Cav's Place

I’m running out of potential titles for these posts, but there you have it. Yes, it’s yet another personal update posted despite having two non-personal posts that I’d really want to write these days and two more that I probably should write if I could just hold on to a suitable mindset for some hours. But we all know that’s not going to happen, so you just get this instead. At least I have a fair number of things to say, seeing as there have been various new developments, those I’ll mention here even being positive for once, though of course not entirely so.

One of the good developments is that my new UPS can indeed operate at over 250V, though it may actually stop charging the battery at such a time. I’m saying this because it said I got slightly over 250V for about an hour and a half yesterday morning, after I went to bed, and it obviously didn’t switch to battery mode. Yet when I checked the data I saw the battery voltage go from 13.4V to 13.2V during that time, which was the listed voltage when I first turned it on, taking some two days before it fully settled at 13.4V afterwards. Perhaps the additional 0.2V is due to the electricity passing through the fully charged battery, so I guess it could work as a test then. When I get over 250V I’ll check to see if the battery drains itself when it no longer has power flowing through it, which may just provide me with an early warning of an imminent failure, so I won’t be caught off guard yet again… Then again, it may also mean it’ll fail sooner, but since the last one did so only two months after the warranty expired I hope that won’t be the case. I mean, it really shouldn’t be any sooner than that!

In other news, dad bought a laptop and a multifunction printer and added a new DVD drive for me to his order as well, so now I finally have a working one again. My case looks weird with it in, however, because the top panel that hides the optical drive in this case is not removable, so with a bit of force you can push the drive in from behind, but you can’t exactly pull it back out the same way. That means I had to leave the old one in and install this one in another slot, which is no longer hidden behind such a panel, so now I have a silver drive on an otherwise white case. (Why’s it silver instead of white then? Because the shop he got the other things from had no white models in stock. In fact, this was the only one that wasn’t black!)
Yet the problems didn’t stop there, because the things used to hold the cables together inside the case seem to have gotten stuck, so I wasn’t able to free a power cable for the new drive, which was needed because the old one was IDE and therefore I couldn’t use its cable for this. I struggled for a long time and nothing worked, but eventually managed to twist the whole bunch of cables around enough to get one of them to go in the back of the new drive without freeing it. Then, after several failed attempts to squeeze my fingers through and plug in the SATA cable for the new drive without removing anything else, all that was left was removing the video card, the HDD’s SATA cable and the ATA cable so far used for the old DVD drive and then putting them all back in after I added the new cable to the mix as well. But at least all that mess gave me the opportunity to have a better look at why my case has been vibrating so much whenever it was allowed to cool and I seem to have somehow managed to fix that problem, so all’s well that ends well…
The drive itself was some 12 RON more than a white one with similar characteristics was at the shop I preferred, and dad also paid slightly more for the laptop and the multifunction printer compared to what he would have paid if he would have gotten them from this shop I so far still like, and either way I’d wish to support this shop and try to avoid the one he bought these things from if I can help it, but there you have it. It’s not like there was any point in getting the laptop he got anyway. I knew he wanted to replace the old one and had pointed out a nice offer to him, but he didn’t listen. The one I picked was passable as far as performance went, at least for what they’ll be using it for, but the price it had really made it worth buying at this time. However, he looked more carefully through the offers and picked one that was almost 20% cheaper and, to someone who didn’t quite know what to look for, seemed almost identical in performance… Only, of course, it’s noticeably weaker in practice, not to mention that it comes with only one year of warranty, while the one I picked had two. But I guess that’s his problem. I just feel bad for getting a silver drive instead of a white one and not supporting that shop I’d have wanted to support.

Last but not least, the hacking attempts seem to have died down, though I have noticed a few more that seemed to actually be people trying to log on after the scripts stopped. I am attracting trolls, however, and they still seem to be rather, shall we say, dedicated. That one also visited this blog and went through certain parts of it for several days before posting that comment.

I’ll leave it at that for now. For the past two days I’ve once again been slacking off a little when it comes to writing something else as well, so let’s see what I’ll manage to do later today…

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…