Today, I got a letter in the mail hand addressed to Lisa Long, who has her mail sent to my house while she’s in London. The return address is just down the street, which is confusing, since I figured Lisa would have introduced me to any family she had in the neighborhood. Then I notice on the back that it says, “Yes on Measure Q”. Aha! So it’s astroturf, right? The developer has his wife rent an apartment in the neighborhood, then outsources the hand-written address part to a sweatshop in Liberia, then they send them out, and voila: instant grassroots support. ...

So I hopped on my bike and rode down to Yes On Q headquarters. It is, not surprisingly, located in spacious offices owned by the same organization that wants to build the high rises. Sigh. Democracy at it’s finest. I talked to a nice guy there named Bill Ferguson. Here are the things we talked about: me: Get me off your freakin’ list! him: No problem. (He scribbles down my name and number.) him: Your phone number is public knowledge once you register to vote, and we’re allowed to call you. me: Yes, you are allowed to call me. ONCE. Then I’m allowed to ask to be on your do not call list. me: Your telemarketers are not respecting do not call lists, and treating callers unprofessionally when they ask to be removed him: I don’t know how the call centers feed that back that list to us. me: Please figure it out, because I will file a formal complaint against your organization if it happens again. me: This reflects very poorly on your organization, and makes me unsympathetic to your arguments. I’m likely to vote “no” now. So, a constructive conversation was had. I expect to keep getting calls, and I expect to have to learn how to file a formal complaint. Luckily, I’m currently unemployed (by choice, thank god) and so I have plenty of time to make Bill Ferguson’s life hell. ...

If you are searching the web for info about the Marina Shores development in Redwood City this might interest you: I’ve been getting a number of call and hang-up calls on my cell phone with “caller id unavailable”. This is usually an indication that you are in a predictive dialer system’s phone list, and they are having trouble matching the call they made outbound to you with an telemarketer on their end. I kept answering them hoping to finally get someone to talk to to get me on their do not call list. ...

The Guardian carried a really scary article recently about the new face of the insurgency in Iraq. One quote that surprised me was this one: Black soldiers are a particular target. ‘To have Negroes occupying us is a particular humiliation,’ Abu Mujahed said, echoing the profound racism prevalent in much of the Middle East. ‘Sometimes we aborted a mission because there were no Negroes.’ Wow. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me to find racism here too, as I’ve found it in Europe and the US too. ...

This guy arranged for thousands of email messages to be sent to his Gmail account at once, and surprise, surprise! It fell over. What a jackass. One way to know for sure he’s a jackass is the theory about compression and RAID. First, Gmail doesn’t use RAID. It uses the Google Filesystem. It is like RAID, but implemented in user space, which lets Google play games with filesystem semantics you can’t do when you are restricted to one of the Unix filesystems on top of a hardware RAID box. It also leverages the CPU power you get for free when you buy thousands of PCI busses and IDE interfaces. The mainframe guys figured out long ago the key to throughput is lots of I/O paths. The Google Filesystem lets them use lots of CHEAP I/O paths, instead of the insanely expensive I/O paths that Netapp and Sun sell. ...

First the good news: Firefox 0.9.1 for Win32 fixes my crashing problems. (So all you Mozilla zealots that found this page last time I said something about Firefox, please don’t spam me.) The bad news is that Firefox 0.9 was a crashy mess, and it stomped my icons such that my HTML files that I saved out of Excel no longer had the “Excel generated HTML” icon, and no longer had the “Edit” option on the context menu. ...

Karl and I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 tonight. There are fewer classic Moore scenes in it than his other movies, which is a huge improvement. His message is way too important to be lost in the noise of his wacky hijinks. In some ways, I think the criticism of his previous movies have taught him what Moore-moments are defensible, and which ones he needs to just leave out of movies. (The bank-rifle scene in Bowling for Columbine scene is a case where he was fairly excoriated by the critics, I think. To my knowledge, there are none of those in Fahrenheit 9/11.) ...

It turns out the cool guys who made Trooper Clerks are Jeff and Kurt Allen. So which one of us is the evil twin?

There must be something in the chemical they use to deodorize urinals that makes you smarter, because every time I have a hard programming problem and take a break to take a pee, I come up with the answer.

Check out these two funny posts: The Mac is a harsh mistress … and Linux is your psychotic ex. For the record, my computing environment is as follows: Windows XP on a laptop with SSH and PPTP (depending…) over 802.11 to get connected to work. The VNC viewer gets me in touch with a bunch of xterms on a FreeBSD server where I do my real work on real computers (at Tellme, that’s Solaris on Intel). I use Mozilla Firefox almost exclusively. I often go a week or so between using Internet Explorer for some bogus website that requires it. I have Microsoft Office installed on the laptop. I abhor Word, but I really like Excel. I use it to work on clues for the Game, to visualize data while debugging systems, and even to draw rack diagrams! I also love PowerPoint… but I use it as a poor-man’s desktop publishing system, rarely for giving talks. I prefer impromptu talks with whiteboards to prepared talks. ...