I hear you’ve been under a lot of pressure lately.  It’s tough trying to look like you can do something to actually solve the terrorist problem.  Especially since anyone can be a terrorist: white guys, Asian guys, or maybe Islamic guys.   Heck, you need a big list to keep track of whose who, and you need to update it daily…

But I have to tell you something…you know, for your own good and all.  You see, many of the things you are doing are, well, pretty stupid.  And forcing everyone to carry passports to go to and from countries you used to have open borders with…well, that’s really right near the top of the stupid list. 

You remember that one time when your country was struck by evil?  Remember that time?  I’m sure you do: how could you forget?  My heart broke for your people that day- the horror of it.  Well, those guys who did that…they all had perfectly valid passports and travel visas.  The people who want to hurt you can get those kinds of papers.  They aren’t stupid.  They’ll recruit people who are already American citizens…and I doubt they’ll find it that difficult to find crazies within your own borders.

And the rights and freedom’s you supposedly treasure? Yeah, those things in that beautiful constitution you have under glass there?  Well, it’s starting to look to me like what you’ve got now is becoming a police state.  Folks who visit you will have to register their day to day travel plans…how long will it be before you follow them around just to “make sure”?  And since that’s expensive, you’ll probably recruit ordinary citizens to keep an eye open for you…you know, to watch their neighbors to see who is visiting, to observe any unusual behavior.  Not spying, oh no!  No, just protecting good Americans from the terrorist threat.  Enemies in your midst and all that.  And you know all those foreigners…none of them have true American values, so you really have to watch those types.

Remember how your government and citizens used to make snide and sarcastic comments about the bad old Soviet Union…about how they trampled the rights and freedoms of their citizens and so forth?  Remember how you used to go on and on about how those Soviets needed papers to go from place to place, or to leave the country?  Could it be, just maybe, that those oppressive commie bastards were scared, fearful of foreigners in their midst, afraid of the massive ground forces and nuclear missile arrays mere miles across their borders?    Fear makes people do some pretty crazy things. 

Sound familiar at all?  Here’s my advice: you can’t live in fear.  You can take some precautions, be more observant, pay more attention to signs that the bad guys are massing, and take that seriously.  But all this stuff about not letting folks carry nail clippers on planes, or requiring passports for everyone crossing your borders: everyone knows this is a waste of time.  Worse yet, it is playing directly to the fears of the ignorant. 

Hope everyone there is fine, things are great here. 

Sincerely Yours,

Me

A judge in Washington, DC, is apparently very easily stressed out.  His life was ruined when a pair of pants he dropped off at the dry cleaners were lost.  And the terrible mental trauma this has inflicted upon him is worth a mere $54 million dollars.  He initially sued the ordinary working class owners of the dry cleaning shop for $67 million, but apparently concluded that he could shave $13 million off of that since the pants were used.

Those must be some really special pants, I guess.  Either that, or Judge Roy Pearson is a scum sucking, ambulance chasing, bill-padding lawyer who should be dragged out back, have honey poured over his body, and be staked out on an ant hill.  The fact that his case is undoubtedly costing the tax payers hundreds of thousands of dollars, to say nothing of likely bankrupting the owners of the dry cleaning shop, appears to have flown right over His Honour’s head. 

On the plus side, if Judge Pearson is ever charged with murder he should have no trouble whatsoever getting a reduced sentence due to mental defect.  All he has to do is draw attention to this lawsuit.  The really sad thing, of course, is the fact that the Chungs have probably already been strongly advised to settle with him for a half million dollars or so just to save money.  They’ve already tried to settle for as much as $12,000, but that’s only about two days of lawyer-time. 

I’ve heard that bullets are available for about 10 cents a piece at Walmart…*

*This is purely informational.  I do not in any way condone shopping at Walmart

Update: the judge in this suit has ruled in favour of the defendants (I.E.: the dry cleaners).  I wouldn’t exactly call this a victory for justice.  The judge *should* have offered an opinion on how incredibly unreasonable the demands were, how inappropriate and unbecoming it was for an officer of the court to pursue such unreasonable claims,  and perhaps charged the plaintiff (another judge) for wasting the court’s time.

[tags]stupidity, lawyers, judges, pants, criminal, moron, bastard, ass[/tags]

My friend Chris and I make a regular habit of going together to airshows.  I’m not terribly knowledgeable about aircraft, but I greatly enjoy the chance to walk up close and see the planes.  And watching the performances put on by the incredibly skilled pilots that headline the major shows is something I look forward to.

I’ve watched the Snowbirds perform in person probably half a dozen times now, and they can still consistently bring tears of joy to my eyes each time I see them fly.  The precision and beauty of their shows is unmatched.  The dedication and skill of every Snowbird pilot is astounding, and I feel proud to be a Canadian every time I see them. 

Earlier today, Snowbird Capt. Shawn McCaughey died in a crash while practicing for an upcoming airshow in Montana.  I send my deepest condolences to the family and friends of Captain McCaughey: my thoughts are with them and the rest of the Snowbirds today. 

I’ve been watching e-Ink technology, waiting for it to be mature enough to make it a practical choice for supplementing/replacing my paper technical books.  Products using this technology started to become available a little over a year ago, and I wrote a bit about them at the time.

There are two main e-Ink based products out right now: the Sony portable reader, and the iLiad by Irex technologies (iRex is a spin-off from Philips, one of the companies that developed e-Ink technology).  The Sony device is about 40% cheaper than the iLiad: around $400 US versus $700 US.  But the iLiad has a larger display, 16 grayscales versus 4, wireless network connectivity, and the ability to annotate (make notes) on at least some of the documents it supports. 

Guess which one I just ordered?  Yeah…the iLiad.  Neither the Sony nor the iLiad are really “mature” technology: I expect problems, frustrations, and possibly regret.  But I also see an opportunity every time I am sitting in the office and don’t have one of my twenty or so technical books (about 700 pages each) from home, or vice versa.   Even carrying a single one of my technical books, which average a kilo or more in weight, back and forth is irritating.

And a lot of the documents I use are IBM RedBooks: there is a massive library of these PDF-formatted documents available.  Flipping through a 900 page PDF on my computer to find an answer while I try to work on my computer is challenging enough.  Reading the book in its entirety on a computer’s emissive display is something I’ve never really managed.  My eyes give out too quickly.

The paper-like e-Ink technology has a lot of promise, and I like getting in early with new technologies so I can form my own opinions.   I still have an Apple Newton somewhere around here, my Apple II is in storage, my Commodore Amiga and Altos 586 are ancient history, my 300 baud DC Hayes modem might still be in the attic somewhere, I think in a box near it is an original Palm pilot…  I can’t say, in retrospect, that I regret having been an early adopter with any of these technologies.   Each of them taught me something, opened my mind to new possibilities, even when the particular implementation of that technology itself ended up being less than successful.

And hey, my site’s subtitle says it all- I’m an Uber Geek

I’m a technical worker.  I think that the more generic term for my kind of work is “knowledge worker”, but whatever you call it, my stock in trade is generated by my gray matter.

I am not a genius: far from it, in fact.  Every complex thing I figure out takes a tremendous amount of effort on my part.  I’m good at seeing correlations: logical interactions or the like.  But that doesn’t mean that I just pick up a book and instantly understand something.  I really wish I did. 

Part of my work involves designing and writing computer software.  I come from an era when it was actually possible to understand a programming language more or less completely.  I develop in several language frameworks these days, but even the simplest of them seems to me to be beyond the capabilities of one person to truly understand.

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I found the following today during my usual morning coffee + web browsing session:

Wayne Crookes, a former campaign manager of the Green Party of Canada, said he “suffered an immense amount of frustration and emotional distress” over postings on Google’s Blogspot.com, a free blog-hosting website, within an entry under his name in Wikipedia, and on openpolitics.ca, an interactive political forum set up by Michael Pilling, an Ontario and federal Green Party activist.

Source: globeandmail.com: Internet hosts should be made to pay for libellous statements…

Mr. Crooke is, by my reading of it, basically frustrated and upset that anonymous people have been able to post defamatory (and presumably untrue) statements about him.  Since he can’t find the anonymous people to sue (and since they probably don’t have any money anyway), he’s suing the various service providers who hosted their content.

The world wide web is founded on the premise of free speech.  I can say whatever I want, and if you don’t like what I say you can post your own opposing opinion somewhere else.  If I libel you in a legal sense, you can in theory send your lawyers after me…if you can figure out who I am.  But anonymity is also pretty well established on the Internet.  So that leaves  suing the Internet service providers.

But validating opinions and determinations of “fact” versus “fiction” are decidedly *not* something the ISPs are equipped to deal with.  Doing so would mean having full time legal teams working around the clock to review tens of thousands of posts: basically, it is totally inconceivable.  And thus far, the courts have been pretty clear in their interpretation that free speech on the Internet is reasonably well protected.

In contrast, service providers like Google, or your local ISP, can and do respond to relatively clearly defined copyright violation notices.  If you hold copy rights on something and I post something on the Internet using it, you can probably get it taken down very quickly by contacting whomever is hosting the content.  These takedowns proceed without any real confirmation of actual copyright violation.  The ISPs take the content down defensively, because right or wrong, proving copyright violation in court is expensive.  And copyright issues have been clearly defined in court and in law, in the U.S. at least, via the DMCA. 

Lawsuits like the ones being launched by Mr. Crooke that target ISPs for libel regarding content posted by their clients should send a chill through anyone who likes to think of the Internet as a true bastion of free speech.  I’m not saying that libeling someone should be “protected”, but I think we and our legal system should definitely err on the side of permitting free discourse of opinions. 

If, for example, a significant collection of case history was established showing that suing ISPs to take down “libellous” content was a successful strategy, I can guarantee that ISPs would start taking down content the same way they do for DMCA complaints.  That is, before the complaint has been proven by law.  So, if you said something I disagree with, I could send a letter to your ISP and poof- your thoughts would be gone from the Internet.  If I was simply a jerk who didn’t like you I could do the same, and poof- your rights disappear because of the fear of litigation.

I sincerely hope that Mr. Crooke’s legal motions get tossed out of court with extreme prejudice.  Not because I support libel or dislike Mr. Crooke (I have no idea who he is, and know absolutely nothing regarding what it is he’s upset about), but because I know how damaging a successful result for such a case could be.   He and people like him are living in a happy fairy-land where somehow ISPs can determine instantaneously the difference between a legally protected opinion and a piece of libellous trash.  Either that, or he and his legal team don’t give a flying fig about the rights of everyone to express their opinion.

In short, my opinion is this: people like Mr. Crooke and his entire legal team should be required, by law, to read and agree to an Internet usage license before they launch a browser.  The Internet is a scary place, full of personal opinion dressed up as fact, despicable thoughts and images, and dangerous scams intended to trick you.  It is also full of useful and wonderful things: it is up to the user to figure out the difference, and no one will babysit you.  If you don’t “get” this, you should be permanently banned from use of the service.  Good day and good riddance.

 I was reading one of my new favorite comics (thanks, Leaha!), and came across a mention of this:

April 19, 2007 (BELLEVUE, Wash.) – Paizo Publishing and Wizards of the Coast today announced the conclusion of Paizo’s license to produce DRAGON and DUNGEON magazines effective September 2007.

Source: NEWS: Paizo Publishing to Cease Publication of DRAGON and DUNGEON

It is odd how the death of a magazine that I haven’t read in years has caused me to pause

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I am getting tired of the periodic pseudo-scientific “cellphones cause <catastrophe of your choice>” claptrap that gets picked up by the media.  The latest one was brought to my attention earlier today via Slashdot:

“Some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world’s harvests fail. They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world — the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops.”

The study itself quotes evidence that immediately raises questions about it’s validity.  The loss of bees started in the United States and, after several years, is just starting to spread to Europe.  Europe has a massively higher population density, probably ten times the “people per square mile” density that exists in the US, and a higher percentage of those people use cellphones.  So if cellphones cause problems with bees, the problem should have started in Europe or some other vicinity with high density cell usage in close proximity to bee populations.

Further problems arise when you do a little bit of research into normal bee population issues.  There was a massive die-off ten years ago as well.  Apparently this happens fairly regularly.  And more and more bee populations for pollination are being converted into “mobile” (trucked in) colonies.  This stresses the bee colonies out tremendously, and also leads to wide spread distribution of any illnesses or parasites that may exist in the bee population.

Basically, the whole issue is news industry scare mongering.  Maybe at its root was some good science showing some kind of relation between electromagnetic fields and bees, but linking it to mass die offs on a global scale is pure bullshit.  We have enough problems in the world without half-baked and easily contradicted theories being made into headline news.  Reporters who do this kind of thing should be sent down to the printing presses and forced to roll ink for the rest of their careers.

I am fortunate to have an employer who was able to allow me to work from home while Irene recovered from her second hip replacement.  It made things much less stressful for all involved.

Working from home for a month, though, leads to some odd behavior.  My hours of work were scattered all over the 24 hour day, partly in order to accommodate things Irene needed me for, partly because I found it convenient to work when Irene was asleep.  I could take naps whenever my eyes started to feel heavy.  There were several days where I didn’t bother to dress.

This past week was my first week going back to the office each day.  It was a shock to my system: resetting myself to a semi-fixed schedule was tough enough, but making it through an eight or nine hour day without a nap was torture.  I raced home from work on at least two days during the week so I could immediately toss myself into bed and close my eyes. 

And there is this great desire to have tons of “face time” now that I’m back in the office.  I felt like I was in an endless series of meetings as the week wore on.  The toughest was one four hour meeting on Thursday, during which time I was grilled by three people regarding a complex data model and code design I had originated.  Four hours straight of running my brain at full throttle: I swear, smoke was pouring from my ears.

Yeah, I’m weak, I know: lots of people drive themselves at 110% all the time, and seem to thrive on it.  I have great respect for people who can do this, but no particular desire to emulate them.  For me, the mid-afternoon nap is more in keeping with my continued mental health…I must be ready for early retirement or something.

[tags]work life balance, naps, meetings[/tags]

I work in cubicle-land (when I’m not working from home), so I can find a lot to laugh about in the following song…

I sit here in the…nude