I have to wonder, why do major sites that are also available in the official language of the country they detect you’re in automatically switch to it, regardless of your preferences? For example, lately I see YouTube switching my location, and the site version I see, to Romania instead of Worldwide every so often even after I set it back to Worldwide, and oddly enough even if I don’t clear cookies. Previously, there was the issue with Avaaz sending e-mails in Romanian, which seemed temporarily fixed after I set my language preference to English and also wrote them to complain, but after a while I again started receiving e-mails that are either just in Romanian or in both Romanian and English, with the Romanian version first. And don’t even get me started on the BitDefender site, which seems to constantly check and switch back to the localized version, no matter how much you try to select another.
If it always annoyed me, to say the least, that books aren’t also printed in the original language in every country where translated versions are published or that English versions of software may at times be more difficult or more expensive to obtain once fully or partially localized ones become available, this may be even worse, especially since there’s absolutely no excuse for it. Considering the amount of effort put into the current system that determines a user’s location, I’m sure it wouldn’t have been any problem to determine the user’s system language, or at least browser language, set the default to that instead, and then definitely add a clear localization setting on every site available in multiple languages. On sites that change even more according to the selected location, this becomes absolutely necessary, so all registered users will be able to select the version of the site they prefer to use, including a generic one, without any localization, and make sure that version will be saved, even if they clear cookies, switch browsers or even use different computers.
Today I finally managed to do the last part of a couple of small things I had been meaning to do for about a week, but I’m embarrassingly behind on pretty much everything even for me and I also just realized a couple of days ago that the main non-personal post I’ve been toying with for the past several days would be pointless, as it’d have been based on something dating back to 2011. As such, you’ll just get this quick update now and then I’ll see what else I can come up with by the end of the week.
First, I have to say that the blackout didn’t quite work as planned, as my ISP decided to crash at 2:50 AM my time, so 11:50 PM GMT, and I was therefore unable to set up the redirects at midnight GMT, as I had planned. According to the logs, it recovered some four hours later, but I was asleep at the time, only happening to wake up and decide to check at 8:45 AM. Still, that meant I was able to start it just at 6 AM GMT, which was actually the scheduled start time of the event, and keep it up for 30 hours, as I maintained my own planned end time, of noon GMT the next day. Unfortunately, the site seemed to get fewer visitors during that time than during an average day, but at least a few people saw the message, so it still counts.
Otherwise, we’re getting beautiful spring weather, with highs even into the high 20s, and everything is green all of a sudden, so I’d be somewhat tempted to go finish Century of the Soldier in a park, but after going out to buy a few things yesterday and seeing as I may be going to a concert on Sunday, I really can’t get myself to go out yet another time this week. Besides, I still have over 250 pages to go, so it’s not like I could finish it in one sitting, the current problem being that I even fell behind the number of pages I should read per day to at least finish it in two weeks. Back in the day, I’d have finished an 800-page book in one week without even trying, but now I have to struggle to even read so much that even doing it in two weeks requires real effort.
Speaking of reading, still didn’t even open this month’s National Geographic, so I should get to that as well, not to mention that my story continues to suffer a lot. Quality was a lost cause long ago, but I once again can’t even manage to get much quantity in, so I’m wondering whether I should try to pick some related projects, such as the maps or a couple of short stories, back up. At the same time, there’s a reason I haven’t done any of those things all these years, so I don’t see how that will change now when it seems that I’m feeling even worse than usual, even physically, my body seeming to want to tell me that it’s about to give. Still, seeing as a worsening of the old bugs experienced on MobyGames means that I can’t keep submitting ranks there anymore, I might as well try to use any time I’d normally set aside for that on some days for this and see if it gets me anywhere.
While I currently see no particular reason to subscribe to certain conspiracy theories that have been floating around over the past few days, the immediate response to the event, as well as past experience, makes it clear that certain elements are now overjoyed at being able to use the tragedy of the Boston Marathon bombings as an excuse for an even further increase in unjustified surveillance and oppresive behavior, mainly in the United States but very probably elsewhere as well, so it’s all the more important to fight now and fight hard against any such measures, and CISPA is as good a start as any.
As such, seeing as the US House of Representatives passed the bill by a wide margin, I have decided to take part in the announced blackout scheduled for Monday, April 22. The entire site, not just the blog, will be blacked out for at least 24 hours, and probably 36 hours. The call to action sets the start time as 6 AM GMT, but I’m not going to set up an automated script and I’ll be asleep at that time, so at the moment I’m planning to start it at midnight GMT on Monday and most probably end it at noon GMT on Tuesday, seeing as I should be well awake by then.
Regardless of where you live, this bill will affect you, so I strongly encourage you to follow the developments and take action. In addition, if you have a site as well, I encourage you to join the blackout, and you could also join the Internet Defense League, if you haven’t done so already. This particular blackout is done on short notice and spearheaded by Anonymous, so the impact will most probably rely on many individuals doing their part more or less independently instead of large organizations and well-known sites taking up the banner.
Yesterday’s announcement confirmed what is by far Kepler‘s best discovery to date: Kepler-62f. The release also mentions six more planets in the two announced systems, and while Kepler-62b, c and d, as well as Kepler-69b, are in very tight orbits and therefore scorched by their stars, Kepler-62e and 69c are also in their stars’ habitable zones. However, they are close to the inner edge of those zones, in orbits roughly equivalent to that of Venus in our own solar system, and considering the fact that they’re 60% and, respectively, 70% larger than Earth, it seems quite likely that they have very thick atmospheres and experience a runaway greenhouse effect. After all, the calculated temperatures are 270°K for Kepler-62e and and 299°K for Kepler-69c, according to a standard method that ignores atmosphere and would make Earth’s average temperature 255°K, while in fact it’s 288°K and increasing.
Kepler-62f, on the other hand, is only 40% larger than Earth and pretty much in the middle of its star’s habitable zone, its position being comparable to being about two thirds of the way between Earth and Mars in our solar system. Of course, it is rather cold out there, and its calculated average temperature is a mere 208°K, but even an Earth-like atmosphere should allow at least a few areas to occasionally be above freezing, and its larger size should normally help it hold on to a thicker atmosphere that’d increase the temperature even more, so it really does seem almost ideal. In addition, the star in question is a K dwarf, K2 to be exact, and that type of stars are considered to be the best bets for life, seeing as they are more numerous and live significantly longer than larger ones, such as the Sun, which is a G2, while at the same time being stable and having their habitable zones sufficiently far away to avoid tidal locking and reduce each individual planet’s risks in the event of coronal mass ejections and other similar events, which isn’t the case for class M ones. To prove this fact, this particular star is estimated to be about seven billion years old and still in its prime, so life has had plenty of time to develop on its planets… Though, of course, at the same time it had plenty of time to be wiped out or, if it followed our pattern, wipe itself out.
There are other problems as well, such as the star’s low metallicity and the fact that, despite being the smallest super Earth found in its star’s habitable zone so far, a rocky planet 40% larger than Earth would have a significantly higher mass and therefore anything living on it would have some problems with gravity. However, seeing as we are still looking for planets that are located within their stars’ habitable zones and are no more than 25% larger than Earth, which is the upper limit for “Earth-size” planets, and Kepler-62f’s exact location within its solar system seems so right for a planet its size, one can’t help but wonder whether there’s somebody there who is, or at least has the capacity to be, looking towards us and wondering the same thing.
There was one other personal post written on a Sunday since the start of the year, but that was strictly about a specific problem that I was unfortunately having at that exact time, so this would actually be the first “Sunday update” posted this year, although they were quite the norm last year. Of course, the reason for that isn’t that everything’s been going so well that I could write at least two serious non-personal posts per week and felt no need to feel sorry for myself in writing, but quite the contrary, that I couldn’t bring myself to write anything else and eventually had to write a personal post earlier during the week just to have something here, leaving me to struggle over the weekend in an attempt to throw some poor excuse of a non-personal post alongside it.
However, this week I somehow seem to have managed to write a serious non-personal post earlier, so I could finally wait until Sunday before posting a personal one and therefore I can also mention the fact that I took part in another event yesterday. I’m not sure I could call it a protest and I’m definitely wondering how much of it is manipulation, but the primary goal is to recover a part of the park that I usually go to when I want to go to a park and have it cleaned and properly maintained once again, which is something I definitely support, so I took part, signed the petition and now I’m keeping an eye on how the situation develops, because something is certainly fishy about the whole thing.
Thankfully, yesterday was also a very nice day, so I could go there and just sit and read as well, starting before the event, since I arrived some 15 minutes early, and then continuing after I left, reading some 70 pages in the park and then finishing the book after I got back, which of course also resulted in the typical two-paragraph review. It took me almost two weeks to read that, which is embarrassing, but at least I did read it, liked it, and now I can move on to the next. Maybe I’ll even read a good part of it in the park too, since spring seems to have finally arrived in force.
Otherwise, there are still some issues with the computer, a couple of them new, which is obviously still freaking me out. At least some of them are definitely bugs that’d persist, or at least reappear, even if I’d reinstall yet again, and sending support messages and trying to discuss the matter feels something like a particular Monty Python skit, so I have no clue what to do about that, nor about the mouse, after the button above the wheel that I have been using as middle button finally became practically unusable, after having issues for a long time. I reassigned the one below the wheel to have the same function, so I’m still fine while not playing anything, which is still the case, but it will be very uncomfortable to use like that if I will manage to get back to playing games and I can’t think of any model out of those I know to be currently available here that I’d want to replace it with.
Last but definitely not least, somebody else seems to have stumbled upon my blog recently and has been thoroughly going through it since then, which also made me go back through certain posts that I saw in the logs as a result… And I realized that overall, despite how it feels, I’m not getting particularly worse. Some details may differ, certain elements that once still functioned at some level no longer do, but the overall amount of despair and hopelessness seems to remain relatively constant ever since I got thrown back here, bar the few moments when I thought I might have a reason to hope again.
Of course, that just makes me wonder what the fuck am I still doing here even more. I mean, all right, I’m waiting for a miracle because it’d be too disappointing to have survived so long without said miracle eventually happening and giving this survival a purpose, but seeing as said miracle isn’t happening and it’s been a long time since I even thought I might want to have a reason to try to do pretty much anything at all unless it does happen, what’s the point? If the purpose of life is that which you give it, yet the primary one I gave mine went away without looking back and I can’t even be particularly interested in wanting to try to go for any of the others without it… More and more often, I find it hard to believe that I’m still around…
