Rancid. Rotten. Rubbish.

We're the flowers in the dustbin
We're the poison in the human machine
We're the future, your future

As a rule I don't listen to the radio, but I like to catch up on what "the kids" are listening to from time to time. Especially if I'm driving a car that I can't plug my media player into. Radio has given me some great music in the past but most days it just isn't worth the time. And some days it's just fucked up.

I had the radio on last week and caught a concert promo for Rancid. If you're not familiar with them - one, you're very lucky and should buy some lotto tickets, and two, they're a ska punk band formed in '91. The ad featured two songs in the background, "Ruby Soho" and "Time Bomb," and that's just sad. I listened to those songs when I was a freshman. Over ten years later and that's the best they can do to advertise themselves? I guess they needed a way to draw the last rude boy in existence out of hiding.

I don't know what's worse, that Tim and Lars are still in a punk band or that they sold out a 1,500-person show. Some musicians can be legitimately active for twenty or thirty years, but there is a definite shelf-life on punks. When your music evokes youthful rebellion, the barbaric yawp of teenagers and new adults, and you're middle-aged, it's time to stop. Even if they were fifteen when Operation Ivy was together, they're still over thirty now. Stop. Fucking. Playing. Kids, stop encouraging them. It's the only way they'll learn.

I saw The Sex Pistols on Letterman when I was sixteen - seventeen years after Sid Vicious died, and the year after "Ruby Soho" was a single. It would have been ridiculous if I hadn't known they gave us "Holiday in the Sun" and "God Save the Queen." Johnny Rotten could have passed as a parody of punk if only he'd had more energy. It looked like he was doing a bad imitation of himself twenty years younger.

Some people are supposed to live fast and die young. Sid did it, Johnny Ramone died of prostate cancer, and Keith Richards is going to outlive our grandchildren. Who will probably be shouting "pick it up, pick it up, pick it up" on their way to a Rancid show.



No Future, no future, no future for you

We band of buggered

I heard this before I saw it, and when I looked up at the TV I wasn't upset, just... disappointed. I really have to wonder where their ad agency got the balls to use the St. Crispin's Day speech to hawk PS3s.

Internet service pimp, part II

Enough backlash finally built up that Charter has decided to stop the NebuAd rollout. I'd like to believe, given the announcement's timing, that my post had absolutely nothing to do with it.
via Ars Technica and Charter Watcher.

Microsoft publishes bullshit; also, water is wet

The news from Redmond is, as usual, ugly. Microsoft Vice President Mike Nash has published a document that's generating some talk. It seems that no one wants to run Vista and this produces a lot of hand wringing in their monolithic dungeons, so they put out a treatise on all the reasons to upgrade from Windows XP and the problems you'll have if you don't. I haven't read the propaganda, and I'm not going to, but I'm willing to bet this article is more than a bit hyperbolic.

I'm the last person to defend Microsoft, about anything, ever. I jumped ship years ago and encourage everybody I meet to do the same. I'll pay to see a George Lucas movie before I buy anything from Microsoft. At this point I won't even loot a copy of Windows; it just has nothing to offer me. Nothing good, anyway. They've dug a hole so deep it would take a Herculean effort to earn any praise, even backhanded. They can integrate some Unix principles into their OS, they can release interoperability documentation, whatever. Even when they do something right they do it wrong.

I've drawn some conclusions from some of the remarks in the Nash's whitepaper. It's no more than a reiteration of the party line: XP is old and busted, Vista is new hotness. Nash says that waiting to be upgrade leaves users vulnerable because XP and its attendant applications are outdated and "don't employ proper security safeguards." He wants you to use Vista and new applications that don't employ proper security, which you'll be reminded of with each new 0-day attack. Vista is supposedly built of sturdier stuff, making it more difficult to compromise. The comments about XP use leaving you insecure only mean that all those years they spent telling you that XP was a security paragon, they were mistaken, but new hotness Vista is really secure. Which is taking the piss. All it takes is one developer working on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon, or one user installing a new screensaver downloaded from a "respectable" website in eastern Europe.

Let's be clear: security begins and ends with the user. Only a truly insecure system - like most Windows releases to date - can be owned without user interaction. A dumb user can cause a secure system to be destroyed, and a smart user can keep an insecure system intact.

As for users who don't upgrade because mission-critical applications won't run on Vista, Nash says that they should just switch now because those apps will still be incompatible with Windows 7, due in under two years. So he wants users to be without functioning software immediately rather than have two more years to prepare for the changeover. For that matter, he wants users to shell out for an upgrade now, and do it again in two years.

The Tech Cult article seemed to be drawing conclusions about the upgrade paths from XP to Win 7, but I don't see any evidence of those threats. Maybe he actually read the whitepaper, but I'll be damned if I waste my time doing that. In either case, I can't imagine anyone buying an upgrade-only version of Windows. It's more desirable to have fresh installs on bare metal every time; if memory serves, that can only be done with the more expensive "full" packages.

Look at features missing in Vista, I'm not sure why anyone would want to upgrade. Yes, they removed Active Desktop, but they dropped useful things, too. A lot of items on the list seem like fringe features (RIP, gopher) but they also seem like Microsoft went out of their way to cull them. Customize the Windows startup sound? Create secondary actions for files in the context menu? Shutdown menu in the Task Manager? Visual progress indicators in Defrag? Not with Vista. Hell, from the way it looks, they castrated the Defrag gui: no pause, no choosing which drive to defrag. Backup won't allow you to choose which directories to archive or exclude. The list goes on. Vista isn't an operating system, it's a digital charnel house.

Gaze upon it and know fear

Since Firefox is the heir of Netscape, academically it could have been assumed to support certain custom tags that other browsers wouldn't. All the same, I was shocked to find that not only was <blink> supported in current builds of Firefox, but that someone actually used it. I haven't seen <blink> in the wild since the last millennium, and hoped never to again. Luckily in these enlightened days, there is a cure.

Back in the day

The Launch of Insignificance

Rocketmail, as you may remember, was the original service from which Yahoo Mail was born in the late 90s.

Damn, that takes me back. I had a Rocketmail account when I was in high school.

Like having a pimp for an ISP

Imagine Charter and I standing together; Charter has a bandage around its hand and I have a black eye. The conversation goes like this: "I didn't mean to, baby, I'm sorry." "You'd better be, bitch, look what you did to my hand."

It started with Google. Charter's DNS was borked in March and returned bad IPs for google.com. That means every Google tool except image search was unreachable. Web search, Gmail, Google Talk, blog search, Google Video - dead. This affected users from Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Iowa, Minnesota, the whole fucking Midwest. Charter blamed it on a routing issue for over a month, which was total bullshit; when I fed google.com's IP to my browser, it connected. That's not a routing issue, that's a name issue. I switched to another set of DNS servers and started wondering when cellular connections would be a suitable replacement for cable and DSL.

Then comes the news about NebuAd. Charter planned and plans to install NebuAd boxes on their network to track users' browsing and deliver tailored ads. The fear was that the box would use deep packet inspection to pull keywords or other data out of pages being viewed by users, but Charter assured us it would look at URL data only. Here's an illuminating interview with Charter veep Ted Schremp, with quotes like:

What you said is correct. What's being said is incorrect.

and:

The enhanced advertising solution does not utilize deep packet inspection. It looks at URL level information only.

The nebulous devices were to be tested in four major markets. Notices were sent to affected users. An opt-out procedure was in place. Charter even had the gall to say it would enhance the browsing experience. Fucking smoke and mirrors, every bit of it.

It's been dissected elsewhere but here's the local version. Opting out of the system is a two-step process. First you're directed to a unencrypted Charter page with a form asking for your name and address. That's a double-whammy: the ISP is asking for private information that it already has access to in an unsafe manner. That page redirects to NebuAd, which sets the opt-out cookie. Remember your first day on the internet, when you went through orientation and they told you that cookies were dangerous, that they could reveal personal information about you, that it was a good idea to block some- most- cookies? It's been standard internet procedure since nineteen-ninety-fucking-five to not let cookies stick around in your browser too long; most people should automatically clear them when the browser exits. That means having to opt-out again to reset the cookie every time you start browsing. Use two different browsers? Have to opt-out for each of them. Home network? Every computer. Upgrade your browser? It might not import the cookies from the old install that you should have deleted anyway. Re-install or upgrade the OS? You know the answer. And the cookie only stops tailored ad delivery; there's no way for the box on Charter's network to read the cookie and know not to track you. This isn't a functional opt-out system. All of this overlooks that the tracking should have been opt-in from the start, since ISPs shouldn't be giving that data to third parties without a signed warrant; why default to giving out personal information?

Congressmen wrote letters the Charter telling them to back off. Charter put the brakes on the roll out, and people might be forgiven for thinking that Charter was seriously looking at their privacy concerns. Then we read:

A Charter spokesperson attributed the delay to technology issues. "It will happen when we're technologically ready," the spokesperson told Online Media Daily.

Thanks a fucking heap, guys. Really.

That's not the end. NebuAd has been implemented at other ISPs and researchers have now figured out how the system works. It's actually a very basic idea that's been used for decades to great effect, classically known as a man-in-the-middle attack. The NebuAd box injects forged data into pages that have no affiliation with NebuAd, like Yahoo! or Google, and can redirect your browser to NebuAd sites to get their cookie. That's called a "cross-site exploit" and "browser hijack." I haven't found it in any reference to internet etiquette, but I think browser hijacks are generally considered pretty fucking impolite.

But wait, there's more! Wired's article contains a little extra somethin-somethin':

NebuAd has conceded that its boxes peer deep into internet packets to pull out URLs and search terms in order to classify each user's interests. That profile is then used deliver tailored ads on various partner websites.

Which is the exact opposite of what Schremp said earlier. I've chosen to think of him as a shill rather than a lying cocktwister, but that's a personal preference and you're free to differ.

The icing on the cake is where NebuAd may be getting its ideas. Internet old-timers will remember a product called Gator. Over the last decade, the parent company Claria has changed Gator's name three times, trying to shake the spyware stigma. Two vice presidents, two high-level managers, and a senior director at NebuAd all worked at Claria or Gator previously.

What. The. Fuck. I need a new ISP.

The least she could do

I close my eyes and see you before me
Think I would die if you were to ignore me
A fool could see just how much I adore you
I'd get down on my knees, I'd do anything for you

I'm the first to admit that my adolescent lovelife was awful. I was already a social cripple and the added threat of romantic rejection- the most devastating kind- paralyzed me. The girls that talked to me dealt with the verbal and emotional equivalents of rolling my body to prevent bed sores. That said, I got play. I was such a mack that I didn't have to say or do anything and the chicks still wanted next to me. Girls would call me and stay on the phone for hours in total silence, the certain kind of truly awkward silence that only teenagers are capable of. I never said more than a few words, as few as possible, but they kept calling. They asked me to walk them home from school. Most telling, they talked about me behind my back, and then someone ran off to tell me about it all, giggling like the schoolgirl she was. And I responded with as few words as possible; believe me when I say that was quite few. The strong and silent type went over in a major way in middle Ohio. I wasn't pregnancy-pact hot, but I was one-of-a-kind and priced out of their purses. My opinion mattered, more than theirs.

For all the interest during high school and that brief year of community college, I never started a campfire from the kindling. There were sparks and smoke, but no flames. Didn't know how to. The up-from-under look; the expectant-without-cause pause; the I-might-be-there meetings at games, parties, school dances, the mall; the stock-and-trade of teenage love dumbfounded me. It took me years but I get it now. If I had put any effort into a relationship, I would have been the pimp of the language arts hallway; freshmen, upperclassmen, foreign exchange students. Even if I couldn't have gotten a nickel in the dimehole, I can think of five girls that definitely should have given me blowjobs back in the day. Yeah, that's one for each finger. Sometimes I think about them during my personal time, when I'm TCB the way only I know how. Where's my head, Liz? Damn right it's in the alley behind that so-called Irish bar after you sang "I Touch Myself" karaoke. That kiss against the back wall would have been so much better if you were on your knees.

Yes, I went to football and volleyball games, coed parties, dances, and what passed for the mall. I was fourteen. And I only went to the volleyball games because the Blonde Chick asked me to, and I could never say no to the BC, which didn't work out great on my end. I don't know what you want from me.

Tumulus formido

Turn the page on the day, walk away
'Cause they're sensing what I say
I'm 45th-generation Roman, but I don't know'em

Why didn't anyone tell me about this?

So it wasn't that Julius appeared as a monarch over the Senate, after all. Cassius was only running the Tomb of Horrors module and Julius rolled a natural one. Some DMs are such asshats.

Straight tribbin'

After a month, there's little to say about the story of a homeless woman in Japan found in someone's closet. Most readers in the western world reacted with ninja jokes, followed by surprise that someone could be undetected in a house for that long. Lisa Katayama sheds some light on Japanese architecture and custom:

Japanese closets usually have two layers—a top shelf and a bottom shelf. They're deliberately made to be deep and dark so you can store blankets and mattresses inside. (Traditionally, Japanese sleep on mattresses on the floor; they put them away during the day to make space.)

Despite not being able to find a single Japanese news source carrying the story (except in syndication from Reuters,) the Chicago Tribune website has the story on two different pages. Submissions to Digg were linked to a third page at the Trib, which now returns a 404 but is available through Google cache.

All three articles at the Trib had different titles but the same copy. They copied the copy of the copy, and then copied that.

I submit that the colloquialism trippin' be replaced with the neologism tribbin'. And kudos to luke16 for his comment on the tale:

Japanese closet woman is watching you masturbate.

That is all.

Update June 20: Google cache has been removed, but it's also available on Duggmirror.

Listen up, you primitive screwheads

Fuck Rocky Horror. Fuck it to death. If you want a musical production about people trapped in the woods with unthinkable horrors from Beyond, there's only one show to see.

I'm not saying Tim Curry eating Meatloaf isn't fun for the whole family, but Brad Majors never cut off his own hand and replaced it with a chainsaw. Advantage: Ash.

It's playing in Toronto and Korea, so get your tickets now.

Blogga, please

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was published in 1499, a mere forty-four years after Gutenberg's Bible but with design elements centuries ahead of its time. Kottke and MIT can tell you all about that:

All of which makes the following puzzling:

The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is one of the most unreadable books ever published... The difficulty only heightens as one flips through the pages and tries to decipher the strange, baffling, inscrutable prose, replete with recondite references, teeming with tortuous terminology, choked with pulsating, prolix, plethoric passages. Now in Tuscan, now in Latin, now in Greek -- elsewhere in Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldean and hieroglyphs -- the author has created a pandemonium of unruly sentences that demand the unrelenting skills of a prodigiously endowed polyglot in order to be understood.

It's fascinating that a book so readable, so beautifully printed, and so modern would also be so difficult to read.

So, it's like Ulysses.

Only a congeries of iridescent globes, yet stupendous in its malign suggestiveness

Surprisingly, everyone in Anchorage seems to have forgotten to mention the massive spatial distortion in the east end. Dicks. We are indebted to Google for relaying images of the anomaly, undoubtedly the work of Yog-Sothoth. For Yog-Sothoth stands at the threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the threshold. He knows where the Old Ones broke through, and where They shall break through again. He will open the gate and cyclopean horrors from beyond the outer spheres shall pass by His ichorous throne, flowing in black streams from that world to this one. When Yog-Sothoth, the Key and the Door, spreads wide the tainted portal, fueled by His black engine and the blood of a thousand thousand stars, you shall glimpse His eldritch amorphous form for only a moment before Terror and Chaos devour your immortal soul.

Thank the Drowned Gods I don't live in Alaska.

Operation

A few weeks ago the fan in my Thinkpad starting making an unpleasant noise. The Friday before Memorial Day the noise changed, growing louder by an order of magnitude. I quickly moved a few important files to our network storage drive and shut the laptop down. I did a little research and it looked like replacing the fan would be fairly straightforward, so I ordered a new part. It was delivered Thursday.

It was the wrong part. I had ordered 91P8392, a long-style fan assembly. Long fans have an extra heat sink for, I believe, the gpu; it was otherwise identical to the short fan I was replacing (91P8393). The assembly sent to me had two labels: *93 on the part and *92 on the bag. No big, but I won't buy from that place again. Let the surgery commence.



Five screws across the front hold the palm rest down. They're all covered by glued tabs that were not replaced. I had enough trouble getting them off, I was about to go hunting for low-grade adhesive just to make the underside prettier.

Keyboard and front bezel removed, my nemesis is revealed. The copper piece on the left is the fan. I had to ask K if she had a set of microscrewdrivers because I stripped the head of my philips driver trying to get the retaining screws out. Her screw drivers had a sheen of dirt and sawdust on them, which is perfect for delicate work inside a computer.

"Fuck, it's dirty in here." Also: "The red wire goes on the left... I hope the new fan has the same color code."

The "new" fan with grease syringe.

A picture of the flipside. This was cool because it gave me a target for the new thermal grease. Three cheers for refurbished parts! What do you mean you don't like refurbs? Fine, I'll refurbish my own parts. With hookers. And blackjack. In fact, forget the refurbs.

Installed. I replaced everything and hit the power. No noise, but the fan is definitely working, and thus ends another episode within the ancient walls of my malfunctioning machines.

The first step to recovery

This isn't really an admission from Lucas that he has a problem; he probably just thinks it's funny. If he hadn't made me feel like a battered wife years ago, I might care. He probably thinks fans have a problem for having fond memories of Star Wars as it was.

Fuck you, George, I'm not going to see the new Indy movie. My wallet's off-limits to you. Oh, and Clone Wars can bite my fleshy ass. You fucked-up a great story and universe too many times. You're fat, old, cantakerous and opinionated, and not half as talented or as much fun as Harlan Ellison. Just go away.