Year: 2004

It looks like this year’s federal budget is going to follow two fairly unsurprising trends:

1) Defense spending up.
2) Science and technology spending down.

Whee! It’s sure to keep America a global leader…

The tedium of spam is really starting to annoy me. Although I’ve got great spam filters running, I still download a couple hundred messages every day and have to sort through them to get the wheat from the chaff. Fortunately everything dumps into a single folder, and I can quickly scan subject lines (“Vi@gra”? What’s that?) and delete all the crap. There’s maybe one legitimate message each day– someone who isn’t in my address book, or is using an alternate account.

Although I love the ability to have a “catch-all” mail account– which lets any address at my domain deliver to me– I think that’s a big part of the problem. These spammers pick random names (and even sequences of numbers) and just fire away. Since everything gets routed to my “jeff” account, I get all the spam. Whee.

So last night I turned off the catch-all, and left only the handful of legitimate addresses I actually use. I didn’t expect a dramatic difference, but imagine my surprise when the spam load dropped by about 70%. Woo hoo! Now I’ll only have to sort through 40-50 messages…

I’m presently reading Eric Drexler’s famous book “Engines of Creation”, which discusses nanotechnology and how its development will undoubtably change our world and our society in dramatic and largely unpredictable ways.

As a fan of nanotechnology, it’s always interesting to learn more about it and ponder how it might affect the world around me. What’s particularly noteworthy about this book is that it was written in 1986– almost two decades ago– and is still considered by many to be not only the seminal work on the subject, but a good overview of the science. Considering how much the world of technology has changed in the last twenty years, that’s a fair accomplishment.

Amazing what they can do these days. And what they might be able to do tomorrow.

Last night La and I watched “The Last Samurai”. It was a good flick, although when it all boils down, it’s just “Dances with Wolves” all over again. We even had Kicking Bird, played by a constantly weepy Taka, and of course the gradual realization by the main character that the “savages” aren’t really so savage after all…

As rumors of the “Return of the King : Extended Edition” DVD begin circulating, there’s much speculation about whether it’ll be shown in theaters before being released to video (which would be both cool and frustrating), and of course about which scenes will be added.

But on Slashdot, the source of all knowledge, there was a great alternate plot:

Gandalf: That ring is bad news, Frodo, it must be destroyed.

Frodo: How so?

Gandalf: It must be placed in the fires of Mount Doom.

Frodo: Oh well, I guess that means a lot of walking, camping and then running away from monsters, lots of death and almost losing all my friends?

Galdalf: Nah, I know some big eagles that can fly us straight to the mountain and we can drop it in the lava. We’ll be home by tea.

Frodo: Nice one!

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.”

— Ernest Benn

The Chinese government never ceases to amaze me. In today’s news, they’ve announced a plan to filter text messages sent between their citizens via cell phones. This is a monumental task, as Chinese people send and receive more text messages (some 200 billion per year) than the rest of the world combined. Not deterred by the sheer magnitude of such a project, the government thinks it has a right to intercept and block communication between its citizens.

Not surprisingly, this goes hand-in-hand with their stringent filtering of the internet– something I would think is a lost cause. Apparently text messages containing certain key words, or even special numbers in proximity to one another, will be blocked by the filtering software.

Although I feel the Chinese government is monstrous for pulling stunts like this, I’m also constantly appalled by the way the U.S. government– and American corporations– continue to treat China like they’re our best friends. They retain their Most Favored Nation status, and as long as the flow of crappy plastic toys continues to flow across the ocean I’m sure they’ll remain our most beloved trade partners. Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that the next Olympics will be held in Beijing: certainly a demonstration to the world that it doesn’t matter how repressive you are to your own people, as long as you manufacture cheap consumer goods.

After an epic three-hour struggle with a database problem on Monday, I finally figured out the problem was a deeply hidden configuration option in Microsoft SQL Server. I changed one line of program code and everything worked. As I was wading through documentation, newsgroups, third-party source code, and any other reference that seemed halfway likely to produce an answer, my friend Craig quipped, “SQL Server’s motto should be ‘We make every day feel like Monday.'”

There is, of course, a lot of truth to that. As it’s Friday afternoon now and I’m not feeling particularly motivated to do anything productive, I hopped on the web and downloaded a couple of graphics to make a real gem of a poster.

It’s now hanging in my office.

Today’s stupid web design note:

I’m so tired of using online payment for things– whether I’m ordering stuff or paying a bill– and having to fill out my credit card information without using spaces or dashes or whatever. Just a big old 16-digit number.

The reason? Because I have all my credit card numbers online (secure, yada yada) and I just cut and paste them as necessary, depending on what I’m buying and which company is paying for it. So I paste the number into the field, hit ‘submit’, and get barked at because the number isn’t formatted properly. Sigh.

Note to all web developers who think this is some kind of insurmountable problem: with about three lines of Javascript code, you can strip out anything that’s not a number and get what you need. For heaven’s sakes, guys, let consumers type dashes or spaces!

Pardon me, I have to go now and re-submit my information to T-Mobile so I can pay my phone bill…

There are at least two things I really hope not to burn out on:

1) Computers.
2) Orange juice.

Without the first, I wouldn’t have a job.

Without the second, I wouldn’t have much to drink.