Business sale status, AND my Google+ moment of shame and infamy(situation too new to judge impact)

The business formerly known as Wright Computer Services, LLC is being subsumed into a larger concern. I do not yet have the physical check in hand, but I have seen the image, and it was mailed on 05. Dec. 2014. I have been contacting customers regarding the change of ownership, and tying up loose ends prior to the final exchange of all rights, assets, and liabilities. Over the past month I have not slept a full night's sleep, and on many a night not even a wink. This situation will resolve once I get the new owner's staff up to speed on my oddly constructed software configurations and codings.

Over the past three nights the situation has become acute as I have slept no more than five total hours over that span. That segue leads me to my next item..

My Google+ moment of infamy and shame

Okay, so this went horribly awry as I tried to catch up on my few commenters' posts whilst responding to comments following this post. In the 10th position of comments, I entered the following: "Why do these Apple posts garner so much attention, both positive and negative?'

"I may have answer. Scientists: Apple Makes Your Brain Go All Religious'

"That this was likely the situation in 2011, would almost invariably lead to the conclusion that this unreasonable sort of devotion--and detraction--is even more pronounced today. My post was meant to be only an account as to what tech. cos. typically do when faced with legla[sic] action, not as an indictment of Apple's particular practices. Nearly all successful, tech. concerns have closets full of skeletons.'

"Thanks for reading, and leaving comments (responder one), and (responder two).'"

To my sleep-deprived, acting God of business transfer, and hence, manifold addled brain, this came out as a sort of merely factual post completely devoid of indictments to the comments--or commenters--subsequent to the post.

Within minutes, I found out just how wrongly placed my confidence in that position was mis-placed. I was dressed down by one of the two mentioned by name. Upon rereading my addition to the comments, I saw just how twisted my interpretation was..I have rarely felt such humiliation, shock, and shame at something I have done by inclusion or by exclusion. I would say 'never,' but my few friends that read this, are certain to bring equally poor lapses in judgement to mind(so that easily plucked fruit is gone!)

How could I have been so wrong...and in so few words? The answers are that i am horrible deficient when it comes to pre-judging the import of socially inexcusable actions, and my sleep-deprived self did not see the all-too-obvious trap that i had set for myself. That my attempt at providing merely factual information was seen as tarring my commenters with the brush intended only for people outside the group speaks volumes about my mindset. I only posted that a few hours ago, and the only thing that has changed is cognition of my deficit. One cannot take back something loosed on the Internet, so I let it stand unaltered. I have only one intention for the post. I hope that it serves the longer-term goal of making me really think about what i am about to loose on the Internet before doing so. If I never err again in this life, I have erred enough. We shall see how this one comment affects the few people in my circles on G+. I only started using "Plus" as a way to relieve some of the stress that has been building since the post business sale has limited the time and energy I can devote to missives on the Web.

It is now abundantly clear that I should have simply waited until the dust settled and resumed posting to this Blog. Perhaps some sleep will alter my perception of things in a more positive way as I feel abject misery over the comment. It may get worse given sleep, bur that is likely to be a short-lived artifact given my level of horror over what just transpired.

It is a given that I am terrible at initially anticipating what effect my nonsense spilling will engender, but this was egregious to a whole new level for me.

I do have a tech. laden post that is ready to go as well, but I had better reread that several times to be as sure as possible that I do not replay that awful event.

One hopes only to do better in the future.

Once the business sale is totally wrapped up I should be back to posting on a regular basis. I only have until the end of 2014 to get the staff prepped to transition so that will almost certainly mean long days and nights spent in a foreign land(another state) until the very end of the year. I will be taking a full-on break from doing anything business/job related lasting at least several months, so I hope to put my brain back as right as it can be.

Thanks(!), and I will be back within a day, and then almost certainly off until 01/2015.

All in all it has been a great year save for the current catastrophes. As financially rewarding as the business sale has been, in all other respects, it has been a sting of awfuls. If 2015 is even half as rewarding on so many levels, it will be a great year.

Oh, and by the way, this post was composed on my tablet, so all errors of logic, grammar, and any other errors that I typically try and avoid have been left as this stream of (un?)consciousness has been unaltered and I have spell-check turned off as the supplied dictionary(sorry Google, but it flatly sucks) makes creative use of the language and typing tech. jargon a very painful affair(the tech. jargon is in the as-yet-yo-be-loosed post that I also composed on the Nexus 7 tablet, of which I now have two).

Again, as always, thanks for reading, and I hope to really return a much more rested, less addled version of my current self.

Oh, and any joy that I felt once negotiations were concluded, have now been consumed by the monster of responsibility that has befallen me since.

"This really sucks" does not even begin to describe my feelings of utter exhaustion and ongoing tension that has accompanied the post-sale process. That is in some part why no names will ever be given--and there are legal issues regarding certain outright disclosure that would take teams of attys. decades to find any loopholes contained therein--so my name dropping reticence is mostly borne out of fear of financial ruin.

I have more work to do before I can even consider calling this day done.

SOLD!

I sold my computer services business. I was not really interested in selling the thing, as I have spent 17 years growing it up. I sold it for six years of gross receipts plus a 5-year non-competition compensation package. That's fair market value. The negotiations seemingly took forever--or six months of heightened angst.

I should be celebrating, but I am cerebrating in its stead. What the 'ell am I going to do now?

I am not ready to retire. I do not want to simply do charitable work, either. My home needs attention, so that will take up a few months of time.

My EE degrees are not of much value as my skillsets are a couple of decades from current technologies. I could go to work as a coder or a networker, but I love my freedom. With the sale, wages are not to be an issue. The one IT company that I have conveyed the sale to is trying to get an inkling as to what I would need for a compensation package to work on their team, but it is an actual commute with crappy hours...so "a lot" is where I am with that proposal. I love working there on site but they too have just been swallowed up by a much larger enterprise, so whether or not the new ownership retains the culture that is currently in place. At any rate, I am taking enough time off between official responsibilities to fix up my home and tend my gardens.

I now have at least some notion as to how a parent must feel when a child leaves the nest. Yes, the money is great, but my child has left.

Nokia N1 AND I have started my icon set for Android 5..which is better than having Android 5 at this juncture

I am going to test drive a Nokia N1 tablet as soon as possible. It looks like next year at the earliest. If Nokia's native apps aren't too intrusive, this could be my next tech. buy. Of course much needs to be finalized. Specs-wise, it's a killer. As what is now high end hardware becomes mid-to-low end hardware, phones and tablets will become less expensive. Commodification is great for the end user, but really tough on margins from the silicon on up. The N1 should certainly land on these shores at no more than 349USD, and will likely be discounted from there over time. Now, on to my project X...

I have the Android Material Design SDK installed--along with the Eclipse ADT--and it's pretty easy to use. I do not think I am oversimplifying things as I grabbed a .png image, used Android Asset Studio>Eclipse>Presto!(well, "presto" isn't part of deal, but compiling my one icon--in five sizes--into an APK was too easy. No need for the SDK as yet. I may cheat a bit as I have a current copy of Axialis IconWorkshop, and I am never satisfied with UI elements that I author. I am going to read up on IconWorkshop a bit, and reason whether or not it will save me much hair pulling and use of foul language.

Go figure..The Nexus 7 Android 5.0 is buggier than I thought possible. Bad Google, bad!

Well, now there are numerous reasons why I haven't received my Android 5 OTA downgrade for my Nexus 7.

Yep. It is really awful. I was thinking about side loading the new OS, but I am certainly glad that I did not. I have said it before, and I will say it again, Microsoft has the least buggy mobile OS--save for perhaps Blackberry--in the very latest and greatest iteration.

If you are having issues with your N7 wi-fi let Google have it..or perhaps simply know about it.

This is really inexcusable. If I shipped a package as bug ridden as this, I would expect my customer to send it right back. Thankfully, that has never happened in 30 years of coding. Test everything under all available scenarios. I was once running six differently configured Windows boxes..plus VMs to test software prior to shipping.

Since the Chrome browser doesn't even get a passing grade, this is very ungood. There is a new release of Chrome that may play better with Anroid 5--as it has Material Design elements--but if so, that should have pushed out well in advance of the 5.0 release.

Apple and Google are really having issues. Applesauce..8.1.1 is a non-fix.

Surely these two tech. giants can do better than a team of three coders.

I am taking on an easy Android task. I am going to construct an icon set that hopefully won't suck. Any UI work that I engage in is never good enough, but I will be using as my goalpost the truly excellent Moonshine+ Launcher Theme. I will only shoot for 100 icons. I am going to leave the new Android Material Design icons essentially alone, save for a dew small tweaks that will be display more minimalistic than Mat. Des. icons. Three icone per day is my goal, so I will have my set done by the end of the year. I think I'll do all mine in 192x192px so they'll display well on most any screen. I have a cool hedgehog search icon done, but it is too busy for my Mat. Des. pack.

Ho hum. I am still waiting for my OTA update to Android 5. I would rather get a stable shiny new OS than a buggy one. After reading about iOS 8 and its need for updates every few days, patience is indeed a virtue. Apple is already up to 8.1.1 and no doubt, there will be more versions. I am certain that Android 5 will go through similar teething pains, so I do not rely on mobile devices to get real work done.

I am sort of ticked off about the XDA Developers Premium app that is taking seemingly forever to accept my new log-in creds. Yep. 'Twas my fault in that I changed my passwords whilst at breakfast, and figured I would kill off all app data while I was at it. I paid 0.99USD for the app. I expect results!

the website data and app data should sync momentarily.

I would buy LastPass for mobile if it was a one-time fee. A subscription based service is not for me. I think I'll crib my passwords in my tablet protector. I have another app that I paid for, but it is certainly not LastPass. These free for PC, pay for mobile apps are a pricing model that I just do not get. I have hundreds of passwords in my LP vault, but visit very few websites via mobile. Wolfram Alpha is likewise. Of course I can tote notebook and get full privileges of LP, and Wolfram Alpha, so it is truly no big deal.

I would buy Wolfram Alpha if Amazon Ppps store carried it, as I have enough coins to make the purchase. Meh. Too much whining

Being ill sucks..Where's my Android 5 OTA? And another thing..

I have been ailing to varying degrees since 11.09.2014. I would suspect Lyme(borreliosis), but since I feel better today, it isn't likely to be that. My symptoms have mainly been an overwhelming sense of enervation and general malaise. Given such non-specific symptoms, it could simply be that the change to DST. I nearly always have a bout of some level of difficulty directly after the change--which occurred on 11.04, but this time(no pun intended) it has been a four day event. Given that I had no fever, or other outward manifestation of real illness A wee bit of seasonal affective disorder(SAD) seems the likeliest culprit. Unfortunately, I am back.

WTF, Google? I want my over the air(OTA) update to Android 5.0 AKA Lollipop. I do not want a buggy release, but the image for my Nexus 7 is available for download..and has been for a couple of days. I have resisted putting any not "5" compatible applications on my tablet..and I have foregone rooting the device. I am going to clean up my tablet before I apply the update. I would flash the image, but I do not need to go through the process of reinstalling everything and remembering what settings I prefer.

The last thing on my enfeebled mind is that I still have 100 bulbs to put into mother earth. I must accomplish this within the following two days. Than I will mulch a few things, and be done until spring 2015..save for starting a bunch of plants. But that's not until Feb. 2015 at the earliest.

What I learned on the Internets today.

I learned that while global climate change doesn't exist, 2014 is on track to the hottest year in recorded history. Please do not use the first link. Climate change deniers are a most mediocre type of creature. The site owner--and principal oddball--has no expertise in climate science. I am not going to make an ad hominem attack..non-specialists in lots of disciplines make breakthrough contributions. However, there is more evidence for anthropogenic climate change on our blue rock than for a great many things in science which people by and large believe to be true. Scietists do not often state that things are true. All of the findings of science can be overturned via contrary evidence.

That is all I have today. I planted 100 allium bulbs at just above freezing temperatures and I need water, heat, and to go take photos of my new garden plots.

150 more bulbs in ground today! 100 to go..Yippee Ki-yay!

I am (nearly) so done planting bulbs this autumn. I should go back to UNH and get a post-grad degree in something to do with plants. Dang. I just checked the pre-reqs. for an MS in plant biology..and I am certain that I could do this.."Applicants are expected to have adequate preparation in plant biology and in the fundamentals of physical and biological sciences. They must submit current scores (within five years) from the general test of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE)". Screw the current scores. I took enough bio., physics, and math to maybe even go for a PhD.

Here are the PhD pre-reqs: "Students will complete a program of study as determined by their guidance committee. Students will be advanced to candidacy after successfully completing comprehensive written and oral qualifying examinations covering a broad basic knowledge of their major and minor fields and their ability to design and carry out basic research in plant biology. Candidates must successfully defend a dissertation based on original research in plant biology".

Now I just need a few years of time to get this done.. :) I need to get hooked up! I can do research..heck, it's what I do nearly every day. I was born in a laboratory.

The link.

My biggest issue in my academic career was being unable to teach undergrad courses. I expect students to know the material before it is presented. The out is this: "Teaching experience is required of all M.S. and Ph.D. degree students. The requirement may be fulfilled by enrolling in a supervised teaching course, by serving as a teaching assistant, or by having previous professional teaching experience. I am not even certain that I could assist in teaching. I am still willing to give it a go..

Who wants to pay for me to go back to school? Come on! I need to learn more stuff.

I have always had a had a difficult time with the use of "Icthyosaur."

I mean, come on.."icthys" is Greek for fish! Of course when you are a big bad-ass marine reptile some taxonomist just had to steal the prefix for reptilian use. Enough word games.

Icthypod? Amphisaur?. Nope. The fossil's existence was already known and named well nigh.

I am sure that this transitional form between terrestrial and marine reptiles will do for reptilia what Tiktaalik did to bridge the divide between fishes and tetrapods.

Well, Tiktaalik did nothing to convince the irrational mind to accept naturalistic evolution. C lenticarpus will surely have the same fate.

Certain religious belief systems are not only demonstrably in error, but are injurious to the rest of us that would like to be good stewards of the earth.

The fact that we have even the diversity in the fossil record that we have yet seen astonishes me. This needn't have been so.

Every time evolutionary science offers up an arrow that points toward greater understanding, certain segments of society clutch their feeble shields and hide behind them.

In Nature today...

No, not the esteemed science journal, but in my very backyard.

Okay, this is about natural beauty. Way back on 11.05 I tossed in a sentence about planting some bulbs. Here is a quick rundown..I had 660 bulbs at the beginning of my autumn planting, and with today's modest output, I now have but 250 left to plant. Planting bulbs is a great way to get started in gardening.

I think that I have spent perhaps ten hours of aerobic intensity gardening in getting the plots ready, depressing the bulbs, and covering them over. I tamped things a bit as well. All looks good.

Once all bulbs are in ground, I will add mulch here and there as some of the plants are just zone hardy for this area.

All the varieties I planted are not hot house hybrids, but flowers as found in the wild from my native New Hampshire USA, to the mountainous regions of Turkey. Barring any really crazy weather events, the planting looks well done. I have been gardening since before I can remember--my great grandfather had me planting vegetable garden seeds at no later than 2 years of age.

I fell out of it as school and work intervened, but have now spent seven years back in the garden. Of all the types of therapy that one could choose, gardening and exercise are especially rewarding.

I am not really a 'personal anecdote' kind of guy, but I do have my passions.

Back off Seinfeld, or solve this tensor equation!

Jerome seems to believe that he is somewhere on the autism spectrum.What is this, some sort of coming out fortnight? Tim Cook, now Seinfeld.

Jerry, don't fuck with the turf of geeks. You dig?

Tim, your sexual preferences are fine as long as you stick to acceptable social mores. However, if you, Tim Cook come out again and claim that you too are somewhere on the continuum of spectral autism disorders, while you have the geek cred, coming out as gay points to you being socially boring ;)

In all seriousness, it is difficult to know just what Jerry has been pondering. Seinfeld claims that he is very literal. That's what makes for good comedy, not necessarily social blind spots. He further claims he never pays attention to the "right things" whatever that might mean. Maybe it is simply that Jerry is not getting any younger, and now lacks the mental nimbleness he may have once had. Is this a mid-life epiphany? An all too close look inside? If everyone analyzed themselves in fine detail, they would likely find all sorts of things in the DSM-5 that they believed applied to themselves. Self-analysis is certainly not for everyone. Put the DSM down, Jerry. You're okay.

I am watching you, Tim Cook.

Claims by Google, Apple, and Microsoft may be prepping an el-cheapo smartphone. Then the post gets all weird.

I am going to start with Microsoft. ComputerWorld is betting that the first Microsoft branded phone will be a cheapy. This is not likely to win converts from other platforms. Still, it is the only well-reasoned route Microsoft can take. Way back before Amazon released pricing data for the Firephone, I had set the price then at 150USD fully unlocked. The market has changed quite dramatically since then, and with the Android One platform already launched, there is little reason to opt over to a Windows device..at nearly any price. Microsoft is likely to do Hail Mary pricing in order to get any traction in the phone market.

I really wish them well. Nadella seems to understand today's ever shifting markets, but in order for a Microsoft phone to get traction, it is going to have to be a full version of Windows. That would certainly help. Cortana is pretty interesting, but that is not going to do it.

Moving in reverse order, Apple's iOS 8 suffers from battery drain issues. Apple pay = good, battery drain = bad. Of course there are legions of Android sites reporting on this, but The Faithful are bemoaning the issue, so it is likely to be true.

Speaking of battery issues, Google, you're up.

Google confirms battery issue as reason for Android 5, but says: "This issue has been fixed in the latest builds, and this issue is now considered resolved. Thanks everyone."Sure. I will wait until the fine folks over at XDA to confirm things before I install the OTA on my Nexus 7, and side load it onto my hacked up little L34C. I have done lots of damage to that phone as I learn--or try to learn--to write good compact code in Java. Is there such a thing? Nah. I learned how to write machine and yes, mostly Assembler as it is easier to figure out where one has screwed up than by parsing binaries. Of course, PLC programming is where most hardware engineers earn the software portion of their income, so we had to learn everything from machine to high level languages, such a C, Basic, etc.

Since Java syntax is largely derived from C/C++ syntax, if you can learn one proficiently, you can learn the other. I think one can go quite a bit further and state that coders either are, or they are not. Certain types of minds do not do so well in hard logic, and these people generally make crappy coders. People like me--in true propeller hat nerd wearing fashion--do not do so well where the logical rules are fuzzy, or altogether missing. I freely admit to not getting high marks in social cuing. Here is a telling example.

My mother asked me where my "wood chopping thing was?" I asked her if she was inquiring about a hatchet or an ax. I told her that those are the only two things I possess for chopping wood. She accused me of lying. I was not. I was blinded by the lack of rigor in her query.

She was actually asking me about the whereabouts of my chipper-shredder. This was a really unusual circumstance as I have to make sense out of a great many things that are not unambiguous and do so without error. But then..

I am still looking for a blog focus.

Oh, I am most displeased with Wall Street's reaction to nVidia's quarterly report. In after-hours trading last night, the stock was up errrrm..approx. 2.5%. Today, the stock is off 2.5%. nVidia's guidance looked pretty good, so I guess this is the "buy on the rumor, sell on the news" adage that often plays out on Wall Street. Whatever. Time should favor my nVidia bet.

Is Microsoft is now the most trouble free consumer mobile OS provider? Mebbe. This offer is sure to be time limited.

iOS 8 has manifold issues*, and the Android team has major battery issues. Hey, I would say go to a flavor of Linux, but that bird needs more time in the oven. Firefox--unless it is the FF browser running atop Android--is too new on which to comment. I will say that Firefox even on my pure Android tablet opens more sites than Chrome. Chrome's rather loose implementation of many HTML5 standards hangs on certain non-Flash sites. I have always disliked Flash/Shockwave(I almost typed 'hated'), but at an earlier time on the internets, it served easy animation purposes. Let us all go to SVG, and/or the JScript libraries for our neato stuff. M'kay?

At the moment, Microsoft is doing quite a few things correctly. Giving away Office for free on iOS and Android as well as almost assuredly making it free on Windows Phone is a great move.

In the phone space, Windows suffers from lots of lack of development. It works--and has GREAT battery life..are you listening over in Mountain View?--but it is clunky and even technology buffs do not seem to give it much love. In the tablet segment, where you can get a full Windows OS, it is unarguably the most utilized platform in the known universe. I have a Dell Venue 11 Pro, and it's really smooth and has a swappable battery. I use a keyboard with mine, but not one of those way overpriced accessory units.

I picked up a Logitech Bluetooth KB that was on a flash sale form Dell(imagine that) with an SD card reader on board for under 20USD.

Why people adopt consumer technology early never ceases to remand me that I am not like everyone else. I enjoy reader comments that take one side in a battle of non-wits. Just yesterday, I was reading a well balanced article about the advantages of this mobile(phone) platform versus another. One of the commenters stated(and I can add quotation marks as statements like the following burn themselves into my memory: "This is why I never bash anyone for what phone they use." I know that I live in a bubble, but really? That this statement even need be made is some kind of parallel universe thing. I can almost never be found via my cell. I only tote it when out of town.

It is abundantly clear that large swaths of American society have a pathological attachment to their mobile gadgets. Since there is no term in common use for this phenomenon, I am coining one now.

Mobiphilia n. a strongly negative, self-absorptive bond for cell phone technologies, that cause interpersonal strife, and/or other maladaptations, i.e. motor vehicle crashes.

There, now I feel accomplished..well, no, but it was fun.

*I know that much of the iOS 8 woes are linked to the iPhone 6, and just wanted my reader to understand that yes, I am aware of some things. Just not a great deal of them :)

Thanks Asus, and other useless junk. Politics. Really high-dome achivers. People DO vote against their own interests..or not understand them, or something.

Okay, I have mt rwo Nexus 7 tablets. One of them is absolutely trouble-free. The other one has--I would bet--a power button connection issue. What a crime. I got it for a friend and after much fruitless troubleshooting, have an RMA and new refurb. on the way. My thinking about buying refurbisehed technology devices is that the manufacturer actually goes through and checks things out which does not necessarily happen on an assembly line. This level of frugality has failed me only one other time, and that was when I spent 10USD on a fairly decent mp3 player. Again, I bought two, and one failed within hours of use. I did get a refund on the device, and I was told to keep, donate, destroy, or perform anything alse as I saw fit. I ended up taking it apart and desoldering the Ni-Cad AAA battery and replacing it with a NiMH AAA battery and a micro spade and blade connection. I have now had that little Sandisk player for well over five years.

I would have cracked the Nexus open but the RMA seemed the obvious route. I can solder SMDs to a small degree, but why when a replacement is but two days away. The company--an Amazon affiliate--did all the right things by pre-shipping me a new one while the other one is enroute back to them.

I do not know how Asus handles(mis-handles?) their refurb. program, but if the replacement unit is good, then we will all be friends again.

Once the warranty period is up on these things, I will have a go at the PCB if need be.

The mid-term elections...

What can one say? I know what can almost certainly be said and that is this: science and reason are the big losers here.

Here in NH, things went much better than nationally, but when you vote against something rather than for something, the seeds you sow aren't likely to grow into the plants you expect.

I voted for incumbents because once you deflate all the hyperbole, you may buy Tide or Downy, they are still owned by Proctor & Gamble. Why don't really brilliant people ever run for office? Surely since Jefferson we have had presidential polymaths, but there is precious little evidence to support such a notion.

No, I am not thinking that obvious geniuses like Stephen Wolfram run for office. Feynman, on the other hand, would have made a terrific candidate to watch, but he was too busy having fun NOT at other people's expense to have fun at other people's expense. It is pretty widely acknowledged the S. Wolfram has among the highest tested IQs of any living person..if not the highest. Because intelligence is very widely scattered throughout humanity, it is not uncertain that there are people that have never had a chance to even enter school at all that may have more raw brainpower than guys like Wolfram. I have a huge fascination with people of this intellectual power. Newton always fascinated me as he would perform thought experiments, physically carry the experiments out, devise new maths to quantify his results, and move on to something else that no one had ever thought of as even being an issue to be unlocked by the human mind.

This blog needs a focus. I need to construct better sentences. I am still achy and whiny from yesterday's soil toiling. I am going to drop in perhaps as 300 more bulbs tomorrow. Then I will something to whinge on about.

I voted..three times...now leave me alone!

Of course since politics really is not about differing agenda(I like not having to have figure out which archaic Latin plural to try and get by mt gentle reader) one should still vote. I would consider it my civic duty, but now that I have been cast out of the jury duty pool for being a witness for the state--yes, I know how unlikely that sounds, but there is a good reason--voting still applies.

Okay, so I voted once this election. In a representative republic like the US, one would hope that a majority of people would vote out of a positive vision for the future.

That shit ain't gonna fly.

It is money and fear that drive people's decisions. The candidates with the biggest war chests have more of an opportunity to keep pressing the fear button.

In New Hampshire--my fair state--the only race likely to be close if for the Senate seat. Neither candidate thrills me, but one of them seems to understand that continuing to despoil the planet is not a good long--or short--term thing. So, I have to make my own habitats for living things--that are not people.

At least I am operating in radio silence today. Cell is off, and home phone is unplugged.

There are others here that can field the nonsense. My ultra-secret NSA proof comm. device(Surrrrre)..nevermind.

3 November, 2014..The day when nothing happened.

Well, the Android team officially released Lollipop or 5.0, or..today. I have had my Nexus 7 in standerd snooze mode since 6 AM. I messed with the table a bit today, but haven't charged it since Saturday afternoon. I watched a little video on the tablet, and used it for email, and a bit of web browsing. Maybe three hours total of really casual use. In regular snooze mode now for ~10 hours, the battery level is at(checking now) 56% with 11h 55m and 44s. of estimated remaining time. That seems way better than reports I have read ion the web. Perhaps the Asus refurb. gods gave me a fancy new and better battery.

Of course, wi-fi is--and has been--active as I was hopeful of getting the OTA upgrade today.

The crazy weekend weather missed us there was snow to the south, snow to the east, and snow to the north of us, but other than bone chilling winds and cold temperatures, this locale got off relatively unscathed.

I am certain that news was made today, but I was out of all loops.

The weather has turned..it is the reason for the hat. Other Sunday tech. device messing.

As of posting time it is 38F or 3C. The wind has been howling up to 45MPH/72KPH. It feels much colder due to the relatively fierce winds. Needless to say, it has been primarily an indoor day as yet.

I rooted my sub-30USD LG L34C a while back. The big limiter does not seem to be the 512MB of RAM, but the amount of eMMC storage..a whole 2GB. I made a couple of new partitions on my microSD card. Using a couple of programs--along with root access--I am able to move stuff around with some difficulty. It works just fine, but it is hardly drag and drop in all cases. I am just starting to learn about proper file associations. I have an app that automates much of this, but you learn nothing of value using a software shortcut. The phone is still quite fluid and acceptably fast given the hardware.

I was going to root my Nexus 7, but since the device should be getting the push update to Lollipop tomorrow, it might be prudent to wait a bit. I have Gigs of apps to install on the Nexus, but I will wait until after the update and install one at a time. I did grab an "On The Go" cable, installed "Nexus Media Importer" with a 128GB USB drive, and I will use that and 'the cloud' to keep things running smoothly. We will see how that goes.

I can see me hacking the file system, as it is not as simple to use as it should be. This is a matter of easily moving and having access to things across non-volatile storage solutions. I can see spending some time on XDA(Android developers site and forums) picking some brains and adding my own tiny bit of knowledge if I gain some ;) I have already learned more about the Android OS than I ever thought I would.

There needs to be a better solution for across storage media moving without breaking links.

I still have no idea as to what direction I want the blog to take. My whole idea sets are as rudderless as my mind is. The only issue with that is while being able to work on several things simultaneously is an asset in the real world, it is a giant liability in trying to find a primary focus for the blog.

While I was out in the backyard, I fed a woodpecker suet right out of my hand. That was only a hour or so ago. That was kind of cool.

I am going to find something to read, eat some food, and hit the rack early. I have a huge personal/professional bit of news that is almost inked, but I will remain mum until it goes through, or goes kaput.

Nov. 4 cannot arrive quickly enough..What is going to kill you?

Yes, that is election day here in the dis-United States of America. There is so much crazy talk on what is, let us face it, a two-party system that is really more of of a one party system with slightly different shades of color.

I have made no secret of the fact that I am represented by no political party, but small differences in initial conditions can result in large differences over time.

No. You are not going to have to suffer through the relevant points in chaos theory from me.

People--at large--are so poor at statistics that they believe the garbage about ISIS/ISOL being a huge threat. On this blog we do statistics. This is a fear free blog. Since YOU and me too, are 8x as likely to be killed with a cop's gun than you are to die via a terrorist attack on US soil, we should be clamoring 8x as much to disarm cops than to worry about terrorism. Are we? Not that that I can tell.

there's a fun breakdown about causes of death here.

A little perspective shows us that taking better care of our personal health is THOUSANDS of times more important than terrorism. You are 1,048x more likely to die in an auto wreck than via a terrorist attack.

This is why people vote against their best interests. By and large, people in the US are lead much more by fear, than by reason.

Even without a hard statistical analysis, one can see that some kind of universal health care is a most important concern IF large swaths of people can be lead to a more healthy lifestyle. Terrorism, on the other hand, should be a non-starter.

No number fudging here, just a much less fear ridden perspective

Oh, and lest anyone think I will not be voting, that notion is errant as I will be at the polls by 8 AM on Tuesday.

In small device mobile computing OSes, there is Android and everybody else.

It is quickly becoming a rout. Android smartphone shipments accounted for 84% of worldwide handsets shipped. 268 million Android phones shipped in Q3 2014? Yep. Apple's iOS lost market share to Android, but then so did everyone that is not Android. Some of the more comical statements in the article are here:

Neil Mawston, Executive Director at Strategy Analytics, added, "Android's leadership of the global smartphone market looks unbeatable at the moment. Its low-cost services and user-friendly software remain attractive to hardware makers, operators and consumers worldwide.

However, challenges are emerging for Google. The Android platform is getting overcrowded with hundreds of hardware brands, Android smartphone prices are falling worldwide, and few Android device vendors make profits."

So, Google--spearheaded by Android--really is taking over the known universe, but challenges remain for Google? That is an error, sir. It is the handset makers that are experiencing challenges. Google's biggest liability is not continuing to erode the sales of other platforms and somehow being faced with a monopoly. Although, one has to be selling something in order to become a monopoly. This is where it gets scary. Since Android is given away for free, how do you curtail what is quickly looking like a black hole for choice? Perhaps Google's brilliant head of Android, Sundar Pichai, may just be offering up something that some government somewhere can use as a lever. By offering Android with the typical small suite of Google services, that may be a wedge. Other than that, it looks like game over in small mobile computing devices. I have used two devices running 5.0 developer v2+(praise be to XDA), and it is pretty awesome..as OSes go, at any rate. Common folk are going to absolutely love it. ART and Material Design are going to allow even weak devices--like my L34C phone--to fly with Lollipop.

Oh, and Android is alos gobbling up worldwide market share in tablet sales as well.I am all for choice and world dominance makes me queasy, but this story continues to get rosier for Google/Android, and worse for everyone else. Even the once maligned Chromebook sales are booming, but coming from a very different level of penetration than either phones or tablets. I think that Google gets a weird last mover advantage here. Netbooks are dead, and until Windows notebooks are as cheap as Chromebooks, Google has lots of room to scale here.

As of now, Gartner Research predicts that only 5.2 million Chromebooks will be sold this year, but by 2017 they predict that 14.4 million Chromebooks will be sold in that year. Google has the wind to its back. Free Windows had better get here quickly, or this market too, may well go to those clever Mountain View folks; and their simple, yet efficient devices. I dunno what parents are thinking getting their kids Macs. That's just not using the old melon very well. At any rate, Chromebooks may be here to stay, and since their development is now under Pichai's guiding hand, no one is safe.

It is very odd that Google is not focused laser like on the company's quarter-to-quarter performance. Google is commendably a big picture company. As of this moment I feel pretty strongly that Sundar Pichai is THE most powerful person in the world of computer technologies. Ac strong statement, but he and his teams are doing a couple of very amazing things while still helping Google to keep the ship afloat via the advertising cash cow.

Google is de-emphasizing adwords in favor of reaching every person on this planet with Google services, and the almost unfathomable amount of valuable personal data that they will have at their disposal. Google has so many divisions already that the company is morphing into some kind of technological GE. Larry Page is no dummy. By not managing the company on a quarter-to-quarter basis, Wall Street might not back his play all of the time, but over the long haul, Google seems a good bet. A better bet than any other technology company that I can name. Those crazy kids are ambitious, and damned successful, too.

This company has yet to reach adolescence. It was only founded in 1998! Lots of room to grow..an almost limitless amount of room. No company in history has had this kind of cash reserve(62.6 billion USD) at such a young age. The company could have billions more as well, but they keep reaching into new areas and fund everything from their enormous cash reserves.

Google is big brother. Hopefully, this big brother will be beneficent.

Yes, I am breaking my own self-imposed rule.

I suppose this is pretty safe ground since I am represented by no political party. I was radicalized before exiting the womb. My political views have often been mistaken for being those of the Democratic Party. I am a firm believer in self-governance. This is good, functioning anarchism. I am so far out of politics that I only align with whichever political party wants to actually go about saving the planet for future generations. Right now it only appears that the Democratic Party is even paying lip service to the only goal of any worth.

That beings me to the point of this post. I have offered to do a number of high skill level tasks for the Dems, but all that they want is me for is to toss them the odd copper.

Groveling for peanuts is downright shameful.

The reason for the post title is that I disgustedly composed this post on 10.27.2014 @ 1100 -500 GMT.

I am only posting it now because of yet further disillusionment with the US political process. I offer up any and all reasonable IT services gratis, and I keep getting asked for a 5 dollar donation. If I went to our local data center, pulled wire and installed say, a caching appliance, I might charge a thousand bucks depending on what kind of software tricks were needed in a multi-vendor, multi-protocol environment. I am offering to do this sort of thing for free and all I get is an extended money grubbing paw. Fucking idiots. I have a working relationship with one person running for office, and her camp has not asked me for a dime. I did a few email hacks in order for her lackeys to rapidly respond to queries and offers of money, young children and so forth, based on geographic information, and that was worth something.

This country is really broken. No one has fix for even the small stuff. The big issues that will likely reduce the population to a fraction of its present size are not even on the radar of the candidates. I would like to believe that some people in elected office are smart enough to see beyond not only the election cycle, but beyond the end of their lives and do something about the issues that are likely to lead to a massive die-off of the species, but there is scant evidence that this is the case.

Elizabeth Warren is a good bet to understand complex and changing landscapes that are part and parcel of ongoing science, but once people reach a certain level in politics, they seem to lose perspective of the big prize. Settling for little victories seems as good a way as any for societal collapse. Natural ecosystems today, anthropogenic systems tomorrow. It is simply a matter of time unless radical measures are taken yesterday.

Okay, hold on a sec. Apple is not a progressive company.

Sure Tim Cook seems to be a much cooler(even tempered) guy than Steve Jobs, but Apple is no where near being a progressive company. Apple's continued use of child and/or slave labor--although to be fair, Apple has done better over the last year to cut ties with manufacturers in their supply chain that continue such egregious practices, but lots more remains to be done. Much of the gains are only brought to light by Apple's inventorying, so please bear that in mind.

As someone that has been to some assembly facilities, the practice seems very, very widespread.

It is not that Apple is less progressive than other technology giants, it is that it is no better. Why people want to believe that Apple is better is due to a lack of rationed perspective.

Apple's stateside feel good policies cannot make up for their across the oceans lack of oversight. There. Not all Apple users are mindless acolytes, but many appear to be just that.

I am going to run with theme just a bit longer..

Back in 1997, when Microsoft saved Apple from almost certain bankruptcy, I had a printing company executive tell me how much faster his Macs were than my Intel boxes. So, I brought in my shiny new Slot-1 PII 400MHz with the new 100MHz bus on a BX chipset in April of 1998 to benchmark against his Mac. I think I paid 1500USD in parts for the whole mess; including a legit Windows 98 disk. I was trying to overclock using a TEC and raising the FSB. I got some good ram and the box was rock stable at 486MHz. It took forever to get to the speed. Well, a couple of weeks worth of work at any rate. The box was really fast for those days. I let the Mac guy use all Photoshop benchmarks and my box which had an up to the second video card(AGP, no less) smoked his 5000USD Apple in every benchmark.

I could have done a better job of overclocking with a PGA Celeron, but the PII 486 was pretty fast in its day. Those early Deschutes core processors did not overclock at all.

On a sadder note, I once left the TEC powered with the CPU unpowered. It froze. I still used that box with Win 98 SE to test 9x kernel software right through to 2006. If I did not cook the motherboard's system bus by overvolting a bunch of stuff, I would likely still have it today. I stopped using TECs after that. They are terrific sub-ambient cooling devices, but today's processors are plenty fast out of the box.

Ahh, a trip down silicon memory lane.

People that are fanatical about things as meaningless as technology products really need to get out more. Seriously.

Oh, and Steve Jobs was a visionary of sorts, just not as great as legend as made him out to be. If you really want to see who the movers and shakers were in the development of the personal computing were, see The Innovators. While author Isaacson leaves out much of the contributions Xerox PARC computer scientists made, it is a pretty good read. One book cannot cover a revolution that is perhaps now just being made, but as an overview, it is acceptably good. The book gets too much praise--like most every popular treatment of a subject--from people not in the field. Not a word about Bill Joy. That is a crime.

Material Design invades web UIs, HTML5, and free beer!

It is all very odd, but I am seeing evidence that many really popular websites are migrating to the new Android 5.0(Lollipop) look via CSS even before Android 5.0 is launched. Not necessarily the animations, but the focus on minimalism with fewer images than what was the current trend until very, very recently. I see no mention of this elsewhere, but "flat" layout is really becoming pervasive on some very large websites. Of course this is driven by four rational site design criteria.

1) The rise of the mobile web

2) Standards compliance sans evil Flash..it is pst due to put a nail in the coffin of Flash/Shockwave. Adobe be damned!

3) The maturation of good web design requires easy footprint pages because not everyone has high bandwidth connections.

And four..

4) Android 5 is really elegant, and web designers are certain to try and emulate much of Material Design in websites, as this gives the site user familiar terrain with which to navigate, explore, and buy.

I am waiting for high adoption of HTML5 as only this month the W3C has finally called it done. This is terrific news for people like me that code only a few sites per year, and I can finally get on with going to the next step as I have been writing been writing in "XHTML 1.0 Strict" for nearly a decade.

As per usual, the terrific group at The Mozilla Foundation via Firefox 3x is best in W3C compliance. I have 33.0.2 installed, and it is my favorite browser. You have to love open source projects. If you're interested in what is new and cool, as well as what is not so good, Mozilla offers release notes with every update. Be careful as adding extensions rapidly increases system RAM use, and even free of extensions, Firefox enjoys using lots of system RAM. What you get in return is speed and the highest level of compliance to adopted Web standards. For geeks(some would say that I am more a nerd) like me, that's a totally acceptable tradeoff.

Sorry, no free beer.

I know that writing about artful web design using a stone stock Blogger template is not a display of any skill at all. I spent a few days writing pages that incorporated the PHP, but Google kept breaking my code back in 2003 using Javasript. Now I do not have the ambition to screw around with the Blogger APIs to write a nice, tidy template.

Here is an example of a site that I developed, but I told the owner that they were limited to one homepage image. The image was the background image. I tried to pull up an older homepage via archive.org, but none show the background image. That site used to look much more minimalist without sacrificing any features. I lost the account because the chief officer and I had differing opinions as to what an eCommerce site should appear to the visitor. If you go to archive.org, you can see the neat little homepage sans the background image.

I had a bunch of pages written using TopStyle 5 and a portable version of the CoffeeCup Editor, but for some reason the HTML will not load into any browser to take a screenshot.

It is one of those days. I am too disheartened to grab some code from my server, or even screens that I sent to clients on CD as that are buried in the stacks of thousands that I have.

Tim Cook comes out..Why the hoopla?

I guess that if you're the CEO of the company with the highest market capital on the planet, coming out as a gay person is news. Why? Of all industry sectors, technology has always been more accepting of various shades of sexual preference. It is women and certain other-than-white groups that still have it tough. I remember the early days of personal computing and online services as being apologetically egalitarian. Cook's admission should shock no one.

My SO thinks that I live in a tiny bubble where everything is defined by logic and reason. She is, unfortunately, mostly correct.It is not as if I am actively trying to hide, but more a matter of not being able to engage with large swaths of American life. I blame commercial television. I get no new data, and then the show cuts to commercial. This must not stand!

Sorry. The UPS man just delivered me two Nexus 7 2nd gen. tablets, and I had to open them up and inspect them.

TV still sucks.

I still have not decided on a new direction for the blog. Please do not force me into penning screeds about the gadget of the day, and just how lame they really are. It really baffles me that endgadget and gizmodo has readers. The writers simply do not have the silicon cred to do the job.

Meh. I am off to have dinner and get some sleep.

I should stop blogging about ebola..with reasoned internal discourse.

Now that multitudes of blogs have sprung up dedicated to ebola--and the West Africa outbreak in particular--I see no reason to continue in like form. It seems odd that the great majority of these bloggers have even less demonstrated knowledge about infectious disease as even I possess.

The rise of blogs dedicated specifically to ebola has risen even more exponentially than the West African outbreak. One needn't even do statistical analysis to demonstrate this. I first drafted an ebola post on 25 Jun 2014. The post was left as draft as I had a new retinal vein occlusion to contend with, and I was really quite frightened over the prognosis. My eye is till ungood, but intense exercise that results in retinal vein perfusion gives me good results.

Back then, there was misplaced hope that the epidemic would be contained in short order. My first post remained a draft until I deleted it roughly a month ago. The reason for this exegesis on my initial concerns about the ebola outbreak is that in the interim months, the number of blogs--or sub-blogs dedicated to ebola has risen to nearly 50,000. This figure was arrived at moments ago by searching Google using "ebola blog" replete with quotation marks. When the quotation marks are removed, the number of hits rises to over 30 million. There are now a few people actively covering the epidemic.

I find it striking that a sampling of ebola blogs that are digitally penned by non-experts fare even worse than I do when commenting on the rise and course of the West African epidemic.

I now use the Newsnow.co.uk "app" to get my daily ebola updates typically whilst breakfasting. Since this seems as good a channel as any to get updates at less than 5 minute intervals, my work on ebola is done.

As a concerned citizen of the world, I may make the odd ebola post, but that will be the exception. Oh, another thing about NewsNow, it is the richest source of data, as NewsNow currently pulls from 44,351 sources. Let us not be fools. Some of the "news sources" are nothing but uninformed habitats for vitriol. The way I differentiate myself from that group is by avoiding inflammatory rhetoric...most of the time.

Since I have no agenda for my blogging future..writing about technology gadgets is almost as dry as writing about semiconductor theory and implementation. That vast amounts of people buy into the gadget of the week pushed by corporate profit goals is more of a realm for sociologists than technologists.

Then there is my aversion to writing about people's weaknesses. I need to come up with a new and narrow focus wherein I can actually add something substantive to the level of discourse. Hard technology blogs are read by few, and while it has never been about garnering a large audience for me, I would prefer to not toil endlessly in total anonymity. That's the rub.

Other than some technologies I only have a reasonable understanding of the following areas:

1) Living well under one's means

2) Innovative home repairs and improvemnts using novel materials

3) Investing

4) Botany. I should note that I have had a passionate interest in applied botany since I was perhaps 5 years of age. I minored in botany at a leading school on the subject.

5) Mineralogy and paleontology. Again, I have been a passionate collector since I can recall; and even had a brush with fame as co-discover of the source of arsenic in local well water when I was 12 years of age. It was quite awesome to co-author a paper with a geology professor before I was teen.

I know about other things with varying levels of depth and passion.

I am taking a break until 30 Oct. and will hopefully have both a more eclectic blog, and a more substantive blog. See you in three days--or four if you prefer to count things in that manner.

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There are some things very wrong with people. Apple vs. Android vs. Windows vs. Unix flavors

One wonders how people in comment threads conduct life outside their boxes..presuming that they have lives.

In nearly every article where one device's virtues are extolled versus another's, cyber rants seem to spontaneously break out. I am no fan of anything that is not truly open source. Given that, I am not fanatical about open sourced projects.

I have had two Apple products in my life. An IIGS, and an iPod nano(2nd generation?). I have only had one Google/Android device, but I have two more that should be here within 5 working days.

I have had dozens of windows machines as I get paid--at least in part--to develop code for the Windows environment.

I fall in and out of love with various flavors of Linux.

The problem seems to me is perhaps that people identify too much with a brand. I am actually quite certain of this.

//begin non-sequitur//Like most enterprise level code writers, I see that Windows is where the most money still resides for development.//end non-sequitur//

I did almost all of my software development in the prehistory of computing on various DEC machines. Since I was awarded--do not ask me how--my Grad. deg. in 1985, the micro computer market was very much in flux. Macs were undoubtedly easier to use than DOS machines, but Windows won that war.

I had to be able to envision what code looked like--quite literally sometimes--when presented with hundreds to thousands of lines of code in order to get my bronze star. Of course, all of us had to be able to write tight code in many languages as well. I fist learned BASIC in 1979, and by 1980 was writing stuff in BASIC, COBOL, and Fortran. I also had a pretty good grasp on assembly language and the Gordian Knot that is uncut machine language. I could use all of these with varying degrees of ease by the end of the 1980 school year.

Since I was an earnest hardware engineering pupil, I had to be proficient in languages for logic controllers. I learned as much as time permitted about every other language while under the care of the university.

Once I donned the cap and gown for the last time, my real education began. It continues to this very day.

I am not the world's best programmer, but I find few tasks that are beyond me. If you can break complex puzzles down into individual pieces--and have the technical knowledgebase to do something with it--things will progress.

That brings me back to these seemingly fanatical commenters touting one set of inhibited coding structure against another. None of these things are truly optimized. The hardware is not magic dust. It is all very much more alike than different. The languages used and the ways in which they are implemented are by nature strangled versions of what they could be. Everything is compromise.

The two camps that seem most antagonistic are the iOS Apple commenters, and the Android commenters.

Having watched both of these hardware and software platforms mature, they are, at base, much more alike in execution than they are different.

I have what is perhaps an unusual view onto these competing spheres. I had to write code that executed flawlessly on the level of the silicon in order to get that piece of paper. I also had to make my own boards with a pretty astonishing degree of complexity and install early microchips to central processing units thereupon in order to pass go.

What many of my classmates found utterly terrifying I actually enjoyed. I cannot paint, draw, or sing. I am at best a mediocre drummer, so my artistic outlet was etched into silicon and lithographed onto circuit boards. Add in a bunch of case specific code, and that was--and is--my artistic outlet.

So, I look at these competing platforms and see nothing but compromises. The great thing about being brand neutral is that I can laugh at the antics of others.

If I have a mantra, it is simply this: get me the best performance per dollar spent. If the software and hardware is not so full of bugs as to render it unusable, I am generally happy.

People that buy into the whole branding game are being played. The fact that many of them seem oblivious to this fact is what all these really unnecessary device makers are counting on..it is really a sad state of things.

Two other things that really irk me are writers and pitchmen that refer to a product's "ecosystem," and/or that this or that feature set is part of the product and/or company's "DNA." Fucking preposterous in both instances. No, we feeble human's are not doing anything remotely close to being as complex as these structures found in nature. STOP SAYING SO!

Please do not tell me that technology products have style, or any such nonsense. It should be a rugged--if a bit more complex--version of a screwdriver. Again, people that buy into a technology product because it is "cool," are corporate tools. In a year--or two at most--that 'must have' device is an expensive door stop.

Stop your inane commenting styles. Your ignorance and lack of the nature of technology and corporate structures are making you appear a fool. Id device "X" was great there would never be a version 2.0.

That is how I see it from the true trenches of technology.

If you would like to contend my points, I will give you a few minutes of my time. After all, I learn much more via the infusion of knowledge from others than I ever could setting up my own frameworks with which to view the world.

I can afford to buy the very best of stuff on the market, but I only do so if it is measurably superior in a meaningful way to another lower priced option.

Spending money on last year's tech.

I bought two Nexus 7 tablets today. They are 2013 models, and they are Asus factory refurbs. Should prove to be good toys. 117.00 ea. These tablets have very respectable hardware and according to sources Google is going to push Android 5.0 out on 3 Nov. to Nexus Wi-Fi devices. It should be fun to mess around with the new groovy animations and ART.

Mali has 1st confirmed case of ebola

It's so new that the BBC gas little to add.

I hope to get back in the swing once my selling of my business is completed, or fails.

There has been lots of chatter about the reansmissibility of these new strains of ebola. Peter Jahrling--who is a real ebola expert--has almost stated that the virus loads in infected persons are carrying higher densities of ebola than in previous outbreaks. He is smart enough to leave the question open as testing methodologies have changed since the late 1970s. Richrd Preston in The Hot Zone really did virology as a popular treatment a disservice by including statements such as "when a virus is trying to break into a new host." Evolution is not directed by the will. I groan when I read anthropomorphic qualities invoked in what is first a purely random event, and once a mutation had occurred, no matter how benefical it may be to the dpread of the 'organism,' there can be little doubt that most of even the most beneficial mutations never spread widely through a species as most offspring die before they have the ability to reproduce. This is even true for microbial life.

Viruses like ebola have a much more indirect path towards higher levels of virulence as the virus kills human beings very rapidly.

I am off the compile some data DVDs ro send to my potential buyer. This could be vert good indeed

Biting the technology bullet

As my regular reader knows I am a real cheapskate when it comes to consumer technology products. However, if you always wait for the inevitable price drops to occur--and they always have--one could miss out on somrhing, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what that might be. I really do need some SSDs. I am going to install Chrome on an old notebook comp., and given that the machine has 2 64 bit unmolested cores running @ 1.9 GHz, with a DX11 1 GB GDDR5 video card, the box will fly, and I will not have to give up very much as it already has Ubuntu on board.

Given that I am doing this as an experiment only, it is totally overkill. The little notebook has more processing power than a 2012 i5 Haswell mobile. I have had the little beast since 2007.

The other SSDs are for work boxes that are not mobile.

I need food

I think that I can get a great deal on a three pack of SSDs right now, so I am going fishing.

New iPads vs. Nexus 9 and doubtless copycats.

Apple doesn't seem to want to be in this game. Google w/Lollipop and nVidia's K1 dual core are very, very fast. Please note that the benchmarking was performed with only one of the two cores functional. I am all about performance per dollar spent, and whilst the Nexus 9 may present a good value for some people, it is not for me. I find it odd that Apple's new iPads are little changed. One has to wonder if Apple sees the future, and it is a future sans tablets. Could the Cupertino giant be so focused on the upcoming watch, and a much rumoured TV product to have passed on major updates for the iPad series? Economies of scale are certainly with Apple as almost everything iPad has been fully amortized.

I am still looking at a Hisense Sero Pro 7 refurb. $81.00 at Newegg using Visa Checkout. What is with the make it thinner paradigm? I want a chunky tablet that doesn't dent in the almost inevitability event of a drop.

Ebola 10.16.2014

The 2nd nurse to catch the ebola virus from patient zero demonstrates a comedy(albeit a very black one) of errors by pretty much everyone involved. the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital is reportedly "deeply sorry" for ebola breaches of protocols. Let us call them monumental fuck-ups.

So, it looks like my early hypothesis concerning protocol breaches were manifold worse than I expected.

I used the disclaimer "looks like" as I trust pretty much no one to come out with the whole truth at a point where people are freaked out.

This is very much like a cover-up after a crime has been committed. The crime may be bad in and of itself, but the cover-up is typically gets someone's head on a pike.

The CDC's first objective is not to stop the spread of pathogenic diseases. It is to assuage public fears in an effort to avoid widespread panic.

We have seen this sort of thing very recently. The incidence of Lyme(Borreliosis) was recently increased by a factor of 10. This after a decade or so of denial.

The health workers were not properly trained, and all manner of containment procedures were not followed. I suppose that the latter is due to direct action of the former.

Let us hope that every health care everywhere on the planet is getting schooled in hemorrhagic fever containment procedures.

I am selling my business this week, so it has been lawyers, and negotiations. I should be done with all of that by 25 Oct. or thereabouts.

Top secret Android stuff..Nah, I got nothing I can share

Okay, so it's no secret at all. I think it's all very humorous that Android sites are still speculating about the Nexus (whatever Google decides to name the upcoming tablet) when the FCC has had the testing data available online for days now. nVidia has confirmed that the as yet officially named tablet is going to have a dual core K1 processor with the full complement of 192 CUDA stream cores intact. Oh yeah, the ARM based but nVidia developed SoC solution does support 64 bit addressing. All will be revealed this week. No doubt, there are sites benching the new Nexus tablet, but are under NDAs...I have seen leaked benchmarks of early efforts, but as the hardware and software solutions become more fully mature, things are certain to change. The Nexus (whatever) phone is going to start at xxx sans contract.

New Nexus 5s have been seen as low as $315.00 on ebay. Not nearly cheap enough for me, but a potential deal if one is looking for a phone to use abroad as the current listings are GSM. Google seems to holding steady at $349.00. I have heard some very solid pricing data on the various iterations of the two big device announcements coming this week, but I too will stay mute. All I can say is that tablet is way out of my price range. One can grab a Hisense Sero Pro 7 for under $90 new, and slightly less refurbished. It will seem dark and blurry compared to devices that cost 4x its modest price, but that's a very acceptable trade-off to anyone that really looks at the low value proposition of consumer grade electronics.

Did New Ebola Patient Follow Treatment Safety Protocols?

I think that this is the real question in this tragic turn of events. If so, and one would like to believe that there is video of the caregiver's every moment with the patient. I, for one, do not believe that a patient's right to privacy rises above the interest of protecting the masses against infectious disease by a little in-hospital monitoring. As long as the video records are destroyed after all personnel that had contact are cleared of contagion once reasonable time has passed to do otherwise seems a bit too insane given how error prone humans are.

The multi-trillion dollar question here is that if the caregiver followed all current protocols every moment with the patient and when the caregiver was disposing of potentially infectious hospital gear, then how did the caregiver become infected?

Links to .pdf files concerning harm reduction from the WHO site available here.

If ebola is still transmissable if all safety protocols were followed, then currrent safety protocols are unacceptable. This would imply that at least aerosol transmission is taking place. Not directly indicate, as another route might be involved, but simply the route that most easily defeats the WHO's Personal Protective Equipment(PPE) given the current guidelines.

This does not indicate this strain of ebola is more easily transmitted. It may simply mean that the current safety protocols have has gaps in them since they were introduced. It is worth noting that when working with ebola in a laboratory setting--it is a Class 4 pathogen--requires what are erroneously referred to by some as 'space suits." Yet in a hospital where the risk of accident would seems amplified many times by the relative lack of training with this level of pathogen, not even a self-contained and pressurized breathing apparatus is required.

Please note that this post was supposed to precede that which I just posted. I had this ready at 10 AM Eastern US. So, the patient in that post is the same person as the one mentioned here.

Sorry about that. I closed the browser and my sleep deprived self failed to get back to it until now.

More and Better Ebola Patient Info..via my Business Newsfeed

Reuters delivers the goods. According to the reporter, the health worker is a woman, and was using the CDC ebola protocols for US hospitals which are simply mirrors of the WHO guidelines with more emphasis and much more clarity on Aerosol Generating Procedures(AGP). I would paste the table into my post, but this lame template doesn't respect the "code" tag properly.

While I was searching for the URL of the Reuters article, I found this video featuring a lab coat wearing doctor telling us that our chance of getting this disease in the US right now "is essentially zero," and goes on for another partial sentence before the video ends.

Our videoed doctor also mentions some things about the way the female health worker was likely infected. The improper taking off of contaminated PPE received all the "by name" mentions.

I often find that the business press is ahead of most media types in getting to stories--and even if they are reported. For instance, the Wall Street Journal, with what is likely the most oddly biased editorial section of all major publications, has to serve up sometimes abhorrent human rights violations in countries where the US corporate world conducts business; which is essentially every country on the planet. Where there is money involved the business press has a truly vested interest to accurately report on the darker side of things. Otherwise, the media outlet not getting the financially actionable story out will perish.

That's a wrap!

Ebola, Zimbabwe, and world of shit

This plainly shows just how damned difficult it is going to be to contain the ebola outbreak. The piece is good. Here is a bit that illustrates just how ill equipped much of Africa is to contain outbreaks within a country's borders:

While Government has done a bit of work in preparation of any case of Ebola, more still needs to be done.

For instance, the entry and exit points of the country are still highly porous. Cases that would have otherwise been picked at these points will find their way into the country without anyone noticing.

I was at Beitbridge Boarder post the other day and there was no screening to talk about both on the Zimbabwean side and at the South African side. I asked why I was not being screened for Ebola and I was told I would be screened upon return from SA.

Upon my return, absolutely nothing was done as I just entered and left the borders without any screening.

Another concerned individual passing through Harare International Airport called the Herald Newsroom a few days ago expressing concern over the screening procedures at the airport.

The immigration officials flip through all travellers' passports with one pair of gloves. The fact that they are putting on gloves means, Ebola has chances of transmission by simply holding someone's passport. But this issue of holding everyone's passport with one pair of gloves exposes other travellers to the virus. The temperature detectors are a welcome development since there is no body contact with anyone.

*heavy sigh*

If you read the article, you will see that people are frightened. Unsurprisingly, health workers are not only the most frightened, but because of their fears, the health workers are--at least according to the piece--largely the people spreading the fears. At this stage, these particular strains of ebola may be more easily transmissible than most other strains; the possible exception being Ebola Reston. If I was front line health worker in sub-Saharan Africa I am certain I would st best be concerned.

I really need to update my case charts. As of 10 October there are a confirmed 4,033 deaths and 8,399 reported cases in the 2013-2014 outbreak. Here are few troubling paragraphs from the piece:

David Nabarro, the senior UN coordinator for the international response to Ebola, said the number of cases was probably doubling every three-to-four weeks.

Nabarro told the UN General Assembly on Friday that, without a global response,"the world will have to live with Ebola forever." He said the international effort needed to be 20 times greater than it is currently.

Well, the world is likely to be dealing with ebola of one strain or another until the virus's natural reservoirs are obliterated, everyone gets vaccinated, or the virus runs out of people to infect via some other means. No, I am not going to state what should be clear from that progression.

I will do a super quick chart revision..Stand by..

Music, musicians, and me..Something completely different

First of all, I have to thank Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers for their latest: Hypnotic Eye. I know that I have made reference to this album either here or somewhere else on the Internets. Some of the tracks would have easily fit on Damn The Torpedoes. Others, not. After listening to this for a few months now I think I can place it in my Petty preference list. It is a better effort than my cherished early Petty records, DTPs, and You're Gonna Get It! It isn't as lovely as Wildflowers...which, while a TP & the HBers record, didn't list the band in the liner notes. Full Moon Fever and Into the Great Wide Open are both better to my warped sense of things than Hypnotic Eye, but it is all very close.

I love the straight up blues tune Burnt Out Town. Okay..I place Hypnotic Eye between Echo and Southern Accents.

I have a huge amount of respect for Tom Petty. He works with Dylan fer chrissakeas! I love The Traveling Wilburys, Mudcrutch, and of course Lonesome Town that the boys gave some fella named with..which is a nice segue into pepole that have played with Tom Petty. In 1994--arguably the best year for Tom Petty--he had this bloke on drums by the name of Dave Grohl...

I really have no idea how I remember asll this stuff. But there it is..

Of course Dave Grohl is the former Nirvana drummer and current frontman for Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl seems like a really decent human being..much like Petty in this regard. The Foos and Petty are the only two really actively working rock bands that I follow with anything like real interest.

A few more words before end this.. Wildflowers is by a huge margin my favorite non-grunge effort of that half decade of good American music. I might even put it in my twenty favorite albums of all time. The only comparable grunge records are Nevermind, In Utero, Pearl Jam's Ten and Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger.

For anyone that wants to believe that I have forgotten Alice In Chains' Dirt, you are wrong. AIC just is not grunge. Of all the 1990s records, Dirt is likely my favorite to listen to..but it's close.

Okay, I think I can simplify this a bit. Desert island.. twenty records..what's it gonna be?
Well, I cannot tell you all twenty, but four have been mentioned above. Nevermind, In Utero, Dirt, and Wildflowers would be there with me.

Too much about that..

Musicians and me..

I really should have spent more time time playing drums and less time getting high. Why? The answer is simple. One can only do so much in this life. Between learning stuff, expanding my noggin, and engaging in various activities designed to get me chicks, I had precious little time for anything else. But really, here is why:



Kanade can play much faster, but this has a really nice groove. 11 years old. Of course age has next to nothing to do with talnet. Either you have it, or you do not. I just hope that she is practicing because she wants to, not to fulfill the vicarious wishes of another. Rock on, Kanade!

Ebola: The next AIDS?

CDC: Ebola could be 'the world's next AIDS'. Could be is a long way from where things stand today. The article is rife with errors. *shakes head* Here is a taste:

"I've been working in public health for 30 years," Frieden told a World Bank and International Monetary Fund meeting in Washingtony.[sic]

"The only thing like this has been AIDS. And we have to work now so that this is not the world's next AIDS," Frieden said.

SARS is a much bigger threat..and it is really infectious sans any mutations.

It seems the height of irresponsibility to equate an virus that does not express symptoms for years with one that does so in 21 days or less.

Noted virologist, Nathan Wolfe has stated that other strains of ebola not yet discovered may possess additional transmission modes, but so far, only fresh aerosols have been shown to spread the Reston variant of ebolavirus. That said, there is this.

I need food now.

nVidia Shield

I think that nVidia has done a really interesting thing with the new Tegra K1 Shield "Gaming Tablet." As my usual reader knows, I am a real cheapskate when it comes to consumer electronics. It is the K1's GPU benchmarks that are most fascinating. In benchmarks, it is a killer. Don't Be Evil Google is using the SoC(System on Chip) solution in the upcoming Nexus (tba), so nVidia has some momentum. For me, I cannot see spending 300USD on any tablet that will not run all programs I use in a given day, and seamlessly sync when I desire.

Thought about another way, this SoC design has more CPU/GPU power than both a PS3 and the XBox 360! In a tablet. This kind of processing power should be aimed at 4K displays. Just where does one find 4K video to stream? If I was a gamer, I might be tempted at 300 beans. Perhaps Black Friday will put one into my cheaper than oughtta be legal range, or perhaps Evil Google's next device will land in my price range.

A quick diversion into local politics...

The GOP candidate for US Senate in my little state moved here a day or two ago. A few things about Scott Brown.

His voting record as two year US senator:

In his first year, he voted with Obama administration only 70% of the time. In his second--and last year--he voted with the O administration 78% of the time. If you extend the curve, Brown would be setting Obama's policy by now.

The source for the figures is that radical lefty rag, the Congressional Quarterly.

One of Brown's big points is that our current Senator in my district voted with the president 99% of the time. That puts her 14th among democrats.

Scott Brown is Obama's no. 1 GOP senator when his voting record is scrutinized. Strangely, Mr. Brown--if that's his real name--fails to bring this up.

For the thinking voter, Brown doesn't have the cred to vote out Senator Shaheen. New Hampshirites know where Shaheen stands on the big issues, whilst Scott Brown claims he was been ermm, unaware of his vote on immigration. This is a guy that will say anything to become self-important again. He is most certainly a narcissist(Playgirl centerfold for 10K, anyone?)*, and perhaps his metal dysfunction goes beyond that. He was not the right choice for MA, and he is an even worse choice for NH.

*I cannot fathom as to how the guy got paid to show off that never-in-the-gym body. I think I have it..it was the MTV era. Real work was shoved aside for guys with lovely nails. "That ain't workin."

WaPo just doesn't get it.

America can’t lead the world in innovation if the FAA keeps dragging its feet on drone rules

Sorry WaPo but South Korea is the world's most innovative country, and the Korean's lead is very likely to widen. South Korea's patent activity is already second in the world(the US is fifth in this forward looking indicator), and as importantly South Korea is far more connected(per capita..amd it's fast) than the US.

Where is all the global climate change?

Exactly where onr would expect it to be on this water planet. The physica are too easy. Air at sea level is roughly 1000x less dense than water. It will be very strange indeed if the two mediums ever have a one to one correspondence. Humanity will have either left the planet by then--and we know just how easy it is to bundle us all up and move to hospitable new real estate, or we will likely be very near extinct.

I hope to make a few brief posts today, but I still have a boatload of work to catch up on. *sigh*

Sad day for ebola news.

The virus, which causes fever and bleeding, has killed at least 3,439 people. Of course the WHO figures are always behing the disease. The Reuters piece gives a just-the-facts timeline, as well.

I have nothing else today. Between coding an emergency bulb planting, I am pretty well done. I blame my fatigue on my bulb wholesaler not providing me with special planting instructions. I knoew that Fritillaria need to put into the ground soon after arrival, but in checking the Interners, they are supposed to be planted directly after receiving them. I have had them in a very cool dry place since their arrival on 1 Oct. The plants are way more finicky then typical bulb plants. In talking to the wholesaler, they noted that they did not specify "plant IMMEDIATELY," so in the advent of duds, I will get free replacement product next autumn. It really does make a difference who you get your plants and supplies from..much like anything else.

Perhaps I can save the plants!

This post was meant for two days ago. Sorry about that.

Faux News "journalist" Chris Wallace gets schooled on ebola..

What is wrong with Fox News? The simple answer is that every piece is heavily slanted to press people's fear button. here Chris Wallace gets some science slapped on his im-propaganda. The inability of what passes for conservatism today to use easily obtainable sets of data before concluding issues is really insulting.

I haven't seen any new WHO data on current numbers of cases and hence deaths, so I wait to update charts once that it available.

Science and religion are they compatible?

The NYT has not a dialogue, but a pretty uniformed bit of commentary by people with no real understanding of either science or religion. samples taken from rebuttal letters and what religion and science really say:

"Science begins with the Big Bang theory, and evolution according to Darwin begins with a simple one-cell life. But science can say nothing about what preceded the Big Bang or how life was injected into that simple cell."

Science begins before the Big Bang. Science begins with a singularity prior to the Big Bang. Science also has multiverse theories that account through abstruse mathematical models, why the force of gravity is so weak in our universe. It also explains why our universe must be but one of many. Lisa Randall's simplified view here

How can anyone informed about pre-biotic conditions possibly state that we no nothing prior to cellular life? The simple answer is chemistry. Almost anyone looking for the chemical building blocks of life has found them via tabletop experimentation using plausible chemicals and energies almost certainly found on the pre-biotic earth. From amino acids to ribose to lipid vesicles that are hydrophilic(water loving) on the inside of the membrane to hydrophobic(water fearing) on the outside, we know more and more every day about the conditions of the pre-biotic earth. Even plausible explanations through experimention of the odd chirality of life(left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars) have been demonstated via preferential biases on opposing mineral crystal faces. This is not nothing.

One could poke holes in every one of the rebuttals, but it as simple as this: Religions have immutable truths without data, science has data but no facts that cannot be overturned on good evidence. The two approaches are fundamentally(no pun intended) different and by my simple definition exclude the other.

It is very odd that the two professors of science do see not this simple fact.

I should state here that while I am hard materialist, I would change my entire worldview given sufficient evidence to do so. The religious have all failed this test as the evidence supporting the scientific method as the most powerful tool to interrogate nature yet devised is measured in Everest-like mountains. Religions almost certainly predate history. Long ago they served the purpose of explaining the ineffable. Religion's time as an explanation for anything has passed. Ascribing anything to God's will, is almost always a lack of grasp of the branch of mathematics known as statistics.

There is really nothing new on the ebola front today.

I know that Mali has yet to close its border with guinea, but I thought the Mali must have be now. I was wrong.

Mali struggles to filter passengers from Ebola-hit Guinea. Mali is another poor West African country. When I there in 1996, Mali had the 4th lowest per capita income in the world at roughly 230USD per person. Back then our party crossed the border from Guinea into Mali without even being stopped at the border. Of course that one road from Guinean bush to Malian bush is now well patrolled.

Oddly, it seems likely that our Guinean guide may have crossed into Mali on one of the forested dirt 'roads' linking the two countries.

You ask for a forested route, and the Guineans happily oblige.

That's the rub. While Mali has no reported cases of ebola, the barriers to get into the country are pretty porous.

IF the current outbreak spreads to any neighboring country, Mali, Ivory Coast, and Ghana, seem the likeliest candidates.

Ivory Coast has had cases in chimpanzees, and a primate researcher there contracted the only known human case of the Tae Forest strain of ebolavirus.

Ghana is next door and bats there have been shown to have ebola antigens. Lest you think this a new phenomenon, it is not. CDC report of 2008 on non-migratory fruit bats in Ghana.

Now here is something you might think unexpected. It is not new, but it does expand the range of filoviruses(the ebolas, and Marburg viruses).Ebola-like virus native to Europe discovered.

That brings the number of continents harboring filoviruses to three. Africa, Asia, and Europe.

I do not believe that I have used the term 'filoviruses' in this blog before. I have known the term since roughly the year 1995. As I have often stated I am not a medical or virology expert. I am simply a layperson with a promiscuous range of interests.

More Applesauce..Android L musings, and the likelihood of a new model for Microsoft OS revenues.

Apple is getting no good press about, well, anything these days. Why the tech press keeps adding "gate" as a suffix to new product difficulties is just strange. Essentially, the whyPhone 6 seems to be getting caught in users hair. The complaints are fun to read. Yes, the phones are far more frequently bent than Apple has let on. Meanwhile, some users are reporting widespread iCloud outages across all Apple devices, and non-Apple devices. Still more...Apple has blamed some of the whyPhone 6 problems on..wait for it...unskilled child labor Okay, I hope that this is an attempt at humor, but Apple has indeed relied on child labor for some time. However, internal company audits have shown decreases in this area. We all know that tech companies can be trusted this area. *heavy sarcasm*

Having worked in the field for almost 30 years, I can assure you that the practice is quite widespread among consumer device makers. Samsung, Lenovo, and Apple, are the biggest players that have acknowledged at least some ongoing child labor issues.

I should not that tech cos. are better than other American multi-nationals that have been implicated in more serious allegations going all the way to using "slave labor" in at least part of their manufacturing chains. Philip Morris--merchant of death worldwide--is an affront to rational thought on so many levels that a little thing like child slave labor isn't likely to get in the way of marketing cancer. Chocolate, and of course clothing makers, are also on the greatest hits of infamy lists.

Am I excusing technology cos. by exposing the egregious acts of other industry groups? Absolutely not. Being in the tech field, I simply hold my own to a suitable standard of conduct.

More Applesauce..

iOS 8 still has stability issues, and in addition to no bluetooth connectivity in certain--but widespread--situations, and file deletion in the iCloud, it seems that Apple did a rush job with the Whyphone 6.

Why the stock is till hovering nears all time record levels seems absurd to me.

If I shipped buggy software and hardware packages, I would expect to the clients that rec'd. the 'alpha' versions to dump me quicker than..something that people quickly dump.

Android with Google will almost certainly not make the Apple errors. Even if one believes that Apple products are superior to Google's purest versions of Android delivered on Google hardware, one never hears about Android devices running the stock released version as exhibiting anything like the Cupertino collapse associated with the iOS 8 launch, and the whyPhone 6 debacles. One can almost tell that things at Mountain View are feeling relief at Apple's continued series of growing woes. Oddly, Android 'L's biggest threat to total world domination comes from Android One. Android One is the project that Google is looking at landing the next 5 billion smartphone users.

I really wish that Google had not launched a phone/tablet OS. Even dominant Chinese phone maker Xiomi uses Android with the custom MIUI UI in various iterations based on phone capabilities. Of course, Indian giant Micromax is on board.

As a consumer with typically American deep pockets, any and all phones are potential purchases, but the Google Nexus 6 will be on short list if the phone comes with the rumoured hardware, and Android 'L' is not plagued with issues. Just because someone can afford a really premium phone does not mean that they will buy one. If the Nexus 6 maintains Google's 350USD price tag, That is still over 10x what I paid for my oft talked about LG l34C. I see that the phone now hovers near the 70USD mark. I got in upon release, and paid less than 26USD at the promotional release price.

I know that I am assisting in utter market control by adding to the billion plus Android devices out there. So, the irony is not lost on me.

On to what is likely to be the new Microsoft model for selling OSes. I knew that Microsoft was doing well by offering Office on subscription basis for the enterprise user. Now they are offering the model for small business, which seems to be ostensibly anyone. I have been on many a Microsoft advisory group, and while pay is not any good, I do get free softwares. I was on the Bing pre-launch panel, and still use Bing as my go to search vehicle. I do enough PC and mobile searches to earn something on the order of 185USD per year. I am working towards something here. I have been granted three versions of Office in exchange for a bit of feedback. Microsoft has given me the $9.99 online Office Online sub., a full Office 365, and the business subscription model. I have no idea why I have more than an inlikng as to why I was granted the business subscription. I am getting to the point..

I am pretty sure that Microsoft is going to transition the Windows revenue model to that of a subscription based service. This is not pure speculation, but given that the subscription of their other cash cow..Office, has exceeded even Microsoft's own projections, a subscription based model for distributing all the stuff associated with an OS--including the OS itself--achieves a few goals. It keeps people using Microsoft OSes for at least years to come, and it really smooths out the revenue stream. Am I in favor of such a shift? Sure. One subscription to update your Microsoft devices sounds grand to me.

I should note that I do not own shares in any of these three companies. My 'relationship' with Microsoft really ended years ago. Other than getting perhaps a few hundred dollars of software that I paid for in lost productivity, I now get nothing cool.

Google's largely successful attempts at mobile world domination have me a bit angst ridden. The "don't be evil" co. is far from harmless. I am pulling for Apple and Microsoft every waking moment. My biggest fear is that the rest of the non-corporate world will be satisfied with "good enough computing," and relegate Microsoft and Apple to niche players. If one looks at Google's trajectory into new markets formerly dominated by others, it is looking like a Google world more with each passing day.

Google may not be evil, but consumers at all levels should be concerned about a future lacking choice.

That is the word from the front.