Author Archives: bluedepth

PAD 2/3/13 – Writing Room

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“A genie has granted your wish to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?”

I’ve got the room, which is the library in the house I currently own. Right now this room is a makeshift guest bedroom with a library that has accumulated along the walls. There is a great design for a modular stackable bookshelf that really intrigues me and I imagine the library would feature this along the walls, improving on the current cheap particle-board bookcases that we currently use. I would also build these into the built-in closet in this room and take the doors off of it. In the center I would place an overstuffed leather chair with an ottoman for the legrests and behind it a floor lamp with multiple lights attached to a central body, much like this lamp. If the room was just a little bit larger I would also like a old-fashioned secretary desk to do writing and composition. I’ve written before about my affection for mixing up the traditional and the technological.

Truth to be told, if I got my hands on a Genie I’d likely not ask for these things, but instead relief from debt.

PAD 1/29/2013 – Looking Outside

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“Go to the nearest window. Look out for a full minute. Write about what you saw.”

I can just turn and look out my office window and the world out there looks like a freshly shaken snow globe. Everything is covered in snow and the wind is carrying snowflakes in a slow gamboling gyre. The tree just beyond my window has lost all of it’s leaves except for one dead branch that apparently can’t lose it’s leaves – perhaps they are permanently attached and just won’t fall off. Beyond that there is the start of the vine neighborhood ghetto that lines up against Austin Street. This particular street is comically steep and usually very slippery. Nobody parks out there during the winter because usually as cars try to climb the grade they tend to slide left and right bouncing into other cars and leaving some pretty breathtaking property damage. The ground is speckled with footprints of various creatures. Humans, deer, rabbits, and squirrels. The trees are loaded with snow and the pines across the way look to be strained with their ponderous load of white snow.

This is only the beginning as tonight the lake effect snow bands will shift towards us again and much of this will be covered over by the blizzard of snow to come. Visibility will be lost and all of the colors and the road and the tracks will be obliterated by the thick blanket of snow.

Cold

PAD 1/12/2013 – Inside vs. Outside

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“Run outside. Take a picture of the first thing you see. Run inside. Take a picture of the second thing you see. Write about the connection between these two random objects, people, or scenes.”

2013-01-30 10.02.022013-01-30 10.02.26

These two images are from my workaday world. On the left is the view out of my office window, as the weather is quite awful outside I chose not to just dash outside. The picture on the right is inside my office and features one of my favorite things on my desk, my very evocative Edison bulb desk lamp. It’s cold outside, the weather is just beginning to demonstrate how surprisingly variable it can be, thanks in no small part to climate change. It’s not that the world will actually warm up, although it very well might just do that very thing, I rather suspect we’ll see more variability in the weather patterns instead.

Cold and Hot, as well, perhaps even impersonal and inviting. Once you start spotting dualities they can sometimes just carry you off. It’s not that there are just a finite set of dualities either, and I’m sure including more pictures would just add to this particular sense of contrast that we see here. I don’t really find the outside to be that compelling except during the spring, or I should say the true spring and not the false springs that appear now midway through winter on accident. There is more stability and comfort in the Edison bulb. This simple and anachronistic bit of technology emits a very warm yellow glow that in the early mornings and late evenings gives my office a very subtle old-world atmosphere. I’ve written before about my affections for both the bleeding edge of technology and the anachronistic throwback technology of the deep past living contemporaneously together and I will always posit that the very old and the very new belong together and that there is wisdom in keeping things that are throwbacks around because you never know when something that has been well-tested may become all important when conditions change and the newest technology cannot cope with changing environments. The classic example i use is how an electromagnetic pulse could render all my bleeding edge technology useless but my Edison bulb and my mechanical hand-wound pocket watch will continue on. This mixing of the newest and oldest makes a lot of sense and speaks to infinite diversity in infinite combinations, something that everyone should take away from Star Trek if you are as earnest about that series as I am. That respecting diversity, even when it comes to levels of technology are vital for survival because you may not have the neat whiz-bang working all the time while the older bits of tech continue to chug along. I keep a fountain pen in my bag because I trust the classics more, as there are no moving parts to a fountain pen other than it’s ink. Older items, or items that harken back to the bygone days are also important to remind you that the world still has room for elegance and simplicity and that complexity, while dazzling isn’t the pinnacle of living.

This connection between the new and the old also is playing out in another part of my life, as I am using something very new, my Day One app,  to do something that at least speaks to the past, which is journaling. I write everything in the journal and then selectively share either on my blog or on social media, depending on the level of security and privacy that my writings require. I’ve discovered that over the past few years I’ve accidentally logged every day of my life in Twitter, at 140 characters at a time and including these bits in my Day One journal is cementing my past so that years from now I won’t have to ever wonder about what I’ve experienced and when it happened, there will be a log of it. I’ve found journaling to be a very mixed bag of motives, right now I feel like a digital squirrel bounding all over collecting and burying bits of my past in a safe place – but eventually I will browse this resource and think about what has happened to me and perhaps I’ll learn more about myself or at least remember more of what it was like to be me during that time in my life. On an expanded tangent I sometimes wish I could include journaled stories from my parents and their generation. The things they experienced and the feelings they felt, shared with the younger ones amongst us. I’m very enamored of the idea of learning this way, not from prepared texts that have been curated and vetted, but from personal experience with all its rich colors and opportunities for interpretation and even its foibles and pitfalls. Much of this resembles the StoryCorps project, where the stories of the past are recorded. This is a wonderful place to start browsing, if you are engaged with this idea, and I think the power of journaling speaks to this and maybe someday I’ll get enough bravery to publish all that I have written, maybe some of it will be useful to someone else in the future.

Friends: Man shot dead after pulling into wrong driveway | www.wsbtv.com

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Friends: Man shot dead after pulling into wrong driveway | www.wsbtv.com.

Do we need gun control in America? After reading that article how could you say anything else? How exactly is this sort of response even defensible? What really upsets me is that I’ve been known on occasion to also pull into random driveways, mostly so I can wait for traffic to clear and turn around with a K-turn. Even more than how this could happen to me, or happen really to anyone at all the segment of this story really gets me:

Thomas has also learned Sailors is a war veteran and a former church missionary. Sailors’ attorney told Thomas that the man believed he and his wife were being attacked.

So apparently they were churchgoing folk as well. It doesn’t do anything to calm my nerves as it appears that not even having the church dominate your life the notion of “Thou Shalt Not Kill” seems to not apply in these people. In this case, at least how it seems, it’s kill trespassers without provocation. Malice of forethought indeed.

Why do we need gun control? Why should there be limits on guns? I think the now-not-happening future of Rodrigo Diaz should be enough, but then again, all the now-not-happening futures of the kids in Newtown, the people in Aurora, or anyone else who was killed with a gun. So much potential squandered, so much lost.

That’s what I want to know. At what point does the loss-of-potential run up against our love affair with the gun? When is it enough that we should as a society temper the second amendment with the very regulations that the text of the amendment itself actually demands?

How much death, how much blood, how many lost lives? To quench this paranoid delusion that if we don’t have guns that somehow the government is going to swoop in and ruin our lives. That’s what gets me so much – this unfocused paranoid fear that citizens having guns is the only thing, the only single pillar that keeps our society functioning. If citizenry didn’t have weapons then obviously… what? No really. WHAT? What would happen? Would Township Supervisors rape your pets? Would Congresspeople attempt to cannibalize your children? What is this fear, where does it come from?

I don’t think it comes from anywhere really. I think people have fallen in love with guns and they love to kill. They love murder and bloodshed and the Church with all it’s high and mighty pronouncements are worth absolute bollocks. It’s got very little to do with securing liberty and everything to do with ensuring that you can kill effectively at a great distance with the minimum of effort. It’s the worst thing imaginable. It’s murder and laziness, the pinnacle of both. The second amendment has more to do with greed and lust for death than it does with any lofty “protect the womenfolk from marauding interlopers”. I seriously need to know at what point the body count, all the blood, and all this death will ever be enough to satiate the lust these people have for their beloved guns. It disgusts me and I am ashamed of what America has become because of this failure to well-regulate the militia.

System Hackery

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Sometimes I find ways to make life easier for my coworkers, things they couldn’t possibly understand but would benefit them anyways. A few weeks ago I discovered a series of system level adjustments to the TCP/IP stack which I thought would benefit everyone. These adjustments, just in case anyone was curious and technically so are here:

/etc/sysctl.conf

kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=4194304
kern.ipc.somaxconn=512
kern.ipc.maxsockets=2048
kern.ipc.nmbclusters=2048
net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=1
net.inet.tcp.win_scale_factor=3
net.inet.tcp.sockthreshold=16
net.inet.tcp.sendspace=262144
net.inet.tcp.recvspace=262144
net.inet.tcp.mssdflt=1500
net.inet.tcp.msl=15000
net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive=0
net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=1
net.inet.tcp.slowstart_flightsize=4
net.inet.tcp.blackhole=2
net.inet.udp.blackhole=1
net.inet.icmp.icmplim=50

/etc/nsmb.conf

[default]
streams=no
minauth=none
soft=yes
notify_off=yes
port445=no_netbios

I found these files online in various sites and the ultimate goal was to find any way to make the networking work better for clients on their iMacs. Most of these settings make sense if you are using a plain Ethernet system like we are here at Western, most specifically the mssdflt setting at 1500. One setting that I think was causing some issues was net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack. This setting covers how the systems handle ACK packets in TCP/IP communications. Back in the 80’s there was a dispute on how TCP/IP should function and there has been confusion and splits between two camps ever since, and this setting causes issues all depending on which number you set it to, 0 through 3. Apple sets this feature by default to 3, and I had this turned to 0 for many workstations and then I started noticing people having problems accessing SupportPress reliably. Perhaps I was overzealous in the 0 setting, so then the question becomes, how to change the setting without upsetting people?

Of course, ARD to the rescue. I created a new list of computers at work, removed the obvious ones that shouldn’t be touched such as the primary file server and such, and for the rest I copied these two files to the client workstations. Alas, these changes don’t work unless you can reboot the stations. I was able to reboot remotely several unoccupied stations but that wasn’t a real solution. I need to cover all my bases, not only change the system so that the new settings are permanent over reboot, but that they take effect now instead of later. I was on the edge of sending out an email to the group asking them to please reboot their computers during lunch and then it struck me, why not simply ship out the adjustment over ARD? ARD can send Unix commands to connected workstations and it can masquerade as root, so, why not?

The command to find out what this setting has is:

sysctl -a|grep delayed_ack

The command to make a change while the user is online is:

sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=1

The users have no idea I’m mucking about underneath their systems, way down in the BSD bits, all from my office, over the wire, with them logged in doing whatever it is that they are doing. Now all the workstations have this change effective immediately and when they reboot they’ll get this change applied automatically as well.

I will have to sit back and see if 1 is indeed the setting that will help. We shall see.

Decameron

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Influenza is a wildfire that is blazing through this state and my office. Many of my coworkers are out sick and at first what I thought was just the standard Influenza might be a few other things. WMU, through the health center and ultimately through the CDC pushed the 2012 Influenza vaccine shot which we later popularly discovered didn’t apparently take into account the strain that is blazing through Michigan and our office. I have talked to a few people who characterized this new flu as “Flu Type A”and I don’t know where they got that moniker from. I also heard that another virus, the Norovirus was blazing across the US, sourced from Sydney Australia. Are these tag-team illnesses or are we mistaking the Norovirus for the Influenza? For me it’s just idle speculation as the practical upshot is, I’m slowly being surrounded by sick people and eventually my resistance will falter, something will happen – either a surface I thoughtlessly touch or some aerosolized agent that I somehow come into contact with.

This has got me thinking about all the popular culture illnesses. Nothing as awe-inspiring as Captain Trips from Stephen King’s stories, but even movies like Hot Zone all lend themselves certain weight to the idea of control, quarantine, and the eventual lapse in vigilance. I haven’t gotten sick (knock on wood) and for that I’m very thankful, but something is knocking on the door and I don’t know if I’m doing enough to protect myself. Much of what I do is probably just a placebo, taking extra doses of Vitamin C, a dose of Vitamin D-3 (which I need anyways, and it probably doesn’t do anything else) drinking lots of hot tea (hot water can’t hurt) and regular drinks at night. Nothing comically appropriate like getting piss drunk every night, but a wee something regularly, wine, liquor, cider, beer. Does it help? It’s not hurting, so why not?

Beyond the things I eat and drink, vigilance visits me in what I do at work and at home. I often times worry that I’m starting to develop a germ-phobia laced with a touch of obsessive compulsive disorder. I know at least somewhat clinically that this activity of washing my hands before I eat (and sometimes afterwards) is only really a mental illness if I am paralyzed because I cannot proceed without cleaning my hands or it somehow impacts my quality of life. There is a small part of me that is concerned that all this handwashing, in hot water, for twenty seconds using rather aggressive soaps is just hastening my seasonal skin issues on my hands. The colder the weather, the drier the climate the more dry and cracked and bloody my hands get. My hands and my legs bear the worst of it, but my legs get a respite as I have them covered up almost all the time, where my hands don’t and pay the price. All this handwashing is just pushing them even harder. At what point will I have that breakpoint of diminishing returns? When will washing my hands mean nothing if I’m bleeding from the cracks from the angry skin on the back of my hands? What to do to cope? I’ve decided that Dove Soap’s line that caters to men, with their moisturizer as part of the soap may be my best effort. I’ve also got a pump bottle of moisturizing sanitizer however as I discovered tonight, sanitizer doesn’t touch Norovirus. Not that I’m really convinced that Norovirus is chewing through the office, but if it isn’t, then it’s on the heels of Influenza Type A.

This very story has played out before. It plays out whenever there are communicable outbreaks and the natural question pops up – at what point does it make more sense to just not go to work and expose yourself? At what point do you stop leaving the house? I laughingly call it the Decameron moment as the people in that book, in order to pass the time recount stories to each other and remain away from the city to avoid the plague. I can’t deny the pleasure of reading the Decameron back when I was in college and if it weren’t for the two other books that I’m currently hip-deep in reading, I would take it right up as it’s applicability in this particular situation is undeniable.

So tomorrow I’m going to have to come up with ways to protect myself at work. Bringing my own soap maybe to start would be okay, paper towels are still the best way to dry my hands as we don’t have any hot-air blowers at work. As for surfaces, it’s going to have to be Lysol and Isopropyl Alcohol as I can’t risk using Clorox on the surfaces at work. I know that Lysol and Alcohol will not likely damage the things at work, but I’m pretty sure that Clorox, even diluted would likely have unintended consequences. I will have to have faith that what I have, plus my nearly OCD handwashing and keeping my distance from people is enough. I have been dallying with the notion of pushing SupportPress down my clients figurative throats and only rendering help over Apple Remote Desktop in order to zero out the touching-of-surfaces vector of possible sickness. I haven’t gotten there yet, but it is something I am considering. I sometimes wonder if anyone has done a pathology survey in regards to electronic forms of communication and that impact on disease spread? What happens if we all switch to video links, phones, and email and shun contact with each other even more than we already have? In a lot of ways, each office could be it’s own Decameron, with people holed up, trying to avoid getting sick and passing the time.

I feel excellent. There is nothing wrong now, but it’s coming. The worst part is not knowing, or rather suspecting that something you can’t see is lying in wait for you and at the very best could make you miserable and at the very worst, kill you outright. Another bit of consideration is what the break-off point is for workplaces all around when a majority of staff is actually sick. At what point is going to work and accomplishing nothing cost more than just staying at home, claiming that you are sick when really, you’re just holed up waiting for the illness to burn past you?

PAD 1/25/2013 – Write Your Own Eulogy

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The height of immodest self-flogging comes with todays rather morbid and silly prompt:

“Write your own eulogy.”

No. I won’t. My life hasn’t been written yet and even if it has, can you sum up something as incredible as a human life in words? So instead of it being long and flowery and really just so much verbal masturbation I will write this:

He was born, during his life he laughed and others laughed. He died. The End.

So you know, take your eulogy and masturbation and sit in the corner where you belong.

Definitely the Moon…

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As I was tending to dinner I started just mumbling stock tunes and plugging in random lyrics as I often times do. Then it hit me.

A tasteless gay porn video with a retro 70’s outfitted cast, bell bottoms, powder-blue frilly pirate shirts, the cheesiest period-Muzak available and the plot is during the civil war, with a poorly-done knockoff of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” as a shamefully plugged plot device… Then the title, which caps it all off: “Dougie does Daguerreotypes”!

LULZ!

That’s what idleness, a full moon, and a touch of Gemini Rising can do for ya! Hah! 🙂

A Good Addiction

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There is an iOS game that I’ve heard before and didn’t think anything of until I downloaded it and started to play. The game is called Letterpress and it’s incredibly addicting. Each game is composed of 25 english letters in a 5×5 grid and the person who starts the game with another player is the first to go. You can select words from these 25 characters, one letter at a time and as you play the letters they are marked with your color. Your color is blue and your opponents color is red. When you use a letter the colors start out faint, but as you use letters and surround other claimed letters, the letters that are surrounded get a bolder color of whomever claimed them. All letters can be used over and over again and you get points for claiming a letter and stealing letters with weak colors from your opponent. Letters that are in strong colors can still be used but they don’t give you any points. The game ends when all letters have been claimed with a color and the person with the higher score wins.

The games themselves are tiny and quick and really fun. It’s like speed-yahtzee and it exercises your vocabulary as you try to construct words with or without really helpful bits like e’s and “ing”‘s. The app is freemium and so it’s free to play a few games but you can upgrade and play an unlimited number of games for $1.99. It’s the best iOS game I’ve ever played. It’s fair, it’s nicely balanced, and the quick game play is great fun. My win/loss is 50/50 and I don’t really care to win that much, but boy, do I love playing. The game is designed with touch, so it has pleasing sounds when you select and move letter tiles to make words and to remove old dead games you can swipe across the display and tap the Remove button and the game makes a really satisfying exploding noise and it actually explodes off the display. Another added extra is that Letterpress is a universal app, it works on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad equally well and your upgrade works for your Apple ID and then applies to all the different devices you have associated with that Apple ID. All in all I love it and I’m trying to get to word out to friends and family so they can start playing along.