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I’m starting research on Tivo. After some household disagreement, we
have finally reached the point where I’ll be allowed to get one. There
is a dizzying amount to research, if the goal is to maximize what I
get out of it. I could just walk into a store and have one in no time,
but since I’m comfortable doing both hardware and software hacking on
it (moreso the latter), I want to get the most hackability for the
money. Ideally, I can add a larger hard drive to get lots of capacity
and to put wireless access into it (so I can download the program
guides rather than using a phone line, as well as possibly tapping
into it from within my home network.) I’ve heard newer versions don’t
have a place where you can attach a card, so I might prefer buying an
older one on eBay. I just don’t know yet.

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Not unexpected, but kind of a bummer. I periodically check on Intertrust’s PDF vending system,
mainly to see how many have been dispensed. I had a huge argument that
lasted hours with their head of IT who wanted to not make public the
system because it wouldn’t do 50 transactions a second. Over the first
year, they vended around 4000 documents, something like one every hour
and a half. Way to go, bro. You were only off by 5 orders of magnitude
(and the spec was for 2 anyway, dumbass.) I and the team spent close
to a year on this system, which worked like a charm even when the
company abandoned it like a sack full of drowning kittens. Today I
checked on it and got the message “Thank you for your interest in
Rights|PDF Plug-in. We have discontinued this product.” Of course, it
was discontinued de facto even when it wasn’t discontinued, since no
one was selling it or gave a shit about it. Still, it is sad to see
something you put a lot into go down the crapper, particularly for
reasons unrelated to its merits. We put a lot of really good work into
that system, and ultimately for nothing. Que sera.

Optical Delusion

Ian McDowell perpetrated this one on me via a Dueling Modems post, in
which he writes:

Apologies to anyone who’s already gotten this lots of times
from well-meaning but annoyingly-forward-happy friends.
This photo purports to depict an actual ghost, that of
a widow who died in this house
while waiting for her husband
to come back from the Civil War.

As with most such optional illusions, you have to stare at
it awhile. Don’t focus on any one point, but you can
concentrate on the general area around the chair.

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Got my second e-mail from a band that had been a band of the day. This
time it was Woozy Helmet a
group I wrote about here. They offered to
put me on the guest list if they tour through my city (not knowing
what it was – a Houston band on tour has a real good chance of hitting
Atlanta.) The google age strikes again! I’m not actually writing these
entries to suck up to people and get free passes and stuff, but I’ll
take it when it comes.

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I did my 3 hours with the Max Cleland campaign – what exhausting,
terrible work! I know it needs to be done, but don’t they have any
ditches I could dig instead? Whew. I made about 250 calls in those 3
hours, of which the vast majority were no answers. We weren’t supposed
to leave messages, so we just skipped them, Presumably they go back in
the hopper for the next crews. I talked to about 35 people, all but 3
of whom were voting for Senator Cleland. Two great old guys, one 80
and one 88 and both veterans of WW II, engaged me in
conversations. They were the high point of the day, telling me about
voting for Roosevelt and such. I had considered doing more, but
frankly I don’t have it in me. I can’t imagine being the candidate and
campaigning for several months.

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I’m going to be doing some phone calling this weekend for Max Cleland. Although I
always (and I mean ALWAYS) vote in every election, I’ve never done
anything like this. I’m not a political animal, I don’t take up
causes. At this point in time, though, I really feel like I should do
what little I can to avoid or minimize a Republican congress. I think
an opposition Congress is the only thing protecting the country from
the bastards in the executive branch. I don’t fear Saddam Hussein or
Osama Bin Laden nearly as much as I fear John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney
and George Bushes. His father was the first presidential candidate I
voted against after turning 18. So, I’ll drive out to Chamblee and sit
in a boiler room making phone calls for a couple three hours. At this
time, it desperately feels like I need to do something to try to
prevent the future I so fear.

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Turns out I’m reinventing the wheel on this Blogmax issue. I
installed Tramp, which allows you to do scp for actions that would
normally be ftp inside of Emacs. However, to get it working you have to do an SSH key
exchange such that you can log in without a prompt. This is a huge
pain in the ass. It either works flawlessly right away, or takes
forever. Once I get that solved, I think I’m done. I just use
Blogmax’s “upload-month” function to rewrite everything and then push
it to the web server and I’m done. It’s my failure to use this as my
transfer method that has been keeping the links from getting
updated. Oh well, live and learn.

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I really really need to brush of my Lisp programming skills (ha) and
figure out how to have this weblogging package go back through and put
in all the daily links in the calendar. It will add them when those
days exist, which means for any day, nothing in the future is linked
unless you are saving an old day’s entry after subsequent ones are
written. For someone who Googles to the entry for August 2nd, there
are no links if you wanted to read the next day and so forth. You
can’t navigate forward. If I were to go back and regenerate all these
pages now, the links would be there. What I want is for the Blogmax
package to do that for me. It doesn’t, so I might be modifying
slightly. Wish me luck.

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I really don’t know what All Saint’s Day is about, but today is
it. Way to go, saints. Stay beatific, homeys.

Ended up doing nothing last night, no shows, minimal trick or
treaters, no costumes. We watched a Sopranos episode, and I dropped
off DVD #3.3 at Blockbuster and rented #3.4, the last one of season
3. After a few days, we have a year to wait for season 4. I also got
some pumpkin gelatto at J. Ripples for my wife, who was jonesing for
something pumpkiny to get in the Halloween spirit. We bought a pint,
and I can’t eat mine until free day tomorrow. Can’t wait.

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Two silly links, forward on from friends and relatives via e-mail:

The lesser one, an online cat for those who want a cyber kitty (kind
of like an interactive version of those aquarium video tapes).

The better one is a Shockwave dealio of a singing
bug
– you have to see it.

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As if last night’s Letterman wasn’t sad enough with Zevon, shortly
before the show started, we learned that Jam Master Jay had been
killed in Queens, NY. Run DMC was the first rap show I ever saw, with
Public Enemy and DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince opening up. This
was back when it wasn’t 60% white kids in the audience. I doubt there
were 6% white kids there. I went to a black high school for my one
year in Augusta GA and I came out with an appreciation for Run DMC,
UTFO, Kurtis Blow, Whodini, the Fat Boys and all the other groups that
were big circa 1984. I will miss Jay. I saw them at Music Midtown last
year, another performance I’m glad I saw when I could.

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Halloween. Very scary. Still unsure of our plans for tonight. We could
go see Southern Culture on the Skids, or we could go to the show where
local “super groups” of folks from various bands will be playing indie
rock tributes, performing in their entirety the albums “Pinkerton” by
Weezer, “Bucky Fellini” by the Dead Milkmen and “Doolittle” by the
Pixies. The last is one of my favorites of all time, so this is
tempting.

Last night we watched Warren Zevon on the Letterman show. It was
awfully touching. The whole thing was an extended goodbye to someone
who has been important to the show. Dave was noticeably choked up at
several points. We were kind of surprised when Warren started playing
“Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” with 90 seconds left in the
show, but they allowed the program to run long by a few minutes. You
get the feeling that Letterman just really doesn’t give a shit about
most things in life, but that he has always cared deeply for Zevon,
both the man and his music. I remember a year ago, when all the
buzz on alt.fan.zevon was about the possibility of him doing a band
tour in support of My Ride’s Here. What I wouldn’t
give to have those days back. I’m very glad I saw him when I had the
chance, at the Cotton Club in Atlanta a year or two back. I wish I had
seen him 20 times more, but you take what you can.

I didn’t weblog it yesterday, but it was the 25th anniversary of the
release of “Never Mind the Bollocks.” Who’d have believed that we’d
still be talking about that album now? For those who haven’t seen it,
I highly recommend the documentary The Filth and the
Fury
.

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I got e-mail from the guys in Maogojiatta
about the weblog entry on them a few months
back
. That’s something about the google age – I’m kind of amazed
that they ever saw it. I guess that name is odd enough that you can be
assured that web searches only turn up things you want.

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SciFi Weekly has a good
interview
with SF great Jack Williamson. I never interviewed
Mr. Williamson, although I did once have the great pleasure of sitting
down for a conversation with L. Sprague and Catherine de Camp. I
believe that he was the only member of the Golden Age writers I ever
interviewed.

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We had a fire drill in my office, and as I was walking up the stairs
returning to work, I heard this exchange, offered without comment:

“Everything seemed to be working out alright, until I found out that
he’d been in jail. Now I’m not so sure about him.”

“Well, if I only dated guys who have never been in jail, I wouldn’t
have any boyfriends at all.”

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From Larry Hammer on Dueling Modems:

The Direct Marketing sector regards the telephone as one of its most
successful tools. Consumers experience telemarketing from a
completely different point of view: more than 92% perceive commercial
telephone calls as a violation of privacy.

Telemarketers make use of a telescript – a guideline
for a telephone conversation. This script creates an
imbalance in the conversation between the marketer and
the consumer. It is this imbalance, most of all, that
makes telemarketing successful. The EGBG Counterscript
attempts to redress that balance.

See the
counterscript

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Here’s some of the links that I’ve been hoarding. Most were ones that
someone on Dueling Modems, SFF.net or Usenet posted and I thought they
were interesting enough to save.

Here is a link to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle about White
House Officials putting pressure on the intelligence community
to
achieve the answers they want about Iraq.

Here is an
interview
from The Guardian with UN weapons inspector Scott
Ritter about why we know that Iraq is not near to creating nuclear
weapons. He goes out of his way to point out that Iraq are not
honorable, or that they are not desirous of weapons of mass
destruction, just that we know that they couldn’t have rebuilt in the
4 years since inspectors left without leaving tracks the intelligence
community could trace.