Terrified

link

I'm terrified of what my future holds..

strong in you, Thanatos is

Sigmund Freud was a pathological wacko. He was also an unmitigated genius. Finding which bits of his theories were genius and which were insane is a difficult exercise for experts, which I am not. Therefore, this is a pop-psychology opinion of mine and nothing more, but I think that Thanatos has ruled my life for far, far too long, and it's time for Eros to take hold.

How do I accomplish this?

I don't know. But discovery is a journey, not a destination.

bye bye AdSense

I was horrified to find out that there was a big Yes on Prop 8 banner on my blog. Turns out someone is paying google to put that on blogs with AdSense enabled. So.. I could configure AdSense to filter this from my blog, but since I get no money from them anyway, I just removed it.

Bye bye AdSense.

If you'd like to know how I really feel - go here or here or here.

no sleep for you!

For once, I'm not talking about my own lack of sleep. I'm talking about my iPhone...

I am in the process of writing a native jabber client for the iPhone. I use jabber for work, and it's about the only thing that keeps me from using the iPhone instead of my MacBook Pro for walkaround communications.

It turns out the the iPhone SDK is pretty darned good. It didn't take a great deal of effort to get it installed, provision my iPhone as a development device, and load working code onto my own phone. But there is a problem.

The SDK doesn't allow me to background tasks.

This means that I can only use my iPhone as a jabber client if I'm actively using the client software. If the phone goes to sleep, or I get an SMS message, or a phone call, the jabber client turns off.

I find this limitation annoying, and it's probably the reason no one else has developed a native IM client to date.

developing for the iPhone

It's been awhile since I've written anything complicated. The last bit of real programming I did was to write a test tool for exercising windows applications through Win32 API calls rather than normal screen positioning and click events.. it was a pretty slick piece of work, but there are 3rd party apps available now that are much better than what I wrote, and I've finally reached the point in my career where it is generally more cost effective to buy rather than write.

That might be a topic for another article.. the progression of software aquiry practice along the career path of the technologist.

Anyway, I've had the iPhone 3G for a bit now, and the only thing that I find it lacking (other than cut & paste...) is a native jabber client.

My workplace uses jabber for internal communications. The jabber server is local to our LAN and inaccessible to the outside world. This is good practice for security. None of our data leak out accidentally this way. However, it means that I can't use a webapp for IM to get to my internal jabber server without some tricky tunneling, and those types of tunnels kinda defeat the purpose of securing the jabber box in the first place.

So, I decided I'd have to write something myself again.

The iPhone developer program is really pretty slick. There are hours of video intros and the tools look pretty easy to use. I suppose I'll see how easy in the coming weeks as I try to get this thing off the ground.

iPhone 3G

It's the bees knees.

is your happiness threshold fixed?

I'm too busy to breathe lately, but I read a disturbing lead to a story off Google News last night while logging in to EVE to change skills being trained.

It seems someone just completed a study that says each individual has a certain default happiness level that doesn't change throughout his life. You can do some things to temporarily go above or below it, but in general it remains fixed for life.

Depressing, isn't it?

the importance of importance

I love to employ cyclical redundancy for effect. You have the redundant, wait for the cyclical..

While I've recently been hurled into a position of authority over not one, but TWO distinct groups of engineers, I've come to the grim determination that I'm not important enough to be important yet. This isn't the first time, or even the more interesting time this has happened, but it is _a_ time, and it will serve to illustrate my grievance as well as any other.

- late edit..
This is a post that I started months ago and never finished. It's been turned on its head a bit since then, but the gist remains. Reshaping your image from within a framework of familiarity is difficult at best. I'm making daily progress, but it's a long road. I had no idea how firmly entrenched I was.

is piracy dead?

Of course not, but the rules of engagement have definitely changed a bit.

There are tons of EVE piracy related blogs out there. Hell, I even started one myself, though I'm nowhere near able to yarr effectively alone. If you read any of them, you've probably noticed the same thing that I have over the course of the past two weeks.

They've gone awfully quiet...

Factional Warfare in EVE has brought hordes of empire and 0.0 pilots into low-sec. You'd think that the pirates would be salivating at this, and initially, I'm sure they were. However, pirates are opportunists and danger freaks. They like to live on the edge, but at the same time, they try to stack the deck in their own favor whenever they can. It's a whole different ballgame when you are flashy red to everyone in the sector and there are 25 people in local instead of 5.

Gangs and proper fleets are invading these spaces and when they run out of enemy faction ships to blow up, they tend to go marauding. Anyone flashy red gets popped.

End result. I can go into low-sec again.

Also end result (and not quite so good for me) my horribly expensive shuttles aren't selling anymore since the pirates aren't hanging out in the red pockets waiting for people anymore.

I might have to find a more lucrative sideline. Perhaps I'll start selling 'second-best' named gear in contested systems..

nobody tells me nothing!

Sometimes I wonder if the reason why Marshal Ney was so stupendously ineffective at Waterloo despite having a brilliant, almost meteoric career of successes prior to that might be because he didn't have the right piece of information in time for it to make a difference.

Now, I don't intend to compare myself with Michel Ney. Any successes I have had pale by comparison and my decisions are nowhere near the same caliber. No one will ever die as a result of a bad decision of mine. Yet, I think I must know something of how he felt.

If I'd had all of the information I needed, I'd not be digging myself, my team, and my project out of the mud right now.

Worse, it's not as if I made a bad assumption. I was misled.

This company sucks.

accept security warnings

The company that I work for is stupid.

I make no secret that I work for a network security company. I won't state the name of the company, because if I do, then I'm required to follow the company's 'blogging policy' or I could be terminated. Normally, the process leading up to termination would involve a nice beefy severance package, which I'd happily take at this moment, but if I violate this particular edict, I can be terminated without any such package offer, which would.. well.. suck.

Anyway, I digress.

This is a NETWORK SECURITY company. We ought to, oh.. I don't know.. give a rat's ass about security? But no.. Today I get in the mail a nifty little card that provides instructions and reminders for how to the use meeting tools that I've been using for about a year now. Handy little card.. it has a number of steps on how to set-up/join a conference online.

Step number 4: 'Accept Security Warnings'

Not.. 'you will see this certificate displayed', or 'you will see X signed ActiveX control ask for permission to do Y', or even 'a security popup may appear with X text, please accept to continue'. No.. just a blanket 'Accept Security Warnings'.

Now, if I was a more devious bastard than I am, I might use this information, along with the links provided and some clever scripting, to harvest authentication tokens of people in my company. Generally the folks that would be setting up online meetings are interesting people to get passwords from. Usually these would be either mid-level managers or assistants to execs.. What could I do with these tokens?

Well.. I could fire people, give myself a bonus, if not a raise... Yes, there is a required approval chain for these things to happen, but if I got auth tokens from everyone who sets up a meeting, how long do you think it would take me to get the tokens for everyone in the auth chain? The system would then automagically do its dirty work and remove my rivals as well as make me rich.

I SO should have been a criminal rather than an engineer.

free money!

One of the perks of my new position is the ability to originate bonuses for people, even people that don't work directly for me.

So, I did. I just flooded (well, tinkled in) the wallets of a bunch of deserving people, about half of whom don't work for me.

Yay! Free money!

Too bad I can't give myself a bonus..

inertia

Physics gives us the concept of inertia, and in physics, inertia is a powerful thing, but I think that as a metaphor, inertia might be the most powerful force in the universe.

I'm fighting against more than 30 years of inertia every day now. Well, not every day... some days it's just too hard, but I really am trying.

Part of that inertia is a tendency to 'let myself off the hook.' This sounds pretty terrible, and it is. It's oddly something that I STRONGLY do not identify with my own self-image, but it's something I do fairly frequently, it would seem.

--late edit
This is an interesting post.. I started this almost six months ago. And I didn't publish it.. Thus, perpetuating the problem I was identifying. Man.. I have some serious damage control to do.

the fifth Cylon

It's got to be Ellen Tigh - Saul's (the XO of Gallactica) wife.

In the first season, she was mysteriously 'discovered' alive on a ship in the colonial fleet as a 'Jane Doe' and then brought aboard Gallactica and reunited with Saul. Everyone thought she was a Cylon then.. of course, her being dead again makes it difficult. We've never seen any clones of the the 4 new Cylons that we know of, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist.

It does seem like she's been dead for a long time to be just now showing up, but there definitely WAS a Resurrection Ship in range when Saul killed her for being a Cylon double-agent, even if she was doing it to protect Saul at the expense of the Revolution on New Caprica.

A good case can also be (and has often been) made for Kara Thrace, what with her disappearing for months and not remembering any of it, but since the non-lobotomized Raiders seem to be able to recognize at least Anders and probably the other 5, and they don't seem to be too squeamish about trying to kill Kara, I think that's probably unlikely.

My money is on Ellen. Literally.

hubris

Lords of Kobol, save me!

Yesterday, I was King of the Cube: unstoppable, unbeatable, a veritable god amongst men.

Today... the open-mouthed-eater is back from his customer visit and I am once again going batcrap nutzo.

Oh well, at least I have Thriller to keep me distracted.

Yes, I like some old-school Michael Jackson.

I am all powerful

Not since the days of early Ultima Online, when I was known as The Dread Lord Baal or The Great Lord Tevyar (depending on my personality for that day) have I had so much power.

And no, before you begin to think so, this is not another post about EVE Online.

I work for a network security company. I'm an engineering manager. I've been 'acting' as a manager for quite a long time now, but didn't hold the title, which means that there was always a way to end-run around any of my proclamations.

Well, NO MORE!

For better or for worse, the buck stops with me now, and if I'm not happy, you're not getting your way.

Fuck 'em. Let them throw me out if they don't like it.

Adam Kadmon and orchestrated objective reduction

I'm not really sure why, but something has been troubling me quite a bit lately.

I was raised to be a good Catholic, so I have this huge store of meaningless mythology at the back of my head. The Catholics, stolen from the Jews, have a concept of the Guf - the Well of Souls from which all human souls are drawn. Certain septs of Kabbalah extend this in such a way that the Guf is not an actual place in this world or any other, but instead represents the original man before original sin - Adam Kadmon. Each of us, since the breaking of Eden, are but a shard of that soul.

Now, this is really uninteresting by itself, but it's been intersecting in my head a lot with another concept that's been bothering me - Orch OR.

Orch OR - or Orchestrated Objective Reduction - is a concept from quantum mechanics and to a slightly lesser extent, psychology. It's an attempt to explain why the human brain, arguably nothing more complex than an organic chemical pile of goo, is capable of instantly computing things that mathematics shows to be intractable and modern computing requires hours and hours of computer time to solve. See - the only way that physicists can figure out how to instantly come up with the solution to a search space problem like - is that a boy or a girl? - with all of the myriad of permutations that might come out of this, is to use a quantum computer. If the computer can simultaneously process every possible path and then through a process of Objective Reduction instantly _find_ an answer, then it will have achieved what we've all been capable of since the time we knew that there was difference between boys and girls. Now - we don't always get it right, but then, neither would a quantum computer, and our own brains are a bit fuzzy. Ever have too much wine?

How do these relate?

Well - suppose that Orch OR is correct. The human brain is an organic quantum computer that is capable of orchestrating objective reductions of a quantum matrix to align to some kind of goal. Consciousness becomes possible because there is a finite set of computations being performed within the matrix of the brain - some of these are pure computations, some of these are orchestrating actions, and some of these are short term storage loops. Memory is a whole different ball of wax.. maybe literally..

This means that it's possible, and perhaps necessary, to create consciousness in any system capable of orchestrating quantum objective reductions.

Scientists are getting closer and closer to solving the decoherence problem and creating a working quantum computer. At first, the orchestration for this will be human action, but in short order, we'll start programming the computers to program themselves, probably through a series of finite state automata. Once we do this, we will have created, at least in a rudimentary sense, consciousness. It's possible that it might not be very rudimentary at all.

So - the former Catholic/Gnostic/mystic in me asks - does the consciousness for this get imbued with the will of Adam?

I don't really believe that way anymore, but it troubles me that I thought of it at all.

you are rubber and I am glue

Weird things in my stream of thought today.

I recall reading about quantum superposition theory once upon a time and thinking to myself - "That means that this is _my_ universe."

It's not an obvious logical progression to get here from there, so let me explain a little...

If this theory is correct (discounting quantum decoherence theory), there has to be one single thread that is holding _this_ universe together. Now, the exactness of _this_ is debatable, but so is the exactness of _me_ in this context.

The gist is this. Every quantum state that is possible is. Because I experience a continuous thread of existence - and the only one that I am capable of verifying - I am the glue that holds my universe together. An infinity of other universes exist that correspond to every other possible state, and you are all transient occupants of my universe, then instantly evaporate into another of these as soon as a new quantum wave function collapses.

So - you're rubber, and I'm glue.

Don't piss me off, or I'll stop thinking about you.

flight of the conchords

I love Flight of the Conchords. These guys are awesome. They just recently announced a second show in San Francisco after the first one sold out.

It goes on sale tomorrow at ticketbastard, but there IS a pre-sale that started yesterday.

Apparently it was only supposed to be for fan club members, but I'm not a fan club member, and I can't even find any information on how to join their fan club, which I totally would have done to get the pre-sale password.

I did, however, find the password. If you want tickets and you haven't found it yet yourself, and there are any pre-sale tickets available (I doubt it, but who knows) the password is "fouxdufafa" (sans the quotes, of course.) This seems obvious, once you see it, but of course hindsight is much more clear than foresight.

I won't tell you how I found it, but suffice it to say, the internets is a powerful thing. If you've attended a lecture by the great Johnny Long, you can probably find just about any piece of information that exists.. somewhere.. on the internets.

If you're stumbling upon this and it's not yet on general sale, give it a shot, you never know..

That being said... I got my tickets yesterday, bitches.

final gravity

I kegged my beer over the weekend.

Final gravity: 1.010

This gives me an approximate ABV of 9.7%. Up a full percentage point from where I was before secondary. This surprised me a bit. I expected SOME fermentation to continue, and I never saw any real evidence of strong fermentation, but clearly there was quite a bit.

wanna buy a bottle?

I racked my beer over to the glass carboy this weekend. It's still pretty sharp and probably needs another two weeks in the carboy at least before it's close enough to complete to bottle/keg it.

However, I did steal about 2 liters of it whilst transferring it, both to do a gravity reading and also to taste.

I have one of these things, so I put the beer in the freezer for a half hour, cranked my regulator up to 30psi, attached it to the 2 liter bottle, shook the hell out of the bottle and then put it in the fridge for about an hour. What I ended up with was a perfectly carbonated, but still slightly sharp (from the suspended yeast) beer. I think this is going to be a mighty fine beer indeed once it's done.

The gritty details:

All measurements done at 68 degrees Fahrenheit with a 60 degree hydrometer.

Original specific gravity: 1.083
Final (so far) specific gravity: 1.018

I'm not going to correct the readings for the temperature difference since both readings were taken at the same temp, and this is only an approximation anyway (and not the final gravity anyway).

So, taking the formula to convert to the Plato scale:

°P[initial] = °P_i = (-463.37) + (668.72 × 1.083) - (205.35 × 1.083²) = 20.001
°P[final] = °P_f = (-463.37) + (668.72 × 1.018) - (205.35 × 1.018²) = 4.578

Then, using the Plato data:

My Apparent Attenuation is: 1 - (4.578 / 20.001) = .771 => about 77%
Given that I expect a full attenuation of .8, I'm pretty close even before hitting the secondary fermenter. It may be that I get no more fermentation in secondary. That's not uncommon.

This gives me an approximate ABV of (1.083 - 1.018) / .75 = 8.7% alcohol by volume.

That's about right for a Dubbel. I was expecting a little more, to tell you the truth, maybe I didn't get enough starches out of my mash.


Anyway. This is a pretty fine beer.

My wife and I recently had a nice dinner out at The Refuge, where they feature many Belgian and Belgian style ales. We sampled quite a few, and I'll put my neck out there and say that my beer compares favorably with any of these. She suggests that I sell a couple bottles to the restaurant, but being a home-brewer, I'm not legally allowed to sell beer.

However, I can sell glass.

So - if you'd like to buy an extremely overpriced decorative piece of glass that happens to contain some beer that I forgot to remove, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

it was only a matter of time

This is some scary stuff. Internet criminals are now targeting individuals with some rather cunning attacks rather than the normal casting of the net wide in hopes to reeling in some lucrative targets.

I work for a network security company, I'm not really allowed to say which one in my blog here, but it's not really a secret.

We deal with SPAM - and some researchers and 'experts' are mis-labeling this as SPAM. It's not. This is a targeted attack on a high profile individual who is being counted upon to be moderately tech-savvy but not a techie, and that's what makes it a little bit scary.

It's the level of knowledge required to do this that is scary. The person who did this was sloppy in a lot of ways. He used an off-the-shelf package to create his deployable malware and then he hardcoded the command and control address. Both of these things are indicators of either someone lazy, or someone who knows 'just enough' to be dangerous. It's the latter that bothers me.

I'm assuming that this person, who if not located in Taiwan at least has a shell account there somewhere, was operating at the limit of his knowledge when he created this attack. This would mean that he's clever enough to research and find the email address of a potential target, custom craft an email that is at least plausible using the target's real name, and then invade that person's machine, stealing, amongst other things, SSL certificates that are installed on that machine, to escalate privileges on other machines. This is not your normal kewl d00d skript kiddie we're talking about here.

it keeps going.. and going...

It seems that I've found the energizer bunny of yeast strains. My beer is still strongly fermenting (cycling the airlock about once every two seconds) after 8 days of fermenting.

In some completely unrelated news, it was brought to my attention that I wasn't letting people write comments in my blog. That wasn't my intent, and it's now been fixed. Comment away.

belgian double dubbel

I started a brew again last weekend. I am brewing a Belgian Dubbel recipe, but I hopped it a little more than normal, for a little longer than normal, and I added 50% more sugar in the form of Belgian Dark Candy and after 6 days, fermentation is still going very strong.

It did slow down considerably on day 4, but following the advice of some folks that post to various message boards, I re-pitched with some new yeast that I'd been culturing for a couple of days just as it seemed that fermentation was coming down off the peak and it seemed to regather strength quickly.

My original gravity was a staggering 1.083 - the highest I've ever tried to brew. My yeast strain should get an attenuation ratio around 80%, which would give me a final gravity of 1.016 and a 9.1% ABV in my final product. That's not a HUGE amount of alcohol for a Belgian, but it's more than I've been able to get before.

I'm even flirting with the idea of pitching some champagne yeast in another day or two to try to get more attenuation.

I don't want an overdry beer, but I don't want a sickly sweet one either.

This will be an interesting experiment, and I plan to culture the yeast for both bread and beer when I'm done as well.

sleep

I don't much write about my 'personal life' here or anywhere else. I do have a paper journal that I occasionally will write in, and the stuff in there is intensely personal, but nobody reads that but me.

This is much more public. Even if there is a slight veil when I don't use my name frequently, and I have a common enough name that google can't find me, but it's still much, much more public.

For those of you who do know me, you'll know that I have children. Two daughters, in fact: one infant (4 months) and one toddler (2 years).

Right now, sleep is a problem in my house. No one is sleeping enough, but my wife and the infant are especially hard hit. I think I've got the genes that allow me to operate better on little to no sleep, but I may be deluding myself. I surely have been gaining weight despite not changing my eating patterns, which would lead me to believe that my body is effective at producing cortisol, which would explain the ability to stay awake, etc. But -- I'm overanalyzing again.

The gist is this: if you have the ability to sleep as much as you want - and I don't mean you fail to because you're out partying too much, or you stay up and work, or watch too many Battlestar Gallactica movies, or have to finish that 8 hour WoW raid - I mean that no one is forcing you to stay awake buy yourself - if you're in that enviable position.. cherish it.

I keep myself up more than I need to, even now. And I'm managing. I won't complain about lack of sleep because I could probably be sleeping at least an hour more than I do, but it's a precarious balance. I've always had problems sleeping. If I go to bed too early, I end up thinking about the day too much. I could be doing literally anything, even something stimulating, and if I go to bed late enough, I'll knock out quickly.

This is hell for my wife though. She's got no choice in the matter. She HAS to be up when she's up, and she goes to bed as early as she can most nights. It's wearing her down, and that's hard for me to see. I wish I could help more.

I love my family.

I would forsake everything in this world for them.

Now is a hard time for us. And I'm beginning to think that it's better to stay here than to move, whether it be to Atlanta or Reykjavik.

piracy in EVE Online

So, I recently started playing EVE Online.

Despite the name of this post, I haven't resorted to piracy yet. I'm not sure that I will.

It strikes me as a terribly inefficient way to make money. I can make 10x as much money by being a 'carebear' than I can by taking it from other carebears. Missions are a decent source of income, but the real money is to be made in the market by capitalizing on the one thing that every MMO participant has plenty of - laziness.

MMOs are strange. They force a bunch of lazy fatassess to grind their way up a ladder for the purpose of bragging to other people climbing the same ladder about their position on the ladder and speed at which they reached it. In EVE, this is especially weird since one of the primary positions on this ladder is pure longevity. If you've been a subscriber for longer, you have more skills. Period. Full Stop. End of Statement.

There is seemingly no way to EVER match a character many months, let alone years older than you. Sure, choice of where to put your training time, intelligent choice of what to train (i.e. train the learning skills first people - but you should know that by now), and profession choice as you create your toon can make a big difference, but if I'm two months old and I'm in a battlecruiser, odds are pretty good that I'm dead at the fitting screen.

So, it would seem that unless I want to be a frigate pirate and max out the frigate skills, it'll be many, many months before I'm an effective PvP player. In fact, using the tools at my disposal, and knowing what I need to have to be an effective PvP player in, say, a Battlecruiser, I can say with no doubt at all that I'll need at least 71 days, 4 hours, 31 minutes and 25 seconds to complete this kind of training.

Granted, I started with a Trade build, and I can now conduct 57 simultaneous buy/sell orders from anywhere within a region, which would probably take a pure PvP toon 71 days, 4 hours, 29 minutes, and 43 seconds to train into, but I still contend that I make way more money doing what I do than he does.

So - why should I be a pirate?

Well, the rush, that's why.

save me!

So... I was going to do a big rant about information leaking and how no one can keep their mouth shut, but that would be fruitless..

Someone either figured it out or let something loose and the company I work for has figured out that I'm looking to leave and they're trying to figure out how to save me.

I think they even know that I'm traveling to Iceland soon and the purpose of the visit, but they're not yet to the point of denying my travel, which is probably because they're afraid I'll just quit outright if they do, and they might be right.

However, today they began the effort to 'save me'. Last week one of the other managers here put in her notice. That created a void, and now there's an opportunity to do a whole new round of reorganizing. There's a place and a need for me in this new hierarchy, I'm told. Just sit tight and "don't do anything stupid" and I'll find out what it is soon.

I can't say that I'm really going to hold my breath.

theme parks and sandboxes

I have a few friends. Very few, really, but I tend to stick with the ones I have even when they do things like stab me in the back. Maybe I'm a masochist, or maybe I'm just not that socially smart, whatever it is, I am a pretty terrible judge of character.

Anyway, a preponderance of my friends play games. All kinds of games, and I think this isn't unusual, since games are entertaining and smart people tend to be good at them and I hang out with a lot of smart people. However, a little more disturbing is that the preponderance of the games that my friends tend to play have become MMOs.

MMOs are interesting. They seem to come in two basic flavors: the theme park flavor and the sandbox flavor. To be fair, I didn't coin this terminology. I've seen it used in many places, and I can't find attribution back to an original source, but it's not me.

The idea here is that most MMOs -- in the DikuMUD style -- are like a theme park, you show up, and they have a number of different entertainment options available for you, you pick one, and then you go on your ride until it's done. Some, like Project Entropia or EVE Online or even the old school Ultima Online are more like sandboxes. You hop in and then figure out on your own what you are going to do.

The theme park games are fun, and grab a lot of folks, even those that aren't hard-core gamers and only want to play for a few hours a week. You might not have the best gear, but you can always find something fun to do.

The sandbox games tend to require copious amounts of time, even if you aren't playing competitively. They tend to be much harsher. Losses are not replaced, and can be catastrophic. Hours, measured over several months, of efforts can be wiped out in an instant. And yet, these games have rabid followings. Why?

I think they more closely mirror society. They have more realistic economies, more realistic governmental (player run and initiated) structures.

I first started MMOs with a Star Wars based MUD that I can't even remember the name of sometime around 1992. I'd been playing BBS 'door' games for quite a bit longer than that, but they were all solo things. Only the biggest BBSes at the time had multiple phone lines, and I only phreaked my way into those to download porn. That was a much more valuable way to spend my stolen bits than playing multiplayer games.. at the time..

My first real MMO experience was Ultima Online though. That game stole 4 years of my life. Many of the staples of the MMO experience didn't exist yet. Eventually UO go in-game guilds, but it didn't start out that way. Eventually it got an in-game reputation system, but that too, was a novelty. In the beginning, there was no way to tell who was a good guy, who was a bad guy, and whether to stay and fight or run (running was often futile anyway) until the other player yelled 'Corp Por' and you died. The whole world (except the cities.. sort of) was a PvP zone. It was a very harsh place. And I loved it. I played both sides of the 'PK' fence. But out of nothing spontaneously came organizations of 'good' and 'evil' players working together because they needed the protection.

Economies are even more interesting, especially in games like Project Entropia (which doesn't like to call itself a game) where the in-game currency is tied to real world currency for value.

But that's a post for another day.

google gets smarter!

Finally!

I looked back today and the AdSense ads that I have on this site are finally about something that I give a care about: Homebrewing! That makes sense.

The Audi thing was a little creepy, but this actually seems to be purposeful. I should really blog more about the brews I'm making anyway, this is just another kick in the pants in that direction.

I've got ingredients sitting in my kitchen for a Belgian Double Dubbel that I've been wanting to make (high gravity dubbel - not a trippel) for some time now, I should get started on it.

It'll give me incentive to bake some more bread too. My poolish accidentally soured on me, and while I think it made for a tasty pizza crust, I think it might contain something that my wife had a mild allergic reaction to, so I tossed it.

Since I think that beer dregs make for the best poolish starters, I'll have plenty to work with after this next batch.

I just bought two more cornelius kegs, and I'm going to begin work on a kegerator at some point in the next months as things start to warm up, so I will actually have things to take pictures of, maybe.

the universe is getting bigger

A few years back, I registered a domain name - greenlock.com - for a business idea that I had. It turned out that the business never got off the ground because I was relying on angel investors that were crooks and I was so disheartened by the experience that I've never tried to start it up again with new sources of money.

I used to use a free DNS service - zoneedit.com - to direct the name to my own machine on the internet. It worked out just fine until someone figured out that I didn't have an MX record published and began to spoof my domain and spam people like crazy. When I did decide to start receiving email there, I got hundreds of angry letters from people telling me to stop spamming them. I didn't want to deal with the problem then, so I just shut it down.

I recently had an idea to start using the domain name again. I still own it, but it's been dormant for a few years. So, I've reactivated it and it's just got a holding page attached right now, but I started looking around to see who else might be using the name Greenlock or GreenLock to see if I'd run into more problems with the name.

No fewer than 25 distinct entities that I find are now using this name for everything from public storage companies, to software DRM (which could be a problem for you.. I trademarked the name for this purpose when I incorporated), to plastic containers, Christian rockers, bloggers, file-sharers (I might also someday object to you..), to other off-the-wall stuff.

Three years ago, I couldn't find one, hence the ease at which I registered greenlock.com, greenlock.net, greenlock.biz, but I left greenlock.org alone.. So, someone else has that one now.

I wish I'd moved on technosavant.com earlier. Technosavant.net is more appropriate for what I started this for, but people confuse it all the time..

superscalar brains, redux

So, I finished that article the other day. I said I'd come back and write what I thought about it, with no real intent of doing so, but that's a cop out and I've resolved to stop doing that, so here I am.

I think that the article makes some truly salient points about the brain's ability to process multiple data streams at the same time through a crude form of parallelism being the root cause for focus and memory issues that seem to be much more commonplace in today's developed societies. To borrow a word from Mr. Colbert, this has a good 'truthiness' to it.

I do not mean to disparage Mr. Kirn in any way, but it is his job to be entertaining, and his piece is an opinion piece and very entertaining as well. He makes loose references to some presumably more rigorous studies, including a UCLA experiment that he gives little detail about, so presumably there is factual basis behind much of what he's writing, but it's not intended to be a representative article.

Do I believe him? Sure. But I also once believed in a man who is proven to be a con artist now, so I'm perhaps not best equipped to make snap judgments like this.

It's an interesting piece nonetheless, and very entertaining, and likely could form the basis of a good conversation.. maybe I'll have to give it a shot the next time I find myself in a social situation.

google is a little creepy sometimes

I just enabled AdSense on this page. As far as I know, I have zero readers, but I figure, "What the hell?"

I don't know how they pick what ads to serve if they can't get a good sense of what your site is all about, but I just looked to see what's there and there are two ads for Audi. How in the hell would Google know that I've been looking at Audi cars a lot recently? I haven't written anything about Audi on my page, I haven't linked anything, I haven't received any emails about their cars in my gmail account...

I think I've determined that I can't afford an Audi, but it's creepy nontheless.

the superscalar brain

Back in the days of my education, when I was learning how to create microprocessors that were superscalar (roughly: able to dispatch two or more instructions within the same clock to disparate parts of the same CPU - achieving better than one-instruction-per-clock throughput) I can remember thinking about how the brain functions in a superscalar manner as well.

See - I'm kinda old. Not old in the sense of what modern medicine considers old -- I have quite some time before I reach that threshhold -- but measured with Moore's Law, I'm hella old indeed.

This was in the days before multiple core processors. Hell, this was before the days of the much-vaunted Intel Hyperthreaded CPUs. You had one CPU and you had one pipeline into it. However, if you were very clever, you could cheat a little bit. The pipeline into the CPU was wider than many of your instructions needed. You could therefore create a new instruction, a SUPER instruction that was two instructions concatenated together. This super instruction would then also pass data to two separate and functionally isolated parts of the same SINGLE CPU. The FPU and ALU could both be active in the same clock, so it seemed more efficient to try and use them in parallel.

This is the heart of the superscalar architecture and how we were able to design in more throughput than you could get from a single clock normally. This is why AMD Athlons had numbers like 1800+ even though they ran at clock speeds far below 1.8Ghz, which was what the competing Intel clock ran at.

But I digress...

I bring this up because today I'm reading an article (literally.. as I write this, I'm reading it in a different pane, I haven't finished it yet) and listening to some music and monitoring the stock ticker to see when I'm going to be rich enough to buy a house, and checking my email inbox and waiting for an IM to tell me when lunch will be happening and I realize that I have only one brain.

And I'm abusing the hell out of it, using some of those same kind of tricks.

Superscalar thinking is addictive, but not very effective. You can do it, but at the expense of not doing other things very well.

But I remember a time, not all that long ago, when I was not old, when I lived in the countryside and hadn't yet been spoiled by the good food and constant entertainment that the city provides, and when I could _concentrate_ on things.

My ability to concentrate has been damaged. I'm still good at all of the things that I've spent time becoming good at, but I'm not quite as good, and new things are hard. Some new things, like trying to change the way I react to situations, or how I think about certain things, or how I perceive things, are very, VERY hard.

This is the article I'm reading: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/multitasking

Normally I'd wait until I finished it to blog about it, but this seems particularly apropos.

I'll let you know later what I think of it when I'm done.

blogging..

I'm pretty sure that I don't much like this Blogger software.. I could write something or adapt something and make something better, but it doesn't seem like a great way to spend my time.

This is 'good enough'.

But it does have some faults. I just deleted a bunch of older posts, and there's no way to get them back.

I shouldn't have done it, I regret it now, but I had this idea that I was going to re-purpose this, again, and that all of these miscellaneous posts were cruft that should be removed.

At least I didn't get rid of them all.. I'll just tag and move the rest away and then use this for blogging my thoughts on technology like I started to, instead of unrelated musings.