Stuff

My son and his gang of hooligans went dumpster diving at Peter Bosco school yesterday and came away with a whole bunch of treasures. One of these treasures was a pristine oversize globe, or at least it was pristine until John drop kicked it down a flight of stairs by accident. It is actually still in pretty good condition. If you look close there are a couple of damaged areas, but hey, it was in the trash.

I have a big pile of stuff here I should get rid of. Stuff that works, that I am not using, that is taking up space and should be worth some small amount of money. Some of it I could give to Goodwill, but some of it is stuff that Goodwill won't take, mostly of a technical or mechanical nature. If I was really strapped for cash, I would expend the effort to take some pictures, post them on Craig's list, answer the phone and/or e-mail, wait for potential buyers to show up, and negotiate the sale when they actually did come by. It isn't difficult, but it is time consuming, and I wonder if it will actually be worth the effort. Guess this means I'm lazy. But it also explains why the globe ended up in the dumpster.

Update September 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Books: Generation Warriors

I finally finished "Generation Warriors" by Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Moon today. I read "Sassinak" by the same people a while back and I really enjoyed it so I went looking for a sequel and found there were a couple stories that preceded this one. I happened to remember that when I stopped in a book shop in Seattle some months ago and managed to pick up the rest of the series. This book marks my completion of the series and am I glad. None of the other books was as good as "Sassinak". Although Sassinak comes in the middle of the series, I think it was the last one written. I stopped in at Powell's a week or so ago and I noticed that Elizabeth Moon has a whole bookcase devoted to her books, so I am thinking that maybe it is Elizabeth Moon's writing that appeals to me and not Anne McCaffrey so much. I have to admit that this "Dinosaur Planet" series was written some time ago. My paperback copyright is 1991. Now wait a minute, the cover says the authors are "Anne McCaffrey & Elizabeth Moon" but the title page says "Anne McCaffrey & Jody Lynn Nye". What's going on here?

Some time ago I put together a Google spreadsheet to keep track of the books I have read and the movies I have seen. Then I came across Google Books, and I started entering my books there. Neither one seems to work very well. The spread sheet is good for data, but not very good for extended comments. Google books is good for everything except that it does not have a method for presenting the data in a list.

Kubuntu Install

I have finally gotten around to setting up some of my other computers. I plugged this one in and installed Kubuntu this afternoon. Had to run over to Iguana Micro to pick up some ethernet cables so I could hook up more than one computer. Everything seems to be working okay, except this keyboard, which is from an old E-machines systems. I picked it because of all the keyboards I have, the layout on this one is most similar to the one on the Dell keyboard I have been using. Most of the differences are inconsequential, but the backspace key on some of the others is half the size of this one. Problem is it keeps dropping characters. Typing really hard seems to alleviate the problem, but I don't think I want to keep doing that. On the other hand, maybe it's simply because this keyboard hasn't been used for a while. Maybe it's just that the contacts are dirty. We shall see.

The g-mail display is different here as well. Kind of surprised by that. I would have thought that html was html. But then I heard that Microsoft changed something to make Firefox incompatible, and Firefox has been crashing on my XP system lately. So maybe I will just keep using this one, but my fingers are getting tired.

Of course, when I tried to add the Iguana Micro link to this post, the Linux web browser (Konqueror)crashed, so I thought I would try good ol' Firefox. I was able to download it, but install, well, all the pieces are on the disk, but that seems to be as far as it will let me go without the secret handshake. So now I'm back on my old XP system and it's working fine, so far.

Plugging the video cable into the other box required using a DVI-to-VGA adaptor. I imagine there is some reason for this, but right now it's just an annoyance. The little thumbscrews don't want to turn and I want them tightened down because I don't want the video cable falling out because the adaptor came loose. Naturally I don't have a tiny slotted screwdriver handy, but wait, what do we have here? An X-acto knife with the blade reversed. The tip is stuck in the collet and the square end (the mounting end) of the blade is exposed. I do this to protect the tip and to keep from slicing my fingers. But the square end should work as a screwdriver, and it does. Actually works pretty well. Thin wide blade fits easily in the slot and doesn't slip out. Can't make more than half a turn at a time, but it is easy find the slot again. I like this.


The sex of the connectors on this adaptor are wrong. I included this picture because it shows what the VGA end of the cable should look like, and what the DVI socket on the computer looks like. The previous picture (with the pins showing) does not really show enough detail.

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.

Pictures & Politics on the Internet

I originally used this picture in a post I made last month, but then the web site where I found it replaced it with a political statement. This is the second time in the last week that I have had a picture I used in my blog replaced with something else. Well, this is the second one I have noticed. Who knows how many others have been changed?

So once again I went to the internet archive and found the original photo. This time I noticed something a little odd. If you look in the shadow cast by the mule you will see what looks like some white zigzags. Turns out it's a watermark: www.pomapata.com. If you look closely you make out some of the rest of it going across the picture. It just happens to start in the donkey's shadow. Never noticed it before. In any case I downloaded the picture before I inserted it, so pomapata.com won't be able to change it out from under me anymore. However, clicking on the picture will now take you to their web page instead of just to their picture.

Update December 2016 replaced missing picture. Did not keep the link.

Renaissance Man

It used to be that a fairly smart person could know just about everything there was to know about science and technology. Such a person was called a "Renaissance Man", as least to my way of thinking. I never looked up the definition, but that was the impression I gathered. I don't know why they were called "Renaissance Men", instead of just really smart people who knew everything except, well, it's considerably shorter. There is also the bit about being a "know-it-all", which is more of a personality flaw than having anything to do with how much actual knowledge one had accumulated. And let's not forget that the term was Renaissance Man because back in those days women didn't count.

I think that impression stuck with me until about twenty years ago when I began to suspect that the total accumulated knowledge of the human race was more than one person could handle. Note only that, but knowledge was increasing at an exponential rate. Now it could be that I was just a naive youngster, and the actual amount real knowledge available to the human race has been more than one person could handle for thousands of years.

Just to be clear, I am talking about real scientific knowledge. Not the day to day minutiae of people's lives. Every minute of every day people produce more gossip than anyone can handle, but fortunately, gossip has a half life of about 30 seconds, so after a day it just so much heat energy being dissipated into space.

And there is another thing about knowledge. There is knowledge in books and there is knowledge in people's minds. Information stored in books is good. Printing multiple copies of books and passing them around is a good way to disseminate information (whether you do it with paper and ink or magnetic dipoles, electrons and phosphorescent particles is immaterial). But it is only when that information has been been absorbed by a person's mind and integrated with the knowledge that they already have that it becomes useful. So part of the exponential growth in knowledge is because of our increasing population and the generally increasing level of education.

Another part is the growth of the internet. For the last several hundred years, people have been establishing trade routes across the globe and devising ever more efficient ways of moving goods. You could look at these trade routes as blood vessels of the human organism. Over the last hundred years or so we have been developing electronic communications. This can be likened to the growth of nerve fibers in developing organism. So are we all part of Gaia? Or are we becoming a new form of multi-bodied life? Or perhaps as Agent Smith in "The Matrix" put it, we are a cancer on the face of the earth?

Protestant Work Ethic

I just had a revelation! The Protestant Work Ethic is what got us where we are. It is not so much that working is good, and it produces useful things, but that it takes up people's time and energy so they aren't inclined to go out making trouble, which is their natural inclination.

Disk Death

My daughter's computer bit the big one the other day: great big Blue Screen Of Death. It restarted well enough, but bad things kept happening. So I pulled the hard drive out and copied all her pictures off to my external backup disk. I think we got everything she needed.

Now that I have her disk hooked to my machine, I want to run some tests to see if I can figure out what is wrong here. I run scandisk, including search for bad sectors, but it does not find anything. One of the security programs complains about some kind of bogus boot record, but we aren't booting from this disk right now, so that should not be a problem.

Okay, I did not actually run scandisk. That must be my ancient history showing. I don't know what they call it now. On Windows XP, which is what I am using this week:

• Open "My Computer".
• Right click on the drive in question. A menu should pop up.
• Select "Properties", which should be the last item at the bottom. This will give you a tabbed dialog box.
• Select the "Tools" tab. There should be two boxes displayed. The upper one will be labeled "Error-checking".
• Click the button labeled "Check Now ...".

Properties says the disk is almost full, and that's not good, so I start looking for things I can delete. I add up the sizes of all the directories and files in the root and it comes to 22GB, 15GB less than the capacity of this drive. Where did the 15GB go? I use Google to look for a program to fix this problem. I download two or three and try them out. They can do this, that and the other, but none of them is even as good as scandisk at finding problems. Run scandisk again, still no problems.

But now the noise this disk is making is getting to be annoying so I turn it off. It is a very high pitched, loud, whine. Could it be a bearing going bad? I have all the important stuff off this disk, so I could reformat it and reload it, but it would be my luck that just about the time we got all the new software reinstalled, the bearing would crater and that would be end of that disk. I wonder if bearings can be replaced? I am sure it would not be practical, this disk is only 40GB, and you can buy a new one for $45, but I wonder what it would take. I am sure there is someone out there who has done this.

It's a moot point, really. She has graduated from High School and will be going to college in the fall, and all college students need a laptop, right? So I'll probably be buying her MacBook sometime in the near future. Meanwhile I have too many computers, I need to sell some. Anyone need an aged Dell with a noisy hard disk?

Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.