Coincidinks

Random phenomena just isn’t as random as you may think – if you think about it, there are so many people on this planet, it would be unusual if the odd person didn’t have a totally unbelieveable event happen to him and her.

The trick is to think logically and rationally, rather than try to attribute such things to conspiracy theories or the paranormal.

On the bookshelf: Dan Simmon’s Endymion. It’s almost like a buddy/roadtrip story than a sci-fi epic, not as good as the first two books of the Hyperion Cantos, and frankly drags on.

Once in a while, you step on a red ant.

Ernie Ball, world-famous guitar-string manufacturer, was a Microsoft shop. Then, in 2000, the BSA raided their premises, found a few dozen unlicensed programs. With legal costs mounting, Ernie Ball settled for $65,000 plus $35,000 legal fees.

But it doesn’t stop there. In a move that would make a mafioso proud, the BSA humiliated Ernie Ball in public, making an example out of them.

But unlike other companies that had been stepped on like ants, CEO Sterling Ball fought back. “I don’t care if we have to buy 10,000 abacuses,” recalled Ball, who recently addressed the LinuxWorld trade show. “We won’t do business with someone who treats us poorly.”

Now running Red Hat, Mozilla, and Open Office, Ball spends less money on hardware and software, and less time chasing down viruses and technical issues. And he’s not looking back.

My new toy.

It arrived…

August 007.jpg

The Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro Atlantis, with about 18 stamps on it too. The card was very heavy and thick, as it is almost entirely smothered with a gigantic Zalman heatsink-heatpipe system with ramsinks for good measure.

Since it is about as thick as a deli corned beef on kaiser, the manual stated that it would obstruct the PCI slot below the AGP slot. OK, fine. What they didn’t tell me was that the lower heatsink would rest about half a centimetre from the top of my sound card in second PCI slot, exhaling its stale hot air as it flexed its juicy pixel shading muscles.

So, the Audigy had to move to the fourth slot, some wires had to be loosened, and all was well. The internal temp of my PC has shot up about 5 degrees, but I think I’ll wait on the cooling upgrades this time. One the good news, I’m scoring 5226 3DMarks in 3DMark03, and Half Life 2 here I come!

Sunday driver

Finally, after over a year of this curse, I have managed to tame my personal chimera, my shrike, my nemesis. Since March 2002, my laptop’s 3com network driver failed to load in W2K intermittedly. The annoying part was, it didn’t do it all the time; it only did it once out of three boots. But when it did it, no IP is assigned, and trying to get an IP results in crashing ipconfig.

I finally traced it to a…bad network driver. But since 3com’s oh-so-dedicated software department have only released two drivers in the three years this accursed NIC has existed on this earth, I had to revert to a driver created in November 2000.

I’ve tested this new (old) driver for a few weeks, so far the problem has not reappeared. Looks like a keeper, folks. That’s what I get for listening to Windows Update.

My story

I was in downtown Toronto. I was chatting with a coworker when the power went out.

Or should I say, the primary lights went out. Emergency lights flipped on, and the racks of Opteras and other Nortel equipment continued running, on uninterruptable power supplies.

Looked outside. It looked like this part of the building had a brownout. Walked outside. Wow, the whole block.

Oh well, I have some time to make some calls. I decided to call Silverlotus, to see if she had V’s work phone number. The guy wanted to have dinner when I was in town, but lost his cellphone, didn’t know the number of his loaner, and neglected to tell me what his work number was. :rollseyes:: “I’d love to help,” Silverlotus said, “but we’ve had a blackout for the past fifteen minutes.” That was when the hair stood up from the back of my neck.

It was like 1964. But it also was not. Most buildings had backup power. Fire elevators hummed along their protected shunts. People were on mobile phones. Bell’s voice and data networks were at 99% functionality. They were a bit congested at times, but they worked. We always take dialtone for granted. If you had a laptop with a modem, you could log into your Sympatico account and surf the web.

Couldn’t check into my hotel at first, because they needed their computers to look up my reservation. Silverlotus got my bedside radio clock working, and was my primary source of news for the next few hours.

When I was hungry, I went downstairs to find a hot dog vendor. The booth sat empty. “He ran out of buns, so he went to get more,” another would-be customer explained. I looked at the bumper to bumper traffic. Hell, if he ever returned, it wouldn’t be for hours.

As night fell, they barricaded all the doors to the hotel except the main entrance. Police cars roamed outside, their headlights creating surreal reliefs of grooves and potholes in the asphalt. Used the glow of the LCD screen of my digicam to use the pitch-black washroom. I fell asleep to the murmur of a hundred diesel generators.

The power had returned, at least briefly, during the night. Unless I dreamt it. In the morning, I brushed my teeth, went back to the sink, and discovered there was no more water. Water is piped in with electrical pumps…

The Bell building had full power, however. This will make a lot of businesses rethink they’re business continuity plans. It’s not good enough to have a backup datacentre in another building; maybe it needs to be in another province all together. And fully stocked with UPSs.

Later, I was sitting in a VIA train en route to London, immobilized somewhere east of Brantford. Trains run on diesel – but signals run on electricity. The ride eventually took over 5 hours – a normally 2 hour trip.

Came home, took a shower. A cold shower. No hot water.

Pretty bits of glass

Gem-quality artificial diamonds are long due. It is a pity that DeBeers, much like the RIAA, haven’t seen the writing on the wall in their respective industries.

I can see one of two things happening, if Gemesis and Apollo succeed and aren’t sued or bullied out of business:

1. Demand shift from flawless/internally flawless diamonds to diamonds with minor imperfections in them. A similar thing is already with emeralds – the most prized emeralds have some inclusions in them, because you can guarantee they’re real, not “sims”.

2. Diamonds shifting to a service-oriented industry. In other words, the money will be made with how well a jeweller can cut the stone, rather than the actual stone’s attributes (carat, clarity, colour) itself.

P.S. The article’s title may be a nod toward a cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson called The Diamond Age. In that book, diamonds have become so easy to make that they become cheaper than glass, and are used in everyday items like knives, window panes, windshields, etc.
On the bookshelf: Dan Simmon’s Hyperion.

LookOut Express bows out

Last month, MS announced they would stop support standalone IE. Now, Microsoft kills off Outlook Express. They have decided to push Hotmail and Outlook 2003 instead.

If you just want an email client that filters spam, does not have 50-100MB of extra stuff, and that just *works* and not, you may want to look into Mozilla Mail, or the experimental Mozilla Thunderbird mail client.