Cav's Place

A few days ago I switched to Eurosport to see whether they were broadcasting any matches from Wimbledon. They weren’t, but instead I happened upon a football match from the Women’s World Cup and have watched pretty much all of them since, or at times at least listened to them, looking when something particularly interesting seemed to be happening, though unfortunately the commentary wasn’t exactly helpful when it came to that.
This reminded me that I also happened to watch some of the Women’s Euro 2005 back then, also after stumbling upon a match by accident. If I recall correctly, it was a pretty sad affair and they were also experimenting with allowing time-outs then, which frankly looked quite silly in a football match. Not as silly as the Italian team looked while playing, however, because they seemed completely clueless, the commentator repeatedly and rightfully asking how and why did such a team end up qualifying and what did such a thing mean for the sport as a whole.

Compared to what I saw six years ago, this time I can really say I’m impressed. Admittedly, with the possible exception of France yesterday, the teams that impressed me were not the European ones, so a direct comparison with what I saw in 2005 is not possible, but it still shows a significant increase in the number of good women’s teams. Though all three lost, New Zealand was a very pleasant surprise in their first match and both African teams were quite interesting as well, but most notable is the level of Asian women’s football, China even failing to qualify. The fact that Australia now competes in the Asian zone is partly responsible for that, but the most notable aspect is how well Japan plays.
Actually, it would appear that women’s football finally got to the point where there is enough competition at the highest level for the traditional favorites to take second stage. Though they all somehow managed to win so far, the way Germany played was a disappointment, while the United States didn’t exactly impress and Norway even less so. On the other hand, as I said, Japan is playing really well, France could obviously be capable of great things and Brazil is showing that they have great players regardless of sex.

There were a couple of pretty nice matches so far and a few more that started in a very spectacular manner, though they later died down. There are teams with good tactics and players with good technique which are interesting to watch, though the goalkeeping is usually quite poor and frequently the finishing is even worse. That made for an unusually low number of goals during the first round of matches, the scores only getting closer to what would be more typical ones for women’s football, particularly when it’s not a match between two favorites, with France’s 4-0 defeat of Canada yesterday and Japan’s defeat of Mexico with the same score just now.
Granted that they still have quite some way to go, the balance reflected by the first round scores often being, as I said, more a result of poor finishing than one of good defending, the misses and the bad decisions made by the strikers being quite shocking at times, but the midfield action is often good and it shows that more and more countries are at least getting to that level. Which is quite amazing in itself, considering that many players aren’t fully professional, having other jobs as well, and some don’t even have teams, so their only recent official matches are their national team ones. Then again, since I heard that the best paid player in the German championship, which is considered the strongest women’s national championship in the world, earns €11000 per month and signed on for an installation fee of €40000, that’s hardly surprising. Most of these girls earn next to nothing from football; some of them probably nothing at all.

Seeing how far these girls are getting with only a tiny fraction of the incentives their male counterparts are used to having, one can only wonder how far they’d be if they’d benefit from even half of that level of attention, or perhaps even just a quarter of it! And why aren’t they getting that? I mean, even though football was originally intended to be just a men’s game, there is no reason why women couldn’t be just as good if given similar chances. Yes, strictly on average, they may need to play a slightly lower number of matches per season and may retire from the highest level slightly earlier, but at the same time, since we’re working with physical development averages, they may start playing at the highest level slightly earlier as well, making for a roughly equal number of years of activity. In addition, based on the same averages, it could be said that women could be more likely to have great technique if offered proper training, finesse usually tending to be associated more with women than with men.

On a related note, I was wondering about the coaches. I’m frequently seeing men coaching women’s teams in various sports, but how often does it happen the other way around? I can’t personally recall of any such case, though I now heard that Canada’s coach, Carolina Morace, very briefly coached an Italian third division team in the past… And then she very quickly resigned, apparently due to very heavy media pressure.
Seeing as she also coached that terrible Italian team at the Women’s Euro 2005, she’s not the best example, but why does that happen in general? I mean, I can understand that a coach of the same sex is preferred, yet I don’t usually see people being surprised and complaining when a women’s team is coached by a man, in fact sometimes considering that to be the preferred scenario, so why is the reverse unacceptable? The two situations seem very similar to me, so if you can find any reason other than simple sexism, do let me know…

I’ll end this here, because the New Zealand vs. England match already started and New Zealand is once again impressing, taking the lead.

Let me start with the good and say that I did get a new UPS. It’s a slightly different model, namely Mustek PowerMust 848 LCD, and for once the cables go in properly. The special cables the previous models came with never connected quite right and the slightest touch could have them loose, but this model no longer comes with its own cables, instead being made so you can plug regular power cables into it and, as I said, they actually go in properly. But there’s a button on the back that seems to be meant to reset a circuit breaker after the voltage gets above 250V, which confuses me because, despite it being listed as capable of operating at up to 290V, that breaker would indicate that this particular UPS would switch to battery mode in such a situation instead of staying in AVR mode, which would make it unusable in my situation, since I frequently get over 250V at night. However, likely because of the higher power usage during summer, with all the air conditioning equipment, that didn’t happen yet, the most being a frustrating 249.5V, so I still don’t know whether I’ll even be able to use it…
But the issues don’t stop there. Together with the new UPS I also bought Risen because it just fit into the order. The UPS was 252 RON and I happened to spot this special offer for Risen at 99 RON, which would make it some 30% less than other stores from here currently sell it for, putting the total at 351 RON and therefore just above the 350 RON threshold below which 20 RON would have been added for shipping. At least I can now finally say I did something to support Piranha Bytes, but it sure was a bad choice otherwise. For one, because I had forgotten that my DVD drive started having serious issues with certain types of DVDs, namely those that legally purchased software comes on, some two years ago, and then because I only found out afterwards that it uses Tagès and I said I’ll never support anyone selling games that use such copy-protection methods. As a result, I accidentally bought something I said I never will and can’t do anything with it anyway because I now see that my DVD drive really needs to be replaced as well because it wouldn’t read the disk under any circumstances. When I first noticed the issues I had to reboot the computer with the DVD in question in the drive around three times before it’d start reading it, after which it’ll keep working for as long as the computer would stay on and that disk would stay in the drive, but now it completely refuses to work and seems to have also started having issues with other types of disks, which so far worked perfectly.

Moving on, there was a big storm yesterday. It actually started raining nicely Friday night and was still dripping a bit when I woke up on Saturday, but then it got heavier and all of a sudden, 40 minutes before the start of qualifying for the race, this wall of water came down, alongside a barrage of lightning. There was hardly a second or two between the flashes and the thunder was loud enough to shake the building. It was over very quickly, only some moderate rain remaining, but it was enough to mess up this part of the city and my Internet access was obviously down as well, which meant I couldn’t watch the qualifying.
After some time I started resetting my switch and taking the cable in and out every so often, because that is sometimes needed after they restore access, so I was checking… Until the plug just broke and left me staring at the contacts spilled on my desk and wondering what could I do. Eventually I just left a note in the bathroom for dad and, several hours later, he told me he called them about it and they they said they still had a lot of work to do to fix the damage caused by the storm, but if they’ll somehow finish in time they’ll be around to replace the plug as well, though otherwise I’d likely need to wait until Monday.
Obviously they didn’t fix it in time, so dad left me his mobile Internet thing, assuring me that it’s fast enough for anything. I obviously didn’t believe it and was proven correct when the bandwidth settled down to around 40 kbps after probably about one minute at a maximum of around 1 Mbps. As that was only enough to allow me to follow the live timing and text commentary, I didn’t see a single live image from this race weekend.
Still, some good did come of it because dad went and bought some plugs and even one of those special tools made just for these, even though I’m quite sure that with a bit of effort you can do without it, so now at least we have some more if this will ever happen again or we’ll ever need to replace some wiring. And they would have charged for replacing it too, especially since they didn’t even install it in the first place, this cable being here since before they became my ISP, so it probably wasn’t that bad of a deal, though I still say getting that tool was unnecessary.
He actually came back with the things just as the race was starting, so I had to bump into him to get them and then rushed to put on the plug… Only to see it still wouldn’t work. So he called them and they said they still hadn’t fixed the damage, which resulted in what I said above regarding the race. They were only done about an hour and a half after the race ended, at which point I could see that I had done a reasonable job after all, though the contacts are visibly not quite aligned properly on the wires. If this will cause problems in the future I don’t know, but at least now I know how to do it and the next time I hope I won’t be in such a rush anymore… But noticing that it wasn’t done properly was enough to make me curl in a ball yet again, once again trying to at least cry and failing even that.

Finally, after the recent attack on WordPress, I’ve been noticing steady attempts to hack this blog. It’s probably just one of many, as the bots look all over for sites that use WordPress and try to exploit vulnerabilities, but it was quite worrying nevertheless. In fact some of the attempts are still ongoing, one particular bot trying to log on every 30 minutes, as it’s been doing for the past few days, though originally the attempts were one hour and seven minutes apart.
I won’t give details about what I have in my logs because I don’t want to attract more attention. They’re quite irrelevant anyway, seeing as the IPs are almost certainly fake, as is any other information that can be gathered. So I’ll just tell you that there seem to be multiple ways in which this is attempted, so some security hardening is certainly in order. Make sure you have the latest version of WordPress and that your host has the latest version of phpMyAdmin and any related software, use strong passwords, don’t log on under standard names and try to have some more tricks up your sleeve as well for the moments when somebody seems to have an eye on you. I know I have noticeably improved the security of this blog because of this, so at the moment I can say that all’s well that ends well.

Though I hope this won’t be an issue, if something weird does happen with this site, you now know why. Also, if you’ll notice any suspicious changes that I somehow won’t, please let me know. Thanks.

It seems that I will quickly continue the series I recently started after all, if only because, out of all the topics currently swimming through my mind, this seems to be the clearest and possibly even the simplest, theoretically. Then again, why wouldn’t it be clear and simple? I certainly don’t see why should it be difficult to make the places where people live no longer require certain polluting, wasteful and potentially dangerous devices that people themselves invented only about a century ago!

Let me now give some details regarding the measures outlined in the previous post, starting with the sidewalks, which must exist on both sides of any and all surface roads that are open to motorized traffic. There should be a clear area, with a minimum width of one meter which would obviously be increased areas that see heavy pedestrian traffic, strictly reserved for pedestrians on each sidewalk. This “pedestrian lane” should be different from any lanes designed for bicycles and kept clear of any and all obstructions, including but not limited to parked vehicles, bus stops, kiosks, trees and garbage cans. In fact it would normally be understood that the entire surface of the sidewalk is reserved for pedestrians unless otherwise specified, so markings would only be needed if parking vehicles or placing kiosks would specifically be permitted in certain areas, otherwise only the authorities being able to place things, such as bus stops or trees, on the sidewalks, always making sure that the space left for pedestrians never has less than the specified minimum width. The fines for blocking the “pedestrian lane” would need to be significant.
Then pedestrians also need to be able to safely cross roads without needing to waste time looking for a suitable spot. In intersections, when it comes to roads that have no more than two lanes and see relatively little traffic, this issue can be handled with simple pedestrian crossings. However, if the traffic is significant, the road has more than two lanes or the crossing is not in an intersection, traffic lights, overpasses or underpasses are required. In fact, overpasses or underpasses would always be preferred instead of using traffic lights for pedestrian traffic as well, and for areas with heavy traffic and crossings that are not in intersections they are almost a requirement. And such crossings that wouldn’t be in intersections indeed need to exist, as pedestrians shouldn’t normally be required to walk more than 100 meters in order to safely cross a road, making 200 meters the maximum distance between crossings, though that could be slightly extended, to an absolute maximum of 250 meters, under exceptional circumstances.

Next comes the public transport network, which needs to exist in some form in all but the smallest towns and absolutely must be properly developed in all that stretch on for more than about a kilometer and a half, also having sufficient capacity to avoid overcrowding even during peak hours. All public transport services must be affordable, reasonably comfortable and very reliable, never making the passengers wait too long. Adding a subway network is recommended when the total area covered by the city exceeds 20 kilometers and the population exceeds 50000, becoming mandatory for cities with a total area greater than 50 kilometers. To ensure good coverage, surface stops must not be more than 500 meters apart, though that would perhaps be somewhat less than the typical distance between subway stations, the maximum being around one kilometer, to allow for higher speeds.
This would allow people who don’t have or simply don’t want to use personal motorized vehicles to get from one place to another in a reasonable amount of time. In fact, it should be a requirement that no person may need to spend a total of more than 30 minutes on foot in order to get from one place to another within any town or city, no matter how distant and unrelated the two places are. In that scenario, the time spent on foot would be calculated by adding together the time required to walk from the starting point to the first stop or station and from the last one to the destination, as well as between the proper stops or stations in case a switch is required, considering an average walking speed of three kilometers per hour but also adding the time spent waiting at traffic lights that also direct pedestrian traffic and happen to be on the respective route. Said person should also never be required to switch public transport vehicles more than once during such a trip, with the possible exception of switching subway trains in stations where the routes intersect, as long as the passengers don’t need to head back to the surface or pay any additional fee in order to do so.
In addition to all of this, lanes should be reserved for buses and similar vehicles, particularly when their routes take them on roads that usually see high traffic. If the penalties for the drivers of any other vehicles that are seen on these lanes would be harsh enough, this would ensure that people would make it through crowded areas significantly faster in a bus or similar vehicle than in their own car. Note that tram tracks don’t count as such lanes, so if they will exist they will be separate, counting as yet another reserved area. However, I do have issues with the fact that these tracks tend to be on the middle of the road, requiring people to cross to get to and out of the stop, so solutions need to be found for tram stops that aren’t in intersections.

This would probably be enough for the second post in this series. I’m saying nothing new, of course, but would sure like to see these changes implemented. Granted that the suggestions listed above are not the easiest ones to implement, the methods meant to simply encourage walking and using bicycles and public transport services and discourage driving without significantly changing the infrastructure being the ones that fit that description, but these would be extremely effective without quite requiring destroying the cities and starting over, as the particularly difficult to implement ones I mentioned in the previous post do.
The plan for the next post currently involves parks and public squares and how they may be used for this purpose, as well as some less common vehicles that could be included in a city’s public transport network. Let’s see when I’ll get around to writing it…

It’s not like I’ll be able to write anything else tomorrow, so let’s just throw something here just to say I’m still at two posts per week.

Seriously. Move along now. Nothing to see here. Just me wanting to curl in a ball and stay like that until a miracle will happen.
Can’t even talk to Tiel at all anymore, as it would seem that her messages hardly ever reach me anymore, so we basically gave up trying. Andreea is close to graduating but still has a whole lot of work to do on this final stretch, so she’s on even less than she has been over the past several months, meaning it’s quite impossible to reach her either. And Shiri vanished over three months ago for the same reason and I haven’t seen her log on anywhere since. So that’s that when it comes to those I’d actually want to talk to and who aren’t specifically ignoring me.

There are several games I should be submitting things for on MobyGames, but really don’t feel like it. But at least I should be finishing another section of something else today or tomorrow, so there’s that…
Right now, I probably should do the little monthly computer maintenance and then perhaps even clean the mouse and keyboard, as I haven’t done that in a very long time and they’re really filthy. But I’ll first keep a close eye on my HDD while it’ll be tested, because of the new bad sectors discovered two months ago. Last month I was too afraid to even verify that partition again, but I guess I have to get around to it and see what happens, after backing up all the important things of course.

Probably wasted enough space and bandwidth with this already, so that’s it. Have a nice day… So at least one of us will…

It doesn’t look like I’m going to be sleeping, so might as well use the time to write this. Kept putting off another personal post for the past two days anyway, thinking I’ll somehow manage to write something else first, but now this seems required. It may well prove to be nourishment for the bridge dwellers, but they’ll just get ignored. Hardly in a state that’d allow me to discuss anything with anyone even if I wanted to anyway.

I’ve been using an UPS for my computer for the past six years, if not more. It became necessary while living with Andra due to frequent power fluctuations and the fact that the “normal” voltage we were getting tended to be quite high, constantly above 240V, and I always keep the computer on as well, starting back in 1999, when I started having it work on SETI@home, so that puts it even more at risk. As a result, after I thoroughly analyzed the options, we got a Mustek PowerMust 800, which did its job really well while I lived there. The poor thing actually was in AVR mode nearly constantly, seeing as that triggered whenever the voltage was outside the 198V-242V range, and the battery had a fair amount of work to do as well due to the fluctuations I mentioned.
She kept that one after I got kicked out and I got a new one of the same model, which once again did its job really well for some two and a half years. However, that ended in the second half of 2008, when the battery died. I believe it first kept my computer up for several minutes because the power went out when I was taking a shower and I couldn’t immediately rush to turn it off, but then never recovered after that effort, even though the monitoring software was listing the charge as 100%. The next time there was a power failure, I got the “battery low” warning after about a minute, though it held until the computer shut down. The next time after that, the warning came up the moment the power failed, and afterwards it was completely dead, so my computer just turned off the next time the power failed.
By then it was already three years old, which is the amount of time these batteries are supposed to last anyway, so I replaced it with the next model, PowerMust 848, seeing as that one was discontinued. It actually arrived on April 1st and now it would appear that the joke really was on me.

I first noticed an issue when it kicked in Sunday morning, at around 5:25 AM, when I was in bed but still awake and heard it activate. Seeing as the power wasn’t off and it wasn’t beeping anyway, I got up to investigate and saw the voltage above 254V, which is when this model goes in AVR mode, having the standard set at 230V. I also saw the battery drain to 63% very quickly, though I assumed it was because it needed some time to adjust after I had turned on the monitor as well while it was busy adjusting the power, but it was a sign of things to come…
After I woke up that day and saw the battery only at 79%, even though the voltage came back within more reasonable levels at 7:32 AM, I started checking the log more thoroughly and noticed that the battery never recovered full charge, which is 13.6V, ever since June 2, when there were two power failures within hours of each other. Until Saturday morning the drop was minor and it held steady at 13.5V, but then it dropped to 13.4V and later that evening, so only hours before the event that made me check it, it went all the way down to 12.9V without any reason whatsoever. Then it had apparently recovered to 13V and then dropped even more, to 12.8V, when I noticed that 63% charge. Afterwards, it held at 79% charge for a couple of days, then started trying to go higher but never managed to hold it.
The first attempt to increase the charge got to it 84%, and 13.2V, then it fell straight down to 52% and 12.6V on its own. Haven’t seen any such drops after that, but the pattern seems to be the same. It struggles to get to 84%, stops there for a while, then very slowly loses the additional charge until it settles back down to 79%. After a brief “rest” at that level, it once again gets to 84% and the cycle repeats itself.

Now it wouldn’t have been that much of a problem if the battery would simply have lost some maximum charge. It would have been a little early, since they are supposed to last three years, as I said, but probably manageable for a while longer. However, this morning it just decided to turn itself off, obviously also turning off my computer in the process, which means it really needs replacement.
I think I was just asleep for a few minutes when I woke up quite confused and I needed just a moment to realize why: The computer was off. Now I don’t know if the UPS actually beeped once first or the silence was what woke me up, but checking the log afterwards proved that I woke up just when it turned off. So I got up, figured out what happened, checked the UPS and saw that it was indeed off. Pressed the power button twice, since it was still in the “on” position, and it turned back on well enough. The charge is also still listed as 84%, where it actually managed to stay for the past three hours, and there is no log entry about any event that might have caused it to turn off. It is possible that there was a brief power failure and it was completely unable to switch to battery, so it turned itself off without managing to log the event first, but I can’t know that and either way it doesn’t matter.

I wrote a long note and left it on the kitchen table for dad, but have no idea what I’ll be doing now. Warranty expired in April, so I guess it’s time for a new one, quite some time earlier than expected and even a few months sooner than the previous one started experiencing issues. However, that implies interacting with dad in some way when I’m so scared of everyone and everything, and especially of him, seeing as he can do things that can have major and immediate effects on my situation… It may also imply, if it’ll turn itself off again for no apparent reason, having to do without an UPS for some time, until the new one will arrive. I do have the normal power cables, so far unused, but it will first require moving some things around and then I’ll be at the mercy of the power fluctuations, which hasn’t happened in a long time, plus that rather frequently getting over 250V early in the morning is rather worrying without an UPS as a safety net in case it gets too bad… Sure, lots of people manage it like this, shrugging off the reboots when there happen to be power failures and possibly not even being aware of the high voltage issues, but I’d really prefer not to risk it!
Then again, it does seem to be a rule, doesn’t it? Something failing in or related to my computer when I’m really out of it. Could even say that it took its time right now, because I’ve been in this state for a couple of months already. There have been times in the past when being very angry or scared immediately caused temporary computer problems, and it only took a couple of weeks after I bumped into Andra again that time towards the end of 2007 for the HDD I had at the time to fail, so it was unfortunately expected… Now I guess I can only hope there won’t be even worse problems, though I did see some new bad sectors on the HDD as well…

Note: Edited in the afternoon after noticing that it was in fact bought in 2009, not last year, so warranty did just expire…