Excessive work this week to be followed by a vacation next week and I started feeling like crap this morning.
Joy.
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This is more like petty annoyance, but Iâm looking to buy an eReader, specifically one that doesnât require me to go through the rigmarole of installing wine, winetricks, 32-bit app of Adobe Digital Editions with all these other âgotchaâ utilities and apps, and creating tons of accounts, and over half the Kindle ads I see on Craigslist donât mention if they have special offers.
E.g. of companion install for Adobe Digital Editions 1.7 (the current one doesnât play well in WINE, I have read)
"suggested installs: opencl-icd:i386"
sudo apt-get install opencl-icd:i386
Reading package lists⌠Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information⌠Done
Package opencl-icd:i386 is a virtual package provided by:
nvidia-opencl-icd-384:i386 384.90-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
nvidia-opencl-icd-340:i386 340.102-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
nvidia-opencl-icd-304:i386 304.135-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
mesa-opencl-icd:i386 11.2.0-1ubuntu2.2
beignet-opencl-icd:i386 1.1.1-2
You should explicitly select one to install.
E: Package âopencl-icd:i386â has no installation candidate
Hurrdurr, such a cinch, right?Is it likely Iâm the only person in a metropolitan area of 2 million people who would care if special offers were on a used Kindle?
ETA: just went to Reddit, learned from a five-year-old news itemthat in my vicinity 1 in 124 people own a Kindle eReader. Is it still likely that in a metropolitan area of 16,129 Kindle readers I would be the only one who finds âspecial offersâ in eReaders unnecessary and objectionable?
Do North Americans fidget or take their stress out on others if they donât meet a minimum Required Daily Allowance of ads?
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Large, small, or what?
I have a lot of trouble with pdfs and djvus with @#$% jpeg-2000 images, and would like some way to test whether pdfs are compatible with my e-readers short of⌠installing them, checking, uninstalling, trying to reprocess, installing them, checking, etc.
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Size of ads doesnât matter to me, as I donât want any of them. When I read a physical book, I donât think âI need to take a break and look at some ads.â I donât believe ads are required in reading books (although I have noticed some legitimate trade nonfiction books are practically ads for the authorâs website, products), ergo they are unnecessary in electronic media when I have already spent money on the unit, and possibly on electronic format materials.
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I meant âsize of reader.â I havenât encountered e-reader ads. I have to block web ads to keep them from triggering migraines.
Iâd like an eReaderâs screen size to be at least 6". My phone allows some eReader apps but Iâm not into small screens, ergo not into the small print.
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I got a used Kindle Dx, but had to wait for a good sale. Occasionally a $40 one turns up before it reverts to the $200+ price range. No ads. I had to replace the usb cord, and have to reprocess a lot of pdfs because too many have edit passwords, or have jpeg-2000 images, or are scanned as jpeg-2000 images. But it has a big non-touch screen, and it has buttons, so thatâs good for me.
A couple years ago I bought some Mutex foam to protect agains backup beaters. It didnât work. Now I moved my desk and stuff to slip the foam under because maybe it would at least protect against bass-blasters and gear-grinders which shake the building. It hasnât been working there either.
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We had a fire drill recently at work, and flunked miserably because the firewarden didnât have an employee list to check off. The other warden who did know where the list was, was sick.
So, me and another employee suggested a clipboard by the main exit with a list, and that whoever is exiting by that door grab the clipboard and give it to the firewarden. That is it.
First firewarden liked the idea. Manager liked the idea. Went to second (had been sick) warden to say we could work on getting it up next week and was told âagain with that damn list. All we have to do is print up a list when we know when the drill is, and itâs fine. We donât need everybody checking off different lists.â
I tried to explain that no, there wouldnât be a separate checking off, all the person with the clipboard was to do is give it to the firewarden. No, I was told, that would be redundant. We have a list. An OSH committee member agreed that itâs just redundant, and neither one seemed to understand that no one other than the warden if they needed it would take roll or check anyone off the list. âWe have a list, that would be redundant.â
Redundancy is rather the point. Especially since the one they have hasnât been updated in over a year and nobody knows because only the wardens can see it (I got that from the conversation). If everyone could see the list, we could keep it up to date.
Why canât people understand that transparency and redundancy in safety systems is a good thing? Especially redundancy. Things can and do frequently go wrong, especially when the emergency is real. If you never engage the redundancy, thatâs fantastic. But youâll be damn lucky you have it it you need it.
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If it helps: where I work, there is a sign in the elevator lobby of every floor telling you what floor youâre on and which way all the meeting rooms are.
On the back of that sign is the list. The fire warden or anyone else can grab it on the way out. The plastic cover of the sign becomes the clip board.
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I just canât get over how hostile these people are to the idea,and how they refuse to wrap their heads around the idea that youâre not going to have two people doing checklists, youâre just ensuring that the person who does the checking at least has a list. If they have two and just use their own and ignore the backup, tell me where the harm is.
Because while they are claiming âwe have a plan and it worksâ, clearly it doesnât. Not when the absence of one person throws it into disarray. Itâs like I am accusing them personally, by trying to use an easy (and cheap) solution to help plug a hole, rather than relying on the hope that all the key people are present and not incapacitated when the real thing happens.
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And thatâs passable(?) for a fire drill, but in the even of an actual fire Iâd hate to perish because the printer was out of magenta ink.
Give people a title and it goes to their head.
Tangentially related, one manufacturing plant I worked in had a âFire Wardenâ who checked fire extinguishers and who knows what else because during a large RIF, he was some of the low hanging fruit to be picked.
Month later, we had a surprise inspection from the fire department and they knew where all the âproblemsâ were.
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From what you said, it seems pretty obviously about their pride.
Besides, if the list is easy to get to, anyone could take the roll call! It would be anarchy!
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Well, I can understand not wanting panic when three people have incomplete lists.
It just occurred to me, though that these people are not very computer savvy (they can do basic stuff, enough to function in an office, but not much more) the idea of redundancies and backups is not as familiar a concept to them as it is to those of us who grew up on âsave early and save oftenâ. Theyâve also grown up in cities that have largely escaped disaster.
I am⌠average with computers, but am enough of a data nerd to cry in the event of harddrive failure, and hate having to rebuild everything when a phone gets killed (or at least everything since the last backup). I also grew up in a rural area that saw bad flooding on average four times every year. I have learned that you canât count on anything going to plan and that shit happens faster than you think. But until you have actually had to deal with more than âjust a drillâ, sometimes itâs hard to comprehend the reality.
ETA: This is not a value judgement on rural versus urban upbringing, but an observation born from the fact that more isolated areas often spend time cut off from services. Urban areas that have never faced a significant emergency often have nothing but drills which canât fully simulate the chaos that a real emergency brings. This is why I am cynical about the kinds of drills for emergencies where you canât trigger a Pavlovian response (fire and evacuation drills work because we react to the bell, not the actual emergency) because people are really, really bad at thinking during the actual event.
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Incidentally, thank you for confirming that I am not entirely off-base on this. I know I can think a few degrees off normal at times, and itâs nice to know that I really am not out of my mind and that I didnât need my head ripped off over this.
Honestly, that was my thought. If all youâre concerned with is passing the test, youâre doing it wrong. Drills arenât just for fun or show â theyâre both a test of how well your system works (and whether you need to plug holes) and theyâre a way of ensuring that you donât have to think. You just do. If the only time you make sure everything is in order t is during a once-yearly scheduled test, then I am officially terrified.
Of course, the warden who said that is also the one who (in a previous drill) mocked me slightly for ensuring I had my keys, jacket, wallet and lunch cooler. She lives half a block from work, I live 35 km away. If thereâs a real fire, I want the ability to go home, too. Plus, I can grab all those things, lock my computer and still be the first person out the door, because Iâve practiced and donât stand around asking questions like âIs this real?â
Okay, itâs official. I am way too stressed out about this. Time to go play stupid games.
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So theres a fire everyone gets out the building except the fire warden whos currently booting up the computer, finding the file, opening the file, printing the file and leaving the oh wait they died.
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If I go outside to relax, I get hammered with the gorram construction noise. I have a neurological condition where pain can hurt, so I am sick of this pain.
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But the world is now one jobsworth the fewer, so thatâs possibly a net gain.
Making the survival of people dependent on their planning for their part of disaster fighting could lead to much more robust systems.
For instance, British civil servants used to boast to one another that they had now reached the level at which in event of nuclear war they had a place in a hardened bunker.
I am told (but am not in a position to verify)* that there is a UK bunker where the civil servants and generals will occupy the hardened bottom level.
Unfortunately the vehicles are on the top level and the water storage, aircon and food are on the next level down.
And thatâs what a classical education gets you.
The Germans were equally brilliant in WW1. They built special armored bunkers called Stollen to mass troops before an attack. Two small design faults:
Prone to flooding
Too crowded to sleep in so if the attack was cancelled the troops were subjected to shelling as they returned to their lines.
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Lack of respect from students, such as:
Students chatting in the middle of my lecture, like Iâm not standing there doing my god damn job, right in front of them. As if they arenât there to get an education, but to socialize.
Bonus: Students arguing with me, in front of the class, about their grade. How about come to my office hours to discuss it?
Seriously, it makes me feel like chopped liver⌠and I know this is much less common for male professors. And in both cases, these were young women disrespecting me.
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The level below the hardened bottom level? Or the level just below the vehicles?
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