MemeMachineGo!

When I went to work for an ISP in late 1998, a perk of the job was free DSL. When I left them, I couldn’t go back. I’ve been paying for my own ever since.

My new employer offered to spring for my DSL. But I needed to change carriers. You know how cellphone companies are falling all over themselves to make it attractive to switch service to them? Well, DSL companies missed that memo. The new carrier demanded I cancel my old service before they would accept the order. Despite the fact that their work to switch on a line that’s already been provisioned for DSL is trivial, they tell me to expect service within ten business days.

In the meantime, I’m on a dial-up.

I’m pretty sure I have a 56K PCI modem somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. So I’m using the 56K PCMIA modem in my vintage 1998 laptop. Running Windows ‘98. In glorious 800 × 600 resolution.

People may complain about Windows 2000 and XP, and with plenty of good reasons, but they really do represent as big a jump over Windows 98 as DSL is over dial-up. I can’t even switch the keyboard back and forth between QWERTY and Dvorak without the Windows CD and plenty of rigamarole. In deference to Pocahontas, I’ve left it on QWERTY.

To give myself even a fighting chance at using the web, I spent some 15 minutes downloading Firefox so I could get Adblock and Flashblock. I installed a hosts file to block access to a lot of ad sites altogether.

I’ll note that I haven’t attempted to block ads in general in the past. I consider it generally a good thing that the sites I look at get ad revenue. I just don’t want flickering things interfering with my ability to read something. So I use FlashBlock; I turn off GIF animation; I use Firefox’s built-in pop-up blocking. And that’s enough for my use of the Web to generally not suck.

At 56K, things are different. Requesting animated GIFs from multiple sites puts a pretty big dent in loading a page. It’s now hard to believe the Web Boom happened when home Internet access was this lame. It’s not just the speed. It’s having to wait to make the connection. I’m used to compulsively checking my email every time I get near my computer. Most nights lately, I haven’t bothered at all.

And so, too, with updating my weblog, though I’ve got a big backlog of things to say. For instance, I hear there’s some kind of election going on…

Well, shit.

How do you make sure only your cat can get in by the cat door? And make sure she doesn’t carry in any dead rodents? Well, if you’re a really big geek, you build a silhouette recognition system to control the door.

We are not alone:

Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking “superorganisms,” highly complex conglomerations of human cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses.

This is one reason I find the resurrect (say) dinosaurs from DNA scenario unlikely. ‘cause I suspect they had their own complex interdependencies with creatures with their own DNA.

In this bad attitude How to survive maintenance programming thread on Perlmonks, I was greatly impressed by this tale of stealthy geek auto-amusement.

If you have a suspicious supervisor, sometimes you have to introduce the complications in more subtle ways.

I once used to do work on an invoicing system for people selling cars; the program’s job was to take an invoice template and fill it in. Naturally the template language could only be interesting if it were Turing-complete, but with suspicious minds around me I had to go for a two-pronged attack - get two different customers to request two different features, one of which required an optional line (“skip the following line if this value is zero”) and the other of which required a dynamically-selected continuation template.

Once I had those two in place I had control flow, and shortly thereafter I had the vehicle-invoicing prime number generator: about 300 lines across 7 templates.

Ah, happy days. :)

If a programming language is Turing Complete, it can be used to solve any problem that any computer can solve. One of the surprising results of computer science is the bar for this is very low.

When I first showed up at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1983, the only computer for most of the campus was a single IBM mainframe running MTS, the Michigan Terminal System. Access to the computer was metered by time logged in and CPU seconds used. My first programming course used FORTRAN. There was still an operational card punch machine attached to the mainframe, but I didn’t know of anyone using it.

But, today, they’re America’s most connected campus, according to Forbes.

On Saturday, I saw The Incredibles. Normally, I only see matinees or otherwise cheap showings, but I didn’t want to wait for this one, or see it in a theatre full of screaming children, so I actually paid full price. And I learned something: matinees are so expensive, there’s not much savings.

The Incredibles was a huge amount of fun. One of my reactions was that I’m not sure anyone should bother with live-action superhero movies. Despite the fine efforts of Spider-man and the X-Men, the superpowered fight scenes played much better computer-animated.

The other was: the makers of the Fantastic Four movie must be pissed.

The Incredibles: a super-powered family consisting of a big, strong guy, a stretchy person, a girl who can turn invisible and project force fields, and a hot-headed, impulsive boy with super-speed.

The FF: a super-powered family consisting of a big, strong guy, a stretchy person, a woman who can turn invisible and project force fields, and a hot-headed, impulsive young man who can set his body ablaze and fly.

You can’t help but notice this if you have any familiarity with the FF — while comics have lots of big, strong guys and stretchy people, there isn’t anything especially obvious about the confluence of invisibility and projecting force fields. And once you’ve noticed it, they almost seem to be deliberately twitting Marvel. The FF’s patriarch is Mr. Fantastic. The Incredibles’ is Mr. Incredible. One villain we see in the Incredibles bears a large similarity to one of the FF’s classic villains.

It’s nothing actionable, but it does mean that a lot of people seeing the FF movie will be thinking “hey, I’ve seen this before.”

Montage from Team America

The hour is approaching to give
it your best — and you’ve got to
reach your prime.

That’s when you need to put
yourself to the test and show us
all a passage of time —

You’re gonna need a montage!
MONTAGE!

Ooh, it’s gonna take a montage!
Montage!

Show a lot of things happening
at once remind everyone of
what’s going on!

And with every shot show just a
little improvement - to show it
all would take too long!

That’s called a montage!
MONTAGE! Even Rocky had a
montage! MONTAGE!

I saw Rocky for the first time recently. And it occurred to me that montages are one of the movies’ most dishonest devices.

Most of the time in the real world, accomplishing big goals is done mostly through doing undramatic things consistently. Working every day at writing, or studying, or programming, or exercise, or whatever. It’s the most important and most time-consuming part.

Movies turn that upside-down. Dramatic clashes are portrayed as the important part. And what’s really the important part is compressed to two minutes with a cool soundtrack.

Don’t mistake me as arguing for realism in this regard — I don’t want to watch a movie consisting solely of watching someone getting up early to study every day.

But I know I’ve sometimes acted like I could get a big project done in the last two minutes. And that’s not going to work no matter how cool your soundtrack is.

=v= Congresscritter John Hostettler is launching a faith-based campaign against naming a highway with an immoral number:

"Every time I have been out in the public with an ‘I-69’ button on my lapel, teenagers point and snicker at it. I have had many ask me if they can have my button. I believe it is time to change the name of the highway. It is the moral thing to do."

What will they 86 next? Perhaps they'll try to ban rational numbers, which have a way of supporting global warming science and other inconvenient forms of heathenism so beloved by the reality-based community.

DSL is in da house. Regularly scheduled blogging resumes tomorrow.

Well, as regular as it’s ever been.

A girl in Minnesota just became the world’s fifth rabies survivor due to the timely intervention of an induced coma.

So I called Pocahontas over to look at these dozens of pictures of adorable kittens. We were oohing and aahing and oh-so-cuting, when there was this mournful meow at my office door — one of our cats, Pepper. He’s part Siamese and does mournful really well.

“Another Internet porn widow,” I said, “pining for affection, but being ignored while we look at younger, cuter cats on-line.”

I was joking, but Pocahontas really did feel bad that we were neglecting our real, live cats for pictures of cats on the net, and she never did finish looking at the pictures on that page.

Remember the cliched mystery clue of the letter that came from a typewriter whose ‘e’ was a little below the baseline?

No surprise that it’s out of date, but did you know that all color laser printer output can be traced to an individual printer?

Like Photoshop’s refusal to open images of currency, its stated purpose is to fight counterfeiting, and it’s an example of consumers paying for a feature no one actually wanted. Unlike that, though, the laser printer colormark obviously has much wider potential application.

As I recently mentioned, Snow Crash says:

There’s only four things we [Americans] do better than anyone else — music, movies, microcode (software), high-speed pizza delivery.

Paul Graham takes a stab at explaining why,

Americans are good at some things and bad at others. We’re good at making movies and software, and bad at making cars and cities. And I think we may be good at what we’re good at for the same reason we’re bad at what we’re bad at. We’re impatient. In America, if you want to do something, you don’t worry that it might come out badly, or upset delicate social balances, or that people might think you’re getting above yourself. If you want to do something, as Nike says, just do it.

Home-schooled identical twin girls. An interest in the Civil War. Access to large quantities of Plastalina. Add it all up, and what do you get? Dioramas recreating Civil War battles with clay cats.

The twins said they’ve yet to meet others who do what they do.

Go figure. You must also see Ruth’s Civil War Horses (and Cats) page, their cat census, and their gallery.

(Via Metatalk)

Today, Sumana suddenly got mad about the Fuller Projection. I emailed her my favorite cure for the Mercator Projection Blues: Bucky Fuller’s Dymaxion Map.

The Dymaxion Map is the only flat map of the entire surface of the earth that reveals our planet as it really is an island in one ocean without any visible distortion of the relative shapes and sizes of the land areas, and without splitting any continents.