Living

I’d like to ask you all to take a few moments of your day and take time to watch this. It’s worth it.

Good, now that you’ve watched Chris Anderson’s talk on the long tail of technology, reflect with me a moment.

The DVD player killed the VCR. MP3 is slowly killing (and it’s almost dead) traditional music distribution. We’re running out of oil and we’ve already succeeded in frying our own planet. These are, if you’ve not had your head buried in the sand, facts. If you don’t believe me, there’s plenty of scientific data out there you can research (but if you don’t believe me already, you probably never will.) Yes, I’m preaching to the choir.

Now stop for a moment to think about the patterns of change outlined in Chris’s talk. Cycles, up and down, waves. So let us venture for a moment that societies, their quality of living, their numbers, and pretty much everything else about them moves in cycles as well. We’ve got war in Iraq, Darfour, Columbia and Palestine as well as many other places around the globe. War. Not get up and go to work, come home, watch TV and go to bed, but War. And yes, it’s terrible and in many cases we should do something about it (what motivates that is an entirely different thing, “world cop”?) But stop a moment and think, back to history and gradeschool. We’ve all been here, Civil war in the US. Napoleon and various other empires blazing a trail and killing millions in the name of some chosen ideal. Was it wrong? I’d flinch and say yes until you realize that our very way of living was built on these actions. So was it wrong? No… was it right? No.

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A blow-off valve, in short, allows the turbocharger in a turbocharged engine (forced induction, the pushing of air into the intake) to relieve pressure inside the turbo. Normally this pressure is vented back into the intake, but sometimes it’s sent out into the atmosphere as a noise maker. Some think it sounds cool, and I’m one of those people… Too bad it’s apparently illegal. Note that I think this is cool for high end use, not for you and your turbo civic or jetta. Humbug!

So what happens when someone stuffs a duck call on the end of valve, and that valve opens and vents pressure? You’ll have to watch below, I had a hell of a good laugh with this. Apparently so did variable! Courtesy of MDK!

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So I’d just gotten out of the tub, watching CSI, having a libation or two and relaxing post-chiropractor appointment. I go to turn on the TV and notice that strangely enough, it’s stuck on PBS-HD. While entertaining, this is not terribly useful when what I want to do is catch up on heroes. So I power toggle the box at the plug, shortly after the box goes through it’s usual boot process. Good, so far. It hits the screen first screen OCAP Middleware load screen, the progress bar fills, then the box goes to PBS-HD again (utoh) and finally to the Mystro countdown screen. It hits L-13… and stops dead, turns to E-13. I sat for a moment and thought: I could say screw it, and go play WoW — and I nearly did. But against my true nature to leave anything broken alone… I had to fix it.

I call up time warner cable and after about 5 minutes of wading my way through various voice menus and having my phone number read back to me after I’d input it… The CSR answers the phone and I told her what was going on. The box is stuck on E-13. She’s never heard of that error. She says did I leave it off for a minute… I think not but of course I say yes… That couldn’t possibly be it (it was in the end.) The box came back up just fine and I’m watching PBS-HD (Nature) now as I write this.

So what the hell is OCAP? And what do Mystro and OCAP have to do with the fact that my cable box (and possibly yours) lock up? Well, here’s the gist of what the CSR and I discussed on the phone while the torturously long proccess of an Explorer 8300 HDC damned boot sequence trundles along like an overweight crippled oompaloompa. Remember that description, it’s important for later.

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