Nobody ever blogs about good customer support. So I sent my Powerbook into Apple to be fixed on Thursday. On Saturday, I checked the repair info page, and the issue was marked as closed. This was somewhat worrisome; I had visions of my poor little laptop lost in Apple’s vast cavernous shipping bays, never to be seen again. So I called customer service. Turned out they’d fixed it the same day it got there, and dropped it back into the mail. I got it back Monday. Three business day turnaround! Go, Apple.

Supernifty site full of 1890s Boston photographs. Already used some for the entrance pages.

Credit to Joe Landsdale, Simon Green, and Green Ronin. God of the Razor: domains are murder, knives, reflections. God of Satin: domains are lust, seduction, hotels. God of Twenties: domains are money, fraud, first impressions. God of Tears: domains are regret, alcohol, and arguments. They ride, like loas, except full-time until the horse dies. Sometimes it’s mutually agreeable, and sometimes not.

In the second installment of the Dear Brother letters, Reese and the gang fight a crocodile. At least, if you define “fight” as “feed a helpless old man to.”

Today, I’m downloading 10,000 books. Because I can, and because I want to. If anyone local wants a DVD with 10,000 books on it for the holidays, let me know.

WISH 76 (original) asks: A lot is made of the role of the GM in a game, but what is the role of the player? I’m not really sure if I can answer that one, since so much depends on the game. The single most important trick to master can be summarized as “support interaction,” which covers a lot — sharing spotlight time, making your character sticky, and so on. Most other stuff depends on the game, I think. ...

Good news (original), without question. Doesn’t make people on US soil a whole lot safer, but it may make a difference for soldiers in Iraq, and it’s excellent news for the Iraqi people. I could speculate all day on the possible effects of this. “Aha, now the attacks on American troops will slow down.” “Aha, now the Iraqis won’t feel the need for US protection and will demonstrate against the occupation.” “Aha, there will be a major boom in Saddam bobblehead dolls.” I don’t have any idea what will happen, though, so I’m not going to try and say something authoritative and convincing. I’ll just be happy the guy’s caught. ...

Everett Ehrlich starts out talking about the basic value of the Internet (original), which is that it makes it really cheap to gather and transmit information. I’d never heard of Ronald Coase, but the basic outlines of the theory as Ehrlich explains it make complete sense. The Internet allows very focused tribes to form very quickly, because one no longer has to look very hard to find other people who consider bowling shoes to be the pinnacle of modern art. ...

We’re restricting Iraqi rebuilding contracts to coalition countries. That’s pretty short-sighted. Bush’s take on it: “Coalition, friendly coalition folks risked their lives and therefore, the contracting is going to reflect that, and that’s what the U.S. taxpayers expect.” Actually, I expect Bush to choose the course which results in high-quality reconstruction at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayer. I suspect that opening the bidding to more firms will lower the costs. I would prefer, thusly, not to exclude non-coalition firms. ...

Well, mt-blacklist lasted a good month or so. I’m now getting hit by a clever guy who figured out that by varying the capitalization of his URLs, he can get past the simple filters. Course, I can complicate the regexp some, but it’s still fragile. Second order solution is the distributed spam database, which works pretty well as these things go.