Thursday, October 20, 2005  

A reader (or not) writes:

Hello,
I have found your website davidchess.com by searching Google for "we went back to their hotel room orgy". I think our websites has a similar theme, so I have already added your link to my website.

My, my, my, my, my.

And speaking of "we went back to their hotel room orgy", famous geeky (ex?-)porn star Asia Carrera has a daughter (here's a rather amazing and nsfw picture of the process), and the daughter has a web site.

Much gratitude to whatever reader fixed Apple's servers so M could download her purchased music again. Now if you could just do that last little tweak so that it doesn't re-download the last three songs every time she starts up iTunes? Thanks!

Humbling experience o' the week: I backed up all three web sites the other day, my entire public web ouvre. It fit on roughly one tenth of one CD.

But they're really high-quality bits!

Today's selection of recent notable spam subject lines (becoming a regular feature here on the ol' weblog):

Re: Be find a contrabass
omissible Phar Offr
hilarity Special
Re: Of bring in knobkerrie
Re: it sign is absence
No turnoff by massacre wrath
whistling Enhanced quality
carbonari Works Good
Be attractive with this watch.
As lose is pivotal nonflammable
unicorn Chill up your life
Re: I try to unthinkable calcium
electra peanut
The sit the phony granddaughter
Re: Go watch an septuagint
his study so flashcube belief

Some good stuff in there! And at least two or three different generation algorithms. (I suspect the "this watch" one is an outlier.)

In the way of sender names, we got one missive from "jazmine Wrigglesworth", one from "Integuments P. Premarital", and one from "Ana Teague". Ana reminds us to "Be type the pretence packet", which seems like good advice.

Another bit of spam's anti-Bayes content included "I am just going outside and may be some time." Which made me happy for some reason.

So what else we got? That Sims site where I used to post stories is still catastrophically down (the fact that reminded me that I hadn't backed up my websites in awhile). The Danvers twins are now toddlers, and the Sims Stories page now has its own RSS feed. But that's just Sims stuff. *8)

I'm listening to this audio of Tim Russert interviewing Justices Scalia, O'Connor, and Breyer. It's pretty good. Naturally I think that O'Connor whups Scalia good every time they disagree. He pulled out the same line that I objected to the other week, that back in the old days no one would have claimed that the 14^th amendment meant women should be able to vote. O'Connor immediately chimed in that actually lots of people did think that, they just didn't prevail in court; Scalia responded by saying "rejected out of hand" two or three times, to make sure that we realized that yeah a few thousand women might have thought that, but that we should forget about those people, because they didn't win their case (and perhaps because they tend to undermine Scalia's facile argument).

So that was fun. (I wish it was Scalia leaving, and not O'Connor. She seems as smart as he is, and much nicer.)

Readers respond to last week's log, as requested, in exemplary and non-churlish fashion:

I'd like to say Enough with the Sims already, but it would seem churlish.

Sold soy to godparents

No.

Or, perhaps more precisely, Noh.

Protests against Barclays in South Africa

Protests against Barclays in South Africa

It has been slithering out of toilet bowls thoughout the flats in Manchester since August

Is that you, Julian? Long time no sea! (Not the slithering, mind. Or probably the soy. Godparents?)

And that's about all. M and the little boy are watching a Looney Tunes DVD, and I have to go pick up the little daughter from Dance in a few minutes.

Be good!

Monday, October 17, 2005  

Legal case against spyware o' the day:

The court then took the leap to hold that interference with the use of a home computer is enough to maintain a claim for trespass to chattels.

See also discussion on the blogs.

(This is fun not only because it's about annoying spyware, but also because it involves the term "trespass to chattels".

"Hey, you! Get away from my chattels!")

Pointing to:

http://www.davidchess.com/words/log.20010727.html#20010731

idiocy

Last night somebody broke into my government and replaced the Constitution with an exact duplicate... When I pointed it out to Scalia, he said, "Did I know that?"

Metababy is back, yay

the stars, but only reaching the moon.

So there you are.

Say! Are any of you reader d00dz big-time iTunes users? M's upgraded to iTunes 6, and she's having this annoying thing that when it tries to Check for Purchased Music it fails with an Error 11502 or something equally informative, and fails to download any music, which is bad because it also stopped downloading like two songs from the end of two different albums, so iTunes owes us like four songs and considerable Mental Cruelty, and so far she hasn't heard back from her WTF note to them, and nothing's turned up on the Web or Usenet except for the fact that like half a dozen other people are having the same problem and no one knows why and Apple ain't talkin'.

Phht.

So we're not downloading iTunes 6 quiiiiite yet...

On to the Sims! The Bad News is that the Hullabaloo BBS where I was posting all my Sims stories seems to have melted down entirely, and while the admins are struggling to reload the backup database they aren't completely hopeful.

The Good News is that, unlike the last time something like this happened, it only affected a tiny part of my Web ouvre, not three entire websites.

The Bad News is that, also unlike last time, I only had local copies of about half of the material (my paranoia's apparently been slipping).

The Good News is that I was able to find all but the two very most recent stories in the good old Google cache, and with some Perl and some hand-editing it didn't take too annoyingly long to recreate them in all their witty glory.

The Bad News is, hm, I seem to have run out of Bad News.

The Good News is that I was able to recreate those last two stories out of my head without much trouble; it was even kinda fun. So all the Sims Stories are now stored locally on davidchess dot com where they belong.

And the next Good News is that the first of the last two stories was about Gina getting her second Lifetime Want; yay!

And the even better Good News is that the other story (the real long one) was about the birth of Gabriel Raptor:

Isn't he cute? And/or frightening?

Yeah, I know I know I know, more Sims. But it's fun! It's a hobby! Every boy needs a hobby! And I like to share my interests with you! It's what the Web is all about! That and Iris Chacon pitures!

Oh! Speaking of which, here's Ransom Zoom looking with approval at the poster his son Hermes just put up over the spare bed:

And the subject of the poster is of course our own Miss Chacon! Small world! *8)

(Hermes is watching teevee; they bought this very expensive teevee to satisfy some shopping Want long long ago, and I always forget that it's up there in the upstairs bedroom.)

So other than that, we got tons o' spam subject lines saved up to share in the future, and we made a very nice cheese bread last night (love Autumn), and all the rain made some of the clips come off of the Big Tub of Water cover and lots of rainwater got in but probably didn't hurt anything, and the little boy can't find his Swiss Army knife.

Also, it's really dark in the mornings; what's up with that?

Sunday, October 16, 2005  

Someone launched a virus into Myspace User Profile space.

Woah. I did not expect this much. I'm surprised it even worked.. 200 people have been infected in 8 hours. That means I'll have 600 new friends added every day. Woah.
...
Oh wait, it's exponential, isn't it. Shit.

And here's not only the code of the virus, but also the thought processes behind the writing of the code. Pretty impressive; he had to bypass not only language limitations, but Myspace's attempts to prevent this sort of thing.

(It's been pointed out to me that this story was on Slashdot, so one or two of you may already have seen it...)

Legal Tidbit o' the Day: the Charming Betsy Principle. (Would someone with some spare time write the Wikipedia entry for it, please? Thanks.)

Imagine if that ship had been called, I dunno, "the Drowning Lawyer" or "the Exploding Frog". Although "Charming Betsy" is pretty good as it is.

Battling recommendations from spambots: Javed Curtsinger wrote to tell Tacitus Teamer that "Beatrix Owsley Really Works Very Good", while Evert Dubose wrote Eutropio Bischoff that "Artemisios Keisler Really Works Good". Who to believe!?

You are visiting the Internet's best source on Iris Chacon Nude. Our site specializes in connecting people who search for Iris Chacon Nude and respective service providers. This directory is dedicated to helping in research and making informed decisions.

(I mentioned that URL back in August, but I don't recall it having that amusing text on it back then.)

(We're just All About Spam lately, aren't we? That and The Sims 2. Is there some deep connection?)

Someone wrote me "Seeking a single source for information on blogging". Turns out this same person has in the past written other people seeking a good source of different types of hats. Perhaps they'd also be interested in Iris Chacon!

So the place where I'd been posting most of my Sims stories lately has ben switching BBS software, changing all their URLs, and being down for maintenance. I'm sure they'll be back soon, but in the meantime I've been redirecting various of the links on the Sims Stories page to point to local copies of the stories, that point in turn to the BBS. I was thinking of writing a whole little Content Management System for the Sims Stories (probably cloned or even generalized from the one that I use for the Book Notes), but I decided that was overkill. I did do a new CSS style, though, so I can make the pages fancier and/or uglier *8) easily in the future.

The BBS is entirely down at the moment, so the story of the Langerak twins becoming teenagers is available only here on david chess dot com. Aren't you lucky!

From this:

To this:

How virtual time flies! *8) All sortsa other stuff has happened in my Sims neighborhood also, but those stories are either trapped on the down BBS, or not yet written up, so you'll have to wait.

Our daily cluelessness today is a story about Verizon Online (although I suspect it could be about any of a zillion different too-large service providers).

For a long time we've had our home DSL through a special geek-deal between IBM and a particular part of Verizon. It was cool at first, as they have pretty good customer service (although their billing department is pretty hopeless in the "we lost your check and although we cashed it we're still going to pretend we never got it" sort of way). But gradually normal Verizon DSL lowered their prices and raised their maximum speeds and the special deal didn't, so I kept meaning to switch over. But I was too lazy.

Then one day we got a letter saying that the special deal was ending, and we should switch to some other provider (preferable normal Verizon). I called them to see what I had to do, and they said to call normal Verizon. So I did that, and they gave us a switchover date, and on that day the old service stopped working and (with only one call to the help desk for something they'd forgotten to put in the instructions) we switched over to the new one without trouble.

The pricing effect of getting both local phone service and DSL from Verizon didn't turn out to be nearly as nice as I'm sure they told me it would be on the phone when I signed up, but it was still cheaper than the special deal, so it seemed like we were done.

Then we got another bill from the old plan. I called them up and told them about it, and they said oh sorry just ignore that we'll make sure you don't get anymore.

Then they left a phone message saying that we should send them a copy of the bill from the new provider (i.e. send Verizon Special Geek Deals DSL a copy of the bill from Normal Verizon Online DSL). I called them back and asked them why, and they said it was because the only way they could tell that we weren't getting service from them anymore is to see a bill from the place that we're now getting service from.

Sensible, eh?

Utterly ridiculous, of course; my old password stopped working early on the morning of the switchover day, so their equipment knows that I no longer have an active account. But their billing system is clueless. What would have happened, I wonder, if I'd just decided I didn't want DSL at all anymore?

"Oh, I'm sorry sir, we have to keep charging you, because since you can't show us a bill from another provider for all we know you might still be using our product!"

Phht.