AI

You got your Internet in my cheese.
Thank you, I think.

The Internet of Things, Soon Accessible by Smartphone – Technology Review

A forthcoming packaging chip could let your phone talk to the plastic wrap on your cheese.

These are the famous Flaming Tar Barrels of Otterly St. Mary. 

In brief, the townsfolk put tar in barrels, set the tar on fire, and carry the barrels around the town. Only local are permitted to carry the barrels, but the competition is open to men, women, and children.

They are worried that they’re not able to raise enough money to keep the festival going.
Mark Steele describes the town and its carnival of flaming tar barrels in this BBC Radio 4 Extra show.

A lot will be said about the recent tragedy in Connecticut. Most of it will be an expression of grief and bewilderment. Much of the commentary will be thoughtful and heartfelt. Some of it will be positioned, consciously or not, to advance an agenda. Intertwined with all of it will be observations from people whom we respect, but who are making statements that are passionate, stupid, and wrong. That’s who we are, and that’s how we have to live together.
Let me add just a couple of quick thoughts based on early and likely to be inaccurate information.

• It appears that the guns used in this shooting were purchased and owned legally by the assailant’s mother (now dead by those same guns). Gun control legislation of a type that would pass muster under the recent Supreme Court rulings on the Second Amendment probably wouldn’t have prevented these guns from being used in these crimes.
  There may be reasons for considering stronger gun control laws, but this case doesn’t appear to be one of them.
• Much will be said about identifying people with mental illness in an effort to prevent future shootings. Our predictive powers regarding the behavior of anyone, mentally ill or otherwise, are nil. We have statistics that will show that a certain percentage of people who exhibit certain behaviors or who have been treated for certain conditions are likely to cause problems. There is, however, zero chance that we can then say with certainty that any specific individual matching that profile will offend.
  Two members of my extended family have done time in jail as the result of their mental illnesses, one for what he did and the other for what he said and that others feared he might do.
  • The one who did the crime did so as a complete surprise to all of us.
  • The one who said the wrong thing to the wrong person as the wrong time only learned how not to say those things to anyone, including a therapist, again.  Anyone who has been committed to a hospital under a Massachusetts Section 12 knows the magic words not to say. As a result, the person’s illness goes underground even further.

  Even as we discuss identification of people likely to offend, we make it more difficult to get the kinds of sustained mental health and family services that might give us a chance to heal what is badly broken.  A person who kills his mother and her kindergarten class isn’t going to be made whole by a Prozac presecription. 

One of the family desktop computers developed a problem. The disk drive was failing. After tinkering with various disk repair utilities, I determined that we needed to replace the drive.

We were coming in to the Thanksgiving holiday week, with only two days of school, so I didn’t hurry to order one online. I figured I could find one at a local store, install it, and set it up over the long weekend.

When you go to Staples, you discover that the disk drive product boxes on the shelves not only do not contain disk drives, but do not even represent disk drives elsewhere in the store. The message on the box says,  Please ask an associate for assistance. I asked. I learned that they don’t keep drives in stock. They could order one if I’d like.

After a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat and another day around the house, I thought I could pick up a drive at Best Buy and perform the aforementioned transplant.

Almost.

A kind, blue-shirted sales associate pointed out several drives of varying price and capacity. I picked out one and proceeded to the checkout counter. Best Buy in the Greendale Mall in Worcester has an entrance/exit to the mall. We figured that we’d make our purchase and walk around a bit. The checkout was staffed by another blue-shirted associate who told us that we couldn’t check out at that checkout station, that we had to go to the front of the store, the side away from the mall entrance.

Fine.

I brought the drive to the checkout. A loud, blue-shirted employee told us that we could use Register 8. The nice blue-shirted cashier took the drive and brought to another desk to remove the do-not-steal tag on the box. She brought the box back, scanned it, and waited for me to pay the $170 or so. I said that was not the price I was expecting, that the sticker on the shelf said $70. I wanted to go back to the shelf, check the price, and, if needed, pick up one that was truly the price I wanted.  The nice blue-shirted cashier told me to wait.  She told the loud blue-shirted employee who called loudly to unseen person to check the price. At this point, three people were trying to figure out if the scanner was incorrect.

There was a good chance that I’d picked up the wrong box. I was fine with that. I wasn’t fine with having to wait while they checked their inventory-scanner system. I left.

By the way, the tools on Hiren’s BootCD are very good. I was able to clean up the disk enough to muscle out the User directory tree. I have a disk on order from Amazon (next day shipping), but may be able to get a used one from a local repair guy.

This is the part that the retailers don’t get. Online shopping isn’t about price-matching. It’s about having the product I need and letting me buy it easily. A 10-year-old running a lemonade stand knows this. Staples and Best Buy, it seems, don’t.