New Year's Day

Wednesday, January 01, 2003

Does this mean that the Season™ is finally over?

Spring stopped by to visit Gregory in the hospital. He's doing better, but the fractures he received are a bit worse than first expected—each of the six ribs and the clavicle are broken in two spots so the bones are kind of swimming around there. But that appears to be the extent of the damage from his motorcycle accident, which is fortunate.

He'll probably be in the hospital for at least a week or so.

Now THIS is War Driving …

I am going to make an actual page for this sometime: all of us from portland going to codecon will have wireless equipment in our vehicles providing a roaming hotspot all the way down to san francisco. We should have at least three vehicles and as many as six during the trip.

c o d e r l o g: wireless caravan

A mobile network … the mind boggles …

Let's see … given sufficient laptops, 802.11b PCMCIA network cards and VoIP and I can see this being way more popular than CB ever was.

Thursday, January 02, 2003

Simple amusements

For those of us living in the United States, today is 01/02/03.

Okay, so I found it amusing …

Mickey Rourke on the Danish 20 Kroner

“The chin makes her look like Mickey Rourke in 9 Weeks,” he added, referring to the steamy 1986 film in which Rourke, who is famed for his skill in the boxing ring, has an affair with Kim Basinger.

Via a search engine request, Taking mickey out of Danish queen

I was going through the log files and one of the referers was to a search request for “queen margrethe+coints+pictures” (which was referencing the entry I did on some foreign coins). Intrigued, I started following links and I came to realize that not many Danish people are happy with the likeness of Margrethe II.

Fancy that.

Friday, January 03, 2003

A further lesson to the RIAA and the MPAA

So, there's been a slight change of plans. As you may remember (surely 2002 isn't too hazy yet), I serialized my most recent science fiction novel, Old Man's War, here in December, and this month I was going to put it up as shareware, a la Agent to the Stars. Well, I won't be doing that. The reason for this is that, well, I kind of sold it. Instead of being available as shareware, Old Man's War will be available either later this year or early next year in a hardcover edition from Tor Books, publishers of (among others) Orson Scott Card, Robert Jordan, Steven Brust and Teddy Roosevelt. Yes, really, Teddy Roosevelt. It's a reissue, I think, not one of those L. Ron Hubbard-eqsue “dictating from beyond the grave” situations.

Via InstaPundit, John Scalzi's Whatever: Change of Plans

Further proof that making intellectual property available increases sales of said intellectual property and I certainly hope examples like this will drive the point home (through the skull if we're lucky) of the RIAA and the MPAA.

Then again, perhaps we'll be lucky, they won't get a clue and implode instead.

One can only hope.

One last Gregory update

Gregory was moved to a rehabilitation center (for physical therapy) in Lauderhill last night, although there was some confusion as it appeared that Gregory was lost, either in transit or the bureaucracy (or both!) as the hospital has him discharged, but the rehabilitation center had no record of him. When Spring finally found him at the center, the head nurse explained that the receptionist was clueless.

When we went to visit him tonight he was looking much better as he laid there in the adjustable bed watching the Miami-Ohio football game on TV. He's now able to move about a bit and will be dischared from the rehabilitation center tomorrow morning (which means I was wrong about the length of his stay by a few days). He's going to be all right.

Sunday, January 05, 2003

More Ins and Outs of Calculating Weblog Traffic

As I do occasionally, I run the stats for the Boston Diaries. I use some programs I wrote to pretty much manually go through the log files as I feel it gives me a better feel for the actual traffic I get than if I were to use a program like Analog. Besides, doing it this way I often times find interesting things going on with autonomous agents silently indexing websites for their own nefarious reasons (muahahahahaha!).

I suspect that most people who run their stats don't take the time to really look into the results, because it wouldn't surprise me if the reported stats for most bloggers is inflated quite a bit.

I ran the stats as I have in the past and noticed that I had a higher rate of traffic than normal; I usually get about 100 human hits per day but last month it looked more like 116 per day. Okay, not that big a spike but enough to make me curious as to what's going on. I look at some of the requests that are being counted as human hits and I see [output truncated somewhat]:

213.60.99.73 GET /2002/11/29 HTTP/1.0 200 Mozilla la2@unspecified.mail
213.60.99.73 GET /2002/11/29.1 HTTP/1.0 200 Mozilla la2@unspecified.mail
213.60.99.73 GET /2002/11/23.1 HTTP/1.0 200 Mozilla la2@unspecified.mail

Interesting … seems to be some unspecified robot. A quick query shows it to be from Spain, but other than that, no real information unless I want to track this down further. I'm not that curious, so add that to the list of agents to ignore and rerun the stats.

Still high—about 114 visits per day. Check the requests and find:

12.148.209.196 GET / HTTP/1.1 200 Mozilla/4.7
12.148.209.196 GET /2002/6 HTTP/1.1 200 Mozilla/4.7
12.148.209.196 GET /2001/10 HTTP/1.1 200 Mozilla/4.7
12.148.209.196 GET /2000/6 HTTP/1.1 200 Mozilla/4.7
12.148.209.196 GET /2002/5 HTTP/1.1 200 Mozilla/4.7

Now that is odd. Netscape 4.7 is usually a bit more verbose about what it is than just Mozilla/4.7. Looking up the address I see that it belongs to NameProtect®:

NameProtect, Inc.® is committed to setting the industry standard when it comes to trademark research and registration services. As one of the world's leading trademark research firms, we have helped thousands of entrepreneurs, businesses, attorneys, and other intellectual property professionals with trademark needs.

NameProtect®—About us

Oh how nice …

I probably wouldn't be so upset over these guys if they weren't tring to hide behind a browser, or if they respected the Robots Exclusion Protocol, but they don't do either (and I wonder what they'll think of my using their logo here? It won't be the first time I got a cease-and-desist letter for trademark violations—my first, and so far, only one was in September/October of 1998).

This section of your report includes information on generic top-level domain names (.com, .net, .org) and other country-specific domain name registrations that are similar to your name. Use this section to identify potential competitors and assess the potential for your web traffic to be diverted.

NameGuard Free Name Monitoring

Okay, so removing the “anonymous” NameProtect® robot and rerunning again, I see I'm now down to a more normal 106 human visits per day, but just on the safe side …

4.64.202.64 GET /2000/08/30 HTTP/1.0 200 Mozilla/3.0 (compatible)
4.64.202.64 GET /2000/08/28.2 HTTP/1.0 200 Mozilla/3.0 (compatible)
4.64.202.64 GET /2000/08/31.3 HTTP/1.0 200 Mozilla/3.0 (compatible)
4.64.202.64 GET /2000/08/19.1 HTTP/1.0 200 Mozilla/3.0 (compatible)
4.64.202.64 GET /2000/08/14.7 HTTP/1.0 200 Mozilla/3.0 (compatible)
4.64.202.64 GET /2000/08/15 HTTP/1.0 200 Mozilla/3.0 (compatible)

Large number of requests from this address. 143 to be exact, the majority on December 8^th and requesting entries mostly from August of 2000. Hard to tell if this is an actual user or a robot someone is working on. If I filter these requests out, I get 101 human visits per day.

Which is about what I expect.

A brief snippit of overheard conversation

“Do you mind if I open the blinds?” I asked.

“No,” said Spring, “go ahead.” I head over to the sliding glass door. Spring starts singing: “Let the sunshine in! Let the sunshine in!”

“Cut it with the hippy crap,” I said, opening the blinds.

Monday, January 06, 2003

Maybe one day sanity will return to the airlines

Last Thursday I was flying to LA on the Midnight flight. I went through security my usual sour stuff. I beeped, of course, and was shuttled to the “toss-em” line. A security guy came over. I assumed the position. I had a button up shirt on that was untucked. He reached around while he was behind me and grabbed around my front pocket. I guess he was going for my flashlight, but the area could have loosely been called “crotch.” I said, “You have to ask me before you touch me or it's assault.”

He said, “Once you cross that line, I can do whatever I want.”

I said that wasn't true. I say that I have the option of saying no and not flying. He said, “Are you going to let me search you, or do I just throw you out?”

I said, “Finish up, and then call the police please.”

When he was finished with my shoes, he said, “Okay, you can go.”

I said, “I'd like to see your supervisor and I'd like LVPD to come here as well. I was assaulted by you.”

He said, “You're free to go, there's no problem.”

I said, “I have a problem, please send someone over.”

Via jwz's Livejournal, Federal V.I.P. Penn

I like Penn (of Penn and Teller). He's great. And I think it's wonderful that he's willing to fight (and can afford to fight) this craziness of airline security. I think (and I think Penn thinks the same) that it's insane that he gets special treatment just because he's famous (and if I may get cynical here, that may also mean he has the resources to make this look really bad, or the financial resources to fight this in court).

I'm suing Attorney General John Ashcroft and various federal agencies, to make them stop demanding that citizens identify themselves in order to travel. Not only airports, but trains, buses, and cruise ships are now imposing ID requirements. This violates several constitutional rights. Stop showing ID whenever someone asks (or demands) it, and you will start to discover just what your rights are.

John Gilmore, Entrepreneur

So between Penn and John Gilmore's suit against the Federal goverment on behalf of anonymous travel, this is slowly restoring my faith that this current lunancy (link via The Duff Wire) will go away soon.

Forget antiglobalization—we're already there …

From: Sean Hoade <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To: Sean Conner <sean@conman.org>
Subject: A smile for you
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2003 19:41:17 -0600

Con—

I found this amusing, but you've prolly already seen it. Just in case …

Keep smilin',
Hoade

What is globalization, one may ask.

Well, below here is probably the best example on the definition of globalization.

Question: Explain “globalization?”

Answer: Princess Diana's death

Question: How's that?

Answer: An English princess with an Egyptian boyfriend crashes in a French tunnel, driving a German car with a Dutch engine, driven by a Belgian who was high on Scottish whiskey, followed closely by Italian Paparazzi, on Japanese motorcycles, treated by an American doctor, using Brazilian medicines!

And this is sent to you by a Russian-Jewish Canadian, using Bill Gates' technology which he stole from the Japanese. And you are probably reading this on one of the IBM clones that use Philippine-made chips, and Korean made monitors, assembled by Bangladeshi workers in a Singapore plant, transported by lorries driven by Indians, hijacked by Indonesians and finally sold to you by a Chinese!

That's Globalization!

Well … there isn't much else to add to that I'm afraid …

Tuesday, January 07, 2003

Things that make you go “Hmmmmm …”

Following are the ten most alarming theories about September 11, the “war on terror,” and the future of the world. Feel free to accept them as gospel, study them as symptoms of a traumatized culture, or scoff at them as anti-American propaganda: I'm only the messenger. Personally, though, at this point the only person I hold above suspicion in the matter of September 11 is that poor kid with the goat.

Via jwz's Livejournal , Top Ten Conspiracy Theories of 2002

As if the Top Ten Conspriacy Theories of the JKF weren't bad enough …

The thought never occured to me

Normally, a small form would arrive in the mail from the DMV and I would fill it out, and send it back with a check to renew the registration on my car. Fairly painless.

Only this year, I never did receive that form.

I suspect that's due to never having actually updated the address on my driver's license (even though I have only ten days from moving to do so) since going to the DMV is like being in a real life version of Brazil, only twice as annoying and no Harry Tuttle or Jill Layton to help out. But since I need to register my vehicle and I suspect not actually living at the address listed on my driver's license would cause a bureaucratic snafu the likes I've yet to see I figure the best course of action would be to break down and get a new driver's license!

Spring did mention finding an empty and fast DMV when she went nearly two years ago so I figure I would give that office a try. It couldn't hurt, right?

Never mind I was in a foul mood by the time I got there due to traffic. Never mind that I missed the strip mall and had to circle back around across six lanes of heavy season traffic. Never mind that the XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXX of a XXXXXXXXX woman couldn't make up her mind as to which XXXXXXX parking lane she XXXXXXXXX wanted to park in, or the XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX of a woman was trying to back into a space in a huge conversion van and tying up traffic to XXXXXXX XXXX and back. Never mind all that.

There was a XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX line out the XXXXX XXXXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX XXX XXXX XXX X XXXXXXXX door! XXX XXX XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXXXX XXX XX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX X X X XXXX XXX XX XXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXX XXXXXX XX DMV XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX X X X XXXX XXX XX XXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXX XXXXXX XX XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXX XX X DMV XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX X X X XXXX XXX XX XXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXX XXXXXX XX XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX X X X XXXX XXX XX XXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXX XXXXXX XX XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX X X!

And then some!

So I decided to try the old DMV office I used to use. It wasn't quite as crowded as the people were only crowded up to the door but not out.

XXX XXX XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXXXX XXX XX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX X X X XXXX XXX XX XXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXX XXXXXX XX DMV XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX X X X XXXX XXX XX XXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXX XXXXXX XX XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXX XX X DMV XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX X X X XXXX XXX XX XXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXX XXXXXX XX XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXX X X X XXXX XXX XX XXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXX XXXXXX XX XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXXX XXXXXX XX X XXXXXX X X XXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXX X X!

I gave up the notion of just waiting in the office. No way I was going to waste five, six days easy waiting for my turn to talk to a surly public employee who probably never heard of “fast friendly service.”

But there was a web address listed on the door, claiming that you could renew your driver's license, renew the registration and about half a dozen other things on-line!

What have I got to loose?

Five minutes.

And that was to change the address on my driver's license and renew my car registration.

For some reason, the thought that I could do this all on-line never occured to me. Not once. Here I am, having had Internet access for twelve years now and it's still yet to sink in that other parts of society are now using this wonderful thing called the Internet!

XXXXXXX yea!

The Boston Diaries