DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I rented a big truck on the day we moved across town. You’ve seen them, lumbering inexpertly around wide turns, packed wall-to-wall with boxes and furniture and potted plants, driven by stressed-out and dirty and exhausted people who have apparently piloted one of these things about twice before in their lives. It isn’t just the tentative way they change lanes, it’s the way they stop traffic, set out pylons, and call in for airborne support when they have to back into a driveway. New drivers of big trucks need a football field to execute a three-point turn.

None of this is true of me, of course.

So I sit down in the truck, fire up the motor, pull the handle to release the parking brake, shift into drive, and lurch halfway across the driveway. The acrid smell of unhappy brake pads rises immediately. “What a maroon,” I think, “the previous renter must have tried to drive with the parking brake on.” And then I realize that the hood isn’t latched, and yes, I did put two and two together shortly after that.

I stood on my deck, eating an apple picked from my yard. When I finished, I threw the apple core as far as I could. And it landed on my property.

Sure, you could say, you’re a computer nerd, and you throw like a girl. You’d be right. Still — it’s a big yard.

The move went pretty well. I am indebted to the hardy souls who donated a day of their lives and worked tirelessly without complaint to haul my stuff: Patti, Bim, Chuck, and Pete. Thank you!

The crew put in about six hours of difficult labor. Then my wife and I put in about six more… we cleaned the old house, and packed the car (twice) with the handful of items that hadn’t fit onto the truck. Then we began the project for this month, unpacking. This house has more storage space, but it’s all different, and we’re having to find new ways and places to hide all our junk.

I was excited to realize I’ve been socking away all manner of useless electronic crap that I can now donate to the CRC. For example: an external ZIP drive that works great but requires a computer with an external SCSI-2 port. Or: two CueCats, never used, still in their original boxes from Wired. Or, from the scary tangle of wire that filled four boxes: seven ADB cables, thirteen RJ-11 phone cords, fifteen power cords, and a selection of unidentified ribbon cables. It will be refreshing to downsize my collection.

If you can read this, I congratulate you! You have braved the rough DNS waters to surf to my server’s new home.

I spent nearly five hours today standing around while a series (and, many times, a parallel) of Pac*Bell and PBI technicians tried to make my new DSL work. The first tech tried a router and 3 modems. All showed synch, but none passed traffic.

The installation tech had to leave (PBI folks are forbidden from working overtime) but they dispatched someone else, apparently missing the message that something in the central office was broken. The second tech confirmed that the first tech was correct in diagnosing a problem “elsewhere,” and then he went and sat in his truck for 90 minutes waiting for P*B to change hardware in the CO. The hardware apparently got changed, but no one thought to call me or him to say so.

Finally, after 6:00 PM, the line came up. And then about 11:00 PM I got my server installed and configured. And then by about 12:30 AM some of the DNS and whois changes began to take effect.

I think this site actually showed less than 1 hour’s downtime, although individual client experiences vary with the performance of their local DNS caches. I saw traffic coming it shortly after booting up the server, though, so that was gratifying. All in all it was the least painful server-and-DNS relocation I’ve ever done.

This is fun: online intelligence testing from the “High IQ society”.

Here is a sad comment about media saturation and advertising and, well, the sloth of the average American: regarding its new series of anti-iMac television advertisements, computer maker Gateway estimates that “83 percent of U.S. adults would see the TV ads an average 14 times through September.” (local mirror)

If the ad is 30 seconds long, then 83 of 100 adult Americans will spend seven minutes next month watching the same commercial, over and over. How productive is that?

According to the 1990 U.S. Census, there are 248M people in the country, of which 74.4% are 18+ years of age. So that’s roughly 185M adults. If 83% of them see seven minutes of Gateway commercials next month, that amounts to 2051 years of wasted time.

Fortunately, the media companies have not yet succeeded in making it illegal to skip past commercials (in spite of Jamie Kellner’s efforts), so some of those 153,583,320 adults won’t actually see all 14 broadcasts of the Gateway commercial. I feel good about this: perhaps those people will be out winning the Iditarod or inventing revolutionary transportation devices or ghostwriting autobiographies for people who didn’t spend their lives watching computer commercials on television. But I fear that some large percentage of the people who leave the couch during the commercial will just be going to the kitchen to retrieve some Jiffy-Pop or a Snickers bar, which, while in one sense good for the economy, in most other senses doesn’t address the productivity problem.

An associate of mine views advertisements as entertainment. I can’t be so positive, or even impartial: I think advertising is a virus. It feeds on attention and turns brains to jelly. Check out your neighborhood toddlers in designer footwear if you disagree.

Most people I’ve talked to claim they’re not affected by advertising. That argument can’t be true — if advertising wasn’t effective, why would merchants spend so much money on it? In fact, the people who think they’re somehow untouched by the manipulative messaging are probably the advertisers’ favorite audience, as they are puppets who insist that there are no strings.