From the next article in the NYT series on health care in prisons, the phrase “Prison Health Services, a Nashville-area corporation that bills itself as the gold standard of jail health care”… rings both true and meaningless.
That’s my kind of wording.
yet another article on how people in prison die of malign neglect. It reminds me of this book from Disinformation called “50 facts that should change the world”. The problem is, well, you could call it “fifty facts that should change the world, but won’t, because nobody gives a damn.”
Anyway, Disinfo seems like a neat publisher. Check ’em out. Coming up: reviews of wine, cheese, and the book “A Carnivore’s Inquiry” by Sabina Murray.
People have been talking about “social software”being good and groupware being bad. Sure, I want to share my address book and calendars. You want a genuinely funny story, unlike JWZ’s unfunny story of Netscape’s death (Ok, ok, I get it, it was a horrible tragedy, and as a result you became very rich and have to run a nightclub, and the world has to use Mozilla Firefox for free instead of paying for Netscape Navigator Gold 12) and why business users shouldn’t be your target customers?
In the original Evolution manual I wrote about how you could share calendars and address books, deciding which ones were shared and which ones weren’t. On an individual item basis, even. It seemed like the sort of thing that would be useful: if I’m JWZ’s 22-year-old college kid, or my target customer of a 35-year-old middle-manager, I need to keep track of some things privately and some things in public.
Of course, Evolution couldn’t do that– it barely ran at that point. But also, it wasn’t in the list of things it was planned to do. I tried to convince the developers that if I got to the manual before they got to the functionality, they had to code it the way I had described it. That didn’t work. Evolution was just a client app and we didn’t have a server to host that data and control access to it. Nowadays there is the opportunity to really do all the things I imagined Evolution would be able to do. What do I want it to do?
For address books: I need to have an address book of everyone in my CS class or marketing team or study group or book club, one that I can share with just the CS class or marketing team or study group. (The CS class one should be run by the prof, obviously, the others should be run collaboratively by anyone who joins). I need to have access to the whole school or company’s directory so I can look up random people I need to talk to, but we already have that.
For calendars: I need to keep track of public events that I may or may not be involved in (Red Sox games), personal events that only I am involved in (my work or study schedule), and — here’s the tricky part — semi-public events like the meetings that only five or ten people are invited to, or the schedule for when I am babysitting or having my baby sat upon.
Basically, I want to share these things with a selective audience. And I want to have different levels of power and privilege assigned to different people. And that at some point requires a server. And it requires people to join. And it requires giving up some of the cool.
JWZ’s argument is that something can be made to work, but people won’t love it unless it’s cool. Mine is that something can be made cool, but people won’t pay for it unless it works — and works in a way that nothing else does. Ideally it’s both, and I think there’s room for both coolness and functionality in Hula. Go Hula.
Sometimes, one comes across an application with an interface that is so bizarre, the manual has to admit that it’s aberrant. Such is the case with hdparm, a command with nearly forty single-letter option flags, some of which can be combined, most of which have multiple functions depending on their arguments, and several of which can cause horrible irreversible damage to data.
The flag I found hilarious, though, was not dangerous– it lets you set the amount of time the drive should wait, unaccessed, before it assumes it’s not being used and spins down to save electricity and wear-n-tear. The use is as such:
hdparm -S N
where N is some number. Typically you’d guess that 0 turns the feature off, and any positive integer would be a number of seconds or minutes. Oh no. I quote from the man page:
Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5 seconds to 20 minutes. Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30 minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 signifies a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-defined timeout period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved. 255 is interpreted as 21 minutes plus 15 sec�onds.
Then comes the clincher: “Note that some older drives may have very different interpretations of these values.”
My guess is, this is determined by hardware engineers who had only had so many bits for the value, and tried to divide 256 options into some reasonable range of timings. They’d have said, we need an option for no timeout, an option for leaving it at the vendor default, and one set aside for just in case we forget something. After that, how do we divide up the remaining options? Well, what’s the smallest increment you’d reasonably want? Five seconds. So, we’ll do it in five-second increments. But at 20 minutes adding five seconds is just silly, so they go to 30-minute intervals. At that point someone says, hey, but what if I want 21 minutes and 15 seconds? They all laugh, and assign a couple joke values because it’s 3am and they’re still at work and it’s just this one drive, right?
Of course, later, they just go with the one they used last time, and six trillion drives later, everyone has the same insane interface.
Yesterday I took a picture of Ming the Merciless but I didn’t hit “Save” on the phone so I lost it. So no pictures of Ming finishing his meal and going over the evening’s reciepts.
Instead, I direct you to this incredibly depressing portrait of celebrity and drug abuse.
Last night, I woke up screaming. The dream began with having to get to the theatre for opening night of my role as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. I had to be there early because I had never read the play, so I had a lot to rehearse. First I had to get dressed and shave. Shaving took forever. My face seemed impossibly wide, and every time I turned my head I’d find a new spot of thick, gnarly whiskers I’d overlooked. The razor was dull, I was out of shaving cream. My beard extended all the way to the back of my neck. I cut myself. I brushed my teeth and got toothpaste everywhere. I went to get dressed, but the good white shirt I had was dirty, so I had to wear one that was sort of ragged and old and not the right color. Where was my tie? I buttoned my shirt wrong. Every button took forever to do, my fingers were completely numb, I slowly buttoned each button again, and it was wrong again. That’s when I became totally enraged and started yelling and woke myself, and Bookdwarf, and the cats.
“What’s wrong?”
“I couldn’t get my shirt buttoned right.”
Last year’s results were N. This year’s results were anticipated to be N-1, but turned out to be N as well. N is OK, but N+1 would be better. Even so, things turned out better than expected. Especially when, if you count the one-time windfalls, the results are N+87.
Why is this considered disappointing? Bah, humbug. Wall Street is dumb.
Start reading here, where our hero, a femme mostly-lesbian named Heathen, finds a “wayward” does of testosterone. Continue upwards toward the conclusion of the experiment. Caution: contains dirty words.
See also the Slate review of Jose Canseco’s latest book which describes it as less an expose and more a discussion of how cool steroids are. (The press surrounding the book has treated his tales of racism in the press and in the game as an aside, at best– not surprising, I suppose, since we already knew about the racism and nobody ever admitted to the drugs before).
Anyway, it all makes me think steroids are cool. No wonder gynecomastia is in the news so much these days!
Today I got a letter from Mrs. Jesus. She wanted to know if I wanted to have some fun, since her man was away. I also got a message titled “Advanced Degrees.” It was a letter from my college alumni office, asking if I had an advanced degree, and if I had, would I please let them know, so they could put together a list. I wrote back and asked if I should have an advanced degree, and if they had an opinion about which was best, since they seem to be pretty easy to buy online.
Project Runway, on Bravo. Funny, addictive, “reality” tv show. It’s ending this week, but Bravo is showing all the episodes in order on Wednesday all day. Tivo them if you dare.
Secretly Ironic 