Geek Drivel

I ran across this quote on the Tools For Thought blog (which is rapidly becoming a new favorite of mine):

From the film Roger Dodger:

Nick: Like, what do you do all day?
Roger: What do I do all day? I sit here and think of ways to make people feel bad.
Nick: I thought you wrote commercials.
Roger: I do. But you can’t sell a product without first making people feel bad.
Nick: Why not?
Roger: Because it’s a substitution game. You have to remind them that there’s something missing from their lives. Everyone’s missing something, right?
Nick: Well, yeah, I guess.
Roger: Trust me. And when they’re feeling sufficiently incomplete, you can convince them that your product is the only thing that can fill that void. So instead of taking steps to deal with their lives, instead of working to root out the real reason for their misery, they run out and buy a stupid pair of cargo pants.

Possibly exaggerated, but true nonetheless.

If the human brain were a piece of computer software, this would be considered a critical security vulnerability. The company responsible for it would be expected to patch it as quickly as possible, security software packages would add features to detect and prevent it, and the people exploiting it would be considered criminals. But since it’s human nature, the victims are expected to block or patch it themselves, and the people exploiting it best get six-figure salaries and corner offices in New York City.

Is it any wonder that logically-minded people (including us computer geeks) tend to look askance at the rest of humanity?

My friend Ploni Almoni crows that Apple “ranks 85 out of 100.” That’s nice Ploni, but honestly, they hardly have any competition in that arena.

I am rather like a mosquito in a nudist camp; I know what I want to do, but I don’t know where to begin.
– Stephen Bayne

Quite interesting…

Although interesting (to me) in and of itself, I’m mentioning this article because of this bit from the last paragraph:

In other developments, spammers have abandoned the use of image-based spam, file attachment spam and other such frippery by going back to basics. Nine in ten spam messages now contain little more beyond a few simple words and a URL.

I’d call that a major win for the anti-spam effort.

I’d wondered at the lack of spam recently, but I figured that SpamBayes/ThunderBayes was just doing an exceptionally good job. Which it is (when I saw the above, I checked… out of 308 spam messages in the past couple weeks, I’d only had to look at forty of them, and SpamBayes was unsure of only seventeen of those), but getting only about 22 spams a day is pretty freakin’ amazing too, considering that I’ve had these e-mail addresses for five and seven years now. (I’m not counting the GMail account or the account at the company that bought our Project Badger, since both of them have their own very effective spam-filtering stuff.) After only three years with my previous e-mail account, I was being inundated with a couple hundred spam messages a day.

Uh-oh! Better lock up your e-mail program ’til he’s re-caught!

GoddessJ pointed this one out to me:

We regret to announce that due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control, the publication of

The Astrological Magazine

will cease with the December 2007 issue.

So the stars didn’t say anything about that, eh?

Two of my favorite targets in a single (and pretty good) article — bonus!

There are two churches on a small stretch of a particular road we travel often. One of them usually has a Christian-oriented (but often humorous) saying on its sign. Recently it had a humorous saying that was somewhat… unexpected:

Forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them more.

Annoying people isn’t supposed to be a Christian attitude (despite what a couple of major sects seem to believe), but hey, it’s the action of forgiving that’s the point, right?

The other church, perhaps realizing that they can’t compete on the witty-saying front, just puts information about its upcoming events on its sign. At the same time as the above example of cognitive dissonance, they had an interesting menu up:

Muffins and Coffee, 9AM
A Dysfunctional Family, 9:30

Thanks, but I think some muffins and coffee would suffice for me. I’d be too full to stuff in an entire family after that, dysfunctional or not.

I like most of what Joss Whedon comes up with (the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series and Firefly, for instance), so when I heard that he was involved in this site, I had to check it out. I’m not sure who plays Dr. Horrible, though he looks very familiar (he might be one of the guys who played a pseudo-evil teenage geek in Buffy on occasion), but I instantly recognized “Captain Hammer” as Nathan Fillion (”Captain Mal” from Firefly, as well as the big bad guy from the last season of Buffy).

The first two “acts” are online now, with the third marked as coming tomorrow… very amusing, check it out. But hurry, it’s supposed to stop on Sunday, after that it’s only available on iTunes.