journal features

proxy TV

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kokubunji, 2020.11.03

Today I hooked up a small Linux device between the new TV and our even newer Internet connection*. It's got a VPN client on it that can connect to anywhere in the world. I've set it to Toronto for now, because The Girl wants to watch some Netflix shows that are only available in the Canadian (and presumably US) version of Netflix and sadly not in the Japanese version. So when we want to watch Canadian stuff, we'll use the TV's LAN connection via that proxy. When we want to watch Japanese content we'll use the Wifi connection (not routed through the proxy) or the tuner or cable. TV is such a complicated thing now!

I managed to do this today because it's another holiday in Japan. Holidays tend to be very disruptive at work, sadly: the work stacks up for every day you're away, so Monday was a thirteen hour day and I'm expecting more of the same on Wednesday. One of my managers spent a twenty hour stint working through Sunday and until five AM on Monday. Another manager from a different department - who I coincidentally worked with at the company where I met Mari - was working with him for the last ten hours of that. These Japanese style "heroics", combined with Western-style "agile" practices - which have devastated orderly work and sane workloads - produce an intolerable endless loop of overwork. The hell of it was that they spent all that time recovering from a botched effort at hardening some Windows servers - a task undertaken because Security said so.

*We had a new line installed on Friday as we're already switching providers primarily so we can save a small fortune on our mobile service

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)