While I usually try to be nice, I know I'll always have at least a little taste for wrath and vengeance. I prefer to build, but sometimes I have an urge to destroy. And this "meme" abuse has got me thinking.

George Jetson's gay old time was rudely interrupted by someone calling him a homosexual. This wrong was never righted, but it was avenged. Gay farmland was salted, gay wells were poisoned, and gay huts were burned, for: as early as the mid 1980s, I saw the word "gay" used as a generic pejorative. A fellow student objected to a homework assignment, and exclaimed "that's so gay!" He was thrown out of the classroom by a teacher who, while correctly identifying the student as disrespectful, probably incorrectly thought he was being accused of putting his tab into the wrong slot. The point is, gay took on a generic usage. If George Jetson can't have a gay old time, then nobody else can, either.

We lost the battle on "hacker" so let's deny it to everyone. Let the word henceforth mean, "any bad person." Hitler wasn't just gay; Hitler was a gay hacker.

I'm not 100% sure that the battle for "meme" is really lost, but it probably is. I'm thinking we could use it to just mean any sort of communication.

Throughout my sordid past, I have:

• [x] Stared at a so-called "meme" and tried to find the reproductive hook.
• [x] Executed/copied a meme even though I couldn't find the hook.
• [x] Fondled the reproductive hooks of three memes at the same time while being videotaped for a direct-to-DVD release.

I realize some people will copy any idea, but if the motive to copy doesn't come from the idea itself then is it really a meme?

That used to be such a cool word. *sigh* I'm trying to sweep back the tide with a broom, aren't I? Meme has already become one of those words like "hacker" and it's too late to save it.

A couple weeks ago I got an email from a robot; someone had uploaded their signaure for my pgp key to biglumber's key exchange escrow service. That's not terribly unusual, but it raised the question, "who is this guy?" It was someone I had never met, who shouldn't have been signing my key. I emailed him and explained that I couldn't sign him back, unless we met and I checked his id and got his fingerprint from him in person. (And I want to meet him, to "correct" his behavior, but be as diplomatic and nicely encouraging as possible -- overall I'm glad a newbie dived in. We just need to get his signing standards up a bit.) Fortunately he's a fellow Albuquerquean so meeting was perfectly viable, and I got the idea to call a general meeting in Albuquerque so I could get someone else I had missed, as well as start the newbie off with several good connections. The upshot of all this, is that I had a keysigning meeting yesterday.

Unfortunately the newbie who started this, didn't show up. But fortunately, I'm now just two hops away from my hero, PRZ. ;-)

Anyway, after uploading a few new sigs to the keyservers, I started surfing around and found some keyring analysis websites that I hadn't been previously aware of. Henk Penning's site has some good tools for tracing paths through the WoT, and also showed me some one-way links from my key, indicating that some people I signed, never uploaded my sig to the keyservers. But best of all, it linked to Thomas Butter's website which has some graphs.

There's the MSD graph of my key, for example, which shows drops of my MSD (average distance to other keys in the strong set) a couple weeks after each keysigning meeting, and one mysterious drop that I suspect is caused by someone near me (?) having a particularly good meeting. It's fun to try to track down what happened. The ranking graph is interesting too. It has drops that correspond to the MSD dropping, but combined with an overall trend of my ranking to get worse. As time goes by, everyone else's keys are getting closer together, so whenever you just sit there and don't do anything, your relative closeness tends to drop. Neat.

(Oh, BTW, about the weird glitchy-looking thing on the MSD and ranking graphs, showing some spikiness around June 2004 -- it looks like everyone's graphs show this spike. I think something weird happened with the keyservers back then.)

([Update] Oh, and there's another "bump" in my graphs in June 2005. I finally figured this out -- it's from a friend's key expiring. So my rank and MSD suddenly get worse, but then they get better again a few weeks later, apparently due to this keysigning meeting.)

But the surfing went on, and I totally hit the jackpot. Behold Jörgen Cederlöf's brilliant Dissecting the Leaf of Trust. This thing is just full of interesting things, showing how if you look at a chaotic graph (I mean the Wot, not the pictures) the right way, then you can find consistent trends. Check out the "German double cross" (I don't know what else to call it, but that seems like a nifty name) and the top-level domain sorting.

Owen Skywalker: So, Ben, what brings you into town?
Ben Kenobi: Just mailing a letter.
Owen: Yeah, I'm just here to get a replacement part for a condenser.
Ben: [nods]
Owen: I hope I brought enough money. I forgot about that darn Imperial import tariff.
Ben: Well, if you ever need help solving the Imperial problem, you know where to find me. I'd lov--
Owen: [warily] Now hold on, you know I didn't mean that. Look, I know what you're trying to do. But leave me out of it, ok? And leave little Luke out of it too. He's ten years old now, and I'm trying to give him a solid future.
Ben: Sorry. Of course. I didn't mean to push.
Owen: Oh, it's alright. Look, I'll see you around, ok?
Ben: Yeah, see you around.

[A month passes]

Ben: Good day.
Owen's Father's Cousin's Former Roommate: Hello. Uh... Ben Kenobi, isn't it?
Ben: Right. Ah, here it is. I came into town for a copy of the Mos Eisley Times. Hmm.. J-Lo's marriage is on the rocks? Sheesh, this is what passes for news these days? That settles it. I'm not reading this trash anymore.
OFCFR: Yeah, the paper's really gone downhill.
Ben: [Sighs, nods] I guess there's no longer any reason for me to even come into town.
[awkward pause]
OFCFR: Hey, I was at the general store the other day, and I couldn't help but overhear you talking to Owen. I didn't mean to eavesdrop and I didn't really understand what y'all were talking about, but I gather ...
Ben: Yes?
OFCFR: Well, you're some kind of expert in troubleshooting Imperial problems, aren't you?
Ben: Well, sort of. I mean, not really, but yeah, I've been around. Actually, I've been dying to do something about the Imperial problem.
OFCFR: I gotta do something. I mean, if I keep waiting, it'll just get worse, won't it?
Ben: [aside] That's the spirit! Maybe people are finally waking up and getting ready to throw off the chains of oppression! [aloud] Yes, it will. Delaying a problem only makes it worse.
OFCFR: Maybe you can help me.
Ben: [getting excited] How can I be of service?
OFCFR: I need help filling out my Imperial tax return. I just don't understand schedule 3524-D and how I'm supposed to report my outworld grain sales on form 6-F and ...

Ben isn't listening to the details. He remains expressionless, but behind those eyes is frustration, rage, and despair.

OFCFR: ... don't even know where to find form 2345-q! And if I don't file by Thursday, the penalties will just keep piling up. You used to have some kind of government job, didn't you? So you know about this stuff. Ben Kenobi, you're my only hope. Can you help me?

Ben: [soliloquy] So it has come to this. Does this fellow have any idea what he is asking of me? Doesn't he understand that it hurts me to even think about this nonsense? If I help him, doesn't he realize that it would be going against my principles and by helping him with his tax forms, I would be legitimizing the Empire?

Good grief, I have never filled out an Imperial tax form in my fucking life. I GOT OUT OF THE SYSTEM, DAMMIT! Why does this idiot think I moved out to the middle of nowhere, into a cave? I have paid a price and had to make some minor personal sacrifices, but the reward is that I got distance from this crap. I became a free man!

I'm not even going to look at this fool's tax forms. I wouldn't dirty my hands with that toilet paper!! I ought to slap his face! How dare he ask for my help with .. this. Of all things, THIS!?!

Please, anything but this. You shouldn't have to pay extra tax on your offworld grain sales. The situation you're in, is not normal! That's not what being a farmer is about; it's not why you became a farmer in the first place. Ask for my help with anything else. I'll stand in the hot Tattoine sun all day helping you pull weeds. Imperial tax forms!

And yet.. how could he know? This is a remote planet, and it's not like this damned Mos Eisley Times keeps people informed. And it's not like I go around telling everyone. If I were to launch into a sermon every time someone mentioned anything Imperial, I'd just get a reputation as a weirdo.

Look at him. He's feeling pain and fear. He really does need help. He's a farmer, not really a fool. I was wrong to think of him like that, and I can't expect everyone to join in my damn fool idealistic crusade.

And if tell him that I actually have less experience with Imperial tax forms than even the most common layman, he won't believe me. He'll think I'm just weaseling out. And the truth is, I did major in accounting back in my academy days, and I helped a lot of friends fill out their old republic tax forms. I have a lot of general experience. I don't know if any of it will apply, but maybe some of it will. And I'm a reasonably intelligent person. Lots of other people are able to make sense of Imperial taxes, so there's no reason I won't be able to.

I just don't want to.

But he needs my help. What kind of complete asshole would I be, if I let my hatred of the Empire, overrule my compassion? I'd be as bad as Palpatine himself.

Ben: [aloud] Of course I'll help you, friend.

You'll never understand why I hesitated. But ok, old Sloppy will come over and look at your spyware/virus problem. I don't know if I can really help, but I'll try.

Life is just a big game of Chez Geek and I'm about to collect some more slack points. I'm in the ABQ airport, about to fly to Chicago for Classic Metalfest 5 and of course, another keysigning party. If you're in the Chicago area, join me! On Friday and/or Saturday, come to JJ Kelley's in Lansing and bang your head to heavy metal, and on Sunday come downtown (see biglumber for details) and get your pgp key signed.

What a Saturday!

In the evening was Alibi Spring Crawl and that's always fun. Beer and bands, you can't beat that. I saw Anesthesia, part of Astray, End to End, part of Rage Against Martin Sheen, part of The Dirty Novels, The Foxx, and Black Maria.

Now, that's pretty good stuff, but let's get serious here: I don't think I've ever made journal entries on Slashdot about the Alibi Crawls before, and I'm not about to about to start now. Crawl isn't the subject, it was just the dessert at the end of the day. Let's get back to that seemingly throw-away statement: "Beer and bands, you can't beat that." I tricked you. It turns out, you can beat that, and on Saturday before crawl, I did.

Because, you see, the big decision I had to make before I drove downtown for crawl, wasn't "which bands am I going to see?" It wasn't, "When do I need to stop drinking so that I'll be reasonably sober by 1 am?" It wasn't, "Who all will I run into down there?" (though that question had some pleasant surprises as well) No, the big question was: should I wash off my makeup? For behold: on Saturday morning/afternoon, I was an extra in a zombie movie!

On Friday, I picked up the Alibi (to get the crawl schedule) and saw that a locally-produced low-budget horror movie, Necroville was in need of a horde of the walking dead. I showed up at the Sol Arts center at about 8:30 am, signed a waiver, and waited. A few dozen people had shown up before me, and they were calling people's names in order that they had shown up, to go into the back and get zombiefied. A couple hours went by, and then, to my horror, there was an announcement that they were running out of gray face paint, because such a larger-than-expected horde had shown up. They had about 17 latex masks, and were going to try to conserve makeup by just putting it around our eyes and whatever else the masks didn't cover.

At this, I was heartbroken, because I sure as hell didn't want to be in a zombie movie and end up anonymous behind a mask. This was my big break to become a movie star! Or at least something that I'll someday get to watch on a DVD with my friends, and have a few laughs as we all watch me get killed. But I decided I would still help out and be an extra, so I stayed instead of getting discouraged. Then -- good news! -- I guess they figured out that even using the masks wouldn't conserve enough makeup, so somebody went out and got more, and I didn't have to wear a mask after all. Whew!

Some pretty lady painted me gray, then Kurly himself (star of "The Stink of Flesh" and owner of Burning Paradise) put some blood and gore on my face. I then went out and rubbed some dirt on my clothes (I thought they looked too clean), practiced my hungry-for-flesh moaning and shambling walk, and I got assigned to "horde west." My destiny was to be mowed down by a lumberjack with a chainsaw.

I won't spill any cinematic secrets, such as the subtle distinction between when the director yells "live chainsaw" versus "prop chainsaw." You little people on the other side of the silver screen, will just have to wonder how the magic of movies works, and how I was able to get killed and yet still be able to write these words.

Well, ok, I tell you a little about it. Everything is filmed multiple times. Each different action we did, we did about 3 times. So I guess they'll have plenty of different things to edit from. I just hope nobody notices that we zombies didn't always do everything quite the same all 3 times.

Blood. Blood is sweet and sticky. It's sugar-based, and bees love it. The blood turned out to be the deciding factor in me going home and showering. If I had just been covered with the initial gray paint and gore, I would have gone to crawl that night, in full zombie attire. But by the time I got to do my "be a corpse" scene (where I used my amazing acting(!) talent(!) to .. um .. lay down and be still) I was a sticky mess, including my hair. And we're talking a lot of blood. There were several people on the set whose jobs had titles of "blood squirter" and "gore thrower." This gore, thrown by the fistful as the hero cuts through the horde with his chainsaw, consists of shredded toilet paper soaked in the sweet sticky blood.

The guys who did this movie have done others before, and will certainly do other low-budget horror movies again. If ever called upon, I'd do it again. Things to remember: put more effort into my clothing. I wore some "expendable" clothes that already had a couple of naturally-occuring holes in them (though it turned out that everything washed out, easily) but next time, I'll actually try to make them really tattered, and -- more important -- dirtier. Maybe next time, I can get an individualized, close-up death scene.

Anyway, the movie (at least in some form) should be out for TromaDance New Mexico in October, and probably a more thorough edit, some time after that. I look forward to seeing it. I'll try to remember all you friends, when I'm a big star.

[Update] Some photos from the set; I can be seen in at least one, maybe two. Hopefully, I don't have enough fans to "slashdot" this page.

Filth leaks and seeps and turns up where you least expect it. Lady Macbeth couldn't get it off her hands, because it was in her head, figuratively. What do you do, when it's really in your head?

I read that someone wanted to sell a certain electronic device. I repeat: they wanted to sell it. I must emphasize this, because the seller emphasized it. They had to, lest casual readers get the wrong impression.

I'm being vague about the device, because there's just no need to be specific. You think you don't know what I'm talking about, but the filth has already penetrated your defenses, and you'll never wash it off.

I chose not to buy the device, because my first reaction was that I would have to tell 5 friends and they would have to tell 5 friends, and what are the chances that the 31 of us would all agree to the purchase?

See? Now you know what I'm talking about, even though I didn't tell you anything about what the device does.

I'll scrub and scrub, but I know that I will never be clean. I'll never be able to think about that company's product, without also thinking about spamming 5 friends.

"I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me." -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Damn you, Lemmy. A buzzing noise has followed me home from the Motorhead show. Given past experience, I predict it'll be gone when I wake up tomorrow. But that's just hope and speculation, and regardless, the long-term loss in my left ear is beyond all doubt.

Kids, it's too late for me. In fact, today I turn -- ugh, I don't want to say, but it's .. um .. late 30s, as opposed to mid-30s. But maybe it's not too late for you. Wear earplugs. Trust me, I really know what I'm talking about. Yeah, that's dogma, but I'm telling you, just do it anyway. If you can't believe me on this one little thing, then unfriend me.

And don't give me that shit about earplugs looking dorky, or that it means you're "weak" or something. That's bullshit. Maybe a few ignorant fuckwits will look at you funny, but notice the expression on the faces of us old-timers. We'll look at you with respect, and maybe a little envious regret as well. Just wear the fucking things, or you'll end up like Sloppy, and "What?" will become your most-often spoken word.

I guess I'll tell y'all about last weekend and my hastily-prepared trip to Colorado. But first...

I have a problem that I'm working on. I think the solution is to get out more and meet more people. I'm doing this in a variety of ways (I'll tell you a lot more about one of them below) but one of them is that I'm using one of those "social networking" websites, MySpace. MySpace is technically lame, very unreliable, down a lot, and full of many idiotic users. But some of the people I've met in the local metal scene are on there, and they pulled me in, and it actually has helped to keep my in touch with them, so.. I use MySpace. It's popular too, for some reason, and you know what Metcalfe said about the value of networks. Anyway, I joined a local MySpace group that looked like a very heterogeneous mix of various types of people, and they meet often, so on Thursday night I went to a coffee house and .. there a bunch of us were.

That's when I noticed how different this was, than a bar. I spend a lot of time in bars. The bars around here are long, narrow buildings, typically with not enough chairs for everyone to sit. As a result, you get around and mix. It's hard not to (unfortunately, I sometimes still find a way not to, which is one of the things I'm trying to fix about myself).

But at this coffee place, there were plenty of places to sit, and I just can't get up and chug coffee-after-coffee (it'll drive me crazy -- I'm at a point in my life where I just can't mainline caffeine like I used to). So we sat, and the layout was pretty static. I ended up pretty much only chatting with a small sub-group of this supposedly diverse mix of people.

Just my fucking luck: I ended up sitting near IT workers!! D'oh!!! Two of 'em were pure support people, and one was a hybrid programmer/support/misc. This almost counts as not meeting new people. ;-) Oh well. Anyway, I learned a few things. One of them was the dollar cost of some of the computer crap that people are putting up with. I don't run viruses, so I don't think of virus scanners, anti-spyware stuff, etc as being particularly important. Outside of my little sphere, though, these are apparently important things, and one of the problems that support people put up with, is keeping their peoples' machines clean, keeping the AV software up-to-date, etc. Even more shocking, was the dollar cost associated with all this. At Sandia National Labs, there's apparently a "tax" that they pay for computer support (which mostly consists of cleaning up after viruses, etc) based on every employee. Would you believe $1500 per employee per year?

Holy crap. You'd think some bean-counter would say, "Enough's enough!" You don't even have to be a "computer dude" to know that getting away from Microsoft's suckage would have a upside. You just have to see how much money is being wasted on a uniquely-Microsoft problem.

Oh yeah, and from the way bonuses are awarded, it sounds like the support people are basically rewarded for "solving" more problems, and penalized for making problems really go away. And you wonder why the world is fucked up.

*sigh* Anyway... that was Thursday night. Did I unconsciously gravitate to the IT people, or was it just bad luck? I don't know. Next time, I'll make sure to sit next to a girl. Girls don't work in IT, right? ;-) Or maybe I'll fake it and pretend I'm at a bar and wander around even though no one else is doing it. Maybe I'll start a trend!

Friday morning, I hit I-25 for Colorado Springs. About 400 miles later, I checked into my hotel and rested a while, then headed to a local bar called Navajo Hogan Roadhouse for what promised to be a metal show. Neat place! But the bands turned out to be lame death metal, metalcore, more (but much better) death metal, and then utter crap. If you're not into metal, you'll see the word "metal" in all those descriptions and think I was pretty happy. No, not really. But it wasn't too bad, and what else was I going to do that night? A little headbanging, but nothing really passionate. That would come 24 hours later...

On Saturday morning, I checked out "Garden of the Gods" on the western side of Colorado Springs, and every time I saw a sign with those words, I sang them like Chris Boltendahl (Grave Digger) singing the "Twilight of the Gods" chorus from Rheingold. Nobody looked at me funny, though.

Then I headed north to Palmer Lake to a coffee place called Speedtrap. Off the I-25 exit, the road has a speed limit of 50 or 55 MPH, and then suddenly changes to 30 MPH, turns, and there Speedtrap is. When I left the place later, sure enough, there was a cop with flashing lights who had pulled someone over. But there can be pedestrians around here, and the turn really does reduce visibility, so I don't think the speed limit reduction is really unjustified. (I would find out about the real speed trap, the next day.)

Why did I go to Speedtrap? This is where you nerds ought to perk up your ears, because the purpose of this was .. a keysigning meeting! Ooh yeah! See that biglumber.com thingie that I have entered as "my" webpage? Well, no, I'm not associated with biglumber in any way, I just want to advertise it so that more people will get in on it. Biglumber is a geographically-oriented database where people who are into pgp keysigning can find each other, and it works pretty well.

Now, these are pgp nerds, so you think I would be as unexcited about meeting them as my previously-mentioned meeting of IT workers. Bah, shows what you know. Anyone can get a job running virus scanners, but the people who are into building a pgp-based distributed authentication infrastructure, tend to be more .. oh shit, how can I say this and not sound pretentious? They're more .. well .. elite. Real enthusiasts. Or maybe this is the best way to put it: they tend to be into what I'm into. If you start talking about Windows registry settings, it's pretty much guaranteed that my eyes will glaze over and I will start looking around for someone else to hang out with. If you start talking about how you met Whitfield Diffie, I'm listening.

In this case, I met an MIT alumnus who works at HP, and another guy who is working on a dual-masters program in business and theology. (Weird, huh?) The second guy even brought us both a souvenir-pack, which included a SimplyMEPIS Linux CD (I haven't checked that out yet) but also some .. uh .. evangelical materials (a Liberty Dollar pamphlet, and The Gospel Of John). Ok, that seems a little unusual to me, but hey, it takes all types. Gave me the idea that maybe I'll maybe make up some kind of packet to hand out to people in the future, beyond the usual hardcopy-of-fingerprint. (Dunno what I'll put in it. Any ideas?)

Anyway, fellow geeks, this is what I wanna point out to you: even if you don't see the value in building a cryptographically-based distributed authentication system (upon which email encryption is just one potential application), biglumber is a way to meet nerdy instant-friends when you travel to somewhere, and maybe have some interesting conversations with some strangers when you're away from home.

You know you want to. Generate that key if you don't have it yet, and then join in the fun.

But the best was yet to come. I left Palmer Lake and hit I-25 north again for Denver. Then onto a suburb that looks like an endless shopping mall, called Westminster. Checked into hotel again, scouted the area, rested, and then had dinner at an Indian joint named "Yak and Yeti." Yummie Chicken Tikka Masala and Lamb Vindaloo, then onto Pink E's Black Den for DEEP FREEZE METALFEST IV!

This was a rockin' night. Even the worst of the openers was better than the best band I had seen in Colorado Springs the previous night, and to top it all off, I saw Flotsam and Jetsam for the first time in over 5 years, and Jag Panzer for the first time ever. And I got to meet yet another nerd there, a fellow metalhead, for a keysigning meeting, thus combining my nerdliness with my metalheadedness. It also give me someone to chat with and drink with between sets. That is a good thing when you've travelling alone.

At the end of Jag Panzer's set, the finally played a song from my favorite album of theirs, and it seemed like Harry forgot the words to the chorus of King At Any Price. At the time, I thought this was because he was high, as he had made some kind of bong reference at the beginning of the show, so I shouted "This is your brain on drugs!" But later they said he was just very ill. Ok, whatever. Anyway, except for the totally fucked up King At Any Price, it was a good set.

But Flotsam was even better. I'm probably a bit biased here.. Flotsam and Jetsam is one of my absolute favorite bands in the world, maybe the #1 spot depending on mood, but always at least in the top 5. Constant headbanging and singing along, hair flying, covered in sweat, surrounded by true metalheads, belly full of faux-Indian food and Mexican beer -- oh, it was a glorious thing! Quite simply, this is why I live. It'll be years before I top this one. I love my local bands back in Albuquerque, but this was really special.

A few notes on the return trip on Sunday. I had noticed one of my tires was low, so I filled it with air at a gas station. But since I wasn't sure how fast it was leaking, I decided to overfill it a little, to give me more time. Then I got the idea: I wasn't really in a hurry to get back home, so why not perform a little mileage experiment? I overfilled all my tires to 40 psi, and drove at 65 MPH. (I briefly entertained the idea of driving TMP into a fit and imagined his resulting caustic rant melting various internet backbones, but then I thought "what are the chances he's on this stretch of road?" so I changed back into the right lane.) Got 43 mpg. That's consistent with earlier experiments. (I can get 50 MPG at 55 MPH.) And that's not a hybrid or TDI or anything like that. Just ol' fashioned Otto, made in Japan.

As I approached the Palmer Lake exit (161) going south, I considered stopping by there again, to drink another "Entrapmint" (the minty coffee drink that I had the previous day). But then one of those "Speeding Fines Doubled" signs came up, without even the pretense of road construction to justify it. Purely arbitrary. Then the I-25 speed limit dropped from 75 MPH to 55 MPH. For no reason. Arbitrary. Then, over the hill, was the pig and his radar gun.

I usually call cops "cops" instead of the pejorative term "pig." But now that I see the true namesake of Speedtrap, and the road signs that serve no safety-related purpose and exist solely to generate revenue, I say this pig is aptly labelled. Disrespect is my intent. I hate you. And I'm speaking as someone who didn't even get caught speeding and get a ticket. Imagine how your victims feel. Pig, when you pull some sucker over, you probably justify your despicable behavior by telling yourself that they wouldn't have gotten pulled over if only they "respected the law." Well, Pig, you and this speed trap are reason no one respects the law these days. Because the road signs and law do not exist in good faith. Fuck you, Palmer Lake pigs. As you can guess, I changed my mind about doing business in that community, and drove right by the exit. I can only hope the local businesses some day learn what impression us tourists are getting.

Three British soldiers are on trial for abuse of prisoners. It's a different set of photos than what I've seen before, I guess a different incident from the more infamous case. What I found interesting, is what Jim Lehrer said at the end of the summary: "The case came to light when one soldier returned home and had some film developed. The photo lab spotted the images of abuse, and alerted police." Remember folks: use a digital camera (or polaroid, if you're old-fashioned) for your criminal momentos.

The courts long ago ruled that phone users have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and thus a warrant is needed for Law Enforcement to intercept.

I wonder if this "reasonable expectation" is delusional and technologically out-of-date. I see a lot of people talking on wireless phones these days. Heck, I have one myself. Do most people know how they work? Does a user have the slightest clue as to every sort of network hop that might occur in your connection?

We actually have laws against building certain types of radio receivers. But let's get serious: if you build one, will anyone know? Of course not. And thus: it is perfectly reasonable to assume that someone out there, has done it. So it's against the law: BFD. People break the law all the time. (Except me, of course. I'm a model citizen. :-)

"Reasonable expection" is vague enough that it deserves to be reexamined and challenged every now and then. I think this expection is more of a wish, combined with a little bit of faith that, "Oh, nobody is interested in spying on little ol' me."

I look forward to the day when my cellphone can look up people's PGP keys (and give me some sort of trust indicator that shows how well that key has been authenticated (e.g. signed by me is 100%, total stranger with no pathway of sigs to him, is 0%)) and use them.

Better yet, if I'm in the same room as someone, my phone and his should be able to use some low-powered IR link and exchange a few megabytes of One Time Pad right there on the spot; there will be plenty of room to store it for future reference, on the phone's built-in 100 Gig hard disk. (And it's not like phones will have a hard time gathering entropy; they have a radio receiver and a microphone. And if you spend all your time in a quiet, radio-shielded room, just point the CCD at yourself and make funny faces.)

When we have endpoint-to-endpoint encryption, then I'll believe that we really do have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Of course, that'll keep the Good Guys out, even if they do get a warrant. But it'll keep Bad Guys out too, and they never bother with warrants anyway.

I'm a little slow. I finally figured out something that I should have picked up, decades ago. Most programming isn't programming at all. It's all about learning interfaces. Interfaces that are here today, gone tomorrow.

I started C programming in 1986, but guess what: I still can't tell you, off the top of my head, what the order of the parameters to open() is! I guess there's a filename and a mode in there, and maybe something else. I don't remember. I always have a reference handy, even for something I've probably typed a thousand times. Someday, at a job interview, someone is going to ask me to write a trivial program, and I'm not going to know on-the-spot how to open a file! Yog-Sothoth help me if I have to remember all the rules in scanf()'s formatting string.

But nowdays, no one would ask for that, probably. The interface du jour would be something else. And I wouldn't even get the interview, because I don't have J2EE on my resume. ;-) Still, I guess the standard C library is something that lasted longer than most things. Maybe I'll get around to memorizing it.

Lately I've been trying to learn to be proficient with wxPython and Twisted. This is a drag. I just try to think about all the neat (and profitable, I hope) stuff I'll be able to whip off, once I have mastered these libraries. I've been using KDE for a few days (I usually run xfce4), and I think the whole "kioslaves" thing might be pretty neat to work with. Maybe I'll learn that too.

At work, I used to be the "talk to the OS" guy. My boss wanted to know how to do something, and didn't know how. Not because he lacked programming skill, but just because it was something beyond the scope of an app programmer. He'd want to take advantage of some service that MS Windows offers, and he'd hand it to me. I'd research around a bit, eventually find what part of the API handled it, then maybe translate someone's C example into the proprietary language we used (don't get me started on that subject), then write him a little function or something that let him do it, maybe give him a little sample code. My job was done. I'm talking about really simple stuff, functions in user32.dll. It was really the same 15 years earlier, when the API was MS DOS instead of Windows. I was the only guy at the company who ever bothered to learn all that "int 21h" stuff, or who thought reference books that listed all this stuff, was worth looking at.

One of the reasons I enjoyed programming on the Palm platform, is that the API gave me a feeling of nostalgia. It reminds me of some of the ideas I used to get, whenever memory started getting tight.

I was always the interface guy. Say we needed to generate a file that would get sent to some banking company, or claims processing company. I was the guy who read their specs and wrote the code that wrote (or read) the appropriate file. Data conversions from a competitor's product's data files to ours? Yep, that always came to me, too. I've RE'd more file formats than I care to think about.

Even earlier, back in high school (shit, this is even a couple years before high school; I'm talking like 1981-1982 here), the "cool" hackers were the ones who mastered interfaces, not programming. The machine was a PDP-11 and the OS was RSTS/E, and most everyone programmed in BASIC. At some point in a budding hacker's career, they would find the big ring-bound books that showed all the syscalls available in the BASIC runtime system, and suddenly they could write lots of programs that they used to not be able to. But the BASIC runtime system used up a lot of memory, so you could only write a program where the combined code+data size was up to 16 Kwords. Or you could write programs in Pascal, which were linked to the much smaller RT11 runtime system, and you had a whopping 28 Kwords to use (and it was a little-known fact (i.e. I was probably the only one who knew it) that the Pascal programs could be linked to use overlays!), so you could write bigger programs. But there wasn't any way to access all the syscalls (at least the "normal" way) in a Pascal program, so people were limited. Severely limited -- people didn't even know how to poll the keyboard like you would need to in a video game; they could only do standard Pascal whole-line-at-a-time I/O.

One day I found some obscure little PDP11 handbook that showed the RT11 API, examples all being in PDP11 assembly language. So I just wrote a little library that used all this stuff, to make it so that Pascal programmers could link it into their programs and do the same stuff that the BASIC programmers could do. And that made me the famous star of the computer room that week, even though I hardly wrote any code at all. Each function was just a few assembly instructions, one of them being .. heck I think it was called EMT (for Emulator Trap or something like that -- basically just a software interrupt). It wasn't programming; it was translation. But you had to be a programmer to do it, and no one else at the site had done it, or even known it could be done.

It's fun at first, I guess, but it gets old. Now I'm trying to make sense out of Twisted. I could write my own dealing-with-sockets code I guess, but that's "bad" and unproductive. You're not supposed to re-invent the wheel. Indeed, code-reuse and building up higher and higher levels of abstraction is an ideal that programmers are supposed to aspire to. This is how the real productivity gains happen, right?

But it means you're always researching. Always learning how to interface. Always reading someone else's code or documentation, hardly ever spending much time writing your own.

I think I'm getting tired of it. When I was a teenager 20 years ago, I was already a pretty good programmer, and I thought that all I had ahead of me, was learning to be an even better programmer. I had no idea that what I really would have to do, was to keep learning new interfaces all the time. New OS APIs. New libraries, new reusable components. And the need to keep learning will never stop, because no matter what you do, you'll find that someone else already did it, and you were supposed to inherit their object -- after spending a few hours making sure you understood how it worked.

And unlike programming knowledge, interface knowledge becomes obsolete. Do you think it does me any good to know RSTS/E or MSDOS trivia? Does knowing that the Amiga's Exec library can always be found through memory location 4, really benefit me these days? Or what happens if you load a character into the accumulator and then JSR $FFD2 on a C64 or VIC20? Ten years from now, will I need to know how Twisted works? Everything I ever learned about programming still applies to this day, but interface knowledge is tomorrow's garbage. And it doesn't really do you any good to notice this, and then decide you're not going to take it anymore. Keeping up to date, and resigning yourself that you will always have to keep learning new ephemeral interfaces, is what being a programmer is all about. Either you do it, or you slip behind.

Yes, I'm tired of it.

The last really fun project I worked on, was in the early 90s. An amateur project, of course. I was playing around with graphics. I wrote a homebrew ray-tracing program that ran, distributed, on the company's networked computers at night. (The 486s were so much faster than the 386s -- wow, floating point in hardware! What will they think of next?!) Except for some vector math functions that I stole from someone else's ray tracer, there wasn't any code reuse at all. Except for just a tiny little I/O, there wasn't any OS interfacing either. Almost pure compute-bound. That was GOOD! I was actually programming -- spending time in my editor, typing code -- instead of researching how to call someone else's functions. And then I wrote my own damn code that took the 24-bit output from the raytracer, selected a 256-color palette, and F-S dithered it down to something a VGA display could show. No Photoshop for me!!

Was that project a colossal waste of my time? Yes, if you look at it from a productivity viewpoint. I shouldn't have written a raytracer at all. I should have used povray (I think it was around at the time?) and some canned thingie (there's gotta be hundreds of them) to convert true color images to palette images. But I sure had fun.

I can't have fun anymore, though, because I know I shouldn't do anything so "foolish." And even if I were to decide, "Oh hell, let's be a fool! Dance the night away, on my keyboard!" I wouldn't be able to kid myself that I was exploring a new frontier, as opposed to wasting the few remaining seconds of my life.

There's still stuff to work on, of course. But I can't think of anything, that doesn't somehow involve building on someone else's work, and harnessing the power of stacking components upon components. So I have to keep learning about those damn components. So I have to figure out the damned Twisted documentation. And yet.. I'm not having fun. And if I'm not going to have fun, then there's no reason to start the project at all.

Why learn Twisted? I'd rather go to a bar and drink beer and listen to heavy metal. Maybe even get laid. I'm driving to Denver next weekend for the Deep Freeze fest. Gonna see Jag Panzer and Flotsam and Jetsam, and some relatively obscure Colorado bands. I'm staying at a hotel within walking distance of the bar, so that the usual drinking constraints don't apply. Fuck Twisted's twisted framework! Then I remember: learning Twisted is one of the ways I'm going to get money, for future gasoline, beer, and cover charges.

It's a means now, not an end. It used to be an end; I was a hacker. It's not an end anymore, and that says something that I can't bear to type.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas. Then nobody would care if I knew J2EE or not.

Heh. Watching a Frontline episode called "The Persuaders" and it's about advertising. Douglas Atkin, an ad strategist, was working with a focus group:

I was at a research facility watching eight people rhapsodize about a sneaker. I thought: where is this coming from? This is, at the end of the day, a piece of footwear. But the terms they were using were evangelical. So I thought, if these people are expressing cult-like devotion, then why not study cults? Why not study the original? Find out why people join cults, and apply that to brands.

Then we see taped interviews, where blurred-faced focus group members discuss their interest. We have a good chuckle at their expense, because, of course, we're better than them. There's the Falun Gong member. Then WWF Wrestling Fans: "Most of the people I discuss the WWF with, know that it's not a sport. It's a masculine ballet."

Then we drift into "cult brands." Volkswagon Beetle owners: "If you're a smart kind of individual, then that's what you drive." Macintosh users. Deadheads. Linux Users.

I feel compelled to mention then I was watching this on my Tivo(TM), of course. You should buy one, then you'll be cool like me.

I tried to indicate to my pack leader, that I really wanted to go. He said, "Ok, hop in the car," and we got to go for a ride! It was great! I got to stick my head out the window, bark at my friend over in the next car, and everything!

We got to Ikea and it smelled fascinating, but then pack leader said I have to wait in the car. Dammit! I whined and looked at him with my big eyes, but it was like he didn't understand or something. I'm sure that if he knew I wanted to into the store, and maybe run around the parking lot for a couple hours, he would have let me.

So he goes in there, and it starts to get a bit stuffy in the car. I licked myself for a while, then chewed on the upolstery on the back of my pack leader's seat, but it didn't taste enough like cat, so that got boring after a while. Then one guy walked over, and I didn't think he was one of us, and that's when I realized what my job was, and why pack leader had me wait in the car. I was the guard! So I barked at the intruder. He went away. That was cool!

Then this nice-looking lady with a bag (that smelled like about three or four dozen scented tea lights) walked up, and I wanted to lick her. At least, she looked nice at first, but the next thing I know, there's screaming and shattering glass and hoses blasting water and someone with a bucket. It was terrifying, and I think I peed.

When the company I work for writes custom software, we usually retain the copyright on it. Why? Because the customer is too dumb to ask for ownership of it. It's pretty neat, because it lets us get paid to write it, and then we have a product we can sell to our customer's competitors (or other people in a similar market). And then they pay to improve it some more. And then we sell it some more.

Product development, where customers pay for the development and the product. Yum. It's been good for us, that's for sure. No flames, please.

But "the customer is too dumb" is really the only excuse we have. There have also been a few occasions when the customer wasn't too dumb. Ok, fine. Getting paid only once to do the work, is still profitable. Sure, we'd like dumber customers, but we can work with smart ones too.

One of those smarter ones was the State of New Mexico. Actually, we didn't get the contract on that job, but part of the proposal was that the state would then own the software we were going to write.

Fair enough. We still wanted the job.

Turns out NM isn't the only state government that wants to own the stuff that it pays for. It's actually pretty common. What may not be common (I haven't checked), is that some states are considering laws to prevent themselves from being dumb. That's where a tale in Oklahoma comes in.

In March 2004, Oklahoma House of Reps easily passed a bill requiring that the state try to gain ownership of any custom software that it hired someone else to write. Make sense?

But the bill didn't get through the Oklahoma State Senate, because a company that doesn't even produce custom software, lobbied to stop it.

Why would this company do such a thing? Why indeed. Read what happened. I hope you're happy, Oklahoma taxpayers. I hope you're happy, everybody.

I'm outta here. Tomorrow, I fly to Atlanta for ProgPower 5 (and the Pre-Show Party) and I don't come back home until Talk Like A Pirate Day. Like my CMF vacation, I got a hotel room within "staggering distance" which means this is gonna be a hell of a drunken debauch. Some bad news about PP5, though: due to a freak lawnmowing accident (?!) Zak Stevens is out. So while Atlanta is expected to be pretty rainy from the Ivan remnants, there will be no "Handful of Rain."