Author: Alan

News from Mars

Hellooooooo??? Here doggie!!!Steve gave me a heads up by instant message and I spent two hours at the end of yesterday listening to the landing on Mars live from NASA. I tagged Mel, too. Here is the site for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Get some Tang and food in tubes and follow along.

The photo right is the rear view mirror shot or as NASA describes it

This image taken by the hazard avoidance camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows the rover’s rear lander petal and, in the background, the Martian horizon. Spirit took the picture right after successfully landing on the surface of Mars.

I wish I came with a hazard avoidance camera.

Trip Stateside

Trees in Marshmallow
Foggy view from the Thousand Islands Bridge, late afternoon

With freezing rain impeding our trip north to Hull, Quebec and the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, we decided to go south instead and explore Jefferson County, New York. We checked out Sackets Harbor which was lovely but largely closed, saw the War of 1812 battlefield there, went to a Hannafords in Watertown to buy a stack of New York newspapers, look for goofy US food like B&M “Brown Bread in a Can” from Portland, Maine (home of so much goodness), treats now denied Canadians like Campbell’s Cream of Shrimp soup – not to mention the topic of our kids’ favorite ska tune, Mephiskapheles “Bumblebee Tuna”. I picked up a six of Lake Placid Brewery 46er IPA as well as Sackets Harbor 1812 Ale – the former is drinking better than the latter. We went to a Borders at the mall and the Red Lobster, a fast food place which has never seen my face before but which won me over with $6.99 broiled flounder. Both were a good surprise but the latter gave rise to a mystery which I humbly ask you to pursue sympathetic to the rather private circumstances of the moment…what is the dimple for? I am thinking an ash tray but do folk really do that?

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Spam as Crime

I noticed this over at Will’s: Bill C-460, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Unsolicited Electronic Mail). Sure we all hate spam but this is too much:

  • It is too late. Email is lost. Why criminalize activity in a medium which constitutes more than 50% of activity on the medium. You may as well outlaw cross-posting on Usenet.

  • Is spamming really a crime? What gets to be crime? Not just bad things.

  • The offenses are insane. Up to a quarter million dollars and/or two years for a first offence.

Have a look at a real data related Canadian criminal code provision, s. 181:

Every one who wilfully publishes a statement, tale or news that he knows is false and that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.

This section actually addresses the wrong – “that causes or is likely to cause injury or mischief to a public interest” – and caps the maximum imprisonment at two years. Under C-460 a second offence can get you five years and there is no requirement to do any harm.   Maybe I have lived a charmed life but I in my seven years as a web nerd have never seen a “sexually explicit pop-up”. Do they exist? Apparently he is a commando in the fight to combat what he terms commercial “cyber wars” with crime control credentials.

Don’t worry. It is only a private member’s bill so has gone nowhere, it’s natural destiny. It was the efforts of Mel’s local MP, Dan McTeague, who apparently believes the annoying and vulgar should be criminalized. Most of my friends are annoying and vulgar.   McTeague appears to be the only Liberal in Canada not to be a cabinet minister under either Chretien or Martin.

First New Thing of 2004

Not so much greasy as fatty

Not being hung New Year’s Day has advantages. A bagle, 30% butter fat cream cheese and artichoke heart salad for lunch, french restaurant dinnerware, damask linen. I’ve had two already. How many until I would kill myself through tangy goodness overload? Cream cheese is one of those things that we have to be forgiving with ourselves about. This 30% butter fat is care of the Baltic Deli – I’ve never seen a higher percentage. I think that’s called butter.

Later: photo reduced due to outcry by the hungover. What the hung see.