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Population: One

Come on and

October 30, 2002
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One of the things I’ve come to terms with is my gadget habit. It’s there, I can control it, it’s fun giving into it once in a while. Right now was not the optimal time to do that, but I did anyhow. Thanks to EBay, I got myself a nifty analog video converter. What will I use this for? I have no idea. It just offends me that there’s a type of media in my apartment which I can’t convert to digital form. I can scan books and pictures, I can rip my CDs to disk, but I can’t turn a stupid videotape into Quicktime? Totally unacceptable.

However, now that I’m about to have it, I’m seriously tempted to put together a little video with Aimee Mann’s “Save Me” for the soundtrack and clips of tag team wrestlers breaking up pinfalls for the video.

Wizards uber alles

October 29, 2002
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I’ve thought to myself, from time to time, that J. K. Rowling’s world is just a little bit on the bigoted side. The Washington Post has an nice editorial on the subject. Mind you, the tendency isn’t reserved for fantasy — it might have been interesting to cross reference Slan for an example of the same thing with a scientific spin. (Hey, that review was written by Tasha Robinson. She used to be a housemate.) When it gets right down to it, the distaste of technology we find in the Harry Potter books is just another avenue through which we express our desire to be different.

Link ripped from the pages of Tapped, which is worth reading.

Bang bang

October 29, 2002
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One more quickie… people have observed that the University of Arizona campus was a weapons-free zone, and that this didn’t prevent the recent shootings. This is about as significant as pointing out that the UIowa student shootings didn’t take place in a weapons-free zone. If you don’t know how many people decided not to go on a rampage due to the policies in either case, you don’t know anything.

I’m anti-gun control as a matter of policy. I’m just tired of stupid people who obsessively twist every tragedy in the world to suit their political agenda.

Rack 'em up

October 28, 2002
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I got a magazine rack for the bathroom the other week, continuing my headlong rush into domesticity. (Today I got rugs. There’s no end to it.) Right now, it’s a very sad magazine rack; it’s populated with a handful of Sports Illustrateds, and a Macworld. They’re pretty limp, since it’s a sizable rack. I’m kind of fascinated by the process of populating the rack. I hadn’t really thought about it, but it’s going to look pretty pathetic until I get it around half-full. I bet Martha Stewart has a way around that.

Fortunately, it will populate pretty quickly. When I moved, the Post Office kindly let me know that there was a service which would do all my magazine address changes for free. I called ‘em, and they knew about Dragon Magazine, so that seemed like an excellent deal. After they got a list of my magazine subscriptions, they took advantage of my generosity by asking me if I wanted to subscribe to two magazines for a low low price.

I had been wanting Analog and Asimov’s again, so I said sure. This apparently earned me a couple more magazines. Um. Sports Illustrated and Macworld, sure. This earned me more magazines. Quite the unexpected little bonanza. I think I wound up with two or three more magazine subscriptions (all for the same low, low single price!) and I’ll be damned if I can remember what they all are.

But they do keep coming. So I have faith that the sad little rack will fill up.

Mirror mirror

October 27, 2002
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Referrer log spam has to be the best kind of spam ever. For $1,000, they’ll add your URL as a referrer in the httpd logs of thousands of weblogs. (They’ve hit me twice.) Right now, the user agent is “Mastadonte Referrer Advertising”, which is pretty easy to filter out; I assume they’ll change that to something that doesn’t give away the game.

The great thing about this spam is that it’s so easy to nullify it. All we have to do is stop obsessively poring over our referrer logs. If we stop caring who links to us, we won’t ever be suckered into hitting one of their URLs. If we stop building those automated referrer display widgets then the spammers get less advertising.

(Yeah, I know, we shouldn’t have to constrain our behavior to avoid spam. It still amuses me that they’re taking advantage of our harmless narcisissm.)

Update: More on this here.

Feelthy pictures

October 25, 2002
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Unnoticed in the furor over other issues: Bush is pushing for a ban on computer generated child pornography. In April, the Supreme Court struck down such a ban. I’m no fan of child pornography or its consumers, but free speech is free speech.

I found the claim that one in four children between the ages of 10 to 17 is exposed to pornography every year to be really funny, by the by. Newsflash: teenagers find porn on purpose. Always have, always will. It’s not an Internet thing, Mr. President.