General

Pretentious Pontifications: The needs of the fast-paced life

Dave Farquhar General

Since it would appear that David will be out of commission for a day or two, I have forcibly forecefully volunteered to fill in for him. And I must say, I read yesterdays tete-a-tete with great interest, and upon reading and reflecting upon it with a fine cognac and a cigar, I must come to one conclusion.
You are all, to use one of David’s favorite phrases of yesterday, IDIOTs.

Everybody knows that real men fly supersonic.

I will grant that I rather enjoyed David’s discussion of Station-wagon Utility Vehicles. Indeed, the typical SUV does look like an engineer took the body of a station wagon, put it on a truck frame, and put big tires on it. Very clever. Very observant. Obviously he must not have thought of it himself.

But before I extol the virtues of air travel, I must point something out to the SUV-defenders here. By the time you buy your status-symbol SUV and pay for the insurance and the fuel for them, you could have had yourself a Mercedes. And the Mercedes would be worth more by the time you finish paying for it. But the really big plus is that rather than looking like someone trying to act wealthy, a Mercedes actually makes you look wealthy.

Some of you touched upon the hatred that often gets directed towards SUV owners. Yes, a certain segment of the middle class is learning about conspicuous consumption, and I applaud them. The upside to conspicuous consumption is that it gets you noticed. The downside to conspicuous consumption is that some people, such as my brother, have yet to learn how to appreciate it.

That is another advantage to a Mercedes. Since people see fewer of them, there is less hatred directed at them. The true upper crust learn how to conspicuously consume without drawing as much hatred as everyone else. I, of course, am a master at this, as I have so aptly demonstrated on these pages in the past. I am also quite humble.

Since some people are not born wealthy, they must learn how to create wealth. Buying a Mercedes instead of a four-wheel-drive station wagon is a good start. If you continue to spend your money wisely, by the time you finish paying for that Mercedes, you might be ready to graduate to a Rolls.

Now, of course, it is time for me to talk about flying. Some of us lead very hectic lives, and driving entry-level vehicles like David insists on doing is just impossible. On a typical day, I get up at the early hour of 10 a.m. You will find me unlike that sloth Raunche, who sleeps until 10:30. I have breakfast in bed, and then, while one of my servants bathes me, I usually take the time to smoke a cigar and read a newspaper or magazine. Usually there is no time to drive–most people worth keeping appointments with live too far away to make a 12:00 appointment by car. That is why a Tu-144 comes in most handy. Now, some people say that using an airliner designed to carry 170 people is wasteful for one person. What they forget is that when I travel, I do not travel alone. Besides my pilot and co-pilot, I also have a stewardess, a hairdresser, and a chef, just in case I decide I need a mid-morning snack. I find that when I travel with such a large group of people, a plane designed to carry 170 commoners gives me just enough space to myself.

Unfortunately, most people worth keeping a noon appointment with do not live anywhere near an airport. But some of them do not yet have a landing strip, or their landing strip is inadequate for a supersonic passenger liner. For that reason, I am usually in the habit of clearing an Interstate. Most Interstates make excellent runways for a plane such as the Tu-144. Some people complain about the inconvenience, but what about my convenience? Is that not important? We have had a few incidents where a vehicle or two was damaged, but the drivers of those vehicles should know to get out of the way. I like flying, and my tax dollars pay for those Interstates too. Besides, flying is so much safer than driving. More people should do it. Some people complain about the fuel involved, but really, what is more valuable? That fuel, or your time? I can always find more jet fuel. If I found more time somehow, my busy schedule would quickly expand to fill it.

And I can never have too much safety. If my safety puts other people at risk, they just need to make more money so they can keep up with me. Or they need to learn how to spend the money they do have. A helicopter costs much less to buy and operate than my Tu-144, and although it only has a fraction of its speed and its quarters is very tight, it does have the advantage of being able to land just about anywhere. I am no danger and no inconvenience to someone in a helicopter. More of the middle class should give helicopters serious thought.

For those who can afford it, I highly recommend the Tu-144. Unfortunately, there are very few of them left, and I have the last one that was still airworthy. With some refurbishment, however, there are a small number of them that could be made airworthy again, and they could save countless other people lots of time. Do not worry yourself with the noise or the pollution. People get used to it. Trust me. I know from experience.

The Tu-144 is conspicuous consumption at its finest. It is so uncommon, people cannot help but notice. And marvel.

Promising ways to fight spam

Dave Farquhar General ,

Increase your breast size in weeks!
Yeah, obviously I’m real interested in that kind of e-mail. I’m sure you are too. Even if you happen not to be male.

I read an article on Slashdot on Friday about an interesting approach to spam. Essentially, it uses artificial intelligence. You get two delete buttons: One that says, “Delete this spam!” and one that says, “Delete this, but it’s not spam.” Based on your answers, it figures out what’s spam and what isn’t. For example, nobody I correspond with regularly has ever talked to me about breast size. Male or female. Strange how none of the women I correspond with ever bring that up, isn’t it? Come to think of it, that’s almost as strange as how none of the men I correspond with do.

The problem with spam is that people tend to define it a little bit differently. It’s kind of like trying to define pornography. To some people, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is pornography. To others, the swimsuit issues of 20 years ago aren’t, but recent ones are.

Fortunately, it’s easier to analyze text than photographs.

Words like “toner” and “breast” and “sex” and “sexy” appear in spam a lot. Words like “bring” are a lot less likely, but very likely to appear in personal correspondence. So, based on the number of highly likely words and highly unlikely words that appear in a given piece of mail, it determines whether a piece of mail is spam.

I like this because it could conveivably have some applications beyond spam. I hate spam, but I hate mail forwards nearly as much. I believe there are precisely 33 of those cutesy mail forwards and send-backs out there, and I’ve seen them all several times, but people continue to insist on sending them to me. Usually with the preface, “I know you hate these and I usually don’t send you stuff like this, but…” Never mind the likelihood that since literally thousands of people have my e-mail address, someone’s already sent it to me.

Some people love those kinds of things, so filtering them for those people wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate (unless you’re that person’s boss and you want them to stop wasting time). But if I could filter them, I’d have a whole lot more time.

The researcher quoted on Slashdot claims only 5 of 1,000 pieces of spam get through, with zero false positives. Very nice.

So I can’t wait for a mail client to become available that uses Bayes classification (the technology used here). You’re probably asking where you can see this in action. I wish I knew.

Meanwhile, though, someone mentioned Cloudmark, a free service which appears to use checksums to identify spam, maintaining a large distributed P2P database of checksums. They claim 75% accuracy.

It was closer to 50% for me when I tried it on my work e-mail, but I reported each piece of missed spam, so that might help it in the future. The more people who use it, the better it’ll get. Individual Bayes classification is better, since it’s based on what I don’t want to read, which might vary slightly from what the masses don’t want to read, but it’s better than nothing. It saves me some time and lowers my blood pressure.

If you have the misfortune of using Outlook for e-mail, give Cloudmark a look. For once, Outlook will do something good for you. Being free, I don’t expect it to be around forever, but we might as well use it while we’ve got it.

A story about lapsed domain names

Dave Farquhar General

There’s a good, featury story at Salon about lapsed domain names and speculation as to why. Good read, especially for those of you (and you know who you are) who enjoy typing weird stuff into a Web browser to see what will happen.
Like Gatermann, for example, who likes to type things like www.goatmilk.com and see what comes up (these days, nothing), then goes and changes the hosts file on another friend’s computer to keep his little brother from visiting his favorite Web sites.

I’ll never forget the time Gatermann typed www.hotmonkeylove.com into a Web browser. Up popped a big picture of Henry Kissinger picking his nose. The only text on the page said, “E-mail me if you have any ideas about what to do with this site.” We should have cliked on the link and said, “I recommend you visit IRegisteredADumbDomainNameAndNowWhatShouldIDo.com.” But we didn’t. And by the time we got around to redirecting another site to that page via the hosts file, it had lapsed.

We were probably the only people who missed it. And I’m not sure I know why.

My next project

Dave Farquhar General

I’m in the Web design phase of my next project, which I’ve alluded to in the past. I’ve got a fast machine here (I’m still trying to figure out why my site’s slow–CPU usage is low, memory usage is way low, and there’s no disk activity) with tons of capacity. I’ve got a fantastic piece of software. I’ve got the world’s best server operating system. And my guest has compelling and important things to say.
All we need is a kick-tail design. So I’ll put a design up there, and hopefully that’ll goad her graphic designer son-in-law to say, “Hey, I can do better than that!” and she’ll get her kick-tail design. (But nobody’s gettin’ their mitts on mine. I’m doing my own design, writing, and editing, to leave my mark on my site. It’s the same reason why Aimee Mann sometimes plays every instrument on one of her songs.)

I said Sunday it would go live Sunday. That didn’t quite happen. But soon, very soon.

Words to live by

Dave Farquhar General ,

I do what I do, and I don’t plan how I ought to do it. I never have. I don’t believe in being rigid about anything. If I see an opportunity, I will drop all the rules, even when doing so is probably a mistake. –John Cocke, inventor of RISC
I’d never heard of John Cocke until he died, but that figures. Since I didn’t major in CS or EE, there are a lot of important people I’ve never heard of. But the father of virtually every non-x86 CPU still standing died this past week at age 77. Like many geniuses, he was eccentric and didn’t like to be bothered with mundane, everyday stuff. And like many geniuses, he didn’t think about his methods much. Read more

What’s the matter here?

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

I remember when the stock market crashed in 1987. I had to inform a 16-year-old that 1987 wasn’t “a long time ago” the other day, but that’s another story. So, in 1987 after a crash, who’d CNN talk to? Sam Walton. Makes sense. Sam Walton owned a lot of stock.
So, when the Dow dropped 390 points on Friday, who’d CNN talk to?

Billy Joel. Read more

Must… sleep…

Dave Farquhar General

Video editing melted my brain. My project is so close to being done I can taste it. My brain is dead tired but my body wants to keep on going–it’s used to playing softball doubleheaders Thursday nights, after all, and nobody told it the season’s over–so I’m sitting here listening to Joe Jackson and typing this.
I find I can’t watch TV for enjoyment anymore. Any time I watch (which amounts to minutes per week), I spend the whole time trying to figure out how you’d do the same thing in Premiere. It’s no great loss though. I haven’t been able to watch TV for enjoyment–aside from a Royals game or the World Series–since Quantum Leap went off the air. That was nine years ago.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Dave Farquhar General

I spent some time preparing a new web server. It’s minimalist. I hope it’ll do the job. If not, hardware’s cheap, and this server’s doing a job that needs to be done. I really need to run this blog on something other than my main workstation. But there’s another reason.
Soon, I’ll be bringing another blog online. Not written by me. I don’t do this for just anybody, but this isn’t just anybody. I won’t say much, because I don’t know yet what it’s going to look like, but this person has the most important message of anyone I know right now, and will hopefully use this new forum to share that message. So that blog’s going online, even if it means I have to go buy a little hardware. I’m always willing to go spend a little money for a good reason. Read more

Do I have to title this?

Dave Farquhar General

I’ve got a full day ahead of me with not much time to post anything. I’ve read a bunch of things this morning that really disturb me and I’m having difficulty finding words for the things I’m thinking right now.
If you’re looking for something to read, go check out Charlie’s entries for July 4 and 5.

The craziest thing I’ve read in a long time

Dave Farquhar General , , ,

I thought the craziest story I’d read this year was a UFO enthusiast’s account of his hunt for a wrecked 1960s vintage spyplane so top-secret you’ve probably never heard of it.
Then I found a link to the story of a teenager who had plans to build a nuclear reactor in his backyard. (Click the printer-friendly link at the bottom of the first page if you want to read it.)

I lived such a sheltered life… Read more