Techno-crap
Sep. 9th, 2009 01:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksSo, I have my new netbook Acer Aspire, and I'm sitting there wondering what the fuck to do with it. I also have a Palm Tungsten W, and it's sitting there and I'm wondering what the fuck to do with it. I've disinterred the old computer and set it up by the Yamaha. In this case, I know what to do with it, but I don't know how to do it. Oh, computers, thy name is taking up time.
The Netbook is the most paradoxical. Looking at it, I think "wow, that's GREAT", but then I can see that, when I go away on holiday, I shall still be humping along a 17in widescreen super laptop with full keyboard and surround sound. And at the moment, because I'm darned disorganized about these things, there's nothing installed on it apart from Windows XP. Perhaps this might be the right moment to start using a free e-mail package. Then at least I could do my email stuff and the like while relaxing in bed.
The Palm Tungsten really works best with a Sim Card in it and GPRS data retrieval. I haven't got round to that, either.
But will I have the courage to go away and actually leave my laptop behind? I don't know. It would make travelling a lot lighter.
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Worst week of the year on the trading front, following a bad six weeks. So it goes. The year has been good to me so far and I'm more content than I have been for a long time.
I can pretend to myself that it's a "hedge" against my stock holdings, but to be honest, that's all bollocks. It's a gamble that went wrong and to claim anything else would be self-deception. I've put together a sequence of these since the end of 2007 (from the moment I chose a fixed rate over a tracker for the mortgage). Gainsayers can be wise in hindsight, but they said nothing at the time. And the bears on the stockmarket have been markedly quiet of late. Meanwhile, I sit there doing my balls, short at 4618. Sigh.
The softs have proved an unmitigated disaster as well. Lesser men would probably have been broken, quit, left the country, claimed that it's all rigged, lol. Me? I just take it as a good lesson in being careful of hubris and overconfidence that my analysis is right. After all, analysis can be right, but the timing can be wrong. The markets are a weighing machine in the long term and a voting machine in the short term. And the short term is longer than you think.
Still, chucking yet another grand into the IG account to stop yourself being closed out can get a bit tedious, even if the Marketmaster account is up by three grand at the same time.
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The Netbook is the most paradoxical. Looking at it, I think "wow, that's GREAT", but then I can see that, when I go away on holiday, I shall still be humping along a 17in widescreen super laptop with full keyboard and surround sound. And at the moment, because I'm darned disorganized about these things, there's nothing installed on it apart from Windows XP. Perhaps this might be the right moment to start using a free e-mail package. Then at least I could do my email stuff and the like while relaxing in bed.
The Palm Tungsten really works best with a Sim Card in it and GPRS data retrieval. I haven't got round to that, either.
But will I have the courage to go away and actually leave my laptop behind? I don't know. It would make travelling a lot lighter.
++++++++
Worst week of the year on the trading front, following a bad six weeks. So it goes. The year has been good to me so far and I'm more content than I have been for a long time.
I can pretend to myself that it's a "hedge" against my stock holdings, but to be honest, that's all bollocks. It's a gamble that went wrong and to claim anything else would be self-deception. I've put together a sequence of these since the end of 2007 (from the moment I chose a fixed rate over a tracker for the mortgage). Gainsayers can be wise in hindsight, but they said nothing at the time. And the bears on the stockmarket have been markedly quiet of late. Meanwhile, I sit there doing my balls, short at 4618. Sigh.
The softs have proved an unmitigated disaster as well. Lesser men would probably have been broken, quit, left the country, claimed that it's all rigged, lol. Me? I just take it as a good lesson in being careful of hubris and overconfidence that my analysis is right. After all, analysis can be right, but the timing can be wrong. The markets are a weighing machine in the long term and a voting machine in the short term. And the short term is longer than you think.
Still, chucking yet another grand into the IG account to stop yourself being closed out can get a bit tedious, even if the Marketmaster account is up by three grand at the same time.
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no subject
Date: 2009-09-09 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-09 10:49 pm (UTC)PJ
no subject
Date: 2009-09-10 03:13 pm (UTC)Blimey, PB crams more into a month than I manage in a lustrum!
Titmus
Soup, meet Art
Date: 2009-09-10 04:55 pm (UTC)Of course, the question of what to do with the garbage was different in those days. I mean, said zany was actually paying for the zine; not snorting it up off the 'net. So, you had to edit it and try to make sense from nonsense. That's Art, baby.
Blogs are, in comparison, Soup. ((c) Lily Tomlin.)
Beats me why anybody accepts anonymous submissions: the only fun you can have with them is to try to guess the hidden identity -- I have my suspicions in this case -- and, frankly, that sort of low-grade entertainment went out with What's My Line in the fifties.
There's a sort of inverse power series going on here. Power series, for them what don't know but might for some reason care, are a mathematical model often yanked out of context to suggest that the Internet is a Good Thing because of "the long tail." Given a large enough audience, so the theory goes, you can always find a market somewhere down where the power series dwindles away. I mean, there's billions of the fuckers out there. All you need is a thousand or so ... collect underpants ... ? ... Profit!
This has always struck me as a dubious proposition advanced by intellectually challenged mental midgets such as Marketing Consultants and PhDs in Mathematics.
The flip-side of the idea, which gets very little attention, is that the process is dynamic, not static. At random points, some blogs will suddenly acquire notoriety. At this point, a million feebs will spring out of the woodwork and post inane comments because "Hey Mom! I'm on the Intertubes!" The power series inverts, and suddenly you've got more babbling cretins on your hands than the Leader of the Opposition during a morals scare.
Tech blogs are the worst. The process starts with well-meaning, but uninformed, people. Then it degenerates into people who didn't read the actual article, but noticed the word "Microsoft." Then it degenerates into people who, I assume, are repeatedly banging their head against the wall and slashing their arms with an exacto-knife while they type. At this point, all hope of sanity, reason, relevance, spelling, grammar, or even CAPITALISATION is lost.
This is the pre-terminal point in the pattern. The terminal point is where some web-bot in China notices that the blog is phenomenally popular, and starts spitting out ill-disguised "responses" advertising either World of Warcraft or underage escort girls in Shanghai.
Fortunately, this will never happen to Birks.
His life is far too empty and desperate to attract that sort of Hollywood glamour.
Re: Soup, meet Art
Date: 2009-09-11 07:16 am (UTC)An ongoing search of the garage ensued and I have some stuff in there that is amusing and some which is downright embarassing - especially when shared with Steph who is a couple of years older than I was then. The notion of writing 10-15,000 words (which these days constitutes a thesis) in a weekend is a hard one to explain. Although her most telling comment was, "God, you were such a nerd." Out of the mouths of babes...
But I can confirm - there was an awful lot of lined paper from my fellow nerds.
Re: Soup, meet Art
Date: 2009-09-11 07:16 am (UTC)Re: Soup, meet Art
Date: 2009-09-12 05:11 pm (UTC)I know this, because I wrote my "dissertation" overnight whilst extremely drunk and with a wet towel over my head. It came out at around 7,000 words. It was gibberish. I like to think it had several good jokes in it, but it certainly didn't have much to do with implementing a digital switching system over the Fast Cambridge Ring ... which words I stencilled in, neatly, with lime-green letters over a chocolate-brown binding.
It seemed the right thing to do at the time.
Shortly after that, my friend Richard Tobin, who is now a renowned something-or-other in Artificial Intelligence, but was then merely a triple-starred Maths First at Cambridge, asked me to help with his PhD.
"Richard," I said, "You've known me for fifteen years. You're well aware that I'm a mathematical ignoramus."
"So what?" said Mr Tobin. "I've spent three years writing the equations for my PhD, and it turns out that they only qualify for 1,800 words in LaTeX.
"I need another fucking twelve hundred words."
Needless to say, I left him to it. If there's one thing I can't abide, it's a whiny mathematician.