It's my fault for agreeing in the first place. I'm not disputing that. Long ago, I learned that Just Say No is a great strategy for a lot more than just drugs. But I still don't use it often enough.

I don't like how credit card agreements (and many other things like that) contain this clause that lets the other party amend the terms unilaterally.

Once or twice a year, I get a letter from a credit card company, saying they're changing something. Then there's a page of very boring legaleze. (Although sometimes if you take the time to read it, you realize it's less boring than it first appears. For example, oh wow .. I can't sue them if we have a disagreement over something; instead, I have agreed to arbitration. I didn't know that.) (No, I'm not in the middle of a dispute; it's just something I noticed.) And it says, if I don't like the new terms, that's cool: I can just terminate my business with them.

They can get away with this crap, because people don't want to have to go shopping for a new credit card, every month. Whenever I decide to get a new credit card, I put some thought into it, although usually that just means picking something without any fee and with a lower rate than whatever I have right now. I can put some effort into that .. oh, every few years. It's not something I have the energy to deal with every month. Who does? (They do, that's who.)

Are they real contract terms? Do they actually apply? Are they enforcible? I think so. I haven't signed any of them, or read most of them. But they did get my signature once -- when I signed the original contract, which contained a clause saying they could change the terms in the future. I automatically retroactively agreed to something I don't even know about. D'oh!

So I sign up, and then a few months later, find out that the card I have now, is subtlely different than the card I had a few months ago. A couple years later, it's even differenter. No big deal -- not like they changed the rate or anything. But they change something. It's always something, and it's usually something obscure that I don't understand.

I can always Just Say No so it's not really unfair. And it hasn't bit me on the ass yet. But I still don't like it. It makes me nervous.

One of these days, I'm going to wake up and find out that three months ago, they mailed me a piece of paper (with terms that I didn't opt-out of) that made me personally liable for the whole national debt or something. Minimum payment: a trillion dollars.

Quit feeding my paranoia.

The San Francisco gay marriages were just annulled by the courts. This got me thinking about the issue again.

One common argument heard related to this topic, is that "Activist Judges" are responsible for all the hubbub. That is, judges are "creating" state-sponsored gay marriage. If the people, through their elected representatives, did this instead, it wouldn't be as legally controversial.

The counter to this, is that the judges aren't creating anything, and the legislation in many places doesn't explicitly state that marriage has to be heterosexual. The law is ambiguous. So the judges interpret the ambiguity liberally, since discrimination tends to be frowned upon. [Update: Apparently in California, there was a referendum that removed this ambiguity. But that isn't the case in all states.]

And the counter to that, is that calling it ambiguous, is bullshit. That marriage must be heterosexual, is just common sense, tradition, biology, etc. Common law is partly based on the idea that tradition itself is legal precedent, at least a little bit. Just because something hasn't been codified, doesn't mean it isn't law.

That last argument, is something I'd like to look more closely at. It's a pretty good-looking argument. While homosexuals have been around forever, state-recognized gay marriage (AFAIK) has not. Traditionally, marriage really is a union between exactly one man and exactly one woman. Unless one can find traditional exceptions, then the argument stands, right?

No, I think I've stumbled on a weakness. Is it enough? I don't know. But I'll explain what it is..

We have already substantially changed marriage such that it is different than earlier tradition. As a result, really old traditions that would be common law precedent, have been overridden by new laws. Just as traditional slave ownership, for example, has been invalidated by a constitional ammendment. The People's representatives have taken action and codified things, and society has created new traditions, that make the older traditions less relevant. These new things have changed what marriage is.

What new codifications and traditions am I talking about? Here are some examples, though I can probably come up with more, if pressed/motivated:

• This doesn't appear to be marriage-related at first, so I'm hoping it'll show why the issue is maybe a little subtle: the instition of income tax. The tax tables for single and married people are different. Federal income tax simply didn't exist until about 100 years ago, when the 16th amendment passed. (I don't know when the policy of having the different tables dates back to -- maybe someone else can chime in.)

  Why does that matter? Well, if congress creates a new difference between married people and unmarried people, then that difference becomes part of what marriage is, from that point forth. If you get married now, you know that part of the package you're getting into, involves tax changes. Thus, marriage is no longer simply two people, in love, contracting to raise a family -- it is now also a tax strategy. Changes in the codified law, seemingly unrelated to marriage, caused marriage to change.

  IMHO, that partly invalidates common law interpretation of marriage. If I were a judge (heh, no need to point out my lack of qualifications here :-) I would become, shall we say, less interested in any traditional and common law precedent for marriage, if that precedent pre-dated this particular codification. (Just as I would reject traditional precedents regarding slavery, if those precedents pre-dated the 13th amendment.)

• 200 years ago if you were injured, you'd recover at home, and anyone who lived with you, would be there to see you. (What a country! In olde America, Doctor visits YOU!) Visitation "rights" weren't even something that would come up -- if you were in the house, you probably had access to a sick person within. If you lived with someone, whether you were married or not, you had access. Likewise, if someone you loved needed medical aid and you were able to help or make decisions regarding it, you could.

  Now things are different. Sick people hang out in hospitals, and healthcare providers are much more careful about "covering their asses" (good opportunity for gay joke here) with regard to legal access, decisions, etc. And it has been decided, somehow, that spouses have more power than others. Nowdays, at the time that you get married, you fully know that this is part of the whole marriage package. Thus, marriage has been partially redefined. Earlier tradition and precedent loses relevancy.

• Asset inheritance. People keep their assets in banks and securities, instead of a chest full of coins or a field of cattle. In the old days, if the person you lived with died, you pretty much had their assets unless someone challenged you, because you had physical possession of their assets. Nowdays -- hah! Assets are numbers inside some database, and they're not going to get rekeyed to you, unless you take legal steps to make it happen. Changing tradition has changed the utility value in getting married. Thus, common law marriage is partially redefined.

Well, that's my argument. Whatcha think? Has marriage been changed and redefined, to an extent that common law precedent is weakened?

[Later update]: I guess what I'm saying is, if people wanted to "preserve the institute of marriage" then they should have done exactly that: preserve it. They shouldn't have changed it. They shouldn't have codified new laws that redefine what marriage is -- what the differences are between married people and unmarried people. But they didn't. Your congresscritters changed marriage, and they've been doing it for at least a century. And it's not just your congresscritters. Informal tradition has changed too -- unmarried couples have been "acting" married, and you can probably come up with examples where married people have been acting unmarried.

It's a little late to say, "Whoa there, back off, what these gays are doing, isn't marriage."

So it turns out that this Khan guy, working in Pakistan to compromise the Bad Guys, was still working undercover when his leaked name was confirmed by the U.S. Government.

It's not the first time this sort of thing has slipped out. You would almost think that the current administation considers secrecy to be a bad thing. That's the problem with this administration: they're too transparent and open with information! ;-)

Edwards and Bush both have their speeches today shown Lehrer's Newshour, and they're saying some of the same things. For example, they're both going to help the economy by creating jobs. Here I thought these people were running for President of USA, but apparently the candidates think they're running for chairman of the Central Committee for Economic Planning.

But we really did win the cold war. You see, it's a four year plan, not a five year plan. Those darn Soviets were so arrogant, thinking they could see that many years into the future.

(Hey, I know I'm beating a long dead horse here. But I still wanted to blow off some steam about it. I think one of the things that pissed me off, is that the Newshour's own reporters was calling the people who want to pass that marriage amendment, "conservatives." A lot of people really see it that way, don't they? Wow.)

Oh well, happy Bastille Day.

They're an old classic rock band, and rock they do. It looks like they're about to leave USA, but just in case they're passing near you, have a few beers and kick out the jams. When I just saw 'em, they had Suffrajet open for them (but I think this was their last night with 'em) and locals The Dirty Novels, who were a perfect fit (but you won't get to see them either).

In case you're thinking, "But I don't know any MC5 songs," you're wrong. You know them. You just don't know you know them. ;-) When the music starts, you'll get it. Oh yes, you will.

This weekend, I was like everyone else so I went to the movies too. It was a double-feature; I saw The Big Heat and Human Desire.

I bet I had a better time than people who paid $8 to see that propaganda film. Ya know, I don't hold it against anyone who goes to see that.. after all, Ebert says F911 is actually a good movie (regardless of whether or not Moore tells it like it is) and I think his judgement has been pretty good lately. So I might go see it when it's $1, and that should still happen in time for me to get brainwashed for November.

The downside: 'Human Desire' got trains on my mind, so then I then wasted Sunday evening playing Railroad Tycoon 2. D'oh. :(

On another note.. I must be on a 1950s kick, because on Saturday I read "Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham. Whoa, this book reminds me of Romero's ".. of the Dead" movies. Both have catastrophes that leave civilization in ruins, with an aftermath of survivors who have to deal with menacing, but managable, monsters. Good fun.

It's really 2004. 2004 was once a distant dream, but we're finally there, in a sense of it being more than just a number on a calendar: stuff is starting to really happen. Cassini is on the fringes of the Saturn system (though not really going into orbit for a few more weeks) and doing a close (2000 kilometers) flyby of one of the moons today.

[Update: Eh, there was a front page article on this, just a couple hours later. I should probably just delete this.]

Anyone seen this lately?

$ nice -20 yadda yadda...
nice: `-20' option is obsolete; use `-n -20' since this will be removed in the future

Gee, thanks. Let's arbitrarily change a UI that people have been using for years.

Back in the 80s I used to just use the 'nice' command without any sort of priority argument. But then the Amiga days spoiled me, and I got used to a static priority scheduler. I like to be able to completely starve less important processes (or to put it another way: I like for important processes to get all the CPU time that they want, without becoming "jerky" and getting preempted by stuff I don't care about).

When I finally moved away from the Amiga to Linux, I found the dynamic scheduling to be annoying. My first reaction was to run unimportant stuff at just the lowest priority I could (nice -20), but they still didn't starve enough. In the 2.2 days I even hand-modified the scheduler to never run a lowest-priority process if there was anything else to do. (No, this doesn't make me a uber-elite kernel haxx0r; if you haven't ever taken a look at the Linux source (at least as of 2.2) you might be surprised just how small, managable, and simple it is.) But it was a pain in the ass to keep doing this every time I updated my kernel, and I eventually stopped.

But I still retained the habit of passing that -20 arg to nice, to at least minimize the amount of unjustified preemption that happens. If you can't eliminate, then mitigate. This became especially important when I moved to Gentoo about a year and a half ago, since it's now a lot more common that I have CPU-intense stuff (e.g. emerge -uD world) going on, which I don't want slowing down my actual use of the computer at all. (My 50 MHz Amiga could run over 100 processes, with plenty of them CPU-bound, and still be 100% snappy. Why can't Linux on my GigaHertz machine do that?!?)

But I digress... I didn't mean this Journal Entry to be about how dynamic schedulers annoy me. I just want to rant about a UI issue.

Someone, somewhere, has decided that nice's -20 argument is too terse and convenient, and I should use -n and some number, instead. I can adapt, but why the heck did some busybody bother doing this? There are plenty of things that could be improved in Linux or GNU userspace tools, and someone decided that changing the nice command's user interface was a good use of their time? And the maintainers decided that everyone else should get this "improvement"??!?

Bewildering.

Ok, I guess I better get the pathetic part of my vacation out of the way, before I start talking about CMF.

Except for Chicago itself (a special case that I'll talk about later), I stayed at fairly good(?) hotels along the way. Not super-expensive 4-star places (which I don't think OKC/STL/KC has anyway) but rather, from a geek point of view, nice places in that they offer more than just a "dataport" for someone to plug their modem line into.

The Westin in downtown OKC and the Marriott in downtown STL give you good ol' fashioned ethernet on a rj45 connector, right there in your room.

I expected the Marriott in downtown KC to be the same. I was wrong. They had high-speed internet, but it was wireless. 802.11b. As it happened, I hadn't gotten around to really testing out Warwick's wireless networking yet. But in KC, I had to, or else go netless.

Mandrake had always detected the hardware fine, but never could really bring the interface up. I always thought that was because I was never around a hotspot. Nope. Here I was in a place I knew was buzzing with 802.11b frames (even if my naked eye couldn't see them) and Mandrake just couldn't get it up.

I had the basics -- I mean, the rawest stage 1 basics, with a few minor things added -- of my Gentoo system installed on another partition, and a kernel for it (I was scared to use the existing Mandrake kernel to run Gentoo; Yog-Sothoth only knows what all is in there!) So I put that kernel onto my /boot partition (I always separate /boot out from my root) added it to grub which Mandrake had already installed for me. Booted it, and now I was actually running Gentoo.

And of course, unlike fucking Mandrake, Gentoo initialized my eth1 just fine. Got an address from some dhcp server, set up /etc/resolv.conf to get names from somewhere, it was like magic. I had a tiny running system, but it had working wireless.

Now here's where I ran into a little problem: the Marriott doesn't really give you free wireless internet. Oh no. This isn't some friendly neighbor providing wireless access to anonymous users. No, all their names resolve to, and all their routes go to, one special little web server, so you can sign up for access using your web browser. Then when they have some money, you are on the internet.

I didn't have a web browser. No Mozilla or even an X display to run it on. I didn't even have telnet. At least, not on my Gentoo environment. Sure, boot up Mandrake and I have more crap than I know about, but then the interface won't work, whether due to the Mandrake version of the kernel or their weird init scripts, I don't know.

Then I got the idea of mounting the Mandrake partition and running their lynx binary. That worked. So I signed up for their ripoff^H^H^H^H^H^Hconvenient internet access, and then I was really on the net and Gentoo could start fetching packages.

The thing is, this all took a while. And once you have xfree built, then you just can't resist getting your favorite window manager (unless you're one of those twm perverts). You know how it is: when a nerd and a computer that he cares about get together, one thing leads to another.

Hey wait ... why did I want to get on the internet in the first place? Well, to email some people. And look up the address of some museum. Oh wait, that museum closed hours ago.

So the sad fact is, I spent too much of my time in Kansas City in my hotel room, playing with my computer and setting it all up the way I wanted it to be -- stuff I had intended to do the weekend before my trip started, but didn't do, because the machine got shipped to me late.

At least I'm fairly happy with the machine, now.

The question now, is which is worse: that I "wasted" my stay in KC, or that Elmegil was right? ;-)

I'll tell ya'll about Chicago (which ruled) and Kansas City (which was pathetic) later, but for now, I just want to say...

Here I am at a truckstop in Tulsa (on my Fujitsu, now running Gentoo instead of Mandrake -- part of my Kansas City story) that has Wifi, just checked my mail for the last time 'til I get to OKC. And DexterPexter hasn't answered any of my emails after the first, where she suggested maybe we could meet when I was on the way back.

Feh. Everyone, please join me in shaking your head and muttering a sentence the begins with the word "Dames."

("This will go down in your permanent record." Ooooh, my permanent record. That should make a drunk person think twice. But thinking once is hard enough.)

Too many impressions to list. But I will go ahead and digress on one point..

Tulsa has a river. I saw a few rivers on the way over here. More to the point, STL has a river, and it's a famous one.

Albuquerque has a river, too. It has an impressive name. El Rio Grande. Que grande! I think the name may have been chosen with a bit of a sense of irony, given what I've seen today.

Yahoo maps is pretty neat. Not only will it help you find a place, but it will help you decide what place to go to, too. With a little click, it will display restaurants of a various type, for example, You probably knew that. It's not shocking. But it will also display 802.11 hotspots. Did you know that? I need to try out Warwick's wireless. The hotels have all been offering a cat5 connection for $10 per day -- a mere $300 per month for an ISP. What a racket. But day-to-day, it doesn't seem like a big deal. What's $10? Pretty fuckin' convenient, that's what.

But back to Yahoo maps... In April 2003 I visited Charlottesville Virginia with some friends and they introduced me to Indian food. Not Indian as in Navajo, but Indian as in nuclear-war-with-Pakistan. Today, I started suffering chile withdrawal symptoms, and being afraid of Mexican restaurants (because I just know that I would find plenty to bitch about) I figured Indian would be an acceptable substitute. Yahoo Maps to the rescue! It showed me a place near my hotel, called "Curry in a Hurry." Fast food Indian? I was intrigued. Alas, the hours are only 11am to 2:30. It's just a lunch place. I'll have to try it tomorrow.

Later it hit me: a place can stay in business in downtown St Louis, only being open 3.5 hours per day? I should be impressed. I bet it'll be crowded when I get there.

I ended up eating at an Italian place near there, as I've had hankering for Italian lately, as well. It was pretty good. Beer selection was a bit limited. (No IPA. I think I explained my recent IPA infatuation in Em's journal.) Waitress suggested Amber Bock to me, so I went with that. Amber Bock is what I used to often drink at The Launchpad back home, 'cause they had a $2 special on it. So I always think of the Launchpad now, whenever I drink that stuff.

Speaking of bars, after my expensive (but big and delicious) speghetti, I went to a place called "Creepy Crawl". It looks like I was on-the-mark with this place, but I'm here on the wrong day. There were punk bands here, and finished with a weird "Celtic Punk" band. I don't know what else to call it. But I think they sometimes have metal here. Maybe I'll check back tomorrow.

Creepy Crawl ran out of limes for my Coronas, so I had to settle with lime juice from a bottle, added to my last one. Hmm. I don't like when bars run out of limes. It makes me think they're not taking their responsibility seriously.

Other things...

Near the beginning of Missouri, they had fifth-mile markers. Instead of the markers going 17,18,19,20, they go 17,17.2,17,4.17.6, etc. What's up with that?

Dex, I regret we didn't get to meet. The winds of fate of viciously cruel. May the 19th (when I pass through OK again in the opposite direction) work out better. If that day doesn't work out, then I'm going to tell everyone on Slashdot that I asked you out, and you said No. Then you'll be in real trouble.

My Neuros has developed a problem with the power connector. It now runs on battery power even when it's plugged into the cig lighter socket. and the battery doesn't charge. So when it died right in the middle of a Pagan's Mind song, I had to either live with silence, or try the radio. This was in Oklahoma. I was afraid that on the radio, I would find only "both kinds of music" (Blues Brothers reference, if you know what I mean). But after channel surfing, I heard Boston's "Don't Look Back" which was followed by some AC/DC and Rolling Stones and Steve Miller. Ok, Classic Rock, I can live with that. The station even called itself "classic rock." Then they played Nirvana's "Heart Shaped Box." Ok, I don't have a problem with that song, but is 90s grunge really classic rock? WTF is happening to the world? Is "classic rock" merely defined as anything that was commercially successful 10 or more years in the past? That's creepy.

I saw a cop do something amazing today on I-44. But first, an apocryphal anecdote. There was once a cop, in full uniform, who went to a drug dealer's house, and asked to buy drugs. The drug dealer said, "Dude! You're a cop!" The cop said, "It's ok, I'm cool." So, the dealer sold him drugs. And the cop arrested him.

Today I saw the speeding equivalent of "It's ok, I'm cool." I had my eyes peeled for ellie, so when I (speeding) came up behind a cop, I squinted, growled, cursed and slowed down .. not to the speed limit, but to as fast as the cop was going, and stayed back a couple hundred meters from him.

Other drivers, trusting the cop's "coolness" got a little closer. They kept pace with the cop, right physically near the cop. I shook my head. "You idiots!" I screamed. Then I watched it unfold. The cop slowed down a bit .. to the speed limit. Not being an idiot, I slowed down too, keeping my distance behind him. His "speed-mates" kept going, passing him. What idiots. Then he got behind one of 'em and flashed his lights. I laughed my ass off. People really fall for it! The drug dealer anecote is probably real.

I arrived pretty late in OKC and it wasn't until about 11:50 that I was able to go look for some fun. (BTW, aside: western OK is gorgeous. Right near the eastern edge of the Texas panhandle, the terrain stops looking like the brown deserty New Mexican terrain that I'm used to seeing all the time, and it turns GREEN. And then in OK the dirt turns red, so it's red'n'green. I liked seeing that, until it got dark.)

In Albuquerque, the "happening place" on a Saturday night is downtown, near where the relatively tall buildings are. That's where there's a bunch of bars and people.

OKC's equivalent appears to be a place called bricktown, which is a little east of the tall buildings. So that threw me a bit. But no matter -- I found it.

It was kinda depressing. The hip hop infection here is severe. I wandered around, finding music I didn't like. But Jager shot 'n' Corona tastes the same everywhere, so that was ok. The only thing I liked was a street performer who was playing Black Sabbath riffs on his guitar.

Oh, then I found some kinda jazzy stuff that was ok, but I think it was after 1 and they wouldn't let me in. I swear the bouncer guy said something like, "we're not taking money anymore" but maybe I misheard him. A literal truth, though. They woulda had my money if they let me in. So I wandered off.

Then I stuck gold! I had given up on bricktown and was staggering back to the Westin, when I heard distant drums. "What's that?" I thought. I couldn't figure much out, at the distance,. Hey, did I mention this is a windy place? My hair was blowin' all around, and distant sounds come and go.

I followed the sound, and then discovered it was rockin' blues! Awesome! Just the second best type of music after heavy metal. The band's name is "Danger [somethin', I don't remember] and the Danger Zone." Maybe Danger Dan? The problem with bein' drunk (I started drinking Jack at this place, whatever it was called) is that it's hard to remember stuff. But I remember this, because I repeated it to myself over and over as a I staggered back: I talked to the lead guy and he says they're playing tomorrow at 4 at a place called Galileos. Galileo, you know, the gravity solar-centric heretic guy. I am so there! It's at .. um .. Paseo near 29th street. Good thing I'm typing this down, that way I can look it up tomorrow. What, you thought this JE was for the sake of your sorry ass? I don't think so...

Well, this Saturday I start my epic vacation: Oklahoma City, then St Louis, then several days in Chicago for CMF4, then Kansas City, then .. I dunno, maybe I should come home. Or maybe I'll go to Denver.

Er, anyway, I long ago decided I need a portable computer for keeping in touch while on the road. Using 3rd party computers just isn't cool, because typing your access credentials into an untrusted computer just ain't right .. no, I'm not really paranoid, but it's the principle, ya know?

I looked at things as small as Zaurus, and as "large" (yeah, right) as 12" Powerbook. But in the end, I went in between. I just got my Fujitsu Lifebook P1120 in the mail today. It's tiny (8.9" screen) but not as small as a handheld, so it won't fit in a pocket. That's a slight bummer, but other than that, it should be ok.

And I just realized something: I lost my Microsoft Virginity. I have never bought Windows before now, even indirectly. The last time I owned a computer that had any Microsoft stuff on it, was my C64 with its Microsoft-crafted BASIC interpreter. (And heck, my parents bought that, not me.) All my previous x86 machines were built from parts. This thing supposedly came with Windows preloaded, and although I'll never see it, I can be counted in some database as "another satisfied customer." And believe me, it's true: Windows was totally painless. It did not get in the way at all, when I deleted its partition.

I'm taking a break from my usual Gentoo zealotry, and I'm going to try out Mandrake. It's installing right now. The real reason for this, it that installing Gentoo without a CDROM is a bitch! Except for the HD, all this machine can boot off is network and floppy. It won't boot off a USB CDROM. I tried a lot of Linux boot floppies .. all I needed was something that would load the network driver, have a few utilities (wget, tar, etc) and a bash prompt, and from there I know I can get Gentoo going. So many boot floppies failed me, one way or another, and I evnetually gave up. I found out something: a lot of Linux floppy distros, use weird 1.7MB formatted floppy images: 82 tracks, 21 sectors per track. I was able to format 'em and put images onto them from another machine, but this Lifebook didn't like booting them. Some floppy images that did work, would just give me installation programs and no way out to bash, not even on other virtual consoles.

Anyway, a floppy boot for Mandrake worked fine, and now I'm downloading the packages from some ftp mirror. Maybe it'll be done tomorrow. ;-) I'll give Mandrake a fair chance. But I did leave room for a Gentoo root near the beginning of the drive, so if Mandrake cheeses me off, I'll just use it to get Stage 1 onto the other partition... or maybe OpenBSD, though probably not. Then my existing mandrake will become my new encrypted /home or something.

What a tiny little machine. The first other person who saw it was a woman, and naturally, she said "oh, how cute!" I guess size matters. Cute, huh? Can I use this computer for picking up girls? Is it like a puppy?!? Then after I have their interest with the computer, I can start talking about Linux, and describe my Mandrake-vs-Gentoo predicament. "Hey wait, why are you walking away?" Bad puppy!

Oh geez, Mandrake installer says it'll be 4 hours hours. Hm. Off to the bar.

Whew! I just got a little more involved in the Spam Wars than I wanted to.

A few years ago, I bought a mailbox at spamcop.net, and I have a couple of domains registered with gandi.net.

Spamcop provides an IMAP server (and web access to the mailbox too, if you want), spam filtering, and automated spam reporting tools.

Gandi is a DNS registrar (with a nice low rate and good terms of service -- I recommend them), but also provides a few network services as well. One of the services they provide, is that they can host a domain and have the MX record point to themselves, and then forward any mail sent to that domain, to another address. If you have a domain that you use for email only, and don't want to bother setting up a server for it, it's convenient. In my case, I used that service and had it forward mail to my spamcop mailbox.

(See where this is going, yet? You do, don't you. Yes, the audience has the luxury of that omniscient point of view, where two trains are on the same track, going in opposite directions. The camera cuts to one, then the other, each showing a contented train engineer, blissfully unaware of what is about to unfold.)

Sometimes spam gets through Spamcop's filters, and I report it. It's just a few mouseclicks in the web browser, the details totally automated. Clicky clicky, and abuse@somewhere is told about spammer@somewhere. There have never been any nasty consequences (at least for me). Until today.

Somehow, Gandi itself (who does not run an open relay, but does provide the forwarding service) got identified by Spamcop's software, as being complicit in the spamming. And I didn't notice or follow up on who my automated complaint was about to hit. It was so routine.

Then Gandi.net got added to bl.spamcop.net. Then Gandi notified me that they were cutting off my forwarding service, so that I would no longer receive spam from them and complain about them.

Oops. My bad.

After a bit of explanation, apologizing, and grovelling, I just got Gandi to restore my mail forwarding, and I haven't heard back from Spamcop yet about getting them removed.

Anyway, I feel like a particularly wussy nerd, since I happen to also run a virtual machine at linode.com, so why don't I just run my own SMTP and IMAP servers for those domains too, instead of using Gandi and Spamcop's servers? Duh. Brushing up on my postfix config file lore...

Of course, running my own SMTP server will probably get me even MORE personally involved in the Spam Wars. Hey, isn't that why I signed up for Spamcop in the first place, so that someone would just do stuff for me? Oh well.

I must admit, in that stupid game, I have been a complete bastard. It has been an outlet for my evil side, you might say.

I have attacked people just because they voiced annoyance at being attacked. You know, to teach them that that the squeaky wheel gets .. the warblade. The more they scream, the more I enjoy it. Whenever Commander Mekkab or Fortknox mentioned a squeaker, I delighted in joining in, further taunting and harrassing the fool. Cruelty and sadism suit an orc well.

Loyalty, on the other hand, does not suit an orc. I attack Fortknox every once in a while, not even giving a Slashdotter a break. But he doesn't bitch about it, so I don't enjoy it, and only do it reluctantly when he happens to have a lot of gold to steal. And I think I once threatened my own Commander Mekkab, when he wondered out loud if he should show mercy to someone.

But back to the sadism... there's this guy who I have been farming for a few weeks. I pretty much attack him every day or so, sometimes for a really nice haul. Never heard a peep out of him, which took most of the fun out of it, but at least the gold was useful. About 3 million per week, I guess.

After today's 577k haul, he finally had enough:

Lokk man. I have 3,639 turns to use. Go farm elsewhere. i am areally pissed off with you

And now my shame: I almost decided to let it go. I must be getting soft, because I actually briefly entertained the idea that I had profited enough from this guy and should give him a break. After all, this message is more of a stand-up threat, than whining. The reference to attack turns is a sign of strength (the only thing orcs respect), not weakness.

This is what happens to orcs when the get old, I guess. Somebody should kill me and take over the gang. A true orc knows that the fact he spoke up at all, means he's hurting and that all my attacks have finally gotten emotional results. It's the smell of blood in the water!

Fortunately, I snapped out of it, and believe I am still fit to lead my gang. (If you hear of my assassination, though, then I guess it will mean one of my boys disagreed.) Here's the reply. I wanted just that right mixture of spitefulness, humiliation, arrogance, and nastiness.

I must say I have profited heavily from our association. I am grateful for what my peasants -- er, excuse me, I mean, the gentlemen you think of as your "warriors" -- have done for me. Toiling all day long, waiting for the now all-too-familiar orc faces to show up, so they can helpfully load the gold into the chests on my war wagons. Don't think I don't appreciate your servitude up to this point. All that money bought me plenty of ale, pleasure girls, bardic entertainers, a nice home, and of course weapons (which you have had the pleasure of seeing). I don't know where I would be today, if it weren't for the hard work of humans like you.

Am I to understand that you wish to retire, or be some other orc's farm? No, my friend, I couldn't bear to part with you. Your services are still quite desired! Please have your gold ready in the usual location, and my boys will be back to pick it up later.

XOXOXO,
Aramchek the Orc

P.S.: I have no fear of your pathetic attack turns, human. I've seen your men fight and they remind me of young orc children practicing with their wooden swords. If you have a desire for action, I recommend you practice with some 100,000-ranked band of elvish wandering thespians.

That XOXOXO is of course, completely necessary. You guys understand.