A little Quechup on your spam?

This must be some kind of new land speed record for getting spammed.

Last month, I set up a private, "secure" e-mail account, and just gave the address to friends and key business contacts. It's been working like a charm - the account works beautifully with the iPhone, and I know that every piece of mail that arrives is high-value, because I've given the address to nobody outside a tight little circle of privileged contacts.

Today, the first piece of spam arrived.

A trusted friend had included my secure e-mail in a mailshot promoting a project. No problem there; it's not a state secret, I'm just trying to keep it safe for useful communications... wish he had bcc'ed me, though.

Everyone on the mailshot who had a webmail account that autoharvests e-mail addresses for their contacts suddenly had my e-mail address. Gmail does this; Yahoo does it if asked; probably others do, too.

OK, still not a real problem there.

Then a woman I know slightly, who was on the trusted friend's mailshot (still following me?) apparently signed up for Quechup, a new social-networking site with a very underhanded modus operandi:

When you sign up, Quechup asks, as many social networking sites do, if you'd like to check your address book to see how many of your friends are already on the service (something that can be done safely at sites like LinkedIn and Facebook.)

Then guess what happens. It spams *everybody* in your freaking address book, evidently without your knowledge or consent.

Rat bastards.

I've tried to remove myself from future Quechup mailings, but with this standard of ethical behavior on their part, I'm sure my address has been sold to every Viagra spammer and Nigerian scam artist in the world by now.

Writer fetish pr0n

Notebookism.

(via)

Adventures in branding

Hulu.com, NBC and News Corp's new joint-venture video sharing site, might have been named a little better.

Hulu means “butt” in both Indonesian and Malay. But that’s nothing compared to Swahili, which 80 million or so people speak in sub-Saharan Africa. In Swahili, Hulu means, among other things, both “cease” and “desist.” See here as well. Given the litigious nature of online video, that is some serious irony.

TechCrunch: Hulu Translates To “Cease” and “Desist” in Swahili. Oops.

After all, the Romans invented bureaucracy...

“I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralisation.” - Petronius Arbiter, A.D. 60

Beaches

With Labor Day right around the corner, my thoughts are turning to the beach.

In fact, I am a late-spring and early-fall beachgoer, by preference.

I had my share of high-summer beach vacations with my parents when I was a child, but with very few exceptions since I've been doing my own vacation scheduling, I've been a before-Memorial-Day or after-Labor-Day kinda guy.

This has nothing to do with being cheap or contrarian -- or, rather, is independent of how, um, value-conscious or contrarian I might be.

The reasons are simple: I don't like very hot weather, and I abhor crowds. (In the summer, I'd much rather be in the cool, green mountains than sweltering in the sand.)

So at about the time that everyone is packing up and schlepping their stuff back from their summer shares, and the seasonal workers at the resorts start contemplating their migration back to hometowns or schools, I am rubbing my hands together with glee and contemplating walking in bare feet in the incoming tide, and eating seafood suppers, with my lovely wife.

Cape May, NJ this year, I think.

Everyday heroism

James Fallows, currently living and working in China, shares an inspiring story:

Last Saturday morning China time, when I was in the rural hinterland, I got a very early-morning mobile phone call from a friend on the U.S. east coast, where it was Friday night. For medical reasons I won't go into, it was a matter of life-and-death importance that a close friend of his in New York receive a certain medical supply, available in Shanghai, as soon as possible.

There was no way to get the medicine there in time through the ordinary and usual international supply-logistics chain (DHL, etc.)

So Mr. Fallows started making some phone calls...

Read on: Recognizing generosity: David Valentine and Raider Ramstad (James Fallows)

Objective data about politicians

As often happens here, a comment on a post inspires an actual post. In the discussion re Larry Craig, reader Dan asks:

Are you aware of any easy to interpret web sites that rate politicians based on their voting records in a non-partisan fashion?

Partisan rankings, of course, abound; every interest group worth its salt will assign voting scores to Congresscritters based on their pet issues, and by taking these scores in the aggregate, one can often assemble a meaningful picture of how a representative votes. (Of course, if you're like me and would prefer to support politicians who have good track records in supporting both citizens' rights *and* fiscal probity, you're, um, kinda screwed.)

Anyway.

My suggestion was a Dead Tree publication called The Almanac of American Politics, published every two years by National Journal, which lists key votes in the House and Senate in a dispassionate and nonpartisan fashion. (It's available in electronic form to National Journal subscribers, but that is a very expensive subscription indeed... they don't even list the annual rate on the site.)

Doc had what is likely to be the most practical suggestion for free, web-based information:

[T]ry Project Vote Smart. I think it'll provide what you need.

Project Vote Smart does indeed look to be a terrific resource.

Other ideas, anybody?

I, da ho

Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho), a staunch "family values" man and a big Romney supporter, pled guilty to cruising for gay sex in a Minneapolis-St. Paul airport bathroom in June 2007 .

Upon arrest and interrogation, Senator Craig apparently tried to throw his weight around:

After he was arrested, Craig, who is married, was taken to the Airport Police Operations Center to be interviewed about the lewd conduct incident, according to the police report. At one point during the interview, Craig handed the plainclothes sergeant who arrested him a business card that identified him as a U.S. Senator and said, “What do you think about that?” the report states. (source)

The police sergeant's reaction is not reported, but I hope he said something like, "You're still not getting that blowjob..." (or giving, as the case may have been.)

Whew. Anyone who still plans to vote a straight Republican ticket in 2008 may have trouble finding enough straight Republicans.

---

Postscript: An editor at The Nation wants to know: "What's up with Republican politicos getting arrested by undercover cops for soliciting sex in public restrooms?" Yes, there are some obvious (and very funny) cheap shots taken in the editorial, but it's also surprisingly thoughtful.

TalkingAboutPolitics.com

I developed my taste for bare-knuckled politics growing up in North Carolina, where both local and statewide races were often entertainingly tawdry and replete with dirty tricks.

One of the formative political experiences of my young adulthood, in fact, was the 1984 U.S. Senate election between Jim Hunt, the Democratic governor of the state, and incumbent Republican Senator Jesse Helms.

Both sides pulled out all the stops--it was the costliest and arguably the dirtiest Senate campaign in U.S. history at the time--but Helms won in a squeaker.

Today I was delighted to discover that two veteran political consultants who met during the 1984 campaign -- Gary Pearce, who was Hunt's man, and Carter Wrenn, who was Helms's -- are publishing a blog together these days. It's called TalkingAboutPolitics.com, and while it has a definite Old North State flavor, their observations about party and process transcend regional and state boundaries.

Brother Bubba says check it out.

Whew.

I like graphs, and this is a good one.

Move along, citizen

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez resigns, two weeks after Rove.

Countdown to Hugh Hewitt's "there's nothing to see here, move along" post at Townhall in 5... 4... 3...

Vint Cerf on Internet security

Vint Cerf is vice-president and “chief internet evangelist” at Google. If the internet needs proselytisers, Mr Cerf, 64, is more than qualified – he is considered one of the architects of the worldwide web, having developed the protocols that govern it.

At the weekend the American computer scientist gave warning that poor security and poor software design were undermining the reliability of the internet. He said that he was worried about the robustness of computer software and the exposure of the network to hacks that alter the website addressing system.

Business big shot: Vint Cerf (TimesOnline, 27 August 2007)

Middle management ranks senior management... in the U.S. Army

Followup to an earlier post:

On Aug. 1, Gen. Richard Cody, the United States Army’s vice chief of staff, flew to the sprawling base at Fort Knox, Ky., to talk with the officers enrolled in the Captains Career Course. These are the Army’s elite junior officers. Of the 127 captains taking the five-week course, 119 had served one or two tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, mainly as lieutenants. Nearly all would soon be going back as company commanders. A captain named Matt Wignall, who recently spent 16 months in Iraq with a Stryker brigade combat team, asked Cody, the Army’s second-highest-ranking general, what he thought of a recent article by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling titled “A Failure in Generalship.” The article, a scathing indictment that circulated far and wide, including in Iraq, accused the Army’s generals of lacking “professional character,” “creative intelligence” and “moral courage.”

[...]

General Cody looked around the auditorium, packed with men and women in uniform — most of them in their mid-20s, three decades his junior but far more war-hardened than he or his peers were at the same age — and turned Captain Wignall’s question around. “You all have just come from combat, you’re young captains,” he said, addressing the entire room. “What’s your opinion of the general officers corps?”

Over the next 90 minutes, five captains stood up, recited their names and their units and raised several of Yingling’s criticisms. One asked why the top generals failed to give political leaders full and frank advice on how many troops would be needed in Iraq. One asked whether any generals “should be held accountable” for the war’s failures. One asked if the Army should change the way it selected generals. Another said that general officers were so far removed from the fighting, they wound up “sheltered from the truth” and “don’t know what’s going on.”

Challenging The Generals (Fred Kaplan, New York Times Magazine, 26 August 2007)

Radley Balko: The Privileged Class

...[Y]ou're immune from drunk driving laws; you can stash the evidence that you've committed a crime in your office, because investigators aren't allowed to search it; if you kill someone because you've got a lead foot and blew a stop sign, the taxpayers will cover your financial liability; and, we learn today, you can commit whatever Internet-related crimes you please, because the police aren't allowed to search your computer.

Three guesses as to who he's talking about, and the first two don't count.

Radley Balko: The Privileged Class (Reason's Hit and Run Blog)

Helpful Gato

helpful gato
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

Mister Gato helps Carrie with a crafts project by holding the fabric down.

What would we do without him?

See more bloggers' pets at The Modulator's Friday Ark; this Sunday, the Carnival of the Cats is hosted by The Scratching Post.

Hacking the iPhone

yep it's unix
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

The iPhone has been out not quite two months, and already benevolent hackers have been working hard to open up the platform.

With the help of community-built toolkits like "Jailbreak," serious Unix geeks have been installing new applications on their iPhones for weeks now.

For those of us a little less certain about DIY mods to our $600 cell phones, there's now a nice, hand-holding GUI interface -- Installer.app (Mac OS X only; there's a roughly equivalent program for Windows that is named, somewhat unsettlingly, iBrickr) -- that walks you through "jailbreaking" your iPhone and putting a nice Unix package installer on.

Once Installer.app is up and running, you can install everything from programming language runtimes (Perl, Python, Ruby) to OpenSSH and standard Unix apps like the Apache web server.

iPhone "Finder"

Cool.

Mac notebooks in third place in U.S.

While Apple may be focusing a lot of its attention on the iPhone lately, consumers are clearly still interested in the company’s computer offerings. Data from one market research firm shows Apple’s notebook business broke 17 percent while another research firm said Apple has moved into third place among computer makers.

According to NPD, Apple’s U.S. retail notebook market share for June 2007 was 17.6 percent, an increase of 2.2 percentage points over the same period last year when Apple posted a 15.4 percent market share.

Macworld: Apple's notebook market share climbs to 17.6 percent

*Not* for sale, one owner

To keep a car running for many years, change the oil every 3,000 miles, says Clarence Cleveland Curtiss. His advice is not new, especially for anybody who owns a 1990 Buick, a 1980 Chevy or even a 1964 Volkswagen.

But Mr. Curtiss, 84, of Shelton, has followed the advice with the first car he ever owned, a 1929 Ford Model A; it has 200,000 miles on it and still runs.

[...]

Mr. Curtiss also has a strong emotional attachment to the car. He met his wife, Dorothy, shortly after he bought it, when he was 17 and she was 14; they had been married 56 years when she died in 1998. The initials they carved on the steering wheel as teenagers can still be seen. “She was the first and only girl I ever kissed in the car,” he said. “It’s priceless because of that, as far as I’m concerned.”

84 Years Old and Still Driving His First Car (New York Times, August 19, 2007)

Steve Pavlina: How to stop complaining

Perhaps the most important step in quitting the habit of complaining is to disconnect the undesirable behavior from your identity. A common mistake chronic complainers make is to self-identify with the negative thoughts running through their minds. Such a person might admit, “I know I’m responsible for my thoughts, but I don’t know how to stop myself from thinking negatively so often.” That seems like a step in the right direction, and to a certain degree it is, but it’s also a trap. It’s good to take responsibility for your thoughts, but you don’t want to identify with those thoughts to the point you end up blaming yourself and feeling even worse.

How to stop complaining (Steve Pavlina.com: Personal Development for Smart People)

Now reading: "The Groucho Letters"

Reading "The Groucho Letters" is like eating candy without the carbs or guilt... or, actually, the sort of sick feeling that you get when you eat too much of it.

Okay, it's nothing like eating candy but it's still pretty great.

TO ALISTAIR COOKE

July 8, 1957

Dear Mr. Cooke:

I was a little disappointed on receiving your rather lengthy letter, to find no mention of money. I am of course, an artist, with my head in the clouds. And I was very happy to be invited to appear, gratis or thereabouts, on "Meet the Press," "The Last Word," the City Center Theater in New York, two all-night telethons, etc. But my business manager, Mr. Gummo Marx, has a passion for money that is virtually a sickness. I am constantly being embarrassed by it. Still, he is my brother, and rather than upset him, I have to bow to his wishes.

I hope you and your charming wife are as happy and as gay as the weather permits, and that this note will not end our fragile friendship.

Regards,

Groucho

Heh. On a serious note, there are some funny and very moving letters to and from people like T.S. Eliot... Groucho had very interesting pen-pals.