The Flow of Consciousness

Do it!

Todd Steinberg wrote for LewRockwell.com an editorial entitled Personal Motivation through Austrian Economics. It’s an interesting look at the value of something or some activity.

This paragraph really struck me:

Yesterday, you told me how you would often fall into a rut and it depresses you, which leads you into long stretches of nonproductivity. We all have a monkey on our back in one respect or another. Everyone conquers this differently, but I bet if you take it one day at time, it will be easier if for one day you falter. So in your case, try thinking of each day as a new day filled with a fresh 24 hours that you can use to apply yourself productively. In your mind, by deciding to make each day independent of the other, the non-accomplishments of one day won’t bleed into the next day or the next week and so on.

Give the article a read—it’s one of my favorites on LewRockwell in the past few days.

First off, Yuwie is 100% FREE. Yuwie is like any other “connect with friends” or social networking site. But Yuwie has one major difference: use Yuwie, get paid!

Yuwie pays you to blog, upload pictures, refer friends, chat, hang out, etc.

Click here to join!

You see, MySpace and Facebook and the like get advertising revenue every time there’s a page view. This means that any time anyone looks at your profile, anytime you look at someone else’s profile, or any of the pages that branch from it (photos, videos, etc.), they get a small amount of money.

Yuwie is willing to surrender a good portion of their potential income in order to draw more people to the site. So, when you join, you get 10% of the profits you make for Yuwie just for using it. When you invite someone, you get 10% of whatever they make for Yuwie and they get 10%. It’s exponential, and gets a little smaller after the fourth degree of separation, but if someone 10 levels away from you joins, you get 30% of whatever they make for Yuwie.

I’m giving it a try for a few days. It’s very MySpace-esque: more attractive than MySpace and better functionality, but it’s obviously a newer site.

So, click here to join!

Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot

I liked it more for the cinematography than the story. I agree with one of the previous comments—there’s not much character development nor explanation. However, considering the nature of the movie—footage found during the aftermath—I don’t think there’s much need for either. It begs a sequel or prequel explaining things, but I don’t know if such a thing would be appropriate. The special effects are fantastic, more because of how well they fit into the cinematography than how cool they look.

The merit of the movie is in the style, not the story, and for this I think critics will love it but the public will dislike it. Motion sickness is going to be a factor, too. I don’t get it, fortunately, but the friend who accompanied me yakked in the bathroom during and couldn’t watch the rest (he listened, though).

It’s also really short. It’s tops an hour and 20 minutes—approximately the length of single DV camera tape.

Eschew any rumors—it has nothing to do with the Slusho site or Jewish eschatology.

WANT.

I could probably afford the cheaper model now or during the summer, but I want the 64 GB SSD. My configuration puts it at about $3,400.

This begs the question: MacBook Air or Lenovo IdeaPad F11?

Eric Bangeman of Ars Technica has a great article on the ethics of open WiFi. He explores the viewpoint of those who believe that it’s stealing and compares it with implicit permission given by the owner to use the network.

I believe the use of an open network is legal, provided that, upon connection, the network gives the connecting computer connection information (such as an IP address via DHCP). This is implied permission. If the network uses static IP addresses or MAC filtering or the like, it’s easy enough to get online, but one must take action in order to connect.

I also believe that use of an open network is risky. If I’m using an open network, I don’t know what the network administrator has set up to monitor, capture, or log everything I’m doing. The savior here is secure protocols, such as HTTPS, IMAPS, and SMTPS. Even better, though, is dynamic SOCKS forwarding through SSH, but that takes a little more technical know-how than simply not trusting passwords to unencrypted connections.

It’s like peeing in a public place: one is free to do so, but anyone can see what you’re doing and there might be people who object.

By the start of the new year, I will have eight gigabytes of RAM.

That is all.

<3 ubuntu-amd64 / win64

Last year at around this time, Amazon.com did a program where it sold a small quantity of some very expensive item at a very, very low price. This year, it’s going the program again.

• 1,000 Nintendo Wii Game Systems (see prices on Customers Vote page)
• 500 Panasonic 7.5MP Digital SLR Cameras, $499 (*normally $1,149.95)
• 1,000 Razor E100 Electric Scooters for $29 (*normally $89.99)
• 500 TiVo HD Digital Video Recorders, $89 (*normally $253.48)
• 500 Magellan Maestro 3140 Portable Auto GPS Systems, $99 (*normally $247.00)
• 200 Samsung 46” 1080p LCD HDTVs, $719 (*normally $1,899.98)

Go check out Amazon Customers Vote!

Additionally, Amazon’s posted its Black Friday deals, or will shortly.

Why do manufacturers have crappy download speeds for firmware, drivers, and utilities on their web sites? QNAP and Synology, two companies whose products I’ve reviewed lately, have downright abysmal speeds (both are approximately 10 kB/s) and limit number of connections from a single IP to two.

I remember that Realtek used to be like this, too, but I’ve not used a Realtek device in a while. However, my Foxconn motherboard has a Realtek HD audio chipset on it, and my shiny, new wireless card has a Realtek chipset. I don’t recall experiencing the slowness on Realtek’s servers when I got those drivers.

How can companies expect to serve users efficiently and deliver the customer service expected from a technology-related company if it takes four hours to download a 53 MB firmware file and a 20 MB utility?

For $20 per month, these companies could set up a VPS in the states (maybe with my host, colo4jax) on a 10 MB connection with nothing running but Apache or lighttpd to serve up files. Hell, put a decent FTPd on there instead and updates would be effortless. For another $20, they could have two of them and even torrent the updates with web seeds for ensured availability!

It’s very difficult to respect technology companies that don’t go the extra mile to speed up things like this.