Month: May 2007

Internet Law We Can All Agree With

There are few things people agree upon as much as the benefits of jailing spammers and it looks like the law caught a biggie:

A man nicknamed the “spam king” for allegedly sending out millions of junk e-mails has been arrested in the US. Robert Soloway, 27, was arrested in Seattle, Washington, after being indicted on charges of mail fraud, identity theft and money laundering. Mr Soloway has pleaded not guilty to all the charges. Prosecutors say Mr Soloway became one of the world’s biggest spammers, using computers secretly infected with orders to send out millions of his e-mails.

Fortunately, g-mail has effectively blocked most of the spam he sent me. Yup, it has been quite quiet for a year or two now. But, it is something of a testament to the staff at the Internet that email has not collapsed due to the load of 95% or more of their coal-stoking capacity has gone to sending junk. So here’s to the copytypists and telegraph operators who actually keep the whole thing going despite the acts of the wicked like Mr. Soloway.

Did I Ever Mention How I Dislike Pat Binns?

For those of you who rightfully have no idea who Pat Binns is, you can relax now as he is once again someone with a bunch of bad ideas who is now without the power to implement any of those bad ideas. Ruk – who we popped in on at Dublin NH on the way here – made sure it was done right.  And I am happy to say that the new premier, Mr. Robert Ghiz, has also done right and taken on his responsibilites to the Canadians who live in PEI a little more seriously than Mr. Binns could ever imagine doing:

In the CBC Radio interview Monday night, the province’s next premier was also asked whether he would stand by his pledge to end the perennial practice of replacing Tory-leaning contract workers on the provincial payroll, in order to replace them with Liberals. “The days of firing people are over,” he said firmly. “The [Canadian] Charter of Rights and Freedoms has been clear on this.”

Whatever my part was in laying the ground for that statement [Warning: the first link is a .pdf!!] – me now over four years removed from living in those parts – I am pretty pleased to have been able to play that part. I am also pleased for the folk who had the courage to say they got shafted and stood up for their rights in the case. It will be interesting to see how a government that respects the Constitution will change the lives of the Canadians who live in PEI.

I am also pleased for Cynthia Dunsford, blogger and our sometime comment maker hereabouts who won her riding as well as for Craig and all the others who consistently worked or bitched about the last lot when working against them or speaking out could compromise your career in a place where a political leader can and did use influence in a way that might shock because it damn well should have shocked. And good for us all, I suppose, not having a bunch of yahoos who might justify things with arguments like “you wouldn’t understand” or “it’s an Island-made solution” as tax dollars were poured into another dead-end, untendered, unaccountable scheme. Sadly, now and until the end of their mandate in a few days, the exiting Tories will now have their self-appointed task of destroying the record through a couple of weeks of shreading and burning so that years from now someone will right a book proclaiming what a great bunch they were and there will be nothing left to refute the claim.

Oh well, in any event, I’ll be whistling a happier tune as we drive up northwest through New Hampshire, Vermont and New York’s north country on our way home.

Eating In Portland

In case you are wondering we are doing OK but you would be if you had Beal’s Ice Cream (hard ice cream specialists), Red’s Dairy Freeze (soft serve specialists), Maine Diner on the way here (lobster roll and chowder), Gritty McDuff’s (lamb burder and cask ale), 3 Dollar Dewey’s (fish sandwich but shockingly no smoked fish chowder), baseball game hot dogs (plain please), Beale Street BBQ (bulk ribs…say that again…bulk ribs), Scratch Baking Co. (blondies and peabean coffee) and a trip to Hannaford for a side of salmon and enough scallops to stuff seven for under thirty-eight bucks.  Scratch Baking was a bit of a surprise.  Even though it is a few blocks away, I had it in my head it was pricey.  Not so.  Blondies for $1.75.  And fine beer and wine, too.  Achoffe IPA and a half Cantillon for $6.99.  Nutty.  But seeing as owner Bob co-founded Magic Hat Brewing of Burlington, VT it makes sense.  Portland is the new Burlington, you know.

Three Signed Balls

So we are out early at the ball park to get a good seat behind home.  We are all covered in red to fit in with the minor league Red Sox crowd.   The kids say they want to get the balls signed.  I had three that I had bought for 500 Up and the kids wanted to bring them just in case and away I go, off on a fool’s errand, thinking that I would get some old guy selling programs to sign when a nice lady in a staff shirt tells me to stand over there.  “Over there” is a little pen with guys with big cameras and other guys with binders of memorabilia.   So we stand and we wait and after a few minutes the kids start to complain.  A lesson in patience or a lesson in dashed dreams.  I know not which but either is good for a kid in grade three.  Then a Reading player comes over, a memorabilia guy shouts Michael, he signs and turns and his back says “Garciaparra” – Michael, not Nomar however.  The kids aren’t satisfied.  They don’t want no stinking Reading players autograph.  So we wait.  Nothing.  Then a guy walks out.  A kid.  A tall skinny kid with 11 on his back.  He lifts a finger and then walks away.   “Awwww” the kids say.  I hear “awwww” again and a huff for good measure.   But then Mr. 11 comes back, signs a memorabilia thing for a memorabilia guy and I hear myself say from the back “can these three kids get their balls signed?” and he says sure and a path opens to the front.  Three red dressed kids are scooted forward and he signs each one with a neat and natty signature but I can’t read the name and he walks away in one direction and the kids and I go in another.

Back in the stands, we show the balls and say who is number 11?   Apparently Clay Buchholz was Boston’s Minor League Player of the Year in 2006 and he beat Roger Clemens in his last start.   More ball cases now needed.

Three Signed Balls

So we are out early at the ball park to get a good seat behind home.  We are all covered in red to fit in with the minor league Red Sox crowd.   The kids say they want to get the balls signed.  I had three that I had bought for 500 Up and the kids wanted to bring them just in case and away I go, off on a fool’s errand, thinking that I would get some old guy selling programs to sign when a nice lady in a staff shirt tells me to stand over there.  “Over there” is a little pen with guys with big cameras and other guys with binders of memorabilia.   So we stand and we wait and after a few minutes the kids start to complain.  A lesson in patience or a lesson in dashed dreams.  I know not which but either is good for a kid in grade three.  Then a Reading player comes over, a memorabilia guy shouts Michael, he signs and turns and his back says “Garciaparra” – Michael, not Nomar however.  The kids aren’t satisfied.  They don’t want no stinking Reading players autograph.  So we wait.  Nothing.  Then a guy walks out.  A kid.  A tall skinny kid with 11 on his back.  He lifts a finger and then walks away.   “Awwww” the kids say.  I hear “awwww” again and a huff for good measure.   But then Mr. 11 comes back, signs a memorabilia thing for a memorabilia guy and I hear myself say from the back “can these three kids get their balls signed?” and he says sure and a path opens to the front.  Three red dressed kids are scooted forward and he signs each one with a neat and natty signature but I can’t read the name and he walks away in one direction and the kids and I go in another.  

Back in the stands, we show the balls and say who is number 11?   Apparently Clay Buchholz was Boston’s Minor League Player of the Year in 2006 and he beat Roger Clemens in his last start.   More ball cases now needed.

Is China Monitoring Dullards?

Maybe it is just a state plan to keep an eye on the yakky dullards amongst the citizenry:

New rules by a Chinese government-backed Internet group maintain strict controls over the country’s bloggers, requiring them to register with their real names and identification cards. The guidelines from the Internet Society of China (http://www.isc.org.cn), a group made up of China’s major Internet companies, contradict state media reports this week claiming that China was considering loosening registration requirements for bloggers to allow anonymous online journaling.

Well, fat chance of that. Given what might be called “unhealthy content” by a blutocrat working in a dictatorship one can only presume that the search to squash it is really just a great make work project. Which may make it more honest: in dictatorships, people are paid to idly read the web while in the free world people are paid while they idly read the web.

Facebook Thoughts

Now that I am obsessed with Facebook and expect the feeling to continue for the next sixteen days or so, it gets hard to actually read news and, you know, blog. Blogs have readers and hits but I have friends at Facebook – including that guy who insists we took a course together in New Jersey last summer. But you can understand entirely why sensible employers are cracking down as it is an utter time suck with little or no real productive use. Not the greatest co-worker though there is that picture of the guy you did not keep up with from the time he ate pickled eggs and took off his pants.

Apparently Facebook may have a death wish, however, as it wants to reinvent itself:

Facebook Inc. has bucked the Silicon Valley acquisition trend, remaining independent of larger technology companies. Now the social-networking start-up is seeking ways to reach the big leagues on its own. On Thursday, the Palo Alto, Calif., company will announce a new strategy to let other companies provide their services on special pages within its popular Web site. These companies will be able to link into Facebook users’ networks of online friends, according to people familiar with the matter.

Translation? You are about to be spammed. Yik…it’s going to get on my favorite t-shirt and everything. But with a really useful interface, an explosion of activity recently as well as talk of billions and billions of revenue from the stock market who can blame the 22 year old geek who created the thing. Show him the money.

Oh, well. Like most things it will be fun for a while then work then moved on from and then an embarrassment then forgotten then remembered then finally forgotten and one guy in his mid-forties with wads of cash will tell his pals at the yacht club again about how he made a killing when he was 22. Unless he doesn’t take the cash.

Group Project: Giambi’s Slip or Blurt

Last night, listening to the ever excellent Tony Paige on WFAN at 3 am, I was listening to callers list any number of reasons to support or decry what Jason Giambi said last week and what should be done about it. It struck me that we’ve been though quite distinct waves of sports and drugs over the last few decades, according to that most important personal characteristic – my foggy memory:

  • 1970s: when I was a kid in school, steroids were what East German swimmers and other Soviet athletes took. We didn’t know their names and could never think of them as heroes as they were cheaters plain and simple. They bad, we good even when we lost to them.
  • 1980s: Somewhere in here Sports Illustrated does a huge article on how high school and college kids in sport are using steroids regularly. In 1988, Ben Johnson certainly let the world know that it athletes from the west used steroids. Sports illustrated posted comparison photos of changes to his shoulder mass. Saturday Night Live did comparison photos to US women sprinters upper lips.
  • 1990s: Lyle Alzado admits doing steroids before the NFL player dies. The early ’90s baseball strike leads amazingly (and quite unexpectedly to everyone everywhere…like…you know…pixie magic dust had settled on the game) to the late 1990 home run boom by all these big guys.
  • The new millennium: Jose Canseco proves you do not have to be clever to be an author and everyone almost admits that people they knew when they were young knew people who did steriods. Barry Bonds approaches Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record. Giabmi now says all of baseball should apologize.

So, it is pretty clear that we’ve known about steroid use for a long time and anyone who thinks Mark McGuire’s surprised look means anything is nuts. But why do we care? We like people being able to do amazing things and steroids let them do that even if it later on robs them of their health – after all it’s a free country, right? If we now celebrate the baseball players who came out of the late 1990s, should we not allow the Soviet-era swimmers back into the pantheon, too? And how different is it from Michael Vick hosting dog fighting, anyway? Where do ethics fit in in all of this? And whose ethics? Do we take apart baseball because we want it pure even though we loved the home runs when everyone knew the players were on the drugs? Isn’t it just entertainment and we are all consenting adults?

Group project rules apply.

Shot put 2007: Day one, 21 May 2007 – 16 lbs, 22 feet or 6.7 metres. Day two: hit 21 feet twice. Herself at 8 got 16 feet with the 2 kg shot. Day three: hit 22 feet three times. Day four, 16 July: 22.5, 23.5 and 24 feet. 24 is 7.32 metres. Day five, 13 August: a bunch of 22 footers and a 24.5 – best yet. Compadre started hoisting them 32 feet but he is a pup at 35. Day six, 20 August: a bunch of 22 and 23 footers and a 24. I am now sneeking in the low end of provincial championship results for men under retirement age while having no style at all. Someday, I could be on Throwers Club.