Blackmoor Vituperative

I am in the process of re-digitizing all of my music. I sold my Neo35, which was a large, hard drive-based MPs player mounted in my trunk, and I replaced it with a Creative Zen Touch, which does everything the Neo35 did, fits in my pocket, and has a much better user interface. So as part of that I am going through and re-ripping all of my CDs to MP3.

One of the many cool things the Zen can do is sort music by genre. So as I’m ripping the CDs, I am assigning genres to them. There’s the rub. Music comes in such a bewildering array of styles, I may wind up with nearly as many genres as I have CDs, which kind of defeats the point of sorting by genre. So I went back and started assigning just a few genres, but then 90% of my CDs were in either “Rock” or “Alternative”. And what does “Alternative” mean, anyway? As I’m assigning the genres, I am thinking, “wait: everybody calls Poe ‘alternative’, but is she really all that different from Rush, which is filed under ‘Rock’?” But if I assign 90% of my collection to “Rock”, why even bother assigning genres at all?

And take Shakira, for example. (I really dig Shakira.) I would probably put her in the same category as Alanis Morissette (“Rock”? “Altenative”?), or maybe Kylie Minogue (“Pop”? “Dance”?), but she always gets put into the “Latin” genre, whatever that is. She should be in a separate category just because she’s from Columbia? I just don’t get that.

I’m just kind of baffled on this whole genre thing.

Wednesday was my last day at JFCOM. It’s funny: it did not occur to me that I would miss it, or that I would feel sad when I left.

On Tuesday a bunch of people took me out to lunch at Applebee’s. They said lots of nice things about me, and made a few jokes about the working relationship I had with a few of the less cooperative members of the Consortium. It was funny, and sweet. That’s the first time I felt sad about leaving.

Yesterday was my first day at my new job. I will have tons to learn, and tons of work to do. It will be challenging, and that’s what I need. The people there seem smart and good-natured. I have a desk, but I do not have a desktop computer: they gave me an Apple Powerbook, which is great, I suppose, but I’ve got no idea what I’m supposed to do with the thing. I have a feeling it’s going to gather dust, which is a shame because I know they cost a small fortune. Oh, well.

I hope I made the right decision. The last time I left a job where everybody liked me and I had it easy, I fucked up my life for seven months and depleted our savings (not our long-term savings, just our “ready cash” savings). I have to make sure that does not happen again.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell , by Susanna Clarke, is the most interesting book I have read recently. The premise is that English magic has slowly faded from the world, until by the early 19th century it is little more than the subject of dry scholarly papers. One of the main conflicts of the book is the difference in perspective between the two title characters, who are two of the last practical magicians in the world.

This isn’t a book of high fantasy or Tolkienesque adventure. Nor is it a Harry Potter for grown-ups, although I have heard it described as such. Of any books I can recall, it most reminds me of the excellent Lempriere’s Dictionary, by Lawrence Norfolk. Both books are a joy to read: clever, inventive, subtle, literate, and very long. Give them both a try.

I used to idolize the Swiss. Their traditions of neutrality and universal firearm ownership seemed, to me, to mirror a spirit which the USA used to cherish and to which I wished it would return. Then I got a job where I worked with the Swiss on a regular basis, and the scales fell away from my eyes. The Swiss certainly do have traditions which the USA would do well to emulate, but this does not mean that the Swiss are an enlightened people somehow better and wiser than Americans. I can tell you firsthand that they are not: they are simply people, as irrational and as myopic as any other.

Here is a pretty good example: the Swiss held a referendum upholding restrictions on Swiss citizenship. Being born in Switzerland, or even being the child of those born in Switzerland, is no guarantee of citizenship. The underlying premise here is so primitive that it belongs in a Jean M. Auel book. Héctor Abad Faciolince has some insightful comments regarding this sad state of affairs:

As no one chooses where to be born, one’s birthplace is a pure accident and therefore neither a fault nor a merit. In this sense one’s nationality ought to have no importance, since the soil does not imprint one’s character. Just as astrology is an idiocy (or, as bad, a society game) supposedly based on serious methods of proof, rather like a sort of “geology” which determines who we “are” according to where we entered the world, it has very little real basis.

(From Nationality irrationality and the Swiss referendum)

I used to use Verizon DSL. The main reason I switched from Verizon DSL to Cox High Speed Internet is because Verizon required all mail sent through their SMTP servers to have my “@verizon.com” address in the “From” field. They said this was to fight spam. You and I both know that this was either a) evidence of Verizon’s gross incompetence, b) a deliberate lie, or c) both, because requiring “@verizon.com” in the “From” field has nothing whatsoever to do with spam. So now I use Cox High Speed Internet, and I’ve been very pleased with them.

Let’s assume that Verizon wasn’t lying to me, and that someone there really thought that their policy would have some effect on spam. Sure, it’s hard to believe anyone could be so grievously stupid, but apparently such spam-related stupidity is pretty common. For example, there are a number of ISPs which block port 25. This is pretty damned stupid. I’ll let George Ou tell you why.

In a surprising show of nigh-marginal intelligence and vague cognizance of the Constitution, the U.S. Congress may consider “minor modifications” to some of the more profoundly anti-American aspects of the perversely-named “USA Patriot Act”.

Congress is taking a second look at the FBI’s power to seize confidential customer records from businesses without showing probable cause in a state or federal court. The controversial tactic has been the target of intense criticism since the passage of the USA Patriot Act in 2001, and even the U.S. Department of Justice concedes that maybe it goes too far….

Hotels, apartment-building owners and ISPs are among the businesses that the FBI ordered to turn over records without demonstrating evidence that subjects were involved in crime. Under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the government merely has to state that records are sought in an investigation related to terrorism, and the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will authorize the search.

One reason that none of these businesses has joined the growing chorus against the Patriot Act is that the law forbids them from ever mentioning this kind of FBI order to anyone, even a lawyer. It also prohibits them from challenging the order in court.

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is prepared to fight tooth and nail to retain the USA Patriot Act in all of its brutally unjust glory. Fortunately for us, we have bold defenders of freedom like Senators Larry Craig (Idaho) and Richard Durbin (Illinois), who introduced legislation that would require the FBI to show suspicion about individuals before ordering records from businesses under Section 215.

Suspicion. Not evidence, merely suspicion. The sad thing is that this would be an improvement over the law as it exists.

It is a great pity that there is no penalty for lawmakers who pass unConstitutional laws. Every single member of Congress who voted for this abomination should be in prison. That won’t happen, of course. Prisons are reserved for truly dangerous threats to society, like people who smoke marijuana on the weekend, or people who make copies of thirty-year-old music recordings.

I think I have found a new high water mark for the “soulless wretch” scale: “Columbus, Ohio public school principal” clearly trumps “Norwood, Ohio mayor and city council“.

A high school principal in Columbus, Ohio, has been fired and three assistant principals suspended without pay because they failed to notify the police last month about accusations that a 16-year-old special-education student had been sexually assaulted in the school auditorium by a group of boys, one of whom videotaped the incident, school officials said yesterday.

The principal and her assistants not only failed to report the incident but also urged the girl’s father to avoid calling the police out of concerns that reporters would become aware of the assault, according to statements given to school investigators.

(Source: New York Times)

What the hell is up with Ohio, anyway?

I am so sick of rain. It’s been raining in southeastern Virginia for weeks. I searched Google for a while to find out how much precipitation we’ve had so far this year, but I got bored with that. It’s not really the quantity of rain that bothers me, anyway. What is so annoying is its frequency. If the rain ever ends, I’ll need a native guide to lead me to the garage to get the lawnmower.

National Alcohol Screening Day is coming. Why? Because it’s everyone else’s business what you eat and drink. You are a child, you can’t be trusted, and both you and your clients are so incompetent that they can’t tell from your work whether you are high or not. You need other people, wiser people, better people, to make your decisions for you. You need to be tested to make sure that you don’t consume any forbidden substances on your own time, at home, because everything you do needs to be scrutinized. You have no privacy, and anyone who wants to pay you for a service has every right to pry into the details of your personal life.

Marijuana, tobacco, alcohol…. Marks my words, people: butter is next. What are the rest of you doing about it? Nothing, that’s what. The USA is going to hell in a handbasket and you are doing nothing but sitting on your asses and voting for the same people who keep making it worse — if you vote at all.

Now here’s someone who gets it. ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn skewers the nonsense being spouted by Sun’s president Jonathan Schwartz, and calls it what it is: a self-serving attempt to profit indefinitely from work done in the past, and to profit from the work of others in the future. If people like Schwartz had their way, we’d all be pushing ploughs and tithing to the local warlord.