The Problem with music by Steve Albini

The Problem with music by Steve Albini

It's an old story but it's worth reading... kinda of like this one:
Courtney Love does the math

Ideas behind educated dating problems

In my last post, I talked about how most of my well-educated friends are all single... I have my own little theory on the idea... Of course, this is my own interpretation, based on personal experience and it might not apply to everyone, but it's still a pretty good explanation for my own social group.

So, the idea behind dating is to meet people, see if they share a or several common interest and try to see if this relationship would work. It's not really hard to do, but there seems to be some limiting factors in those I see in college. Sometimes seems like an almost impossible task.... Why? Well, first let's break up the meeting concept a bit. It boils down to a couple of things things:

• A place
• A social context
• Shared or mutual interest

In addition to this, you need:

• Spare time
• Motivation

I think these are the primary reasons why most of the single individuals I know tend to stay that way...

• It's hard to find spare time (Time)
  
• It's harder to find someone who share your field of interest (interest)
  
• Don't feel at ease in the 'Traditional' meeting places, like bars (Place)
  
• Lack of some social skills (social context)
• Seeing how poorly you fare, you bury yourself in your work/study (Motivation)
  

I'm still unsure how exactly to break this sort of vicious cycle... I've got my own ideas on the subject, but could not come to significant conclusions in almost 2 weeks. It's such a simple yet complicated topic at the same time... I think I'll revisit the problem in a month or more to see if any significant developments can get me a fresh perspective...

Depressing Febuary 14...

In the last message I talked about how I had more intimate reasons to hate valentine's day, well the answer is simple: I've always winded-up single (and alone) on that day.

There is nothing more frustrating to a single guy that a days reserved for couples. It's sort of like everywhere you look there is a reminder that you suck terribly at finding or keeping a mate. It is as if everyone else could be happy except you.

It's very depressing and hard on the self-esteem.

But I am not the only single guy. There is a clear trend among all of my friends : the more educated the person is, the less likely he is in a relationship. All those with university degrees or higher are still single, while those who don't have a college degree are almost all in a stable relationship. It is as if getting accepted in any college puts off everything for 3-4 years, and when you come out of it, you realize what your opportunities where back then... and that you simply missed out...

It's not really true but it give a good idea what the real reason is. It revolves around the inner workings of dating. I've been reading a tech-based humorous book about dating (link) and it just confirmed my own personal theory I had as to what the initial phase of dating is, and how it plays out badly to those that have already graduated from college (or those well-educated).

I think I'll keep the little theory for tomorrow. For now, I'll just say this: it's hard to meet people when you work all the time, and it's even harder to find someone with mutual interests...

Feb 14

Tomorrow (or right now elsewhere on the planet) is February 14. Valentine's Day.

While I like the ideas behind this holiday, I hate almost everything in it. It has basically become a commercial reasoning pushing people to buy stuff. If you don't you look like you don't really love your significant other, or that you are too cheap to do anything. (I've got deeper more intimate reason to hate this day but I'll keep that is for another day.)

The best gift you can give on this day is the one that doesn't cost any money, it's what's missing in most couple.:

Time and Attention.

Show you care. Any material gift will probably buy you time or a little peace of mind, but it's only short lived. Quality time together can hardly be bought but the memories can last a lifetime...

Apple - Thoughts on Music

I never thought that an accurate portrait of the DRM problem would come from the one who has a lot to lose from it, Steve Jobs from Apple:
Apple - Thoughts on Music

Wired News: Lessons From the Facebook Riots

I use google service a lot, but what about the information I put in on a daily basis? I trust google, but it could turn out to be a big mistake in the long run: they now own everything that I have put on their servers.
Facebook user learned that the hard way earlier last year:
Wired News: Lessons From the Facebook Riots

What information do YOU have out there? how is it treated?

The credits card companies are more interested in your habits than your interest. Taken individually, those purchases giving little information. But if you take every purchases made from one card company, it is worth a fortune in statistical information.

The same logic is true for the debit card. Banks makes a lot of money from transaction feeds but the information from all theses transactions are worth their own weight in gold. Thus your information is worth money, and it give incentives to theses entities (any companies) to sell your information.

Once it's sold, who knows what will happen to it?

Anyway, I'm not an expert in privacy (far from it) but I like to remind people, not to fear, but to be concern about what trail you leave behind you...

A small set-back in the router project

Well, it seems after carefully considering my options for m0n0wall, it seems the best solutions is:

A linksys wrt54gl + Openwrt

Well, it is the economic one, but it is not very flexible, as the hardware of the Linksys is very limited. Still I'm impressed by the compabilities of OpenWRT. And it is only a quarter of the cost of building a full-fledge, or an embedded PC for the job. But I feel the Lynksys solution will be limiting....

So I continued my search, and I was kind of overwhelmed by what I found out... I had prepared a small table comparing the PCengine WRAP architecture with the Soekris hardware, but then someone told me about Mini-ITX form factor motherboards. (And I found out about the new Nano-ITX ).... After more research, I even found more Single board computer manufacturers, like Commell , MIS, Microsys, Versalogic, Evalue-tech, ...

It's like a whole world that existed right before my eye and I never saw it. Truly fascinating. There is even sites and stores dedicated to making Car PC. A pc for your car!

It seems I'll need more time to evaluate the possibles solutions to my simple 'making-a-home-router' project.

you *MIGHT* regret it... yeah right

I thought about explaining how one should stop worrying and start living, but this comic can says it better than I ever will...

Of course, it doesn't mean you should something stupid, it just means that worrying is waste of time, and a another stressing factor which we don't need. Worrying in itself does nothing. It solves nothing. It changes nothing. It just bring more stress.

The basic rule is simple: put things in perspective. Ask yourself: what CAN I do? What will it change? It is that bad?

Don't worry about getting sick: You WILL get sick at some point in the future. Do something positive to solve that: Wash your hands. Stay in shape. Eat right. It's not hard and it's not rocket science.

Don't worry about your future, plan for it. And if things don't go as planned, at least you are more prepared than someone who simply worried and do nothing.

There is a web site that explain several possible 'end of the world' scenario. You could start to worry right now about any these scenarios, but it won't change anything. If a comic is due to hit the earth in 5min, what can you do? It is really going to happen? Do you really have to worry about it? I know it's a far-fetched scenario, but some individuals worry about the silliest things, it's not funny anymore.

Worry about the things that matters, not about something that might be important. In other words: "it's not the end of the world is it? Why do you worry, then? Live!"

Monowall VS Pfsense

I did a little research on Monowall vs Pfsense features. I really need to choose between the two, because since Monowall only needs 64 MB of memory and Pfsense 128MB, it will be the deciding factor in my purchase. The cheaper board from PCengine tend to have less memory, while the pricier and more potent boards from Soekris Engineering can have up to 256MB of memory, and thus be more future, and feature ready.

Since Pfsense is based on Monowall, it has the same features, namely:

• Everything a Linksys WRT54G can do...
  
• IPsec VPN tunnels
• wireless support (WEP, WPA in the near future)
• SNMP agent
• SVG-based traffic grapher
• serial console interface
• 802.1Q VLAN support (useful for a separate wireless network)
  
• and more features, that are less usefull for me...
  

Pfsense has all that, plus:

• SSH support
• CARP!
• Traffic shapping
  
• pf (openbsd's packet filter)
• packages! (Even if they are not supported on embedded platform for now)

The packages (including doorman, snort, nmap, squid, etc...) are the most attracting features of Pfsense, but are disabled on the embedded edition...

Going to do a cost-analyst for the hardware solutions and post my results later...

Next Project

So I built a MythTv box a couple. It was cool while it lasted (especially the emulator part), but it had a couple of problems:

• We don't watch that much TV to beign with, so the recording features, while impressive, were rarely used
• We mostly used the emulator part, and we don't need an entire Mythtv box to do that
• We now have a Wii, so the emulator saw less and less use with time (combined with the fact that the Wii has a virtual Console
• My roommates wanted to play Flight Simulator on the new 37' LCD we have as a TV, and that doesn't run on Linux
  

So it became a solution in search of a problem. The computer became little more than a media File server. We have since installed Windows XP on that machine and wipe the partition by error. (even if we planned for a NTFS partition at the start, it wasn't the first one created, and Windows didn't like that.) And I have little incentive to completely re-install the machine. It turned into a costly machine, but it was worth it as I learned a lot.

I have thus decided to invest my time into a new project. I'm still undecided as to which exact project I will do... I have a couple of ideas:

1. I could update my old school project. It was basically a proof-of-concept application to control any machine without installing anything on the server itself. It used SSH to connect to remote server, and used the command-line to issue command. (could be simulated on Windows using Pstool)
2. I also have another unfinished project about a simple security guide. Something my parents could read and understand what are the securities and privacy problems on the net, and plan accordingly. Of course, the problem is big and constantly moving, but the idea behind how and why, tend to stay the same. (The ideas behind virus and malware in general haven't changed in year. A security hole, whatever the type, still has the same kind of effect.)
3. The third idea I have for a project is making my own router. I'm not talking about taking some old computer and installing linux, or modifying a Linksys router, I'm talking about buying hardware like the Soekris net4801 motherboard and installing pfSense or M0n0wall. Really nice idea because since it's a full-fledge computer, I could make it do more than just Routing and firewalling
   

Of course, I could just spend more time with Eve-online and C&C:the first decade....