The other night I had a dream. In that dream I had a truck, but it was the wrong kind of truck. So I changed its CSS.
Life in the Matrix
Reply
Author Archives: Jerry
Never Been So Close, Never Been So Far
In a few minutes the San Jose Sharks will take the ice in Pittsburgh. Their backs are against the wall, down 3-1 in the championship series. Winning the next three straight is… tough. The hardest of those three is tonight; so we’re all just sitting tight and pulling for a win.
The Sharks have never been in the final before. Never been this close to the big prize. In a league with 30 teams, championships come far apart, and who knows when the next chance will come. This year, right now, is their best chance to win it all. Next year, they have to beat all thirty teams all over again. Right now, there’s just one team between them and glory. They’ve never been so close.
But, dang, the Penguins have been playing really well since January. So have the Sharks, but for long stretches the Penguins have been clearly the better team on the ice. Three in a row against those guys is a huge mountain to climb.
Win this one though, and the series comes back home. That’s a winnable game, and it sets up a game for all the marbles in Pittsburgh, with the Sharks mojo running high. Storybook shit.
It’s been my longest hockey season ever, and I’m not ready for it to end.
1,000,003 Words!
It has happened. Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas has rolled over the odometer and has blasted well beyond the 1,000,003-word line. I decided to celebrate by taking the day off work to throw out a bit of a redesign here; the old code simply did not support some of the cool new WordPress features I’ve been wanting to leverage. A ground-up rebuild is long overdue.
Even when you start with a fairly clean off-the-shelf theme, however, a great deal of fiddling and tweaking ensues. Some of the old widgets, like the colorful tag cloud and the sweet-o-meter, seem to be awol right now, and I’m not sure about the typography for reading my longer-winded treatises.
Also missing, and a little more difficult to bring back, is the poetry feed that was playing in the header. I’d like to bring it back, but at this moment I’m not sure where to put it.
What do you think? Too dark? Please leave comments here on the blog, while I work on getting the styling of the comments on the blog looking right.
Later tonight, after the celebratory single malt, I will compose the Inevitable Retrospective Episode.
Strava vs. MapMyRide
One of the first decisions I made after choosing a bicycle was choosing an app. I did a search on the ol’ app store and found quite a few options, but only a few were what you might call “feature-rich”. Strava, the most popular app for bicyclists, did not appear in my search results for whatever reason, and I ended up choosing MapMyRide.
Later I heard about Strava — first from a comment on this very blog, and realized that most of the cyclists around me were using that service. Strava is especially popular among “serious” cyclists, which I’m really not, despite the miles I rack up.
There are, I’ve heard, people who ride bicycles without an app, if you can believe that. I find the app extremely valuable, from logging how well I did and guessing calories I burned (MapMyRide seems… optimistic in that regard) to totaling up my miles for my maintenance log. (Hint to both services – maintenance log would be sweet.)
When I got my Apple Watch I found that Strava has a a watch app but MapMyRide does not. It was time to try out the senior service, but I wasn’t ready to walk away from MMR quite yet. It’s about the data. In MMR’s database there are hundreds of my workouts – not just bike rides but walks and machine training as well. MapMyRide is part of a family of apps and Web sites that go under the general moniker MapMyFitness. MapMyWhatever started with MapMyRun, so its features aren’t terribly bike-centric. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
While I was interested in Strava, I was not about to abandon all that data. The obvious answer: use both for a while, and then choose the better service.
So I have been using both for quite some time now, and this episode is intended to compare and contrast the two services. The comparison is, of course, subjective, but I think I can be honest about where my subjectivity comes from.
Technology:
Strava wins hands-down. The core functionality of the two apps is similar — you push the start button when you begin riding, you push the stop button when you’re done. Both apps (and the corresponding Web sites) show how you did and draw your path on a map. Both apps have a lot of other features that are done better on the Web sites. It’s a fundamental law of human nature: time on task is inversely proportional to screen size.
Strava’s iPhone app just works better, and MapMyRide doesn’t even have a watch app. MMR’s app crashed my phone on a couple of rides, but that problem seems to have been fixed.
Technology doesn’t end with the app. While MapMyRide.com has a cool-but-useless feature that allows you to relive your ride in 3-D, Strava has a mind-blowing heat map that will show you where the locals ride, anywhere in the world. It’s great for finding the best route in unfamiliar terrain, and it’s great for city planners and those with a vested interest in improving bicycle infrastructure. And heck, it’s just fun to drift through. It’s awesome.
They sure do ride a lot of bikes in England.
Also Strava offers a “fly-by” feature. If you interact with someone on your route, or are merely curious about the guy who blew past you while you slogged up Homestead Ave, you can use the fly-by feature and if the person was using Strava and makes their data public you can see a little about them. (I have chosen not to share my data close to home, but the rest of my trip I have made public. It seems like a good compromise.)
Bike-centricity:
Strava. Strava is a bike service that now does running as well; MapMyRide is a running service that expanded to cover all fitness. This has echoes though both services. For you, bike-centric might be a plus, it might be a minus.
Web Site – General:
The phone apps gather the data, but it’s the Web site where you really dig in. I’m giving MapMyRide the nod here. The dashboard is what a dashboard should be, not just a list of events but a meaningful summary of your recent activity. When you look at a particular ride, you get the information you’re most likely interested in, in a simple-to-survey, color-enhanced display (were I red-green colorblind, I might not feel the same way). Overall, I think the information design is better at MMR.
Web Site – Social:
Both sites have ways for you to connect with other riders. I don’t use them. I ride alone, mo-fo’s. Though I am part of a group of Apple riders on Strava, and it does motivate me to be in the top ten for mileage each week. Last summer I could hang in there on weekdays, but I got blown away when the weekend warriors come out. I’m trying to get back up there again this month. But really, as a guy who’s no big fan of Facebook, I’m not qualified to judge this category.
Web Site – Performance:
Performance in this case means your performance. Both services offer a great deal of analytics to help you evaluate how your ride stacks up. The way the information is presented demonstrates the fundamental difference in thinking between the two services, and it probably defines which service is right for you.
Here’s the deal: Strava pits your best against everyone else’s best. MapMyRide compares you to your previous efforts, and rewards consistency.
Each service starts with a similar concept. Strava calls them “segments”, MapMyRide calls them “courses”. They are (usually) fairly short bits of your overall ride. The mighty servers in their air-conditioned warehouses recognize when you traverse a segment/course (hereafter, “bit”) and provide a wealth of analytics to compare you with everyone else who has ridden the same bit.
The analytics offered between the services are very different. Strava ranks your best performance on that bit with the best performance of everyone else. If you pay for premium service, you can filter those numbers so that you can measure yourself against people of your own gender and age. If you’re riding your bike to break records, then this is what you would want to see.
MapMyRide instead has a point system. Sure you get points for being fast, but you get even more points for being consistent. You might not be the fastest over that half-mile stretch of trail that month, or even the tenth-fastest, but if you do it day after day you will rise to the top of the rankings.
Here are a couple of screen shots, showing one small part of the data each gives. Both show data from my ride this morning. On the surface, Map My Ride shows much more. Each allows you to dig deeper into your performance on each bit. Map My Ride shows how you stack up using their points system (which greatly rewards riding the same course many times), while over at Strava the most important thing is how your best time stacks up against other riders’ best times.
Here’s a look at the top of the summary of my morning’s ride from Strava. At a glance, there’s not much information, but with a click one can dig deeper. On the right of the expanded section is my best time compared to the best times of everyone else. My other rides aren't really represented. But holy crap – how did I get in the top 10%? Now that I think about it, I don’t even think that’s right. So, that’s a bit of a problem.
Below are the first three bits of my ride summary from this morning on MapMyRide, comparing my times with my own past performance. I was not exactly fast this morning, but I’m slowly getting back to form. You can dig down into each of the courses in the list to see how you’re doing compared to others for speed and consistency. The default period for the comparison is this month.
The difference between Strava and MapMyRide might be summarized as performance vs. health. The MapMyFitness family is about habits, about getting out there every day and doing what has to be done. Strava is about the result of that fitness regimen, that one day when you fly over the hill and bank a great time. They both have their merit.
Missing from both (as far as I can tell):
I want to have my own, private, way to stack overall commutes and chart my progress, without creating a route that is visible to the public. I want it to be a little flexible so if I take a different zig through the cemetery or a zag through Santa Clara it will still be in the comparison.
As mentioned above, a maintenance log integrated with the service would be awesome, and would provide ample selling opportunities. “Hey, that’s a lot of miles on your chain…”
Web Site – Promotions:
MapMyRide has better promotions with better free stuff.
Data Freedom
I won a premium membership in a MapMyRide promotion, otherwise my data would be hostage to that service. Dicks. Strava acknowledges that my data is mine. This is actually a big deal.
Use of Spaces
Ugh. I wrote this whole episode with words separated by spaces – “Map My Ride” and whatnot. But their own copy smushes the words together, so I went back and applied a global-smush algorithm.
Conclusion
Are you a plodder? An everyday grind kind of person hoping to maybe get stronger but mainly getting from place to place and burning a few extra calories in the process? Perhaps you’re trying to lose weight, and the most important measure is whether or not you’re doing what needs to be done. Then MapMyRide is for you.
Are you a competitor? When you get on your bike is your primary goal to kick ass? Then probably Strava is for you.
Personally, I’ve managed to get into the top 66% on most of my Strava segments (ignoring the clearly incorrect reading I’ve discovered lately). I’m right around the bottom third. On a couple of odd backwater segments, I’m actually way up there. If I were to pay for a premium membership I could see how I stack up against other 50-year-olds, but in all likelihood the results would be more depressing, since my main excuse for slowness will be stripped away, so honestly I don’t want to know. MapMyRide, on the other hand, says, “Good job, Jerry, you got back out there and did it again today.” I don’t need to be best. I need to ride.
BUT — Today I chatted with a spandex-clad man on a fancy bike. A teacher, celebrating the first day of summer vacation. He even rode slowly enough to chat with me for a bit after the light changed. As soon as I got to work I fired up Strava and checked the fly-bys for my ride to see if he was there. Alas, he was not. But if I hadn’t been running Strava I would have been gnashing my teeth and rending my clothing over not being able to check. So I can’t ride without Strava anymore. I just can’t. You never know when you’ll run into an engineer from Tesla on your ride and want to follow him.
But the information provided by MapMyRide fits my style so much better. I have to use that.
For the foreseeable future, then, I’ll be using both.
Going All-Out for the Finals
We’ve applied a lot of science to ritual cannibalism in this house, trust me. It started a few seasons ago when we had roast duck for dinner on the first night of the season when the Sharks hosted the Anaheim Ducks. The duck didn’t turn out as well as it might have, and the Sharks lost. In the ensuing seasons, the duck has been ever-more delicious, and the Sharks have won the season opener against the rival Ducks by ever-more comfortable margins. Last year, after stuffing the duck with orange quarters, we shut them out. Orange county, you see.
The science of ritual cannibalism is, therefore, irrefutable. We eat the duck, we beat the Ducks.
This year, as the home team has progressed through the playoffs, we (and by ‘we’ I mostly mean the Official Sweetie of Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas) have explored the proper dishes required to vanquish ever-more-fearsome foes. For Nashville, whose fans throw catfish onto the ice, we ate catfish.
St. Louis was a little trickier: They are the Blues. How do you eat a musical style? We went with the color, which is slightly less tricky. We started with (yummy) Blueberry Crumble, but of course that didn’t work: we took their crumble, leaving them steadfast. We switched to a (delicious) blue cheese sauce on pork chops and never looked back.
Of course, there’s plenty of other Fan Science at work as well. Official Sweetie’s old-school Sharks t-shirt is banned from the living room at game time. When things aren’t going well, a glass of Canadian Whiskey will reverse our fortunes. The list goes on.
Pittsburgh has proven to be our greatest challenge yet. You don’t just pop down to Costco and grab a family-size tray of frozen penguin. Happily there are gummy penguins, and where there’s a will there’s a sauce.
For game one it was chicken (a flightless bird) with penguin sauce, and while it was most tasty, it was not effective. The Sharks started the game poorly, and though things stabilized after I turned to the whiskey it was too late. A heartbreak goal in the waning minutes sent our boys back to their hotel with heads bowed.
The menu for game two: Game hen with penguin sauce, with black and white rice. Really, really, tasty. Another close game; the whiskey brought the team back but they gave up a goal in overtime and were down in the series 2-0. Either game could have tilted the other direction, and while the Penguins seemed to be in charge much of the time they weren’t scoring very much. It wouldn’t take much to turn things around.
More research was required.
Thank goodness for the Internet. Sidney Crosby, the captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins and a darn good hockey player, is a man of ritual. On game day, he always has a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Aha! we had found the chink in his armor.
And speaking of science, pork chops are a proven winner. Forget the symbolism of the flightless birds; go with what works!
For game three tonight, we pulled out all the stops for victory. Pork chops grilled outdoors with a peanut butter and jelly and melted penguin sauce. Do not cringe, my friends, it was absolutely delicious. The char from the barbecue added the perfect bitter note to work with the sweet/salty sauce. Rice and grilled green beans rounded out the meal. I wore the black t-shirt, not the gray one. Canadian Whiskey, as always, stood at the ready.
We found out not long before game time that one of the Sharks’ best young players would not be playing due to injury. Tomaš Hertl had hit the iron frame of the net three times in the game two heartbreak; had any one of those three shouts bounced the other direction the Sharks could well have won. It was going to be up to the pork chops to make up for the critical loss for San Jose.
It was a nail-biter, I have to tell you, but in the end the good guys prevailed, scoring in overtime after steadily looking more confident all game. Joonas Donskoi, or “Donkey” as we call him, slipped a shot past the Pen’s excellent net minder as the home crowd made enough noise to be heard in space.
As we celebrated at home the Official Sweetie said, “I hope we have more pork chops.”
A Lifestyle Choice Pending
Assembling an iomega Mac Companion Enclosure
One of the big-ass hard drives we use for backup has started to make scary noises. Not the kind of sounds you want to hear from a drive that holds important data for our family and for a few of friends around the country as well. It was time to start looking for a replacement drive. One thing I wanted to do was have a clear upgrade: with the new setup I will not have to fear the catastrophic consequences of a single drive failing.
A note on levels of catastrophe: some might think that losing backup data is an inconvenience. In the same way you could think that losing the co-piolot of an airplane is an inconvenience. But with the backup compromised, risk of disaster has gone up exponentially. At Muddled Ramblings and Half-baked Ideas we take that shit seriously as we skulk in our secret bunker, buried deep beneath a trailer park next to a sprawling cemetery, ready for the Zombie Apocalypse to begin.
There are fancy enclosures that hold several drive units and use a variety of schemes that fall under the general acronym RAID to protect data from the failure of a single drive. Most of those enclosures have loud fans, and all of them cost a lot of money. Where does a cheap bastard go when he wants RAID 5, quiet and cheap? He buys a bunch of inexpensive but high-quality disks, puts them in inexpensive but high-quality quiet enclosures, and uses SoftRaid to turn them into a single virtual disk with reasonable protection from disaster.
After a little research, I found the right drives (Seagate bulletproof datacenter-rated blah blah blah) and the right enclosure: the iomega Mac Companion. What is great about this enclosure is that it has TWO firewire connectors, so you can daisy-chain them and connect many drives to a single firewire port on the host computer. Music to cheap-bastard ears, and not found on other enclosures at any price. Plus, you can buy them cheap on eBay in any quantity you might want, while supplies last.
There’s a catch, of course: iomega is defunct, and never officially sold this enclosure without a drive already installed. The packaging looks as though they might have been planning to sell empty enclosures, but the documentation (and even some of the text on the box) is clearly written with the assumption that the drive is already in there and everything is assembled.
So, you have packaging clearly designed to contain an empty, partially-disassembled hard drive enclosure, and instructions clearly for a pre-assembled unit. Weird. Perhaps some last, desperate attempt to sell an inventory of enclosures the company could no longer afford to fill. The only intern left to handle the packaging had no idea what to do about the instructions. We’ll never know the whole story.
But there’s a glut of quite capable hard drive enclosures out there now, and I bought some of them. As for assembly, there are no instructions. Not in the box, not online. You’re on your own, buddy. Until now! By my third enclosure, assembly was actually pretty easy. As a public service to anyone else who might have jumped on this deal, here are step-by-step instructions. You don’t have to thank me, it’s what I do.
Step 0: Survey the stuff.
When you open the box you will see parts in two groups: the top and the bottom. The bottom section includes the plastic base, the metal housing, and the circuit board, which is attached to the bottom of the aluminum inner shell. The top section has an aluminum inner shell top and the plastic lid for the enclosure.
Let’s take a moment to visualize the final product. A hard drive mechanism, inside a protective metal inner shell, inside a sturdy enclosure with lights on the front. With that in mind, we will be building from the middle out. (Yes, I thought of Silicon Valley when I wrote that.)
Step 1: Start by disassembling the bottom parts even further. Carefully pop the plastic base out of the outer metal housing, then slip the circuit board with inner shell off the plastic base. This is the step that took me three tries to learn. After this, everything is actually pretty obvious.
Step 2: Set the hard drive onto the white shield over the circuit board and slide it forward onto its connector.
Step 3: Slide the top inner shell over the drive unit with the little pigtail cable sticking out the slot in the side. At this point, you have something that looks like this:
Step 4: If you look at the picture, you will see a screw holding the drive in place. The enclosure does not include the screws, but they are a standard size. I’m not sure what size, because I had some in my hardware collection, but you can figure that part out. In fact, in the first drive I assembled, I didn’t use any screws at all. I resolve to not use that drive as a maraca, and all will be well. But if I had it to do all over again, I’d screw those bad boys down.
Step 5: Slip your well-shielded hard drive assembly back onto the plastic base. Fiddle with things until the connectors line up with the holes in the base.
Step 6: The circuit board on the end of that pigtail cable hanging out the side actually has four LED’s on it. The tiny circuit board fits into a slot in the plastic base. Note that there is a wee indentation in the board at one end; that part goes DOWN, where it seats neatly on a plastic fin:
Step 7: Now it’s time to put the outer metal housing on. There’s an odd plastic bit you set aside earlier with four little shafts sticking out. Those go into the holes in the front of the housing, and as you put the housing down over the plastic base the odd plastic bit will slide into the holder directly in front of the circuit board from step 6.
Step 8: At this point, everything is connected and should be functional. Before passing the following Point of Maybe-No Return, I plugged in each unit and made sure it spun up happily.
Step 9: Snap on the lid. You’re finished! Woo!
I have no idea how to remove the lid again; and hopefully I’ll never have to learn. Now I have a lot of room for data. Setting up my poor-man’s RAID will likely have to wait until next weekend, and hopefully will be simple enough that I don’t need to write a how-to. In the meantime, I hope this is helpful to those who find themselves with a question mark hovering over their heads as they stare at the parts they have just received.
It Feels Different this Year
I’m a hockey fan, and if you insist that I be more specific I will tell you that I’m a fan of the local NHL franchise, the San Jose Sharks. Almost every year this team makes it to the playoffs. Almost every year they exit early.
Which is mostly just math. Half the teams in the playoffs are eliminated in the first round. By the end of the second round, only four remain. So MOST of the teams that make the playoffs go home early. But you do that too many years in a row, you get a reputation. Even if you go home because of a bizarre bounce in an overtime that shouldn’t have happened except the ref blew a call with 33 seconds to go in regulation.
Right now San Jose is skating agains St. Louis in a titan battle of saints in which God must be careful not to take sides. Like Joseph, Louis has earned a reputation for early exits. One of the two will reach the finals.
Three games in, it’s pretty easy to see that my team is the better of the two. Nashville took it to San Jose a couple of times in the previous round, but the Sharks answered by playing really good hockey. That good hockey has carried into the semifinal round with the Blues.
The Blues deserve to be here. They are a very good team, and they beat powerhouse Dallas fair and square. They beat the Stars by beating on them, and getting under their skin, and making Dallas do stupid things. They came out against the Sharks with the same strategy — and it failed utterly. A dude friggin’ pulled Joe Thornton’s beard and the Sharks laughed it off and scored on the power play. The Sharks, under the leadership of captain Joe Pavelski, just don’t take the bait.
Last game, Newt Gingrich Ken Hitchcock pulled his bullies and agitators and tried to match the Sharks with speed and skill. For a while, it seemed to be working. But nobody plays Sharks hockey better than the Sharks do.
And there’s the thing. Some time around the start of 2016 Joe Thornton started backchecking with energy and the rest of the team stepped up and Burns stopped making stupidly overoptimistic passes and it feels different this year. This isn’t a team getting by, it’s a team offering both an unstoppable offense and a disciplined defense (3 shutouts in the last 4 playoff games) and exposing no weaknesses to exploit. A team like that can laugh when an agitator on the other side tries to lure them into mistakes. Even people on the East Coast are waking up to what a good team this is.
It feels different this year. The Sharks aren’t looking for answers, they aren’t looking for the weakness of the other team. They’re playing their game, and they’re doing it well. It’s up to their opponents to solve the Sharks, and so far none has. Man, it’s been fun to watch.
It’s sports, and anything can happen. I felt confident two years ago when the Sharks went up 3-0 on the Kings only to choke away the playoffs. But this year the Sharks handled the Kings pretty easily, and while Nashville gave them a run for their money the way the Sharks emerged from that series has carried over.
What’s different this year? Maybe the most important thing is the C on Pavelski’s sweater. But don’t forget Wardo, and Donkey, and Jones. Don’t forget old man Zubrus making the fourth line a disciplined unit and a legitimate threat. Hertl’s lovely slap shot to open the scoring last night is now a rarity; under the new management the Czech kid is expected to be a complete player, not just a sniper but a stout defender and a guy willing to mix it up down near the goal. He has embraced the role and thrives on the chaos around the net. “Now I go to net, get rebound and score. Is better.”
The team knows: this is their chance. The older players, Thornton and Marleau in particular, know that time is running out, and this year they’re playing like their legacies are on the line. The new kids are hungry, and skilled, but they are inheriting discipline from the old-timers. It really is a joy to watch. At this time they are still six wins from their first championship, but no matter what happens I thank the Sharks for making it different this year.
Could Someone Do a Quick Test for Me?
I wonder if any Microsoft IE/Edge browser users out there would mind taking five seconds to pop over to http://knives-the-novel.net and check the little red thermometer-thingie on the left. It should do an animation to show partial progress toward a goal. I’ll be trying to test it myself, but we don’t call our Windows machine “The Anger Box” for nothing.
Thanks!
It should end up looking like this.
A little more background for the curious:
It’s easy to put simple animations directly into SVG images, to scoot things around and whatnot. The embedded-in-SVG style of animation is based on SMIL. Microsoft has taken the position “we’re not going to support that, because there are better ways to do animations, like with CSS.” They’re right, for certain definitions of “better”, but to take full advantage of the better aspects of CSS animation one must jump through some hoops — especially if you want to adjust the animation at run-time. So, if “better” means “simpler”, then not so much.
But now my plugin’s hoops are through-jumped, and to my eye, animations are smoother in all browsers (hardware acceleration is more consistently available to CSS-based animations), so it’s a win all-round. Safari still leaves annoying trails in some circumstances, but overall things look pretty sweet in the mainstream browsers. Although, as mentioned above, to date I have no idea how it looks on Microsoft’s IE/Edge browsers. Any help in that regard would be welcome.
Miami, 2049
A setting for a story: Miami 2049. Shining towers rise from the sea, a glass archipelago. On the lower stories, buffeted by the sea, glass has been replaced with stout timber, purchased from the mainland, but higher up the old glass still gleams. If you look closely you will see missing panes here and there; in Miami, breaking a window isn’t just bad luck, it’s reason for exile.
Some of Miami’s towers have have fallen in the storms; others still stand tall, each a city-state.
All around them, the sea. Once teeming with fish, perpetual algae blooms have robbed the water of oxygen. All that’s left is algae and whales that eat algae. Suddenly-prosperous whales seem more organized than they used to be.
Algae is the blood of this place. Each building has a small fleet of algae harvesters, plying seas once rich with fish to provide protein for the starving masses on the mainland, now 100 miles away and receding. Protein is worth a premium, and what is left of Miami is prosperous.
Below the surface are streets still clogged with cars, and drowned shopfronts where once was sold for a premium things which have no value now. Gadgets and fancy clothes. Two stories up, piers extend from the glittering city-buildings, providing a place to load cargo, but offering no shelter from the all-too-frequent storms. It is widely accepted that once ocean temperatures find a new equilibrium that the storms will return to the relatively benign level of fury known in the 20th century and before, but the people of Miami have learned not to wait for that to happen.
The buildings’ bosses can efficiently control access, both at the piers and in the stairwells. Socially, building-states are insular, with two exceptions: There is a complex system of taboos governing sex and enforcing the exchange of women between buildings, and there are some tradesmen, primarily doctors and merchants, who can move between the buildings relatively freely. Of course, wherever they go, they are quizzed about the other buildings, but the smart ones know that those who tell tales won’t be in business long.
Out on the sea the algae harvesters have their own society, quite distinct from the structure in the archipelago. While the harvesters are not completely separate from the building-state rivalries back home, they have their own ethical code while out on the sea. Because of the wealth they bring, they have a level of autonomy other citizens do not.
There is still enough tech that they know when storms are coming. It has been a couple of years since a building toppled, but the possibility is real – though the greatest risk was when the surf lapped at the buildings’ foundations.
When a building falls, the city pulls together to save the victims. And if your building rescues particularly valuable citizens, all the better. Spoken out loud is a strict ethical code regarding helping a drowning neighbor, but some building-states might not honor the intent, even while they honor the letter.
So there’s a setting, one I rather like. If someone were inspired to use that setting for a story, I’d be right pleased.
Security Questions and Ankle-Pants
I’m that guy on Facebook, the party-pooper who, when faced with a fun quiz about personal trivia, rather than answer in kind reminds everyone that personal trivia has become a horrifyingly terrible cornerstone of personal security.
The whole concept is pure madness. Access to your most personal information (and bank account) is gated by questions about your life that may seem private, but are now entirely discoverable on the Internet — and by filling in those fun quizzes you’re helping the discovery process. Wanna guess how many of those Facebook quizzes are started by criminals? I’m going to err on the side to paranoia and say “lots”. Some are even tailored to specific bank sites and the like. Elementary school, pet’s name, first job. All that stuff is out there. Even if you don’t blab it to the world yourself, someone else will, and some innocuous question you answer about who your best friend is will lead the bad guy to that nugget.
There is nothing about you the Internet doesn’t already know. NOTHING. Security questions are simply an official invitation to steal all your stuff by people willing to do the legwork. Set up a security question with an honest answer, and you’re done for, buddy.
On the other hand, security questions become your friend if you treat them like the passwords they are. Whatever you type in as an answer should have nothing to do with the question. Otherwise, as my title suggests, you may as well drop ’em, bend over, and start whistlin’ dixie.
My computer offers me a random password generator and secure place to keep my passwords, FBI-annoying secure as long as I’m careful, but no such facility for security questions. I think there’s an opportunity there.
In the meantime, don’t ever answer a security question honestly. Where were you born? My!Father789Likes2GoFishin. Yeah? I’m from there, too! Never forget that some of those seemingly innocent questions out there on the Internet were carefully crafted to crack your personal egg. But if you never use personal facts to protect your identity, you can play along with those fun Facebook games, and not worry about first-tier evil.
Complete the Analogy:
But I DO Blame You
In a few months the “Don’t blame me, I voted for Trump” bumper stickers will start appearing. The implication is that a Democrat is in the White House despite the efforts of the Trump faithful. Well guess what, Sunshine: you and all your pals who endorsed the clown-car politics of the Republican party are entirely to blame for the coming election outcome. You nominated a toddler to be President of the Unites States; what did you expect?
In the process, you robbed the electorate of any sort of grown-up conversation about the future of our nation (outside the debate among the Democrats), and utterly silenced the rational conservative voices who have valuable contributions to make regarding the governance of our nation. You put Trump in the election and you not only screwed your party, you screwed the United States.
Ok, I have to grant that “Republican” and “conservative” have nothing to do with each other any longer, but wow. The only people who want Trump to be president are stupid people. I’m going to say that a second time, to give you a chance to reflect on the Buddha-like wisdom: The only people who want Trump to be president are stupid people. Intelligent conservatives are wondering where they can go to be heard. Intelligent middle-of-the-road folks have had their minds made up for them.
Trump voter, you have kicked your own party in the balls. And while it might have seemed fun at the time, you have left yourself with no voice. You’re an idiot, Trump voter, so you losing your voice doesn’t bother me much, but you also robbed the rest of us of a chance to hear a clear conservative argument in what promises to be a watershed election.
I do blame you, Trump voter. This is your fault.
Return of the Weekenders
Requiem for my Crappy Little Office Chair
At work, I have a fancy chair, adjustable forty-seven different ways, and after a week of increasing back pain a trained professional was dispatched to get things just right for me. (The back pain was more about keyboard height than it was about the chair, but still…)
It’s a mighty comfy chair.
At home, I have a little piece of crap chair that apparently came from Big Lots and cost $16. It has no arms, the back rest is fixed and there’s no padding to speak of. Yet, I can sit in that chair indefinitely. I have fallen asleep in the spartan little-more-than-a-bench-with-wheels many times, whether watching bittersweet Japanese cartoons deep into the night or playing some stupid computer game.
For you, perhaps for everyone else on the planet Earth, this chair might be torture. But for me, it just fits. Also, when sharing a small office, a chair that doesn’t take up a lot of space is beneficial.
That chair and I have been friends for many years now. It’s the place I sit when it hurts to sit anywhere else. Only now, it’s breaking. The center post has pushed down through the ring that attaches it to the wheels, so that it sits up on the post instead of resting on the wheels. Today I tried, with steadily increasing force, to reverse the slippage. No success, but a wheel flew off in the process, even though that leg was not involved in my percussive maintenance. Like I said, increasing force.
Even if I force the stem back, the connection relies on friction, and once things start moving, that’s the end of the story. New slippage is pretty much guaranteed in the near future. And as you can see in the picture, the fabric won’t be holding on much longer, either. Pretty soon I’ll be getting a new chair. Big Lots apparently doesn’t carry this chair anymore; my new chair is likely to be fancier, but will it be better? Unlikely. And there’s no way to know in the store; it won’t be until my next research project based on Revolutionary Girl Utena that I discover whether the new chair is friend or foe.
So let’s raise a toast to all the simple things in life that just work, beyond all reasonable expectation. Not the fancy, glitzy things, but the spartan chairs that fit right and the stapler that never gives up and the bargain-store shoes you wear until they completely fall apart. Those things go beyond value, to become part of you.