No Normal Person Is Ever Finished Moving

Posted on November 13, 2011 by ehurst

The worst is over, now.
All the stuff we intended to keep is now in another place. Most of those places are fairly appropriate, for now. There are a few items still sitting in inconvenient places, but don’t expect to be moved soon. Some items, maybe never. Normal humans always find more important things to do than to obsessively park every item in some particular proper place.
Being as I’m an introvert, I need lots of time just to be with my own thoughts. It’s not a dislike of others; other people are the only reason I live. And I am quite comfortable dealing with just about anyone, but only when there’s a reason for it. So instead of picking over things not completely put away, I’m needing right now a lot of quiet time.
Of course, with all the walking, climbing and lifting I’ve done over the past few days, my bad knee is swollen and painful. That means I can’t even take a solitary walk. That bike might need a long ride tomorrow.
I’m blessed to have enticed my neighbors to take away all but two pieces of junk. It would have filled a dual-axle U-Haul trailer. My entire collection of vintage computer stuff went all at once. I’ve kept only a tiny handful of spares I’ve seen the need to use in the past. My “office” is a comfy office chair I bought awhile back, a shelf full of stuff I use all the time, and my laptop — all next to the bed. My private space is smaller than most aircraft cockpits.
The only thing I’m still waiting on is a real job.

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Hatred for Those Who Don't Hurt

Posted on November 12, 2011 by ehurst

There are few things more threatening to wealth, and civilization itself, than mandatory ritual mourning.
On 19 April 1995 I was standing near a large plate glass window on the second floor of a college classroom building, high atop a hill in Edmond, Oklahoma. In a few minutes class would begin and I was just finishing a conversation with a friend. It was around 9AM. The glass in front of me rattled, the floor jolted and there was a loud, sharp thump which sounded to my military-trained ears as a large mortar impact — CRUMP! (Homemade explosives simply cannot do that.)
After all the hideous lies from the federal government over what that was all about, there was an even bigger threat to those of us who live in Central Oklahoma: Mandatory sorrow over the loss of life. That is, the sudden imposition of political power into the hands of widows, widowers and other grieving relatives was a far more dangerous weapon than the bombs which brought down the building on those inside. To this day we are all made to feel false guilt into eternity if we don’t pickle ourselves in the unforgiving sorrow of the Victims. I don’t complain so much about the memorial, a hideous and utterly artless boondoggle, because that’s what most monuments are like. It’s the eternal imposition of very real limitations of everyday life which will make everything downtown more expensive than it has to be.
I’ve lost relatives to hideous injustice, too. We didn’t see the need of imposing our loss on the whole world. Rather, we honor them by avoiding just that very thing. If we do not live to make things better, our deaths are merely a relief.
How many mourned the loss of military life yesterday? How many mourned the walking wounded still among us? Instead, we simply allow banks to confiscate their homes while they recover what little is left of their flesh in the hospital. Sure, it’s technically illegal, but we are too busy with other things to raise much hue and cry. How about a little justice while they live, so we don’t have so much sorrow when they die?
People do awful things because humanity is broken. There will always be the imbalance of power handed to predators who don’t play by the rules. All that does is prove the rules were a pretty good idea, if only poorly implemented. But we don’t honor that notion very well. It’s rather like that perverse romantic silliness sweeping places like Vietnam, where having a broken heart over lost love is far more important than being in love.
It’s also the primary reason for initiation rituals, and why they tend to get worse with each passing generation of initiates. Everyone has to add to the mandatory suffering of others until people start dying. What began as legitimate training becomes hateful hazing, a bizarre ritual of having to lick the feet of Satan for the privilege of burning in Hell.
So here we go again. Joe Paterno did what the law requires. He went to the police. What everyone wants to ignore is the crime was under the jurisdiction of the Campus Police at Penn State. Telling the administration is telling the police. It was the entire upper staff which committed the crime of coverup. It was no longer on his shoulders, but theirs. Call it “Pedo State” and close the stinking school, but firing Paterno is nothing more than pickling the world in the personal sorrow of a few victims. I’m not even sure it’s what they wanted, but it’s done in their names, and whatever protest they might have about the outcome is missing.
We have come to the place when the greater injustices in our world will be committed by the victims who can’t stand the idea other folks aren’t hurt. A few men have raw and painful memories that will trouble them for life. I have enough of my own, thank you. Today’s political Victim Class project their sorrow on the rest of the world and demand, demand, demand, without end.

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Great Aspirations

Posted on November 11, 2011 by ehurst

All my life, I’ve never been happier than digging ditches or stumps.
Too bad I can’t get paid for it. I’m not competitive in the market right now. I’m too slow with the digging and nobody does trees by hand these days. Still, whenever I get a chance for a volunteer job I always do it. I also think it’s fun to put on steel roofing, and it’s almost fun to do shingles, but not if anyone is in a hurry. (Edit: I should note such work allows me to avoid standing still which hurts and makes my knees swell after just a half hour or so.)
Today I cut up some scrap lumber and other bits and pieces and built a shelf to wrap around, and stand above, an old desk. We are moving things around in our house, and that old wooden desk will become my beloved’s computer desk. There’s a wire shelf just above where the computer and monitor will stand to hold our printers. Above that will be another shelf on which to rest the cable modem and router. Much better coverage inside the house when the wifi router is up high. We won’t be living by ourselves any more.
I’m ditching my huge collection of ancient Linux CDs and a bunch of other crap I don’t use any more. Cleaning out a whole bunch of stuff like that. I put out a sign at the edge of the yard next to the street saying “Free Stuff!” Then started setting out junk still useful, but not to me. So far, it’s mostly disappeared. Beats hauling it down to the community dumpster.
We are compacting our lives down. I don’t intend to move again, but I do want to be more mobile. No more running servers in the house. My whole computer office will soon fit in the laptop bag. I’m still hoping the computer support ministry grows, but I won’t be fixing any more here at home. I’m switching strictly to house calls.
I have no idea how I’ll keep myself busy this winter, but something nagging at the corners of my mind tells me I will be busy. No heroics. I agree with Old Jules sewage work is by far more heroic than many things, but I may be getting too old for that stuff, at least full time.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep piddling away at stuff people want done, but not in a hurry. Semi-retirement is serious business.

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Short Attention Span

Posted on November 10, 2011 by ehurst

Washington’s Blog notes correctly much of what we see today has been in the works far longer than most people realize.

From my earliest memories, I have always been trying to see the forest, and not just the trees. Something about the gestalt, the holistic view always appealed to me. I wanted to know where current events came from, and how we got into this mess. It has always been easier to decide how to act if you understand why following your internal inclinations causes pain and conflict with your circumstances.

So, as a Military Policeman in the late 1980s, when given access to high level training guidance and national professional standards for policemen, I began trying to understand the pattern. Our Provost Marshal was big on such things, and I kept overhearing talk of evolving standards and greater federal influence in local police training. I picked his brain often. At the time, I was foolish enough to be on board with this stuff.

By the time I began having serious knee trouble, I also began having doubts about what I was learning. A career in Law Enforcement was less and less appealing. I wanted out. So when my term expired, I didn’t take the offered promotion to reenlist, offered despite my permanent knee problems. I came home. A short time later I watched on TV news the unfolding drama in Waco. A few years later, I was the object of federal harassment myself. All of which merely confirmed my growing apprehension while still in uniform.

Thus, I can confirm from inside the system itself that during the late 1980s, things changed for policemen everywhere in the US. Those US Marshals had easy access to my military records, and could have known I was ostensibly on their side. But the days of doing the work, of thinking before jumping in and “making a collar” (an arrest) were long gone. When the federal government interferes directly in the politics of a tiny rural Baptist church, it doesn’t matter whether it was intentional. They never so much as twitched a finger to help me clean up the mess they made of my life.

And they call it “professional standards.” It was all part of the long term plans to make life a living hell for folks here in the US, and I’m sure they have been the same for all the world.

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Work and Play on the Computer

Posted on November 9, 2011 by ehurst

Much discussion and gnashing of teeth over at Slashdot on Do We Really Hate All New GUIs?
Yes, we do. That is, unless our only contact with computers is as phones and tablets, which is apparently now the majority. So we accept that for them and agree they should have what they need. It’s not an input device, but an output device. You want stuff to display and make noise, and your only input may be vocal, using it like a telephone. But don’t try to foist that crap on people who use keyboards and mice.
As correctly noted elsewhere, the difference between GNOME 3 and Unity is insignificant from the user perspective. Both have completely destroyed all standard expectations for desktop users. The developers gleefully assert you will love it, and come near to calling for a Predator drone to shut you up if you don’t love it. Open Source has always been somewhat unconcerned with user reactions, but that has slowly drifted over to open hostility.
And God forbid we should simply keep it working for more than a week before adding new features and geometrically larger quantities of new bugs to go with it. GNOME 2 was adequate, but it was never even moderately bug-free. KDE 3 seems to have come close, but nobody had time to every quite finish the job, because the developer-centric model caters to the brilliant ideas of creative genius and users be damned. When you can point out what’s wrong with KDE 4, they tell it’s a feature, not a bug. Sound familiar? Get a clue, KDE developers: We want simplicity where we want it, and options where we want them. If you choose to ignore our peculiar mix of needs, and pursue your own bizarre wet dreams, we will go away.
It’s not just my own position, but of every user I’ve talked to: Nothing will ever top KDE 3.x as the very pinnacle of what Linux GUIs might have been. As noted in the comments on the Slashdot article, it matters not a whit that most users never touch the majority of features. Each user has their own selection of must-have features from the common set typically available, and damn you if you try to remove them. There is simply no good reason for dumping on users and abandoning that truly lovable desktop model for anything else. The KDE folks have only themselves to blame for their stupidity. All those “new” features were a regression away from actual usability. Now it’s just a shiny toy for junkies. You could have easily kept the interface when moving to QT4. Don’t pretend you’ve done us any favors. (I’ve previously commented I know about the Trinity Project, but I don’t believe there are enough people working on it for it to be viable; it needs most of the current KDE folks who have no interest.)
Having examined the GPL in all it’s manifestations, and read the crotchety religious self-righteousness of its founders, I still don’t understand what kind of arrogant hatred it takes to refuse to negotiate with hardware vendors on behalf of users. No, RMS and his friends simply make impotent demands, so users have, at best, horribly inconvenient work-arounds for a lot of common hardware. The few vendors who actually like having more users are permitted to put a non-GPL “blob” in the kernel and those vendors trust you not to examine the code. When Open Source people start thinking about users instead of their petty electronic gods, perhaps it will mean something and Linux will see something more than a 1% user base among computer users.
How about the way Apple used to deal with some tech support calls? “You don’t need to know how to do that.” Such was the response to asking how to change some settings which hindered your work flow. Nowadays you simply don’t have the option to call and ask such questions. I reject any discussion of Apple which does not assume the basic fact it’s always more about fashion and coolness than actual usability. Most of those even conscious of computer technology agree with me. I’ve used Macs enough to know they shine in only one place, and that is graphics applications. If that’s really important to you, then Mac is a blessing. Otherwise, your only reason for touching one is sheer hateful arrogance, and we who have no use for it hate you back.
Windows is the Borg. They hate users, too, but at least realize users are a useful commodity to deliver to advertisers, their real customers. Because of that, MS has in the past done some decent work, in realizing the user has to get something done or they won’t hang around. Right now, Windows 7 is about as good as it will ever get for people who actually need a computer. Windows 8 will go down like Vista and ME for those of us who don’t want or need to touch a tiny screen. I’ve shifted all my work over to Windows 7, because the control and security of Open Source simply isn’t worth the trouble any more.
I’m tired of futzing with computers. I have work to do, a calling from God. I have tech support clients in my computer ministry who need as much love and support as they can get, and it won’t come from anyone who actually makes this stuff. I have enough work explaining what computers can and can’t do. If you want my support, the least you could do is stay out of my way. Aside from something like Ubuntu 10.04 with some tweaking for kids’ computers, I have no use for Linux. I realize those who actually do work with computers are probably a dwindling population, but we happen to have more mass buying power than the cell-phonies and tablet-heads still. Ignore us at your peril.
Addenda: It occurs to me one final word is needed. Back when Windows 95 first appeared on the scene, a lot of folks never noticed just how much MS had invested in UI design testing with all those human behavioral scientists. Their aim was to examine what users wanted to do, liked to do, and could be persuaded to do with a computer keyboard and mouse while interacting with what was on the screen. You’ll notice it really hasn’t changed much up through Windows 7. Boring? Kiss my patootie, because that’s how humans operate. It’s the best compromise between what ought to be and what can be. There is no sin in aping the Windows layout and functions in terms of GUI design. No two people like exactly the same thing, but the mass of humanity can at least find their own place in that common user experience package.
When enthusiasts stop trying to remake humans into their image of how users ought to be, when Open Source developers realize they do not represent the cream of humanity in their wacko “innovations” and begin to care about the rest of the human race, then they’ll stop making such dramatic changes in the desktop. Just once, how about fixing something which worked so well?

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Curmudgeonry for the Week

Posted on November 8, 2011 by ehurst

Just a quick laundry list of short items.
1. We are trying to bring Afghanistan under the boot heel of our empire, on one level. We could win, but we won’t. The single greatest factor is incomprehensible to the military and foreign policy wonks: the economy. There is a way to appeal to their Islamic moral fervor and build up the economy, too. The Taliban wouldn’t stand a chance if the people had anything to lose by listening to them. No one in charge has bothered because that was never the real objective. Part of the real objective was destroying our own economy, and shattering our military power. It’s working.
2. OWS is dead. It was vulnerable from day one because they hadn’t taken the time to school the protesters. There are only two ways to keep something like this coherent, and that’s ties of blood/covenant, or a strong orthodoxy like communists use. Whether we like it or not, given the vagaries of human political behavior, any kind of revolt demands a unity rather like a religion. Not just any religion, but one with a stern sense of commitment to something concrete which takes on the aura of holiness. While there have been some brilliant flashes of rhetoric, it never reflected enough of the protesters to keep the political infiltrators from destroying it. The protests have been hijacked by several other strong agendas, and will probably continue on that thread for some time to come. The name is the same, but whatever it was at first is long past.
3. There’s a good chance Herman Cain will survive this kerfuffle over sexual harassment, in part because that card has been played too often. If current trends continue, he could easily be the next president. Should that happen, we will most certainly have a World War III, and the US will see conscription on a scale making Vietnam look piddly. More, when draft protesters flee to other lands, Cain is the kind of man who will send execution squads after them. And most evangelical churches will applaud that move.
4. I’m tempted to believe there is something in this provocation of Iran we aren’t being told by much of anybody. While I don’t quite agree with the wild conspiracy theories espoused by Duff at Veterans Today, I do have to wonder at all the posturing from both sides. It seems almost surreal, with an all too public slow-motion march into an obvious, foregone conclusion. It’s hard to imagine how any part of this can yield the surprise attack sort of thing which actually works. Am I the only person who thinks the anxiety leading up to any action is a major, if not the whole, objective? And is there anyone else who wonders if maybe this is all some feint while preparing some other attack entirely?
Most of what you think you see is theater.

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Picking a Church

Posted on November 7, 2011 by ehurst

My wife and believe we have found a place which can tolerate us.
Every church is first and foremost a human political organization. Okay, that’s redundant, since all human organization is inherently political. Shorn of emotional imbuing, “politics” is the broader term for how humans come together and use each other, the numerical mass, as a means to some end. Even a marriage has politics. Thus, every church has politics because it involves fallen humans.
It has become popular to make the joke when someone complains a church is filled with hypocrites, they should go ahead and join because there’s room for one more hypocrite. Humans are inherently hypocritical. It’s part of the fall, so there won’t be any other type of humans available for any organization, including churches.
Being involved in a church requires the same basic cynicism which comes from fully realizing this plane of existence is broken, and won’t be fixed. Churches are going to have problems, so the question is simply a matter of selecting one with problems you know how to handle. Because it’s a voluntary thing, it’s not like some things where you hold your nose and choose the one least offensive. For example, for good or ill, some sort of computer with some sort of Net access is becoming virtually essential for interacting with almost any agency, government or otherwise. Without one, you officially don’t exist for most bureaucrats. Everything about computer use sucks, but if you don’t have one, you are out in the cold on too many things, these days. That’s the nature of human existence.
So all churches have leaders, and those truly democratic don’t last long enough to get much done. From one generation of leadership to the next, fundamental changes are actually rather rare. So examining the track record, the history of controversies, is part of the process. No church of any worth is without controversies, because if you do anything at all, someone will get terribly upset and cause a scene. On top of that, the Savior we claim to emulate in our churches was condemned to the Cross by His own religious leaders.
After several years of working alone in house church, my wife and I found ourselves tired of isolation. You can have splendid spiritual purity in isolation, but little place for using that purity. So we began investigating via the websites. Granted, really savvy Net marketing is deception in itself,  but a complete lack of Net savvy was unacceptable. We made several false starts, but stayed with it. Finally, we found something where we believe we won’t be much of a problem if we follow our convictions.
It’s actually a sort of franchise type church, with “campuses” all over the US. They even have a Web Church of sorts, where you can be a member without ever showing up in person at any of the campuses (or so it seems). It’s called Life Church. They are a branch of the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC). I did the research, reading their statement of faith, some of the criticisms leveled at them, and felt pretty much at home with it. That is, complaints and accusations leveled at them would probably be aimed at me, should I gain enough attention from the same accusers, though for different reasons. You learn a lot about an accuser from their selection of targets, just as you learn much about a church from the accusations made against them.
I suppose I’ll have to dodge a bunch of Purchase Purpose Driven stuff, and similar garbage, but I’m guessing such is not a test of faith, as it were. They permit female pastors, but not many churches have one. However, the two items I find most intolerable are absent: (1) wrapping faith in the US flag and (2) slavishly supporting modern Israel. I didn’t catch so much as a whiff of Dispensationalism in any of the reading material, and there wasn’t any hint of celebrating Veterans Day Sunday yesterday. It’s fine if restaurants and other businesses want to give us freebies, but I’m a veteran who doesn’t want battle flags polluting my worship.
We’ll give them a try, and see how it works out.

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What's Shaking? Oklahoma Edition

Posted on November 6, 2011 by ehurst

Here in central Oklahoma, we are down at the southern tip of the Humboldt Fault.
I know a little about seismology. It became a childhood fascination after we moved to Anchorage, Alaska just a year following the Bad Friday Earthquake in 1964. (That would be the common Alaskan pun on Good Friday, when the quake struck.) When I was in college studying for my teacher’s exams, I chose that as my project. I still have all the slides somewhere. The USGS did a massive study of it, and the college library had the whole thing, two full shelves of stuff. Over several months I read as much as I could understand without taking senior level mathematics.
All that math the scientists developed for it doesn’t help us here in Oklahoma. They have no idea why things are shaking here. We had a 5.6 in the middle of the night, about 3 miles (4.8km) deep. Apparently where we now reside is somewhat isolated from whatever is shaking, because all we got was an audible rumble and the mobile home shook just enough to wake me. Since our house has never sat tightly on the pilings, we usually don’t feel the minor stuff. But it’s anchored, so we would have to have a truly major shake locally to even shift it noticeably.
Unless the ground actually reshapes itself under us, a mobile home is about the safest place to live in a fault zone. We are more worried about the water tower 30 feet (9m) from the back of the house.
But there’s not much chance of this being the result of any nukes or other skulduggery around here. This is flyover country. Nothing ever really happens here. We can’t even get the economy to crash decently, since we are one of those exporting states: oil, gas, food, water, etc. The tornadoes and wildfires are a bigger threat here. Wish we could export those.

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If I Could, I Would

Posted on November 5, 2011 by ehurst

Yep, if I had as much money as he does:

[Ventura] vowed to apply for Mexican citizenship so he can live there more months of the year….
“I will never stand for a national anthem again. I will turn my back and I will raise a fist,” he said.

He is entirely right. If he had done as the judge said, it would go before a panel of judges and be buried. There would be no point if he couldn’t get a jury, which would be guaranteed to side with him in almost any jury pool I can imagine. That’s why the judge refused the case. Rare is the judge still willing to so much as appear to kick back against the hand that pays him.
We all know, of course, this is grandstanding. It’s what you do when you have a pass to enter the grandstand. Ventura does.
We don’t. We have to do something else. Of course, things aren’t so sweet in Mexico anymore, anyway. But I’m sure Ventura has the leverage to keep the Narcos away from his door down there. For whatever reason. I’d pick places farther south. No, no place is utterly safe, but given what we can know about things in general, Tierra del Fuego is looking better all the time.
The roads don’t run from here to there, far as I can determine. Couldn’t afford the gas, anyway. And there is some hostile territory to pass through, so biking isn’t an option.
Without a pass to the grandstand, all we have is what we have and can get. I decided long ago the stars and stripes were not an object of veneration. How easily we forget it has always been a purely war emblem. It’s called a “battle flag.” You aren’t supposed to fly it in peacetime, or over any administrative office not under literal military attack. But I don’t bother to insult it, either. Even if it hangs around awhile, it will never again mean what it once did, which was bad enough. Nor has it ever meant what most people think it means, which turns out to be even worse. As it is, I figure we won’t be seeing it officially much longer.
As the song says, “Pledge allegiance to the flag, whatever flag they offer…” I’m a citizen of Heaven, and My King says He only loans me out to lesser authorities at His discretion.

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Windows 7: Converting Flash Videos to MP3 Music Files

Posted on November 5, 2011 by ehurst

While some of the same tools are available for both Linux and Windows, there is simply no point learning the command line stuff in converting Flash videos on Windows.
The hardest part is learning how to search the cache for your browser. Since I don’t use IE, you’ll have to work that out for yourself. I no longer use Firefox, so I can’t help you with that, either. However, the primary trick is when you start the video in question, notice where FlashPlayer shows both the download progress (usually gray) ahead of the running progress bar (red). Note the exact time to the minute, because that’s part of the trick to finding it.
In Opera, you’ll need to drill down into:

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Opera\Opera\cache

Several folders will present themselves, usually labeled in the format g_000x. One or more will show about the right time stamp. Simply drop down into each one close to or after that point until you see a bunch of files labeled in the format opr000xx.tmp. Notice what sizes they are. Most will be in KB, but your video will easily be in MB. Since few items in your cache is likely to be that large, copy that file to your Video folder and rename it properly. For example, I usually label it: Artist-ShortSongTitle.flv.
If you use Google Chrome, it’s even easier. The location is:

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache

All the files are in there labeled: f_00000x and it should be easy to pick out the giant file which matches your time hack. Same trick, just copy with a new name according to whatever scheme suits you.
The conversion is pretty easy, just visit Cocoon Software and download their “Quick Media Converter” in a zip file named “Install-Hd-4-5-0-2.zip” (as of this writing). Unzip it and you’ll have the installer with a similar name. In the process, the installer will pull down the latest FFMPEG and all the goodies that go with it. The application is simply a front-end which keeps the dirty details away from you.
Warning: It comes bundled with the Ask Toolbar. Don’t select the simple install, but choose the advanced, and unclick all that crap. These days you just about cannot get anything useful without running interference this way. But if you somehow miss that, you can always uninstall it later. At least it’s not genuine spyware, just close to it. The other issue is they nag you for a donation every 20th use. I can stand that, especially because this is one of the smartest tools for doing this job.
After it’s installed, run it. You first need to find your video using the buttons on the left side. Look for the “add” button, then navigate to your Video folder. It will probably remember this location as default. Click on the FLV file in the list, then select from the top row of buttons along about the middle, a CD with a note over it. If you aren’t sure, hover your mouse and you’ll be told that is for converting to audio only. Select MP3 from the dropdown list that comes from that button. Then in the row of large buttons across the bottom, select the one which determines the output folder. You gotta pick one, so I use my Music folder. Next, just click the “convert” button there next to that and wait for it. You’ll get a progress bar and so forth.
Check to see if it landed in your Music folder. Test it; the sound quality should be at least as good as the Flash video you watched in your browser. Digging through your browser cache can be a real mess if you don’t clear it once in awhile. Either using the browser controls or something like BleachBit daily, at least.

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