Seebach Exhibit 7

Hey, lady! You parked in a handicapped spot!

On Saturday, I saw a woman steal a handicapped spot. It looked deliberate. Maybe she just didn't notice, but it's hard to tell. The car was a Ford Mustang convertible, silver with a black top. The license plate was BTN 870. The car was there for at least two hours.

Nice job, lady.

Is it possible that this woman, who seemed to walk just fine, secretly had handicapped tags? Maybe, but the law says they're supposed to be visibly displayed, Minn. Stat. 169.346, subd. 1 (3) (ii).

Cygwin and the Little Tin God.

The 10 Commandments for C Programmers is a very important document. All programmers should read it.

I would like to call your attention to a side comment in the annotations for Commandment #7:

Numberless are the unwashed heathen who scorn their libraries on various silly and spurious grounds, such as blind worship of the Little Tin God (also known as ``Efficiency'').

Cygwin's bourne shell clone has had a feature, the getopts builtin command, removed from it for lo these many years. The topic is discussed occasionally, as a Google search shows.

Why were these things removed? To make the shell smaller. Why? To make it faster, supposedly.

Well, it turns out that removing getopts doesn't make the shell faster. But that's not the best part. The best part is that getopts wasn't really removed; it's still there, in the shell, it's just that the entry in the builtin command table has been removed. The code is still being compiled. It's still in the shell.

Removing this feature was stupid to begin with; the goal of a "code-minimized" shell is incompatible with the goal of providing a working environment to which scripts written on other Unix-like systems will run. But turning it off for no benefit at all is just plain crazy.

The feature should be reenabled, and the person who removed it should re-read Spencer's commandments. Premature optimization is the root of a great deal of evil, but not even successfully removing the feature suggests a carelessness inappropriate for maintaining a shell.

Wow. I mean, just wow.

A friend of mine got what may be the worst Christmas presents I've ever heard of.

A coathanger, and a bar of hotel soap.

I am not making this up.

Why even bother? I mean, at this point, wouldn't it be kinder to just give a card? If you're not going to put any thought into a gift, a gift certificate might work. But... A coathanger? And a bar of hotel soap? A bar of hotel soap isn't a present. It's not even like a present.

I mean, I think we'd generally give better stuff to strangers who showed up unannounced at our parties than this person got from her relatives.

Wow.

The secret joys.

One of the great joys of life is knowing about something wonderful which most people don't know about.

One of the few greater joys is sharing these things.

With that in mind, I must call your attention to August Moon, the best restaurant in the world.

I am not much of a person for fancy or expensive food. There's exceptions. There's a restaurant near my house called W. A. Frost & Company. (I have no idea why their main page says "click here to enter".) It's one of my favorite restaurants. It's the restaurant where my wife got a $10 bowl of maccaroni and cheese which was worth the money. It's where I had to make a conscious effort to set my fork down, rather than dropping it, as the best steak I ever had overwhelmed my nervous system so I could barely hold silverware.

August Moon is about that good, and cheaper. They're not as fancy. If you want a fancy dining experience, go to Frost's. If you want awesome food in a fairly casual atmosphere, go to August Moon. My favorite is the Spicy Imperial stir fry, with beef. They let you pick a sauce and a protein. None of this "we do spicy beef and bland chicken" stuff; any of the stir fries can be done with any of the meats, or tofu, or combinations. Jesse had "mock duck and tofu".

They're a bit hard to find. You have to take the Park Place/Xenia exit, then circle around. (If you've ever been to Metropolitan Ballroom, it's the same parking lot.) I don't know how much they advertise.

But they have great food, I mean, really [i]great[/i]. The servers are friendly, and very good. They're also pretty informal; if you like to maintain a master/servant relationship, you might not like it here. If, on the other hand, you like people who will offer real advice on the food, and make jokes about the artwork on the walls, it's the right place to be.

So... If you live in the Twin Cities area, and you have ever imagined that there could exist Asian food that you can stand, go to August Moon. I strongly recommend going on a very empty stomach; you don't want to be forced to stop eating just because you're full. The food is just too good, and you want to leave room for some of their wonderful selection of interesting ice cream. I like the cinnamon chocolate.

Also, if you ever want a moderately formal dining experience (I wouldn't show up in jeans and a t-shirt), and you don't mind paying a bit extra for absolutely incredible food, try W. A. Frost & Company. The atmosphere is quite amazing; we went there for our anniversary one year, and they were playing Christmas music. It was December 26th, which means we'd been bombarded with Christmas music for roughly two months. The music was pleasant, and not at all tiresome. This is, frankly, an incredible accomplishment.

Two of my favorite places to go. Just thought it'd be fun to share. It's really hard to compare them, or say which is better. They're both excellent.

Happy anniversary to me!

Wow.

I have been married for nine years.

There's not much else to say. It's nothing like people seem to think it will be. It's better, but not in the ways people expect.

I bet you forgot about the online store

Well, it's been a while since we added anything to the online store, but we've got one today.

Valentine's Day cards! This is based on a card Jesse made me for Valentine's Day a few years back.

Just trying to stay one holiday ahead, I guess.

And, if you're curious, yes, the "Be Not Afraid" picture will be done as Christmas cards for next year. Merry Christmas, everybody!

Be not afraid.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

Party preparation

Here's how you prepare for a party. You vacuum a rug that probably hasn't been vacuumed before this millennium. It turns out the dusty pink carpet is actually sort of a deep maroon.

"Charlie" McCarthy

Please disregard this post. Unless, that is, you know what the letters "C", "M", and "U" have to do with Charlie McCarthy, and the word "Gail" means something to you, in which case, everything's moving up two weeks. Drat this inefficient cell structure!

Pathetic. Just pathetic, really.

So, I was at SuperAmerica (local convenience store chain), and some guy stole about $40 of gas. Put gas in truck, drove off without even hanging up the hose.

I'd just like to make this very clear: Dude, whoever you are, you impressed the hell out of us. Your can-do attitude, your calm authority, the way you ran like a weasel that just saw a hawk's shadow; you really showed us what you're made of. I'd like to know that everyone in that SuperAmerica thinks you're hung like a horse. We are in awe of your brilliance. Your scheme was foolproof. We all appreciate paying extra to subsidize you.

Sometimes, people are just pathetic. It's depressing. Imagine a life in which stealing a bit of gas from a convenience store is one of the highlights of your day. Hell, if the guy were that desperate, if he really had some immediate need, he coulda asked for help, and people might have helped. On the other hand, people in giant trucks with huge gas tanks often don't have the ability to see into the distant future and realize that a giant truck will cost a lot to drive around.

Company X is Belkin.

In this article, I refer to "Company X". Actually, I referred to Belkin, but the editorial staff deemed it best to avoid too clear a mention.

But I'm not the editorial staff, so I'll say it again: Company X is Belkin.

Lord of the Rings movies

I'm always torn. I really enjoy these movies, but I sometimes wish that they'd stayed closer to the books; on the other hand, that would have made six to nine hours per movie. Maybe it'll be a miniseries some day.

Spoilers? Here's a spoiler: Sauron loses! Seriously, it's hard to imagine what would be a spoiler for a book many viewers have read more than once. On the other hand, there's lots of stuff that was done differently in the movie than in the book, which might surprise people. For instance, who woulda thunk that Ewoks would play such a crucial role in the third movie of the series? Oh, wait. That was something else.

Amusingly, I accidentally read the books in the time leading up to the movie. I forgot that the movie was coming up, but a while back, I read the Hobbit, and then I was working my way through the books; I'm just about at the end of the third book, and it turns out it's movie time.

Fun movie, lots of cool scenery. I thought it was a bit too loud; they could have turned the volume down about 5dB and not bothered me any.

See it as a matinee; not that it's not a good movie, but movies are way overpriced these days.

Why would a guitar need documentation, anyway?

I'm gonna be writing some documentation for a guitar company.

Yeah, that's right. A guitar. You know, strings, a bit of electronics, lots of "squeeee" noises.

You wouldn't think a guitar would need a manual, but it does. Let me tell you about my wife's bass guitar, and why it needs a manual. You see, it recently stopped working. It would fade in and out, but it wouldn't produce a signal. That's pretty odd, really, for a guitar; the output is normally passive.

Well, it turns out it's not; this bass has active pickups, meaning, it uses electricity. Which means it has batteries. But there's no manual, so we didn't know that. Nor did we know where to look for the batteries. We found them, and we tried to replace them. Standard nine-volt batteries, right? Wrong. It turns out that one brand (Energizer) makes 9-volt batteries which are about a millimeter narrower than the brand we have to hand, and the little hole in the back of the bass is cut to exactly that size; you can't put the cover back on with different batteries.

That's annoying.

It would be a lot less annoying if there had been a manual. So, yeah, guitars need manuals.

Self-employment tax

Here's the idea: If you get paid, some amount of your money is due in taxes. If you were self employed, you then pay additional taxes on that money. Why? I don't know why. It's presumably because self-employed people are bad for the economy, because a single guy working directly for his customers imposes so much extra overhead compared to what a good chain of middle-men can do... This is a plausible explanation for part of the tax code because it's precisely backwards, and perfectly stupid.

The entire tax thing has been gradually getting worse. The percentage of your income which goes into taxes has gone gradually up for a very long time now. Two-income households? A lot of that has to do with the tendency for about a third of your money to go away before you ever see it. There's a lot of pork barrel projects being run off of that money.

Starting on the taxes is always depressing. It's bad enough having to work ludicrous hours to try to put food on the table; having four months out of the year go entirely into paying taxes makes it pretty hard.

It's only about a third (well, 40%, maybe) of gross income, but a third of your income taken by taxes means that, whatever you got, half again that much went to the government. It's sobering.

At least I got some writing done.

Today was our "settlement hearing" in Seebach v. MCU. That's the event where the lawyers go head to head in an iron cage, trying to find a number they can both live with.

As you will remember, we already got summary judgment on liability. That means we will get, as a matter of law, $500 per ad, plus attorney's fees. Even if my lawyer gets stiffed pretty badly, that's gonna end up being a fair sum; there's pretty much no way to get it under $10,000.

So, today's event is a settlement hearing. We all show up, both counsel and parties (that means "the person suing, the people sued, and everyone's lawyers"), we negotiate, we resolve the case. That's what's supposed to happen.

What actually happens? Defense counsel shows up late, wearing ordinary clothes, not, say, a suit. (It's one thing for me to be wearing regular clothes, but lawyers are supposed to maintain professional appearances when showing up in front of a judge.) Defendant doesn't show up at all. Lawyers are called back into chambers. In chambers, they discuss things. Defendant would like to settle for $2,000. That's $2,000, as in, one fifth of the minimum number that's on the table if we go to trial. It is clarified that, yes indeedy, the $6,500 is not under dispute, and the attorney's fees (if reasonable) are going to happen.

Defendant goes to call his client. He comes back with a new offer. $4,000. That's right, it's still less than the minimum legal award. Much whining ensues; despite their 30,000 customers, and despite their statements showing that they've made a profit of close to $30,000 (and probably more) on junk faxing, they are threatening to declare bankruptcy! Luckily, in the cell phone business, they have a long-term revenue stream from the companies whose contracts they've sold; if they go belly up, all their bills will get paid out of that money.

During the entire time, of course, I'm sitting in the court room, cooling my heels. I wrote a couple paragraphs for the Cranky User book, which is still being revised and worked on. Mostly, I just waited. Why was the Defendant out doing stuff, while I was sitting in a courtroom being bored? I think this can be summarized simply. MCU's Richard Luzaich, after being sued for violating this law in March of 2002, continued sending faxes for the rest of the year. By contrast, I don't even jaywalk. One of these people thinks that a legal system is a basically sound idea; the other thinks it's a nuisance.

This is the real argument for the treble damages for willful or knowing. It's willful, it's knowing, it's even intentional. This guy doesn't think the law applies to him. After being told that he will pay the $500/ad the law provides for, he makes not one, but two offers below that number. The first offer was an insult to me; the second was an insult to the judge.

Well, we'll see what happens in March. I can guess already; we get to make our presentation on the nature of the law, and the nature of willful or knowing violations. In the end, MCU pays money. If there's any extra damages for willful or knowing violations, it goes straight to a charity; probably Mercy Corps, although the local food shelf has been desperately short for a couple of years.

MCU could pay now. They could pay their dues honestly, and people who are starving would eat.

What's interesting is that they almost certainly don't believe that. We've told them, but I don't think it's occurred to them yet that we might be telling the truth. If we get any W&K damages, I'll send them a photocopy of the cancelled check to charity. I suspect that this will simply be incomprehensible to them.

MCU coughs up the money.

No, not my money. We're still going to have a hearing about that. But apparently, now that word's gotten out that they're losing cases on this, they're pretty eager to pay money; they settled with one guy for $1,200 in the last couple of weeks. So, if you have old junk faxes from Mobile Cellular Unlimited, don't throw them away!

Weirdest research ever.

So, I'm going to be writing the user's manual for a guitar. So, as part of my research for this job, I, uhm, I moved a bunch of synthesizers upstairs and hooked them up.

I'm not actually billing for that time, mind you. But it's sort of weird to think about it. It all makes perfect sense. I want to experiment with a prototype of the new guitar when it's available, so I want to practice guitar a bit, so I moved some of my music stuff back up from the basement so I can play with it. This all makes perfectly good sense. Of course, that highlights that the only thing I'm still doing on my old powermac is music, so I've mailordered some stuff to let me do it on my regular mac. I've ordered two things which are out of stock everywhere so far; luckily, I found workarounds for both of them. It's still a bit weird to me.

This tragically means that my Mac is gonna have to find a new home. Most annoyingly, I've been too busy to do much with the very interesting hard disk recording card I got for it - which was discontinued just in time to never acquire OS X drivers, so I can't put it in my new mac. (Any Windows folks want a Yamaha DSP Factory card, with an ADAT interface and an 8 channel A/D/A converter?) So, if I find that the new Mac's built-in sound isn't quite up to snuff (this is probably a given), I'll need to buy some kind of Mac sound card which is compatible with my music software, eventually. Ugh.

Music hardware is fun, but it's very frustrating being a hobbyist in a field designed to convince people to buy the biggest and best of everything. These are tools for professionals, and they don't really make usable toys for hobbyists. Upgrading from version 4.7.3 of my MIDI sequencing package (Logic Audio) to version 6.x would cost $500, because, way back when, they ended up deciding that the used copy of some early version I picked up was in the "professional" line, so I can only upgrade to the really expensive version. I'm not gonna bother; I'm buying the lightweight "entry level" version, and if it's missing a bit of stuff, well, so what? A full-price copy of the entry level version costs well under half what the full price version costs.

Still... There's something soothing about the blinking lights on a half-dozen cheap old boxes. I am a great fan of the "cheap synthesizers from a decade ago" approach to musical instruments. I still love my Korg 03R/W, despite the fact that it's got a fraction of the feature set of the newer synths. But hey; it works. It makes noises, and they sound cool.

If I ever get around to producing anything decent, I'll have to put up MP3s.

Last week, I was reading the POSIX thread API. This week, I'm trying to debug 1990-era synthesizers. I love my job.

Tech Central Station: "We don't know how you got on our list, but we don't spam."

Boy, that's useless.

They say don't spam. They don't know how I got on their list. They say "someone must have signed you up", which is to say, it is possible to get on their list without signing yourself up. They don't know who, they don't care; if I want, they can remove me, but they won't tell me where they got my name, they don't track this stuff, they don't care.

That's exactly what spam is.

There's probably someone at TCS who harvested my address.
They spam. They continue spamming.

If you want to get off their list, send mail to jpeterson@techcentralstation.com. He can't actually take you off the list, but he can forward your request to the person who can. The person who actually runs the list is apparently not available for contact.

Mr. Peterson was in a meeting, and too busy to deal with my call. That's what I like to hear; abuse of personal privacy is a low priority, something you brush off, something you ignore while you're doing your real work. Ethics are a secondary issue; what's important is that we Get Stuff Done.

I'll try to get him to make me stop getting his junk mail. I doubt it'll work. They don't care, and they don't have any reason to care, because spamming doesn't cost them anything.

If they cared, they would have responded to my previous calls, or my previous email. They didn't. Not even a "what are you talking about" kind of response. No call, no email, no contact of any sort. Just drop it in the memory hole; it's just some guy, we don't know who he is, who thinks he's too good for our mailing list.

Spammers. They never change. They always think spam is "something other than what we do". They never look at the straight up facts.

Did I ask for this mail? No.
Did they ask my permission to send it? No.
Do they have my permission to send it? No.
Are they sending it anyway? Yes.
Did they respond to my repeated requests that they explain how I got on their list? No.

Previous comments (and yes, I've been trying to get them to do something about this for about three months):

Blogspam (September 17th)
And TechCentralStation is still spamming me. (November 11th)

Edited to add:

I'm not the only person with doubts about them. Nicholas Confessore spotted them a while back:

But TCS doesn't just act like a lobbying shop. It's actually published by one--the DCI Group, a prominent Washington "public affairs" firm specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called "Astroturf" organizing, generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional Third-World despot. The two organizations share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington, a block off K Street. As it happens, many of DCI's clients are also "sponsors" of the site it houses. TCS not only runs the sponsors' banner ads; its contributors aggressively defend those firms' policy positions, on TCS and elsewhere.

No surprise, then, that they spam. They probably brag about how large their mailing list is in to get sponsors to pay extra for ads.

Update, December 9th: Still spamming.

Lawsuits are hard work

Just for the record:

If it were for the money, it wouldn't be worth it. The lawsuits against junk faxers are socially productive, but the payback isn't worth it. I can earn money faster doing nearly anything else I can do.

Today, we spent a couple of hours working over a memorandum, as well as making copies and copies and copies. We reached document #200 for one numbered set of documents. That's two hundred documents, each identified, considered, redacted if necessary, copied, numbered, and copied again.