Tom van der Woerdt-blog

It’s Monday morning, 12:10 AM. I woke up at 1 PM. I should be sleeping, but because I’m awake for only 11 hours, I can’t. Monday morning is usually the time I think about things.

Tonight as well. My last tweet was about me needing a Bashir-62. It’s a Star Trek “holo-program”. Then I realized I needed some time away from my life. I ended the tweet with #FML (Fuck My Life).

But the thinking had only just started. I have a German test tomorrow and haven’t found the motivation to learn for it, so I will fail the test. I must admit that it’s pretty much the same with my math test tomorrow, but I’m rather good at math so it shouldn’t really be that much of a problem.

I ended up thinking about why I have motivational problems. Why do I go to school? It’s the law. Why are the only other people at school who have motivational problems, your friends? Now that’s a good question. Most of them are computer-geeks. How did they end up as computer geeks? I guess they didn’t have anything better to do.

And the answer to that question made me realize a possible cause of my motivational problems. All my days are the same. I go to school, then stare at a screen for a few hours, sleep. Next day, the same. And the next day, the same again. In the weekends, it’s the same, except for the school part. It’s always the same.

Isn’t it obvious what the problem is? I clearly don’t have something to look forward to. A school vacation perhaps, but that’s just staring at my screen for 16 hours a day and that gets boring very quickly. No, I need something special.

You could ask me: What do you want? Well, I don’t know. A vacation to a far country? Not alone, and not with my parents either. I kept asking myself that question for over 15 minutes, and I think I know the answer: I am lonely.

Every now and then, I download some songs from the internet. I respect the authors of these songs, so I usually buy them from iTunes. But I also have the good habit of cleaning my computer every 2 to 3 months (windows re-install) so I did that a few days ago.

Basically, what you expect from a web-store like the iTunes store, is that it will automatically re-download the songs you had before you cleaned your PC. I mean, if Steam can do this with games of 5 GB, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem for Apple with songs of about 3 MB-. Sure, we are talking about a lot more songs than games, but I don’t think many people buy 5 GB off the iTunes store.

So, I logged into my iTunes this afternoon, after installing iTunes again, and I clicked “Check for available downloads”. It told me I already had all songs! Well, in my Purchased tab, I only saw one song, and that was a free song I downloaded from the iTunes Store because I wanted to test something. So, I checked the iTunes FAQ and it told me I would have to backup all my songs!!

Isn’t it ridiculous that I have to re-buy all my songs again? Is it really too much that I expect the iTunes Store to re-download my purchases after I re-install my computer? Steam does it. The EA download manager does it. Battle.net does it. And a way bigger company called Apple can’t do something as simple as this?

They force us to have DRM on the songs we purchase. They force us to backup everything we buy, but we can’t burn them on CDs if we want to listen to them. They can only be on five computers at the same time, and if you accidentally forget to deauthorize your computer before re-installing your PC, you can only have four computers at the same time. The iTunes Store really limits what you can do with the music.

I don’t think I’ll ever buy off the iTunes Store again. I will resume my old habits of downloading them from Usenet and Torrents, and if I respect the author well enough, I will make a donation to them. Sorry Apple folks, but it’s 2009 and this kind of trickery isn’t wise.

This blog post was written for Blog Action Day, http://www.blogactionday.org/

Our climate is changing. Probably even more than we know. Many of us know we have to do something about it. The country I live in, The Netherlands, is already making some laws to “help” us, by, for example, prohibiting sale of the old-style light bulbs, in favor of LED lights. Which is good.

But it is not our lights that use a lot of energy. It’s the big companies, who use most of it. And, with computers usually generating the worst energy consumption, it is the IT sector which should change.

Computers in homes and companies: People have them active even when they don’t need them. Each morning they get turned on to check the e-mails, to be turned off when people go to bed. And with a total of about 1.6 billion internet users (source), this uses a lot more than is necessary.

In data-centers, the same happens. Servers are active all the time. However, that is the idea of a server, so it is acceptable. The energy consumption of these may be reduced, but that is not the main issue. The temperature of the average data-center is kept at about 20 degrees Celsius. This is not needed: Servers will perform just as well if they raise this temperature to 30 degrees Celsius. System admins will not like that, which is why it is currently 20 degrees Celsius. But wouldn’t 25 degrees be a better option? It could save lots of energy, because data-centers would have to be cooled less.

Also an option, which I decided to do, is put the servers in “green” data-centers. While everyone knows this doesn’t mean the data-centers are green-c0lored, and it doesn’t mean that it’s 100% climate-neutral, it’s better than the average data-center. The data-center the server of this blog is in, for example, cools the data-center from air from the outside. Since it is a Dutch data-center, it means that the air compressor can be turned off 40% of the time. Also, the power to the data-center is “green”: Produced only with sustainable energy such as wind, sun and biomass.

There are still a lot of things that need to be changed. Now would be a good time.

It can happen to everyone. You have a problem with Skype.

So, what you do: you go to www.skype.com and try finding a solution. Too bad, you are the first one. So, you open a support ticket.

A few days later, you get a reply from them. Basically, there’s an Indian guy trying to answer your questions by clicking a pre-defined answer.

Our conversation, attached below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Looking at the media of the past weeks/years, I’ve noticed these things:

• Local problems are WAY more important than remote problems. The 5 (or more?) kills (because of terrorism) a day in Afghanistan aren’t important to the media. One kill during a dance festival, however, is horrible, and requires all the attention of the public. And I didn’t even count for all the other deaths in the world.
• The media never cares about the indirect and a bit more complex news. For example, where the 9/11 (World Trade Center) killed “only” 3.017 people, 229.866 people were killed by the Indian Earthquake in 2004 which caused a tsunami. I cannot deny that 3.017 is a lot, but the media was way more interested in the terrorist attack of 9/11. Why? My guess is that it was because either people think it’s too far away (after all, India isn’t exactly a part of the Occident world), but it could also be because a terrorist attack is more spectacular and the media would receive more views.
• Saying anything about this is “not done”. For example, a Brazilian advertising company published a non-official WWF poster a few days ago. Sure, the WWF denied it was in any way related to them but if you ask me I’d say they are damn right. If we can’t talk about the kills made by terrorists, and people don’t care about the kills made by nature, how are we ever going to return nature to the state it once had? Or should we just destroy it and let our sons and daughters fix the problems we created?

In other words: Our media is too much focused on entertaining the public, instead of bringing true facts.

Tom

Last night, something got me thinking about religion. I will try to output my thoughts here. Just, let me get one thing straight. I am not associated with any religion, nor do I consider myself atheist.

Imagine yourself. Imagine someone of 1993 years ago. Imagine that that person is Jesus Christ, who hasn’t written the bible yet. You are a person coming from another planet. Jesus is from the actual Earth, so you are from 2 different planets. The only difference between these planets is that your planet is far more civilized: You have computers, are able to project images on a screen (projector), can travel via the air at high speed (planes) and can talk with people that are on the other side of the world (telephone).

Now what would happen if you would show all that to Jesus, without telling him what they are? Most likely he would consider you a god. Sure, everyone from your planet knows you aren’t a god, but because the people from Earth have never seen a telephone, a computer, or anything else you brought, they will try to explain things. Obviously you won’t let them see how they work and how they are made, because that would spoil the “fun”.

Ok, I hope you still understand my post. Basically you’re talking with someone (Jesus) that’s 2000 years backwards in time and you are showing him things that won’t be invented for another 2000 years. Because of this he will consider you a god because he cannot explain the things.

Now, of course Jesus will not keep this for himself only. He will talk to others, try to convince them that there is indeed a god. Of course, nobody will believe him. So, he will try alternative ways, such as writing a book. Of course, because he only talked to you for a few minutes (or maybe an hour?) he does not know enough to write a complete book, so he improvises a bit. It takes a long time, but he finishes it and shows it to others. Because all facts in the book, which has been read by many people, are right or cannot be confirmed, people believe the story and go live by the things he made up, because you are a “higher being”.

This “story” works for all religions I know of. Someone from another planet (or the future) comes to Earth, shows something that’s not possible yet, and people believe the person. The same counts for the religions that have multiple gods: multiple persons came to Earth, and they showed something that would, according to the people from that age, be impossible. You then have 10 people believing you, 100, 1000, a million, a billion, etc.

The people from “the other planet” all know their friend(s) aren’t gods. They aren’t immortal either, and everything they do can be scientifically be explained. But the people on Earth don’t know that. Jesus didn’t see anyone get killed, so he might have assumed they were immortal.

Sure, in the next few days I will receive a lot of comments about this story not being possible, that some things can’t be explained, that there isn’t life on other planets, etc. Prove it! Why wouldn’t there be life on other planets? It simply hasn’t been seen yet. Why would the events in the book not be possible? They were either made up because Jesus didn’t have good references or they haven’t been explained yet. Can’t you travel back in time? Quoting Wikipedia: “it is currently unknown whether the laws of physics would allow backwards time travel”. Think about it! Why wouldn’t this story be possible? Comment on this post with your reasons, I will try to explain them.

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Tom

Somehow, it felt as if the posts on my blog shouldn’t be there. I have hidden them for now, perhaps I will put them back later. It’s mainly because I somehow don’t want people to read my blog. Well, only certain people.