This morning at 7:30am I got up, showered and made my way northeast to Sulphur Springs, Texas. The arraignment for my speeding ticket was at 10am in the morning and it takes about an hour and a half to get there from Dallas. The plan was to just enter a plea of not guilty and to start the trial process rolling forward. I arrived at Judge Glossup's court about 20 minutes early.

I didn't realize this but not all arraignments are the same. When I went to Albertville, Alabama to plea they had a courthouse. Everyone sat in the court room on wooden benches waiting for the judge to arrive. Then after he arrived he explained all the rules and what area of the law he would preside over. Then he went through each case and had the person walk up to the bench and plead guilty or not. In this case it was just a small office with two other clerks, like what you'd see if you went to get your driver's license renewed. It was a bit more dignified than a strip mall though as his office was right off the town square on Main street.

I introduced myself to the clerk and said that I was there for my speeding ticket arraignment. She got my information and looked it up in the computer. She said that will be $105. I told her that I wanted to plead not guilty. Then she got the plea form. In order to plead not guilty I would have to provide a $200 bond. This was a surprise. Since I was going to opt for a jury trial that meant an additional $5 fee. In my only other court case, Albertville, they just scheduled the trial like normal. However, Albertville didn't offer jury trials and what court system wants to sit through a speeding ticket jury trial. I was ready to accept my fate and go get the $205 they needed to move forward with the trial.

As the clerk was taking my paper work back to the judge to get him to sign it she stopped, turned around and asked me why I wanted a trial. I said I'm not guilty. She gave me this look like "well I know that" and said tell me why you're not guilty. I said I'm still building my case. Then she disappeared into the next room where the judge sits. When she came back she asked me if I might be interested in deferred adjudication. I asked her to explain the specifics and she said the court will dismiss your case if after 60 days you have no other traffic dispositions filed against you, in exchange you enter a plea of guilty and pay $150.

What is interesting is that at this point I felt like the tone of things changed. Prior to her mentioning of deferred adjudication I had no idea it was an option. Apparently it's only an option if you know to ask the judge for it, and he decides it's okay. She was very careful to tell me she was not trying to sway my decision to plead not guilty and that I was making up on own mind on this. Then the judge came up front and we started talking. He said getting a jury together and going to trial is a lot of expense and time. I felt like as soon as I told them I wanted a jury trial they wanted more than anything to avoid that. When the clerk was preparing my deferred adjudication forms she made sure to explain to me that I only have to pay the original speeding ticket if another court disposition comes in. She said that means you can still get another ticket within 60 days you just have to plead not guilty and if the first court date is outside that 60 days then you are fine. I felt like she was telling me, if you take this route you'll be able to forget about this because getting a ticket, pleading not guilty and getting a new court date will take more than 60 days.

The two clerks and the judge were all very polite and nice. I had hoped for an experience like the one I'd had in Albertville but Texas seems to have a different stance on citations like mine. They just want the money and see you on your way. I feel like Alabama has a more punitive approach. I wanted to get some of the details about the ticket out, I'll write more about the nifty little details later.

I've been looking through old emails trying to find some quotes on bandwidth and server rack space. While poking about I found this thing that I sent over the summer. What happened to me? Why don't I think like this anymore?

"While I was camping I started thinking about things that happen in August. Now keep in mind I was sort of in a fantasy frame of mind. My sister has a birthday in August and my father's birthday was in August. His birthday was August 3rd to be more precise. Then I started wondering what happens to people's birthdays when they die. Does it stop being their birthday? Birthdays do have some sort of magic in them I just don't know if it stays there when the person dies. Then that got me to thinking about what would happen if you lost your birthday while you were still alive. Would you stop aging? If someone stole your birthday would they age faster? Would their personality change as they absorbed the astrological significance from your birthday? Would you be free to be someone completely different if you didn't have a specific birthday to help define you? Could you go on a quest to find a new birthday? Would the quest have to finish before your old birthday because something bad might happen if you reached your old birthday without a new birthday to celebrate? Who or what dispenses new birthdays to people? I'd never really thought about these things before and they have been on my mind ever since. I was wondering if you had any answers."

It might be silly and frivolous to have thought about those things, but it sprung from a mind and a time that I miss. Has the change been brought about by Fall? The temperature? The job?

I've been caught up in social obligations and house/apartment hunting. I've been caught in up analyzing my relationship with Leia. I've been trying to figure out how to get back on track financially. I've been a grumpy prick for the past week. I feel pulled apart by all these social groups. Then there is work. As I learn more about the processes they have here at Cingular I approach loathing for the company. The formal requirements they've written for this thing I'm working on are asinine. I guess I'm not the sort of person that is made to work at a large corporation. I wish I was smarter, more inventive or creatively inclined because then I'd figure out a way to get out of this mess.

I just want a personal space where I can keep my stuff. I want a work space that I share with other professionals who push themselves. I want to work on projects with those other professionals that I can take pride in. I want our clients to be thoughtful and passionate about what they are doing. I want to make enough money to travel and buy a few CDs and DVDs. I want to see Emily regularly. I want to speak my mind more. I want to get away from being concerned about what others think. Are these unreasonable desires?

I went to Huntsville a week ago. I got to see Christina and Katrina and gloat to myself on the inside that they would have been better off with me. (What a righteous prick) I was even surprised on Thanksgiving to get a call from Ryan. She must be so happy she finally gets to talk to trees and it's for school now. I did pick up a couple speeding tickets on the way back though. This friday is the arraignment for my Sulphur Springs ticket. It's about an hour and a half away and that means at least three hours of work I would have to miss to plead not-guilty. Why is the law so inaccessible at times? I wish I could submit my plea in writing.

"And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife"

Better dumb and happy than, smart and without any friends. Better cute and better loud, better join up with the crowd.
-Boingo "Change"

I should be working on work stuff but it can wait and I'm staying here till I finish it anyways. I've been thinking about Leia. We've settled into each others lives with an ease that contradicts the unanswered questions in my thoughts.

I'm not the most sociable person in the world. I'm not very good at talking to people I don't know anything about, unless it's a tête-à-tête thing. I feel uncomfortable doing things with groups of people. I think part of it is that I feel this responsibility to myself to always be doing something that matters, or contemplating my guilt when I'm not. I feel like having a girlfriend means more frivolous social obligations. Before I felt more justified in being a loner at home. Now I feel I'm holding her back if I don't try and meet social obligations. I also mildly chastise myself for not trying new things, and so I follow through on most social obligations.

I found the vending machine at work that carries Mountain Dew and Pepsi products! I don't think a word exists to capture the invigoration and completeness this brings to my work life. O frabjous day, calloo, callay!

I find it really cool that since I've been alive new words have been invented in the English language. Beeper, VCR, laser printer, camcorder and cell phone have all come into existence since the 1970s. Word Formation has got to be one of the most fascinating aspects of linguistics. I wish I understood human languages as well as I understand computer languages so I could program people to do the things I want.

Anchoring the World News Tonight newscast Monday night from Dallas, where he participated in a local forum on TV news over the weekend, Peter Jennings showed a clip of an interview with a fan at Sunday's Cowboys football game. "Can you tell me how the mood is in Dallas these days?" Jennings asked. "Nobody likes you," the man responded, claiming that the media's reporting on the war on terrorism was unpatriotic. Jennings commented: "Our conversation then got pretty drained away. But I wonder how he might have felt if we'd sat down and had a beer. My sense was that he was so angry about life that it might not have made any difference. But it would have been interesting to try."

Wow, how would you feel if some obnoxious Dallas Cowboy's fan said "Nobody likes you." (Link from StudioBriefing)

I modified Blogchecker so that it would do a weblogs.com ping for those DFW Bloggers that participate in the weblogs.com listing. It sends a ping any time the site updates. If anyone wants their sites included on the weblogs.com list let me know what name you want it to use and I'll setup blogchecker to send the pings for your site when it updates.

In the not so distant future I'll have a web site up for people to manage all their information so you won't have to email me, also you'll be able to create your own custom blogchecker lists for incorporating into your site if you so wish.

Alright, with the Alabama reasonable and prudent violation my arraignment is set for 12/5/01 and on that date I enter a plea of guilty or not. Then they set my trial date, which would most likely be in February or January according to the clerk. Since I must be present to enter my plea that means a trip back to sunny fields of Hillsboro, Alabama on 12/5 at 1pm. If I plead guilty it carries a $167 fine and is reported like a speeding ticket to insurance.

I haven't been able to reach Judge Glossup's office in Sulphur Springs, Texas yet. According to the ticket I'm not eligible for defensive driving because I did not have a Texas driver's license at the time of the ticket. I wonder if I am eligible for deferred judication. Hopefully I will know more when they call back. That ticket carries a $105 fine.

The good news is I can lose both of these cases and not see any changes to my car insurance premiums. In the event of future citations my car insurance provider, USAA, may elect to change my premiums. Thankfully the claims department has an appeals process so I can plead my case and emphasize my zero accident record.

I've been wondering how to automate the discovery of groups that people clump into while online. Here in the DFW area we have this DFW Blogs meta group. Inside that meta-group are several other groups. When I talk about groups I mean a collection of people who primarily read and comment on each other's blogs. I'm reticent to give examples of groupage in the DFW Blogs arena as it's based on my informal observations rather than real data. However, I'm sure most DFW blogger types have observed the groups that have formed.

This is similar to what I talked about back on November 1st about grouping people according to interests. It's more direct though. I'm not talking about passive implications gleaned from word histograms. It's about observing the explicit activities of reading and commenting. I imagine both ideas would combine well though. I can use the reading/comment observations to discover the groups, then use the word histograms to figure out the best cross-pollination opportunities.

Call me grumpy old man...I just sent this off to netflix.com:

What happened to the great selection of movies that Netflix used to have? Two years ago when I first started renting from Netflix the only reason I might not find a movie here is that the title wasn't on DVD. Now I'm finding more and more movies that are available on DVD but I can't rent them from Netflix. Case in point, a fairly mainstream movie like The Stunt Man (3 Oscar nominations) isn't available. A recent theatrical release like The Sticky Fingers of Time, while available on DVD, is nowhere to be found in my searches on Netflix. As proof of Netflix's original diversity I can still find titles like Salo or Arabian Nights but now they are unavailable for rental. So my question is, will Netflix's selection continue the downward spiral till it is a clone of my local Blockbuster or will it return to the original diversity that drew me to the service in the first place?

"Dr. Meredith: A bit of advice... Mitch: Oh, uh, thank you... D: Always...no, no...never...forget forget to check your references. M: Uh, ok, thank you. I'd better be going. D: [to his wife] I think the young people enjoy it when I "get down" verbally, don't you?"

This weekend I was the delighted recipient of a speeding ticket and a reasonable and prudent speed violation. I've never received two citations in one day but that doesn't change the routine. I thought I would document my ticket fight for my personal edification and anyone else that's curious.

In the case of the speeding ticket it was an assembly line operation so he probably got a number of people. In cases such as those the very first thing you need to do is make a motion for continuance. This means that you will postpone your court date while you prepare your case and gather more evidence. It will throw off the officer's schedule because his plan is to schedule all the cases for the same court date and be there when they go through the meat grinder. You increase the likelihood he won't be there for your court date. In most states that means your case will be dismissed. Apparently some states don't require your accuser to be present if it's a traffic violation. One thing I did like about the Texas ticket is the fact that it says "alleged speed."

In the case of the reasonable and prudent speed citation this is a curious one. I've never heard of this law. They can apparently issue citations when conditions mandate a lower speed than the speed limit based on the officer's judgement. I wonder if they are handled differently by the court, i.e. they aren't reported to insurance companies. If so that's not so bad. The big problem I have with speeding tickets is the double jeopardy situation where the municipality punishes you and then your insurance company dings you. Okay, I also have problems with speed limits that aren't set according to the traffic study and are artifically lowered creating a traffic hazard. I'm going to have to talk with the court clerk and get a better feel for what the law is and if it's worth my time to defend myself.

This is just the beginning. I bear no grudge or malice towards the officers, clerks and judges that enforce the laws. I have some issues with the city councils that set unsafe speeds for roads, the insurance companies that have forgotten their purpose and the poorly educated civil engineers that build bad roads in the first place. I highly recommend fighting a citation or at least going to the court with someone who is. The experience will give you a really great appreciation for the law and you will learn a lot of things about people along the way.

lp: Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong: Live - National Anthem

Wow, one twenty dollar accessory and I can listen to music off my iPod in my car through my Kenwood MP8017 receiver.

Listening pleasure: Radiohead - OK Computer - Airbag

Cool ipodhacks.com is a nice clearing house of info on iPods. More importantly, last night I was thinking about getting a case for the iPod and they have a link to just the thing I need for my iPod.

Listening pleasure: Built to Spill - Keep it Like a Secret - Carry the Zero

The Ministry of Information is at it again. (link from slashdot) Are we winning the war with Oceania? This week they increased our chocolate rations from 30 grams to 20.

Just purging some thoughts so I can revisit them later...

In Steven Johnson's book Emergence he talks about sites like slashdot that miss the non-verbal cues that go on in conversations. The only way to shape discussion on slashdot is to post something, whereas in real life if a lunatic is trying to dominate the conversation people will just walk away. This has really gotten me to wonder about the passive ways people can affect web sites.

If you have a toy in a store that people can play with it changes over time. The more popular the toy is the more likely it will be maimed and torn apart. At the very least it collects fingerprints and gets moved around. The important thing here is that you don't have a list of written statements from kids saying how much they liked the toy, with moderators modding up the statements that they like. How does one capture that sort of thing on a web site? Some people might like an entry but don't want to leave a comment stating such. Maybe the site should take note of how long they linger on the entry and try to visually reflect that. The more an entry is "handled" by people the more it should collect "fingerprints."

How do other sites take shape through the direct or indirect manipulation of the visitors? What sites change the more they get used?

If I was an Autobot, I'd be:

src="http://android5.com/misc/tests/autobot/prowl.gif" alt="Click to see what Autobot you could be!"/>

Well, "Prefers OS X/FreeBSD to Windows" is more accurate.

In 1986 I started to BBS. The school I went to had a DEC PDP 11/44 mainframe that ran RSX-11M+ and one of the students had written BBS software for it. That student was Brian Reynolds. He helped code a little game you might have heard of called Civilization II. (I need to get him to sign the BBS source code I have printed out.) The BBS really opened my mind as to what you can do when you start connecting all these computers together.

Back in those days we had silly terms like Sysop (pronounced SIS-op not SIGH-sop) and Co-Sysop to describe people who ran them. I devoted a DOS PC (well sometimes I ran Desqview) to running WWIV BBS software. That was how I met my friends Hymie, Porovaara, Otopico and Randy. Over the years I've lost touch with friends like Alex Rayborn, Darkstar, Falcon Hunter, Shade, Plaid Ninja, Alchy Anarchist, Knight O'Vaxdom, Jim Scarborough, Raphael, Klaus, Dragonsbane, Wes Wilson and others that I can't remember at the moment. Oh the wonderful stories...

It had a darkside too...one that I didn't comprehend at the time. I'll never forget my conversations with mister multiple personality syndrome Showman/Dave/Karen/Jennifer. Showman would buy used little girl's underwear. Another guy I knew at the time, L. H., just wanted to play with the boys. I heard through the grapevine he was in jail for possession of pictures of kiddie porn. Eventually I learned how to filter those people out of my life quicker.

It was a remarkable time and for those of us that were there we blazed trails that the rest of the world would follow a decade later with the Internet. If you remember the good old days then you might be interested in a BBS documentary the textfiles.com guy is making. (Link from Consolation Champs)

Amiga 1000. I feel this tremendous gratitude to folks like Dave Morse, Dale Luck, RJ Mical, Dave Haynie and Jay Miner for inventing the Amiga and with it uttering the new words that would dominate computing for the next decade. —>

"Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks."
-General Beringer

I feel this way about XML namespaces at the moment. Oh they are cool, way cool, when you are hand coding your XML and you want to make things look all nice and tidy. However, when you switch to letting a machine generate the stuff all hell breaks loose. If anyone tells you otherwise then ask them how they copy a node with namespaces from one XML document to another without getting the oh so fabulous and uninformative "Namespace Error" message. I thought I was being cool when I learned how to get around the "Wrong Document" error. Oh no, not at all, all new errors were lurking behind it.

Oh and to be specific I'm talking about using DOM and the importNode() method. Yeah, I could write a manual copy routine from scratch but what a pain in the butt.

8-28-01 Main Street's Coffee Shop in Albertville, Alabama 2:10pm

The older man had tight, regimented, grey hair clenching tightly to his head. He limped towards the counter and remarked to the owner that it was Elton John playing over the speakers. "Someone here must like him because he was playing the last time I was here." The owner smiled and let out a slight laugh and said it was just a radio station. Then he started into a story about an Elton John concert. He had worked for a radio station in Huntsville promoting concerts. When Elton came into town he was lucky enough to get some tickets for himself. He and his wife showed up early to the venue because they weren't sure where it was. Well, some of Elton's crew gave out front row seats to all the early birds. The older man couldn't top that story right away so he walked off with his coffee, limping. A few moments later he said Elton John and Billy Joel once toured together, but tickets were $75. He wasn't going to pay that, he'd just listen to the albums. The he limped off again to the front of the store. He is the kind of person with a permanent scowl.

I walked up to the counter and ordered a banana pie smoothie. I asked the owner why he moved to Albertville from Huntsville. He said his father got sick. He and his wife and the kids moved back to take care of him and take in the small town life. His father died a year ago in August. I offered my condolences and stammered through the awkwardness such moments bring about in me. The owner was nice and quick to add that he was at peace with his father's passing. In a quirk of fate his father hadn't died from his illness. He was hit by a drunk driver. By then the owner and his wife had made Albertville their home and they all loved it here.

I wonder about that guy with the limp. He doesn't even seem to be at home in his own body. The owner though, he has it. He's found home.

Anyone camping out for a GameCube or XBox this week?

A week ago I installed tomcat and cocoon on my machine at work. This week I installed dbxml and started rewriting my comments so that they are totally java/xml based and none of this perl nonsense. I've succesfully rewritten things (with a kludge here and there) but now I can store all the comments in an NXD (native XML database) which is trés cool.

The keyword here is rewritten. I've now written the comment system from scratch twice, each time learning better ways to do things with java and xml. Welp, I just started on my third rewrite (or should I call it code refactoring) and I'm hoping that this is the last friggin' time. Sometimes I wish I wasn't so stupid.

For the cocoon-curious among you, in my third rewrite I'm implementing the comment system as a logicsheet now that I understand how to write one.

But most people seemed pleased. ''Everything is different today, it's 100 percent changed,'' said 35-year-old tire seller Sarfraz Hostai. ``We had so many problems before, but now we are free and we are waiting for our new government.''

That quote is regarding the Taliban evacuation of Kabul. What struck me about it is the line "waiting for our new government." I have grown up with the idea that government is solely an expression of the people's will. I had never ever thought of a government existing without the citizenry willing it into existence. Well, that's not entirely true. Conceptually I can understand what it's like to have a government imposed on you. It's just that I don't think I could ever accept it as the norm, and that I should just wait for my new government.

Most of the articles I've read about the Northern Alliance have some sort of Toyota truck/SUV product placement in them. If I'm Joe American and I want to be patriotic is it okay if I buy Toyota products instead of the equivalent American car?

Does Toyota have a great marketing team or are journalists taught to place product endorsements in their articles as best they can? I don't see them noting the manufacturers of the guns, bombs and warplanes with the same fervor.

A timeline of clothing reveals a small detail that many of you probably overlooked. The invention of the wire hanger in 1903. This was the beginning of the democratization of clothing (along with revolutions in textile manufacturing) because it opened the door to mass production and thus lower cost hangers. This past summer when I visited The Biltmore Estate I learned that when hangers first started showing up they were for the rich. Setting aside the dangers of asexual hanger reproduction and the fact that the hanger has no known predator in the wild, I found myself fascinated by their impact on society.

You see back in the bad ol' days before hangers people folded their pants and put them in drawers. That's not so bad you might think. Then came wooden hangers and with them a way to distinguish the rich from the poor. The creases on the rich people's pants were different because they had hangers. It may have been a small detail but having the kind of creases you'd get from a hanger was important to fitting into high society. I'm not making this stuff up.

What is amusing is to see how that sort of nonsense has marched forward in time to what we have nowadays. At my workplace, and many others, they have this notion of "business casual." You aren't supposed to wear jeans or tennis shoes. In general you can sum it up as don't wear clothes that laborers would wear. What rich, white, male enclave thinks this is important? More to the point, how do they keep perpetuating their classist notions of clothing? When I rule the world I will make sure that people wear what they think is best.

Food for thought: If you have some time read about who invented the hanger and you'll notice no women were involved. I'll tell you why. It's because the hanger was an effort by that enclave I spoke of earlier to cling to class distinctions in clothing, something women had no interest in doing.

:)

I saw Silver Scooter and Death Cab for Cutie last night with Josh and Leia. After my last music experience with Built to Spill I was a bit leery of going to another show. While I enjoyed myself at that BtS show I felt like it was a musical deathmatch with the bands and I vying to see who would succumb to exhaustion first. I didn't get home till after 2:10am and I reeked of an odor that would have made Grendel blush.

This show was nothing like that and I found myself pleasantly surprised by these new sounds. They reminded me of a mellower "Ancient Melodies of the Future" Built to Spill with their short songs, vocal stylings and guitar/drum rock sound. I found myself flagging as the night marched on towards midnight. Leia and I left before Death Cab finished their set.

The kick ass HMV.com sent me a copy of the new Rheostatics album Night of the Shooting Stars. I am still impressed by how quickly they shipped it after I ordered it. Only a handful of bands have found regular play in my CD player over the past decade and the Rheos are part of that handful.

Has there ever been a better time for music?

Okay, this is too cool. My friend Porovaara had this in his latest livejournal entry.

Last night I made my own laptop case out of a blanket and some shoestrings.

Here are pics of the laptop case in question. I bet he could sell those things for a fortune on eziba.com.

Rolled out some new comment code. Still tweaking but it's cleaner now. It should handle HTML tags and fake tags like <rant></rant> much more gracefully. Although I still have a lot more testing to do on it. I will be adding the ability to have new comments emailed to you (thanks hymie) and the ability to delete your own posts if you posted in the last 20 minutes.

I've reproduced the web publishing environment from gnumatt.org on my machine at work. A few quick comments.

• There is a reason Cocoon 2 is still a release candidate, and not a release.
• The reorganized automagic class loading in Tomcat 3.3 is confusing
• War files are very cool
• I wish mod_jk worked like good old mod_jserv did
• Cocoon 2, when it works, is about the coolest thing since mitochondria

gnuhouse

The limitations of housing today do not fit well with the e-lifestyle. The notion that we should sign up for a six month or twelve month lease, or buy a house is ridiculous. Employers can fire and hire on a moments notice. Our housing needs to reflect the same flexibility that our ability to eat and work have. The e-lifestyle is not bound by geography and it's about time that our notions of housing catch up to that fact.

In William Gibson's book Neuromancer he saw this phenomenon years ahead of time and he talks about the "coffins" that people would rent and sleep in as needed. I'm not advocating a Spartan, fluorescent bulb housing solution here though. What I have been thinking about is creating some sort of corporation that rents houses from someone, and then its "employees" can stay in the house and move about as needed. I've got friends in Huntsville, Dallas and San Francisco. It would be cool if the gnuhouse corporation had houses in those three places for me to stay in when there was work for me to attend to in those cities. Since the corporation is the only name on the lease the "employees" can move in and out with ease.

I'm not sure how the rent and utilities would be divided up. If you have a five bedroom house and three people are occupying it at the time it seems like the rent should be divided into thirds for that house. I guess you would need to be able to prorate monthly rents if people come in and out. Also people need to ability to store things, can they store things in one of the houses or do you force them to get a storage unit? Where would my book collection go? However, I must say that as one who has put most of his stuff in storage since January the only things that really need to follow you with regularity are clothes and toiletries. I think the only thing I would need to store in the houses would be clothes. I've been fine with making periodic visits to my storage unit to withdraw the books or things I need.

So who wants to figure out how to make something like this work?

I started building a list of movies that I own. I have a lot more work to do on this, also the list is quite incomplete.

It's sort of funny how I feel cheated by movies like Clean, Shaven that I searched so hard for (found it in Philadelphia) on VHS. It came right out on DVD. However, Ridicule (cheated out of its Oscar by the way), was easy to find on VHS but still isn't out on DVD. If that's not proof of an arbitrary and uncaring God I don't know what it is.

I went to my second ever Dallas Stars game last night. This time it was at the new American Airlines center. Leia scored two kick ass tickets and parking passes. I was about eight rows back from the glass, Row H, Seat 8. Sadly I got to see my team the Nashville Predators get blanked in a 3-0 whooping by the Stars. I gotta love the Predators though, they are one of the hardest working teams in the league and they get production from all four of their lines because they don't have any star players. However, last night was not one of those nights.

I had expected more security as I believe we are still on this vague "high alert." However, they didn't appear to have visibly stepped up security. I've got to be honest my life feels little changed by the incidents of 9/11/01. I don't watch TV so the terrorists didn't pre-empt my television shows. I get my news online so it's been filtered and packaged in pretty much the same way as always. I haven't given up any conveniences. I'm not filled with rage and anger at some "new" enemy. I feel compassion and sympathy for those suffering at home and abroad as always. I still feel the same mix of slight disappointment and ennui with my government, but like Scooby Doo and the gang they will make their silly mistakes and stumble through in the end when it all counts.

Perhaps, most importantly, I still feel that I have the same opportunity to excel and make my mark that I had when I was younger and first realized I could do whatever I wanted.

Today was my first day with corporate email and I already had 47 emails waiting for me. They all had to do with one message from Travis. Travis was looking for someone named Matt so he sent an email to all 194 Matt's in the company across the nation:

A customer named Jacklyn *ahem* @ [some number] says that you have not returned her phone call and would like for you to do that as soon as possible. The only info she had was Matt and the extension 4194

Within minutes Matts were responding:

Oh sure immediately jump to the conclusion that it's one of us. [*] Perhaps we should start a find the Matt at ext 4194 contest [*] We should start a "Find the Matt" fund, please send $1.00 to me, and you can wear jeans on friday...

The discussion went political as Matts united in brotherhood:

In response to our responses, I am thinking of having a Million Matt March in D.C. how about it? Let the Matt's unite! Fight the power. [*] Okay, which one of you people sang like a bird and told my name was Matt I have been working under the alias of "Hey" for some time now. [*] Just think....all of us will always remember what we were doing on November 1st, 2001. Washington D.C. is too dangerous for that Million Matt March. Let's have it right here in the good ole Lone Star state? Whaddya say ya'll?

As is the way with all causes some went turncoat:

You can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay, but don't be calling me Matt anymore!

Eventually the kooks and nostalgia started in:

Just think we can all tell our sons Matt and grandsons Matthew about this day. The Witch hunt for Matt 4194 [*] Did you know that.......there are approximately 194 Matts at Cingular??? [*] 194 Matts ... ext 4194 ... coincidence .... I think not!!

Some comments brought in corporate dogma:

We are "expressing" ourselves, that's what "we have to say".

At the end of the day the Matt's were happy and Travis was made an honorary Matt:

I would just like to say that this has to be one of the most interesting and humorous things that I have seen happen at this company! [*] I think we need to take a vote on making Travis an honorary Matt. [*] All in favor say "Matt"....I count 194

Finding the slender threads

This is something I've been kicking around a little bit. People's blogs are really cool to me because people tend to share personal things about themselves in them. Not only are these personal things shared but they are archived. I've long been fascinated by the notion of lateral discovery. You can go to places like yahoo and try to describe your interests so others can discover you. However, interests change over time and your fanatical devotion to the A-Team just doesn't mean what it used to. What if yahoo could use some sort of introspection by studying your journals to determine your interests? In this case, what if I had some software that studied people's journals and determined their interests?

At first it would be very simple, just a histogram of common words. I would have to figure out which words were meaningful as interests so I could eliminate all the "the","a","an", etc. words. This also presents interesting problems as I'm losing context. How do I separate an interest in the band Anthrax from the deadly spores? I think it would be good to track when the interests were recorded because that might help in regards to context. What does it mean when a whole bunch of people put the word WTC in their blog on the same day? I don't think I'm ready to build a Bayesian network to predict interest commonality just yet. At any rate, I think I will start crawling the dfwblog's list and archiving the words in them.

You know it could do stuff like crawl the news sites so it knows which words are news oriented, and music sites to know which words go with music and so forth. You might get some neat context voodoo as it tries to guess whether the blogger meant anthrax in the musical or news context. You could use the timestamping to guess that since anthrax has been in the news context a lot recently that's probably what they are referring to.

I think it will be interesting to see what my program thinks is on the hearts and minds of the dfwbloggers. Maybe I can even teach it to start blogging its observations about dfwblogger's blogs.

The latest Netfuture starts off when an amusing quote:

If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear [energy] is really very good.
-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill

Steve Talbott goes on to point out that we don't think about these things in terms of the thousands of years they will be with us and offers this analogy:

O'Neill might just as well have said of a bullet that has as yet barely cleared the gun's muzzle: "So far, its safety record looks pretty good".

Later on it goes into a really great piece about insecticides and our short-sighted understanding of their long term problems. The best piece in the newsletter centers on the relationship between this one entomologist and the grasshoppers that his insecticides wipe out in the hundreds of millions.

The Greeks had Cassandra and we have Steve Talbott.

I think it's time for me to go consume food products from those short-sighted industries. Isn't it great to live in America where I can learn about all the dangerous things going on around me, and then struggle with my complicity in their nefarious purposes!

Ever wonder if you're really alive? What do the coincidences in your life mean? Do you struggle against breaking the world down into binary models like good or evil, fear or love, on of off? If God knows everything, then everything is mapped out already right? What's the point in just walking through God's movie script? While we are connected to others in many diverse ways, what's the base connection, the prime mover that connects us all? Does God only exist so long as we exist? Voltaire said "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." Certainly not a new question, but then if it's all mapped out anyways new is a relatively useless term. Anyone want to tell the patent and trademark office that nothing has ever been invented, just discovered?

Just a few thoughts from Donnie Darko, a 6 foot tall rabbit named Frank and Roberta Sparrow. I'm still putting together all the pieces from this "Holden Caulfield filtered through the paranoid sci-fi consciousness of Philip K. Dick" story.