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http://salsbury.stumbleupon.com/review/13403410/

Sat, 13 Oct 2007 00:29:46 -0700

Found this little tidbit down at the bottom of the page on my last review of getPlus:

"getPlus� enables you to easily and fully automatically provide your customers with your products, regardless of Internet security restrictions."

Lovely.

http://salsbury.stumbleupon.com/review/13264442/

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 21:39:47 -0700

(Continued from my previous blog post - Read that before this.)

When the drug-suppliers stop supplying, and then the self-proclaimed drug-warriors go in, upset everything, and drug production zooms to all-new highs (pardon the pun), well...that's just crazy-backwards, right? So it must be some kind of parallel-universe where everything is the opposite of what it seems...right? Like when Superman battles Bizzaro, (the one with the backwards "S" on his chest) in the comics. Or maybe more like the "Toys-backwards-'R'-Us" company, selling toys for toddlers & kids, supposedly to help them grow up all smart and such, but actually having reely stoopid spellung an' gramir on their stores and commercials and...well...on everything, really. It's their corporate identity, isn't it? Their freaking letterhead probably has a backwards-'R' on it.

I dunno. Maybe there's just no really rational explanation for it, at all. And I find that even more disturbing, honestly.

Or maybe, just maybe, things really are as good as they tell us repeatedly on the TeeVee. Maybe if we just keep clicking our heels and repeating "There's no place like home" over and over and over, it will all work out. Maybe.

Or maybe not. But it certainly is interesting to think about as we while away the time trying to make heads-or-tails of all the craziness going on around the world, isn't it? :-)

Reminds me of that supposed old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." We've certainly got that, and then some!

And while we muse about the topsy-turvy nature of things, one has to wonder about the seemingly endless exodus of people from the current Administration. Between the scandals, the "dismissals", the scandals, the resignations, the scandals, the "voluntary departures", the scandals, the court cases, the illegal wiretapping, the scandals, the 2006 election upheaval and all the scandals, it must be getting kinda lonely over there in D.C. -- (Metaphors about rats leaving ships seem quite apropos.)

Anyway, I've already had the text editor eat the end of this essay once (...or was that the censors in Domestic Surveillance? Fnord.) - So you're getting a rewrite, and it's different, of course.

Keep paying attention out there, as none of this seems to show any signs of slowing down any time soon. It certainly is "interesting"... :-)

http://salsbury.stumbleupon.com/review/12635356/

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 20:24:33 -0700

Here's the bit from the v.2.0 FAQ that got me started on the website linked just below.

Man, that's still some great Engrish...whatever it says...

From the "SILKYPIX� Developer Studio 2.0 SE Software Manual", which came with my digital camera:

"I want to adjust a JPEG file and a TIFF file.

In this software, the target data is RAW data only. Therefore, regarding other format files, you are not able to not only adjust and develop, but also display them."

WTF?!?

http://salsbury.stumbleupon.com/review/11872623/

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:16:24 -0700

An interesting follow-on to the previous post. Despite the quality-control issues, this is a great example of why it was a GOOD thing to bring China into the WTO. Lots of people thought it was a mistake, given their human-rights record & such, but honestly, what better way to get a country to toe-the-line and improve its standards than to engage in trade with it, and then be able to use that as leverage when issues like this arise?

They (China) have certainly shown that they won't listen to people just complaining/protesting, but they seem to listen to their trading partners.

http://salsbury.stumbleupon.com/review/5847161/

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 23:37:34 -0700

I know that some people criticize space research and NASA budgets as a waste of time/money. But I was thinking about it this afternoon, and this came bubbling up:

"Why not go back to the Moon, and onward to Mars, and beyond? In the long run, it will certainly be more beneficial than, say, waging war on a small Third World country.

...Cheaper, too."

Kinda hard to argue with that logic, so I figured I'd post it and get the idea out there. :-)

http://salsbury.stumbleupon.com/review/3951210/

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 16:47:09 -0700

I wanted to post a few more thoughts about the "ox heart" page a few stumbles ago. (Go read that, if you haven't already.)

The reasons it struck me as odd were several:

-Recently my girlfriend and I were cracking jokes about how funny mis-targeted advertising seems when you get search results that are obviously from a template, and they've just stuck your phrase in there, to make it seem "personalized". Those sorts of marketing are especially egregious, and we always wonder just who they are aiming for with that, because it's so lame. And here I got a whole page of them! All about ox heart! :-)

-Another reason it struck me, which I didn't have space to elaborate on before, was that room full of robots that I mentioned. It typifies something that I've been pondering over the last 6-12 months, about the breakdown of mutual respect in our culture, brought on by raw free-market capitalism. Now, I'm a big fan of capitalism, but I think this may represent a fundamental flaw in the theory:

It seems that people have accepted the notion that they, or others, have the right to interrupt you, no matter what you're doing, and try to sell you their product, whether you want it or not. And while no one likes being called by a telemarketer while sitting down to eat dinner with their family, it seems that most people have accepted this behavior as "necessary" for some reason, and assume that advertising is mandatory, or the Internet will collapse (or something.) This constant, scattershot, random "pushing" by what Terence McKenna refers to as the "Product Peddlers", in the hope that you'll buy their stuff or service over someone else's, is what leads to things like the "ox heart event horizon" like we see below, where there was NO useful information given at all. Just a chance for the one web page to give a plug to 20 of its sponsor-advertisers, no matter how inane the linkage.

I think that this notion that the Product Peddlers somehow have a "right" to hawk their crap at you and distract you incessantly is one of the major contributing factors to all the spam, logos, jingles, slogans, pop-ups, ad-ware, viruses, spyware, billboards and other things that we're soaking in up to our necks. It illustrates the basic lack of mutual respect in society nowadays, and the attitude of "I'm gonna do what I want to try to make a sale/get ahead, even if it means being rude, because if I don't, someone else will, anyway."

That just seems lame. Whatever happened to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you?"

-In the case of the ox heart "room full of robots", there weren't any humans, just these software bots left in place to pester everyone who came through the door, which is even more lame, and shows that the advertisers really have no interest whatsoever in representing themselves accurately, or in a good light. (Although I must admit, I just checked Ebay, and they did turn up 10 matches for "ox heart"! I'll let you go check for yourself to see what they came up with. I figure if a whole bunch of people start tagging & searching for ox heart, maybe it will confuse them all. :-) )

-And finally, it most reminded me of the Eighth Episode of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Radio Series, where Zaphod and Roosta use a Body Debit (teleport) card to get out of a jam, only to find themselves teleported into a discotheque full of robots, with no actual humans there at all.

The are immediately set upon by dozens of robots, propositioning them and insisting that "You must have a good time!", and spraying them with the smell of hot sweat and adrenaline from nozzles recessed in the walls.

(Sound vaguely familiar?)

-And so, in the end, I came away mostly humored, rather than traumatized, and I gave it a "sad" and "pathetic" tags, because that's how it struck me. (And if a room full of robots isn't "cyberculture", then I hope someone can clarify what is!)

I imagine them sitting around, playing cards, smoking cigarettes...possibly for years...while patiently waiting for someone to come in looking for ox heart or something similar. Then...WHAM!...Instantly, they're all clamoring for your attention, in "competition" with their card-playing partners and cigarette-smoking buddies, until you manage to escape the room (hopefully intact!), and then they sigh, and go back to their games and waiting. :-)

And I realized that, despite some parts of the 'net seeming "crowded" or "mainstream", if I can wander off by accident and find random weird shit like rooms full of bots wanting to sell me ox heart, then the 'net isn't really all that crowded, and still has lots of fun mysteries to discover. :-)

...now if I can just get that smell of adrenaline out of my clothes... ;^)