Daily Dump
Send a Message From Samuel L. Jackson!
September 10, 2006
August 10, 2006
Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew
Listen.
Lyrics
This song pretty much sums up 40-50 hours of a typical week for me.
August 7, 2006
August 1, 2006
July 29, 2006
July 27, 2006
It’s been nice knowing you, Google Desktop
I uninstalled Google Desktop today.
Someone on our network has been using 400kb/s 24/7 for the past two months. It’s not exactly my job to hunt around for that kind of thing, so I didn’t really investigate what it was. Turns out, Google Desktop was downloading something from 64.233.179.*, port 443 (HTTPS) the whole time it was running (I installed the new version about two months ago). I switched it off, and the downloading stopped. Switch it back on, it starts up again.
Naturally, I was curious as to what exactly Google Desktop was doing that consistently used up that much bandwidth, so I started disabling features. One by one, I disabled every single feature, from “Index secure pages (HTTPS) in web history” to all of the RSS gadgets in the Sidebar, and still nothing. I disabled everything I could find in the Google Desktop Preferences to the point of making it absolutely useless, and still it sat happily downloading 400kb/s from https://google.com/.
So, finally I gave up. I guess I wasn’t willing to believe that something I downloaded from Google Himself was broken, but I can’t find any other explanation. When I uninstalled it, there was a place to explain what the problem was, so I gave them an abbreviated version of this story.
Hopefully someone reads it. I’ll update this post if I hear back from them.
By the way, the tool I used to monitor my network activity was the excellent PRTG. There’s a freeware edition which is more than adequate for a single user trying to figure out what in the world is eating up their bandwidth.
July 24, 2006
It ends tonight.
I’ve got to figure something out, guys.
This article is one of the most depressing things I have read in a while. I recommend you take a look, but for those of you who are far too busy, the basic gist is that regular full-time jobs are for people who are not smart enough to make money any other way, and that any reasonably intelligent person should never have one. Instead, we should aspire to decouple our income from the amount of effort we exert obtaining that income.
Well, I consider myself reasonably intelligent, so I’ve decided that I’m not going to take it anymore. Don’t get me wrong, my current employer doesn’t mistreat me, but the fact remains that I am employed by someone, and I don’t think that’s what I’m meant to do.
Now I just need to figure out what it’s going to take to make this transition happen. I have a hundred ideas, and for each idea there are a hundred reasons why it won’t work. I guess I need to stop being so negative and just start doing something.
