fast track it to the meatballs

 

I've just read an an interesting post from a friend, about the nature of existentialism and determinism. It cunningly packs the question into a discussion about turning corners, as if in a deterministic state. 

A contrasting divergent thought could have free-will based existential agency. 

It reminds me of queueing in Disney. Follow the beaten path, or walk through walls? Maybe a question for Nietsche.* 

In Disney terms, you get a Fast Pass on your digital watch, to make it about strategy. 

Travel at 100 times the speed of everyone else, but know when to pause. Some of the best queues make it a part of the ride "To travel hopefully etc." 

Like the sadly suspended Rock 'n Roller coaster, there's a pre-queue a trip to the studio, watch the band mix down, and get invited into a stretched limo. All before the ride itself, across SoCal at 0-60 in 3 seconds.

Three minutes at insane cross town traffic speed is an unforgettable experience. Or waiting for that that space flight where you go through space preparation before getting into the rocket and blast off on a mission to Mars. Worth the wait to have felt those G-forces at launch.

My point is we are making it up. This life. This story. It's unique. To each of us. 

 *And still knowing in IKEA to 'look behind you' to get out of the pantomime of queueing and fast track it to the meatballs.

Fogg : Another reason to leave Meta/Facebook

I notice Meta is becoming more desperate and now sending out historical posts from me. They are from about 15 years ago and personally I find it intrusive that they are pretending to be posts directly from me.

It's bound to be somewhere in the T&Cs that they can plunder my old thoughts, but I'm finding it disconcerting.

white goods

Our fridge freezer has so many new ways of giving.

It came with the house and was/is a high-end Siemens device. The original one lasted about 5 years and 2 days, so it was out of warranty when it failed. The refrigerator part stopped making things cold. It's my first ever fridge failure. We had a Zanussi for 25 years.

The expensive man who we'd called out explained that the cost of fitting a new compressor was almost the same as the cost of a replacement fridge unit. And if they replaced the compressor they could not warranty the resultant device. So much for making repairable white goods.

We looked at replacements and because our fitted kitchen uses 'hinges' instead of 'sliders' the choice was very limited, particularly as we needed the doors to align on the replacement. 

We found a choice of one device that could fit the bill and we had two very nice technicians from John Lewis come along to fit it. I'd wondered about doing it myself, but when I realised how long these two industrious guys took to puzzle it all out, I was relieved to have paid the extra to have the new machine installed.

The thing is, it's a stress purchase. If I'd somehow got a new device which had more functions / lights /shelves then I could have persuaded myself that it was an upgrade.

But no, it's a downgrade. The shelves look cheaper. We actually reused some inserts from the older fridge for purely cosmetic reasons. It's impossible to stand milk upright in the main section. The moulded-in shelf stays are not suitable for sensible shelf spacing.

At Christmas we had the drama of not being able to fit everything inside. It has a smaller capacity than the one we replaced. The Munich-based manufacturers advertise on telly with a bearded man fitting a large marrow into a fridge. 

It's all lies. I want to shout at the TV.

The fridge just doesn't have the capacity. I could understand if they'd built it to be more energy efficient (e.g. with thicker insulation) but no, it's still got a terrible energy efficiency rating.

So every few weeks we have a little therapeutic rant about it. And today, I couldn't even get a litre of gold top milk to stand up in the door. 

It was too tall.

Candles in the rain

I remember seeing Melanie Safka perform in London once. Lone guitar on the stage. She'd played Woodstock, the first female to open a new record label(Buddha) and had a string of hits. Songs about roller skates, animal crackers, things being a certain kind of symbol if they were longer than they were wide. That scratch and sniff cover on Garden in the City (my copy still works!). Well, she's got a brand new key now.

Wasting my time

 

I've received a few of those password messages recently. You know, the ones where someone in Bangkok is trying to log into my account. I log the attempts to the security gateway and report them to the service that is being hijacked.

It occurs how much time I now waste doing this. With a combination of a security gateway, a firewall and a sandbox, plus around 1,110 unique passwords, it's just the waste of time of it all. 

Press here for more information.

AI goes shirty

I've just seen the respectable example cited of using AI to analyse the shirt a man is wearing,  when the man comes on and tells me how white my shirts can be but, he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me. But if he did my AI could recognise the shirt and order one just like it online.

Crazier than the Bonzos. Ask Mr Stanshall. 

Spoken intro by on-the-street reporter:

Hello, well that was the sound of Roger's Wah Wah Rabbits. You heard them eating endive there. That's very cheap at this time of the year. But now here in Willesden Green...yes, brrr...it's a bit chilly, but no matter, because we're going to talk about shirts!

I'm going to take you right away straight over to the Earls Court Olympia to watch the shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt event. I'll repeat that…the shirt even

Good morning. Could I have this shirt cleaned "express," please ?

Yes, that'll be three weeks, dearie

Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt Well they're shakin' my shirt all over the place  But it's been thrown right back in my face Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt

New horizons in sound now as Roger plays a solo on the electric shirt collar Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt Shirt! Shirt! Shirt! Shakin' the shirt?

teenage engineering and the rabbit

I must admit to a slightly bemused expression when I first heard about the pocket-sized Rabbit R1 being promoted by Teenage Engineering.

It's not what you think. It's a compact bright orange AI device that's like a smartphone but which only has AI functionality. Scroll wheel, microphone button, camera. Tamagotchi on steroids maybe? Or the AI part of my car's speech recognition? 

It's an interesting take from the folk who made those build it yourself synths.

you and whose army?

It's getting heated. Now it looks as if Trump is resurrecting his old plans to have a private army similar to Putin's Wagner group. The stars help the person in command. I suppose it will help Trump take over dissident towns and corral non-supporters.

Among Trump critics who’ve had run-ins with his security, complaints include unnecessary force, discriminatory profiling and removing people from events based on little more than their appearance. 

Crass landing

'Oops I did it again' could be the donald's walk-on music. America sleeps its way into another presidency run by the king outlaw. Laundering, Sleaze, Payola, Defamation, Tax Evasion, Rigging. He's denied them all and just got bigger suits. 

The press must love it, for the number of stories it can generate.

As Britney might say:

"Oops, I did it again
I played with your heart, got lost in the game
Oh baby, baby
Oops, you think I'm in love
That I'm sent from above
I'm not that innocent"

Valve operated mindset?

I see Bletchley Park has released some new photos of the Colossus, one of the valve operated computers used in World War II. 

Back in those days it was all paper tape input, but you can see the outline architecture of a von Neumann machine, which is filling an entire room.

We had venerable Elliott 803 in my first computer room. It was transistorised but similarly arcane and had paper tape input, along with the 39-bit word (don't ask). It only had 4096 memory cells I seem to remember and needed to be programmed in Autocode. We didn't have mag tape, but it supported 35mm film coated with magnetic material, by Kodak.

Then the Elliott 503 came along with Algol to write Apps and the rest is, as they say, history.

It's worth noting that this heyday of invention was largely from the International Computers Limited  ICL stable: Elliott, Marconi, English Electric and Leo (Joe Lyons corner houses). The business-focused part of this group in turn became part of ICL - a 10%-nationalised company formed in 1968 by Harold Wilson's Labour government, whilst the automation parts of Elliott went to GEC - the company which would end up briefly running Dragon Data before the the latter's collapse in 1984.

GEC would eventually end up as part of British Aerospace - BAe Systems, whilst ICL was subsumed by Fujitsu in 1998, although it kept its name until 2002.

ICL (and later Fujitsu) continued to win many government bids with their COBOL-running competitors to IBM's machines- some say it also staved off antitrust. 

COBOL has been criticized for its verbosity, design process, and poor support for structured programming. These domain weaknesses resulted in monolithic programs that are hard to comprehend as a whole, despite their local readability. It was designed for clerical programming with forms...

Many said that ICL's new range (2900) was better technology, but IBM had the marketing clout.

In Europe there are IBM buildings adjacent to major German organisations with processing centres. In the UK I can think of Fujitsu across the road from big government processing centres.

FutureMe

 Well maybe I'll do this. Send a letter to future me.

https://www.futureme.org/letters/new

Waiting for the phrase Technical Debt to be in a sentence with Horizon.

I'd add project is overrunning and the commercial folk are getting agitated about the contract.

Technical debt (also known as tech debt or code debt) describes what results when development teams take actions to expedite the delivery of a piece of functionality or a project which later needs to be refactored. 

In other words, it’s the result of prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code. 

aka 'shipping bugs' 

 If you’ve been in the software industry for any period of time, chances are you’ve heard the term “technical debt”. Also known as design debt or code debt, the phrase (or more accurately, the metaphor) is widely used in the technology space. It is referred to as a catchall that covers everything from bugs to legacy code, to missing documentation. But what exactly is technical debt anyway? And why do we call it that? 

 Technical debt is a phrase originally coined by software developer, Ward Cunningham, who in addition to being one of 17 authors of the Agile Manifesto, is also credited with inventing the wiki. He first used the metaphor to explain to non-technical stakeholders at WyCash why resources needed to be budgeted for refactoring. 

 He didn’t realize at the time, but he had coined a new buzzword in the software community. Later, it would become the subject of countless academic studies, debates, and panel discussions. 

 Years later, Cunningham described how he initially came up with the technical debt metaphor: 

 “With borrowed money, you can do something sooner than you might otherwise, but then until you pay back that money you’ll be paying interest. I thought borrowing money was a good idea, I thought that rushing software out the door to get some experience with it was a good idea, but that of course, you would eventually go back and as you learned things about that software you would repay that loan by refactoring the program to reflect your experience as you acquired it.”