Done yesterday (20110607 Tu)

[mdlbear]

0607 Tu
  * up 6ish; W=198.6; drugs, nose, laundry, coffee, dishes, teeth, light
  % I managed to aggravate my pulled muscle a little last night.  Grump.
  & ice on the pulled muscle.  That and the naproxen should help.
  * left-over chili for breakfast.  
  @ Bhut Jolokia chili pepper (Ghost pepper)
  @ Capsaicin
    Capsaicin is also the key ingredient in the experimental drug Adlea, which
    is in Phase 2 trials as a long-acting analgesic to treat post-surgical and
    osteoarthritis pain for weeks to months after a single injection to the
    site of pain.[46] More over, it reduces pain resulted rheumatoid
    arthritis[47] as well as joint or muscle pain from fibromyalgia or other
    causes. 
  @ Scoville scale
  @ Liniment
  @ A Little History Humor (peer-reviewed lightbulb joke)
  * 15min: cutting board cut, edges rounded, sanded.
  @ The perils of commuting: Commuting makes you unhappy @rowanf
  ' (on the way to work, thinking about proofreading address labels.)
    Stupid bear.
    No, _not_ stupid bear.  Bear who catches himself in time not to repeat a
    mistake. 
  * mail Kat's envelope
  * tofu for lunch, from Ranch 99 across Murphy from the Post Office
    Also tried the Prince of Peace ginger candy.  Ranch 99 may be a good
    source for ginger-honey drink.
  @ esr - The Smartphone Wars: The world turned upside down
  @ I, Cringely » iCloud's real purpose: kill Windows (technoshaman) 
    " Here is the money line from Jobs yesterday: Were going to demote the
      PC and the Mac to just be a device  just like an iPad, an iPhone or an
      iPod Touch. Were going to move the hub of your digital life to the
      cloud. 
  @ Apple's new "iCloud" paradigm: Don't believe the hype
    a contrary opinion.
    " As I posted on TS's blog awhile ago, my response is: I'm sorry, I ain't
      buyin' it (in either sense). Much though I respect Mr. Cringely, I think
      he's vastly overestimating consumers' willingness to entrust all their
      data (some of it quite private and potentially embarrassing, if not
      outright dangerous if made public) on someone else's server God and
      Apple's techs alone know where.  
  * 15min: huge wad of receipts out of my wallet
  * $5500 to savings (DeVry plus a little extra)
  * bed 11:30ish

Hmm. Very productive at work. Somewhat less so at home, though I guess I did a fair amount of puttering.

My new flag for internal dialog is already starting to prove useful; I just have to keep it up. I think I need names for the critical voice and the one that supplies helpful corrections (see notes); nothing comes to mind immediately, but I expect they'll introduce themselves eventually.

Several links about Apple's iCloud announcement. I'm still skeptical and suspicious; there are things I'm simply not ready to trust to anything outside my firewall (which includes my laptop and phone), and other things that are just too bulky to try to push up there through a straw. I haven't even started to convert my video collection, for example. And I'm not going to use it for audio editing -- that's a couple of gig per song.

Comments

iCloud

[idea-fairy.livejournal.com]

I suspect that fans and filkers and other people like us are not the ones the iCloud is for.

To oversimplify a bit, consider a spectrum of users. At one end are those who are heavily into creating and editing stuff, whether it be text, music, video, or other forms of art. At the other end are those who buy whatever everybody else is buying and who want to be able to play their purchases wherever they happen to be. In the middle may be those who shoot lots of pictures and want to share them with their friends, but who do relatively little editing.

Something like the iCloud would seem to be ideal for the more or less passive consumers of mass-market stuff, since there's a lot of redundancy that can be eliminated in the back end. And it may work fairly well for those sharing snapshots with their friends.

It would seem less well suited for significant creators of creative content. That segment (which probably includes many fans and filkers and other artists) will continue to be a market niche for something like the traditional PC.

So the question may boil down to how many people fall into which categories.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

I think I need names for the critical voice and the one that supplies helpful corrections (see notes); nothing comes to mind immediately, but I expect they'll introduce themselves eventually.

A large part of mine is named Loiosh. (see userpic)

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

names have power; go for the most helpful to you even if perhaps slightly overzealous namings you can ;-)

there are permanent scarcities: spectrum, bandwidth, throughput, heat dissipation, privacy in an age of connection and common sense. Just as Apple threw away the floppy drive before most users were ready and the replaceable battery before the chipmakers were ready and expected them to just keep up, now Steve wants to throw away rich local processing and storage in favour of bandwidth and a regulatory environment that aren't ready yet and have networks and government just keep up. I don't expect all users to appreciate the compromises involved until it bites them (ditto Chromebooks)

[joecoustic.livejournal.com]

Really like how you caught the "stupid bear" comment to yourself this time! It took me many, many years to learn to catch myself with some of the derogatory comments I used to make to myself - even if I justified them as being amusing on some level they can leave a residue....

As to the capsaicin, I started experimenting with it, along with a number of other things, for help in both mood and physical issues and have seen what I think are positive results. Since I love the taste of hot stuff I win either way :).

[mdlbear]

Thanks. I still catch them rarely enough for it to be noteworthy when I do. We'll see how long it takes for me to learn to do it regularly.

[montemplar.livejournal.com]

The cloud has its uses. I use GMail for handling my personal e-mail, which I can access from anywhere (home PC, work PC, laptop, iPad, phone) - but I should definitely start backing up my e-mail to the home PC using IMAP and Windows Live Mail, as a fall-back. I also make use of Steam for most of the games that I play these days in my spare time.

However, I still do nightly backups to an external drive (and I'm thinking of investing in a Drobo or similar, for added reliability) - and I now have my documents, art, photos, etc. backed up online (and offsite) using Carbonite. I've had a few hard-disk crashes over the years, so I'm MUCH more conscientious about backing my stuff up!

I'd be vary wary of having my own data (as distinct from digital purchases) ONLY stored online. That is just asking for accidents to happen.

[mdlbear]

"I'd be vary wary of having my own data (as distinct from digital purchases) ONLY stored online."

Indeed. I'm also very wary about where I keep my secret data -- passwords, social security numbers,... I really need to keep encrypted backups; for now it's just easier to leave it at home and ssh in when I need it. And I do keep offsite backups on an external drive at work.