car allergic to vanilla ice cream

[LaurV]

I have a "car allergic to vanilla ice cream" problem (that story is at least 20 years old, but if you don't know it, google it before reading the post below, there are a million versions on the web, every idiot that thinks he is a psychologist retells the story in his own way, thinking he tells it better, but in fact screwing it up; so you should read the original one which is told first person, and the letter is shown without cuts, also first person, not retold, but that version I don't know how to find - edit: this is a close version to the original which I could find - anyhow, regardless of which version you'll find, you will get the idea; the moral of the story is about how to treat customer complaints, how to solve technical issues, and what's the difference between a "good" company who cares about its customers, as opposite to a bad company who doesn't give a sheep; however. people who retell the story often try to change the moral too, which is just plainly moronic).

I was looking for a long time for some old TV show, the name is not important, which at last I succeeded to find and download last week. There are more seasons, for a total of about 80 episodes or so, each episode about 42 minutes, no advertising, etc., the way you get it from torrents, and the way I like to watch them. Usually, I set the VLC player at about 1.5 speed, or even 1.7 or 2 if the sound is in English and I have good English subtitles, and watch 5 to 10 episodes in a row every night, till the show is gone. Sometimes I have to rewind to watch scenes I can't understand at first sight, or scenes that are too fast or too funny. But all in all, that's the idea.

One such movie show (which I was talking here about, in the past, at least few times), which has a much MUCH better effect if it is watched like this than if it watched live, is Columbo. When you watch 9 or 10 seasons for a total of about 70 episodes every Saturday for about 35 years (with pauses between seasons), you will still like the movie and the characters, but you lose the global view, and you don't remember how all started. But watching all episodes compacted in a very short period of time, you can see the whole EVOLUTION of the characters and actors, how they get more and more experienced, and complex, and complicate, how the real actors and directors, and scenarists are aging, they all get older, more experienced, wiser, etc., but they all lose that "spark" of the youth. Seeing Peter Falk getting 35 years older in few weeks is a freaky-enlightening experience.

But not about that I want to talk. To understand what follows, please pause here the reading, and read the vanilla ice cream story first.

This weekend I started my "watching session" with my "new old movie" show, and had the surprise that all episodes, but I mean ALL of them, were perfect, and I mean PERFECT, for about 60 or 70 percent of their length, then the last part was barely watchable, barely playing, skipping frames, showing blurry scenes, and all the stuff that usually means a bad compression, or a strange algorithm, a bad codec, or malformed video files (torrent blocks missing, incomplete download, garbage inside of files, etc), or a memory leak on the player side (because the issues were in the last part of each episode never in the first part, and that's a sign of accumulating memory leaks along the run). When this first happened, I decided to play them normal speed, and immediately the quality improved, but yet, it was still pixelating and skipping frames here and there, but only the last ~30-40% of the file. Never in the beginning! This got me very much intrigued, and I ended up re-installing the codecs, and then upgrading the whole VLC player, which was still a very old version (you know, if it works well, don't fix it!).

But the problem persisted.

Lots of nerves and anger! Even with the newest VLC, I still could not watch the last part of the episodes "cursively".

But doh, the files were downloaded from torrents, so what can you expect? If you want them to be perfect, pull out the credit card, and buy the movie... Or not?...

Suddenly, that spark, the diode in brain starting functioning, and I found the problem... Which had a very easy fix, and didn't need the credit card.

Who takes a guess?

Last week (for whatever unrelated reason) I switched from doing PRP with gpuowl, to doing P-1. And each P-1 assignment takes about 40-50 minutes, from which the last part, stage2, needs more memory, which was leaving too less memory for the VLC to unpack its 1080 HD frames... Somehow playing each episode (plus my struggle for the last part of each episode) was taking roughly the same time as a full P-1 test, and it was "synchronized" with doing those P-1 tests. When I reinstalled VLC and the codecs, it took me about 20 minutes, which somehow kept the sync, the duration of stage 1, so when I resumed the watching and skipped to the part of the movie where I had quit, it was still pixelating. So, the movie was playing perfectly if the card was crunching PRP or P-1 stage 1, but it was starting the pixelation and skipping frames when P-1 stage 2 was ongoing, due to the fact that both the stage 2 and the video player needed large amounts of memory. It was not related to beginning or ending of the episodes, but to the P-1 stage 2, haha. So, the fix was to stop gpuowl doing stage 2, i.e. schedule a PRP test which was taking few hours, during I was watching videos. Lots of fun!

[LaurV]

Guess what! It happened again! I was almost ready to reinstall stuff again
Then I remember the past...
"Who can not remember the history, is condemned to repeat it"...

[MattcAnderson]

Wow! I'm glad you found the solution to your problem.
Regards,
Matt

[Dr Sardonicus]

Originally Posted by LaurV

Guess what! It happened again! I was almost ready to reinstall stuff again

There's a saying, "Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades."

Then I remember the past...
"Who can not remember the history, is condemned to repeat it"...

As we grow older, we may perhaps grow wiser. But it often takes longer than it once did to bring our recollections up to the surface. And not as long as it once did for things to sink below the surface.

When I was young, I had nearly instant and total recall of all sorts of things, recent or long past. I didn't have to think about it. It was just there. But at some point I realized that more and more, it was no longer "just there." But it was a hard realization, going against my whole previous lifetime of experience. I began to say, "Of all the things I forget, the one that gets me in the most trouble is forgetting that my memory isn't as good as it used to be." I learned to take this into account, and devise countermeasures.

Thus it is, that sometimes I agree to do something, and rush off to do it immediately, and am told "You don't have to do it right now," and I say, "Yes, I do. Anymore, I have a new deadline: Before I forget!" (Or worse, before I forget again!) Memories sink below the surface much more quickly than they once did.

And, once they do, they can take their own sweet time coming back up, and may quickly sink back down again. So, if I suddenly remember something I need to take with me when I go out to run errands, I put it by the door. I deliberately do small tasks around the house, to give myself time to remember what it is I know I'm forgetting I need to buy, get that satisfying thought "That's it!" when I do, and write it on the shopping list I have in my pocket. That way, I'll most likely remember it even if I somehow leave my shopping list at home.

But "remembering history" does help. The more connections between things you know, the more different contexts you can put them in, and the more "handles" you have on them. And that really does make it easier to remember them.

And thus, easier to avoid having, once again, to learn the same thing the hard way.

[kriesel]

When I was young, my memory was like velcro; it only needed to be touched lightly once for a new item to be fastened on.
Now it's slippery, taking effort to get anything to stick for later. I call it teflon neurons.

And worst of all is short term memory, with a dismayingly short half-life.
Coping mechanisms include putting the incoming mail in the same place always, keys in the same place always, outgoing items in a bag hung on a peg by the stairs, written lists, etc. Really LOOKING, and consciously noting location, anytime anything is temporarily set anywhere that is not its usual storage place. And still the memory can sometimes be gone in seconds. Very annoying.