Month: October 2006

Categories
Spamatozoa

Bayesian filter helter skelter.

Do you ever wonder about those utterly bizarre e-mails you get with huge blocks of text that make some kind of sense, but just not a lot? That’s a technique used to try to foul up spam filtering software, which uses Bayesian filters to look for certain kinds of words, and certain amounts of words. The randomly generated text is usually encoded as a comment or as text that you’ll never see, so that the real spam – usually HTML-coded – can slip through. After all, all that text isn’t using spam words, and it does feature complete sentences…
Kinda.
Here are some recent dispatches from my inbox that simply are their own kind of poetry. My apologies if you get enough of this in your own inbox, but y’know, sometimes they provide a perverse kind of entertainment all their own. … Read more

Categories
Television & Movies

Auction-adventure.

Enterprise DI watched some of this morning’s Christie’s Star Trek auction online, and my head is still reeling from what I saw. Y’know, I did see some stuff that would’ve been killer to have if it were within my financial reach – man, just think of the fan films you could make if you had some bits and pieces of the real deal (and I hope to hell that some of the folks splurging in New York today have that aim in mind). The pilot consoles from the Enterprise-E were some of the tastiest stuff that went in the morning auctions that I saw before I had to finally get to sleep. What blows my mind is that two empty wine bottles with Paramount art department “Chateau Picard” labels went for more than those consoles. C’mon, if you’re gonna spend enough money to finance part of an episode, get a foreground “hero” prop, people, not foam rubber stuntman phasers that can’t leave their holsters.
I was stunned to see a great big honkin’ Star Trek: First Contact Borg cube model go for tens of thousands. Tens of thousands! You know, I’m a Star Trek fan. Still. And I think I’m a fairly big fan. But for the amount that the aforementioned model went for…God, the stuff I could do with my house. I could add rooms (plural) for that kind of money. Or I could pay off the mortgage in toto (meaning that I’d send the money to the bank inside a little dog).
I still think I’m a big fan, but I’m clearly not on the same planet as these people. My wife and I have been attending some classes on reducing debt, increasing savings, and just generally getting out of the hole, and I guess they’re having some kind of effect on my fundamental thinking when I watch something like this auction and wonder out loud to every winning bidder, “Do you really have that kind of money to spend on that? How far in debt are you going for those Chateau Picard wine bottles?” I mean, if these are people who have the means to get the stuff without sliding into a pit of debt that’s deeper than the hole where the oil creature that killed Tasha Yar lived, cool. God bless ’em. More power to ’em. But as much as I might drool over the Enterprise’s pilot consoles, I no longer think I’m the kind of person who would even give a moment’s thought to hanging a big question mark over the next house payment just to get them.
Guess I’m not as big a fan as I thought, eh?… Read more

Categories
Critters Home Base Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Care for a cat scan?

This is becoming an increasingly common sight in my game room/office with the now-frequent Opening of the Window:
Cat Scan 😆
I’ve just about got all of that scanning and printing technology hooked back up, so Olivia may have to find a new spot to crash. Seriously – I need to find her a little ottoman or something. I used to have one in Green Bay, and kept it next to my computer desk, and Othello and Iago would spend all of their time there, watching me and staying within petting distance. Today I nearly stepped on Olivia’s paw (one of her recently-operated-on paws, no less) and she let out a loud alarm squeak before I put my weight on it. I moved my foot in a hurry and turned around to check on her, only to find Othello standing between me and her, hissing at me. Somebody’s protective of his little sis. I never thought I’d see the day.
Supremely frustrating evening at work tonight, just another instance where I’m more than ready to move on or just get out and start carving my own path. Maybe it’s just me getting a “bad attitude,” but the faults and weaknesses in our company are now sticking out like big, red, glowing sore thumbs to me, more and more, every day. And it pisses me off. It shouldn’t be like this. These are bring-everything-to-a-standstill problems and making-us-look-really-amateurish problems. When you’re endeavouring to be in the mass media, especially with a news operation, your credibility with the public is your only currency and it can take a lot to rebuild it if you make a habit out of screwing up. In this day and age of cowering away from anything that might potentially result in the vaguest whispered hint of a lawsuit, and then turning around and courting easy hot-button controversy for ratings, it’s no wonder that the media is losing that currency of respect with the folks who they’re too busy forcing ads onto.
Pac-Man potholderBack to the game room: when I moved stuff around, I had to take the HAL 9000 off the wall, leaving an icky nail sticking out. A while back, a friend of mine – in fact, it’s someone who reads this blawg! – sent me a few hand-made potholders (which, in this house, come in far more useful than you might realize, though I’ll admit that at least one has been hijacked by Olivia and pressed into service as her pillow). This one, however, is a display piece only, and perfectly suited for a retro gaming room. I just thought they’d like to see that these were definitely appreciated.
Back to L.E.O. for just a second – if anyone wants to grab it through my site instead of Not Lame, I’ve put it in the site’s store – click here-ish. All proceeds go toward…well…getting me a copy of the same. 😛… Read more

Categories
Music Serious Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Why I hate election season.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t for a moment begrudge our ability and our privelege to choose our own leadership. Sure, I’ve spent 6+ years really questioning whether or not the infrastructure by which we do that actually works, but I’d rather have the ability to vote, and to question the system, than to not even have the ability.
That said: I completely f’ing hate election season when it comes to work. I hate it. With the white-hot passion of a billion dying suns. On an ideological level, I hate that campaign advertising has essentially become a vituperative exercise in misdirection and stuff that would be considered actionable slander if it wasn’t a campaign ad. This helps no one. This informs and enlightens no one. It merely plays to passion, knee-jerk reactions, and polarizes communities rather than inciting them to ask questions. There is an equal time rule for news coverage of candidates running for office, though somewhere along the way this seems to have become an “equal time for Democratic and Republican candidates only” thing.
And how do the respective campaigns monitor the equal time process? Why, by watching our coverage, of course. And this is where it gets blisteringly, brain-boilingly ridiculous. Several years ago, I came up with a solution: anytime we do a story on, say, candidates for governor, I put together a multi-split-screen montage showing every candidate for governor. There’s your equal time right there – you’re all up for exactly the same amount of time. This year, though, it’s already sunk to new levels of pedantry – let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a transition from one story to another within the same promo takes the form of a lens flare that starts at lower left and moves to the upper right. Now you’re likely to hear from some campaign that the lens flare obscured their candidate for a split-second longer than it obscured the other guy.
It’s enough to make me fall back on that most impartial of methods: Text On A Screen, Showing No Candidates. It’s also enough to make me scream, but the soundproofing in here, such as it is, couldn’t silence a moderately noisy mosquito.
It’s a month before the election, and I’m sick and tired of it already.
L.E.O. - Alpacas OrglingIn tonight’s good news: check out this upcoming CD from a group called L.E.O. (warning: the page that link goes to will begin playing music to you immediately, just in case you’re at work or something), a sort of all-star collective of folks ranging from Andy Sturmer (ex-Jellyfish) to Bleu (??) to the Hanson brothers (!!) and numerous others, all put together in a style paying homage to ELO. Tasty stuff, actually. You can listen to the whole thing online (lo-fi of course), but some of it is really good if you’re into that kind of music. I’ll be trying to pick this up as soon as funds permit. Damned if there isn’t a lot of good music coming out right about now – and again, mostly not on the major labels.… Read more

Categories
Funny Stuff Television & Movies

Torpedoed!

Star Trek RemasteredWell, so much for me taping the remastered classic Star Trek episodes every week. With the end of their UPN affiliation, the station that used to be this area’s UPN station has folded like a deck of cards since the arrival of the WB. I take this kinda personally, because this is a station that (A) I helped to build in its early days, and (2) I promoted Star Trek aggressively on in its early days. Now KFDF is just one of the many low-power translators rebroadcasting KPBI’s My Network TV signal. (As I discovered from observation this weekend, My Network is a new upstart created by Fox, so they have a place to show the second-string material that’s actually – get this – too cheap, cheesy and tawdry to show on Fox itself. Can you even imagine such depths?) So Star Trek’s remastered episodes have vanished from the Fort Smith/Fayetteville market, along with Smallville strip syndication reruns and a bunch of other stuff. 😡 You know, I know it’s all going to wind up on DVD inside of a year or so, but I’d just like to see the damn things on-air because I really have no intention of buying yet another iteration of the series on DVD. Again. … Read more