thwartedefforts

You can tell a lot about some people just from how they respond to random stuff found on the Intartubes.

The Test topic

Guitar Captured with Enough Coke Stashed Aboard to Take Us All to Electric Ladyland

Responses

August: OH DANG! They got my guitar!

Joel: my, that is a lot of coke

Dennis: how the hell did they find that? ahh: “The Man noticed a bit of telltale powdery residue poking out of a conspicuous spot”. THE MAN

Peter: I’ll take the chunk they broke off

Dan: hah, it was the bargain brand Squier ironically enough

Will: Wasn’t there a Cheech and Chong movie where they drove around in a truck made from marijuana?

Mike: fucking hilarious. You gonna buy one?

Kurt: damn drug addict musicians

At 2:48pm on September 14th, I entered San Francisco by crossing over the city/county line in the middle of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

The limited contact one has with co-workers means they can end up thinking of you in ways you don’t have control over. First impressions are important, but impressions continue to develop over time. However, the way Rob Warmowski has classified me is a new one. As someone who is used to the moniker “asshole”, his classification scheme is refreshing.

So this makes me want to know exactly how many “Andys with root” Rob actually knows, or plans to eventually know? Is he forever cursed with being under the authority of system administrators named Andy? Or have system administrators named Andy made a distinctive, hopefully good, impression upon him? Is an Andy themed song in order? Or do these Andys share a common culture and style that is best communicated through apparel? I’m specifically thinking of my continued (verbally silent) claims of No, I won’t fix your computer, and the constant threats of reading your email (but why bother? your email is god awful boring).

Me: here’s something interesting… driving around town last night, there was a road block on Elston with signs that said “Voluntary Survey” and an SUV marked “Sheriff” was redirecting people into the Microcenter parking lot
Me: signs all the place that say voluntary survey. we had 5 people in my mustang.
Me: it was about 2am. this woman approaches the car. someone in the car thought to ask “is this a state or federal operation” and she said “federal”. asked me if I’d like to answer questions as part of a survey, completely anonymously.
Me: I said, “this is hardly anonymous, you have the ability to take my license plate number”
Me: which caught this woman off guard. “we aren’t collecting that, sir”.
Me: so I denied to take the voluntary survey, and she asked if I’d consent to an anonymous, voluntary breathalyser test
Me: and I said “no”
Friend: wow, that is really fucked up man!
Friend: It is getting out of control
Me: which apparently was unexpected, because she called over some other woman and said “this guy says he doesn’t want to participate”
Friend: whoa
Me: and the other woman said, “well, they can go” and kind of gave a surprised look at the survey woman, like “duh, it’s voluntary”
Friend: voluntary breathalyser “survey”
Friend: that stinks like week old fish
Me: well, the first part was apparently questions
Me: I wonder if they were supposed to offer the breathalizer if one said they didn’t want to answer the questions
Me: they had like three or four cars lined up talking to them
Friend: Hmmmmm
Friend: How many people will actually refuse such?
Me: exactly
Friend: Is it not really a violation of your privacy to even stop you without due cause?
Me: when we were talking later, it came up “I bet they were thinking, ’shit a car full of educated white people, better not push it’”
Friend: Bingo
Me: it’s not unreasonable search if it’s “anonymous”
Me: apparently
Friend: Did it look like busts were happening?
Me: no
Friend: Right I remember those bullshit rulings about the road blocks
Me: but the sheriff car gave it an air of legitimacy

Here’s a Google map of where the voluntary survey checkpoint was.

Update (2007-08-04): idolatrare found this survey methodology description (Pilot Test of New Roadside Survey Methodology for Impaired Driving DOT HS 810 704) that very closely matches the experience (up to the part about actually participating, which I have no information on). Check out this bit in “Basic Survey Technique”:

As the motorist came to a safe stop in the bay, the data collector recorded basic demographics based on observation (e.g., the number of passengers, use of a safety belt by the driver, and the gender and ethnicity of the driver). These data were recorded so that we would have descriptive information of potential subjects who refused.

Anonymous should mean no identifying information. However, they only made a claim that taking the survey was anonymous; one does not have a right to privacy if one refuses the survey, apparently.

See also the Executive Summary.

Not that anyone seemed to have any trouble breaking the ice or starting up a conversation, but TECHcocktail should have some kind of bingo game, treasure hunt, or something like that. This way, people have another excuse to chat each other up, can check things off, gather points, and there can be prizes at the end that you can effectively “earn” rather than just get lucky and win.

To get things started, here’s a sample list of point generators and things to find:

• If you’re a recruiter, you get one point for each minute you accidentally talk to another recruiter thinking they are in technology and looking for a job.
• You get one point for each person who introduces someone else as their significant other.
• If you unexpectedly meet an old significant other of your own, give yourself 10 points.
• Getting interviewed by someone who is carrying a tape recorder nets you a point. If you have to spell out a domain name into a tape recorder, you get one point for each letter in the domain name.
• One point for each domain name someone drops like it’s a household name but you’ve never heard of it. Two points if you’re the only one within earshot who has heard of that domain. Three points if you’ve actually been to the domain in question.
• One point for each person who, apparently being so new to this Internet thing, appends every domain name with .com, no matter how many times you say .net, .org, or .us.
• One point for each founder of a company whose product is not live yet. Two points if they have a known/estimated release date. Three points if it’s next week. Four points if the product is already live.
• One point if someone says “web two point oh”. One point for “web three point oh”. Two points for “web one point oh”.
• Three points when someone utters “ontology”. Subtract four points if it’s immediately followed by “Sorry, I’m not sure who’s familiar with that term”.
• On your trip to the restroom, you acquire one point for each person talking on the phone in there. Two points if they’re typing into a blackberry.
• One point for each mention of “D&D”, “Star Trek” or “Star Wars” you overhear. Two points if it comes up in a conversation you’re having.
• Distribution of professions:
  • One point for each “project manager”.
  • Two points for each “founder” or “partner”.
  • Three points for any “designers”, “programmers”, “system administrators”, or “network administrators”. Bonus if they make known their “flavor” (Flash, Air, .NET, Cisco, Linux, Windows, OSX, PHP, RoR, Oracle, etc). Extra bonus if they’ve written a book.
  • Three points for each “lawyer”.
  • Zero points for recruiters.
• One point for each claim of “Internet Celebrity” status. One point if you recognize their name. Bonus if someone overhears and is awestruck.
• If you hear someone say “It’s my blog” and the person they are talking to responds with “What’s a blog?”, double your points (I kid you not, this actually happened).
• One point if a conversation you’re having gets cut short when someone needs to take a phone call. Two points if it was a legitimate phone call. Three points if they come back to continue talking after their phone call is finished.
• One point for each person who hands you a business card that is actually for the business they are talking with you about.

Overall, it was an enjoyable couple of hours. Free drinks are always nice. I’m told by those from Arstechnica who were there that the previous ones had more actual tech people and fewer, ahem, recruiters. I was kind of hoping to find some people to fill in the expertise gaps in the projects I’m working on or people to bounce ideas off of, but honestly I didn’t really know what to expect. I did definitely met some interesting people, people that I plan on following up with.

And then there’s this conversation August (aka Mayor Awesome) and I had:
“So, there don’t appear to be too many technology nerd chics here.”
“There aren’t even that many true nerds for that matter. But, yeah, it’s a sausage fest.”
“Shit, there’s even a sponsor for this sausage fest,” pointing at a logo for Poll Everywhere projected on the wall.
“See, even they know it’s mostly a big buncha guys.”

Sex sells, especially when you’re selling sex products. Take this image for example:

You may recognize this as Shredder, of late 80s kids television cartoon fame, fucking April, also of late 80s kids television cartoon fame, from behind. The guy can’t even be bothered to take off his cape. April appears to be saying “I am your Woozy-Oozy Cutie little Brain”, and the caption reads “Our pills made him so sweet”. I believe those are stylized cartoon pills behind the text. What’s even better about this is that the spam email that contained this contained only this image, no links or names of products or anything.

But that’s nothing compared to this spam subject line, though:

Starscream DOA

Talk about getting rilled up! When I read this in my inbox, I immediately clicked to read the full message, since Starscream was one of my favorite characters from the Transformers television series. Unfortunately, the email contained no further information on Starscream, why or how he died, or information about contacting his next of kin. Only information about male enhancement drugs.

These guys just gotta new agents. With TMNT back on the big screen, with Transformers not far behind, I hope they can get back on their feet and not have to stoop so low as to do the Internet equivalent of late-night television shows hawking male enhancement wares.

Roughly Drafted usually has some interesting things to say, but gets it wrong when it comes to DRM:

When DRM is created to serve the needs of both producers and consumers, it works to create markets; DRM creates a product that can be sold, creating demand for content that would otherwise be unavailable.
…
Without DRM acting to turn content into a product that can be sold in the same manner as other physical goods, there is no market because there is no way to establish a price using supply and demand.

If (I emphasize the if) DRM creates a product that can be sold, then this increases supply. Demand doesn’t just suddenly appear when something can be sold, when supply appears. Creative works have two things working against their supply side: the authors’ and creators’ drive to create and the infinite replicatability of bits. The lack of scaracity doesn’t change that. And it is useless to talk about price in this context, yes.

Techdirt has an ongoing series of posts about how lack of scaracity doesn’t mean anything new for economics. The problem is that the goods and services that once did map very neatly to the supply/demand economic curves do not necessarily do so anymore. This doesn’t mean an industry, like the music industry, is in trouble, it just means that, historically, the most obvious method of extracting a profit, forcing bits into physical form and selling those forms, no longer applies. The music industry may need to reinvent itself as a service industry (or find something else that they do/provide that does map to the supply/demand model) in order to still remain relevant.

Dirt farmers are welcome to try to sell dirt, but such a dirt-selling business will run into problems once everyone realizes they are standing on dirt. One would be stupid to enter the dirt selling business after everyone has already realized this. Just because you were selling dirt before everyone realized scarity was zero doesn’t mean you, or your product, deserve any kind of artifical protection. And providing such protections, either via laws, technology or artifical scarcity, produces an inefficient market. And an inefficient market is quite anti-capitalistic.

This Talkcrunch podcast about Adobe’s Apollo is interesting. Looks like interesting technology, in as much as rehashes of current capabilities and repackaging of current technologies are interesting. But what strikes me about this podcast is that, in 2006, there are people, presumably technically inclined, still dealing with email syncing between mutliple machines and having off-line access. Near the beginning of the podcast (9 minutes), that is one example of trying to handle on-line and off-line access that, presumably, a properly written email application written in Apollo could solve. There has to be a better example. The protocols and products that deal with this have been around for a while. They are IMAP and email applications that support working off-line. I read my email regularly from four different machines using a variety of different applications and operating systems using these technologies.

Uh, what’s with Apple’s Mac-mini case design? Is this the 80s or something? The power button and the head phone jack are on the back!? I mean, even the IBM PC AT had the power switch in a moderately accessible side location — they had a few excuses: IBM was not known for their mad design skillz at the time, and the only toggle switches apparently available during that era were big ugly orange ones necessitating hiding it an actual goal. And the IBM PC AT was kind enough to not require the use of headphones because it could hardly make a useful beep. The Mac-mini comes with a remote, I guess under the assumption that you might want to use Frontrow, perhaps near or in your entertainment center, which we all know have easily accessible rear areas. They should have made the optical media drive “side loading” and put the power/sleep indicator light on the bottom of the case to really drive the usability home.

Now, what’s odd about that last dream is that the Seinfeld episode on tonight was The Pledge Drive, where Jerry, after Kramer’s suggestion, cashes some checks found in old cards from his grandmother.