DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The worst thing about buying a new house — so far, anyway — is feeling like I don’t own this one any more. I’ve been thrown back into my apartment-living mentality, where every picture hung means one more hole to patch, every moment spent setting up new drums or computer gear or recording equipment means another moment packing it away in a few weeks. When I know I’ll be leaving soon, I have a hard time settling in; the temporary nature of the arrangement wrecks my ability to get comfortable.

Ironically, we’re continuing to remodel, on the advice of our realtor, who insists that a dollar spent on the kitchen now is worth two more in the listing price. Yes, that’s right: had you put all those tech-market investments into kitchen remodels instead, your portfolio would have doubled rather than halved last year. So long as the kitchens in question were located in northern California.

Following this “logic,” we just had the kitchen cabinets refinished, and new counters and a new sink put in. The place looks so good, I’m tempted to say I don’t want to move… but that was true before these changes.

Yeah, I admit it; I’m whining. I can hear your protestations now: “So don’t move if you don’t want to!” It’s not that simple — I want my damn 5 acres, recording studio, datacenter, home theater, and 1700 electronic and/or ethernet devices. It’s just hard to be excited about the property when it exists only conceptually. Whereas it’s easy to be depressed about packing boxes, weekend trips to the self-storage place, and the prospect of putting our home on the market before we find a “suitable replacement.”

Internet users who knowingly submit incorrect contact information when registering Web addresses could face up to five years in jail under legislation introduced in the House of Representatives this week.

Source:
New Bill Would Criminalize False Domain Name Registrations (local mirror)

I have not used a real address or phone number on any domain registration in 5 years. And I’d hate to have to start, although a felony conviction is a pretty dramatic incentive, assuming they can find me to serve the papers.

This is a great quote: “Cybersquatters and other electronic ne’er-do-wells often submit false names and contact numbers when registering Internet addresses.” I think cybersquatters are vermin, just one rung on the evolutionary ladder above spammers (but 2 down from slime molds), so by the process of elimination that makes me an “electronic ne’er-do-well.”

I hide my contact information for exactly 1 reason: the WHOIS databases are among the first databases imported by every new spam outfit. Worse, shady domain registrars like Network Solutions/VeriSign routinely sell access to their customer lists, resulting in snail-mail-borne crap like the UTP-Online.com pro-forma invoice scam.

The bill’s authors, Howards Berman and Coble, are at least aware of the need for privacy; see Berman’s statement from last July in what appears to have been one of the initial hearings on the issue.

And yet, ten months later, the bill they’ve come up with ignores these privacy concerns and simply implements a (stiff) penalty. Here is the full text of HR 4640:

Whoever knowingly and with intent to defraud provides material and misleading false contact information to a domain name registrar, domain name registry, or other domain name registration authority in registering a domain name shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.

How about a little federally mandated protection for all this personal WHOIS data? Please don’t tell me that would interfere with commerce — the excuse bureaucrats usually foist off on their victim/constituents when they pass anti-privacy legislation.

Here is contact info for Howard Berman. Here is contact info for Howard Coble. My letter to both, urging them to reconsider the issue, goes out tonight.

We started looking for a new home a few weeks ago. This was a difficult decision, fueled by a desire to prepare for the future rather than by dissatisfaction with what we have for today. In short, we know that we’d like to have more land, more space, and more privacy, so even though we’ve made ourselves extremely comfortable in our current home, we’re officially looking to upgrade.

The news from the real estate front is this: you can ignore whatever you’ve read about a recession. The California housing market is still insane, same as it ever was.

We toured a property that fit most of our criteria, and even had a lot more land than we need. The price seemed fair (by which I mean, it was about 3x what it would cost anywhere else in America). But the house was trashed; what the realtors called “cosmetic” shortcomings translated to roughly $20,000 worth of improvements that would need to happen before we could move in. Specifically: the carpets were disgusting. Several cats and uncounted herds of local fauna had had the run of the place for weeks, due to the broken pet-door. Most rooms were littered with half-packed boxes and stacks of junk — it was unclear whether the sellers had actually moved out, even though the property was listed as “vacant;” maybe they’d all just gotten lost in the 8 acres of waist-high weeds that constitute the yard, and would return home to finish packing as soon as they get their bearings.

I was entertained to see, amid the wreckage, a copy of a book called How to pack. It looked unused.

Over 1000 square feet of asbestos ceilings would need to be removed. The vinyl kitchen floor had split and been repaired with duct tape. The paint on the bathroom ceiling was shredded, hanging down in sheets. And the water had so much iron in it, metal stalagmites were forming in the bathtub. That was particularly gross.

Without question, the house had potential. Over time, we would be able to turn it into something great. But the first five years would be a painful compromise, living with an outdated miniature kitchen, a dozen leaky single-pane windows, and electrical wiring that one realtor described as “bizarre”.

But we didn’t have an opportunity to even make an offer, for the place had sold — above listing price — before we’d even seen it.

According to Salon, Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings’ (D-S.C.) so-called privacy bill, the “Online Personal Privacy Act” (S. 2201), puts a trojan horse into the camp of privacy advocates — if the bill passes, an army of greasy marketing-company executives will pour out of the statu(t)e, collecting and selling personal information with the full protection of the law.

In A law to protect spyware, Chris Wenham writes:

But Hollings’ bill should outrage Internet users just as much as Brilliant Digital’s [KaZaA-piggybacking] spyware. For while it talks a good game about protecting “sensitive” information, the truth is that it would place a congressional stamp of approval on precisely the kinds of practices that purveyors of spyware are eager to engage in.

(Seen at considered-harmful.org)

In retrospect, it was dumb for me to wear an ancient pair of blue jeans on a travel day.

I had purposefully packed old clothes, both to commemorate the weekend visit with old friends (thinking it would be clever to wear the same clothes this weekend as I was wearing when I met these guys, 8-12 years ago), and because I’d suspected I might be falling off the wagon into a bottle of frosty amber ale, and getting sloppy upon impact… but the lacing studs on my boots consistently set off the airport metal detector, and the frayed jeans consistently set off the airport security guards.

“Step over here please.” I stepped out of line and raised my arms as if I was about to be crucified, which is how I felt at the moment: under-rested, about to endure abuse, and being laughed at by two of the guys I’d been drinking with all weekend, both of whom had passed unscathed through the apparent cultural profiling at this security checkpoint, even though neither was dressed even as nicely as I… one of them, in fact, was wearing the same pants he’d been drinking in all weekend — old brown corduroys with the pantslegs hacked off in an apparent Mission-District imitation of a cuff — and a pair of Dr. Martens so old, that when they were in medical school the curriculum included a course in “Leeches”. My jeans were only slightly more ratty, but a lot more clean, not that the security guard was going to do a sniff test, which, all things considered, was probably for the best.

Anyway, I braced myself for the second “wanding” of the weekend. This wand operator was a lot more thorough than the previous one. He had a little stepstool for me to put one leg up on, to better invade my personal space (yeah, I mean the part between my legs) with his little battery-powered toy. “Does that thing vibrate?” I asked. He wasn’t amused. “I mean, so long as you’re pressing it into my crotch.”

He ignored my beery taunts and proceeded with the inspection. He even announced what he was doing as he patted me down: “I’m going to touch your back now… I’m going to touch your thigh now…” I wondered if this is what it feels like to be at the OBGYN, minus the stirrups and the fact that I still had my pants on.

Finally, having exhausted any possibility of discovering contraband that would not require a cavity search to reveal, the guard made me sit down and take my boots off. And then, boots in hand, he walked away! He delivered my boots to the X-ray technician, and from the distance, turned to me and mouthed, “You’re free to go,” waving dismissively down the hall to where my buddies were chatting, no doubt commenting on my high intellect, good looks, and strong moral character in the face of unpleasant public groping by an airport security guard while they waited.

“What about my shoes?!” I yelled. He shrugged at me from the distance. That’ll teach me to make dildo jokes, I thought.

So I walked over to wait for my shoes to be irradiated for the second time in three days, wondering if I should invest in lead-lined socks, like those heavy aprons they make you wear at the dentist’s office. Of course, the shoes passed the X-ray inspection without comment or complication, because I’d taken the precaution of hiding within my navel the portable nuclear warhead I’d been smuggling back from Cincinnati.

I picked up my boots and bag and prepared to face the gauntlet of ridicule my friends had prepared in the 10 minutes I’d been fending off your government’s best attempt since my last audit to find some reason to arrest me… when yet another security weasel appeared and shouted “Bring your bag over here!”

This is the point that I really would have begun to get upset, if I hadn’t been so “heavily sedated.” Why couldn’t they have swabbed my bag for bomb residue while I was getting felt up by the guy with the wand? “Because I can’t do this unless you’re here,” says the swab technician, demonstrating a decidedly mixed view of respect for passengers’ privacy.

The funny epilogue to this dreary episode is that, through all the inspections, examinations, and interrogations, I had a nail clipper in my carry-on, and none of the security blockheads had the presence of mind to confiscate it.