Author: Benjamin Mako Hill

Last week, as I was up on the podium having my talk at XIV CNEIS introduced to a packed room of something like 1,500 people, I opened a bottle of water and placed it on the the cloth-covered row of tables between my laptop and another workstation. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had in fact placed the bottle precariously on the gap between two tables. Immediately, the water bottle tipped and began to slowly empty its contents into my laptop’s keyboard.

As quickly as possible, I picked the bottle up and tried to right it. It immediately fell the other direction to dump what water remained into the keyboard of the other computer.

I beckoned to someone for a cloth, ignored what was going on as best as I could, and began to speak. I explained that my laptop might catch fire, explode, or simply stop working during the talk. Many people thought I was joking. I wasn’t.

I guess the fact that they thought I was joking is a testament to my ability to act cool under pressure. My laptop — at least it’s keyboard — is not doing as cool.

I wish I could say that last week saw my worst laptop and water related incident. However, last week is in competition with several occasions when I justified the extra price paid for a Panasonic Toughbook CF-25.

On the second most spectacular occasion, I came home late and tip-toed into a room I shared with my girlfriend at the time who was already asleep, I plugged the laptop into its AC adapter and then I proceeded to drop the machine into a square laptop-shaped plastic bucket that I found lying conveniently next to the bed.

It was the bucket of my water my girlfriend had been soaking her feet in and I winced as I heard the splash of my laptop hitting the water and the thud of it hitting the bottom of the bucket.

Due to the toughbook’s water resistant design, last week’s relatively minor incident will almost certainly end up costing me more money to fix than the incident with the Toughbook. On the bright side, the workstation’s keyboard I also nailed last week seems to be fine.

In certain moods, I really like Julie London. Of course in both lyrics and delivery, she can be a little bit over-dramatic. Play Misty For Me is a good example.

Julie opens it claiming, in one of her most seductive voices, that she’s, "as helpless as kitten up a tree." My favorite lines follow:

Walk my way,
And a thousand violins begin to play,
Or it might be the sound of your hello.

You can listen yourself in OGG Vorbis or MP3.

I like the little flurry of instruments when she finishes the line about the thousand violins playing but lets get a couple things straight:

1. There are not 1000 instruments playing. There are two.
2. Those are not violins. Those are flutes.

I guess it just sounds better than:

Walk my way,
And two flutes begin to play.

Many people think that Mika and I have confusingly similar names. Folks think it’s funny that two people with such similar names live together in the same apartment.

Well, in the last day, Mika have put most of North and Central America between us but it doesn’t seem to have disambiguated things very much. Mika is still at Columbia. I’m in Colombia.

As many people know, I can appreciate an informative sign. That’s why I was happy to see this useful sign inside a train bathroom to help remind patrons of the consequences of their presence:

For the last couple months, I’ve been lurking on the public Unicode mailing list. It’s a lot of fun and there are many very smart people who are both serious geeks in technical sense and serious language geeks. I hope that after I take some time to acclimatize myself, I will be able to get more involved and become a productive presence.

Part of being acclimatized is getting used to all of the names for symbols in different scripts. There has been a lot of discussion lately about Arabic’s (apparently very controversial) teh marbuta. In ways I don’t exactly understand, the teh marbuta can change into a teh in certain situations.

Every time I see teh, I can’t help but think it’s a typo made when someone was trying to type a definite article — a very common mistake in places like IRC. I can think of some funny and confusing IRC conversations about the teh and heh code points.

Yesterday, an email yesterday with a lead-in very similar to the following one made it past my spam filter. (I’ve changed all of the details to protect the innocent but it’s true to the style and effect.):

From: Mr. John Richard <presidentialdirection@yahoo.com> Subject: NIGERIA PARTNER Dear Sir, This email may come as a suprise to you but I am very glad to make your acquaintance.

To my surprise (and probably to yours as well) this email was not a 419 scam. It turns out, John is from Nigeria and he really wanted to be a partner on a Free Software project I’m working on! I was glad I read the whole message before hitting delete!

I think this is interesting case for two reasons:

First, I can’t help but think that had I not had been using a machine spam filter, I would have deleted this in a heartbeat. This is a rare example of a mail that could be correctly identified by many (most?) computer spam filters using techniques like Bayesian analysis on the complete message but incorrectly by human filters who make a decision based on the headers and the first paragraph.

Second, it made me think about the impact that these 419 scams must be having on legitimate Nigerian mail. I’ve heard it said that most 419’s were, at least historically, are actually run by Nigerians although I don’t know if this is still the case. In any case, it seems that many people have come to associate Nigeria and Nigerian email writing styles as indicative of scams.

It seems possible that Nigerian Internet cafes are full of emailers with names like Mr. John Richard who use yahoo email addresses and who come from a culture where it is common to write subjects in ALLCAPS. When they write to people they don’t know, they — quite sensibly — start mails apologizing for the fact that they may have surprised their readers with an unannounced missive. Spammers and scammers put all these more upstanding folks at a real disadvantage when it comes to getting their message out.

A few years ago, Enrico Zini and I were talking about spam and he introduced me to an idea that I thought made a lot of sense. Basically, he said that the only real solution to spam is education: Until we educate people to not buy the things advertised in unsolicited email, spam will persist because there will be an economic incentive for it to do so.

There are other ways to stop spam being sent but these alternatives seem to boil down to making the spammers’ medium either prohibitively expensive or regulated — neither of which are solutions I’m comfortable with with a number of reasons.

Enrico’s idea broke down for me today when I received religious "spam." It was a email from someone trying to convert me to Christianity.

As one of my friends put it, it’s surprising that unsolicited religious mail is not more common and I don’t doubt that it will become more so in the future. The problem with the education model for combating spam and these religious mass-marketing campaigns is that there is no reaction that we can educate people not to have that will eliminate the messages. There is no link to click and no phone number to call in the email. Religious spammers have a message and the chance that you might get it and become saved eternally — no matter how improbable — is enough to justify their effort.

At this point, religious spammers are using the tools of the commercially-motivated spam industry so they are connected. However, I can’t help but see this is a profoundly more problematic type of spam creation.

I met a girl named Ionna yesterday.

If I were named Ionna, I would make it one of my life’s goals to live in a spherical home like this at least once in my life:

"No gods, no masters," is a phrase commonly associated with anarchism.

If I go back to school, I would like to get PhD and not bother with a MA or MS. I feel this way because I enjoy doing research and that’s usually easier in a doctoral program. I think it would be fun to tell people that I am choosing a doctorate degree because I am anarchist and am politically opposed to Masters.

Yesterday, Mika and I were talking about seppuku. Mika said she could never do it. Evidently, she doesn’t have the guts.

Looks like fun, right? Probably. But a tube of powdered candy of that size might as well be a loaded gun. It’s frickin dangerous. I know.

When I was thirteen and tried putting the whole mega-Pixie Stick worth of flavored sugar in my mouth, I laughed and inhaled and the moisture in my throat hardened the sugar into a moist sugar ball lodged squarely in my trachea.

One my friends knew the Heimlich maneuver and managed to dislodge the bright blue coagulation into a psychedelic pool of vibrantly scarlet regurgitated Big Red Cola. It was the last time I touched either Pixie Stix or Big Red.

It wasn’t my time but I think, when I’m ready, that is exactly how I want to go.