So my order to NewEgg was for two flash disks and two cans of compressed air "dusters", and as always seems to be the case Newegg divided them into two orders and shipped from two locations.

The flash disks shipped from Oakland by Fedex overnight, and Fedex tracking says they're at the Portland sort facility and on track to deliver today "before 8 PM".

The dusters shipped from Tukwila, WA by UPS overnight, and UPS tracking says it's in Portand and on track to deliver "by end of day".

So who will win the race, Fedex or UPS? Stay tuned...

UPDATE: AND THEY'RE OFF! UPS tracking shows "Out for delivery" as of 0701.

UPDATE: Fedex shows the package at Lake Oswego as of 0817.

UPDATE: Starting from the pit lane, Fedex now reports the package on a truck out for delivery at 0852.

UPDATE: And there's the checkered flag! 1220 Fedex wins. Now to see how well these memory sticks work.

UPDATE: I might have known; like all mass storage makers, they're using 10⁹ as a "gig" instead of 2³⁰. Windows says 468G.

UPDATE: And a 22G transfer went at 33 MB/s, compared to about 12 MB/s for the USB2 drives. I think we have a winner here.

UPDATE: And UPS limps across the finish line at 1320. And now I can go take a nap, thank goodness, because I really need one.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Daily Life at 05:33 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 235 words, total size 1 kb.

I'm really looking forward to this:

Lime is really getting into it, baby!

It might be in the next episode, but it's probably the one after that.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:39 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 32 words, total size 1 kb.

"J-Pop Idol Mayu Tomita Stabbed by Fan in Tokyo"

He stabbed her 20 times, including once in the neck. The only reason she didn't die immediately is that he was using a pocket knife. But there isn't anything else good about it. Depending on what he hit in her neck, it may be impossible for her to fully recover. With that many wounds it may be impossible anyway, and even if she can it'll take a long time.

Anyway, according to the report she hasn't regained consciousness, which is never a good sign.

(Note: there are apparently two idols with this name. This isn't the one who is in AKB48; this is the one who starred in the show "Secret Girls".)

UPDATE: Of course, there isn't anything new about rabid fans; ask John Lennon or Jodi Foster. But it's still sad when it happens.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Japanese at 06:27 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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It's winter and we're approaching the end of December. Which means Hijiri's birthday is coming up and soon she'll be 16 and elegible for a driver's license. In fact, she already has one. There's a country which will issue one for enough money (and if there's anything Hijiri has it's plenty of money) and the Japanese government will accept it and roll it over into a Japanese license without any test.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 01:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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A couple of 3-minute shows have been running for a while, so let's see what they've been up to.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 02:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 207 words, total size 2 kb.

I've been a bit worried about my lack of backups lately since my WHS died. I still have one NAS but one of the two drives in it reports as being dead. (Probably I could get it back by hitting it with the handle of a screwdriver when the power is off; likely the problem is the seek head is jammed. But it's been months and it's RAID and I don't know what would happen after that. Not worth the risk.)

A better answer is to have some other backup. A while back I bought six 128G USB2 flash disks and this evening I rolled copies of a bunch of my anime onto three of them. But you'd be surprised how few series will fit on 128G. My Railgun directory is 71G all by itself.

So another visit to NewEgg was warranted, and by damn they were selling 512G USB3 flash drives for about $250 each. So I just ordered two of them, and they're supposed to arrive on Tuesday, and we'll see how it goes.

Turns out all the USB ports on my computer are USB 3. The new drives are nominally rated 250MB/s write speed. I don't expect to make that, but surely these will be faster than the USB2 sticks I bought last time, which have been averaging about 12MB/s.

One reason I won't reach 250MB/s is that my NAS, where my anime is stored, can't feed data to me that fast. But it surely can exceed 12 MB/s.

I hope.

Regardless, even if these new drives are not very fast, this is 1TB of reliable storage that can't lock up because of a sticking seek head. And that's worthwhile all by itself.

(Oh, and by the way: this post is not a request for suggestions or advice. Just thought I'd mention that.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 08:29 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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The most important thing about an army is how diverse its soldiers are.

We'll win future wars because our enemies will look at the Army and say, "Hey, they have lots of women and homosexuals in the ranks. We better surrender."

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Rants at 12:59 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 49 words, total size 1 kb.

(Yes, this post is about anime, so stick with me.)

May I introduce B.F. Skinner? He did critical work in understanding conditioning. Everyone has heard of Pavlov's Dogs, but that had to do with low level neural circuits and its practical application is extremely limited.

Not so Skinner's work. He was studying processes which happen at the highest levels of the brain. It's known as "operant conditioning" and it's extremely powerful. It has to do with reinforcement: the person who is training you is trying to achieve certain results, and he uses rewards to make you comply.

It's more complex than that, however. How does the operator get across what he wants the subject to do? You start by rewarding behavior which is close to what you want, and get more and more specific as time goes on.

You want the pigeon to peck the keyboard of a toy piano. So the first thing you do is to starve the pigeon so it's voraciously hungry. The pigeon wanders close to the piano, and you dump some food in a hopper which the pigeon immediately eats. But it wants more, so it wanders back to the piano and when it gets a lot closer, you reward it with more food. It goes like that; eventually you reward it when it puts its head near the keyboard, and you reward it for pecking the keyboard, and so on.

Quite complex behaviors can be induced this way. And they can be reinforced really very strongly. He also studied "schedules of reinforcement" and came up with some surprising results. "Continuous reinforcement" is what you use when first teaching the desired behavior but it isn't very effective at maintaining it.

The most effective schedule of reinforcement is to reward randomly, with varying amounts of reward. Small rewards more commonly, and bigger rewards more rarely. If the reward schedule is consistent, the subject knows each time whether there will be a reward. But if the schedule is random, then he thinks, "Well, maybe this time it'll hit."

Skinner's work was anticipated by tinkerers a hundred years before him, when they invented the slot machine. It turns out to be a nearly perfect device for teaching people to stick coins in the machine.

So what has this got to do with anime? Wonderduck asks, "Why are we watching?" when really excellent shows come around so rarely and unexpectedly?

The answer is that we've been conditioned. Smaller rewards more often (shows which are good but not great) and an occasional masterpiece without warning -- isn't that exactly like a slot machine?

Which makes us think, "Well, one more try; maybe this one will turn out to hit the jackpot!"

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 08:56 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 455 words, total size 3 kb.

My fellow Americans, we have exceeded parity! There are now 11 guns in private hands in this country for every 10 Americans!

And all because of Obama. Every time he starts talking about "common sense gun control" gun sales go up another notch. Ammo.com declares Obama to be the greatest gun salesman in America, and I think they have a point.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in linky at 05:08 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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"Man admits to using gun in SE Portland hoverboard robbery, records show"

Hoverboard robbery? It must be the future already. I didn't know anyone was selling hoverboards yet.

UPDATE: Sigh; apparently they don't actually hover. It's like a segway without the handlebars.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 08:56 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 45 words, total size 1 kb.