Perette's Journal: 2012

Contents

1. A thought on social media

2012-05-12 18:59 (Saturday) journal

The idea of social media as metadata occurred to me today. I'm not sure it's accurate, but it yields some interesting perspectives; in particular, people's tendency to use social media to define the state of their lives. And it clarifies my feelings—perpetually tinkering with the metadata achieves nothing; there's actual living to be done.

2. Funny man pages

2012-04-27 11:09 (Friday) journal

One thing I love sometimes is when things are written in a way that important inferences are left up to the reader:

     "If SO_LINGER is disabled and a close is issued, the system will process
     the close in a manner that allows the process to continue as quickly as
     possible."

In other words, if SO_LINGER is disabled and close is issued, the system may shitcan the rest of the data in the pipe in attempting to continue as quickly as possible.

3. Spam

2012-04-23 22:46 (Monday) journal

So I just got an email that starts:

  Did you receive the e-mail which we sent to you recently (copied here-below)?
  Please confirm since I have had problems lately with emails
  intercepted by spam-filters set too high.

Let me assure you, you bastard, that my spam filters are set at exactly the appropriate levels.

Perhaps I should reply to him via way of SpamCop, in hopes of encouraging cluefulness.

4. Pick any two

2012-04-23 09:26 (Monday) journal

I am reminded of an old engineer's saying: Good, fast, cheap—pick any two.

I can have a job. It takes 40 hours of my week. I can do it to earn money, but it doesn't make me happy. The projects don't interest me; I wouldn't do it if they didn't pay me, or if I didn't need the money. A job is an active process, it takes effort and energy—but it doesn't make me happy. It's just something I'm obligated to do to have the resources to survive.

I can perform the stabilizing skills that I learned in DBT and over the last few years—which, when it comes down to it, is vacuuming, making my own food, which in turn requires going shopping (preferably at the public market), keeping up with dishes, etc. (Part of the stabilizing influence of these is maintaining my life in good order, the other part is that it's fairly rote, procedural work that gets me away from thinking and the machines.) It's also just having veg time, watching TV or reading a book. These are passive activities; they don't require major effort but don't create happiness or unhappiness. But in that, they stabilize my emotions.

I can do things that interest me. This is things like interacting with others, participating in RKS, and building things of interest. Often it's writing pieces of software, like the auction manager, the RKS website; other times it's writing position pieces or thinking about how to take capitalism down. These are creative, and they require thought and effort—they are active, and draining. But doing them satisfies me, makes me happy.

All of these are "heavyweight" processes. They require substantial time commitments.

  - Stability + personal interests leaves a problem with money.
  - Stability + work leaves me unsatisfied with my life; I feel empty
     because I'm not pursuing any interests.
  - Personal interests + work over stimulates me; I become ungrounded,
     I become so busy with ideas and interests I lose the ability to
     sleep, and from insomnia madness derives.

They are all required to allow me to enjoy a fufilling yet stable existence. Yet they simply don't fit in the available time. I don't see how to resolve this; the best I can guess is to either oscillate every few weeks between work + stability and work + interests, and seeing if I can modulate something useful out of that. But that seems like a shitty, stupid, and dangerous solution.

The other alternative is what seems to have been the de facto result, doing work + a half ass balance of the other two until I crash and burn, stacking up money as I go fast as I can; then switch to personal interests + stability as long as viable. But that leaves the eventual financial fears looming over my head, and creates massive turmoil around the transition points...It's far from a good solution.

There must be a viable solution. I just can't see what it is, or how to achieve it.

5. The real Killroys

2012-04-10 21:22 (Tuesday) journal

In my job recently I've been doing some analytic setup and tracking stuff. For those unacquainted, I'm setting up the stuff that allows websites to follow what you're doing, and report that data later later on—typically in summary form, but they could track individually.

In the past I've dismissed the seeming comspiracy minded thoughts of friends like fuschia; as much as I respected there was potential for abuse, I thought she and her kind were probably a little over zealous on the argument. I am not of that mistaken opinion any longer.

Part of why I thought it was tolerable was that it was a merchant I chose to do business with, or consider doing business with. This is not a valid argument. In the early form, social sites worked by getting webmasters to add links to their sites (you'll find a few of these around my website). The sites typically had button graphics, but webmasters were savvy enough in those days to make and/or host their own image, thus preventing these social sites from "leaching" data every time somebody requested the button (when you request the image, your browser announces the site it is for).

Nowadays, webmasters either (a) aren't smart enough, (b) don't care, both resulting in more data collection.

The information gathering done by social media is more refined and more valuable (which justifies investing money in further refining the process).

So (c) data is collected more accurately, and (d) data is processed into more useful results.

The masses have bought into/been sold the idea of the social web, and so they're happy to use it. Furthermore, the caliber of intellect/technological awareness of the average Internet user has declined—we're no longer all brainy techies that have the ability to be skeptical about the reasons we're given.

So (e) people are less resistant, and even worse, people (f) actively want social integration in the sites they use.

This last point means the social sites can be more aggressive. Instead of a static code snippet, the most recent ones use a script that runs on every page. (Part of the reason your old web browser/machine dogs down new sites—all the scripts.) And since the caliber of webmaster has dropped, many now being just average salespeople or whatnot, that works for them—they don't have the capability to add custom code or prevent tracking. Not that they'd want to, because the social sites give them statistics and analysis in exchange for the abuse of their shoppers' privacy.

(g) the social sites collect more aggressively, (h) webmasters don't resist or watch over their users, and in fact (i) webmasters buy into the "free" data access too.

This has caused a proliferation of social web sites—link sharing, social bookmarking, blogging, image sharing, etc. The hundreds of buttons available out there has resulted in meta-sites, sites whose "purpose" is supplying widgets that create the other buttons. For webmasters, they offer a simple, consistent way to add buttons for the other social sites—perfect for a webmaster who just wants it easy, doesn't give a shit about his user's privacy, just wants to increase his bottom line. And, guess what, after you add their script to your site they too collect data. In fact, the amount of data these fuckers must take home blows me away, because almost all the merchants I work with have taken to using them.

(j) The metasites offer nothing of their own, but harvest the data like wheat in August.

That merchants use Google Analytics to see what their users are up to does not bother me. It's the data collection that's under the guise of something else, and in particular, (j) really gives me the jitters.

The thing that really drove the point home recently though? For years, I suppose sites have been trying to sell me stuff, and I guess I habituated to the kinds of things they try to sell me. But now I work in the industry, and in the last few weeks I've been debugging and making small enhancements for our merchants. That means visitng a lot of websites to check the way a product displays, shop around a bit and make sure that new social media button looks okay, stuff like that.

And all of a sudden, Google Product Search (better known as Froogle) is broken. It doesn't suggest RAM upgrades or a hard disc, it's offering me clothing and lingerie, overpriced purses, baby strollers and clothing. It thinks i might want to buy shit I couldn't care less about—but is spot-on with the websites I've been working on the last 2 weeks.

If I could, I'd just block a lot of the sites...but I need them to work to do my job. If there's a silver lining in all this, it's that at least I can go to bed knowing they're data on me is presently hopelessly corrupt.

6. The damage done unknowingly...

2012-04-10 08:13 (Tuesday) journal

It's odd being me. The values I have, the way I process information, the way I interact with others, the way I learn things (especially interpersonal skills) seem different from the rest of everybody. Not that I'm completely unique of different; what I want out of life is to be happy—but if you compare how I think that can be achieved, it's not the standard response you'll get.

The best explanation I've found so far is the likelihood of Asperger's ("AS"), although it's a sort of useless diagnosis: it explains but doesn't change anything. As a side note, an interesting effect I've experienced is reduction in AS-type traits when living without testosterone ("T"), including being less goal oriented, interest in being social, experience of emotions, loss of ability to lose myself in interesting projects. These have all returned since being on T for a waning sex drive, with the nice effect of anxiety being less overwhelming at the expense of having all emotions muted (it's like they're the other side of a strong tempered-glass wall, where I can see them and vaguely hear them, but not enough to get my interest). But a sample of two (one being T removal circa 1993, the other the subsequent restoration circa 2009) is not good science, which makes it difficult to trust the T datapoint, because it could be coincidence. But I've digressed.

When I was struggling to find enough business in 2009/2010, David and his daughter persuaded me that I should stop living an open life, and not write about myself in this journal anymore. It didn't make sense then, as living my life openly has always seemed to improve it. Closets and all that. But I also recognize my own limitations, especially interpersonal ones—I used to talk with Jan about this, he would give good critical feedback that helped me understand how my behaviors are interpreted by others and thus helped me grow and change.

In acquiescing, I think I may have allowed an important tool to be taken away. Writing in this journal, whether or not anyone actually reads or cares what I write, nevertheless presents the possibility of people reading it. It's thus in my interest to be clear about my feelings and experiences. Writing about those required I think about them and sort them out, to have sufficient understanding that it's possible to write coherently about what I experience or how I perceive the world. In retrospect, it seems likely this was probably one of the processes that helped me understand myself, reflect on it, and to grow and adapt.

Of course, discontinuation of journal writing approximately correlates with resuming T, so it could be that. Back to 2 data points, bad science, can I trust any of it? And there's no reason they can't both be influential.

I won't say I believe the journal is a resolve-all solution. It's slow, resource intensive (taking time and effort to form my words), deliberate and not spontaneous. But if we assume the Asperger's premise is true, then considering AS's stereotype (inflexible, procedural, resisting change) then any change at all is a good step. Over the last 2 years, I've shown remission of many of the AS traits, a regression in personality—but more than that, a distinct lack of interest or ability in personality revision or improvement. I have no way of being sure or proving it, but I'm nevertheless suspicious that without Jan's feedback, and without writing in my journal to do it myself, the underlying feedback processes that create change are gone.

7. Training tools

2012-04-05 14:38 (Thursday) journal

A co-worker send this along as useful design tips. It really is spot-on, and funny as shit.

        http://theoatmeal.com/comics/shopping_cart

8. Occupy movement and tooth decay

2012-03-26 09:21 (Monday) journal

Occupy Wallstreet was about the capitalist abuse of the worker, making us work long hours for low wages, keeping all the profit for themselves, not addressing all the out of work people.

The stress of those conditions causes insomnia in some people, like me.

Medication for insomnia cause dry mouth.

Saliva is antibacterial, so dry mouths are subject to more bacteria.

Oral bacterial cause tooth decay.

It really seems stupid to me that we keep fighting symptoms instead of addressing the problems, yet we do it all the time. It seems backward that I'll spend 4 hours of wages to talk to a counselor to help me cope with work, when 4 hours of rest are probably what the answer truly is.

9. pianod

2012-03-22 09:00 (Thursday) journal

pianod homepage

10. Why I don't like "clever" things

2012-03-20 15:35 (Tuesday) journal

You'd think as a brainy type myself, I'd like clever solutions to things. I do like good solutions, and good ways of achieving a goal; I like well-written, solid code. I'm not sure about "clever", though.

"Clever" (at least as used in software) has this sort of dark underbelly, a sneaky sort of implication that one achieved something either via a short-cut to save time and effort, or achieved the impossible by bending rules. Clever scientists coming up with ways to discover the Higgs bozon, I approve of. Clever CSS ideas like sprites (sometimes called "CSS hacks", "tricks", or other giveaways that they aren't cricket), though they might save some bandwidth, do so by making code unmaintainable. Clever ways of getting a browser to display something often aren't portable. Clever coding doesn't always yield understandable code (and thus makes it bug-prone, IMO), and thus is usually just not worth it.

11. gnutls build failure

2012-03-18 17:41 (Sunday) journal

Can't find libnettle even with --with-libnettle-prefix=<whatever>, but libnettle is bloody well there? Then libnettle is built wrong; install libgmp, then for nettle rerun ./configure, make, and make install; this will get you hogweed, and you can finally get ./configure to work for gnutls.

Wouldn't it be great if it ./configure failed in a more intuitive way? Like, indicating nettle was incompatible rather than missing?

12. Fix failure, Cost of war

2012-03-01 23:04 (Thursday) journal

Problems with Fishie Car's stereo lately, not working with the MP3 player quite correctly. I screwed with it a bunch, tried to diagnose it, but no luck. There are actually things I can't fix. But I can build a pretty nice wiring harness for a new stereo.

Cost of war: $1.3T. But that's actual spending; when considering the hidden and future costs, it's speculated to be $4–6T. The US population is apx 310M, 210M of them adult.

        Existing costs: ~4,200/person
                         $6,200/adult.
        Estimated real cost: ~$12,900–19,350/person
                              $19,000–28,575/adult

That money could have made a big dent in all of our energy budgets as prices increases, and that's before considering the price increases that are due to the massive consumption oil by the war itself, thus diminishing supplies and driving up costs it was supposed to keep down.

I know they want us to believe this was about how we're the good guys and needed to get the bad guy, and if not that then we were over there to liberate the Middle East. And if nothing else, we should have been happy to have the war because it would get us access to cheap oil. Personally, I don't buy any of it. The only ones that benefitted were the war profiteering companies of the military-industrial complex and the rich that own and run them.

Why didn't we revolt?

13. Coding foo

2012-02-02 20:15 (Thursday) journal

CRC calculation of arbitrary length polynomials and values in a language with no native binary operators or loops (only recursion): fun!

14. SOPA & the Greedy

2012-01-18 16:14 (Wednesday) journal

So the media companies, owned and lead by the rich superwealthy, want SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) so that the rest of us can't pirate things and have to pay for them. These are companies like Time Warner that charge exorbitant rates for cable TV and other entertainment.

But we all know we're being screwed everytime we pay the cable bill, or $20 for another copy of a 70-year-old Walt Disney movie (but now on the latest media format). But what do we do about it? We grumble, piss and moan, and most of us pay it. And a few go pirate things, because they're fighting being screwed with screwing back.

But what's the real solution? On our end, the real solution is to stop watching, stop paying. Everytime you pay an overinflated cable bill, you're consenting to their fees. So fuck'em, tell them to shove their fees. Go to NetFlix, or read a book.

The solution on their end? Well, SOPA. They've got the money, they've got the power to buy the laws, they've got the power to enforce their extortion. Unless, of course, we opt-out of it altogether and go read a book, or go to a coffee shop and talk to people, maybe gather some friends—while we're at it, we can start planning a revolt. Maybe when they've made it too expensive to dull ourselves over with the glowing glass eye or fuckbook on the interwebs, we'll have time to devote to problems of our country and the way things (don't) get solved, maybe even realize things never get fixed by asking politely.

And then we'll come to the realization that we the masses need to be a threat. We need to own guns and be ready to exercise our duty to use them to overthrow things when they go wrong. It's not that I want to go risk my life fighting in a war at home, just that things aren't going to get better... because what's forcing them to get better? Our owning firearms and having the (apparent) willingness to use them creates the power that gets us be listened to.

And SOPA? The greedy should really know better. As long as we're distracted with our bread an circuses, they can keep screwing us in the financial markets, and turning our tax dollars into all kinds of tax incentives and pork-belly spending and wars that aren't in our interests but somehow end up lining their own pockets.

So please, you greedy sons of a bitches, come take away what poor, meager entertainment I get in the name of keeping a few dollars away from the pirates. Take away the thing that keeps the rest of my ilk preoccupied, the thing that you use to push your ideas and agendas into the masses' minds. Take away the thing that distracts us after a hard days slaving at making you fuckers money, with little enough for our own—the masses need more anger at you after the last few years.

Kill SOPA, and things will just drag on as they've been. Pass SOPA, and it'll be one more thing in the long train of abuses and usurpations that step by step are pushing us toward the next revolution. I say, full steam ahead.

15. The Coder

2012-01-05 09:39 (Thursday) journal

For some reason I've had Kenny Roger's The Gambler running through my head, though in a slight variation:

        You've got to know when to malloc,
        Know when to calloc,
        Know when to check for NULL...
        When the code is run.

        You never count your array
        without checking out the length first
        There's no need to be a'crashing,
        when you're doin' sums.