Tuesday, August 20, 2002

I got this from an e-mail contact, Martin Spencer in New Zealand   "Hello, and welcome to the Psychiatric Hotline ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++   "If you are obsessive-compulsive, please press 1 repeatedly. "If you are codependent, please ask someone to press 2. "If you have multiple personalities, please press 3, 4, 5 and 6. "If you are paranoid-schizophrenic, we know who you are and what you want. Just stay on the line so we can trace the call. "If you are psychotic, listen carefully and a little voice will tell you which number to press.  "If you are manic-depressive, it doesn't matter which number you press. No one will answer.  "If you are delusional and occasionally hallucinate, please be aware that the thing you are holding on the side of your head is alive and about to bite off your ear.  "If you are suicidal, please hold for the next available operator. Your call will be answered in the order it was received. Please do not hang up and re-dial, as this will only delay the processing of your call. Currently, you are number 381; estimated wait time is three hours, twenty minutes. If you prefer to change your psychiatric affliction, press zero at any time to return to the main menu ..." 11:55:37 PM

If you are easily offended by humor, do not read this installment. This was passed along from [Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog] to [dws.] but I have previously seen variations of this in my e-mail.  If you like this kind of stuff (I love it), check out  http://www.wullamette.edu/~tjones/language-Page.html = Human Languages Page = an archive of Web sites about (and in) foreign languages - including dialects & fictional languages such as Klingon. http://www.mmania.com/ = humor in French ie. you need to be familiar with the language of France to digest this stuff http://www.best.com/~imagine/jokes/ = humor in very bad taste, in four different languages http://www.nine.org/notw/notw.html = news of the weird news stories from around the world Americonics = standard American English Chiconics = a language unique to Chicagoans, that Mike Royko used to  talk about in his column Ebonics = African-American language with its roots in tribal languages such as Ebu Ubu Abu Abadabado Hebonics = language of many of America's Jews.    I have shared this with several Jewish friends who have informed me that this is hilarious, and they wish they dreamed it up first.  If anyone is offended, that persion does not know and love Jews.  Here are some descriptions of the characteristics of the language, and samples of phrases in standard English and Hebonics.    Samples of Pronunciation Characteristics   Jewish English or "Hebonics" hardens consonants at the ends of words.      Thus, "hand"  becomes "handt."     The letter "W" is always pronounced as if it were a "V".      Thus "walking" becomes "valking."     "R" sounds are transformed to a guttural utterance that is virtually impossible to spell in English.  It is "ghraining" "algheady."    Samples of Idiomatic Characteristics     Questions are always answered with questions:      Question: "How do you feel?"      Hebonics response: "How should I feel?"     The subject is often placed at the end of a sentence after a pronoun has been used at the beginning:      "She dances beautifully, that girl."     The sarcastic repetition of words by adding "sh" to the front is used for emphasis:      mountains becomes "shmountains      turtle becomes "shmurtle."    Sample Usage Comparisons:      Standard English Phrase                 Hebonics Phrase   "He walks slow"                   "Like a fly in the ointment he walks" "Sorry, I do not know the time"   "What do I look like, a clock?" "I hope things turn out okay"     "You should BE so lucky" "You're sexy"                     (unknown concept) "Anything can happen"             "It is never so bad, it can't get worse" Good writing is the basis for weblogging. Good books about how to write are "On writing well" and "Style: toward clarity and grace". If you don't feel like reading books, this list might help as well: Avoid alliteration. Prepositions dangle awkwardly if you use them to end sentences with. Avoid clichés and colloquialisms like the plague, or you will seem old hat. Employ the vernacular, while eschewing arcane and obfuscatory verbiage. Avoid ampersands & abbreviations, etc. Take it easy with parenthetical remarks (however relevant), to avoid chopping up sentences (unnecessarily (we might add)). To ever, however artfully, split an infinitive, marks you as grammatically challenged. Skip the foreign words and phrases you know, n[base ']est-ce pas? Never generalize. [base "]I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.[per thou] [^]Ralph Waldo Emerson Comparisons can clog up writing as badly as alliterations and cliches. Avoid redundancy and verbosity, or readers will think you are repeating yourself and using too many words as well besides. We really get @*&%$**)!! when you use vulgarities. Clear, specific writing beats vagueness, we suppose. Whatever. Overstatement totally destroys any credibility you ever had forever. Understatement can, at times, perhaps shade a point to the point of its fading away. One word sentences? Eliminate. Analogies work about as well as fur on a flounder. [base "]Is[per thou] just sits there. Pick verbs that do something. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, you should derail it. Who needs rhetorical questions? Its distrakting too punctuat, an spel rong. Good writing is surprisingly hard. [Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Weblog] [dws.] 11:41:18 PM

Sep 2, 2002 issue of [US News & World Report] has a highly entertaining collection of articles with major coverage of Hoaxes. 11:35:18 PM

A tree is known by its fruit, A meeting by its results. The key to success is a good Agenda. 11:17:07 PM

Sewage pouring into lakes, streams [USA Today : Front Page] Looks like [Bob Morris] does not yet know about this, because I do not yet see it in the Radio News Aggregation Feed from him. 11:04:52 PM

I like [John Patrick]'s technique.  He flourishes an abstract statement, much like that of a journalist or fiction writer, then has read more for the details.  Obviously, if we doing this in Radio, the read more would be a story in which for purposes of home page, we not see the actual title of the story. If I going to emulate this a lot, then as stories grow, and get added to the collection, there is the topic of how do we keep track of subjects we have posted? [John Patrick] QUOTE Power To The People Broadband service via either Cable or DSL is spreading around the world. However, there are many places where it is just not available. One of them is the Ruby Ranch neighborhood in Summit County, Colorado. Rather than wait until broadband service would be available -- which could be years -- the residents decided to take the matter into their own hands. (read more) UNQUOTE [John Patrick] 7:52:43 AM

To subscribe to this blog in Radio. Just click the orange "coffee cup" XML button on the left [Asia Business Intelligence] I thought I would repeat this how to for folks who are behind me on the Radio Education learning curve.  Al's Radio Weblog reflects the wide spectrum of Al interests, and is at only the early stages of figuring out how to use this technology. 4:36:05 AM

PARAPHRASING [Boing Boing Blog] I am rewriting the content to try to better understand the process of what happened, and how we are all at risk from misapplication of a system to try to fix a big problem.  Spam is an extremely serious pain in the butt.  Software to try to block it is flawed, generating false positives.  People dream up flawed systems and policies in which people are used like robots to enforce the flaws, and we end up having more problems instead of less. There is also a relevant story on this kind of problem from [Dan Gillmore] on the problems that faced writer Steve Outing. Ed Felten, spam-vigilante martyr. Ed "Tinkerer" Felten setup a new webblog at www.freedom-to-tinker.com containing his commentary on various issues.  News of Ed "Tinkerer" Felten's new blog was shared with a mailing-list, by an enthusiast, someone other than Ed sent the e-mail. A subscriber to that list made a mistake and reported the posting as spam to SpamCop. On that "evidence" SpamCop declared Ed guilty of spamming and decreed that Ed's site should be shut down. Never mind that Ed had never sent a single e-mail message from the site. Never mind that Ed's site was not selling anything.  Ed was not allowed to see the e-mail, mentioning his site, that did not come from him, that was used to label him as a spammer. Ed could not even to communicate with an actual human being at SpamCop. They're not interested in listening to complaints from spammers. But you know, that is how spammers operate. They have a website at ISP # 1. They send e-mail to millions of people from account 2 then shut it down and send from account 3 and so forth, shutting down the source of the e-mail is ineffective, so the anti-spammers go after the spammer website. Ed's ISP shut off Ed's account, because it had appeared on a list of "spammers" published by SpamCop, who blackballed his email address with no appeal. -- it was that or have their mail-relays on everyone's blacklist. Why did his ISP shut Ed down? According to the ISP, SpamCop's policy is to put all of the ISP's accounts on the block list if the ISP does not shut down the accused party's site. With help from his ISP, Ed eventually learned that the offending message was sent on a legitimate mailing list, and that the person who had complained was indeed subscribed to that list, and had erroneously reported the message as unsolicited. Ironically, the offending message was sent by someone who liked Ed's site and wanted to recommend it to others. Everybody involved (Ed, his ISP, the person who filed the complaint, and the author of the message) agreed that the report was an error, and they all told this to SpamCop. Naturally, SpamCop failed to respond and continued to block the site. Note the similarities to the worst type of Stalinist "justice" system: conviction is based on a single anonymous complaint; conviction is based not on anything the accused did but on favorable comments about him by the "wrong" people; the evidence is withheld from the accused; there is no procedure for challenging erroneous or malicious accusations; and others are punished based on mere proximity to the accused (leading to shunning of the accused, even if he is clearly innocent). Note also that the "evidence" against Ed consisted only of a single unsigned e-mail message which would have been trivial for anyone to forge. Thus SpamCop provides an easy denial of service attack against a web site. The only bright spot in this picture is that our real justice system allows lawsuits to be filed against guys like SpamCop for libel and/or defamation. My guess is that eventually somebody will do that and put SpamCop out of business. Link Discuss (Thanks, Bruce!) [Boing Boing Blog] Al's guess is that it will take several lawsuits, and bad publicity. Let's suppose they do this to a journalist with BBC or New York Times.  That institution fights back with a court injunction to shut down SpamCop, which makes an exception for the complainant with the clout, but continues behaving this way against all the little guys. The basic problem is that SpamCop has a good idea but incompetent implementation. Meanwhile [Dan Gillmore] relates that Steve Outing wrote an article on what NOT to include in e-newsletters if you want to avoid becoming a false positive from the anti-spam software, giving examples, which meant that his e-newsletter was bounced all over the place due to brain damaged filters, proving that he was right about the problem, but wrong path to communicate it. Dan talks about some spam fighting software that does a better job, and asks people to share what we do with spam, for him to share on [Dan's Weblog]. The good news is that Computer-Science Professor Ed Felten's weblog (www.freedom-to-tinker.com) is back up. 4:27:44 AM

[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] QUOTE I've been reading the History of the telephone, as written in 1910 by Herberst Casson. It has been very refreshing to read how hard it was for Bell to get anyone to notice, look ar listen to his new device. In fact, it wasn't until he sent a 'news story' at a distance of 16 miles, that he received the attention he needed: the press. Seems they only react when their own business affected. So much of this story is analogous to weblogs. Their invention, mis(understanding) and application all pretty much went through the same stages. Here's one you'll recognize: "There were hundreds of shrewd capitalists in American cities in 1876, looking with sharp eyes in all directions for business chances; but not one of them came to Bell with an offer to buy his patent. Not one came running for a State contract. And neither did any legislature, or city council, come forward to the task of giving the people a cheap and efficient telephone service." It gets better: " ......it was a most unpropitious time for the setting afloat of a new enterprise. It was a period of turmoil and suspicion. What with the Jay Cooke failure, the Hayes-Tilden deadlock, and the bursting of a hundred railroad bubbles, there was very little in the news of the day to encourage investors." UNQUOTE [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] [Blogfish] QUOTEs Adam Curry quoting Dave Winer Dave: "How do people make money with weblogs," asks the happy blogger who wonders out loud. "How do people make money with telephones and word processors," asks some random wise-ass. Beautiful! QUOTING [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] UNQUOTE [Blogfish] Money is made based on the content transmitted, such as newspapers, and jobs for people who can read a script on telephone spam. Money is made based on services to the people who struggle to use the technology effectively, such as the folks who do house calls to clean the dust out the inside of personal computers, and value added plug-ins that users are willing to pay money to get. The history of the telephone has had to have been rewritten since 1910 thanks to the controversy over who really invented it.  Check out this thread in an off-topic forum of www.AirDisaster.com http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&;f=2&t=001470 The exchange of information is as follows, between people with the same kind of wild identities as Bloggers use: [Sherlock]: Antonnio Meuci, an Italian Engineer, invented the telephone in 1850 and was unable to sell it.  It gathered dust on a shelf in a Long Island Laboratory for Bell to find and patent. There was some debate over whether or not it worked before Bell improved it, or whether Bell's patent was identical to Meuci's earlier published description. [Ed]: Part of the process of invention is telling the world about the invention, and in fact managing to sell it. [me]: misc. [Sherlock]: It is still stealing to take another man's work and claim it as your own. [me thought]: Only if you are caught doing that.  [Jim]: National Geographic Society on where the telephone was invented and Dual Citizenship Bell Family Tree.  The first publicized stunt as opposed to perfecting and researching the process in advance. [Adoucette]: US Congress House Resolution 269 on Antonio Meucci inventing the telephone in Cuba then moving to New York, demonstrated it, published description in newspaper, went bankrupt. [Fearless Freep]: Initial research on the Light Bulb in the mid 1800's.  First patent 1874 for a Canadian inventor, bought out by Edison's buddies to be replaced with Edison's invention. 3:21:58 AM

reorganizing my site. I created category SF (Science Fiction and Science Fact frontiers), tried to set it up like My Friends and Family, except not in Navigation Link yet, copied a couple posts to it, one from last 25 and one from Archives.  What got there was geeky for a while, but give it time to catch the updating.  It got Ok, I moving a bit more from the Archives, plus I reminded that I am setting them up correctly. This might lead me to further adjusting my reference story Understand Radio Categories.  I do not understand the significance of rendering in whatever.  I have a test category with one post from weeks ago that is not rendered, and it continues to be geeky. 2:50:54 AM

Monday's Topics: Current Events; Environment / Ecology; e-Organization; Radio Education. 2:31:10 AM

© Copyright 2002 Al Macintyre.