Rusty's Blog

There are times when a little bit of random delay is handy. We see it technology wise in ethernet for example. Classic hub based ethernet operates in a half duplex mode, which works very much as the original thick net and thin net bus architectures did. If you are not familiar with the scheme, think of you, and your neighbor across the street both getting ready to go to the store, or work, or perhaps one of you for the store, the other for work, or who knows. You both check your wallets to make sure that you have what you need when you get to your destination. One of you grabs the re-usable grocery bags, the other the backpack with the laptop for work. You each head out to the garage, open the garage door, start the car, and start backing out to the street. You shut the garage door and you’re now a packet ready to get out onto the streets and highways on your way, but there’s a small problem. You both can’t get onto the street at the same time.

Up to this point everything you each have done doesn’t directly impact what the other does. You probably didn’t even see each other through the point of closing the garage doors. And that’s OK. But neither of you wants to sit there forever on the driveway, and you can’t both get onto the street at the same time, or there will be a collision. So you look at each other and in some way one of you decides to wait till the other goes, and lets the other know to go ahead. Unfortunately computers don’t have a way of passing that information back and forth. Essentially what computers do is check before they put the packet on the net to see if there is already a packet being sent, if there is they wait several milliseconds and check again. If not they put the packet out onto the network and look to see if what they get back on the network looks like their own packet or not. If it doesn’t they assume that a collision has happened, send what’s called a jamming signal (think of this as the driver honks the horn) and waits again. However this time the wait is not a fixed time. If it were, then every time it went to send a packet the other computer sending packets would do the same and they would continue to have collisions.

Instead what the system does is it uses a random number generator to determine how many milliseconds it will wait, then it listens and sends a packet again. This happens pretty much every place where a collision might happen. Think of it as happening at every intersection. There are a lot of places where random number generators are handy in computers.

If you’ve been playing any of a large number of roll playing games (off line variety) you are probably familiar with random number generators as well. You might have used 2 sided, 4 sided, 6 sided, and so on dice to decide how far you may go on a turn, what your character is capable of, how well your character performs a task, damage sustained, etc.

Obviously random numbers are at play in most games of chance. Luck of the draw, flip of a coin, spin of the wheel, and roll of the dice. And there’s bingo and the various lottery games. I have a strong suspicion though that we are going to see random numbers being used more in business as a means of controlling contacts than we do today. Oh we see that at some level with telemarketers, some random dialer walks through a list of phone numbers and connects the person on the line to a telemarketer who’s ‘available’ at that time. Most of the time though, that’s not part of a business relationship, it’s a marketing tactic to keep the telemarketing drone on the phone selling.

Business relationship maintenance is a slightly different problem. Some times you need to follow up a couple of days after a transaction, and other times it might be good to wait a week or more. The better business relationship management software will take into consideration things like knowing when your contact is on vacation and when they will be back. You may adjust contact frequency based on knowing what sort of a mood the person is on Monday vs. Friday, or if knowing that the week is half over on Wednesday is a good feeling or bad. But most of the time you won’t know ahead of time. It’s almost a given that day after day is not going to work out for you. So any solution that says call the day after you’ve called, probably won’t work in your favor. Likewise unless you have a fixed business relationship that probably doesn’t need a specific contact schedule either, it’s probably a good idea to at least touch base every couple of weeks. But for a while it is probably a good idea to work with the ‘about once a week’ schedule. But with a little bit of randomness built in.

This is where a pair of 6 sided dice can be handy. If you look at the collection of ways that 2 dice can be summed together you end up with the following series. 2 – 1, 3 – 2, 4 – 3, 5 – 4, 6 – 5, 7 – 6, 8 – 5, 9 – 4, 10 – 3, 11 – 2, 12 – 1. That means 12 times out of the possible rolls you should end up with a 2, 3, 4, 10, 11, or 12. the remaining 24 times will result in 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9. If you treat the result of the roll as the number of days to wait before calling again, you trend strongly for calls about a week apart, with ranges from a couple of days apart to almost 2 weeks apart.

But perhaps that’s too frequent. You don’t want any calls to happen within 5 days of when you last talked. And the relationship is pretty good, but you don’t want to go over a month between calls. So add more dice. Let’s work with 5 dice. The sums and frequency and up looking like: 5 – 1, 6 – 5, 7 – 15, 8 – 35, and so on. It turns out that there are 7,776 possibilities, and 780 each are 17 and 18, and if you plot the count you end up with a classic bell curve. In other words if you wait this many days before calling, you are most likely to call between 2 and 3 weeks from the last time you called. I will leave it to someone else to calculate the standard deviations.

That said, I like the distribution pattern of 2 dice a little better. So you could use 8 sided or 10 sided dice and sum, or even a pair of 20 sided and get a range from 2 to 40 if that’s the range you are looking at. 3 10 sided dice would give you a rang of 3 to 30 with a tendency towards 16 as well.

For really long term contacts of course you could use the 2 10 sided dice method gamers use to get a random percentage. Designate one 10 sided die as the units position, the other as the 10s position, a double 0 is 100, otherwise a zero in the 10′s position means that the other die gives you the range of 1 to 9%, and a zero in the units position gives you 10, 20, …, 90. That would make a reasonable range for calculating a delay of anywhere from tomorrow through 3 months (and a little) from now.  I think that range is a bit too long, but it may work out for you.

But as I say, the better relationship management software and practices are going to use information you glean from your relationship already to suggest when to call again.

Usually.

Well, I’m close. You probably can’t easily tell, but I’ve updated the core blog software for my blog.

Both ‘about time’ and ‘good thing’ apply. In the process I did find my blog had been hacked.

I use WordPress as my blog software here. The edition I was using was one of the last releases that did not have a built in update button. The last couple of releases, 2.8.4 and 2.8.5 have been ‘hardening’ releases. These are versions that make it harder for hackers to break into your wordpress blog and do things like delete previous posts, add or delete users, or even edit posts.

One of the most famous incidents of this nature is the blog that Robert Scoble writes. Apparently whomever has been compromising or hacking into wordpress blogs decided that that might be a good blog to do some rather offensive things to, such as delete all the blog entries for him.

For the most part my wordpress update was smooth. The thing that has been of concern was backing things up. I’m a big fan of ‘simple’ and the first thing that I could see when looking at the instructions for backing up the wordpress database was that they were not ‘simple.’ Granted I didn’t look far enough into the process. Once I did I saw that there was a 1 line command I could use to do the job. No installing extra software that I hadn’t worked with before, etc.

As I was re-enabling a plugin, a new feature showed up that I hadn’t seen before. Checking what the feature gave me, I ended up ‘spotting’ a user I didn’t recognize. So I went to ‘Users’ and Hmm. there sure are a lot of users here, and none of them appear to be this user.

I actually suspect that the bigest use of the hacked admin account has probably been to create users that can then be used to authorize users at places that ‘check’ to see if you have a valid account some place. In any case I certainly didn’t recognize any of them, and since I do not allow people to create accounts for themselves, away they went.

But no, that didn’t delete the hidden account. That was going to take a little bit more work. For that I ended up having to do a bit of searching. I ended up at http://reports.graymattergravy.com/2009/09/06/remove-hidden-admin-users-in-wordpress/ where the writer has very sucinctly demonstrated how to delete a hidden admin user.

Will that be the end of it? I don’t know. It should be harder to break into the new version, but if someone broke into this, it’s possible that they (or someone else) broke into another system I use. Fortunately (theoretically) much of the underlying code that the wordpress software ran on should be up-to-date, and hopefully reasonably secure, but there are a few things I will have to check out now.

All of the users, except the stray admin users, that I deleted were ‘subscribers.’ As one of the questions in the deletion process went, I was asked if I wanted to delete their submissions as well. Yes.

I have at least one person who reads and occasionally comments on my blog. I was concerned that their posts may have been lost. They were not.

The remaining item I have to deal with is getting google analytics hooked up again. I’ve had a bare bones hit count running against my blog for a while. It’s racked up what I consider to be a respectable count of reads of my blog. However I really didn’t have a way of knowing anything interesting about the readers. Hopefully that will change shortly.

Some say that curses are all in your mind. You know, it’s not really ‘real’ it just turns out to be real because you believe them. For the longest time I was of this opinion. I was certain that what someone told me was a curs upon me was just someone’s delusion. I’m not so sure any more.

Growing up I was more or less a loaner. I think that’s not all that unusual for geeks. I didn’t spend all that much time with other kids. Well, we lived almost a mile away from the nearest family for a long time, and the closest family was a very religion centric family of a different faith than ours. So I spent a lot of time reading, exploring on my own, and that thing that all siblings do, fighting with each other. Who can get their music to play the loudest? who knows the best wrestling moves, and so on.

I didn’t have all that much in common as a result with people I played sports with. I wasn’t interested in a lot of the discussions going on on the bus to and from school, and beyond that on extra curricular sports activities. I played Basketball one year, j/v, third string. I think I got on the court 4 times through the year. Everything else was ‘team’ only in the sense that we were all doing something for the school. Cross country, track, and of course Band. No band camp stories. Marching band went to the worlds fair in Nashville, was about the most ‘impressive thing we did there. I did spend a year in a drum and bugle corps, we went to nationals, I stood in the corner, ‘guarding’ the American flag. I wasn’t exactly on the ‘high achiever’s list,’ and wasn’t dating the prettiest girls in school. Oh the girl I was interested in was very pretty, but I would hardly call all that we ended up doing together dating.

From there I went into the army. In Germany I met and ended up marrying a woman I thought was beautiful. Should we have married? Well if you go by the fact that we ended up divorced about 4 years after we met for the first time, probably not. After we married, she left the service as a result of a medical discharge because of our daughter. I joined her just about a year later, but in the interim I was told of my ‘curse.’

Of course I ignored it, and attempted to forget it, but of course it was always in the back of my mind.

It happened in an out of the way place. it was not unusual for me to go out riding my bicycle from time to time. The part of Germany I was stationed in has plenty of hills, up and down along the rivers. Every few weeks when I didn’t have some other duty I would pick a compass direction, and go out and ride. As sometimes happens when you are not intimately familiar with a path, it is not difficult to get lost, or end up in trouble. You start up a hill, and well, it turns out to be longer, or steeper than you expected. So you get near the top, and you put that little bit of extra push into the pedal, only to discover that the road turns suddenly, and suddenly your not on the road. Or your bike. Yea, it hurts.

Fortunately this day I ended up on the ground next to an old lady who oddly enough had a vegetable stand along the road. Who knows, perhaps I had passed out. In any case the next thing I remember was her spreading some ointment on my hands where the knuckles had been abraded. Of course I didn’t understand what she was saying. I learned a little bit of German while I was there. ‘Eine Bier’, Velan Dank’, Bitta, simple stuff that is supposed to get you by, but you know, never really does. Her grandson was there though and in somewhat broken English he explained that I needed to be a bit more careful. Beyond the treatment for the scratches she was chattering away. And while I didn’t know all that much German, I could recognise that what she was saying wasn’t German.

The part of Germany I was in did have a lot of ‘Turks,’ but that label really applied to any immigrant or migrant worker. Her grandson did explain a bit. He said that I would never suffer any serious injury, but would at some point need to start taking meds on a daily basis. And I do. But the important part was the ‘curse’. Oh, she didn’t cast one, or anything like that. But she did rattle off something in an even stranger voice than everything else she had been saying.

Grandson appeared a bit shaken. He explained, “There is a curse on you beyond that of original sin.’ You will never find long term happiness with someone you are intimate with, and if you take a significant interest in someone outside of your marriage ill will befall that person.”

It’s been true so far. I looked into it a bit later, and there is a safety net for those who I take an interest in, and that’s if they are already seriously involved, or become seriously involved with someone else, that ill is forgiven.

—

It’s been over 20 years. My daughter, and then son have both grown to be adults. My marriage fell appart as I noted earlier. I have tried dating over the years. Invariably one of two things has happened. Either I’ve discoverd that she was already involved with someone, or. Well, I suppose the rest of this is about ‘or.’

The first woman who was not attached who I was interested in after our marriage started falling apart was manic depressive. We did go out a few times, but, no it didn’t get very far.

I ended up getting focused on school, raising my kids the best I could, and getting my career going.

I was interested in a couple of people at work, that didn’t turn out very well. An old addage is don’t shit where you eat. Asside from the hygene issues revolving around excrement and food, it applies to work in the sense that if you end up in a relationship with a co-worker, and the relationship goes south, you have to look at the person every day at work. And that’s the ‘nicer’ side. All too often the result is charges of stalking, or sexual harrasment. (While they are not the same thing, they amount to the same problem.)

I never lost a job because of an interest in a co-worker, but at the same time I never got intimate with one either.

That leaves non-work related activities. As my history amply shows, I don’t tend to be a very social person. That’s not to say that I’m anti-social. It’s just a recognition that my social skills ain’t what they could be. That being the case I have been involved with a couple of community activities, as well as some hobby related events. And along the way I’ve encountered some absolutely beautiful women whom I’ve had an interest in at one time or another.

For the longest time I thought as many guys do that I was encountering just two types of women: Involved, or Insane. But that really wasn’t the case. Oh I met a lot of involved women. Many of whom are stunningly beautiful. But the alternative being insane, really isn’t true. Oh there are a few who may be certifiably nuts, but it’s not a large percentage. Far more often the situation has been that something went wrong between us. In most cases that something wrong was probably me. Whether I dropped the ball, or didn’t get her mind ‘involved’ or just happened to be boring and not funny for that person doesn’t really matter. we didn’t hit it off.

Music has been a part of my life all along. The honest recognition that there was something going on that involved me involved two different women who were both musicians. I would like to say that I had gotten intimate with one of them, or the other. But by now you probably can tell that didn’t happen. But each of them were people I was very interested in, and who I still think are some of the most beautiful women I’ve had the pleasure of encountering.

Shortly after I graduated from college I started dating Mary. She played the violin. Beautifully. We chated from time to time. I treated her to a couple of dinners, things were begining to go well. Then disaster struck. I had dropped her off at her house, and was walking back to my car. The next thing I know, I’m flat on my back with tubes sticking out of my arms, and there are bright lights all around. Saying that was what I ‘knew’ might be a bit of a misnomer. I realized that there was an ‘I’, but beyond that, I wasn’t sure what was happening.

I found out later, that there had been a gas leak at Mary’s place. Kitchen stove or something, they never were very clear on that.
apparently Mary had turned a light on in the hall way and a bulb was loose somewhere such that a spark ignited the vapors. The police said that she never felt a thing. I believe them as I certainly didn’t feel it. While I was recovering, and in rehab, before I even was awake, they held her memorial service.

Tabitha was more recent, and not quite so easy to define as ‘me. Oh, I was interested, but we had some differences. She wanted children, and since I had already had children I did not want to get in between her and that dream. But yes, I remained interested. She plays the piano like no one’s business. Jazz is he personal favorite, though she loves Boogie Woogie as well. That said, she can play classical, rock, country, and hip-hop. Some of her compositions have provided background for Rap musicians and she playes a mean blues. If you’ve listened to the radio in the past couple of years, you’ve probably heard some of her bits as transition pieces for some of your favorite talk radio.

As much as I would love to say we were an item, because of the question of family desires, we have pretty much gone our separate ways, but she has been in my thoughts at some level ever since I met her 8 years ago.

This year she was diagnosed with cervical cancer.

You can figure out why I think that is worse than losing Mary.

This world is full of strange things. Perhaps you’re wondering about those two specific medical predictions for me. No major injuries, and that I would be on medicine at some point. Well, a couple of years ago I was diagnosed with heart disease. I’ve almost a bucket of medicines that I have to take every day now.

And that time spent in the hospital after Mary died? I went back and checked the records. The doctors never found any actual injury beyond some cuts and scrapes. Oh, I’ve broken a toe bone, twice, and twisted my ankle a time or two, but all the tests the doctors performed on me? Clear. Not even a concussion. No one knows why I was out for so long.

I still am not sure about this curse business. To me it seems like entirely too pat of an answer. Similar to my early diagnosis of Involved or Insane. There are places on earth where people go to great lengths to put a curse on someone who has done them wrong. And other places where people believe in witches, and hexes. Arthur C. Clark pointed out decades ago that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. The idea of a curse that exists on you and someone can detect but did not place there, sounds too much like ‘Magic’ for my tastes.

There are side benefits. I get to enjoy watching other people start their dances of intimacy. Some might suggest that this is a recipe for jealousy. I suppose for some it would be. A long time ago though, I recognised that being jealous of someone else’s situation did me no good. I know that no matter what, people will be people, and love will exist between many of them. And it’s always amazing and encouraging to see people in love.

But unless something pretty spectacular happens, I’m not going to be looking for any for myself.

Just to get a feel fro submitting to a writing contest, I put together a quick story a couple of months ago and submitted it to the Misfits Writing Contest.

There is a bit of an influence of Corey Doctrow in here, as I had just finished reading Little Brother. That said, I would not say that it is fanfic by any means.

I would direct you to the http://www.misfit.org web site for more information on Misfits as an organization, as well as additional information on the writing contest. The feedback I personally received at the 2009 CONvergence convention was that every submission that was received this year was of substantially higher quality than much of the material they have received in the past. I believe it was an effort to say that while what I wrote was very good in their eyes, they did receive even higher quality writing that went forward and ended up winning the contest. I also gather that the top 5 entries in each catagory were all agreed to by the judges, thought there may have been some disagreement on the order.

I tend to limit myself to short fiction. There is a fair amount of writing formats that I do not do well. As an example I know that I Need to do a lot of work on Dialog, as well as character development. Dialog can help the story move along very well. I would have to say that most of my writing at this point is more narrative than anything else. As a result it often will feel that someone sat down and ‘gave testimony’ when reading my writing. That said, I will try to write to a wider variety of styles in the future. I shan’t be submitting novels by any means. I don’t expect the judges to consider such worthy of inclusion. Their time is limited, and should be devoted to being able to review and consider each contestant’s writing.

If you happen to like my writing, or story telling, I would have to suggest finding a copy of the Misfits Writing Contest book, and read some of the other writing as well. I am a poor judge of my own writing. I have been told to continue, and to submit further pieces. I know I will do the former, and I’m hoping to do the latter as well.

If you are interested in a completely separate piece, and I’m not really happy with the ending of it, so I may re-write it in the future, I have published here as well, http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/blog/2008/10/short-story-time/

Both stories can be considered a bit dark, though I hope you will find humor in them as well.

I know people who have worked for The Department of Homeland Security. I’m pretty sure that if they wished to they could poke holes in this story that you could pilot the Queen Mary through. I do not hate what they stand for, though I don’t always agree with everything they have done so far, and strongly disagree with some of their policies and recommendations. That said, the people of the USA as a group as well as as represented by or representatives and senators, has elected to effectively eliminate certain ‘rights’ that some consider as included in the Declaration, the Constitution and the bill of rights. Whether you agree with those people or not, we will be experiencing issues for some time to come that we can point directly at those decisions, and recognize that what we ended up with was the logical outcome.

Without further foreshadowing, or other writing…

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