Ask MetaFilter posts by grrarrgh00

Need for speed

grrarrgh00 — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 12:02:23 -0800

I want my computer to work exactly the same, but faster. I can't add any more RAM. Motherboard/CPU upgrade? Four years ago, my coworker built me a wonderful PC that has brought me little but happiness and joy in the time since. (I can now never again imagine purchasing one of those factory-built monstrosities, with their pre-installed applications and mysterious innards.)

I've maxed out the RAM on the 4-y/o motherboard (1.5 GB), but it's grown too slow and jerky for my tastes. The prospect of reinstalling all my applications and recreating all my settings causes me palpable distress, which is why I don't want to replace the computer altogether.

Previous threads seem to indicate that a motherboard/CPU upgrade is not that complicated. And RAM is cheap enough that I don't care about having to purchase all-new RAM, if that's the case. But I'm uncertain whether I'll have to consider changing any other parts. (E.g. Power supply?) And I'm assuming a mobo/CPU upgrade will get me the performance jolt I'm seeking, but is that assumption correct? Are my visions of making this upgrade and then continuing life with my exact current setup intact Pollyannaish?

A walk on the wild side

grrarrgh00 — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:30:50 -0800

How do I know if my frozen lake is solid enough to walk on? I'd love to watch tonight's lunar eclipse out on Lake Calhoun tonight. It being the middle of February, I'm pretty sure the ice is OK; except for a warm spell last weekend, it's been well below the average temperature for most of the last two weeks. But is there a rule of thumb I could go by, or (even better) an official ice status tracker for MN lakes I could refer to?

Best discussion/debate sites

grrarrgh00 — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:43:51 -0800

Which websites are the best at conducting vigorous, intelligent online debates and discussions? I'm especially looking for successful examples of collaborative filtering; sites where readers can quickly sort the best posts/arguments to the top of the heap. What I have in mind is a site with some combination of the following traits:

controversial topics are posted
highly-rated responses float to the top of the list
open to general users
the quality of discussion scales even with a high volume of participation
if any human moderation is applied, it's generally light

Slashdot and the Kuro5hin/Scoop sites both offered early models of collaborative filtering for large discussions, but I've gotten the sense that their systems are too complicated for non-techy audiences to understand. I'm intrigued by some of the models being tested at ConvinceMe.net, but that site doesn't let you do much actual filtering (you can't, for example, sort arguments by the number of votes each one receives or collapse unpopular responses), so the discussions seem to be just as noisy.

Are there other examples out there?

A sad coming-out story

grrarrgh00 — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 21:22:38 -0800

I'm dealing with the fallout from coming out to my deeply religious immediate family. For years, I had prepared for their tears, their anger, their remonstrances, their appeals to the Bible, and all of those have come. What I hadn't prepared for was how disappointed I would be, and how fundamental and lonely that disappointment would be. Help? All my life, the person I've considered myself closest to was my older sister. I love her dearly, and I've always held her up on a pedestal as a rational, incredibly decent, and most deeply generous person. A little under a decade ago, when I first realized I was gay, and that it wasn't a phase, I knew my sister would be the family member I'd come out to first, because even though I knew she'd have some trouble with it, I also knew she'd understand and assuage my fears in a way no one else would or could. If I could depend on no one else in life, I could depend on my sister.

I've been living on my own for almost a decade, in a different state than any of my family members. I've been out at work and to friends for 6 years. After years of prelude, I formally came out to my sister at the beginning of this year, as best as I knew how. Our first conversation about it made me grimace and chuckle a little bit -- she said everything the textbooks tell you not to say when someone comes out to you -- "Were you abused as a child?" "And you're sure it's not a phase?" But she assured me she loved me, and was, on some level, OK with it, and understood I couldn't be the person I was if I wasn't the person I am.

In the ensuing months, though, our conversations became a touch more difficult. She started telling me in every phone call that she was praying for me, asking me to open my heart to God, pointing out the standard passages in Leviticus and so forth. I was taken aback, because although my sister has always been religious, she's never been a fundamentalist. But I assured her of my own time spent studying the Bible, reconciling my sexuality with my faith, and walked her through the numerous doctrinal interpretations challenging the fundamentalist position on homosexuality. (I attended Christian schools all my life; I've read the Bible basically cover to cover, and I've done a lot of intense Bible study to help inform my own faith.) I was trying to engage her at her level, although I was astounded that she'd brought it there. Leviticus, really? My sister?

Tonight was the last straw. My year of finally coming out to my family climaxed in what was more-or-less a coming-out conversation with my uber-religious mother. (A wonderful person, who commands much of my love and admiration and respect, but whom I will probably never describe as thoroughly rational.) It was tough, but I've been steeling myself for that for years. My mom is probably still wailing and screaming and asking what she did to deserve this. I don't know how long it will be before we speak again, but again, that I was prepared for.

But the giant blow was the conversation with my sister that followed, which included every distorted Biblical canard a fundie ever threw at a fag. (OK, she left out the Adam-n-Eve-not-Adam-n-Steve quip.) We each remained as civil as we could, but "civility" is a term I'd hate to ever use to describe an interaction with my dear, dear sister.

What I'm left with is my disbelief and disappointment that this was my sister. My decent, rational, generous, cherished sister, clinging to such uncharitable, irrational, bileful dogma in the face of all reason and loyalty and love. Something fundamental has soured in our relationship, even if things get better between us. It feels as though the person whose love and support I have always counted on in life is a different person entirely, and the loneliness and disappointment in that is just wrenching.

Give me some perspective. Point me to an essay, or a speech, or a book, or a song, or something. Lay down your words of wisdom. This was long, but I had to get it off my chest.

Book Club Bleg

grrarrgh00 — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 18:50:05 -0800

Help me choose some books to nominate for book club. No, no, no, this one's a tad more complicated. :) Every month, one of my fellow book-clubbers is assigned to nominate three or four books. When we meet to discuss the past month's reading, we choose one of the nominees for the next month. Being something of an oddball, I like to organize my nominations around themes. The last time, for example, my theme was "Masters of Humankind." The books I proposed were No god but God (God), The Year of Magical Thinking (Death), The Time-Traveler's Wife (Time), and Moneyball (Money). (The club picked The Time-Traveler's Wife. The actual selection doesn't make much of a difference to me, because I plan to read all the books I propose, and I did.)

The theme can be oblique, clever, or straightforward. (In the straightforward camp, for example, I've been considering the four elements -- Cloud Atlas (Air), Snow (Water), American Prometheus or Dante (Fire), Coal: A Human History or Salt: A World History (Earth).) They can be either a prominent theme of the book or just a play on its title. We prefer books that have been out in paperback, and a nomination almost always goes unpicked if one of us has already read it. I aim for variety in the selection -- memoir, biography, journalistic non-fiction, literary fiction, magical realism, social history.

So, whaddya say? Help me out?

Finding combinations in PHP

grrarrgh00 — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 13:46:59 -0800

How do I find all possible combinations of a multidimensional array in PHP? This is a pretty simple function that I'm sure many real developers have created in their sleep before me. Unfortunately, I can't find any working examples of their scripts to crib off of.

I'd just like to write a simple function taking a multidimensional array as an argument, and looping through all the possible unique combinations of elements in the array.

Here's a similar question from the archives that includes links to PHP code that's apparently no longer online. Here's an answer to a similar problem that doesn't work in PHP5. There's a solution here that I sorta think I understand, but doesn't seem to work when I execute it. (It produces "PHP Warning: Missing argument 2 for getAllPossiblePermutations()."

Any tips? Thanks in advance!

Navigating the RSS backlog

grrarrgh00 — Wed, 02 May 2007 06:17:23 -0800

I need RSS backlog management advice. In my RSS reader (Google Reader) right now are 213 subscriptions with 3,852 unread items. I'm really hesitant to dump them all. I've prioritized them as diligently as my current categorization scheme will allow, but I'm definitely open to other schemes. Your advice? First, a little background on my process and what I get out of subscribing to RSS:

Broadly, my love for RSS is probably the same as everyone else's: I love having ubiquitous access to an everlasting, ever-fresh publication filled with text and images that touch on a range of subjects I find absorbing.

More specifically, I also scour feeds for: News about technology, including write-ups of tools that make my life easier. Off-the-beaten-path stuff happening on the Web to stoke my imagination for lectures and presentations with Web-savvy groups. Ideas to stoke my imagination for the work I do. Commentary on the news from a variety of perspectives.

Everytime I attack the pile, I find new gems, but I haven't had the drawn-out time it would require to get through the whole set of items. And at any rate, with my attention span, I think I'd just start glossing over all the good stuff if I set aside a day and promised to click through all the headlines.

I use Google Reader, generally on list view, and I'm good with the keyboard shortcuts. My one brainstorm so far is that I currently categorize my feeds by topic, and I may flirt with changing that. If I categorized them by priority/value, I could go through the best folders first, and dump items from the lesser folders if the load became too much.

Your thoughts are welcome!!

Polling scripts?

grrarrgh00 — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 18:32:27 -0800

Know of any good non-hosted free or open-source polling applications? My needs are similar to this person's:

I need a cheap (or free) online poll service that can collect at least 1000 responses and prevent revoting (using cookies or IPs, it doesn't have to be highly secure).

With one difference: (s)he wasn't looking for scripts. I am. Ideally, I'd like a solution I can port into my own design, with some administration options (e.g. can close voting at a certain point; users can't see poll results until I pull some sort of trigger).

Drupal has something close, but Drupal's kind of cruftastic for what I need.

Audio/video stuttering

grrarrgh00 — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 17:13:57 -0800

Audio and video has recently started stuttering on my computer. It might have something to do with the installation of new hard drive on Monday. It seems to be worse in some applications than others. Any ideas? The stats: Intel Pentium 4, 1700 MHz, 768 MB of RAM. Windows XP SP2. Started with an 80 gig hard drive.

The story: I installed a Serial ATA card and a 320-gig SATA internal hard drive on Monday. Since then, when I play audio or video in most applications, I'm getting this super-annoying stutter; every few seconds or so, the sound/video is catching slightly.

Audio/video performance is slightly better (though still somewhat unwatchable) in the moments after a boot-up, which makes me believe it might be a matter of not enough RAM. I'm using FreeRam XP, but that doesn't seem to be helping one bit. And it's slow.

The problem also seems to be somewhat diminished when I use the VLC player versus using, say, WinAmp, iTunes or Windows Media Player.

Other than that, the new HD and SATA card are working out great. My memory tells me I was beginning to see blips of this problem even before I installed the hard drive, but I don't exactly trust that. And at any rate, it's much worse now, and the hard drive/SATA card are the only variables I can think of that changed in the interim.

I increased my paging file from 250 to 1150 megs. Hasn't helped.

Short of uninstalling the new HD, should I try purchasing more RAM? (I think my card will accommodate up to 1 gig.) Or are there other things I can try first?

I almost paid to see another movie at Landmark just to hear this again

grrarrgh00 — Wed, 31 May 2006 07:57:23 -0800

Name that tune: It serves as the soundtrack to the HBO Documentary Films commercial that currently plays before movies at Landmark Theaters. It's beautiful. I can barely describe the song, except to say it's got swirling string instruments, a man's voice, singing pretty high. Sounds sort of like a cross between Radiohead and Rufus Wainwright. Maybe. I can't think of any of the lyrics.

The commercial itself shows snippets of documentaries sort of projected onto squares that fade in and out, with words like "real" and "inspiring" popping up randomly on the screen. Cheesy as it sounds, the effect is actually nice. But really it's just because the song is very pretty.