I just checked the mail, and…
SHELLY’S ALCOR BRACELET WAS IN IT!!!
Happy news!
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Baby lizards!
On the way to the office this morning, we spotted this little guy running around…he’s so ky00t! He’s a Florida anole; the whole place is overrun with them, but I’ve never seen one this small before. (This pic is very close to actual size.)
He was a bugger to catch the first time, but after I caught him, he had a great time running all over me. He finally jumped off (onto the sidewalk, not a good place for a lizard to be), so I had to catch him again to get him into the bushes. By the time I got him there, he’d just about lost all fear of humans, and was letting me handle him with no problem.
From another forum: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JOE REPUBLICAN
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JOE REPUBLICAN
Joe gets up at 6 am and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.
With his first swallow of coffee, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised. All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance — now Joe gets it too.
He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry. In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body an d how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.
He walks to the subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.
Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn’t think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.
It’s noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.
Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime.
Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards. He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers’ Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.
He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to. Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day.
Joe agrees: “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I’m a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.”
What dreams may come…
So yesterday, I was dreaming about nanotech.
Specifically, I was dreaming about Shelly, datan0de, and nanotech. In a weird kind of way.
In the dream, the three of us were in a huge industrial factory of the kind that was built at the start of the industrial revolution–an enormous brick building, with spinning metal shafts along the ceiling that drive great pulleys connected by long belts to machines that did the actual work (and sometimes lopped off people’s fingers). For some reason I’m not quite clear on, it was desperately, vitally important that we come up with a way to construct generic, programmable nanoscopic assemblers, soon (like in six months), or we would all die.
During the dream, the three of us were arguing about the best way to go about constructing prototype assemblers. datan0de, who was wearing his DragonCon gear, was arguing for a “bottom-up” approach: design a molecule that would do what we wanted, then figure out a way to make that molecule spontaneously self-assemble when the correct ingredients were brought together in the correct way.
I was arguing for a “top down” approach, where we first design the assembler, then construct it on a molecule-by-molecule basis by using devices such as atomic force microscopes to place every molecule in position. Once the first assembler had been hand-built in this way, we could then program it to build more assemblers.
Shelly was arguing for a third approach–namely, designing the assembler, then constructing protein-based machinery to build the assembler by using custom strands of DNA to create the protein-based machinery. She argued that datan0de and I were trying to reinvent the wheel; the mechanism to create proteins from a strand of DNA already exist, so if we could figure out how to build a machine out of proteins that would construct the assembler, then we could use the machinery inside a living cell to cause the cell to churn out assemblers just by cooking up the appropriate DNA and introducing it into the cell.
More FetishCon ’04 fun stuff!
Yep, still more yummy goodness from FetishCon ’04. Friday night, datan0de went with Shelly and I, our roommate, and his girlfriend to the Fetish Factory party, which was a lot of fun. We ran into a bunch of friends there, including someone I haven’t seen in quite a while, who I ran into later at the convention proper.
The Fetish Factory parties are strict-dress-code affairs (fetishwear only), which actually helps to create a very immersive atmosphere–it was a lot more fun than I’d predicted. Pics of Shelly and I and our roommate’s girlfriend, as usual not work-safe
A quote…
…ruthlessly ganked from skitten‘s journal:
There are two kinds of people — those who finish what they start and so on.”
–Robert Byrne
I have tons and tons of pics and stories about FetishCon still to post, but I’m running late and likely won’t be able to for a while, so instead I’ll just rave about a movie.
Shaun of the Dead, to be exact.
We went to see the movie last night with all the Smooshlings, and I can safely say it was by far the best zombie flick I’d seen all day. In fact, it was hands-down the best zombie romantic comedy ever filmed in London.
Seriously, it’s hysterical. Much, much funnier than I expected it to be. It’s dead-balls on target, skewering every zombie movie cliche in existance; it even gets in a little poke at Resident Evil toward the end. And it’s all brilliant deadpan stuff. Highly, highly recommended. (Pay special attention to the scene where Shaun goes to the local grocery to pick up some Coke after the zombies have started taking over London…)
FetishCon ’04: What’s more fun than hot girl-on-girl action?
Hot girl-on-girl action in full suspension, of course!
One of the high points of the convention was Lew’s demonstration of double-suspension techniques. These two clearly had a LOT of fun during the workshop, and it really showed.
One of the things I like about the kind of suspension he does is that it affords the models a tremendous amount of mobility, while still being extremely secure. Still photos don’t really do justice to just how much mobility there is; essentially, this kind of suspension allows you to do just about anything you want, only in three dimensions rather than two.
During the demonstration, he said they have yet to find a position in the Kama Sutra that can’t be done in suspension, and I’m inclined to believe him.
Note: No nudity in these pics, but still not work-safe!
FetishCon ’04: Shelly in the Spiderweb
As promised, the first round of pics from FetishCon ’04.
Shelly and I met up with a friend of ours, P, who we haven’t seen in a while. (Actually, this was a recurring theme for the weekend; I met an old friend I haven’t seen in about six years or so, and we got the opportunity to catch up, which was cool.) P was acting as DJ for the post-con party, so after things wrapped up on Saturday night, we hung out with him and met many of the people who were planning the post-con events, including Lew Rubens, who was one of the presenters and did several sessions on suspension bondage–more pics of those later. 🙂
We hung out and chilled whle they rehearsed the post-con show, which made us the only two people not connected with the show who’ve ever seen it, on account of the hurricane, which killed power to the hotel just before it was supposed to be staged. Afterward, P practiced some rope bondage on Shelly.
Anyone who’s put off by nudity or bondage probably shouldn’t click, as these pictures are SO not work-safe
Whew! Another convention, another %#$@ hurricane…
What’s the deal with hurricanes landing on Tampa every time we go to a convention?
Anyway, we’re back from FetishCon, which was huge fun–much, much, much better than either of us had anticipated (and Shelly got suspended!). I’ll be posting some decidedly not work-safe pics later.
Since the convention hotel was about ten minutes from home, we didn’t get a room, but drove back and forth to the con. We weren’t counting, of course, on getting clobbered by the latest hurricane, so by the end of the weekend, things were getting a bit tricky…we were, quite literally, dodging debris in the road (including fallen traffic lights, road signs, trees, and the like) each way. We didn’t suffer any real damage, and didn’t even lose power, thought the hotel did. My office got a bit flooded, too.
Good news: Logged on to one of the net-admin newsgroups I read this morning (where I had posted this saga of a spammer named Art Schwartz and my dealings with his Web hosting firm), and discovered that the resulting backlash against Hopone Internet was great enough, and enough people chose to blacklist Hopone as a result, that Hopone threw in the towel and terminated Art and his Web site permanently. Y’know, I wonder if he realizes I would never have made such a big stink of it if he hadn’t started emailing me death threats.
And just for fun:
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I amNyarlathotep! The 999 forms of Nyarlathotep are a point of meditation for the true initiate. It is through these manifold faces that the secrets of the universe are made known. Called “The Crawling Chaos”, Nyarlathotep is the disembodied ego of Azathoth and thus the universal “I” of known reality. Some of the many documented forms are; Father of Knives, Nephren-Ka, the Black Man, the Beast of the Lashing Tongue to name a few. |
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| Which Great Old One are you? | |
The return of Art Schwartz: a sordid tale
Many of you already know the backstory of this tale. Namely:
Periodically for the past couple of years, I and other readers of newsgroups like comp.graphics.apps.photoshop, alt.graphics.photoshop, and the like have been spammed by a particularly slimy spammer named Art Schwartz, who collects email addresses from graphics-related newsgroups and spams his Web site, www.perfect-shareware.com, where he says one can get Photoshop and other high-ticket graphics apps for $29.95. It’s a scam, of course; he’s a credit card fraudster, not a pirate, and those dumb enough to fall for the bait get (1) a list of pirate Web sites and (2) big credit card bills.
He’s been hosted by an outfit called Cove Software Systems (“Covesoft”) for years. Covesoft has for years ignored LARTs and permitted him to spam. Recently, as these sorts of outfits do, Covesoft went titsup and got bought by Superb Internet, the retail marketing arm of Hopone. So when some spam showed up in my main email address and one of my spamtrap addresses, I sent ’em along to Superb’s abuse address.
The next day, I get a rash of threatening emails, as documented here, from the spammer. Okay, that’s not cool–so I pick up the phone and have a nice long chat with a person at Superb who identified himself as the head of their abuse department.
The good bits:
The person I spoke to claimed Superb/Hopone have strict zero-tolerance spam policies. Okay, I ask, why is this Web site still up? We haven’t received any complaints, he says. Ah, but you have, I tell him, from me, on thus and such a date, with these headers–would you like me to send you the spam again? Oh, yes, we have received complaints, he says, but our policy is not to take any action unless we receive a number of complaints from different people. You have, I say–I can give you the email addresses of about a half-dozen Usenet readers who’ve LARTed you, there’s a conversation on one of the Photoshop newsgroups about it right now.
So then he says, Well, the official policy of my bosses is that as long as our customers pay their bills, they can do anything they want, so long as what they’re doing is not illegal and doesn’t get us into SPEWS or Spamhaus. Sez I, spamming addresses scraped from newsgroups is illegal, the CAN-SPAM law is right on point about this. You’re right, it is, I’ll pull the site right now, he says, and sure enough, Perfect-Shareware.com stops resolving that afternoon.
Fast forward to earlier this week, when I get an email from abuse@hopone.net in my mailbox. The email says We have put www.perfect-shareware.com back online. If you feel this customer is doing something illegal, contact the police, not us. The business relationship between Hopone Internet and this customer is none of your business. Do not email us again.
So, just for the record: Hopone/Superb Internet are black-hat spam supporters. No reasonable person should touch them with a ten-foot pole–which is, of course, why you’ll find criminals like Art Schwartz using them.
The normal course of a spam-supporting business is to go bankrupst. When it happens to Hopone, it can’t be soon enough.