War is Boring

 OK. So I'm going to tell you about one of the web sites I found on the list I told you about yesterday--and I have to say that my initial explorations have not uncovered that much of interest, at least to me. But this site had a fetching title: "War is Boring." And as you will see from the entry, the news wasn't new. Fighting an killing in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. And a lovely photo of rockets launching.

So I suppose war is boring because we just get tired of hearing about it? Or war is boring because it never stops?

DailyTekk Discovery

Regular readers know that I'm a lover of lists. I make them myself and always dispose of them, when they finally reach the point of uselessness, a very fluid notion. But I've always got lists around. I've got scraps of lists of web sites to check out, books to read, music to listen to, things to do, words I don't know the meaning of, etc. I could not live without lists, even though, if I'm truthful only the ones I take with me to the grocery ever have any real impact on my life.

And, like I suppose everybody else--though I know that's not so--I cherish "best of" lists. You know, best of at-the-end-of-the-year lists: books, movies, music, etc. So it goes without saying that I would find a list called "The 100 Best, Most Interesting Blogs and Websites of 2014"would be a real turn-on. Especially since I googled "best blogs out there ". I always google "the best of . . . " something. I know it's crazy, but I believe this does give some granularity to the process.  (Yeah, right. That search only turned up 761,000,000 results in .20 seconds.)

So this site was 4th down on the list. You should check it out. I'm not about to get to writing about the places I've found. I'd never get finished.

It Never Goes Away

I've gotten to the point where I almost feel guilty dealing with anything that's plastic. It is so ubiquitous. From where you're sitting right now, how many things can you see that are plastic or contains plastic components? Thank goodness I can salve my conscience some by recycling all the plastic waste this one little household with only two people in it generates. But I know it's just the smallest atom of help for a problem that staggers the imagination.

Plastic, Plastic Everywhere: Plastic, that handy, lightweight, nearly indestructible stuff is... well, indestructible. We throw a lot of it away, but for plastic there is no 'away'. Most of it ends up in landfills, where it will sit for a few thousand years. A tiny bit, about 9% of the US share, gets recycled. A lot of it ends up in the ocean, about a million tons so far. Of that vast amount, about 35,000 t ons has ended up in those swirling garbage patches – every ocean has at least one of them. But the 965,000 plus other tons of seaborne plastic has just 'disappeared'. But plastic doesn't simply disappear. It'll be back. Shut up and eat your fish.

Facing Up

I read in the Washington Post that we're on the brink of having technology that will be able to predict how long we're likely to live. It does this with facial recognition software and, one supposes, the black magic that is behind all these technological wonders. Article says that if your parents were people who didn't age in a hurry, you're not likely to either. Nobody believes how old I am now (except those who know), but I suppose that has something to do with my looking about 10 when I was 16, 16 when I was 26, etc. At this stage of the game, it's about the only blessing of aging that I can think of. Looking younger than you are, that is. And now through the magic of technology we (and all the insurance companies) will have a basis for projecting our future years. What a country!

Unceasing Wonders

Technology. It will be the death of us for certain, but in the meantime it keeps serving up wonders and glorious gadgets. I learned just recently about carrying coupons around in your cell phone and using them at cash registers. Now I read that the hotel key cards that replaced regular ole keys are on their way out. They will probably be replaced by a cell phone app. When guests check in through this app, they get their room number and the ability to open their door via their cell phone. You don't have to even go to the front desk because sensors in your room's door will recognize your phone. Reason we don't have widespread use of this right now is the hotels don't want to cough up the cash it'll take to transition. Don't they know there's a recovery on? Ha.

Faded Away

 

My daughter posted this on Facebook and it caught my eye. Interesting list. Notice how many of these things here are victims of digital technology. Maybe I'm fading into obsolescence because some of these things don't seem so weird to me. On this list, for example, bookstore (I go to 'em.), cursive (I was amazed to learn that kids don't learn it in school anymore), grammar (Are you kidding me?), ink (I habitually use a fountain pen, the only civilized way to write), newspaper (read one on paper every day), quality (it can still be found if you look for it), and zip code (I still do first class mail) still resonate with me to a greater or lesser degree. 

But when you think about it, there are just bunches of things that have faded away and out of our lives. How about general courtesy to others? Manners? Courteous truck drivers? Sensible packaging? Independent grocers? Reasons to trust politicians, bankers, businessmen, clergy? Something other than mindless drivel passed off as news? 

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Our Defunct Fourth Amendment, Part 1

I cannot say I'm really surprised by the bombshell revelation that the National Security Agency has a gargantuan (and growing daily) database containing the phone and electronic records of every person in the country. I worked for the Fed in the military long enough to know how these people who are purportedly concerned with "protecting our freedoms"--that of course would include the entire "security" establishment, law enforcement, and the Dept of Justice--don't really care about constitutional protections of those same freedoms, not when they get in the way of what they want to do, which in the context of the paroxysms of paranoia launched and nurtured by the Bush and Obama administrations is by definition intrusive, drastic, and dangerous to civil liberties. Moreover, the attitude is to use the latest technology can offer (and remember, always at a handsome, if not obscene, profit to the government contractor) to the greatest extent possible. Believe me when I tell you that monolithic focus on the "bad guys" simple blots out concern for our basic constitutional liberties. And of course, this is all cloaked from the American people by classifying the programs, the technology, the locations, everything, under blankets of secrecy. 

Related articles

• Why NSA's defense is so weak (salon.com)
• Fourth Amendment Restoration Act - Rand Paul Introduces Anti-Snooping Bill (patdollard.com)
• An Orwellian Paradise (theburningplatform.com)
• Everything is terrible. (jwz.org)

Astounding Technology

This is not faked. Truly mind-blowing. Lord only knows what this technology costs, but can you imagine the possibilities here?

Addictive

Sometimes nice thing happens when you're out of town. A really nice thing happened for me while I was in Louisiana. My iPad2 arrived. (A gift to myself with the honorarium from the talk in Hammond.) All the way from China. Well, it wasn't exactly while I was gone to be precise. UPS attempted to deliver the thing last Friday, but since no one was here to sign for it, they left only a notice and I had to make arrangements for it to be brought here on Tuesday, when I was sure to be home.* I have to say, I've been pretty much entranced with the thing since. I'm right now, five days later, just getting to the point where I can initial set-up has just about finished. You know, all that stuff you have to go through when you get a new computer (laptop, smart phone, tablet, etc.): getting to know the device, setting up where you want all the applications, playing with them and others, and generally learning how the new toy works.

There are all kinds of excellencies about this device, not the least of which is that I can access the Internet now from anywhere in my house, which means I will be able to spend more time in the same room with Susan. The way our house is situated when I'm sitting at the computer I'm away from the kitchen/living room where my spouse is most of the time (when she's not outside puttering around in the garden/yard, which she does a lot). Her laptop is there. So closing that physical separation will be nice.

Plus, of course, there are literally over 300,000--I think that's right--apps (applications) that running independently accomplish about any task you can think of.

I'm still having some glitches getting everything to work the way it's supposed to, but I can tell you now, friends, these things are addictive.

*And as luck would have it, the iPad I got had a defective wall plug-in so the damn thing would not charge up. I had to drive 30 miles to the nearest Apple store to get a replacement plug.

Related articles

• Using my iPad Mouse (insideview.ie)
• Want an iPad 2? Got a kidney? Inquire within. (weinterrupt.com)

Well, Welcome Back!

No, brothers and sisters, I haven't given up blogging. Nor have I just been remiss about posting. No . . . I, or should I say my computer, has fallen victim to a pretty vicious virus. This sucker--I forget the name of the damn thing--shut down everything. Not a single program would run--Internet? Forget it. MS Office? Nope. First gone: the anti-virus program. Nothing, but nothing would run. Big ole banner on the screen telling me I had infected files. Previously a program "scanned" the computer and reported I had 38 infected files, but . . . and here's a surprise . . . for only $59.95 I could buy a program to make my computer all well again. Well, shit! no way. Truth is, it cost me more than that to have this miserable thing scrubbed from my computer. Geeks at the repair place said the whole purpose of this virus is to steal your money, i.e., get your credit card number. Guy also told me that 1 out of 1,000 will actually give these people a credit card number. Proof positive that you cannot go broke betting on the idiocy of some people.

But think for a moment about the scabrous lowlifes who produce these viruses. What kind of creep deliberately breaks the stuff of millions of people he doesn't even know? It is a great evil that these people do. Utterly despicable when you think about it. But nobody does. These evil people doing these evil things on the Internet are just part of the deal. Like lies from politicians, hypocrisy from the clergy, self-righteousness from the right and left. Gives me a frigging headache.

Related articles

• Remove Spyware Perfect - How To perform a Spyware Perfect Removal ... (spywareremovalprogram.net)

At the Berkeley Free Speech Cafe

Neat poem with nice kicker. 

       At the Berkeley Free Speech Cafe

                    by Thomas R. Moore

The students are seated,

one to a table,

at tables for two,

ears wired,

laptops humming,

cell phones buzzing,

fingers texting,

iPods thumping,

toes drumming,

email flashing,

lattés cooling,

textbooks open,

reading for an exam

in Issues in Contemporary Culture 102.

And Now the Nopes

Continuing from yesterday with the same source, here's a list of predictions of science fiction writers for 2010 that did not come to pass. Just as an aside, you could probably list 100 things here. These guys are wrong more than they're right.

• Flying cars--possible technically, but not socially
• A Moon base (supposed to have this before the turn of the century or a couple of years later. The new target date for such a base is now 2069. I'll be 126 years old then, so I don't think I'll be around to see it.)
• Anti-ageing pills (I'm not sure I would want to take them, if they existed. Little teeny repair robots courtesy of nanotechnology may be coming, but would you trust them messing around in your aorta?)
• Trips to Jupiter (a long way off, at best)
• Nuclear holocaust (This is the one I'm most happy about seeing on the list. The possibility of a general exchange of these weapons between the forces of light (USA) and the forces of darkness (USSR) is no longer with us, but now we have to be concerned about little gaggles of madmen [and women] terrorists who are itching to get hold of a nuke. And then use it.)
• Virtual reality (We're a long way from Neuromancer.)
• AI robot butlers and self-driving cars (Would be nice, don't you think?)
• Computer overlords (no apparent danger of this for a long, long time. Humans will probably make the planet uninhabitable before something like this comes to pass. But maybe if not, the world will be perfectly habitable for them.)
• Commercial supersonic air travel (My God! Can you imagine the airport and security hassles that this would cause? Actually we had this at one time--the Concorde. But the return of such elegant, hyper expensive birds is to say the least, not likely soon.)
• Cheap, clean, unlimited energy (" Nikola Tesla’s dream of free and unlimited electricity seems even more impossible today than when he first proposed it in the early 20th century. Many of the wars on this small blue marble we call home are in large or small part over energy resources. Global climate change is intrinsically linked to the ways in which we produce energy. Whether it’s gas for your car or electricity for your house, we all spend a lot of money on energy. A limitless, non-polluting, inexpensive (or even free) energy source could completely transform humanity, taking us out of the energy dark age we live in now, and leading to a true peace on Earth and good will between all mankind. That’s my wintertime wish for the future. Do you have one?")

Yeah, I have one. World peace. If we did not spend such staggering amounts of money devising ways to kill fellow human beings, resources would be ample to hurry a lot of these unfulfilled predictions into reality.

Related articles

• The Greatest Inventions Nikola Tesla Never Created [Io9 Flashback] (io9.com)
• 3 reviews of Nikola Tesla (rateitall.com)

Yeps . . .

This is the time of year for predictions. (And resolutions.) I ran across this article on Newsvine, and I thought it was interesting. Two lists: 10 things that science fiction predicted would happen that did and 10 things that science fiction predicted would happen that didn't. First the YEPS . . . did happen.

• Airport x-ray scanners (And you know what an advance I think these are.)
• Video phones
• Alien life (Yes, I did a double take too . . . but what we're talking about here is a life form that's not carbon based, i.e., "a microbial life form that thrives on arsenic.")
• 3D TVs (I'm not rushing out to get one.)
•  Big Brother (Everybody's business is public, thanks to the Internet. This is not exactly Orwellian, but it's scary enough.)
• Telepathy "Got a mobile phone and Bluetooth headset? Then you’re a telepath. Stay with me on this one. Telepathy is the ability to broadcast your thoughts across small or great distances to another persons mind instantaneously, seemingly without using your normal senses. With a wireless headset you can send thoughts (through speech) to anyone in the world almost instantaneously. Implant the headset behind your ears and mic at your throat, learn how to sub-vocalize (speaking with only your throat) and no one around you would hear. For all intents and purposes, telepathy. It makes me wonder if all of the crazy people wondering the streets muttering to themselves aren’t just early adopters." (a stretch)
• A permanent space station
• Tablet computers (Apparently, if my daughter and her family are any indication, as addicting as smart phones, too.)
• The Web ("2010 has seen the widespread deployment of some important new technologies that will fundamentally change the way you view the Internet’s most popular offspring. “Web 2.0″ was really just a marketing ploy compared to how HTML5, CSS3, and the new web typography are shaking things up.")
• Cyber Wars (Information warfare is a reality . . . but presently pretty hidden.)

Tomorrow, the NOPES. . . didn't happen. Happy New Year, everybody!

Google's Maw

Google is devouring everything in sight. I have to be frank with you. I have had a love affair with Google for a long, long time. Back when there was actually a competition among various search engines as to who was going to be the best, the king of the hill, I discovered this engine called Google that seemed to do it better than anyone else. I don't know how long Google's been around now, but whenever they started on the Web, that's when I started using their search engine. (Here's a short piece on the most popular searches on Google for 2010).

There is a lot of water under the bridge since then. Google has become a vast empire on the Internet. I have a whole folder in my bookmarks devoted to Google, and I habitually use any number of them: Gmail, the calendar, Google news--every day. Google books and scholar are great boons for my research. Both have come in real handy there. I also use Google maps frequently and of course, YouTube. Less frequently I use Google Earth, Notebook, and Documents. And Google Reader (for blogs and other things like The New York Review of Books.)

Now comes news that Google's got an e-reader. Why not? Google's got everything else. Obviously this thing is out there to compete with Amazon's Kindle, which at present dominates the e-reader market. I've got one of those myself. You'll never guess what? Google's e-books--you can read on just about anything: the iPad, iPhone, Android-driven devices, the Web itself, as well as the Nook and Sony e-readers. The only thing it won't work on is . . . the Kindle. The e-book wars are going to be real interesting over the next year or so. I'm anxious to see how Amazon reacts to this direct and very potent threat. Google's maw is huge . . . it swallows up almost all before it. Which is a bothersome thing. But that's a whole 'nother post.

Related articles

• Google Opens Doors to E-Bookstore (nytimes.com)
• Is Google leading an e-book revolution? (salon.com)
• 10 Best Technologies of 2010 (fool.com)

Chromatic

My daughter has been using Google Chrome for browsing the Web for some time now. I have resisted. I was more or less married to the Firefox browser because it was eminently customizable. All kinds of bells and whistles that you could hang on it to accomplish various tasks and personalize the tool for your own tastes. But then, about a month ago or six weeks ago, it started slowing up. Whether it was because of something I had added (I experimented removing stuff without too much success) or whether it was something inherent in the browser itself, I know not. What I do know is that it became intolerable to use and I had to make a switch. So I have switched to Chrome--I never for a minute considered Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which I still consider a clunker in the browser wars, and I'm not looking back. I had, of course, seen Chrome when it first came out, but in its initial iteration it lacked essential features that Firefox had: a bookmark bar for fast access to oft-used web sites, for example, and customization tools. Plus extensions, which are graft-on programs for the browser that allow enhanced operations. (I've got one on Chrome that lets me check my Gmail and perform various operations there without leaving the browser, for example.)

Well, it doesn't take Google long to get things figured out. Chrome has all of these things now, and it is much, much faster than any other browser out there. How fast? Well, check this out. And it's pretty cool on top of it:

Delicious

My son alerted me to this site the other day.* Actually, I knew about this site before. I say I knew, meaning I had once encountered the site and thought it was worth keeping for future reference. Which reminds me about the mega-URL saver site, delicious. It a so-called "social networking bookmark" site, but I've never used anything but my own bookmarks.** Delicious used to be called by the same name but it was broken up by several periods: de.li.cio.us. I'm not sure that's right and I'm pretty sure nobody else could ever remember where to put the damn periods, so they finally decided to render it plainly so normal humans could deal with it.

Delicious is there in case you need it. A lot, most, of the links I use all the time are more handy. They are on toolbars or in readily accessible folders. Which sites do you most frequent? I mean after Google. I'm sure almost everybody must use Google more than anything else, that is unless you're a truly independent cuss and don't use Google to search with. And your email site, of course. For me, it would probably be this blog site. One of these days, I'll take the time to find out what the actual tally is.

But to the point, delicious holds for me a treasure of places I might need sometime. Believe it or not, over the years, I've consulted with my delicious bookmark collection probably four or five times a year. It's another one of those "tar baby" places. Get stuck in there and you might not ever get out. Case in point: I just went and checked when I made my first entry into delicious. It was April 10, 2005. And here it is . . . well, hell. That site is busted. Probably gone. Next one up the list did come up: a heavy academic type research site. Whaddaya know? The first site did indeed come up upon the second try. Here's another random site from Baysage's delicious collection. Fun!

How do you handle your bookmarks? How many do you have? Do you use delicious or something like it? IMWTK.

*Not a bad site at all. If you're interested in tracking the lies and truths that emanate from the mouths of politicians, this is an excellent place to do it.


**I've got quite a few of them after saving them for several years now. 1,257 to be exact. You can find another link to delicious and my bookmarks there right here on Powderfinger. Look down under the labels. Apropos of nothing, I wonder how many people play around with the stuff on the right-side column? I occasionally play around with such things on other people's blogs is the reason I'm wondering.

Here's the Buzz

OK. I confess. I'm a Googlehead. If Google did it, I'm odds-on favorite to like it. And use whatever it is we're talking about. I should say that these comments apply to Google software, not hardware like phones.

But I do use a lot of Google stuff, some of it every day like: Blogger, the search engine (every day, all day)--an aside: I discovered Google search long before the rest of the world did, and it was damn good even way back then--the calendar, Gmail, News, and You Tube. Stuff I use at least once a week: Google movie (features and show times for theaters near me), maps, language tools (the translator),  Google groups, and notebook. And now Buzz (see below). Plus I regularly use Google Earth--did you know you can look at the sky from any point on the globe with Google Earth? And that there are such things as Google Moon and Google Mars?--Picassa, and several specialized searchers: desktop, books, scholar (journal articles). I can say without equivocation that Google is the best that has happened for scholars and research in the past 25 years. When I was in grad school computers and all their everyday wonders of now were still years in the future. We actually had to find things in big ole reference books and card catalogs and in printed bibliographies. And we historians had to go to libraries to view primary sources in manuscript collections. A ton of this research can now be accomplished on your home computer.

But all this is just a prelude to some comments on the newest Google thing out there: Buzz. Which is Google's answer to the other social networking tools: Twitter, Facebook, and MyPage. It's only been around for about a week, and heavy hitters are lining up behind it. Apparently, after 7 days, Buzz has users numbering about a quarter of Facebook's. That would be a about 100 million users, brothers & sisters.

And why this swift acceptance? Well, because Buzz integrates right into the vastly used Gmail. No muss, no fuss. Without actually being obtrusive, Buzz is right there in your face all the time. Plus it's got all the slick tools that FB does: you can include photos, maps, URLs, video, etc. There were some privacy concerns upon the rollout--here's a New York Times piece about that--but Google moved promptly to meet the complaints, and now is just paused for a period of steady growth.

I might have some more to say about this later after I get a feel for it. Meantime, the official Google Buzz site is here. Check it out.

Well . . .

. . . where have you been, you might be asking yourself if you're one of my nine or ten regular readers. I have two reasons to report, one more or less unavoidable, the other avoidable, but not really. You know about it already. I just finished telling you all about the Great American Fantasy League on Thursday. Well, yesterday, Saturday, virtually all day long was taken up with this game. I didn't really have a grasp of the scope of its complexities until I spent all those hours to play a nine-inning game. True enough, it was a wild game (which the Rangers lost, of course, 11-7 in the ninth because pitching fell apart), but my instructor was thorough, and, I have to confess, sometimes  . . . well, a bit too thorough. Plus he tended to editorialize, so the lesson probably stretched out longer than it might have. Worse, I still don't think I've got a real great handle on how to play yet.

The second problem was with technology. The other day being at my most careful to transfer my wife's printer from the top of the dryer where it spent Christmas season, I dropped it to the floor. So long faithful printer. The replacement, a spiffy new wireless printer from HP, arrived last Thursday, way before I thought it would get here, and I spent 4-plus hours trying to get the damn thing configured for this computer. My frustration level was high, and of course I stewed about the problem even when I wasn't in the same room with it. It did not get to working properly till late this afternoon when my son-in-law, an expert in these matters, came over and worked very fast magic on it. I'm happy to report that everything seems to be fine now. The new printer is an HP Photosmart Plus B209. It's slick. Wireless--that's a miracle right there. Plus printer and scanner. Amazes me the kind of sophisticated stuff you can buy for $150. Hi tech stuff for computers and including computers is about all that's gotten better and cheaper over the years. Everything else has gone the other way on both counts.

Look, Ma. No Mouse.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

As you know, if you're one of my 10 or so more or less regular readers, I like gadgets and technology. I just came across this video in my swing through Facebook a little while ago and was sufficiently impressed to put it up here for you watch, too. If, like me, you can foresee a future of a lot of hours in front of your computer, than anything that will make your time there more productive and easier deserves your attention. Hence 10 GUI, which has convinced me that this is something with a future. I saw similar sorts of GUIs demonstrated at Microsoft University in Redmond, WA, a few years ago, back when I was still employed, or should I say, before my glorious and blessed retirement from the work force and transport to the land of do-what-you-want-with-no-boss-to-stop-you. If you're interested in computers at all, the eight minutes of the video will be worth it for you.

Raining Spears

It's been raining big spears on us for the past couple of days--points down. It all started on the trip back home to Oklahoma from the funeral in Baton Rouge. The plan was to avoid the running sore that is Dallas and take the blue highways through Oklahoma back home. Great idea until we got to Atoka, OK. Sounds like a speed trap, doesn't it? Well, it was, and the ticket for "72 in a 55" cost me--are you sitting down?--$241 frigging bucks!! The cop was polite, and I knew the minute I saw him, we were doomed. No mercy: he could plainly see a couple of geezers in the car, but that didn't stop him from writing us up. It's obvious this is Atoka's sole source of income. And it occurred to me that this cop got paid out of the same pot that these outrageous fines go into. There's a conflict of interest here somewhere.

But this is just the first in a series of disasters to befall us in the past three days. Next thing was my discovery on Saturday, that the battery in the car was dead as Franco and had to be replaced. Which in turn required my going to the Mart of Darkness, and worse, hanging around for almost 2 hours in the hideous place until the car got fixed. More money for this.

There's more: my iPod has crapped out. I don't know if it will be worth fixing. It's got some kind of hardware problem. Will not play after being turned on. Sad, sad face. I use my iPod a lot. I will have to be repaired or replaced.

There's more: the microwave oven in the kitchen has also crapped out. My wife says she overcooked an egg in there, and after that happened, the thing would make this awful noise whenever the door on the microwave was shut. When the noise stopped . . . eventually after I gave it a couple of hits with my fist, no more heating. Let me make this observation right now: modern man cannot live without a microwave. Susan says she would give up just about every other appliance before the microwave. Yet another costly problem staring at us. Guy is coming tomorrow to fix it, we hope. Maybe it will be something simple and cheap.

Against all these disasters, Susan leaving her phone charger in Baton Rouge and being without a phone since we got back . . . well, this is just a very minor annoyance.