Friday, February 25, 2005

Misteries of Human Construction

Wheeee, internet is back and that techie didn't bother to pick up the modem he left for me to test with it. Now I've got two modems. Perhaps I could sell one, if it weren't an outdated phased-out technology. Everyone is handling or is planning to handle internet according to the DOCSIS standard.
Not always does everything play out according to plans. Like the human DNA. It was estimated that it contains more than 100.000 genes, but they found out it contains only 34.000 genes. Not enough even to map all the proteins in the human body. There is a possible explanation for it. Remember, think positive and everything will play out just fine. ;)

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

CMS = Cable Modem Shit

Actually, CMS means Content Management System. This blogger is a type of CMS.
First you have to know that there are cable companies and there are Internet Service Providers (ISP) that work with cable companies to bring the internet to my computer. Kind of like telcos and ISPs, if you know what ADSL is. An ISP is a separate entity from cable company. And somehow, perhaps because of this division, ISPs and cable companies don't tend to like each other. Except for where there exists a cable company's favourite ISP. Today a technician came from the ISP I'm subscribed to. He brought with himself 3 modems of the same model as I have, only with different firmware revisions. He was an hour late. He spent an hour fiddling with all the modems. And making phone calls. One was exceptionally tedious, as if he would talk with a man that still visits kindergarten. I bet his child quite often tells him in the morning: "Father, now I'll play here, but you must get to work. Don't forget to pick me up in 8 hours." I got a good impression of the technician though, he seems like a man that knows his stuff, and is quite friendly. Now, on to the problem. The ISP supports only one type of modems with the cable company I'm connected to. Yes, that Israeli shit. He also told me they use other technologies elsewhere, but here it may take some time before they introduce technology that's actually a standard, not some bizarre proprietary crap that's not compatible with anything else. To cut the story short, it seems that the cable company didn't correctly adjust the signal levels for this type of modem. Cable modems use two TV channels for their operation; considering modem's self-diagnostics it appears that the downstream is doing well, but the upstream signal doesn't reach the hub. Bugger. A job for the cable company. And tomorrow the technician will come again. Hopefully then he'll get something done. I STILL DON'T HAVE INTERNET#"$^"$%!@~^#$

Monday, February 21, 2005

[Dis]service

The electric company is bullshitting me again. On the night from 16th to 17th February, that's the night between Wednesday and Thursday in the previous week, they didn't have the cheap tariff. And that remained so all nights since. Even the whole weekend! It is supposed to be the cheap tariff the whole weekend!
And I won't even start talking about my Internet provider. They're playing with my patience. If even tomorrow I won't have internet access restored, then it will be the whole 2 weeks without access to the internet from home, the exception beeing two afternoons. One was Thursday two weeks ago, one was Tuesday the previous week. Today they were just repeating the excuse that they were having extensive problems with my type of modem. Not all of them can connect. Crappy Israeli technology. They should have bought cheap Taiwanese shit, not a bloody expensive piece of joke. Sure enough, a year from when I bought the damn modem, they've changed the technology. They're not all that stupid, but sufficiently stupid for me to always get into some kind of trouble! That Israeli work of art cost me the same as five Taiwanese plastic boxes would have. There's always been some transient problems with this modem. On average once a week in late evening it wouldn't connect anymore. You had to wait until the morning, and then it worked again. I didn't even bother to report those problems. Tomorrow I'll ask them for how long would they have me wait before I switch to another provider. I'm very interested in what the reply will be.
I hate dilettants. At times like this I am sorry I chose civil service instead of army service. Now I'm barred from ever having a gun.

Friday, February 18, 2005

Health and Society

Statistics show that the primary causes of death are coronary diseases and cancer. When professionals delve into that kind of data they all start saying how we don't live well, how we should improve our way of living with more physical activity and better diet. Jogging, cycling, raw vegetables and fruit! Yeah. They all say how it should be, there's never any analisys on why it isn't so already. Until I see those reasons exposed I'm calling them all a bunch of dilettants.
People should want to exercise and eat plants. If after those health litanies I still see a person enjoying his/her existing way of life then there's something fundamentally wrong in trying to convince people to enjoy a "better life". Just placing ads telling us to eat fruit and vegetables five times a day won't have any significant impact. If you're targeting the society then you have to change the society, not individuals. One simple way of doing this is to drop taxes on healthy food, and to somehow motivate people to exercise. By changing the mindset do you change the opinion on what joy means. Invite, not suggest. I've observed that people around here like to take suggestions as a mild form of an attack, a judgement or a critique. The more "drastic" and personal suggestions are, the more of a feeling of repression they get. Just do a simple invitation. Drop taxes. Implement some kind of a financial stimulans for persons that decide to exercise. I don't know, finance some minimum number of hours in a sport club for exercising. Lower life insurance rates. Give people an incentive by properly changing the society.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Don't Invest in USA

They have a crazy law that a crazy president just might use. Here's an excerpt.
  1. During the time of war, the President may, through any agency that he may designate, and under such rules and regulations as he may prescribe, by means of instructions, licenses, or otherwise
    1. investigate, regulate, or prohibit, any transactions in foreign exchange, transfers of credit or payments between, by, through, or to any banking institution, and the importing, exporting, hoarding, melting, or earmarking of gold or silver coin or bullion, currency or securities, and
    2. investigate, regulate, direct and compel, nullify, void, prevent or prohibit, any acquisition holding, withholding, use, transfer, withdrawal, transportation, importation or exportation of, or dealing in, or exercising any right, power, or privilege with respect to, or transactions involving, any property in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest, [...]

So: when can you say it is the time of war, when can you say someone is hoarding something, etc.? Big ambiguities when the President is doing something he calls the War on Terror, and having a weak dollar. Dollar appears to be sligthly regaining strength lately only because Europian and Asian countries cannot afford it to become any weaker. Not until they have freed themselves of (most of) the dependency on dollar. When they will have converted their dollar reserves, one can only imagine what will become of dollar. Nothing rosy, that's for certain. And when dollar sinks, everything else goes up. If I were a crazy president with a dollar that isn't worth anything, I'd declare a war on, say, Iran and seize all foreign capital.
But if you're a speculative person and have the nerve, you may get rich trading in gold. That is, if you're not an American and don't plan to store your assets there, or you believe the above-mentioned law won't get into effect. You see, the value of gold is still pegged to dollar. Hint, hint, wink, wink? ;)

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

The Season Is About to Change Therefore I Must Be Ill.

Yes, I think I finally got it how I get ill. I must get ill before spring weather can show up. No sneezing, no spring. I've got a sore throat and my right ear aches. Actually, there's something wrong with the whole right part of my head. It's one of those weird colds I tend to catch.
Actually I'm in a mockingly funny mood and have typed a post already, and then decided it's more suitable for The Dregs of I.T. So no more typing for me. I have to implement a transaction server anyway. Not a very easy job. At last something interesting. ;)
Oh, and I'm doing documentation using LaTeX! Yay! Too bad it's a trade secret. I could really enjoy some gloating by putting it up here and showing the world how these things are done.