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?

Ok so in my last post I was off by a bit. I said I'd be willing to pay $10 for an ebook, which is true, however I should have mentioned some sort of length modifier to that. The ebook I did buy was $14 and I read it in a bit over 6 hours total (flight and a bit). Since then I've looked up the prices of various collections of books on my bookcase (multiple series) and of the ones available, the kindle price seems to be around $7.50 (USD) each, which is less than $10, however, for an 8 book collection that's still $60. Pity you can't trade in your "license" to the hard copy and pay the change of format fee to get the electronic copy in exchange. After all, I'm pretty sure each physical book I have, cost me over $10, so if I needed to replace them, that'd be hundreds of dollars as new hard copies. Obviously the books not available electronically that I have on my bookshelf would end up being pirated copies on my kindle. That comes back to the making available argument - publishers: GET WITH THE PROGRAM.

The last few months have been a bit random. After starting a new job I've been taking public transport to work, which has been interesting to say the least. Clearly anything goes for attire on public transport, and you get to know what school uniforms look like very very fast. One day I even saw three awesome rats tails in a single day (not only on school kids). Maybe they're making a minor comeback, even if only in the demographic who catches the Armadale line on weekdays.

I went to Sydney for a training course for a week, and managed to fit in a few touristy things I didn't do last time I was there; bridge climb, Bondi, ferry to Manley, ummm. For that I borrowed a kindle, which is sort of where all this ebook nonsense came from. I'm probably a bit late to the show on this one, but the ereader thing is a great idea, and the kindle2 (and even more so, the kindle3) is pretty awesome.

For self defence at work, I've obtained a small nerf arsenal, originally with intention of painting and modding, now I'm not so sure how much of that I'll end up doing, but it's entertaining to say the least. Not to mention how dodgy you feel looking up reviews on youtube, because they're nearly all done by little kids. Though while looking at them we did find an entertaining russian guy who does real firearm stuff and comedy.

I guess the bottom line here is now I'm doing work that's relevant and interesting to me. It might not be always interesting but at least results can be seen immediately and we're solving common problems with the best products available. All my dabbling in storage over the last 10 years has not been in jest, it's purpose is now coming to the forefront. The only downside to all this is due to lack of facilities I can't commute by bike, so my cycling form has been totally wrecked.

cue big cry