Cav's Place

The Green Institute, which is the NGO branch of our Green Party, announced another protest against the Government’s plans to allow the Rosia Montana mining project, but trying to attend just screwed up my entire day for absolutely nothing, so this is largely just to state that before I’ll even consider attending any other events organized by our Greens they’ll need to prove to me that they are actually capable of organizing them. Video proving that they managed to make at least a few dozen of their people arrive precisely on time and be completely involved will be a start, and I doubt anything short of that will do, unless of course some other known activists will guarantee that they’ll be there and take over if needed.
Of course, our Greens, and the current leadership in particular, making a mess of anything they attempt to organize is the norm, today’s embarrassment and the mess from the previous protest being only the most recent in a long series. One may certainly feel quite justified to think that they’re doing it on purpose, actually serving other interests and seeking to undermine and discredit any real efforts made for the environment in order to drive away those who may otherwise be inclined to participate, but they’ve been doing this for so long, following the same pattern and messing up so many times in other ways as well, that I’m inclined to think that they’re simply too stupid to know or be able to learn better and too proud to ask for or even accept help. Then again, there is the chance that they’re smart enough to be extremely good at playing dumb…

The protest itself was originally scheduled for 1 PM, which was terribly unwise considering the high temperatures, not to mention that scheduling it during the day on a weekday is a terrible idea either way. The Government is also pretty much on vacation now, which tends to rule out any potential benefits having it take place near the Government building during working hours may otherwise be said to have as well, but this is the way Remus Cernea and his crowd have always done these things, so it was hardly surprising in itself and it’s quite clear they wouldn’t have changed anything if they wouldn’t have been forced to, regardless of the complaints.
However, the authorities were somewhat wiser this time and did force them to, not allowing anything any later and making them reschedule for 9 AM, supposedly for only one hour. That at least took care of the heat problem, but it actually made attendance even less likely, because who the fuck comes to a protest at 9 AM? Worse, they didn’t even announce the change, which was done on Tuesday, the only way to know of it being to see the notification that event details were changed if you were already on it. Granted, the most recent messages they posted on their pages did mention 9 AM, but by then it was already Thursday evening and anyone who failed to notice the change before then would have had a hard time adapting to it on such short notice, not to mention that at the bottom of the event description they were also asking people to actually arrive at 8:30, to make sure everything will be ready by 9:00, and I doubt more than a few ever read that far at all.

Either way, I meant to do my best yet again, so woke up at 7 AM, after about one hour of sleep, to make sure I’ll get there on time. Actually meant to be there shortly before 9 AM, not keen on the 8:30 part, knowing there’ll quite clearly be nobody there then, but a mix of the metro being already in the station when I walked in and the fact that I left early due to being too sleepy to remember that I can get to the protest location without switching made me end up there at 8:40 anyway. Of course, the only ones around were the gendarmes, so I simply walked past and took a stroll through a nearby park which I otherwise very rarely get to see.
Sadly, what I found when I returned, quite exactly at 9:00, was even worse than I expected, namely a single guy sitting on a nearby bench, with some rolled up banners next to him. Circled around the area and by the time I got back to him there were two others there as well, one of them wearing an European Greens t-shirt, so walked to them and looked up shyly, which prompted the first guy to ask whether I was there for the protest, and if so which one, because there are apparently two scheduled. Replied that I’m there in case there will be a protest for Rosia Montana, but it seems that I bothered for nothing, and also that the other is irrelevant, because that crowd always tries to hijack everything. Got told it’s not for nothing, because at least I show that I care, coming for myself if nothing else, and when I said it’d have been nice if at least the organizers would have been there they said they are, the two who arrived a little later, while the one talking to me said he was a “half-organizer”.
So I sat around a while longer while the two “organizers” kept talking on the phone, apparently trying to get others, possibly Institute or Party members, to come and saying everyone’s busy, except for one who apparently said he’ll be there in about 20 minutes when it was already past 9:30, prompting an “yes, so just in time for the end” from the one who had talked to him. They also unrolled the banners a few times, so I could see that they were proper posters on glossy paper, but they seemed genuinely embarrassed as they did that and rolled them back up very quickly.
A single other person came to stay, around 9:20, and he was one of those I see as hijackers, though he had a Rosia Montana t-shirt on at the time. Two others showed up briefly, a few minutes later, but after having a look and exchanging a few words with each other they decided it wasn’t worth wasting their time and left, so we were a grand total of seven people for about a minute or two. Compare that with the ten or so gendarmes, possibly more if those I saw across the street when I left weren’t the same ones I spotted when I circled around the area the first time, who were standing around and occasionally coming to ask the “organizers” what was going on, and with the size of the area that was set aside for the protesters to use, which could have probably held about 200 and yet was completely empty, seeing as the five of us who actually sat around for a while were around the corner, where we could find some shade.

In the end, I got bored and finally walked away at 9:35, though I did so very slowly and always looking back, so it was past 9:40 when I finally made my way back to the metro station nearby and got back, coming out at a supermarket I thought I might as well check out while I’m out, seeing as the catalog we got in the mail mentioned something about an offer for something I might have been interested in. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the exact kind I wanted, so that was for nothing as well and, as I said, I simply messed up my entire day for no reason whatsoever, which is definitely not what I need when, for example, I’ve recently been doing worse with my writing than I did around this time last year, and that was the worst period I had in quite a while from this point of view.

Meant to write this yesterday, but simply couldn’t get myself to do it, so I had to end up with a third Sunday update during 2013, still very soon after the second, after all. And to think that it’s nothing but a personal post about what I did over a couple of days, and Friday in particular… This is certainly going nowhere, and it never has, but I guess I’ll keep struggling to write two posts per week here just like I keep struggling to write something in my story every day, despite the whole thing constantly drifting farther from what it should be.

Since the discount season started and I only have one pair of pants I can wear outside, which is well over a decade old and visibly in poor shape, I wanted to have a look at what was available, and perhaps also see about a good t-shirt that could be worn outside and a simple pair of shorts to wear around the house, since I’m doing rather poorly even by my standards when it comes to those as well.
The problem, of course, is that I remember having a lot of issues with pants before getting these and also being basically unable to wear the one pair I got at some point after that, so now that I know one type that really feels all right I want some that are just like these, not to try who knows how many others to see what else is available that may just feel comfortable, and I can’t find any even though I’ve been doing this for the past at least four or five such periods. Worse, while so far the issue was that what I did find of this type in any places that were reasonably priced seemed to be of pretty poor quality, this time around I didn’t find it at all, unless you count precisely three quite expensive pairs stuffed in a corner in one place, and those seemed to me to be of worse quality than what I could find for about a quarter of that amount in previous years.

I sort of started on Thursday, when I found myself waking up at 7:30 AM and went to two hypermarkets I can easily get to on foot, since I wanted to check some offers on some food items. Didn’t come back with much, but made plans about that for the next day and also spotted something that may do for the shorts, since I didn’t care too much about the quality when it came to those, and even a t-shirt that might just work, though I wasn’t keen on it. Absolutely nothing as far as the pants were concerned, but I wasn’t particularly surprised by that, as the plan was to more properly look for those the next day, though I was getting even more uncertain about that after failing to fall asleep again after getting back.
Still, a plan was a plan, so on Friday I woke up at 8 AM and was out the door at 9:15, set to wander around for a good part of the day on a total of about four hours of sleep between that morning and the previous one. For that purpose, I bought an one-day metro card and ended up using it eight times by the end of the day, so the cost per trip was half of what it’d have been if I’d have used eight trips off a ten-trip card. Thanks to that, I could check out pretty much every place I knew of and, by the time I came back for something of a “pit stop”, I at least knew that finding a suitable t-shirt shouldn’t be much of a problem, if pants were still out of the question. In addition, that “pit stop” was actually due to finally finding an offer for a certain type of ice cream that Andra kept getting and which I had been looking for offers for since the start of summer, so I couldn’t miss the opportunity and then obviously had to bring it back here quickly.
When I went back out, I wasn’t sure where I was going. I mean, there was one place with the two stores from where I was going to pick a t-shirt and the hypermarket I had to pick up the stuff that was on offer from, after noticing it the day before, and if I was going to go to both places I obviously had to get the t-shirt first, but I really didn’t feel like wandering around anymore and the decision to do so after all came at the very last moment, when I got to the place where I had to turn right to get to the metro and the clothing shops or left to get to the hypermarket, and I ended up turning right after all.
The actual shopping was about as stressful as I thought it’ll be, and my odd behavior quite clearly got the attention of at least one security guard, who made a point of watching me and probably played some part in my decision to eventually buy from the other shop. Not that I wasn’t watched there as well, but those were regular employees, not guards, and at least they didn’t make a point of walking up to me and staring. Was still shaking by the end of it, especially after I tried to fold one t-shirt I had tried on and an employee quickly told me to let her do it, and as a result I just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible and hardly even looked at the one I ended up picking, only noticing afterwards that it was a little dirty in one spot. Don’t think it’s a stain though, but I guess I’ll find that out now after it was washed, just like I’ll find out just how badly the color comes out and exactly how it fits. At 40 RON (about €9 or $12), it was the most expensive one I had considered, so I’ll be feeling even worse if there’s anything wrong with it.
Then I made my way to the hypermarket, had the t-shirt sealed before entering though I believe the guard wanted to just wave me through, as it obviously wasn’t something they’d sell, and quickly grabbed what I wanted. Felt even more awkward when the cashier took note of the large quantity of cereal I was buying and took her time reading the back of one of the bags, but thankfully she didn’t actually ask anything about it, so I got out of there and for the first, and probably last, time used the free transportation they provide to get back. Unlike what the hypermarket I usually go to offers, this seems quite poorly planned and the only reason I could use it was that three older women also wanted to get on, one of them also getting off at the metro station here, from where I could easily walk back without keeping perishable food in the afternoon heat for too long, so I just used the opportunities they provided without needing to talk to the driver myself.

As for the pants, I guess I’ll have to hope I can make these last another six months and then try again. I doubt there’s much hope of finding any just like them, so I may need to give in and switch to jeans, but I have real issues with the texture of those and the ones that feel all right are outrageously expensive by my standards. This was actually the first time I seriously checked out jeans while looking for pants, realizing I’ll probably need to make this switch, and noticed that I could pretty much tell the price by how they felt, finding that each and every pair I thought might just be all right, in a few different shops, was in the 150 RON (about €34 or $45) range, and that was the discounted price! Granted, if I’ll end up using them for 15 or so years as well, it may seem somewhat less outrageous, but I hope I’ll end up using anything I get for that long anyway and the amount itself is well above anything I’d find in any way reasonable to spend on clothing, with the exception of winter jackets or boots.

But I think I babbled long enough and I’m not even sure I’ll understand everything I just wrote here, so I’ll just say again that I absolutely hate shopping for clothes, or getting or picking clothes in any way, and leave it at that for now, without going through all the other issues staring you right in the face after something like this as well. At least I got all that food at discounted prices and also finally found some of that ice cream at somewhat less than its regular price, so something good came out of these days, but not much of it had anything to do with the actual reason why I did it all… In fact, since I decided not to bother with the shorts after all, if the t-shirt won’t turn out to have been a particularly inspired choice either, it’ll mean that none of it had anything to do with that.

Later edit: Was sort of thinking to make a separate post about this, but doubt I will, so will just add here that when I left Friday morning I saw two people walking through the vegetation behind the building here and, after they had been digging and obviously clearing everything in another part of that area recently, that worried me… And it worried me for good reason, as by the time I was back with the ice cream, everything had been cleared with great efficiency. And I do mean just about everything; little trees, small plants, bushes, the lower portions of those that had grown along the walls and onto the roof of that building there, so everything that’s on the roof is now dying as well… Dad said four people struggled with it for hours while I was gone, and I still don’t know why the fuck do they keep doing this. In the middle of summer, instead of the fresh air and what little cooling effects those plants, even if they’re mostly just weeds, can bring, they just want piles of dried leaves and branches strewn all over the place! If only they’d happen to catch fire due to the heat someday, teach them a lesson…

According to an announcement posted yesterday, The Old Reader will most probably become a private site within two weeks, the only accounts that will be transferred being those created before March 13, when it was first announced that Google Reader will be shut down on July 1, and those belonging to people who have recently sent them donations. They are open to selling the project to someone who will keep it open, but they made it clear that they want to continue using it, so the sale is only an option if someone will persuade them over these two weeks that they’re willing and able to make the site capable of handling all existing and future users while returning it to the speed and reliability it used to have before this influx of Google Reader “refugees”, preserving all current functionality for free accounts and preferably making improvements as well, though such new features may require payment.

This is sad, but not particularly unexpected. After the recent downtime, lasting more than two days and caused by four SSDs failing within hours of each other after an update they implemented in an attempt to better handle all the data, it could be hoped that the worst was over, but at the same time that event could and should have been seen as a sign of things to come. After all, with the number of active users and the amount of data constantly increasing and them unable to even implement the measures they had worked out to handle the situation, it was only going to get worse and yesterday’s downtime was likely enough proof of that to convince them that there’s no way they can deal with the situation. They never actually said what caused that crash, but it lasted quite a while and a brief announcement about the closure was displayed as soon as the site recovered, with the blog post detailing the reasons following shortly.
Granted, the reasons given are largely personal, but they are entirely understandable. Nobody should sacrifice their personal life like this; nobody should put this much time and effort into anything, much less into a project that isn’t exactly saving the world, recovering a species from the brink of extinction, regenerating a heavily damaged ecosystem, finding a cure for a deadly disease, eliminating poverty or something of that sort. This was a personal project that had gotten completely out of hand and there was no way for the original team to still manage it, which also meant that they became unable to develop the additional features required to switch from an entirely free to a freemium model, as they were planning, and therefore didn’t have the funds to hire additional people.
It does show a lack of planning though. Many agree that The Old Reader is clearly the best direct replacement for Google Reader, even some of those who chose other services admitting that they largely did so simply because those were faster and more reliable and not because they found the features more suited to their needs and tastes, and yet they only got a small part of the “refugees”, so it could have been much worse than this and they should have planned for it during those three and a half months between the initial announcement and the actual closure of Google Reader. Since it was largely a personal project, it’s not exactly inexcusable that they didn’t, but it is very disappointing and needing to give up on it after less than a month of feeling the strain will look terrible on their “record” if they’ll ever want to start or otherwise play a major part in a serious project in the future.

Either way, unless they will miraculously find that buyer to meet all their demands during this short time, this leaves me and over 400000 others, or at least that large part of them who were actively using The Old Reader now and didn’t simply make an account but eventually choose one of the other options, in need of yet another RSS reader, and with less than two weeks to find it. Suggestions are welcome, but please don’t mention Feedly or anything else that is or may be seen as having an interface better suited for smartphones or tablets, or is clearly focused on the “social” aspect.

I’m barely managing to add a paragraph or so to my story lately, when I struggle, so I won’t make that even worse by struggling to write anything else, such as this post, any more than I have to. Initially meant to leave it for tomorrow too, but I was sort of thinking I may go to a protest then and it’ll be even harder to write after that, so I had already decided I’ll post it today before giving up on the protest idea for good, not long ago. Besides, I didn’t exactly feel like ending up with a third Sunday update this year immediately after the second either, so I’ll just throw a couple of things here and leave it at that.

You might have noticed that the site has been rather slow lately, and even had moments when it was briefly down. In fact, it has been slow at times for months, but it does seem to have gotten worse lately, and this week marked the first, and then also the second, time I saw it not load at all, so I asked my hosting provider for some explanations and was told that they’re dealing with some attacks that occasionally overwhelm the servers. Before this, which I’m told is a relatively recent development, the issue had to do with some other site which was hosted on the same server and used far more than its share of resources, but that has supposedly been resolved a few weeks ago while this still hasn’t, and at the moment there’s no clear estimate as to when it’ll be sorted out. Sure hope it won’t be long, but at the same time their services were almost perfect for at least two and a half years and they went above and beyond the call of duty in the past, so at this point I’m not complaining.

Otherwise, while I’m not doing much of anything else, which includes not getting back to playing any game either, I found myself starting to watch a playthrough of The Last of Us yesterday and at this rate I imagine I may even finish it tomorrow. Also watched two movies earlier this week, which is something I very rarely end up doing, but now I’m pretty much taking this as watching a season of a TV series and have to say that somebody certainly put a whole lot of effort into this. Being a post-apocalyptic shooter, it’s not something I’d care to actually play even if it would also be available for the PC, but watching it like this is quite nice, largely thanks to the interaction between Joel and Ellie, and in fact thanks to Ellie in particular. I’m not exactly sure how this will sound, especially since I’m definitely not keen on the gameplay or the world it takes place in, but I will say that it certainly seems to me to be a very solid piece of evidence in favor of the idea that games can be art without being unbearably artsy.

The pictures of Earth taken on July 19 by Cassini and MESSENGER were released by NASA, so now we have a few more images of our tiny and fragile world to add to Voyager 1’s Pale Blue Dot, taken in 1990, Cassini’s previous effort, from 2006, and the few taken over the years by our orbiters and rovers operating on Mars.
MESSENGER should have actually taken six pictures containing Earth and the Moon on July 19 and 20, but they should all be nearly identical to this first one that was released and, due to being black and white and overexposed, unlikely to be particularly inspiring. Cassini’s picture, on the other hand, is only the third ever taken of Earth from outside the inner solar system, while also being the clearest of the three and so far the only one that also depicts the Moon from such a distance. As the press release states, while this frame that contains Earth and the Moon was processed and published as soon as possible due to public interest, the challenges of assembling such a mosaic mean that it will be weeks before the full image of Saturn and its rings during what from Cassini’s viewpoint was a solar eclipse will be ready for release.

With the sad reminder that New Horizons, launched in 2006, is the only spacecraft sent beyond the orbit of Saturn since the Voyagers and that, since both Cassini and Juno are scheduled to end their missions in 2017 and nothing else with a destination beyond Mars is scheduled to launch by then, these three will be our only active spacecraft beyond the inner solar system after that date, all I can do now is once again add links to Carl Sagan‘s Pale Blue Dot speech and, though it refers to images taken from the Moon, Neil deGrasse Tyson‘s We Stopped Dreaming (Episode 2).
Actually, while I’m at it, I’ll also add these few thoughts shared by Kepler mission scientist Natalie Batalha before Cassini took this latest picture, most notably the last part: “Here we are, the human family, attempting to survive. May we succeed. May we figure out how to love one another fully and how to live in harmony with the Universe and continue to evolve into perpetuity.” It struck me as well said, though somewhat too anthropocentric for my liking. I’d personally be quite happy if we’d figure out how to live in harmony with the other species we share this tiny dot with first, recognizing that it’s our responsibility as the ones most capable of shaping the future of this little sphere to help them survive and evolve as well.