BWare : The swimmers the dolphins push away from shore don't live to tell the tale

Plate of shrimp

I was literally just thinking I hadn’t had a flat in a long time. As I pulled away from the intersection, my tire was completely flat. One second full, the next empty.

There’s one in every car, you’ll see.

2014 10 23 Brent Bicycle
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Like the local hardware stores (ahem, Berg Hardware Store – good riddance), the local bike shops are going to drive themselves out of business. They don’t even need online stores to do it, but that’ll help.

Steve’s $75 tune-up cost me a $300 wheel-rebuild. He ripped three spokes out of the rim overtightening them. Oh yeah, I bought another set of wheels to use during the two weeks it was going to take to get the parts in and get it rebuilt, so that’s another $350. At least Incycle threw in the tires.

Helen’s Arcadia wasted a week and two trips not tuning-up my bike. I called to see if it was ready after a week, they said yes, then when I got there, they told me they hadn’t had time to work on it. At least that only cost me a week on the bike and three hours going back and forth. Well, then another two trips someplace else getting it tuned up. But then I guess it was still cheaper than Steve’s.

Today, I went to Pasadena Cyclery to see if they had a bike seat, and the fellows behind the counter, who were doing nothing except popping bubble wrap from a new UPS box, got into an argument about who was going to have to help me. I walked out while they were hashing it out.

The guy at Incycle at least knocked off 15% for a three year old seat that might or might not fit… I get a week to try it.

I also bought some new tools to do the work on my bike myself. I used to do this all the time when I was student. It’s not difficult, just time-consuming. I’d rather pay someone else to do it. But given the last three experiences with letting someone else work on it, I’d be better off putting the drive time and money into doing it myself again.

2014 10 17 Brent Bicycle
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Steve Jobs calls his shot

He told them what he was going to do, and how he was going to do it.

Oh, wait, that’s the Babe calling his shot. Here’s SJ in 2007, calling his shot:

SJ took Alan Kay’s dictum seriously, unlike Microsoft, and Dell.

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

And ahem, Samsung. “Samsung Electronics forecasts 60% fall in quarterly profit”, if you don’t want to drill down. But you should read this, the next time someone starts talking about “market share.” And remember Dell, and Gateway, and IBM…

Google and Amazon are trying, but they have big mountains to climb.

The opposite can apply too – witness Nikon, Canon, Sony. Basically any camera or TV manufacturer. Good hardware, crappy software.

Interestingly enough, Kay also said this:

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn’t think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years.

Which is interesting, considering this.

2014 10 17 Brent Comment Comments Off Permalink

Kitten eating potato chips out of a bag

What it says on the tin:

2014 10 09 Brent Photography
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We are doomed

I work with a bunch of really computer literate smart guys. Advanced degrees from well-respected universities with TLAs for names, program FPGAs, get poached by Wall Street regularly. Literally computer rocket scientists.

Yet it is not uncommon for them to email me saying “Username xxxxx/password yyyyy doesn’t work anymore. Can you reset it?” And most of the time it isn’t a problem with the authentication, it’s something else.

So these brain surgeon computer scientists just sent their username and password in the clear over unsecure, unencrypted email. How do we expect your grandmother, or any J Random User to do better than these guys (and they’re all guys), who should have a pretty good understanding of computer security?

It’s hopeless.

2014 10 09 Brent Rant Comments Off Permalink

Harvest moon

I listened to Neil Young exactly once, Spotify. Once! Otherwise, I’ve only used Spotify to listen to new music incessantly, looking for the next Mountain Goats or Best Coast or National or or or anyone from this millenium. Anything new.

So why is it that every notification I get is about Neil Young or CSNY or some other 60s band? And it was new Neil Young! I just wanted to see if his new album matched up to some of his brilliant latter work (it didn’t).

I’m pretty sure there was Seinfeld episode about this… except it was Tivo. And sadly, that was in the 90s, 20 years and a previous millenium ago, and still, predicting human likes and needs seems not to have improved.

2014 10 07 Brent Rant Comments Off Permalink

Seven years

I bought two pairs of these bike gloves on Steap and Cheap in September 2007, $28, after my former Olympian bike racer friend convinced me it wasn’t sissy to ride with gloves:

“It’s not for padding,” she said. “It’s for the inevitable road rash. You want to be able to use your hands to change the bandages on the rest of you.” [1]

I ride my bike 10 miles per day, 9 days every two weeks, every day that it doesn’t rain or that I’m not sick or on vacation, so about 2000 miles per year. That’s 14000 miles on those gloves.

I would have changed them out about a year ago, but I stoner-stashed them in a box in the garage and only just found them yesterday! I was also too damn cheap to buy a new pair when I knew that I had a pair in the garage.

[1] Crashes are also the reason to shave your legs, but it took me a while longer to get around to that. I’m not racing anyone, so wind tunnel results don’t matter much to me.

2014 09 27 Brent Bicycle Comments Off Permalink

Nothing will happen

The head of the CIA, a position that requires Senate approval, declines to answer questions from the Senate about his agency’s spying on the Senate.

Yet subpoenas will not be issued, contempt citations not issued, the sergeant-at-arms not called, U.S. Marshalls not sent to compel attendence at hearings.

Laws will not be passed, funding will not be cut to the agencies that refuse to allow oversight.

The CIA will continue to be incompetent in discerning the intentions of our enemies, e.g., gobsmacked by ISIL, but very competent in having blackmail information on members of Congress, which is all that matters.

In other news, the big plan is to arm Syrian rebels to fight ISIS. This should go well. About as well as training the Iraqi army, and arming them.

2014 09 12 Brent Rant Comments Off Permalink

Blink tags

If you’re using CSS to write one of these way cool Medium-like pages that takes 10 seconds to load after you click on the URL while it’s doing all it’s CSS stuff, or makes you have to figure out how to scroll down, or disables the space key, or waits to load until I’ve scrolled down, you suck and you’re doing it wrong.

It’s the modern equivalent of the blink tag. It’s annoying for no reason, and it slows everything down, and it will get you an command-W quicker than you can load the page.

2014 09 10 Brent Rant Comments Off Permalink

Invisible hand

For years, airlines have been shrinking seats, and the space between seats, to the point where even reasonable people can't stand it anymore. Flights are being diverted because people are arguing over leaning the seats back. Three times in a week.

This is just the free market at work. Airlines try to maximize profit by squeezing more people into smaller spaces, and now they'll have to eat the costs of diverting flights because they've gone too far.

It sucks to be the people who are going to get fined $$$, but hopefully that money won't go to the airlines, and some accountant somewhere will do the math and conclude that x diverted flights are more expensive than n more passengers, and ease back on the ridiculous cabin crowding.

2014 09 02 Brent Comment Comments Off Permalink

And again

There’s a building in Utah that holds exabytes of data at a cost of $1.5B.

Yet the NSA seems to be befuddled by ISIS.

Possible explanations:

That’s not their primary mission.
They’re incompentent.
They’re too busy amassing information on politicians.

In any case, the solution is the same. Burn it down. Salt the earth. Ostracize anyone who has ever worked there.

2014 08 24 Brent Rant Comments Off Permalink

Failed again

It turns out that the US tried to rescue James Foley, but failed because their intelligence was bad.

Huh. Maybe the NSA should spend less time on spying on citizens, and more doing its actual job. At which it fails almost every time.

Or we could just burn it to the foundations, salt the earth at Langley, and cast into exile everyone who has ever worked there.

2014 08 22 Brent Rant Comments Off Permalink

In the bag

It used to be if, for whatever reason, I was short of poop bags for the dogs (brought N, needed N+1 for whatever number, including 0, meaning I forgot), I could walk one house in either direction and “borrow” one from a neighbor. Meaning, I’d take their newspaper out of the bag, put the newspaper on their porch, and “recycle” their plastic bag.

About a week ago, I was out of bags (actually I spaced out and didn’t bring any, a rare occurrence but it happens), and I walked almost all the way home, a couple of miles, past dozens of houses, without seeing a newspaper.

Which is a anecdotal observation of this:

Yeah, that corresponds about to my observation of when I stopped being able to rely on finding a plastic bag to recycle.

2014 08 22 Brent Because linking is an intrinsic good
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Monsters

Must read interview with Snowden by Bamford.

Addendum: Another reason why NPR will never get a dime from me. Dina Temple-Raston continues her Judith Miller-esque swallowing of the Deep State line. DTR presents talking points about Snowden from a completely CIA- and NSA-funded front company as though they were independent viewpoints, with no acknowledgement, or alternative source.

2014 08 13 Brent Because linking is an intrinsic good
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Pre-crime

It had to happen. Now we send people to jail, not for what they’ve done, but for what they might do in the future.

Unless of course you’re C-level at a too-big-too-fail bank. Then you can money-launder drug money, sell worthless mortgages, commit fraud, and not only get off scot-free to, utterly predictably (and not just because you live in the wrong zip code) do it again, but get a huge bonus as a result. Probably have politicians come to your house to seek your approval.

2014 08 11 Brent Rant Comments Off Permalink

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