LED bulb that fits in a microwave? YES!

I finally found the holy grail.

That's right. An LED bulb that works in an over-the-range microwave.

Though I love LED bulbs for the energy savings, in this application, it's more than saving a few bucks in electricity. They just burn out all the time. It seems like literally every single month I have to change a bulb in the microwave. Apart from the fact that Home Depot gouges you for 4 bucks a pop for these replacement T8 bulbs for microwaves, it's annoying to keep changing it. I have longed for an LED replacement for longevity.

Here it is, in all it's raw glory. I ordered this straight from China, since in the US, apparently there is a conspiracy to ensure a steady stream of T8 bulb sales, and there is no such product available.

While this particular bit of nascent imported technology doesn't seem to have a name, your crucial search criteria on Ebay are E17 LED (the base is E17). It is easy enough to tell by the pictures on ebay if the bulb is going to fit in a microwave. The ones I got were about $3.50 apiece shipped... less than a conventional 30-day-life-expectancy bulb.

What about dimming?

It doesn't dim. On the other hand, it doesn't freak out either. Most over-the-range microwaves have two "on" settings, full power, and half power. When set to half power, it's mostly off (a few of the LEDs still light, but it's not really usable). But nothing bad happens either, I've left it this way for long periods of time with no ill effects. I've personally never cared about the "dim" setting anyway.

Energy use?

About 5 watts total (2 bulbs x 2.6 watts), versus 50-80 watts for two incandescent bulbs. So basically it's a nightlight. Just leave it on all the time if you feel like it, it'll cost you about 30 cents a year.

How's the light quality?

It's not as great as a high-quality residential LED warm white bulb but who cares? It's for over the stove. It's bright enough and not too harsh.

You are kind of a freak for LED bulbs aren't you.

Yes, yes I am. I have about 50 of them in my house. There are only about 6 incandescents left, and they too will be gone soon. I have to change a fixture to get rid of one of them, but it's time will come. Oh yes. It's time will come.

Complexity

"I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface."

--Jaron Lanier

Roughly translated, the computer geek who uttered these words is saying that things would be simple except for it's too much of a pain to go back and simplify them.

Or, you know you're in the internet age, when you go to hook up a new gadget to your television and you discover you don't have any more ethernet ports.

What I found behind my television

I bought a media player gadget, one of these things you can use to watch Netflix movies over the internet and play Youtube videos on your big screen TV. There are a few different devices out there, I ended up with a Western Digital WDTV Live Plus.

It's pretty cool, and it basically works. Though I am still fairly baffled that coming up on a decade after the Tivo hit the scene, these things still seem fairly immature. That is, I have been able to use my Series II Tivo as a "media player" for years now. I can put video in a folder on my PC, and the Tivo can play it. It's not without it's issues - the major one being that the hardware itself does not have HD output because it's so old.

Compared to the Tivo, the WDTV is: small, cheap, has HD, has no hard disk. It works with Netflix, which is a major reason we got it. But I also wanted something to be a better media player than the Tivo.

Even though the video quality is far better, stunningly, it has some basic shortcomings that the venerable Tivo does not.

First, it plays very badly with Windows. You are supposed to be able to just share a folder and it can pull files from there and play them on your TV. I could not get it to work at all. And I'm a computer guy. I read all sorts of crap in the support forums, and apparently it's not an uncommon problem. But despite discussions about it going back more than a year, I couldn't get it fixed.

So I moved on to the next option - set up a media server on my computer. Well, this is more or less how the Tivo works, so that didn't seem like a total defeat. After some brief research I tried a commercial product called PlayOn that seems fairly well established. It mostly works.

But again, compared to the Tivo, there are some surprising shortcomings.

• No "replay" feature,which sends you back about 8 seconds.
• Fast forward/rewind are slow-reacting. It's not highly stable - if I try to fast-forward for any period of time, it craps out and goes back to the menu. Sometimes you can start playing again from where you left off. Sometimes not.
• No automatic indexing. Why wouldn't the media server, or the media player, have some basic functionality that lets you skip forward 5 or 10 minutes at a time?

Tivo Series II: Still Running

At the end of the day, for a hundred bucks, it's hard to be too disappointed. Of course, I will have to pay 80 bucks for PlayOn (unless I can find a free media server). Then I will probably have to upgrade my desktop computer, for a thousand bucks, since it's barely adequate to run a media server. Then I will have to upgrade my network infrastructure, since my wireless G network isn't fast or reliable enough to...

Progress.

It's a nice simple device to play media. It's smaller than a paperback book. It's has HD, and two USB 2.0 ports. It's dead simple to play Netflix and Youtube videos.

The Tivo worked with the limits of people's networks ten years ago. They were slow and unreliable. The Tivo server software transcoded the video to the necessary format in the background, on the PC, before it was needed, so it worked on slow machines. It would download videos to your set-top box in the background, because your network might not be fast enough to play them in real time. It was failure-resistant, if you tried to fast forward (or just play) past the end of what could be served in real time, it would just stop and tell you that, and you waited for a few seconds.

The WDTV seems to be designed around the notion that your network is as reliable as the postal service. It does not do well with a slow server or internet connection. It doesn't buffer much, it doesn't handle problems well. Basically, it fails to give me easy access to media on my home network, with all it's warts and old technology, in the way that Tivo didn't.

Is it simpler? In some ways, yes. It just doesn't work as well.

The march of progress seems to mean that we no longer design devices to work around the shortcomings of the infrastructure. If only the infrastructure was good enough that such a design made sense.

The Internet Is A Vast Wasteland

This should be a revelation to few. While studies are not conclusive, for every man-hour saved by being able to immediately determine the availability of King Ding Dong lunchboxes for home delivery, at least another man-hour is wasted, filling up our brains with information about things that have no value whatsoever. Such as Sarah Palin's children's wedding plans. And King Ding-Dong lunchboxes.

Almost 50 years ago, then-FCC chairman Newton M. Minow declared television to be a vast wasteland. He's 84 years old today. I wonder what he would have to say about the Internet? With the hindsight of someone born moments after the first human being is known to have stepped on the moon, who still remembers such things as 13 channels and black-and-white programming, I can tell you it's a hundred thousand times worse. Maybe more.

But this thought didn't just occur to me out of the blue today. I subscribe to upwards of a hundred different blogs. I don't read them all regularly, but skim a lot of them. Many are personal blogs, that I happened to read once and I found interesting or well written or funny, and so I susbscribed. Two different posts on two absolutely unrelated (and indeed, almost diametrically opposed) blogs touched on this. The first is from a blog called the committed parent which is written by a "social neuroscience educator." I'm not exactly sure what that is, but he writes about child psychology. His last post discusses the downsides of having so much information available and its consequences on creativity, intellectual development, and wisdom.

The other is from a personal blog written by some Canadian guy who calls himself The Real Johnson. I know nothing about this guy except from some of his posts, but he writes well and is often funny. Oh yeah, he likes to drink, too. His last post is called "Internet Killed The Artist" and, from a totally different perspective (possibly drunk) from our PhD child psychologist above, comes to much the same conclusion.

I happened to read these two posts back-to-back and was stunned by the parallelism. In real life, these two individuals could be arch-nemeses. Yet separated by thousands of miles, several decades of life experience, 8 or so beers a day, and a Royal Mounted Police border crossing, they both wrote about the same notion today.

Internet usage is supposed to surpass TV watcing in 2010, at least in Europe. I am not sure exactly how you'd define "internet use," though, since a lot of people watch TV online. If I download a movie from the internet and watch it on a TV, does that count? Anyway, the distinction is fuzzy because "internet usage" could be doing stuff on your iPhone, or playing games, or all kinds of things that can be done on a variety of devices, or may be essentially similar to what you used to do on a TV. The mediums are merging and changing constantly.

But at the end of the day, wherever all this goes, I think that watching television (just watching it) will soon be something that is so passive, that fewer and fewer people will be able to do it. Our collective attention span gets smaller every year as technology invades every aspect of our lives. We lack the patience needed to immerse ourselves in any single pursuit, because we can achieve the kind of gratification we seek from the shallow alternatives that technology make available.

The television is no longer a stage, it is an extension of a the information matrix that weaves through every part of modern life. There is no need to sit and watch it, when you can take it with you and interact with it. We aren't interested in being passively entertained, we want our entertainment to actively engage us and respond to our feedback or we will lose interest.

Historically, anthropologists have demonized television for its passivity. It demands little of its users to entertain them. But could it be that the opposite problem is no better? As people become accustomed to instant gratification from life connected to the Internet, we are losing our ability to pay attention to anything. Even crappy television.

I predict that just sitting on your couch and watching television will soon be a lost art. Parents will beg their kids to unplug from the hive and just try to do something that doesn't give them any "likes" or comments for an hour or two. Television, once predicted to destroy the world, could be the last hope for saving it.

The child psychologist, in this post, says that we need to "spend time in nature, meditating," among other things. While I think his advice is good, the chances of getting most kids to unplug long enough to meditate is about zero. After all, there are a lot of wifi dead spots in nature.

So let's all do our best to get out in nature. I bet few of us can say we've been more than 200 feet away from the nearest automobile in the last month. But barring that, let's at least all pledge to stop checking our email for a couple hours and watch some good old fashioned TV.

Major Facebook Security Bug -- On Top Of Bad Policy

Facebook recently added this "Connections" feature which many of you probably unwittingly signed up for. I did. Each time you would log onto facebook, it would give you the opportunity to convert all the things you entered into your profile page into "connections" -- your music, likes, interests, and so on.

Programming: Scary and Insecure

I'll explain the new policy below, but far more frightening is a bug I came across while messing with the new privacy settings.

The picture at left is my profile as it would appear to one of my friends. This is something you can do in Privacy settings.

Those chat windows are not mine.

Those message waiting, friend request, and status update indicators are not mine.

I can see my friends' outstanding friend requests, and type in the chat windows.

I have no idea what the practical implication of this bug might be, but it is very clear that Facebook's code does not isolate your profile and session information from others at a basic level. Like a jilted lover, Facebook has become scary and insecure.

There is no way that any system with a functioning security model would ever let something like this happen. What this means is that information which should only be available to my friend when they are logged in, was shown to someone else.

My friend's friend requests.
I am not nearly this popular.

Let me repeat this. This should never happen, ever. Even if someone made a programming error in this section (that shows you what your profile would look like to someone else) -- there is no way I should ever have seen open chat windows or friend requests. That information, related to my friends' profile and session, should be at the highest possible level of security in Facebook and never shown to anyone other than that specific user, when they are logged in.

This raises serious concerns about the hackability of Facebook - that is, it's almost certainly vulnerable to fairly basic security exploits. Core profile information is not only unprotected at a basic level but was shown to me accidentally.

Is this bug reproducible?

Yes. I have a "joke" facebook account that is friends with a few of my friends. I sent myself a message from the "joke" account, and opened up a chat window in my real account.

When logged in using my joke account (from a different computer entirely) and viewing my "joke" profile as my real account, I could see the message waiting indicator, and the chat window that I had open in my real account.

Did you tell facebook about it?

Yes, and it sure took some doing to find their bug report form. Now taking bets on how soon it will be before my account is disabled, which is their usual response to any communication about a problem.

This Isn't Exactly Rare

After a bit of googling, there are numerous reports of similar security breaches in the last couple months, which further reinforces just how shaky the basic security design of Facebook is.

Faceook bug might have exposed your inbox - February 25, 2010

Facebook bug delivers mail to the wrong people - February 25, 2010

Facebook bug exposes private email addresses - April 1, 2010


Policy: Bad

This change came with new privacy settings, which seems to be a fairly routine event these days. Most people probably didn't realize that by finally acquiescing to the "connections" thing, you made all that information public. This article explains what "connections" does to privacy. The long and short is that anything you "like" is now publically associated with your name, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Supposedly, you can prevent your "likes" from appearing directly on your facebook page, though in practice that does not seem to work. But even if you could, from the viewpoint of the thing itself that you are "liking," your name will show up on their list, meaning that it will end up in every marketing database known to man.

iPad Saves World, But What's Next?

Last week heralded the unveiling of Apple's latest wonder-child, the iPad. As everyone with access to the Internet, a newspaper, or pictures of The Rosetta Stone knows, the iPad will revolutionize the world in much the same way the automobile, antibiotics, and the vacuum bottle have.

Since everyone has drunk the Apple cool aid, there is no question that any new product released by the company will be met the sort of rejoicing and world peace that can only be compared to the second coming of Christ. This is despite such obvious attempts at money-grubbing which include batteries that can't be replaced, and the inability to sell any software for one of their products without giving Apple a substantial cut. But making Steve Jobs rich is a small price for world peace, isn't it?

But never mind all that. This post is not about cool-aid, or even the glorious future that awaits us in a new world, filled with throngs of happy hipsters who have been led down the path of righteousness, converting all unbelievers with the touch of their touch-screen. That world will obviously be free of hunger, disease, poverty, and even hiccups. Especially hiccups. Instead, this post is about what's in the "Apple Core," that primordeal soup where future unstoppable products are conceived and gestated. Even though starting next week, the iPad will solve global warming at the same time as providing for all the world's energy needs, there will still be many opportunities for future miracles from the Apple Computer corporation.

So what's in the pipeline? Take a gander at these:

iQ: The world's "smart cue," it will change your drunken 2-hour 8-ball game into something Minnesota Fats would envy. With a precise GPS satellite uplink, it will automatically analyze your shot and tell you when you're perfectly positioned. It will even let you know when you're being hustled by accessing a datatabase of known bar scammers. You will only be charged for shots you make.

iRan: A device so small it can be hidden, er, anywhere on your body, this gadget is designed specifically to assist Middle Eastern political dissidents in escaping from dictatorial regimes. Essentially a tiny GPS receiver that comes with a a pair of running shoes, it was test marketed in the U.S. as the "Nike + iPod Sport Kit."

iCaramba: iPad rebranding for the Latino market.

iSore: A new product that will revolutionize, nay, eliminate the plastic surgery industry, the initial iSore is anticipated to be released in January 2011 for $999. This amazing device will project a holographic image of it's owner, making them appear to look like Jessica Simpson or Hugh Jackman. The iSore 2.0, which will be released three months later for $499, will expand its audience to the trashy market and include Khloe Kardashian and "The Situation" as options, among others. Initial iSore purchasers can upgrade to the iSore 2.0 for $199.

iDeal: Will revolutionize casino gambling by replacing table dealers with a machine that never misdeals and automatically shuffles whenever card-counting is detected. The perfect dealer, it will even make casual banter and tell players how disappointed it is when they lose.

iCon: Apple made "icon" a household word in 1984 when the immensely popular Macintosh changed computers from an intimidating machine with a screen full of baffling information, into something where you point at things and clicked them. Much like how a toddler interacts with you by pointing at your dinner, while he dumps his mac 'n cheese on the floor. This new product once again owns the word "icon" by offering an all-in-one espionage tool to would-be spies and con-artists. By enabling you to read your victim's minds, the unkowns are effectively eliminated from any scam.

iLand: Tsunami sunk your ship? Lost at sea? No longer a problem. The sunburned ragamuffin clinging to broken boards, dying of thirst, will be a thing of the past, as the new all-weather iLand will automatically direct you to the nearest dry land. Once stuck on your desert island, the iLand will let you download music and video via satellite connection at the castaway discount price of $0.69 per song or $1.49 per video. Internet connectivity is limited to the Apple Store. In adhering to Apple's "captive audience" market strategy, no outgoing email is permitted.

iDo: Apple will change the way the world thinks about nuptials by inventing the "Wedding 2.0" courtesy of the iDo. This amazing gadget will guide couples through every step of the process from planning with the iKnow add-on, to the wedding day itself with the add-on iVow Writer and the iRing, availabile in iRing "Tones" of gold, white gold and platinum. Many other add-ons are available. The base iDo application includes one free iPreNup download, as well as a 30-day trial of their marriage counseling app, dubbed "imSorry," and as well as "iSplit," the separation and divorce app.

Beware the Facebook Scam. And The Cure.

* Yawn * So I got to work at 6:40 AM this morning because of some crazy deadline and was interrupted by a facebook chat from one of my friends. Serves me right, I suppose, for logging into facebook at all when I have so much work to do...


7:53am L hey are you there?

7:53am Jamie: yep

7:54am L how are you?

7:54am Jamie good, you?

7:55am L not too good

7:55am Jamie that sucks. what's up

7:56am L I'm stranded in London got mugged at a gun point last night

(Shockingly, my radar has not yet gone off, despite being a highly skeptical person who knows all about these scams. I blame lack of coffee and early hour.)

7:56am Jamie in london?

7:56am L all cash,credit card and phone was stolen

7:57am Jamie i thought those silly english folks only used knives.
sounds more like a DC story.

7:57am L it was a brutal experience but thank God i still have my life and passport

7:57am Jamie are you ok? not hurt?

7:58am L yea
my return flight leaves in few hours but having troubles sorting out the hotel bills
I need your help

(At this point I am starting to become suspicious for any number of reason... not the least of which is, I have not been in touch with this person too much lately, and they are the kind of person who would absolutely have been able to sort out this problem themselves).

7:59am Jamie what can i do?

8:00am L wondering if you could loan me some few $$ to sort out the hotel bills and also take a cab to the airport?

8:01am Jamie sure, but how will i get it to you?

8:01am L you can have it wired to my name via western union
do you know any western union outlet nearby?

(HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! At this point I pick up my phone and call my friend, who is very pleased to hear from me at 8:00 AM with the news that her facebook account has been compromised.)

8:03am Jamie one sec

(Talking to friend on phone, who is now logged in and able to watch the conversation. Interesting and surprising: you can be logged into Facebook from more than one location simultaneously. If someone's logged in to your account, the act of YOU logging in DOES NOT kick them out. Stupid? Yes.)

8:04am L ok. let talk via email. ojeri51@yahoo.com
facebook is tripping

8:04am Jamie
ummm. yeah right.
ha ha
see ya scammer!

(Friend changes password. This action DOES cause all other sessions to be terminated, at least, which I confirmed by testing it myself from two different web browsers).


The Aftermath

Here's where things get a little ugly. This was all fun and games, and the scammer was booted before any damage occurred.

I reported the abuse to Facebook using their hacker victim form. I did this because I thought it was important to let them know about the abuse to add to their data, and possibly help track the way in which the account had been compromised.

I also clearly stated in the report that I had spoken to my friend on the phone and she had already changed her password.

Within minutes, I received a response from Facebook. They disabled her account. They told me to direct my friend to this page to get access restored. That page has no information on how to get your account access restored after Facebook disables it. The page she receives when she tries to log in is similarly unhelpful.

Facebook's security page advises people whose accounts have been compromised to do exactly this: log in and change your password.

Well, we did that.

What To Do Next Time Around

First and foremost, I wasted a golden opportunity to mess with a scammer. For example, this guy enjoyed quite a bit of wonderful thief-mind-f*cking before he finally moved on.

Second: The moral of this story is that no good deed goes unpunished.

If your facebook account is hacked, or the account of a friend is hacked, DO NOT report it to facebook or you will lose access. The only reason I can think to do this, is if you can't get in touch with the friend whose account has been compromised so that they can change their password. But you are setting them up for a big pain in the ass by doing this.

from      The Facebook Team 
reply-to  The Facebook Team 
to        (Jamie)
date      Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 8:22 AM
subject   Re: 419 Scam - Friend Report
mailed-by facebook.com


Hi Jamie,


Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We have taken the appropriate action to secure this person's account.


In order to resolve this matter, please ask the account holder to view the Security section of Facebook's Help Center:


http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=420


From here, they can take immediate steps to contact us and reestablish ownership of the account.


Thanks for contacting Facebook,


Jasmin
User Operations
Facebook

Thanks a bunch, Jasmin!!

Google Maps Meets Home Improvement

I had the great pleasure of receiving a call from one of my tenants a couple days ago to report that water was dripping on his bed. Awesome. There's no plumbing in the attic so it had to be the roof. Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

I had been on my roof once before when the DirecTV was installed. Unfortunately, there's no easy access from inside the house. The DirecTV guy went up with a 30 foot ladder from the back yard. Aside from the fact that I don't own a 30 foot ladder, I can't stand being at the wrong end of a wobbly ladder high above the earth. Being on the roof - I can handle. It's the sketchy trip up and down I don't like.

However, I did note that there was actually an access hatch, which someone brilliantly drywalled over inside the house. If I had been thinking I would have drilled a hole through from the top while I was up there, but I didn't. Now, faced with having to go up there to see what's up with the leak, I need to find it somehow.

Enter Google Maps. The lovely satellite picture clearly shows my hatch and with a little cleverness I realized I could probably get a pretty good fix on it's location. I pulled the screenshot into Photoshop, blew it up, and did some measuring. I know my house is 18 feet wide. In my blowup, it's about 142 pixels wide. The center of the hatch is 73 pixels from the left, and 33 pixels from the back of the house.

Some math... 141 pixels / 18 feet = 7.83 pixels per foot. So the hatch should be 9.3 feet from the left edge, and 4.2 feet from the back of the house. Most likely I'll need to subtract about 6 inches to account for the brick wall from the side-to-side measurement, but this should be close enough so I can drill a hole inside the house and at least be somewhere in the 2x2 hatch zone.

So it seems the internet is not comletely useless after all!

Communication Irritation

I left my phone at home today. While it is slightly disconcerting, it shouldn't be a big deal since there are 27 other ways people could get in touch with me. Heck, I get an email anytime I have a new voicemail or miss a call anyway. But still, it leaves me feeling slightly disconnected.

I remember the old days. You had a black book with your addresses and phone numbers in it, or you kept them in your head. You had a "daytimer" or some such quaint thing with your schedule and important notes. Maybe you even had a rolodex. Yeah, I'm really dating myself, ask me if I care. Just google it. But at the end of the day important information was always in one place. Really important information, like the phone numbers of your best friends/spouse/pizza delivery/drug dealer were kept in your head. Now, I'm not even sure I know my own phone number, much less anyone else's.

There was only one way to get in touch with someone. Land line telephone, leave a message. You made plans because you had to. You couldn't just say "let's all meet up tonight." No, you would have to arrange in advance, a specific place, a specific time. A concert or sporting event was even more complicated - imagine trying to connect with a bunch of other people at RFK stadium with no cell phones. That was serious business. Parking Lot A near light post 27 at 4:30 PM. Try again every hour if we miss each other. Meet at the beer station by portal 120 if we get lost. And so it went.

While in some ways this was a pain in the neck, in other ways it was far simpler than it is now. There was no ambiguity about how to reach someone, because there were no options.

Now, there are a million options.

• Cell phone. Many people have more than one.
  
• Land line. Becoming endangered in the wild, but they still exist.
  
• Text messaging. Quickly replacing voice communication.
  
• Email. Ubiquitous, but inconsistent. Some people receive it on the telephone, some people get it while at work, some people never while at work.
  
• Facebook. Social networking is becoming increasingly popular as a way to organize events, parties, even just communicate directly with people or groups.
  
• Twitter. Not really quite sure what it's purpose is yet, but since I just got onboard with it a month ago, I assume it's already yesterday's news. But it is clearly considered a legitimate method of communication by some.
  
• Online chat. Gchat, facebook chat, whatever.
  
• Blogs. Half the world has a blog now, so if you want to keep up with your friends' manic musings or rants then you better be on that too.
  

The lines between everything is getting blurred. I've sent people text messages and had them respond by email. I've posted something on facebook and had someone call me in response.

And it's nearly impossible to keep track of everything. I have events scheduled on facebook and evite. I have a calendar at work in Outlook. I sometimes don't check email over the weekend, but other people assume that everyone's on email all the time because they have a blackberry or an iphone.

Without question there are benefits to all this stuff. But god damn does it suck up a lot of time to keep up with everything. Can't all this stuff just get wrapped into one place somehow?

Someone invent the the twitfaceiphonetextchatblogemailasaurus already. I can't take any more.

I Think You Made A Wrong Turn...

Sorry for yet another boring post about Google Analytics, but apparently I am obsessed. One really fun thing is that you get to see what search terms people used to find your web site, and some of them are hilarious. Here are some awesome ones for my blog.

"Obama sex toys" - This post is the 12th result in google. A whopping 23 people found their way to my web site looking, apparently, for an Obama-themed vibrator. An item that is sure to be worth a fortune on Ebay in ten years...

"Meat My Ass" - This post about my first Krav Maga experience has, bizzarely, become Google's 20th hit for this query. I will refrain from postulating a theory about what they were actually looking for.

"Quick Hell Update" - Oh my god I'm the third Google result when looking for news from the underworld. In January, four people got to my site with this search.

Okay. I apologize if you have completely glazed over. Moving on...

Countdown to 200

This is my 190th post on this blog. According to blogger, it is my 201st. For a sweaty-palmed moment I thought that I had blown by #200 without realizing it, and, in fact, that my 200th post was yesterday's generally boring and entirely filler "metapost."

But then I realized I have a bunch of drafts that were never finished or published which don't count. Eleven, to be exact. So in an attempt to post something that's less banal than yesterday's statistical analysis without having to think too hard, I decided to try to say something about each those drafts over the last two years in the countdown to 200.

In some cases, I actually did write something but never publish it. Probably because I realized doing so would result in legal action against me. But now, I will publish my old prose, or in cases where I didn't write anything, at least try to remember what the hell I was going to write about, for your amusement.

Draft #1 - April 16, 2007: "Virtual Poker"
Status: Never Started

Yes, I'm talking about the card game, not some twisted Second Life sexual fantasy. I used to play poker on a fairly regular basis with a bunch of friends. Two of our group (a couple) spent about six months in North Carolina in the winter/spring of '06/'07, where their daughter was being treated for a rare disease. (She's doing great now, by the way!) Being starved for gambling opportunities, and hoping to alleviate the ennui for our friends down south, those of us in DC decided to set up a virtual poker game so we could all play.

This actually kinda worked. We had a couple ideas. One was to use an online casino's "practice" room and just have us all sign in and everyone would play online, and let the casino handle the cards, money, etc. The problem was, everywhere we tried would only let you have a single computer from each IP address connected at once. Since we were all at my place with laptops, we could only get one person on. Two of us had VPNs that we could use to get around this, though there were general concerns about playing poker on some Cayman Islands web site through the office VPN. But even throwing caution to the wind, we still couldn't get everyone on at the same time.

So then we set up a laptop to represent the remote players, seen at the left end of the table in this picture. The video feed back to NC was of the cards on the table. We just had a pile of chips next to the laptop and would act on his wishes to bet, raise, or whatever. This was OK except he couldn't see anything except the cards...

In the end it was pretty fun and more or less worked. Michael won too. I can't remember why I never finished this one, I've certainly written about less interesting things before. For example, my second post, "ordered lists in Internet Explorer."

Footnote: This is my apartment at 5130 Connecticut Avenue. I moved out of there less than a month later when I bought my place in Columbia Heights. Pretty sweet apartment, actually.

Metapost

I decided to look at google analytics for my blog today after I finished watching this useful, if unbelievably dry, video about using the "ASP.NET AJAX CascadingDropDown Control Extender." Don't ask. It's my job. Anyway, it nearly fused my synapses. Not because of the complexity, but rather because of the monotone of the delivery... can we have just one wisecrack please? So I needed something to wake up my brain before I could begin creating cascading drop down controls. Yes, somehow, web site usage statistics fit this bill for me. I'm a geek.

Anyway, the majority of my traffic is still dominated by people reading my April 5, 2007 post about removing Spector Pro, a keylogger tool that people generally use to spy on their kids and spouse's computer activities.

Really, though. I have had 1,915 page views in the month of January. 627 of those were the keylogger page. Almost 1/3 of my traffic is for a nearly two-year old post!! There must be a lot of paranoid people out there. I hope I've enabled countless people to surf porn, buy drugs from mexico, or meet "friends" online without fear of being spied on by their spouse or parents. Don't thank me, I'm just a philanthropist by nature.


In this same timeframe in 2007, I had a total of 187 pageviews, 21 of which were the spyware page. Well that ain't bad, a 10-fold increase in traffic in one year. Too bad it's mostly people trying to cheat on their wives. Oh well.

I also now have 16 google reader subscribers, up from about 3 a year ago. Yay! And I think I only know about half of them personally. I feel like that is a tremendous victory.

In January:

• Nearly half (47%) of my traffic came from google.
  
• 13.6% or 198 visits was direct traffic. That is probably some of my luddite friends who don't know about blog readers and therefore just go to a bookmark once in a while to see if I've posted.
  
• 11.68% or 170 visits came from Prince of Petworth, probably because I comment there all the time and he links to me.
  
• 7.14% or 104 visits came from dcblogs.com. I got "noted" once this month.
  
• A paltry 6 visits, or 0.41% came from expressnightout.com! That blows. I mean, you get printed, on actual paper, in the Washington Post Express and a miserable 6 people linked from there? Or maybe some people actually made that impossible paper-to-internet leap of faith and typed in the URL. Let's count them as part of the 13.6% above.
  
• The rest is mostly other people who link to me, or a random blog where I commented, or a random geek forum linking to the spyware post, or some non-google search engine. (Didn't know about those, did you?) The grey wedge is "everything else" even smaller than those little slices.
  

And what the hell does all this mean...

Well, commenting and/or being linked from PoP generates a lot of traffic.

Getting in dcblogs generates a lot of traffic.

Getting in the Express Blog Log is fun, if you find out about it soon enough to grab a copy to put on your fridge, but it's impossible to know whether or not it generates any traffic. I'm guessing not so much. Need to do a covariant analysis of months where I was not in blog log. Does anyone know how to do that...

Finally, and most importantly: I should be selling spyware removal products and services.

Repeat: That's Not Lancelot

I happened to be watching the local news last night. This is a result of my new television addiction -- without even thinking I turned on the TV when I got home last night and started watching whatever drivel was spewing forth.

The story was about this couple in Boca Raton who cloned their yellow lab Lancelot. I was immediately reminded of the fairly decent Arnie sci-fi yarn called The 6th Day (2000). The movie, set in the not-so-distant future, begins with our hero taking his dead dog to the local "Repet" outlet to get the expired pooch replaced with a spanking new clone version. Best name for a pet-cloning business ever, I might add.

And as it turns out, the future is basically here. While you won't find Repet at the Montgomery Mall just yet, simply send a self-addressed stamped enevelope, a frozen DNA sample, and $155,000 to the BioArts International company in South Korea, and ten weeks later, you'll have yourself a Lancelot Encore. Yes, that is what they named him.

"When he crosses his front legs over each other while lying down, that's when we'll know he's the same," said Ed Otto.

Ummm.... yeah... I've never, ever seen another dog do that before... you know, I may just start my own pet "cloning" business...

But I am not going to comment on the absurdity of spending the GNP of some third world countries on cloning a yellow lab. No, that is not my point today. I just like it when fictions related to Arnold Schwarzenegger become reality.


From the 1993 movie "Demolition Man," starring Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock....

SB: I have in fact perused some newsreels from the Schwarzenegger Library, and that time that you took that car...

SS: Hold it!.... "Schwarzenegger Library?!?"

SB: Yes, the Schwarzenegger Presidential Library! Wasn't he an actor when you...

SS: Stop! He was president?!

SB: Yes! Even though he was not born in this country, his popularity caused the 61st Amendment which states....


That's right, kids, you heard it here first. Schwarzenegger '16!!

Google Knows All, Not Afraid To Tell You

You may have noticed that lately, when you start entering a google search, it pops up the number of results of searches beginning with the words you type. While this is both cool and disturbing at the same time, you can also use this feature to harness the power of the Google Oracle to answer all questions. Google will reveal the truth about any question of character based on the fact that it knows everything.

Please feel free to waste hours trying this on your own, but as you can see from the examples below, it is never wrong.

1. George Bush




Observe how more people believe that George Bush is an alien, than believe he is a great president. But what about the veep?

2. Dick Cheney



I think that pretty much sums it up, though #6 concerns me.

3. Barack Obama



More people think Obama is the anticrhist than Bush, but at the same time more people think Obama is their homeboy than that he is the antichrist. Check! Barack Obama is definitely the first muslim terrorist arab socialist president of the United States.

4. Sarah Palin

This one got a little tricky. Since most people started out their proclamations with "Sarah Palin Is A... " we had to look up that too in order to find out what she is.





But "Sarah Palin is Hot" still wins!!

But what about local politics?

5. Adrian Fenty




I think that speaks for itself.

Now that we've got the final word on the important politicians, just a few more questions need answering.

6. God




Still hanging on, with "good" having a slight edge over "not great".

7. Google





Do you doubt the veracity of anything you read here? I give you two final Googloracle searches to prove that you should never doubt it's power:

8. The answer is




All that makes perfect sense to me except the last one, say what? But anyone who still doubts the answer is 42 can wait another five billion years for the question. This is good enough for me.

Finally... the ultimate proof. All hail Google, Who Knows ALL!!

9. Jamie is

Comcast: You Can Blow Me

My last bill for the suite of services that I could almost certainly live just fine without - that is, cable television, internet, and my "land line," or IP phone, was $245.

That makes it officially the biggest single bill that I have ever received at my house, including gas in the dead of winter last year, despite having a house with windows that are older than Methuselah, a front door that seals so badly that I can clearly see the street when it's closed (and no, it has no windows), and no insulation.

Okay, technically it's three bills. But if you take out the phone ($40 a month, which I've been too lazy to cancel) and the internet ($35 a month, well worth it) we're still talking $170 a month for cable television.

ARE YOU F@&#($&*!ING INSANE?? I don't even have the full-on package! I've got HBO and Skinemax. That's all. Oh yeah, and I have such "services" as HDTV and DVR which used to be basically free. In six months there won't even be any non-HDTV, it's going the way of the dodo. The "teaser" price for this exact same set of services -- my first bill about 18 months ago -- was $105. In the intervening months, the price has gone up incrementally. I mutely accepted that, like a frog in a pot of water slowly coming to a boil. But last month, it went from the already outrageous $205 to $245. WTF? I haven't been paying the teaser rate for nearly a year now, so that's not it.

A regression analysis of the incredibly complex bill revealed that the rate for Skinemax and HBO was now $36 per month (up from $22) and the rate for my DVR service was $15.95 a month (up from $4.95 when this all began). The remainder I assume is bured among the various "screw you" fees.

Wow. That's a pretty big jump for one month. And frankly, no television is worth $170 a month. That's more than 5 bucks a day for Reno 911 and Alien versus Predator at 2 AM.

Comcast must have forgotten something very important.

YOU HAVE COMPETITION. Oh yeah, and it's a recession. When times get tough, ridiculously expensive luxuries like cable TV are the first things on the chopping block. Brilliant thinking - now that people are watching their spending, let's just jack the prices about 40 bucks for no good reason! Everyone else who didn't get their business degree from a cereal box is doing just the opposite- offering crazy deals to try to get their piece of the approximately seventeen dollars that the entire population the United States is willing to spend this year.

The resolution: DirectTV is being installed in two weeks. Their full-on package is $110 a month AFTER their teaser expires, and that includes about everything under the sun. Coincidentally, Verizon just mailed me an offer for their crappy DSL internet service for $9.99 a month for a year. So I'm going to get more channels and functional (if old-timey) internet service for exactly half the price of Comcast.

The end is nigh!!

Holy crap!! Everyone start building an ark, prepare for the rapture, or make love to the nearest hot person of the opposite sex. Or whatever your preference is.

AMAZON.COM IS DOWN!!

As of 1:46 PM on this Friday, June 6, 2008, the world's most powerful consumer web site has been broken for at least five minutes. Already, thousands of people are sweating and wondering where the nearest Wal-Mart is.

Update, 1:55 PM: Amazon.com is still down, and I have learned from reliable sources (that is: spam from Borders) that Borders has terminated their seven-year partnership with Amazon.com, and launched their own website a few days ago. Could this be first shot across the bow in a bloody bookstore battle? This could be the ugliest online vendetta since Wonkette pissed off the Ron Paul freaks. And Borders.com is working fine, stealing thousands of customers per second. Coincidence? I think not.

Update, 2:07 PM: Still down. I'm not sure exactly what's going on, but I'm feeling a little anxious. Are those bugs on my arms? Ack, get them off!

Update, 2:44 PM: After hitting reload 4,234 time in the last 20 minutes Amazon.com has finally been restored. Praise be to Allah, Isis, Shiva and Kim Jong Il for gracing us again with your terabytes of one-click shipping goodness. How the world managed to exist for the approximately one hour of Amazone-free hell, I will never know, but this day will live in infamy as one of the greatest horrors of the 21st century. Never forget.

Update, 2:49 M: Noooooo!!! It's broken again... those heinous Borders terrorists have somehow defeated Amazon's advanced security grid and once again brought the world of gratuitous spending to it's knees. The network is shaky, we're up and down. I'll be outside sniffing glue until this crisis is over.

Update, 3:49 PM: It's official. There are dozens of stories in the news about Amazon.com's demise. Their stock is down 4%. This is, without question, the first horseman of the apocalypse and the surest sign of the end of western civilization. Saddle up, bitches. It's time to move to Canada.

Update from the Farm

I've been busy as hell, and therefore not going out too much, which usually results in getting into trouble, observing or participating in crimes, taking illicit pictures, and consequently blogging.

But I feel compelled to post something, so my seven Google Reader subscribers don't think that I've disappeared. Hey, it may not sound like much, but it's up from three a month ago! And I figure for every Google Reader subscriber I've got, there are 1,453 who just have me bookmarked or use other readers.

So in the absence of time to think of or instigate anything interesting to write about, I thought I would share some fascinating information about this web site's readership. Below, you can see the statistics from the last month. Those are some pretty impressive numbers - on one single day, nearly 200 people read my blog! That means with the I potentially have about as much reach influence as, say, your average bullhorn wielding nutjob on the sidewalk downtown.



Actually what's really amazing is the power of Google. Despite this post about Radiohead getting linked from billboard.com and then reproduced on a dozen other media web sites, including Reuters, my 13-month old article about removing a nasty piece of spyware generated more traffic last month than the Radiohead thing.

If you google for "remove spector pro" this site comes up 4th. Before a lot of people who actually sell software.

But if you search on "radiohead clusterfuck", I'm only 6th!

Anyway, back to my regularly scheduled neighborhood rambling. I actually did witness a crime this weekend (hard to go long without that happening in Columbia Heights) and did a lot of work on the house so I'll have something to say when I come up for air.

Another nail in the coffin for DRM and the old school...

Here is the story of how author Paulo Coelho benefited from the free distribution of his work, in this case, a book called "The Alchemist." He said, in his keynote speech at a conference in Munich called Digital, Life, Design:

"In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came from zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000."

This is a pretty odd pattern for a book - to go from almost no sales to hundreds of thousands as years go by. It turns out, pirates had made electronic copies of his work available online through BitTorrent. The free availability of his work exposed him to millions of new fans. So, Coelho actually went out and located links to torrents of all the different language translations of his books and published them on his web site. Sales skyrocketed.

I've long held that restricting distribution of artistic work works against the artist. While people who closely guard copyrights will maintain that 100,000 illegal downloads of a song (or book) is equivalent to 100,000 lost sales, I believe exactly the opposite. This is for several important reasons:

1) People do not buy something they can't afford. Kids especially have limited amounts of discretionary income. A pirated CD or computer game or whatever does not equate to a lost sale.

2) Increasing distribution of artistic work increases popularity. It's free advertising. How many bands did you get into because a friend of yours made you a copy of their album? Electronic distribution is this same basic idea to the nth degree.

3) Your potential audience is almost limitless. By restricting distribution you rely on old-fashioned word-of-mouth to spread the word. The benefits of viral distribution of art far exceed the potential losses because some people aren't paying for music. That is, even if some portion of the people who downloaded your music would have paid for it, the benefit of an exponentially larger number of potential customers being exposed is far greater that that loss.

4) Every artistic work has potential for sales other than the item that can be distributed electronically. Increasing your fan base can only increase those kinds of revenues. Authors sell printed books. Musicians sell tickets to concerts, physical and electronic media, merchandise.

Of course, the other side of the coin is that this only works if you're GOOD. If you let people try something before they buy it, well, you better be offering something worth buying. In some ways, this is the crux of the fear that has taken hold of the traditional record-label recording-industry model. Their business is less substance than sparkle. I remember the days when your favorite band put out a new album and you'd rush to buy it, and listen to it start to finish over and over. Now, the vast majority of what comes from the major labels is driven by a single hit song. So who wants to buy a whole album of crap for one song? While this is great for record labels, as they rake in the bucks for a load of drek, consumers naturally weren't as excited. The consequence: album sales are down, individual MP3 sales are up as a result.

Free distribution of artistic work is the future. And it has almost universally benefited good artists of any kind who have embraced it. But the old guard continues to fear it, because it puts them out of a job. The writing is on the wall, though. The floodgates are starting to open. Let's just hope that the unfortunate breed that continues to cling desperately to the protections of our backwards copyright laws dies off soon.

Suing your customers

In this story we read about 19-year old Jhannet Sejas who recorded about 20 seconds of the Transformers movie with the video mode of a pocket camera, and was promptly arrested for video piracy.

In the comments (from another site) someone writes:

"i took out a cell phone in a theatre recently, to check the time, and put it on vibrate. a guy can down from the projection box apparently, asked to see my phone. i ask why, he says to check if it had a camera.

So. It seems that the MPAA is tearing a page from the RIAA's handbook, and throwing the baby out with the bathwater: they are pissing off the very people they depend on for survival, their customers.

The absurdity of hassling people for recording (or, in the case of our commenter, simply opening his cell phone) a movie with a pocket camera, or cell phone, cannot be overstated. Within hours of a movie being released (or in some cases, before it's even been released), a high-quality bootleg is typically available on the Internet. These are sourced from prerelease DVDs that get leaked, or are telesync recordings that are made by the video camera operator himself. What possible threat, then, is a barely-watchable, and necessarily incomplete recording made by a patron for fun?

RIAA and MPAA have apparently decided that the best way to deal with sagging record sales and movie viewership is to have their customers arrested. Yet these are the people who are actually still going to movies, and still buying music! These are fans of Hollywood, the very consumers of their product! This kind of legal action has no effect on piracy as everyone knows. Movies and CDs continue to proliferate freely around the internet.

I believe in paying for a product, even if I can get it for free, if it's a good product. I buy CDs and DVDs all the time. But when I read stuff like this, it doesn't exactly make me feel good about supporting them.

This continued hostility towards their own customers shows how shortsighted the entertainment industry is. More than eight years after Napster forever changed the way people consume music, they still aren't getting it. Where once there was an opportunity for these organizations to embrace the technology to the benefit of everyone, instead they continue to dig their own grave as the world marches on around them.

Shut the Internet down!!

This is absolutely priceless. Clearly fame has it's privileges. No matter how much of a crackpot you are, you can still get your looney tunes opinion in print.

"I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span."

Ummmm... we'll get right on that!!

"In the early seventies there were at least ten albums released every week that were fantastic."


I am guessing he's referring to this sort of thing.

Urgent IT Bulletin

From: ******
Sent: Wednesday, July 25, 2007 4:29 PM
To: All
Subject: IT Bulletin
Importance: High

Please remember to be very careful of opening an
attachment or link within messages where you don't 
know the sender or if the message looks the least 
bit suspicious.  When in doubt, leave the email alone 
(ie. don't forward it to anyone or click on anything 
in it) and call or email the helpdesk for assistance. 

Sigh. I work for a consulting firm. Even with an industrial strength spam filter, I still get a dozen or so junk mails a day. As does everyone else here, I assume. Yet still, we need to tell people - professionals, who work in offices - not to open the virus/scam/trojan horse emails.

This is 2007. Most people don't even realize that "spam" was actually a canned meat product before it was junk mail, and googling news about "phish" will return as many results about phishing scams as it does about the band.

I am just trying to figure out: exactly who isn't getting it? Who reads that email that says "Your [CLASSMATE] has sent you an invitation, click aakdkdk.iluv.superscams.ru/28231uiopjj32138129038lsdaxxxx.jsp.exe to view it" and thinks to themself, now THAT sounds like a good idea?

It really takes a lot of effort to fall for an internet scam these days. Email programs and web browsers warn you relentlessly about running any executable. Attachments are filtered mercilessly - to the point where it's actually quite a challenge for me to get an executable to certain clients for a legitimate purpose. You can't just accidentally read the email - you have to open it, follow the link, then click yet another link which actually downloads the virus. Then, your browser will give you dire warnings about running programs from the internet, or force you to save it to your hard disk, at which point you can finally commit technological suicide.

The moral of the story is, it's pretty hard to prevent stupid people from hurting themselves. I'm not sure that warnings like this really work. You might as well tell people not to stick their hand in a vat of boiling oil, it might burn! Oh yeah, and don't eat broken glass. It hurts going in AND coming out.