Cav's Place

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.

This will be quick, but there are things to say, starting with the fact that the expected crash actually came two days late last week. It wasn’t that bad on Friday, but Sunday I woke up after a dreadful dream, stared at the ceiling for about one hour before somehow managing to crawl out of bed and was largely out of it all day. Somehow managed to post something on here then, and it wasn’t even personal, but I’m not particularly sure how I did that.

Moving on to this week, Wednesday was quite a mess, starting with the terrible organization of the planned protest against fracking. Our Green Party announced it, calling for NGOs to join them, but none of those appeared to pay any attention to it until the day of the event and what was worse was that they even listed the wrong address, picking one for a secondary location that’s in an unpleasant and difficult to reach area, possibly where some equipment to analyze air and water quality is located. When I actually read their press release, Monday evening, looked at a map to see where they wanted people to gather and then checked where our Environmental Protection Agency is actually located, I did send a message to Cezar Maroti to point out the issue, seeing as I’m otherwise banned and couldn’t post directly or tell Remus Cernea, but despite thanking me for noticing it even Cezar posted the wrong address on his page the following day and it wasn’t until Wednesday morning, some two hours before the set start time, that they sent out a new press release with the correct address and also announced the change on a group they recently created.
Still, I was awake at the time, since I was planning to go and buy a few things relatively early, so I noticed the announcement and said I’ll give it a shot, changing my initial decision to skip this one since that was motivated by the selected location. However, as expected, there were a total of 15 people there, which included a couple of reporters and I believe three politicians and three or four representatives of NGOs which also seemed to have only noticed the event that very morning, and the police just allowed us to display banners for some ten minutes, after discussing the matter with Remus, seeing as the protest wasn’t authorized. The sign I held wasn’t even on topic, as I was sort of standing around when somebody handed it to me and I felt that the message that was on one side of it, which was about fracking, would be understood by too few, so I turned it over, saw a much clearer message about another environmental issue and decided to hold it so that side will be visible instead. Of course, even though we ended up standing right next to each other for the first few minutes, I made a point of ignoring Remus and he ignored me, despite shaking hands with pretty much everyone else.

After the protest, if it can even be called as such, I went to a hypermarket to buy what I meant to buy and also donate some food to account for the fact that the cashier had made a mistake in my favor the week before. I didn’t originally intend to get back there then, looking for some other way to give something worth about 5 RON, since the mistake gained me 4.27, but the protest was relatively nearby and I thought I might as well do both things at once, since I knew they had a place there where people could donate food for the food bank. However, since no good deed goes unpunished, this time I noticed that they overcharged me, the price of one of the items I had bought to donate showing up as being 1.26 RON more than it was listed as, which is a difference of over 50%. But it was supposed to be a donation, so I shrugged it off and dropped those items in the box… Which at the time held only junk, as people had obviously used it as a trash can and there wasn’t as much as a single food item in it before I threw mine.
And since I kept looking for a way to fit this in at some earlier point and couldn’t, I’ll just add here that, as I was exiting the building to go to the protest, I found myself stopped by a neighbor who recognized me and then said she was the mother of one of my former classmates from school. Being forced to interact with someone like that was bad enough, but then it got even more awkward as she kept asking how I was, if I finished college and where I worked while I just held the door open and stared silently away until she finally seemed to get the message and ask if I’m upset that she’s asking those things, which was my cue to peel away. Seriously, if she was who she said she was, what the fuck was that, just deciding to stop me at the building door and question me about annoying and irrelevant shit like that when I had nothing to do with her or her daughter in 14 years?

Otherwise, I was alone between Wednesday afternoon and Friday morning, and then again between Friday evening and earlier today, so these days were somewhat less unmanageable than they’d have normally been and I see that I still have the drive to spend quite a few hours in the kitchen and make some simple things to eat when I’m alone. Largely the same things, but that doesn’t matter; what matters is that I can get myself to do this again, after a long time when I couldn’t. Probably won’t last, but I guess I’ll keep doing it whenever I’ll have the opportunity while it does.
The story’s still going nowhere, however; I haven’t played anything other than a few hours of UnReal World, during which I stupidly “managed” to kill the one character I had been somewhat successful with; and the MobyGames issue doesn’t seem like it’ll be resolved, so that ban seems to be there to stay and I therefore can’t submit more things on that site either. In addition, as of yesterday I’m noticing updates missing from my interest lists on Facebook as well, and if this means they’re now filtering those like they do the news feed, it probably leaves no way to follow everything anymore.