The Unreasonable Man

You all know what The Unreasonable Man thinks. British Muslim Terrorism is pathetic (and inefficient, for now) and must be stamped out - but you do not do this by abolishing 1,000-year old rights or turning Western countries into Saudi Arabia. Instead, you do this by turning your nose at the terrorists and showing them what a free society is like, and how we do not care about them - we will carry on with our lives.

I fear, however, that we will do the opposite,. Already, the wait to cross into the USA today was three and a half hours, and airports around the world are “implementing new security measures”.

That’s what Saddam used to do, “implement security measures”.

Meanwhile, I am listening to Bangla Desh by George Harrison, Eleanor Rigby, Back in the USSR and The Walrus by The Beatles (they were innovative beyond words - the Mozarts of the 1960s), and I’d like to change the world by Ten Years After.

I love these refurbished IBM servers. I just bought a second one, a 3U IBM xSeries 340. A slightly older machine that will replace my web/email server fro corporate clients.

Just like the newer x345 I bought last week, this older server has:

• IBM hardware RAID (on this box I am using Raid-1 with a hot standby - love it)
• Dual hot-swappable power supplies
• Redundant hot-swappable fans
• Diagnostics (in this case on the front panel)

In addition, the x345 (above) also has lightpath, multiple fans (8!), fast-bus 10,000 rpm SCSI drives, GB ethernet card, etc. These are heavy-duty machines. And sinc ethey are off-lease, they are affordable for mortals. I am installing CentOS 5 (a RedHat Enterprise Linux clone) as we speak.

..until proven innocent. That is the principle behind Canada’s new No-Fly list.

This list is created for secret reasons by secret people, and is based on secret evidence and created by a secret process. That, and the very dubious benefits, prompted Canada’s privacy commissioners to unanimously call for its abolition last week.

The dangers are not theoretical. Ask Alistair Butt. Either of them [link]. A 10-year old boy and a 15-year old boy were denies flying rights last week. And until they can somehow get themselves removed from the secret list, they will face this for the rest of their lives. And there is no recourse: The airline told one of the boys’ mothers that perhaps she could have the kid’s name changed.

Kafka? No, Harper’s Canada.

Uh oh. For some reason few of the major journals have picked up this story [link]. Am I misreading it, or has the Supreme Court just abolished a main rule that made America into the great power it has been for the last century?

Apparently, the Supreme Court decided today in a 5-4 decision that price-rigging can be legal. Here is another link. If I am not misreading this, then wait for software, books, food and many other items to go up in price, and for Amazon to go broke as we all end up paying the “minimum retail price” again.

Perhaps there is soemthing I am not seeing, but it seems to me that manufacturers will ut pressure on retailers now to stick to minimum prices. When I was selling software, for instance, the conventional wisdom was that any price-rigging, even discussing retail price with resellers, was a jailable offense.  That restriction has evidently been lifted.

As you know, I am not impressed with monopolies or near-monopolies. For a start, service is lousy.

My wife’s cell, my home lines (two lines) and my long distance (three lines, at two homes) are all on Rogers. What used to be Sprint Canada, until the Rogers monopoly gobbled up Sprint’s assets (I am an asset - fancy that).

Rogers have been “merging their systems”. We all know how difficult that is, and sure enough, it has been a tad chaotic. Every month my bills have had different “account numbers”, and I hear things like “that part of your bill is the wireless department, and you have to call a different number”.

So now this month, Rogers has decided, without checking with us, to add my home bills to my wife’s cell bill. This is not acceptable since this is a business cell phone, so I called to get them separated and to get the home numbers taken off. Alas, that is not possible because “the system does not allow it”.

I told the supervisor lady “Your systems are really not my concern. Not combining private and business bills is my concern. But the only answer I ever hear from you is ‘the system does not allow it’.

“That is because that is the only correct answer”, she said. Then this lady put down the phone on me. She put down the phone - did not feel it was necessary to discuss with a customer. And this was a supervisor!

So I guess I will be switching back to Bell.

The other reason I do not like our telecommunications-monopolies is that they charge way too much. Suppliers of these services clean me out. Every month I pay:

• Cell: up to $250
• Nancy’s cell: $40
• Home phone, two lines: $70
• Cable TV, high-def: $120
• Fast cable Internet: $90
• Satellite TV, home 2: $90
• Phone, second home: $30
• Internet dial-up, second home: $20

Individually, you shrug: so we pay too much here. Deal with it. What do I care about $90 if it could be $70. What’s 20 bucks.

But put together, I pay a somewhat astonishing $710 every month for TV, Internet and phones.

Everyone knows Canada is a nice country.

It is surprising, therefore, that Canadians are so badly served by their medical system. And badly served they are: long waiting lists, no family doctors available, areas without any doctors, 8-hour average emergency waiting times, and so on. The system is a mess.

The Canadian system is public-only: no alternate private care. This gives the medical industry enormous power and no real incentive to improve care. This is the same phenomenon you see with any government-run mechanism where competition has been outlawed: whether it is Russian communist-era food supply, cell phone competition, or ‘public’ medical care. Oxymorons all.

It is now virtually impossible to find a family physician in Canada. The few who take on patients have ‘application forms”, designed basically to ensure you will not be a needy patient, and “interviews” - where they interview you to see if you might be a worthy patient. Our GP is in another town - could not find one in Oakville.

Unfortunately, Canadians have been sold a bill of goods when it comes to this system. They think their system is great and free, while in the US, people are dying in the streets. They do not realise that they are paying more here, through taxes, for a vastly inferior system. And the subject is taboo: any politician who says he would like more private involvement in the medical field is unelectable.

One day it will change. Until that day, if I ever need medical care, I will drive to Buffalo, NY and pay for it there.

So after the server upgrade, everything is working: web, email, database, a million other things.

Except the blog spam filter.

And as a result, I am now getting 1,000 spam posts a day here. Unless I solve the problem soon (and it is a typical unix problem: wrong error message, hundreds of people asking, and no responses) I will soon have to turn off all comments.

The death penalty for these blog spammers is not too heavy a punishment. I mean it: I hope the Chinese (and that’s where most are from, it seems from grammar and IP) torture them them to death. Painfully, if possible.

If there is any temporary disruption in reaching this site or in its functionality, it is because I am in the middle of switching to the new IBM server. That may mean some brief disruption: apologies. If you are reading this, it is on the new [refurbished] IBM x345 server. Eight redundant hot-swappable fans keep it cool. Two SCSI disks in a hardware-based Raid 1 array keep the data safe. Two Xeon processors use 2 GB of RAM to manipulate all those posts you are doing.

I am going to replace the server that this site works on with a new IBM xSeries 345 server. Well… not new: refurbished. $1,000 instead ofmany times that.

But it has eight fans. And two power supplies. It will be installed in a week, or less. In the mean time I cannot hear anything. The server is too loud.

While yesterday was dedicated to baseball kids in the morning and Dykes (their term, not mine!) in the afternoon, today was dedicated to soccer kids in the morning and my studio in the afternoon: here is son 2 and his hair:

(For the photographers: three Opus monolights used (key and fill into umbrellas, background straight), fired by an on-camera 580ex speedlite set to 1/64th power.)