insert something witty here

For a while, I've been (manually) reposting entries from my blog to my LiveJournal, so that folks who have put me on their Friends List can easily see my entries on their Friends page. I'm really tired of doing it, but I also know that most of my friends are on LJ and don't use an RSS aggregator (or even know what that is). So, I've asked my good friend srattus, who's got a perm LJ, to set up dossy_feed for me. This is LJ's way of making it easy for LJ users to sign up to RSS feeds. So, if you want to still read what I write on my blog, go and add my feed to your Friends List.

One thing to keep in mind, though: LiveJournal won't send me a notification email if you comment on entries in my feed. If you want to comment on an entry and make sure I see it, you can comment on LJ and then drop me an email letting me know you did so I don't miss it, or, preferably, you can click on the "comment on this" link at the end of the entry which will take you to my blog where you can comment on it and I'll automatically receive notification that you did. Of course, the downside to this is that when I respond to your comment, you won't receive a notification email (yet!). I'm working on fixing that.

Just a quick update, but anonymous comments are back on my blog! I've implemented simple comment screening, so you can now leave comments anonymously and I can moderate them -- to keep out the blog comment spammers.

I realize most of you on LJ just have me on your Friends List and read my blog through my cross-posting to LJ ... but if you're geeky, you might be interested in checking it out and playing with my comments system. It's alway good to have help testing things out.

Once in a while, I have to go into NYC to work out of our offices there. I take the bus in to Port Authority, then take the subway. I take the 7 train from Times Square to Bryant Park, then walk along the corridor to get to the F/V trains to Rockefeller Plaza. Walking the corridor is always a treat because of it's "human zoo" quality: you get to see all sorts of people in there, some performing various instruments, others pan-handling with little cardboard signs, sometimes they even try to sell what look like shady pirated DVDs. Well, yesterday, I had an encounter that just made me chuckle and smile.

There was a lady standing in the corridor asking people passing her by, "Do you have a quarter?" Well, marveling at this woman's curiousity, I felt compelled to give her an answer. I stopped, reached into my pocket, pulled out what loose change I had, identified a quarter and held it up with with my other hand and answered, "Yes, I do." I then proceeded to put it back in my pocket, smiled at the lady and then resumed walking towards the other end of the corridor.

I realize that there was an implied question of "can I have a quarter," but if you're not going to ask the question, I don't see why you've earned the quarter. She asked a simple question I felt I could answer, I answered it and went about my business. She got exactly what she asked for.

Specificity is an engineer's delight. When you can give someone exactly what they asked for, you try to do it. Yesterday was a good day. :-)

(dossy.org | comment on this)

Police are apparently accusing Barbara Asher of a bunch of things:

• being a dominatrix by the name of Mistress Lauren M
• having a 53-year-old man by the name of Michael Lord as a slave
• Asher only changing into her outfit after Lord was already naked and bound
• Michael Lord having a heart attack in her dungeon
• having a boyfriend by the name of Miguel Ferreria
• dismembering Lord's corpse with a hacksaw
• fitting the dismembered corpse of a 280-pound man into eight trash bags
• doing all this without leaving DNA evidence of the butchery, or evidence of cleaning agents

Suppose for a moment that the part about Asher being a dominatrix is true and that Lord was her slave. Lets assume that she's a pro, because allegedly she was "worried the police would find out about her operation" -- I don't think they mean the sex-change kind, here. The implication is that she was doing this for money or she was afraid because kinky sex between consenting adults was illegal back in July 2000, years before Justice Anthony Kennedy and Lawrence v. Texas (2003) said otherwise. So, if I were a paying customer of Asher's services for kinky roleplay, I'd certainly expect her to be in her outfit from the start, not after I'm already naked and bound. Otherwise, you're just not getting your money's worth, right?

How can they prove that Michael Lord died of a heart attack, if they never recovered his corpse? I know I'm no forensics expert, but I imagine determining cause of death minimally requires observing the corpse, maybe even an autopsy, right? Maybe the police consulted an expert psychic and contacted Michael Lord's spirit to find out what happened to him? Maybe they just watched the wrong episode of Crossing Jordan and got carried away?

Regardless of all this, lets pretend he really did die in her dungeon. Is your first instinct to call someone like your boyfriend and tell them about it, or to deal with it by yourself and leave no living witnesses? Okay, maybe you are the type to call someone for help -- fine. Now you and your boyfriend are trying to figure out how to dispose of this 280-pound corpse. Damn, can't sell it on eBay. Don't suppose she's got some starved pigs in her condominium, either. What's a girl to do? Oh, duh -- pick up the hacksaw and start carvin' like it's Thanksgiving! But, then what? Well, it's 170 miles to Augusta, she's got a full tank of gas, eight 35-pound bags each full of Lord's parts, it's dark and she's wearing shades. They find Alice's restaurant and dump their trash and head on home. Right? Because, you know, if someone just died in my freaky sex dungeon in my own private home, this is exactly what I'd do, wouldn't you?

Sounds like witch hunting is alive and well in Massachusetts. I thought they gave that up in the 17th century. Guess old habits die hard.

(via grigoricennui)

(dossy.org | comment on this)

Yesterday, the kids had off from school and I had off of work. (Thanks, Martin Luther King, Jr.) We got together with some friends and decided to take the kids out for a play-date. In the winter, it's typical to go to indoor playgrounds to let the kids run around, since it's too unfriendly to do play outdoors after a wind and ice storm like we had this past Sunday. Our friends had recently been to a new place we'd never been to called Unbelieva-Bills, so we wanted to try it out. I can't figure out when they opened for business, but based on what little information I could find, it looks like they've been open since mid-2004. The owner, William (Bill) Dubiel has been Unbelieva-Bill for some 25 years as a professional magician, though. I'm surprised that it took a year and a half for us to even find out about this place -- needs some better marketing, perhaps? The website has the necessary information but the presentation could definitely use some work.

The picture to the right shows the innocuous little entrance to the gi-normous yellow cinderblock building. I mean, the building is huge, some 21,000 sq. ft. large and two stories tall! What's strange is that I expected to see "Unbelieva-Bills" above the blue awning, or at least some kind of signage saying what this monstrous building was to the casual passer-by, but there wasn't one. Luckily, we knew that the place was at 140 Hopper Ave., in Waldwick, NJ, off Wyckoff Ave. next to the Waldwick middle and high schools.

Once inside the place, you see the Enchanted Kingdom playset (see picture to the right). There's an admission fee for hildren to play on it: the "Kingdom Pass Only" cost us $9.95 per child regardless of age, so we paid for both our five year old and our two year old. They do have a special discounted "Infant/Parent" pass but it's not clear what age qualifies as an infant. Needless to say, this place isn't cheap. They do entertainment shows, temporary tattoos, kiddie bowling and a sports simulation video game, and Laser Tag, but all of these things are extra costs on top of the $9.95 Kingdom Pass, unless you buy one of the more expensive admission passes. I'm sorry, for a 5 and a 2 year old, $10 had better buy enough entertainment for three hours. Sorry, Bill.

I would, however, like to take the kids there to see one of the live show performances, though. But, again, $6 per child for the 20 minute Wizardo's Workshop Magic Show is steep. I'll probably give it a try once to see if it's worth the money, at least. Considering Bill's long experience as a professional performer, I suspect the show's going to be excellent. I really like live entertainment for the kids, especially if it's interactive. Of course, you can't really tell much about the show from the website, unfortunately.

One nice thing about the place is I believe I saw Bill walking around, helping out in the Hocus Pocus Pantry area where we sat and ate lunch. It's a good sign that the owner's around, watching what's going on and personally involved in the business's success. Maybe I'll say "hi" and introduce myself next time I'm there with the kids -- that wouldn't be too strange, would it? Oh, and speaking of the food, it was better than I would have expected for fast food at a children's indoor entertainment place. I had two grilled cheese sandwiches, my wife had a cheeseburger, my older daughter had chicken fingers, my younger daughter had a grilled cheese sandwich and we all shared some nachos with cheese. Okay, so maybe it wasn't the healthiest of meals but the food was fast, hot and tasty. The price for food wasn't outrageous, either, which really surprised me. I definitely won't mind taking the kids there to play at lunch time, that's for sure.

Oh, another nice consideration: the bathrooms have step-stools at the sinks for the kids to step up on! You can't believe the number of times I have to pick each of them up and hold them hovering by the sink so they can wash their hands after using the bathroom when I take them out to places. Argh! Well, at Unbelieva-Bills, they've done the right thing and solved that problems. Thank you!

Unbelieva-Bills

Facility Hours:
Monday-Thursday: 10am - 6pm
Friday-Saturday: 10am - 8pm
Sunday: 10am - 5pm.

Telephone Number:</br> (201) 824-5891

Street Address:
140 Hopper Avenue
Waldwick, NJ 07463

If you have any questions, leave them here in the comments or email me. If you've been to Unbelieva-Bills and want to share your experience, leave a comment here or email me, too.

(dossy.org | comment on this)

We've had a PlayStation 2 for a while, and last year we got an Eye Toy camera for it. The game titles that use it are actually pretty cool: Antigrav, the hoverboard game; Play, the amusing little set of fun mini-games; Groove, the rhythmic hand-movement game just like Dance Dance Revolution is for the feet. The kids especially like Play, either playing Wishi Washi (or however it's spelled) where you wipe soap suds off windows, or the Playroom where you can dance around with special effects being applied or be chased by bees -- great fun to watch the kids run and hide behind the couch. So, as far as gaming console accessories go, I think this one's got lots of potential. Great family fun, for sure.

Now, any full-body interactive game is will cause you to physically exert yourself and tire you out and possibly even make you sweat. Sure beats sitting on the couch mashing buttons with your thumbs, right? But, if someone said, "Hey, you can actually get a real work-out, with the right software ..." and you're a skeptic like me, you'd laugh incredulously and think, "Yeah. Suuuuuuure." Boy, was I wrong.

Well, this past Christmas, we got the EyeToy: Kinetic for PS2. It's essentially a virtual personal trainer in a box, or so the marketing fluff claims. Well, it's not as fluff as I thought. Into my third week of workouts, which it schedules and keeps track for you three times a week, I have to say, this is the real deal. If you take it seriously, you can get a real aerobic workout and perform toning and strenghtening exercises that will leave you sore the next day or two. The workouts last close to 30 minutes and include a warm up, a good mix of workout routines, and a cool-down stretch. The background music is even pretty tolerable, as far as modern electronic-beat pop goes. When you create your profile, it even records your height, weight and age, and will tell you how many calories you're burning while you're working out. As you progress, it adjusts and adapts the difficulty of your routine throughout the 12-week program it creates for you.

Kinetic comes bundled with what seems to be the next generation Eye Toy camera -- this one's silver, with a heavier base and a special wide-angle lens adapter, while the older camera we have is black and much lighter which makes it harder to position in a stable fashion. The one challenge with the camera is lighting: even on the "dim room" setting, it has a hard time with our cheap pair of lamps and the amount of light (and shadows!) they provide. But, overall, it's more than adequate to get a decent work-out and play some games, as long as you don't get frustrated when the camera mis-reads your motions now and again. We need to figure out a better lighting solution -- we're thinking about installing some track lighting. Maybe that'll help.

The folks at Nike Motionworks have done a superb job for a first attempt at a "game" like this (if you can really call it a game). I'm definitely not the kind of person to go out to a gym regularly, and being able to do my routine in the evening, in my own home, makes it so easy I don't find myself trying to make excuses not to do it! I think if more folks see real results with Kinetic and spread the word, this could be a real disruptive technology -- in the near future, I can imagine some gyms setting up private rooms with a PS2 set up with an Eye Toy and Kinetic for people to come in and use. Could be a great business to start, once word gets out that it really works.

So, feel free to leave me questions you have, or if you've got a Kinetic, share your own story about it in the comments below!

(dossy.org | comment on this)

Okay, I've been sitting on my hands for a day or two, itching to say something about this ... but I resisted until Jason let the cat out of the bag, first. I consider this a mental health project, something I could hack on for fun. So, when he asked about an Engadget AIM Bot back on December 29, I decided to start hacking on it. Four days later, at the end of my New Years vacation on January 2, it was up and running and mostly functional.

For folks who aren't sure what I'm talking about, let me back up a step. Engadget is a gadget blog that is part of the Weblogs, Inc. Network. A number of people contribute articles to it, covering all sorts of news about gadgets and technology. Traditionally, you might subscribe to its syndication feeds through an aggregator and keep track of updates to the site that way. But, what if notification of updates could be pushed to you via instant messaging instead? That's one of the things the Engadget Bot does -- it allows you to subscribe to any number of categories at Engadget and receive IM alerts when new entries are posted to those categories. For example, there's lots of new entries being posted in the CES category because the CES tradeshow is going on right now in Vegas. To subscribe, you'd would send an IM to the screenname EngadgetBot with the message subscribe ces. Also, it seems that the bot has trouble sending IMs back to you if you don't have it on your Buddy List, so it might be a good idea to add it to your Buddy List first.

Here's a screenshot of an example interaction with the bot, receiving IM alerts and querying it for the latest headlines:

(Click for larger image.)

(That's a screenshot of a Trililan window. Trillian is a multi-IM application for Wintel which I use regularly for my IM needs -- so much so that I wrote a plugin for it called Tcllian which embeds my favorite scripting language, Tcl, so I can write scripts for it in Tcl that run inside Trillian.)

For the geeks in the audience, the Engadget Bot is written in Tcl ... roughly 2,000 lines at this moment. For persistent data storage, I opted to use the light-weight SQLite 3, which has a really convenient Tcl binding. The source for the bot isn't available, but it might be someday. A lot of it has to do with the fact that the code is embarassingly simple and I'd honestly be embarassed to have folks looking at it until I can clean it up and make it presentable.

Anyway, I really enjoyed hacking on this and feel really proud to have gotten it working. It's very simple, but I think it's already very useful if you're interested in Engadget's content and keeping up to date. I get to build something really simple because all the hard stuff -- feed syndication of Engadget content, the AIM messaging network, etc. -- are already all in place. This is just another example of what Web 2.0 mash-ups can enable folks to build.

UPDATE: My friend Og Maciel just blogged about the bot after I told him about it. Considering he's on the Ubuntu team doing the translation to Brazilian Portuguese, it's only natural that his entry is in Portugese. Way cool!

(dossy.org | comment on this)

Dear Lazyweb,

I find myself needing to create excerpts of HTML text with full markup, which sounds like an easy problem to solve incorrectly but is actually quite interesting and difficult to do correctly. The brief description of the problem is: take arbitrary HTML and produce an excerpt containing the first N characters of the text, including the markup but only counting the characters in the text. In other words, while "<b>bold</b>" is 11 bytes long, it only represents 4 characters of text towards the N character excerpt. This is why taking a simple substring of N bytes doesn't work: it counts any markup as characters and worse, could break/unbalance tags, since the closing tags are likely to be truncated away.

My first thought to solving this problem simply -- in under 5 minutes, would be my definition of simple -- would be to write some code that walks the string, counting characters and stepping over markup, and truncating after the first N characters. This at least solves the "excerpt of N characters" portion of the problem. However, this leaves two problems unsolved: (1) what if the 100th character falls in the middle of a word, and (2) what do I do about any unclosed tags? Solving the word-boundary problem is simple: if the 100th character falls in the middle of the word, back up until the start of the word and truncate there. This does mean our excerpt will be less than N characters, but only by a word fragment which is acceptable in most cases, since I'm guessing most words are shorter than 15 characters. But, closing unclosed tags ... in the odd edge case, this can get messy. If you're starting out with well-formed HTML or XHTML, perhaps it's a simple problem. But, in the general case, we know the world's HTML is far from clean -- plenty of it is invalid, which means creating rules to close tags based on the assumption that you're working with well-formed input is not going to work.

There's a well-known solution to cleaning up HTML called TagSoup and it does a magnificent job and has been packaged for easy use from the command line, which is an added bonus. The only downside is that it's in Java and I primarily work in Tcl. Now, I can execute stuff from Tcl and grab the output, but that's far from desirable from a performance standpoint -- firing up a JVM every time I need to sanitize some HTML string would be insane. Sure, I could go through the gyrations to write a simple TCP server and make TagSoup available via network RPC, but that'd mean writing a mound of Java code and that's a deep rathole that I want to avoid (it sure won't take me 5 minutes). So, here's my plea: Lazyweb, please implement TagSoup in Tcl, please.

In the meantime, I'm going to work on a simple implementation that's based around a whole lot of assumptions about the input data I currently need to work with, but a solid, robust solution in the general case for Tcl would be really useful.

(dossy.org | comment on this)

I've heard of the Nigerian 4-1-9 scam via email -- numerous variations on the Advance Fee Fraud scheme -- but this is the first time I've seen it carried out via instant messaging! Tonight, I received an IM from some random name on Yahoo! IM. Here's the transcript:

[21:00] samuelmylove2008: hi
[21:00] samuelmylove2008: hello asl
[21:00] samuelmylove2008: <ding>
[21:01] samuelmylove2008: were are u from sweeti
[21:05] samuelmylove2008: <ding>
[21:05] dossy: ?
[21:05] samuelmylove2008: were are u from
[21:06] dossy: who are you and why are you IM'ing me?
[21:06] samuelmylove2008: are u there what can i do for u
[21:06] samuelmylove2008: am mary am from florida
[21:06] samuelmylove2008: u
[21:06] samuelmylove2008: ?
[21:07] dossy: how's the weather in florida?
[21:07] samuelmylove2008: well am not right now in florida am in africa
[21:08] dossy: right.
[21:08] dossy: and I bet you work for a bank. or you're the son of royalty. right.
[21:09] samuelmylove2008: what do u do?
[21:09] dossy: I avoid scams like this. Thanks.
[21:10] samuelmylove2008: what do u mean
[21:10] samuelmylove2008: i dont no much about u
[21:13] dossy: Where in Africa are you?
[21:14] samuelmylove2008: am in nigeria were the meeting was hold
[21:14] samuelmylove2008: i hope u dont mind?
[21:14] dossy: What are you doing in Nigeria?
[21:15] samuelmylove2008: a littel host by our boss
[21:17] dossy: Who's your boss?
[21:18] samuelmylove2008: oh my managing director
[21:19] samuelmylove2008: we went there to cash a chekq but the chekq was not from nigeria is made from usa
[21:20] samuelmylove2008: sweety can u help me cash the chek only that my boss was not with us and even we dont have money to come back
[21:20] dossy: that's a pity. Florida will miss you.
[21:20] samuelmylove2008: sweety can u help me to cash the chekq
[21:21] dossy: The Nigerian scam works better if you spell things right.
[21:21] dossy: And claim to be some Nigerian royalty. People really dig royalty.
[21:22] dossy: And you have to use really big numbers, like "TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION (250,000,000) DOLLARS" -- need lots of zeros.
[21:23] dossy: You want to go create a new screen name and try it again? You should practice more and get better before you try this on anyone else, you know?
[21:24] samuelmylove2008: what do u mean
[21:26] dossy: *beep beep* That's the horn of the turnip truck, leaving you behind. You'd better run if you want to get back on it!
[21:27] samuelmylove2008: what do u mean by that
[21:28] samuelmylove2008: <ding>
[21:28] dossy: So, where were you born?
[21:28] samuelmylove2008: am born in usa but my mom and dad bass in africa
[21:29] dossy: Where did you grow up?
[21:30] samuelmylove2008: i grow up frm usa
[21:33] dossy: Where did you go to school?
[21:40] dossy: You know, right now, I bet there's a Nigerian village that's missing an idiot.

I couldn't make this kinda stuff up. I'm still laughing.

(dossy.org | comment on this)

For those who have been reading my blog for a while might remember me mentioning that we attended church a few years back. Fast forward through a few more holidays where we continued to attend church ... then to more regular attendance of church ... then to our kids attending Sunday school ... and then now. By the time I sat down to write this, the day has past and I've finished cleaning up around the house, but yesterday (December 11th), my kids and I were baptized at The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Our Savior, nearby in Pompton Plains, NJ. For those that know me, this might come as a surprise: did Dossy really find religion? What was I thinking? Let me try to explain ...

As I said, we've been attending church on a pretty regular basis, once every other week or so, for the last few months. I've been really enjoying the sermons delivered by Pastor Rossman, and often find crying over them. Strangely, it's a good feeling; after so many years of bitter angst and cynicism, finding something that moves me enough to actually cry helps me reconnect with these important feelings I've suffocated for so long. We've discovered that some of the people we meet, say, at our daughter's school, who we thought we'd like and would get along with, we find out later also attend the same church! It really attracts the kind of people we really like, and that's a very good sign. The people we've met at church are fantastic people, all very loving, caring and supportive -- exactly the kind of people we need to surround ourselves with, struggling to raise two very bright, challenging and spirited daughters. We are starting to build healthy and positive relationships with people who are good for us mentally and emotionally. Without sounding corny, Kelly, our babysitter, who introduced us to her church, is the best thing to ever happen to us in our lives (next to the birth of our two daughters, of course). She has touched our lives in a way that will stay with us forever and we will always be thankful for that.

But, what of all that atheistic cynicism I used to hold onto so dearly? Why give all that comfort up and look to God? Well, around the time we started contemplating getting the girls baptized -- as well as myself, since I don't believe I ever was -- I came across Penn Jillette's fantastic essay from NPR, titled This I Believe: There Is No God (which inspired the title for this blog entry). While Penn (of Penn & Teller fame) is a professional funny-man who I've enjoyed for many years, the essay feels nothing but absolutely serious. Apparently his essay has stirred a lot of controversy. Why is this all relevant? Well, just as I was getting cozy with the idea of being baptized and joining a church and all, along comes Penn's essay which very strongly called out to my former self: the religion-disparaging, God-denying nihilist. What was I to do?

Clearly, I agreed with what Penn wrote, so did that mean I should forget about church and being baptized and all that? Was that a necessary conclusion to agreeing with the essay? At first, I thought it might, but after reading it over a few times, I realized that the essay was just a written form of his talent: the misdirection and slight-of-hand (or, word in this case) that fools you into perceiving what isn't really there. The truth is, if you read his words and what they really mean, as opposed to what semantics people tend to apply to the words he chose to use, he isn't rejecting God, just refusing to believe -- or, merely have faith -- that there is a God. Look in the dictionary at the definition of "believe" and then ask yourself if it really is healthy behavior to believe in God? To have faith, to depend on, to accept as true or real, to expect, to trust? I think there's a word that describes people who believe something is real that doesn't exist: crazy. Oh, sure, they'll swear up and down that it's real, it's real to them, and others might even collaborate their delusions, but does that make it any more real, or just make them more insane? After all this, how can I believe in God?

Maybe I don't, well, not the way you might believe in God, or the way others do. But, with certainty, I know I do believe in God. Maybe I don't believe there is a God, or a singular figure that lives somewhere and is responsible for everything that's happened or will happen or does happen. But, then, what do I believe? How can I consider myself sane but believe in something that doesn't really exist in a way that can be proven to exist? Well, let me ask you: do you believe in the concept of "infinity?" Of course, you probably do. You probably learned about it in school, or someone else explained it to you, or you just figured it out all a priori because you're so smart like that. But, has have you ever found an infinity? Or counted to it? Or measured something infinite? Of course not. You can't, it doesn't exist. But you believe in the concept, and you consider yourself sane, right? Why should believing in God be so different? It isn't. It's that simple.

So then, what does it mean to believe in God? It's exactly what Penn's essay says: we own our actions, our thoughts, our relationships, our mistakes, our failures, our successes, everything. Everything is a manifestation of God. At the deepest level, our individual conscience is God's voice, speaking to us. In healthy people, it makes you feel bad when you do something wrong. It guides your thoughts, your actions, and your perception of the world around you. Clearly, the conscience doesn't control people, because we see people doing unconscionable things every day; maybe that's the influence of the Devil, or maybe just the refusal to listen to the spirit of God's influence, or maybe it's just people choosing to be jerks -- I don't know. What I know is, God wants us to be loved, to feel loved and to share love with others -- and listening to God, our conscience, will bring us closer to that. As Penn says, it's the reason to "be more thoughtful" and "treat people right the first time around". It's why we should listen to each other, learn from each other and share ourselves with each other. It's why we should do things to lessen other people's suffering and not like it's just some unjust cosmic punishment. It's why we shouldn't just believe there's a God, but to prove it by listening to our conscience and living life in a way that we can be proud of. Only believing there is a God is not enough. Actions speak louder than words, for sure.

And so, yesterday, I was baptized along with my two daughters. I was welcomed into a new family, one of God, of our church and its people. In a sense, I am truly re-born, a child of God, learning for the first time that the life I knew will be different from the life I will get to know. I want to know God's love -- the love of everything -- and to learn to enjoy this wonderful life I've been given, rather than just getting by, passing time until it's over. Just like Penn, I want to "make this life the best life I will ever have." He's so very right. He's a smart guy.

(dossy.org | comment on this)

(Alternate title: OMG, Wil Wheaton blogs and plays poker online!)

Wil Wheaton, who most people know as either Gordie in Stand By Me (IMDb) or Wesley Crusher on Star Trek, has long since left those roles behind. These days, he's got his own blog (which, after experiencing technical difficulties, has been moved here, to TypePad). He's also written two books (Just a Geek and Dancing Barefoot), and actively plays online poker at PokerStars.com. He's even started a podcast recently called Radio Free Burrito Episode Zero (MP3 [27.3MB]) where he answers some questions asked by his blog readers.

Why am I blogging about him? Mostly out of awe and admiration, I guess. I mean, he's a father like me, he finds the inspiration to write, he finds the time for his geeky interests and to play poker online. On top of it all, he seems like a really nice person, someone I wish I could be friends with in meatspace. (If you knew me, you'd know why that's a compliment, considering I'm patently misanthropic in nature.) Alas, he lives out on the West Coast and I'm all the way on the East Coast.

Anyway, I say he's cool and if you're curious as to what he's been up to since he disappeared from the Hollywood limelight, you should go check him out. He's been busy and it all looks like good stuff.

(dossy.org | comment on this)

With the proliferation of wireless computing technology (aka "wi-fi ethernet") and people freely using other people's open wireless networks -- I have a hard time calling it "stealing" but it is -- I started asking myself: is it morally wrong to set up a transparent HTTP proxy that injected malicious scripts into the HTTP response to exploit people's computers who are using your wi-fi? My gut says that knowingly destroying other people's computers is wrong, always wrong, even if they're illegally trespassing on your wireless network and stealing your bandwidth without your permission. But, then I wonder if it's a framing or context problem. Is it so obviously wrong because it's happening in an intangible space and all highly theoretical? So, I tried to redescribe the problem in more mundane terms.

What if you were a candy store, and you had a serious shoplifting problem: where people would randomly walk into your store and help themselves to some of your candy without paying for it? Would it be wrong to poison a subset of candy and mark the poisoned goods in such a way that only you could identify them? If a real customer came along and wanted to purchase the candy, you'd recognize it as being poisoned and replace it with a clean version. But, if someone just came along and grabbed it and walked off with it, if they proceeded to eat it, then they got what they deserved? If they didn't get permission to take your candy, you have no obligation or responsibility as to what happens to them if they steal it, right?

Are the two situations (unauthorized use of wi-fi vs. owning a candy store) really different? Is the aggressive defense mechanism acceptable in one situation but not the other? Are both unacceptable? Should the entire burden of securing a wireless network rest on the shoulders of the owner of the network, or should there be some responsibility and etiquette for people not to just assume that because a wi-fi network is unrestricted that it doesn't make it open for public use? If I set up open wi-fi and want to signal that it's open for public use, I'll include "public" in the SSID to signal it as such.

What do you do with your wi-fi networks? Do you secure yours, or leave it wide open, or what? If you leave yours open, do you have a problem with people jumping onto it and using it? Have you ever had someone use your wireless network and send spam using it, or anything else you'd not want them to do, but you still want to leave it open so that other good people can use it when they need to?

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In the midst of the recent AOL Journals banner-ad debacle, Jason Calacanis (of Weblogs, Inc. fame, who is now a member of the AOL team) asks, "Where are all the AOL bloggers?" He's compiling a list, hoping to uncover an AOL exec.'s blog in the process. He's even offered to get an AOL exec. blogging with their own vanity domain and fancy design as incentive!

If you're an AOL employee blogger, go and leave a comment and self-identify! Microsoft, Yahoo, Google ... they've all got tons of bloggers. Where's AOL's bloggers? There have got to be a few dozen of us, at least, right? Right?

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This article at eWEEK.com is the reason why I've switched to using the Mozilla Firefox web browser for everything except a few web applications at work which only work with MSIE.

Read the article, but the gist of it is that a fully up-to-date Windows system, if browsing a malicious site containing the exploit, can be made to execute arbitrary code that the attacker has intended on your system. Quoting from the article:

The proof-of-concept exploit, which is available from the FrSirt site, currently launched the Windows Calculator (calc.exe) but can be easily modified by malicious hackers.

What I'd really like to see is someone modifying the proof-of-concept exploit to instead fetch a copy of Firefox, perform an unattended install of it, then rename IEXPLORE.EXE (the MSIE executable) to something else and replacing it with a copy of FIREFOX.EXE. Of course, I'm sure anyone who did such a thing could go to jail because there's no distinction made between "good hacking" and "bad hacking" in our lovely legal system. You know, the same legal system that lets killers walk free but makes hackers go to jail.

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This year, I decided to take advantage of a benefit that work offers: the Health Care Flexible Spending Account (HCFSA). Basically, you set aside pre-tax dollars to pay for certain otherwise non-reimbursed medical costs which you pay for out of your HCFSA account instead of using after-tax dollars. Without going into detail about taxes, the short explanation is that it's always better to spend pre-tax dollars than after-tax dollars, so the HCFSA is good, in general.

The trick with the HCFSA is that you have to decide, up front at the start of the year, how much money to put into the account. This isn't so bad if you already know what your yearly medical costs are, because you know approximately how much you spend. When I enrolled, I didn't really have a good feel for how much we would be spending this year, so I estimated as best I could. The snag about the HCFSA is that at the end of the year, whatever funds haven't been spent are forfeited! Yes, it's "use it or lose it" so it's important to avoid over-estimating, but under-estimating means not taking full advantage of the tax benefit the HCFSA affords you.

Today, I called to get the remaining balance in the account and it's just shy of $770. I do have some medical expenses that I can file reimbursements for through the HCFSA which should be around $700, but what do I do about the remaining balance? Should I go and buy a ton of over-the-counter medicines and file for reimbursement to flatten out the account?

Do you have a HCFSA? What do you do at the end of the year with funds that are left in it? Is it better to just under-estimate to ensure there's never a surplus in the account which you might forfeit when you haven't spent it?

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Something that I noticed about my recent posting funk is that I still find myself writing small blurbs about links when saving them to del.icio.us. I've been thinking about using the links to power a linkblog, and seeing Joe Grossberg go and set one up, it motivated me to hack one out for my own blog.

So, twice a day, 9:00 AM and 9:00 PM US/Eastern time, you'll see a post auto-publish using my del.icio.us links. Here's the first post generated by my script, to give you an example of what to expect. Of course, you could just subscribe to the RSS feed in your aggregator, if you don't want to wait until the links get posted to my blog.

What do you think? Is auto-generating an entry twice a day, lame? Should I relegate these links to the sidebar of the blog instead? Do you just not care about what links I find interesting and I shouldn't bother with a linkblog at all?

Oh, and the folks who are reading this via my crossposting to LiveJournal or Blogger: sorry, you won't see the del.icio.us links, because my script only posts them to my actual blog.

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Back in the 1990's, I formulated a theory that the universe is "donut shaped" -- well, I said "toroidal" which most people I hung out with at the time would probably have to look up the definition of, so I avoided using the term. I had no scientific expression of my theory, no empirical evidence to prove it -- matter of fact, I asserted that the truth value of my theory was unprovable from any other compatible theory because of its properties, nor any math to back it up. It just seemed like the only simple explanation that I could accept at the time. I didn't even express it in any kind of written form to document it; I just threw it out during conversations that would turn to matters of physics or philosophy where it seemed appropriate to bring it up. Everyone I explained my theory to said I was just being silly and it made no sense, but it made perfect sense to me. Let me explain ...

Suppose we want to believe that the known universe is either expanding or contracting inside a larger body of "space" in three dimensions. Suppose we formulated a theory about weak and strong forces between "things" that exist in the universe, for microscopic interactions between particles and macroscopic interactions between large bodies (humans, planets, etc.). What we want to believe is that the universe is finite but the space it occupies has all appearances of being infinite but is likely to be finite. Suppose we want to believe that at fundamental levels, things are spherical in nature but simple spheres and even oblates are too simple of a structure to explain what we observe. I first thought: Well, what if the universe was really the surface of a Moebius strip? You know, that clever strip where if you trace a line on one side all the way around you end up back where you started? You can travel "infinitely" far -- or at least, at the surface, perceive it to be -- on a segment that has a finite length. But, the universe isn't a two-dimensional planar thing, and the half-twist inversion is hard to rationalize -- too complex of a shape to explain simply. Well, how about a toroid, then? It's a simple closed geometric shape in three dimensions with an interior space and an exterior surface, that offers symmetry which should make the math simple because you don't have to have all sorts of exceptional explanations at the half-twist like you would in a Moebius strip. Sounds great, right? Except I'm not smart enough to take this theory any further and I can't seem to get anyone else to understand what I see.

But, Steven D. Levitt over at the Freakonomics Blog recently wrote about a physicist named Lisa Randall and quoted a passage from her new book titled Warped Passages. (Oh, and if you haven't heard about Freakonomics yet, check out their site and maybe even buy their book.) What made me do a double-take was the explanation that Randall gave, according to the quote by Levitt:

"[...] Dr. Randall and Dr. Sundrum's model consisted of a pair of universes, four-dimensional branes, thinly separated by a five-dimensional space poetically called the bulk.

When they solved the equations for this setup, they discovered that the space between the branes would be warped. Objects, for example, would appear to grow larger or smaller and get less massive or more massive as they moved back and forth between the branes. [...]"

While this isn't the same thing as my "universe as a donut" theory, it gets close to describing what I've been trying to explain. Think of the branes as the donut and the hole as what they call the "bulk." I don't see why they need a pair of universes but I'm sure it's to tie up some loose end they had to explain. That's the problem with scientists: they have solutions looking for a problem. If you just solve the problem, you just get the actual solution.

Another thing that makes my theory useful and simple is that it not only explains the universe at the macroscopic end, but also explains microscopic particle behavior -- quantum mechanics and all that. Recently, Randell Mills and his company BlackLight Power have come forth describing a new form of the simplest atom, hydrogen, calling it a "hydrino." (For more background, read this article in the Guardian: Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head.) What's so controversial is that Mills is describing something which current beliefs in quantum mechanics would assert is impossible. But, Mills apparently is actually demonstrating his findings: how do you argue with reality? Like a fool, that's how.

Suppose the donut hole represents the proton. Suppose the donut represents the path around the proton that the electron can take. The only rules here is that the proton and electron can't occupy the same position at the same time, and that the closer the electron gets the "faster" it travels around the center, and centrifugal force says that the electron will favor staying near the outer ring of the donut than the inner ring closer to the hole. The whole notion in quantum mechanics that there's a fixed distance where the electron can't get closer to the proton sounds foolish. It might take a lot of energy to do it, but okay, that's fine. A lot more energy than is available? Possibly. But, space isn't discrete, it's continuous, as well as time. Heisenberg figured this out back in 1927 when he expressed his uncertainty principle. According to the Hydrino Study Group page, there's a "1986 Herman Haus paper that explains how charged particles may undergo acceleration without radiation." Suppose there actually is radiation but it's practically unobservable because the radiation event happens closer to the center of the donut's hole, which keeps it unobservable because as the radiation moves towards the outer edge, it gets absorbed back into the source of the radiation itself. In this way, you have the whole kinetic-potential energy conversion happening, like the swing of a pendulum, but it's not observable. All we can observe is the acceleration, not the radiation. Why not, right?

Where am I going with all this? Well, I hope people like Randell Mills continues to try and solve problems and not work within solutions and finds a new source of safe energy that everyone wants to believe is "impossible" -- you know, because the Earth is flat and all that stuff that scientists know with certainty. I hope that someone like Lisa Randall figures out my everything-is-a-donut theory and proves it for me, somehow. Granted, I think the former will happen sooner than the latter, but that's fine by me. I don't need to be proven right; people can continue to argue with reality. Like fools.

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I don't know why, but I've had so many things I've wanted to write in the last month (yes, it's been almost a month since my last update, sigh) but for some reason, I just haven't been able to commit my thoughts into words for long enough to get a coherent entry written.

(I know what you're thinking: like this entry is coherent, either? Okay, fine -- that's my point, get it?)

I generally try to write fewer, but longer, entries because I know how hard it is to keep up with folks who post lots of little entries all the time, but now I'm realizing: they probably do it so they can get a thought off their chest rather than not posting anything, like I have been all month long.

Maybe I should try an experiment for November, where I write entries of whatever length they happen to be, and just post stuff. Those of you who read this will let me know if it's okay or not, right?

It's finally official (after Rafat Ali at PaidContent.org said yesterday) that AOL has acquired Weblogs, Inc.!

I wonder if this means WIN properties will start linking into AOL content more. Regardless, it's a good move for AOL and I hope Wall Street gets it, too.

(dossy.org)