Rusty’s Blog

At some level the concept of an entertainment center comes up for the home. In the past this might have consisted of a TV and stereo system, or even one or the other. Add a VCR, and now you can watch your favorite TV show even if you are going to be working late. Or well so long as you remember to set up the recording. And there was no power glitch that sets the clock to 12:00 blinking, and wipes out all the recording schedules.

A few years later people started getting a game station of some sort. Maybe a Genesis, or a NES. Since we considered that to be entertainment for the kids, that got relegated to the TV in the kids play room.

For Mom and Dad a few years later the DVD player came along, and you ran into your first major conundrum. The TV had one or possibly two speakers which worked well for watching the news, or sitcoms, but if you wanted to get a bit of that theater experience, you are going to need a bit more than the TV speakers. This is probably the first time people even considered using there stereo in conjunction with their TV. Up till then the Tuner on the stereo selected whether you were listening to the radio, a tape, or the record player. You may have had a CD player in th mix as well, but that was about it. Also most of our stereos were just that Stereo. If you wanted the Movie experience you had to add a few more speakers. First up are the ’surround’ back speakers. You do want to get that helicopter audio coming in from behind you right? The early surround sound systems actually fed the same signal to the left rear and right rear speakers.

For most people the next decision was a sub woofer. Get the really low sounds that were pretty non-directional. Sounds below something like 200 hz are so low that your ears are not far enough to provide the needed spatial information. Put that wherever is convenient. That takes the 2 channel stereo system up to 4.1. In many cases people would still run the speaker in their TV. It gave a great reference for voices and ‘center’ of attention activities. As a result many people who decided to migrate to a ‘large’ screen ran into a problem with the missing ‘center’ information. So add another channel for ‘center’ and we get the 5.1 that most people end up with. Today most ’stereo’ receivers support a 7.1 arrangement, and all 8 speakers are fed with different audio.

All that to support the ‘theater’ sound of movies. ‘Audiophiles’ all tend to go for the 2 chanel systems. What do you need more than that for to listen to the most important variety of entertainment around, music? I think in part that’s why dvd ’super’ audio has not taken off. Along with the fact that the media tends to be even more expensive.

In any case we’ve gotten to the point that along with the TV, VCR and DVD, we need an audio system in the mix. Where you go from here varies for different people. Some people went with the PVR. The Personal Video Recorder (PVR) takes the idea of a VCR, and gets rid of the tapes. When one of my uncle’s passed away we ended up having to figure out what to do with something like 500 VHS video tapes. Only a few of these were pre-recorded, most were recordings off the air, or from cable. That worked for him. By that time I had almost completely eliminated video tape from my own entertainment systems. I picked up my first Tivo as a DirecTivo.

Ah, I see I missed a device. The ‘Cable Box.’ Well to be honest, we had cable boxes because we were paying the cable companies to control what we watched on TV. And they didn’t trust that filtering the channels we had not agreed to watch would be sufficient, or they wanted control over who could watch the ‘pay’ channels. They still don’t, but if all you are looking for are the channels with commercials in them, then you could set up your TV with one of the new tuners to tune directly to cable channels. Ok, most people first did this with their VCR. After all, it made sense to be able to tape the game when you were on being dragged out to the mall for some shoping, but HBO would re-run the movies several times over several months, so we can probably find a time to watch that. So this box was ‘hit or miss’ for being in the entertainment center. Sort of like the game system.

On the other hand a couple of satelite services came up as alternatives to Cable TV. All of them required a receiver next to your TV. The one I had chosen was DirecTV. Since I already had this, it made sense to me to get the DirecTivo when I saw a really good price on it. This device allowed me to record a couple of TV shows while I was watching something that had already been recorded, or record one thing while watching another.

One of the advantages to the TiVo was that it was a ‘hackable’ device. Meaning that I could do a number of things with it that had very little to do with watching TV. Or that gave me advantages while watching TV. As an example, the TiVo would use a modem built into the system to call up the TiVo service and get schedule updates. However the phone line was not generally disconnected when that call was being made, and the modem in the box supported caller id. Through a software hack initially, you could add some software that would put the caller id information for an incomming call up on your TV. Mom’s calling on a Tuesday? Better take the call. About this time I had a network of computers at home, with a dedicated internet connection. One of the hacks that I installed was a network card. This allowed me to get rid of the phone line entirely after service had been established.

When it comes down to it, a TiVo really is nothing more than a computer that has a TV tuner card built in, and can present it’s output on a TV. Since the core of the system is a general purpose computer, you could set it up to show the pictures you had been taking, or getting scanned, as a slideshow, and eventually people were playing their music through this box as well. Why get up every hour to replace the CD, or after every couple of songs to select something else to play, when you could craft a custom play list ahead of time, and have it play background music for the party, or for that photo slide show you want to show your parents.

After a while though, TiVo, or more accurately DirecTV wanted more control over their version of the TiVo. And about the same time I moved to an apartment on the north side of a building with no balcony, or other means of seeing satelites which were all to my south. So I started looking at other solutions. Since I was already using Linux for most of my computing needs, I tried a couple of solutions that gave me functionality similar to TiVo, one of them being an application suite named FreeVo. I ran into a few problems there, but finally found MythTV, using Knoppix as an installer and base to run it under. For a few years that was all I used for watching TV.

I’m still using MythTV, but have changed to a different distribution, and currently am recording across two different computers.

About 3 years ago I picked up my first video projector. It was not a ‘great’ projector, it’s native resolution was 640×480, but would project a passable 800×600. Also the bulbs have an expected life time of 50 to 75 hours. Fortunately they are not particularily expensive, which is a bit unusual for projectors these days.

I’m actually on my 3rd projector now, as I needed a projector that supported some advanced HDMI support for my PS3. Also my PVR supports HDMI out, though not audio (yet.) For a ‘video switch’ I am using a Yamaha tuner. Since audio out through HDMI is not supporte yet on my PVR, I’ve been using a SB external interface with optical out into the tuner. This lets me do 7.1 input with only 1 lead for audio. Granted having it embedded within HDMI would be even better, but that will come in time.

As you might imagine, that amount of hardware takes a significant amount of space. Since I don’t have cable in my closets, or for that matter, much space there, I’m not keeping either of the computers I’m using to receive TV in there. If I were in a house I would have the cable and antenna feeds going to one room separate from the projector, and feed that essentially from a front end with no hard drive or if possible fans. I might even just run it all from the PS3, if I could figure out how to watch TV that way. (I can watch most of the rest of my content that way.) In any case I’ve had everything pretty much crammed together in too little space.

The base for everything was a coffee table that allowed me to put the tuner under, one computer on top, and the PS3. Along with the network firewalls, cable modem, switches, Access Point, Game controllers, antennas, CD player, Record player, and UPS to prevent power glitches from taking down the computers immediately, I had a narrow folding table above the coffee table, and the space involved a bit cramped. The big problem this causes is really heat. The one thing you don’t want to have to listen to when watching a movie, is the fan of the PS3 kicking in and wiping out the softer audio.

So when someone moved out, and tossed a wood shelf structure this last summer, I was able to pick up a bunch of 2′x4′ laminated pine boards, with the vision of making a better entertainment center for all the hardware. I just needed some way of supporting it. I picked up some 3/8″ aluminum rods, and some 3/4″ pvc pipe, and this weekend I finally took a day and put it all together. It’s not perfect, but for the moment everything is holding. I’m expecting it to hold till I can get a fix put in place.

The arrangement is that there are four boards acting as shelves. To either end there are 2 boards, with an overlap of about 3 feet in the middle The outside corners have a post running from top to bottom and 2 posts run through all 4 boards in the center, 2 and 1/2 feet from the ends. The aluminum rods provide ridgidity for the the posts, and the pvc pipe is cut in sections of 8 inches for the first shelf and center poles, and 16 5/8″ for the outside ends between the shelves. So that things can be moved about I put caps on the ends of the sections acting as feet.

One of the flaws is that when I assembled everything, I did so away from the wall. After putting everything back together, it turns out the aluminum rods are not sufficiently strong for moving the assembly back to the wall with all the weight on it. As a result the back center post has started to fold. I’ve provided a support that will hold for now. for the future I’m planning on a better base. First of all the ‘feet’ will have latteral support between them. I’m also hoping to get iron or steal rods, possibly threaded. If I get the threaded variety, I’ll add nuts and washers for better vertical support, and hopefully better structural integrity. (Less wobble.)

But for now, this will do.

Well? Are you?

There are several ‘ways’ to be ‘ready for DTV.

If you currently get your TV from a Cable TV provider, or a Satelite TV provider (Dish, DirecTV, or the like) you’re covered as long as you maintain that service. That doesn’t mean that you won’t find some advantage to getting some off the air equiopment, but we will get to that later on.

It’s been my impression lately that most people are not buying VCR’s any more. Tivos, Replay TV, Windows Media Center platforms, and a few other solutions exist these days that take care of the video capture and playback options have taken over for those people who are looking for that type of a feature. For the moment I’m not going to go any further into these options either, but if you have ever hooked up a VCR, you have more than 90% of the experience needed to switch how you receive Broadcast TV from Analog to Digital.

There are two basic solutions to converting to Digital TV. You can get a TV (or TV system) that has an included Digital TV Tuner. Or you can get a converter box that plugs in between your antenna and your TV, and that provides you with a signal on one of your TV channels (often 3 or 4, sometime others) that allows you to watch the digital tv broadcast.

If you go the first route, and buy a TV with a digital tuner, or you did so in the past couple of years, you do not need to buy any additional hardware. Ok a possible extra purchase may be neccessary. That would be a better antenna. If you already have an antenna on the roof, in the attic, or you get really good reception on a pair of rabbit ears on the top of the TV, you probably don’t need to get anything else. Those antennas will continue to work. On the other hand if you live in a marginal area, you may find that an improved, amplified, or outside antenna may help reception significantly.

So let’s see about that TV. For the past few years the FCC has mandated that any TV receiving device being sold in the US that was not capable of receiving ATSC (the standard for digital TV) be clearely marked as having problems with the near future. So it is likely that you have avoided buying one of those sets, or will be buying a TV with a digital TV receiver. If you have the TV delivered by the people you buy it from, and have them set it up for you, then you probably don’t need to worry about anything either. Most installers will configure your TV for the best reception they can get, and most of the time that will be with the Digital TV channels that are already being transmitted.

If you set it up, you will very likely find that there is an option that you get to configure in a setup menu that allows you to select your receiver variety. This will usually be the same general location as where you would select whether you are watching off the air, or cable TV. Some TVs have automatically sensed what type of service you have, and most of them will automatically pick up that Digital TV is available, and set up those channels for you.

If you run into serious problems, you may need to check with the support people at the location you bought your TV from to resolve the issue.

That leaves converter boxes. This will often look like the old cable converter set top boxes. They run about $60 or $70 at many electronics retailer sites. For some time you can request a voucher from the FCC that will discount the price of the converter box at the store. Do a serch for ‘fcc.gov DTV Vouchers’ at your favorite search engine, and you will find more details.

Depending upon the box, you very likely will get a remote control that allows you to select the channel and sub-channel that you are going to watch.

Sub-Channel?

Yes. Most of the major networks will be broacasting multiple programs on their channel. In most cases this means that you may see an HDTV channel on sub channel 1, and on sub channel 2 either a lower resolution version of the same program, or possibly something else entirely. Many (I don’t know if all is correct) NBC affiliates broadcast a weather channel on the second sub-channel. The local ABC affiliate here repeats their news programming throughout the day. The CBS affiliate only does their HDTV broadcast, and the PBS affiliate(s) run several different programs. Fox, and CW both broadcast their high def program in standared or improved definitian, and there are a couple of other channels around with their own schemes.

If you are watching through a converter box, about the only difference I would expect you to see between the HD sub-channel and the lower res channel is that you will get bars across the top and bottom of the screen, on the HD channel, and the lower res channel will clip off the sides. Where the HD comes into it’s own will be with newer TVs that are HD capable.

Note that you do not need to have an HD capable TV to watch that content. The tunner will re-encode the content to fit on whatever screen you are using. You will loose detail, but not ‘content.’

If you are using a OTA tuner through your DirecTV box or Dish box, you may have to do some fine tuning of your setup to watch TV. For the most part you will simply put your converter box ahead of the satellite receiver, and pass that content through just as you do for OTA content now. No that won’t make a difference if you get your local channels from your satellite provider, but it can be helpful if you went with the ‘mount an outside antenna at the dish’ route.

As for me, I don’t actually own a TV, won’t be buying a converter box, and already watch digital TV off the air. My solution is a bit complex for a blog entry, but I’ll see about putting together an explanation in the next few months.

Have fun, and stay entertained. (It’s a lot more fun for you than being the local entertinment for not being aware of the changes comming down the pipe.)

I’m about half way through my collection of CD’s at the moment in ripping them to .ogg. Though to tell the truth, that’s my ‘music’ cd collection for the most part. If I consider adding my language CDs, I may have a long way to go. I have more music variety, but some of the language collections are 10 or more CDs.

I haven’t quite decided how to treat the lauguage CDs. Since they are primarily voice, I suspect that I could get away with ripping them to Speex rather than ogg vorbis, but I don’t know if I would end up missing any of the inflection and other characteristics that are good to have in language study. It’s something I have to think about a bit.

I’ve used a variety of CD ripping software over the years. Some do just about everything for you, some take a bit more work. Part of the problem with rippers that ‘do everything for you’ is that they relly upon the correctness of the information they find in the CDDB sources they use. Where this becomes an issue is when your collection contains multiple CDs from the same artists or a CD from an independent with a small distribution.

In the case of the former, the big problem is that how you think something should be entered is not necesarily how I think it should be entered, or someone else for that matter. As an example, I have about 8 CDs from The Steve Miller Band. Some of the CDDB entries for the CDs list the artist as ‘Steve Miller,’  some as ‘Steve Miller Band, The,’ and a few as ‘The Steve Miller Band.’ If you let the ripper created all the various sub-directories for the each CD, you end up with 3 (or more) directories for the same artist.

I suppose I should explain that I do directory structure as ‘MyMusic/ArtistName/AlbumName/’ with each song it’s own file within that structure. Multi-disk collections usually end up with a folder per disk. In theory I could also catagorize things by genra either before or after the album, however I’ve found that letting the music player I want to use handle genera sorting tends to work out best. Some artists have moved across genra’s over the years. ZZ Top for example can be considered Hard Rock, Country, Blues, and a few other possible genera’s depending upon what disk you are looking at. Likewise Jewel has Folk, Folk Rock, and poetry CDs out. If your ripper does not handle ‘folk rock’ you may end up with either folk, rock, or misc as the genra.

The latter problem (independents or small distributions not being indexed) means that I have to enter all the information myself. That’s OK for the rather small collection of these CDs that I have, but since I am not interested in maintaining an account to enter data into the CDDB servers for these small number of disks, I end up with the prospect of running into the other problem later on when the CD does get indexed by someone else. I’m pretty sure that I’ve run into this issue already.

There is one other problem. CD’s do not have an ‘information’ track where the information regarding the content of the disk. As a result the various CDDB servers use information regarding track starting locations, counts, and lenghth of each track to determine what CD you are working with. Over the wide variety of CDs that have been entered this leads to some situations where multiple CDs have the same indexing information. For most CD’s this does not present a significant issue, however I actually have one or two CDs that not only have collisions in index information, they also have collisions within the genera they work within. Worse is that the song titles have ended up being ‘mostly’ right, though there was other information that was wrong.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I’ve already ripped almost everything I have at some point in the past. As a result, for the vast majority of my music, there’s already a folder for each CD. I would prefer to maintain using those folders for a number of reasons, not the least of which is to give myself some idea of where I stand on on the conversion process. This also means that I pretty much need to do this all on one system. If I were ripping enverything for the first time, I could distribute the load across multiple computers. Then I would just drop CDs into open trays, pick out CDs that had been ripped, and when everything was done merge all of the files into one directory structure that then gets copied, shared, etc. to the various systems I want the music on.

If I was willing to wait a couple of weeks to get everything done, and I was taking the fully ‘automated’ route, I would just stack a part of the collection of disks next to the computer, and every time the computer kicked out one disk, I would just drop another in it’s place, and let it grind away. However I am using a multi-core computer, and it can handle ripping more than one disk at a time. I’ve got an Internal cd-drive, and several external cd-drives that I can work from. Actually they are dvd+/-rw drives, but that’s not really all that important. It turns out however that even when ripping through different bus interfaces for USB, that I can effectively rip from only 2 sources at a time. Ripping time goes from about half the play time for a disk on the first two drives to more than the play time for the three disks if I add a third disk to the mix. In other words when I rip from 2 drives at a time, I can rip about 6 one hour disks in 3 hours. Add a third drive, and I can rip 3 disks in 3 hours. (What I was ripping at the time of the testing was disks with about an hour of music on them.)

While I am about half way through my collection, by count I am only about a third of the way through. That’s because the first ‘half’ of my collection consists largely of classical music and a few one or two piece collections, such as radio shows, or ambient sounds. (Hard to call that music in reality.) When the average lenght of a piece of music in the collection that has already been ripped is 10 min, and the average for the remaining part of the collection is 4 min., you end up with some disproportion in the counts…

About the only thing more tedius than riping CDs is doing laundry. Of course it sounds like a good thing to do at the same time. Once or twice.

More snow on the way it sounds like, so now would be a good time to make a quick run to the grocery store before the roads get bad again.

If you haven’t heard of it by now, you could probably be accused of living under a rock. Possibly in an effort to save yourself from space junk.

A little over a week ago, an astronaut at the space station was working with a tool bag, and reportedly the grease gun in the bag popped. The report sounds a bit suspect to me, but for whatever reason the tool bag in question drifted out of reach of the astronaut, and ended up floating away.

Ever since then I have been seeing reports of people on the ground spotting the bag in orbit. Personally I suspect that it is at the top of the list of orbiting objects being searched for on ‘http://www.heavens-above.com/’ or it will be soon. Actually I suspect that most people who go out looking for it will miss seeing it entirely.

Why? Well, to be honest most people who go out looking for the tool bag in orbit won’t know what to look for. Reeportedly the object is showing up as a magnitude 8 object. For people who are thinking that means it must be pretty bright, a minor bit of explanation. Astronomical objects are described as appearing to have a brightness relative to a theoretical magnatude -1 star. For a detailed explanation, see http://www.stargazing.net/David/constel/magnitude.html

The relationship of each level of magnitude is the base of the natural logorithm. e. For unenhanced or ‘normal’ vision, the brightness of stars in the sky in a rural area on a clear night is from Sirius at -1 down to magnatude 6 stars. The dimmest of the stars normally seen in the constelation ursa minor is 5.4.

This means that if you live in the city, even if you have really good eyes, and a solid understanding of the type of flight path that the tool bag should have, it is very unlikely that you will see a magnitude 8 object.

If you know what to look for, exactly where to be looking, and a good pair of binoculars, it’s possible that you could see the tool bag.

I’ll be honest though. I think there are a lot of other things out there in the night sky that are just as interesting to look for, and a whole lot easier to see. Watch for Iridium satelites. These are satelites that were put into polar orbits that just happen to have features that do an absolutely wonderful job of reflecting the sun as they fly overhead in orbit.

The Space Shuttle and the International Space Station are both highly visiable when their orbit is over head during the appropriate times of the evening and morning.

And at various times during the year, the sky puts on some absolutely wonderful fireworks shows worth spending hours watching. Meteor showers, and after a CME Aurora events are both often spectacular.

But if you really do want to see the Tool Bag, I would suggest doing a bit of research. At some point, probably in about 2 years, the bag will re-enter the atmosphere. I haven’t heard a lot of information one way or the other, but I would suspect that it will mostly burn up on re-entry, and very likely will put on a brief, but bright, show. If you are in the right place, and alert at the right time, I strongly suspect that it will be very visiable.

Promotion

I don’t often do this, but here goes. As I’ve noted a few times in the past, I am involved with the CONvergence science fiction and fantasy convention held over the first full weekend of July. I’m also a fan of Jonathan Coltan. If you don’t know who he is, I’d suggest digging yourself out from that rock I mentioned earlier.

In any case, there is an open request out there for Jonathan Coltan to be ‘demanded’ as an appearance at CONvergence. See <a href=”http://eventful.com/performers/P0-001-000132714-3/demands”>the eventful.com page</a>

I’m not getting any money for the link. I don’t work for Eventful, and while I do a lot of work for CONvergence, it is part of a non-profit. If I get anything out of this promotion it’s the opportunity to see John perform or appear at the CONvention, and even that’s not gauranteed for me. (Potential wor schedule concerns are cropping up.)

I would appreciate it if you would add your voice to the demand requests. But if you’re not interested, that’s fine too.

Have a great Thanksgiving day, and a wonderful weekend.

I’ll admit that when it comes to technolgy, I’m somewhat biased. I’m hoping that in this post that while I am coming at it from that perspective, that my thoughts result in a balanced result.

I don’t think that there is a means of making a living today that doesn’t take advantage of technology in one way or another. While it’s fairly obviously true in the US, I actually think that it’s universally true. Even when you consider subsistence farming and hunting and gathering, we end up using technology in one form or another to give ourselves the advantage we need to survive.

Take gathering as the most basic. You walk to where your source of food is, and pick berries or pull up roots. It becomes fairly obvious after a very short period of time that the trip back and forth from where you are living, to where your food happens to be growing is introducing you to the risk of a preditor of some sort. Be it a bear, wildcat, wolverine, wolf, or something else, you are not set up with the same level of strength, or hunting implements (teeth, claws, eyesight, etc.) that are going to give you a particular advantage against one of these guys. So you’re going to want to do something to reduce that risk. There are two ways to solve this issue, carry something to defend yourself with, and make more trips because one hand is occupied with carrying that weapon or shield, or find some way of carrying more of what you are gathering, and cut down on the number of trips, and therefore the overall risk. Besides if you only make one trip out for food, rather than 4 or 10, there’s all that time you were spending gathering food that you can spend developing critical social skills, or better yet procreating. (And demonstrating that you’ll be around to help raise those kids you are busy procreating as well.)

Either carrying a weapon, or finding a way of carrying more food is going to result in a technological solution. You created a tool that makes you more productive in one way or another. And while having to make more trips because you are only able to use one hand may seem like a loss, the fact that you have a way to defend yourself also means that it is more likely that you will be comming home at the end of those extra trips.

Your first first solution to carrying more at one time may be to use a large leaf as a simple basket. Or after carrying a weapon for a while you might discover that the skin of one of those creatures you were defending yourself from makes for a good basket as well, or even a sling. Who knows.

Fast forward to today. the technology we wor with today includes far more than just a better hammer or a basket to carry things in, but they all are an effort on the user’s side to get more done with less work done from the user’s point of view to improve the working situation. It even gets into the world’s oldest profession, where a hooker can advertise her services online, and make arrangements for where and when to meet. She can check out the John ahead of time, as well as the location, and know far more about what’s going to happen. She doesn’t have to stand on the corner trying to make eye contact with prospective John’s on the street. (This is not to be taken as an advocacy for prostitution, just an example of how pervasive technology ends up being.)

All technology is information handling. From the latest computers and high speed network infrastructure, down to the basket of berries and point of the knife or spear. They are all means of demonstrating that you have some idea for getting ahead, and can make use of that idea to solve the problem at hand.

In the 1960s the LASER was developed. LASER stands for Light Amplification through Stimulated Emission of Radiation. For a long time it was described by naysayers as a solution in search of a problem. And while there are some ‘problems’ that lasers have solved that might be considered a real stretch of credibility, the reality is that they handle more information in one day today than all the computers built before 1999 handled between the development of the jakard loom and the latest computer of 1999 combined.

Technology and information handling today are the foundation of all business. “Products!” I hear you shout. Ok, without products to sell, you won’t make any money. But what are ‘Products’? They are transformed raw materials. A Car is a large chunk of a variety of metals, oils, plant and animal byproducts, all processed by technology and the know-how to use that technology, (added information) to produce a car. We sure as hell don’t fart them, or find them growing on trees. (Money does grow on trees by the way. As any orchard owner can attest. But if he’s going to be profitable, he’s going to have to employ some hard won knowledge either of his own or of a hire.)

There seems to be a strange view showing up in business these days. The view is that technology is a cost for the business. I can understand a part of this view. If your business is moving packages from one location to another, or better a lot of locations to a lot of locations, you use tools to perform that movement. For small packages, it might be an individual acting as a courier. For larger packages, it might be a truck driver and truck of some sort.

In theory that isn’t very complicated. How difficult can it be to take a package across the street? Follow a FedEx package across the street some day, and you might be surprised. Perhaps you’re wondering why you should pay FedEx to take the package from your receptionist, put it on a truck down town, another out to the airport, a flight to Memphis, another flight back, onto another truck back to the local city office, and then out to your neighbor across the street? Especially when you could hire your next door 8 year old kid to take the package across the street, and all it will cost is a piece of candy from the candy dish. The thing is, the FedEx solution will cost the same, and take the same amount of time (within reason) regardless of whether the destination is across the street, or across the continent. The 8 year old is going to run into problems getting the next package across the continent. FedEx has a technological solution that scales well for their defined problem set. Deliver the package anywhere in the US, overnight.

That’s the thing with technology. A solution that looks expensive for one set of problems may turn out to be the lowest cost general solution. And trying to undercut that cost may result in you having a surprise in follow-on costs that you did not prepare for.

Another way of looking at that is to note that there is nothing particularly difficult about owning an orchard. Let’s assume that the cost of labor is fixed. As is the cost of shipping the fruits of your orchard to market. The question comes up then, how do we maximize our profit, or maximize sales. Better yet, is there a way to maximize both profit and sales? While the cost of shipping is ‘fixed,’ the qustion comes up ‘how’ is it fixed? It could be on a per mile basis, no matter how much we ship, whether it is 1 lb, or 1,000 tons. Or it could be the same amount per lb, whether the product is shiped across the street, or across the continent. Worst case it’s a combination of both. Weight (or volume) and distance. In that case is the market down the street going to be more profitable than the one 2 states over? Well, if you and your 20 neighbors are the only people in the continent who have orchards producing Makintosh Apples, perhaps sending a bunch of small loads to markets a couple of states away you might be able to sell the apples at $10 a lb. rather than the $5 a lb. that you can sell them for at the roadside stand you set up next to the orchard.

Perhaps you can maximize the price per sale by developing a history of selling consistently good Apples. You personally go through the pecks of pick, and get the bad apples out of the barrel. This takes time, but in the end it means that where you might have been selling at $5 a lb, perhaps you can sell for $7 a lb instead. At that point you have to ask is the amount of extra effort and information added to the sold product costing more or less than $2 a lb. If it costs more than $2 a lb, then that should tell you not to perform that service. Right?

Back when I was going through school, a common case was posited that at some poing the effort and costs associated with identifying and repairing bugs needed to be compared to the added value for the end product. In other words if the cost of reparing the bug was low, and the value for resolving the bug was high, then you work on fixing the security issue. If not, then ignore that bug.

A lot of that changed as companies realized not fixing those bugs ended up exposing the company to some very high risks. If you failed to work towards a fix for that bug, and someone found an exploit, you personally or as a company may be held liable for the damage that some script kiddy does on your systems. Not because you are at fault for doing whatever it is that the script kiddy initiated, but because you are responsible for not properly securing your computer.

This gets into a whole slew of issues with technology that I won’t delve into too much here, but what I hope is simple to understand is that providing a technologically advanced and competitive means of doing businesses is not without it’s costs, both up front, and over the long term.

Schools have learned this the hard way. Someone suggests spending $1000 per child on computers for the students this year, and that will give them a significant advantage in learning. And yes that part is true. Actually it’s more true that if you spend money on technology with a plan for how to implement it in a educational system to make it possible for children to learn more, and you follow through, then they will. The long term problem has always been that this is not a one time expense.

When it comes to text books, you buy 60 copies of the $50 text book for your two 30 student classes, or perhaps three 20 student classes if you are really fortunate, and those text books can be expected to survive through between 5 and 7 years of classes. Likewise for film projectors, Televisions, and so on. That’s not the case with computers. If you spend $1000 on a computer today, next year you couldn’t get $100 in return for it, even if you never opened the box. That might be an exageration, but I can assure you that in 3 years the computer will cost more to get rid of than you can sell it for. Additionally most classrooms are dusty environments that will end up filling your computers with enough dust to cause significant problems for that computer, both in heating related issues, as well as with potential for electrical shorting across power elements of the computer.

This carries over into the business world as well. computers are machines that require regular maintenance. We have not yet gotten to the point where computers will clean themselves. A significant portion of a business budget needs to be spent to regularly go through the computers in it’s inventory and make sure that supported hardware, software, drivers and so on are all in good condition. Patches being provided by manufacturers and operating system vendors need to be reviewed for problems, distributed, and validated, That takes money. And it will cost a business a fairly significant amount to ignore. There will be down time, and that needs to be kept track of as a part of the cost of doing business. Some of the down time can be managed around. Tracking recurrent issues and woring with vendors to identify the cause and providing effective prevention needs to happen, but to do that requires people who are familiar enough with the situations involved to be able to perform those reviews, and also the resources of time and money for them to complete those preventative actions.

Remember that the goal is to be competitive. Whether that means having more customers, or more cash flow, or some other element of measurement, it fundamentally means getting customers to want to do business with you, and to get them to tell their friends how great it is to work with you. You can’t do that if your goal for technology is to reduce it’s cost 10% overall, year to year, without providing a plan for reaching that goal. Additionally if you are increasing your profitability 5% a year, and technology is fundamental to that growth, then while you can easily get rid of 10% of the people and technology costs associated with your business over the next year, you have to consider whether removing that 10% of a fundamental element of your company is going to leave you with a 15% growth this next year, or are you going to still see a 5% growth in profit next year with a 10% loss in revenue.

Stockholder value is based most often on the combination of profit and revenue. If you earn $500 in profit this year and your costs were $5000, then your revenue has to be $5500. A 5% growth in profit would mean $525 in profit next year. However if you cut $500, (10% od $5000) then your total revenue would be $5025. A loss in revenue of $475. You met both goals of increasing profits, and decreasing costs, but the total value dropped by almost 10% as well. If there are 500 shares of stock in the company, then you have actually cost the stock holders more than your increase in profits would predict.

Now that might be where you want to go. I’m just not convinced that it is the best business model.

The reality is that we all want our technology to cost less, and produce more. Whether that means the ability to sell more potato chips from the same amount of raw material and number of people on the production line, or that means that the technology results in a product that tastes better and lasts longer, and is therefore of more interest to customers, there will be different types of costs involved. Technology does not provide a free ride. And at times the costs associated with one technology will not result in better value in the end product. But those are the real business decisions. ‘Cutting Costs’ is almost always going to result in reduced revenue. There are times when that will be desired. But it should not be the primary goal of any department head.

Then again, what do I know. I’m a fan of technology, and I work with it every day at work doing what I can to provide improved stockholder value. Sometimes I succeed, other times, not so much.

Back a few years ago, I started buying my music on CD. I happen to be old enough to remember my folks buying 8-tracks, I had a 45 player. Actually I had a 78 player, but those were not in record stores any more by the time I was born, aincient I may be, that old I am not. The 78 player was one of my grandparents opening space in their home and I was currious enough about the stuff that I got to take it home with me.

I don’t know if there is a 45 record anyplace in my collection of ’stuff’. I’m kind of hoping not. Mostly because the conditions they would have to be in are not exactly good for the records. I do know I have some LPs (33 1/3 rpm vinyl) that I’m hoping are not in truely horrid condition, though I’m not going to suggest that they have been treated the best either.

I think I bought my first CD in 1984. I was stationed in Germany, and had bought a ‘midi’ system. (Nothing to do with the Musical Instrument Digital Interface platform.) I bought a Techniques CD player at the same time, and started building a small collection of CDs. Along the way I’ve lost a few due to various incidents, and a few have just gone missing. It’s not like I haven’t had kids or something right?

In any case I’ve been amassing a bit of a collection. Nothing like some people build, and I don’t expect to be hosting a radio station really worth listening to any time in the future, but I wouldn’t want to have to try to dig through the collection to find a specific CD any time soon either.

Back in the late 90’s I picked up my first MP3 player. A 6 gig Archos hard disk based player. I had already converted a few of my CDs to a small MP3 collection as I wanted to listen to a randomized playback without having to pay a couple hundred bucks for a cd jukbox, and having to wait for disks to change, and mechanical parts to fail, etc. I was using BeOS, and the ripped collection easily fit on the Archos drive at the time.

I looked at the various file sharing applications over time. Napster included, and decided for my own reasons that I really wasn’t interested in having copies of music I wasn’t willing to buy the CD for. I know that it was not a decision everyone made, but that was mine. And I continued to buy CDs from time to time.

I bought a lot of used CDs over the years. For the better part of a decade I would visit music stores and look for a couple of CDs that had disappeared, or been broken. and replaced most of them. At one point I had ripped my collection to over 13 gigabytes of 384kbps MP3’s. I got to thinking about my listening environment, and decided that I really didn’t need my collection to be at that high a bit-rate. So I re-ripped the entire collection back down to 128k, and left it at that. Along the way I discovered that some of my CDs had been revised on the various cd databases that the rippers were using, and some which had not been there before happened to match newer albums that didn’t happen to be in the same genera. So a bit of manual updates being used from time to time.

Over the years I’ve used a variety of MP3 players. Anything from devices that look like a USB key drive that a pair of headphones plug into the side, on up to my Nokia N800 with 2 16 gig sdhc cards in it. I have had a cell phone that had a built in MP3 player (SK-3), a Samsung Nexus XM player that worked as an mp3 player as well, and more than enough software MP3 players. There are a couple of other players here and there, but for the most part I’ll be ‘done’ with the hardware players fairly soon now.

The only significant problem I have with MP3, has nothing to do with the players themselves. Though carrying around special purpose devices that only play mp3 files seems to me to be a bit of a waste of resources at the moment. Perhaps not as bad as devices that need a special headset adapter perhaps, but that’s a different matter.

Back to what my biggest problem is, it’s that the encoder’s are pattent encumbered. Well, players are as well, but I’m buying the player from a retailer or manufacturer who is paying the licence fees for that player out of the sales price. Under Linux, I’m not buying the encoders. So any MP3 encoder I end up using also happens to be in violation of the patent that is applicable. I don’t expect that I’m likely to be taken to court over it any time soon over the matter, but it is a thorn in the side. A ‘legal’ way for me to circumvent the issue would be to play the audio through a sound card, into one of my Haupauge PVR-250 cards and capture to MPEG, then strip the MP3 audio out of the MPEG file. That encoder I presume is paid for in the cost of the hardware itself. Personally I think that’s a lot of excess work that I’m not interested in doing, especially as there are other ways of accomplishing the same goal.

Remember that the Goal is to have the opportunity to listen to the music I own the CD’s for. I’m not trying to resell any of them. I’m not trying to hand out copies to all my friends, or my family. Just me, listening when and where I would like, preferably without hauling around 20 pounds of CDs.

Obviously I could install a CD Jukebox in my car, duplicate the collection of CDs I have by buying another copy of each one, and so on. You know, I don’t think that’s a reasonable solution. It doesn’t help me when I ride the bus to and from work. It doesn’t help when I’m at work, etc.

A few years back, someone else who wasn’t happy with the situation regarding the pattents related to MP3 developed a new encoder, called Ogg Vobis. (or Vorbis, not sure at the moment) There’s another solution for video called Ogg Theora. (again, I think that’s the title.) They both do a very good job of encoding and playing back music and video, however there hasn’t been a lot of hardware on the market that has support built in for it. One odity related to that is the N800. This device is built around a Linux kernel and platform. Ogg has been available for almost all varients of Linux, but Nokia decided that there was insufficient demand for Ogg to include it in the software included in the N800. Now there are some reasonable explanations for this, in that the device does have a limited amount of space, but since the device supports full motion video and more, there are people who are not particularily happy about the situation. Yes, some people have ported the necessary libraries, and it would be reasonably easy to get them to work, but for most people it’s not really worth the effort.

Last week I bought a new cell phone. I like a lot of what the iPhone has to offer, but really don’t like the idea of having to do almost all update processes through iTunes. (If for no other reason than I don’t want to fight with trying to get that to work under Linux.) However Google anounced the Android cell phone platform specification some time back, and about 2 weeks ago T-Moble started selling the HTC Dream G1 in broad distribution. It’s no more for ‘everyone’ than the iPhone is. And I don’t expect the G1 to be an iPhone killer. However it does provide significantly more service than my previous combination of cell phones, N800, and ‘disposable digital’ camera provided. Mostly because with 1 device I have taken care of all three of those resources, as well as my GPS, and a few other things that I am hoping it will work out for. It won’t be a remote head for my ham radio gear, but…

One of my co-worker’s is a musician. He just released a new CD, of which I bought a copy. I went to rip it so I could listen (again without having to cary the CD itself around) and the CD-ripping software on the computer I used didn’t support ripping to MP3. Flaac and Ogg though are both supported. Again since I’m not too concerned about compression artifacts, I chose the ogg format and once the tracks had been ripped I copied them over to my phone figuring that at worst it would work as a way of getting the tracks home.

I disconnected the phone from the computer, and pulled up the music player. Now if you guessed that with all that I wrote above I was disapointed to find that the song’s were not in the collection the player would handle, you need to re-look at the title of the posting again. Yes it did work. I wasn’t expecting it to, but the Android platform is built around a Linux kernel and they did include the ogg libraries.

So, it’s time to go back to the collection of CDs, and start ripping them again. This time to ogg. I may not be able to do all that much with the podcasts I listen to, however there are a couple that do distribute in ogg.

Prison

I ask at times, “What makes a prison?” A prison is not four walls with a
door that someone else holds the key for.

Prison is exile. It is a means of requireing someone who has been
convicted of a crime of doing penance for that crime. In the U.S. legal
system, we use buildings or structures of some sort to take one of these
people and separate them from what we think of as our society. We put
these people there with the thought that by doing so, we make it safe
for other people to live their lives without fear.

As an observation, the system has some serious flaws, though we keep on
using it. I’m not going to try to suggest that we can correct that here
though. No, this is a story about a prison, and someone discovering that
it is not the place, but the person.

–

Don’t ask me how I got here. It was supposed to be a joke. No property
was lost, or people killed or maimed. No animals were injured. But then
we all say that. Even if it’s true.

When you first get here the first thing you notice is the wall. It isn’t
exactly featureless. There are grooves every 3 meters or so. And it has
that marbled look you might see on some counter tops, or the ’stone’
like stalls in some public restrooms. Corean or something like that. It
looks a bit like Marble, but at the same time you know that it is not a
naturally occuring metamorphic rock.

About the only strange thing is that you are asked to let people know
when you like a particular segment of wall. It’s going to be ‘yours’
people say. The grooves are interesting of course. They are about 1
meter across, and come to what looks like a 90 degree corner at the
bottom. That seems to carry into the floor leading out from the wall as
well.

Everyone is working on the wall, the floor, or what looks like a ledge
on top of the wall. The wall is about 10 meters tall, which is also the
distance the floor extends out from the wall. Oh, and it’s a good idea
to jump across the grooves. They are 1 meter wide, and half that deep.
Easy to twist an ankle in.

I started out working on floors. I guess you could say that I have an in
depth knowledge about them. That groove may only be half a meter deep,
but that’s on top of something far deeper. We start by making a level
surface about 5 meters below what will be the surface of the floor. For
the most part we just shovel or grade out a path abotu 15 meters out.

Next we lay down 2 meters of asphalt. Yep, gravel and tar, compacted and
set. It has a number of advantages over just a bed of gravel. First of
all it’s permiable. Meaning that if rain water, or other substances get
past the layers above, or spill out from them, it can seep into the
water table. I understand that not all that much gets back into the
water table, but then it’s humans we’re dealing with here. We never
seemed to care on earth, why should we care here?

On top of the asphalt, we end up putting in a drainage system. It’s a 20
cm thick layer of ceramic about 3 meters wide, and about a meter away
from the existing floor, in parallel with it. Every meter there’s a 30 cm
round pillar about 50 cm tall. As we’re putting it in, we put in a wall
across the drain every 20 meters that gets taken out as the top stones
are being put on the drain. The top is another 20 cm of ceramic, tiles
this time, and one tile, about a meter from where the cross wall was has
a slot in it, about 10 centemeters by 40 cm. The rest of this layer is
filled in with asphalt as well, to be level with the top of the drain.

Next they pour the floor. 2 and a half meters of what looks like plastic
as it is being poured in, but which cures almost as hard as diamond.
Having worked on it, I know how many people step on every square
dicimeter of it. how much heavy equipment rolls over it over the years.
Yet as I look at my part, it’s as smooth and scratch free as the day it
was poured.

The frames we set this stuff up in are a bit interesting. When they are
laying on the asphalt before they are set up, it looks like a square
wave, with a leading 45 degree bevel. There really are four  ‘forms.
The first one to get put in is the drain form. It looks a bit like a
funnel. There’s a bit of a ledge or lip on one side, and the bottom fits
cleanly to the slot in the top of the drain. I suppose that’s a good
thing. If any of what they pour for a floor next were to start filling
the drain we put in earlier, I guess it wouldn’t be much of a drain. Eh?

The edge forms come next. Those are those square wave looking things.
One end actually has a complete ‘V’ in it that sits in the edge of the
floor over towards the wall. That sort of holds that part in place for
now. Two long V chanels fit along the edges of the parts of the floor
that were already poured, and the outside edge piece gets put in and
bolted to the other pieces. Part of the form fits into the square ladder
edges on the floor that was poured earlier.

After we make sure everyone is out of the forms, we pour in the mix. It
cures over night. The next day the forms get pulled, and repositioned
for the next day’s pour.

_Walls_

After a while you realize there’s more to this than the floor. One by
one, or about as many as new people show up in a day, you move on to the
wall. Or Walls.

There really are 2 walls that are built. The first wall gives you what
looks like a stall. 10 meters deep, 2 meters wide. The wall itself is a
meter thick. They lay out a sheet of smooth plastic that can support a
person, even over those grooves in the floor. Well, actually that’s in
part because they have filled in the groves where you work on the wall
segments for additional support. Not that the stuff really needs all
that much support. 20 people can move the wall segment that’s 10 meters
by 10 meters, by a meter thick. It’s solid stuff, but not as dense as
you might think. Really it doesn’t need to be.

For this pour the forms are just ‘V’s that get arranged in a square,
with the ‘edge’ of the ‘V’ to the outside. There’s a bead that the edges
of the form rest against that the plastic fits around so that the wall
material doesn’t flow out from under the forms. It seems to work well
enough I guess. We never had a problem with sections adhearing to the
floor or anything under it anyway. So you lay all this out, fasten it
all together, and along comes the mix and it fills the form.

I never figured out how they knew how much to mix up. I mean, OK, it’s
not like they have to be right down to the liter. And the forms all end
up with the same volume for the part they are working on, regardless of
where it ends up, but I’ve never seen them over fill a form. Zero
spillage. I know some people back on earth who would like that kind of a
set of tollerances.

The wall segment cures overnight, and after breakfast the next morning
the crew of 40 go to work. First we pop off the forms. Then ten of us
per edge come along and set the segment next to the old wall, with one
edge about 3 meters from yesterday’s wall segment. 10 of us practically
sit on this edge, while 20 of us get along the far edge, and start
lifting.

The remaining 10 people are standing in what will become the stall,
interspersed with the sitting people, and ready to keep the wall from
toppling against yesterday’s segment. That’s happened a few times, and
while nothing gets damaged of course, it’s a bit of an annoyance as you
have to go back and check the alignment of that segment again.
Once the segment is vertical, everone takes these suction cup things,
sets them where they can get a good grip, and we fit the edge that is up
against the long wall, into the groove there.

I understand that over the next few weeks the material bonds to the old
stuff, and not even a thousand strong men could move one of the stall
dividers that’s been there for that long, though I don’t know. I never
saw that many men in one place during construction.

_Roof_

You can’t call a place ‘Home’ unless you have a roof over your head.
Right? Well, our roof covers about half the stall. I understand it’s
designed to keep people dry in the very infrequent rain storms that we
get here. Of course these roofs do a bit more. They are also the piping
system for the water. Every stall has that drain I mentioned earlier.
And the lip of that drain is direcly under an opening in the roof where
water poors constantly. Hot and cold running watter. Well, depending on
the time of day, and the day of the year. The planet isn’t particularily
seasonal, but there are times when it is a bit warmer, and other times
cooler. It never really gets cold here, though I suppose that if we had
to experience the wind we saw on stormy days when I worked on the
construction team, I might think a bit differently.

The roof extends over the stall about 4 meters from the older wall. It
has those grooves under it which allow it to rest on top of the walls
that were put in earlier, and there’s about a meter of overlap over the
old wall. Besides water, there is the equipment for delivering food to
each stall. That happens on the other side of the stall from the water
delivery system. Just a narrow slot in the roof, and you want to be near
the slot when the food is delivered. The containers are water soluable,
and will be protected from the elements, and can withstand the drop to
the floor. 10 meters that it may be, but it’s not a lot of food, and
well, it’s good to eat.

I’m not sure where the food comes from. or the water for that matter.
They would need a huge pump to deliver as much as I see every day to all
of the stalls, but somehow they do it. When I was working on the roof, I
saw mountains off towards where the sun sets, but nothing but scrub
grass anywhere away from the wall.

If you look down the wall, you see that even though it seems straight,
it bends just a bit to the left as you look south, and a bit to the
right as you look to the north. There are stories the old timers on the
crew tell about how the people who were on the crew when they started
would talk about even earlier crews talking about how the wall is one
long spiral. They say it’s been being built since the planet was
commissioned, with one central cylinder about a thousand meters across.
I don’t know. That was centuries before I got here. And yes I told some
of those stories too.

As you put in one of these roof components, you finally get to decide
which stall will be yours. Actually you may have decided that some time
ago. But now you have to commit. Once you do, you are asked to step into
the foreman’s trailer. Depending upon how long you’ve been working on
the crews, you get a different collection of packages to choose from.
Oh, no diamond encrusted, furniture, or tools, but if you are handy with
tools, you might get some tools to work with. Of course that does imply
that you’ve been working.

Every once in a while one of the new arrivals doesn’t work out well.
Starts crying, or trying to get people to not work, or picking fights.
Well, ok, everyone does some crying. After all, back home your family
has already had your funeral. Presuming you had a family to begin with.

In any case, every once in a while one of these people shows up who it
turns out is more trouble than help. After about 2 weeks, he’s sent to
the next group, and so on. Ultimately he passes the group where you get
to select your packages, but he never get’s that opportunity. A couple
of weeks later he’s gone.

Oh, I suppose he Could be in the next stall over, but I doubt it. We
make more stalls than there are of us cycling through this process. From
what I can tell it’s about 20 stalls per person at this point. I’m not
really sure why we make that many. Well, I suppose the planet’s name
might have something to do with it. It’s not like we’ll be able to work
on things with each other.

_Cell_

After we select our package, we get to work on the final portion of the
stall. The outside walls. This one is a little bit different fromt the
others. First of all there are grooves that end up on this wall running
from top to bottom. It’s also 2 meters thick rather than the 1 meter
thick that the side walls were. The grooves are used for bringing in
your packages, and any raw materials you need for your craft, and taking
out any product you create. If you would rather have books to read, or
stuff to study, all of that gets handled by the equipment that makes use
of the grooves. Lastly there’s a bit of a lip on one side that you
discover is to hook it over one of the inside walls to fix it in place
until they get the row of roof on the next row of stalls.

All along you’ve been building our cells. And yes there are some people
on the crews who never figure that out. Most of us know by the time we
get to working on the drain crew. If we didn’t know already. I suspect
that reason most people might take some time to figure out what’s going
on is that at one level or another, we all volunteered for this. Some
because it’s the legal system’s resolution for what we did, and we did
it any way. Others because they thought they were coming here to ‘help
out’ the less fortunate. I gather that some of these people end up in
the foreman’s jobs, but from what I saw, even those people got replaced
every year or so. And, well, none of them seemed to be looking forward
to going home or even talked about where they were from.

I think they knew better.

I never became a foreman. Several reasons I suppose, but the biggest
would have to be that I learned before I even came here that while I can
work well with others, I’m not a great leader. Abismal even.

Yeah, it was supposed to be a joke. Might even have been sarcasm
involved. Oh, someone did get hurt. Though I had nothing to do with it.
I was asked if I would stand in a lineup with some suspects, sort of the
control subject if you will. I said “Sure, why not?” Then the victim’s
family ‘fingered’ me, and before I knew it I was before a judge. I was
kind of down at that point and muttered ‘Yeah right, send me to
Solitary.’ Or so my attourny says that’s what the judge heard.

He obliged. And here I am. And will spend the rest of my life.
Personally, I think I would rather be playing Klondike. Perhaps even
Freecell. But this is no card game.

I’m on, and in, Solitary.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I am diabetic. I have type II diabetes. On it’s own, it probably won’t kill me, though it will probably contribute to my death. Whenever that happens. In a review of what my life has been like, and what my personality is, I have no doubt that I will end up dying of something preventable. I’ve no interest in suicide, but that is far from the only ‘preventable’ cause of death. It would not surprise me to find I die in a car accident, or from doing something that I should know better than to do.

Some things that I’m pretty sure will not kill me are alcohol related events (on my part) and I doubt strongly that I will die directly of smoking related conditions, though indirect exposure may have an impact.

Pretty heavy so far eh? Sorry about that, it will get a bit easier along the way.

Back a few years ago, I realized that I weighed too much. I knew well enough that being overweight was a contributing factor to people becoming diabetic (Type II, Type I is a different set of conditions in most cases.) and in as I had lost an aunt and two uncles to the side effects of Type II Diabetes, I took action. Apparently too late. I did loose weight. I went from a high of 260 lb as I weighed myself in the morning, down to a low of 170 lb. One of the things I was hoping to see happen in the process was that I would regain some of my ability to run.

In High School I ran in cross country, and track. I wasn’t very good, but I did run. Running is also one of the things you do when you are in the Army. When I was deployed in Saudi Arabia, I started running around the towers coumpound twice a day. I had  hoped that I would continue that once I got back to the states, but ‘life’ got in the way. I did enjoy running though, and when I was running, I would weigh in the neighborhood of 160 to 170 lb.

But as I say, once I dropped down to the 170 to 180 lb, I didn’t regain my running ability. I can jog about half a block, maybe a block or two if I’m not carrying anything, but that’s about it.

Somewhere along the line, my heart lost some capacity for pumping blood. About the same time I was diagnosed as diabetic, I had an ultrasound done of my heart and caratoid arteries, and a stress test, and it turns out that my heart is functioning at about 70% efficiency. I.e. about 70% of the blood is ejected from the main ventrical every time my heart pumps. It compensates for this by pumping at about 20-30 bpm higher than the ‘normal’ resting rate of 60 bpm that most people have. If we do have a limited number of heart beats to live through, I could be said to be getting close to living on borrowed time. However that’s not one of my personal beliefs. Additionally it’s only been within the past 20 years that my heart rate has become elevated, so I should have some time to go.

When the results of the ultrasound came in, my doctor suggested that it looked like I had experienced a heart attack at some point in my life. A normal cause of loss of function for the heart is a heart attack. However after my stress test, my cardiologist (I should set up an appointment with him soon as well) noted that while it’s true that I do have reduced function, he does not see any indications in the ekg or the stress test that it was related to a heart attack. We shall see what comes up after I have a followup with him (or another cardiologist.)

One of the reasons that this is of interest, is that simply because I am diabetic, I have a 50% higher risk of dying of heart failure than people in the general population. Another reason to take interest in this is that one of the varients of one of the medications that I take for Diabtes has been linked to heart failure for people with congestive heart disorders. I am not taking that specific medication, however Actos is in the same family, and while the study did not show a strong corelation for Actos, my doctor is concerned, and I understand that concern.

When I visited my doctor about a month ago, I had been off all medication for the better part of 8 months. My fasting blood sugar reading was 280 by the finger stick test, but the lab test showed a reading of 320. Note that a ‘normal’ fasting reading is under 100 milligrams of glucose per decilitre. Just reading over 120 two times is sufficient for a diagnosis of Diabetes. I don’t think I’ve had 2 fasting readings under 120 in the past month. For the purpose of that statement a ‘fasting’ reading is a reading that is taken more than 8 hours after my last meal. A contributing factor to this situation is that when you have not eaten for some time, your liver goes into starvation mode, and starts converting fat into glucose and dropping that into your blood stream.

As most diabetics know, one of the log term indicators of good control over sugar in your diet is what is usually called an A1C test. The way this test works is that red blood cells are ‘damaged’ by excess glucose in the blood stream. Your bone marow produces red blood cells, and they have a 90 day lifespan in your blood stream after which they are filtered out by your kidneys and ‘pissed away.’ the A1C test takes a snapshot of the damage to the red blood cells in a blood sample, and assigns a ‘damage’ assesment. I am not sure how most people consider the number, but if you think of it as a loss of carrying capacity for oxyogen in a blood cell, we can work with the system. ‘Normal’ blood sugar levels will introduce some damage to the red blood cells, The value is between 5% and 7%. When I visited my doctor, the value their equipment at the clinic was able to report was >14%.

I don’t expect to be getting an A1C evaluation done when I visit the doctor this time. If I do, I do not know if it would be meaningful. Oh, it might show a reading of 12 or 13%, which might back up the testing that I have been doing for myself, but it is not a given. The damage to blood cells over the period of the 2 months prior to my last visit doesn’t ‘improve’, though it should be ‘lesser’. The problem with that sort of an assessment is that it took about 2 weeks for me to get what I would call my daily average under 200. And I still spike over 200 after meals. That may improve depending on the medication that I start taking, but the most promising medications are some that I very likely won’t be getting, as they are the most expensive, and their long term side effects are still unknown. One of those may help with my overnight blood sugar rise, as it basicly tells the liver to hold off on the conversion of fat to glucose. It appears to be doing wonders for the son of a co-worker of mine.

I do wonder at times if having liposuction would help. The logic behind that is that one of the reasons that people become type II diabetic is that fat cells appear to be doing what they can to stay in shape. (I.e. stay filled with fats.) They do this by increasing the bodies resistance to Insulin. (Called obviously enough insulin resistance.) The question becomes if someone looses half a liter or so of fat cells via liposuction, (that’s about a lb of weight, but a quarter of the volume of a 2 liter bottle) does their resistance to insulin go down noticably. The supporting question would be what varieties of fat or other body cells increases the resistance of the body to insulin. If the predominate variety of these cells is those around the abdomen and legs, then a reduction in the number of these cells fhrough liposuction may have a positive influence. On the other hand if it is the variety of fat cells that are within the muscles of the body, then while the total fat cell volume goes down, the percentage of fat cells increasing insulin resistance goes up. I don’t think this would have a specifically negative result, however not having a positive effect would tend to be disheartening to many people.

Am I ‘getting better?’ Well that depends upon what you consider to be ‘getting better.’ I am not expecting science to come up with a magic bullet to cure type II diabetes. The best that I can hope for there is to ‘control’ my blood sugar levels and over the long term hopefully the damage to my body will be reduced. Some of the side effects of diabetes includes taking longer to heal damage to the body. Some damage will not ‘heal’ of course. If you tear a tendon off of it’s bone or muscle, it doesn’t self correct. The best you can hope for is that you get surgury done to reattach the tendon with stitches. However some of the other side effects of normal ‘wear and tear’ to the body do ’self repair.’

As an example, when you work out at the gym, walk or run, one of the side effects of the workout is that in burning the sugar in your blood, your muscles generate lactic acid. This acid ‘damages’ the muscles, which is why a day or two after a heavy workout, your muscles get sore. Likewise most of use experience scrapes and cuts from day to day that scab over and we go on, and a week or so later the scab falls off and we have a light scar there. The effect of Diabetes is that your body’s repair system does not work well in a high sugar environment. So a diabetic with an uncontrolled blood sugar level will spend more than a couple of days with those sore muscles, it may be weeks or longer. Likewise scratchs may never seem to heal up.

One of the first thing that people who have been living with uncontrolled diabetes discover after getting their blood sugar under control is that the scabs that just wouldn’t go away finally do. Doctors and nurses who were working with me when I was first diagnosed with diabetes said that I was going to feel much better. In part this would have been due to muscles finally repairing, but also joints swell as the body works to get the excess sugar out of the blood stream into other places.

My first obvious experience was that I didn’t have to ‘pee’ all the time. But I never really felt bad when I was first diagnosed with Diabetes. At least not in the muscle aches, back aches, joint problems varieties. This time, and a few other times when I know my blood sugar had been elevated for some time, I felt it in my lower back, and I am still feeling issues with one of my arms that I’m expecting to see some improvement over the next month with. Though I will discuss it with my doctor tomorrow.

In the sense of not feeling that pain, yes I am getting better. Still some ways to go, but that is likely to be the case for some time. So my response is ‘Yes, I am getting better.’

I hope you are too.

…What a horible sentence.

There’s a joke in there, but you have to be ready for a bit of thinking. For most of us, the phrase ‘Life on Earth.” is sort of a basic premise. Well yes there’s life on earth, and some of us happen to think we’re intelligent as well. I’m not about to argue the intelligent aspect, I’ve read suggestions that bacteria moving away from a hot surface is an indication of intelligence. And I’ve read the suggestions that there are no signs of intelligent life on Earth comming from as deep thinking of an authority as Stephen Hawking. In sort, the question of intelligence is not something I think is worth my involvement in at this time.

The ‘horible sentence’ part might clue a few people in. There’s arguments all over the place showing that the death penalty is effective, or isn’t effective, that there are flaws in our judicial system that let innocent men be imprisioned and executed for crimes that others are guilty of.  Some think that imprisioning has an advantage over execution in that if later on we discover that the person was not the person who commited the crime, we can take them out of prison.

Perhaps. The problem is that even if you do that the person has had as significant of a disruption to their life as can be had. It’s nearly impossible to go back to living the way they did before. Even if you discount the time spent in prision, everyone that he or she worked with up until they were incarcerated will harbor thoughts that perhaps the original conviction was right. Or other people have taken up where they left off and the opening is no longer there. Someone else now owns what was their home. All their personal property was confiscated and sold by the govornment. etc. I strongly suspect that many people who were wrongly convicted have wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to be executed, as they struggle to put their lives back together.

For another interesting view on the subject, I would recommend reading “The NORP Think Factor,” Staige Productions (Winona, MN)(1994) by judge Dennis A. Challeen

As an observation, several crimanl justice systems over the centuries have come up with alternatives to imprisonment and execution for serious crimes. While we tend to think of execution as the death penalty, I would include such acts as judicial decisions to remove limbs or body parts in response to theft or casteration for sex related crimes to be part of the execution family of responses. Outside of these two responses we have had a history of alternatives. Young men were often offered the opportunity to join the military as an alternative to going to jail. And both the US and Australia have been penal colonies (or at least parts of each have been) in the 17th and 18th centuries. Along the penal colony line of thinking, Amercan Indians would kick out tribal members who committed acts that the tribe considered unacceptable to the tribe. This may not seem like as significant of a response as imprisonment, but at the time any person traveling alone was looked upon with great suspicion. The advantage was that a capable person could make a new life for themselves. Also along this line has been the requirement that people do community service of some sort, often picking up trash along the highway, but other types as well, including hard labor.

Some variations on the theme have been proposed. Wall off New York and make the entire city a prison. Or LA. Islands of Death, where no-one leaves alive. In the Science Fiction universe, the Moon, Marse, Venus, Ganimeed, space stations, colony ships, etc. have all been considered for prison colonies at one time or another. For some reason most people are treating Earth as the place that people ‘want’ to be. And for the moment, it’s the only place we’ve got that’s reasonably close to being self sustaining. Granted we seem to be pretty good at changing the self sustaining part of that statement, but I’m personally more interested in changing the ‘only place we’ve got’ portion.

In the long run, I’m inclined to believe that should we figure out how to get off this rock in a sustainable way, that we’ll see two phases of criminal handling. The first will be to set up penal colonies on remote worlds. The second will be to take away the criminal’s opportunity to profit from space and comit them to ‘Life, on Earth.” And as a result, eventually Earth will be abandoned. Which will probably do the human race great favors, but we’ll see some significant loss as well.

But that’s my thoughts on the matter. For the moment, I’m stuck here with most of the rest of you.

Since I started blogging with word pad, I have been somewhat currious as to how many times my page is being read. Surely I’m not the only one. Well, apparently as far as the WP people and community is concerned, it’s not all that important. So today I added a couple of functions to my users.php include to be used by my template’s footer.php file to display a rudimentary hit count. And when I say rudimentary, it’s pretty basic. No bouncing balls with the number, no per article counts, etc. All it does is display and update a bit of text you will see at the bottom of most of the pages here in my blog.

It’s not something I am going to advertise all that much. First of all the counter file is written into the function which means it is not easily re-configurable. It also means that it will probably be broken the next update I do to the blogging software. Variations on the theme include referencing a record in a database, keying off the story title in the requested URL to give article specific counters.

If I were doing this in python rather than php, I would probably just have one function. The process is open a file for read and write. read the content of the file. (which should be a number.) display the number. (which may include additional text wrapped around it, such as ‘Viewed :” “times.”) increment the number, and write it back into the file. I might be able to do that within php all as one function, but I figured that if I used an existing pair of functions, it would simplify things a bit. Additionally I can write a script at a later date to reference the write function and reset the counter to 0 at any time. Say perhaps any time I add a blog entry.

Well, time to get some cleaning and re-aranging done.

-Rusty