DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Earlier this year I wrote a semi-sarcastic bit about the fumes generated by modern furniture. I never would have predicted that I’d ultimately buy the very desk I’d used as an example of fiberboard construction. Nor would I have predicted that after unpacking it, I’d have to move it into the garage to offgas for a few days.

The desk surfaces are beautifully made, but they smell like sawdust and chemicals. Which is what they’re made of, of course. They may also have picked up some odor from the packing crate (made of plywood, styrofoam, and glue).

If the fumes persist, you may notice some bizarre, meandering posts in this space, as my forebrain is slowly eroded by VOCs. (I’m sure some of you would insist this has already happened.)

Fun for math nerds: How many ways are there to lace a shoe?

This is the most interesting, refreshing sentence I’ve seen in the newspaper in weeks:

More precisely, this condition says the shoelace is not allowed to pass in a straight line through three consecutive eyelets on the same flap; otherwise, the middle of the three eyelets does not actively help close the shoe.

During a road trip a few years back, I wrote a PERL script to calculate how many unique combinations a burglar would have to try to brute-force the lockbox hanging on my back door (put there by a general contractor during a bathroom remodel). The answer was 715, fewer than what you’d expect from a 4-digit key (which in a more-secure design would yield 10^4 or 10,000 combinations).

Alas, my analysis did not get published in Nature, perhaps because the editors realized that the easiest way to brute-force a lockbox is with a hammer. And it would take a lot fewer than 715 blows.

I set up my first email server, and created an email address at my own domain in late 1996. I used that address as my primary personal email address for six years, sending over 47,000 emails and receiving probably five times that.

Years ago, before spam accounted for 40% of all commercial email*, I used that address to subscribe to a few mailing lists. This is probably how the spammers got their tainted hands on it — because the mailing lists published web archives of list traffic without obfuscating posters’ addresses. In other words, the owners of those mailing lists published my email address on the web. (You can find out if this has happened to you by doing a web search for your email address. If even 1 page comes up, spambots will eventually find and harvest your address.)

As of late 2002, spamming has become commonplace. I receive 10-20 spam messages per day. That may not sound like much, but I have extreme countermeasures in place, and I’ve been using disposable addresses extensively for two years.

But I loathe spam and I have no more time to spend deleting it. The easiest answer was to retire my primary email address. As much as I hate to sacrifice my address as a victim of the war against spam, I look forward to a spam-free inbox. And I’m curious to see how long it will last!

The only remaining open vector of address dissemination, short of my own personal carelessness (e.g. subscribing to a mailing list without first generating a disposable address), is through friends who share my address indiscriminately. Maybe someone will send me an e-card from a website that, in the throes of financial distress, will collect and sell email adresses entered by users. That would suck.

My old address will work for another week or two, and after that will begin issuing auto-replies containing the day’s disposable address. Anyone who reads their bounce messages will therefore be able to find me.

Oh, if you’re about to email me to advocate email filtering, e.g. to tell me that I should have just installed SpamAssassin rather than changing my email address, you need not make the effort. I approve of filtering, but at this time I would rather block spam at the server level, than accept it for filtering.

*Anti-spam software vendor Brightmail calculates and publishes this statistic. Their figure for August was 36%, according to this WSJ article: For Bulk E-Mailer, Pestering Millions Offers Path to Profit.

Nearly in time for your holiday spending spree, here’s a miscellaneous collection of stuff I think is neat. I’ve mentioned many of these items before; see links below or search the site for more info. I’ll update this list periodically over the coming weeks, as I stumble around my mail-order-furnished abode and discover forgotten-but-intriguing items you can purchase and forget for yourselves.

A few of the links below (the book titles) go to Amazon.com. If you use them, I’ll make a tiny commission on your purchase, which will help offset the considerable cost of hosting this website. Of course, this costs you nothing; Amazon’s prices are the same either way. Thanks for your support.

Gifts for cooks and foodies

• The best salmon in the world comes from Alaska’s Copper River. Buying fresh or even frozen is expensive and inconvenient, but the canned and smoked products make fun and unusual gifts: Wild Copper River Salmon
• Cook’s Illustrated — simply great recipes and straight talk about gourmet cooking. (More about Cook’s Illustrated.)
• My current favorite bread book: The Bread Baker’s Apprentice
• (See also my other cookbook reviews and recommendations.)

Gifts for audiophiles

• Stereo-Link 1200 USB digital-analog audio converter. Plug your workstation into this (via USB), and run the analog audio outs to your amp to get high-end sound from CDs and MP3s.
• Etymotic ER-6 Earbud Headphones provide 15+ dB isolation from outside noise, plus middle-of-the-orchestra-pit sound quality. I use mine at the gym. Not recommended for use while driving or operating heavy machinery (other than a treadmill). More on Etymotic ER-6 Earbud Headphones.
• Clearview Golden Helix Speaker Cable - I hate to admit it, but I really could hear a difference when I replaced old MonsterCable with these alarmingly thin wires. (Why do I hate to admit it? Because now I’m doomed to a lifetime of tweaking. Seriously, I have a shopping list that contains “silver solder”. Argh.) For reference, I’m using the least expensive version of the cable, between small Polk Audio speakers and a Cambridge Audio A500 (65W) amp, which I point out to illustrate that you need not have a multi-thousand-dollar stereo to benefit from new speaker cables.
• Sorbothane Isolation Pods - I had a CD player that skipped due to foot traffic in the room. The fix was a simple matter of inserting four of these blue gel pods under the player’s feet. Note that you can spend twice as much for the same item at AudioAdvisor: AudioQuest Sorbo-Gel Big Feet.

Stocking Stuffers

• You’ll feel funny giving someone deodorant. But this one is special, and worth considering if your giftee isn’t a sweaty Neanderthal: Crystal Deodorant Stick. It contains no aluminum (implicated in Alzheimer’s, Gehrig’s, and Parkinson’s diseases). One stick lasts about 18 months, so there’s less landfill waste. And it’s cheap. But it probably won’t work for people who rely on chemical anti-perspirants to keep from sweating through their Oxfords; for these unfortunate souls we recommend a career change and new wardrobe.
• This is a real brain-twister: SET (a perceptual card game). Not recommended for anyone who has trouble distinguishing colors, or anyone whose spouse turns out to be a lot better at perceiving gestalt patterns from a randomly-dealt hand of cards. Otherwise it’s great: easy to learn, compact (for convenient travel), challenging. Play alone or with others. Play with your kids (if you don’t mind losing).

Miscellaneous and yet still unique

• Digital cameras are cool, but analog photo albums are even cooler: paper is never obsolete. Prints don’t crash.
  These are the best photo albums I’ve seen (I have six of them): Henzo Hand-Stitched Photo Albums. The paper is acid free, so your photos won’t turn yellow and brittle, which is likely if you use cheap albums or — shudder — those “magnetic page” abominations. Get the large one; pages are 12.5x16.5 inches, so you can fit 4''x6'' prints eight up on a page.
  A few warnings: The “Henzo Archival Photo Glue” is messy and difficult to use; I recommend using acid-free tape strips instead. And, be aware that once these big albums are filled, they’re heavy (9 lbs) and a bit unwieldy, and perhaps not recommended for persons of small stature or frail constitution.
• Make a poster or framed print of the Earth at Night. NASA provides free high-res, even extremely high-res images of what they call Earth’s City Lights. The next step is to find a service bureau who can make a large print from a digital image — try a web search. Pricing depends on size, but for reference, one vendor charges $36 for 36''x18'' in a satin finish.
• Handspring is selling reconditioned Visor PDAs for as low as $99. Compare the Visor Platinum ($99; 33 MHz; 8MB) to Palm’s Zire ($99; 16 MHz, 2 MB) to illustrate the bargain.

Customers of SBC Communications — including Southwestern Bell, Ameritech, Pacific Bell, Nevada Bell, or in other words anyone who owns a telephone and lives in Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, California, Nevada, or Connecticut — should be aware that your phone company is selling your calling history.

Wanting privacy doesn’t mean you have something to hide. SBC’s definition of CPNI, Customer Proprietary Network Information, lists the data SBC no longer consider private, including:

• Number and type of lines
• Current charges
• Long distance billing record
• Subscriptions to custom calling services (e.g., Caller ID)
• Bill summary - where, when and who you call

Here’s the confusing thing: the SBC privacy policy claims, honestly, SBC does not sell CPNI to unaffiliated third parties. But as David Lazarus points out in The devil’s in Pac Bell’s phone bill details, SBC is affiliated with many more companies than you’d care to share your calling history with.

P*B spokespeople call this a “family of companies.” It sounds warm and fuzzy… but that’s probably not the same feeling you get when your phone rings at dinnertime. Worse than that, telemarketers won’t have to guess that you’re home at dinnertime — they can look at your phone bill from last month and predict when you’re home. Don’t think there aren’t any patterns there; any halfway-intelligent burgler can scan a phone bill and draw conclusions about the homeowner’s schedule.

Lazarus wrote a followup article to explain the backlash from the first: Pac Bell strikes back. It notes that SBC/P*B’s phone reps are familiar with, and sensitive about the story. I experienced this firsthand when I called the Customer Service number (800-310-2355) and asked the rep if I could “opt out of the personal data-sharing that’s been in the news.” She forwarded me to an automated service — she wouldn’t help me personally, and would not give me the direct-dial number of the automated service. At the appropriate prompt I keyed in my phone number and 3-digit account-number extension, but then the system read me a failure message, something along the lines of “we were not able to assist you.” Then the line was disconnected.

I called 800-310-2355 again, navigated through to a human, and very politely requested to have my account flagged “private,” without mentioning the Lazarus story. The rep handled my request personally. I suppose the lesson here is that we’re allowed to opt out, but not if we admit to knowledge about the controversy.

It might also be possible to opt-out online at http://sbc-pacbell.com/rescpni. This might only work for California residents.