If they really do open up an execution chamber at Guantanamo Bay (and thank God the Mail on Sunday isn’t a reliable source), I’m going to start seriously considering moving out of the US. But when I read about an asylum seeker in the UK sewing his eyes and mouth shut in protest, you wonder where can you go?
Try and fix things where I am, wherever I am. Look for levers. Because “this time we said it would be different. Remember?”
Everybody else pads out their blog with their life, so I might as well join in. Actually, this is more padding out my life with my blog, as not much is going on (and Cait, yes, this is what my blog would look like if it were a diary.)
This weekend, we went Ada juggling around Baycon with Cory and Martin. Last year’s Baycon was my first SF convention ever. Oh, except for that Welsh one a few years back when a bunch of overenthusiastic security volunteers, dressed like Blake’s Seven guards, tried to throw me and Dave out for unauthorised filming. We and our pathetic Sony camcorder were being manhandled to the fire-exits when Dave announced that he’d seen another, even more unauthorised, film crew with boom mics and everything heading up behind us into the lifts. Our captors immediately abandoned us and ran up the stairs, doing little SWAT team hand gestures and shouting for backup into their little throat-mics. We went back to illicitly giving publicity to their con with one of their guest speakers, who’d asked us to come. Let no-one say that these tricks only work in comedy action capers.
Now I am world famous, such misunderstandings are a thing of the past. No longer am I part of an underground rebellion of ex-convicts with shitty camcorders. No, this year I was complimentary “guest of a guest”. Quinn was a guest of another guest. Ada was a child of two guests of two other guests.
It was all a bit unnecessary – Ada exudes so many cutons these days that you could swan into the Pentagon by slotting her into a giant plastic badge holder and waving her around reception. We were going to dress her in a little Star Trek uniform too, but she was sick over it. I guess there must be cuton toxicity levels, even in the eye of the cuteness hurricane.
Baycon is a very costume-based convention (or “ Comments Off on oh just my life
My friend Cait has decided to go public with her blog. It’s mostly about her pregnancy, but she has wisely started off with a long rant about blogs themselves. She says they’re no different from diaries, and they’re just called blogs because men don’t like to admit to such female pursuits. Oh, and she thinks social software is a load of unrevelatory bunkum too, and that even if it does exist, there’s more to it than blogs.
I’m linking to it mainly because I find it really funny that someone should go on about how people just endlessly talk about blogs by endlessly going on about blogs. And, you know, I should point out that people who write diaries also go on about the nature of writing diaries quite a bit. I know I did in mine – and I distinctly remember Cait doing so in her old online journal. Livejournal, similarly, is full of people talking about Livejournal. It’s like Children’s TV as a frequent topic amongst students; it’s popular, because everyone has it in common.
And what about that whole media obsession? Well, I did a search for “blogosphere”, as Cait suggests, on the BBC and Guardian sites. The BBC site has two hits. One is by Bill Thompson, poo-pooing the whole thing. On the Guardian site, there are eight hits, two of which are negative, one of which is just the name of an app, and the rest have that excited tone of people using a word they’ve just heard. It looks like a reasonable percentage of the people talking about blogs in the press are doing exactly what Cait’s doing: going on about how much people overrate them, and how there’s more to social software than that. Which is to say, Cait’s complaining partly about people doing what Cait’s doing right now.
The other reason I’m linking to Cait, though, is because I remember thinking similiarly when I started writing Oblomvovka. I think what changed my mind and made me more interested in their more novel aspects is the effect of being linked to, and having people comment on your pages, and seeing things you’ve discovered percolate around the rest of the world. That really seems distinctly different from my experience of writing diaries, and much closer to the original idea of a weblog – as a commonplace book of interesting links that you’ve found. It’s the meeting of strangers in referers, rather than the internecine world that you meet when you just read blogs and their explicit links, that I find fun. Whatever you call them, writing a blog is a lot more fun than just reading them.
And I don’t care how much I talk about that. It’s my blog, I can do what I want with it. Nyahhh.
I have to write about something other than spam sometime. Anyway, Justin Mason wrote in, to say the new version of SA (v.2.54) severely punishes those Pine-‘n’-Mozilla pretending creeps, and adds: “overly cautious my ass”. Apparently Razor doesn’t get high scores, because the genetic algorithm that they use to calculate the scores doesn’t think it needs it. In other words, most of the Razor stuff gets caught by other traps. He also reckons I’ve got BAYES_60 and BAYES_70 a bit too high, and maybe he’s right – I got one FP from LinkedIn the other day. On the other hand, I have problems separating give-all-your-friends-email-addresses-to-a-third-party services like LinkedIn from spam.
Wow. I now get over 20,000 spams a month. Maybe that explains why I seem to get a lot more false negatives (spam that gets through) via Spamassassin. It’s the same small percentage as ever, there’s just a lot more of them.
Some spammers are definitely working on evading SA’s filters. I see a lot of spams that pretend to come from Pine and Mozilla simultaneously – scoring them a massive minus twelve on Spamassassin’s anti-spam-o-meter. I’ve tweaked the reward for these tests down a bit in my own user preferences. I’ve also nudged up the penalties for falling foul of SA’s new Razor2 and Bayesian modules. Spamasssassin’s still a bit hesitant to trust these much. But with the amount of spam (and normal mail) I get, my Bayesian filters get all the training they need. Don’t know why it gives Razor such a low score – perhaps Spamassassin’s overly cautious approach to false positives is leading it to punish for accidentally catching some major mailing lists?
Beverley Hughes is the Minister of State for Citizenship and person in charge of investigating introducing Identity Cards into the UK. She said a very odd thing in Parliament last week:
Mr. Paul Marsden (Shrewsbury and Atcham): If he will make a statement on plans to introduce identity cards. [109766]
The Minister for Citizenship and Immigration (Beverley Hughes): We published a consultation paper on entitlement cards and identity fraud on 3 July 2002. We are at the moment making a detailed assessment of the 2,000 responses received to the consultation exercise, which ended on 31 July. Many organisations and individuals have expressed support for a card scheme, and that has been backed up by other research on the public’s views, which we will publish alongside our response.
What’s peculiar about this is that I know for a fact that at least 5029 consultation responses were submitted via stand.org.uk. Of course, that consultation ended on the 31st January, not July, but I assume that’s just a slip of the mouth from Ms Hughes. Unless she’s planning to retrospectively change the dates, and dump several thousand voter’s responses (most of which were resoundingly negative) out into the Home Office dustbins?
I’m going to mail her later today and find out what’s going on.
