DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

48 hours after our lights went out, PG&E deigned to release an estimated repair time: 8:00 PM tomorrow. In the meantime, I’d seen lights all over town going on and off for two days. Every time the wind blows, another section of the county goes dark.

I knew there was some risk in moving farther out into the country, but I didn’t expect to be out of power for three days. It’s especially incongruous that the weather has been beautiful all day, and the utility is still blaming “storm conditions.”

We’re fortunate in some ways. We were out of town the first night. The second night was inconvenient but interesting, with rustic-adventure appeal; I read by candlelight, and wrote on my laptop in front of the woodstove. The third night began to suck, as food spoiled and the water pressure dropped to nothing. (Well pumps require electricity.)

My house is a wreck of takeout containers and unread newspapers. It smells of woodsmoke and scented candles. It sounds of silence — a sharp contrast to the loud music that is the pulse of the place whenever I’m conscious (assuming the power is on). Behind the silence is the low throbbing of the neighbors’ generators.

Yeah, we should have bought a generator too, but after five years at the old house we’d never needed one. Now, at the new house, we’re apparently at the end of the power line, lowest priority on the repair list for the guys in leather gloves and rubber boots. i think we’ll forego the generator and put a solar array on the roof instead.

An acquaintence on a local mailing list phrased it well: “We’re learning to live like the Amish, but are doing it with a lot less grace.”

Amen to that. Or, maybe, gesundheit, or something.

Stories like this give me a good feeling about small-town cops. The good feeling in question is relief that I rarely have to deal with them.

Suisun City, CA is a town of 28000. The police chief has just announced that he’s gay.

With that background, read this remarkable quote by Suisun City police officer Gail Hill:

I think a sigh of relief was let out by everyone in the department simply because it’s not a whisper in the hallway anymore… It’s out there, and we can deal with it. We’re a smaller department, and we’re a family. We are able to overlook people’s downfalls and shortcomings and treat people the way they should be treated.

I regret that the reporter of the story didn’t ask the police chief for a reaction upon learing that one of his staff equates homosexuality with a “shortcoming” or “downfall.”

Original story: Besieged Suisun City chief says he’s gay

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.