The Golden Age of Computing

Ah, the Golden Age of Computing!

It isn’t here yet.

Maybe a hundred years in the future.

I’ll be nice.

If you read this then, take joy! You’ve got a wonderful digital assistant that’s an expert draftsman, chessplayer and trivia champion, runs a tight, secure network presence for you, is always letting you know the latest interesting tidbits on the news feed or the personal side, sigh…

For now, I’ve got to deal with nginx configuration files.

When I got up this morning the network was down. I had moved a laptop yesterday from wired to wireless and back, it didn’t come back right and its used as a router because the real router doesn’t have a wifi interface. Probably still not right, but I got the power turned on to osito. It took a while.

Jotted some things down in my diary, took a smoke, had something to eat, back to work.

Now I’m trying to re-install collaborate. Remove the development version. Install the distributed version. Why is it so slow? Dig through Google pages because I can’t remember the name of the debugging program – that’s it! iftop! Why is it connecting secure? Why is my website so slow?

Oh, crap, my website is down (again). D—. Dig through the docs and keys to figure how to get into the aws console. Oh, it looks fine. Wait a minute, that was just a typo on my part, logging in to the wrong machine. False alarm.

Finished the install, but it’s broken. Stare at its logs. bbb-html5 didn’t install right. nginx couldn’t start. Check the nginx logs. Why didn’t that file delete? It was part of the removed package. Check the package versions. Yup, we got the right package, but that file shouldn’t be there. Who knows why it wasn’t removed. Remove it by hand. Complete the install.

OK, now I can connect, but no audio. Seen this plenty, just down and up the videoconferencing server. OK, now it works with audio!

It’s 3:30 in the afternoon. I just finished my first task for the day: install the currently distributed version of collaborate on osito.

To those of you reading this in the Golden Age of Computing, take joy!

We in the early twenty first century see their potential, but waste so many hours dealing with all these bugs, the lack of natural language recognition, and the bugs, the bugs, the bugs!

In the Golden Age of Computing, you’ll be able to get some work done.

An Open Letter to Surfing the Nations

My name is Brent Baccala. Some of you know me only as the man in the white robe holding the sign that reads “Surfing the Nations is a Fraud”. I don’t particularly like the sign, but it’s been given to me by God. I’d rather just stand in front of Surfer’s Church with a microphone and preach, but Tom Bower will not allow that to happen. Let me explain, briefly, my history with STN, tell you what has happened over the last month, and summarize the message that I wish you to hear.

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Corrupt Education

I recently toyed with going back to school for graduate study in mathematics, going so far as to apply to a university. I won’t parade all the details, but I think it was a positive experience. I reached an epiphany, a conclusion that I’ve been resisting for years, but have finally accepted:

A university is a corrupt institution.

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