Month: March 2004

My spam blocker just intercepted a message “Secure SMTP Message” from president@whitehouse.gov. Wonder what W needed to ask me about this time – you know he always wants me to help him out. I keep telling him, “George, you’re the president, why are you sending me emails about this? Can’t you ask your buddies Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld? Or are you asking me because you know I won’t lie to you?”

Either that, or the spammer/cracker/idjit that created the message thinks people will open this. They must not be familiar with typical procedures for processing postal political junk mail (step 1: throw away; step 2: vote for anyone else). Between the Outlook/Exchange viruses and the ads for Viagra, it’s amazing any actual mail gets through.

Speaking of which, the other day I got a long diatribe from a friend of mine, all about politics. Which I might have read if it had been on his blog, but as email I skimmed and deleted it. Pull, don’t push, people!

Will someone please explain to me, the deal about pulling the tabs off of aluminum cans to send to charity? I mean, I understand the point of donating to a worthy cause, but all the rigamarole with pop tabs seems to me like a massive waste of effort. Is it because this is the only easily detachable proof of purchase? And who’s doing the actual donating – the soda companies (or god forbid the beer companies)? I can’t believe this because I don’t think there’s an identifier on the actual aluminium tab, so how would the manufacturers know it was theirs – even so, imagine workers examining each little bit of metal to determine what must at most be a fractional penny donation? Then there’s the mailing – I guess the people in the office who ask us to collect these mail them somewhere? And sure, they’re recyclable, but the worth of that has got to be less than the mailing expenses alone. I just don’t get it.

(I know this goes against the strategy my company is taking of credit card affinity donations, but…) If you want to donate, just f’n donate. Dig into you wallet and pull out some of those cold green dead presidents. Write a check. Put it on your credit card and pay for it eventually. But peeling tabs off of cans and mailing them in? What’s up with that?

Update: a reader writes in to suggest that this may be what they’re used for.

Also found this on Snopes: Pull tabs from aluminum cans have special redemption value for time on dialysis machines: FALSE. Well, that warms my heart. Do I dare tell the guys in the next room, or do I just smile and nod at their folly? Or do I kidnap all their saved tabs and make myself some chainmail?

But then I read that the “Ronald McDonald House” actually collects them! Go figure. The site I looked at even repeated the claim that they’re made of higher grade aluminum, which they aren’t, and rationalized not collecting the whole can. Bah.

What the hell is up with the bizarre media censorship that’s going on now – all based on the Super Bowl exposure of Janet Jackson’s nipple!?!? Because of this, our fine government is trying to increase penalties on radio (no, not TV – radio!) personalities for obscenity (however that’s defined, which it appears it isn’t). Not that I like listening to Howard Stern, I find him a little moronic and I tend to listen to NPR in the morning instead; I actually knew who Sandra Tsing Lo was, before her fifteen minutes. The goofballs (and the down-to-earth Dr. Drew) on Loveline have no guidelines for what they’re allowed to say on their late night teen advice show so instead they’re just paranoid about everything.

And yet rap singers on MTV can obsenely objectify women left and right, and everyone sorta takes it for granted.

On a related note: the beach town of Leucadia, which used to be just a little grimy and even had its own nude beach back in the 70s, finally allowed an “F Street” adult store to go in, provided they made the facade tasteful and bland. And this is just a place that sells mainstream porn, timid lingerie and dildos. Big f’n deal! This town is littered wih (probably mostyl legit) holistic health centers and massage therapy centers – in San Diego county, which equates massage directly with prostitution, unless you pay several thousands of dollars for it in nearby La Costa, I suppose.

Again, on the internet you’re only a few clicks away from ordering sex toys that defy description – stuff so perverse it’s painful to even imagine how it’s used, can be delivered to your door by UPS in a couple of days.

But, back to what I started on, we certainly wouldn’t want anyone to hear the word “Fuck” on the radio. Reminds me of this, from Apocalypse now.

“We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t let them write “fuck” on their airplanes,
because it’s obscene.”-Colonel Kurtz

Personally I don’t think Janet ever showed her nipple; I think the Bush administration just wanted a memorable Superbowl halftime show, so they made it up based on sketchy information from the CIA. I believe that we should have more inspections. Anyone among us might be hiding nipples! Let’s expose them all!!

…you must always back up. Yeah, I got that.

But then when you restore old backup files over perfectly good recent files, your data goes poof. Which is what happened to my blog this morning.

I upgraded my server software to the latest version of OSX, and breezed past the warning that if you use mySQL databases, you must export them before upgrading. So after the upgrade finished, my blog dates were all messed up. Apparently they reversed a mysql bug that did the same thing to me about six months ago. No big deal – I went back to the old OS, exported the databases, came back into the new OS and imported – and wiped out a good database with an older backup.

But you may notice that all of my old entries seem to be back! Well, I did a google lookup (obtainium justfred) and used the cached page, which was taken just a few days ago, and copy and pasted all the entries over. I think one was missing, but I don’t think I care.

Some of you may be saying (Nelson) “Ha, Ha!” Yep, some of these things still crap out on OSX. But – remember that step where I “went back to the old OS”? I just reinstalled the previous version of OSX on a spare hard drive, rebooted, exported data, rebooted, and was done! I would have no idea how to do this on Windows or Linux – on OSX it’s relatively trivial. I might even have used my iPod as a spare hard drive if I’d needed to. And it’s vanilla mysql I’m using as a database, so it’s really easy to do the data export and reimport – a single command line for each database. And I had several other databases that, while they still had this problem, I didn’t screw up on the repair so they came back up no problemo.

Useful Aramaic expressions for commenting on Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ”, from the UK Guardian.

Ma’hed lee qalleel d-Khayey d-Breeyaan, ellaa dlaa gukhkaa.
It sort of reminds me of Life of Brian, but it’s nowhere near as funny.