I don't believe in global warming. My argument is pretty simple. I haven't heard anything that points out otherwise. I haven't actively searched, either.
Simple argument is thus: quantifiable inputs to global warming follow an exponential growth curve, not a linear growth curve. I think I'm getting my wording right here. The point is best illustrated by a finance joke.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet walk into a bar. The average net worth in the bar goes to $30 billion.
Not much of a joke, but it illustrates the Pareto principle pretty good. Let me add another couple of lines.
In one corner, a man is losing his entire net worth gambling on a horse race. By the end of the race, the man will have lost $500,000 dollars of his net worth and he will be homeless. The average net worth in the room will be completely unaffected.
In another corner, a woman has won the lottery. She just won $5 million dollars. The average net worth in the room will be completely unaffected.
Now. Let's go re-examine that story. It well illustrates the power of exponential growth curves to destroy averages. That doesn't mean those lives weren't affected in the gain and loss. It just means the average is unaffected.
Now, lets apply the idea to pollution. Of all the polluters in the world, 20% of the polluters produce 80% of the pollution. It's the same concept as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. Let me give you an example.
A household is told to reduce their pollution by turning the AC up 5 degrees in summer. That will "solve" global warming. Compare then a TV studio and audience. That building uses energy at a greater rate. Given common electricity usage rates, that TV studio probably has monthly electrical bill of $3,000. The house has a monthly electrical bill of $100. I'm guessing on both of those. So one studio is the equivalent of 30 houses.
The other part of the equation is the house has a higher use rate than that TV studio. The TV studio probably runs about 10 hours a day at high capacity. Lets say 70% occupation. The rest of the day, it runs closer to 10% occupation. It is either empty, or has very few people. The house is a study in contrasts. It runs at 0% occupation for 8 hours, and 60% occupation for the other 16 hours of the day.
Which building is better capable of reducing electrical usage? The TV studio. The changes in that single building would easily dwarf the changes to 30 houses.
Now, the second part of this is in the implementation allowance. Or should I call it the "put your money where your mouth is" tax? The people most likely to declare the need for changes regarding global warming are, by a high percentage, unwilling to make meaningful prolonged change. Despite everything, that person wants to continue their lifestyle while you cramp yours.
Let's look at this another way. How many large metropolitan areas have city ordinances against windmills and solar panels? Why? Because solar panels are reflective and remove the picture postcard view of the city. It narrows down to the "not in my back yard" problem. So people want you to change, but won't change themselves. If you are that adamant about something, you'd do it first.
I think I've covered that section pretty well. Next...
The next part is one that drives me up the wall. It really does. It's the lack of a failure state in global warming. The lack of a failure state is invalid in most events. There is a failure state built into all weather forecasting models. That's why you get a percentage of a chance of rain. That's why forecasts longer than five days are negatively correlated.
In global warming, there is no failure state. If the weather gets colder, it's global warming. If the weather gets hotter, it's global warming. If the weather stays the same, it's global warming.
There is no condition where the global warming crowd is ever wrong. Except when they are.
Anyone remember acid rain?
I remember acid rain. It was the rain the was going to fall and burn our faces off. I was a kid, and had assumptions about what acid did. Mostly the horrible, horrible kinds of acid that destroyed things badly. You can still see such idea propagated to movies. And when you hear it, it causes you to stop.
Because there never was any acid rain.
But the people who declared there was going to be acid rain suddenly changed their position when it didn't happen. Amazing how that happens. And it was like they never preached to the choir about acid rain. It just quickly disappeared. And then suddenly global warming is here. And then global cooling. And then global weirding.
Yeah. There is no failure state. There is no point where these scientists sit back and declare "yup, I'm wrong". Everything has a failure state. Everything.
The third part of all of this is the lobbyists. Yes, the lobbyists come into play. But not the science ones. No, these are the lobbyists from the power company. Why would the power company have lobbyists? Simple: remember that 80/20 rule discussed earlier? Who's the 20% doing 80% of the damage? The power company. Who's the 20% that is likely to suffer the most from individuals generating their own power? The power company. The power company builds its business model off of monopoly. It's not designed to compete. It's designed for winner take all, and loser becomes illegal.
There was a point when that was required. But I think we're beyond that point. There will probably still be the need for a public utility company. But that company needs to have to compete with private individuals in order to become more efficient. There is no need for the power company to innovate due to the nature of their monopoly. And they will protect that monopoly to the best of their ability for as long as they can.
And the thought of individuals living off the public grid is something that does not appeal to them.
So what would it take to generate an off the grid solution? You'd need some sort of solution or a partial solution. And an electrician. The solution would probably be a one box solution. And you need an electrician to safely wire the thing into your house. There's a giant boom for the electricians and a major loss for the electric company.
I wonder what the lifetime loss is of one person leaving the grid? What about 1% of the population? I'm guessing its astronomically huge.
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
Monday, October 17, 2016
Color redesign
I decided to change the colors around this morning. The old background was my dinner table from a few years ago, and is now sitting out on the back porch. Not terribly impressive, but hey. It's out there.
The new one fits more with the manilla folder idea I've been obsessively using in the past few decades. I remember a website I created back following the days of GeoCities where I had a manilla folder background. Nothing terribly impressive, but it takes me back to those days.
This one was a little more professionally designed and actually tiles like it is supposed to.
At work, I've recently been using TWiki a lot. Seems like a good platform. After my vacation a couple of weeks ago, I realized the catalyst for much change is documentation. If you don't document, then you are going to keep repeating the same tasks over and over again, and wondering why no one ever gets around to changing.
You can't shove a part of the job you don't want to do on someone if you do not document. It's that simple.
If you will not document, then you will do the same thing over and over again.
Once the documentation is complete, you must then hand the documentation off to someone else in order to test your documentation. If your documentation is never examined or tested, it's not really documentation.
You must also revise and expand on your documentation to the point where it is excessively long. You have to realize the person you are handing your documentation off to has no clue what a native VLAN is or why it could affect communication between a router and a switch. And why have a native VLAN in the first place. I've probably heard that question before, but I don't remember the answer. I know the difference between a native VLAN and a non-native VLAN. Hell, I brought up ISL in the conversation in order to back up enough to provide a starting point.
But in the end you must document to the point of excessive. All you are going to do is take up disk space, and disk space is relatively free.
Anyways....
Upgrades Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week. At least the prep work is mostly done on them. So they should go relatively quickly.
The new one fits more with the manilla folder idea I've been obsessively using in the past few decades. I remember a website I created back following the days of GeoCities where I had a manilla folder background. Nothing terribly impressive, but it takes me back to those days.
This one was a little more professionally designed and actually tiles like it is supposed to.
At work, I've recently been using TWiki a lot. Seems like a good platform. After my vacation a couple of weeks ago, I realized the catalyst for much change is documentation. If you don't document, then you are going to keep repeating the same tasks over and over again, and wondering why no one ever gets around to changing.
You can't shove a part of the job you don't want to do on someone if you do not document. It's that simple.
If you will not document, then you will do the same thing over and over again.
Once the documentation is complete, you must then hand the documentation off to someone else in order to test your documentation. If your documentation is never examined or tested, it's not really documentation.
You must also revise and expand on your documentation to the point where it is excessively long. You have to realize the person you are handing your documentation off to has no clue what a native VLAN is or why it could affect communication between a router and a switch. And why have a native VLAN in the first place. I've probably heard that question before, but I don't remember the answer. I know the difference between a native VLAN and a non-native VLAN. Hell, I brought up ISL in the conversation in order to back up enough to provide a starting point.
But in the end you must document to the point of excessive. All you are going to do is take up disk space, and disk space is relatively free.
Anyways....
Upgrades Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week. At least the prep work is mostly done on them. So they should go relatively quickly.
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Falling back into a routine
I'm falling back into a routine. The first few days were a fight to get the routine going. The few days afterwards have been empowering. I can't say they have been great. But it's been a lot easier keeping the routine.
I think that's with all new practices. The initial period is always horrendous. It's a few days or a few weeks of thinking about doing something, but never doing it. It makes me think of Confidence and Paranoia from an episode of Red Dwarf. Lister ended up getting sick, and his confidence and paranoia came to life as external beings. Your confidence, to paraphrase Lister, is the guy who tells you you're great, you're wonderful, you're sexy, and everyone loves. Your paranoia tells you you're stupid, you're ugly, and everyone hates you.
Both are just competing opinions in the brain. The answer is simple and obvious: trudge on regardless. Start regardless of what you think.
It gets easier to follow the routine through days 3 and 4. Though the first few days are pretty much like pulling teeth.
Is it automatic yet? No. No where near. But it is at least to the point where I can see a benefit in going through the motions and doing the exercise. I'd generally say give something at least two weeks, but I know I haven't done that before.
But then I'm also influenced by the thought that people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year. Broken down, some goals aren't that hard when spaced out over a year. There just has to be definite progress throughout. And there almost never is definite progress.
Recent books I've read:
The Four Hour Chef by Tim Ferris
I think that's with all new practices. The initial period is always horrendous. It's a few days or a few weeks of thinking about doing something, but never doing it. It makes me think of Confidence and Paranoia from an episode of Red Dwarf. Lister ended up getting sick, and his confidence and paranoia came to life as external beings. Your confidence, to paraphrase Lister, is the guy who tells you you're great, you're wonderful, you're sexy, and everyone loves. Your paranoia tells you you're stupid, you're ugly, and everyone hates you.
Both are just competing opinions in the brain. The answer is simple and obvious: trudge on regardless. Start regardless of what you think.
It gets easier to follow the routine through days 3 and 4. Though the first few days are pretty much like pulling teeth.
Is it automatic yet? No. No where near. But it is at least to the point where I can see a benefit in going through the motions and doing the exercise. I'd generally say give something at least two weeks, but I know I haven't done that before.
But then I'm also influenced by the thought that people overestimate what they can do in a day and underestimate what they can do in a year. Broken down, some goals aren't that hard when spaced out over a year. There just has to be definite progress throughout. And there almost never is definite progress.
Recent books I've read:
The Four Hour Chef by Tim Ferris
Sunday, September 18, 2016
The Boring Details
I've been spending a lot of time contemplating automation recently. Automating things is rather great. But I think there is an unwritten side part to automation. I'm going to write that down.
In order to automate anything, you must first document the entire process.
After reading that sentence, you are probably thinking a lot of sarcastic comments. I'd like to agree with you, but the stupid simple is what most people miss in the first place. How often has business classes shown case study after case study of ridiculous levels of bureaucracy that can be removed and processes that can be streamlined by knowing the process.
But then that involves a lot of boring drudgery. That's the part that no one does. It's a simple thing, but doing that simple thing is all that really needs to be done. By the end of the process of documentation, you've got an in depth understanding of the events that take place. Often in the process you start thinking about why certain things are done, and you realize just how much time you can solve by automating.
I looked at the same idea when I was fighting the Windows Automatic Installation Kit. Sounded like a great idea. I could never get the network drivers to work on my builds. So I basically burned through a lot of crap and none of it worked.
So after that, I went back to partial automation and partial manual. If part of the process is copying files and creating directories, why not automate that? A batch file is perfectly acceptable for that and it becomes automatic and the same everywhere.
I want to do the same thing with network discovery, but Python is giving me hell. Something I'm not certain of is causing me problems. I can't get the data file to create.
Anyways, I guess this is the call to do boring but important things. Documentation is boring. But it solves a world of problems. It also gives you the ability to solve all sorts of problems in the future. And it gives you the best ability: delegation. If you have something well documented, you can then delegate the task and give it to someone else.
In order to automate anything, you must first document the entire process.
After reading that sentence, you are probably thinking a lot of sarcastic comments. I'd like to agree with you, but the stupid simple is what most people miss in the first place. How often has business classes shown case study after case study of ridiculous levels of bureaucracy that can be removed and processes that can be streamlined by knowing the process.
But then that involves a lot of boring drudgery. That's the part that no one does. It's a simple thing, but doing that simple thing is all that really needs to be done. By the end of the process of documentation, you've got an in depth understanding of the events that take place. Often in the process you start thinking about why certain things are done, and you realize just how much time you can solve by automating.
I looked at the same idea when I was fighting the Windows Automatic Installation Kit. Sounded like a great idea. I could never get the network drivers to work on my builds. So I basically burned through a lot of crap and none of it worked.
So after that, I went back to partial automation and partial manual. If part of the process is copying files and creating directories, why not automate that? A batch file is perfectly acceptable for that and it becomes automatic and the same everywhere.
I want to do the same thing with network discovery, but Python is giving me hell. Something I'm not certain of is causing me problems. I can't get the data file to create.
Anyways, I guess this is the call to do boring but important things. Documentation is boring. But it solves a world of problems. It also gives you the ability to solve all sorts of problems in the future. And it gives you the best ability: delegation. If you have something well documented, you can then delegate the task and give it to someone else.
Friday, August 26, 2016
finishing projects
I actually finished Causality Crimes today. At a whopping 21,123 words before editing, it probably shouldn't have taken me more than 2 years to finish. I started (keeping track) in January of 2014. At that point, I was at 3,000 words. August, 2016 I'm finished at 21,000 words. It didn't go the way I would have expected. I don't know what I thought about the story going in. It's probably going to require some serious rewriting. I started out in a first person omniscient and moved towards a third person. I'm not sure that was the right thing to do with this story. It might have been a good transition. I don't know. I'm going to have to get a break from the thing to figure that out. I'm not even sure I like the title any more.
With that complete, it's off to finish the second story I was writing before finally publishing my second work. Short stories, collection 1. I may try to find a physical book, but I'm doubtful. It will probably be another Kindle release. I'm okay with that.
Now it's off to re-read what I've written about a nightmare turned story called The Gray Lady about an intergalactic space virus. It might be interesting. It might not. I've got to finish it to figure it out.
And yes, it really was a nightmare I had that started the entire thing. I took notes. They were...
-nasty intergalactic space virus
-makes non-sentient life forms sentient
-tries to kill sentient life forms. Red bands on top of armsthat wrap around to cover the wrist and slice through.
With that complete, it's off to finish the second story I was writing before finally publishing my second work. Short stories, collection 1. I may try to find a physical book, but I'm doubtful. It will probably be another Kindle release. I'm okay with that.
Now it's off to re-read what I've written about a nightmare turned story called The Gray Lady about an intergalactic space virus. It might be interesting. It might not. I've got to finish it to figure it out.
And yes, it really was a nightmare I had that started the entire thing. I took notes. They were...
-nasty intergalactic space virus
-makes non-sentient life forms sentient
-tries to kill sentient life forms. Red bands on top of armsthat wrap around to cover the wrist and slice through.
Bands are capable of being cut or broken
-Creates telepathic capabilities in sentients, but none have ever lived through a case of it.
-Called the Gray Lady because it creates a gel/smoke/shade likeshadow around the foot when infected.
-100% infection rate. 100% lethal. Any ship infected is blasted out of the sky, no questions asked.
-Creates telepathic capabilities in sentients, but none have ever lived through a case of it.
-Called the Gray Lady because it creates a gel/smoke/shade likeshadow around the foot when infected.
-100% infection rate. 100% lethal. Any ship infected is blasted out of the sky, no questions asked.
Amazing what a completely screwed up dream can turn out.
Wednesday, July 27, 2016
CCNA
One last day before the CCNA.
After a bit of testing, I'm pretty good on the LAN side. It's WAN and routing protocols that I need to spend the most time on. I can get the necessary points out of studying OSPF, EIGRP, PPP, and Frame Relay.
Still working on Mnemosyne on my studying. I covered the LAN side way too deeply. Basically means I can answer LAN side questions without a second thought. But WAN and routing protocol side is weak.
On the practice tests, I've been getting about 65%. So that means I only need to improve 20% or so. Easy.
Back tomorrow afternoon with results.
After a bit of testing, I'm pretty good on the LAN side. It's WAN and routing protocols that I need to spend the most time on. I can get the necessary points out of studying OSPF, EIGRP, PPP, and Frame Relay.
Still working on Mnemosyne on my studying. I covered the LAN side way too deeply. Basically means I can answer LAN side questions without a second thought. But WAN and routing protocol side is weak.
On the practice tests, I've been getting about 65%. So that means I only need to improve 20% or so. Easy.
Back tomorrow afternoon with results.
Monday, July 4, 2016
Learning the Right Lesson
I finally set a date to take the CCNA. Actually, it's the part of the CCENT. So I'm doing the two part CCNA thing. Anyways, now that I have a date I have a limited time left to learn everything that I could possibly need to pass this thing.
And I'm doing everything different again.
See, success is a bad teacher. I think I heard that from Bill Gates.
So far, I've had success. But there were certain places that I had limitations. Mental gaps in the knowledge. I should be strong in all the information, not just sections. But there are sections and specific information that I needed that just wasn't making it into my head in the correct manner.
It's funny. At one point I was turning my CCENT notes into a book to sell. That project was abandoned for various reasons. But the main one being that what did good for the CCENT may not be good for the CCNA. How can I know?
So I've been using Mnemosyne. It's a flash card program that allows you to create your own flash cards. So you end up getting a lot of flash cards that you study. It seems I heard about flash cards for years, but always avoided them.
I didn't avoid them because they were complicated.
I avoided them because they were work. I didn't need to work to learn everything. Until I did. And the methods I was doing weren't working. And they didn't work for years. YEARS.
So now, it's time to quit avoiding work. Because that's what all this searching has been about. Avoiding work. And flash cards are work.
You are what you repeatedly do.
I think Aristotle said that.
Success is a bad teacher.
So if you want success, you must repeatedly do something. And it's probably going to be work. And it is going to suck.
And you can either do it now, or spend the rest of your life avoiding the work.
And you will keep ending up in the same scenario: wondering why you only get so far.
You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act but a habit.
Success is a bad teacher.
Strangeness indeed.
And I'm doing everything different again.
See, success is a bad teacher. I think I heard that from Bill Gates.
So far, I've had success. But there were certain places that I had limitations. Mental gaps in the knowledge. I should be strong in all the information, not just sections. But there are sections and specific information that I needed that just wasn't making it into my head in the correct manner.
It's funny. At one point I was turning my CCENT notes into a book to sell. That project was abandoned for various reasons. But the main one being that what did good for the CCENT may not be good for the CCNA. How can I know?
So I've been using Mnemosyne. It's a flash card program that allows you to create your own flash cards. So you end up getting a lot of flash cards that you study. It seems I heard about flash cards for years, but always avoided them.
I didn't avoid them because they were complicated.
I avoided them because they were work. I didn't need to work to learn everything. Until I did. And the methods I was doing weren't working. And they didn't work for years. YEARS.
So now, it's time to quit avoiding work. Because that's what all this searching has been about. Avoiding work. And flash cards are work.
You are what you repeatedly do.
I think Aristotle said that.
Success is a bad teacher.
So if you want success, you must repeatedly do something. And it's probably going to be work. And it is going to suck.
And you can either do it now, or spend the rest of your life avoiding the work.
And you will keep ending up in the same scenario: wondering why you only get so far.
You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act but a habit.
Success is a bad teacher.
Strangeness indeed.
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