Older blog entries for mirwin (starting at number 207)

Reaction Notes

Future mogul? Atta boy Nymia!

User Notes on Graphics Monitors

Braden has the right of it. I will give up my NEC MultiSync 6FGP graphics monitors for LCD only when the resolution, crispness and color is superior or the NEC's give up the ghost .... I no longer worry about when they will fail as I have a couple of spares and I can see personal affluence at the end of the tunnel. Still, no monitor can last forever ... can it? Maybe if I stop moving them around in the front seat of my RX-7SE they will last longer?

Interesting, Ikcl provides link to Blue Angel

Superficial review of the specifications indicate that these have more power than the workstation I am installing Fedora Core 4, or reverting to 2 if necessary, to run a web server for an entrepreneurial startup. Ok for my own business but I need to get a little careful since I am starting to do some low end and charitable consulting and services work. Be embaressing for a customer to notice his phone had more processing power than the rebuilt computer I was proposing they use as a base load electric space heater, wikiversity study portal, and background scientifc processor. A goof like that and they might never go for a cogen plant to save wear and tear on the redundant natural gas burners they just installed. Of course, it probably has only limited hard drive or RAID array expansion capability. 8)

mchirico provides a suggested exercise that looks useful to the wikiversity software engineering crowd, maybe informatics and grid departments as well. Maybe I will drop a link there to his diary entry.

Rippit allegedly provides links to MichaelCrawford's album ???. I am definitely going to check this out ... soon .... maybe as a new year's resolution. Maybe I will get my niece to check it out for me. She is musically inclined (and in training and self study with multiple instruments) and I just sent her a simulated legal notice that I have suddenly remembered that she has never delivered my aquarium art specifications (for which I already paid her a couple of bucks and provided books and other reference material). Now Dad has taken over my unused aquarium for random evolutionary activities instead of the intelligent design I had intended, so she clearly owes me some serious damages.

avriettea I hope the sinus infection leaves fast. Use the overhead while it lasts man. Get some expensive antibiotics! 8)

Regarding the reading. is easy on the budget for generic background and links to further online reading and you get to add your quarter's worth. Much more satisfying to enter a paragraph commentary or several questions in the text or the discussion page than to be stuck with drawing pictures of handwaving in the margins when you find the author has conveniently skipped to the proof and simply written down an alleged answer in an advanced physics book. (If you cannot do the math, it is not physics; ---> possibly belongs in a monastory with other beliefs.)

salmoni Might check out tailored mil-stds The Software Engineering Institute used to do a lot of work with the military, they might have something. Basically when developing for the military one starts with detailed outlines (mil-stds; military standards) as specificed by contract and then tailors them appropriately for the task, project, specification, DID (data item description), CRDL (contract deliverable), etc. than one is working on. A tool like the wikimedia software which provides maximum freedom and tailorability to technical development teams along with a full audit trail is ideal for a Total Quality Managment driven technical development process utilizing modern concurrent engineering practices. Of course, most of their best practices might still be classified or unpublished but one might find some papers in applicable AIAA or other technical society journals. I would be interested in links to any online material you find or any research results or essays you publish online and would appreciate it if you publish the links here in your advogato diary. You might also wish to checkout xwiki.org. The developer/entrepreneur there has put substantial administrative tools in place that look like they would allow effective access management ... I am not sure it provides the detailed level of audit trails available from wikimedia. Personally I would go with wikimedia and internal team understandings and procedures for the configuration management, but I always managed small highly trusted teams. A larger more hiearchical engineering organization might feel they needed the stricter access control immediately available from xwiki code.

Analog Life

Friend of mine gave me a disassembled computer that had everything except the memory boards. I am already using the keyboard and monitor to get two systems back up. My old windows network is working for the first time in years and I am getting ready for another run a samba via Fedora Core 4 (assuming the sha1sum's checkout if I can figure out how to do so and that the hard drives are large enough).

I built a model prototype CEV atop a solid booster ... if it sells for ten bucks at flea market I will make table money. Otherwise I will give it and its payload (pre prototype odds and ends conceptually useful for extended stay elsewhere or beyond). Meanwhile I have started giving out free computer advice and receiving in turn computer scrap for salvage and disposal. My dental hygienist tells me there is a guy in a nearby town who will take broken monitors which he fixes, recycles or disposes of so I will keep the working units and pass on the duds.

Got a couple of hundred dollars worth of college grade textbooks at the flea market for mere dollars and quarters last week. That is a lot of reading and paraphrasing so I guess I will simply do some of the fun stuff for wikiversity as I get to it.

Started studying how Wikinews works

Public Notice: An Error Received at a US Military Recruiting Site

Pieces of following message sent to webmaster. Most trimmed with a link provided back to here due to a 255 character limitation in their web data entry form. I guess due to funding limitations they are reducing bandwidth requirement and total ascii reading volume sufficient to meet their mandated coordination with citizens or sovereigns at large on an individual basis. I wonder if they know Wikiversity is available for access to online expert volunteers interested in life long education?

I received this error message:

Web Site Certified by an Unknown Authority * Possible reasons for this error: - Your browser does not recognize the Certificate Authority that issued the site's certificate. - The site's certificate is incomplete due to a server misconfiguration. - You are connected to a site pretending to be www.cool.army.mil, possibly to obtain your confidential information.

Please notify the site's webmaster about this problem.

Before accepting this certificate, you should examine this site's certificate carefully. Are you willing to to accept this certificate for the purpose of identifying the web site www.cool.army.mil?

<button>Examine Certificate...</museum>

o Accept this certificate permanently. o Accept this certificate temporarily for this session o Do not accept this certificate and do not connect to this site

<button>OK</button> <button>Cancel</button> <button>Help</button>

page break

Title: Certificate Viewer:"www.cool.army.mil"

<Tab>General </>Tab Issued To Common Name (CN) www.cool.army.mil Organization (O) U.S. Government Organizational Unit (OU) USA ou=PKI ou=DoD Serial Number 02:51:4D

Issued By Common Name (CN) DOD CLASS 3 CA-7 Organization (O) U.S. Government Organizational Unit (OU) DoD

Validity Issued On 11/3/2005 Expires On 11/3/2008

Fingerprints SHA1 Fingerprint 97:2C:8B:9A:EA:46:51:DO:A1:CF:C7:A4:49:AB:E3:58:80:5A:C2:92 MD5 Fingerprint 5A:68:FB:3F:35:2B:6E:EA:FF:D0:71:4B:F2:7C:43:95

<Tab>Details </Tab>

Certificate Hierarchy -DOD CLASS 3 CA-7 |_www.cool.army.mil

Certificate Fields - www.cool.army.mil | --Certificate | | | |--Version | | | |--Serial Number | | | |--Certifcate Signature Algorithm | | | |--Issuer | | | --Validity | | | | | |--Not Before | | | | | --Not After | | | |--Subject | | | --Subject Public Key Info | | | |--Subject Public Key Algorithm | | | ---Subject's Public Key | | | ---Extensions | | | ---Certificate Authority Key Identifier | | | ---Certificate Subject Key ID | | | ---Certificate Key Usage | | | ---CRL Distribution Points | | | ---Certificate Policies | | | ---Certificate Issuer Alt Name | |--Certificate Signature Algorithm | ---Certificate Signature Value

For later maybe hacker lingo lesson Note to self, due to self lameness and/or laziness or self alleged learning deficiency with regard to computer languages, puns, relative merits, etc. simply make some money and/or pay brainiac if really a space freak really needs this level of specificity to complete a tech app. Remember to learn only enough of it to delegate effectively (hopefully little or none) and make the call. We are now going water skiing while the frackers (friendly hackers)(packers, green bay, political hackers, ph'd, political hackers divine) do it first (prototype to functional specifications) and then do it with us later in user orientation.

raph regarding Wikiversity and your frustration at lack of visible progress ... Wikipedia trust metric has been on hold primarily because we have been learning how to handle information categorization, filtering, censorship and dynamic allocation of write access to increasingly responsible persons of all ages, tongues, nations, oceans and religions. As useful groupings are found or proposed for testing and the educational value fades of overwriting graphiti someone reliable and respected (R&R) probably NOT associated with the anti cabal (ac) formed by direct collaboratory (ac) greenSpace faction allies ("24" is not A.C. Green, at least I do not think he/she/it is A.C. Green, much the same staying power but the English usage and primary interest seem markedly dissimilar) I suspect a slow phasin of current page edit access might be implemented between all the various interwiki infosphreres via an advogato style trust metric. Might lead to messy politics but hey, that human condition is better fought with ruthless abandon within an infosphere than on our precious and delicate oceans, deserts, mountains, valleys, forrests and plains. Maybe when the nanotech gets good enough to clean it up we can go back to depleted uranium thunderbolts at all scales and elevations.

Birds of different feathers sometimes flock together

One of these days I am going to get into the commercial convention scene for a while. First I have to make some money or earn some scholarships, which means getting obsessed or at least focused with something of value to someone else as percieved by them so I can make a profit trading or selling them something that is currently not worth much to me in terms of opportunity cost.

When I get a chance I need to decertify people at robots.net and maybe make arrangements to attend a robots convention, competition, or mania to get tied into the physical trust network. The founders at robots.net have given me a long trial period by extending certification in violation of their stated mission plan and certification guidelines. It is time I eliminated this liability or risk factor for them. I can either visit relatives in Texas to keep costs down or possibly contact a high school buddy who is big in the univerisity robot scene. Surely one of his girls teams knows somebody at robots.net or would like to eventually, although I have notice participation on the recentlog has fallen dramatically. Maybe other pickup participants had/have the same problem I have. I think I will have to think abou this a bit and maybe write some paragraph/page draft outlines of mission plans to get tied into physical people networks via Wikiversity and Wikimani's and local chapters ... maybe extending that somehow into family clans and alma maters, or maybe veterans organizations ... those old farts need help refurbishing their big club totems like aircraft, ships, gun museums, tanks, etc. Good vocational training too, the U.S. Air Force has begun taking old war steeds out of service by collaboration between training programs and engineering R&D. They equip an F-4 for a suicide mission with automated or telemetry driven systems and then sick a combat trainee or team on them. Of course the F-4 is not allowed to win ... yet. When they get smart enough to guarantee friend or foe recognition systems along with disengage upon diagnostically determined uncertainty or friendly fire risk factors then they will probably start fielding testing. I wonder what kind of force multiplier combat engineers can safely create while recycling our garbage?

Found a formerly active Wikipedian who was missing in action during the brief time I was active there back on 2002. I tried to join one of his proposed projects but it was idle by the time I got there and I do not think we ever made near realtime contact, I learned quite a bit from his participation at Wikipedia however from the crumbs and data he left behind for us all. Found him working at OSDL via http://planet.openclipart.org/ helping remind us all that we must create economic opportunities for ourselves and others to succeed economically and create freedom from inability to act from inadequate perceived or identified resources (poverty) if we are to be agents of change or assist local immune systems combatting cancers and corruptions running amok through the native, alien, and cross breed populations.

I hope they notice or found Wikiversity's art department one of these days when they get a chance. Since they work with the commercial world I reckon they probably got expertise with license conflicts and can contribute to our integrity studies regarding why we must respect others property rights if we expect to hold them accountable by force of arms (hopefully implied but the U.S. is officially in a shooting declared global war and intends to win .... wise people finds ways to stay out of the way of lone assassins, criminals and avenging armies of the Lords or the actual or perceived allmighty. Others die for poorly formulated ideologies setup to expand somebody's (or nation's) ego, self worship, addiction, or bank account without ever asking a few critical questions. Which is why in the U.S. we teach science in public schools and belief systems management in private churches, cults or conspiracies .... and what is it we do in black programs here in the U.S. except slow every thing down? Maybe they blow little fuses instead of galactic sized ones? How do they pick the proper fuse? What do they do when they run into a diverse, networked, mutually supporting robust community practicing what they preach? Maybe its time the right to life folks support abolishing the death penalty for treason so we can start convening grand juries and picking scapegoats for public show trials?

Gotta go. Gotta finish buring a couple of CDs of Inkscape bundled with openclipart.org's database in case that customer looking for graphics support shows up at the flea market today. I will have to put off my gimp disk until next week ... have not struck any sophisticated interest locally yet in professional grade image processing so it is not a priority this morning while I frantically repack my merchandise, books and tools for another day of losing just a little money while trying to learn how to make some serious stacks of green stuff from the treasure lying around locally and via the internet.

Component Test

I powered up my brand new 900 watt Briggs & Stratton field generator ($500 from their web site last year) last night in the dark with a flashlight. Used it to light up one 100 watt light bulb (auto garage style) and my space jam board. Got a nasty ~60 hum feed through out of the key board so I played a couple of lackadaisical scales and shut it all down.

If I had been thinking clearly, getting the most data out of the capital funds expended for feuling flight operations to collect useful engineering data, I would have plugged in my two ups's and attempted to use a multi-meter to measure something useful instead of having to restart the generator for another test data run. However, what exactly I need I am not sure. What guarantees that enough of the harmonics are being filtered out to avoid damage to my laptop even if enough get through that it is occasionally unreliable and crashes?

I guess I better backup up the data .... it has some of my partially completed scifi concepts and operational scenarios, which means somehow I have to get a net up with portable talking to one of the two other Windows machines in the house with a cd burner, before I can proceed with testing my backup power supply for local grid, automation, or robot components and processes. Which is bad because I just found out that I can get Wireless at DSL speeds for about 50 bucks/month from local member of the Oregon Rural Internet Consortium (who have grandiose plans of repeaters on every useful hilltop for {among other things} reliable beacons, bugs, and handheld communicators to allow local tourists, criminals and citizens communicate effectively with each other and the local authorities and vigilante groups.

Anyway, 2 power sources, 2 paths (2 dsl, one dialup, 3 services, might all depend on local phone company fiber ... must check on paths out of County to Portland and San Francisco or maybe Boise))2 wire protocols ... talk to cd about independent radio digital relay.

The point is that I can start designing a data processing facility that I can operate responsibly (redundant diverse power and data transmission access) at my home cottage manufacturing site in the background when it is not busy doing engineering calculations, background scientific data crunching for philanthropic or Wikiversity purposes, or running an automated or robotized microfactory ... say laser etching glass or producing turing machines parts.

Anyway, I guess I better start learning how to use EBay. A friend of mine at the local flea market is selling an antique Multimeter for seven dollars. I wanted it bad, it was similar to models used in Electrical Fundamentals; labs that I labored through burdened with foreign language teaching assistants. I squeaked through with B's by glomming onto an effective studier whose only demand for allowing my participation on his efficient lab team was informing the ladies that they were not welcome in our lab groups. This turned out to be even more costly than I anticipated later as the lady in question was gorgeous, brilliant and ended up sitting next to the two of us in Engineering Economics. She was also witty and friendly, apparently interested, in one us anyway. I had extreme fantasies about asking her out (a major reason among quite a few for refusing to apply for the Air Force Academy despite generous salaries {they pay you instead of you paying them} was I was determined to learn how to interact with girls. How one can be a valedictorian in a school with sex education and a grid iron star (selected for East West Shrine Game, cost me two week pay but since I was on Air Force ROTC scholarship at the time I had to decide it was a relatively painless decision, even though I was eager to be done with football. I had decided that for me college was about studying Aerospace Engineering, not football and not becoming a military officer. Actually that came later when I could not get a straight answer about what my obligation was and when it was finished from my freshmen CO and ROTC unit.) without learning how to talk to girls and date? I do know. Idiot savant I guess. I am still single and inept but only 45, so with any luck I still have a few years to try learning some effective social skills. In a pinch I guess I can convert to Islam from Christianity and earn an interesting afterlife .... or buy a playboy fantasy CD and devise my own sinful demise. Bible tells us that we are what we think and choose and the wages of sin and refusing to choose redemption is ultimately permanent and final death.

I think she regretted that neither my buddy or I ever overcame our shame at our shabby discrimination against her and took a chance of getting turned down by asking her out. I wonder if she has put any scratches, dents or large holes in stainless steel cubicles? I would wager she is doing well somewhere, somehow; if not now then soon; as she certainly had her act together and the talent and loving willingness to forgive necessary to take her far .... unless she got tired out or worn down by another 500 slobs like me and my criminal crony wherever she chose to pursue a professional engineering career. Tonight I think I will pray for forgiveness and ask God to reallocate some of my good fortune her way in compensation for the valuable lessons and examples she patiently lavished on me and my buddy for an entire term after we had sinned grievously against her at what had to be a difficult time breaking into the male dominated engineering field in the U.S.A. An equal opportunity society filled with equal opportunity employers. Maybe God already has and it will not cost me much to admit my guilt, accept forgiveness from Jesuses blood sacrafice on my behalf, and get on with living a joyful creative life loving God and my fellow people while I explore some immediately accessible pieces of the universe, internal and external.

Anyway, the multimeter might make me some quick cash if other engineers my age find it worthy of refurbishment and collection (or purpose a museum or gift for an engineer somewhere?), could be reutilized as breadboard components, or at worst I can get my money's worth back from the investment by using it as a case study in liquidation of assets or creation of salvage value when attempting to phase transition from one project/company to another. I think I will buy it if it is still available as it is only seven dollars and I got an extra hundred in from an unanticipated partime task helping fix a roof.

Tomorrow I have to burn some Abbiword CDs, GIMP CDs, and looking for a simpler cut paste business graphics design tool ... you know, cards, letterhead, presentation, that sort of thing. Had a customer mention his requirements. He might show up again.

Friend of mine asked me if I had bought any tools yet applicable to casting some alimunum. I incorrectly told him no. I got some serious rock grinding tools that could be used in forming optics components, various jewel and machine parts or molds for commercially viable gizmos or simple forms ... like say belt buckles or ornaments or aluminum parts interchangeable with the dollar store's tiny hot wheel buildables ... not exactly open source cars yet but given Walmarts cheap supplies of radio controlled vehicles, robots.net summaries of compenents and sources, and the fact that local stores will not give me a nickel for crushed aluminum cans (so far I have been giving the crushed ones to Dad, they accept his count when returns his recyclables) I think I might grind a couple of forms. Power up the blow torch. And do some microcasting within a few months. Maybe I can cast a quarter's worth of tot's toy parts out of those stolen nickels that Oregon's recycling laws require local venders to refund. The law was written most carefully ... actually I need to read it for myself again before I discuss the failure to remunerate with local store managers or file a complaint with the DA's office for non-compliance.

Probably easier to just cast the can into Mickel Nickels commemmorating some local sports championships and sell them for a dime apiece to the local kids and booster clubs for resale at local school functions. Expand the market volume a bit by selling similar line simultaneously to guest's fans. Maybe encrypt and lasar etch some secret public data like the bottling laws they have locked up in the local law library that nobody can use and allow local activists, saboteurs and citizens demanding their rights to read the actual law via homemade microscopes. I guess maybe I should donate some money this month to Oregon Public Broadcast Corporation ... their kiddy programs seem to be helping me remember stuff I used to know. Like how to love myself and others effectively while having fun learning something useful and potentially profitable. Maybe I am finally arriving at the future potential points I invested so much work trying to achieve recognition so somebody would give me a chance or permission.

</a>

Wikiversity

Looks like it might be finally happening. About 200 of a little under 300 validated voters (Wikimedia Foundation project participants in good standing) (69% reported in favor) supported the proposed Wikiversity that many of us hinted at or requested years ago. Unfortunately this is not binding upon the Board, which long time readers will remember was allegedly stacked initially by the benevolent Owner/God King/Founder with business partners and cabal members in good standing. Since all of Wikimedia Foundation's sponsored projects have been frequently limited and/or negatively impacted by insufficient internet infrastructure capacity there is a good chance that some government or corporate or dot.com funded entity will step in to act as an effective global focal point. Too bad we did not plan for success after agreeing/choosing to GPL/FDL all the software and data goodies developed or donated by "community" volunteers and philanthropists.

Should governments ever get serious about this I doubt they are going to wait a few years or decades for Wikiversity to get its act together. However, governments are notoriously slow and unreliable, so perhaps there is still time for motivated collaborators to shine helping establish the first best world class free online university while accomplishing personal goals such as: learning new software languages, augmenting personal studies, using convenient online reference texts, developing newly identified features and utilities critical to online learning environments and peer based distributed grids.

Personally, I am investigating whether I can grandfather into Oregon's recently proposed regulation of Systems Engineers or whether I am going to have to retake the EIT (the one I passed at graduation in 84 expired sometime 2001) so I can take the Oregon P.E. in some appropriate engineering discipline. Combat engineers brushing up on necessary skills for any contemplated current or future revolutionary activities are extremely welcome. Be subtle and discrete. Maintain appropriately arms length tradecraft. One of the alleged founders spends a lot of time shouting troll at me any time the concept of financial planning comes up or any suggestion that others in disagreement with the cabal may not actually be entirely troll like and therefore irredeemable within the scope and parameters of our published mission statements, goals, and charters.

Note also the attempts to divert professional journal publishing and other traffic to wikicities.com which is allegedly associated somehow with members of the stacked board of the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course Florida is notoriously beneficial to corrupt capitalists so perhaps this is not actually an apparent conflict of interest resulting in slow rolling promising projects ... or even if it is, it probably does not matter to any applicable authorities.

Interestingly .... freepedia.org has been put online apparently by a for profit entity earning income from advertising by relaying content requests to wikipedia.org. No doubt someone is selling books via Amazon off of Wikibooks.org while the primary communities creating the content put up with service delays and downtime due to lack of funds for equipment, bandwidth and professional staff support. Well to paraphrase what our mentor Heinlein has noted god, girls, and governments are all mysterious and it is not given to mortal to truly understand their ways.

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Directors allegedly has gods, kings, girls and is authorized by another government so it is [{(Mysterious-MYsterious)X(mystERious)^2}(Mysterious/50)^FTC}]convolved with several nationalities regulated via the WTO agreements regarding internet content and various standing armies enforcing anti terrorist and anti peasant uprising regulations locally .... seriously murky if not outright opaque. Solivy.

I sure hope something like this or some of the emerging globus grid components and/or utilities turn out to be useful at distributing workload in case the Board decides a free online university is too challenging in terms of explosive demand growth upon the overstrained Wikimedia Foundation's server farm. It would be cool if it turned out a properly implemented Wikiversity Grid could scale with each new serious participant's loan of a few meg and gig via a screensaver until they needed. Even better if it turned out that accounting systems could prioritize and allocate dynamic resources preferentially to past contributors ... gnunet ready for alpha, beta or omega yet?

I sure hope some participants manage to kick our Wikiversity:School of Computer Science and our Wikiversity:School of Informatics into critical mass pretty soon. Where are our founding all stars seeking fame, fortune and fun study buddies available from being in on the ground zero? We are probably going to need to honor them before launching any serious projects within the Astronautical or Space Physics Engineering Departments. It seems that every rocket engineer and future space settler wannabe that I have met knows that software is cheap, easy, and free to develop while rocket feul has real opportunity costs.

You know ... I think somebody may have forgotten to establish the School of Hackers or the Hacker Hangout or whatever your dudettes decide you should call it ... I am not going to coordinate or do it. I spent too many years pulling hair out trying to get precise answers out of software engineers, systems analysts, and technicians regarding fuzzy customer requirements to be visibly associated with a horde of chaotically creative evolutionaries. It would totally destroy any future ability to rest on my laurels in a cushy corporate or government project management job and coast to retirement. Later lovers.

Sound Tracks

Robot communication with music This might be interesting. Funny if have to deceive Mozart first before tackling Turing.

Entrepreneurial self study Dug out the Tricky Nuts microfactory I created last year, unfortunately after Halloween. Last year after I prototyped it on a pound of Walnuts there were no longer whole wall nuts available in Coos County. All the retail outlets I checked were selling machine shelled walnuts incredibly cheap. So I packed the microfactory up and did not bother to document the buiness model. This year I negotiated a deal with my mom to shell out about 3 pounds of nuts for her cooking purposes. Hopefully once I complete this business cycle I can write it up along with digital photographs and post it as a suitable economic endeaver for children looking to make a few bucks or parents looking to allow children to earn those few bucks or allowances. Ideal for kids to small or young to safely run a lawn mower or legally bag groceries. Once I get the writeup done and posted to an FDL site somewhere ... probably bizplan/world.org .... actually I need to look that site over. It has been a year or two since I looked at it and you never know when someone might have sold out and the new owners subvert/corrupt the original business model and site goal from the perspective of some users with specific goals and limitations in mind.

Flea Market Sold a couple of open source Urquan Masters</b> disk (ported from $50 commercial Star Control II I played extensively about 5 years ago) for three dollars. One came back because kids already had it on their nintendo or something. Could have salvaged $.50 revenue by trading a $5.00 texas hold em set I assembled from prefabs but chose to insist on $4.00 rather than list of $5.00. Customer did not wish to spend $4.00 rather than $3.00. None of the other scrap games I had with me were suitable subs. I wanted $5 for old Command & Command, Age of Empires, etc. Finally lost the sale. Probably goofed, the customer did not go away happy. Should have earned the $.50 (I thought I had $3.00 into construction of Texas Hold Em disregarding my prototyping time .... however should have subtracted one deck of cards which was split out into a separate $1.00 item at 100% markup; and had a satisfied customer happily spreading word regarding my goods and services .... hopefully I will do better next time. I almost managed to trade him an alpha Virtual Airport Operations CD (my own product .... I may open source it in a few months to help establish a web site or I may finish it off and sell it to a toy company to market ... situation once again fraught with possibilities) but he wanted it for an XP system and I have not yet successfully got the compatibility wizard to run. Something is screwed up on my system and XP will not dedicate 3 MB of virtual memory to the Director Projector (main executable that calls and interpretes the Macromedia Source Movies and Multimedia pieces) so it will not operate.

Almost sold a VAP disk to another customer but he decided he wanted the clip art studio packaged with my Incredibles DVD instead. I guess I should have had it priced higher since it was unique in my stock and looked more commercial.

abiword Downloaded source and installation files for Abiword. This week I am creating an installation disk tested on win98, win95, and winxp so I can burn and sell CDs at the local flea market for $3.00ea. Found this link by chasing their sponsor's link from abiword's homepage. Lab on a Polymer Chip

Life</a>

Learning to play the keyboard. Turns out my mom had six years of piano lessons as a child. She wants me to fix her organ so I guess we could have some holiday jam sessions. Will not be the same as space jam with Brian (combat engineer down the street retired from managing the grounds of a UC campus .... died of an aneurism while I was in the mental hospital last time .... life. What happens or passes you by while you are stuck in a cage of your own devising. Stuck in neutral or park. Fuck forward, put it in reverse and back out of this hole. When I get some money I may buy a good guitar and carve Brian's initials in it. Or maybe I will buy some sheet music ... Brain's Song Theme Music ... Hopefully some of his other mentees are around somewhere and might be interested in life support or microecology hydroponics and control/management systems.

Found some robot parts, or at least materials for future parts, while strolling and picking up litter along the intergalactic bypass over our local sewage mitigation microecology.

Wikiversity

I am rejoining Wikipedia while I wait to see if the Wikiversity project will be supported/initated by the Wikimedia Foundation. I intend to propose a more participatory quasi-democratic/participatory government since public donations now fund the servers and bandwidth. I am just not convinced that the sole figurehead is the best way to get started. It is good enough (I guess, who knows?) once reach global focal status ... after all what God King who does not keep his henchmen, stakeholders, and various populations of other soverereign authorities happy lasts long? How much influence can a TINC really hold on to with millions of effective participators? Incompetence will obviously be dealt via forks at the whim of some unsatisfied customers and some people will migrate. Best fork wins by definition ... or leads for a while once in while anyway.

I suspect we will eventually end up with multiple forks to serve slightly different populations via slightly different methods to enourage rapid evaluation. Everyone who participates effectively seems to come to at least partial agreement that at least some of us Terrans really need this Wikimedia technology (and other forthcoming wonders of the information age, such as the global internet, gridlock, and autononous factories, vehicles, processes, and friendly AI seeds) to do some neat things ..... such as allow humpback operation voice operated word processors via various SOSUS lines.

They (actually we I guess ....) have come a long way in the last few years. Check out this article on Total Quality Management which points to an excellent online summary: Refresher/Intro TQM into Education and Learning

Looks like a nice intro to the subject and pointers to quality online material available elsewhere around the net. Be cool when a couple of pointers to study teams and environments as well as course materials, scientific studies, software packages to aid one person internet entrepreneurs with implementation, and a full range of books (all of the above free materials) can be added.

Maybe NASA's CEVs and Mars Missions (or at least my lunar settlement or mobile factory/homestead) will be able to talk to Mother Terra's public grid without experiencing the blue screens of death via script kiddie or NSA misinfo attack viruses.

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