Definitely a good book, though it starts out rather slowly. It doesn't really pick up until the Pak Protectors are mentioned and Louis Wu realizes that they built the Ringworld and humanity are descendants of normal Pak colonists on Earth millions of years ago whose Protectors died off.
Because it took so long to get to that point and thus to find the Ringworld control centre, the actual fixing of the Ringworld's orbit seems a little too pat and deus ex machina to me.
I give it 3.5 out of 5.
This is a book that I have had on my bookshelf for decades, but I have never gone back and re-read it like I have so many other books in my personal library. So a couple of days decided that now was the time. Unfortunately, it just wasn't as good as I remembered.
Yes, I know that this book and its two sequels were written for as younger age group, but so were the Harry Potter novels, and those are awesome. So Ged meets this one dragon and uses his magic to sail around the islands of Earthsea, but beyond that there isn't much more than narrative. It gets rather boring, actually. Even the encounter with the shadow creature was anti-climactic.
I give it a measly 1 star out of 5.
This past week, on and off, I've noticed somebody hammering at my wi-fi trying to get acess. And it's not like they are trying anything overly intelligent to get in, just request after request after request for a DHCP address. Now I have things limited to a handful of specific MAC addresses so they aren't getting in, so I'm not terribly worried about them stealing my bandwidth. But then I remembered this website: Upside-Down-Ternet
This is only really interesting if you're sufficiently over age 18. Go to Pop Culture Madness: Pop Music and select the year you turned 18. Take the first 50 songs and paste them into a word processor, then mark up each song as follows:
Well, I turned 18 in 1988, so here is my list:
So how cool were you?
I found this on the Web today. A hospital in Japan has put in place a “baby hatch” where mothers can anonymously drop off unwanted babies.
You can bet that conservatives everywhere will be foaming at the mouth over this. That it encourages premarital and casual sex amongst singles. That it promotes lack of responsibility among new parents. Even that it destroys the foundations and sanctity of marriage.
In a perfect world perhaps it would do those things — I don't know. But we don't live in a perfect world. We do have have women who get pregnant and don't want to be but have no access to abortion. Maybe they don't want the baby because there is no economic way they will be able to afford, first, taking the time off work and, second, buying everything that new child will need. Then there are those women who could afford it, they just don't want a child at that point. Babies are innocents — they deserve to have the chance at a real chances in life rather than being poor, or the emotional problems of knowing that your mother never wanted you in the first place. And you know what? We do have a stigma in our society against people who give up their children and that stigma can prevent a woman from doing what is right for her baby. Not just adult women, but teenage mothers, too. Perhaps all hospitals should have baby hatches.
Me, I choose that which benefits the innocents in the picture, even if it promotes that which the conservatives fear it does.
Normally I am all for people getting tattoos if that is what they want. I feel it is wrong to to think that all people who get tattoos are drug users, gang members or whatnot — that is hurtful stereotyping.
However, I also think that Rebecca Holdcroft from the UK is a whiner. She has a lot of tattoos, as you can see from the picture on that page, and her employer would like her to cover them up. She says how she's been ask to wear a cardigan and at a previous job “on a hot day I passed out and cracked my head in a toilet cubicle”. Oh poor baby. There are long sleeved shirts that you can buy which can be worn on a warm day, and Britain doesn't even get that hot in the summer! Now if she lived in the Mediterranean area, I might have some sympathy.
Now I say this as a person who has a tattoo — your employer has the right to require that you dress in a fashion which they feel will be presentable and acceptable to their customers and clients. If you don't want to, then your employer has the right to put you in a a non-public facing position, even if it pays less and is in the back broom closet.
Rebecca — give it up. Stop being a whiner. It's not like this is a real issue like freedom of speech or equal rights regardless of age, sex or race.
And according to this How Canadian are you quiz, from the same website as the What American accent do you have quiz, I am only 99% Canadain! Awwwww... :-( :-)
You rock, you are an almighty Canadian through and through. You have proven your worthiness and have won the elite prize of living in a country as awesome as Canada. Yes I know other countries think they are better, but we let them have that cuz we know better than they do, eh?
How Canadian Are You?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz
| What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio. | |
| North Central | |
| The West | |
| The Inland North | |
| The South | |
| Boston | |
| Philadelphia | |
| The Northeast | |
| What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes | |
I figure that this is what almost every anglophone Canadian Ontario and west will get, along with many Maritimers. However, it would be interesting to see what those with a strong Newfie accent would get. What part of the USA would the test place them from? Eh?
Well, it looks like the outcry against Microsoft's more restrictive licensing as to how many time you may reinstall Vista was actually heard by the software monopolist giant. A product manager at Microsoft posted this to the Windows Vista team blog yesterday.
By now everybody knows that the next version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, Vista, will be out soon. What most people don't know is how restrictive the new End-User License Agreement is for Vista. If you thought that Microsoft's court battles against various governments over its monopolistic desires made them soften up, read this article by Scott Granneman.
As an example, one if things the new EULA restricts is how many time you may reinstall Vista. It used to be that as logn as you only had it running on one computer at a time, you could reinstall it as often as you wanted — like if you bought a new computer. But the new EULA only allows you to install it twice. Yup, only twice. Say you buy Vista in January when it comes out and then you get a new computer a few months later, moving Vista to it. In a few years when you next upgrade your hardware you won't be allowed to install Vista on that one because you all ready used your two times.
This is the first thing that has ever made me think of getting rid of Microsoft software entirely, instead of having it on just one of my 3 computers.
I may be trying out Linux on one of my computers, but I am still a BSD snob at heart. :-) This video was pointed out to me be somebody from #userfriendly on Undernet.
A tongue-in-cheek look at the history and future of the BSD movement. Modeled after the presentation styles of Lessig and Hardt, the talk provides a light-hearted introspection of the leaders, technologies, and community that forges ahead despite having been left for dead some 15 years past.
This presentation was given by Jason Dixon at the NYC BSD Conference at Columbia University on October 28, 2006.
Well, I got around to wiping OpenBSD from my formerly main computer earlier than I thought. (See this previous post.)
Saturday evening I installed Ubuntu 6.06LTS on to my dual P3-450 system which, until April, had been my main computer since 1999.
After getting home from church and lunch at my Mom's place today, my day, and evening, has been spent fiddling around with Ubuntu, learning how Linux is different from BSD and installing packages that I would like to have but weren't part of the Ubuntu base system. Almost the first package I installed (after Firefox and Thunderbird) was the 686-class kernel for SMP capabilities. The default 386-class kernel ran rather sluggishly and (obviously) only used one of the P3-450s. The difference after rebooting was immediately noticeable! I've also decided that I like Gnome (which comes default with Ubuntu) better than KDE for my X11 window manager.
The only major problem I have had so far was with network setup, specifically the file /etc/network/interfaces and the loopback device. I was trying to get the SSH daemon to accept IPv6 connections, since everything on my home LAN is almost all IPv6. Suddenly, after a reboot, I was getting the X login screen supplied by gdm, but after typing in my userid and password the screen would go blank with just a mouse cursor. Nor were any of the character terminals present — just a blinking cursor in the upper right corner in all Ctrl+Alt+F? screens.
The thing is, in *BSD, the loopback interface is called “lo0”, consistent with all other devices — a few letters identifying the hardware and the a number for the Nth device of that type. In Linux, however, it's just called “lo”. If you accidentally turn lo into lo0, like I did, or just remove the setup lines for the loopback device from the interfaces file, the loopback device never gets configure and the entire network subsystem is FUBARed, which in turn FUBARs the entire operating system. In OpenBSD, the loopback device is always there if you have networking compiled into your kernel. Not having a /etc/hostname.lo0 file won't prevent the loopback device from being configured and it won't bring your operating system to it's knees. Indeed, even if you delete all your /etc/hostname.* files, all your server daemons will still start unless you've specifically configured them to bind to a specific address or fail. Technically, your system still works and you don't have to go into single user “safe” mode to fix things because you can't login in normal mode.
Now part if this was my own fault for mixing up what I thought the loopback device's name was. However, I cannot believe that Linux has such a potentially major problem creator in it's network configuration method. I did find a webpage that describes a fail-over and load-balancing network architecture using something called Ultramonkey where you configure additional loopback interfaces with non-127.0.0.0/8 addresses, but I think that OpenBSD's carp is the more elegant situation. No futzing around with carp will prevent your computer from booting properly.
At any rate, we'll just have to see what the future holds and how strongly I maintain my pro-BSD bias as I become more familiar with Linux.
Having had OpenBSD for a number of years on my second computer acting as my firewall, when I got my third computer back in April the idea was to turn my formerly main computer from a Windows maching into a un*x desktop.
My experiences with OpenBSD have shown me that while it makes an excellent firewall or server operating system, because it lags behind in certain key areas (like third party applications support), it's not really the best OS to have for a workstation. This meant that I would have to choose between FreeBSD and some Linux distro, with perhaps Darwin x86 from Apple as a minor contender. Using one of those three operating systems, I would be able to get things like a Flash player, a decent office software system and many other things I could not get on OpenBSD.
Well, as it happened, shortly after converting that formerly main computer from Windows XP to OpenBSD as an interim step, my brand-new Xeon behemoth stopped working. The motehrboard had ba capacitors and had to be RMA'ad back to Asus and that took forever. The first replacement motherboard they sent back, which took 6 weeks, simply would not POST so a second one had to be sent, and that one also took 6 weeks. After talkign to the guy at the computer store I usually shop from, I found out that Asus's support has been slipping dramatically. The 1-800 number they used to phone for RMA info and the like simply no longer worked and they no longer were getting responses back in 24 hurs to email inquiries like they used to. Needless to say, I doubt my next computer will be Asus-based after all this.
So in the mean time, I wasn't about to do a whole 'nother OS installation my once-again-main computer until the Xeon behemoth came back. But never expecting 3 months without it, I got kind of comfortable with the formerly main computer as an OpenBSD workstatin, in spite of what I feel it lacks.
I switched the window manager from WindowMaker to KDE, installed both Firefox and Thunderbird because I disliked KDE's konquereor and kmail apps. I set up NFS shares so that all my MP3s were available to the firewall where I set up two different multimedia servers so I could listen to my MP3s when not at home. The firewall had also been a Samba server and had hosted the home directories for the users with accounts under Windows XP on the formerly main computer, so I moved them over, shut down the firewall's Samba daemon and NFS'ed /home back to it. All in all lots of modifications over the three-plus months I was waiting for the Xeon behemoth to return.
When that day finally came, I just re-integereted it into my home network, started Samba daemon on the former main computer so /home would be available to the Xeon behemoth running Windows XP. And that's how it has been for the last few months.
So today I decided to install the Ubuntu distro of Linux since a number of people I know on-line had recommended it. But where did I install it? Not on the formerly main machine which stil hasp OpenBSD, but onto the Xeon behemoth into the partition which had held Windows Vista RC1 for the past month. :-) I almost feel like a traitor to BSD, installing a Linux distro.
Ubuntu seems nice, and eventually I will wipe the formerly main machine and install it there, but knowing me that will take a few months. Mostly because of all the data which will have to be copied off of the *BSD-type FFS file systems in order to be able to set up proper Linux-type EXT3 partitions for everything. Also, doing all the system administration tasks on Linux rather than on BSD is a little like being dropped in the Scottish hinterlands — you know that they're all speaking English but you can't understand half of it. On the bright side, by the time I do ge around to it, I should know enough about Ubuntu specifically and Linux in general to make the switch over go smoothly in a single day.
Normally I'm a pretty irreverent person. I'm able to laugh at not only my own goofs but also at my own sacred cows. Partially, this is because I knoow my own failings, but mostly it is because I cannot comprehend a God without a sense of humour. After all, look how counter-culture Jesus was — you just know God had to have seen the humour in overturning so much of what the Jews expected the Messiah to be.
But today I came across this video. I couldn't decide whether to laugh at its irreverence or to be shocked at how it trivializes the tragedy of terrorism and all those deaths. I guess I'll let you decide for yourself.
Well, as it turns out, I won't have to risk turning my wi-fi router into a brick just to get IPv6 connectivity again!
I'd like to call it a stroke of genius, but somebody else has probably already figure this one out:
For several years I have had an IPv6 prefix to allocate from for my home network and virtually all internal traffic has been IPv6 rather than traditional IPv4. Lately, however, I haven't had access to the IPv6 universe because my tunnel client doesn't like the fact that the OpenBSD host it runs on is behind a wi-fi router and on an IPv4 NAT.
Unfortunately, my apartment is in an older building and I only have one telephone jack and it's right near my front door. Tiny as my apartment is, it still meant cables stretching from there to my desk where my computers live. I got so tired of tripping over the cables that I went and got a Linksys WRT54G router.
The wi-fi router runs wonderfully. I can use my PocketPC with it, and with the router set to DMZ mode and forwarding all ports to my firewall machine there is no difference, IPv4-wise, as when the DSL modem was hooked directly the firewall.
Alas, no such luck with IPv6 connectivity. So while googling for brands of IPv6-enabled wi-fi routers, I find that there are open-source firmware updates for my router. It seems that the WRT54G uses an embedded Linux to run itself and people have made their own versions with expanded functionality. I even found a client specifically for my IPv6 tunnel broker, Freenet6.
So now I have to figure out whether I want to:
Decisions, decisions...
So today I get into work and what do I see in my inbox? Email wanting an explanation of the 88 hours I sumitted on my timecard and why it was there was overtime. In fact, there were multiple requests les less than a hour's span by the time I got through my 3 day weekend backlog of email.
Now I'm not exactly sure why it was called “overtime” as it was two weeks at 44 hours each, which isn't enough to qualify for the time and one half of "overtime". OK, my scheduled shift is 4 days at 10 hours each day (10.5 if you count the unpaid lunch), so maybe that's what my boss's boss was referring to.
So I say how yes, my shift does end at midnight but I am supposed to stay until the last agent finishes their last call and is logged out. Sometimes that is at 00:15 and sometimes it is 00:45, but usually it is by 00:30. So, an extra half an hour per day times 8 days is an extra 4 hours in two weeks. Because of that, on average I clock in a base amount of 84 hours every two weeks. Occasionally less if call volume has been light for a few weeks.
On top of that, given the nature of my job and how I have to be easily accessible to whomever, I have been told multiple times by my boss and my boss's boss that if it is too busy I am not supposed to go for lunch. Nor can I go for lunch or break unless I can get some other centre to remotely watch mine while I am gone. That is the basis of why why my position is the only one who is allowed to have food & drink on the production floor. Perk for having to eat while on duty.
So the last two weeks were busy, new software and watching Kelowna while my counterpart there has been on vacation, and I was not able to take a lunch break any day. So, again 30 minutes per lunch is an extra 4 hours in a two week period. An that is what made it 88 hours. While this is not always the case, nor has 88 hours been unheard of. Except for sick days (a whopping 3 total) My clocked hours for the past year and a half have consistently been between 82 and 88 hours each pay period and nobody has said anything until now. Indeed, there have even been a few 90 hour pay periods with actual real 1.5 time base wage overtime thanks to an agent being on a two hour long call that started 15 minutes before the end of my shift to which nobody said boo.
“Just because it's been happening doesn't make it right” replies my boss's boss, less than ten minutes after my explanation. “I would like it to stop immediately.”
So I reply that “sure, I can trim my hours to exactly 40 per week, but that means I can no longer stick around after midnight for the last agents to finish up their calls. In fact, I cannot guarantee that the queue will even be drained by midnight for me to announce last call to the agents before I clock out,” so could he please let me know how he wants me to do things from now on? After all, he was the one who told me that I had to stay as long as the last agent to logout and to not take lunch when it was too busy.
That was at 13:18 in my boss's boss's timezone, almost six hours ago. So I'm wondering — why no reply in less than 10 minutes this time?
