In my business, we never make friends."
"Ah... Professional detachment?"
"No, we just don't have the knack. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Episode 9
A Mind Occasionally Voyaging

On The Road

This past weekend, Leah and I went up to visit her family and friends in NJ. Here’s some observations…

  • We watched Children of Man. There’s a featurette on the disc showing how — at the risk of a spoiler, I’ll spoil you only this much: there is a baby in the move, and it was added using CGI, which is why it looks like Gollum — they did the baby. At one point, the caption said “Rendering the layers of baby.” Johnathan Swift would be proud.
  • Friday night as I was going to sleep, something made my eye hurt. It was red in the morning, and has been watering ever since. I think I am allergic to New Jersey
  • Many years ago in Maryland, there was a supermarket chain called A&P. They are now called SuperFresh. In New Jersey, I saw a “Super A&P”. It’s as if the name-change had just hit that town, and something caused it to tragically halt halfway through the transformation.
  • There was a stretch of highway on the way home called “The Concrete Mile”. It was made of asphalt just like every other highway.
  • We passed a shop called “Andy Ferrigno’s Equipment”. The jokes to be made may well be endless. I’ll start you off with “Don’t make fun of his equipment: you wouldn’t like it when he’s angry.”
  • When you enter most states, there’s a big sign welcoming you. Often, the sign will remind you of local laws: on the Delaware/Maryland border, the sign reminds you that right turns are permitted on red after stopping. In Delaware, it reminds you that shopping is tax-free. In New Jersey, it reminds you that you need to wear your seatbelt. And right below that is a greeting from Governor John Corzine. I assume the sign was erected by the New Jersey Department of Irony.
  • There’s a town, it seems, in PA called “Schrodinger”. I didn’t get a good look at the sign, because my brain insisted that the sign should say now “Next Exit, 10 miles on left”, but “The town will not exist until you get there.”
  • Unrelatedly, I once took a class in public policy from Heisenberg’s granddaughter. The class was taught by Distance Learning, because, unlike her grandfather, she could not be in two places at once.
  • Billboard: Close deals between laps
  • There is a section of US 222 in Pennsylvania called “MIA Highway”, but we couldn’t find it.
  • Sign by a dairy farm in PA: Registered Holsteins. Thank god PA has cracked down on illegal cows.
  • A sign at a gas station gave prices for “Regular”, “Plus”, “Super”, “Deisel” and “Kero”. For just a second, I read that as “Karo”, and thought that it would be a truly wonderful day if we could make our cars run on high fructose corn syrup. Of course, the fumes would probably send me into a diabetic coma.

That is all.

I am not a number, I am a free man!

So, I’d hoped to avoid it, but I realize now that I’ll look very dense if I don’t at least acknowledge it.
There’s a certain string of hexadecimal digits spreading like wildfire through the blogosphere. If you speak the incantation aloud, it casts the magic spell “Summon AACS Lawyers”, who give you a cease and desist notice.
In the event I get one, this article will disappear, and be replaced by a copy of the notice.
But here’s the various news:

  • Digg was deleting posts containing the incantation, and, as I understand it, banning users who posted it. The users rebelled, and Digg decided “T’hell with it. We’re gonna back our users.” So yay, the users win. One of those huge popular web2.0 things turned out to not just be a corporate shill masquerading as a countercultural free-for-all. Of course, if Digg gets shut down by the AACS, I kinda wonder how the users will react.
  • Google received a cease and decist letter, demanding they remove all links to the magic incantation. Google, whose motto these days has sort of drifted from “Don’t be evil” to “Don’t make waves” may well do as they’re told, but some friends of mine helpfully suggested that Google write them back demanding that they provide every single URL they want expunged.
  • The AACS is basically threatening everyone they can find. Isn’t it weird how a business model can become “Scare the hell out of your customers and try to hurt them,” for a business other than a bondage club?
  • For that matter, a business model of “Create a product consumers do not want and which does not give them any value, which, in fact, reduces the value of a product to the consumer, and then use legal threats to force them to buy it anyway,” does not sound very capitalist.
  • Ed Felten, over at Freedom To Tinker (look left) says that the AACS will probably realize this is stupid, pointless, and making them look cartoonishly evil, and will eventually give up. Though he also reminds us that, every once in a while, big businesses will sue the hell out of you for no reason other than spite.
  • Here’s a question: the root of the magic number thing is not simply that AACS claims to “own” this random number which they picked out of a hat. It’s that they claim that the number is a “circumvention technology”, which is illegal under the DMCA. See, under the DMCA, it’s not just illegal to sell a bootleg copy of something, it’s not just illegal to make a bootleg copy of something, it’s illegal to even possess any sort of device which could hypothetically be of some use in creating a bootleg copy of something — in fact, it’s illegal to even talk about how you might go about making such a device. That said, this magic number is the key which decrypts HDDVD movies. Its purpose is to allow the player to play the movie. Is using the number whose purpose it is to make the movie viewable in order to make the movie viewable really circumvention? Should I worry about the fact that I carry around the key to my house, because that key could unlock my front door?
  • In addition to the number of note, AACS claims that a number of other magic numbers are also theirs. They won’t tell us how many, and they sure as hell won’t tell us what they are. Math teachers of the world: be careful. Next time you ask your students to multiply 367 by 72, you may be unwittingly asking them to produce an illegal number.

I’m not going to post the infamous string of hex digits. And, just to be clear, we’re not talking about some kind of magical code. It’s a number. Like 7. Or 42. Or 790,815,794,162,126,871,771,506,399,625.

Random Thoughts

A roundup of things I’ve noticed or thought of lately…

  • The squirrels used to like ot taunt Sarah. Being a small game dog, she’d have liked nothing better than to chase them. To my knowledge, she only ever got the chance once, when she was a puppy and managed to wriggle throuigh the railing around our pool deck to go after one. The squirrels seemed to work out that she couldn’t get through the plate glass window in the dining room, and would congregate in the back yard, running up near the window and teasing her as she cried at her inability to go after one.
  • The exercise regimen I’ve adopted to help control my diabetes involves a lot of walking, mostly on the network of pedestrian trails through Columbia, MD, where I spend most of my day. There’s a jogger whose path I cross a lot. He looks just like the lovechild of William H. Macy and Jon Voight.
  • The office park where I work consists of three buildings in a sort of triskelion configuration. A few months ago, a crew came through and gave one of the other buildings a good power-washing scrub. The sandstone exterior was left so bright and shiny that when it caught the light, it was almost blinding to look at. I can’t help thinking that this is possibly the closest I’ll ever get to knowing what it was like to look at the great pyramid of Giza when it was new.
  • Once upon a time, I was walking Sarah in the back yard, and we came across a tiny little frog. Sarah and I followed the frog for a bit as it hopped along its way, Sarah with her nose to the ground, studying it. Suddenly, just as it landed after a hop, Sarah reached down and scooped it up in her mouth. A few seconds later, just as I was peparing to chastise her for eating the frog, she opened her mouth, and the tiny little frog hopped out and continued on its way as if nothing had happened.
  • Another man I see a lot looks just like the love child of Wilford Brimley and Martin Mull
  • Walking along the trails, you see a lot of strange things. I keep seeing bicycles, half-submerged in the stream that runs alongside the trail. I can understand how they got there, but why were they abandoned there?
  • I’m going to a Cinco-de-Mayo party this weekend. My girl wanted to have a pinata at the party. Since I don’t like candy enough to eat it in spite of my doctor’s admonishions, I suggested a route that would allow me to take part in the pinata-y goodness: a meat pinata. She told this to her friend via instant messaging, and was asked “Do you mean a pinata made of meat, or a pinata full of meat?” When she indicated the latter, the response was “YES!!!!!!!”
  • A few days after cleaning the building I mentioned earlier, the crew went back over it for a second go. The building ceased to shine, and actually looked ratty and dirty. The windows looked particularly streaked and spotted. I found myself wondering the the University of Phoenix had failed to pay its bill, and the crew was sent back to re-dirty the building.
  • I also see a lot of abandoned shopping carts along the trail. These mostly belong to the Safeway about a half mile down. But some of them are for other stores which are nowhere near here
  • There is a small man-made pond across the street from the office. During certain parts of the year, geese congregate there. About the same time, there are two geese who wander around on the far side of the parking lot of the office park, across the street, with the building between them and the pond. Are they lost, or have they just slipped off for a romantic stroll?
  • At one bend in the stream, a shopping cart has gone off the edge and into the water. It’s been down there a long time, I think, because silt has built up around it. The process of sedementation has done its work, and there is, right now, an island forming around this cart.
  • I saw a blue heron last week. But I don’t want to say where. When I was a kid, if you saw a blue heron somewhere, you could be assured that within a week, you wouldn’t be allowed to go back there, as the area would be cordoned off to protect the heron. It’s quite a pleasant spot, and I don’t want it being destroyed by a big chain link fence to keep the heron safe.

IT69: Via Time Travel

Okay, so I just noticed that what with my blog crashing all around me, I skipped ahead a number last week. Bending the space-time continuum, I now bring you the missing episode. IT71 will appear as expected next week, and IT72, as a result of my skilled manipulation, will appear on March 30, 1942.

it69

And now we see the root cause of the New York City ban on using a certain racial epithet.

Thank you for getting me out of that well

Some time, I don’t remember when exactly, early in 1991, my dad brought Sarah home to live with us. She shipped in a cardboard crate with a blue blanket inside it, but, I am told, she rode most of the way on dad’s arm. It was, I think, a good thing that the previous year, he’d traded in his old Subaru for a newer one and switched to an automatic transmission. A few years later, she would wrap her leash around the handbrake, leaving a mark in it that lasted until I finally sent the car to rest in 2002. Westies were popular at the time, and Sarah herself had the distinction of having been born on Christmas day.

Sarah, on her 15th birthday

Sarah was an affectionate puppy. For years, I remember her always greeting me at the door when I got home from school, jumping on me and losing control of her bladder. We were new to dog-ownership and had our various ups and downs. Bred for hunting small game, Sarah had an insatiable desire to dig holes, and I recall that she once dyed herself orange for the better part of a year as she excavated a huge mound of sand we’d had dumped in the back yard to lay a patio behind the house.
For some time, she had some sort of skin condition, that caused her to tear out clumps of her own fur. Her habit of doing this at night while she lay under my parents’ bed eventually led to so much collateral damage to the carpeting that they replaced the floor in their bedroom with commercial tile. Later in her life, she took to sleeping in bed with my mom, and then eventually to sleeping on a mat at the end of the hallway once getting in an out of bed as the mood struck her became more than her hips could handle.
Sarah was for the most part a friendly, well-behaved dog, aside from her unfortunate tendency to snap when startled. She gave my sister a scar on her nose that I don’t think she ever fully forgave her for. Sarah became closest to my mother, and even as she grew old and tired, would usually rouse herself from a half-slumber to follow her from room to room. Once, she changed direction abruptly, and my mother lost her footing and twisted her ankle.
But all things considered, Sarah was a good dog, and we grew to appreciate her even more when, years later, my sister would convince my parents to let her get a second dog, a lab, who still hasn’t calmed down and can’t be left alone for so much as a minute. Sarah and Jamie got on well — we’re fairly sure that on at least one occasion, they actually collaborated to steal a ham sandwich.
When I went away to college, dad liked to tease her that I’d fallen down a well, a little running gag that he’d repeat every time I came back ot the home of my youth.
Because she was small, it was always difficult to think of Sarah as anything other than a puppy, even as she grew old and bouts of arthritis impaired her mobility from time to time. Cataracts took most of her vision, though you couldn’t always tell, except when she went running for the wrought iron gate my parents had installed at the end of the hallway to restrain the lab. Sarah could wriggle under it without much problem, but at a full run, she couldn’t see it until it was too late to stop, and she’d occasionally end up ramming it headlong.
About a week ago, I’m told, she collapsed after her morning walk and had to be carried in. She vacillated between better and worse for a few days, eating little and often too tired to move. Late Tuesday night, Sarah got down off the couch (My parents didn’t care enough about the furniture to keep her off of it until they bought new furniture a few years ago, by which time she was old enough that a policy change would have seemed cruel) and slumped to the floor. Her breathing slowed, and finally stopped. We do not think she suffered. Sarah passed away at about 12:25 AM Wednesday morning of a condition my sister called “Too Many Birthdays”. She was 16 years old, which, depending on who you go by, is either 77 or 112 in dog years.
They laid her to rest beside Jamie. I imagine that they are frolicking together and stealing ham sandwiches in whatever sort of afterlife is reserved for pets.
Sarah Jane Raszewski, December 25, 1990-April 25, 2007. You will be missed. Good dog.

Kids Say The Darndest Things

Every once in a while, the little girl who lives across the alley from me will try to strike up a conversation. This is usually a little uncomfortable for me, because, while when you’re a kid, you’re always warned not to talk to strangers, no one ever tells you, as an adult, whether you’re supposed to talk to strange children. But I guess technically we’re not actually strangers: we’re neighbors. Maybe it’s just a symptom of the times that I should think there was anything at all unnatural about being on conversational terms with the children of the people who live across the alley.
But anyway, the reason I bring it up is to relate this conversation:
Her: (Talks a bit about her love of digging up bugs and worms)
Me: (Polite interest)
Her: What do you love?
Me: (after thinking) Well, I like video games. And movies. And I love my girlfriend.
Her: You’re lucky you have a girlfriend.
Me: Yes I am
Her: If you had three girlfriends, you’d be the luckiest man in the world
Me: (after a bumfuzzled silence) I think one is about all I can handle.

The Blog of Death

So, regular visitors may have noticed some strange error messages last week. Those should be gone for now. I was spammed so hard that the database which runs this blog broke, rather severely. I’ve managed to recover almost all the data to a new database, but the comments table was completely trashed. This means that old comments have been relegated to the status of “ghosts”, and will vanish in the event old pages ever get updated.
How do other bloggers deal with spam? I’ve got spam filters, but those don’t really help: a million spam comments an hour pouring into the Junk folder breaks the DB just as bad as a million a day going to the page — and it’s not just the spam being received that causes the problem: just by the act of hammering the server with their spam, they suck up my bandwidth — and I do mean suck.
Anyway, I’ve got some redirects in place now to divert suspicious activity away from the comments pages. It’s possible that you might accidentally fall into one — make sure you never navigate your way to a page called spider-trap, as you’ll fall permanently into my list of banned IPs.