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A journal of sorts to record Jonathan Sturm's (and others') thoughts and observations on things worth thinking about. Feedback welcome, but be aware that unless you prominently say you want your communication kept private, I may publish it. |
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University is a very different experience for those of us who have had a life outside academe. Martin remarked the other day how full of self-importance these young people are and so ready to protest the slightest thing, knowing full well the protest won't make the slightest bit of difference. When The Git remarked to one youngster that he was renovating a cottage for sale, they wrinkled their nose and said it was obscene that they were forced to rent a home at exorbitant cost and that the Capitalist System allowed The Git to profiteer from his efforts. Marxism is alive and well on campus, but it's remarkable how quickly these folk become Capitalists, Yuppies even, as soon as they graduate and begin earning incomes far higher than The Git earned during most of his life.
Not that The Git is complaining about the "poverty" period in his life. It was after all voluntary. He could just as easily decided that earning oodles of money was more important than his chosen lifestyle. For newer readers, here's how The Git wrote about that period in an earlier blog.
As an alternative to blogging software, The Git spent part of the day reading though his earlier blogs and creating a table of contents to the more interesting bits. Hopefully, this will be completed over the next two, or three weeks.
Returning to the original thread of this Diatribe, the unrealism of campus youth extends to the managers of the system: lecturers, administration staff and so forth. The Git's first exam is on a public holiday and our rural bus service doesn't run its regular schedule on public holidays. Fortunately, Mrs Git will be able to deliver me up and we will go to see Matrix Reloaded with Thomas. It will be the third time for him.
Mind you, the lack of realism/rationality extends beyond the campus. Today, Stan the plumber phoned to demand payment for the plumbing that he took fifteen months to fix. The Git explained that it would be a little while yet. The Git said: "If you had done the work properly in the first place, you would have been paid over a year ago!" Stan claimed that if he had been paid long ago, he would have fixed the problems instantly instead of making me wait fifteen months. If the incentive of being paid was insufficient and his taking legal action in an attempt to avoid finishing the job adequately is any guide, then Stan must believe The Git is a fool.
Thought for the day:
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
Niels Bohr
Current Listening:
John Lennon -- Double Fantasy
A busy day working on the cottage renovation. Tony and Tanya phoned as they want to come and discuss purchasing the cottage a fourth time. The week is even more busied by revision for the upcoming examinations: history on Monday and philosophy and geology the week following. Then it's a short holiday before returning to study.
The machine we supplied to neighbours recently has been misbehaving. Fortunately, The Git has Thomas the Boy Wonder for a son. He went and fixed it for the second and hopefully last time. The machine periodically forgets it has a modem installed and refuses to connect to the Internet. Thomas surmised that this had something to do with going into sleep mode and managed to duplicate the problem. Hopefully, with sleep mode disabled, the machine will now behave itself. One would have thought that Win2k at SP3 and current hardware would allow this potentially useful function to work properly by now.
It's Mrs Git's birthday later this month and much to The Git's relief, she decided to say what she wanted for her birthday: a truckload of sawdust. "Sawdust?" The Git hears you exclaim. One of the important local industries is sawmilling so this is the cheapest material for garden mulch. It's far from ideal as its nitrogen content is close to zero, but the price can't be beaten at $A85 (~$US55) per very large truckload. The picture has a shovel so you can sense what's there.
To the right of the sawdust that Ricky Watson delivered is the 5-6 tonnes of firewood logs that Ricky Ferrier delivered. Ricky the Wonderdog created some confusion with his barking during both deliveries. Shouting "Shut up Ricky" is not a very good way to start a conversation with someone called Ricky. This being the Huon Valley, they are probably all related.
Here's picture of the garden that needs mulching. The grassy footpath will be mulched as well. Barrowing sawdust once every year or two is a lot easier than barrowing crushed stone once. Before mulching with sawdust, it's a good idea to compost the soil so that the sawdust doesn't rob the soil of nitrogen.
The pictures are not very high quality. Fran came by and lent me a digital camera he has been given. His computer is an antique running Win95 and without the USB port needed to talk to the camera.
-oOo-
From the Inbox:
Dear CCBill customer:
This email is to inform you that we have just received a check back in the mail due to an address discrepancy. To ensure that checks do not continue to be sent to the incorrect mailing address, we have placed a hold on all checks that are to be printed. To remove the hold and get your payments out to you in a timely matter, please fax an address change request to xxx.xxx.xxxx. This form must include:
- Your CCBill account number
- Your old address
- Your new address
- The name and signature of the account administrator
There is a copy of the form at http://ccbill.com/forms.html.
If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to reply to this email or contact your sales representative. Thank you.
CCBill Accounting accounting@ccbill.com
Jennifer CCBill Accounting
Since a prior cheque and the following cheque arrived OK and The Git's address hasn't changed in more than twenty years, he replied to the email with that information. The only potential point of confusion is that CCBill's software prints the State as XX instead of TAS (for Tasmania). However, Australian postcodes reveal the State with the leading digit, 7 for Tasmania, 3 for Victoria etc. The cheque was most certainly not returned from the post office at Franklin, Tasmania. In a community as small as ours, a letter doesn't need any address details to be delivered.
-oOo-
With the sale of the cottage imminent, The Git has been thinking about the computer system changes plan. The machine in the corner of the office that does print, CD burning, and Mrs Git's email and word processing is only a 400 MHz K6-II, so it's too slow for playing DivX movies. The Git's current workstation, a 700 MHz K7 is more than good enough, so it will replace the 200 MHz P200 we currently use in The Great Hall to play DVDs and MP3s. The Git was contemplating his new machine being a Mac, but having used the Macs at university, he is singularly unimpressed. They are certainly more than good enough to do what The Git does with his machine, but he cannot see the point of spending twice the money for a machine with a slower CPU, half the amount of slower RAM and slower hard disk as well as needing new software.
The new machine will be a 2.4 GHz P4, ASUS MoBo with serial ATA and SATA hard disk, housed in an Acer case. A Sony DVD writer seems like an excellent thing to include as well.
The modem in the Intel router/hub died some time ago, so it's now using the 3Com/USR modem. This is on one of the kitchen benches next to the phone outlet taking up space that could be better used. We will have the phone outlet in the office connected to the external line (it used to have its own phone line) and attach the modem to Mrs Git's machine. Thomas wants to run a Linux router in VMWare on that machine so that he can control the ports, something the firewall in the Intel box won't allow.
Thought for the day:
The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything or nothing.
Lady Nancy Astor
Current Listening:
Matching Mole -- Little Red Record
The Git decided to take a look at specifying himself a computer from his usual supplier, EYO. As ever, The Git hates spending money he doesn't have to and the machine is a compromise based on budgetary and performance issues. When specifying his current machine back in April 2000, performance was the main issue. Today's entry level machines are faster than The Git needs, so other issues come to the fore. Here's the list of components and thoughts behind their selection.
Case and PSU
While there are some mighty fancy cases out there, the A-Open Super Middle Tower H500A isn't one of them. It's very plain and ordinary looking, but it's solid, easy to work with, has excellent air flow and capability for adding additional fans. There are four externally accessible 5.25" drive bays and two 3.5". If The Git wanted a fancy case, he'd be buying a Mac, but I suspect that case would cost a whole lot more than $A110 ($US71-50). If he decides he wants visitors to admire his box, The Git can always paint it! The Git would rather admire the boxes here on his Sony G400 monitor.
CPU and MoBo
On the last occasion he specified a machine for himself, The Git chose an ASUS MoBo and AMD CPU. Purchasing an Intel rather than the AMD CPU then meant spending a significant amount of extra money, or sacrificing a significant amount of performance. Today, the difference between the Intel and AMD solutions is significant only in percentage terms. For similar performance, Intel costs almost 50% more, but it amounts to a mere $A143 ($US93) in absolute terms. The Git is going with an Intel 2.4GHz P4 with 533 MHz FSB.
One deciding factor here is the fact that Intel has always made really excellent chipsets. (Albeit with some crazy design decisions, recalling the TX chipset's limit of caching only the first 64MB of RAM). The suppliers of chipsets for AMD -- VIA and SIS -- are good enough, but do not qualify as excellent. Since The Git had decided he wanted to include a SATA hard drive, the choices came down to Intel's 845, 865 and 875 chipsets in ascending order of performance and price. He chose the 845-based ASUS P4PE on price. Moving to the 865 with 800MHz FSB capability adds only a little to the cost, but the extra for the 800MHz P4 and the need to have paired memory modules adds more for no particular purpose. If performance was a big issue, a justifiable extra, but in this instance not.
The Git likes ASUS MoBos and this one apparently has all the goodies to like, such as thermally controlled CPU fan speed to keep the noise level down. The BIOS can be restored from an image on floppy. The machine will come without a floppy drive since we have several already, none of them used with any frequency.
Hard Drive
The hard drive is an 80GB Seagate SATA. At only $A236.50 ($US154), the extra performance compared to the older ATA technology is well worth the extra ~$A40.
Memory
Usually, The Git has used Kingmax memory in the past. On this occasion, he decided to specify 512MB of Kingston memory at $A132 ($US86). At that price, it's likely that at purchase time the machine will be equipped with 1GB, just in case. Despite being an extensive multi-tasker, The Git has never been assailed by shortage of RAM as a performance issue with his current machine. He also feels no need to upgrade any of his "current" crop of aging software, so there's a good chance it won't become an issue in the future. The one caveat here is that this machine will run virtual machines in VMWare at reasonable speed and that would justify the extra 512MB of RAM.
CD/DVD Drives
Given the price of CD rewriters these days, it would be foolish to not include one on any machine intended for standalone use. While there's an excellent Sony on The Git's network, he decided "What the heck! My budget is ~$A2,000" and decided to include the Sony DVD -/+ RW+R DRU500A DVD ReWriter at $A660 ($US430). This is the drive that reads and writes anything currently available. Likely the Pioneer DVR-105 at $A418.00 ($US272) would serve, but then you only live once ;-) Readers thoughts on this issue are more than welcome.
Rather than wear out such an expensive drive reading CDs and DVDs, it's accompanied by an ASUS DVD-ROM drive at $A93-50 ($US61). Copying is also much quicker with two drives, rather than needing the intermediate step of writing to the hard drive.
Video Adapter
The Git is happy enough with his Matrox G400, so he specified an ATI-Sapphire Radeon VE 7000 with TV-Out for $A86.90 ($US56) since the current machine will become part of the entertainment centre in The Great Hall. MPEG decoding is built into this card, eliminating the need for the Hollywood decoder we currently use.
Keyboard and Mouse
It's a long time since The Git specified anything other than a Microsoft mouse. Their keyboards are excellent too. The Multimedia Keyboard with Wheel Optical Mouse is only $A66.00 ($US43). Thomas the Boy Wonder already has the slightly less capable Internet Keyboard and will get the Multimedia version for its volume control.
Conclusion
All of the above is quite a stunning machine at a mere $A2,011.90 ($US1,308). Likely others' choices would be different, but it's a machine The Git would have killed for not so very long ago.
-oOo-
Spam Report
There's 155 spam emails in the Spam Folder. Of these, SpamAssassin has managed to identify 96, or 62% with no false positives. Its effectiveness appears to be decreasing rapidly :-(
Thought for the day:
We didn't actually overspend our budget. The Health Commission allocation simply fell short of our expenditure.
Keith Davis
Current Listening:
Mahavishnu Orchestra -- The Inner Mounting Flame
From the Inbox:
Truth, Lies and Weapons of Mass Destruction
Mark Steel The Independent May 29, 2003
I think I've detected a new type of Gulf War Syndrome, a shocking disease that attacks the nervous system. It afflicts anyone defending the latest Gulf war, making them see piles of imaginary weapons. For example, one American soldier, interviewed after his regiment shot dead 14 demonstrating Iraqis, said his regiment was under attack, adding: "It was like the Alamo out there." Yet not a single US soldier or US thing of any nature was dented by a bullet.
Or maybe the soldier was telling the truth, and at the Alamo the Americans came under siege from a terrifying horde of Mexicans carrying placards. And their leader cried: "Abandon the fort, amigo, or you leave us with no choice but to chant slogans. And I warn you, I have the fastest megaphone in Texas."
But this is a mild attack compared with the alarming delusions of those victims who, for a year before the war, were certain they were in the presence of weapons of mass destruction. Now Donald Rumsfeld is suggesting the reason they can't be found is because they were destroyed before the war started. So we went to war to rid Saddam of weapons that were already destroyed. We had no choice in this, because the destroyed weapons could have been used against us, or fallen into the hands of al-Qa'ida, who would then have been able to take them down the council dump or maybe sell them for scrap. In any case, as he'd destroyed his weapons of mass destruction, this meant he couldn't hand any over to weapons inspectors, which was a flagrant breach of UN resolution 1441. If he wanted to comply with the UN he'd have built a nuclear plant so he could hand it over, but typically he had no interest in co-operating.
The lack of actual weapons is a little embarrassing for the British Government, so you get statements like that made by Jack Straw when he said it didn't make much difference that there was no "literal" evidence. If only we weren't so bureaucratic and were happy to accept conceptual evidence or imaginary evidence or evidence in which Jack Straw puts an ashtray on the table and says: "So let's say this is his bunker. Then this salt pot here is his anthrax. Well there you are, there's his weapons of mass destruction."
Then there's astrological evidence, documented evidence from tea leaves, evidence that Nostradamus predicted a man with a moustache would threaten the land of the eagle with deadly vapour, but knee-jerk anti-Americans persist in demanding the literal type. And presumably, because Saddam only destroyed the weapons because the threat of war was real, once they'd been destroyed we had to have the war anyway as otherwise the threat of war would have turned out not to have been real, creating an unsolvable philosophical puzzle.
The amazing part is the Americans aren't even trying to lie properly. Surely they could find something if they really wanted to, but they almost take enjoyment from implying, "So what if we made it up, what's anyone going to do about it?" They're like someone having an affair with a married woman in the office, having to keep things officially secret but desperately wishing they could stand in the middle of the room yelling: "Guess what I've been doing".
In some ways you can almost respect them. They made no secret, before the twin towers were bombed, of their "Project for the New American Century" with its military aiming for "full-spectrum dominance". The really annoying people are the politicians and commentators who still think the war was fought to make the world a safer place. Ironically it seems that the anti-war movement in this country did more than anything to stem the growth of militant Islam. Several imams and Muslim leaders have stated how the scale of the movement made it hard for militant groups to argue that all Westerners were the enemy.
Even more infuriating is the certainty that the same people who fell for the lies will fall for them all over again. Already Iran is turning out to be backing terrorists and producing weapons of mass destruction. You'd think the Americans could at least be original and say they're breeding dinosaurs or have made contact with Voldemort or something. And, almost inevitably, as we hear stories of how atrocious Iran is, we refuse to believe an asylum-seeker who's been tortured in Iran. Then, when he sews up his eyes and mouth in protest, the attitude of those most enthusiastic about backing America is: "Well where did he get the needle and thread from, ay? That's our taxes paying for that cotton, we're mugs I tell you, mugs."
Blair believed that his actions would be proved right. Instead we've become the country that has officially no friends. But so wild are his Gulf War sickness hallucinations, it must be almost certain that his response will be to announce: "I fully support the bid for America to have a regular entry in the Eurovision Song Contest."
-oOo-
Head down revising for Monday's history exam. It's cold, raining and windy. Still, this is Tasmania and The Git recalls that at the end of this month in 1984, his wedding day was fine, mild and sunny.
Thought for the day:
But we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.
Lyndon B. Johnson
Current Listening:
Kevin Peek -- Awakening
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© Jonathan Sturm 2003
