mh-z web-log

I want a [http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4240000/newsid_4245900/4245983.stm friendly fox]…

Welcome, any new visitors who might be visiting this site! I’m still under lots of construction (the construction workers are on strike and we’re negotiating intently) but in the meantime, please click on the “My Old Site” link to the left.

My family’s cat routinely sleeps in the middle of the staircase, sprawled out in some odd form or other. People are continually going up and down the stairs, and each time he’s woken up and opens his eyes halfway, looking groggy and glum. As anyone would be, woken up every few minutes. I don’t think he realizes that the middle of a thoroughfare is not a good place to nap. Stupid cat.

No, today is just hot. Sweltering, rather. Broiling. Boiling (it’s the humidity that does it). Humidity is the complement of wind-chill factor for heat. If I were sitting on a vinyl chair I’d have stuck for a while and then come unstuck and slid right off. But I think this is only in my room, where comparatively the outside isn’t nearly as bad. I’m programming in a self-imposed coding sweatshop! But I can take the heat.

Got my old data imported, more or less. Some articles didn’t come through perfectly, but this’ll do.

I’d been meaning to redo this site for quite a while, but since it wasn’t broke, I had no particular compulsion to fix it. Then I went and broke it, and as you can see, it’s in the process of being fixed. Of course it would have been quite boring to put things back just the way they were before, so let’s see how this evolves.

I’m tired!

Of course I was right, 1&1 did apologize and change their policy. :) On the other hand, as the post points out, they just blamed some “uninformed” tech support people rather than admit fault, which doesn’t go too far to breed good will, in general. But just evaluating 1&1 on technical merit (see my post a couple days ago) says enough for me: they’re solid, but behind the times.

TextDrive seems like a nice webhosting service. I just signed up for an account to use for my own client.

Update: TextDrive is awesome. I set up access to the MySQL server through an SSH tunnel, transferred the database without a hitch using MySQL Administrator’s backup/restore feature, copied all the files using WinSCP (a secure FTP client), changed the database connection string and a couple other variables, and the site works perfectly.

Comparison with 1&1, my current host: 1&1 does not support the SSH tunnel, though at least I can use MySQL-Front through its PHP tunnel script. 1&1 only supports an older version of PHP (4 rather than 5). 1&1 interfaces with PHP only through the CGI method (slow) whereas TextDrive uses the Apache module method (fast). TextDrive lets me create my own php.ini file, if I were to need it, which I don’t think 1&1 supports. 1&1 has an ancient version of the MySQL server, and to import a locally exported database I have to edit the SQL in Notepad and do a search-and-replace to get rid of any “character-set” declarations among other things.

But then again, I haven’t paid a penny for my 1&1 account (besides registering domain names through them) which I got through a promotion 1&1 ran a while back where they gave away free three-year accounts of their top package.

It’ll also be interesting to see how 1&1 deals with the backlash regarding one customer support person’s ignorant defense of an equally ignorant policy regarding Bit Torrent files. I wasn’t that surprised to see 1&1 mentioned on BoingBoing, and my impression of them (due to the technology issues) hadn’t been all that great, but at least that was somewhat excusable under an assumed principle of them sticking to more “tried-and-true” existing programs so as to not trigger compatibility issues across their user’s sites by upgrading to newer versions (of PHP, say) which do slightly change the behavior of certain functions.

Anyway, I’m predicting some sort of “public” (on the ‘net, at least) apology by 1&1 and a changing of that specific policy, because if they know what’s good for them they’ll do some damage control. BoingBoing is big media in this arena, so we see how big media has power. It doesn’t seem like the normal channels we call “big media” (like the New York Times or other newspapers, or (sensationalistic) TV news) really have that much power anymore, compared to their historical roles in triggering political change (well, newspapers, at least), so this is interesting to see happening in the online world. Not political change here, I mean, but rather the reaction of a large company to news published about it.

This post starts out with a ridiculous piece of misinformation! I realized that I had just configured something wrong so Proxomitron wasn’t filtering anything at all, and the sites I was visiting just happened to have a bunch of Flash-based ads. Anyway, it does in fact block many of those ads, although not all. But I wrote this already, and it digresses pretty fast, so here it is:

The shortcoming of Proxomitron is that it only catches the image-based ads, but Flash ads sometimes right through. And Flash ads are inordinately more annoying than image ads, because at least GIF animation stops when you hit “escape” so if an ad sneaks through you can stop it from flashing wildly (if that is in fact what it does), but there is no “stop” button for Flash! So when I see “catch the X and get a free iPod” (or “punch the monkey” or “swat the fly” or… I could, really, truly, go on for an hour like this but that is, really, truly, a tremendously horrible waste of time).

Let me digress for a moment: it is ALWAYS an iPod. At least, it was up until this moment, but let me talk about iPods for a moment, and ads in general. The basic principle is: there is no such thing as free. Nobody wants to give you a free iPod unless they’ll get something from you of greater value than that which they paid for the iPod. If you have to sign up 10 friends to get a free iPod, rest assured that each of those 10 friends is contributing a little more than 1/10 of the cost of the iPod to the coffers of whomever’s giving you the iPod. So you might as well ask 10 friends for $20 each and go buy a nice iPod yourself, right? Well… maybe there’s value in this for the consumer somehow, but remember that no matter what a marketer tells you, there is no such thing as free. But let me put an asterisk on that, since it’s a more complicated issue, because money doesn’t always flow DIRECTLY from you to the marketer. It could be a promotion, or some such. And so on…

But as for the iPod itself. I just don’t like the image of the thing. It’s a pretentious music player. Maybe this is an image that has been created in my mind because of all the “X the X and get a free iPod” (always an iPod) ads, or maybe because it’s become a ubiquitous status symbol that everyone has to have even though there are hundreds of other players that cost less and do more. Maybe it’s because although it has a unique look, everyone has to have one, making them all conformists and I prefer the idea of evaluating products via their own merit. Maybe because I don’t like using Apple computers, although I can, and each experience I have with one validates my taste (and I’ll admit this is mostly a matter of taste, although there are issues on both sides using which one can argue for the superiority of various different platforms over others). Definitely a combination of all of those. This is also the same reason I’m not going to buy a Mercedes or BMW or Ferarri (i.e., status symbol; I hate status symbols); watch me get a De Lorean someday, though! But if I do that I’m not going to keep it in a garage, I’ll drive it around as my main car because otherwise what’s the point? Things are meant to be used.

Oh, anyway. So the iPod has the best reviews of any music player on CNet and it’s probably pretty decent, so never mind most of the above product disparagement, especially since I haven’t really thoroughly tested one. But then, I’m just talking about the product image here, you know, not the product itself. :) I’d still rather get an iRiver or something like that. I have an MP3 player already, and I’m happy with it. Just go invest in a good pair of earphones… those are a pretty important piece of your sound delivery system, but something I think most people overlook.

What prompted this whole, uh, rant I guess you could call it was a Flash ad I kept seeing which said “spray the stinky monster and get a free* Ionic Breeze air purifier!” with two people sliding back and forth across the screen forever after some brown blob with eyes, and your cursor turned into an image of a spray can. The fact that aforementioned ad would appeal to anyone (especially among the sea of “X the X and get a free* X” makes me question the sanity of the general population of Internet users that such a marketing idea would actually work!

Should product manufacturers be able to control more of how their products are advertised by resellers because certain classes of advertisements, to me and probably many others, represent “negative advertising” which devalues the product’s image??

If I don’t write something now, I’ll probably end up breaking this daily trend.

I’m going to run in a marathon, sometime. Should be fun, you know? If I can already run for an hour straight at 8 MPH, then 26 miles would take a little more than 3 hours… that shouldn’t be too hard. I could always run a little bit more slowly if I’m feeling tired. Although I think the body parts that start wearing out over such long distances aren’t the same ones that wear out with larger exertions for short distances or efforts, like lifting weights. Usually it’s the heart or lungs that get tired, or the muscles… but if I can go for at least an hour, then those things are self sustaining. I guess it’ll be other things, like my feet hurting from the repeated impact, or something chafing against something else. Things that don’t regenerate quickly with more energy or rest, but rather need a few days of rest and recuperation to heal. I guess I’ll find out. True runners have to be going at least 10 MPH on average for the entire race to finish in their 2.5 hour times, and I can’t keep up that speed for much more than a mile on a treadmill, but I think 3 hours would be a pretty respectable marathon time for an absolute beginner. Only I’m not wearing those silly short shorts they wear, I don’t care what.

There’s something to be said for nine hours of sleep, too.

The weather is hot, but I went to the beach!

Enough with taking breaks. I installed Wordpress and mucked around with it a bit, then decided that although it’s nice, it’s going to take a lot more mucking around before I can make it live and put it up on my homepage, meaning, here, of course. In some ways it seems overly simplified: I like my “advanced” user options and configurability. I like easy-to-edit templates and having to use Server-Side-Includes. On the other hand, with WordPress I can enable comments finally, so that the nonexistent people who view this site can write deeply expository missives upon… I’m not sure what. But maybe they will, and this site will become a think-tank for future world policy, technology, health, and all sorts of important social issues. On the other hand, perhaps they will simply write single word comments such as “drool” and “poo”, which a certain person whose name starts with ‘Z’ tends to do.

There’s a cat here, now. My little sister’s cat, actually. He’s a gray one-year-old silver tabby who doesn’t have a definite name yet, doesn’t mind being handled and is friendly in that sense but doesn’t seek out human contact, and who jumps up on all the windowsills of the house one at a time and meowls loudly, wanting to go outside. But there are all sorts of dangers outside for a feline of his stature, such as a bunch of stray cats who fight at night. One lives under the house, and its eye was injured, presumably in a fight, though it looked better the last we saw it.

I transcribed the “B” background music from the Gameboy Tetris game, which sounds rather nice when sythesized on a piano. I’ll upload it when I work on it some more and iron out some kinks.

My grandfather passed away the week before last, and I said a few words his funeral. He was a good man, and perhaps I will post what I said, here.

WordPress supposedly had a “post in the future” option, whereby one could write an article and put it in a bin for automatic posting at a certain date/time. I liked the idea of that feature, but couldn’t find it in the program as distributed. WordPress also has a “post by email” feature, which is incredibly simplistic in its controls. I fail to see how this would work without several more options, and in fact when I set it up to check a particular mailbox and mailed something there, nothing happened. There’s no test feature or log which could help in debugging the issue, either.

I also see some WordPress sites which have a graph showing “posting by time of day”. That’s pretty neat. It fits in with my Birthday Histogram, somewhat. All my postings would probably show up at about 4 AM. Although I’m typing this at noon, so perhaps that thought isn’t valid anymore.

Does a plugin for Firefox exist which saves the contents of form fields as you type in them? If not, someone ought to write one.

I’m liking Trillian 3 better than Gaim, at least for the moment. Both have annoying behaviors, but Trillian has fewer. For example, when a message is received, Gaim flashes the window in the taskbar either indefinitely, or not at all (depending on a setting). Trillian only flashes it a specified number of times, and then it remains solid. There’s nothing like a flashing thing on your screen to annoy you, but you might not want to interrupt what you were doing to respond to an instant message, therefore, the flashing issue was insufferable.

There, don’t you now want to write some earth-shattering words of wisdom as feedback to this entry? Come on, I know you do. But you can’t! Yet, that is…

Cool things:

1. Mvelopes: Finance tracking system. Excellent website-scraping abilities to get your bank and credit card transactions into their system, where you can drag each transaction into a folder to assign it. Steep learning curve, however, and the site is still under development and somewhat buggy.

Thoughts:

1. Annoying Bad Data: File sharing programs like WinMX should never automatically share a song anyone has downloaded until they have listened to the song and “certified” that it is error free and correctly named.

2. Annoying Bad Data: Websites which post song lyrics should indicate whether the lyrics were obtained by someone listening to the song and writing down what they thought they heard, or whether they were actually transcribed from liner notes or copied from some official source. Most of the time if I search for song lyrics, I’ll get several pages showing slightly different words.

Also see: anyone who tries to transcribe Cocteau Twins lyrics (because the singer doesn’t, on purpose, actually sing words that make sense).

Ideas:

—–Original Message—–
From: Regina Ryu

there were a bunch of cops across the street from my house today, one of them was holding a rifle. never did find out what happened. oh well

—–Original Message—–
From: Michael Hecht

Don’t you wish there was a news service where you could search by latitude and longitude to find the events that were reported closest to you?

You could record your coordinates if you happen to be out and about (you could easily find that of your home) by hitting a button on your GPS enabled cellphone to record your current location.

Check out Google Maps, their satellite photo feature is cool. Underlying the map, I think there’s a way to get latitude/longitude. The only remaining step is hooking coordinate data up to the newswire services. Also, there should be a news service where regular individual people can submit news in relation to coordinates, sort of like blogging. Geo-blogging, as it were.

—–Original Message—–
From: Regina Ryu

that’s really cool! i was just going to give my neighbor a call. whee

—–Original Message—–
From: Michael Hecht

But we need more technological solutions so that nobody has to actually talk to anybody. You know that, right?

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday.

I have lots and lots of Gmail invites now, if anyone wants.

I’m in Palm Springs, visiting my grandparents here for the day. I was going to drive back tonight, but it’s still wet outside and I’d rather wait until tomorrow morning and exchange darkness for traffic. In one minute it’s going to be my birthday. There we go. I’ve never done anything big for birthdays, except when I was little and had birthday parties. Now, just a nice family dinner where I get to specify the menu. What should I have? My little brother has already volunteered to specify my menu and says steak; I say that’s not a bad idea. Birthday parties when I was little: Those were fun. Most memorable experience is of a friend of mine singing “happy birthday to washing-machine!” because my birthday is the same as George Washington’s. So now you know. Don’t use this information to steal my identity, ok? (I think anyone determined enough would be able to find that information in public databases, anyway. So my plea is directed at the casual identity thief.)

Sometimes friends ask me what I’m going to do (expecting a lavish party or something, who knows what their overactive imaginations hold) and I’m probably letting them down by saying “nothing much”, but in a way I’d rather it just be another day. I suppose there are two ways of looking at it.

One way is like sleep. In general, when I think of days, I don’t think of them as being divided, one from another, by an arbitrary time like 12:00 AM; I think of them as being divided by sleeping periods. For example, even though now it’s technically Tuesday, it’s still part of the same “day” as far as I’m concerned. When I go to sleep and wake up, it’ll be a new day. That means an all-nighter leads to my having a strange sense of the current day, since it’s really one day, but a day with two mornings and two afternoons and maybe two evenings… but it doesn’t feel like so much time has passed. Maybe because I think of a day as starting when I wake up and get out of bed, and not having that as a reference point means that a new day never really started. A birthday is like 12:00 AM. It’s an arbitrary point which divides ages, just as midnight is an arbitrary point which divides days, both being for logical purposes of letting us communicate with others and have standard definitions of things. So what’s the “real” divider of ages? What says that now I’m one year older just as going to sleep and waking up says that now a new day has started? Maybe there isn’t one and I’d rather just see life as one continuous amount of time not punctuated by years. Why even view days that way? (That’s a dangerous view, though… it leads one to sleeping whenever one wants and floating around the clock not in synchrony with daylight or anyone else’s schedule. Anyway, that doesn’t work when one needs to be available to meet with or have calls with others at specific times, which would be during standard business hours.)

The other view of birthdays compares them to new years, or new school terms, or anything that provides a fresh start. Now it’s the first day of my being this age, and here is a fresh chance to make this the best year I’ve lived yet. Just like we have New Year’s Resolutions, or an attitude at the beginning of a semester that “I’m going to study hard and remain focused and not fall behind in any class and get straight A’s; I’ll start my homework when it’s assigned and not wait until the last minute for anything; I’ll do all the assigned reading right away and start studying a week before each exam to give myself plenty of time and consequently not ever have to feel stress when the exam looms because I’ll be confident that I know all the material” and so on. Why not birthday resolutions? Today’s as good a reference point as any.

(It’s been a while since I wrote the above.) So maybe it’s just another day. But the steaks are about to go on the grill…

Tonight I went to the gym. I went into the locker room and opened up a locker. It had some things in it, as sometimes is the case when a trusting soul doesn’t use a lock. I noticed a pair of shoes that looked remarkably like an old pair I used to have but hadn’t seen in months, and the thought occurred to me that, hey, maybe someone stole my shoes, and that’s why I hadn’t seen them, and here they are again! But it was just a thought, so I closed that locker and opened the one to its immediate right which was empty, proceeded to change, put my things away, and put a lock on the door. I was about to go out and thought, hey, let me take another look in that unlocked locker. I looked in there and carefully pulled out one reminiscent shoe, holding it at arm’s length. I brought it closer and inspected it, noting how remarkably it looked like my old one. Probably really was my old one, but I wasn’t completely sure yet. I looked at the other one. Then I noted that there was also a pair of underwear in the corner of the locker which was identical to a particular pair I had once had and also hadn’t seen for a while, come to think of it, but underwear being underwear, one doesn’t tend to give it much thought or feel much of a loss or even necessarily notice if a particular pair wanders off. But I recognized this one as mine, and the combined weight of the two pieces of evidence, shoes and underwear, clinched the fact that they were both mine. I next asked myself how long it had been since I had seen those shoes, and I recalled that they had disappeared around the time I moved, which was the end of last September. I’d always assumed they were around the house somewhere, or in a box somewhere, but here they were in a locker and they had presumably been in that same locker since the end of September! Which would be: all of October, November, December, January, and over half of Feburary. So the facts are that my shoes and a couple other things (there was also a nondistinct tee shirt I didn’t mention) were sitting calmly and patiently in an unlocked locker in my gym, undisturbed, for four and a half months. I laughed out loud! Then I closed the door and left the items there rather than transfer them to my locked locker, because what was one additional hour after those four and a half months going to do?

But when I came back after working out, my long lost things were gone and the locker was empty.

All right, that didn’t really happen; of course everything was still there. I took it all home, my beloved pair of sneakers among the other items. And to think that months ago I had considered tossing them out because they were old and falling apart. What would have happened if I hadn’t found my old things? How long would they have persisted in that locker? Probably until the death of the universe.

I’m reading The Lake of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe, which is the second in a series. I’m a sucker for stories based on pure imagination which create whole worlds and adventures set in those worlds. Maybe it’s the mundanity of the world we live in, or the fact that we seek to establish routines so that we avoid dealing with new and interesting experiences. This world really isn’t that boring, actually, despite the dreams of other worlds we’re capable of. And I’m not one to shy away from exploration and adventure, or at least that’s what I tell myself (so it’s in principle), but then I come across wonderful opportunities and don’t take them. For example, a close friend of mine went to China (Shanghai) recently and invited me to come along, at least to stay for a week and visit. For the cost of a plane ticket alone I could go, since she would provide accomodations, and aside from that I’d only have to pay for food and other incidentals. I certainly can afford the plane ticket, so why haven’t I gone? That’s simple, actually: Because I’ve built up responsibilities here in Los Angeles. And the longer I’m here, the more responsibilities I tend to create for myself. I don’t have a full time job anymore (I’m a consultant), so as my own boss conceivably there’s no reason I can’t pick up and leave. But it’s not as simple as just taking a vacation. I told myself, now isn’t a good time, because right now I have several programming projects to finish and a new client where I will be a network administrator. The programming projects I can take with me on a laptop. But there are offices I have to visit, and things that need to be fixed or smoothed over, and to take off means neglecting those relationships. I don’t like the idea of being tied down, and yet I’m tying myself down, by accepting monthly retainer fees or agreeing to provide support and service. I’m far less free than when I was in school, because at least then I could skip class and no one would care; as long as I didn’t miss exams I could take a few days off and I only had myself to answer to for my grades. And there were school breaks, which provided ample time to travel. I probably wouldn’t have done it alone; with Fuyuko I visited Rome, Germany, Prague, Japan (twice), and Hong Kong. Those were the days, and yet, there can be plenty more. So why not? It’s only the world awaits. I’m less free than when I had a full-time job, because that provided vacations and those same exact routines I mentioned earlier. Vacations as a routine part of a yearly cycle of work; a standard part of the accepted way things are done. In fact by writing this I’m procrastinating; it’s 3:30 A.M. and I have something to finish before tomorrow afternoon. Since I won’t get anything more done tonight, I might as well go to bed. I hope I dream up something exciting (and remember it).