Time flies when you're having fun. Or smoking crack.
Can you believe it's been one whole year since I created bitchsetmeup.com? Unbelievable. The domain is set to expire today, unless I renew it. But is it really worth $15 a year for such a lame joke?
I think so.
I hate debit cards. With a passion. Your money is in your bank account for less time, thus earning less interest. Also, they don't come with the same level of consumer protection and fraud liability as the good old-fashioned credit card. To boot, they are a huge money-making scheme for the banks. Their popularity has been artificially inflated with clever marketing campaigns that tout their one supposed upside: You can't spend more than you have in your account.
Except it's bullshit. If you're a smart person, you keep as little money in your checking account as possible, since it bears little or no interest. Unfortunately, with debit cards, it's really easy to lost track of how much you should keep in your account. So you drain your account - but instead of your card being denied, the bank "helpfully" transfers money from your savings account, under the guise of "overdraft protection". And they charge your a huge fee - like $20. So your morning latte just cost you $23.57! Great!
Now, of course, they have to notify you of your overdraft. But what notification scheme do they choose? Oh, right, the United States Postal Service. They send you a letter, telling you that you've just overdrawn your account, and that they've taken their fee, and you should really transfer some more money into your account. But, being the postal service, the letter doesn't get there for three days; and, as a normal American, you buy a lot more stuff during that three days of ignorance.
You buy lunch: $7. Overdraft. Another $20 fee.
You pop in for a beer at the pub: $4.50. Overdraft. Another $20 fee.
You swing by the store for a gallon of milk: $2.69. Overdraft. Another $20 fee.
And so on - for three more days!
The end result? A little screw-up turns into hundreds of dollars in bank fees and a dozen letters in your mailbox. Oh, did I mention they won't let you opt-out of this service? Hot damn those banks sure are helpful!
Hopefully, it's about to change. Buried near the end of this NYT article on impending changes to credit card regulation is this tiny little gem:
The proposal also seeks to regulate overdraft protection, banning companies from assessing a fee unless the customer chooses not to opt out of that service.
One can only hope.
No, I haven't been diagnosed with anything. I just saw this article on Wired about green funerals that are coming into vogue, and I just wanted it on the record as to how I'd like my remains disposed of:
Bury me in a shallow grave in the forest.
Barring that, which I'm sure would violate several jurisdictions worth of laws, one of these green funeral things would be a decent second choice.
Ever since the announcement that portions of the Library's new Library of Congress Experience initiative would have some user-interface components implemented using Microsoft's Silverlight in exchange by Microsoft for some $3 million worth of hardware for kiosks, the net has been ablaze with fury over some perceived "selling-out" of the organization. For some reason, people think that www.loc.gov will shortly be 301ing to loc.microsoft.com, or something ridiculous.
(Disclaimer: These are my opinions, based on my experience and work as a digital librarian. They are not necessarily those of the Library of Congress, or anybody else. Also, I am deliberately avoiding the topic of content born-digital in a proprietary format. It's an especially painful area for digital archivists, as the content is still important notwithstanding the problems reading it both now and in the future, and it really doesn't bear on the current complaints, anyway.)
It's a tricky problem, to be sure. The cost of digital conversion, preservation, and access is extremely high. The cost outlay by the National Endowment for the Humanities for digitizing the 1/2 million (and growing!) newspaper pages in Chronicling America runs into the millions of dollars. And that doesn't even account for the cost of keeping that data around for any length of time! Funding has to come from somewhere, and so, as Ars says, there will likely be more and more of these quid pro quo arrangements in the future.
But I'll let you in on a little secret: It doesn't matter. The future of digital libraries, and of organizations like the Library of Congress, isn't in the web site that people visit. It isn't in the technology choices made for viewing content. And it certainly isn't going to be controlled by any particular company.
See, though the user interface may be written in something proprietary, like Flash or Silverlight, the archived bits aren't stored that way. Librarians are an insanely conservative bunch, made that way through hundreds of years of experience in attempting to keep old stuff and make it available for new people. The guidelines for digital preservation reflect that. We're still working with TIFFs for a good reason: TIFF has been around for decades, and it'll continue to be around for decades. We know we'll be able to read them in a hundred years. In the library world, lack of shininess on a file format isn't a bug - it's a feature!
But the real reason it doesn't matter is because the digital library as a web site you visit to view content won't exist in a decade. Instead, we'll be serving out content via web-exposed APIs, opening the inner archives to anyone who cares to look. Sure, there will still be curated special presentations of content just like the new Experience program, and they might even use some new, fancy, proprietary technology, maybe even in exchange for $200 million of computer equipment (adjusting for inflation, here). But those special presentations will just be the tip of the content iceberg, and the rest will be there to look at in very standard and open formats.
Yes, yes. We all know that humans are causing global climate change. We're responsible for increasing CO2 levels, and the resulting increase in temperatures. It seems, though, that we've been doing it for a lot longer than just since we started burning fossil fuels.
(Preemptive anti-anti-global-warming comment: So even if we have been affecting the climate for a lot longer than we thought, the amount of CO2 we're putting into the atmosphere now is way above what we were doing back then. It's like having some Scotch and thinking, "Well, that didn't kill me. All those teetotalers are full of crap," and then going out and drinking a bottle of rubbing alcohol.)
But this isn't about global warming. It's about time scales, and how self-centered we are. And I don't mean that necessarily as a bad thing, just that we quite naturally center everything around us: right here, right now. Take this pair of sentences from the first paragraph of that linked article: "It started 200 million years ago and ended 55 million years later, give or take. For the past 12,000 years, we've been living in the Holocene." When I read that, I hiccuped.
55 million = 55 * 10^6 = 55,000,000 12 thousand = 12 * 10^3 = 12,000
Three orders of magnitude! Really? One epoch is on the order of tens-of-millions of years, and another is on the order of tens-of-thousands? At this point, are we really talking about the same thing? Does the word epoch really apply that broadly?
Oh. Yeah, well, I guess it does.
But still! It seems rather self-centered to consider our measly 10^4 years on planet earth to be on the order of the rest of life. I mean, in the race of life, we're just barely past the starting blocks. If our 12,000 years of civilization were a mile, then I (as a representative of human civilization) have walked from my house to Constitution Avenue; the lowly cockroach is somewhere off the west coast of Australia.
Sure, we've probably had more short-term global impact than the cockroach. But that's not my point. We have trouble imagining more-than-our-lifespan of years in any given direction, at best. Do we really imagine our civilization is going to make it to even a hundred-thousand years? Can we even comprehend making it to even just one million years?
I upgraded to Vista SP1 this weekend. There really is no reason not to try, especially since the version I have has a disk-imaging backup tool. So I could lobotomize my machine and re-insert the old image if something went horribly wrong. Heck, anybody with a Linux boot disc and dd could do the same. Everything went smoothly, unlike Thud, who seems to constantly have problems with the thing.
Personally, I don't find Vista to be the steaming pile of crap that is so commonly reported on Slashdot and the like - well, any more steaming than a Microsoft operating system usually is. I mean, sure there have been some minor hiccups with certain driver upgrades, but it's never blue-screened on me. I've even had some updates go awry, but it recovered nicely when I did a hard power-cycle. Sure, it's not a break-through tower of innovation like OS X, but it's a relatively solid next-version operating system.
I don't even mind the UAC security pop-ups that are so widely panned. Actually, I can't see how they would be at all annoying unless your daily job involves opening and closing administrative and system maintenance tools all day. And in that case: What, exactly, do you do for a living? Though playing Mother-May-I with my computer is neither the best nor final move in the security game, it is a reasonable response to certain classes of maliciousness and mistakes that are quite common in the current landscape. I appreciate UAC in the same way I appreciate needing to sudo when using Linux.
This is my first foray into this argument, and I'm pulling out my toe after this brief dip into the chilly waters of the Vista-sucks sub-genre. (Being baited just isn't as fun as it used to be.) It seems to me that most of the people howling about how much Vista sucks are just the usual slash-trolls, squirming in pleasure at the orgy of "Vista Sucks; Mac/Linux/BeOS/Whatever Rules" articles and posts, just because they can. That's cool; whatever gets your rocks off. But all-in-all, Vista is pretty good. Sure, there are problems with it, but they're being fixed as fast as a megalithic monopoly can move. And how quickly we've forgotten that the same rhetoric was spewed about the now-venerable Windows XP when it was released. It's the same people who swore they'd stick with Windows 98 until 2098.
So, to summarize: Vista is OK. Service Pack 1 installed with no problems. And my mission of lowering the signal-to-noise ratio in the internets, even if ever-so-slightly, has been successful. Back to work for me.
"Scoop Your Poop" created from makes a great desktop; icons to the left by Rob!, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license. "Vista of Flowers" created from Carlsbad Flower Field March 2007-DSC_3575 by akaporn, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license. Vista logo (a trademark of Microsoft) taken from the web, and used fairly in good faith for parody and description.
With the release of Vista SP1, I decided it would be a good time to back up my computer - in case something went horribly wrong. Better safe than sorry, or somesuch. But when I tried to run a backup this morning, I was rebuffed with this inscrutable message.
It got it right - I was running on battery power. But, really? This is the best you can do? I mean, I'm sure there's some really good Raymond Chen reason for why I can't or shouldn't or Microsoft-knows-best reason I haven't thought of as to why this is. I can come up with several on my own, in my head.
At least tell me why I can't start a backup on battery power. As it is, I feel like I need to jump through a hoop for no reason at all.
