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Doug 9:21 pm on October 31, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Politics, World

Jay McCarthy recounts some of a conversation he had last night concerning the the death of old institutions and the creation of new ones:

bq. There is an intense falling away of old institutions as they lose their appeal by eating themselves and allowing members to benefit from betraying their system. And the new institutions that are being created are being founded on new ideas and technologies that can make them fast, better, more exciting, and more involved. It’s not the destruction of hierarchy and organization, it’s a new form, possibly, in the style of Stirling’s “Sphere”.

bq. Driving home last night, Stirling and I continued the conversation about what’s wrong with current institutions at a fundamental level and how to patch those problems in the new version. He believes that every system for needs to be able to provide predictive power to its populace: “How can I be sure we have a stake in each other?” and “What will happen if X?” I have to read more of Stirling’s writing, he’s an amazing person.

Oddly enough, I was thinking along similar lines this morning before I read Jay’s post - and about how my dreams and hopes and aspirations used to be centered around changing the world. I’m less concerned about changing the world these days, and less convinced of my ability to do so. I’m more concerned about just hanging on and making through to another day. It’s tough to be engaged in changing the world when you’re mostly concerned with day-to-day things, like paying the mortgage and your kid’s education.

I’m awful glad though, that Jay and his generation are thinking about changing the world - it’s their turn to do so. Changing the world is a game for the young - the young and those who have enough power and wealth that they don’t have to worry much about the day-to-day. It takes energy and attention and focus and enthusiasm, all things that an aging father of two with a new job and too little savings finds in short supply.

I hope that by the time I’m in a position to have the resources to worry about changing the world I won’t be too tired and cynical to want to do it.
Doug 2:28 am on October 31, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Pictures

More Fall color. Shot around 5:15 PM at the nearby soccer practice field during Ian’s last practice of the season.
Doug 2:26 am on October 31, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Pictures

We still have some excellent Fall color around town. This was shot on Oak Street in Zionsville around 10:00 AM this morning.
Doug 1:17 am on October 30, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Apple

For my own future reference, here are some instructions on using the text-shadow CSS attribute. Right now, this appears to only be supported in Safari 1.1 on Mac OS X 10.3.
Doug 7:15 pm on October 29, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: World

A person named Paul Kroto has spamming me repeatedly for a couple of months now. Despite multiple efforts to filter his miserable messages to the bit bin, every few days he hops domains or changes his messages to get around my filters.

He works with a multi-level marketing company called New Vision. After today’s e-mail, I followed the opt-out process specified in the mail, know full well that all I’d done was confirm to Mr. Kroto that I was a real live person and receiving his mail. I followed that up with a spam abuse report to his current ISP - again, knowing full well that he’ll just hop domains and start spamming all over again.

A call to New Vision resulted in a run around from a low-level telemarketing person who insisted she couldn’t remove my name from her list without an account number, which, of course I don’t have. When I mentioned filing a complaint with the Indiana Attorney General, she said “Sounds fine to me!” and started to hang up. I quickly asked to speak to a manager, was put on hold, and disconnected after about 30 seconds.

A second call ended up at the same telemarketing person’s phone. This time, I asked for the manager straight off. She recognized my voice, saying “Oh, you must have been disconnected. Sorry about that!” Uh-huh, I bet you are.

This time I was quickly connected to “John.” I’ll give John his due, he was courteous and listened to my complaint. Again, he asked for an account number I don’t have. After a bit more discussion, John revealed that in fact New Vision isn’t mailing me, but rather Mr. Kroto is acting on his own initiative. John was sure the problem would be cleared up since I opted out of the mailing list, but said he’d give Paul a call to make sure it was taken care of.

A little bit of sleuthing reveals that Mr. Kroto has made himself unwelcome other places, as well. It also suggests that he’s located in Depew, New York. Specifically, he’s located at 204 Enchanted Forest South, Depew New York. Further, his telephone numbers are (716) 656-7777 and (716) 656-7634. The second appears to be a fax number, the first goes to some sort of voice mail, at least at 7:00 PM. We’ll see where it goes tomorrow. His e-mail is paul.kroto@verizon.net.

Are you reading this, Mr. Kroto? See how easy it is to track your spamming ass down? I’ll be sure to pass this information on to the Indiana Attorney General and the FCC should I receive another e-mail from you. Oh, and if you ever make it to Indiana, look me up. I’d love to have a little chat.

10-29-03 9:22 PM Edit: Removed references to “registrar lock,” since it doesn’t mean what I thought it did.
Doug 6:48 pm on October 29, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Environment, Space

Powerful Geomagnetic Storm Strikes Earth - too bad it’s cloudy here tonight. We might actually see a bit of aurora from one this big.
Doug 5:54 pm on October 29, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Work, World

Dissing American Tech Workers:

bq. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday (paid registration) that chip maker Intel, among others, is pushing Congress to lift the cap on H-1B visas, which allow citizens of other nations to live and work in the United States.

bq. Andy Grove, chairman of Santa Clara-based Intel, recently told a business group that the United States was losing its competitive edge. He and others see a fix in attracting more foreign workers to the United States.

Grove’s comments reflect a self-fulfilling prophecy. How exactly are we supposed to keep our talent’s competitive edge if all the high tech and R&D jobs are going to foreign workers brought into this country or being sent off-shore?

From the comments:

bq. Intel, who recently said that they’ll be hiring thousands of engineers in China, is wrongly pointing the finger at US engineering talent when Grove complains about “the United States … losing its competitive edge”. Management’s bad, short-term, stock-market-driven decisions over the past decade to reduce costs and improve profitability by shrinking or eliminating internal technology development and R&D groups then effectively outsourcing it by using other companies’ technology development and R&D (benefitting Taiwanese foundries like TSMC and ODMs like Arima) is killing it.

Finally, keep in mind that something like 75% of Americans are now stockholders - it is our own greed for ever-increasing 401(k) yields that allow us to be manipulated by the market-makers on Wall Street. They in turn are the ones who bring pressure on companies like Intel that generate the short-term decisions mentioned in the comment above.

We are fucking ourselves over. We eat our own young.
Doug 1:41 pm on October 29, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Apple, Work

The paranoia-induced surrealism of our society grows more mind-boggling every day: Of blogging and unemployment.

This poor guy wrote a post on his blog concerning how even Microsoft, his then current employer, was using Apple G5’s. The next day, they canned him. What actually appears to have caused the termination were details he provided in the post concerning what building he worked in, along with an accompanying picture. Microsoft Security seems to have been behind the action.

In all fairness to Microsoft, I can easily see this happening at many another large company. Having said that, it’s certainly ironic that a company that produces an operating system with an incredibly bad security record, which exposes millions of companies and individuals world-wide to security threats, would get so spooled up over an innocuous blog post.
Doug 8:40 am on October 28, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: Mobile, Work

A crew just came through the office, clearly doing planning for installing a bunch of new ethernet drops back here in the cubicle farm called “the bullpen.” The bullpen is where all we rookie Realtors sit until we hit $1M in volume, at which point we’re eligible for a private office. Sort of a Darwinian incubator for baby real estate agents, as it were.

I can’t help but wonder why we don’t skip the whole wiring nightmare and just put 802.11 WAP’s throughout the building. That’s the real estate business, striding boldly forward into the 1990’s in terms of technology.
Doug 8:33 am on October 28, 2003 | 0 | # |
Tags: World

Matthew Dennis is scanning old photographs from his father’s house:

bq.The batch I was working on were particularly old (for me, anyway): shots from the mid-to-late seventies when I was a small, only child. I was looking at these pictures, at my little face and little body. It was almost like I was looking at another kid. And I had the sensation that I had somehow let this little kid down.

I wonder if this isn’t something of a common feeling. Reading this made me reflect for a little while on my own childhood expectations. How many of us can say we fulfilled those childhood dreams? How many of have lived up to the expectations we, and others had for us when we were five or ten years old?

How many of us would be really happy if we had?