Seebach Exhibit 7

Now that's service!

Long ago, there was a computer called the Amiga.

I used to use them, and to this day, I have never found anything quite so wonderfully friendly. I look at modern GUI toolkits and application libraries, and I am stunned at how much they suck compared to the Amiga's UI toolkit.

So, the Amiga used to have this backup program, which came with the system, and it was called HDBackup, but it had a command-line back end, called BRU. When Amiga Unix came out, they managed to get BRU ported to it.

Today, BRU is used on Linux, BSD, and a dozen other systems; they're up to version 17.

I wrote to ask if they were related to the company that used to maintain HDBackup, because I had just found what appeared to be an HDBackup archive floating around on an old tape. The answer? Yes, they were, and a demo version of BRU ought to read the old archives. So, I downloaded a demo of BRU, and sure enough, it works. It extracts those old tapes of long ago.

How many of the companies selling backup solutions out there would be able to read an archive made over ten years ago, on a kind of computer that isn't even made anymore? Not all that many, I'd tend to suspect. That's an impressive track record. It's the kind of thing that makes you think that maybe these people are serious about their work, you know what I mean?

http://www.tolisgroup.com/

Cool people. Thanks to them, I have lost one less set of backups. :)

Honesty

So, a friend of mine wandered into a Firestone store (they do various car service), and had something minor looked at on his car. While it was there, they checked it for other stuff, and pointed out that his front brakes needed to be replaced; they were worn down to metal-on-metal, so they'd need new rotors and everything, about $500. He said no, because he was in a hurry, and figured he could get them looked at in a day or two.

Today, he brought the car in to a local Car-X to get the brakes done. These people said he had about 25% of the brake pads left, no rotor damage at all, maybe he should come back in the summer or so.

He will. He sure won't be going back to the Firestone place.

Ever wonder how much of the stuff you get charged for is just made up from whole cloth by people who are having a slow month and want a bit of padding?

Yin/Yang design

This is derived, somewhat, from a design idea Sean Eric Fagan gave me a while back. This isn't exactly the way he described it, but I think it's pretty.

Like it? It's available on t-shirts and mouse pads, at my CafePress store.

Was Bingo the farmer or the dog?

Seen in this thread, we have the key question: Was Bingo the farmer or the dog?

Consider the source text, translated literally from Koine Greek:

There was a farmer had a dog, and Bingo was his name-o!

What's that mean? Was the farmer named Bingo? Was the dog named Bingo? Some people say that Bingo was both farmer and dog. Some people say it's clear that the dog is named Bingo, and that you cannot assign a name to a Farmer. Others say the Farmer is named Bingo, and that dogs don't get names. Some say Bingo was fully farmer and fully dog.

Eventually, we have BingoForums, where you must agree to a creed to post in the sections restricted to Bingo-believers. The creed has gone a long way past what's in the original text; it's now all the things people have inferred from the text. We learn that BINGO must be spelled in all caps, for instance. We learn what kind of dog Bingo must have been, because we know that a good farmer will have a good farm dog, not some kind of poodle or something.

It's all very hauntingly familiar. Me, I don't really care; the point of the song is to have fun clapping your hands. Sometimes, it'd be more fun to just sing together, without worrying about the finicky details.

Prices reflect a 3% cash discount

This is too funny.

On the bottom of most of CaDan's faxes, there's a little disclaimer, in teeny-tiny type; "Prices Reflect a 3% Cash Discount."

In CaDan's policy and procedure manual, Procedures 04-02, page 1, we see the following:

NOTE: DON'T FORGET TO MARK UP 3% FOR CREDIT CARD CHARGES

What?

Well, see, the credit card company charges a couple percent of credit card transactions. Merchant agreements often prohibit passing this on, so the public face is to say that there's a "discount for cash". But, of course, the manual tells the true story; they mark up credit card charges, even though they're probably not supposed to.

More importantly: They are, unambiguously, lying. The "3% cash discount" is actually "the real price". That's why the prices all look normal ($102.00) after the "3% discount". Then they mark it up by 3% from the posted price.

Oooh, sneaky!

Would you do business with people like this?

What an annoying noise!

I'm trying to extract old backup tapes before they become unreadable.

I am absolutely stunned to realize that, ten years ago, I found this noise tolerable. What an amazingly annoying piece of hardware!

It is perhaps worth noticing that my Amiga-branded Archive Viper SCSI tape is fine, but my Sun tape drives from the same period don't look so healthy.

I wonder whether anyone ended up with rights to Commodore's Amiga Unix.

250,000.

Just for the curious: I'm well past 250,000 spams received now. Wayyyyy past. I think it's right around 275,000.

What's amazing is the number of people in the marketing industry who don't see a problem here.

And yes, TechCentralStation is still spamming me. What would you expect? Likewise, it remains the case that my email to their info address has gotten no response at all. What would you expect?

Honest marketers, honest lawyers, and other mythical beasts.

One of the things that I think is a problem is the way we get cynical. Cynical is easy. Cynical is what you get when you get burned too often.

I have talked to a lot of marketers; when time allows, I try to contact companies which are spamming me and find out what they think they're doing, and maybe help educate them as to what they're actually doing.

Time and time again, they've turned out to be dishonest. They have been people who just don't understand why everyone makes such a big deal about truth, or what other peoples' property rights have to do with their junk faxing or spam campaign. They don't care, and they don't see why they should, and indeed, they have a very big reason not to; insofar as they seem to have any moral code at all, it seems to be one of contempt for anything that would stand between them and any increase in profits.

Everyone hears all the lawyer stories, so there's no surprises to be had there, right? Lawyers are sneaky, dishonest, and manipulative; they coach their clients to lie, they try to abuse the court system, and so on.

What's starting to happen is I'm starting to realize just how horrifically wrong these stereotypes are. It's not that I've never seen a dishonest lawyer, and I've probably talked to fifty or more dishonest marketers.

It's that I've started meeting the honest ones, and I've started wondering if they aren't more common than I previously suspected.

With that thought in mind, I call your attention to an honest marketer; Paul Myers. He runs a site called TalkBiz News. Reading his company policies and privacy policy is refreshing. They're written in English, and they actually say something meaningful. This is a guy who understands marketing well enough to do a good job of it, and to have successfully taught other people to do it well, and yet, he doesn't like spam. That's probably not as unusual as it seems, but after weeks and months and years of DMA headlines about how marketers want more protection against anything that could be done to stop them from spamming, well... It sure is a nice thing to see.

I think I'm going to have another go at assuming that marketers are likely to be honest again. I'll presumably get burned occasionally, but I think maybe the honest people will appreciate being treated a little better for a while.

Writer's block

I like to try to update my blog regularly, but sometimes I just have nothing to say.

Writer's block is a real problem. Unfortunately, if you want to be a professional writer, it's one you can't easily afford to have.

It's interesting how hard it is to defeat. Writing is not a purely volitional activity; it's a creative one, and creativity is very hard to do on purpose. Some days, I'm so full of ideas I can barely stand it. Other days, I can stare at a blank screen for quite some time.

In fact, I was doing that when I decided to write about writer's block. Since the idea of doing so happened, I haven't had to stop typing for so much as five seconds, not once; the words are just sort of happening, with no kind of conscious intervention on my part. I don't pick words, I don't pick topics; having gotten the machine started, I can sit back and watch it run in quiet amazement, as automatic parts of my brain type, correct typos, pick words, phrase and rephrase sentences, and just generally keep the whole thing happening. I'm just watching this; I don't do it on purpose.

Which is really weird. It's clear that writing is in some way something "I" do, but I'm not the one picking these words; I don't know what they'll be until I read them. Where do the words come from? Who does pick them? Why do they always seem to agree with my own positions?

I think this is why I'm a moderately successful writer; I have somehow managed to get a great deal of the hard work of writing practiced enough that it's become an essentially automatic process, which happens without the kind of conscious effort it takes to do less familiar things. It's like driving. I don't need to think about gear shifts, or turn signals, or any of that; the car just goes where I mean to go. Picking words is the same way, and indeed, structuring short pieces (say, a few paragraphs, or maybe a couple of pages) is much the same.

What's particularly interesting is that I don't think I can do it on purpose anymore. I can't decide how to do things. When I'm stuck, that's all there is to it; I'm stuck. I can't decide to write, I can't pick words, I can't form paragraphs; I just have to wait for that automatic system to kick in and do the thing it does, in its strange and automatic way.

This is a very disconcerting experience, the moreso because it happens so often, and so easily, and because it can happen on such a broad range of topics.

The same thing happens even on fairly abstract topics; for instance, if I were to send an editor proposed outlines for a couple of articles, I wouldn't be making many conscious decisions; I'd just sit there for a while trying to keep myself focused on the question, and suddenly words would appear.

I really wish I understood this. I don't know where the ideas come from, and I'm not entirely sure it's me... but if not me, then whom? I'd like to meet this guy. He writes about topics I find interesting.

Spam, blacklists, and long memories.

We have about 5000 lines in our spam filters.

We are, realistically speaking, very unlikely to ever check most of these entries again. We're unusual; we do check them. When someone writes us and says "hey, why is this blocked", we look at it.

Which has happened twice, in about 7 years.

So... The other 5000 lines will probably just be there forever. The people who spammed us in 1998 are still in our filtering list in 2004. Some of them, in theory, may have reformed -- although in practice that's never a good bet.

As someone once commented, long after Mars is colonized, the old Cyber Promotions network block will probably still have poor internet connectivity.

This has a big implication for people thinking about spam. The benefits (if you get any) will be over in a week or two. The costs will be with you forever. When Barnes & Noble spammed, I stopped going there for a few years. Companies that spam more consistently, I just never deal with. And I do mean "never". I have never bought anything from Microwarehouse. I have no idea whether their spam is still coming out; we blocked it years ago, and have never had any reason to rethink this.

That's the thing, you see. There's very little reason to reconsider the decision that a given company is a spammer, and thus a bad company to do business with. The world is full of businesses which don't spam. There's no reason for me to keep doing business with the ones who spam me, so I don't.

It's the death of a thousand cuts. You can get off of a big-name blacklist, like the MAPS RBL, if you clean up your act. But my blacklist? You might not realize why you're getting errors from our mail server, and even if you did, there's a thousand others just like it. Or maybe ten thousand.

There's a lot of learning curve here. Of course, most of the spam is just fly-by night scams, delivered mostly by viruses which, so far as anyone can tell, do nothing but send more spam. But there are real companies dabbling in this, and they never seem to learn from their mistakes. Idiots.

Some day, I should collect my funniest/worst spams, and put 'em up for general consumption. We have Network Associates spamming a vendor's support address, presumably because they scraped names off of one of their mail servers. We have all the people who send me spams in batches of five or more... It's a recurring theme.

Science!

My mom took me to the Science Museum of Minnesota today. Wow. I'd forgotten how much bigger this place has gotten since they moved into their new digs.

What's most impressive, I think, is how crowded the place is. There were lines for a lot of things, and the place was just generally full. Every exhibit had kids playing at it, and there's a lot of exhibits. This isn't a school day or anything; just a lot of parents taking their kids out to the museum.

It's sort of interesting looking at the demographics of this. Kids who are raised to think science is interesting are likely to pursue education with a little more interest, and in the long run, likely to be more successful. That makes it sort of worrisome, I think, that the demographics could be reasonably summarized as "a bunch of white folks, half a dozen Asians, and about four blacks". I mean, I know Minnesota's not one of the more homogenized areas, but... That seems a little off. I have no idea what the reasons are. I don't think it's institutionalized racism; I think some people just aren't interested, and that means they're raising their kids not to be interested either. Not good.

Science museums are really neat, and this one has an exceptionally broad selection of interesting hand-on exhibits. I recommend it, if you're in the area.

Why MOO3 sucked.

Okay, let's ignore the problems with copy protection... No wait, let's not. The copy protection was a major component of what moved Master Of Orion 3 from "mediocre" to "awful". Quite simply, it took me a good extra five or six hours of work to even get the game to run.

That I would put in that much work for a game suggests high expectations. MOO2, after all, was a really incredible game.

MOO3 was boring. I don't know what it was; it had all sorts of interesting potential, after all, and it could have been a great deal of fun... But it had a weird cross between tedious micromanagement and total powerlessness that I was unable to get past.

Contrast, say, Galactic Civilizations (by Stardock). This game is is pleasant and interesting. It's a lot friendlier, too. I'm not sure what the difference is, but I think it comes down to a more cohesive developer vision. MOO3 feels like second system effect; it's huge, and it tries to do everything all at once, with the result that it's very hard to see the game in there. GalCiv picked a part of the "space empire" game genre to work on, and did a good job of it.

This isn't to say they're the only ones. For instance, Space Empires IV is pretty neat too. (It's by Malfador Machinations.)

What do these games have in common? A small development team, and not that large a budget. What else do they have in common? Both are apparently commercial successes, in that the companies making them are still in business selling them.

It is of particular interest to note that, of these three games, the two I'm willing to recommend are the two that didn't use copy protection. Why? Probably because they're confident enough of the value they offer not to bother. By contrast, Infogrames (now "Atari") used draconian anti-copying mechanisms, so extreme they are physically incompatible with many CD drives. Why? One assumes they didn't have any faith in the product's ability to inspire buyers.

I'm starting to think that copy protection schemes are a good indicator of a program I won't want to play.

I've definitely learned to prefer small teams I've never heard of to large companies. Even small teams I've heard of can be good; Troika games is pretty decent. (On the other hand, Temple of Elemental Evil was gutted by Atari's last-minute fuckups and their love for horrifically unusable copy protection.)

5-Speed and the Pluto Spoon

So, I used to run a BBS, called Schrodinger's Cathouse. The readers of this BBS were inclined to get together socially from time to time. Everyone went by handles; for instance, one of my friends went by "Troll For Hire". One guy went by "5-Speed". At one point, we formed a plan that he'd rent a room in the 3-bedroom apartment I was sharing with one other roommate. This ended up falling through... But not before he brought over a spoon with a handle shaped like Pluto. No, not the planet; Mickey Mouse's dog. I seem to recall the spoon was used to eat cookie dough, and then left in the dishrack for washing.

He never got around to taking it back. It's been close to ten years. I still have the spoon. It doesn't fit the rest of our silverware, but it's a pretty good spoon, unlike some of the crap we've inherited from roommates.

Yet another example of one of those people I'll never run into again. Weird.

Instant Review: Charlie's Angels 2

This is a really, really, fun movie. None of it makes any sense. Continuity falls by the wayside. On the other hand, lots of big-name actors, even just in cameo roles, and beautiful fight choreography. You can tell it was a lot of fun to make this movie.

If you want a thriller, pass. If you want to point and laugh, and try to catch all the jokes and puns, go for it. If you care about continuity, this movie is probably not for you. If physics matters to you... No.

But if you just want a fun movie to watch, this is not a bad deal at all.

Doing the right thing

That's something you don't see every day.

A company I do some work for had a deadline; they needed to make a tradeshow with a working product. They were working evenings and weekends. Finally, two days before the show, the guy in charge did the right thing; he cancelled the appearance at the trade show.

Why?

Because he knew he couldn't have the product really ready in time for the show; he knew it would not be the work they wanted to show people. He decided he would rather miss the show, and have a finished, polished, product ready for some other event, than be at a huge trade show and get a lot of interest in a product that wasn't quite ready yet.

That's a hard decision to make. Nowadays, people announce schedules months or years in advance, and there's a great deal of social and economic pressure to make those deadlines, and if they slip, you whip the engineers and make them work 70+ hour weeks. The result is that software is shoddy, and hardware products aren't always much better.

But, just once, the guy making the decisions was serious about the product, and wanted to do it right... so the product will come out a little later than they hoped, but the bugs will be worked out, and the features will be in place. My contribution, the manual, will be a little more polished off. We'll have time to make pictures and charts for the things we wanted to cover but haven't had time to.

When the new Mercurio Guitars come out, they will be perfect. I think they'll be worth the wait.

If ever a wiz there was

We went to see a production of The Wizard of Oz today, at the Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis.

These people continue to amaze me. The munchkins were played mostly by munchkins. There were kids who can't have been over ten in this play, and a few older kids. The CTC appears to be a great place for kids who are interested in acting to get a start on it.

The production values are consistently incredible. I mean, they're not quite as good as the Guthrie Theatre, but they're pretty consistently good; in particular, they generally have good special effects. Everyone I know who saw their production of The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins was impressed. The memory stays with me to this day; I still don't know how they did it, and that's after they explained it and showed us.

Unfortunately for my readers, this was the last performance of this particular show. There will, however, doubtless be others. If you happen to be in the area, I recommend it as quality entertainment, and a genuinely good idea. If you've been ignoring it on the grounds that it's probably just kids in bad costumes forgetting their lines, you have missed out on some truly incredible entertainment.

I hope they redo Hound of the Baskervilles some day; that was an incredible show, but it was a little spooky for me as a kid.

Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick

A little after nine last night, my phone rang. It was my friend dave.

"Can you do me a huge favor?"

"Sure, Dave."

"Can you get me the address for the Aspen Medical urgent care clinic in Bloomington?"

...

I came up with the address. That was it. I found myself wondering; what's up? What's Dave running to an urgent care clinic for? Does this involve Sylvia, who's young enough that she ought to still be under warranty? Is it Jordan? Is Dave in danger, perhaps bleeding to death? He's always so strangely calm that you'd never know.

So, the next day, I call. Dave is still strangely calm, but he explains: It is, in fact, pretty much exactly as bad as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. While moving a chair into his house, he was struck in the face by a branch. What's impressive here is that it hit his right eye, even though the tree was to his left, and it managed to do this despite his glasses.

Dave now has an impressive-looking eyepatch, as well as three different prescription medications. Apparently, his cornea is scratched; this is bad. It should feel a bit better in a day or two, but it'll take six weeks before it's fully healed.

Dave informs me that, in fact, just about everything is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Good to know that cliches stand up to the harsh light of reality.

Roxio joins the spam wagon

So, Roxio spams. I mean, a lot. I bought Toast Titanium 5, a couple of years ago. No problem. A few months back, Roxio started spamming me at the address I used - even though I had never given them permission to do so, and they had previously implied that they wouldn't do that.

So I complained.

And complained.

And called in, asking them to explain this.

And complained.

And they keep going, and going, and going. They continue spamming, and I continue complaining.

Do not buy anything from these people. They don't care about customers, at all, ever. Nothing you say matters to them.

Never let a hacker get bored.

So, I love writing, but the fact is, I like to program. I'm not happy if I'm not programming a little.

So I decided to write a mud. You know, as a little hobby. To do this, I'm designing a new programming language and building a program to compile it, interpret it, and let people access a system running it. That's all. Just a handful of the foundational problems in computer science and programming languages - but at least they're well-studied problems.

It'll be a lot of fun, I expect.

In the process, I found a bug that's been in an old library I wrote for at least five years, maybe longer, and I can't imagine how I ever missed it before, or how I could have written the code in the first place. Argh.

Please enter in a spirit of worship.

There are double doors leading into the meeting hall at the Quaker meeting house I go to. Before a meeting starts, they are propped open. On each door there is a little sign:

It's just a little reminder to calm down, and set the traffic jams and taxes aside before coming in. A thoughtful message, and an appropriate place for it.

However, this has an interesting effect. When the doors are closed, the signs are on the inside of the doors. That means that, after the meeting is over, when it's time to go back into the rest of the world, the door you have to walk through has a little sign:

Imagine, for a moment, that you are entering the world. What would it mean to enter the world in a spirit of worship? It seems to me that if more people did this, every day, when they leave their houses, or even their bedrooms, to go out into the world, it would be a much more peaceful place.

I doubt the signs were intended to be understood this way, but it's a fortuitous thing nonetheless.

More about TCS.

http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000848.html

So, they're just a plain old lobbying group. Which explains why my email and phone calls have not yielded any useful results; so far, no calls back, no email responses, and the one time I reached a guy, he was too busy to say anything but that he doesn't have any idea where they got my address, but that if I send him email, he can forward it to the guy who can take me off the list. (No, there is no way to reach the actual list manager.)

Other relevant links:

http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002201.html
http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000848.html

I'm still trying to find someone who has contacts there who are able to understand what "permission" and "bulk email" have to do with each other.

They're still at it!

Woo! More spam from TechCentralStation.

It seems to me that their refusal to respond to email, and the unreturned calls, are sending a pretty clear message here.

Anyone out there got any contacts with them? Maybe someone there who isn't too busy to return email or calls? I sent in another email, just for amusement's sake.

The problem isn't just that they're still spamming; it's that they show no signs of having any way to find out where an address came from, and thus, they have no way of knowing whether or not they are still spamming other people, since there's no evidence that they originally got permission from the people they're mailing. They have no permission; they're sending mail in bulk. That's spam.

Wow. Traffic.

I don't commute, so I haven't seen rush hour traffic in a few years.

Wow.

I mean, just wow.

Guys, I have news for you: That SUV with a 350+ horsepower engine is burning an awful lot of gas when it spends a solid hour driving down two miles of crowded road. And no matter how far off the ground you are, and how slowly the scenery is passing, 70 is still too fast in a 55 zone.

I cannot believe the amount of traffic out there. The last time I was commuting regularly, I carpooled. My car pool wasn't 100% efficient, but I drove for an extra 5 minutes on un-busy streets, give or take, to get to a friend's house. Net savings on the order of 15-20 miles a day of driving, I'd guess. Seemed obvious at the time. Why don't more people do this? Why don't they seem to be even trying?

This is a problem we know how to beat. We have the technology, we have the resources. We could make rush hour mostly a non-issue. We could spread working hours out more; we could have people telecommute more. We could carpool. We could, if nothing else, drive to and from work in smaller, more efficient, cars. I hate to break it to you, guy, but that Hummer is not actually convincing anyone that you have a big weenie.

If you commute, give the question some thought; there may be something you could do that would reduce the stress and hassle of rush hour traffic. It wouldn't take a whole lot of reduction in traffic to make rush hour a lot better; if there are fewer cars, they can go faster, and get off the roads sooner.

If all else fails, drive courteously. If you have to merge in stop-and-go traffic, do the zipper thing. Calm down. Drive patiently.

Anyway, I'm convinced; I'd need to be paid a LOT of money to take up commuting again.

The sanctity of marriage

I know a lesbian. She might, some day, find someone she'd like to settle down with. When she does so, depending on local politics at the time, she might be able to legally marry this person, or might not. The argument for "not" is that, somehow, letting her get married would violate the "sanctity of marriage".

Frankly, it's bullshit.

Her father is screwing a 20-year-old student, which he hides from his wife. That sounds to me like a bigger problem for marriage. But it's not just this one guy. A bit over half of straight people who are married cheat on their spouses. This percentage doesn't vary much from one religious group to another.

That is to say that, for instance, in the US, there are more evangelical Christians committing adultery than there are gay people breathing.

Where, exactly, is the threat to the sanctity of marriage? I think it's with the larger group full of people who are making a conscious decision to do something they believe is wrong.

Honestly, I don't think civil marriage has any "sanctity" to begin with. It's a legal contract which has certain social and economic effects. I can see no grounds for people to reject legal gay marriages, but allow the straight marriages of other religions. They're just as "invalid" according to the traditional theology, after all.

But me, I'd like to have my marriage recognized even by people whose traditions I did not follow when getting married, and the Golden Rule suggests that, if I want people to recognize my marriage even though it's not very much like theirs, then I should recognize theirs, even though theirs aren't very much like mine.

I don't buy the "sanctity of marriage" argument. I think it's just one more way in which homosexuals are used as an excuse for the majority to feel smug and self-righteous about being born lucky, while quietly ignoring their own volitional failings. The sanctity of a marriage comes from the people involved, and God; it doesn't come from what other people do, or don't do.

Mr. B., if you ever stumble across this, I hope you do realize I'm talking about you. I hope you, some day, come to realize what it means that your daughter has to decide, having stumbled across graphic descriptions of your sexual exploits with that student, whether to tell her mom or not, knowing that you'll just keep denying it, like you did last time. Do you realize what you're doing? Think about the example you're setting. Is it worth it? I am very glad that your daughter isn't using you as a role model.

Just imagine a teenage girl, on Christmas Eve, stumbling across a letter from her father to a girl barely older than herself, reading "no no, i love it when you suck hard on my head". Imagine that, and try to tell me with a straight face that the biggest threat to the sanctity of marriage is same-sex couples.

Metanoia update: Prologue finished

The prologue to Metanoia is done now. If you haven't read this, you might want to hop on over. Warning: Graphic violence, not-quite-so-graphic sex, religious themes, you name it, it's all there.

Good writing, too.