Here We Are...

Where To Now?

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:28:00 +0000

I linked my Blogger profile to my G+ profile.

I was a little conflicted. My official Real Name is now attached to my blog, but it's not like it was national security to begin with, I just voluntarily gave up a little bit of privacy but I'm anxious for what comes next and getting my tools in order is a step forward.

More than anything, I think it's about exposing my blog here to my G+ Circles rather than the other way around so... everybody check it out, browse the archives as you see fit. I've been here quite awhile and life has changed a lot.

Google+ And The Future (?)

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 22:44:00 +0000

I'm on Google+, I got into the beta/field trial/whatever-you-call-it and it's awesome. There are a bunch of reasons why I highly recommend it but I won't be listing them all out here just now as there's plenty of discussion on the topic. Check out anything by Mike Elgan for a start...

I have a backlog of blog topics I want to write about. I stash them away in a Springpad notebook and there they languish...

My reason for mentioning Google+ is kind of hinted at here. I really think this is how I can break the logjam on actually talking about the stuff I want to talk about. Blogger is supposed to integrate with Google+ in some awesome way by the end of this month but there's no word on what that means or how it's progressing so in the meantime, I'll throw as much stuff up on G+ as I can handle where as many people can see it as possible.

The Nature of The Open Market

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 22:43:00 +0000

The Impetus

Today I saw an article on the Wall Street Journal which caught my eye.

Fundamentally I see a problem with the line of argument this author has taken. He's under the mistaken impression that the market isn't already free. As I see it, the market is free and his team is losing the game.

The Big Picture

Picture the global market as a giant casino tournament. There's poker, blackjack, mahjong, etc. all being played simultaneously. Players are free to enter and leave any game they please, the only thing they can't do is unilaterally change the rules.

Here's where the US private sector is losing. They refuse to play by the rules of the table at which they sat down. What they'd really prefer to do is to go appeal to a higher authority and get the rules re-written to where they will win by default. A win condition for a company is basically where they minimize their costs and maximize their gains, ideally they would pay zero and gain infinity but they'll settle for being as close to that as practically possible.

Incentives and Punishments

In the last 40 or so years real wages adjusted for inflation have been flat. During this time profits have gone through the roof with companies getting double and triple productivity from their workers. What this means is that a company is doing one of two things: paying 1/3 the wages and benefits for the same output or they've tripled the output for the same wages and benefits. The extra money is being sponged up right at the very top of the company and being funneled into tax shelters for shareholders and executive level employees. This is where "trickle down economics" failed outright because nothing whatsoever trickles down.

Workers are seeing less real personal benefit per unit of effort while they simultaneously are expected to do more and with less security than they've ever had. The private sector would really prefer slaves over employees if they could get them legalized because then they can pay even less and expect even more.

The standard argument from the private sector as to why public sector workers aren't worth the money is lack of proper incentives and punishments. My question is why the private sector hasn't re-aligned its interests with those of the workers they're complaining they can't get. If they think workers need better incentives to perform, why aren't they offering them? There's plenty of punishment to go around in the private sector with "right to work" and "at-will" employment laws being pushed across the board making it easier and easier for an employer to dump any worker for any reason at all. If punishment is the answer, then there simply isn't a problem.

End Game

The winning strategy appears to be this: Offer workers plenty of benefit commensurate with their productivity. Sweeten the pot as necessary to attract the labor you need and want. If you can't or won't ante up in a game you chose to play, that's your loss to absorb.

We Have an Angel Baby!

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 23:18:00 +0000

We went to lunch in an actual restaurant and our son only mildly fussed twice. Both times it took under a minute to calm him.

We are so spoiled for the next one.

Gas Prices, etc.

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:02:00 +0000

I overheard a couple of people at work complaining about the price of gas, we've shot up to about $3.30/gal in the last couple of weeks, and I couldn't help but snicker at it. All of the complaint about getting ripped off and the talk about when it might be coming back down.

The bottom line here is that gas is never going to go down to any significant degree. We are already at Peak Oil. For those not versed, and hardly anybody is, Peak Oil is the point at which the output of the oil industry cannot go higher. It's not that the oil is running out per se, it's that what limited oil is available is harder and harder to get at. The chief argument by the people who want to debunk Peak Oil is that there's plenty of oil to go around. The fundamental problem with this is that: a) nobody disputes that oil is limited, even if they believe the limit is high and b) the amount of oil we burn as fuel for harvesting oil is higher than the actual harvested amounts. For the sake of argument let's say the ratio is as low as 10 gallons burned for every 9 gallons harvested. This means that even if, as the Peak Oil detractors contend, we have 100 years of oil left in the ground, it will cost us 110+ years worth of oil to get at it.

This is the fundamental reason why petroleum will never run out. As oil gets more and more expensive to extract, eventually demand will crash when nobody can afford to burn oil anymore. At that point we'll stop drilling/digging/working for the stuff and it'll sit safely in the ground at some incalculable price per barrel.

Worse yet, almost everything we make is also built from some petroleum derived chemical compound, in fact even our fertilizers and pesticides are made from petroleum. The entire modern world is built on and of petroleum so even if we discover some alternative fuel, we need alternative seed stock for all of our industrial processes. This is where it stops mattering how much oil exists in the world and the question is entirely about how expensive the oil becomes and nobody has yet successfully debunked the fact that oil is getting more expensive and less efficient to extract.

Non-Linear Time Musings...

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 01:16:00 +0000

Tests and experiments are underway testing a provocative theory that in some scopes, causes can happen after their effects. From a human perspective, that time isn't fixed to any particular order of events.

The implications of this are that, potentially, there's nothing random whatsoever in the universe, only events for which the causes are unobservable. There's not (yet) any useful application for such knowledge but I find it totally fascinating anyway.

It's possible that the radioactive decay of an isotope, considered classically to be a random event, is happening backwards from the way we're perceiving it. It's possible that the so-called "unstable" state of the isotope is actually a stable state in a reversed timeline, it's what happens when the "base" isotope is struck by a radioactive particle moving backwards in time.

Further it also suggests that we don't need a multiverse theory to explain quantum branching because there's really only a single timeline with entities moving along it in both directions.

Especially interesting and exciting to me is the possibility that this explains everything and nothing at one. It might just define the borders of what is knowable while at the same time indicating quite plainly that there are things beyond the borders.

I wonder if this is what Flatlanders feel like...

Netflix and Social Awareness

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 02:23:00 +0000

I've been bit by bit knocking items off my "Must Watch" list with Netflix's Instant Watch.

So in the past 2ish months I've watched "Collapse", "The Corporation", "Capitalism: A Love Story", "Food, Inc." and "King Corn". The common thread here is largely a counter-culture view that the modern world, and particularly the US, is built on some seriously screwed up assumptions.

Effectively the baseline assumption of Capitalism in general is this: There will always be an untapped resource which a sufficiently gifted individual can spin into a profitable business. The problem here is that we live in a finite physical world. Eventually we enter an end game where we just trade the same rock back and forth.

Furthermore the modern implementations of Capitalism are based on another flawed assumption: There will always be more petroleum available for whoever is rich enough to buy it. This is patently untrue as we enter an era of Peak Oil, and especially since new surveys of the Saudi oil supply suggest they've been lying about how much they have left for decades, it's pretty clear that the price of oil is simply going to rise until there simply isn't enough economic demand to attract new investments in creating more supply.

In the US food economy we have the entire house of cards built on a single crop - corn. If this single crop fails, we're boned. Even our animal products are created by feeding untold millions of animals our corn byproducts. Moreover the corn we're so absolutely dependent on has been genetically engineered to a point where it is itself no longer edible, it requires an entire petroleum-driven processing chain in order to make any kind of use of it. The reason corn is so profitable is because the "Free Market" has completely failed to be self-regulating. All of the available investment funds went into more profitable or more reliable markets leaving the farmers to either give up their lands to urban sprawl or to factory farms who seem intent on producing unlimited amounts of bland and minimally nutritious corn by-products.

For all intents and purposes we're spending all of our remaining oil trying to make products nobody needs in the pursuit of short-term profits instead of long-term solutions to the problems which all of mankind needs solved.

Anybody out there with contrary evidence-based approaches to the problem? There are various flavors of whacko out there with a handful of theories... "Oil is regenerating, it's all a scam to drive up the price..." or "God will use his magic to save me before things get bad..." and others but none of them have been able to establish any actual credibility.

As one might have guessed...

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 03:22:00 +0000

Got super busy roundabout 11/15 when my son was born. He's now 2 months old, enormous and growing like crazy. At this rate he'll be walking by 4 months...

Work is absurd. I'm officially the department's Wiki Gnome and well on my way to becoming the company's Wiki Gnome. Out of the blue I find I'm also testing some new Open Source software for deployment. Nothing serious but definitely a break from the doldrums of freight invoice auditing.

I finally broke down and signed up for Facebook awhile back. I pretty much turned down all my restrictions as much as possible without deleting my account or otherwise disappearing.

Not entirely fun all around but I'm trying to enjoy what I can of the ridiculousness.

Baby Madness

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 18:52:00 +0000

Our updated baby profile:

Gender: TBA

Due Date: 11/18/2010

20 week ultrasound was last week but the doctor loves to keep us on the hook and so we don't get her official opinion of the results until next week. I despise this approach...

My wife's got an appointment with a hypnotherapist, she's hoping to do a drug-free delivery but we're definitely open to the doctor's opinion on the matter when the time comes.

We have some concern that our older dog is a problem, he's a grumpy old man and we don't know what his interaction with a baby will be. He's probably too old to find another home for him at 10+ years and he's got some health issues which make him a bad candidate for adoption. The choice might be between putting him down and keeping him which is absolutely agonizing but definitely needs to be considered.

Baby and mom are both healthy and happy so far. In only the past ten days or so have there been very distinct kicks and wiggles, if they started earlier they were too indistinct and we're too new at this to be sure of anything. I *think* I felt a kick, but again they're wimpy for now and I'm new at the whole spiel.

What's Capitalism for?

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Mon, 17 May 2010 03:01:00 +0000

Out of the blue this odd though struck me and I needed to record/express it...It'll be a kind of rambling thing.

I suspect that the "Crapification of Everything" trend is inherent to a Capitalist economy. Capitalism's primary function is to extract value from whatever resources are available. As resources are used more efficiently and the means for production are streamlined, stuff gets cheaper. Eventually stuff is *so* cheap that the producer doesn't feel justified making it anymore to that level of quality/price point and so they cut corners. Eventually whole markets are consumed by inferior, but cheap, goods.

In the US we're seeing a backlash where production jobs are altogether going away. Effectively there's no more value for us to extract from manufacturing or production, we've tapped that well so completely dry that we're importing labor hours.

This leaves us with service jobs. Service jobs are more and more becoming the norm. Everybody works in service these days, whether they're at the consumer level in a waitstaff or cashiering position or if like me you're on the back end of this auditing invoices or shuffling paperwork.

A service economy is "achieved" when Capitalism runs out of physical resources to exploit and only human resources are left from which to extract value. It's the labor equivalent of "Peak Oil" (when the price of extracting oil starts to overtake the ability of the market to pay for it), we're at a crisis point where making things is too expensive so companies have innovated and figured out how to sell labor hours more or less directly. "I'm not going to make something for you but I am going to do non-production stuff on your behalf..."

So now we're in a position where labor has become so scarce (in market terms anyway) that the price is too high for manufacturing concerns to pay. There's simply no way around it, there are only 23.72 hours in a day and human production drops off drastically after about hour 8 or 9 of doing the menial stuff that provides so much profit for the people on top of the heap.

So I think my basic concern is this: The "invisible hand" that was supposed to keep everything running smoothly doesn't give a damn *where* we go. We've blindly followed the path of least resistance (read: cheapest goods) and it's brought us here to where all the money is made at the bottom on behalf of the top and I think that's the only place it could possibly have ever taken us.

The Big News...

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Mon, 10 May 2010 14:42:00 +0000

I finally get to say so publicly... Angie and I are expecting. Quickie FAQ:
Due date is 11/26/10
We won't be finding out the sex early.
We have registries set up w/ Babies R Us and Walmart currently. Somebody already has dibs on the crib but it's not actually bought yet so it'll stay on the list for a bit (as a warning to you big spenders out there...)
We're ~12 weeks along.
I can post details or answer questions later when I'm at lunch or home or something...

Live Food and Synchronicity

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:13:00 +0000

So I've opened up my culinary playspace somewhat to include "rotten" categories of food. I've done a little lacto-fermentation, enjoyed and attempted to make some kombucha. I'm looking to try homemade kefir but couldn't be sure where to start. I've done a *lot* of reading on "traditional" live foods and their health benefits and I've arrived at this weird place where I'm apparently the most politically liberal person with any visible interested in alternative diet theories.

Reading up on Healthy Skeptic, Weston A. Price Foundation, etc. has yielded some interesting tidbits and I'm pretty sure I'm on to something pretty big but in the meantime, bit by bit, I'm trying to transition to a much more "real" diet and lifestyle. Eliminating the pre-processed, pre-dosed anything is a lot harder than it sounds. While I don't necessarily buy into a lot of the "anti-nutrient" theory regarding phytic acid and such, I have no reason to doubt that sprouted or fermented stuff is easier on the system and better balanced in the long run. Having eaten the stuff and actually "kicked the tires" a bit I find it really agrees with me.

For about the last 10 days or so my wife has had terrible digestive upset and after two trips to urgent care, being on a prescription bland and horrible diet somebody in a position of authority finally gave her a lead on something that might help and it was live yogurt. I've been saying for awhile we should give this "live foods" thing a shot since her system was so picky in general but until the last 10 days it hadn't really been a high priority.

The doctor in question said, more or less, she probably caught some stomach bug about 10 days ago. There are no detectable traces of it in her system *now* but whatever it was left her system in such an uproar and so depleted of all the good bugs that she wasn't able to digest food properly now. We're about 24 hours out from that description of the situation and a little kombucha and yogurt later she's almost feeling back to normal.

Now, I don't think it works *quite* that fast absent any placebo effect but if this rate of improvement keeps up, she's probably finally sold once and for all on the live foods.

So I'll let people know how this goes. I've got a batch of ginger-carrot pickles, ginger beer and kombucha started. I have beet and carrot kvass rolling around in the back of my head and a garden to plant in the next couple weeks to supply all the salad-pickling-stewing-roasting madness to come.

Life as a hockey player...

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:23:00 +0000

There was some controversy surrounding the rule that helmets should be worn at all officially sanctioned ice hockey games. There is a certain paradox to it though, the players unanimously refused to wear helmets and unanimously supported the mandating of helmets.

This makes sense, viewed from a certain angle. Helmets block some sight, sound, etc. and slow a player down on the ice. They also minimize the damage taken should a puck go astray or another player take umbrage. From a competitive viewpoint, nobody wants to be the guy with the helmet. From a human standpoint, nobody wants to be without a helmet.

So I'm re-realizing some of the tragedy of a modern lifestyle is that we're all brain damaged hockey players.

Think about our workday. We get up, earlier than most of us like to go to jobs most of us find less than fulfilling, to receive less pay than we would like (and in most cases probably deserve) and we take all of that extra effort and time and we put it aside as something we *must* do. Why?

We're the hockey players who refuse to wear helmets. We perceive some kind of competitive advantage in careening through our days, skipping out on time with friends, family, hobbies, pets, etc. Those things are all nice but somehow we don't perceive that we need them as much as we need this next paycheck (or the next after that, or the next after that...), we don't need them as much as we need this promotion or that car... And it isn't like there's any "win" condition here either. There is never an end where suddenly we have enough and we go back to full-time attendance to our own lives.

Until or unless somebody forces us *all* to put on the damn helmet, we'll all spend some significant portion of our lives sleepwalking, doing the zombie shamble between food and work and sleep...

Wave Rocks(?)

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:15:00 +0000

I'm enjoying Google Wave. It's a weird thing, but it's a platform with obvious potential for expansion.

For those with no clue, Google Wave is Google's new collaborative ummm.... experience?

It works more or less like this: imagine a wiki being edited in realtime by a chatroom of users. It's not really an IM platform because everything can be re-edited going back to the beginning. It's not a wiki because you can edit it live while other users watch and even perform their own edits. It's not a blog precisely because it's all done pseudo-publicly, that is, only people invited to the Wave can participate.

The potential is there for nearly endless enhancement. Insert a map gadget and plan out your meal stops with all your travelling companions... link in your online docs and build a menu for your next holiday potluck/family gathering... add a dice roller and make a bot do the number crunching for a virtual tabletop gaming session... And those are just apps that exist already.

It's silly and probably not using it to the full potential but I'm playing at using it, with the help of a syntax highlighting bot, as a web-based programming tool. Even without anybody else in the session, being able to login from anywhere and play in a "not just notepad" edit session is awesome.

Veggie Stuff...

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:28:00 +0000

So I got a recipe and had to try seitan aka. "wheat meat". It's pretty much wheat flour soaked with warm water and kneaded to death to develop the gluten and then washed to eliminate the starch. I'll share here the process I followed and what I might do differently. I'm not actually making it vegetarian, using beef boullion for broth since it's what I've got...

The recipe I used is this:
4 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups liquid (composed of soy sauce and hot water, proportioned to taste)
assorted spices

It's not very specific but neither is the blob of proteinous goo I created.
In a food processor combine everything until you've got a good blob formed. It should form a relatively sticky ball of proto-dough.
Remove the ball of goo and work it until any bread baker would be apoplectic. Work it until your wrists are sore and weak and just beat the hell out of it.
Let it rest in a bowl of hot water for ~20 minutes. The water will loosen up the dough a bit but you're trying to soak out the starch so that's okay.
Start a pot of flavored liquid boiling on the stove. I way overdid it with soy sauce, a little demerera sugar and beef boullion. It's salty as hell.
Dump your now milky water and work the dough until it's stiff again. The grainy junk that washes out is the bran because we started with whole wheat dough. You're not losing anything we care about in the washing, just fiber and starch mostly.
Run some more hot water over your dough, knead it until the water goes milky. At this point the dough is probably falling apart and you'll have to work all the dough back together and this is a challenge as it tends to run away from you in the water, bobbing and floating around as you vainly try to grab at it. Dump out your water, don't let your dough get away from you. Repeat until the water stops going all milky.
When you have a blob of nearly pure wheat protein, aka gluten, you can stop with all the kneading. Get it into a shape you want and plop that thing into the boiling water. Let it cook half an hour or so and when it comes out, pack it in the cooking liquid in the fridge until you use it.

In effect, we're creating an intentionally over-worked pasta dough and then washing all the starch out of it. Now armed with this sadly tiny realization, the process I'm tempted to follow...

The Recipe:
3.5 cups of high protein bread flour
0.5 cups of soy flour (lecithin contributes to gluten formation)
2 cups of hot flavorful liquid (sweet soy sauce or something similar)
spices to taste

Combine the above in a stand mixer with the dough hook. Let the machine knead the dough for as long as you have patience for, maximize gluten development.
Soak the dough ball in hot water ~20 minutes.
Set flavorful cooking liquid on the stove to boil
Work the dough and dump the rinsing liquid.
Run more rinse water over the dough. When it gets too loose, throw the dough ball into a cheesecloth or similar and squeeze out the water.
When the dough is almost done, roll it out flat. Fold it over and roll it out again, developing a definite grain to the direction of the protein fibers. Do this for about the last 2 rinsings.
Toss the dough into the boiling water for ~30 minutes.

At the end of either of these processes, the goal is to have a product which behaves more or less like meat when cooking. The advantages here are if you're vegetarian you can harness all sorts of "conventional" recipes and use them with your faux meat. If you're not a vegetarian, it's a new and relatively cheap food product made mostly from stuff you'd have around anyway.

I'm still experimenting with my inaugural batch but I sauteed a couple slices with some onions and that turned out well. I'm looking forward to getting more expertise and being able to control the texture better. It'll suck up any flavors you use during the preparation and so it's pretty much a blank canvas, more so even than a tofu which is always a little sweet to me.

Internet Phone Is Go

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:12:00 +0000

I have a MyTouch now. Keyboard is small but from my perspective the whole world pretty much is... Now I have a Twitter account as Urzl but real posts should still appear here. Got my new phone super cheap thanks to Oprah and birthday cash.

Birthday, Vacation...

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 23:24:00 +0000

I'm recovered enough from my vacation to talk about it with the world... I was worried what I'd come back to at work but that turned out okay.

We went whale watching and saw a blue whale and his poo. The poo was disturbingly bright red but all is well, blue whales eat krill which is pink-red and when they digest it apparently the color is concentrated down to somewhere between crimson and magenta.

I've finally signed up for Twitter. I have a MyTouch smartphone on the way (thanks to my dad's b-day cash infusion) and figured I should probably set myself up with something easy/dumb to do with it.

While at my grandmother's we did our usual talking and talking and talking and... b-day stuff was nice but just hanging out is always good.

My dad was a little weird and mortality-oriented. We got there and he was cleaning out his garage and having us claim dibs on his stuff before he throws it away. Some of the stuff wouldn't come back on the plane with us (got a Mantis tiller thing coming in the post) but I got a nice leather delivery bag/man-purse. It had been packed up awhile and so when I got it home I scrubbed it up with some leather conditioner. The color shifted darker but that's okay, now I've got a bag that's more water resistant than the nylon backpack I'd been carrying my stuff around in.

I always carry a couple of notepads, writing instruments and my lunch with me to work. Sometimes my lunch, iPod, DS etc. will be in there but I've always got note-taking supplies on hand just in case. I pretty much spend my life inventing things someone else has already thought of but which I can't research until I get home to discover that my invention isn't new...so it goes.

I hate being all anxious about my new phone. I don't like being that materialistic but at the same time as I've told my friend Dan at work, part of what I want about the smartphone is the emergent technologies and toys. I got a massive deal and spent $100 on a phone with GPS and a motion sensor and an available scripting interface for languages I can even play in. For all of the toys this represents I could have easily spent $1000 and not been able to wire them all together so as to really indulge my lazy but hackerish tendencies. The example program in my tutorials is a script that detects whether the phone is face-up or face-down when you put it down and turns off the ringer when you put it face-down. That alone is an awesome use of several technologies. I spend my life missing calls with my ringer off, if my phone had the intelligence to know when I need to hear the ringer and when it's inappropriate that would be great but this is the next best thing.

Oh, and Prototype is freaking awesome...again about the enabling stuff... A PS3 isn't interesting unto itself and new games are way expensive *but* it has a browser which means I can do all sorts of craziness online and my desktop is set up to stream my media to the PS3 over our network. It's not just a game console, it's also a part of my living room sound system, an internet appliance, a blu-ray player... see? Expensive hardware providing ridiculous amounts of cheap entertainment. Now all I need to do is get a much bigger hard drive in it and install Linux on it and I'll have yet another device to hack on to ridiculous and useless effect.

Also, while in California I got to see both my dad's girlfriend's and my grandmother's computers at work...I'm going to wind up sending out Ubuntu CDs to pretty much everyone I know just because of the insanity I witnessed there. Both of those desktops boot slower than my relatively older laptop and Windows (and attendant viruses, malware, etc.) is to blame. They could probably both run from the LiveCD, and except for the irfanview compiled-to-exe slideshows at my grandmother's place, be a much happier user experience.

Played in the ocean, saw whales, visited with Ama, my dad and sisters. It was all good. Now to work towards a promotion and more money!

And The Wonders Never Cease...

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 01:49:00 +0000

Our connection is finally up and mostly acceptable except with random lags in speed off and on... so unsurprisingly the tech is blaming our Vonage VOIP equipment. This comes as no surprise because A) the tech isn't familiar with the equipment and the first instinct is naturally to blame the alien gear and B) AT&T would really rather keep up the arbitrary distinction between billing us for phone service and billing us for bandwidth.

Barriers between similiar (even identical) services are stupid. Everything is on packet routing, almost everything is even on IP routing. Stop pretending that the cell phone has a magic distinction that makes it more expensive to send an SMS packet vs. an MMS packet vs. a voice packet.

Here's the dream...

I buy a broadband connection at home from whatever provider I see fit for whatever reason I see fit. I pipe that into my home network built from whatever hardware I have on hand. I use it for whatever I see fit. I hook up a VOIP adapter from whatever vendor I like, I register whatever phone number I like with whichever numbering authority/broker I like. Nobody needs to know or care what I'm doing on my network.

I buy wireless bandwidth from whatever provider I see fit. I use whatever hardware I feel like. If I'm using a Wi-Fi capable device, it switches seamlessly between routing through the nearest available Wi-Fi access point and the cellular backbone.

My preferred billing scheme works something like this: I get charged $0.01 per MB per second. Mathematically, this means 0.01/MB/second... I get charged more when the MB goes up, I get charged less when the seconds goes up. At 1 MB/s, I'd pay $0.01 to download one MB; at 0.5 MB/s, I'd pay the same $0.01 to download two MB. I can maximize my value by voluntarily capping my bandwidth usage. The ISP can maximize their take by consistently providing the maximum speed connection. If you still want to divide service tiers, do it by *guaranteed* bandwidth, not theoretical maximum. If I'm on the $0.01/MB/s plan, I pay a maximum of $0.01/MB because 1 MB/s is the fastest I can expect to get. If I'm on the "unlimited" plan, I pay whatever the going rate is for the speed I get.

More consumer control and choice over their bills, more scalability for the ISP because it gives consumers a reason to limit themselves.

Now that I've fixed the telcos and the wireless companies once and for all I can move on to healthcare or something...

All The Latest in DSL Bullshit

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:26:00 +0000

So we're moved. I'm in the new house now. Our furniture is here, we're slowly unpacking more and more stuff, most of which we'll probably wind up getting rid of...

We were with Mediacom Cable for internet and television. It was a nice package, good speed, no complaints. Then when we moved, they wouldn't hook us up because of the status of my sister-in-law's account. We got pissed, my wife does this a lot, and we told off Mediacom and signed up for DirecTV and the AT&T DSL package deal.

They signed us up for 6 mb/s internet. This is a problem. They don't have 6 mb/s internet in my neighborhood. It's an impossibility, we're too far away from the DSL thing the name of which escapes me anytime I try to talk about it. In any case, they apparently sign up *everybody* with the 6 mb/s internet and totally fuck with you. Their plan is, apparently, to either hook you up with ridiculously fast internet and bill you accordingly or fail so miserably that you resent their name and the fact that they managed to somehow get a bill out to your house within a week of hooking you up with a tragically broken connection.

I'm connected now at less than 56k dial-up speed through my DSL connection. The tech I spoke to on the phone said there was no way in hell we could possibly be on the 6mb/s plan, it wouldn't work and it's something they can even tell by remote. So they walked me through how I was supposed to call billing, make them back me down to the 1.5 mb/s plan which *should* work in this neighborhood, then call the tech back to flip the switch which would connect me. I called billing, they were closed by the time I was off the phone with the tech. My wife called billing and they told her that it'd be until the 13th before they could fix the fucking thing. They told me it'd be half an hour once all the right calls were made. We called the tech back who did his thing and handed off to whatever arbitrary third-party is in charge of breaking my fucking internet connection.

A week into their service I have a bill for a fictional 6mb/s connection, still no useful internet connection and I'm still waiting until their apparently arbitrarily chosen deadline of the 13th before I'm allowed to call back and be pissed off.

Screw the USA telco/cable monopolies! This is complete bullshit that Mediacom is going to pull this shit where my connection is incumbent on someone else's account status and AT&T is going to do whatever they damn well please and bill me without the agreed upon discounts before the service even works. I have pretty much two choices for decent internet speed in town, both of them are going to screw me on price and they're both going to do as they please when it comes to service.

Meanwhile, my wife's machine has given up the ghost for reasons I can't really diagnose until I can throw some Google-fu at it. We're probably looking at, at the very least, digging through our crap to find the pristine hard drive she has buried somewhere and then spending the traditional 12 fucking hours reinstalling Windows because she's phobic of Linux on top of being phobic of ever having to reinstall her software.

Hot Or Not Tips...

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 01:16:00 +0000

I'm looking at HotOrNot.com again. I'm not single, I'm not shopping around, it's just a weird cyber-people-watching kind of thing. As I go through I realize that when I'm allowed to be very judgemental, I'm still not... at least not on the scale they try to enforce. In light of this, I'm writing up this list of the meta-scoring I do while viewing these photos. When submitting a photo to Hot Or Not these are the rules to keep in mind.

If your photo looks doctored, you get an automatic 1 from me.
If your photo is terrible, not *you* but the photo, you get an automatic 1. Examples would be too dark to see, too bright to see, blurry, small, pixelated.
You are going to probably get a 5 from me. Nothing personal about that but if I get the "nothing exceptional, personality makes all the difference" vibe, that isn't necessarily a bad thing it just means that your photo for some reason didn't stand out as good or bad.
Every time your repeat photo comes up, you'll get one less point from me.
If you are obviously a dude, or trying to look like one successfully enough, I will rate you as a very un-hot female. You may feel very attractive in your androgyne disguise but the crewcut hair hidden under a hat and 3 piece suit just make you look like you're in the wrong category and the sunglasses that cover half your face make you pretty much unrateable under any circumstances.

With that, I wish you good luck internetting!

Shared Identity

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:20:00 +0000

So I launched a Google Sites location, theoretically for my family to kind of reintegrate. I don't know if they'll like it but everybody (whose email I had handy...) is invited. We've got individual blogs, emails, IM, etc. but those are all somewhat different than the shared group identity and connection that unites a family.

I started by posting a recipe from my mom which at least my siblings and my dad will remember. My grandmother tried it once and didn't like it but she still knew it as my mom's recipe.

I'm hoping this takes off but I can't really know, I know email and phone were pretty much not working and I figured I should try something new.

Slow Food Here I Come!

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Mon, 25 May 2009 16:44:00 +0000

I made bread!

I used the recipe and process found here: http://www.instructables.com/id/Artisan_Bread_in_Five_Minutes_a_Day/

No longer am I at the mercy of Big Bread and their global cabal of $7 loaves of bread I made for... probably more than $7 per loaf in my initial batch (getting a container for dough, we didn't have flour on hand, we didn't used to have much use for yeast...), but screw you, I made it and I like it.

I have to refine my technique (the thing has a crust like a geode) but in all, it's tasty and I will be making more soon. (Possibly once a day before bed to have it cooling in the oven for breakfast and lunch making...)

Wooooooo!

Moving...

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Sun, 17 May 2009 23:13:00 +0000

It's a weird situation but by now all of the relevant parties have heard so I'm not breaking any news but I wanted to share a different angle anyway.

My brother is getting divorced. Neither of them wants the house they bought together but it's a terrible market to try to sell. Knowing that my wife and I *do* want a house and a fenced yard and so much that would be an upgrade from the place we're in now, we've been offered a long-term rent-to-own deal on the place.

We're hammering out details, no moving until likely July, on things like making sure the bank can't yank it out from under us due to unforeseen circumstances.

Pros:

It'll be the most space my wife and I have ever had together. We will have space to unpack our wedding gifts, counter space and outlets to actually *use* our kitchen appliances. Not to mention going through all of the "put it in a box and deal with it later" junk we've accumulated through 3 moves.

It's essentially a "no holds barred" rental agreement. We're not burning the place down and short of that, we're free to do a lot of the stuff that renting has held us back from. I'd like to be more crafty, do more gardening and such but as long as I'm in a place like I am now all of my work is being done for the management company who doesn't care and might actually see fit to evict me for *any* exterior modifications.

A fenced yard where I can let a dog, kid, etc. out without having to babysit every moment. We've gone from apartment to house to house where we were sharing very limited space and though we have a tremendous yard now, it isn't fenced. It's a massive space to mow and it sees pretty much zero use. We have a bunch of mosquitoes, the yard is actually spongy and unpleasant to walk on and again, there's nothing we're allowed to do outside. A potted plant is technically outside of the terms of our rental. This all goes away after we move.

Stability is a big thing. We've been on a streak of moving about once every 2 years, whether we like it or not. This hasn't done wonders for our housekeeping or long-term planning. *Everything* has been temporary for 4-6 years now. My wife is practically phobic about some kind of financial disaster which is going to sink us for good. All things considered, if 100% of our costs were covered and our income was all being poured into savings, that probably still wouldn't calm her nerves. Having something which is locked in and reliable at all will be a *big* help for all sorts of reasons both practical and psychological.

Cons:

This is further away from both of our workplaces. It'll represent more commuting which is automatically more gas and more vehicle upkeep.

It's a house we'll actually have to keep up with... this sounds like a really lazy complaint but moving from a landlord who refuses to properly fix a roof leak through 2 tenants, himself drove the backhoe that put a big ugly hole in the yard and refuses to address persistent problems with the plumbing (pipes more or less rusting completely shut...) into a house whose owners' we actually have some loyalty towards and who might actually share the wealth should improvements be rendered to the property is a big deal. Suddenly it matters that my dog might scratch some paint or carpet...

Instability...a big-ass management company has more padding in their budgets than my brother and his ex-wife. It's possible for them to be wiped out unexpectedly in ways that our current leaseholders are not.

In any case, the date is approaching when final decisions have to be locked in, paperwork has to be done and a big stupid undriveable truck will have to be rented. I'm getting excited though I'm not sure why, moving sucks!

Ubuntu Conversion(s)

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Sun, 17 May 2009 22:54:00 +0000

I've been running Ubuntu on my main machine for awhile now and recently converted my laptop over to running Linux. It's twice as fast as it ever was, validating all of my bitching about Windows at the very least. In any case, it's going to be a lot more pleasant to use.

Geek Changes...

noreply@blogger.com (Kyle Turpin) — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 02:28:00 +0000

So I desperately wanted to get into KDE-4.2's plasmoid stuff. They have Python bindings, a language I kinda know (and enjoy learning) and it seemed like a great source of little projects to practice on.

Gentoo after almost a year doesn't have KDE 4.x available (easily). I used autounmask to open up everything I might need to make it work and couldn't get PyKDE4 to install no matter what I tried or who I asked for help.

Today I installed Kubuntu and everything works. I had a hitch where for some reason it's anal about not adding users to the audio group unless you do is explicitly and I'm still booting from CD because GRUB is unreasonably psychotic but even so, I've got things working now that I didn't know I was missing.

It's a sad, sad thing to have to leave my favorite distro behind, particularly since it *used to be* cutting edge and then failed miserably on that front, but thus far I'm pleased with what I see.

If all goes as I hope, I'll be converting my wife over to some flavor of Ubuntu from her ancient Windows 2000 install. WINE is more compatible with current Windows software than her OS and we both got in on the Lame Duck Challenge over at Codeweavers so she's even got Crossover waiting to be installed. I just have to figure out how to back up her schizophrenic array of hard drives, install the new one we've had in the box for 2 years (because she's paranoid about installing it...) and let her run with it.