Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Air Torture

Posted on June 19, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Air TortureAmnesty International has a new parody web site devoted to “Air Torture,” an insufficiently fictional airline that ferries detainees to places they can be tortured,

Air Torture is the premiere airline transporting detainees to select torture chambers around the world. Organizations such as Amnesty International like to call our business “outsourcing torture” because we deliver all our customers to countries where torture is routinely practiced – but our partners at the U.S. government have come up with a much better name: “extraordinary rendition.”

Thanks to the Bush Administration, the “war on terror” has been a big boon to our business. All flights are fully funded by unsuspecting taxpayers in the United States.

Incidentally, when I went to that site, it sent me to a page at https://www.kintera.org/ which appeared to have a unique ID in the URL. What’s up with that? Is Amnesty International tracking us too?

Posted in Torture | 4 Comments

Prospective Usury

Posted on June 19, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

My credit card bill came today with one of those little notices advising me of a change in terms. This time the change is the APR. It’s going to be 29.9%.

Twenty-nine point nine percent annual interest. On someone who has enough house equity to be no serious risk.

Presumably this is punishment for my paying my bill on time every month?

Posted in Econ & Money | 8 Comments

Technical Difficulties

Posted on June 19, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

My home PC — not even two years old yet! — has decided to die. Either that it wants to kill me.

First the power supply fan started making a grinding noise. Blowing out a pile of dust didn’t fix it, so I got a new power supply. That seemed to go in unusually well. I should have known that the Fates were marking me for trouble.

While installing the power supply I stuck in the replacement for the backup disk which had gone bad a few months ago. Then I fired up the hardware RAID to mirror the main disk. It wouldn’t. I tried a lot, lot, lot of things, finally finding a software product that told me the old disk didn’t want sector 1 read. That is potentially very bad – sector 1, if I recall, is where the disk keeps its partition info. The first step in a solution, if solution there be, was to run CHKDSK /r (scanning for bad sectors).

So I ran CHKDSK /r. Took a while. Found a bad cluster in one old file, otherwise was no excitement.

Rebooted. And now my display is all funny. The text is corrupted even during the bootup process. Once I get into Windows XP, there are funny lines everywhere. Not good.

So turn it all off, unplug, reseat the ATI 9800 AIW video card, check wires, change the oil (no, wait, that was last month when I was fixing the generator, different story). Fire it up again.

Now there are blocks of rainbow along the bottom half of the display when I boot up. And, once in Windows, the entire display is corrupted with a sort of moire vertical line pattern at every resolution except 1024 in which only the right half of the display is corrupted.

I’ve checked the monitor and the cord and they display perfectly off a different computer.

So I think my AGP video card is fried. And even though it’s probably inside the warranty period, I bought a modded one with a silent Zalman heatpipe and fan, and I would imagine that this just might void the warranty.

I will call ATI help soon, but they’ve never been any use in the past (“reinstall the latest drivers” “but I did that twice before calling” “reinstall the latest drivers”). So now I have to find a reasonably fast AGP video card that doesn’t make too much of a racket.

And then I can go back to worrying that my disk is about to crash.

Posted in Sufficiently Advanced Technology | 6 Comments

What Unix Can Feel Like

Posted on June 17, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

In the course of an informative account of his efforts to install MythTV (open-source TiVo), David Weinberger perfectly describes what Unix feels like to many people:

I am a slightly competent Unix user who can grep his way out of a paper bag, so long as no regular expressions are required, but that’s about my limit. So getting Linux-based MythTV installed feels like it requires me to issue complex magical incantations. Get one syllable wrong, and instead of the mouse turning into a white charger, you’ve given your sister boils for seven years.

Indeed. I’ve had days like that…and I first used Unix circa 1984.

Posted in Software | Comments Off on What Unix Can Feel Like

Because Those Poor Defenseless Gators Need Help

Posted on June 16, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Flablog is on the case:

If giant pythons are outlawed only outlaws will have giant pythons.

The board of the South Florida Water Management District asked federal regulators this week to take a step toward banning imports of the Asian reptiles, which can grow as large as 26 feet and 200 pounds – and, if one one famous case is an indication, seem to have acquired a taste for gator.

Posted in Florida | 1 Comment

Geek Humor

Posted on June 16, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

18 Days of Reckless Computing:

What kind of idiot buys a computer and willingly — even eagerly — exposes it to all the malware and viruses he can? Me.

Posted in Completely Different | 1 Comment