Posted on by mwhybark

In Dreams

I awakened at 3:48 am in a cold sweat brought on by an anxiety dream about a friend’s blog. The friend posted about an friend of his who, he’d learned that day, was killed in a freak funeral-home accident, when she was pulled through what appeared to be a band saw, by the three-dimensional Quicktime VR of the decendent’s neatly halved corpse my dream visualized posted on my friend’s blog. Accompanying this extremely disturbing product of my slumbering mind was a video clip of the dead young woman, speaking about her relationship with her job at the funeral home.

How do you people stand living in your own skulls? I really don’t think I’m that different from most of you, but I fear and dread my own mind, my dreams, my body, and my soul. I’ve been insistently told that this is not how it has been for most of we language-using apes over the ages, but to my ear. the assertions ring falsely strident, carrying a kind of desperation which ultimately I find unconvincing.

Still, I would much rather not have had the experience above that I recount here as a result of reliving the memory involuntarily all day.

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Fun Resoundingly Defeated

Excerpted early-return election numbers:

MONORAIL:

Endless gridlock: 28,821, 67%

Monorail: 14,143 32%

I voted for the light rail project for the first time in 1990. It was projected for completion in 1995. Do date, not one track has been laid, and the downtown bus tunnel, which opened that same year with rail built in, is closed, so that they can replace the railbed, as apparently train technology, that hotbed of innovation, has advanced so far in the intervening fifteen years that all-new rails are called for. Seattle is well-positioned to continue its’ settled course of becoming just like every other car-choked metropolis in the country. Pray for a crippling recession.

NO SMOKING ANYWHERE IN SEATTLE, EVER, THIS MEANS YOU, YES YOU:

Smoker = shiftless, no-good addict low-lifes: 483,823 63%

Don’t be so absurd: 277,107 36%

I challenge you to find a pleasant, pedestrian-oriented street which includes a non-thoroughfare location more than 25 feet from a door. I wonder, are pot-smokers bound by this nonsense? Also, don’t sit on the sidewalk, and if poor, please remain south of SeaTac, mmkay? Thx.

Not like I can’t understand the votes. The fools that blew through the Monorail money killed the project, no doubt there. And who can possibly defend smoking? It’s bad, bad for you, etc. Still, it’s legislating morality disguised as a public-health issue.

Posted on by mwhybark

Rattus

On Saturday, Petr found a rat hiding in the closet of the new place.

On Sunday I set four traps.

On Tuesday, I found the rat, dead in the one I set by the furnace. The animal did not appear to suffer, as the trap bar landed directly across the brain pan. Happily, there was no mess, apart from the rat’s body.

However, there are little bits of rat poop through out the house now. Yick.

In other news, Qwest has finally completed the telephone services migration. Tomorrow, my ISP claims they will show up to configure the router. I’ll believe that when I see it.

Posted on by mwhybark

Flickr wrkflw

I’d love it if I could assemble a workflow for especially my Treo pix which would automatically pick up the pix from the folder they land in at sync, add them to iPhoto, and push them right on out to flickr in a new set with the day’s date as the set name.

It would be great to get that going for any arbitrary photo source, toom actually.

Since the Treo (and my other cameras) do not retain or offer rotation data, there’s a bit of a pitfall there. But not such a big one. I think setting my privacy defaults on Flickr is a bigger issue than that.

Posted on by mwhybark

Salvage

Last week the P-I ran a piece on a bunch of local salvage stores, which have become a primary materials resource for us in the remodel.

The REstore

1440 N.W. 52nd

Seattle 206-297-9119

M-S 9-6

www.re-sources.org/restore

Second Use Building Materials Inc.

7953 Second Ave. S.

Seattle 206-763-6929

www.seconduse.com

Seattle Building Salvage Inc.

330 Westlake Ave. N.

Seattle 206-381-3453

www.seattlebuildingsalvage.com

2nd Floor Store

945 Elliott Ave. W

Seattle 206-933-3032

Posted on by mwhybark

The Googley Man

The NYT writes about Wal-Mart, among others, quaking in their boots at the specter of Google looming on the horizon. Annointed media priestess of the future Esther Dyson prophesies “a huge increase in efficiency” as a result of Google, and others’, far-reaching efforts to enable universal ease-of-access to arbitrary data. Efficiency! Ha!

The writer of the article either heard what they wanted to from Ms. Dyson or bought the nonsense whole, as a bit later on the article notes, breathlessly,



Among the many projects being developed and debated inside Google is a real estate service, according to a person who has attended meetings on the proposal. The concept, the person said, would be to improve the capabilities of its satellite imaging, maps and local search and combine them with property listings.

The service, this person said, could make house hunting far more efficient, requiring potential buyers to visit fewer real estate agents and houses. If successful, it would be another magnet for the text ads that appear next to search results, the source of most of Google’s revenue.



This service is already available independently, albeit imperfectly, and was widely celebrated as an early and impressive Google Maps hack. The site is housingmaps.com. In addition, non-Google players have been rolling a fully–fledged version of this service out for the past year, as evidenced by our largely Redfin-powered house hunt. Redfin is Seattle-based, and I understand that also-regional real-estate programmers HouseValues just unveiled a similar tool, homepages.com.

I did appreciate the tools. I was, indeed, able to consider a seriously larger number of houses than I would have otherwise. But in the end, we invested an estimated twenty hours a week for about six months into the search. Without Redfin, I would have invested a probable five hours a week into the search. How long it would have gone on is unknown, but given the ten-percent-plus monthly cost increases in the market, my estimation is that we would have been flat priced out by February.

My real beef is with the idea that information transparency will bring greater efficiency. We looked at an estimated 120 houses and bid on five. Requiring potential buyers to visit fewer real estate agents and houses my sweet-smelling, taut, and perfectly round ass!

As person who has worked in the graphic arts for some time, this incredible, unproductive ballooning of the work needed to produce a given product, be it brochure or mortgage, is quite familiar. When the new tools make it easy to provide the client with a range of options, options increase to fill – and overfill – the time available, to no actual benefit or economic advantage.

Infinite choice is the end result of perfect information transparency. Infinity is the horizon of inflationary event spirals, while the numeral one is the horizon of efficient decision making.

Posted on by mwhybark

Mwa ha ha ha

For some reason I got sucked into a decent, if ultimately pointless Ask MetaFilter thread on the problem of evil.

I wrote a post but MeFi went down before I could post it and I didn’t want to lose it. So here it is.

—

“transworld depravity?” Ill-mannered skateboard magazine readers? I don’t get it.

I think a part of the problem here is attempting to associate culturally-derived values and perceptions with the attempts of cultures to represent an idea which is necessarily beyond culture. If God is eternal and omnipotent and the universe derives from God, our little corner of that universe can’t wholly represent or comprehend the nature of God at all.

Additionally, it’s clear that what is or is not evil changes depending on the cultural perspective of the perceptor. We tend to associate evilness with torture and murder and so forth; other cultures at other times have associated evil with, oh, porn and gay sex. Still other cultures have sanctified sacrificial murder and even genocide.

A common thread in other posters’ attempts to look at the nature of evil in this thread is the acknowledgement of a differentiation between the idea of a world without evil and the world we live in. Evil, then, is apparently seen as a consquence of living in an imperfectible, non-ideal world, which includes suffering and, most crucially, change.

The deistic idea, which posits an extrauniversal reality, eternal, omnipotent, and ideal, must also therefore depict a sort of stasis, where no entropy can effect change. If this gloss is accepted, suffering is a consequence of entropy, of time itself, and therefore will always be with us. Evil may be described as directed suffering, in my view, and as long as humans remain monkeys with complex troop-building and maintenance behavior, some monkey will be suffering at the hands of others.

Posted on by mwhybark

disassembly

I took the whybark.com server apart tonight in anticipation of a physical move tomorrow. I expect to configure it Saturday. I sure hope the damn line is up.

Posted on by mwhybark

Slogging through the bitmuck

Sigh.

On October 27, Qwest disconnected our phone and connected the new line, with a new number, at the new house. I moved the Qwest-provided router to the house and plugged it in, and the router illuminates to a state indicating connectivity.

On November 1, I called Qwest to get our old number restored in the new location. We had to wait until the new POTS number rang through in order to allow them to merely transfer the extant services rather than end and start anew, or so I was told. On November 2, I was told when I placed this second call, the old number would be effective in the new locale. Instead, the new line yields a “this number has been changed” message whilst the old number remains disconnected.

Today I was told that the old number will actually be restored on November 7.

Meanwhile, I placed a call to my ISP, which is not Qwest, and requested that they assign the IPs so that I can get my server online at the new house. I have now called them every morning for three days, and each time I get a different story about the expected delivery date and required actions from them to deliver the service. All I need from them is six IP addresses. They refuse to release these to me until a technician has made a site visit and configured a brand new, quite unnecessary, router.

This morning I was assured that the technician would be on site this afternoon, and that I would get a call from the technician when they were on site. I was hoping to intercept them and get the IPs directly in order to get the whole ridiculous mummery show over with on the sly. I don’t need or want a new router. I didn’t want or need the last new router. I believe that there must be some way to force the ISP to buy the Qwest-provided router from me. However, my intention is just to reconfigure the Qwest router to match their setup and swap it back so I can stick their junk on the shelf with ALL MY OTHER DAMN ROUTERS.

I have argued.

I have pleaded.

I have been reasonable.

I will call them once more in the morning. After that, I will no longer be reasonable or patient.