A Civil War in Bolivia?

For my entire life I've been hearing that the Cambas (people from Santa Cruz, the plains) were better than the Kollas (people from La Paz, the mountains). I always assumed it was just a joke, that people didn't really think anything of it, like a rivalry between Purdue and IU or the Red Sox and the Yankees. People in Santa Cruz would say when they were travelling to La Paz that they were travelling to Bolivia, as if Santa Cruz wasn't really Bolivia. My uncle Nicanor would say that the 'cristo' statue at the edge of the city with his arms open pointing to the west was saying 'go away Kollas, go back to the moutains'.

Now, it's absolutely true that the country is culturally split in two. The mountains (La Paz, Potosí, Sucre, Oruro) were settled by Spaniards that travelled through Peru and the plains were settled by Spaniards that travelled through Buenos Aires and Paraguay. The indigenous people from the moutains (the Kollasuyo) didn't interact that much from the indigenous people from the plains (the Guaraní). The people in La Paz right now look towards Lima and Santiago for there cultural influences and the people in Santa Cruz right now look towards Brazil. But I can't believe that it's going this far.

I've read books where people talked about Bolivia splitting in two, but I always thought the authors were crazy. How can a small country that doesn't have much divide itself and become much less than what it was before. But, then again, Santa Cruz is now the economic powerhouse (obviously this is a relative word) of Bolivia. They have oil, natural gas, and agricutrual products where the mountains have nothing anymore (since the Spaniards basically raped the country for hundreds of years).

There are rumors that Goni (the previous president who was kicked out of office (and Bolivia itself) in a bloodless coup) is actually in Santa Cruz right now and is planning on becoming president of Santa Cruz if it breaks off. And the rumors also say that this is the work of the CIA, which prefers Goni (right winger who Bolivians consider an American since he's lived so long here). I have no idea whether this stuff is true but it's fun spreading rumors.

I done got myself a Mac (say that in a southern accent)

I got my first Mac today. It's a Mac Mini, 1.2 MHz G4 processor with 512 megs of ram and 80 gig HD. It's really fucking cool. It's soooooo small and sooooo quiet. As people I know have heard me say over and over again, I've been looking for a completely quiet PC for a long time. I was actually planning on doing watercooling until I decided to buy a Mac.

So, I have this Mac thingy now, let me tell you a little bit about what I think of it. The OS fucking kicks ass! It's really cool. All unix shit is there. Fink lets me get packages just like apt-get on Debian. I'm kinda weirded out by the installation process for a new app. I installed X11, XCode, and Fink right away and I'm currently compiling the Gimp, which is taking a fucking long ass time. And the mouse moves kinda weird, it's not like Windows or Linux. I wonder what's different, is it the acceleration?

Now, here's the big let-down: The Mac Mini is really slow compared to even a cheap PC. I had convincing myself that the G* processors are faster than Intel processors of the same speed. But, it doesn't seem like it's by much. Opening new tabs in Firefox takes a perceivable amount of time where my PC does it almost instantaneously. Yeah, I know: Compare this to what I was using even three years ago at home. But the most important thing for me is the lack of noise.

There's always one thing I'll forget

This weekend I decided to finally move my server, networking gear, and printer into the computer room closet. I have multiple reasons to do this, reduce the noise and clutter, reclaim more deskspace, et cetera et cetera. But the biggest reason was that I just ordering one of those brand spanking new Mac Minis and I wouldn't be able to use my printer with it since the printer is a really old HP Laserjet 4 Plus with only a parallel port. So, I rearranged the shelves and got everything to fit, made sure the internet connection still worked, then tried to setup cups on the server so I could print through the network. Pretty quickly I was able to get it up and running where I could connect to it through a browser running locally on the server and being displayed remotely through Exceed. The first test page printed out perfectly. But then I spent like three or four hours trying to connect from my other computer. I tried everything: screwing around with the cupsd.conf file, trying to setup Samba instead, et cetera et cetera. Then, today, I finally realized that I had a software firewall running on the box (in addition to my hardware firewall in front of it) and that I hadn't allowed those ports through. Damn, it's always one tiny thing like that. Well, less than five minutes after that revelation I had port 631 opened up and Windows XP talking with cups.

The Current State of Video Games

Laurel bought me a PS2 for Christmas, which I guess is four years after everyone else I know got theirs. But that I guess is normal for me. I usually try to get by on old stuff for way longer than everyone else. I get a certain satisfaction from that, getting use out of equipment that my friends probably think of as garbage. Part of my thing with being late to the current state of the art of video games is that I've always been late. My parents never bought a Atari when lots of other people had them. I never had a Nintendo when everyone had them. My brother and I finally convinced my mom to buy a video game console for us, the thirty dollar reintroduced Atari 2600. It was certainly fun, and we had lots of games because our friends certainly didn't want their old games. But it was also somewhat embarrassing. And that was it for consoles. I don't really think of it as a bad thing, at least not too much of one, because it forced me onto the computer to try to recreate those games by programming them myself. And I ended up getting a great education in Computer Science and a job at Amazon because of that.

I really loved those side scrollers that the [S]NES and the Genesis had but I stopped really loving console video games when the N64 and other 3d systems came out. The 3d graphics were pathetic and the games didn't seem like much fun. So all during highschool and college I slept on the N64, the Dreamcast, and the Playstation. I was pretty content with computer games. Civilization [III], SimCity [2000|3000|4], and Dune 2 provided me with years of fun. And believe it or not these simulation games even caused me to upgrade my computer, I bought a new computer with a gig of ram specifically because I liked played several month long Civ3 games on huge maps that would cause my old computer to pause for several minutes during each move.

Man, this entry has really gone off track. I'll try to go back to my original thread. So now I have this PS2 (which was very hard to come by for a four year old gaming system, I called several places for about a week and was just lucky enough to walk into a Fred Meyer that had just had a shipment in this morning and had one left, for me). And I'm playing SSX3 and I'm amazed by the graphics. I was blown away by the graphics four years ago when I first saw SSX on the PS2 and I'm still blown away by it. This is a four year old console, which means the technology must be at least six years old.

So I'm blown away by it right now, in 2005, but just imagine if I got to play SSX3 for a few minutes back in like 1988 when I was drawing gaming consoles of the future and writing their specs with completely insane numbers like 128Mhz and 64 megs of ram. I would probably have wet myself. No, I'm sure I would have wet myself. And now the PSP comes out. Holy fucking shit! I'm about to pee my pants right now. It looks like it's from the future. Look at it next to the other portable gaming systems of the present and past. It's sleeker than anything else out there and smaller than almost every other system. And it has the same power as the PS2. This right here was what I was dreaming of and drawing 17 years ago.

Interplanetary Internet

I haven't read any of the papers here but I've skimmed a few and they look interesting.

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/durst96tcp.html
http://www.ipnsig.org/techinfo.htm

I just got finished watching the latest Nova about the Mars Rovers and it made me think that it would have been easier to deal with the communcations on each of the rovers if they had an orbiting internet infrastructure to work with. Just imagine a constallation of at least a few satellites orbiting Mars with routers that route ip traffic to and from any rovers on the surface. So the rovers will be able to transmit to Earth even if they are pointing away. And there could be a satellite just for transmitting to and from Earth orbiting Mars differently.