Dearest readers,

We are happy to announce the launch of sewersofbabel.com. Regular posting will resume immediately. We have some nice new features available on the .com version, including contributor's blogs aggregated onto the main page, categories for each individual blog, and a linkpost for quick-hit links more terse than our normal format. Be sure to update your rss feeds and such. If any of you have websites, profiles, etc. to get the word out - well, every bit helps; and for those already linking to us, update dem hrefs. Thank you for your continued interests.

Sincerely,
The United Bloggers Alliance of Sewers and the Intergalactic Meme-Welders Union

Lessig Presentation on Google Print

I just noticed on Lessig's blog[1] that he has been figuring out how to make available his presentations to those of us who are unfortunate enough to miss the live performance. This is a Good Thing[TM]. I remember his Free Culture presentation that Leonard Lin worked up from his audio and slides in 2002 and I'm glad to see that the wait is over for more. The Free Culture presentation is a great example of how accessible Lessig makes even sometimes complicated ideas. His style is witty, informative, and compelling. He hates to be called this, but really - he is so entertaining it is hard not to think of him as a Copyright Rockstar.

Anyway, he has decided to make all the rest of his presentations available to a wider audience but is having a bit of trouble getting the process streamlined. The file for this presentation on Google Print is a 85MB torrent, which is quite large for a simple video file, but I have faith he will figure out a better way soon enough. If you get it soon, it should download very fast as the torrent is quite active (I was surprised to see that it just completed, total time about fifteen minutes).

Hm. Just trying it now, I seem to be having a strange difficulty playing the mp4 file. When I tried it in winamp, I could hear the sound but could not see the video. When I tried it in divx player, I could see the video but had error messages on the sound. The file wouldn't play at all in TheCoreMediaPlayer. Check for updates if you are interested, I'll work on it a bit and see what I can figure out. (I mess with my system a lot so you may very well have more luck than me. )


[1] If you are not familiar with Lawrence Lessig, he is a prominent figure in the fight for more reasonable copyright law.

Attn: Windows users.

There is a recently released vulnerability in Windows that has been called the worst ever. The reason is that it does not require the user to open an executable; malicious code can be installed on the computer simply by viewing an image in a browser or explorer.

Microsoft has not yet released an official patch. There is an unofficial patch available, but I am not going to give an opinion, as I do not have the technical knowhow to analyze the code.

There is a workaround provided by Microsoft that will help protect you until Microsoft releases an official patch. I would suggest that you do this, as it does not limit the functionality to an average user and it clears up most of the worry (apparently if one opens an infected file in the Fax Viewer or Paint, one can still be infected so be careful about that.)

1. Go to Start Menu
2. Select "Run"
3. type "regsvr32 /u shimgvw.dll" (without quotes)
4. This disables the starting of the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer when links to images are opened.

For additional information:

Summary from TheReg.
Security and technical history of the vulnerability unfolding.
FAQ
Article that suggests this affects all versions (not just XP and 2003, like the Reg suggests).

Update: After reading much, much, much too much on the topic (being responsible for family's computers is sometimes a bit of a headache ;-), I feel confident in recommending the unofficial patch to keep yourself as safe as possible until the official patch comes out. It can be found here, and a lengthy discussion about the topic here (much of which should be taken with a grain of salt, for example, one does not have to unregister the dll at each reboot, that wouldn't make any sense considering that MS suggests rebooting after unregistering!)

Finally, Someone With The Guts To Stand Up To Those Overbearing Gregorians

Here's a little something to noodle whilst ringing in the New Year:
Dick Henry, a man with an unbelievably Anglican name, is tired of being trampled by the opressive, chaotic nature of the traditional Gregorian calendar. After decades of needless calendar reprinting and date-day calculations, Mr. Henry is finally standing up and saying "NO MORE!" He is leading the charge of calendar reform with the flaming sword of the "Calendar-and-Time" (C&T) system. The proposed system would ensure that all months would conform to the much more efficient 30 or 31 day template and each date would fall on the same day each year. Christmas, the lynchpin of the system, would fall every year on Sunday, Dec 25, people would gather together every Wednesday, July 4th to light firecrackers in celebration of America's Independence, and every year I would have an excuse to get drunk in the middle of the week for my birthday. Now, I know what you are saying, "there must be a downside, nothing could be this easy!" Well, in answer to your assumed skepticism, the only thing we would have to worry about is an occasional mini-month called a Newton that pops up every 5 or 6 years. How can we lose? But wait, there's more! Going arm-in-arm with this new calendar is a new time system as well. The proposition is a universal time, centralized around Greenwich Mean. Our sense of time will be slave to that brutal taskmaster, the Sun, no longer. To put it in perspective, here is an excerpt from an FAQ from a C&T support site:
"Question: So, you are really just asking: do I want a very accurate, but very inconvenient calendar (Gregorian), or do I want a more-than-adequately-accurate, but VERY CONVENIENT calendar (C&T)? Answer: Yes."

Aussies make CD ripping, a common practice, legal!

It seems so simple: Make copying television shows and CDs (for personal use) legal. I mean, making this act legal does not make sharing the files legal. Nor does it make downloading files improperly (without obtaining a license through purchase or explicit permission) legal. It makes using devices like PVRs and iPods legal. That's it! People still have to buy cable and CDs, they can just do more with the product. I can see why TV producers have a hard time with the concept: their money is made on ads, and simple recordings allow the viewer to skip past these ads. But the sellers of CDs should have no problem with this. It increases the utility of their product, which should promote a subsequent increase in demand for the product.

Yeah yeah, I know all the arguments that if people rip they will share. Well, that isn't the point is it? The point is whether banning ripping has a significant and effective impact on copyright infringement with respect to the loss of utility caused by the ban. Since all it takes is one person to break the law to seed the file-sharing networks, the answer is obvious. This is not an effective means to promoting the legitimate market for copyrighted material. I'm happy to be in a country that recognizes this.

The question remains whether they will levy a tax on devices that have potential for infringement. I'm against this approach also, because I think it distorts the market for consumer electronics. If someone has a convincing argument to the contrary, I'd love to hear it.

The Love that Conquers all Fear

God is not dead,
Nor does He sleep.
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail -
With peace on Earth
And goodwill to Men.

Transcript of the Sunday Address

Pandora

Pandora rawks. Check it out. They had this whole music genome project thing, which appears to have resulted in some really fabulous preference-based radio streams. I'd pay for it. That's pretty high praise, from me. Check it out. Now. :)

edit: About the name, they use Pandora in reference to curiosity, and as our current society favors the curious, the legend of the box is no longer brought to mind, instead, we find discovery. Neat, huh?

And just to be more clear: It is a site where you can stream music from a seemingly very well chosen array. What you do is pick an artist or a song and it then takes the elements of that to choose your next song. You can tell Pandora that you like the selection or not or just let it keep playing songs for you. If you tell it that you don't like a song, it stops playing that song and chooses another for you, using the fact that you didn't like that particular song to help make future song decisions for that station. If you tell it you like the song, it will use that information as well, in the end bringing you new music in a fashion tailored to your tastes.

I love it, I've had a dearth of good new music and this is opening my world back up without any headache of wading through gobs of obscure facts. This is just music, just for me.

Ho Ho Hardcore!

Just in time for the holidays!

Karkis - Secret Satan


"You put your name into a hat, then pull one out maliciously, then sign an oath to do Beelzebub's work serrupticiously."

Internet Dating, An Awkward New Pubescence For the Whole of Society

If the assembly line can drastically change the structure of manufacture, and the automobile can drastically change the structure of population concentration, why not revamp that dusty old dinosaur "romance" with a little modern engineering? I speak of course about the Internet, that zany new fad that is supposedly making the world a "much smaller place". With the combined computational powers of modern computers and the instant communication possible through high-speed cable connections, certainly the world of partner-finding will never be the same.

In the realm of coupling, mankind is the bastard child of nature, not feral enough to just sniff out an appropriate genetic match, not socially organized enough to handle all of its breeding through a single "queen" specialized just for reproduction, we hover in the middle of the spectrum, between pure individual selection and socialized mating. On the one hand, we still have many of the fun mammalian tools for finding that special someone, for example though our acumen has decreased we can still smell if a mate will be a good genetic match, even if we don't realize that is what we're doing. On the other hand, due to the extreme degree of interdependence that is necessary for the survival of the species, we've also got a nice and complex system of social sub-categorization to ensure that sexual reproduction doesn't interfere with economics and by extension the ability of the species to successfully reproduce.

And now for a brief summation of thousands of years of human mating:
In the early days, while human social groupings were small due to the limitations of necessary resources, human pairing possibilities were limited by the number of available partners and the act was used to cement social ties between families and form the larger groups necessary to sustain life. As technology improved and larger populations became possible, the nature of the beast remained roughly the same, but the style shifted. More people meant more complex social organization, which in most cases meant that well defined guidelines were necessary to make sure that the right people were getting together. If there is one thing that societal structures always attempt to do it is perpetuate themselves. Anyway, the march of progress meant bigger and bigger populations, driving the economic and social value of an individual human life lower and lower. In time, it is no longer necessary to the survival of the larger society that specific people turn off the lights and light up a candle, and deciding who should be marrying whom is important only to the sub-societies whose identities are predicated on some group characteristic, having been decided upon at an earlier time. At this point more than ever before, people start to say, "Hey, maybe I should just get it on with someone who makes me happy" to which their identity group responds "Only if they aren't one of those people and they make enough money." Ta dah, romantic love. This is not to say that no form of this existed before, but that it did not become a prevalent force in the zeitgeist until economic and social factors made it more attainable. Now we skip over the Renaissance, the Age of Imperialism, the Industrial Revolution and a couple of World Wars and we've got populations so swollen and mobile that even if you should happen to get to know the people in your local community they won't be around for long. So, communities based on geography are going out of style, communities based on religious and racial identity are blurring their borders to become more inclusive, and individual people are born and die each day without the larger society taking any notice. To add to the fun, post modern thinking just keeps chipping away at the supports of religious, national, and vocational life validation and the feel-good, self-centered capitalist mindset has set up in their place a Cult of Romance, suggesting in movies and on breakfast cereals that the goal of a life is to find love and shop at the Gap (or Hot Topic if you decide to be an "individual"). So now you are ready to get out there and start flinging woo like nobody's business and you stop and say to yourself, "Huh, where do I start?" You probably have an idea of who you’d like to meet based on their preferences for clothes, entertainment and net income, but where do you find them? All those movies you watched in high school lead you to believe that you'll just bump into them and sparks will fly, but that isn't really "pro-active" enough. Wait a second, on the internet I can search for socks and find what I need in three seconds, if only there were a way to harness that power.

Internet Socializing
We may not have jet-packs or hover-cars but by Odin’s beard with a click of a button we can search through thousands of people and find everyone within driving distance who likes Futurama and drinking whiskey, and if that ain't progress then smack my ass. People based search engines, they're all over the place, like pokemon, and if you want to find Mr./Mrs./Ms. Right/Right-Smith you'd better collect them all. There are two main divisions in the field as I see it, first there are the sites that directly sell you the "search for companionship" at the price of 19.99-29.99 a month, then there are the ones that are free of charge and simply pimp out the ad space. The former includes sites such as Match.com, Soulmatch.com, or Soulmatesworld.match.com. Sites of this order are the vanguard of the corporate exploitation of post-modern ennui, "something is missing in your life, but maybe you can find it if you give us money!" The latter on the other hand is more my style, sites such as MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, and my personal favorite OkCupid. With a loose guise as a forum of personal expression and a means to connect with likeminded people, these sites are slowly but surely changing the mechanics of modern socializing. Right now, our internet voices are cracking as we awkwardly step into this new milieu like a pimpled 14-year-old into a junior high school prom, after all, most of us were raised in a time when classified adds were looked down on and the idea of arranging a meeting with someone you met over the internet was tantamount to inviting rape and murder, but as odd as this idea may be for we children of the 70s and 80s, those out there who are going through their actual adolescence on MySpace will most likely see this forum as a natural and time tested method.

A Break Down of My Favorite Sites:
Friendster - Perhaps the first of its kind, Friendster is dedicated to the documentation and expansion of your collection of friends and associates. Its tone is more in line with camaraderie but the mechanisms and the sidebar advertisements skew towards finding that special someone. My Friendster profile.
MySpace - Perhaps the most popular of its kind, MySpace allows the artist in each of us to come out for a little bit to show other people that we are a unique snowflake because we use different wallpaper. What better way to impress the person of your dreams than with your creative use of fonts. My MySpace profile.
OkCupid - My favorite site for two reasons, all the attitude and fun of TheSpark.com combined with a system designed to match you with other people mathematically based on your answers to incredibly biased user written questions. Also, it has tons of cool quizzes to tell you when you will die and whether or not it will be at the hands of zombies. My OkCupid profile.
Catch27 - The award for most original take on this premise definitely goes to Catch27. Catch27 goes balls-to-the-wall and just flat out says, "People are objects, trade your friends with other people and collect a killer set of people." That honesty and fresh take on the whole situation almost makes up for the fact that practically everyone on the site is a slack-jawed cretin. My Catch27 card can be found by searching for "Boys" in "Oregon" named "Devon". I like this, as well.
Portland Mercury's Lovelab - An offshoot of the classified section of the Portland Mercury, this is a matchfinder predominantly for the hip young demographic in the PDX area. I like this site for its quasi-creative style and the fact that you can make a profile for free but then have to pay to send people messages. Now that is classy. My Lovelab profile.

Stick it deeper.

Standard needles aren't long enough to break through our fat asses to the muscle. Reminds me of the story I saw about people needing bigger toilets. (NB: do not try to search for that article with the terms big fat toilet. Yuck.)

Phone cheat sheet.

Just what everyone needs: a cheat sheet for dealing with automated phone systems. From now on, whenever you get an automated system, take notes and write this guy!

Popcasts: Podcast aggregator.

Popcasts:

Popcasts is an aggregator of the most popular podcasts from many different directories and ranking sites, all on one page.

For those of you who are in to that kind of thing. Filter filter filter.

Perhaps Arthur lost himself and had to flee...

Rimbaud's inspirational methods

I say you have to be a visionary, make yourself a visionary.
A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons and preserves their quintessence's. Unspeakable torment, where he will need the greatest faith, a superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed--and the Supreme Scientist!

If I still long for Europe's waters, it's only for
One cold black puddle where a child crouches
Sadly at its brink and releases a boat,
Fragile as a May butterfly, into the fragrant dusk.

Bathed in your weary waves, I can no longer ride
In the wake of cargo ships of cotton,
Nor cross the pride of flags and flames,
Nor swim beneath the killing stare of prison ships.

From Wyatt Mason's translation of La Bateau Ivre; The Drunken Boat

Attn. Windows Users: Password Safe

Passwordsafe is a utility originally developed by Bruce Schneier to address the problem that many of us have: How to keep track of all our login information while maintaining personal security. I find that many people have said jokingly that they have one "low-security" password that they use for many sites. What I wonder is: why? Why compromise your personal information when there are many tools out there to help you manage your logins in a safe, secure (encrypted), and most importantly, EASY TO USE fashion.

I recommend this utility. I've never had such an easy time managing my bank accounts, my identification information (passport numbers, SSN, drivers license, my Australian visa info and Australian TFN, these things add up and it is often in dealing with my visa and such online that the information is required and password safe allows me to have it at my fingertips in an easy to copy and paste format.) I've just counted how many entries I have in passwordsafe and decided to stop at a hundred, as I feel that is a significant enough magnitude to make my point.

Best of all, it allows me to organize my information. For example, when managing my domains I have FTP info, SSH info, etc. I can keep not only the password safe, but I organize my information into easily manageable and unforgettable structures.

Okay, I'm done selling you this. Peace.

( NB: This is NOT the passwordsafe that I speak of: passwordsafe.com )

The Wonderous and Magnificent Beauty of Chaos, Expressed Through the Medium of Population Excess

The subway doors open. A hobo enters, holding a bottle of windex in one hand and a tube of toothpaste in the other. He says: Which is the better time to read Dostyevsky? Winter?

He sprays the windex.

Hobo: Or Spring?

He squeezes toothpaste out of the tube.

Japanese girl: Spring!
Hobo: You are correct.

--F train

Overheard in New York