Saturday, 10 September 2011 by Marcus Aquinas.

With due apologies to the staff at “The Economist” for swiping their title.

Several things converged and set me to thinking. My daughter tweeted that she refused to watch television tomorrow as there was a vast difference between remembering the past and wallowing in it (brings a tear to my eye – my little girl done grown up). Two of my favorite magazines (“Foreign Affairs” and “The Economist”) and undoubtedly every other English language periodical dedicated substantial page space to the remembrance and analysis of September 11, 2001 and its effects, as did various  programs on PBS and NPR. But a surprisingly non-9-11 event kind of brought it all home. A fellow gaming enthusiast in the UK asked if he could use content from my Elder Scrolls guides in a wiki project. For the record, my response was, as I have always maintained, “of course – just be sure to attribute me”.

The significance of the latter event required an almost complete reread of my earlier work, mostly checking its accuracy, but with a surprise. I’m pleased to report that 15 years later, a few minor inaccuracies aside,  the work remains dead-on without access to the development teams. What caught my eye, though, was the vast difference in the “voice”, if you will, of the works. Pre-9-11 (my last review/revision was in 2000), my writing was very upbeat, light, conversational, and accessible. Post, though, is much darker, more cynical, much more snide and not nearly as enjoyable to read. I doubt very much that 9-11 had much to do with that change in voice. After all, what relation could a terrorist attack have on a fantasy RPG game guide? The short answer would have to be “not much”. Games is games and real life is real life “and ne’er the twain shall meet” as the saying goes.

So what could possibly have caused such a shift? Several things, and I believe they’re all tied back to the events of 9-11 either directly or indirectly. Probably the most obvious (to me, anyway) was the change in attitude of our government. While always a subject of various jibes and satires, the U.S. government has always been (or appeared to be) accessible to the people who elected them. Post-9-11, though, the U.S. government seems to live in fear of everyone. A couple pieces of anecdotal evidence should suffice, although I caution that anecdotal evidence does not prove existence; it merely points to the possibility of existence.

My wife is an immigrant. She has been a U.S. citizen for a while now, but in order to get to that point, we had substantial dealings with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, under the Homeland Security Administration). At one of our last visits to the nearest INS office, I noticed signs prominently posted around the waiting room to the effect of “no cameras or other electronic recording devices permitted”. One might immediately jump to the conclusion that something shady might be happening where no record should exist, but I suspect that the truth of the matter is that they did not want anyone to have the layout of the building. Why? Because they are afraid that the people coming through the door might want to harm them.

While this may or may not be the case, the fact that government workers (or at least their bosses)apparently live in fear of their constituency gives serious pause for consideration of the ramifications of that sentiment. This is something that I would not have been surprised to see in the USSR, the PRC or especially the DPRK (North Korea) where the government really does see the people as something resembling an enemy or at least someone of which to be extremely wary. But in the USA? Something is seriously wrong.

And why “Homeland Security”? Why not something more accurately descriptive? How about “Central Search Authority” or perhaps the “Keeping an Eye on Suspicious Characters Administration”? KAESCA has a nice ring to it in a Kafka-esque kind of way, doesn’t it? Maybe “National Security Administration”? Wait, I think we already have that. Can’t have duplication. As soon as President Bush said it (yes, I watched the speech), shivers and ideas of “1984” hit me. The name had to have been chosen for public impact. I won’t swear to focus group testing, but it wouldn’t surprise me, and I doubt that the majority of adult Americans have even read “1984”, but “scary” came awfully close. Yes, I am suspicious of anyone who says, “I am from the government and I am here to help you.”

And let’s nor forget the added security at our airports, train stations, bus terminals, courthouses, city halls and the like. Since 9-11, I have used airlines for long-distance travel a couple of times because it was absolutely necessary. The rest of the time I drive because I detest the extremes to which airport security has gone. I’ve often wondered how many terrorists have been foiled because of these “security” measures. I put security in quotes because I’m not sure wither it’s security for us or security for them. I go to the courthouse only when summoned for jury duty or for some other business where I cannot avoid it because I horribly resent the “guilty until proven innocent” attitude.

While there are many conspiracy buffs out there who might attribute 9-11 to some massive government plot, I’m not among them. But I do see 9-11 as the justification for a grab for more power at the sacrifice of the people’s civil liberties. It is axiomatic in the IT world that security always comes at the cost of accessibility. As technologies have improved, accessibility becomes easier, but it’s still a trade-off; more of one will almost always mean less of the other. We Americans tend to view security a bit differently than the rest of the world. They whip it out for a while and then put it away; we tend to institutionalize it.

On a separate tack, there are innumerable examples of how domestic politics have changed. Some of it is attributable to 9-11, but I suspect that most of it is attributable to the heightened sense of power and authority which the federal government has assumed in the aftermath. Consider Reps. Paul Ryan, Ben Quayle, Chip Cravaack, and probably others that I overlooked who have decided that their constituents must pay to be able to ask them questions. Since when has this been the case in the USA? I have always been under the impression that elected representatives have been responsible to their constituencies, period. Not “responsive as long as you pay the cover charge.” This attitude should be the subject of an entirely separate rant, so I’ll cut it off quickly. And don’t even get me started on “No Child Left Behind,” one of the major post-9-11 domestic policies.

The past 10 years have seen a widening gulf between Democrats and Republicans. I DO NOT attribute this to 9-11 except insofar as each party seems to have competed to see who could wrap themselves in the flag more tightly than the other. I believe the Democrats came to their senses a bit earlier than the Republicans (some of whom still seem to be smothering themselves in it), but they’re both equally guilty.

For those who can remember Ken Burns’ remarkable documentary on the Civil War, the late Shelby Foote made what I think was a very astute observation in the first episode. I wish I could quote verbatim, but I can’t and will have to settle for the gist of it. We Americans see ourselves as being a very uncompromising people when, in fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. Our entire system of government and way of life is built on compromise. And in this, especially in the last ten to twenty years, we have failed miserably.

To perhaps overly simplify G.W.F. Hegel, two opposites clash, producing something which contains some of each, but is uniquely different than either (thesis + antithesis = synthesis). Our judicial system works on a similar system – each side presents its version of the truth while the actual truth lies somewhere in between and it is the job of the judge/jury to find that middle. Both Democrats and Republicans are guilty of polarizing and failing to recognize that the vast majority of Americans are not with either of them. How much has this delusion cost us?

Time was, not so long past, that the rest of the world viewed Americans as the big children on the international playground. Naïve, boisterous, immature, optimistic, quick to anger, quicker to forgive and always surprised that everyone else didn’t see the world through the same rose-colored glasses that we did. 9-11 changed all of that. As a nation, I think we’re more jaded than we were 10 years ago. More cynical. More willing to accept “the end justifies the means” as an instrument of policy. I do not see this as a good thing and only see continued Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt as a result. My experience has shown that FUD never works as an effective instrument of policy, but works exceptionally well at gaining and maintaining power.

Perhaps I do not see as much as I think I do; perhaps I see too little. Only time will tell, but they’re my colored glasses, rose or otherwise. To steal a line from Joe Straczynski, “The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip by, moment by moment, in that vast, terrible in-between.” While I am not overly fond of what we have become over the past 10 years, I am even more afraid of what we could become if we do not stop buying the bullshit.

Posted in Politics, Musings and Thoughts, Philosophy, Whatever | No Comments »

Sunday, 4 September 2011 by Marcus Aquinas.

For some odd reason I had to go digging through a drawer that is not one of my usual stash sites. In the process I discovered tons of old receipts, business cards, lapel pins, string, shoelaces and the other assorted detritus that we manage to unintentionally collect. At the time, hanging onto it seemed like a good idea, but after the space of more than a decade in some cases, they just didn’t seem so important anymore. R.I.P. in the local landfill.

This set me to thinking about how we often do the same thing to ourselves. Little bits and pieces of daily life that we treasure or nurse but, when viewed through the lens of time, seem trivial and petty. Perhaps we should make a point of occasionally rummaging through all of those little mental drawers in which we stash such things and send them to our own mental landfills.

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Saturday, 27 August 2011 by Marcus Aquinas.

The new school year is in session and promises to be interesting (as in, “may you live in interesting times”). My school participates in the national free and reduced-price lunch and breakfast programs administered by the USDA.

In simple terms, the USDA will reimburse the school up to a certain amount per student who qualifies for the program. Since the vast majority of our students qualify, our whole district receives the maximum reimbursement from the USDA. If memory works as a guide, that comes out to about $2 per student for breakfast and about $3 per student for lunch, or about $5 per student per day. In order to reduce staffing costs in the cafeteria, breakfast is delivered and served in the classroom, but lunch is served cafeteria style in the cafeteria.

I had forgotten something important in my car the other morning, so I took advantage of an assembly to pop out and retrieve it. This just happened to be right after we finished clearing away the breakfast stuff and I was shocked at what was going into the dumpsters. Hundreds of dollars of unopened/unused food items just headed for the local landfill.

This was done for food safety reasons, as far as I can tell. Not being anything even remotely resembling a certified nutritionist, chef or food service manager, my take on this is decidedly uninformed, so keep that in mind. If I understand correctly, those little 8-oz. milk cartons have to be kept at or below a certain temperature until they are served. Once they are pulled out of the refrigerator, of course, they begin to warm up to whatever the ambient temperature is (at this time of year, that would be “hot”, air conditioning notwithstanding). If they cross that temperature threshold, they must be thrown out. I suspect that the same is true of fresh fruit and most especially true for hot food such as pancakes, sausage and the rest. No one wants recycled breakfast burritos, I’m sure.

The USDA requirement is that in order to qualify for reimbursement under the program, the meal must be served to the student. My students are required to take one of each item. If they don’t want the item after it has been given to them, they are welcome to give it to another student and I’ll snag the occasional uneaten apple or something before it hits the trashcan. But unwanted items typically just go into the trash and from there to the local landfill. So take that $2 (for breakfast), multiply it by several hundred students, times 180 school days and we’re talking close to $100,000 per year going to the landfill. And that’s just from my school. According to the USDA, 11.1 million students were being served in this program in the 2009-2010 school year, at a cost of $2.9 billion. It’s undoubted near or higher than that number for this school year. You can roughly triple those numbers for the school lunch program.

I am not faulting the USDA for this waste. Whether the program is necessary on this scale is probably the subject of much debate and I don’t have enough information to have an informed opinion one way or the other. For the time being, I’ll simply accept that it is necessary and proceed from there.

I am not faulting the school or the district. They are doing precisely what is required by the USDA and I’m relatively sure that our cafeteria could not operate without the program. Lizards, rattlesnakes, tumbleweeds and cacti aren’t real good about paying their property taxes, so local revenue sources are pretty slim and we’ll take any help we can get to defray any expense we can.

I am not even faulting the students. If they don’t want something, it’s not my place to shove it down their throats. If childhood obesity is the problem that everyone claims it is, then forcing a child to take in calories that they don’t want seems counter-productive.

But there is something out of kilter when every piece of the government is screaming about not having enough money to <insert function here> and we’re literally sending billions per year to the landfill. Some of it is inevitable. There honestly isn’t much else you can do with half of a burrito or a third of a salad. But we might start with a bit of common sense. Anyone in your household suffered from food poisoning due to an apple or banana being at room temperature for a couple of days or the milk warming a little on its way home from the grocery store? And while you’re thinking about that, consider what else your local school could do with the money that they’re having to send to the dump.

Posted in Education, Carthago delenda est, Whatever | No Comments »

Tuesday, 16 August 2011 by Marcus Aquinas.

Note: I began this posting at the time that Gibbs wrote his column in November 2010, but it got buried in an out-of-the-way “Drafts” folder and did not see the light of day until now. The question is still relevant, so here it is, for what it’s worth. The link was still good, though. Glad to see that someone is better than me about keeping track of these things.

In this week’s “Backspin” column at “Network World,” Mark Gibbs tackled some very good questions regarding the relationship between being good citizens in the real world and being good citizens in the virtual world. I think his assessment comes very close to the central problem: “…the issue is about people and not technology.”

Someone wiser than me once observed that if you want to see a person’s true character, watch what they do when they don’t think anyone is watching. In the case of online behavior, perhaps that could be tweaked to something along the lines of “watch what they do when they think they’re anonymous or think that something cannot be traced back to them”.

In a person-to-person engagement, there can be immediate (and possibly painful) repercussions to anything that you say or do. In an online engagement, however, you’re dealing with people who are somewhat removed from the conversation or action and perhaps reveal more of their true selves than they would in a person-to-person encounter. I’m immediately reminded of Billy Joel’s “The Stranger” as raising relevant points. (digressive question: are there really online actions or is it all just different forms of conversation?) I’m sure that people can come up with a variety of reasons for this behavior and there are undoubtedly dissertations galore addressing or touching the topic. But I think it boils down to many people, especially among the younger generation, who frankly have no idea of how to carry on a meaningful dialog with someone who does not share their viewpoint.

Perhaps I am influenced by some of that Southern gentility in my view of the issue. We tend to use a lot of euphemistic expressions to convey meaning, but which aren’t overtly offensive. One of my favorites is “bless his heart”, which pretty much translates to “he’s dumber’n dirt, so make allowances”. I don’t see much of that in online conversation. Instead, people pretty much say what they’re thinking (or sometimes not thinking) because the recipient is either not immediately present or perhaps they figure that if it’s really offensive a moderator will quash it first. I note that on the discussion boards where I participate, these folks are among the loudest screamers when something does get quashed, so maybe that observation is off-target.

At any rate, I might advise that a good approach could be to treat each online conversation or action as if it were person-to-person. While that won’t fix all of these problems (frankly, there are a lot of people out there who exhibit no manners, even face-to-face), it should fix most of them.

To be honest, I do hide behind my “Marcus Aquinas” handle, but not for anonymity reasons. It’s a nickname given by a dear friend many moons back, I believe it captures my approach to questions, and it does not directly reflect back on my family or employer. On the other hand, I’m not prone to saying things online that I wouldn’t say to someone’s face. Or in the words of Sheriff Bufford T. Justice, “…you can think about it…but don’t do it.”

Posted in tech, External, Whatever | No Comments »

Monday, 15 August 2011 by Marcus Aquinas.

I am now three days into restoring my computer after a hard drive failure. The drive failure itself, while aggravating, is just one of those things that happen from time to time. The restoration process, however, is an abysmal FAIL from your end. Allow me to detail the depth of your failure.

I am running a Vista installation on a quad-core AMD processor with 6GB of RAM and dual nVidia 9800GTs in SLI. The rest of my hardware is pretty standard stuff. After partitioning and formatting the new hard drive, I did a clean install of Vista. The 6GB of RAM was overkill since Vista will only support 4GB in 32-bit mode, but the RAM was on sale and came in a six gig pack that was significantly cheaper than two 2GB sticks. Go figure, but that’s not your problem. In the original installation, all six gigs were recognized by the system BIOS, but Vista (as expected) ignored the extra two gigs and all was well with the world. After installing Vista, I found that it was only recognizing 2.5GB of the RAM, which was a puzzlement, but turned out to be caused by a stick being loosened while I was installing the new hard drive. Reseating solved the problem, Vista reported that it had six gigs again and that was the end of it.

Vista installed just as it did originally: very quickly and painlessly. On getting to my desktop I found, as expected, that I needed to install drivers for my hardware, so I broke out my driver CDs and went to work.  Interestingly enough, the Vista DVD came with a more up-to-date audio driver than the one that came with my motherboard, but it was the video driver that worried me since I had tossed the CD that came with the cards. nVidia updates its WHQL drivers several times per year, so the drivers on the CD were outdated by the time I bought the cards, anyway. Windows Update offered me an only slightly out-of-date driver for the cards, but I declined in favor of the latest WHQL-certified package from nVidia.

After installing it, I was immediately met by the blue-screen-of-death on rebooting. Major bummer. "Aha!", I thought, "Perhaps the driver package needs one of the Service Packs." This would be a reasonable conclusion considering the way that you force updates, so off to Microsoft.com I went, only to find that Service Pack 2 requires Service Pack 1 before it could be installed. I had somehow developed the impression that you had abandoned that tactic back in the XP days and that new Service Packs would include the previous Service Packs. Apparently not so. Your recommendation was to NOT download the service pack from the download center, but to use Windows Update to get it. So off to Windows Update I went, only to see that Service Pack 1 was nowhere on the update list. There were about 100 other updates (including the slightly-out-of-date graphics driver), but no SP1. Most puzzling.

"OK," thought I,  "let’s see what the good folks at Redmond have on tap for me". If memory serves, SP1 was released back in early 2008, so I should be seeing updates from before that. I don’t know why since they should be included in SP1, but no. I’m seeing updates from 2008, 2009, 2010, and even from 2011. It would seem to me that installing an earlier update (SP1) over later updates is a quick ticket to system problems, but I will trust that you guys know what you’re doing (if you detect a note of heavy sarcasm, you’re right). So I install the 80 or so updates that you offer up (including the graphics driver), reboot, and find the graphics control center crashes and burns at logon. The driver seems to at least partially work since I was no longer at 640×480 resolution, but there was no way to make changes to resolution, color depth or any of the rest because the control panel wouldn’t run.

I continued by installing a few more updates, reboot, find a few more updates, install them, reboot… Get the picture? I don’t know how many hours I spent dealing with all of that piddly stuff, but it was somewhere around several hours and well over 100 updates before I even glimpsed Service Pack 1 in the update list and the whole time the graphics controls are crashing and burning as soon as I log on. Once SP1 showed up, I felt like I was almost home free.

"Woo-hoo!", say I. "Finally!", as if I had reached the end of a level in some game and won the boss fight. So I install SP1, which takes close to the advertised hour to install. I’m thinking that I should now be able to see SP2 in the update list. Not so. 79 other updates, including Internet Explorer 8. So another couple of hours to get those installed and then a few more minor ones before, finally, SP2 shows up in the list. All this while, the only applications that I have are my antivirus (because I don’t trust anything to be clean, including you); Adobe Flash/Reader because they’re necessary to get my video driver from nVidia and to see the documentation on my hardware; and Google Chrome because IE7 is a POS that I refuse to use (but you made me update it — several times), IE8 is somewhat better, but won’t install until SP1 is in place, and let’s not even talk about IE9. And all the while that this is going on, I can’t even play a decent game of Solitaire or FreeCell while I wait thanks to the graphics issue.

At long last, SP2 shows up on the update list. It only takes about 15-20 minutes to get through the first part of the installation, but otherwise takes pretty close to the advertised hour. After SP2 is installed, guess what? More updates. I am now into my second day of trying to recover from a crashed hard drive and am only now within sight of being able to start reinstalling my applications. One refreshing note, though, is that the driver control panel has stopped crashing. My best guess is that it requires Service Pack 2 before it will work, yet you offer up the driver package almost 200 updates earlier than you offer up the service pack that it apparently requires in order to function. Which Einstein in your development team came up with that bright idea?

After two days of messing with system and driver updates, I’m at the point where I can start restoring the rest of my stuff. I decided that doing a full system restore from my backup drive is probably not the way to go. It’s not I had problems with that configuration (I really didn’t), but restoring functional applications means that I need to fully restore the old registry and all of the assorted junk that goes with that. No. The better course seems to be to manually reinstall applications and I’ll start with my Office installation.

Oops! No can do. My Office 2007 is an upgrade version, which means I need to hunt through all of my junk to find my previous version of Office. My first choice, and the one readily to hand, is my Student-Teacher version of Office 2003. Buzzzzz! Not going to work; it’s not upgradable. What do we have for our loser as a consolation prize? More digging to find the Office XP Professional CD. I finally find it and install it so that I can now run the upgrade to 2007. Office 2007 installs nicely (minus Outlook – long experience showed way too many problems making it play nicely with any non-Exchange email provider), but it seems that there are 20-odd updates to it. Not an unexpected condition. And then there are about 30 more after the first batch. Is this starting to sound familiar?

But what about the system backup that I have? After getting burned by a failed drive on my laptop a few years’ back, I’ve been pretty religious about backing up. To be fair, Vista makes backing up a very painless affair as long as you don’t look too closely at what it asks you to do. Just tell it when you want to backup and where to put the backup files and it will take care of the rest. The only problem is that you don’t tell the user that all he’s getting is an incremental backup. It now appears that I have a year’s worth of backups to restore in order to recover my system.

The old NTBackup was much more informative on what the user gets. Granted, it had a much clunkier user interface. But it asked, pretty much right off the bat, whether I wanted a full, differential or incremental backup. Under your “set it and forget it” mentality, unless you specifically choose a full backup, all you get are incrementals.

Since I have brand spanking new hard drives (going to multiple physical drives seemed a prudent course), I took advantage of them in order to work around your really clunky Restore functionality. I’ll restore everything to an empty partition that’s big enough to hold it all. Now it’s just a matter of sitting back for God-only-knows how many hours while I piece all of those incremental backups back together again. Once that’s done, I’ll move my data files over to where they need to be and then wipe that partition. Not the most elegant way of getting the job done, but it’s about the only workable option you’ve left me. Thanks, Microsoft. You haven’t done much listening to users over the past 30 years, so I doubt you’ll start now. I’m starting to think that Penguins might have a better idea.

[EDIT - 8/16]: As an addendum to my comments about Microsoft’s backup, I have to admit to discovering that a chunk of the problem is mine. When I set up the backup routine, I did not ask it to do a full system backup. Because my major applications and OS are on optical media, it turns out that I had opted to backup only my data directories and some directories of downloaded software. For the vast majority of those applications, I made good backups of the installation files. There are quite a few games where it’s an open question as to whether I have the installation files in the backup set or will need to download them again, but I must admit that Vista’s backup routine did exactly what I told it to do. The question is whether I told it to do the right thing or not. We’ll see.

[EDIT 8/17]: As an addendum to the addendum (maybe I should have just added another post), all is not well with the restore. It turns out that Vista’s native “Backup and Restore” will not backup executable files. So I’ve got everything except the stuff that actually does something. For all but two of my normal applications, it’s not that big of a deal since I have the installation media handy. For most of my games and such, though, it’s going to take weeks to download and reinstall everything. As I commented to my daughter, “when Vista blows, it blows at Category 5”. Thankfully my ISP doesn’t charge by how much bandwidth I use. Penguins are looking awfully good at this point.

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