Milestone

It all kinda snuck up on me. I’d been kind of halfheartedly looking for what seems like forever. Last week, I decided it was time to get serious. Real serious. I called up a friend of a friend and we had a good conversation. We agreed to meet on Saturday. More good conversation. We were out and about for a couple of hours. The results were pretty good.
And then, yesterday afternoon, I saw her. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I looked around some more, just to be sure, but I found myself comparing. And nothing I found stacked up. No, that’s being too generous. Nothing else I found even deserved to inhabit the same universe.

I was smitten. I decided I couldn’t live without her.

Sunday, I made an offer on a house. It’s less than a mile from where I live (1.28 miles if you follow roads, which is generally a good idea). It’s been there for 37 years. I wonder where it’s been all my life.

I’m about to go seriously, seriously into debt. But I find myself liking the idea. I didn’t expect it to happen this fast. Nothing’s guaranteed yet, but my realtor says I made a solid offer.

But I’m finding I already have regrets. Although I rather liked their grand piano, I realize it would be totally wasted on me, and I made no demands about what stays, other than what’s standard in the contract, like attached shelves and the garage door. So I don’t think anything stops them from doing something crazy like taking, oh, doors, and, well, light bulbs and shower curtain rods. Don’t laugh. Growing up, we lived sandwiched between the two weirdest families in our subdivision. One family was the cool kind of weird. I liked them. The other family was psycho-weird. They finally moved away because no one in the neighborhood would speak to them–I think I still have a picture of their moving day–and when they did, they took the light bulbs with them.

What do you care if they take the doors? You Scottish simpletons never use them anyway. Especially you bachelors. –Raunche

Oh well. Hopefully they’re reasonable people. They’ll be able to see from my offer that I am.

A story about lapsed domain names

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.

Who needs Ghost?

One of the most common search engine queries I get hits from is “open-source ghost clone” or something similar. There’s no doubt in my mind why; Ghost is probably the most useful utility I’ve ever found, but not everyone can afford it or its competitor, DriveImage.
The closest thing I’ve found in the open source world is PartImage but it’s a Linux program. I suspect most people want something that runs in plain old DOS.

I don’t know of anything open source for DOS, but I found a freeware program called Savepart. It sports a clear, easy interface and it’s just 268K in size, so it’ll fit easily on a Windows boot floppy. It’s not as fast as Ghost, but for people who just need to make a backup copy of their OS installation for disaster recovery, or for organizations who can’t afford Ghost, it’s great. Re-imaging a system with Savepart is much faster and easier than reinstalling Windows and your applications from scratch.

The progress meter didn’t work right for me, but it beeps at you when it’s done. Just hit Enter after it beeps, and you’re set.

If you’ve never used a tool like Ghost to make a backup copy of your system in its current state, or if you don’t like Ghost’s licensing terms, give Savepart a look. I don’t think it’ll take long for you to love it.

Crime’s downward spiral

I used to waffle on the death penalty. But if the kidnapping, rape, and apparent planned murder of Tamara Brooks and Jacqueline Marris this week doesn’t illustrate why the death penalty is sometimes necessary, I don’t know what will.
More details of Roy Ratliff’s sorry excuse for a life will undoubtedly surface in the days and weeks to come. He committed his first crime before his final two victims were even born. He jumped parole last year, was accused of raping his stepdaugher, then went on one final spree, stealing cars at gunpoint, threatening the drivers with death, and finally, kidnapping and raping two teenaged girls young enough to be his daughters. The girls’ rescuers were convinced he was looking for a place to kill and bury them when they shot him dead.

I’ll be perfectly honest: I’m glad the two deputies shot Ratliff dead. It saved a messy trial, saved the girls undue pain (they’ve been through enough), and it eliminated the chances he’d get off on a technicality, or that he’d play the same game that Leonard Smith played. Smith killed baseball star Lyman Bostock with a shotgun blast in Gary, Indiana in 1978. He pleaded insanity. Twenty-one months after Lyman Bostock died, Smith was a free man again, on grounds that he was no longer insane.

Crime is addictive. I saw it as a teenager. I knew people who started off with little crimes. It started off with pirating cheap computer games. Then they started stealing long distance so they could pirate more cheap computer games. Before long they were stealing credit cards to get more computer equipment. I know of one person who got caught in this mess and started selling drugs so he could pay for all the long distance calls he’d made illegally.

Not everyone gets to that stage. I pirated some computer games as a teenager. As a matter of fact, I don’t know anyone who had a computer when I was a teenager who didn’t pirate software. But for some, the allure of getting away with something was just too much. I never got far beyond casual copying. I figured out how to crack a manual keyword-based protection scheme with a sector editor (I just changed all the words to the same word, then changed the screen to tell you to type that word), but I just passed copies of the game to a few friends. I wasn’t willing to upload seven disks’ worth of stuff at 1200 bps. I had better things to do. I found ways to justify pirating software to myself–for a time–but stealing long distance or stealing credit cards was wrong.

But not everyone thought so.

I’m not saying all those guys I know about are destined to become serial kidnappers or worse. But a tangle of crimes can easily become just like a tangle of lies. You get caught, and you have to commit a bigger crime to get yourself out of the mess the last one got you into. Just like Bill Clinton and his lies.

And that seems to be what happened to Ratliff. You can certainly see the pattern of behavior. He stole a car. The car developed a flat tire. So he stole a truck and attempted to torch the car he’d stolen before, to cover up the evidence. And that seems to be what he planned to do with the two girls he kidnapped–once he’d gotten what he wanted from them, keep them from testifying by putting them in the ground.

Maybe I’m wrong to assert that Ratliff was beyond help, beyond rehabilitation. But when it comes to serial rapists, I’m not interested in finding out. When someone rapes more than one woman or murders a child, I think the best thing to do is send him to God and let Him figure out what to do with him. Maybe God will show him what it’s like to be intimidated and destroyed by someone who makes him look powerless by comparison. Maybe He won’t. At that point it’s His business.

We’ll never know what drove Ratliff to his final deeds. Maybe he thought he could get away with this just like he’d gotten away with previous crimes. Maybe he just needed a bigger sick thrill. Maybe he sensed his end was near, and he was going on one final binge of his addiction before going down in a blaze of glory. That phenomenon was well documented in World War I airmen, whose life expectancy on the front was literally measured in weeks. They drank and slept around like there was no tomorrow, because in many cases there wasn’t.

There’s no sure-fire way to predict which guys who traffic in speed will ultimately end up harmless and which ones will end up like Ratliff. Knowing more about their history, you can profile them, but no one can predict the future.

And you can’t tell a crook just by looking at him. Yeah, Ratliff looked like an unsavory character. But so did one of the interviewees in the first video project I ever participated in. But Joe cleaned up. And now Joe dedicates an awful lot of his spare time helping other people clean up.

I don’t know if the recent rash of kidnappings is really a change in reality or just a change in the way news is reported. Face it, kidnapping is a big story right now. Murder was a big story a century ago, and many newspapers operated under the mantra, “if it bleeds, it leads.” This might just be the 21st century’s answer to that.

I’m not a big fan of teaching your kids not to talk to strangers. I was taught that, and I never got over it. I still have the hardest time talking to people I don’t know. But considering the alternative, it’s an easy choice. Tell your kids not to talk to strangers. Prevention’s a whole lot less painful than rehabilitation.

And while you can’t spot the dangerous criminals of today by looking at them, you stand a chance of being able to predict the dangerous criminals of tomorrow. Kids who steal at a very early age without any remorse and who torture and kill small animals are at very high risk for developing far worse antisocial tendencies when they get older. But when a kid’s age is still measured in single digits, there’s still hope for them. Exert some positive peer pressure on the parent(s) to get the kid straightened out.

You owe it to your grandchildren.

Copyright terriorists can’t take what they dish out

Aw, poow widdle awe-aye-ay-ay! Poow widdle bay-bee!
The RIAA, if you recall correctly, is endorsing legislation that would permit copyright terrorists holders to knock off or hack into computers they suspect are being used to violate copyright law. So I guess calling what they want “copyright terrorism” is apt. Read more

My next project

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.

And the axe falls

I don’t talk about work very often, and usually in vague terms. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned my current employer by name here, and I very rarely mention a former employer by name, mostly because they sometimes made decisions I disagree with. I figure if I’m going to trash them, it’s better if I do it without mentioning them by name.
But something happened Friday. I was going to just ignore it, but I’m not going to accomplish anything by doing that. I might as well confront it. Read more

Buying a monitor

I don’t have any strong opinions about monitors. None at all. I don’t have strong opinions about anything, but I especially don’t have strong opinions about monitors.
The reason for my overwhelmingly weak opinions about monitors is twofold. For one, I very rarely have hardware fail. When I do, it’s almost always a monitor, and it’s rarely cost-effective to repair one. The parts are costly, the hourly rates are costly, and in my experience, a monitor that’s failed once is likely to fail again anyway. So it pays to get it right the first time. Read more