Well I have been perhaps a little depressed lately but nowhere near
as bad as that heading makes out. I was going to use "the only
constant is change" as a vague pun about PHP v8 no longer willing
to accept unquoted variables as array indices, insisting that such
unadorned labels must refer to a defined constant. It'll probably
be a long while until I switch over to PHP v8, but I fixed a
handful of such instances last week in a diversion while fixing
bugs in my online store, probably a result of me either getting
confused by, or copy/pasting from, the unquoted array variable
format inside strings (which I was relieved to confirm isn't
changing). But change and failure are the same, everything that
works will break after enough change, and that's a better theme for
my past week. This doesn't just refer to carefully-argued changes
in programming languages, or even to human decisions in general.
Change is rife as much in the things we ignore as in the few
intellectual topics we feel passionate about. Wear and decay are
change, eating relentlessly away at the physical realisations of
designs once outlined in a coneptual state of pure perfection.
Mistakes are change, the little differences in process that dart
reality outside the bounds of our own intended outcomes, building
and cancelling themselves in an unseen rhythum that has a tiny
potential to one day peak in absolute catastrophy.
In the real world these changes sometimes create success: Changes
to designs are of course made to improve them, decay of designs can
create its own beauty, and serendipitous mistakes frequently
shortcut technological advancement. But none of this is guaranteed.
The only constant with change is that beyond some unknown threshold
it will lead to failure, of human concepts and intentions in all
their physical manifestations. This is the weight of change that we
all have to lift, raising it above that threshold of failure.
So I've been busy with that heavy lifting lately. The website thing
killed me - fix one bug, cause another, and I only seem good at
discovering bugs when I go back to test it one last time late at
night. Then I stay up late while my tired brain insists on finding
fixes to them before bed, which then have to be fixed again the
next day because I was tired and doing a rubbish job. Though
somehow tired-me is much better at least at getting to the root of
a problem than awake-me who tries too hard to understand everything
that's going on and ends up wandering down all sorts of dead ends.
The result is that I only seem to make progress at this in
day/night cycles, which frustrates the hell out of me, especially
because before a night's testing I always think I've finished.
That got me into my late night / late start cycle again, so I made
an effort to catch up over the weekend and hence I have time to
write this phlog post in the morning for once. Though I'm running
out of that time because I'm go extremely slow when I start on the
philosophical stuff, so this is about to get rushed...
The weekend was stuffed up by my washing machine dying. It's the
newest appliance that I use besides perhaps the A/C, so in my
pessimism about modern technology I suspected it would be the most
likely to break, and I was right. It was the control electronics
that failed, so I set to fixing them. I'm pretty rubbish at
debugging electronics as well - I inderstood it fine and quickly
tracked the problem down to the switch-mode power supply (which in
a typical show of excessive cost-cutting, isn't isolated from the
mains so testing it safely is very inconvenient), but then got
bogged down in checking every part of the circuit and was
bamboozeled by an unusually-labeled Chinese-brand PTC thermistor in
series with the AC input, substiuted for the fusible resistor in
the datasheet's reference circuit. I also lost my place and started
referring to the wrong schematic in the datasheet at one point,
which at least caused me to _absolutely_ rule out every component
except the one that has failed. Unfortunately that's the one
component of which I haven't a suitable spare - the switch-mode
controller chip. It's widely available at least, but to buy one
that's probably not a Chinese fake I've got to pay $15 postage on
top of the $1.70 cost for the chip, and it'll probably take a week
for the "next day delivery" to my location outside of the
internet's known universe. What really pisses me off with the
design of this machine though is that they have a rotarty switch on
it with an off position. Does the switch actually cut the mains to
the power supply and power-off the microcontroller in the off
position? No, the microcontroller turns all the lights off, but
that circuitry is still on 24/7 waiting for that one day of the
week where you actually use the thing for an hour or two. Why? So
the manufacturer can save 50c by not needing to use a mains-rated
rotary switch. It's bloody ridiculous. I might hope that
environmental responsibility ideas would have had them fix that
since my model was made in 2011, but odds are the current model
probably uses even more power in its pretend switched-off state so
that it can talk to smartphones and phone home via the internet.
Anyway I never trusted it and always turned it off at the wall
anyway. That chip probably would have burnt out many years earlier
if I hadn't.
I also saw on the TV news, after they'd finally stopped rambling on
about stuff in America, that Michaels camera store in Melbourne
closed down after 106 years and gave all of their unsold stock away
for free to people on the street. Further research reveals that
they actually closed last year after getting knocked about by all
the pandemic lockdowns, and this stock seems to have been
everything that they've failed to sell online since. Anyway it does
mean that I count myself lucky to have visited their camera museum
in 2019 during my last visit to Melbourne. At 10,000 cameras they
claim that it's the world's largest private collection, though they
only had room to display 3,000. It was actually quite tucked away,
up a staircase and past some offices, but it was very well
presented in fancy custom-made display cabinets. It was the last
attraction on that year's day trip and I spent so long there that
they'd started closing the shop and had to let me out their secret
door onto the street - it's funny all the places you can pop out of
in these big cities. So as it turns out I discovered it just in
time. There's some talk in old articles from last year about the
collection being donated, but there doesn't seem to be any new news
about that.
The webpage for the collection is here:
https/michaels.com.au/pages/the-worlds-largest-camera-museum
Actually it shows me that, after three years, I've forgotten most
of what I saw there anyway. Such is life. But hey, I did take
photos! I just have to get around to developing them.
Since then I haven't been back to Melbourne due to lockdowns, and
although the date for my annual visit is approaching rapidly for
this year, the requirement to wear a mask for the entire train trip
there/back, and equally the presently rising COVID case numbers
because most other restrictions have been lifted, rule it out for
me again. I was always a bit suspicious that I'd catch something
even before, given all the crowds (not in the camera museum though,
I had that mainly to myself), one of many reasons I kept it to one
visit a year. I'm guessing there's been a lot more change there
since than just a 'failed' camera store. But it's probably time
that I stumped up the cash to pay for accomodation and found some
new places to visit besides those within day-trip range, and
perhaps without quite the same rush to get around everything before
closing-time (though that does add a sense of excitment).
Finished at lunch time because I did take too long in the end.
