complicated, geeks might use it, but most people won't. I want an OS that I can recommend to most people, like my mother and my non-techie friends, not one that I have to modify to make usable.
May 16, 2013 Update:
One of Kubuntu's updates apparently fixed the blankscrn.kss issue. Today, the buggy windows didn't pop up. I don't know why, but that's nice, at any rate. My thinking now is I might weather the storm, stick with Kubuntu, and avoid the pain of installing a different distro.
Progress Consists of Relocating Wars Away from Home
Today, half of taxpayer money is wasted on the drug war, foreign wars, corruption, and welfare for the rich--completely wasted, with no return at all, and only negative effects arising from the foolish investments. That's bad, but then turn the clock back to 1813, and what do we have? America is reeling from the War of 1812, in which England and America fought for no really good reason other than stubborn pride. Tons of gold down the drain, and in the end, a peace treaty and a poorer England and a poorer America. The British burned Washington, D.C. in the war of 1812, but we won some battles both on sea and on land. Yahoo. If you were an English taxpayer back then, you'd throw your hands up in distress. The English government hadn't learnt a single lesson from the Revolutionary War back in the 1770s, which cost the English a vast fortune. Messing with the Americans never paid off for the British. It was a poor investment and an indicator of stupidity in the government. In much the same way, the U.S. didn't learn a single lesson from Viet Nam. We keep messing around with these cesspool nations full of ignorant and backward barbarians who live to fight and only know fighting and nothing else. Governments don't learn, in general. They remain stupid. Probably 80% of taxpayer money was wasted in early 1800s England on foreign wars, corruption and welfare for the rich. They didn't have the drug war back in those days, because they knew that drugs didn't matter, but they wasted much more money on foreign war, and their foreign wars were closer to home, and involved every single ship and soldier at their disposal. There was a foreign war every generation, like today, only because of one reason, because leaders are idiots and don't know what else to do with themselves. The only positive today is that our foreign wars don't involve the sacking and burning of our own cities like in 1812. That's nice, that they take place thousands of miles away. The further away, the better.
Monday, May 13, 2013
Ooze Mini-Campaign by SpenceLack (Wesnoth)
The Ooze Mini-Campaign by SpenceLack has to be the best add-on campaign for Wesnoth yet. It's easy, funny and fun, just the sort of the game I like, although replay value is limited. However, "Ooze" stands out for its originality and wit, and I had more fun playing that easy campaign than all the others. I think that other campaign designers could learn a thing or two from SpenceLack about writing and campaign design. I often find the storyline in other campaigns tedious and skip past them after reading a few lines. Typically we have the same old saw along the lines of "I'm a-gonna getcha fer what you dun ta my folks!" "Oh no, you ain't, I'm gunna getchu first!" "Oh yeah?" "Yeah!" That gets old after a few repetitions, although to be sure it's the standard fantasy storyline. "Ooze" made me smile and appealed to my sense of perversity, and I looked forward to the continuing story with anticipation and curiosity. I was also delighted to find a new race, the ooze, a very interesting one, although limited in advancement capability.
Commune with the Dead
When reading Patrick O'Brian, one communes with the dead. The author has been dead for thirteen years now, and all the characters in his novel (some based upon real people and all based upon real history) are dead. I find it very pleasant to enter his world of the imagination, which remains very much alive, even though his body is not. I wonder which is the more real, the imagined reality or the reality we live in. Of course, the imagined reality of a great writer has far more endurance than a frail human body and pleases many more people. Almost all the writers I like are dead or, I'm afraid, soon will be, not that I feel it is a prerequisite of any kind, but each generation reads the work of the preceding generations, because a writer requires a long time to earn popularity and get established among publishers.
Cannabis also allows the shaman to open the door between living and dead and commune with various entities, but I think that great books provide a guided tour, a more interesting journey in many ways, the experience less physical and more cerebral. I have always felt that I would be completely satisfied reading select books by my favorite writers. If I lost the use of any of my limbs, like some of the innocent victims of the Boston bomber, it would not ruin my life unless I were unable to turn pages. I would adapt as long as I could continue reading, perform the basic necessities of life and communicate with others. The health problems that really worry me are ungovernable infection, such as antibiotic-resistant pneumonia, cancer, stones, heart disease, or the worst of all, mental dysfunction such as senility.
Cannabis also allows the shaman to open the door between living and dead and commune with various entities, but I think that great books provide a guided tour, a more interesting journey in many ways, the experience less physical and more cerebral. I have always felt that I would be completely satisfied reading select books by my favorite writers. If I lost the use of any of my limbs, like some of the innocent victims of the Boston bomber, it would not ruin my life unless I were unable to turn pages. I would adapt as long as I could continue reading, perform the basic necessities of life and communicate with others. The health problems that really worry me are ungovernable infection, such as antibiotic-resistant pneumonia, cancer, stones, heart disease, or the worst of all, mental dysfunction such as senility.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Wesnoth 1.10.6 - Northern Rebirth - Stolen Gold - Bug - Can't Win
In Wesnoth's "Northern Rebirth" scenario, "Stolen Gold," the scenario objectives have a bug in the code. The player is supposed to win by resisting until turn 37. Instead, on turn 37, the player is defeated, contrary to the scenario objectives, which clearly state that only the death of the three unique commanders can cause defeat. I gave up on "Northern Rebirth," because there's no defeating the vast troll hordes without many hundreds of gold in one's purse, and mine only had about 200 g.p.
So in Wesnoth Solitary, I am stymied by trolls of one variety, and in Wesnoth Multiplayer, trolls of quite a different kind.
I suppose it's just about time for me to capitalize on having Kubuntu 13.04 by installing the development version of Wesnoth. It wouldn't work on Linux Mint 14, but I have a feeling that it will work on Kubuntu 13.04.
Wesnoth seems about the best game around for Linux. I've tried plenty of others, but Wesnoth is really fantastic. It exceeds expectations for a free open source game. In many ways I like Wesnoth better than Crawl. For one thing, Crawl is handicapped by a design flaw that the developers refuse to remedy--the game restarts at ground zero after a character's death. I coded a batch file to circumvent this undesirable behavior. Wesnoth's developers wisely opted not to go that route. They have an auto-save feature which saves the player a lot of time and trouble and compensates for the inevitable unfairness and arbitrary nature of the game. The point of a game is of course to have fun.
So in Wesnoth Solitary, I am stymied by trolls of one variety, and in Wesnoth Multiplayer, trolls of quite a different kind.
I suppose it's just about time for me to capitalize on having Kubuntu 13.04 by installing the development version of Wesnoth. It wouldn't work on Linux Mint 14, but I have a feeling that it will work on Kubuntu 13.04.
Wesnoth seems about the best game around for Linux. I've tried plenty of others, but Wesnoth is really fantastic. It exceeds expectations for a free open source game. In many ways I like Wesnoth better than Crawl. For one thing, Crawl is handicapped by a design flaw that the developers refuse to remedy--the game restarts at ground zero after a character's death. I coded a batch file to circumvent this undesirable behavior. Wesnoth's developers wisely opted not to go that route. They have an auto-save feature which saves the player a lot of time and trouble and compensates for the inevitable unfairness and arbitrary nature of the game. The point of a game is of course to have fun.
Userstyles.Org Wants Me to Work Harder
I was amused by the recent change over on userstyles.org. All my .css styles have been evaluated by an automatic process for conformance to some standard of coding. Two of them have been highlighted in ugly mustard yellow, with red text warning me of minor anomalies. Well, you know, maybe I'll get around to fixing that next month, next year, or never. The thing is, the styles are useful to me, but I don't get anything for them from all the strangers that also find them useful. Vanity is nice and all, but I've also noticed that nobody posts any reviews or comments on my styles, so as far as I can see nobody else cares. If nobody cares, and the admin expects me to do more work, well, then maybe I don't care either. Maybe the admin over at userstyles.org can pay my hourly fee of $99.99 / hr, and then I might do something about it. Or he can start coughing up a share of his advertising revenue. The styles work great for me, and I could give two hoots about minor anomalies.
I'm reminded of all the work I did for a friend's web site for free. It was just about a full-time job. I worked on just about every aspect of the site, fixing links, refining the html, improving the menu system, even installing cron jobs to update content. Then one day, the owner of the site decides to take it down. Flip the switch. Presto, all gone, ha-ha. I have a backup collecting dust on a dvd somewhere, and one of our users also ripped the site before it went down without so much as a by-your-leave. Other than that, years of work flushed down the toilet with nothing at all to show for it. That has been the story of my life to date. Incredibly difficult work performed with sometimes heroic effort, but without much to show for it in the end. I'm a little choosier about the things I decide to work on nowadays. I also don't believe in hard work anymore. The point isn't to work harder. The point is to work smarter. Choosing the right kind of work and the right people to work for and the right conditions are all the critical decisions. Simply working harder, well, that's what the ants do, isn't it?
I'm reminded of all the work I did for a friend's web site for free. It was just about a full-time job. I worked on just about every aspect of the site, fixing links, refining the html, improving the menu system, even installing cron jobs to update content. Then one day, the owner of the site decides to take it down. Flip the switch. Presto, all gone, ha-ha. I have a backup collecting dust on a dvd somewhere, and one of our users also ripped the site before it went down without so much as a by-your-leave. Other than that, years of work flushed down the toilet with nothing at all to show for it. That has been the story of my life to date. Incredibly difficult work performed with sometimes heroic effort, but without much to show for it in the end. I'm a little choosier about the things I decide to work on nowadays. I also don't believe in hard work anymore. The point isn't to work harder. The point is to work smarter. Choosing the right kind of work and the right people to work for and the right conditions are all the critical decisions. Simply working harder, well, that's what the ants do, isn't it?
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Does KDE Test at All?
From the number of problems I've noticed in my Kubuntu install, I'm starting to wonder whether KDE tests their stuff before releasing it. Maybe the end user is considered to be the tester? When Linux Mint 15 gets released, I think I'm going to give Xfce or Cinnamon a try and see whether it can boot up clean. Every boot, Kubuntu 13.04 gives me two empty blnkscrn.kss windows and a buggy error report on Thunderbird. I don't think KDE is ready for prime time yet. Certainly Xfce seems more stable than KDE and less error-prone.
Friday, May 10, 2013
Hooray for Jinkx
I was pleased to see that Jinkx Monsoon won the fifth season of RuPaul's Drag Race. However, I don't flatter myself for predicting her victory. To anyone paying attention, it was pretty clear who the top runner was. I also predicted that Ivy Winters would win Ms. Congeniality, but that too was obvious. One of the interesting little details about the fifth season is that Jinkx had a crush on Ivy Winters. I think that showed good taste. Ivy Winters looks better male than female. However, Jinkx is something else. She is one of many drag queens I would like to see on a regular TV show. She has a great talent for acting. She just needs good lines, although she's competent at impromptu. I think she's pretty amazing, and if Hollywood doesn't have a producer that can imagine her in a television show, then that's Hollywood's loss.
Although I am a bonafide fan, I cringed reading the bio on her web site. I absolutely cringed, and my heart sank. She comes across as too arrogant by half. Every other sentence boasts of her intellect. You know, intelligence is a funny thing. It should be self-evident; there is no need for trumpet-blowing. And also there is the danger, no matter how intelligent one thinks oneself, there is always someone more intelligent, who will laugh at one's boasts. Intelligence is all a matter of perspective. Summa cum laude, indeed. But I may be hypersensitive to a fault I also share, because have I not also boasted of those three Latin words, the finest decoration for a bachelor's degree? After all, did we not work hard in college in order to achieve summa cum laude? Don't we deserve some credit? Is the trophy without value? Yet I have qualms about how it is perceived. I've never gotten a job on the strength of summa cum laude. As far as I can see, no one cares about academic honors besides those in academia. Even a college degree has no value in terms of employment. A bachelor's degree translates into a minimum wage job in today's America.
But perhaps the author, which I assume was Jinkx herself, is worried about being underestimated. I predict the bio will be rewritten within a month's time or whenever Jinkx has a moment to spare.
Having read Jinkx's bio, I know the backstory to a curious remark that RuPaul made to Jinkx after their luncheon late in the fifth season. "You're a bright young star," Ru said, which signalled that Jinkx was favored to win. Ru rarely gives such a strong and undeniable sign of favor, and Jinkx was clearly pleased by the remark. Yet Ru was borrowing the phrase that Jinkx used in her bio--"bright star."
Although I am a bonafide fan, I cringed reading the bio on her web site. I absolutely cringed, and my heart sank. She comes across as too arrogant by half. Every other sentence boasts of her intellect. You know, intelligence is a funny thing. It should be self-evident; there is no need for trumpet-blowing. And also there is the danger, no matter how intelligent one thinks oneself, there is always someone more intelligent, who will laugh at one's boasts. Intelligence is all a matter of perspective. Summa cum laude, indeed. But I may be hypersensitive to a fault I also share, because have I not also boasted of those three Latin words, the finest decoration for a bachelor's degree? After all, did we not work hard in college in order to achieve summa cum laude? Don't we deserve some credit? Is the trophy without value? Yet I have qualms about how it is perceived. I've never gotten a job on the strength of summa cum laude. As far as I can see, no one cares about academic honors besides those in academia. Even a college degree has no value in terms of employment. A bachelor's degree translates into a minimum wage job in today's America.
But perhaps the author, which I assume was Jinkx herself, is worried about being underestimated. I predict the bio will be rewritten within a month's time or whenever Jinkx has a moment to spare.
Having read Jinkx's bio, I know the backstory to a curious remark that RuPaul made to Jinkx after their luncheon late in the fifth season. "You're a bright young star," Ru said, which signalled that Jinkx was favored to win. Ru rarely gives such a strong and undeniable sign of favor, and Jinkx was clearly pleased by the remark. Yet Ru was borrowing the phrase that Jinkx used in her bio--"bright star."
Thursday, May 9, 2013
Crest Whitening Toothpaste--Yucko
I've been remarkably healthy for a long stretch, up until I started using Crest Tartar Protection Whitening Toothpaste, at which point all of a sudden I came down with an upper respiratory infection--a cold, a sore throat, and bronchitis, which lingers to this day. Now I am of the belief that that nasty toothpaste had something to do with my bronchitis. I haven't caught bronchitis in a decade or more. I use Crest, and all of a sudden I have bronchitis? The only reason I bought this infernal toothpaste was it was on clearance at the grocery store for something like $1.50 for a 232 g tube, which is a good deal, toothpaste normally being about $2.50 - $3. I should have asked myself why this toothpaste was on clearance. Why do the other customers not like it? Why is it unpopular? These are the questions a consumer should always look into whenever a brand is marked down.
I found out why the Crest toothpaste was so cheap after using it. It has the approximate consistency of baking soda, being powdery and not at all like normal toothpaste. The brushing experience is extremely unpleasant. The toothpaste tastes bad, and I don't feel that it cleans teeth well at all. To make matters worse, one of the ingredients of this Crest toothpaste--and the reason it is supposed to be whitening (I don't care about the whitening effect)--is titanium dioxide, a known carcinogen that causes lung irritation. Now I brush my teeth right before bed, and I am sure that I leave some amount of toothpaste residue in my mouth and subsequently inhale it while sleeping. So I think a connection might well be drawn from using Crest Whitening toothpaste to bronchitis, especially due to the timing of my infection (a few days after beginning use) and the highly unusual color of my phlegm--bright white, the color of titanium dioxide, rather than the yellow one might expect from bronchitis. I stopped using the toothpaste two days ago, and I'm already starting to feel better. I'm not going to buy any more Crest, regardless of variety, ever again, because in my opinion that brand does not know how to manufacture toothpaste.
I'm afraid all the brands have a variety with titanium dioxide, because CEO's tend to be evil and not care about the health of theirvictims customers. Anyone suffering from an infection in the respiratory tract should not rule out their brand of toothpaste as a possible cause, or for that matter the gum one chews--Trident sells a cheap gum that also claims to be whitening and also has the cancer-causing irritant, titanium dioxide.
I found out why the Crest toothpaste was so cheap after using it. It has the approximate consistency of baking soda, being powdery and not at all like normal toothpaste. The brushing experience is extremely unpleasant. The toothpaste tastes bad, and I don't feel that it cleans teeth well at all. To make matters worse, one of the ingredients of this Crest toothpaste--and the reason it is supposed to be whitening (I don't care about the whitening effect)--is titanium dioxide, a known carcinogen that causes lung irritation. Now I brush my teeth right before bed, and I am sure that I leave some amount of toothpaste residue in my mouth and subsequently inhale it while sleeping. So I think a connection might well be drawn from using Crest Whitening toothpaste to bronchitis, especially due to the timing of my infection (a few days after beginning use) and the highly unusual color of my phlegm--bright white, the color of titanium dioxide, rather than the yellow one might expect from bronchitis. I stopped using the toothpaste two days ago, and I'm already starting to feel better. I'm not going to buy any more Crest, regardless of variety, ever again, because in my opinion that brand does not know how to manufacture toothpaste.
I'm afraid all the brands have a variety with titanium dioxide, because CEO's tend to be evil and not care about the health of their
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
A Firewall for the Telephone
My phone has a firewall. If it didn't, I'd disconnect my phone and give it to Goodwill. There are far too many evil scum in the world that call on a daily basis for the purpose of sales, scams, handouts or just pure harassment. Just as every computer should have a firewall, every telephone requires a firewall, and the best firewall is Call Clerk. That program just keeps getting better and better, with an update every few weeks. I would purchase Call Clerk before any other program, including Windows. It is reason enough to own a computer and is far more important than the internet browser or the operating system. Call Clerk transforms the telephone from what it is today, a weapon of harassment against the user, and makes it what Alexander Graham Bell intended it to be, a useful method of communication. The only downside is that it runs on Windows instead of Linux, so one has to use an inferior operating system.
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Avast's False Positive on ACDSee 15
Avast Antivirus was giving a false positive on ACDSee 15 today, which was a minor annoyance, because by doing so, ACDSee's automatic camera offloading feature was disabled. I fixed everything and researched the issue, discovering a thread of messages on Avast's forum complaining about the false positive. I disabled all of Avast's shields until the next reboot, which might be a week from now, figuring they will fix their database by that time.
I have a couple of thoughts about this issue. One, Avast does not normally give false positives; this is an anomaly. I recommend Avast for a reason. Two, Avast shows laxity in regards to testing. It may be that they are releasing their database updates far, far too soon, and should test the damn things a bit better than they do. I am not sure virus database updates--or any system updates, for that matter--should be made in such a hellfire hurry. How about slowing down, letting a few systems have it, and seeing what the results are? Three, I'm not a paying customer of Avast, nor are the vast majority, so do we have a right to complain? Yes, because this is a free country, but Avast also has a right not to give a damn. It may be that Avast unleashes a false positive on purpose once in a while to scare the gullible into buying some of their product. Microsoft offers free antivirus, so I do not understand Avast's business model at all. I do not understand why anyone would pay for an antivirus when they can get one for free. At the moment, I am considering uninstalling Avast and installing Microsoft's solution, because Avast does like to be annoying with their little pop-ups and now a false positive.
I have a couple of thoughts about this issue. One, Avast does not normally give false positives; this is an anomaly. I recommend Avast for a reason. Two, Avast shows laxity in regards to testing. It may be that they are releasing their database updates far, far too soon, and should test the damn things a bit better than they do. I am not sure virus database updates--or any system updates, for that matter--should be made in such a hellfire hurry. How about slowing down, letting a few systems have it, and seeing what the results are? Three, I'm not a paying customer of Avast, nor are the vast majority, so do we have a right to complain? Yes, because this is a free country, but Avast also has a right not to give a damn. It may be that Avast unleashes a false positive on purpose once in a while to scare the gullible into buying some of their product. Microsoft offers free antivirus, so I do not understand Avast's business model at all. I do not understand why anyone would pay for an antivirus when they can get one for free. At the moment, I am considering uninstalling Avast and installing Microsoft's solution, because Avast does like to be annoying with their little pop-ups and now a false positive.
Monday, May 6, 2013
Middle-Aged Despair
Seems like middle-aged suicide is on the increase, and as usual social scientists don't know why, so they are pointing the finger at drugs. Of course, evil only exists in the world due to drugs. Without the heroin, there would be no shoplifting. Without cocaine, littering would be a thing of the past. Drugs are also the reason for inflation, drought, and water pollution.
I don't know about these social scientists. One would expect they would be a little more perceptive of current events. It's the economy, stupid.
I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out the connection between the lack of good jobs in this country and the suicide increase. Men that have known better times and held responsible positions now find that they can't find any work other than minimum-wage jobs. They fall behind on their mortgages, divorce, go on welfare, lose the hard-earned respect of friends and family, lose their homes, don't have enough to eat, can't afford medical care, and become victims of crime. This goes on for years with no end in sight and no hope on the horizon. No jobs, no money, no respect. And yet they had spent their lives doing all the right things, working hard, attending school. Any surprise they blow their brains out or O.D. on painkillers? Not really. America has always been a very materialist, capitalist society that views people in terms of winners and losers, and nobody likes to consider themselves losers. So death is way of resigning a losing game. Once you're dead, you don't give a damn anymore. Other people can deal with the clean-up of the body and weave crazy theories about how prescription painkillers made you do it.
For my part, I found the adjustment to the modern economy of zero good jobs and no hope to be difficult, but on the bright side, these low-wage jobs are pretty easy compared to the responsible positions I held in the past. I used to work really hard, harder than anybody I know. Now I don't have to use my brain half the time. I use maybe 1% of my intellect on my job. I used to use 100% of my intellect on my job. My job used to keep me up all day, all night. Skull-sweat. I don't think more than two people out of a hundred could have managed my job. But in the new economy, easy jobs are the only kind I will ever get. So I have adjusted to working less, working not nearly as hard, making less money, and trying not to worry about the future, because hey, when you die, you die, right? Other people will have to dispose of the body, and that's that.
I have a good life in some ways, and besides, I've never felt like suicide is a smart move, because one never knows what the morning may bring. The morning may bring something good. I think life has too many possibilities to just give up based on something that doesn't ultimately matter, like money. I could see suicide in the case of someone with a chronic medical condition in addition to not having any money, however, especially if they also feel isolated and alone. Our world just doesn't care. We throw people away. But as long as one has good health, I think it is foolish to throw that away based on something like a bank account balance.
I read in another PBS article that a lot of companies only hire young people, defined as under-30, because they feel younger people are cheaper, easier to handle, and will be with the company longer, and cost less in medical bills. So, I suppose young people may feel smug about things, but the trouble there is that they, too, will get middle-aged soon enough, and then they will find that the same strategy that applies to middle-aged people now will also apply to them. They will get down-sized, right-sized, out-sourced, whatever the case may be, and then they will find that McDonald's is hiring a few good people.
I don't know about these social scientists. One would expect they would be a little more perceptive of current events. It's the economy, stupid.
I don't think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out the connection between the lack of good jobs in this country and the suicide increase. Men that have known better times and held responsible positions now find that they can't find any work other than minimum-wage jobs. They fall behind on their mortgages, divorce, go on welfare, lose the hard-earned respect of friends and family, lose their homes, don't have enough to eat, can't afford medical care, and become victims of crime. This goes on for years with no end in sight and no hope on the horizon. No jobs, no money, no respect. And yet they had spent their lives doing all the right things, working hard, attending school. Any surprise they blow their brains out or O.D. on painkillers? Not really. America has always been a very materialist, capitalist society that views people in terms of winners and losers, and nobody likes to consider themselves losers. So death is way of resigning a losing game. Once you're dead, you don't give a damn anymore. Other people can deal with the clean-up of the body and weave crazy theories about how prescription painkillers made you do it.
For my part, I found the adjustment to the modern economy of zero good jobs and no hope to be difficult, but on the bright side, these low-wage jobs are pretty easy compared to the responsible positions I held in the past. I used to work really hard, harder than anybody I know. Now I don't have to use my brain half the time. I use maybe 1% of my intellect on my job. I used to use 100% of my intellect on my job. My job used to keep me up all day, all night. Skull-sweat. I don't think more than two people out of a hundred could have managed my job. But in the new economy, easy jobs are the only kind I will ever get. So I have adjusted to working less, working not nearly as hard, making less money, and trying not to worry about the future, because hey, when you die, you die, right? Other people will have to dispose of the body, and that's that.
I have a good life in some ways, and besides, I've never felt like suicide is a smart move, because one never knows what the morning may bring. The morning may bring something good. I think life has too many possibilities to just give up based on something that doesn't ultimately matter, like money. I could see suicide in the case of someone with a chronic medical condition in addition to not having any money, however, especially if they also feel isolated and alone. Our world just doesn't care. We throw people away. But as long as one has good health, I think it is foolish to throw that away based on something like a bank account balance.
I read in another PBS article that a lot of companies only hire young people, defined as under-30, because they feel younger people are cheaper, easier to handle, and will be with the company longer, and cost less in medical bills. So, I suppose young people may feel smug about things, but the trouble there is that they, too, will get middle-aged soon enough, and then they will find that the same strategy that applies to middle-aged people now will also apply to them. They will get down-sized, right-sized, out-sourced, whatever the case may be, and then they will find that McDonald's is hiring a few good people.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Here's for Jinkx
I expect Jinkx Monsoon to win the fifth season of RuPaul's Drag Race. Jinkx epitomizes what I think drag should be, a performance act with emphasis upon acting, drama, and comedy. I like Alaska too, but as an actor, Alaska seems less refined than Jinkx. I noticed the look on Jinkx's face when RuPaul said she was turning the decision over to the viewers. Perhaps Jinkx suspects that she has captured the hearts of the viewers. She has more cunning than some people have given her credit for. She was the strongest contender from day one and knew it. One felt the same way about Raja, a contender from a previous season who simply demolished the competition--was so far above them as to seem another species.
Some judges and competitors ding Jinkx for her fashion sense. Perhaps I am not a good judge of that sort of thing. My fashion sense is below average, although I've absorbed a good dose by osmosis from my spouse, who has a very great fashion sense. However, I think Jinkx puts her face together very well, and the face is the most important part of the body. As for her costume, I usually like it, and I never understand why judges praise another competitor and criticize Jinkx for her costume. It is never clear to me. There have been times when I felt that Jinkx was the best-looking competitor on the stage by a factor of about a hundred to one, and yet the judges seem to differ from my opinion by a similar factor. To me, the costume is almost irrelevant. I'm more interested in the acting and the presentation, or how a competitor handles herself. There are some competitors that may get their costumes right according to the arcane laws of fashion, but they bore me silly with the same wooden face that never changes and never registers any passion other than naked ambition.
Some judges and competitors ding Jinkx for her fashion sense. Perhaps I am not a good judge of that sort of thing. My fashion sense is below average, although I've absorbed a good dose by osmosis from my spouse, who has a very great fashion sense. However, I think Jinkx puts her face together very well, and the face is the most important part of the body. As for her costume, I usually like it, and I never understand why judges praise another competitor and criticize Jinkx for her costume. It is never clear to me. There have been times when I felt that Jinkx was the best-looking competitor on the stage by a factor of about a hundred to one, and yet the judges seem to differ from my opinion by a similar factor. To me, the costume is almost irrelevant. I'm more interested in the acting and the presentation, or how a competitor handles herself. There are some competitors that may get their costumes right according to the arcane laws of fashion, but they bore me silly with the same wooden face that never changes and never registers any passion other than naked ambition.
Friday, May 3, 2013
Lemons are Medicine for Sore Throat
I think that lemons have immense medicinal value, in part for their vitamin C potency, but also due to their acidity and perhaps some as yet unexplained qualities. For a sore throat, I like nothing better than fresh-squeezed lemon juice, drunk straight without sugar or water, and swallowed directing the flow over the sorest part of the throat. I think lemon juice is hostile to germs and at any rate the acid should work to dissolve bacterial film. Limes may work in a similar way, but lemons I think are to be preferred, as they contain more vitamin C and greater acidity. For variety, I also like black tea with lemon juice added, because together they seem to have a certain medicinal synergy and should be quite antiseptic, tea having antiseptic properties of its own as well as acidic tanins. With any medicinal preparation, it is important not to add any sugar, because sugar reduces acidity, feeds bacteria, and causes inflammation, but I seldom add sugar to tea anyway.
Scott mentioned in the comments section below that lime juice can be used as a deodorant. At first I was skeptical, but Google finds support for this belief. According to Simply Lovely, lime juice proved an effective deodorant for a runner. It is worth noting, however, that the sweat generated by nervous stress has an altogether different quality about it and produces a more offensive odor than the sweat produced by athletic activity.
For my part, I'm not motivated to switch from the traditional roll-ons, because my skin tolerates Speed Stick Antiperspirant by Mennen, which is cheap and also extremely effective. Typically, I buy 20 coupons on Ebay and then buy 20 units at the local grocery store when they are on sale, thus reducing the price to peanuts. I can get a 76g container for $1.50 apiece or less.
Scott mentioned in the comments section below that lime juice can be used as a deodorant. At first I was skeptical, but Google finds support for this belief. According to Simply Lovely, lime juice proved an effective deodorant for a runner. It is worth noting, however, that the sweat generated by nervous stress has an altogether different quality about it and produces a more offensive odor than the sweat produced by athletic activity.
For my part, I'm not motivated to switch from the traditional roll-ons, because my skin tolerates Speed Stick Antiperspirant by Mennen, which is cheap and also extremely effective. Typically, I buy 20 coupons on Ebay and then buy 20 units at the local grocery store when they are on sale, thus reducing the price to peanuts. I can get a 76g container for $1.50 apiece or less.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Linux Kernel 3.8 Working with S/PDIF
Last time that I updated my htpc's Linux kernel to 3.8+, S/PDIF fell silent. I had to fall back to Linux kernel 3.7.10, and I wrote about the cliff between 3.7.10 and 3.8. After 3.7.10, silence.
Reading the notes on alsa dev, it was implied that only in systems with HDMI, the new 3.8+ kernel reserved a slot for HDMI, leaving none available for S/PDIF. That suggested to me that if I disabled HDMI in the BIOS, then my S/PDIF would work, even without further modifications to the system. Tonight I confirmed my hunch. Since my htpc does not use HDMI, disabling it was not a problem. I upgraded the kernel in Linux Mint Nadia Xfce to 3.8.11, rebooted, and played a video to test the sound. No problem.
Reading the notes on alsa dev, it was implied that only in systems with HDMI, the new 3.8+ kernel reserved a slot for HDMI, leaving none available for S/PDIF. That suggested to me that if I disabled HDMI in the BIOS, then my S/PDIF would work, even without further modifications to the system. Tonight I confirmed my hunch. Since my htpc does not use HDMI, disabling it was not a problem. I upgraded the kernel in Linux Mint Nadia Xfce to 3.8.11, rebooted, and played a video to test the sound. No problem.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
The Trolls of Wesnoth Multiplayer
It's always an eye-opener to note those in the world with less suave and social sophistication than myself. I was reminded of the existence of trolls when I experimented with Wesnoth - Multiplayer, where many players quit games without a word or after citing a quite trivial reason; insulted one another, and booted other players for not understanding the rules, although they are not willing to speak of rules nor much else. They do not seem willing or perhaps capable of communicating in an effective manner. All of their communication is wasted upon name-calling, upon hostile behavior that cannot possibly produce good results. I wonder how these people are going to get by in the real world with attitudes like that. Their behavior should attract other people with similar personality types, and repel people like me that just want to get along and have a bit of fun. Not a friendly bunch. Not people I would want to spend any amount of time with on a voluntary basis.
I was amused by the thought that I could code an AI that would behave in the same manner as these trolls. They are predictable in a certain way; trollish behavior is not complicated. Each turn, there would be a 30% of a random profanity, a 20% chance of a random insult, and a 20% chance that one or more players would quit. If anyone quit, there would be a 1% chance that they would give any notice, and a 99% chance that they would leave without saying a word. I can't tell how many games I've waited thirty minutes for someone to move, only to discover after I quit that everyone had already left the game.
Whatever happened to sportsmanship? I learned at an early age to be both a graceful winner and a loser. What is the purpose of a game, after all? The purpose of a game is not to win, but to exercise the mind. Of course games are a diversion and a way to kill boredom, but they should never be stress-inducing or hostile. I don't see the point in a hostile game for no stakes, when one could be reading a book instead.
The learning I have that gives me the most satisfaction of all are my social skills. To know what not to do and to know what to do, and how to say things and communicate with others in an effective manner is very useful indeed. I'd trade all my knowledge of history for it, although that's not quite a fair trade, because I'd simply enjoy rereading history books to relearn all that I had given away.
I'm rereading Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey & Stephen Maturin books. I like to go through the twenty once every seven years or so, after some of the stories have been forgotten. He is an absolute joy to read. I think I'd rather spend a few hours with Patrick O'Brian than with the trolls of Wesnoth.
I was amused by the thought that I could code an AI that would behave in the same manner as these trolls. They are predictable in a certain way; trollish behavior is not complicated. Each turn, there would be a 30% of a random profanity, a 20% chance of a random insult, and a 20% chance that one or more players would quit. If anyone quit, there would be a 1% chance that they would give any notice, and a 99% chance that they would leave without saying a word. I can't tell how many games I've waited thirty minutes for someone to move, only to discover after I quit that everyone had already left the game.
Whatever happened to sportsmanship? I learned at an early age to be both a graceful winner and a loser. What is the purpose of a game, after all? The purpose of a game is not to win, but to exercise the mind. Of course games are a diversion and a way to kill boredom, but they should never be stress-inducing or hostile. I don't see the point in a hostile game for no stakes, when one could be reading a book instead.
The learning I have that gives me the most satisfaction of all are my social skills. To know what not to do and to know what to do, and how to say things and communicate with others in an effective manner is very useful indeed. I'd trade all my knowledge of history for it, although that's not quite a fair trade, because I'd simply enjoy rereading history books to relearn all that I had given away.
I'm rereading Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey & Stephen Maturin books. I like to go through the twenty once every seven years or so, after some of the stories have been forgotten. He is an absolute joy to read. I think I'd rather spend a few hours with Patrick O'Brian than with the trolls of Wesnoth.
Asperger's Syndrome
I have bronchitis and a cold. Illness, especially the communicable variety, brings isolation, and solitude encourages reflection. I thought of my phone conversation with my mother yesterday, which was unusually candid.
Asperger's Syndrome is interesting, and I'm fairly sure my father has it. He has the full-blown variety, no half-measure. My mother agrees with me and also agrees I inherited the trait, which would explain my nerdiness in school. Years ago, such a reflection may have seemed threatening to my ego, but I am not bothered by the working hypothesis, because I like to understand things and get closer to the truth of a matter. Recollections that for a long time puzzled me become clearer when I accept this hypothesis, as though a missing piece of the puzzle falls into place, and the complete picture is revealed to me at last. It is not embarrassment I feel therefore, but satisfaction, to find at last the answer to a riddle that perplexed me for years.
What is nerdiness after all? It is below average adaptation to the social environment. Asperger's is a weakness in interpreting subtle social cues. A person with Asperger's may sometimes be mystified at the reactions of other people. He may not be quite as good at nonverbal communication and may not be a very engaging speaker. Lack of facial expressions, lack of physical expression. Disinclined to engage in social events; prefer to be alone. This is the textbook description that I know by heart. Yet, beware. These are rough generalizations, and variations abound, because the subject is not a mineral that can be classified with precision, but a human being. Furthermore, I describe how the subject appears to some from without, not from within. I describe how norms perceive things, or how I may be perceived on occasion. To a certain extent, Asperger's is a box into which shrinks have thrown some of the kids that aren't making enough friends in school or some spouses whose other half has enrolled them in couples therapy. Asperger's is more or less a pseudoscientific euphemism for nerd. The kids on the playground and the shrinks are using different labels that mean really quite the same thing.
After surviving the trauma of school and gaining experience in the world, neuro-atypicals get better at interpreting subtle social cues. When discussing a subject close to the heart's joy, such as computer programming, certainly there may be emotional emphasis and an engaging speech indeed, no monotone at all. The trouble is that most people don't care about the kinds of things that interest a neuro-atypical. The norm's window of curiosity is half-closed. Who has a Syndrome? Who has the weakness? This is all a matter of perspective. Another way of looking at things is that the guy with Asperger's lacks interest in what other people find very interesting. It is difficult for a neuro-atypical to generate interest in other people. Knowledge helps; if the other person knows a great many things, then that can be very appealing, because hunger for knowledge is a very real need. Depending upon the social events in question, a neuro-atypical may be well-inclined to participate. I think of Asperger's as being the equivalent of a learning disability in social engineering, in networking with other people, or perhaps a reluctance to manipulate others, a disinclination to become drawn into the affairs of others. Although learning may be delayed, many skills can be acquired, depending upon the individual.
I made friends in school. I wasn't quite as nerdy as some, but nerdier than the average boy. I was called a "walking, talking encyclopedia," because I knew words with more than three syllables. I thought everybody should know and use such words. What is wrong with the world, that people don't care to learn everything they possibly can about everything under the Sun? This was my first reaction. Compliments and straight-A's fed my ego, but actually this sort of thing is typical with Asperger's. I got more joy sometimes from reading something as mundane as the back of a cereal box than talking with a peer. I wondered what the ingredients were, and sometimes I had to pull up the encyclopedia, my best friend, to find out. I remember that as a boy I was so naive that I believed everything I read, as long as it corresponded to the general sense of reality and wasn't mythology or magic. Now I know that what one reads on the back of a cereal box must be taken with a grain of salt, along with everything else. One must look to the author and his motives. Of course the cereal manufacturer's motive is clearly to sell cereal, so perhaps not everything can be trusted to be completely candid.
My brain was a sponge, although my memory is very far from photographic, and I'm definitely no savant. I think I was wasted on my school, because I was ahead, and the classes were just lagging behind, leaving me bored and with no sort of challenge at all, just brainless makework. School was a punitive environment. By the time eighth grade rolled around, I was completely disengaged from school. I got into trouble because I wasn't reading social cues as well as the others. I was at least a full grade behind in social development, and a couple grades ahead in academics. I don't think schools knew what do with kids like me. Maybe they do now, but back in the day, the chips fell where they may.
Silence was an early coping mechanism. Silence avoided hostile scrutiny. I learned how to be invisible. Almost all my teachers were less informed about the subjects. Those teachers who knew more than I did, I prized. They were my favorite teachers. But most did not. Teachers who had less knowledge nevertheless had the power to wreak revenge upon their arrogant pupil, and I was certainly arrogant. Let us define arrogance. Arrogance is a failure to understand and apply unwritten and undeclared social norms. One such social norm is that we should convey thoughts and feelings in an inoffensive manner that does not appear designed to make the listeners feel small. Appearances are extremely important, the most important thing in fact, and if one cannot speak without seeming arrogant, silence is preferable. It is better to be silent until one learns the social skills one needs to learn. Of course other boys and girls did not like to seem stupid by comparison, so I learned to disengage and stay quiet in order not to offend anyone. My first lesson in school was the power and the virtue of silence. After several betrayals and cruel pranks, I also learned to be suspicious of others and never to accept what anyone said at face value, but to search for hidden motives--and once the search is complete, to keep watching, because some motives are hidden well indeed. I am almost never taken in by anybody anymore. But in order to achieve such invulnerability, perhaps it is necessary that one endure numerous betrayals, which are such valuable learning experiences. I would not have gone without them.
Some people are better at interpreting social cues than others, and they flourish as social butterflies: politicians, actors, business managers. There are great rewards available for those with above average skills of social perception. I think the self-made rich almost always have something of the social butterfly in them. There is great value in networking, and it is the best way to thrive in business. On the other hand, people with Asperger's seem better with computers, engineering, science, and other detailed and complicated skills. In my opinion, they would also adapt well to the military, which is a system much like a computer, very rule-based, with clear priorities and a chain-of-command.
Asperger's Syndrome is interesting, and I'm fairly sure my father has it. He has the full-blown variety, no half-measure. My mother agrees with me and also agrees I inherited the trait, which would explain my nerdiness in school. Years ago, such a reflection may have seemed threatening to my ego, but I am not bothered by the working hypothesis, because I like to understand things and get closer to the truth of a matter. Recollections that for a long time puzzled me become clearer when I accept this hypothesis, as though a missing piece of the puzzle falls into place, and the complete picture is revealed to me at last. It is not embarrassment I feel therefore, but satisfaction, to find at last the answer to a riddle that perplexed me for years.
What is nerdiness after all? It is below average adaptation to the social environment. Asperger's is a weakness in interpreting subtle social cues. A person with Asperger's may sometimes be mystified at the reactions of other people. He may not be quite as good at nonverbal communication and may not be a very engaging speaker. Lack of facial expressions, lack of physical expression. Disinclined to engage in social events; prefer to be alone. This is the textbook description that I know by heart. Yet, beware. These are rough generalizations, and variations abound, because the subject is not a mineral that can be classified with precision, but a human being. Furthermore, I describe how the subject appears to some from without, not from within. I describe how norms perceive things, or how I may be perceived on occasion. To a certain extent, Asperger's is a box into which shrinks have thrown some of the kids that aren't making enough friends in school or some spouses whose other half has enrolled them in couples therapy. Asperger's is more or less a pseudoscientific euphemism for nerd. The kids on the playground and the shrinks are using different labels that mean really quite the same thing.
After surviving the trauma of school and gaining experience in the world, neuro-atypicals get better at interpreting subtle social cues. When discussing a subject close to the heart's joy, such as computer programming, certainly there may be emotional emphasis and an engaging speech indeed, no monotone at all. The trouble is that most people don't care about the kinds of things that interest a neuro-atypical. The norm's window of curiosity is half-closed. Who has a Syndrome? Who has the weakness? This is all a matter of perspective. Another way of looking at things is that the guy with Asperger's lacks interest in what other people find very interesting. It is difficult for a neuro-atypical to generate interest in other people. Knowledge helps; if the other person knows a great many things, then that can be very appealing, because hunger for knowledge is a very real need. Depending upon the social events in question, a neuro-atypical may be well-inclined to participate. I think of Asperger's as being the equivalent of a learning disability in social engineering, in networking with other people, or perhaps a reluctance to manipulate others, a disinclination to become drawn into the affairs of others. Although learning may be delayed, many skills can be acquired, depending upon the individual.
I made friends in school. I wasn't quite as nerdy as some, but nerdier than the average boy. I was called a "walking, talking encyclopedia," because I knew words with more than three syllables. I thought everybody should know and use such words. What is wrong with the world, that people don't care to learn everything they possibly can about everything under the Sun? This was my first reaction. Compliments and straight-A's fed my ego, but actually this sort of thing is typical with Asperger's. I got more joy sometimes from reading something as mundane as the back of a cereal box than talking with a peer. I wondered what the ingredients were, and sometimes I had to pull up the encyclopedia, my best friend, to find out. I remember that as a boy I was so naive that I believed everything I read, as long as it corresponded to the general sense of reality and wasn't mythology or magic. Now I know that what one reads on the back of a cereal box must be taken with a grain of salt, along with everything else. One must look to the author and his motives. Of course the cereal manufacturer's motive is clearly to sell cereal, so perhaps not everything can be trusted to be completely candid.
My brain was a sponge, although my memory is very far from photographic, and I'm definitely no savant. I think I was wasted on my school, because I was ahead, and the classes were just lagging behind, leaving me bored and with no sort of challenge at all, just brainless makework. School was a punitive environment. By the time eighth grade rolled around, I was completely disengaged from school. I got into trouble because I wasn't reading social cues as well as the others. I was at least a full grade behind in social development, and a couple grades ahead in academics. I don't think schools knew what do with kids like me. Maybe they do now, but back in the day, the chips fell where they may.
Silence was an early coping mechanism. Silence avoided hostile scrutiny. I learned how to be invisible. Almost all my teachers were less informed about the subjects. Those teachers who knew more than I did, I prized. They were my favorite teachers. But most did not. Teachers who had less knowledge nevertheless had the power to wreak revenge upon their arrogant pupil, and I was certainly arrogant. Let us define arrogance. Arrogance is a failure to understand and apply unwritten and undeclared social norms. One such social norm is that we should convey thoughts and feelings in an inoffensive manner that does not appear designed to make the listeners feel small. Appearances are extremely important, the most important thing in fact, and if one cannot speak without seeming arrogant, silence is preferable. It is better to be silent until one learns the social skills one needs to learn. Of course other boys and girls did not like to seem stupid by comparison, so I learned to disengage and stay quiet in order not to offend anyone. My first lesson in school was the power and the virtue of silence. After several betrayals and cruel pranks, I also learned to be suspicious of others and never to accept what anyone said at face value, but to search for hidden motives--and once the search is complete, to keep watching, because some motives are hidden well indeed. I am almost never taken in by anybody anymore. But in order to achieve such invulnerability, perhaps it is necessary that one endure numerous betrayals, which are such valuable learning experiences. I would not have gone without them.
Some people are better at interpreting social cues than others, and they flourish as social butterflies: politicians, actors, business managers. There are great rewards available for those with above average skills of social perception. I think the self-made rich almost always have something of the social butterfly in them. There is great value in networking, and it is the best way to thrive in business. On the other hand, people with Asperger's seem better with computers, engineering, science, and other detailed and complicated skills. In my opinion, they would also adapt well to the military, which is a system much like a computer, very rule-based, with clear priorities and a chain-of-command.
Friday, April 26, 2013
Kudos for Kubuntu 13.04
Getting Kubuntu
I've been working on my spiffy new Kubuntu 13.04 system, which replaced the older Linux Mint Nadia KDE. Kubuntu was released April 25th, 2013. I recommend torrenting any large file like the Kubuntu .ISO, because by torrenting, one is assured of receiving a valid file without errors, and there is no need for comparing MD5 checksums. I used Ktorrent to download Kubuntu, and K3b to burn the install DVD. I installed Kubuntu on my desktop, which has an ASUS E35M1-M motherboard with a sluggish AMD/ATI E350 apu and four gigs of RAM installed, the standard ration nowadays, a cool and quiet Western Digital 1.5 tb Green drive, and an awesome Acer X223w widescreen LCD monitor.I'm old school when it comes to distros. Unlike some reviewers, I don't play around with virtual machines or live CD or a different partition of the drive. I go whole hog--format the drive to ext4 and let Kubuntu have every last byte. Having a couple of drives to play around with helps. At all times, I have one to three floaters that aren't connected to any system. Their mission in life is to serve as backups. I think this is the best way to go about things, especially with drives so cheap these days. There isn't much reason to be cheap on hard drives, when one weighs their trivial cost against the hassle involved in losing a Windows install or a multimedia library.
Kubuntu 13.04 is not any worse than Kubuntu 12.10, and I think the developers have done a few things better. I was pleasantly surprised that Wesnoth was indeed updated in the repositories to the current stable version of 1.10.6, as that was my main motivation for upgrading in the first place, along with the latest Ktorrent, 2.3.1, which I also found. Very good, Kubuntu! New versions of all the apps is reason enough to upgrade. Also, KDE 4.10.2 is certainly better than 4.9.5, although clicking on a petty option or two in the settings menu, like syncing with the internet time server, triggers an error report, an unpleasantness I first observed in Open Suse 12.3, but it is nothing serious in my opinion, because of course one can avoid clicking on these things. An avoidable bug that does not cause hardship is not a big deal. When I say "error report," I mean just that. KDE does not crash--one merely gets a popup with an error message, clicks "OK" and that's that.
April 28, 2013 Update:
The time bug seems more severe, at least on my system, than it at first appeared. For two days now, my system has been displaying a time four hours in advance of real time. Originally, I selected Eastern Time / New York, which usually works for me, but apparently New York time is based in a Universe four hours ahead of my Universe. I spent about an hour playing around with KDE's settings trying to fix this, because correct time is important. After many reboots, I concluded that New York time actually is broken, although whether this issue will impact all Kubuntu users I can't say, because this problem may be fall-out related to the error reports I mentioned above. Once I changed the time zone to Louisville, Kentucky Eastern Time, all was well.
The New York time zone was four hours ahead of New York time. If you live on the East Coast of the U.S. or at any rate in a region that subscribes to Eastern Time, I recommend selecting Louisville, KY as your time zone rather than New York.
April 30, 2013 Update: The Clock is Still Broken
Once again, the time has regressed to being four hours ahead of local time. I thought this problem was fixed, but apparently not. My display has changed, too. Instead of displaying only the date, it now displays the date followed by "Local."
May 2, 2013 Update: Fifoxtasy's Fix
Fifoxtasy left a comment with a working solution to this problem. I confirmed that the time remains fixed even after a power down and cold start. If your system is impacted by this problem, read on. Otherwise, count yourself among the fortunate ones and enjoy an otherwise superb KDE 4.10.2 experience.
Open a terminal and type the following commands:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdataThe last command merely displays the contents of /etc/timezone. If the time zone noted there isn't right, edit this file via sudo kate /etc/timezone, thus bypassing the buggy GUI. Fifoxtasy also suggests a graphical way of changing the time zone: "KDE's systemsettings didn't let me change anything, but when running as root via kdesu systemsettings, I could at least change the timezone."
sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org
cat /etc/timezone
I'm pleased that the time is fixed, because I was thinking about replacing Kubuntu with something else. Time is important. I'm sure it's not on the short list of cool things developers want to work on, but to the end user, a computer that can't tell time is a poor old thing. Here is a link to Fifoxtasy's Blog.
Despite this initial teething pain, I'm still a fan of KDE and of Kubuntu, for three main reasons: Dolphin, Ktorrent and K3b can't be beat; KDE offers the best desktop experience under the Sun; and KDE is free, so morally I should have to sweat a little to make things work, or else I'd be witness to a violation of Heinlein's TANSTAAFL principle, which states there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Defiance of such a fundamental law of the Universe might result in the disintegration of the bonds that hold molecules together, ending reality as we know it.
Tweaking, Uninstalling and Installing
Do you find that the mouse pointer is far too slow in KDE? I do. First thing I do in KDE is change the pointer acceleration from 2.0 to 12.0 and dial the Drag Start Time down to zero (look under Input Devices | Mouse in System Settings). As with Linux Mint KDE and Open Suse 12.3, I spent the better part of a day darkening the background and replacing default KDE apps such as Kmail, Kwallet, and so on with Thunderbird, Firefox, and VLC, and installing Jedit, which I consider absolutely essential for its macro support. I would never have a system without Jedit, which I find similar to Notepad++ in Windows. Amarok may be the best thing since sliced bread, but I don't think Amarok plays local files as well as VLC, and I don't need Amarok's newfangled features, thank you very much. Rekonq might actually be a faster browser than Firefox for all I know, but I am a Firefox diehard because of Firefox's universe of add-ons. Firefox is the most extensible, the most powerful browser. I chose KDE because of Dolphin, K3b, and Ktorrent, all great programs in the KDE universe and to my knowledge without equal in the Linux world. KDE's settings menu is also great, allowing me to customize just about every aspect of the desktop.Firefox Sync did not work the way I expected it to do for some as yet undetermined reason, and I can't rule out Ubuntu's little tweaks to Firefox at this stage. I decided not to troubleshoot the problem, but rather to start Firefox afresh, because I've been experiencing a strange problem on Blogger where my text sometimes disappears on me, so I thought a fresh start might not be such a bad thing.
Kubuntu's biggest difference with Linux Mint KDE may be the Muon Package Manager. I find it has a betaish quality at present. Information displayed to the user is not always accurate. For instance, the Install button remains even after an application is installed. Also, I experienced a few error messages with Muon, the precise nature of which I forget now, but I do not think Muon is as reliable as Synaptic Package Manager. However, certainly Muon has more features, and bottomline, it works. I never found a case where Muon did not install (or uninstall) a program as told.
I noticed today that Linux Mint has the firewall icon accessible in System Settings | Network and Connectivity, but Kubuntu doesn't. I prefer Linux Mint's accessible firewall. I don't know why I should have to resort to the command line in Kubuntu in order to configure my firewall. Also present in Linux Mint's System Settings, but not in Kubuntu's, is the Partition Manager, found under the System Administration header. Little touches like that propelled Linux Mint up to #1 in Distro Watch.
KDE 4.10.2's default wallpaper seems pretty good, so I didn't change it, unlike last time. I wouldn't say the wallpaper is better than OpenSuse 12.3's, because it's not. Open Suse 12.3 has the best wallpaper of any Linux distro ever made in all of history, but that's faint praise for a distro.
Kubuntu Introduces More Color Schemes
I love dark backgrounds so much that I coded dark style sheets for my favorite news sites. Color schemes in Kubuntu 13.04 are much improved, especially for the dark side:
Kubuntu 13.04 has six new color schemes, including new dark backgrounds. My choice was Krita - dark.
Comparing my Kubuntu 13.04 desktop side-by-side with my Linux Mint Nadia KDE laptop with backported KDE 4.10.2, I find that Kubuntu 13.04 has six flavors of Krita, a superb scheme with competent dark flavors, whereas Linux Mint doesn't. For dark background fans, Linux Mint offers only Obsidian Coast and Zion (Reversed) schemes, which render some text invisible due to an unresolved black-on-black problem. What I wound up doing in Linux Mint Nadia was spending an hour customizing the Oxygen scheme to be what Krita - dark is out of the box. However, I expect Linux Mint 15 KDE, when released, will also have Krita. The reason Linux Mint Nadia didn't get Krita probably has to do with its KDE 4.9.x origin; backporting KDE 4.10.2 wasn't sufficient to install Krita.
Krita - dark is reason enough to prefer Kubuntu 13.04 above any operating system that does not have it.
Here's a shot of my Kubuntu 13.04 desktop as of now:
Customizing Kubuntu 13.04
There are a couple finishing touches I like to perform on every KDE system I install. One is to adjust the time and date in the lower right hand corner so that it supplies something useful to me. I want military time, none of this PM and AM nonsense. I also want the day of the week, followed by the month, the day of the month, and the year. Right now, all of that is in a tiny font, and I haven't yet found the option to increase the size to something more readable. I do not understand why the KDE developers do not display the date by default, because time has no meaning without a date.April 29, 2013 Update:
The font parameters, including size, for the taskbar's time and date are found in System Settings | Application Appearance | Fonts, as shown here:
The font used for the time and date is not the taskbar font, but the small font. I think that the time and date is so important that it should have a font that is named "time and date", and that it should be in a class by itself. By increasing the small font from 9 to 12, I produced a legible time and date that can be read at a glance. I increased the taskbar font as well while I was at it. My desktop has 1680 x 1050 resolution, so there is no reason to use tiny fonts.
Adding an Off Button
The other innovation I like to add is an off button, which really is a no-brainer. Every OS should have one. To install an off button in KDE, open Konsole and enter the following command:
sudo chmod u+s /sbin/shutdownThen create a new link on your desktop called "Off" and copy from the following screenshot:
The "application" being loaded is actually just a command-line program, shutdown.
The Language Barrier
While editing this post in Blogger, I notice that Firefox underlines many words as being misspelled because they deviate from the Commonwealth spelling. I am not sure whether this is related to Kubuntu's installation of language packs. All Ubuntu distros and even Linux Mint install the South African language pack by default, and Kubuntu also installs the GB language pack. I disabled these and installed the U.S. language pack, but the spellchecker remains foreign, underlining common words like "favorite" and "color" because they lack a superfluous vowel.
Unfortunately, adding the U.S. language pack does not fix Firefox's broken spellchecker.
Another KDE Gem: Okular
Unfortunately, for some reason, Krita was the default app in Firefox to print out .pdf files, which cost me about an hour one morning, because whatever its other merits, Krita does not print .pdf documents at the proper scale by default, and I was not in the mood to learn how to use a program I have never used before. Sometimes one simply needs to get things done.I use my printer for one main purpose, to print out postage either from Ebay or directly from the United States Postal Service's web site. By doing so, one receives a discount of ~ 16%, saves fuel and time, and enjoys the convenience of staying at home. The USPS delivers online postage in .pdf format. In Linux, the application that works best for printing .pdf files is Okular, and it is extremely important that all Linux operating systems default to Okular for .pdf files, because to my knowledge, there is no better app than Okular for viewing and printing .pdf. I have used Okular extensively not just for printing but for searching through long and hairy .pdf files. Okular has proven extremely fast and has a very intuitive interface. Windows does not have a better app for searching .pdf files. Linux has the best app, and it is Okular. People that read .pdf files on a regular basis should erase Windows and install Linux in order to access Okular.
Ensure that Okular is the only app for viewing .pdf files in KDE:
I also advise adjusting the application preference in Firefox itself:
Esoteric Weirdness
Of interest only to fellow geeks, I triggered weird behavior in Kubuntu 13.04, booting up to this screen:
I cannot call this behavior a bug, because intuition led me to suspect my recent changes to fstab were the culprit, as indeed they were. I have gotten into the habit of optimizing every linux distro's fstab in the following manner:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.I feel that Linux systems, by default, access the hard drive for rather insignificant reasons and behave as though we were still living in a world where memory was measured in kilo- rather than giga- bytes. I have four gigs in my system and I expect it to be used. Let's not run the hard drive ragged, because the hard drive is the bottleneck.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
#
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=blahblah / ext4 errors=remount-ro,noatime 0 1
# swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=blahblah none swap sw 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=2G,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/lock tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=384M,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/run tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=1G,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
Kubuntu 13.04 does not like the last two lines above, the ones that change /var/lock and /var/run to tmpfs. Commenting out those lines eliminated the weird startup problem. I'm not alone in tmpfs'ing /var/lock and /var/run--I read about this in the ArchLinux wiki--but it is far from mainstream practice. I will never do so again, now that the potential for problems is clear. I discovered through further experimentation that the tmpfs for /tmp causes no problem, I think because it is closer to being mainstream practice now, what with Fedora having adopted the practice a version ago or so.
Conclusion: Kubuntu 13.04 is for Keeps
I am sticking with Kubuntu 13.04 for the foreseeable future on my desktop. It is better than Open Suse 12.3 because I know, with any Debian derivative, that printing will be a no-brainer, as printing should be in 2013, for all love. Kubuntu works out of the box with my wired network, requiring zero adjustments. And Kubuntu does not enroll the install dvd into the library of repositories like Open Suse does. Although I picked at a few things with Muon's package management, Muon seems better than Open Suse's package management, which gives really hairy and I think frequent error messages. Open Suse's biggest problem is that it does not have Debian behind it. Its second biggest problem is that they are preaching to the choir, to users that have used Suse since back in the day, and don't seem very interested in recruiting new users by making the system easier to use.Comparing Kubuntu 13.04 with Linux Mint 12.10 KDE doesn't seem quite fair, because Linux Mint only has an older version available at present, but I will say that I didn't notice the lack of Mint. I don't miss the Mint menu, and I feel like I can work with Muon Package Manager. Mint always messes around with the Firefox search box, too, so using Kubuntu saved me about five or ten minutes not having to jump through hurdles to revert the search box to Google. I like the right-click options that Linux Mint adds to the file manager, the "Root Actions," which are missing in Kubuntu. Another way that Mint saves the end user time is that the devs are kind enough to install Firefox, VLC and the firewall by default, but like Kubuntu, Linux Mint KDE still has the Kmail and Kwallet monsters lurking in the shadows. In the past, I did not have a good experience with Kwallet. For some odd reason, it forced me to enter my email password each and every time that I loaded Kmail. The reason that I use a mail reader in the first place is that I do not want to enter my password. Tweaking Kwallet's or Kmail's settings didn't help. My solution was to permanently uninstall Kmail and Kwallet, and that is the first thing I do every time I install any KDE distro. Overall, I would say that Kubuntu 13.04 is comparable to Linux Mint KDE, and given a choice between the two, I'd probably choose Kubuntu, because it is released sooner and does not mess around with the Firefox search box. But the final verdict remains to be seen, because Linux Mint 15 KDE should be released later in 2013.
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