“As for smoking bans in ‘public places,’ there are three reasons why they’re unjustified. First, pubs and clubs are actually private property. Second, bars don’t have to be smoky any more, with the air-cleaning technology available. But most importantly: no danger from ‘second-hand smoke’ has ever been proven. Unlike most journalists, politicians and, regrettably, doctors, I’ve gone through all of the more than 40 studies. Only a few show any risk, and it’s statistically insignificant. There are higher risks from drinking milk, using mouthwash and keeping pet birds. I swear I’m not making this up! People who use this sort of ‘junk science’ to stigmatise smokers and to nag and bully us out of our pleasures should be bloody well ashamed of themselves.”
— Joe Jackson, in The IndependentColor combinations for web sites
I’ve stumbled across two interesting tools recently. The first is the Mac application ColorDesigner, which generates random color combinations with lots of tweakable knobs. The second is Cal Henderson’s online color-blindness simulator, designed to show you how your choice of text and background colors will appear to someone with color-deficient vision.
I decided to try to merge the two together into a single web page, using Mason and Cal’s Graphics::ColorDeficiency Perl module. It’s not done yet, but it’s already fun to play with: random web colors.
Right now, the randomizer is hardcoded, but as soon as I get a chance, I’ll be adding a form to expose all of the parameters.
Online music done right
Just for amusement, a list of the albums and songs I’ve purchased from the iTunes Music Store since it went online.
Complete albums:
- A Wonderful World, Tony Bennett & k.d. lang
- Jazz Cello, Ray Brown
- The Best of Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years, Ray Charles
- In Blue, The Corrs
- Count Basie's Finest Hour, Count Basie
- Getz for Lovers, Stan Getz
- Stan Getz and the Oscar Peterson Trio, Stan Getz
- Best of Al Jarreau, Al Jarreau
- B.B. King: Anthology, B.B. King
- Late at Night with Dean Martin, Dean Martin
- The Best of the Moody Blues, The Moody Blues
- Confirmation: The Best of the Verve Years, Charlie Parker
- Blues Etude, Oscar Peterson
- Tracks, Oscar Peterson
- We Get Requests, Oscar Peterson Trio
- With Respect to Nat, Oscar Peterson Trio
- Oscar Peterson: Stéphane Grappelli Quartet, Vol. 1, Oscar Peterson & Stéphane Grappelli
- Liz Phair, Liz Phair
- The Dynamic Duo, Jimmy Smith & Wes Montgomery
- Great American Marches I, John Philip Sousa
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Trevor Jones & The London Symphony Orchestra
Individual Songs:
- You've Made Me so Very Happy, Blood, Sweat & Tears
- Do You Wanna Hold Me?, Bow Wow Wow
- Takin' It to the Streets, The Doobie Brothers
- What a Fool Believes, The Doobie Brothers
- Radar Love, Golden Earring
- The Day Basketball Was Saved, Jackson 5
- I Think It's Love, Jermaine Jackson
- Laura, Billy Joel
- Beth, Kiss
- Detroit Rock City, Kiss
- King of the Night Time World, Kiss
- Shout It Out Loud, Kiss
- Head to Toe, Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam
- Insanity, Liz Phair
- Don't Stand so Close to Me, The Police
- Every Morning, Sugar Ray
- Macho Man, Village People
Mass walkout in progress?
This afternoon, I was harassed and verbally abused by a total stranger who called me at home. Since the Caller-ID info identified him as a telemarketer, the only reason I’d picked up the phone in the first place was to chant the familiar litany, “please place me on your do-not-call list.”
I never got the chance. He refused to identify himself, refused to tell me the purpose of his call, called me offensive names, and gleefully repeated my responses to the other people working at his call center. I could hear them in the background, saying similar things to other people.
Then I said, “you know, this phone has caller-id, and I know where you’re calling from.”
click
I’m currently waiting on a callback from his manager.
Pacesetter Corp, 916-364-3900. Apparently they sell window coverings and other home-improvement products.
Topless, lifeless
I want to like Page3.com. Viewing attractive young women who are wearing little or no clothing is a hobby of mine, one I’m unlikely to give up any time soon. And, indeed, some of the pictures work just fine for me: pretty girl, nice smile, healthy body, real breasts, no piercings, few or no visible tattoos.
Most of the time, though, I find myself wondering if I’m looking at a woman or a RealDoll. The blank stare! The static pose! The aftermarket accessories! It’s like those giant inflatable liquor bottles: great advertising but no substance.
Live Munitions!
The most popular content from munitions.com is now back online: my large photo archive, consisting mostly of fully-clothed Playboy models. It’s in serious need of a complete overhaul, including rescanning every image to get rid of the worst mistakes that my flaky LS-2000 inflicted, but it’s back.
Of course, the whole collection was apparently posted to Usenet again last week, and I’m sure that a bunch of the pictures are being fraudulently sold on eBay this week, either as “real prints from the negative” or “copyright-free image CDs.” This, however, is their home, and having it back online makes it easier for me to file copyright infringement claims with ISPs.
Annoying habits
/dev/audio: Breathless, The Corrs
Next to my casually-held belief that Bush actually won the election — something that I’ve thought of as a dead issue for quite a while now (and hooboy, how wrong I was!) — I think my worst habit is a certain selective deafness when it comes to music.
No, not the part about listening to utter crap, although I do that, too. See the song mentioned above? It’s been playing on repeat for more than six hours today. Just the one song.
I didn’t notice. It’s a nice song, but is it that good? No, it just falls into that category of music that fills the background pleasantly without ever attracting my attention.
I have a large collection of such songs, although obviously I could get by with one or two. This repetition isn’t usually a problem, since I live alone, but I’ve heard some grumbling when it happens at the office, and it was once taken as a planned insult by my college roommate’s live-in girlfriend. She simply couldn’t believe that someone could play Debbie Gibson’s Out of the Blue album for seven hours straight without noticing, and she was sure I knew that she hated it.
The funny thing was that I hadn’t realized she was in the apartment in the first place.
Sanitizing Apache with PF
About 45 minutes elapsed between the moment that I first turned this server on and the arrival of the first virus/worm/hacker probes. It was obvious that most of them were looking for Windows-based web servers, so they were harmless to me.
Still, I like to review the logs occasionally, and the sheer volume of this crap was getting annoying. Later, when I raised munitions.com from the dead, I discovered that it was getting more than 30,000 hits a day for a file containing the word “ok”. Worst of all, as I prepare to restore my photo archives, I know that I can’t afford to pay for the bandwidth while they’re slurped up by every search engine, cache site, obsessive collector, Usenet reposter, and eBay scammer on the planet.
Enter PF, the OpenBSD packet filter.
Unrepentant sinner
Undergrads love free Internet porn. This is not news. Undergrads will go to great lengths to hide their porn collections from the sysadmins. This also is not news. Sometimes they outsmart themselves. This is just plain fun.
