Teleselfconscience

Tuesday, November 14, 2000

More times than not, I find myself being very self-conscience when on the phone, where I think I come across very badly. I've been assured that this is not the case, but still, I feel this is the case quite often.

An early thanksgiving

Thank God for email and instant messaging. Else my phone bill would be ballooning right now.

Wednesday, November 14, 2001

Okay, so it was a slip of the fingers …

Okay, I think I squashed that bug.

If you've been browsing this blog between 11:00 pm yesturday to around 1:30 am today (Eastern time that is) then you probably noticed a bunch of duplicate entries. This was caused by a bug in the new feature I added today (okay, technically yesturday).

What happened is that the program would add the entry, and notify Weblog.com and it was in the cleanup code of that feature (after it had already sent the notification to Weblog.com) that it would crash. This caused the mail server (since I use email to update this journal) to think the message had not been delivered and therefore queue it up for delivery later.

And basically, every entry made since this new feature was in was still in the queue trying to be delivered successfully.

So much for my programming prowess.

The code (C—I program mostly in C) in question was:


	int UrlFree(URL *);

	/* ... */

	URLHTTP url;

	/* ... */

	UrlFree((URL *)url);

UrlFree() takes a pointer to a URL and here I was passing in the URL directly, but because of the cast (since URLHTTP is based off the URL datatype but due to the lack of actual objects in C, I have to cast) the compiler let it slide.

And please, no “Why didn't you use Java?” or “Why not C++?” or even “What? You didn't use Perl?” I freely admit to being a C bigot and I like my language to remain standard, unlike C++ (which until what? Only last year got a standard?) or Java (what classes did Sun change this week?) or even Perl (Perl 6 is just around the corner, and it's nothing at all like Perl 5 … heh heh heh). I have better things to do (like chase bugs it seems) than to run after ever shifting languages.

Besides, is there anyone else that talks about bugs in their software?

Major network suckage today.

Major network suckage today. At around 3:00 am this morning the network at Condo Conner dropped. All attempts to get out didn't get past the DSL unit and a trace from outside (fortunately my roommate works at night as a system administrator) showed that traffic to Condo Conner was not getting past a router in Miami.

Fast foward to noon today. Can't traceroute to my colocated server. Can't ping it. Yet Spring can get her mail. Uh oh. A quick telnet to port 80 and yes, I can bring up a web page.

Great!

Poking around I'm seeing major network problems with my provider. Inside, I can ping some sites, other's I can't. Some sites I can traceroute to, others I can't. One moment I can ping but can't telnet. Then I can telnet. From outside again, it's hit or miss if I can ping or traceroute back to Condo Conner.

Most things are working and that's what makes this more annoying that if it was all down. I'll be going along and wham! can't get there.

Sigh.

Aaaaaaaah!

I heard from Mark that last night around 3:00 am that the DSL provider is upgrading the software on their equipment at the same time that the local phone company (no names but its initials are BellSouth) is upgrading the software on their equipment and well for the past 17 hours the Internet connectivity has gone to Hell.

Nice job, guys. Ever hear of rollbacks?

Okay, okay, cheap shot, but man, we're jonsing for Internet connectivity here. It's been bad all day … can't get to a site … can't get to a site … can't get to a—wait! We got a page! Woo hoo! Click on a link and … can't get to the site.

Trying to log in to a remote server is just as fun. Nope—that box is refusing ssh connections. Still refusing. Is it … yes! It connected! I'm logged in and … the connection is frozen.

Sob.

Good news though: we have a dial up account (good thing I hadn't gotten around to getting rid of the second phone line). Bad news: the number is busy.

Okay, things could be worse and for that I'm grateful.

Thursday, November 14, 2002

20 minutes into a quagmire

There is nothing quite like having thirty days to write fifty thousand words and you have no idea what to write. So you write. And write. And write some more. And end up with a mess that will either be really terrible or a masterpiece.

It's early 1961. Eisenhowser gave his farewell speech that warned about the millitary-industrial complex and Kennedy, after the closest Presidential race in U. S. History, is turning the White House into Camelot. The horrors of the Cold War have yet to come. Vietnam is still back page news in the papers, McCarthyism is, if not completely dead, mostly over. The mood of the nation is optimistic.

And into this idyll place a novel is given to some random 20something to read. It's not a novel in the conventional sense but more of a collection of vignettes about the future. Nothing exciting, nothing overly grand. Just normal life as it would appear to someone in the future. Some fourty years into the future.

About our now.

Notes from my poor attempt at a novel, 20 Minutes Into The Future

My intent was to write a series of loosely coupled stories taking place in the near indeterminate future, some fourty, maybe fifty years down the road. Just take current trends as I see them, and extend them down; maybe toss in a few outrageous things that can't possibly happen (who could foresee the fall of Communism or terrorists piloting a plane (a commercial plane!) into the Pentagon? Or two of the tallest buildings in the U. S.?) and let it stand at that.

Only I'm getting rather depessed the more I contemplate the near future. And not just over Pax Americana either. The abolishment of anonymous money (unless of course, you are already filthy rich in which case there are plenty of tax havens for you to shuffle your funds towards), the abolishment of ownership (and not by a Communistic government fiat but by the relentless shift of ownership from personal to corporations and foundations), creation of corporate fiefdoms (which are worse than the fiefdoms of Europe—at least there you gave your fielty to your local barron and he protected you—now you still have to give your fielty to your local corporate masters but they don't have to protect you, or even keep you employed), errosion of privacy (data mining of cross indexed corporate and government databases, ubiquitous cameras watching our every move, and every citizen being fingerprinted and chipped from childhood) and excuse me whilst I slit my wrists right now …

For Sale!

Investment Homes for Sale—4 days use! Buy now while they last! Going fast, so hurry!

Two days overnight use only. Use during Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas extra. No Trick-or-Treating allowed during Halloweeen. Dinner parties of more than 20 require permission of the Board. Taxes include city, county and school district. Monthly cleaning required.

Excerpt from my poor attempt at a novel, 20 Minutes Into The Future

I thought it best to rethink my strategy, and it's then when I turned to The Hero Of A Thousand Faces. Joseph Campbell did extensive research into the myths from around the world and noticed certain themes coming up time and time again. These he outlined and explained in his book, The Hero Of A Thousand Faces, notes of which I made into entries (mostly for myself but hey, someone else could find a use for them). So if George Lucas can apply the monomyth to a crappy script (“You can type this XXXX, George, but you can't say it.” –Harrison Ford), bad acting (Need I mention a whiny Mark Hamill? Or Carrie Fisher's faux British accent through half the film?) and a derivative plot (taken from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, right down to the two peasents rendered as A2-D2 and C-3P0) and have one of the top grossing films ever, then it couldn't hurt me, right?

But I have a problem with the Hero's Arc. Not that I don't think it's valid (it is) but more for what it represents—that the Hero is extraordinary in some sense; that he's of divine birth (or noble birth, but really, there is no difference as the early kings and emperors of our history were thought to be of divine birth anyway) and has a higher destiny; a calling to greatness. Joe Serf need not apply. And that doesn't sit well with me. Even Luke Skywalker turned out to be the spawn of a knight and a queen …

The other problem I'm having is that I've yet to write fiction. Okay, sure, I have a few comedy sketches I did (Monty Python phase) and my humor columns towards the end might be considered mostly fictional but they did derive from actual events (however exaggerated they became—perhaps this was my Hunter S. Thompson phase, unbeknownst to me) and there was the one college paper on Gothic Cathedrals was largly fabricated on the spot (I was in my Dave Barry phase at that point) but overall, most of my writing has been non-fictional in nature. This fictional stuff is quite different for me, so there's difficulty there.

So right now, I'm at a loss of where to go …

Chemical experimentation on minors, all in pursuit of educational excellence

The second document, the gigantic Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project, outlined teaching reforms to be forced on the country after 1967. If you ever want to hunt this thing down, it bears the U.S. Office of Education Contract Number OEC-0-9-320424-4042 (B10). The document sets out clearly the intentions of its creators—nothing less than “impersonal manipulation” through schooling of a future America in which “few will be able to maintain control over their opinions,” an America in which “each individual receives at birth a multi-purpose identification number” which enables employers and other controllers to keep track of underlings and to expose them to direct or subliminal influence when necessary. Readers learned that “chemical experimentation” on minors would be normal procedure in this post-1967 world, a pointed foreshadowing of the massive Ritalin interventions which now accompany the practice of forced schooling.

Participatory Democracy Put To The Sword, part of Chapter 2 of The Underground History of American Education

I came across this link not as research for my poor attempt at a novel, but because I have an interest in just how bad our educational system is, but I didn't realize just blatently manipulative it is. And it's just one more depressing data point to add to the every growing list of depressing trends in society.

Real life giving satire a run for the money

[from orders given on Mr. Gatto's first day of teaching:] Good morning, Mr. Gatto. You have typing. Here is your program. Remember, THEY MUST NOT TYPE! Under no circumstances are they allowed to type. I will come around unannounced to see that you comply. DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING THEY TELL YOU about an exception. THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS.
Not a letter, not a numeral, not a punctuation mark from those keys or you will never be hired here again. Go now.
When I asked what I should do instead with the class of seventy-five, he replied, “Fall back on your resources. Remember, you have no typing license!”

Wadleigh, The Death School, part of Chapter 4 of The Underground History of American Education

Words fail me.

I wish I could say this was satire; a damning critique of the U. S. educational system and unions or guilds but no, this isn't satire, it's real life. It's the New York City school system (in Harlem) circa 1961.

I'm so glad I'm out of that system. But I feel for Spring's children …

Friday, November 14, 2003

… run faster than an express train …

Via the Duff Wire comes a scan of Action Comics #1—the issue Superman was introduced. Very interesting material here. The entire backstory of Superman fit on one page (I think it took Bill Keane two pages to do the backstory of the Bat-Man) and if you really want to be pedantic about it, it's really the first three panels of page one.

A very quick introduction indeed.

Other differences, no mention of his parents (the implication of panel three being he was raised at an orphanage), he works for the Daily Star (not the Daily Planet) and no one really knows who he is (he has to force his way into the Governor's Mansion to save a woman from being electrocuted) and he can't fly—he can only leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Other stories in that issue include Zatara, Master Magician (“Uoy era won ni ym rewop!”—the magical incantation to hypnotize people) and Sticky-Mitt Stimson, among others.

I never heard of Zatara either.

Then again, it's hard to follow in the shadow of Superman.

I wonder how many kids made it to Scoop Scanlon (Scanlon?) Good lord, Superman's alter-ego Clark Kent had a better name than Scoop Scanlon.

Scanlon?

What I found amazing though, was the lack of advertising in the comic. The only advertising to be found was on the back cover, advertising pretty much the same stuff you found up through the 70s.

Scanlon?

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Cutting room floor

The clip I made yesterday, all 34 seconds of it, took perhaps an hour and a half to make, but that's including the time it took for me to film the all 18 bits that day (second day of filming).

The sample you saw required the cutting of four individual clips (raw footage: 73 seconds) into the 10 cuts shown and took about half an hour of actual editing time to create (about 1 minute editing time for each second of resulting footage) but I had a clear outline of what I wanted to do for that clip.

The rest of the video?

I'm making it up as I go along, unfortunately.

Outtakes … um … and for a good … um … reason.

I don't even have all the bits I wanted filmed yet (I'm only in The Office two days a week) and there's a strong tempation to reshoot a bunch of what I already have (oh, and a transcript? “Uh … uh right there. Blah! Take 37. Ahem. Yeah, right.”).

I wonder if I will ever finish this …

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Notes on a possible way to store tuples in a greylist implementation

I was checking some other greylist implementations when I came across an implementation that only stores a 32-bit hash instead of the full tuple. The idea sounded intriguing, and since I'm already calculating a 32-bit CRC as part of my protocol, I thought it might be interesting to see just how effective it might be.

Out of 499,846 unique tuples checked, only 28 had duplicate CRCs. I think I could live with that; I could then store 32× the number of tuples in the same amount of memory. Of course, I lose the ability to see the actual tuples, but for a huge ISP or webhosting company trying to deal with an insane amount of email, that is certainly a viable option (hint, hint—Rob, you listening?)

Friday, November 14, 2008

This is by no means an indication that I want to live in a Gibsonian novel

Another day, another script kiddie removed from one of our servers.

This time the script kiddie didn't even bother hiding his program.

Sheesh. Kids today.

But it's probably because of stuff like this that Smirk tolerates my old fashioned ways …

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Reading comprehension and user experience are not a spammer's forte

Sometimes I get the feeling the people who send spam just do a quick search for something and blast out email to any and all sites that give a result. Like this one:

From

"Bobby" <bobby@diydoggroominghelp.com>

To

sean@conman.org

Subject

conman.org Quick question

Date

Fri, 6 Nov 2015 13:11:55 +0000

Hi there,

I have just been on http://boston.conman.org/2002/08 and found some great links on London information and things to do. I have also found a great little site that shows some of the less known spots in London and thought you may like to add a link to it from that page or from a resource page on your site?

This is the link to the interactive map, you need to scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the map.
https://www.thelondonhelicopter.com/interactive-map-of-london-tourist-attractions/

Let me know what you think?

Kind regards

Bobby

There are a total of four links, covering the entire month of August, 2002, that mention anything related to things British. And given the date, that was thirteen years ago!

So, reading comprehension is lacking in spammers—what else is new? Well, I did check out the site (but I will not link to it—why give the incompetent any page rank?) and yes, the interactive map is nice and all, but good lord! The huge content-less images and pointless Javascripty-wankery you have to scroll through to get to the interactive map is seriously annoying. Heck, the fact that the email says “scroll down to the bottom of the page,” and the website says “keep scrolling” says something: the website failed in delivering a user friendly experience!

Sheesh.

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

MyFaceGoogleLinkedBookPlusInSpace is stalking me

I was a bit surprised to see an ad for the ceramic Department 56 National Lampoon Christmas Vacation The Griswold Family Tree on FaceGoogleLinkedMySpaceBookPlusIn. It was surprising because yesterday, Bunny came across a picture of an inflatable National Lampoon Christmas Vacation The Griswold Family Tree and was threatening her brother with it. She did a search and found the one on Amazon and sent her brother the link.

Now, why would I be getting the ad on LinkedMyFaceGoogleInSpaceBookPlus? Is FaceGoogleLinkedMyBookPlusInSpace listening in to us via our phones? Does the NSA have a sideline of selling information to advertisers to help their bottom line? Is LinkedMyFaceGooglePlusInSpaceBook psychic (or psychotic—could go either way)?

No. It's just simple tracking via the web [“Simple,” he says. Ha! —Editor].

Bunny did a search for the Griswold Family Tree (or something along those lines) and some of the resulting pages she visited included bits of of HTML or Javascript or images that said “person from such-n-such IP address did a search for this.” And some of that tracking is either done directly by GoogleLinkedMyFacePlusInSpaceBook or is sold to them. Bunny does not have a LinkedMyFaceGoogleSpaceBookPlusIn account (she did at one point, several years ago, for all of five hours) but that doesn't mean FaceGoogleLinkedMyPlusInSpaceBook doesn't keep track of her. They do.

But what does that have to do with me?

Well, I do have a MyFaceGoogleLinkedInSpaceBookPlus account. And GoogleLinkedMyFacePlusInSpaceBook knows I log in from the same IP address that did a search for “The Griswold Family Tree” and while I may not have been the one that did the search (since the search wasn't tied to an account—and just because I'm not logged in doesn't mean LinkedMyFaceGoogleInSpaceBookPlus can't track my viewing habits on the web), I did come from an IP address that did! And thus, I too, might be interested in the ceramic Department 56 National Lampoon Christmas Vacation The Griswold Family Tree.

No, not really.

New York? Chicago? They have nothing on Detroit pizza

My favorite pizza place is a bit of a drive. A twenty-hour drive of nearly 1,350 miles to Buddy's.

Yeah, I don't go there that often. It's a shame, because the pizza is that good. It's Detroit-style pizza, made in square, blue steel pans (from the automotive industry) with the sauce on top, and yes, Buddy's defined Detroit-style pizza.

And guess what? There's a video on Youtube about Detroit-style pizza:

[If properly dried and trimmed, New York-style pizza could be used to make a box for Detroit-style pizza.]

My dad, who probably hasn't had Buddy's Pizza in thirty years, still pines for it, and kicks himself to this day for not getting the receipe from his sister (who worked at Buddy's for a number of years).

Darn. Now I want Detroit-style pizza.

Update on Thursday, November 16^th, 2017

Now I really want Buddy's pizza.

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Notes on an overheard conversation about “The Toilet Situation, Day 3”

“I finally have the toilet on its side.”

“Hmm, there's no real room to get a grip on the nut, is there?”

“No—wait! I have an idea. We can use a clamp to squeeze the tank towards the bowl. That should expose the nut enough to get the vice grips on it.”

“Hold on … okay, how's this?”

“Perfect! Vice grips!”

“Vice grips.”

“I think the bolt is turning with the nut. We need to hold the bolt somehow … ”

“Vice grip?”

“I'm already using it!”

“No, another pair of vice grips. Right here.”

“Oh. Unnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng! Oooommmmmmmmmmph!”

Two hours later …

“Errrrrrrrrrrrrraaaarrrrrrg! How long is this bolt?”

“It's almost off!”

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmrrrrrrrrrrrrgaaaah! There!”

“Got it!”

“And here are the other two nuts from the other bolts. The tank is no longer attached to the bowl!”

“Hallelujah!”

Sunday, November 14, 2021

Extreme taxidermy, Brevard edition

It's our last day in Brevard (we're leaving tomorrow, back towards warmer climes) and we spent the day not doing much of anything.

But a few days ago we went into Mantiques, an eclectic antique shop with a more masculine bent to it, and well …

[A picture of half a taxidermied gazelle—at least it's the front half] I …I don't think leaving the front legs on added anything but disturbing dreams.

I can say with honesty I have never seen taxidermy quite like this.

And with that, we leave Brevard.

The Boston Diaries

Tuesday, November 14, 2000