December 2003 Archives

You know, for as much spam as I get about the Paris Hilton Video, and for as much as people are talking about it, you'd think there'd be a shitload of places hosting it that aren't like professional porn/spamhauses.

Here I decided "I'll see what all the fuss is about with this damned video"... I've never been a huge porn-hound, but it's not like it disgusts me or anything...

Thing is, it's damned near impossible for me to find a copy. ;-) Maybe it's that with all the years I've spent actually paying for my software that I've completely lost whatever knack I used to have for finding illicit items on the net, and I just have a problem paying for something that was illicitly distributed to begin with, and that everyone else seems to be obtaining for free. ;-)

UPDATE: Someone e-mailed me a URL for a WMV file, except that for some reason it "requires Media Player 9", but the latest Media Player 9 for the mac completely fails to handle the file... so I guess I'm now looking for the MPEG version. Sigh. Maybe I'm just not meant to watch. ;-)

There is nothing more frustrating than having a dream, seeing someone in your dream who you recognize -- i.e., it's someone you know and have had conversations with -- and when you wake up, you can still see that person's face but still can't connect the face to a name. It isn't "the person's image has faded from your mind so you don't remember who it was", it's "I see the image clearly but can't for the life of me remember where I've met that person before, because I know I have!". You're like, "I know him/her! Who the hell is he/she?!"

It's a similar feeling to when you meet someone at a party and can't remember their name. At the party, though, the nervous panic over whether you'll get caught overrides the self-anger about why you're a dumbass who can't remember the name.

Yeah, you may remember me... I was the guy driving the Jeep Liberty on 9W north this afternoon. I was doing 65-70 in a 55 in the show-off lane, driving along at a good clip, getting ready to pull back into the normal lane. You were the guy who decided I wasn't getting back over fast enough for you, so you decided to gun it past me in the "normal" lane, doing about 80.

I wanted to thank you for getting in between the State Trooper's radar gun and my car. It was much appreciated. In exchange for you playing "Secret Service catch-the-bullet" with my speeding ticket, I'll happily buy you a beer at the local establishment of your choice.

As a kid, on my Commodore 64, I loved playing Choplifter. I was an addict.

I am now addicted again, as someone has turned the Choplifter of old into Chopper, an OpenGL game for OS X. Same basic interface, significantly greater graphics and sound, same great levels of fun.

Thank goodness I don't have any significant book-work to get done while it's in tech review...

I know I've touched on this before but it really hit home for me this weekend.

I spent the past few days watching Season One and Season Two of Dawson's Creek. I'd always written it off when I saw commercials for it... after all, it was on the WB for god's sake. But then I got trapped in a hotel during a firestorm and found that the show wasn't all that bad.

One thing I've found odd, though... nearly every movie aimed at teenagers or young adults has -- as its protagonist(s) -- a collection of people who could easily appear in the center of a Gap ad.

Even twenty years ago, a show that was supposed to be about the school geeks starred the extremely hot Sarah Jessica Parker.

John Hughes was pretty good about it, but even his "social outcasts" were terminally cute, like say Molly Ringwald in Pretty In Pink.

I know why it happens... the beautiful people make eye candy on TV. But the reality is that they're not all that populous. By and large, the average teenager sits somewhere in the middle.... not terribly popular, but not a social outcast either. They're not the superhottie, but they're not terminally disgusting either.

Why is it, then, that television and movies don't aim more for that demographic? It would seem, to my limited understanding, that you could get better ratings with actors and actresses of merely average looks, playing characters of merely average popularity, because those are the characters that the target audience can identify more with. Sure, some of it is the escapist, living-vicariously-through-the-characters'-eyes type of appeal, but there has to also be some attraction to characters to which the audience can truly relate.

Maybe it's just me. Other than Office Space, I've had literally dozens of shows that I liked, but none that I related to.

I have always been a big fan of the folks at despair.com. Their demotivational materials are some of the funniest, most original stuff I've seen in years.

For those not familiar with Demotivators, they look strikingly similar to the motivational cards, posters, calendars, that inane middle-management think will help improve your productivity if they're plastered all over the office place. These posters, cards, and especially calendars, however, are for the "realists" among us... detailing things like "Retirement" ("Because you've given so much to the company that you don't have anything left we can use"), or "Discovery" ("A company that will go to the ends of the earth for its people will find it can hire them for about 10% of the cost of Americans").

If you're one of my cynical friends, you've gotten your annual christmas present of a Demotivators calendar before, so you know what I'm talking about.

However, there's something different this year. The folks at Despair, Inc., have been working with Mark Osborne, an award-winning film-maker who has done several short animated films. His first, More, was something I downloaded and watched over and over again. It's a story that resonates pretty well despite the lack of dialogue, and can easily be considered a cautionary tale for today's entrepreneurs.

Despair, Inc. (well, actually a subsidiary company of theirs called Copernica), helped Mark set up a distribution channel for his product, and thus www.happyproduct.com was born. (HappyProduct is a reference to something in the movie).

I cannot recommend it highly enough. There's a QuickTime version of "More" available on happyproduct.com, so you can see what it is, and I'm sure you'll go buy a copy on DVD afterwards. Mark also has another movie being released in a couple of days, called "Greener". ("Greener" was actually made first, but released second, in the way that often happens with movie projects).

I was trying to find the name of a company I'd looked into several (3+) years ago to purchase a stand-up arcade game in (to pass it along to a friend). Not finding it in any of my "archives" I cracked open a ZIP file I hadn't opened in years: the backup I made of my Eudora mailboxes on my last Windows machine, which appears to have been shut down in December of 1999.

I found some of the most amazing e-mail messages in there that brought back tons of memories....

Tonight was the annual opening of gifts at the parents' homestead. My father got what every male with a DVD player needs -- a copy of The Godfather Trilogy on DVD. My mom got a couple other DVDs she wanted, as did I, including a very cool Weird Al DVD I'd had on my wish-list for a while.

My mom, ever the avid reader of this site, also bought me a couple "cookbooks for one", based on a recent blog entry, as well as a very cool Yankees Watch.

Of course, the greatest present this holiday season was knowing that the book was -- by and large -- done, and that we didn't have to worry about it going into the holidays.

Happy Holidays to all those who have a holiday to celebrate...

The days I actually "go into" the office, versus the days I work from home, are the days that I seem to get absolutely nothing done.

If you only telecommute one or two days a week, you probably haven't noticed this. If you telecommute more often, like I do, you've probably noticed this. It seems to stem from the "Oh, I haven't seen you in days/weeks/months," type of phenomenon where there's a bit of chatting about catching up on work stuff, then another (longer) bit of chatting about catching up on non-work stuff.

Meanwhile, during none of that chatting are you actually managing to get anything done.

I've gotten to the point where I just practically write off the days I have to go into the office as being valuable only for "doing work in the computer closet that needs to get done". Otherwise, they're a complete waste of time.

Although my commute day this week will yield a department lunch/party so I guess it's not a complete waste. (Although an astute observer will point out that I'm not going to get any work done from the dining area at P.F.Chang's)

We are now at Terror Alert: Orange

Now, seriously, wasn't the whole point of the "threat chart" was to try and indicate to the public realistically what the "imminent threat" was of being attacked by those Men Of Evil.

But we've been into "high risk" several times already, with nothing in sight. In other words, I don't buy it. It's not doing it's intended purpose. I see "orange" as "ooo, pretty color", and not that there's a real threat of harm because we've been here so many times already.

In other words, it appears that the "scale" they're using is way off. If, in real life, you do something "high risk" a bunch of times, you'd expect that the risk would catch up and something happen one of the times. We've yet to see that with Threat Code: Orange.

So this member of the populace has reached the point of ignoring the colors. They're meaningless.

I think it's just an excuse TSA people, et al, can point to during the holiday season, when people are most likely to complain about the jackbooted-thug treatment at the airports. After all, the heightened alert statuses do tend to coincide with the peak travel periods all the time....

I downloaded the latest-greatest version of a piece of shareware the other day. It didn't work right. I asked vendor what was up? The first version didn't even work through a proxy (I use an ad-blocking proxy), the second version appeared to be trying and failing to get image data.

The author sends me a debug version that creates a log of all the socket data it's dealing with. I notice both that the image is being sent with Content-type: text/plain and that there seems to be some & entities in the middle of the binary JPEG data.

So this, to me, says "Ah, the ad-proxy is seeing that it's type text/plain and trying to fix things that are broken."

We're on the fourth "debug version" and every time I include a polite request to "please please please fix the Content-type on the image data and I bet this problem will completely go away since the proxy won't think it's content it can fix".

There's nothing worse than pointing at the bug, waving like mad, jumping up and down, while the software vendor wanders off looking in a completely difference direction.

For years, every time someone claimed to come forward with "images of ghosts" or "haunting spirits", it was some crazy whack job, or the image was so poor that it could be a christmas bulb's reflection on the lens of the camera.

Except that at Hampton Court Palace in Surrey, just outside London, they got a decent shot. Someone kept leaving the fire-doors open in one section of the palace, so the security crew scanned back into the archives of the security tapes, looking to see who they should yell at.

It looks like the culprit might have died a couple hundred years ago.

What makes this story believeable are the details... it wasn't like anyone was looking for a ghost, they were just looking for something completely different. The crew -- who usually dress in period costumes -- confirm that that's a period costume, and it's one that they don't actually have so it's not one of them.

Right here, actually, having just gotten back from the 12:01 Return Of The King showing. It was myself, Little George, and Big Dave. (Mark and Big George were too pussy to go, whipped as they are)

Once again, I am unable to see the trees across the lake from my apartment. Well, I can see them if you count "there's this area of grey that is darker than the rest".

The snow is back... total accumulation is expected to be between 9 and 14 inches between today and the overnight.

There's something to be said for being snowed in, though... I've got some bread baking in the bread machine, had a cup of hot cocoa (one of those things that I only drink when it's snowing out), got to watch the last bits of Buffy Season 5, and then started watching the new Horatio Hornblower box-set.

More importantly than all of that, though, is that being snowed-in has meant work is getting done on the book. I can't believe that the last of it won't be ready (for our part) for the reviewers within the next day or two. I have no idea how long after that it would take O'Reilly to typeset the copies they send to tech-review, but probably not all that long, given the way the process works.

There's a light at the end of that tunnel.

Things which suck: Coming home, not feeling all that terribly great, just wanting to order in some food and relax and do nothing

Things which rule: Coming home to find the Buffy, Season 5 Box sitting on your doorstep, giving you something to watch while doing said vegging out.

How can OS X not include vmstat?!?!

Here I am, in a situation where it looks like I'm swapping, so I decided "Hey, let's take a look at the output of vmstat and see if I'm paging in and out!"

Except there's no vmstat.

That's gay as hell.

Spotted on Dean's World:

There was an article in the New York Post about some comedians' performances at a Howard Dean fundraiser.

What disturbed me was not their performances, but the Post's characterizations of the fundraiser as "an angry X-rated fund-raiser"... in fact the article goes on to use the phrase "X-Rated" no fewer than three times, in just under half the paragraphs in the eight-paragraph article.

Now, the last I knew, the way to get an "X" rating was to show copious quantities of direct sexual contact (penetration, etc.) or to show absolutely insanely ludicrous over the top quantities of gratuitous violence (a la the first cuts of RoboCop that you can now only get on DVD as the "unrated" version).

If the use of the word "shit" or "fuck" by a comedian is considered by the New York Post to be "X-Rated", methinks it's entirely possible that paper is just a teensy-tiny bit too stuffy. What's next? Men and women holding hands in public! The travesty! Maybe the editorial staff should move somewhere more in line with their moral standards....

Tonight, I start something new in my life. I've known for a while that I needed a form of exercise, but couldn't find anything that could keep my attention. Going out walking/running - to me - is just boring as hell. I'd love to play baseball, even poorly, except that almost all mens' leagues are softball only (plus it's pretty seasonal, it's hard to play baseball in a foot of snow).

So I decided to take up fencing. I know it'll be tough, but it's a year-round sport, and it's one that I think I'll find interesting enough to stay with it. Plus, once I purchase a couple hundred dollars worth of equipment, I'm going to be kicking myself every time I don't use them, so that'll keep me motivated as well.

Now I just need to really and truly decide what style of fencing I want to partake in... I've been thinking about epee, since the barrier to entry for me (as a newbie) will be lower, since I don't have to worry about learning the semantics of right-of-way and such (yes, in fencing there actually are prescribed rules for when you may attack the opponent... except they don't apply for epee). By the same token, though, if I take foil or sabre, then I'll learn right-of-way, and if I decide down the road to switch for some reason, I won't be completely in the dark on the topic.

In Brown v. Board Of Education, the practice of "separate but equal" as it applied to racial separation was found to be unconstitutional.

There are similar cases that discuss separation based on sex.

So why is it we still have mens' and womens' rest rooms?

You may chuckle under your breath upon reading that, but how is having "separate but equal" bathrooms any different fundamentally than having "separate but equal" drinking-fountains, or seats on the bus, or doorways to use to enter public buildings?

I understand that abolishing separate but equal bathrooms would probably spell the end of the urinal as we know it, but I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing (especially as any guy who's ever had to deal with the "public bathroom piss trough" can attest).

There must be some reason for the holdout nature of separate bathrooms, but I can't for the life of me figure out why... I have to believe at some point in time, some guy (or girl) was pissed off at the much-shorter line for the other folks' bathroom and decided to make a case out of it... if not, someone should...

I ordered a piece of software from MacMall (no link, obviously, since they're here for crappy customer service). I got an e-mail that it had shipped, uncluding the "tracking number", this huge thirty-digit thing that bore no resemblance to a tracking number for any shipper I'd ever used. I cautiously fed it into all the major companies' tracking systems, all of which replied "Sorry, that's the most screwed up looking thing we've ever seen, and it's certainly not a tracking # for one of our shipments" (well, more or less anyway grin)

So I decided to give them a call, and asked innocently "do you have the tracking number for that package?"

CSR: "No sir."
DB: "It's coming FedEx, right?"
CSR: "Yes, sir."
DB: "And you don't have a tracking number for a company that doesn't offer shipment WITHOUT a tracking number?"
CSR: "Sorry, sir, we don't give out tracking numbers."
DB: "What do you mean you don't give them out?"
CSR: "We're not allowed, it's company policy."
DB: "But you did give me a number, it's on my order confirmation on the web site, I just can't make heads or tails of it."
CSR: "Sorry, sir."

... thus ensuring that I won't be ordering from MacMall ever again. If you've got the fscking number, you should let me track my own package, damn it.

Why couldn't they have changed the name?

Seriously, the "reimagined Battlestar Galactica" on SciFi is great science-fiction. The problem is that because they called it Galactica, I find myself comparing storylines between the old and the new, and really there's no comparison. Aside from the title and some character names, there's very little in common between the two.

Those changes are well-documented other places, and I won't go into them here.

I'll be back, watching it again tomorrow night. Not sure how long it'll survive on the TiVo, though. I've learned to compensate for my "comparitive nature" by just making the occasional snide comment back and forth with Jay via instant messenger. Helps me put it in perspective.

I have these jagoff neighbors. They're several apartments down from me, but they like to park their car -- not in the parking spots off to the side of the road, but off to one side of the road. They probably justify it by telling themselves the only car they're blocking in is their own, etc., etc. (which is probably true).

Except that their car also sits now partly in the road. Now, as anyone who's been to my apartment can tell you, the road to get back into the apartment complex, as it passes between the rows of apartments, is quite narrow, certainly it's narrow when an ill-placed car is parked so that half the car is sitting in the road.

Meanwhile, there's a crew of people trying diligently to keep the road clear (cuz, you might have heard, we're having one of those blizzard things up here), but this jackass' car is making that pretty darned hard for them to do that.

Personally, I'd pay good money to see them either flatbed the bitch out into an impound lot, or just say "oh, that must be where we're supposed to deposit the snow" and bury the fucker. (Actually saw that last year... car didn't move when it was supposed to for the "plowing cleanup" after the snowstorm, so the woman came out to find her car hidden behind three snowpiles of about 4-5' each).

Admittedly, my neighbors aren't as stupid as Jay's who got told "one more noise complaint and you're fucking gone", and then proceeded to turn up their stereo full blast, but this guy has to got to be at least ranking somewhere near to that....

I remember my first concert... Iron Maiden on the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son tour, in the summer of 1988, at the RPI Fieldhouse in Troy, NY. It was so damned hot that summer that the fieldhouse turned on the ice so that it would counter the oppressive heat of the summer. By the end of the night, the ice was completely melted away, as one might expect.

I think I paid Ticketron about $19.50 for that ticket, including the convenience charges, etc. If I had ample ambition, I could find the ragged envelope that has ticket stubs going back to that first show (because I was the kind of kid who kept that sort of thing) and find out for sure.

A couple years later, in 1994, we marveled at the "greed factor" of the Woodstock94 folk, for their "ludicrously inflated" ticket price of $135 for the weekend...

I'd been waiting impatiently for two weeks for tickets to go on sale this morning for Iron Maiden...for the first time in years, they're bringing the entire stage-show over to the states, and on the road. The whole deal.

Except that it's about $70.00 per ticket before the TicketMiser thieves start tacking on surcharges, etc.

The cost of living in twenty years has not increased nearly four-fold, so what is there to explain this huge cost-delta between "then" and "now"? How much of this is the band's greed, and how much of it is the managers, promoters, venues, etc., all raping the concert-goer for big acts, knowing that people will pay it?

Sweet fucking lord, no, he's the antichrist!!!!

OK, maybe not... but it's funny, admit it.

Today, Yahoo announced "Domain Keys", which they claim is the answer to forged e-mail.

Their solution is thus: You send mail from foo@domain.com through the domain.com mail server. Your mail server adds a cryptographic 'signature' header to the message when it goes through. Now when someone receives the e-mail they can look at the header, compare it to a public key shared via DNS zonefiles and verify "yup, it's a real message".

Which all sounds good in theory, but in practice, just doesn't hold up.

The anti-spam community has, for years, been convincing ISPs around the world to block tcp/25 and tcp/587 (the mail ports) from their dial-up and cable customers, forcing those customers to send mail through their ISP's mail servers.

Except that such filtering is completely at odds with that filtering process. If I was on a dial-up line that was so filtered, and wanted to use my domain, megacity.org, I'd have to send it through my ISP's servers.... except that my ISP has no way of crypto-signing mail for megacity.org.

What if I wanted to send my mail using my acm.org forwarding address? ACM doesn't even have a mail server I can send my mail through, they're strictly a forwarding service. Nope, in a DK world, that gets completely broken, with no solution offered.

Both of these types of problems are solved in the SPF solution that's been the front-runner in the open community (you know, where standards get debated by your peers, not just dictated by 800# gorillas).

In that respect, I say it thus: As soon as the headers, etc., that this "Domain Keys" system uses are announced, I will be pushing for blocking mail that uses it, as punishment for breaking legitimate use of the net in the of blocking spam. It's one thing to do "what must be done", but when there are solutions to the same problem which don't require breaking legitimate mail, then there's no excuse for doing so.

Tis the season to be spending lots of money on Amazon, buying stuff for others and for yourself. Being a cheap bastard, I always choose super-saver shipping (because it usually only adds one day to my order).

So I throw three items into my cart. Two are pre-orders (on different days), and one is current. Each item individually sells for more than $25.00.

I click "Ship my items as soon as they become available" and "Super-saver shipping" (because I know that mathematically it's impossible for the smallest possible shipment not meet the $25.00 super-saver-shipping criteria).

I'm sorry, no can do. You must select "ship all at once" for that option to work.

Well, since one of those items (which is not a gift) doesn't get released until the week before Christmas, I'm not going to wait that long for the ones that are gifts.

So, Amazon, you had the option of the paperwork being simple with one order, etc. etc. Now you have three shipments, each going out on a different day, but instead of being able to tie them all back to a single order, they're on three separate orders. Maybe you might want to consider coding the logic into your system to recognize that if the lowest-priced item in the cart is higher than the minimum for super-saver, to just let the customer do what's easy for them instead of making them jump through hoops.

I could understand it if I had some items at $12.00 or something, because you don't want to have to code shipping logic into it (will that item ship alone or with something else, etc., etc.), but if all my items are Super Saver eligible, and none of them is under $25.00, why make me go the long way to get that feature? Dumb.

I'm sitting in the hotel getting ready to head over for my last day of training, and some talking head is on the Today show, talking about how "This is the year, you must get a flu shot, even if you've previously been anti-flu-shot, you need to get one this year!"

Of course, I think it's entirely possible that the same talking head said the same exact thing last year.

I'm trying to figure out what the reason for the sudden (in recent years), push for everyone to get flu shots.

"Many people will have side-effects including flu-like symptoms."

Ummm, dumbfuck, if I've just gotten an injection of flu vaccine, I'm willing to put good money on those not being "flu-like", but being "flu" (albeit weak flu). Yeah, I'll trade "a chance of getting the shit kicked out of me" for "a definite chance of getting the shit kicked out of me" anyday. Not!

"Some folks will have an allergic reaction to them, but that's to be expected, and is worth the risk..."

Ummm, maybe to you, but for me? I'll just opt to not get myself injected with some shit that's going to give me the symptoms it's being used allegedly to prevent, and might have even worse reaction than the flu it's trying to prevent if I turn out to have a reaction to it.

For as obviously imbalanced towards the "bad" as flu vaccinations are, one has to wonder why it's suddenly become so hip to demand that everyone get a flu shot. I'm not a conspiracy theory nut or anything, but it does raise odd questions...

Last night, I lamented room service gratuities.

Tonight, I'll point out that it was much more economically sound for me to work up the ambition to head out into the bitter cold, drive over to Baskin-Robbins, buy myself an overpriced quart of ice-cream, bring it back to my room, and throw 3/4 of it away, than it would be for me to pay $6.00 for two (small) scoops of ice cream, a single strawberry, a dash of whipped cream, and a fancy name like Gelato. (oh, and never mind the unsatisfied feeling after the six spoonfuls of ice-cream are gone)

If you're going to charge a ludicrous price like that, plus the mandatory gratuity (but of course!), you at least ought to offer a value somewhat commensurate with that price.

Here's a hint: If I was willing to go out on a night as cold as tonight is, that's pretty damned overpriced.

PS - If anyone wants some ice cream, there'll be the better part of a quart of Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream for the next 20 or 30 minutes, if you're in the area. ;-)

As anyone who's gone anywhere with me knows, I tip like a madman. I'm Steve Martin in My Blue Heaven tipper. "You tip everybody!"

One thing that always grated on me, though, is ordering room service and getting the bill with 20% already added to it (or whatever the hotel adds). I don't begrudge the room service guy his tip, but I just can't justify putting anything on the "TIP" line of the bill when there's already a 20% gratuity added to the bill, and I think it's positively distasteful for the hotel to print the line in the first place.

Except, of course, that they all do it.

If you want to "force" the tip that way, then don't put the line on the bill asking me for more money. I'll give you a hint -- if you don't force the tip the waiter will probably end up getting more money out of the deal, at least from me (since I'm usually a 30% kind of guy, sometimes 33% depending on the mood and the service).