Three Things a Post Makes, right?

[silveradept]

Three things a post makes, I suppose? Especially since they're all related to doing some amount of leveling up on things related to reading and language. And also technology.

1. I have finally learned how to use the transcoder Handbrake properly, I think. In as much as I can now create containers that have multiple audio and subtitle tracks contained in the files. This is good when you have a significant quantity of animation from your collegiate days that would do well to be digitized and added to the digital collections.
   
   For one particular series, however, the usual ability of "here's the series name, format the episodes this way, let the media scraper do the rest" doesn't work, because when the series was conceived, the first character in the official title is a period. This is not ideal, because many POSIX-based systems treat files and directories that start with a dot as hidden or to be ignored entirely. So I can't give it the actual title and have the scraper pick it up. After banging my head against this problem for a bit, aggravated by the fact that the series itself exists in the database that the scraper is pointing to, I finally remembered that a good deal amount of the World Wide Web also runs on POSIX-compliant systems, so there had to be something that the database website was doing as well to avoid getting all dotted up by themselves.
   
   So I took a look at the URI for the series in the database, saw what they had done for the series name, and thought "why not replicate that series name locally?" Lo and behold, once I had given the series the proper name that the database scraper was looking for, it quite cheerfully scraped it all up and provided the metadata that I was looking for. Yet another case of RTFM, I guess, but it took me a good long time before finally hitting on the solution that worked, even though the information was staring me in the face, quite literally. Huzzah for information professional-quality troubleshooting and persistence.


2. In that same vein, after having successfully diagnosed, then replaced, a light fixture in the kitchen, with the engineer in the family on the phone to make sure I didn't become part of a circuit I shouldn't, I took my hand and brain to the process of rooting and installing a custom operating system on a working but still bloated Kindle Fire. I thought I had done all the appropriate reading beforehand and knew which steps needed taking, but after diligently following the steps as they were outlined in the initial post, I put the Fire in an unrecoverable state because the post itself, as I would find out, did not accurately reflect the correct steps to take for the process. Had I read the entire thread of replies to the initial post (all 50+ pages of them), I would have discovered the pitfall and been able to avoid it, theoretically, around the 40th page or so. Usually, the owners of such threads are very good about keeping their initial posts updated with correct instructions, or using the "reserved" posts after them for FAQs and troubleshooting, so as that information becomes figured out in the threads, it is moved forward to the early posts for the convenience of others.
   
   Anyway, having bricked the Fire by following the process outlined, which was the wrong process, there was only one hope of salvaging the Fire and completing what I had started, for you see, the Fire of that particular type can be induced to return to a specific state through the process of creating a hardware short that kickstarts it into an appropriate state where it will be able to accept commands and have the downgrading and rooting processes completed on it. This was the first time I had to disassemble a tablet to get it back into a working order. (Also, this was all being done on a device that would be fabulous if it worked, but otherwise would be no great loss if it were irreparably broken. I take risks with my own devices, because I'm the one that's deciding to do that, but with others, I try to make sure that it's not a device that has to be production-worthy for them.)
   
   Memory served and reminded me that persons in the household had the necessary tools for removing cases and tiny motherboard screws and the other parts that were necessary to get at the circuitry. I borrowed a little wire from the time where I had constructed LED-light painters out of bottles and such - the sort of thing where I could have learned to use a soldering iron, except I instead opted to twist the wires together and they held well enough not to need soldering. (Plus, several of those spaces were going to be tight fits for the solder, and DEX is not always a good stat for me. Which is about to become very important.) I asked someone with better fine motor control than I to strip the ends of the wires using the wire cutters that I had found in one of the toolboxes.
   
   I was able to carefully extract everything, get the short to work, and finish the exploit work! Which is great. Except for the part where, as I was trying to put everything back together, I accidentally disconnected the battery cables from the motherboard. After a significant amount of other words that began with "mother," and a little research about how ribbon cables actually stay connected to their boards, I was successfully able to reconnect the cables. After checking to make sure that it turned on, the screen came on, and touch functioned, indicating I had successfully reconnected the digitizer, I quickly screwed everything firmly in place and reattached the cover, and then proceeded to do what I had actually intended to do, which was to replace Fire OS with something lighter-weight and less beholden to Amazon. So now, on the list of things I have done with my life, I can add "Used a hardware short to unbrick and root a tablet, using someone else's scripts." That was definitely an adventure. (It could have been avoided, had I either done more reading, or the original poster had clearer instructions.)


3. I got remarkably bent out of shape out of the presence of others about something that was ultimately small and trivial and didn't take but a few minutes to fix. I fixed the thing first, indicated that it was fixed, and then proceeded to grumble loudly about it to others, who were helpful and patient in trying to explain to me what the other position might be, for I am still a person who seems to switch between "everyone else's thoughts are more important than mine" and "everyone else is wrong," depending on how personally aggravated I am about the thing. And, often, about how much it affects me personally. Anyway, it was something saying that what I had hoped to achieve in a project wasn't possible, and could I please make edits so that it would be possible to participate? These are reasonable things to ask of someone, but it turns out that I have a part of my brain that very resolutely demands that words mean things, and that was where the upset came from.
   
   English, as a language, is rich and varied in shades of meaning and nuance, often because English is shameless about borrowing words from other languages and using them, with as much of the nuance contained in the original language as can be understood by someone borrowing the word. One of the more common things mentioned in my provincial upbringing was that the Inuit people have many words for snow, which was sometimes seen as weird and strange, because snow is snow, right? Except, of course, when you need to describe the difference between snow that you can stand on and snow that you will sink into. Or light fluffy flakes against heavier, wetter material. Describing the snow becomes a matter of importance, so you're going to get new words to put concepts into shorter forms and communicate information more densely.
   
   Or, in this case, certain words take on additional meanings that convey additional information about the situation. The request to change things had two parts to it, one of which said it was not appropriate to ask, and the other was not allowed by the rules set forth. I was having a much bigger reaction to appropriate than allowed, apparently because words mean things. It's not allowed just says I needed to read the rules more closely, or understand them better, but otherwise the people are doing the thing they're supposed to be doing to make sure it's all according to the way they want it done. To say that something is not appropriate is to attach a moral judgment to it that goes beyond "that's not okay according to the rules" and instead moves into "that's not okay to do in a society with shared norms." It might still be a mistake, but it becomes more worthy of condemnation because of what kind of mistake it is, that it shouldn't have been conceived of, much less actually done.
   
   And on that space, I definitely have opinions about whether or not something is appropriate, even if it isn't allowed. Because expressing your preferences for something in a space that is about making sure that important preferences are respected is entirely appropriate to do, even if it would result in a situation that's not allowed, and therefore there have to be modifications made or a request withdrawn. And words mean things. So I got mad at the slight I saw without fully understanding why I was mad at the one thing and not the other, until I recognized why. It's not necessarily fair to apply your own standards to the behavior and choices of others, but there are more than a few times in my life where the word I've selected is exactly the word that I want for a description or a situation, because while many of the possible words have the same general meaning, it's the specifics of nuance that I want to apply that goes into making the decision about what word to use. Not everyone exercises the same amount of thought about it, and not everyone has the same amount of ability to remember and use words in context that way.
   
   But, for the most part, it is probably an entirely imagined slight and I should not be so annoyed by it. On the positive side, thinking this through contributed to my understanding myself better or remembering that this is a thing for me, one of the two. Either way, a net good. So that's three good things that make up this post, right?

Comments

[silveradept]

It never hurts to know that you're not alone when you wonder about these kinds of things.

[batrachian]

That was my hope, yes.

[marahmarie]

Sometimes it's a progression! ie, "Everyone's thoughts are more important than mine" eventually can equal "everyone else is wrong" (put in a less formal way by me that often involves the personal invocation of glassforming techniques) - but that takes time and things happening to prove it, for the most part.

But words do matter; it can take very few at just the right moment to think I'm not in agreement with someone with whom I am and probably was all along.