I got what was the most baffling friending on Facebook to date: Jennifer “Porky” Gadsden (Greeley). The names are a story unto themselves. I’ve mentioned, but not named Porky before. She was the very conventionally beautiful (the nickname is not a reference to her weight) woman I was briefly with that warned me off conventionally beautiful women forever. Without going into too much detail (maybe I’ll make a Ghostland post out of it), in the words of Death Cab for Cutie, it was vile and it was cheap.

I’d say that things ended poorly, but save for a brief window at the start they went poorly throughout with each of us asking what the hell is wrong with the other person as time progressed. After the split (if we had anything to split from), the only contact we had was a “hello” at the university’s convenience store and once when she texted me to ask if I could help move her furniture. That was fine with me (not moving the furniture - I was helpfully out of town - but the no-contact thing).

So what the hell was she making a friend request on Facebook for? My first thought was maybe she sent out a lot of such requests - though that wouldn’t be like her - but after I accepted (I’ve never denied a request from anyone that I know to be a legitimate person) I saw that she had only a few more Friends than I do. I did see that she was still single, though with a cute little kid. She’s still thin, which I was sure she wouldn’t be.

Anyhow, those of you who read me know that I have a tendency to get hung up on the past. Yet, despite this, if there was one book I don’t mind being shut (even to the point of being so indifferent as to not care to know if things are turning out miserably) it’s her. And she was always far more indifferent to me than I was to her. I know what I got out of what we had, but hell if I can figure out why she would even remember my name.

Maybe she didn’t, or confused me with someone else. All I know is that when I woke up the next morning, I had been unfriended.

While I was ordering a couple of replacement hard drives, I went ahead and ordered a new keyboard. The existing keyboard, purchased in 2003 or so, was still doing its job. But it had, at some point, picked up an odor that even I could smell. Plus, and I will grant that this reason is more frivolous, it was beige and all of my computers have since switched to black.

You never realize how much you’ve gotten used to a keyboard until it’s gone. All of the little things you never noticed. Oddly, this is true even when you regularly switch between keyboards. I have no problem going from laptop to desktop, despite the very different computer configurations. But I guess when I am sitting at the desk, my mind has incorporated one keyboard over another.

So what are the differences? This keyboard has shorter keys. This is a shame. It’s one of the things I prefer about desktops over laptops. The tall keys. I was about to say that it makes typing easier - and it does - though I have gotten so used to the laptop I think I can switch back and forth between modes. But when I in desktop mode, I am expecting taller keys. This has resulted in an unusual number of typos. The biggest ongoing issue is for some reason my failing to correctly tap the letter “L.” The L key works fine, but for some reason I seem to suddenly be missing.

This new keyboard is also much, much quieter. I am not sure if the old keyboard simply got louder over time or if it was just a louder keyboard (this may be related to the whole height thing). I have been told, by a large number of people, that I am the loudest typist that they have ever met. My musician friend Clint actually says I am also the most rhythmic typist he has ever met. I think that’s a good thing. I seem to have gotten used to it. The only key that makes any notable noise is the spacebar, which means that the noise comes in a non-rhythmic fashion.

The biggest issue, however, is the fact that the new keyboard has a sightly different layout. They almost always do, and I consider it frustrating. This has a problem that is more severe, however. Where I am used to the Scroll Lock key being, now resides a “sleep” key. I don’t like sleep keys to begin with, but definitely not where the Scroll Lock is supposed to be. Now, some of you may not even know what the Scroll Lock is. It’s one of the least-used keys on the keyboard. Which is why KVM switches (which allow you to use a single keyboard/monitor/mouse for multiple computers) use it to switch machines. So, without thinking, I tap what I think is the Scroll Lock key in order to switch machines, and the next thing I know the computer I am on is going to sleep.

This will pass with time, no doubt. Maybe I’ll even be able to remap the key. But even if not, I’ll get used to it soon enough. I remember back in the old days how much I absolutely hated, hated, hated the double-decker Enter key. I still don’t prefer them, but it didn’t even occur to me to look for a keyboard without it.

The last thing is that my wrist hurts typing this. I am really hoping that’s temporary.

Alexis Madrigal argues that frictionless sharing could undermine our legal right to privacy:

You are no doubt familiar, now, with Facebook’s concept of “frictionless sharing.” You enable a social reader like the one from the Washington Post and the next time you read an article on the site, news of that textual encounter is broadcast to your Facebook friends. {…}

In Fourth Amendment cases, the Supreme Court has to determine what “a reasonable expectation of privacy” actually is. If you do have that expectation of privacy, then the government needs a warrant to look into your communications. So, if you go out in the public street and shout to the world that you committed a crime, the government does not need a warrant to use that communication. However, if you were to send a sealed letter to a friend containing the same information, you would have a reasonable expectation that the government would not be reading that note.

Because we’re talking about expectations, we have to think about what cultural norms are and the actions that signal what norms are in play. For example, Kaminski notes, “In the 1967 seminal Supreme Court case on wiretapping, Katz v. United States, Katz placed a phone call in a public phone booth with the door closed, and was found to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone call, so a warrant was required for wiretapping the phone.” Closing the door meant he expected the call to be private.

And the problem with frictionless sharing is that it may leave the door open for the government to collect and use information without a warrant.

“Justice Alito recently contemplated that we may be moving toward a world in which so many people share information with so many friends that social norms no longer indicate a reasonable expectation of privacy in that information,” Kaminski writes. “Without a reasonable expectation of privacy, there will be no warrant requirement for law enforcement to obtain that information. This analysis is troubling; sharing information with your friends should not mean that you expect it to be shared with law enforcement.”

I was skeptical of the headline, but reading the article it actually made sense. It actually makes me wonder, more broadly, if the perception of young people wanting to share everything won’t change privacy expectations with or without frictionless sharing.

I consider frictionless sharing to be, on the whole, a negative thing regardless of its fourth amendment implications. I mean, I keep (albeit with poor maintenance) a list of what I am reading, watching, and listening to on this site. But I choose what to put up there. I put up a thing for Fringe, or maybe a season of Fringe. Frictionless sharing can mean, basically, that every time I watch an episode of Fringe it gets posted. Or every time I listen to something on Spotify, you get to find out what it is. I don’t care if you know, but I don’t have any reason to believe you would want to know. And if I think you might, I’ll write a post on it.

The same goes for articles that I read. If I find something interesting, I’ll pass it along. But just because I am reading something doesn’t mean that I think you will be interested in reading it as well. The same applies to Facebook friends and such. The internet as a whole has a signal-to-noise problem, and this creates a whole lot more signal.

According to Thomas Freedman, we shouldn’t be worried about broadband capabilities in rural America:

Right now, though, notes Levin, America is focused too much on getting “average” bandwidth to the last 5 percent of the country in rural areas, rather than getting “ultra-high-speed” bandwidth to the top 5 percent, in university towns, who will invent the future. By the end of 2012, he adds, South Korea intends to connect every home in the country to the Internet at one gigabit per second. “That would be a tenfold increase from the already blazing national standard, and more than 200 times as fast as the average household setup in the United States,” The Times reported last February.

Therefore, the critical questions for America today have to be how we deploy more ultra-high-speed networks and applications in university towns to invent more high-value-added services and manufactured goods and how we educate more workers to do these jobs — the only way we can maintain a middle class.

Erik Loomis disagrees, arguing:

I know the fact that people live in rural areas and small towns is inconvenient for people obsessed with national planning and technological fetishism, but that’s the reality of the United States. You can’t just marginalize these people and their futures by dooming them to second-rate access to resources. I mean, you can, but then you have to deal with endemic poverty, high rates of drug use, domestic violence, and any number of other social problems.

He is particularly concerned about rural Hispanics.

I am, of course, in the middle of this. I am a broadband using geek living in rural America. So naturally, I am sympathetic to the idea that the “last 5%” should get broadband. I am not presently in the last 5%, but I’m close enough to it that we would have to be careful about where we buy a home. I’ve already let it be known that broadband is not optional. But I am a computer geek. A lot of people out here can live with cut-rate connectivity. There’s nowhere in the country (or the lower 48, anyway) that you can’t get something, even if it’s satellite. Satellite might not be good enough for me, but I am not a typical case. The degree to which the rest of the country should bend over backwards for its most rural brethren is limited.

It leads to projects like this, where millions was spent on areas with 35k homes, of which 30k already had fixed broadband service. Over 90% of the remaining 5k had 3G availability, which isn’t ideal but is still something. I would be surprised if satellite were not an option for the remaining 500 houses. At some point, I think you have to say “good enough” and move on.

On the other hand, Friedman’s suggestion about the top 5% leaves me cold. Namely because we want a degree of universality to our service. Even if some get left behind, web site developers and content deliverers (like Netflix, Hulu, etc.) need to have some idea of the sorts of speeds that people are going to get. If you plug in Silicon Valley, and their speeds are significantly faster than everyone else (who isn’t in the top 5%, that is), they will be developing things for those speeds. This is already a problem, with inadequate buffering on the unjustified beliefs that everyman’s delivery speeds are faster than they are.

In terms of Internet, what I would very much prefer over raising speed caps is raising speed reliability. The other day I was at a coffee shop wherein all of the comments I wanted to leave at blogs had to be emailed to my cell phone, where I could then post it using my phone. The main reason is that they (I believe) have to dedicate so much of their bandwidth to downloading and so little to uploading, that the latter just became impossible. This is at a hot spot. This is where we really need improvement before we’re worried about the top 5% (or, for that matter, the left behind 5%).

Doc Searles writes:

There are dozens of wi-fi hot spots showing up on our lists, but all of them are closed. If this were eight years ago, at least half of them would be open, but the popular default in the world is now for closed hot spots, so those are also not options.

I’m sure in the long run The Market will fix this, but meanwhile “The Cloud’s” promise and reality are way out of sync. Since most of The Market outside our homes is comprised of pay services over wi-fi and cellular data systems are sure to suffer traffic jams as more of our lives require tethering to data banks and services in clouds, I’m not holding my breath for ease in the short run.

Remember “the information superhighway”? Would be nice to have that now.

I’ve written here and there about why I am skeptical of cloud computing. Namely, for cloud computing to really work, we have to be able to reliably access the Internet, and have a solid connection, wherever we go. And it needs to be free or a part of a ubiquitous subscription service. As long as we have to ask ourselves whether it’s worth it to get a solid and stable Internet connection in some place or another, cloud computing won’t work. Because the alternative is installed software. And you know what? That’s on my computer wherever I go. A file locker that can be accessed anywhere would be helpful, but even then it’s going to have to be a synchonization thing rather than a working on it from wherever thing. I open it and download it to the laptop, and as soon as I’m done with it, or the first time I am connected to the Internet again after it’s done, it uploads to the central server in North Carolina or wherever.

I am the first person that should be using cloud computing. I have an obscene number of computers and laptops. It’s a real pain to know that a file exists somewhere and then have to figure out which of the four likely places it is. But I will take that, every time, over being able to work on something only until the Internet connection slows to a crawl or stops.

This isn’t an appeal for some large government program that will assure Internet access anywhere and everywhere. Rather, it’s saying that unless we have such a program (whether supplied by the market or the government), it’s going to make more sense to work on files locally rather than remotely.

-{via Dustbury}-

I haven’t made the complete transition to Windows 7 yet. All of my secondary computers are still on XP (or, in two cases, Vista). When you do a search on XP, there’s a little dog that appears in the lower left-hand corner. You can make it to tricks. The problem with this digital dog is that it makes noise (some scratching sound). I don’t mind the dog, but the noise is irritating. But to get rid of the noise, you have to get rid of the dog. Right-click and tell it to take a hike and it trots away.

I feel the slightest bit bad about telling a digital dog to take a hike.

I feel ridiculously dumb for that sentiment.

—

Many years ago - maybe it’s till around - there was an application you could buy to raise a digital dog on your computer. My then-girlfriend Julianne had some. If you didn’t play with it often enough, it’d get droopy and sad. Sometimes it’d leave a dump on your screen. Julie bought me the program. I played with it a little bit, but it got old and only served to remind me that I didn’t have a real dog (mine had died not too long before). And I hated the notion that a digital dog required my attention or it would get pouty.

This is, of course, Zynga’s business model. Making you feel bad for letting pointless digital things languish. I guess, despite the stupid little feel-bad for telling the searchdog to leave, I am relatively immune.

My real dog would say that I am too immune to letting her languish.

—

Once upon a time, it was part of my job description to keep the office’s network up and running. It was an irritating part of my job. Not the least of which because I was having to look after the computing habits of a bunch of post-middle aged women who didn’t know the first thing about computers. One of them would say “Hey, Will. You need to see this!” so that she could show me something cute that the Office Help paperclip did. That was the second most annoying of all.

(The most annoying was conflating “I can’t find the database” (which I accidentally deleted the shortcut to) to “The database has been deleted.”)

According to the EFF, CNET has not been living up to its standards with regard to bundled ware:

The blogosphere has been buzzing about revelations that CNET’s Download.com site has been embedding adware into the install process for all kinds of software, including open source software like NMAP. For the unwary, some of the ads could have been read to suggest accepting the advertised service (e.g., the Babylon translation tool bar) was part of the installation process. Users who weren’t paying attention may also have clicked “accept” simply by accident. In either event, after their next restart, they would have been surprised to find their settings had been changed, new tool bars installed, etc. Gordon Lyon, the developer who first called public attention to Download.com’s practices, found a particularly egregious example last night: a bundled ad for “Drop Down Deals,” an app that, once installed, spies on your web traffic and pops up ads when you visit some sites. It’s hard to imagine that many users would choose that app on purpose.

This practice is not only deceptive, it directly contradicts Download.com’s stated policy, which promises users that it has “zero tolerance” for bundled adware and that “when it comes to fighting unwanted adware . . . Download.com has always been in your corner.” Indeed, that promise was one reason users and developers had come to trust Download.com as a reliable source.

CNet was really a pioneer in anti-bundling efforts. I remember when they first announced that they were no longer going to be accepting anything that relied on adware being bundled in. It was a questionable decision because some people (like me) wondered how these freeware providers were going to be able to make money. But it worked out splendidly because the freeware kept on coming and they either made money by having a beefier version that you had to pay for or they didn’t care that they weren’t making money.

I am increasingly loathed to pay for software. It’s not that I can’t afford it. It’s not just that there are free alternatives most of the time (this is necessary, but not sufficient - sometimes the paid stuff is really better). Rather, it’s because I don’t want to have to buy the product several times over. I keep a fleet of four operational desktops and regularly use about four laptops. I seek for a degree of consistency for what’s installed on them. I never really know, when I purchase software, whether I can install it on all my computers or only a limited number. Even when it starts off the first way, sometimes it converts to the latter. Then, further, I don’t know if when I upgrade to Windows Vista or Windows 7 whether it will continue to work or if I will have to buy it all over again.

With free software, I don’t have to worry about it. I can install my free version of TeraCopy anywhere I choose. Or OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

The major exception to all of this is Windows itself. If I ever make the transition to Linux, it’s not because I can’t stand spending $150 on an operating system. Rather, it’s because I can’t stand it when I want to do an F&R, can’t, and have to go to the illegitimate well I should be able to avoid buy paying for the license in the first place.

To bring this back to the subject at hand, what CNet’s policy normalized was making free software less hassletastic than the paid alternative. Even though they seem to be ignoring their policy, they normalized it so that I don’t have to just assume that any free software I get has something bad bundled in with it.

Apparently, someone reached my original Trumanverse map by googling images for “map of the usa with state names”.

Relatedly, I wrote this on LoOG yesterday:

With Wikipedia down, Timothy Lee points out that this could be Wikipedia-alternative Citizendium’s chance to shine. I tried to use it, but it’s pretty… thin. Personally, I thought that this was Uncyclopedia’s turn at the wheel. They joined the blackout, though. Shame. That would have made for some awesome term papers.

Much of last week was spent on computer stuff. It was a bad week, some of it my own fault and some of it not. The main goals were to (1) assemble and get a new PC up and running and (2) install a new SSD hard drive on one of the laptops. Though assembling a PC can be fraught with hazard and it’s a pain to go through and reinstall everything, it all should have been pretty straightforward. But nothing that was supposed to go right went right.

I expected that I might order a wrong part due to carelessness, or that I might forget to plug something in and freak out when the computer doesn’t boot like it should, but neither of these things happened.

Instead, things started happening everywhere else in the constellation. The laptop that was plugged in to the TV downstairs stopped working. The laptop I assigned to replace it wouldn’t do the one and only thing I really needed it to do: play video. So the laptop I had to use was the one I wanted to put the new hard drive in. So before I could get to that, I had to format and restore the one that wouldn’t play video (the typical things, such as installing new codecs and drivers, didn’t work). Then, after having taken the PC I am replacing apart, one of my other PCs started acting funky and was no longer reliable. That meant placing a last minute order for a new power supply as I had isolated that to be the problem.

Everything with the new PC worked except for the high-falutin’ video card. Except, it being a new PC, I didn’t know the video card was the problem. So I had to run all sorts of tests to isolate that as the problem. In my investigations, I discovered that the video card wouldn’t work through a DVI-VGA adapter, which meant that even if it did work, it wouldn’t do what I needed it to do without a new monitor and KVM switch. But even accounting for that, the card still didn’t work. I called tech support and was on hold for four hours before giving up, leading me to question their “24/7 commitment to customer support.”

Then, the power supply I ordered didn’t fit into the machine I ordered it for. It was the right size, so it wasn’t an obvious mistake on my part. However, to get to the place where there was room for it, I had to go through a place where there wasn’t enough room to get it through. There may be a way to remove one of the offending bars, but it’s going to be a pain.

Note, while video cards and power supplies can be cheap, these weren’t. They cost $110 and $150 respectively. Oh, and I discovered that because of the pure awesomeness of the motherboard I got, having a 4-slot video card wasn’t even necessary because the mobo would let me use the PCIE card in conjunction with the mobo card.

So then on to the laptops. The F&R on the video-problemed laptop went smoothly until I installed a piece of “updater software” that updated everything from “working” to “not working”, forcing me to start again from stratch.

And the new SSD HD didn’t work. It took me several hours to figure that out (to rule out the possibility that the problem could be anything else).

Then, out of nowhere, the initial laptop that failed causing me to play the 3-card monty with my laptops suddenly started working perfectly again. I mean, a working laptop is better than a non-working laptop, but it rendered a lot of what I had been working on unnecessarily.

With the exception of a desktop sitting on the sidelines for lack of a power supply, and the inability to see video on one of my other desktops (I can still access it through Remote Desktop), things are working okay.

It does make me wonder a little - only a little - if there isn’t something to the whole notion of having “a computer” instead of “thirteen computers.”

On the other hand, throughout all of this I never lacked for a computer no matter what I did. Even on the PC downstairs, if I had really been adamant I could have hooked the Pentium Vista computer up and still been able to watch something. So it was and does remain nice that short of a nuclear bomb, I always have something.

Courtesy of my red-headed step-computer:

Issue

NTLDR is Missing.
Related errors

Below are the full error messages that may be seen when the computer is booting.

NTLDR is Missing
Press any key to restart

Boot: Couldn’t find NTLDR
Please insert another disk

NTLDR is missing
Press Ctrl Alt Del to Restart
Causes

Computer is booting from a non-bootable source.
Computer hard disk drive is not properly setup in BIOS.
Corrupt NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM file.
Misconfiguration with the boot.ini file.
Attempting to upgrade from a Windows 95, 98, or ME computer that is using FAT32.
New hard disk drive being added.
Corrupt boot sector / master boot record.
Seriously corrupted version of Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
Loose or Faulty IDE/EIDE hard disk drive cable.
Failing to enable USB keyboard support in the BIOS.

When the computer started malfunctioning, I feared it would be something easy to fix. Which is an odd thing to think, when I have spent twenty hours or so over the last week or two trying to get the computer back up and running. I had to do a complete Format & Restore because under the previous installation, tasks that should take seconds were taking minutes. I had hoped, upon reinstallation of Windows, that the problem would come right back.

Because then I would be done. Done, done, done.

This computer has been a pain since I very first got it. It’s required more attention than all my other computers combined. It had shifted from my second machine to my fourth by the end of its fourth year, passed up by computers five years older than it that had the virtue of actually doing what it was supposed to do (albeit at a considerably slower pace). But it never gave me an excuse to just junk it. Like the slowest kid in the classroom, I simply gave it the most rudimentary assignments with high malfunction thresholds (so if it locked up or something, it wouldn’t be a big deal).

But now it’s dead. Dead, dead, dead.

I mean, I could go through all of the various things, test this and that, and isolate the precise problem. And I confess a little piece of me is tempted. Just to get it back up and running. But perhaps the greatest irony in all of this is that I was going to need to permanently sideline it anyway. I’m building a new computer. The computer to end all computers (until it’s obsolete, of course). And that made for five computers in a KVM switch with only four slots. Once I got Windows reinstalled, the plan was to just stick it in a closet, not touch it again, and hope that it gets demolished in the next move.

In retrospect, I realize that this is kind of irrational. Not the least of which because, by salvaging the parts that excludes the motherboard, I will be saving about $300 on the new computer. And taking the slightest step back, I realize that the motherboard-processor aren’t worth a fifth of that, which is what I would effectively be paying to keep this computer operational, unplugged, sitting in a closet and waiting to die.

Of course, the thought occurs to me that I am 95% sure that the problem is the motherboard. I think the processor is fine. If I were to just replace the motherboard, it would probably be as good as…

Therein my madness lies. Not this time, though.

If I were really sincere, I would be looking at the computers I got in 2001 and junking those rather than going to the trouble of replacing the fan on the one that needs that and the case on the one that needs that.

I’m not quite that sincere at this juncture.

Anything comment with the “coaching” on it will be automatically deleted.

Because I really, really hate coaches.

Okay, not really. We’re just getting nailed with a spammer.

I prefer the drug spammers. It’s easier to blacklist words of obscure drugs that few use than a word that everybody uses.

Anyway, hopefully this will pass soon and we can talk 24/7 about coaching again. Or the spammer is a live person and they will get creative and I’ll have to not announce which words I am blacklisting.

I’m still trying to get a handle on the malware problem my computer picked up during installation. The CPU-hogging has been killed, but there are still other issues. The first problem is that it has its hooks into Internet Explorer and random ads pop up after the computer has not been used for a while. I can work on the computer for several hours, and it’ll be fine, but if I leave it on for an hour, I’ll come up with three porn ads. The second issue is that it has hijacked Google, Bing, and Yahoo. If I do a search, everything will come up normally, but the links themselves will send me to some link aggregator. Fortunately, it seems limited to IE, Chrome, and Firefox, leaving Safari alone, so if I need to do a search, I can. I just have to use a lackluster browser to do it. Even so, anything that gets in the way of googling has proven to be a major pain.

The first thing I did was install Avast Virus Proction, which thus far hasn’t been able to find squat (it didn’t find the CPU hog, hasn’t found any of the other problem). Then I installed Malwarebytes, which is proving similarly ineffective. But one thing they’re both dang good at is blocking one another. Unless I turn one of them off, I get a message every couple of minutes from one informing me that it has blocked something the other was trying to do.

The laptop that my work issued me did not come with enough RAM or hard drive space. The first part was easily-remedied, the second part less so. There was some encryption software installed that made any sort of cloning from small hard drive to large hard drive more trouble than it was worth. So I reinstalled Windows from scratch.

How secure is Windows 7? So secure that I hadn’t even finished installing all of my software before I’d gotten invaded by a host of spyware and adware. Now, generally speaking, adware has to be conspicuous in order to be effective. I get that. The spyware/malware, on the other hand, is completely getting it wrong.

If I am making some sort of spyware, one of my main goals is that it is not discovered. If I make spyware that sucks up 90% of the CPU on a quad-core machine, it’s not going to take people long to either start looking for the problem say “screw it” and reinstall Windows. It makes the computer that they’re trying to gather data from useless. People will be less inclined to use it. With a little bit of discipline, that thing culd have been on my computer for weeks and weeks without my knowing about. The virus scanner didn’t find it. I wouldn’t have known. Instead, I tracked down the file I was looking for and hit “delete” and that was that.

It’s usually the making of a bad movie when the bad guy is so bad that he gets in his own way. Yet, for the spyware industry, it seems to be standard operating procedure.

When it comes to computer performance, as often as not it comes down to bottlenecks. The computer can only move as fast as its weakest point will allow it to.

For a lot of people, the bottleneck is RAM. Their computer is fast enough, but without the memory, it spends all of its time and energy moving data back and forth between the memory and the hard drive rather than using the energy to do the things that you bought the computer for.

I’ve found that most of the time, the bottleneck is RAM. I’ve found that you can breathe new life into computers that are 5, 6, 7, or 8 years old if you just put in enough RAM. Most computers can take 2GB, and most of the time that’s all you need.

That’s been changing lately, however. I’ve started to run into memory logjams even on machines with 2 or more GB of RAM. Even when running Windows XP (with Win7 it’s a bad idea to even try). And unfortunately, upgrading beyond 3GB of memory is hard to do with XP. So the bottleneck becomes the speed of the hard drive that it has to swap data with.

Enter the Solid-State Drive (SSD). The solid state drive is smaller than a regular hard drive, and a lot more expensive. But it’s also super-fast. So even if the computer does have to move data back and forth from the hard drive, it does so lickity-split.

I’d been wanting to try one for a while, but wasn’t sure about where to implement it. Then I realized that my ultra-mobile Thinkpad X60 laptop was starting to simply become unusable. I don’t know what it is about the X60 model in particular, but its performance has simply never lived up to its specs. Hit Coffee friend Holic has said the same about his (indeed, it was what convinced him to become an Applyte*).

Anyhow, I’d read that SSD HDs were good at breathing life into old machines. While this machine wasn’t old, it was mature for its age. So I went and bought one.

The results have been amazing.

I didn’t think I actually cared all that much about boot-up times, but with the SSD HD, a process that used to take 5 minutes now takes one. This is quite handy for an ultra-mobile machine, but it’s something that I could get used to for other computers.

It turns out that slow boot-up times were something I just got used to, but now I am sitting here thinking “You mean it doesn’t have to be that way?” In fact, knowing I can boot the PC up in under a minute would probably make me more likely to keep them off, saving energy.’This makes it good for battery life, too, as before I would often just leave the computer on and close to take it wherever I wanted to know. With this, I just turn it off.

It’s taken one of the least pleasant computers I have and has turned it into one of the most.

Beyond boot-up times, it allows me to open up as many tabs on Firefox as I want without fear of going into swap mode. It used to have to think about it just about every time I wanted to move between any open apps. Now, if it does, it does it so quickly that I don’t notice.

These may sound like small things, but outside of actual malfunction, it doesn’t get much more annoying than waiting through ten minutes of swapping just so that you can get to the point of closing applications in order to free up memory.

So now I am re-evaluating SSD hard drives for all of my computers. The really old ones can’t take them, unfortunately. The really new ones don’t need them. My work laptop (where I am seeking out a HD replacement) needs the space more than the speed. My newest personal laptop.

There is potential for my desktops, though. Especially since I know I shouldn’t be keeping them on as much as I do but want them accessible at any point. With fast boot-up I can keep them off the vast majority of the time because I’m not using them the vast majority of the time. I do keep my main desktop on. But even there it could be worthwhile because it’s a place where 2GB is starting to no longer cut it. I’ve been debating upgrading the RAM. Maybe I’ll upgrade to SSD instead.

Anyhow, if you have an old but not super-old computer that needs some new life smacked into it, I would recommend considering SSD drives. The same is true if you have a laptop that you take a lot of places.

* - It actually started when he was talking up macs about how PCs can just spend forever and ever swapping with the HD for every little thing you do and every time you want to switch apps. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then, I got this model, which was the last he had used, and I understood what he was talking about.

I was extended, and have accepted, an invitation to join Burt Likko, aka Transplanted Lawyer, at Not a Potted Plant. NaPP is a more pointedly political blog, so there will be some more directly political stuff there than here. It shouldn’t be affecting Hit Coffee too much. There will be a little cross-posting. I plan to recycle and refresh some of my posts here for over there. But mostly, my wonky thoughts there, and other commentary here.

On a sidenote, the commenting rules that apply here do not apply there. We do fall under The League’s Civility Code, however. And, I should add, the commentariat over there is not going to be more hostile to certain points of view involving immigration and multiculturalism as you might find elsewhere in our blogging region.

I was considering changing my gravatar to the old Simpsons image that I made. But when I tracked it down, I realized that I had created it before my weightloss. So I’ve updated it, putting me in front of a classroom rather than an office and changing my appearance somewhat.

Here’s my previous self.

Half-Sigma today:

For some reason, I’ve never had any desire at all to edit Wikipedia. Nerdy value-creation skills are undervalued as it is. Why should I do it for free?

Even nerdier than editing Wikipedia is working for free on Linux or some other open source project. I find it even more mystifying that people want to do that for free.

Mr. Blue a few days ago:

We want the 9-5 people. They’re not the ones killing the job sector. We are. We’re the ones who keep coming up with “free alternatives” to the stuff that people should pay for. We’re the ones that allow Mark Zuckerberg to create a bajillion dollar company, employing virtually nobody, because we’ll make the widgets that make Facebook cool. We’re the productive ones that let the IT companies reduce their staff without taking productivity hits. If more of us were like them, there’d be more jobs to go around.

So let’s kill the “geek culture”. Let’s force the women in. Let’s make it so that we want to leave at the end of an 8-hour day. Bring on the apathy that dominates virtually every other field out there. Let’s spend more time making sure that everyone feels welcome and less time getting shit done. The shit we get done just makes more of us redundant. The wisepeople have spoken (utilizing the technology that we built). They apparently know something we don’t about what’s important.

UPDATE: Dave points to this article:

But many startups today have crossed over the line into freestrapping. Pay isn’t “low”, it’s “no”. Operations aren’t lean, they are free. Revenues aren’t small, they don’t exist. That’s right — no revenue and no overhead that can be strictly assigned to the business. Workers work virtually so there’s no office. Or maybe they spend hours at the local coffee shop mooching Internet access. They work for free, sustaining themselves some other way. Maybe they work part-time, have a working spouse, still collect unemployment or have “walk-away” money from their last gig. There are no materials in the strictest sense since they are creating a web-based or mobile application. Even their tools are free. Can you say open source? Or maybe they are using a “free 30 day trial” of a development tool. (Ah, so that’s why the agile development scrums are so short!) They are creating something from nothing. (And, yes, guilty as charged. That’s how we did it. There were a few out-of-pocket expenses but so far nothing that seriously cut into my coffee habit.)

If you are an experienced bootstrapper, this all sounds familiar, right? You are used to making nothing or next to nothing. The difference, and the trouble lies in the lack of revenue or prospects for revenue and the use of free raw materials and tools. The expectation of free has become so pervasive that we are harming our economy’s ability to grow. How can we make a living if we give everything away for free? And why should we expect anyone to pay for what we produce when we don’t pay for the tools we use?

When your software takes up 50% of my CPU capacity and half a GB of RAM, it’s not going to stay on my computer very long. On the other hand, if you can come up with something that has a smaller footprint, it’s going to take a lot longer to notice and you can collect more information on me to use for your nefarious purposes. Discipline, people!

For some reason, I am no longer getting email notifications of comments. That means I will be somewhat less quick to respond or pass comments through moderation. I apologize for the inconvenience.