True Porn Clerk Stories has ended. If you never read this, it’s worth reading. There’s nothing spectacular there; it’s just a literate intelligent writer working at a video store that does a lot of porn business, talking about her experiences. “Just,” in this case, encompasses a lot of good writing and some quietly sad stories and some really funny stories. I admire her willingness to talk about taboo issues head-on without resorting to the easy outs of mockery or condemnation.
Category: General
Ha, there’s the first sale. I’d been thinking for a while that the real importance of Warren Buffett’s investment in Level3 was that they’d have a war chest for buying other telecoms. Genuity just announced that Level3 was buying its assets. This isn’t any kind of a surprise, but keep betting on Level3 to come out of the telecom crunch in good shape.
This disaster is why I wouldn’t ever work at a hospital. I get sufficiently stressed worrying about my company losing money. Losing lives — no. I respect hospital sysadmins immensely.
It’s not a very technical article, but still interesting. The point about the importance of the network in disaster recovery planning is essential. slashdot claims the problem was due to a spanning tree fault, although this more technical article seems to indicate a congestion problem. Hard to say.
One of the annoying things about being a wrestling fan is the difficulty of watching the classics. Wrestling is meant to be entertainment, right? What kind of entertainment makes it so difficult to see the old stuff? (Well, comics, but that’s another rant.) There are just insane amounts of really good footage locked up in Vince McMahon’s vaults, and most of it never emerges. Here and there a Ric Flair match, here and there some old Hogan stuff, but never any classic wrestling for the sake of classic wrestling.
That makes this really exciting. Bill Watts’ Mid-South Wrestling (later UWF) was very good stuff, and now his ex-wife is making videotapes available online. Not just “best of” or “wrestler we think you should like.” The whole damned thing. 93 Mid-South house show tapes. 101 Mid-South TV tapes. More to come. Wow.
The author of the infamous “The Eye of Argon” has been found.
Descending from his perch, Grignr was startled by a faintly muffled scream of horrified desperation. His hair prickled yawkishly in disorganized clumps along his scalp. As a cold danced along the length of his spinal cord. No moral/mortal barrier, human or otherwise, was capable of arousing the numbing sensation of fear inside of Grignr’s smoldering soul. However, he was overwrought by the forces of the barbarians’ instinctive fear of the supernatural. His mighty thews had always served to adequately conquer any tangible foe., but the intangible was something distant and terrible. Dim horrifying tales passed by word of mouth over glimmering camp fires and skins of wine had more than once served the purpose of chilling the marrowed core of his sturdy limbed bones.
That’s what I’m talkin’ about.
Nortec Collective looks just amazingly cool. Traditional Mexican music, some of which is itself an appropriation of German polka styling, filtered through electronica sensibilities? With wrestling? Check ‘em out on your favorite music-swapping network today, cause they love that. There’s also a record label. Neat.
It really pleases me to see the WWE TV writers working on the WWE’s press releases. That’s just a hugely impressive document. It starts out pretty sane, discussing some WWF strongarm tactics, but around about the third paragraph it takes a sharp left into a very odd place.
“The demand was contained in a letter sent by a Mr. Michael Rogers, an English Barrister who has resided in Switzerland for 30 years and who holds no Swiss license to practice law. Rogers is held out to be the Fund’s ‘Legal Advisor.’”
From there the press release just goes for broke:
“‘Today, according to public records, he [Rogers] is the only authorized Switzerland representative for an entity known as “The Gaia Movement Trust Living Earth Green World Action”, a phony environmental fundraising scheme reportedly under the influence and control of Tvind, a shadowy international syndicate under investigation around the world, whose leaders are sitting in a Danish jail. In between, Rogers was involved, in the mid-1980s, in establishing an Islamic charity known as Dar Al Maal Al Islam or DMI, which is being named in numerous lawsuits after the events of September 11, 2001, as one of the principal vehicles used to funnel Saudi money to fund the Al-Quaida terrorists. Further investigations are underway.’”
Links are mine. The absence of any linkage showing any connection between Michael Rogers and Dar Al Maal Al Islam (which should be, I think, Dar al-Mal al-Islami) is due to the fact that, well, I couldn’t find any.
Still, just a classic press release. It’s not often that you see the losing party in a lawsuit come out of the corner with that much aggression.
I wound up calling this guy. The number listed was his home number but his wife kindly gave me his work number. He sounded pretty confused when I talked to him, so I just recommended that he contact his local FBI office and complain that someone was using his name for fraudulent purposes. At the time, there was no telling if he was lying or not. I figured recommending the cops would work either way.
I later got email from the sysadmin at one of the hosts associated with the spam, who said they’d found the guy responsible for the spam. Didn’t say who it was, which is OK with me.
Today, Greg pointed out this page, on which nandi@bonbon.net says:
We are a new online bank. We need someone who can make us a script which supports fully automated banking (credit card deposits, internal money
transfers, wire transfer requests, etc.). We are willing to pay big cash for
the program.
Alas, Justin Young confirmed that nandi@bonbon.net was his email address when I talked to him on the phone. So I’m thinking he’s responsible after all. Poor guy. I’m glad I got to help wield the hammer.
Jeremy Bowers writes on the hidden dangers of Bayesian spam filters. Core of the argument: spammers can use any possible filter mechanism to fine tune their spam, and since the Bayesian filter is the best we have, once it fails we’re doomed.
However, if you’re trying to sell me something, you have to either a) market it in the body of the message, or b) give me a URL to look at. Here’s the simple algorithm for filtering spam with URLs in it: if the sender is in my address book, let it through. Otherwise, mark it as possible spam. Jeremy neglects to consider the possibility of personalized filters which by their nature can’t be duplicated by spammers, since they rely on information that only I have.
Bayesian filters may in the end prove to be personal enough, in fact, since they use your own email as the basis for the filters. All in all, I’m not too worried.
(Link by way of Workbench.)
Bring me the brains of Baader-Meinhof. They’ve gotta just be misplaced; what would someone do with them? But man, it prompts weird imaginings.