Sony Disc 18 Dream

2022-01-09Posted by xaminmo

Dreamland had a big party and I don’t remember everything. Basically my grandparents Davis’ house, and the kitchen was a living room. All of the cabinets and where the stove were had a bunch more cabinets, and we had a lot of books and storage information.

I’d just met up with one of the two really tall guys that we all knew from the parallel universe. He had a Sony video recorder that used Disc 18 which was basically an 18 inch analog laser disk. It had a 10 inch LCD on the other side. It had a 1.8 inch camera lens on one of the edge near the corner.

It had hand straps on both sides so it was easy to hold while watching playback. The recording quality was excellent, but it was a little bit of an older unit. Everything had been replaced with digital and gotten more compact but the guy who had it really liked it and wasn’t ready to make the change.

Another one of the guys had a special type of mask that he was trying to use so that he would be allowed to formally date his girlfriend from the other universe, but he kept forgetting to wear it, and was probably going to get denied.

The mask had a patch of blue surgical mask fabric that covered almost the entire bridge of the nose as a sort of clamp to hold it in place. It had elastic straps down to a small patch that cover just the nostrils and then another elastic patch that maybe hung off the lip or something.

I’m having trouble remembering exactly but it seems like possibly everyone from both universes maybe had more than two nostrils. This is one of those things that you just kind of don’t remember the details because it is so mundane.

It was all very vivid and probably spawned by some memories from when I looked up my moms house on Google Maps the other day, as there were similar memory feels, and vivid connections between the houses.

Anti-Wealth vs Anti-Corruption

2021-07-23Posted by xaminmo

These space races bring technology and cost reductions to everything we do in the world. Consider we were struggling to maintain GPS (as in, we had outages in some places in the US and around the earth), but now it costs 10% to launch GPS satellites, and SpaceX has had 5 launches.

People complain about internet access all the time, but now you can pop up high speed internet anywhere on earth, meaning you can move out to the country and still be connected. Monthly is about $100.

Branson and Bezos space launches are $250k per person. The extra seats were auctioned off, and raised $28m which was distributed to charities. It didn’t cost $28m for a launch, though there has definitely been a lot of research money spent. Research money spent doesn’t trickle down to the poor, but it does pay salaries, and pays for manufacturing, mining, etc. This literally pulled extra money out of a lot of wealthy people and gave it to charities.

A recent complaint meme was a zinger that “these billionaires should be competing to solve global warming, not go to space.” We all know how to fix global warming. It’s about being more efficient in everything we do, which is what these technologists are motivating people to do. But, a billion dollars, or even 100 billion does not “fix it”. A billion dollars would provide solar power for 25k homes. Barely a scratch. But a billion dollars can drive the creation of a lot of technology, and motivate a lot more change and improvement than you can buy off the shelf.

What’s happening is that they are transforming technology and the way society works. That is more valuable than buying something now, today. You might think buying food for people would help, but it would be better to work on sustainable technologies and things which help make food production possible. If you buy up all of the food now and give it to people, you just shift money to other pockets, and make food so costly that others can’t access it. You shift the problem, not solve it.

As to their money, these guys don’t have $200b. They own companies that other people want to own. If you have 1 million shares, the first share sold at the highest ask price, and multiply that out, that’s how people come to their prices. But, if you started selling them (to whom?), the price goes down, because not everyone wants it that badly. And eventually, as you start giving up real money, you find that the pressure is 30+ times the actual value of the company. For a small company, you could buy the whole thing, but for some of the largest companies, the valuation is so artificially inflated that the supply of money becomes a problem.

They do have multiple billions in assets, but they don’t earn billions. The memes saying “They made $16m today. Pay your taxes!) They didn’t make that money. That money doesn’t exist. It’s an artificial valuation based on the whims of people deciding whether they like a company or not. You want to tax someone highly on something they own being increased in valuation, then you have to refund them when the real value is less. This is why you tax people when they sell assets. Otherwise, your house went up in value. Why didn’t you pay 28% on that increase?

What’s happening here is that people see “He has money. I want money. Gimme.” It’s a propaganda war against people owning things and being a threat to other people who own things. Aim your frustrations at the real problems. It’s not someone owning property that other people want to buy.

Fight their anti-union stances if you want. Fight for higher wages and better benefits. Fight for higher minimum benefits, and protections against price gouging in pharmaceutical research. Fight for no more superPACs and no more lobbyist bribes and fight for ranked choice voting. Real things, not “big money is big bad.” It doesn’t mean anything coherent to say that.

Fight for changes in the way the economy works if you want. If you want no private ownership, be honest about that as well, but consider what happens when you have a horrible boss and no other job prospects. That’s what you’d be setting up.

It doesn’t make sense to say “ah, stop improving aerospace technologies. Liquidate their assets and spend it all right now.” Because then you don’t have the company doing the improvements, and you don’t have the money or assets for the next time you want to spend someone else’s money. But you would have all of the power of ownership consolidated into a much smaller group, which would have even less incentive to consider anyone else’s needs.

Dream: Time Travel to Isol

2020-02-19Posted by xaminmo

Had a dream where I was time travelling in my dream, and I got to hand our with my grandmother who IRL died when I was 8. Giant hugs were had. I got to see her as a fearless young woman, and she was testing out some roof slats on a shed before putting on the metal. I explained to her the other times I would dream visit as a kid and such, then showed her a bunch of modern technology. Dream grandmother was modelled after an acquaintance of mine who reminds me of her, and is pretty amazing. Dream prompt was probably connected because my IRL diet drug cancellation was due to slight cancer risk, and my maternal grandmother died of cancer (metastic colon cancer in the brain).

Dream: Time Travel to Isol

2020-02-19Posted by xaminmo

Dream: Time Travel to Isol

2020-02-19Posted by xaminmo

Dream grandmother was modelled after an acquaintance of mine who reminds me of her, and is pretty amazing.

Dream prompt was probably connected because my IRL diet drug cancellation was due to slight cancer risk, and my maternal grandmother died of cancer (metastic colon cancer in the brain).

Tesla 3 Solar Roof

2017-02-05Posted by xaminmo

Not much detail yet, but my guess is it’s something like this:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adom.201400103/abstract

Imagine this:
* Center layer contains IR fluorescing organic salts
* Refractors bend the new IR out to the edges
* Edges are high efficiency NIR photovoltaic cells.
* Inside layer would be reflective coated on the outer face.

This would reduce IR ingress during sunny days, and convert IR and UV to electricity.
The black edges could also be monocrystalline PV cells in the visible spectrum.

I think you could expect a few hundred watts during a sunny TX day, which would be enough to keep things topped off between short commutes.

After DR of a TSM server, do you need to restore the primary storage pool from the copy cool ?

2014-10-22Posted by xaminmo

It depends on if it’s small files or not. I normally have a small-file pool, which is the DIRMC, VMTLMC, and TOCDESTINATION. The offsite for this is kept reclaimed down to 1 tape, and I try to restore that primary pool first.

For large file, TDP, VM and image full backups, they can restore directly from tape, no problem.

For small files, block level incrementals, or instant restore, it depends on the number of tapes, number of drives and number of concurrent restores.

One restore with 6+ tape drives and it’s not much of an issue.

Ten restores with 6 tape drives could be an issue.

This is where properly setting your RTO/RPO and tiers in advance matters.

Tier-0 would be your TSM server, the DIRCOPY/DIRPOOL, ESX hosts, switches, arrays, etc. You’d restore or rebuild these directly before anything else.

Tier-1 would be the things you can restore within the first couple of days. It would be in one collocation group or one storage pool. You could restore those first, direct from tape. It should only be a small number of systems, such as a NIM server, HR/Payroll, and inventory/medical tracking. Primary systems only.

Tier-2 systems would be what can be restored within a week or two. This might be direct from tape, or restore to disk first. It would be any other important systems that your company can run without, but which is a serious pain to go a long time. Generally, this would be under 50 systems. You wouldn’t usually restore all of these at a normal DR test, but maybe a different subset at each DR test, just to make sure you *can* restore them.

Tier 3 might be the systems that you don’t restore for a few months. Some might be rebuilt from production clones, and some might just restore a source tree for critical system development. Dev, QA, HA, and anything else that you can operate without, but which should eventually be taken care of. You probably won’t ever restore this at a DR site, rather you’d wait until you fail back to new-production. If they were unrecoverable, they could be rebuilt, or decommissioned, without business risk.