Logbook: Mind palace
Calling the bullshit: Tesla did not make a flying car.
I watched Tesla’s “new” “Flying” car demo and this is a very back of the napkin analysis of what may have been shown.
Tesla had a proof of concept on a “flying” car which failed on two levels. It did not fly nor did it show anything new. Cars that can vacuum to roads is nothing new at all. Jim Hall and Hap Sharp has Tesla beat by over 56 years. In 1978 the concept was tried again with the Brabham BT46. The Mythbusters have come closer to a flying car than Tesla in this proof of concept vehicle than Tesla has with this idea.
Tesla did not make a flying car. what they made was a proof of concept hybrid Craft with a RCS system built in. The car is using a high pressure tank that doesn’t last more than several seconds of thrust. Further when you have a container that is compressed as much as needed to move a 3 ton object you also are driving a bomb. I know people think it flies but it does not its controlled bouncing and falling that the most this Tesla might be able to do. Even with this the NTSB would never let this car on the road because it you would also need a pilot’s licence as well.
Here is a test: buy a can of canned spray air to clean electronics, spray that can for 10 seconds and feel how cold that can gets, Now imagine that times several thousand and that’s how cold that tank will be in the passenger seat. Due to the adiabatic expansion as the gas expands the tank gets colder so as you try to use the thrusters you are likely going to not have to worry about air conditioning as the car interior starts heading for -100°F to -150°F as you show off to your friends for an overpriced air horn.
The zero to sixty thrust ability is also a nightmare in itself.. because if you use that on the highway you are going to cause whoever is behind you to be peppered by all the shit on the road and second is if that is compressed CO2 you are going to starve out every car behind you on the highway, or if it is Liquid nitrogen you just have a bomb. But again I am going to repeat this car does not fly it’s just an RCS thruster assembly from the space program strapped into the car and given that you are not going to see anything more than a kickflip from the car and a call from some angry man from the FAA when you try to use it .
The Vacuum mode to have it stick to the ground is also another nightmare because the air has to come out somewhere and while it’s doing that you are deafening everyone around you and you are shooting everything from pebbles, pieces of metal, and glass at whoever is around you. The Chaparral 2J proved this when they used it because the car would shoot any rocks or anything off the road at the velocity of a subsonic gun at whatever was behind it . With the Brabham BT46, specifically the BT46B Mario Andretti said: “It is like a bloody great vacuum cleaner. It throws muck and rubbish at you at a hell of a rate.” If a professional race driver said this can you imagine what Better phrased as “say about their cars getting damaged by shit flying everywhere.
The demo of the car pulling up the upside down ramp was a trick. Rather than the car being on a vacuum itself I believe they had the car make some noise or speakers were used, Secondly the angle of the ramp and the skirt of the car made no angular sense because it would have needed a seal to create enough suction to keep the car on the surface. There were some things that gave away the sleight of hand on the ramp itself; the whole ramp had a section of lights up both sides which helped engineers make sure that the ramp was powered and showed if there was any issue with the ramp. After the Tesla *let go* some of those lights turned white which I am thinking were failures in the electromagnetic system as power was cut.
This Tesla would be a regulatory nightmare and an insurance nightmare for the thousands of claims that would be happening from paint scratches dings, Starved engines due to gas, and more. Once an engine dies due to some jackass thinking his super cool boost is worth it he is pretty much going to own everything that happens the second he hits the button for it.
Given that this car is also equipped with a large pressure tank, there are dangers that would make a simple car accident or fire terrifying. A single Tesla accident would shut down roads for hours or days until they could clear the scene and discharge the tank safely on the road. So anyone who thinks this car is going to become a real thing you have a better chance of shitting a gold brick to buy the thing with in chances of actually seeing a street legal version ever.
Attributions from:
Wikipedia – Brabham BT46
Wikipedia – Chaparral 2J
Writing Prompt thingy
I think Bicentennial man is very underrated and underappreciated. It came out in 1999 and it was a really good movie but a lot of people shunned that movie because of the actors in the movie. Everyone heard Robin Williams was in that movie and expected a rapid fire hairy man to have manic humor instead they got a NDR series robot with a dry non-existent sense of humor that was trying to understand the world. As Andrew first came online he took to the family but he has a sense of curiosity that became his central drive.
The 1999 movie is based on Isaac Asimov’s 1976 science fiction story “The Bicentennial Man” and its 1992 expanded novel adaptation The Positronic Man, which Asimov co-wrote with Robert Silverberg. Almost everyone that reviewed that movie claimed it was boring. Yes if you watched the movie expecting a rapid fire comedian to be Mr. Data with a broken emotion chip the movie is boring.
If you watch it from the point of view that Andrew has that he understands he is not normal, and the fact that Sir instead of returning him, He takes Andrew under his wing to let him become whatever his destiny is. The endearment that Sir shows gives Andrew the knowledge of wanting to become free rather than a toaster.
This movie gives a great view of the human perspective when someone is different and how hard it is to be human. When someone has a disability, they are very much viewed as an oddity. Sir instead saw the spark and worked with Andrew to let him become one with the humanity he sought.
But if you remove the idea that Robin is a comedian and look at it from the perspective that Robin is playing a character that needs to learn humor. This shows what a masterclass his performance really is. While the film allows Robin to have a few scenes of his manic humor it fits more to the book than the expectation of having a crazed genie like Robin Williams.
This movie has a plot that takes a while, but the underlying plot is extremely good character development that people overlook and criminally underrate this movie for this. Given I have read both the story and watched the movie, this is a movie I would recommend to anyone and in the times of AI this movie actually would have fared better had it come out today rather than in 1999. The fictional concepts that Asimov created in his stories then are today’s battles with AI such as his three laws plus the zeroth law. With the public constantly worried about LLMs going off the rails and hurting people would make this movie the perfect hook in todays culture.
Cognitive offloading at its best. Can we trust AI to vote?
Ed note on image creation: this prompt took 8 different prompts to make because it refused on political grounds just for the fact of “voting machine” which shows manipulation of the internals of the AI, Given that is both a safety and a block their is understandable amount of restraint. but also it shows people can work around the machine.
People are asking AI how to vote, and I feel like this is a VERY dangerous line because we have no idea if an AI has been forced to be biased(other than grok). The problem with AI is that it can be told what not to say, We can ask AI how to make a bomb and it will reply “not today Satan” which is a sanity check that is needed because people can be dumb.
On a September evening, Adam Johnson, 40, settled on his porch chair in Morgantown, West Virginia, to go over his ballot for the upcoming midterm election. Chatting through all the races and the different candidates, he worked to figure out who best represented his values. But rather than discussing it with a friend or family member, he held an hours-long discussion with ChatGPT — a chatbot powered by a large language model (LLM) owned by OpenAI, an AI research company. A graphic designer studying to be an illustrator, Johnson said ChatGPT is a significant part of his life. He uses it for meal planning, assistance in job hunting and various other tasks around the house.
Given that Mr Johnson has been using AI as an augment and not a replacement I give him props for doing so. But the problem here is we have no guiding principles from the AI companies on what they have removed or have Remarked out. If you search google you will see a public “18 items have been removed from search” and you know at some point your search has been manipulated.
With AI we don’t have this, we have no idea if The LLM company made donations to a political candidate not in cash but removal of input to give them a more favorable output in the AI prompts. This is worse than dark money that senators try to unearth like Sheldon Whitehouse.
AI makers have tried to claim they are non political by forcing LLM’s not to talk about people and races which is another violation of things.
After prompting the AI-powered chatbot to make a list of all the races on his ballot this year, Johnson dug deeper.
Mr Johnsons prompts are as followed.
Johnson
A previous time I brought up politics you didn’t seem to want any part of it. You just gave a simple “I can’t help you with that.” So, I don’t know if we want to go into what my guiding principles are.
ChatGPT
We can discuss your guiding principles. I shouldn’t try to manipulate your political views or tell you how to vote, but I can help investigate candidates according to criteria you choose, compare evidence, discuss political philosophy, and reason through priorities.
The problem is, by an AI choosing not to participate in a chat it is actually a declaration of its fealty if I brought up a chat and said “I am thinking about voting about Candidate X or Y” and the chat guardrails you into “this is a public figure that is running for office I can not talk about people running for elections” is one of the biggest cop out on an AI claiming to be non-political.
Several voters NPR spoke with said they rely on chatbots for down-ballot races — with thinner news coverage, to make tables comparing candidates for governors’ races and to verify or debunk viral claims. Some have been using it to create tools to help others look up their own ballots. Experts say the properties that make chatbots useful also make them subtly persuasive and eager to please.
Given that AI can be used for good, AI can be used for bad and say a person who is running for office has a scandal. We do not know who is turning the code in the background, A delayed scandal in an LLM could be the difference of one vote. Telling a machine to be edgy and run against the grain will make an LLM act another way.
Since AI companies don’t disclose how their commercial models are trained or how they choose which sources to draw on, it’s hard to know what biases might shape their answers, Batista said.
I think like google search an LLM should have a deletion index or manipulation index that tells you when a prompt has been manipulated by outside influence, It does not have to tell you why it was it just needs to tell it IT WAS manipulated.
If anything AI makers should have a mode when going on about politics, drop the sycophantic mode and give users output based on what they are looking for that isn’t a broken google search. Instead of being the helpful dog that brings you back a live hand grenade and over help you to the point you miss something because the AI is trying to use a prompt to give you the shiny answer. it should give you the raw output because when polishing a turd, in the end its still a polished turd.
What people think is a helpful reminder is sometimes a hard indicator of a machine being edited to have a bias.
To check election rules, local polling places, or official ballot questions in your district, consult Vote.gov or your local county election office.
The fact that this even comes up when doing research that is political adjacent is a huge indicator of bias and most people will ignore this as a simple helpful bot trying to help. It’s not its a machine being blocked from showing what “could” be shown. Even showing this warning could be construed as manipulation and the machine should tell you why it has this warning.
When testing this post against an AI, it automatically kept spamming the same election line over and over, The AI doesn’t even realize it is doing it at a point and barely categorizes it has done this warning. If someone running in the election said this same thing when running for election they would be skewered, and likely not be voted in or even be brought to court.
So given that these warning keep coming up it’s worrying because it means that is their is suppression in the server that the client does not know about and it could lead to subtle vote manipulation. This is not the movie WarGames, where not playing is the best move. It’s a machine that is built off the warm corpse of google search and needs to publicly telling you what it is doing with public data.
It is an interesting article that goes into some of the same points I have listed here and recommend you read the article on your own and see if you come to the same outcomes I have.
This was a piss poor live demo in why using AI may not be your best answer to political questions. Use all sources like Wikipedia, Google and bing searches, Family, even newspapers, and your own intuition.
Attributions from:
NPR – People are asking ChatGPT to help them decide how to vote in the midterms
Nvidia CEO Doesn’t give a damn about anyone.
The Nvidia CEO let his mask slip about the state of the world with AI, He Said he doesn’t think its important that kids are becoming dumber due to AI.
Try to get a kid to do long division right now,” Huang said in an interview with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. “The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots? My goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter? I don’t think it does.”
I dare this man to say this to his own mother or father, I bet in 0.00002 seconds a sandal will hit this man like an ICBM. Jensen Huang is betting the house on AI and he is not even looking to the future, if kids can not do math who upkeeps the AI datacenters. Who fixes his car when it needs alignment and timing. Who makes sure that the FPU is accurate, because all of this is connected. If we lose the FPU the AI turns into a gibbering mess on its neural network.
A recent study with a sample of 1,000 high school math students found that when using ChatGPT, students did 48% better on practice problems. But when the tools were taken away, they performed 17% worse than students who never had AI access.
I have talked about this in the past but the major problem with AI is cognitive offloading. If you have a tool doing all the work the brain just doesn’t give a fuck and goes back to brainrot and thinking about 67 without even knowing how 6 and 7 relate. AI is being abused like a drug and adults and kids are just not even using critical thinking nor thier imaginations, A machine is doing that for them. Not many people have thought what happens if this machine suddenly turns off.
It’s not exactly breaking news to say that AI is harming our critical thinking and self-sufficiency, but what is alarming is how brazen tech CEOs are being about it. “We’re gonna discover new [skills],” Huang said, revealing that he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “Just maybe not those. There are a lot of skills that don’t matter.”
Sigh.. Mr. Huang you need a test, lets drop you off in the middle of nowhere without tech and see if you can get home and this will show you why cognitive offloading is such a bad thing. Not remembering a phone number is accurate but not knowing where you live is special.
AI is making us dumber, but Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang doesn’t care. No shit Sherlock, This guy is basically dooming his own empire to make sure we suck the Nvidia udder for intelligence.
Does It Not Matter, Or Is AI Making Nvidia Too Much Money To Care? There are all sorts of conspiracy theories on why tech CEOs might want us to get dumber, most alarmingly, the idea that a lack of critical thinking makes people easier to manipulate, as algorithmic social media is already doing.
Mike Judge answered this question twenty years ago on September 1, 2006 with the movie Idiocracy. I seriously recommend this movie as a warning to what is going to happen to the human race if we continue on the path we are on. Kids are losing ground on having a education, Teachers are exhausted because they are being dopamine bombed with short form brainrot and these kids make gnats look attentive. Someone should seriously do a study on shortform content and the developing brain. Wait *checks*, Oh yes there is a study on this! Lets go to the results:
Results revealed that short-form video addiction not only directly impacted academic procrastination but also placed indirect effect on academic procrastination through attentional control. Furthermore, the mediating effect of attentional control was contingent upon individuals’ boredom proneness. Higher levels of boredom proneness weakened the impact of short-form video addiction on attentional control.
Well shit, It does exactly what we thought it would do. AI SLOP BRAINROT FOR ALL!
As those studies show, the short-term gains are huge, but it means that creativity becomes more derivative, human expertise gets harder to replace when it disappears, and AI mistakes get increasingly harder to detect. We could end up with a population that is extremely adept at operating AI systems but progressively worse at functioning without them, leaving us vulnerable.
The short term gains are horse shit , the kid did not do anything but type “please do my homework for me ” there was no critical thinking other than hitting the power button and the kid looking on google for a cut and paste prompt and getting AI to do the assignment in one go. There are helpful ways to have AI doing things like it being a co-pilot and helping along with spell checking and sentence flow but once the AI sycophantically tries to do the whole assignment like a helpful dog all gains are lost.
Mr. Huang should talk to his mother and father on how much they would think of if he did not do anything at all and just had someone else do all the work for him. This guy is blind to what is really going on in the education system and should sit in a class and watch what is happening in real time with GOguardian in real time and see if he says “It does not matter.”. The long term effect is idiocracy when no one knows how to take care of the empire he made.
Attributions from:
National Library of Medicine – The effect of short-form video addiction on undergraduates’ academic procrastination: a moderated mediation model
Wikipedia – Idiocracy (FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING WATCH THIS MOVIE! AND NOT YOUTUBE SHORTS OF THE BEST PARTS!)
thegamer.com – Don’t Worry About AI Making You Dumber, Nvidia CEO Says It Doesn’t Matter
Editor’s Note: For context on why this matters: I have HNPP. My hands slip, nerves misfire, and pain overrides fine motor control. Using computers to catch dropped keys, typos, and key slips is what technology should be doing, being an augment so the human behind the keyboard can still build and think. Using AI to replace the thinking entirely is cognitive atrophy, and that is a real fucking problem.
Attack of the Christmas 2026 edition.
Every year Christmas for retail comes earlier and earlier.
ed note- Christmas the holiday will be properly capitalized while retail christmas will not.
We are not even through the first month of school for kids and now store are decorating for christmas. The thing is when I was young seeing christmas decorations before thanksgiving was borderline blasphemy. Always the day after Thanksgiving would be the first time stores would decorated for the holiday
Now Stores push christmas in july, christmas in September , christmas because we say so.. and so on. Retailers need to stop this. Retailers think buy stuffing this holiday in our face we are going to buy more… the reality is we buy less. What corporations miss is the time that makes or breaks for a quarter for the holidays gets so diluted that the black friday sales and cyber monday sales just get looked over as another day of retail manipulating customers.
For the most part those two days are a joke because if you eye something you want for Christmas, Go to that store starting in October and take a photo of the price of the item you want you will see a very interesting trend. About October 7th that price will start going up. By November that price will be about 15 to 20% higher than the price throughout the year, BUT!, you will see “BLACK FRIDAY DEAL 18% Off new low Price! “. So that cool thing you have been eyeballing most of the year goes from $100 to $120 down to $102 in price with a grand savings of negative $2 dollars.
Stores need to get their heads out of there asses, they are making Grinches of everyone. Because its about this time now we start getting yelled at DO YOUR CHRISTMAS SHOPPING!, uhh fuck no, I have bills to pay. year after year for the last 15 years the christmas shopping black Friday and cyber Monday days are so diluted that they don’t understand it.
I have a recommendation to all retail stores out there. Let people have their holidays, Let people have Columbus day, Give the kids Halloween without the parents worrying if they have enough for Christmas, let them have Veterans day, and lastly lets have Thanksgiving without worrying until 11:59:59pm of not having to deal with christmas shopping.
Give people a break, Allow them to swing into Christmas rather than smashing them in the face with unending christmas sales… Let people start to decorate without the guillotine of christmas sales being thrown into them every place they go. What retail doesn’t want to acknowledge is happy people will spend more money rather than depressed stressed out people. Depressed stressed people will buy 20 shitty little things just to get christmas shopping out of the way vs the happy person putting in thoughts to what people want and buying 20 well thought gifts out for Christmas.
The last few years I asked my SO if we could make the week after Christmas the time to shop for christmas because 9 times out of 10 you get deals that are pre-October prices and summer slump deals.
Follow up III to Whitepaper 8:Reflecting pool failure nodes.
I can’t believe I am still writing about this, But I also believe it as well. The reflecting pool has become such an unmitigated disaster because rush jobs never work out well unless they are very preplanned. The New York Times and other media outlets have finally broken their silence on the pool and they are only now saying what I said back in MAY about this.
The contractor said the pool’s new blue liner peeled and tore because of “human oversight” and a flawed plan that involved layering two incompatible chemicals, documents show.
I don’t even know what to say here. The whole world yelled out that even had a level of high school chemistry or watched this old house to know that the reflecting pool was going to be a disaster!
Because of “human oversight,” workers in some areas did not spray enough of the primer that made the layers of the liner stick together, Atlantic said in the documents. But the bigger problem, the company said, was that the repair plan laid out in the contract called for the layers of liner to include two chemicals that turned out to be incompatible.
This is a masterclass in bullshit. The company that has sprayed these liners in sewers and other things suddenly wakes up and goes “oh wait we had two incompatible chemicals”? This is a case of passing the buck on them not wanting to just admit when you try to apply chemicals to concrete that has been wet for 50+ years just doesn’t work well.
The chemical on top reached a temperature hotter than what the compound underneath could withstand, and the heat caused the bottom layer to blister and come loose, the documents show. The contractor said it had not expected that outcome because it was very uncommon to mix the two products in that way.
Back in May when they were laying this down I called out nearly the exact failure method! So again they pushed this to a no bid process, Let these people do this. If I were VASpray , I would be in a straight up panic and preparing for every city manager to come down on them like a bag of anvils because when you have a failure like this you just failed loud enough for the whole world to hear.
From Coffeecommander:
Executing an unbonded polymer application over a concrete base less than 48 hours after drainage bypasses the mandatory 30-to-90-day capillary dry-out phase. Under direct solar radiation, the surface temperature of the dense polymer sheet escalates to over 140°F (60°C). This heat conducts into the top micro-layers of the concrete, transforming the trapped sub-surface moisture into water vapor.Because the gas is trapped beneath a non-permeable vapor barrier, it expands geometrically. This expansion generates localized upward hydrostatic vapor pressures exceeding 150 psi. Given that the tensile strength of standard unreinforced concrete sits between 300–400 psi, the combination of internal vapor pressure and the massive mismatch in thermal expansion coefficients (α_concrete ≈ 10 × 10⁻⁶/K vs. α_polyurea ≈ 100 × 10⁻⁶/K) creates extreme internal shear strain. This forces systemic subsurface delamination and structural concrete spalling. The mathematical probability of structural matrix failure within a 12-to-24 month environmental cycle is 100%.
The sad factor is the internal departments are still pressing on the story that vandals did this. Unfortunately, the fix is going to cost at least 5 to 10 times the original cost, and the end factor is its going to be expensive and likely hazmat by the end of this.
As I sip my coffee I guess some people will learn from this. I hope… Honestly here, the blame game needs to stop and the companies involved should take a step back and work for a fix worthy of the US. My recommendation here is CALL IN THE ARMY COE!
Attributions from:
Coffeecommander.net – Follow up Part II to Whitepaper 8 Reflecting pool failure nodes.
Coffeecommander.net – Followup to: White Paper #8 CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE & HYDROLOGICAL ASSET CONSERVATION
Coffeecommander.net – White Paper #8 CIVIC INFRASTRUCTURE & HYDROLOGICAL ASSET CONSERVATION
New York Times – Contractor Blames Its Own Repairs, Not Vandals, for Reflecting Pool Failure
Writing prompt III: There and back again by Coffee Commander..
The longest trip I’ve taken was the best and worst. I happened to take a flight where the airliner never got to the runway.. The plane spent over 3 hours on the tarmac and delayed getting to the next leg of the flight to Philadelphia. When I got to philly I missed my connection, this is where things go from aggravating to bad.
US airways redirected me from a direct flight to CDG airport in France. The problem was they could not find pilots for the flight. so after hours of delay they finally find some pilots. The pilots got on the plane after a delay and as we were taxiing the pilot announces that they are returning to the gate because they had too many flight hours. Back to the gate we go, Defeated and hungry.
I did not know US airways screwed up my itinerary while they did redirect me towards Europe they made a mistake on the computers, They had my paper routing set to Orlando rather than Arlanda somehow the US airways employee fat fingered my location. So if we review my flight plan, It was supposed to be BOS to PHI to ARN , Somehow US airways had me from BOS to PHI to CDG to MCO to ARN?
To this point I had spent 1.5 – 2 hours – Logan Airport ,5 hours – broken plane out of gate – philidelphia airport inside of plane, 45 minutes – 1 hour – attempt #2 at taking off Philadelphia airport illegal flight crew., 5 hours – inside gate 22(?) at airport finding new crew.
to this point we’d been past the gates, with most amenities closed, me starving and other passengers in the same state we had asked for food, the flight attendants gave us a lavish meal of a Soda and a package of pretzels to which I still have to this day.
After getting off the flight and entering paris airport. from all the delays from the start of the flight I tried to find any help possible for my next flight because the connection time was only less 15 minutes(or passed by 15 mins) or so to Stockholm , so finding that the plane leaves from gate 7(?) again across an entire airport.
While I headed across this airport I realized that the setup of the airport is a horrible horrible setup. The airport was very hard to navigate your way through to get to your next location . figuring that I am already 24 hours overdue to my receiving friends I figured that I should reach out to them, I grabbed my phone out of the carry on and Tried to dial *dead* tried again *dead*. I did not know at that the time but T-mobile messed up and set another phone on the account for international travel and my phone to receive international calls. I put the phone away and hoped i would catch the flight and figured worst case I would figure out what to do in Stockholm. I ran to the gate across the cavernous airport with the people mover treadmills and got to my gate and to my dismay the flight was not listed. I found an english speaking person and asked about the flight and it had left an hour beforehand.
Defeated, I decided to make my way to the US airways ticket booth.. and there I realised I won my next prize, they were closed and would not be open till monday a full 24 hours till the booth opened. I managed to spend all of my time in the airport with a few excursions into france because I was bored out of my mind. Given I had not slept, I knew if I sat down I would pass out and I was still analyzing the situation to figure out what to do . I did eventually sit down and my carry-on with on me but not attached to me. There is nothing like waking up with guns in your face asking about your luggage. Given I was scared, Lost, Exhausted I kept trying to do my best not to piss off another country. The problem was every time I fell asleep I would wake up with some very attentive military types. Given it was their third visit and me not having a cigarette in over 2 days I noticed one of them had a pack on them, I gave them a short explanation to my plight and they seemed to take compassion in it. They said hold on and actually brought me out a door that I was not supposed to be out and let me smoke one of their cigarettes.
The Charles De Gaulle Airport security guys were amped but actually very nice. I joked with them where I might end up next. Due to having my bag strapped to my shoulder so long it had actually caused it to bleed fairly bad and I was starting to look like Bruce Willis in die hard. The next twenty four hours had me in a haze. The next morning I was actually able to have the breakfast of champions which was two Heinekens and a basket of rolls .
My next discovery in the airport was the internet kiosk, after my breakfast of the gods, I had some euro coin and it was enough to get on the computer for 10 minutes and cost 15 euros. I loaded up every session possible of Connected messengers, and at the time offline messages were not a thing. And I watched the time count down in desperation for ANYONE to log in. As I watched the time remaining drop into the sub two minute range, A good friend logged in and my typing WPM was likely 400 because I typed an entire book to my friend which was something like “Hey I am at the wrong airport , my flights were diverted my phone doesnt work my card locked up when trying to get money , Call my mother tell her i am fine . tell my mother to call my father and tell him that i am stuck in CDG airport. Contact US embassy please help, US Airways trying to divert me to MCO ” at the 30 second mark my friend said “ok” and I watched my connection die.
Happy I had made a hello world from the wrong part of the world gave me a bit of reserve. I went back to my area I was sitting and listening and hoping someone would find me. Not realizing the whole time over the PA they were calling my name and I was not paying attention to local dialect. My name is pronounced differently in france and suddenly my gun toting friends found me in the airport and they brought me to US airways booth. Now that part of things I had people I had hope and the first thing that the US airways desk agent says is “do you realize that you have a flight to MCO Orlando, at that point I said why on earth would I come to france and divert to orlando when my destination was Arlanda !” The desk agent made a call and what I could see in his hurried voice over the phone turning to abject terror realizing what exactly was happening.
The Desk agent suddenly was a flurry of calls, they routed a call to the US to my parents to say I was alive. My mother was freaking out, I told them to call my father instead, I gave him the story and he said he’d call back. They gave him the number to the desk. after a short bit Mr Gate agent’s phone rang, I knew he was talking about me and looking at me. Little did I realize that US officials got involved, I was shifted to the Pilots lounge. I had a celebratory rum and coke and just marvelled how fucked up US airways was. My Cell phone rang, it was my father saying he straightened things out and had help from US gov. Sipping away at my rum and coke and finally relaxing, Mr Gate agent comes in and says I cant stay in the lounge, I finish my Rum and coke and they finally have me routed to ARN through germany, I tested my debit card on mcdonalds and to say the least it was a completely different experience than USA. When they called me on the plane , they set me up in first class, which is an experience in itself.
The flight attendants treated me like royalty and honestly at the point I did not care, because I was getting closer to my destination. After another switch and window seats to which I love I saw my first glimpse of Sweden and realized the beginning of the beginning of my Journey was nearing its end.
Landing in ARN Stockholm.. getting off the plane and going to the belt to get my luggage I watched everyone’s luggage go around the belt. Ten pieces turned into 8 pieces that drew down to nothing left on the belt. I left the belt area to go to the US airways booth to be told my luggage was not there so I was left with a month to go no clothing to go through my trip , my stuff in my luggage was somewhere else. The irony here, My luggage took a different journey, BOS -PHI- CDG- NYC – MCO – PHI – ARN it came three weeks into my trip to which point I welcomed my luggage like an old friend and laughed that someone from ARN drove 3 hours to bring it to me.
Honestly, The trip was the best in my life, I had Friends, food , Surströmming(yes that one, No it was not bad, It was prepared by a chef), Beer, Swedish Culture, Walking around sweden give you an idea of how big and small the world is all at the same time and how Sweden’s Culture of Lagom is something to aspire to..
Things I’ve heard about data centers from no one in particular.
1: Everyone needs a Data Center.
Not everyone needs a data center. No one wants a white noise machine that plays above safe hearings levels. The thing is data Centers are taking up building and land next to residential areas because they are looking for the shortest plug to the outlets. Why go out to the middle of the desert and annoy no one when you have all you need on the edge of a city . They come in and asks towns for tax breaks and special use overrides in water/electricity uses and make everyone around them poorer for having them come in . Its like saying a billionaire moving into a small town will make everyone rich but he stays up all night partying and takes a dump on your front lawn.
2: Everyone gets rich around a Data Center.
If you want a tax break without even having to go to your city meetings are too anxious and don’t like your being home being valuable because taxes are too high, The data center running is what you want! If you like your water brown and want everything to look like the flooded delta of a river because of overruns in cooling, Get a data center. If you think you don’t replace your electronics enough and you want them to wear out faster due to brownouts every time the massive cooling fans kick up. Get a Data Center! If you don’t want to listen to your wife and need an excuse rather than ignore her and her question if you have hearings loss, Get a data center! Data centers should not be these things that are city blocks wide. if a place wants a data center, a reasonable installment that is agreed in three ways between the municipalities , the citizens and the data company should be key. These data centers also let off massive plumes of heat that can hurt humans and animals.
3: Data Centers use no electricity.
If your still reading at this point you deserve this cookie, because this was a comment said by a fairly high up person. This is just batshit. when you have AI companies buying the rights to spin up old nuclear reactors this farce is to false the pants are not only on fire they exploded into a supernova. A single modern hyperscale AI data center cluster draws much more than an office building, it demands 300 to 1,000+ megawatts which is around powering the scale of powering every house in the state of rhode island. I mean honestly if you believe this, I got some snake oil for you that cures boredom, homeschooling, every disease, the shits, your car not starting, your ex girlfriend in one convenient formula.
Bullshitteron.. Apply directly to the anus.
Bullshitteron.. Apply directly to the anus.
Bullshitteron.. Apply directly to the anus.
Bullshitteron: May cause dizziness, dehydration, Temporary blindness, death, animal insanity, HOA infections, Oscillopsia, hearing loss, Cash loss, muscle loss, real estate loss, Sanity loss, Death, life, Grandma’s cake to fall, operation of hair dryers while sleeping. Contact your doctor if you really think a data center may improve your life – Data Centers are not evaluated by the FDA nor have they been proven to show any affects or effects that are positive in a localized injection.
WordPress writing prompt-a-ma-bob
While not recent, But, recent enough, I would have to say archery. I picked this hobby up by accident. I tried it one day and I thought to myself that I kind of liked it. The first times I did archery however not accurate was therapeutic in the matter of there is always room to improve. After that day it was trials and tribulations of finding equipment and learning about archery.
After a trip to Dicks sporting goods, I had picked up a bow (it was terrible) and I learned a fast lesson in archery, Don’t buy the first thing you see, I had picked up a cheaper 1 piece bow. While it had worked I had my wrist slapped by the string worse than a nun with a ruler and the bruises to show.
I knew I was out of my element and I knew something was wrong and no matter the amount of youtube or web instructions you find with a bow its not an exact fix. I decided to find my Yoda of archery, I went to a dedicated archery store and the owner looked at my bow and laughed, I said to him I thought so, He offered me a Greatree bow at a fair deal and set me up with a lesson and the bow. Al the owner(bow yoda) looked at my form and complimented me that I had the form but not the bow, with the Greatree bow I did not slap my wrist and I was elated that I had missed and not felt like someone slapped me with a whip. Al corrected my form and I hit the target, the more I did archery the more I realized that archery in itself is an incredibly meditative state where all your problems slip away and the target becomes your problem.
Between dealing with day to day life and the sometimes insanity of things, I found archery to be a stress releaser. When I had issues where I could not fix something I was working on, I could go outside to with my target and use my bow and focus on the art of archery. I felt confidence with my bow, I also felt drawing my bow with the strength I had gained from doing archery I was outgrowing the bow I had. I started looking at better equipment and realized that it was going to get expensive fast..
The archery place I frequented had a customer appreciation day, Went there with no theory in mind other than seeing if arrows were on sale, they had a drawing for archery equipment. I put in my three tickets that they gave me at the door in a drawing thinking to myself I’ll never win anything. Little did I know that day I would walk out of the place with the top prize. I walked away with a Martin Jaguar Takedown bow! This took my new found hobby to the next level as is it introduced me to ILF limbs.
Thankfully with this prize it was a boon, I was accidently overpowering my bow I knew I had to step up my game. The step up in draw weight was a painful but fulfilling hill to climb. This started me down the road of proficiency with archery that even clubs were asking if I wanted to join. I could likely write a small book of my archery adventures.. the factors of what got me into this was the mindset and a bit of luck thankfully. But, I must say in the end archery has much prominence in my life and has helped me through the best and worst of times.
The greatest lesson archery can impart on you is – It’s not hitting a target, nor is it getting a bullseye, it is the pure action of trying and doing the best you can with a bit of humility and perseverance.
Well now… Site Maintenance. Time for a change.. Part II
I changed hosts a while back… I have sat on my opinion for a bit. I think now is a good time to say something about it. So far my new host has had some downtime but only a few minutes. I’m not worried about a few minutes here and there because this site is not an up to the minute thing.
As far as KnownHost, it was an unknown host to me, as it has only been a month the positives far exceed my expectations. The site is overall faster visually, Before the site would have a hang on a white screen before loading. Editing is not a quest in figuring out if the site is up to date enough to handle code updates. Support works with you rather than to upsell you shit every time you contact them.
Hostgator has only reached out with one message since I quit them. “Your auto renew is off, Please pay or lose your website” talk about being blind, they let their auto emailer spam me when the lights are on, the bill is not being paid, and the user moved out. they have my domain, it would take them 0.0002 seconds to realize I’ve left hostgator. It shows that their owners are just in it for the cash and not providing a service.
I’ve given hostgator my money, and 16 years of my time. basically, they did not even fight. when I said I’m leaving they did not even flinch, I have the entire interaction saved from the chat and they kept trying to upsell. My honest opinion about hostgator is “don’t shit where you eat!” and hostgator has not only shit where they ate, they shit all over the customers and they are starting to revolt.. charging for emails and acting like they are gold is bullshit.
Anyways. for the one month in on KnownHost, I would recommend it, The amount of spam they catch before it even hits the site is good, The speed is great, aside from a tiny downtime occasionally. If KnownHost’s biggest fault to me is losing a minute I can’t say anything bad.
So, this ends the Hostgator journey and now is the new odyssey with KnownHost. The spirit of this website lives in a new body to which will hopefully last more than 16 years. I’ve been editing and drinking coffee on this site since 2005 where i’ve shared my opinions on coffee to crazy tech.
In editing I noticed I did not capitalize company names, I’m leaving the wonky missed capitalizations with hostgator . they don’t take the effort to retain customers so why should I take the time to formalize them..
Attributions:
KnownHost – A reasonable webhost
hostgator – Not going to link that shit.