Rightfully So

It has been debated for ages: can geeks, nerds, or guys named “Ed” actually produce offspring? Until recently, the scientific consensus was “Bwaaaaa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! What a ludicrous notion!”

Revealed here, for the first time ever on the internet, is incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Just check out this picture, where we see numerous geek-, nerd- and Ed-produced kids, all gathered into one space for this one photo.

Pictured, left to right, are Collins, Crider 2, Sommer, Crider 1, Villines 2, and Villines 1.

Experts tell us that the photo is doctored, using elaborate Photoshop techniques, and stand-in kids collected from various MySpace and Facebook pages.

“Just look at that so-called Collins kid,” says Maria van Dinkel, Executive Director of the Internet. “There’s no way such a darling little child could originate from her supposed father.”

Hoax, or for real? Sound off in the comments section.

It is important to set reasonable goals in life.

For example, my child could grow up to be chief justice of the Supreme Court.

That particular train has left my station, though. My sloth, apathy and ignorance have eliminated many paths that were heretofore available in my life.

But, there are still many paths available for me.

The key, as I emphasized in the opening sentence, is to have reasonable goals.

I, being reasonable, therefore do not aspire to be a noble statesman, philathropic business mogul, or idolized pop star, as these are not reasonable goals for me.

I aspire to be like RC, and make fantastic comic strips. Am I there yet?

OK, so I got a new job (finally, a job that doesn’t crush the very essence of my soul) and, therefore, with it, a new computer on which to execute my daily tasks. But, I convinced my new boss that a Macintosh computer would be able to do everything I needed to do, and would make me very happy, so he agreed to get one for me.

I now get to use a new Intel-powered iMac. Nice. Very nice.

Included with new Macs is an application called “Comic Life.” This software does for comic strips what the word processor did to the typewriter.

All new macs come with a built-in camera.

Now, combine all of these statements, and you get this.

As you may (or may not) know, I am an adjunct faculty at the local post-secondary education institution. (Translated from the academic-speak, this means I am a part-time instructor at a community college.) While many of you out in non-academia may think that summer is just getting started, here in our ivory towers, we’re already thinking to the future.

For the fall semester, there are several new classes that have been added to the curriculum in order to keep current with the changing technology and business marketplace. Here is a summary.

MTH 404 - Internet Math
In cosmology and thermodynamics, physicists say with a straight face that “2 plus 2 equals five, for large values of 2.” In this class learn how to apply this useful nebulosity to modern internet quantities like “mindshare,” “traction” and “eyeballs.” A final project requires that students use internet math to prove how 2 plus 2 can, in certain circumstances, equal 5,000,000.

CIT 500 - Enterprise Application Development
Students learn how to leverage Microsoft’s .NET environment and thousands of developer-hours to assemble millions of lines of code into a scalable, robust application that would otherwise take a knowledgeable computer whiz a few weeks to crank out in Python.

CIT 503 - Enterprise Application Development II
Same as CIT 500, but using Java.

MKT 302 -Dimensionless Marketing
Use pro forma presence indicators to adaptively enhance corporate resources in order to dramatically administrate performance based intellectual capital and organic knowledge resources management. A multi-tined approach to dynamic matrices and vertical vector alignment enhances the pedagogy.

FIN 402 - Finance for Internet Startups
A fresh mixture of modern finance methods yield a new quantitative statistical metric that can create fast results for a rising internet business. Learn how dividing by zero can generate infinite revenue growth, infinite cash flow, and infinite customer growth.

LOB 101 - Introduction to Lobbying
Why use technology advances or process improvements to further a business enterprise when, for half the cost, your elected legislators would be happy to enact laws that stifle your competition?

ENG 011 - Words for Internet Trolls
Learn the correct spelling and usage of words when astroturfing on internet forums. Another words your a looser if you except instruction at a diffrent school why should the class be exasturbated if u cant even sea that

I received an urgent e-mail message from Professor Mpondwe Nahabuto at the City University of Lagos, imploring me to assist him with negotiating some complex international financial procedures, and I was compelled to respond.

I had heard about other people receiving similar messages, and I was skeptical about why Dr. Nahabuto would have chosen me to aid him. But, I knew it was urgent, and perhaps risky not to help. Why, in April 2003, a Mrs. Edwina McMason of North Larchmont, Vermont, carelessy ignored a similar Nigerian plea, and, four weeks later, she found a bunion on her left foot. Also, in September 2005, 17-year-old Abby Applequints from Pussywillow High School in Highland, Kansas deleted a similar Nigerian e-mail message, and later that school-year, she could not find a prom date, and instead was forced to spend what would have been the most beautiful night of her life at home reading a book.

In my case, I figured I could avoid a similar senseless tragedy by responding to Dr. Nahabuto. We exchanged contact information, and I agreed to help him in any way that I could.

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(Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on the Associated Press on January 24, 2004. It is reproduced here, without permission. The truth is stranger than fiction. Enjoy!)

A spam-free world by 2006? That’s what Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates is promising.

“Two years from now, spam will be solved,” he told a select group of World Economic Forum participants at this Alpine ski resort. “And a lot of progress this year,” he added at the event late Friday, hosted by U.S. talk show host Charlie Rose.

Gates said Microsoft, where he has the title of chief software designer, is working on a solution based on the concept of “proof,” or identifying the sender of the e-mail.

One method involves a human challenge, or requiring the sender of an electronic pitch to solve a puzzle that only a flesh-and-blood person can handle. Another is a so-called “computational puzzle” that a computer sending only a few messages could easily handle, but that would be prohibitively expensive for a mass-mailer.

But the most promising, Gates said, was a method that would hit the sender of an e-mail in the pocketbook.

People would set a level of monetary risk - low or high, depending on their choice - for receiving e-mail from strangers. If the e-mail turns out to be from a long-lost relative, for example, the recipient would charge nothing. But if it is unwanted spam, the sender would have to fork over the cash.

“In the long run, the monetary (method) will be dominant,” Gates predicted.

(Lately, it seems that lists have been popular on the Rightfully So website, so I’ll add mine.)

The conventional wisdom says that we should use the arrival of a new year to resolve to make changes in our lives in order to better ourselves… you know the drill… lose weight, make nice with the ex-, floss teeth twice daily… and a bunch of other crap that you’ll never do.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s a bunch of crap that will fail to happen, and it will fail even before we celebrate the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

So, why set yourself up for that? Why make a bunch of resolutions that are destined to fail? Why not make a list of resolutions that you can keep?

In that spirit, here is my list of things I resolve for 2006:

• I will not smoke any cigars.
• I will not play any video games on any system whose name begins with X and the next three letters are BOX.
• I will not perform any human embryonic stem cell cloning.
• I will not watch any professional baseball, basketball, hockey or soccer games.
• I will not not install any “Vista” preview products from Microsoft.
• I will not fill a burlap sack with puppies and kittens and throw the sack over Niagara Falls.
• I will not watch any new episodes of The Simpsons.
• I will not get a large-screen, digital, HD-ready television to replace my 20-year-old, nine-inch Toshiba.
• I will not call in sick to work unless I truly am sick, or I just don’t feel like going in that day.
• I will not violate copyright laws by downloading illegal copies of Duran Duran songs from P2P networks.
• I will not plan for my retirement.

Have I missed anything?

I got to thinking about the technologies that I shun. There are certain applications or environments that I won’t touch with a ten-foot computer-pole. They fall into two groups.

The first group is the released-before-it’s-ready category. These are technologies that, in an effort to generate hype (or “traction” as the sales weasels say), are born prematurely. Writer and software developer Joel Spolsky, over at the Joel On Software website calls this the Marimba Phenomenon:

The Marimba Phenomenon is what happens when you spend more on PR and marketing than on development. “Result: everybody checks out your code, and it’s not good yet. These people will be permanently convinced that your code is simple and inadequate, even if you improve it drastically later.”

(Go read Joel’s other stuff, too; it’s very good.)

While I am not personally acquainted with the particular Marimba package of which Joel speaks, I am have experience with other packages that have the same problem.
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When the members of the TV biz are out making fools of themselves at drunken Christmas parties, they broadcast these things called “reruns” to fill the time, following the theory that nobody is really watching anything anyways.

So, I too, shall do the same, with some writings from my earlier days.

(Note that this should not be interpreted to mean that I am out making a fool of myself at drunken office parties. The drunken office party is next weekend.)

So, without further ado, here is rerun #1, from Feb 17, ‘03:

Telecommuting Stinks
The techno-wonks drone on and on about the information revolution and how it will free us from the shackles of the office workplace. With paradigm-shifting technologies like the internet, video-conferencing, hand-held computing devices etc., we info-workers can execute our duties regardless of location or attire or hygiene.

At first glance, this sounds wonderful. And, in fact, it often is. Of the six years I’ve worked at my current job, about three of them I’ve worked from my home.

But, on days like today, telecommuting stinks. In Clinton County, Ohio, we’re in the midst of the winter storm of the decade. It has been precipitating since Friday in the form of rain, freezing rain, sleet and snow. In our back yard, we’ve got a foot of this ice-snow mix. The temperature is sufficiently cold that regular salt won’t treat the road surfaces adequately, so they’ve declared a “Level 3 Snow Emergency” which means no travel except for emergencies. In fact, you can get a traffic citation merely for being out on the roads.

But, sadly, none of this matters to me, since, being a fully-equipped telecommuter, I have no excuse for not being able to work today.

If only the wind had torn down our phone lines…….

Here’s rerun #2, from March 20, ‘03:

Streaming Text?
I’m digging further into this Darwin Streaming Server, and, according to the documentation, in addition to being able to stream out MP3s, MP4s, MPEGs, QuickTime, and AVIs, it can also stream text.

WTF?

Here’s #3, from May 15, ‘03

Old Fogey Alert
It is amazing the things one will do when one has children that one would absolutely never ever do without them.

To wit: I got a library card this week.

Yes, I am now spending more time with books and less time with TV. Sigh.

So, as the librarian was finishing up my paperwork, she asked if there was anything else she could help me with. Yes, there was, I thought to myself, but I couldn’t quite articulate it.

You see, I haven’t been in a library since my college days over a decade ago. Back in them olden days, the library system was very low-tech. It was the same system we had in high school and elementary school: the card catalog. A big box o’ drawers, with each book listed in the system thrice on 3×5 cards: one by author, one by title, and one by subject.

Now, I know technology has really progressed; a decade is an eternity for computer systems. I knew that somehow that this library’s card catalog, along with every other one in the country, is somehow computerized. But, I had never seen it.

I suppose that in all the time it took me to think these thoughts, I must have gotten some sort of confused look on my face, because she dug a little deeper.

“Is there something else, sir?”

I realized that there was no way for me to save face; I had to bite the bullet and, very sheepishly, I said, “Yes. What do you do for a card catalog nowadays?”

I can’t believe I had to ask. I hope nobody else saw me. What would my friends and neighbors think?

Of course, the librarian was very gracious, and she showed me to the computer stations where one can perform a search.

Fortunately, my child isn’t old enough to remember this situation. I’m sure it won’t be the last time his old man embarasses himself.

Hot on the heels of the recent Sony-BMG XCP rootkit uproar, computer security researchers have discovered a new mechanism for Sony-BMG to protect their copyrighted content.

Speaking for Xytheros, an enterprise networking consultancy, Larry Goldenrod, Chief Technology Officier, says, “In my 37 years of software development and research, I’ve never seen this before.”

At issue is a new content protection system distributed on certain of Sony-BMG’s new audio CDs which seeks to stem the tide of casual music trading by restricting what consumers can do with their purchased songs. Says Xytheros’s Goldenrod, “This previous XCP mechanism was described as a ‘rootkit,’ but I would use the term ‘proxy server’ for this new technology.”
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