DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

If you can read this, I congratulate you! You have braved the rough DNS waters to surf to my server’s new home.

I spent nearly five hours today standing around while a series (and, many times, a parallel) of Pac*Bell and PBI technicians tried to make my new DSL work. The first tech tried a router and 3 modems. All showed synch, but none passed traffic.

The installation tech had to leave (PBI folks are forbidden from working overtime) but they dispatched someone else, apparently missing the message that something in the central office was broken. The second tech confirmed that the first tech was correct in diagnosing a problem “elsewhere,” and then he went and sat in his truck for 90 minutes waiting for P*B to change hardware in the CO. The hardware apparently got changed, but no one thought to call me or him to say so.

Finally, after 6:00 PM, the line came up. And then about 11:00 PM I got my server installed and configured. And then by about 12:30 AM some of the DNS and whois changes began to take effect.

I think this site actually showed less than 1 hour’s downtime, although individual client experiences vary with the performance of their local DNS caches. I saw traffic coming it shortly after booting up the server, though, so that was gratifying. All in all it was the least painful server-and-DNS relocation I’ve ever done.

This is fun: online intelligence testing from the “High IQ society”.

Here is a sad comment about media saturation and advertising and, well, the sloth of the average American: regarding its new series of anti-iMac television advertisements, computer maker Gateway estimates that “83 percent of U.S. adults would see the TV ads an average 14 times through September.” (local mirror)

If the ad is 30 seconds long, then 83 of 100 adult Americans will spend seven minutes next month watching the same commercial, over and over. How productive is that?

According to the 1990 U.S. Census, there are 248M people in the country, of which 74.4% are 18+ years of age. So that’s roughly 185M adults. If 83% of them see seven minutes of Gateway commercials next month, that amounts to 2051 years of wasted time.

Fortunately, the media companies have not yet succeeded in making it illegal to skip past commercials (in spite of Jamie Kellner’s efforts), so some of those 153,583,320 adults won’t actually see all 14 broadcasts of the Gateway commercial. I feel good about this: perhaps those people will be out winning the Iditarod or inventing revolutionary transportation devices or ghostwriting autobiographies for people who didn’t spend their lives watching computer commercials on television. But I fear that some large percentage of the people who leave the couch during the commercial will just be going to the kitchen to retrieve some Jiffy-Pop or a Snickers bar, which, while in one sense good for the economy, in most other senses doesn’t address the productivity problem.

An associate of mine views advertisements as entertainment. I can’t be so positive, or even impartial: I think advertising is a virus. It feeds on attention and turns brains to jelly. Check out your neighborhood toddlers in designer footwear if you disagree.

Most people I’ve talked to claim they’re not affected by advertising. That argument can’t be true — if advertising wasn’t effective, why would merchants spend so much money on it? In fact, the people who think they’re somehow untouched by the manipulative messaging are probably the advertisers’ favorite audience, as they are puppets who insist that there are no strings.

So I had this milk-crate of “LPs” that I’ve been carrying around for 20 years… the remains of the collection of records I bought in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when vinyl was the only respectable media on which to acquire music. I haven’t purchased an LP since, probably, 1988, and I’d only listened to these once or twice in as many decades. I have not replaced many of these records on CD — my tastes evolved (although not very far, some might claim!) — and that was the only reason I hadn’t dumped these years ago.

We’re moving to our new house soon, though, and it was time to jettison some of the detritus of past obsessions.

I flipped through the stack one last time, reminiscing about the music I used to really enjoy. I think I had the entire REO Speedwagon collection, up through 1980’s Hi Infidelity, a commercial peak but already (IMO) a good distance down the back side of the slope in terms of creative output. Then there was a Lynyrd Skynyrd promo disk, a Zeppelin disk, three from Mannheim Steamroller, a few early Genesis records, one from Alan Parsons, and the record that inspired my earliest remembered case of buyer’s remorse, In 3-D from Weird Al Yankovic. Ewww.

I schlepped the milk crate to a run-down-looking “vinyl-only record store” and hefted it up on the counter. The sign on the door announced “we buy record collections,” so the owner had no escape: it was only a question of price. And I was willing to accept just about anything — one mean stare and I’d just leave the crate behind and run for my car.

The owner looked at the first dozen titles, and uttered a question I never would have predicted: “Is it all heavy metal?” I goggled briefly… there was not one metal record in the whole stack. But maybe this guy was a big Tuck & Patti or Carpenters fan. Still, I’d expect someone who sells music for a living would be better able to distinguish between heavy metal and REO Speedwagon.

Anyway I walked out with $35 cash (about $0.87 per LP) and figured I got the better end of the deal, even considering that I threw in the milk crate.

Steve Kirsch, ex-Infoseek, hates junk faxes. He created junkfax.org, an awesome resource of legal information that should enable any victim to claim up to $1500 in fines per junk fax received without too much difficulty.

Yesterday, Kirsch filed a lawsuit against junk-fax “king” Fax.com, claiming $2,200,000,000,000 in damages. That’s 2.2 trillion dollars. (For additional coverage of this lawsuit, see the junkfax.org news page.)

Coming just two weeks after the FCC fined fax.com $5,379,000, this lawsuit sounds a lot like another nail in the fax.com coffin.

I find it tremendously refreshing that someone with Kirsch’s determination and resources is focused on an issue like this. Like the privacy law that’s currently getting batted around the California senate, junk faxing is an issue that most consumers have strong feelings about, but the legal changes that would satisfy consumers somehow manage not to ever pass, perhaps because the perpetrators are better-organized and better-financed, or maybe just because the average citizen doesn’t know s/he has the opportunity to make a change.

CA residents who are interested in making a change should check out the junkfax.org page on how to vote against junk faxing.