Know thyself

Always good advice, that. In particular, try to know yourself well enough to avoid falling victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect, from either side.

One thing I've frequently been heard to say is that I know just enough about working with natural gas to know I don't know enough about working with it to be safe. This is, from a distant perspective, probably untrue, not least because I know enough to be cautious. Sadly, whoever was responsible for much previous gas work in this house was a victim of the effect from the low side; he didn't know to seal threads, which almost led to the house burning down before we moved in, and it turns out he didn't know enough to realise that gas hardware and water hardware are Not The Same Thing, despite both working on pipes.

I would love it if the gas standard became left-hand threads. That would make gas line idiot-resistant, in many ways.

The morality meter in games

Lately, I've been playing Fallout 3. Reasonably fun, for the most part, but it does have a mechanism called "Karma", which is essentially a measure of how "good" you've been by the game's standards. Sadly, this is a one-dimensional line. You can completely wipe out the effects of, for instance, blowing up an entire town, by repeatedly giving water to certain NPCs. It's also rather broken; I've had clearly "evil" characters attack me, and once I've done the game world a favour by removing them, been reprimanded by the karma system for taking their belongings. They're not using it any more, they were evil, I was told I was being good for killing them, but taking their stuff is bad, wrong, and evil. This seems distinctly broken, as does the entire concept; it essentially boils down to a count of puppies kicked versus kittens cuddled.

Such systems in games seem to be universally unpopular. They're generally heavy-handed. The least terrible version I'm aware of is in the Mass Effect series of games, which I've not actually played myself, but their morality meter is actually a two-axis job; it has scales for both "paragon", which is idealist (with a side order of "spineless wimp") and "renegade", which is pragmatic (with a side order of jerk-for-the-sake-of-being-a-jerk), and the two are essentially independent of one another. Unfortunately, the second game does some heavy-handed behaviour modification by means of altering your appearance based on how you've acted, and I dislike that. What I'd like is for each NPC to have their own preferences for "how people should act", and to react to the player character based on what actions of yours they're aware of (which requires a change in how such things are handled; currently, there's rarely if ever any restriction on what player actions an NPC can know of) and how well those actions line up with their concept of correct behaviour. Make it somewhat mor complex than the above-mentioned puppy/kitten count.

Of course, that's an unattainable pipe dream, and I doubt such a game would sell well, but I'd quite frankly rather have no morality meter than such a simple-minded one.

You don't need it.

One thing I'm constantly astonished by in the US is the prevalence of what I can only call monster trucks. Pickup trucks in general are far more commonly seen over here than in the UK, no doubt because over here they're available with far more plush interiors and lower registration fees than cars, not to mention laxer controls on emissions and consequently less strangled engines, but a truly amazing number of owners seem to have decided that now they have their pickup truck, they must of course modify it; which they achieve by altering the suspension and wheel sizing such that the truck now rides with the floorpan at roughly shoulder height to an average person. This lifting is generally described as being a benefit to off-road performance, which makes it all the more remarkable in its popularity; the vast majority of the moster trucks I see on a day-to-day basis are in near mint condition, with perfect, undented sheet metal, suspension components blazingly orange, and paintwork so carefully shined one could use it as a shaving mirror, although the acres of chrome brightwork would be somewhat preferable. I will admit to having seen a few trucks which had been lifted and had been offroad. I could identify them by the fact that they appeared to be held together by dried mud, rust, and maybe the odd wodge of chewing gum, and if they'd ever been painted, the ripples in what sheet metal remained were ample evidence that it had all flaked off long, long ago. There's no real middle ground when it cones to lifted trucks.

I suppose that this fad, much like the fad for putting two foot diameter mirror-finish wheels with tyres of approximately the aspect ratio of a rubber band (a cost of roughly a grand per corner) onto clapped-out rustbuckets worth maybe $200 on a good day, and whose handling may once have enabled them to negotiate the corners needed to parallel park, or the fad for replacing reasonably functional suspension with hydraulics with all the compliance of a housebrick (but which can cause the car to jump in place), will forever remain a mystery to me.

It would seem that I've become one of those people who doesn't understand the youth of today. I like my car because its seats don't hurt my back. I drive at reasonable speeds. I park carefully, unlike the inspirer of this post, who this morning parked their monster truck in four spaces at once. There were multiple cars circling the parking area looking for spots...

You can't do that.

I heard on the radio news this morning that the US government is considering getting rid of its much-derided colour-coding for "terrorist threat levels" (the one which never, ever went below orange, and only ever spiked up to red when there was an election the Republican party wasn't sure they could win coming up; and I must insert my joke about the getting rid of it being because the TSA saw the threat level was "Grape" and thought it said "Grope") and replacing it with a system which uses words. Specifically, one which has only two levels: "Imminent" and "Elevated".

You can't do that. If the danger level is elevated, it must be elevated from a lower level. That's what elevated means. To make "elevated" the lowest possible rung is far, far more blatant fearmongering than the never-less-than-orange rainbow ever was, and I am sick of it. Moreover, I am sick and tired of the average American reaction to terrorism, which is essentially to cower in the corner and whimper. I've said many times that the way to react to terrorism is ridicule and mockery. Laugh at them. Scorn them. Don't let them change your behaviour at all. Stop being scared. Fear and behaviour modification is their objective.

Trouble sitting.

Lest you think I'm some kind of automotive genius based on my last post, allow me to remind you that I'm a fool from time to time. This one, well... shortly after buying my car, it became clear to me that the velour seats in a fetching dark grey were going to get distinctly hot over the California summer. So, off I went, and acquired a seat cover, of the large-wood-beads persuasion, and fitted it. That was distinctly tricky, due to exceedingly limited space beneath the seat. The easiest part was getting the elastic straps through the gap between the back and the squab, and that was no picnic. Still, I succeeded, hooked the little plastic hooks on, and went on my merry way. Come winter, I removed it, to allow me to make better use of the heated seats. In the process, one of the plastic hooks departed, and by the time summer rolled around again, I was forced to make do, with both of the elastic straps, with velcro cable wraps. These were a sight tougher to manage than the hooks, and I barked several knuckles, but I again succeeded, and until that autumn, there it sat.

Today, it came time to reinstall the thing once more, and so I pulled it from the boot. The velcro made it tricky to feed the straps through, and my eye lit upon the height/tilt adjustment lever for the seat. "Aha!", thought I, "maybe if I adjust this, the gap will widen!"

It did not. However, I should have expected that, as the seat was already at the bottom of its travel, and upon the lever being moved without my bulk in the seat, it leapt to the top with a mighty SPROING! and moved no further. The seatback and the squab are a single unit, as one might expect of a seat designed by a lazy orthopaedic surgeon; so the feeding through remained annoyingly hard. With the seat a good three inches higher, though, connecting the straps beneath it was a breeze.

And it only took me two and a bit years to figure that one out.

Troubleshooting

As you probably know, I drive an older car. Old enough, in fact, that it has a few mildly intractable problems, such as the fuel gauge, which only works intermittently. It's seemingly random, but today I finally figured out the pattern. It had seemed to correlate with cabin temperature, but not during summer; when it was warm in spring, the gauge would work, but for summer it wouldn't. This puzzled me until I finally figured out the human factor.

You see, my car has working air conditioning. This pushes cold air through the ventilation ducts. The fuel gauge is on the extreme left of the instrument cluster, right next to the vent duct leading to the outermost vent on that side.

So, I have a dodgy connection somewhere in there, which sometimes expands enough from heat to make a good connection, and can be cooled to the point of not making the connection by the air conditioning cooling the ventilation ductwork. I'm inordinately satisfied with myself for figuring that one out.

A little about being me.

For some reason, probably to do with the world we live in having been built by extroverts for extroverts, I feel a little ashamed to admit that I am a fairly pronounced introvert. Introversion tends not to be understood by extroverts, but I see a bunch of misconceptions. Let me address some of them.

First: introverts don't dislike socializing. What's different is that we find it drains our energy, rather than increasing it as it does for extroverts. I have friends, I enjoy spending time with them, but it tires me. I put up with that effect because I have good friends whose company I enjoy.

Second: as I implied, introverts can and do make friends. In fact, I would guess that I am closer to my friends than I would be were I an extrovert. Because I find company tiring, I have to be sure of someone before I'll commit to spending time with them.

Third: introverts need time alone. Just as extroverts become depressed and unhappy without time spent with others, introverts deprived of time to be alone will rapidly lose their ability to operate as people. For both sides, though, a balance is necessary; however, dragging me to a place full of people to cheer me up will generally have the opposite effect.

As an introvert, I don't always follow society's unspoken assumptions. I'm polite and friendly, but I generally won't initiate conversation. Please, bear in mind that it's not because I don't like you. It's because I genuinely don't need the extra stimulation and human contact over and above what I already have, with my board game group weekly, my knitting group weekly, my roleplaying group weekly, and my hiking group as often as we can manage it. See what I mean about introversion not being the same thing as not liking people?