England Brazil

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Great first half. It's 1 to 1 at halftime as Brazil scores just before the break to match Michael Owen's shot off a poor reception by a Brazilian defender. Huge names in this match. Owen, Beckham. Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Ronaldinho. I can barely keep my eyes open, but it's tough to miss this match between these soccer superpowers. Not sure how I'll wake myself up for the U.S.-Germany match.

Little pink coffin

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Yet another company has announced a tool for fighting spam (unsolicited e-mail, not the mysterious canned meat). Cloudmark's tool is called SpamNet.
The idea is that this add-on software places an extra folder in your e-mail program. When you receive spam, you can click on it and add it to your spam folder, where it gets reported back to a central server somewhere. If you report spam properly, your future reports are taken more seriously. The idea is that there are just as many, probably a lot more, people reading e-mail and receiving spam as there are sending spam. Of course, each spam mailer sends out a ton more e-mail than the average recipient. However, if the entire e-mail community begins to report spam, you have an entire army fighting the problem instead of relying on a small central group to track it.
Clever idea, and one of the more promising approaches I've heard.
SpamNet only works for Windows computers running Outlook. If you qualify, I encourage you to download it. Since it derives its power from the size and participation of its community (like Napster, or SETI@Home), it will only be effective if a critical mass of users adopt it. You'll feel like you're contributing to better the world of e-mail for everyone--think of it as volunteer work.
What they really need is to have support for Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, whose accounts tend to be spammed mercilessly because spammers can just guess at usernames to attach to @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com. My home e-mail account is actually fairly immune to spam so far. Or someone like Microsoft or some standards board should encourage its integration directly into Outlook and other popular e-mail programs as a standard.

Electronica


Odd convergences. Cleaning out my e-mail at work today and found an old link from James to the video for Dirty Vegas' Days Go By. You know this song, even though the title may not be familiar. It's the one in the Mitsubishi Eclipse commercial, where three young'uns are driving at night, seemingly to a rave, and this song comes on, and the girl in the passenger seat starts grooving.
Cool commercial. Cool tune. Same day, I read an article in Salon about the influence of electronic music on the American music scene, and it mentions this song and the commercial a couple times.
Oh yeah, cool video. Go check it out. I couldn't get the Quicktime link to work, but the Windows Media link came up just fine. I may use a few of those moves next time out on the dance floor.

What the $#@*&!


The fifth leading votegetter for an NL outfield spot in the 2002 MLB All-star game is Tsuyoshi Shinjo, ahead of Andruw Jones, Larry Walker, Jim Edmonds. What, can people not tell the difference between Japanese outfielders and think he's Ichiro? Actually, Armando Rios of Pittsburgh has more votes than Andruw Jones or Larry Walker. I have no idea how that happened.

Creative Comments, er, Commons


Another interesting interview with Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford and the public figure most known for trying to get the folks in D.C. to understand the world of technology and how law might best apply in that world. I agree with him on the principles which he titles end-to-end, which says that you should keep the network simple, placing intelligence at the edges. The Internet is a good example. TCP/IP is fairly simple--it moves data. Computers at the edges of the network are smart and can do all sorts of fancy things like play movies or music, create web pages, process spreadsheets, etc. The principle allows networks to evolve quickly, without requiring the coordination of multiple parties.

Open Source Software


Joel has a theory on why various companies are pursuing open source software.

Quicktime

Quicktime rules.

Will it cause tumors in your ear

Now this would be a cool, a phone that is planted in your tooth and which you hear through your earbone. Someone could be whispering in my ear. All they'd need is a video feed to see what I'd be seeing and a panel of experts could be informing me of people's names, jokes, and random facts which would make me the toast of every cocktail party.
Of course, it would exacerbate the problem now where people talk into earpieces connected to their phones and I mistakenly think they're talking to me.
"Hello?" they'll say.
"Uh, hi," I respond.
(ignoring me) "Hey honey! How are you? Hey listen..." they chatter.
(small black cloud over an embarrassed yours truly)

D'oh!

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The RIAA has neutered Audiogalaxy. Where, oh where, is one to get MP3s? The list is shrinking.

Spidergoat

Interesting article in NYTimes Sunday Magazine about researchers who are synthesizing spiderwebs--or silk--by inserting spider genes into goat eggs, creating goats who excrete the silk in their milk. That silk is then extracted and fed through a series of machines that simulate the biological mechanisms of actual spiders, creating a substance they call BioSteel which is five times as strong as regular steel.
What a crazy world we live in.
Footnote: supposedly spiders were once all ground hunting creatures, but when their prey learned to fly, only spiders who learned to create invisible, sticky webs survived evolutionary pressures.

Neato

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Navigate to the Bang and Olufsen homepage and then to
International > Products > Telephones > BeoCom2

That is the coolest looking phone I've ever seen. Too bad it's not available in North America. Forget tiny cellphones with buttons you can barely press--sometimes bigger is better.
Also, you can hear a low bitrate RealAudio or Windows Media Player sample of Coldplay's new single In My Place from their upcoming album (titled A Rush of Blood to the Head). Catchy, happy BritPop. Go to Coldplay's homepage, then navigate to Audio/Video, then to Singles, and scroll down to the bottom. Rumor has it the band's breaking up after their next album, which would be unfortunate.
These two examples, by the way, illustrate the problem with entirely Flash-driven websites. You can't deep-link to content within them.

Envy

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Orson Welles directed Citizen Kane at the age of 25. I think it takes a certain single-mindedness and courage, or obliviousness, to achieve greatness at such a young age. I think I lack a little of both, and it's depressing me.
I was reminded of it after watching the Seattle Symphony Night at the Oscars show, when they played clips from various classic films while projecting the film on a screen up above.

Fun with fingers

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The movies, and the public, have a fascination with biometric fingerprint devices, yet they're among the least secure of ID systems out there. I was reminded of this while watching The Bourne Identity, in which Matt Damon's Jason Bourne goes to check out his safety deposit box at a Swiss bank and is asked to place his hand on a fingerprint reading LCD screen.
Japanese cryptographer Tsutomu Matsumoto was able to fool 11 leading fingerprint ID devices using a fake finger made of common household gelatin, like those used to make gummy bears.
Other researchers have been able to get a positive ID by simply breathing on the fingerprint readers, which take the combination of moisture on the reader and the oil left over from the previous actual finger as proof that a human finger is resting on the screen.
On a related note, the police lineup may be an anachronism. Experts have shown that the standard police lineup, in which six suspects are shown to a witness at once, is not as reliable as showing the witness six suspects in succession, each one alone. That's because humans tend to make relative judgments when presented with multiple suspects at once rather than evaluating each person independently. I read that in an article in the Atlantic Monthly.
I also learned that claiming to have evidence that you don't actually have is a legal interrogation method.

Tune-up complete

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Lance Armstrong won the final tune-up for the Tour de France, the Dauphine Libere. I finally decided to take the plunge and head over to France for the last week of July to catch Lance in the mountains and ride some of them myself. I couldn't pass up the chance to see the finest cyclist of his generation, the cancer survivor poster boy, live and in person, pursuing his fourth straight Tour victory. Who knows what will happen next year. Maybe he tires of the sport, maybe he gets injured, maybe he loses form. Life is short.

Minority Report

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Ebert and Roeper give it two thumbs up, calling it "a masterpiece." I'm looking forward to it. I never read the Philip Dick story on which it's supposedly based, but I did read a story with a similar premise, The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester, about society in the year 2031, when telepathics anticipate all crimes before they happen. Good book, and not to be confused with Demolition Man, a movie starring Wesley Snipes and Sylvester Stallone, and a much less impressive artistic achievement.
Ebert interviewed Spielberg and Cruise. Doesn't filmmaking sound like so much fun sometimes?
As with A.I., another Spielberg film, this one has a fairly elaborate set of websites associated with it. I visited the Precrime website and took the personality test, to see if I had what it takes to be a Precrime agent. My personality result?
"You are a perfection-seeker: You seek to be an ideal person in a perfect world. You are a reformer and a romantic, always looking at what should be rather than what it. Life has goals and a purpose for you and you find fulfillment when you accomplish something, especially when it has a place within a bigger picture."
I can't tell if that's me or not. As noted in a recent Salon article about alleged psychic John Edward, host of Crossing Over, horoscopes and fortune tellers and psychics often sound convincing but are simply playing a statistics game.

File sharing and music purchases

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Stan Liebowitz's evidence supports what I believe, which is that music sales are not materially affected by file sharing. The music and movie industries, like any other industries, are quick to point fingers when sales are down, and quick to claim credit when the money's rolling in. I do buy more CDs now that I can sample music more easily through file sharing. If I like something I have no problem paying for it. But CDs aren't priced fairly.
Frankly, file sharing isn't going away for a long long time. Perhaps never. Eventually you'd think the music industry would stop wringing their hands and try to meet their customer's needs. These first revs of downloadable music services are pathetic, but they're healthier than a constant stream of lawsuits. Suspecting that everyone is out there to rob you blind, that the world is pitted against you, it's classic attribution error. All bad things are results of your environment. All good things come from oneself.
I know people like that, who have excuses for everything, and I wonder if they'll finally find the courage to take responsibility for themselves on their deathbed.
Maybe one of these days, I'll become an old, conservative schmo who yearns for the good old days. For now, the idea of a universe that changes (discovering intelligent life in this universe, or new laws of physics, these are good things) is an exciting prospect. I believe that law should evolve over time if reality changes, both those of the public judiciary and even those of private institutions like the church (revoke the ban on mandatory celibacy for priests, anyone?).

Bite an ear! Do something!

A whole crew of us gathered to watch Lewis jab Tyson's head into a soggy apple on Saturday night. Frankly, the only reason to watch was the hope that somehow, Tyson still had that dangerous, frenetic punching power from his youth, when he'd savagely annihalate his opponents in a few short rounds.
I'm not one of those folks who finds boxing to be inhumane. If two grown adults consent to beat each other up in a ring with gloves on, I'm not going to stand in their way. Pugilism has a technique and an art to it, and some of those Ali fights were amazing displays of courage.
By the time the fight passed the fourth round, we had gone from hoping to see a display of power and speed from Tyson to hoping he didn't get pounded into oblivion. His face was ground beef. After the fight, when he admitted he didn't think he could beat Lewis, when he admitted he was thankful for the payday, and when he practically begged for another fight, the mystique was gone. At one point during the post-fight interview, when they met at the center of the ring, Tyson hugged Lewis and then noticed that some of his blood had rubbed off on Lewis' face. So Tyson reached over and wiped it from Lewis face with his right hand. Tyson?!? At least in previous fights, when he got disqualified for biting ears and hitting after the bell, he still seemed like a dangerous loose cannon. After the Lewis fight, he was just another meek, unemployed has-been living on reputation, hoping to earn a steady paycheck to pay the bills.
In this economy, there are plenty of those, and I don't need to pay $59.95 to see them on TV.

Heat wave

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Alan and Sharon brought a heat wave to Seattle. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Sunny and 90 degrees is a welcome, welcome change from grey, misty, and 45 degrees.
Before I moved to Seattle, I didn't fancy myself someone easily affected by the weather. But over five Seattle winters, I've learned what it means to crave the sun like an alcoholic craves the bottle. Not that I know what that feels like. I just imagine it feels like this.

Bye bye Bobby

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Today is Robert's last day at Amazon. Yesterday after work a crew of us gathered to share some drinks and some food and to reminisce about our favorite Bobby stories. I have many.
I met Robert at Amazon, which he joined in Feb. of 1998. He used to sit with Aaron in one wing of the fourth floor, where I sat as well.
He was one of my first roommates in Seattle in my sweet old pad up at the top of the hill in Fremont. Because we were at the top of the hill, we had a great view in all directions. The windows of my room opened out onto a narrow ledge which, if traversed, allowed one to climb up on the roof of the house and look out at the sunsets over the Olympics.
Robert used to climb out on the roof with a bottle of wine, his guitar, and occasionally an unsuspecting, or perhaps suspecting and consenting young lass. Of course, I didn't always know he was out there and sometimes I'd be lying in bed and would hear a rap at my window from Robert and whoever else I had locked out there on the roof.
We had some good times playing guitar and singing out on the roof. Somehow, and this is fortunate, we never feel off. It was a steep roof, and the fall was three stories onto the pavement. Death was probable.
After I busted up my knee I couldn't drive stick for a while so he and I switched cars. Robert still had this old SUV from his college days. This grey thing was old, had that red Stanford decal in the back window. It looked like a hippie mobile.
There was the time we saw the Chieftains at Chateau Ste. Michelle. I can't remember why we got the tix, as we didn't really feel like seeing them live. We took Susannah and Robert's Russian bride (okay, she was just a former co-worker visiting from the Bay Area, but she was Russian). Each of us downed a bottle of wine, and we danced around that lawn like lunatics while the older and more subdued crowd looked on with disapproval. Unfortunately, we were too loopy to drive home afterwards so we put down a blanket next to the car in the parking lot, plopped down, and practiced German from my phrase book (don't ask why I was trying to learn German but suffice it to say that phase has passed).
Some long time later, after the entire lot had emptied out, Robert managed to sober up enough to drive us home. Mind you, it was a work night. We got home, popped in The Rock, and watched til 4 in the morning or something like that.
Another time, Robert and I played Gold Mountain and he shot a 73. He had a putt for a par round on the last hole.
There was the time he and I took Scott to Palace Kitchen for his birthday, then to Belltown Billiards for drinks. Scott's head was shaved back then. This is an important detail. We got Scott hammered at Belltown. As we were leaving, some punks from a neighboring table brought back their billiard balls and told Susan, a friend of ours who worked at Belltown, that they had found those on the table and didn't want to pay. Scott and I didn't take too well to their lame excuses, and being somewhat intoxicated, we let them know that they were bunch of cheap asses and to pay up. Susan let them off though, and those guys left.
Well, Scott and Robert and I settle up and leave, and we find the six of these dudes waiting outside for us. Here's where Scott's shaved head comes in. The leader of this band of yahoos says, "Hey skin, I didn't appreciate your comments back there." Except his grammar wasn't quite so solid. Well, three of us loopy dudes weren't going to come out too well against this sober fatso and his five sober buds, but what the hell, it's good to mess it up every now and then. Somehow it never came to blows. Maybe Robert the peacemaker brokered a cease fire. So Scott and this guy shake hands and these six characters wander off. About two minutes later Scott suddenly comes to his senses and goes off chasing after these guys who have long since disappeared.
Robert and I hopped in the car, found Scott, and drove him over to a friends place on the East side, dumped him there, and drove off.
There are other stories which I'll add sometime when I'm not brain dead.

Prior

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Friday, I saw Mark Prior's fourth start in the majors as my beloved Cubbies visited town to play the Mariners for the first time in their history. Prior was matched up against another good young pitcher, Joel Pineiro. Usually, I root for the Mariners, but not when they're playing the Cubs.
Prior started off well, striking out Ichiro on a 95 mph fastball which Ichiro swung through. From there on out he was in control, pitching out of one jam with runners on first and third and no outs. All night he was spotting 93 to 97 mph gas, snappy 80-81 mph curves, and the occasional 84-85 mph changeup. The Mariners were overmatched in many cases; many of the strikeouts were full or check swings. Prior looks calm on the mound and has a smooth delivery. It's easy cheese--as he continues to mature it wouldn't be surprising to see him tossing in the high 90's consistently.
Baylor let Prior go back out for the 7th inning after he had already thrown 110 pitches or so. That made me nervous. He ended up tossing 124 pitches, striking out the side in his last inning. If Baylor had let him stay out there much longer I would've run out on the field and yanked him myself. Baylor let Clement out there the next night for 116 pitches. Let's hope Baylor, with his job in jeopardy, doesn't abuse his starters until their arms fall off. I won't exactly shed many tears if he's let go this year.
Later Kyle Farnsworth came in and blew Ichiro away on a 98 mph high fastball. Sammy also connected and hit a rocket of a line drive out to the second level of the left field bleachers. The other memorable moment came when Pineiro got Sosa to ground into a double play, pumped his fist, and started walking off the field. Problem? There were only two outs. The home plate ump told a sheepish Pineiro to get back out there, but perhaps his mind didn't follow. The next batter, Crime Dog McGriff, homered to right.
Prior ended up with 11Ks in 7 innings. Someday I'll look back and tell folks about seeing him pitch his first year in the majors. He has the potential to be a control power pitcher, much like Roger Clemens or Curt Schilling of the past few years. It's a rare combination--Kerry Wood is still trying to gain command of his stuff. If he stays healthy, Prior will be the Cubs ace within two years.

Bureaucracy Part II

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The Sunday NYTimes has an article about how Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, acknowledges the the FBI has to be reorganized to have any chance to fight terrorism effectively. Mueller took the position Sept. 4, just a week before the attacks, so he isn't likely to be implicated as part of the organizational problems he admits exist. Still, give him credit for being brave enough to confront the facts; it certainly isn't the way to win new friends in an organization you've just been designated to head.
It's not going to be easy. Given that counter terrorism puts communication and coordination at a premium, the idea that FBI agents can't send e-mail from their desktop computers is absurd.
Importantly, sacrificing all of our personal freedoms and privacy does not necessarily have to be part of the counter-terrorist solution. The facts seem to indicate that the FBI and CIA had enough information to detect trouble. Being able to monitor all of our personal activity without sufficient suspicion of criminal activity, as Ashcroft has allowed the FBI to do by easing domestic spy rules, smacks of desperation or even worse, an attempt to capitalize on a nervous public to seize undue powers of surveillance. William Safire of the NYTimes mused in an op-ed: J. Edgar Mueller.
A related problem is that most of the nation's best and brightest don't consider working for the government because of the bureaucracy involved. Some people I know do so anyway, with hopes of serving the public any way possible. Fewer than that actually put up with it for a lifetime.
Republicans and Democrats are standing up from the dinner table and throwing dinner rolls at each other, pointing fingers. Democrats are saying the White House knew more about 9/11 than they're letting on. Republicans are saying the Democrats are out of line and unpatriotic for undermining faith in the government with their accusations. Political crap. It's clear the government and lots of national agencies didn't work together optimally. Instead of trying to use this issue to win votes, they should do a post-mortem and figure out how to work together to fix the problem.

Magic Johnson + Michael Jordan =

Zinedine Zidane, widely considered the best soccer player in history. Magic called him Magic and Michael combined. Soccer has a lot of big-name stars. I don't play soccer or follow it much, but names like Beckham and Zidane and Figo ring bells.
Zidane has the build I wish I had. 6' 1", 172 pounds. Runs 9 miles in a typical soccer match. It's World Cup time. Between my junior and senior years at school I saw Brazil play Russia in World Cup at Stanford Stadium That was likely the craziest sports crowd I've ever been a part of. By the end of the game I was singing Brazilian chants and jumping up and down and passing people up and down the stands. I don't remember much of the match, though I do remember Brazil won.

Clackety clack clack

You know what I want? Someone to write a program that creates the sound of a typewriter as a type on my computer. Writing on a computer is just too quiet. If someone invents that, please let me know.