If you have not seen the marvelous Ballad of Buster Scruggs on Netflix, I highly suggest checking it out when you get a chance. It is a 6-story anthology written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen.
It seems to me that the sixth and final story has caused the most consternation if you must know what the story means. It is titled "The Mortal Remains" and 90% of it occurs inside of a stagecoach -- period unknown, but I think we can safely assume it takes place in the 1850-1900s or so. Someone with more time on their hands could probably dial this in closer based on the songs, wardrobe, and other set details.
The Mortal Remains has 6 and a half characters:
1) The Coachman
2) The Trapper
3) The Lady
4) The Englishman
5) The Irishman
6) The Frenchman
Most of the story takes place in a stagecoach piloted by the Coachman. Inside of the coach, The Trapper, the Lady, and the Englishman sit on one side of the coach, while the Irishman and Englishman occupy the opposite. Oh, and the half character is the dead body stowed on the roof.
The Coachman only stops at the Hotel destination. Upon arriving, briefly going inside, he leaves again. This is all we know about him.
During the course of the journey a discussion begins about the nature of man.
The Trapper is insistent that "ferrets and man are the same!" -- Nature is the Measure!
The Lady, whose first few lines include the worlds "Holy Bible," insists on a godly life -- God is the Measure!
The Englishman, through a story about playing someone else's poker deck, declares that he can not know any man's hand, only his own hand -- Man is the Measure!
While this is happening, the two occupants on the opposite side of the coach have sung a couple songs (whose lyrics need a closer examination) and it becomes apparent that they are a team of bounty hunters. One, the Frecnhman, distracts the wanted man with his silver tongue, while the other, the Irishman, "thumps" him to death. Such was the fate of the half-character stowed on the roof.
This leads me to believe that the Frenchman is the devil, and the Irishman is God. One tempts them to lay down their guard, while the other enacts worldly punishment.
If we can accept this interpretation, some other parts of the story come into focus. The stagecoach suddenly becomes a microcosm of all earth, and the Coachman becomes time.
When the stagecoach finally arrives at its destination -- a rather foreboding hotel that seems to have no staff -- I think we can prudently assume that the hotel is purgatory.
"God" and "Satan" are seen dragging the dead body (from the top of the coach) up the stairs, while the others enter. The doors to the "hotel" close, and the story is over.
Sunday, December 2, 2018
Sunday, November 20, 2016
Dear ad companies that really don't like AdBlock like LATimes and Forbe,
I am hitting more and more paywalls that are too high for me. In my use-case, the biggest problem I have is less with how much money they want, but how often they want it. And the general fact I don't like handing my credit card out to yet another company of questionable security status quo that I have to babysit every now and then as breaches and ordering vaporizers from Singapore randomly kill off valid credit card numbers, to be immediately replaced with new numbers.
I like Flickr, domain registrations, car insurance, and a whole long list of other companies that bill me a reasonable amount of money ($25) yearly to access their content -- maybe not even all of it, and that's okay! I guess insurance really isn't "content" nor is it anywhere near that inexpensive, but you get the idea...
Washington Post has locked me out a couple of times too. How is it I am not automatically logged in as an Amazon user? Why can't I simply be logged in, see a popup to add a year of access for $25 (but only $15 the first year!), and one-click it all away? That sounds reasonable. I know I'm not the first person to express this desire, and if I am, god help us all.
But what I really wanted to talk about was the sites that are now guilt tripping me about using AdBlock, and using my general dislike of irrelevant, resource-hog, no respect ads clogging up my browser experience as a reason to block me from their probably pretty sweet content.
I notice that I have never had a site complain about using Ghostery -- another great add-on. Give them money.
Ad World, is that too much to ask? I'll ease back on my efforts to blackhole an entire department at most companies of any size (aka ads/marketing) online, if you ease back on all the shitty user-hating advertising techniques. And don't tell me some asshole is sitting there telling you users aren't that bothered by being harassed by ads in every conceivable way as they do the internet-equivalent of walking around the neighborhood for a morning walk. That's exactly what a person who kills kittens would say. And I ask of you, dear reader, are you a kitten killer?
God forbid ad companies look beyond turning SNR into money-fountains and start wondering why huge amounts of internet users, particularly younger users, want them entirely removed from their online existence. And possibly offline too, but hey, I appreciate a good ad every now and then too.
I like Flickr, domain registrations, car insurance, and a whole long list of other companies that bill me a reasonable amount of money ($25) yearly to access their content -- maybe not even all of it, and that's okay! I guess insurance really isn't "content" nor is it anywhere near that inexpensive, but you get the idea...
Washington Post has locked me out a couple of times too. How is it I am not automatically logged in as an Amazon user? Why can't I simply be logged in, see a popup to add a year of access for $25 (but only $15 the first year!), and one-click it all away? That sounds reasonable. I know I'm not the first person to express this desire, and if I am, god help us all.
But what I really wanted to talk about was the sites that are now guilt tripping me about using AdBlock, and using my general dislike of irrelevant, resource-hog, no respect ads clogging up my browser experience as a reason to block me from their probably pretty sweet content.
On a quick side note, isn't it brilliant how Facebook Mobile in particular keeps its users within its own garden when they are browsing the general internet via the app, which is ridiculously easy to get lured into, until you wonder where all of that terrible advertising came from, and realize you're using the un-AdBlocked internet, in a panic.How about when you ask me to disable AdBlock because of writers gotta eat and packets ain't free and yada yada yada ... How about you also promise to not serve me shitty, disrespectful ads? Ads that auto-play anything with sound. Java onMouseEVERYTHING (everyone abusing mouse exits has been great, good work frontend world) can all go to hell. No Flash, hopefully obviously. Text. Integrated, lower-impact graphics. Remember Google before like 30% of Google's first screen was ad space, like a decade ago? Get back to basics before trying to sell me on totally new marketing channels built by robots in response to stalking me around the internet.
I notice that I have never had a site complain about using Ghostery -- another great add-on. Give them money.
Ad World, is that too much to ask? I'll ease back on my efforts to blackhole an entire department at most companies of any size (aka ads/marketing) online, if you ease back on all the shitty user-hating advertising techniques. And don't tell me some asshole is sitting there telling you users aren't that bothered by being harassed by ads in every conceivable way as they do the internet-equivalent of walking around the neighborhood for a morning walk. That's exactly what a person who kills kittens would say. And I ask of you, dear reader, are you a kitten killer?
God forbid ad companies look beyond turning SNR into money-fountains and start wondering why huge amounts of internet users, particularly younger users, want them entirely removed from their online existence. And possibly offline too, but hey, I appreciate a good ad every now and then too.
Friday, November 23, 2012
Wherein I attempt to justify something ridiculous
I made it about 25 years on this planet before I really had any first hand interaction with the "designer" world. My then-significant other was into nice bags of varying brands, but more interestingly, she had an old (and real) Louis Vuitton handbag. It was a one of their signature medium-sized handbags in classic monogram print; it had been a gift well over 10-15 years prior.
One day -- at her insistence, because I was a hater at that point -- I took a closer look at that bag and was honestly impressed by the quality of it. It may have just been a bag to tote around junk and had spent a significant amount of time sitting on public transit seats, but you could tell some serious craftsmanship had gone into the design and creation of the bag. Kinda like when you got your hands on a unibody Macbook and just thought, "This feels like quality."
The leather had aged very nicely -- and once you have a general idea of what quality, aged leather looks like, it definitely caught your eye -- but most importantly it was in 8.5-9/10 condition cosmetically, and 10/10 condition functionally. It had a few scuffs on the highest impact areas, but overall it was kind of amazing at how well it had tolerated a decade or two of abuse and minimal care.
Shortly after, she started dragging me into various designer stores and we'd have fun browsing around but very rarely bought anything, and almost always something quite small, but then a certain line leather used in a lot of men's stuff at Louis Vuitton really started to grab my attention. I was really impressed at the texture, color, stitching, and quality of anything in their "Utah leather" collection -- which varied from wallets to $3,000 messenger bags. Something about it really appealed to me and I found myself wanting some of it, but just laughing at the ridiculous prices.
But one thing was for sure: I definitely need a new wallet. My then-current one had lived its 7-10 year life of abuse and was finally falling apart. It was the 4th or 5th wallet I had owned, and the 4th or 5th to fall apart. All of my previous wallets were $5-$20 but the one that needed replaced was a nicer $40 one from a well known brand. And it was in shambles. I went to Nordstrom and looked at all their wallets, I went to Coach and Gucci and a few others I forget the names of to look at nicer ones, but nothing came close to matching the appeal of something from LV's Utah leather collection.
Nothing came close to matching LV's ridiculous prices either. But I did it. Under a haze of rap music and Thai food, I wandered into the LV store literally across the street from where I was working at the time and just blindly bought the one I knew I wanted. It was so ridiculously expensive, but it was kinda fun. I looked at all of their wallets and landed on one of the most expensive ones: a $740 + tax "compact wallet" in "coffee" color.
Louis Vuitton has even nicer packaging than Apple!
Guess how long it took for my nerd friends to start making fun of me? It was pretty much immediate. But I stood by one thing: as long as I didn't screw up, this should be the last wallet I ever buy in my entire life. I won't quite break even unless I live to be like 110, but at least it will become less ridiculous with time. As I was reminded during Thanksgiving, not enough time has elapsed yet, and people still find this purchase ridiculous.
When we saw Inception, like 3 people turned to me after the line, "Here's my wallet, there's $500 in there, and the wallet is worth more than that," said by the rich guy. I gave them the death stare back. I am genuinely embarrassed when people call attention to this purchase around other people who don't really know me because, I imagine, a lot of incorrect things are inferred about a guy who would spend that much on something like that.
Of course, the handful of people I know that have a taste for the designer world were "golf clap" level happy for me. One of the things I liked the most about it was, at the end of the day, it looked like a normal wallet. I see the occasional monogram or other well-known printed wallet from a designer in the wild and, first, it's hard to tell if they are fake or not without taking a close look (unlike most bags, which are obvious from a mile away), but second I was not buying a logo; I was buying an extremely high quality product (rationalization is a very important life skill).
In the 3 years since buying it, not a single person has noticed it and said anything unsolicited. The only time it has come up has been when the conversation has turned on me and it's time to make fun of my ridiculously expensive wallet. Most of the time, I don't even bother to defend myself anymore. (It's all in good fun).
3 years of being sat on by me daily later
Thankfully for my wallet -- literally and figuratively -- LV has lived up to my expectations regarding quality (so far). Every few months I clean it off and recently I took a close look at it: not a single stitch is even blemished, let alone damaged or broken. Other than one very small scuffed area on a high impact corner, a couple tiny marks I've made on it, and some minor wear caused by plastic cards that can't really be avoided (I bought it to use it and do almost every day), it is in perfect condition. I'd give it 9-9.5/10 cosmetically, and 10/10 functionally -- after 3 years of abuse by me, and being sat on. A lot.
Try to find something wrong! Other than the price tag
There is probably some corner of the academic and corporate world that is dedicated to studying this feeling and people out there who can drop some serious Knowledge and Words about the topic, but that person is not me.
If a stitch seems misaligned or not the right size, it's probably functional; this is the highest use area of the wallet
I am not a rich person, nor did I buy a logo (I think), nor do I think I'm awesome because I own some material good, nor have I ever shown it to anyone without them wanting to see it for some reason (okay, I showed it off to my sister unsolicited, I admit it). Usually it comes up because someone witnesses some haters who already know about it hating. Part of the disconnect that happens with the haters of "the $800 wallet" is that by caring less about money -- like I like to think I do, but am not sure about overall -- and material things in general (ditto), it becomes easier to make relatively poor financial decisions (but nothing that is going to send you to bankruptcy court at the end of the month).
If I lost the thing, I'd be sad, but I might buy another one (probably/maybe not). If it got stolen, I may replace it via insurance (I've asked and it's covered). If a pet ate it, I'd probably be upset for about 5 seconds, but at the end of the day it's just a wallet, and it's not the end of the world; plus, hopefully it's a rich friend's pet and we find ourselves at LV the next day; perhaps in Vegas as well. I do my best to take care of it and keep it out of harm's way, but I definitely bought it to use it.
And by "haters", I usually mean friends. Like I said, its all in good fun. If you haven't done anything stupid with a credit card in your life, you haven't lived at all.
Over the years I have seen plenty of 10 year old wallets that cost $20 and are still in good condition (but not as nice as this one will be! and arguably lower-abuse -- like carried in backpacks or bags instead of back-pocket) and I respect that some people just can't process spending that much money on anything like this, but hey, I'd do it again, and hopefully you understand at least a little bit of why this random guy on the internet did.
While researching this post I learned the wallet I bought has gone up in price by approximately $100 since I bought it.
Friday, October 12, 2012
Clearing up the cloud
Congratulation Mercedes! I was watching TV the other day and one of your commercials where you said your cars are "cloud powered" or "cloud enabled" or something like that came on and I knew it had happened: the use of the word cloud has officially become a joke.
Overall, I realize marketing and salespeople mean no harm when they drop the c-word, and I realize that the vast majority of consumers aren't big enough nerds to have a nuanced idea of what cloud computing is, but I definitely think there is room for some general education on what the word means, and what systems administrators hear when you say it.
If the term cloud strikes you as an old one, it's because it's been around forever. You won't get 50 pages into any networking book from the 90s before you find your first network diagram that involves something that looks like a cloud. Historically, the cloud has been used in network diagrams to signify the public internet -- the part of the network where you no longer have control.
The first definition of cloud is simply the public internet. So if your company has a presence on the public internet, congratulations! You can put cloud on as many pieces of marketing you want to.
Obviously that is not a very high bar -- just about anyone is on the internet (you bet your ass my blog is cloud powered) -- so this definition of cloud has become more like #2 at this point.
The other definition is much more interesting, but requires a little bit of digging into how the internet works. I'll do my best to keep it simple.
Amazon Web Services is a shining example of what cloud computing really is. Note that I have never actually used it before, but that's part of why it's so good: I could be torn out of my world of physical servers and trips to datacenters and thrown into a world where everything is virtually hosted by the AWS cloud of servers that I will never see or physically interact with without really feeling that much pain. Amazon built a great system of servers to sell people stuff, but then they started to say to themselves, "What else can our cool network of servers do?" and they came up with AWS. Now I question what date the projection charts say AWS will be a bigger business than amazon.com the shopping site, if it hasn't happened already.
Traditionally, if I wanted to host a website somewhere, I'd have to do it myself using my own computer resources, or I'd pay a managed hosting provider to do it. Managed hosting is the right choice for a lot of people (and we can think of Google as the managed hosting provider of this blog), but you have to live within the confines of what the provider is willing to let you do (Google won't let me install Wordpress on blogspot for some reason), and what other people you share the servers with are doing. These drawbacks are often irrelevant (I could care less how many catblogs blogger hosts), but as you design more complicated web-based software, you really start to see the advantages of managing your own hosting.
It used to be that managing your own hosting in a business environment was a much more significant cost and time undertaking than it has the potential to be now, largely because of services like AWS that make it easy. You had to hire a systems person to coordinate it all, you had to find and lease some space at a datacenter to put your servers in, you had to buy a significant amount of server and networking hardware. The scale hugely varies, but nobody would call it cheap. I'd ballpark a full cabinet in a nice datacenter with a reasonable amount of bandwidth as bare minimum $1,000 per month, probably closer to $1,500, and definitely with 2-3 year contracts attached. That's just the rent, humans and hardware not included.
Another disadvantage to managing your own servers is that you have to worry about a lot of things that aren't necessarily top concerns at managed hosting places. For example, suddenly you are responsible for all the redundancy that must be built into your servers in expectation of hardware failing, you are responsible for keeping your backups running consistently and knowing how to use them, you are responsible for figuring out how to serve your clients traffic if your entire datacenter goes offline -- which definitely happens (though good luck getting a good datacenter sales guy to even acknowledge the possibility of it happening).
I'm not saying all managed hosting providers are competently on top of all these major issues (some certainly are), but at least they aren't entirely your responsibility.
This is where AWS comes in. Instead of having to deal with your own physical servers located in datacenters, what if Amazon told you they could sell you some of their unused capacity and you could treat it exactly as if it were your own computer? And you'd be charged based solely on usage. And it can scale as big as amazon.com which is infinitely for all intents and purposes. And it can handle catastrophic failures because it is big enough to be designed to. That is what AWS offers.
This is cloud computing: servers that scale immediately and pretty much infinitely, located in geographically distinct locations in case of major catastrophes, and have the ability to heal themselves within some generous limits.
It would be like if your Mercedes SL sports car suddenly turned into a G people-mover when you had more passengers to transport. Or if you got a flat tire, an identical Mercedes would appear within a few seconds and seamlessly move you and your passengers into the working vehicle. Now that is a cloud powered Mercedes!
Managed hosting is still the right choice for a lot of people. AWS is the right choice for a hugely increasing number of people. Hosting your own hardware is the right choice for another significant chunk of people. For now, the tech world is respectably split into these categories and none hold a significant monopoly, but I have a feeling that will change as AWS puts managed hosting out of business, and companies can't resist the appeal of doing things cheaper in AWS instead of managing it by themselves entirely.
No matter what you do, you are technically "cloud powered" to some extent if you are on the internet, but marketers and, more importantly, sales people need to understand when you drop the word cloud on a nerd who manages private clouds, or one that manages servers within a public cloud, you are using an extremely loaded term -- certainly not one that has any business being applied to cars.
Finally, I have used AWS as my sole example of a cloud computing provider in this post, but there are plenty of competitors, and the number is growing daily. I am still of the school that does everything in-house and I think I like it, but I do get jealous of my systems friends who provision very large servers with a few dozen keystrokes, while I have provision large servers by researching exactly what hardware I want, convincing my bosses it's a good idea to buy then, lugging them to the datacenter, getting them mounted and cabled properly, installing them, and networking them.
Overall, I realize marketing and salespeople mean no harm when they drop the c-word, and I realize that the vast majority of consumers aren't big enough nerds to have a nuanced idea of what cloud computing is, but I definitely think there is room for some general education on what the word means, and what systems administrators hear when you say it.
If the term cloud strikes you as an old one, it's because it's been around forever. You won't get 50 pages into any networking book from the 90s before you find your first network diagram that involves something that looks like a cloud. Historically, the cloud has been used in network diagrams to signify the public internet -- the part of the network where you no longer have control.
The first definition of cloud is simply the public internet. So if your company has a presence on the public internet, congratulations! You can put cloud on as many pieces of marketing you want to.
Obviously that is not a very high bar -- just about anyone is on the internet (you bet your ass my blog is cloud powered) -- so this definition of cloud has become more like #2 at this point.
The other definition is much more interesting, but requires a little bit of digging into how the internet works. I'll do my best to keep it simple.
Amazon Web Services is a shining example of what cloud computing really is. Note that I have never actually used it before, but that's part of why it's so good: I could be torn out of my world of physical servers and trips to datacenters and thrown into a world where everything is virtually hosted by the AWS cloud of servers that I will never see or physically interact with without really feeling that much pain. Amazon built a great system of servers to sell people stuff, but then they started to say to themselves, "What else can our cool network of servers do?" and they came up with AWS. Now I question what date the projection charts say AWS will be a bigger business than amazon.com the shopping site, if it hasn't happened already.
Traditionally, if I wanted to host a website somewhere, I'd have to do it myself using my own computer resources, or I'd pay a managed hosting provider to do it. Managed hosting is the right choice for a lot of people (and we can think of Google as the managed hosting provider of this blog), but you have to live within the confines of what the provider is willing to let you do (Google won't let me install Wordpress on blogspot for some reason), and what other people you share the servers with are doing. These drawbacks are often irrelevant (I could care less how many catblogs blogger hosts), but as you design more complicated web-based software, you really start to see the advantages of managing your own hosting.
It used to be that managing your own hosting in a business environment was a much more significant cost and time undertaking than it has the potential to be now, largely because of services like AWS that make it easy. You had to hire a systems person to coordinate it all, you had to find and lease some space at a datacenter to put your servers in, you had to buy a significant amount of server and networking hardware. The scale hugely varies, but nobody would call it cheap. I'd ballpark a full cabinet in a nice datacenter with a reasonable amount of bandwidth as bare minimum $1,000 per month, probably closer to $1,500, and definitely with 2-3 year contracts attached. That's just the rent, humans and hardware not included.
Another disadvantage to managing your own servers is that you have to worry about a lot of things that aren't necessarily top concerns at managed hosting places. For example, suddenly you are responsible for all the redundancy that must be built into your servers in expectation of hardware failing, you are responsible for keeping your backups running consistently and knowing how to use them, you are responsible for figuring out how to serve your clients traffic if your entire datacenter goes offline -- which definitely happens (though good luck getting a good datacenter sales guy to even acknowledge the possibility of it happening).
I'm not saying all managed hosting providers are competently on top of all these major issues (some certainly are), but at least they aren't entirely your responsibility.
This is where AWS comes in. Instead of having to deal with your own physical servers located in datacenters, what if Amazon told you they could sell you some of their unused capacity and you could treat it exactly as if it were your own computer? And you'd be charged based solely on usage. And it can scale as big as amazon.com which is infinitely for all intents and purposes. And it can handle catastrophic failures because it is big enough to be designed to. That is what AWS offers.
This is cloud computing: servers that scale immediately and pretty much infinitely, located in geographically distinct locations in case of major catastrophes, and have the ability to heal themselves within some generous limits.
It would be like if your Mercedes SL sports car suddenly turned into a G people-mover when you had more passengers to transport. Or if you got a flat tire, an identical Mercedes would appear within a few seconds and seamlessly move you and your passengers into the working vehicle. Now that is a cloud powered Mercedes!
Managed hosting is still the right choice for a lot of people. AWS is the right choice for a hugely increasing number of people. Hosting your own hardware is the right choice for another significant chunk of people. For now, the tech world is respectably split into these categories and none hold a significant monopoly, but I have a feeling that will change as AWS puts managed hosting out of business, and companies can't resist the appeal of doing things cheaper in AWS instead of managing it by themselves entirely.
No matter what you do, you are technically "cloud powered" to some extent if you are on the internet, but marketers and, more importantly, sales people need to understand when you drop the word cloud on a nerd who manages private clouds, or one that manages servers within a public cloud, you are using an extremely loaded term -- certainly not one that has any business being applied to cars.
Finally, I have used AWS as my sole example of a cloud computing provider in this post, but there are plenty of competitors, and the number is growing daily. I am still of the school that does everything in-house and I think I like it, but I do get jealous of my systems friends who provision very large servers with a few dozen keystrokes, while I have provision large servers by researching exactly what hardware I want, convincing my bosses it's a good idea to buy then, lugging them to the datacenter, getting them mounted and cabled properly, installing them, and networking them.
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