Seebach Exhibit 7

Strata/Fifth-letter are SPAMMING SCUMBAGS.

If you are ever thinking about writing, and you encounter an entity using the domain "fifth-letter.com" or the name "Strata Magazine", AVOID THEM LIKE THE SPAMMING PLAGUE THEY ARE! They have been spamming me for a LONG time. They scrape addresses off of web sites, and spam spam spam the night away. They do this despite multiple requests that they go away. The one good thing they ever did was stop for a while, but they started up again.

Their phone number is 336-723-5655, and I am about ready to call it and ask what the FUCK they think they are doing. What assholes! I'm on a cell phone here, paying by the microsecond to read their spam.

(Disclaimer: Actually, it's bundled service, but the principle applies.)

Road trip redux.

My fastest entry ever, this is being written at about 75mph on I80 west near Des Moines. I love technology. I saw a weird looking store called "gravitylab" and decided to look it up. I looked it up over the course of about 15 miles. :)

Road trip!

I'm going on a road trip to Denver. This is expected to be a great deal of fun. Really, it is. :) I'm trading cars with my mom; she wants an automatic, and we want a station wagon.

Well, it's honorable by comparison, anyway.

Well, here it is. The first fax I got from "Rasheed". Who's Rasheed? We don't know. We know very little about him. What we do know is this: On March 11th, 2003, he sent me this fax:

A few things are worth noticing. First, yes, this fax is altered. I have blacked out their phone number and my fax number. This is a 72 dpi reproduction of a 600dpi scan; I had GraphicConverter do "auto levels", then deleted the remaining faintly gray background to reduce the size of the picutre. The only substantive changes are the two black boxes, one in the upper left, one in the middle of the page. You could maybe make a case for the resolution mattering; the original is a bit more readable. The fax was sent at 9:48:00 AM. The header says it is "From: Rasheed". It does not identify the sender's fax number, which is the first violation of the TCPA we see.

Beyond that, we get to the content. The content is very badly managed; the kerning errors are enough to cause the eyes of a graphic designer to bleed, but only briefly; after that, they'd just fall out. There is the untestable claim that "DVD keeps the original quality for many years". Down at the bottom, we see that "Rasheed" apparently works for Sunex Solutions, "A Division of D. S. Chandy Corporation".

Finally, we have the killer: "This is a one time Fax, your number will be automatically removed from our database." I've gotten three more since then. The newer ones are funnier. The second fax says he can do Betamax. The third and fourth say he can do Batamax.

But... The most important thing is that the first one is an outright lie.

Now, here's what makes this funny enough to write about. We got our response in the case, written by James S. Simonson, of Gray, Plant, and Mooty. For those who don't immediately recognize the name, yes, this is the guy who was involved in the R. J. Reynolds defense. For reasons not immediately obvious, some tiny little company defending against a case involving a total of five junk faxes (one other person got one too) has decided to hire a very expensive law firm.

Their initial response is... A little strange. It's full of commentary about the number at which people have asked not to receive unsolicited faxes; apparently, Mr. Simonson has interpreted the three separate ways in which one can violate the Minnesota state law as three required components of a violation. Furthermore, he has formed the vaguely surreal conclusion that the Minnesota law provides some protection against violations of federal law, but there's no support for this.

However, surreal isn't where this letter stops. It goes past surreal, and becomes Dada.

As you certainly understand, notwithstanding the federal statute, state legislatures and state courts are free to protect all of their citizens, including those who try to make an honest living informing other citizens of such honorable services as preserving family photographs, in a fashion and to an extent that they deem to be the most just and fair.

If there is any actual semantic content to this, it's the implicit claim that Rasheed, D. S. Chandy Corporation, and Sunex Solutions are in some way a fax blaster, rather than themselves the provider of the services; after all, they are making a living informing citizens of these services, not providing the services.

But wait. These are not merely services. They are honorable services. This is why, when you ask children what they want to be when they grow up, only the foolish and arrogant children say they want to be firefighters; those with a keen eye for true honor will, of course, want to be DVD transfer technicians. This is why roughly 15% of all monuments erected nationwide are devoted to those who, against all costs, come silver halide or acidic ink, preserve family photographs. These men, nay, these giants among men, are surely among those we honor most highly.

There are some smudges to be found, perhaps. First off is the obvious question of what exactly Batamax is. Presumably, it's what was used to film Adam West and Burt Ward in some of their more private moments. I'm not sure how "honorable" this is. Furthermore, there's the underlying question of whether they make it clear to people that slides are much, much, higher resolution and quality than DVD. Or whether recordable DVDs really keep their original quality for "many" years, given that they haven't been around all that long.

There is, of course, the decision to fax again after saying they were not going to be sending any more faxes.

On the other hand, Mr. Simonson is perhaps simply comparing them to other clients. Compared to a multi-billion-dollar coverup of the tobacco company research showing that their aggressive marketing to children was, in fact, killing millions of people, perhaps it's not too hard for other companies to be considered "honorable". By comparison, anyway.

Customer support success stories.

I just wanted to share a couple of positive stories, since all we ever hear about is trouble.

Story #1: Canon technical support. What can you say about people who pick up the phone when you call them around 8 PM with obscure questions about a printer? Good stuff, mostly. The rep I got was knowledgeable, and when I did manage to stump him, he went and got my answer right away. The printer itself is worthy of mention. I got a Canon i9100. This is a truly amazing printer. I've seen widely varied reviews of it. After playing around a bit, I'm pretty sure this comes down to how willing you are to read the manual carefully and experiment with the settings provided in the printer driver. I am stunned by the quality of the output. I am also very happy with the "six separate cannisters of ink" design, which means that I don't have to replace $72 worth of ink every time I use up $12 worth of ink. Even apart from the cost to me, consider the environmental cost.

Story #2: Nikon technical support. I bought a camera. I got an open box/demo unit. It was missing a cable, they said, but they'd bundle a card reader. Well, I actually sort of wanted the cable. Furthermore, it turned out to be missing another cable (the almost-never-used "video output" cable), the original lens cap, and one of the two CDs it was supposed to ship with. I contacted Nikon, and got quick responses. I started Friday afternoon, and by Monday afternoon, I had confirmation that they were shipping all of the parts... But that they were out of stock of one part, so it'd ship separately. Tuesday, I got three of the four parts. Wednesday, I got notification that lens caps were in stock again; Thursday, I got my lens cap. Two separate overnight deliveries... I feel appreciated, certainly. It's also a very nice camera, although - being more complicated than my old one - it's a little confusing.

Still, I'm quite happy. Nice to know that not all customer service is awful.

Coming up soon: More junk fax hilarity, including probably the funniest use of the word "honorable" I've ever seen.

Sometimes, too much spam is funnier than too little.

One of these diet plans is 2.2 times as efficient as the other.

1+ 04/27 "Cherryl"          Dump Kgs Fast<<This is a multi-part message in MIME...
2  04/27 "Reynalda"         Drop Lbs Fast<<This is a multi-part message in MIME...

The work that goes into avoiding spam filters produces gradually less and less meaningful spam. I wonder if there's anyone out there who responds positively to spam, but who has filters that this stuff bypasses. Wouldn't you assume that the people who don't mind this stuff wouldn't have filters to begin with?

Cheap TV, redux. Advent turns out to be a zombie.

As I mentioned previously, my Advent TV sucks. A month or two out of warranty, it lost the ability to power on. This behavior has been noted by other people. I took it in for service, based on the suggestion from the Advent people that it wouldn't be very expensive.

The Best Buy folks want $150 to fix it. It was only a $200 TV to begin with.

The problem is that the TV partially powers on the instant it's plugged in, but that any button touched causes it to turn off again. According to the Best Buy people, this involves a failed EEPROM, which must be replaced with a freshly-programmed one. They can't suggest anything to keep the TV from frying another EEPROM; I'm better off spending a little more on a new TV than I am trying to recover this one.

This is another of those zombie companies. Advent, the company that used to make high quality products, died. Some cheap company with a factory in China reanimated the corpse, sticking their logos on "Prima" brand TVs, hoping for name recognition from people who have a good pair of speakers they bought 30 years ago which are still working.

Depressing. It's really just depressing. I guess I can look into the cost of getting a new TV. It won't cost enough more for me to care, and I don't feel like paying Best Buy $150 for what is apparently a $15 part that only broke because they sold me a shoddy product in the first place.

Giving up food for Lent.

I didn't really give up food. I just fasted during the day. During Lent, except on Sundays, I didn't eat food during daylight hours. (The picky reader will doubtless observe that this is more like Ramadan than Lent. I figure, they weren't using it, so no harm done.) After some consideration, I drew the line at "things with calories" - I could drink iced tea, but not caramel latte.

Did I screw up? A little. I had a couple of cinnamon candies through mere inattention. I made considered decisions to have a couple of cough drops and some honey tea for a cough. I tasted the egg roll mix my wife was making, and once I slurped some foam off a root beer float about a minute early. But no meals, no real food; not one bite, even if there were a couple of nibbles.

It's hard. It's surprising how hard it is. It's humbling to realize how many people (perhaps a billion) are, at this very moment, at least as hungry as I was while fasting, but who don't have the option of giving in in a moment of weakness and having a snack. It's also probably a really bad idea, psychologically, to pick a deadline that gets later and later during the fast, to say nothing of daylight savings time, which was pretty much like a kick in the teeth.

On the other hand, I lived. I lost a couple of pounds. I learned that being hungry is not the end of the world, and that there's nothing wrong with waiting until you're really hungry, not just a little munchy, before eating. I appreciate food more than I did a month and a half ago.

I don't really recall exactly planning to do this. Around 2:30 PM on Ash Wednesday, I thought I might as well try fasting for the day. It was easy enough, so I figured I'd do it again the next day. Then it became a pattern... I dunno. It's not as if me eating during daylight hours is the end of the world - in fact, I may well do it today. It just seemed like a good idea to try something, to see if I could stick with it.

It's hard. I think everyone should do this at least once; it teaches you a lot about the level of privilege we take for granted in America, a life where the idea of having to skip a meal is seen as a major hardship, while other people dream about the day when they can have a meal.

But I'm eating again now. Woo! Food.

Photoshop Friday, eat your heart out. This one's real.

I saw this sign. I refuse to believe that this is not intentional. This is from the HarMar theatre in Roseville.

Religious holidays and history.

A recurring theme in apologetics debate is the cycle of claims that Holiday X, whatever X may be, was originally a pagan celebration, only recently coopted by Christians. We're told that Easter was originally the Equinox Festival, or originally Oestre, and celebrated the rebirth of a goddess. We're told that Christmas was a winter solstice festival. Saint Nicholas was originally some other godling. And so on, and so forth.

After months of painstaking research, I think I can finally stake one of these through the heart and lay it to rest. I have found conclusive evidence that April Fools Day is, in fact, a Christian holiday through and through, first celebrated by Christians, and that no pagan holiday similar to it has ever been observed.

AFD may be traced back in its origins to Pope Joan, who, just before Easter in the first year of her appointment as Pope, revealed to those assembled that she was, in fact, a woman who had snuck into the church as a practical joke many years previously. After the belly laughs had died down, the consensus was reached that the joke had, indeed, justified the few irregularities involved in reaching this point. Since then, the Catholic Church has always allowed people to commit sins as long as they are for AFD jokes.

When people attempt to describe AFD as a Pagan holiday, it is most often connected to the Spring Solstice, a holiday which cannot possibly be celebrated, because it's an astronomical impossibility. The next most common apparent cognates are to be found in the Discordians and the Subgenii. However, despite the similarity of names between the Discordian "Eris" and the ancient Greek goddess Eris, there is no evidence of any kind of continuity between the two cults. While modern Discordians do, indeed, celebrate AFD, they appear to have acquired it from existing Christian practice; indeed, in this case, it's the pagans who have coopted a Christian holiday!

Perhaps the most interesting comparison is with Mad Hatter Day, celebrated on October 6th of every year. This holiday, however, is very recent; it dates back only to 1986. Even more curiously, it's celebrated on June 10th in Britain. However, it's much more recent.

Another source lists AFD as being rooted in some ancient, but unspecified, pagan practice. This usenet post illustrates the claim. The author cites no sources, and indeed, being a Usenet poster, is probably not competent to cite sources even if he had any. This unsubstantiated claim may be safely ignored.

The only remaining question is the apparent fondness for practical jokes of the cult of Mithras. However, the research on this turns out to depend entirely on one person's unsupported speculations; there's simply no hard archeological evidence to support it. In fact, most disturbingly, the research itself was first published on April 1st, which suggests that the entire thing may be a hoax.

In short, the Christians can rest easy. This is their holiday, and they can celebrate it freely.