I guess the previous bitcoin post was a bit of a wake up call again. About 14 days after that post one card's fan stopped spinning and died. Fortunately I was alerted and shut things down before any damage was done. The card was returned for RMA. I'd hope for a new one back - considering the fan stopping could have damaged the GPU, however I was at the mercy of the supplier. And I'm still at their mercy as this friday will be 4 weeks since it was returned and still no word whether it will be repaired, replaced or refunded. A lot changes in 4 weeks. BTC2USD for example, is down from 12 to 4.5. Hmmm. I did get the PCI-E extenders and they do work a treat.

Thursday this week is RUOKDay 2011. So I've been listening to TripleJ's hack program a bit lately and it reminded me of about this time last year when an episode dealt with RUOKDay which was very interesting to me at the time. It raised a very important point which wasn't immediately obvious. Don't jump in and ask someone if they're ok unless you truly and honestly are ready for any answer.

Speaking of listening to things, at work we've taken a liking to listening to the CFox. They seem to play lots of music from when I was in high school, which is cool, mixed in with some new stuff and more metallica/nirvana than most stations would play. The ad's are funny too, being from Vancouver it's all Canada-ay. After noticing they seem to play the same tracks multiple times in a day (like all commercial stations) we started tracking it. Pumped up kicks had it's day, and is dwindling now, it's still funny when it's heard around the place though. It makes me laugh.

Minecraft. What can I say. There's a reason I didn't play WoW and this could be it. So far I've only lost one whole evening to it (and built a Nyan cat). It's fun to do stuff in, but is a massive time sink. I also built a weighted companion cube, 35x35x35 too, only another 5 or so hours. Oops.

Storage. I've got the sata port multipliers I wanted, out of China which went as smoothly as could have hoped. I did take precautions on paying by credit card by obtaining a prepaid mastercard to pay with, which was fine. The Woolworths ones have the best fees of the ones I looked at, and was easy to buy and use. Highly recommended. So far I've only done basic testing with them on the doomed (bitcoin) AMD board. I need to get a wriggle on with this project, because the new tv shows all start this week.

"Not all those who wander are lost." - J.R.R Tolkien

Ok so with the surge in price of bitcoins in june-july spiking to USD30 each and then crashing back to about USD12 it got some decent media coverage.

Perhaps I was in a vunerable situation, looking for something hobby like and a decent distraction. See I needed a distraction from storage as that's a problem still sort of wrecking on the rocks waiting to sink. Mix into this the lack of a vmware box and I've sort of lost the plot again.

So I sank some cash into a box to mine bitcoins, which was fine, or would have been fine if the hardware didn't have issues. Basically I rushed into it and opted for something available right now vs shopping around for a quality product. So the Gigabyte board I have has a fault which took about 2 weeks to isolate, and one of 2 dimms is also faulty. Now I really hate returning stuff, and after dealing with gigabytes useless and slow support decided to never buy a product from them ever again, and I still have to convince the shop that there is a fault. So that will be downtime, and in bitcoin mining - all downtime costs money. Real money.

A further complication came from a software hang issue caused by ATI Catalyst drivers, OpenCL code and an accelerated video layer (or GPU call) on Windows. Basically a major bug in the ATI drivers causes a hang of the machine if a video plays while OpenCL code is running. This was after realising the driver bundle with control center caused crashes itself, so switching to the driver only pack at least let me isolate the problem. Oh and the fix has been committed for the driver release due out AFTER the next one. So October apparently. Thank's AMD/ATI. I'll never buy your products ever again too. For reference, this card was released in NOVEMBER last year.

The memory fault isn't such a problem now, but once this fad wears off (or becomes unprofitable due to the price of power going up due to failure of the government (to cater for population growth or restrict immigration)) I was hoping to use this box as a vmware host. But alas, it's again apparent that I'm not allowed to have things go well or to plan.

Further proof of this was the build up to the final Harry Potter film. My glasses broke, and not having spares anymore (long story) left me without sight. Skip forward a week and I'm still without, and now without more money too. Health insurance is such a scam. It barely covered 25% of the cost of replacement glasses. Sigh.

I'm not allowed to win. Someone please remind me why is it I try at all.

Perhaps I should move to some far away land which is cheaper than here. Perth's now in the top 10 most expensive cities to live, and it's higher up the list than New York. What the hell am I staying here for (apart from America being filled with americans).

Hmmm

HALP

Quite a few weeks back, while doing some blog software related coding I came to have an interesting discussion with Billy about some pretty basic blog constructs which there's no right answer for. Specifically pagination and previous/next page links.

It was interesting to compare and contrast the various combinations out there and wonder about the origin of them and so on and so forth.

It pretty much came down to which way around the previous and next links should go. Some sites use previous to mean older posts, and next to mean newer, others swap the labels. Then you get the left/right side part of the debate. If both links are presented on one line, does the one to older posts belong on the left or right.

Comparing to a book was good. Next page is newer content, and located bottom right, previous page is older content and bottom left. I agree with that layout on the screen and even the labels.

Mix into that the page numbers, front page, page 1, page 2 and so on. For simplicity blogs usually have the pages numbered from the front page going backwards in time, not forwards. That would be a bit odd but I have seen it a long time ago, the benefit there is a page10 link will always have the same content on it, however the older articles linked off the front page will link to a high page number. One major benefit of this style of reverse (forward) numbering is if you're generating static content, the already complete pages won't ever need regenerating (unless templates change).

Jump forward a few weeks and it's all moot. As it doesn't really matter I just left it as it was on my blogging related experiment. So far it hasn't really had much of a test, so I'll leave it as is and see what develops.

That turned into quite a bleak blog post, devoid of links and actually anything interesting. Oh my.

Portal 2 came out, I bought it, it's win. I finished it in about 8 hours and only got stuck on one level, which I eventually figured out (after sleeping on it). The funny thing is, within 30 seconds of buying it online (steam) I got a call from my credit card provider's (automated) fraud department. Other people have spoken of this before but this is the first time I've ever been called for one. It's good that the banks are becoming more proactive on preventing fraud. It also proves without a doubt that the transaction makes it to the provider in real time. So why the hell does it take a week or more for the transaction to show up, and when it shows up it usually has the wrong date. Another gripe I have with all banks is the stupid interbank delays. Real time works for everything else in the world, so why not for financial stuff. Paypal proved long ago that it works and is good. I think banks are holding on tightly to a monopoly they have and make money off the delays. They can check your available balance in real time from any ATM, and ATM withdrawals usually show up pretty fast, it's the damn credit charges that don't and I think there is no excuse for it. When I log into my credit cards netbank, it's not to much of a fairy tale to expect the available balance + money owed should equal the credit limit, sometimes they do, sometimes not. Even worse is it when the available balance has taken into account a recent transaction but it hasn't shown up on the transaction log yet. Come on, get with the program. And don't try to give me crap about card authorisations, it doesn't take days for a transaction to show up. I think it's time I moved my credit card to a better place than where it's at right now.

While on the subject of retarded financial things (don't get me started on my home loan provider - they will be getting the boot after 1 July). The milk price war thing has been going on for a while now. I find it interesting to see that despite Coles/Woolworths milk being cheaper ($1/L) the other brands are still selling out first. Did Coles simply adjust how much stock of their milk is on the shelves to cater for where they thought the demand would go? I'm sure they've now got a whole heap of data on the price sensitivity of the milk market (or specifically elasticity), I bet someone could write a thesis on it. I still prefer other milk (Harvey Fresh) anyway because the ingredients list only has milk on it, no additives or nonsense going on. From a global perspective, 2% milk in Canada is $2.89/4L (according to the latest Degrassi episode).

Speaking of nonsense. This whole social networking thing hasn't gone away yet. It's been over 4 weeks and I've been waiting very patiently. Based on some thoughts I've put together previously, I've been contemplating designing a social network experiment to test the waters so to speak. After all, we've proven that collectively everyone has flushed everyone else's right to privacy down the drain by joining the brainwashed masses in this grand experiment already. I reject the premise that to protect your privacy you're better off joining said networks (not naming any names) so you can control and hide all your personal information. Of course that information was put there without your knowledge (or consent) so assuming you can find it all is a big unknown (and totally unprovable). From the social network operator perspective I'd hope they wouldn't consider information supplied by multiple third parties to be authoritative about a person (even if the multiple third parties all said the same thing), so hopefully that information is near useless - or more like background noise if you like. The information put up there by participating persons of course couldn't be trusted either because everyone lies too, and in the social arena surely everyone is more likely to boast and embellish the truth anyway. Surely having all this information in one place is going to be a bad thing eventually. Look at what happened to Sony's PlayStation Network in the past 2 weeks. One big pile of epic fail. Actually Amazon (AWS) had a cloud issue recently too - perhaps the silver lining is leaking.

The other aspect of this social focus is how it's changing the way people communicate. When someone finds out I'm not on various social network sites I often ask why I should join, what would I gain from it. Usually it's some bollocks about catching up with old friends from school, chatting with friends, posting photos, finding out about events/parties. What I've seen from outside is people blindly assume that everyone is on there already and ignore you if you're not - to me this highlights the true friends from the noise (not friend in the social networking sense - which has massively diluted the term, and made it a one way thing). Before various social network sites existed people were still able to catch up with old friends, chat with current friends, post photos, find out about events/parties. Besides, if I didn't keep up with people from school, maybe I didn't want to or they didn't want to; chatting with friends, surely we'll never stop doing that and definitely shouldn't need a specific web site to do it - my email address hasn't changed in over 10 years, and IM goes back to the mid 90's (ok so the networks changed over time - perhaps that could be seen as a predecessor to social networking?). The thing that stands out the most is now people can do all these things in one place, they do, so if you're not part of that you miss out. Surely it's easier than how things used to be, but what have you lost on the click through license agreement and will anything come back to haunt you later. Is it laziness to want everything as easy as possible regardless of the price (even if unknown)? This weeks south park also highlights the risks of not reading the click through license agreements (and the evilness of apple).

Right now the only social network type site that interests me is twitter. Ages ago before it really took off and micro blogging was still a new term, I considered writing a little plugin for my site to do essentially that. Short posts, rss syndicated out, no overhead to enter them - unlike blogging which I seem to curate over days/weeks/months at a time. But then as the site grew it became more obvious there's more to it than just small blog posts - there's communication going on between people, conversations in real time, and people retweeting other's messages to spread them out further. It really is a web of interconnections - again an excellent data mining experiment from both depth of graph and speed of transmission perspectives. Oh and without them we might not have the fail whale either. Now it's also apparent that to get any real response from companies you need to tweet about your dissatisfaction to get anywhere - again the web's been hit with the stupid stick.

Then there's another one, social coding. Github's web interface is great, though I'm not ready to make that switch just yet. The integration of subversion into monodevelop is awesome, so once that catches up to mercurial or git I'll jump ship to that VCS then, but do I jump to a shared hosted version - ala github or bitbucket (vs hosting my own private repo as I do now). That will be the new question.

Perhaps not being reachable via the social web is the newer version of going off the grid, while still being able to buy your groceries online and live in a high rise apartment block.

No random picture this time. Who knows where to next?