I do believe that I’ll end up writing two personal posts this week, unless something really kicks me into action, so let’s just assume I already went over the part where I feel sorry for myself and say I can’t get anything done and keep this short and to the point, shall we?
There was a brief storm Saturday evening and that resulted in dad’s LAN port apparently getting burned out. There were probably only five or six lightning strikes, the first three or four seemed a safe distance away and the one that seemed too close for comfort was followed too quickly by the damaging one for me to react. When I noticed only a couple of seconds between lightning and thunder, I meant to unplug the “in” cable from the switch, but I was writing the previous post at the time and wanted to at least finish the sentence I was in the middle of at that particular moment and the next, and last, strike came before I could do that. The storm simply died out after that, but the damage was done.
It didn’t seem nearly as bad as it was some three years ago and apparently no other equipment was affected, as I still had Internet access, my computer didn’t register anything and, while the LEDs on the switch acted somewhat oddly until I reset it, no other ports got burned out. However, dad’s computer turned off, obviously to protect the other components, and the LAN chipset was no longer seen by the system after it was turned back on. Thankfully, everything else seems to be in order, at least for the time being, and we already had a LAN card lying around since he wrongly thought that something similar had happened to his old computer, quite a few years ago, so I could simply put that in and fix the issue, and also use the opportunity to install my old IDE HDD in there too, so he’ll have a backup now as well.
On an entirely different note, since our government is determined to change the Constitution and people may offer their input until, I believe, May 15, I kept thinking that I should do something somewhat more official than just occasionally rant to one or two people about how I’d want it to be changed and send a rough overview of some of the proposals to a member of the Parliament that I follow and who asked for such suggestions when the public consultations started. Since I didn’t so far and now the deadline is quickly approaching, if I’m not wrong about it and it even passed already, it seems quite unlikely that I’ll manage, but I said we should assume that I already went over the part where I say I can’t get anything done, right?
I did already send a proposal to change article 35, which has to do with the environment, to an NGO that asked for such proposals for “a greener Constitution” until May 8 in order to send them in an aggregate and properly edited form by the deadline, so it can’t be said that I didn’t do anything, but now I’m working through the rest and find it about as disheartening as I thought it’d be, which is why I didn’t do it earlier. Still, I should at least manage to go through the parts not covered by that overview I had sent before to that member of the Parliament, and seeing as that had to do with political and administrative matters and the changes listed there were pretty much the exact opposite of what the government wants, submitting proper proposals for them will likely serve no purpose anyway. Of course, none of it is likely to serve any purpose, but getting involved should be a requirement for obtaining the right to complain of the outcome, right?
Remember WikiLeaks? Remember the banking blockade they’ve been under since late 2010? Well, it would appear that they have finally managed to find a judge with enough of a backbone to neither bow down to the pressure nor accept the bribes of the powers that be, as Valitor, formerly known as Visa Iceland, has been ordered on April 24 to resume processing on-line donations to WikiLeaks within two weeks. Of course, if the interests behind the blockade are powerful enough, I imagine this may yet be overturned and the fine of $6830 per day paid until it happens, but it’s definitely a good start and a signal to all the companies that take part in the blockade that the tide is turning. At the same time, there’s the obvious possibility that this was simply allowed to happen just because so much time passed and the matter was almost forgotten, so legally maintaining the blockade was probably starting to be more trouble than it was worth, seeing as the support WikiLeaks still enjoys is only a tiny fraction of what it used to be and any donations they may receive are also likely to be rather insignificant, but that doesn’t make it any less of an opportunity.
It’s obvious that the whole thing is no longer a story for the media, and likely not for the vast majority of the people who were once interested in it either, myself included, as I only happened to find out about this from the Access newsletter. I somehow highly doubt I’m in the minority when I say that, in part due to the attitude and views noticed in many of their posts, in part due to their apparent inability to accomplish anything else, whether for themselves or for Bradley Manning, and in part due to the conflict between my growing dislike of Julian Assange and the fact that they don’t seem to have somebody else to pick up the banner and therefore supporting him is still necessary for the cause of whistleblowing in general and of WikiLeaks and Manning in particular, I had simply pulled away from the entire mess quite some time ago. However, it may well be time for all of us who have done so to look into the matter again, because there may be an important opportunity here and it should not be wasted.
I have recently found myself going down what for me is a highly unusual YouTube rabbit hole, namely looking for older Romanian songs, or occasionally newer songs by old Romanian bands and singers. I now seem to be out of that mood again and back to occasionally glancing with growing apprehension at the one hundred or so names on my list of bands, the vast majority of which fitting with various degrees of certainty into the female-fronted symphonic metal genre, that I think I should look into more closely at some point, but it started from looking for various older Romanian love songs that I probably hadn’t heard since the ’90s. I gave up on that after being repeatedly disappointed by the poor quality of the lyrics when compared to what I’m used to now, but then I ended up at Pasarea Colibri and Phoenix, so I was quite surprised when I happened to see that a free concert in the memory of Florian Pittis, the main act of which obviously being Pasarea Colibri, will take place in a nearby park.
The concert was scheduled for Sunday at 7 PM, so it was quite clear that I’ll be out later than I’ve ever been since I got thrown back here, but since having any interest in listening to anything in Romanian is so highly unusual for me and the type of music was highly unlikely to attract a troublesome crowd, I thought I’d take advantage of the opportunity and can’t say I regret anything about that, despite only getting back at 11:20 PM. The last, and I think only, time I’ve been to a concert was around the year 2000, or probably even earlier, when dad took me to some crap organized by a radio station, and the warm, relaxed and friendly atmosphere present Sunday was entirely unlike anything I remember from back then. I mean, if I was there alone, well after dark, and still felt reasonably comfortable among the several thousand people who attended, it definitely must have been a nice crowd.
Moving on to the unpleasant part of this post, if it ever rose above that level in recent months, my confidence in my computer’s stability is definitely back at zero as of yesterday, when I suddenly found myself staring at a blue screen while just listening to music and reading a thread on a forum. Seems to quite clearly be a software issue, as apparently error code 4A almost always is, and the listed culprit was BitDefender, but a few quick searches revealed that, while this error was usually caused by faulty or outdated hardware drivers before, various antivirus products, including even Kaspersky, have been causing it with increasing frequency in recent months. So I sent a support request and all I can still do now is wait for a reply and see if it happens again… But I somehow doubt they’ll do much to fix what’s probably an unusual issue with the 2011 version of their program, which is the last usable one, before they took away pretty much all customization options, when they’ve been working on BitDefender 2014 for months now.
As the rating suggests, and despite everything I’ll say past this point, I definitely liked what actually was in this book. However, what’s missing from it would be enough for another Song of Ice and Fire. Even worse than in the first volume, potentially important characters are barely even mentioned and secondary ones may be introduced and then completely forgotten, entire storylines are reduced to mere glimpses, major plot points may either be limited to a quick presentation of their conclusions or, quite the contrary, completely lack them, and when the time comes to skip forward, the readers are largely left to figure out what happened in the missing years on their own.
I’ll say that the author seemed in more of a rush to see the end than the reader would be expected to be. Worse, whether due to lack of skill or lack of will, this haste doesn’t merely result in compressed action, but often in completely skipped action. Add the fact that some moments are overly simplified, some timing and editing issues and the countless loose ends left after the last page, and I’ll say that this series has the potential to offer a lifetime of work to anyone who’d want to fill in the blanks and flesh it out better… And perhaps somebody should do that if the author himself won’t, because it seems to me that it had the potential to become one of the best fantasy series ever written, which makes it even more of a pity that most of it is missing.
Rating: 4/5
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.
