At this time

I'd rather not talk about that right now.

OK - when would be a good date, then? Tomorrow? Or are you about to engage in a year long quest of finding out who knows what and whether I may have forgot about this, whence to estimate whether you still need to tell me "not right now" or "OK, now", or "no, never". Because you obviously don't know enough to give me a straight answer. Not even a straight lie.

Instead of "right now" the more politically corrected euphemism is "at this time". I've heard it on airports so many times - "not ... at this time" usually means "not yet and we have no fucking clue when".

Most of the time, the "right now" and "at this time" translates straight into "". It's a crutch, a few words to add to extend the sentence. Just like the dreadful usage of "What I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna {verb here}" instead of simple "I'll {verb here}". It means nothing per se. However, it means something by itself - that the speaker has a need to use it. That need may be anything - to fill the allotted time, to gain some time (to compose the next thing to say) by wasting time (speaking content-free words), or even to give the listener a common point of reference, because the average listener is using the same empty phrases.

Or it may be just a cover up. "At this time" on an airport may even be just clumsy phrase - "we are not ~ing at this time" may mean they will start ~ing whenever the jam is unclogged. It may sound better than "we can't ~ until... we don't know how long it will take", and may calm the passengers for a while.

In some other cases, phrases like those ring a bell. Alarm bell, that is: whoever is using them is suspect of lying, or of a coverup, or trying to guide you to suit their agenda. The good reason for suspicion is the question: if their agenda is good for me, why don't they tell me straight what they want?

Another shaver maker bites the dust

This time it's Braun. I found these images on a forum:



There are two more, with the same text.

First we have someone pimping his book by positing that religion=civilization (and not as a subset of civilization, but as the bedrock thereof). Now these guys say "shaved=human".

Know what, I never went for those beard mowers. I prefer to just trim mine periodically (using a Remington machine) and shave some parts weekly (using the cheapest plastic two-blader I can find - FU, mr Gilette). But I'm not shaving my whole face, head, legs or whatever the fashion dictates. And if you, Braun Co, paid for this ad, I may just sue you for insult, hate speech, ... well, not really, I don't want to get entangled in legal spaghetti. It's just that I will never ever buy anything from you, because you are henceforth branded in my mind as that rude, uncivilized and mildly racist company, which resorts to just about any slimy and filthy psychological kick below the belt, only to sell a few more mowers.

Reminder to self: write something about the few companies with which you have a decent record. They aren't all that bad.

I am not civilized.

I bought the book. Started reading it. I already know a lot of what it says, and I have good reasons to believe that most of what it says is true. I expected to have the subject matter laid out in a reasonable manner, with firm facts, sources, etc.

Instead, it begins with several biblical quotes. OK, many an author prefaces a book with some verse, and I can't possibly accuse mr Flynn of being a man of one book ("Books are not dangerous - one book is. Beware of the people with one book!" - Danilo Kiš, IIRC). Nobody writes a book on NWO without having dug deeply in the muck of hundreds of books. So the one book is one among the many, his choice. I may not like it - but then, it doesn't mean much to me, I didn't grow with it, don't have all those thousands of memes in my head. To me, "writing on the wall" is identical with graffiti, "be careful what you wish for" is a Hollywood cliche, and so on. If I didn't make myself clear before, I'm a heathen. I just don't believe, and as long as there's no attempt to establish a monopoly on anything by either side (believers, non-believers, anti-believers, whoever), it's fine with me.

The reason I will not read the rest of mr. Flynn's book is on as early as page 24 (out of almost 500):

...that he could accomplish nothing unless he could eliminate the bedrock of civilization, religion.

Thank you for eliminating me from civilization, mr Flynn. Same to you. If you want to fight a good fight, that's exactly the advice I'd give you: piss off everyone who isn't in your narrow club, so to lose friends faster than you can make them.

An uncivilized, unreligious, gentle shelving of the book somewhere in the top, dark shelf near the ceiling will commence in a minute.

Alas, the command line

I'm not using either of them Explorers. Not the Windows Ex, not the Microsoft Internet one, not the vehicle of such name. While there are reasons for each, today it's the first one.

Among other file managers, I played with Geos (or was it Beos?) and a couple of other wrappers around the explorer object, and settled on Ghisler's Total Commander for the last nine years, and still haven't looked back. Two main differences: there's a generic file viewer, and there's the command line.

Under WE (and most of the wrappers), it's a major (admiral, if you ask me) PITA to look into a file. First, you have to rightclick it and wait for all the WE extensions to load; then see if there's an app which can open associated with this type of file. Then find out there's none, select Open With, then wait half a forever for the list of available apps to be scoured from remote provinces of your disk.

In some cases, it doesn't even offer the Open With option, but instead forces you to read this:

Now this is funny. A so-called "operating system" doesn't know how to... open a file? Wow. And after... how many years now, nineteen?... it still doesn't know which program created which file. OK, maybe it doesn't even need to know - the user should know.

Or the user can use The Web Service. There can be only one.

Either way, there's no quick way: if I used the Web service (sorry, the the and the service aren't capitalized, but they think they can always capitalize on web), it would... go somewhere Microsoft, I guess. Never tried. Trying now, it goes here. Amazingly, used my normal browser for it, not insisting on that other explorer. And no, it doesn't know jack about .pig files.

Or, selecting from a list will plow your disk for a while to find a list of registered apps (which are registered so they can be found quickly)(the irony of this wasn't registered and can't be found anywhere). Then you can pick one of the programs, if you know what you're doing. BTW, for .pig files, that would be one of the old DOS gaming platforms, was it the one for Duke Nukem, or 4GW or the one for ROTT or for Doom or Dark Forces - well, open and see... oops, you can't open because of the damn circulus vitiosus.

In case you pick a wrong program and you had the "always" checkbox checked, you're out of luck if you don't know the inner logic of the Redmondians. Because if you try to rightclick and fiddle with the properties of the file, you may find that if you want to change the file association (we're all for the idea of associated files - every file should be an associate! No, an associeté!) (can I become a member of that association?) it may lead to a read-only dialogue, which is about as frustrating as the whole WE. I mean, the button says "CHANGE", for world's name, and when you click it you get to change nothing?!

All this fuss, and I only wanted to see what's in this file. It's actually a text file someone renamed. But the whole of Redmond couldn't figure it out - well, Ghisler did. In Total Commander I just press F3 (imagine, a single keypress) or click the button on its bottom row ("F3 View"), and I get his lister.exe showing the file. It takes its best guess as to the format of the file, so if it's an image it may try to show it; if it's a mp3 or avi it may play it. For most of the rest, it will display it as text, no matter what it is. So you get some gibberish, but you aren't stupid, you know there are unprintable characters, and among them there may be printables too. You scroll and find some text which makes sense to you. Maybe it's the MZ in the beginning, the signature of DOS/Win executable, or a PK (a zip), or JFIF within the first 10 bytes (a JPG), or %PDF - guess what this is. And if lister guessed wrong, you can always tell it to look at it some other way - as text, as Unicode text, as a webpage, as a RTF, as hex, as text+hex, in OEM or ANSI codepage...

Which is why I still don't understand programmers who ask questions like "how does one open a .dat file"? AAaaaarrrrgh! Look into it, open it low-level, and extract what you can or just call it a night.

But which is not the pretext I had for writing this. The command line... which is where you can pass parameters to whatever you're running. In TC, it's fairly simple: your command line is a simple long textbox with MRU history, and you can type the name or command or just highlight it in the file list above and ctrl+enter to copy it (ctrl+shift+enter to copy full pathname) into the command line, where you can then type extra parameters and you're done.

At times I have to use machines where I can't have TC. The remaining non-whites in my beard may soon give up because of that. How do you run a command or executable with parameters? In Windowses, that is. In TOS on the Atari, it was simple - the executable was a .ttp file, where tp meant "takes parameters", and it would prompt you to enter them before actually running.

In DOS, it was sort of simple, but you had to know where you run it. Your exe may have found files it needed on the wrong place on the disk, depending on your path, or may not find them at all. The systems having grown too big for this kind of logic - you aren't running just a dozen of apps so that all their directories can be part of the global path (and even back then when this was done, it wasn't nice). So you need to know where to run the app, or to have an app which can find its pieces (by having the locations registered in the, ahem, registry or in files in its home directory), or which doesn't need any pieces and can work anywhere.

With TC this is not a problem - at any time you know where you are. You can run the app from the left window on a file (and in the location of) the right window by stating its full path and running it with right window active - that's where you are.

Without TC? Only one solution I know of: DOS prompt. Which is your command line sans steroids. You have to navigate to where you want it to run (or, using TC, run CMD where you want it :), type the name of the executable, type the parameters and then wait for the app to run its course, because it will steal the focus from your DOS window and you may not be able to close it until the app exits.

I've heard the "start button, run, type the name of your app and any parameters". Works if your app is on the DOS path, or if you type (or paste) the full path to it, so the run command will find it and run it, and if your app doesn't mind being launched from your "document and settings" folder every time. Because there's no way to tell it where to start.

I have a dozen other reasons for not using WE at all (not even to display the desktop - my shell is bbLean). This much for today.

You shall not know what you buy

In this role or that, I was buying from HP for almost 20 years. The first, IIRC, was a HPLJ IV, which probably still works. Then, a VI or VII (I'm becoming bad with names) for my next company. And a scanner for another company along the way. Then I bought, after coming here, one printer, then another, then a scanner, a laptop... and that's where it began to go sour.

In 1995, HP had a perfect suite for scanners. It could scan an image and then print it, then scan it again and self-correct so that after a few rounds the printed picture looked perfect and scanned the same colors as the original. The 2003 scanner had an idiotic 45K piece of a dll which worked in IE, refused to install if your CD wasn't set to autoplay, couldn't save the settings (it could save A setting, i.e whatever you chose under "other" would still be there) and wasn't capable of scanning two images in a row. It was actually a webpage, stateless, therefore forgetting pretty much everything, ignorant of all the world save for the parameters the caller passed. IOW, a piece of crap - specially compared with the ingenious app they had 8 years before. My next scanner, when this one became just too old, too slow and took too much time to finally scan (4-5 tries when it would just scan black, then one good), was a Canon. Half of it was a gift from Newegg, which they gave me as a gesture of good will after HP's rebate scam on the laptop. And you get a real app with it. Another scanner came with the printer (a Brother... good, I would have paid it the same even without the scanner), its driver not much smarter than HP's, but at least the rest of the software that comes with it doesn't assume the user is a moron.

There's another story with daughter's laptop, where the wireless card overheated but didn't die - it fried the nearest part of the motherboard. HP sort of recognizes the problem but generally doesn't care, because it generally took about 18 months for the problem to fry properly, so it's out of warranty, screw you all. Too bad - until then, HP was a company churning out good products with good software, then good products with not so good software (drivers for HPLJ VII... which worked OK if you reverted to rev IV drivers), then good products with shoddy software (scanner), then good, still well engineered products with crapware on them (first laptop with the Vista and 700M of HP's ads) and roughshod sales department, and finally even bad hardware which would die in your hands and HP wouldn't care. That's evolution.

There. A conclusion. But I'm not finished.

The reason why we bought another printer was that HP's 920cvr got into a period of doubt, and began to print a self-test almost every night, until the paper runs out. Other than that, it still prints nice (and the pictures look better - more contrast, black is blacker), if you care to keep it off the cable between printings. We kept it retired for months, but now a need arose - one of the laptops became a publisher for a while, and will need to print a lot. So we dusted Cvrle, plugged it back in and... it ran out of black ink. Which it shouldn't, the cartridges were nearly full last time. On shaking, you can hear the sloshing sounds in it (Ser: bućka se). But it doesn't print any black. I guess it depressurized. These cartridges contain ink under pressure; the electronics actually open the tiny apertures which then squirt a droplet of ink at a time, which then hits the paper. But it doesn't squeeze it out (as it probably did in the beginning), it squirts under pressure; the cartridge is primed... and can lose the pressure over time.

So when you're buying ink, you're also buying compressed air. If you run out of one, you lose the other. You could print 500 pages in a day or two, and use up the ink, while having leftover pressure to last you another cartridge. Or, as I experienced, you can lose pressure and have leftover ink galore, that you can't use, because it won't come out.

How much ink are we talking about, anyway? Since this is HP's #15 cartridge, it says 25ml on the box. One of the last boxes of the old design, where it still says how much is inside. Or, rather, how much they promise they've put inside. The new black box has no such promise on it. Nothing. Just blurbs, ecological warnings, sales pitch in three languages and pretty much zero info about the product. And I've checked the spare black for Brother printer - they are far more advanced than HP. They never had the mass of ink printed on the box.

At least, this ink isn't cheap anymore - it used to be $25-27 (which is a bit steep for a $100 printer, eh?); it's $36 now.

The morale of the story? You don't need to know what you're buying. How much ink is that? One. One what? One cartridge, that's what it says. What does it contain? What does anything contain? Your sausages contain something, except it's the chemicals, where the dosage makes the difference between spice and poison... well, no numbers. The industry has paid for the laws where they don't have to print any such numbers. You don't need to know how much of what, nothing to see here, move along, just fork out the money, and if you aren't using it the way we designed it, it will last shorter. You don't need no damn data about the product. We need the data about you, though... to see if you got the money.

Cliffhanger: looking for CFL or LED light source (bulbs, that is) which aren't dyed yellow. Missing info: color temperature. I want it white.

Peanuts, an addict's tale

OK, I'm not really an addict. I just have this tooth itch. If you leave me alone with an open can of roasted peanuts, within an hour or two one of us will be gone, depending on when you come to check. Most of the time, it will be me who is gone - to wash my hands. Too much salt and oil.

What's the point in oiling something that contains its own fat? Just grind it and you can spread it on bread (well, if it's the American wet bread, you'd need to toast it first or else your knife will just smear the slice all over the plate).

Being somewhat closely related to medicine (not as a patient), I know that our bodies can daily withstand about 30 times more salt than needed. Did I say daily? Silly me. Worse! On an everydaily basis.

Of course, there's a cost - your blood is thicker, your pump has more work to do. Keep at it for a few decades and you'll run quite a medical bill to make up for material fatigue. And salting a lot is just a habit hoisted upon us by sellers of water, ahem, beer and soda. More salt, more thirst. More thirst, more sales. More sales, more money. But it's your money, your health, up to you.

We gave up salt ages ago. What you get through bread, sausage, soup etc is more than enough; anything you add over that is just excess. It looked funny at first to eat radish, tomatoes or onions without salt (and just raw chopped onion is our elementary Serbian salad) after a long habit, but then the taste hit me. Salt was hiding so much of it, it's incredible. It's like switching from crappy 240x320 old webcam to HDTV. You sense so much more.

Back to peanuts. I buy them in shell. Shelling them is a part of the rite, and I also don't care whether I eat the inner red shell or not. It's just cellulose and a few other healthy bits, which I'll probably digest somewhat. What I don't digest still helps my digestion and has other nice side effects. Does me good.

Unshelled peanuts come in three varieties: raw, roasted and roasted & salted. I still don't quite get it how do they salt them through the shell, but I guess they are drenched in a salty solution, then dried and eventually roasted in a stream of hot air. They could be better done, IMO, but I guess they can't be or else the shell would burn. It blows a lot of smoke (as I discovered while I was using it as kindle for the barbecue), which would not be nice for the workers associates handling the burner.

For a while there was a shop which sold quite decent ones, unpackaged, at $1.60/lb. But then we moved. Tried a few brands - Kroger's was half raw, others were just too expensive, and finally settled for local brand, 5lb pack, priced at $1.20 to $1.60/lb, which were almost right and were generally good. Found them at K-mart, and this became the main reason why I'd drive the extra mile to the place.

Except the unsalted ones would vanish periodically, usually by the end of the year. There'd be an extra stack of bags, all with the salted, and I'd manage to grab the last couple of unsalteds, and then I'd just have to go cold turkey for a month or two, until these would eventually sell out and they get a new batch of both. Happened almost regularly. Until now - yesterday we drove to the other end of town to get a few other things that are hard to come by in the 'hood - and they only had a few 1lb bags of roasted+salted, plus some raw, and it occupied maybe 10% of the space it once did. Last time we bought the last two bags of unsalted they had, but they still had a few dozen of salted. All gone now.

I'm a peanut junkie, but not a true addict. I can go years without the stuff, I don't care. I guess it will be October before we try K-mart again. It's just not worth the trip. Everything else they have is just the same as everywhere else - except one brand of horseradish, but what we bought will surely last until then - and then also costs a bit more.

I think this is a bit of a marketing damnation. They keep adding new stuff to their shelves, probably to get new customers, but their shelf space isn't infinite, and if it was, the customers would never reach the register. So some items vanish. While the new customers may or may not come again, just because they loved the new items they found (and which they'll probably find elsewhere too), the old customers will surely get pissed off because the items they came for can't be found anymore.

So if you're the guy who decides what goes on and what off the shelf, good for you that you read this. If you're the same guy at K-mart, you just shot yourself in the foot. In October, if there are no unsalted peanuts in a 5lb bag, I may buy horseradish and/or up to $20 worth of other stuff, or I may just turn around and walk out. Then check on you in March 2010, maybe, if I remember.

---

Update, June 11th: Checked on them again, no peanuts. I.e. salted available, no will take. Returned the cantaloupes to the shelf and walked out empty handed. So long.

Monopoly on spirituality? Not again...

Amazon has gone to lengths (a few microns, I guess) to offer me this (plus three other books) under "New Releases in Science Books": "Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality".

A sidenote first: the other three books don't sound like science either - one is about consumer behavior (so, predator psychology in service of commerce), a "natural history" of NYC (so, history, more or less storytelling) and a "neuroscientist's prescription for improving your brain's performance" (if it's science, why a prescription? ...sounds like junk science but who knows, this one may have some real science in it). Three other books on offer seem to be popular science, and one on Al-Zheimer, IIRC.

Now to the point. I admire the audacity with which several agenda (now how do you make plural of a plural, eh?) are pushed together. First, a book of religious content (pro or contra is irrelevant, content is the same, it's just painted differently) is pushed as a science book. Huh? Which part of dogma is subject to scientific method? When and where were their experiments repeated and confirmed by independent researchers?

Second, putting their god and spirituality together in the title. Huh? Are they seriously suggesting that we godless ones are spiritless too? There's just about half a step with a size 6 shoe between that proposition, and the one where humanity is divided into castes, the spirited and not spirited, where the latter are lesser ones. Well, know what - screw you guys, but I guess it's a sign of actually having some spirit that I get this adrenaline rush every time you say I don't have any spirit at all. Just because I never bought any of your god merchandise.

Third, assuming that spirituality as such (as per their definition, or as what I think it may be) can be scientifically defined or examined is either preposterous posturing, or just plain old junk science. I bet they can't have any sort of criteria as to how do they know what's (or who is) spiritual or not. Spiritual as in "having a spirit", not as in "related to spirituality" - the latter can be anything, including this text.

Putting all together, pushers of books like this aren't any better than the two girls on Walmart's parking lot yesterday, who were harassing everyone within earshot, nattering incessantly about some donation and walking towards anyone who wasn't fast enough. I'd bet a crate of beer (real beer, not the recycle they sell here) that their church, or whoever it was that sent them, has a condemnation ratio of at least 10:1 (that is, for every word spoken against the corporate thugs, banksters, et al, ten words against his own regular people). And the lie is the same - as much as the book above is science, the charity work like that is actually helping anyone. It's all just PR, selling the same old.

The morale of the story? "Do not ever change anything substantial, because if you do, we may lose power over you".