wildland biohazards

ticks,rattlesnakes,and coyotes seen so far. The ticks are the only ones to draw blood. 10 day old tick bite.

post singularity politics

As I understand it The concept of the singularity is that technology will make it impossible to predict where power will concentrate or to predict the concentrations effect on the social,political or technological landscape.

A worldwide bunch of porn swapping message board denizens have decided that they don't like iran's current government.

I think the government was fucked before and doomed now.

Go Anon. Dictator spanking and lols at the same time, that's fucking glorious.

(title links to subject of this post)

rural entropy

dead cabin series

slave collars

Why I hate closed source software: A recent reminder.

I gave a working tested notebook with ubuntu 8.o4 to my neighbour to assist some associate. Said associate did not want ubuntu so the neighbor loaded a (probably pirated) copy of windows on the damn thing.

As this guy is dead broke and wants to do comic books art I can only assume that he's gonna pirate the fuck out of his toolset. This will result in a thief with encumbered work. "nice photoshop work, Where is your license?" Is the death of cheap graphic entrepreneurship.

Poor people cannot use closed commercial products unless they wish to stay poor or be criminalised. At best you allow others to control your work at worst they own it.

I will never support the distribution of a proprietary OS and I think that those who do for charity are judas goats, Leading those they would help to servitude.

I could rant on but I'm supposed to remain calm and try not to get so worked up over the deeply stupid and those that prey on them.

Stopping point.

We have beaten all major problems over the last few years.

Bankruptcy: nailed it through re-organisation and we are out the other side even with a greedy, self serving, buffoon as the opposing council. (hint for Mr. pepler, When the judge uses the word "disgorge" to describe your future negative earning potential, you are a failure).

Fought past the DTSC's judgement which would have required that we destroy placeable material,valuable museum equipment, and research materials. We now can have a museum and our research into re-use is no longer threatened by the dtsc. My opinion of the agency as a whole is restored and even improved but my opinions as to one particular agent stand. (people who mindlessly follow the rules are better suited to the polyester clad food service sector, not protecting the environment.) As to the trolls who rose up from orange stained basement lairs during this fiasco. I imagine poo flinging monkeys loaded on mountain dew and cheetos, I give them cute names like Dim load and the -hat to remind me of the wit and wisdom displayed by those fine practioners of the ancient art of sitting in a bathtub, farting and trying to bite the bubbles.

As to those who defended us and helped us. You are conquering heroes and with your assistance we still stand. (oh and don't piss off Christian he seems to have digg in his pocket.)

Funding: We have a plan in place that will generate a profit, We are currently profitable and we seem to have survived the %20 cut in state funding for the disposal of crt's. and it seems that our competetors are getting desperate and in some cases dying out. ( Just for my own petty ego gratification, I have been on the record from day one pointing out the fact that the state funding mechanism was flawed and so the cut in funding was not a surprise It may come as a bit of a shock to a numbnut knowitall at SVLUG though) I also dont think that cuts are done yet. A collapsing economy will limit new purchases that fund the system while entropy is inevitable and disposal will continue. The conversion to HD next year will compound the problem as people will buy conversion boxes instead of new tvs and conversion boxes bring no funding into the system.

We functioned before the state got involved and can survive the (hopefull) demise of the state system. Its the wounded flailing around on consumer funded life support that concerns me.

Thieves: yup we had 'em and yup we pressed/are pressing charges. Its demoralising to find that people you are trying to help are stealing material intended for those needier than themselves. People with roofs over their heads stealing from homeless programs, people with food stealing from programs that feed the hungry, and people who squandered their chances at an education stealing from schools. As these are where our machines go that is what they did. they where/ are useless piles of slowly rotting meat too stupid not to piss upwind .) Now that we have gotten rid of them I seem have to enough notebooks to consider placing them.

My own personal stuff.

I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in january of this year. I was put on a drug that increased insulin levels through increased pancreatic output of insulin and went on a restricted diet and increased execise and got my blood sugar levels from 279 (this was the diagnostic measurement after 12 hours of fasting) to 97 three months later ( same test) . ( I was actually eating ice cream and jelly beans at night to get my blood sugar up to reasonable levels I would hit lows in the high 50's if i did not) I had energy to burn, ate like a horse and lost weight. Brief moment of pancreatic cancer related hypocondria. ( I knew 3 people who died of pancreatic cancer) This is a remarkable achievement, yes? no. I was on the wrong meds. The good news is that I was on the right kind of meds but stronger and in too high a dose. I was clueless and thought that I was the king of diabetics and that this was a breeze, This diabetes stuff is easy!

It all came apart when my pills were not green. My refill showed up and I put it on the table and finished my first bottle before opening the new one. When the day came I openend it up and saw neat little white pills, this concerned me as the previous ones had been green. I emailed my doctor and asked something along the lines of shouldn't these be green? Should I take these? I got back some confusion involving generic medications and variations in apearance and was told to take the pills. The next day was bad I had low blood sugar all day and was constantly eating sugar to maintain a reasonable level. I e-mailed back "I am less than thrilled with these pills and am having real trouble not going below safe blood sugar levels" eventuially it turned out that I had been given the wrong meds and that I had been taking them for the last six months.

I am not a big fan of medication and having proof that I had been on the wrong meds didn't make me more co-operative so I got them to let me try to deal with my diabetes thru diet and exercise. on this regimen I now test out on average in the 120's by my own meter. (123 7 day average,125 14day,128 for the month)

So it seems to work and my diabetes is reasonably controlled but I am allways tired and my normally irratible nature has become much worse. I also find that when I am at healthy sugar levels I feel like crap and act like mr hyde.

So We have won our wars and can walk off the field before the next horde comes over the horizon. I for one am tired, As is Ilma. Who quite frankly deserves more credit than I for all of our achievements, but who is far to self effacing to claim her just due. none of it would have happened with out her.

The load is heavy and we are tired and wounded. I think its time to set it aside.

linuxworld recap:

summary:

installfest: went well did 750 machines 600 at linux world and 150 at accrc/mcrc.

Caveats: 1. dont use machines for installfest to test installfest hardware. We have a significant number of machines with incomplete/old software installs. This is due to people turning on machines and seeing what looks like a complete install then putting it into the "done pile"

Good news: doesn't actually add to the workload as we expected to do a final load to cover any last minute modifications to the software before placement.

Bad news : the number of installs on the server do not match the number of machines in the done pile. this caused no small amount of stress amoung those who are tracking our progress.

I have 10 pallets at approx 75 machines each labelled done and due to installfest. Accrc will give away 750 machines. All other details are indeed details.

Collection event: was abyssmal. amounts of material are measured in pounds not tons and probably did not exceed 3 digits. Accrc is very much out of pocket due to linux world.
(A recycled computer grosses about $40 in raw materials and poorly thought out state funding 750*40= $30,000 so installfest will eventually cost accrc 30k before labor costs) .

since refurbishment and placement are why I'm here this is just cost of doing what I want to do, but it does piss me off that the for-profit grinders are paid to destroy while I have to pay to preserve.

installfest 2.0

We will be doing the next installfest at linuxworld in august. This is a joint project with Untangle and with the gracious support of linux world.

We have been working on getting the servers updated and can now load ubuntu 8.04,xubuntu,edubuntu and gnewsense.

The ubuntu will be for conventional machines,xubuntu for low resource machines, edubuntu, for classrooms and gnewsense because we can and should promote the four basic freedoms whenever possible.

Observations on the above so far:

ubuntu 8.04 just works as claimed and the other ubuntu variants use the same repositories so we can load all of the 'buntu's from one set of local mirrors,

xubuntu seems to be viable and we will be trying to get it loaded on a bunch of old (p1 75mhz) toughbooks that we got from various police departments and should allow us to make some use of older hardware and demonstrate that our motto (obsolescence is just a lack of imagination) . Plus we get to play with bad ass millspec notebooks (will your notebook stop a bullet?)

Edunbuntu. very cool, lots of apps. I have an issue with client- server based systems. (single and potentially expensive point of failure in the server, lack of flexibility and poor performance unless you can afford a high end network)

Gnewsense. As far as I know this distro is fully compliant with the fsf's four basic freedoms and I applaud the developers and the fsf for developing and promoting it.
It is also much more functional and polished than I would have thought possible.

It does still have issues but these have nothing to do with the code. These come from an unwillingness of some vendors (hardware and software) to provide drivers or release specifications. This "dog in the manger" attitude is slowly dieing off (good riddance) but at this time our biggest problem with gnewsense is multimedia (there are open source flash players out there but last time I tried one, the steps required to get the video to play far exceed the skills of our average client.) we've also had some issues with drivers for various network and video cards. (just to beat this horse further, this is not a failing with Gnewsense or the FSF, it is a failure on the part of the manufacturer).

The FSF is correct in that software should be free (freedom and beer) and gnewsense demonstrates that it can be.

We expect to have approx 1000 machines ready for install fest but I doubt that we will have room,time or power at linuxworld to do that many installs so we will be running installs at linuxworld and our berkeley and marin facilities during the event.