Don’t fix the symptoms, fix the disease

I’ve had someone denying a specific set of symptoms to me (actually, asserting a state opposite to symptomatic) while the tone & pace of their voice were in fact symptomatic.

This is as silly as complaining about a virus or random crashing while running MS-Windows on a machine: these are symptoms, the disease is a system with an inherently unstable, insecure design.

Ditto pouring turps into your fuel tank, then complaining that the engine is all rough.

CQ DX CQ DX the engine will run roughly at least as long as you continue to feed it junk. The system will crash as long as the design continues to suck. The symptoms will always echo the presence of disease.

To cure the symptoms, trying to convince your subject to deny them is worse than futile, it trains said subject into pointlessness & into acting out a lie to please one person at the expense of another (& doesn’t it practically always?).

Identify (don’t merely guess at or wish about) & remove the cause of the disease — then, viola! No more symptoms.

Comments

Anonymous said…

Quite true. I'm wondering, though; what's with the CQ DX? I see no mention of radios elsewhere in the post. :P

21 March, 2008 10:30

Leon RJ Brooks said…

It’s a short-hand & potentially interesting way of signifying an attention-getting broadcast. Another way of saying “listen up!”

23 March, 2008 14:13

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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