Craigslist Housing + Google Maps = Magic

It's a Craig's List-Google Maps mashup!

This is the coolest web application I've seen in a long while. A clever programmer combines two totally free information sources and comes up with an incredibly useful tool. The whole is clearly greater than the sum of its parts.

(via Metafilter)

Virginia judge sentences spammer to nine years

If we get caught, we're not going to white-collar resort prison. No, no, no. We're going to federal POUND ME IN THE ASS prison. - "Michael Bolton," in Office Space

A Virginia judge has sentenced a man, convicted of a felony under Virginia's strict anti-spam laws, to nine years in prison:

Jaynes, 30, who was considered among the top 10 spammers in the world at the time of his arrest, used the Internet to peddle pornography and sham products and services such as a "FedEx refund processor," prosecutors said. Thousands of people fell for his e-mails, and prosecutors said Jaynes' operation grossed up to $750,000 per month.

Jaynes was convicted in November for using false Internet addresses and aliases to send mass e-mail ads through an AOL server in Loudoun County, where America Online is based. Under Virginia law, sending unsolicited bulk e-mail itself is not a crime unless the sender masks his identity.

I'm pretty sure that they'll keep this guy away from the Internet while he's in prison, and quite possibly once he's released as well. If he does have Net access, however, justice demands that it be an AOL account.

Mister Gato, to scale

objects_on_table_are_to_scale
Originally uploaded by enrevanche.

When a friend saw Mister Gato for the first time, she exclaimed, "That's not a housecat... that's a baby puma!"

He is rather large.

Here, Mister G. is shown to scale, with the following objects for comparison:

-- A copy of the New York Times Book Review, which he is lying on.

-- A one-liter bottle of snooty French mineral water, which he is lying next to.

-- A pile of mail and magazines, which, in order to make room for himself, he has crowded off to one side of the cedar chest that does double-duty as our coffee table (NYC apartments are small!)

The fluffy tuft of fur in the middle right hand margin of the picture is a tail belonging to an unidentified Chow Chow (can't tell whether it's Chow Bella or Chow Fun, but whoever it is, she's sprawled happily next to the table where her cat is hanging out.)

(Earlier Mister Gato posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13. See The Modulator and The Carnival of the Cats for more bloggers' cats from around the world.)

P.S. Don't forget that the Carnival of the Cats is hosted here this Sunday.

Lindsey Graham - the next big thing in the GOP?

enrevanche buddy John deVille writes in with some savvy political observations and prognostications. As you might gather as you read on, John and I have some differences of political opinion, but I have great respect for him as an analyst and observer, and he's got a gig as a guest blogger here any time he wants it. (Most links added by your humble blog editor.)

Does grabbing the third rail merely confirm that one is a retard or does the electricity make it so? In either case, W's pronouncement about the T-Bills which back the Social Security trust fund [NY Times story, April 6, 2005] being worthless is truly the dumbest thing he's said yet. And it's dangerous; it seems to me that the potential for destablizing the world's economy is real, if he sticks to this mantra. China and Japan and the Saudis may just start to believe this loon.

Here's Talking Points Memo's excellent coverage of this gaffe.

And here's a great calendar [PDF format] chronicling Crazy W's Social Security "EVERYTHING'S GOT TO GO" Fire Sale Tour.

[And here's a New York Times editorial taking the President to task for his declaration about U.S. Government debt. To be perfectly fair about it, in the Times' original story, the reporter observed that "Although there is literally a trust fund that can be found in the federal budget, Mr. Bush was on solid ground when he said it was basically 'just I.O.U.'s.'" - bc]

Prediction: A 2008 GOP presidential candidate is going to make a serious move with 90 days.

In other words, there is real potential for a significant insurgency within the Republican party. The leader of the insurgency will talk about a "return" to "true Republican values: states' rights (referencing the Schiavo debacle), the need to keep from exercising the so-called "nuclear" option (dismantling the filibuster), the need to focus on Social Security solvency and serious health care reform, the need to make Homeland Security focus on security and not pork barrel BS, the need to beef up border security and act more aggressively on illegal immigration, the need to protect American manufacturing jobs, and possibly, the need to get the hell out of Iraq.

I'm basically thinking someone espousing a blend of Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan. It won't work coming out of Giuliani's mouth and McCain seems to be stuck in the mud. Most of the other possible candidates--Huckabee, Frist, Romney, Jeb--can't or won't make this move.

But Lindsey Graham...

If I had fifty bucks and a bookie who would give me decent odds, that's where I'd put my money.

John, I'm reasonably sure that some of the British bookmaking firms are already accepting bets on the 2008 Presidental elections. I'll go in halfies with you. Try Ladbrokes (they're currently offering 16:1 on New York City bagging the 2012 Olympics.)

Frankly, if I heard a Republican start talking like a combination of Lou Dobbs and Pat Buchanan (without all of Buchanan's racist, anti-Semitic baggage) I might sell everything I own and follow him or her.

And speaking of Senator Graham, here's a very interesting article about him ("Swing Conservative") in the April, 2005 edition of Washington Monthly.

Returning to a normal blogging schedule soon

Apologies to my regular readers (both of you) but things have been very busy for the last little while, and as I am still acclimating to my new health status I am in a state of pervasive fatigue when I get home from work...

Also, for the last few days I have been attending rather intense, off-site classes on CMMI (for those of you who don't want to follow the link, it's a set of industry best practices for business process improvement, and it's much, much more interesting than I just made it sound.)

However, I've been bringing home a lot of reading to do, and frankly the last thing I want to do after finishing all that up is anything that involves thinking.

Which, you know, shouldn't preclude my usual blogging practices, but somehow, it does.

I wish Blogger had a feature (like livejournal or many other blogging programs) for a current status indicator - e.g., "current mood," "music now playing," etc.

Here's this morning's status:

Blood glucose - semi-toxic.

P.S. Don't forget the Carnival of the Cats at enrevanche this Sunday. (Cue that manic guy from the Monster Truck Rally commercials... "Sunday, Sunday, Sunday!")

How about them Tarheels?

Congratulations to the University of North Carolina Tarheels - 2005 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament Champions.

Update, Tuesday morning:

Here's coverage from:

• The hometown paper
• The (adopted) hometown paper
• Sports Illustrated
• Dickie V (at ESPN)
  
• The BBC

Just ordered my baseball hat and T-shirt, too.

Carnival of the Cats #55 - April 10 at enrevanche

Carnival of the Cats #54 is now up at CathColl.net. (Hey, it turns out she and I went to the same high school, several years apart... what are the odds of that?)

Next week, Sunday, April 10th, enrevanche hosts Carnival of the Cats #55. This is your official "call for submissions."

Per the Carnival rules:

What posts are acceptable? Anything cat-related. This includes pictures, movie clips, poems, tales, and even comments on news stories about cats. As long as you have a permalink to the post where people can get to it, it's fair game.

There are three ways to get your submissions in:

• E-mail your permalink(s) to cats@isfullofcrap.com
• E-mail your permalink(s) directly to me (please put "Carnival of the Cats" in the subject line!)
• Use this incredibly useful online multi-carnival submission form developed by Ferdinand T. Cat's pet human, Bruce

We're a very cat-friendly household.

Mister Gato loves to entertain. We're looking forward to a houseful of felines!

Don't Shoot the Cat

From the AP US wire:

WAUSAU, Wis. - Wild cats prowl around the bird feeder outside Mark Smith's home, waiting to pounce on a wren or maybe a robin. About all Smith can do right now is watch. But if the La Crosse firefighter has his way, there will soon come a day when he can open his door, take aim and fire — and not worry about being prosecuted.

Smith, 48, wants Wisconsin to declare free-roaming wild cats an unprotected species, just like skunks or gophers. Anyone with a small-game license could shoot the cats at will, legally.

His proposal gets tested April 11 at the Wisconsin Conservation Congress spring hearings, where outdoor enthusiasts gather in every county to vote on hunting and fishing issues. The citizens' advisory group then will forward the election results to the state Natural Resources Board. The Legislature would have to change the law, though, for Smith's plan to be implemented.

Predictably, cat-lovers have banded together in opposition to this proposal. (If you'd like to make your opinions on the matter known, you can sign this online petition.)

While I am not unsympathetic to lovers of songbirds and the sort of small game that roaming cats are prone to kill and eat, there has to be a better way to control Wisconsin's feral cat population than letting random, armed redneck cheeseheads take potshots at them.

Would-be anti-feline vigilante types should also be concerned about retaliation. Sometimes, cats shoot back.

Mister Gato, himself a former feral cat (found wandering in the urban jungle of industrial Brooklyn) had no comment.

---

Update, April 13: The results of the vote and related news can be found here.

How to tell whether the pilot light is on

It's easy to determine whether the pilot light is lit on the stove.

Q: Where is the cat sleeping? A: Some place nice and warm.

What's for supper?

QED.

(Earlier Mister Gato posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12. See The Modulator and The Carnival of the Cats for more bloggers' cats from around the world.)

What my spam folder says about me

Having had the same e-mail address for years and years, I accumulate quite a lot of Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (spam) every day.

Happily, my e-mail provider has very effective spam filters in place, and I never see 95%+ of the spam that arrives in my account... it vanishes into my Bulk E-Mail folder, and I usually toss it sight-unseen. I do lose the occasional legitimate message from an actual human being this way, but if it's important, I figure they'll write back eventually.

Occasionally, however, I wade into the spam folder to see what's up. And an interesting picture emerges, of me, as viewed by bulk-mail advertisers:

• I am obsessed with sex, particularly web-based pornography, including some of the more outré fetishes. (Principally, I seem to really have a thing for teenage web-cam girls, although roughly 10% of the cam-spam, which is interestingly right in line with Alfred Kinsey's famous estimate, is for web-cam guys.)
  
  
• Although obsessed with sex, I apparently also suffer from a severe case of erectile dysfunction, and am an excellent candidate for Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, etc. as well as "natural" remedies.
  
  Amusingly, these drugs are often offered to me in "generic" form, which would puzzle and outrage their manufacturers, as all are still under extremely severe patent protection.
  
  I can't read any of these names without recalling Seth Stevenson's trenchant observations:
  
  "Viagra" is supposed to suggest vigor and Niagara. Ehhh. "Cialis" is supposed to suggest—well, I have no idea. And then there's "Levitra." I love this name. It sounds like the Harry Potter spell for summoning an erection. Levitra!
  
  
• Also, I have a really really small penis, which I desperately want to enlarge.
  
  This is becoming depressing. I'm hooked on porn, and I have a small, flaccid member. This is not a good combination.
  
  
• Probably due to my impotence and porn addiction, I am depressed, anxious, and constantly in terrible physical pain, and thus need to buy Xanax, Prozac, Vicodin, etc. from Mexican pharmacies.
  
  
• I am also wrinkled, fat, and bald(ing), and need to address all of these situations immediately.
  
  Well, okay. Even a blind hog finds a few acorns.
  
  
• Although (or perhaps because) I seem to have really poor credit (and thus am deluged with ads for secured credit cards and "Christian debt counseling" -- do they do some kind of loaves-and-fishes thing with my bills?) I am apparently in the market for a dodgy, cut-rate mortgage with "no questions asked."
  
  
• I am aching to serve as a middleman for transactions involving members of the African economic aristocracy who are currently in strained financial positions.
  
  
• I love pirated software, and would be happy to give my credit card numbers to anonymous website operators in a former Soviet republic. Hey, $30 for Microsoft Office 2003! How can you beat that?
  

You get the picture. I would write more, but I have to go pop a little blue pill and give my secured Visa card number to a web-cam hooker.

"Death and Circuses" (World Press Review)

World Press Review covers European response to the Schiavo case:

The fate of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo has preoccupied Europeans as well as Americans during one of their most religious seasons. But compassion for a dying woman and her family was not the only reaction. There was also widespread alarm over the mix of raw politics and religious zealotry in American public life.

“Euthanasia, abortion, stem cell research and, above all, the death penalty mark out a transatlantic gulf which is far more clear-cut than even on Iraq,” explained Bronwen Maddox in The Times of London (March 22).

Blogroll update

Running Scared has a spiffy new home.

Um, as of a little more than month ago.

Sorry, guys. Been busy and out of it, respectively, for about a month now.

Blogroll updated.

Update on Symantec

An update to an earlier post about tech support woes:

I never did get the problem resolved with Symantec (and I am now happily using Zone Alarm, a combined firewall-antivirus program that got PC Magazine's highest rating this year.)

However, my nastygram did get some results. I got a couple of apologetic e-mails, including one from Symantec's COO, and both the outsourcing company and Symantec itself redoubled their efforts to help me solve the problem. In the end, I ran out of time and patience and was just basically unwilling to continue operating my machine essentially unprotected while the wheels ground slowly on, so I manually uninstalled Norton Internet Security (the installation was so mangled at this point that the Add/Remove Programs uninstall routine no longer worked--removing everything by hand and cleaning up took about an hour) and installed Zone Alarm.

Today, in the mail, I received a check from Symantec refunding the full purchase price of Norton Internet Security 2005. While I would have preferred that they solve the problem (and would have greatly preferred that they didn't make getting decent, responsive tech support an exercise not unlike rewriting the Constitution), I think this was a pretty classy gesture on their part, considering that I was long out of their "money-back guarantee" period.

Thought for the day

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote."

-- Benjamin Franklin

Which newspaper do you read?

enrevanche reader and father-in-law Stan the Man passes along this joke, currently making the rounds on the Internets:

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand the New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country -- if they could find the time -- and if they didn't have to leave Southern California to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.

10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure there is a country... or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy provided, of course, that they are not Republicans.

11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

12. None of these is read by the guy who is running the country into the ground.

Medical update

An update to an earlier post:

Had a long visit with my doctor today, and things are looking up. Fever is gone and bloodwork looks good, so any infection is on the wane; pain is (mostly) gone, and we are now entering the more aggressive phase of trying to nail down what caused the pancreatitis, and also dealing with the blood sugar issues. For the time being, the assumption is that I am officially a new diabetic, and that's how we're going to manage things.

Got a fistful of new prescriptions (sigh), referrals to specialists (endocrinologist, gastroenterologist, ophthalmologist) and a schedule of upcoming tests; it looks like, barring a real setback, I'll be able to go back to work on Friday, just in time for my traditional April Fools' Day pranks on my unsuspecting colleagues.

Ordered a very fashionable set of MedicAlert dogtags today. (The emergency instructions read, in part, "Sensitive libertarian: in the event of political derangement or appalling economic news, apply a current issue of Reason magazine and some medical marijuana, stat!")

Also have some good books on order from Amazon.

I now have my very own glucometer, am taking my blood sugar readings several times a day, and can look forward to (at least for the near future) permanently sore fingertips. The cute little gadget has a long memory (it holds your last 500 test results) and can be interfaced to a computer, so I'm sure that I'll be boring my doctors soon with Excel spreadsheets and graphs showing my blood glucose levels by time of day, phase of the moon, correlated with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Nielsen ratings, the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list, etc.

I hope that I will be able to restrain myself from posting them on the blog.

I'm also on a pretty strict diabetic diet, which, counterintuitively, in some cases means eating more - e.g., I've never been much of a breakfast eater, but I have to develop the discipline to eat at least a small breakfast (a little cereal, a piece of fruit) every morning. Can't miss any meals, and can't splurge or binge either. (Au revoir, Krispy Kreme! Sayonara, Pepperidge Farm!)

On the upside, it's an excuse to order some new and interesting cookbooks.

Thanks to everyone for your e-mails, calls, and offers of advice, assistance and prayer. I appreciate it all more than I can tell you.

Thought for the day

"It is no disloyalty to be a realist, Richardson. We are mortal. One hopes for the best, one perseveres, one re-evaluates constantly; one is an asshole if one doesn't."

-- E.B. Farnum waxes philosophical on Deadwood (March 27, 2005)

(The "Deadwood" forum on TWoP is buzzing. The new season is off to a great start.)

Netdisaster: Deface your favorite web sites

Type in the address of any website: your site, a friend's site, a famous site, any site you know. Choose a site that you'd like to punish, or whose destruction would bring you bliss and delight, or just fun.

Here, enrevanche gets the Netdisaster treatment... aaaagh! worms!

Scientific American: Okay, We Give Up

Scientific American's April 2005 issue is out... and here's their lead editorial:

Okay, We Give Up

There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either--so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day.

(sigh) Oh, Scientific American, I love you. If it ever becomes possible for a man to marry a magazine, I'm going to show up on your doorstep with a suitcase full of costume jewelry and a bouquet of flowers.

I let my subscription lapse recently... we subscribe to a lot of periodicals in this house (two writers living together, what do you expect?) and my pile of unread magazines sits on our coffee table as a silent rebuke and constant reminder... but I just resubscribed, this time to their digital edition, which includes complete access to their archives.

(Interestingly, their digital subscriptions cost slightly more than their print subscriptions - but since the digital version includes archive access and therefore offers more value, I'd say they've got the pricing exactly right. I am, increasingly, subscribing solely to the digital versions of print publications, especially when they offer added value in terms of archive or database access... I've been reading the Wall Street Journal this way for years, and I'd argue that the WSJ's web site, with all of its wonderful research tools, is a much greater value than the print version of their newspaper.)

This is where I get off

The NYC Blogger Map is up and running again.

It's a directory of, well, New York City bloggers, but the organizational conceit is pretty cool: each blog is listed by the owner's closest subway stop, so you can work your way through the neighborhoods in the five boroughs by clicking on the subway map.

Here's a list of the bloggers at my station stop (the 14th St stop on the Seventh Avenue Express.)