Very few pop-ups/pop-unders make it past Camino, my web browser on OS X. The New York Times, and The Washington Post, are two sites who regularly get one pop-up through my filters.
And it’s pop-ups to subscribe to The Economist.
The irony is not lost on me: the only intrusive advertising I regularly see on the internet is for a service I’m all ready subscribed to, and one I plan on renewing for years to come, no less.
Well, sorry about that. Life suddenly finds a fifth gear, and all the things that were taped to the outside of the car suddenly come detached and are found later on the side of the road. Like this blog.
I’ve tried, in fits and starts, to accomplish two things with this blog:
Unfortunately, I find myself skipping number 2, because I don’t think I can meet number 1. I’m self-deprecating, thinking that my thoughts, my commentary, my perspective on life and events isn’t worth voicing, even to you, non-existent reader.
This semester has been busy. I’ve tried to write a short post every day, and for most of last fall, I performed admirably well. For the next three months, I’m aiming for twice a week; when I manage once, I’ll feel more accomplished than if I hadn’t written at all.
From rentzsch.com: Programmers Dont Like to Code:
Programmers don’t like coding, they like problem solving.
As a Computer Science major, I deal with this all the time. People ask about CS, about what we do, and it’s hard to answer. I think this gives me a good angle: “We solve problems, and we use computers to do that.” It relates closely to “What is CS?” CS is using computers as a tool, and much like a carpenter uses a claw hammer or crowbar or nail gun depending on the task at hand, we use Java or C++ or PHP as it’s best suited to the problem at hand.
We don’t like coding. I don’t. What I enjoy is the problem solving, the decomposition of some big, overarching, difficult to understand problem set into tiny, manageable packets of problems and solutions. Understanding the whole picture, seeing how each part makes life easier or harder, it’s an experience that I love, that I’m good at.
Both the PS3 and the Wii have been exceedingly difficult to purchase this holiday season. Sales of both seasons have been, as far as I can tell, entirely supply driven.
Supply driven situations are interesting and typically rare for goods in the economy. Typically, these goods are new to the market, and the producing firms are unable to ramp production up as quickly as market demand would dictate.
In the United States, prices on supply driven goods are not floated like they should be. Firms stick to a strict pricing scheme, relying instead on third parties as arbitrageurs to equalize supply and demand.
Supply driven situations, such as a very limited supply of a high-value good such as a gaming system, are perfect arbitrage opportunities. People who value their time cheaply, such as students, are willing to wait in line to buy a PS3 or Wii. They then post their system to an open market like eBay, where people who valued their time too much to wait in line can buy a unit with markup that the seller determines.
This “intermediary” helps to reconcile the supply and demand differences that exist at an artificially low price, such as $250 per Wii. At $250 bucks, assume 100,000 people would go and buy a system. However, there’s only 20,000 systems available. Some people are willing to “pay” in the form of waiting for a system. These people buy the 20,000 systems, and resell them at a much higher value. Usually, this “higher value” will stabilize near the price at which only 20,000 people would want to buy the system.
Why is arbitrage “bad”? From an economic point of view, arbitrage is actually good, because it helps to equalize markets in an efficient manner. People can either spend their time, in the form of waiting in line, or their money, in the form of more expensive auctions on eBay, to acquire a rare good. Because the units are available for sale in both “time payments” (wait in line), or “money payments” (buy on eBay), the market clears more often and more efficiently than if only the “time payments” option was available.
Arbitrage does redistribute profits, however, and this is the oft-demonized aspect of it. The higher market clearing price brings in huge profits, which go to the intemediaries, the “arbitrageurs”, instead of the manufacturer. Ars Technica, a geek website, has an online forum for buying and selling goods. They explicitly ban “profiteering”, which is considered selling a publicly available good above fair retail price. Such bans do no good for the economy. They prevent willing parties (buyers and sellers exist on these forums) from engaging in a mutually advantageous exchange.
Economists everywhere are likely relieved, however, at the relative lack of badmouthing of arbitrage in the news. Often, the reselling of the systems is an addendum to the main news article: “Many of the purchasers are turning them around and selling on eBay for hundreds more, in hopes of making some money for their hours spent waiting at the store. So Bob, how’s the weather look this weekend?” I’ll take no coverage over bad coverage of a good economic mechanism any day of the week.
Despite the obvious profit opportunities of selling my system, however, I intend to keep it. I consider the fun that I’ll get from owning it more valuable than the money I’d get if I sold it. Sorry: you’ll have more posts about “Stupid Games I Bought”, and less posts about “Ways to Waste 500 Dollars in a Week”.
My Wii was flashing when I woke up, like other people’s. Nintendo sent us an email about a system update to install the “Forecast Channel”. After running a short update over the wireless network here, I was up and running.
I have one gripe, for their data provider: Your list of Virginia cities is as follows: Richmond (why is this first?), Alexandria, Arlington, Blacksburg (excellent!), Charlottesville (boo Hoos), Danville, Roanoke, and Virginia Beach.
I’d like you to read that list again. Eight cities (and arguably, one is not a city, but a rather small town) comprises their list for the great Commonwealth. Eight. There’s more than eight notable cities between western Loudoun County and Washington, D.C., and they have eight for the state!
Aside from the complete lack of cities in most of the United States and around the world, it’s neat. I can view my weather forecast for whatever city I like. Much like Google Earth or NASA’s World Wind, I can zoom out to a globe, which is grabbable with the Remote. You can even spin it with damped rotational momentum (it spins after you let go, but eventually slows down).
Every year, the fall semester does this. It drags on, and flies by. From August to November, it never ends. Tests after quizzes after homework pile on, and there’s no end in sight. We get a brief reprieve from the stress for Thanksgiving. It’s a welcome week of rest, food, and relaxation in an otherwise high-strung semester. But when we return from break, finals are suddenly upon us. A week and a half of classes give way to exams, and we find ourselves one semester closer to graduation, with no idea where the time went.
This summer is my last “summer job”. There are no more summer semesters after that: just graduation, and a lifetime of work. No more eight week internships, no more family vacations with summer reading for classes. No more ordering textbooks in the final days, or dropping and adding courses at a library somewhere far from home. After this, the world becomes ours. We can do anything we want: anything, except go back to what we had.
There’s three semesters left in college. Sure, I’ll go back for my MBA, but those will be different times, with different people. What will we make of the time we’ve got left?
There’s stories all over the internet talking about accidents with the Wii remote.
There’s a series of problems coming together that resulted in this.
Speaking of bowling: my friend and I have done more than our fair share of bowling in Wii Sports. It’s quite easy to hold onto the remote. You’ve got a grip on the controller and you’re merely letting off a little bit of force on the B button to release the ball. I guess people are letting their whole hand go slack instead…
In short, there’s nothing wrong with the remote or the strap. People need to not rely on what was meant to be a backup safety device for their primary remote-securing needs.
Update: The gentlemen at Freakonomics have weighed in on a similar matter relating to seatbelts.
The question becomes: does the inclusion of a feature such a seatbelt or wrist strap prevent enough accidents such that it overcomes the reckless behaviour that its existence encourages?
In the case of seatbelts, I think it can overwhelmingly argued that they do indeed do more good than they incite harm. The wrist strap on the remote may be different, however, but it’s difficult to measure without some extensive studies by Nintendo on usage patterns.
However, as my friend was discussing with me earlier, there’s no doubt that if the strap is breaking by the tens and hundreds, this early in its launch, it should be made stronger.
“It’s a barbarian’s game, played by gentlemen.” I went out to a rugby practice today. The VT team is putting together a winter 7s squad for a few tournaments over break. It felt great to get back out onto the pitch and take a few hits.
It’s incredible how quickly the rules, the technique, all of the things I learned over five years ago, came back to me. Physically, I’m leaps and bounds ahead of where I was in high school, and it’s great to get out and see how far I’ve come.
Now, I need to get a mouthguard, and I need to go running every day from now until mid-January. I’m so out of shape for sprint running, it’s depressing.
But it gives me a passion, a goal to chase, to compete with. It’s been gorgeous weather this week, so it’s hard not to run over to the drillfield and kick around for an hour. But come the real winter, the 35 and windy I adore, I’ve got to get out and really go at it.
Somehow, the past is easy. You can look back, see all the things that went wrong, the missteps, the motives behind it.
You lose something when you try to analyze what was. If you tear it apart, trying to get at the meat of what made it so great, you find that it was just lies, convenience, and a willingness to not rock the boat. Suddenly, that which was holy, wonderful, divine, seems cheap, fake.
Unease takes over when you speak of uncertain things. People love to know. They hate the idea that they don’t control things. They want to be the master of their fate, and control the flow of their life.
Fate is hardly that kind.
The best thing you can ever do, is forget. Reminisce about what was, how great it felt, how perfect everything seemed. Enjoy it, and then look to the future. The past is what was, not what will be. People change, coins get flipped (it was tails today), and random events interfere with our best-laid plans.
The best we can hope for is some sort of ability to cope. Hope that we can deal with the knives thrown our way, dodge them, catch them. We stand and say, with confidence, that we love to live on the edge, one random decision away from complete chaos, but no one means it. People want comfort. They want the same.
But nothing is static. It’s all motion, movement, and change. You can react to it, and hope to survive with your head above water for one more day, or you can embrace it. Learn to love the quirks that the next hour, the next day, the next month will bring. Let go of assumptions, of preconceived notions, and of the status quo. Change is the only thing that stays the same.
Embrace the unknown. It brings great joy, and great sorrow, but it is unavoidable. Make peace with its inevitability.
After over a year and a half of trusty and loyal service, the Toshiba 30 GB 4200 rpm hard drive was mortally wounded earlier this week. An unknown disease struck it in its prime, and without warning, it was on its way to the grave.
I’ve run backups religiously, every night, for the past year. Every piece of my data that matters (TV shows and movies don’t really count) exists in two places. I woke up on Wednesday morning to a horrible grinding noise emanating from the iBook’s case, about where the hard drive was. I quickly saved my tabs in Camino, quit all running apps, and ran one last backup to a trusty 40 GB 2.5\” external drive. After that was done, I shut down and rebooted from the backup, and was able to take a closer look at the drive without worrying about the system as it ran.
The S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive showed nothing out of the ordinary. It did have one amusing number, however: “Power On Hours: 11801”. I bought traded the iBook G4 for an iBook G3 back in April of 2005. 11801 hours is almost 492 days, or about a year and a third.
After a test backup from my active drive (the external) to the internal drive, however, the problems became clear. There were inaccessible sectors, and the drive was slow as molassas at times. The sound it makes is likely the read/write arm dragging on the disk surface.
An interesting “feature” of OS X became apparent just now. I’m running from a Firewire attached hard drive. When the machine went to sleep yesterday before I left, I removed the drive and stashed it in my bag. After reconnecting everything when I arrived in town tonight, I simply woke the iBook back up, and it spun up and read the external drive as though nothing had happened. This certainly makes it easier to travel in this half-crippled state.
I’m in a bit of a tough spot for what to do about repairs, however. If I take it in to the bookstore now, I’m without any machine for at least a few days, and that simply won’t do. I have another drive to backup my (former backup, now active) drive to, so there’s no chance of losing anything should the external drive fail as well. I suppose I’ll limp along on this ghetto-rigged drive setup until Christmas, when I can take it in for a proper repair.
The overarching lesson here: backups are your friend. For anyone using OS X, SuperDuper! is indispensable, and is a second-to-none tool for the job.
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