Done yesterday (20091016)

( raw notes )

Any day that ends with pon-pon chicken, yu-shiang eggplant, szechuan beef, dry-braised green beans, and an hour-long drive to noplace in particular with my lovely Cat has to be a good one, right? It was.

It also included a walk, with a little meditation and the koi emerging mysteriously out of the murky depths of the pond like gilded and silvered submarines.

And I got a new toy at work -- the next generation of the eWriter device we've been working on. The hardware is a bit ramshackle, and the software is still rather flaky, but Oh! it's sweet. (I can only say that much because a paper's been presented.) My demo, on the older hardware that went to Japan with $grandboss last week, will be going to New Orleans with $boss next week.

On the other hand (literally), washing dishes is not kind to my right shoulder: I tend to hold pots in my right hand and sponge them with my left. Oh. Right.

On the gripping hand, I finally talked myself into buying a new 1.5TB hard drive for the file server, instead of using the three existing .5GB drives in a RAID. Simpler, and much lower power. Between California's outrageous power rates and my current tax bracket, it has about a one-year payback.

And here's a fascinating wikipedia article on "disaffectation", which may be the best description yet of what "my main problem" is.

So, yeah. Good day.

Link Sausage

Lots of tasty link sausage this morning:

For the cloud skeptics and former Sidekick (l)users, a good opinion piece:

Some argued with me last night that cloud computing is perfectly safe, it's the company deploying that you need to look to. OK. I accept that. Only thing is that Danger's been doing this pretty well since 2002 and at no point did I ever see a single warning from anyone that dealing with T-Mobile, Danger or Microsoft might be a bad idea when it comes to personal data solely living in the cloud.

My real question is how much is your data worth? Not the cost of the data streams you pay each month, but how much value does your data have to you personally? Recently, when I visited a client, I was asked to check my laptop at the door and I was asked how much my computer was worth. The guard was somewhat surprised at my stated value of my system. "Is this computer really worth a two million dollars?" he asked. "No," I replied. However, the information on it is worth that and perhaps more to me. Could you re-create every document or email you've ever written? Re-acquire every song in your collection or re-take every photograph in your catalog. Perhaps you could, but even if so, at what cost and what effort?

For the furries reading this, a robotic tail. Here's another article.

For the filk videographers, the Zoom H2 is now available almost everywhere for $250. Must... not... click... buy... button...

For those of you who are worried that the publishing industry may go the way of the music industry, here's more to worry about. Probably 99% of my reading is on the web these days, so, yeah.

... And here's an article on file-sharing sites teaming up to promite indie films.

Signal boost: Filk_Friendly

My friend pocketnaomi had a dream of a friendly society (read mutual-aid society, co-op, mutual benefit society) -- households banding together to help one another out in the current unfriendly times.

Here's her original post, where she says:

I want to see what we can do with this. The filk community is the group I know, the people who already have a predisposition to help each other when someone truly needs it, to regard themselves as family, and to see with a bit longer an eye than most of modern economics. It also covers a wide cross-section of economic, geographical, and occupational ground.

The resulting community here on LJ is called filk_friendly. See you there, maybe?