2007 TOYOTA : PRIUS HYBRID 60 MPG US$ 5400

followed by a ridiculous description and then, in huge letters, the email address to contact the person, and a chunk of spam text.

So I searched on the email address — they’re in every Craigslist location. There’s 31 on that location alone, all in the last day.

There are more elaborate variants, with similar spam text at the bottom: you can search for “georgecallum878@gmail.com” too and see the same pattern.
Or chrisgrande898@gmail.com did a ton of them at the start of the month, offering almost exactly the same text as George Callum would a week later.

They’re flagged and removed almost immediately, but I don’t see what the angle is here, unless it’s just an attempt to get people’s addys. And the fact that it’s been run repeatedly makes me think they’ve got to be getting something out of it or they wouldn’t keep trying.

But the spam text is random, torn from Wikipedia I think, the kind of stuff used to get spam email past Bayesian filters:

another Red Sox pitcher hurl a no-hitter and the next Fenway Park no-hitter won’t come untilcoin It originally meant the side of a die with only one mark before it was a term for a playing card Since this was the lowest roll of the die it traditionally meant ‘bad luck’ inin 1977 to become Harris Queensway plc until the company was taken over in 1988 Lord Harris was also a non-executive director of(4 8 15 16 23 and 42) It is also the number of minutes within which these numbers must be entered into the computer and the button must be pushed

– it’s not as if people are searching for that stuff. Randomized post stuffing isn’t going to get a lot of people searching for those terms, seeing a Prius ad, and handing over their email addresses. You’d want to go for Allison Williams or one of those other weird keywords that delivers a bunch of strange traffic to your doorstep.

I don’t get it. Unless it’s all more or less automated so it doesn’t require any effort, it doesn’t seem like the return would be worth it.

Also, the people at Eastlake Auto Brokers post over and over about their cars and it’s really annoying.

Embassy couldn’t possibly allow Cartrivision to just be a general purpose record-and-playback system. They were just like today’s split-personality entertainment megacorps, who on the one hand want as many people as possible to pay to “enjoy” their “content”, but on the other hand would rather like it if any customer who even considered copying some of that content for a friend immediately burst into flames.

The rest of this week is going to be totally awesome, I can tell already.

Vivace rocks and the rest of my afternoon’s looking up.

For a while, I was happy. But the more I know about how it’s supposed to go, the more frustrated I am.

There’s a rule for making espresso shots, which is that you want (for a double) 2-2.5 ounces of liquid in 20-25 seconds. Once I get that dialed in, I can pretty consistently make it. Then I bought a nice tamper to replace the awful one that comes with the Silvia, along with this book, this horrible, cursed book from Cafe Vivcace.

It’s a great book, but it’s got all kinds of descriptions about what a shot’s supposed to look like as it pours, coloration, how to tamp, all the variables to control, and I can’t make a good shot now.

Seriously. I’m totally screwed. I’ve been trying to get to their level, and it’s not happening, and now I’m thinking “I really need one of those temperature sensors, no two, and then better… no! no!” They turn out horrible and bitter, none of them look like they’re supposed to when they come out or when they’re done, I’m tinkering with everything and generally unhappy.

I had to do a bunch of work from home this morning, and before I did, I tried to make a cup. It took me five tries this morning to get a decent shot, which I eagerly gulped down. Five tries, and it wasn’t even that good.

And a minute ago I thought “hey, I should go have a cup of coffee”… and I didn’t want to go make it. All I want is a good cup of coffee. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

I’m not actually sure that’s true, after trying for a while to figure out what the world’s computing power was in 1985 and how many processor instructions a web request actually generates, I believe that may not have been that far off. 1982, maybe. I should ask this as an interview question for a program manager and see what they come up with.

I started out my tech career for real working on a web=based telesales application for inbound call center agents for AT&T Wireless, and we had to deal with a couple hundred people placing orders slowly, moving screen-to-screen as they talked to the customer or helped them pick an option.

And while that had its own set of challenges, they aren’t remotely as cool as the ones I get at Expedia.

Dick Gordon: National Security Agency.
Martin Bishop: Ah. You’re the guys I hear breathing on the other end of my phone.
Dick Gordon: No, that’s the FBI. We’re not chartered for domestic surveillance.
Martin Bishop: Oh, I see. You just overthrow governments. Set up friendly dictators.
Dick Gordon: No, that’s the CIA. We protect our government’s communications, we try to break the other fella’s codes. We’re the good guys, Marty.
Martin Bishop: Gee, I can’t tell you what a relief that is… Dick.

Sneakers, for being a two.five-star moderately entertaining flick at the time, surprisingly aged pretty well over the last 16 years, and it makes me feel really old to write that. The clunky stuff is funnier, Mother still isn’t funny to me, but it’s gotten dated-funny, and not dated-boring.

At $5/gallon for the premium the 1994 Volvo 850’s owners manual tells me it needs, I’m looking at $1.25/trip over four miles, and Metro’s only $.50 more than that.

Atrios mentioned something similar today:

At $4.50 per gallon in many places I guess that changes. If you’re getting 20 mpg, a 50 mile round trip commute will cost you $11.25. The 13.2 mile trip from downtown Minneapolis to the airport, which you can do on the train for $1.50, costs 3 bucks by car.

The point I’m trying to make is that when gas was cheap, people thought in terms of the cost of filling the tank rather than the cost of making a trip. People didn’t really make a marginal cost/benefit calculation because they didn’t really perceive the cost for short trips. That’s changing.

She did run an extraordinarily close race, and if the Democrats had the same winner-take-all rules as the Republicans, she’d be the nominee. If Obama hadn’t outorganized her in small caucus states like Idaho, which the Democrats have no hope of winning in November, he wouldn’t be the nominee.

This may all be true, but it’s first unknowable and second condescending and manages to miss the point at once.

They both attempted to win the nomination under the rules set at the start (mostly, since Clinton later attempted to change them when it favored her). It’s like watching a baseball game and then saying “if the winner was determined by stolen bases, the Brewers would have won.”

Well, sure, had nothing else about the game changed. But if the winner was determined by stolen bases, both teams would have spent a ton of money on speedy baserunners instead of good fielders, they would have fielded only left-handed pitchers who could deter the runner on first, and they’d have devoted their farm systems to producing cannon-armed catchers who could throw out anyone.

Obama and his campaign showed an absolutely amazing ability to organize without the support of existing party structures, they raised astonishing amounts of money, and they worked the rules to their maximum advantage, and they won and won and won.

Who’s to say that if the rules were different, and both teams played on a different field, under different rules, that they couldn’t have won then as well?

The best we can say is that Obama won the contest at hand, and the rest is unknowable. And it’s okay to leave it at that.

For starters, I’m reviewing as an adult science-fiction reader. It’s being sold as a young adult book, but genre classification’s always a bit of a joke, and to deal with that point right off the bat: it’s a good read as an adult science-fiction reader.

When I was at Clarion West, I was talking to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the supremely awesome Tor editor, about free books and some other good stuff and he gave me the pitch for this book, and I said “I’d buy that” after the first sentence. The one sentence pitch is: “It’s a group of teenagers who are in San Francisco when terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge and every chapter revolves around a different type of security vulnerability.”

Here’s the good stuff —
- It’s funny
- It’s fast
- It’s well-paced
- It’s interesting and technically sound
- It’s at times brutal and heart-rending
- It’s entirely too plausible
- There’s an immense amount of really-well done throwaway detail that I just loved. Really, if you read this while paying attention, you’re well-rewarded.

There were times, as I rushed through reading it (and I burned through this one) that I wanted to punch something, or start crying. I felt a lot of the frustration, anger, and terror I’ve felt watching my country in trouble these last few years, and it wasn’t pleasant having those emotions stirred up.

The bad:
- I read the ending and was immensely dissatisfied with the resolution of… some things.
- I’m not sure if this is me versus the YA aspect or what, but I pretty much figured out every character arc and twist in the initial subtle hint. You may see what I mean when you read it. This didn’t at all distract from my enjoyment of it, and it also means you’re ahead of some of the characters sometimes, but… I’m having trouble expressing this well. The characters and their motivations are entirely plausible, but the impact of some developments is lessened when you know with absolute certainty they’re coming and at a certain point in the book you know your predictions are always going to be right. I kept expecting a second level of complexity, if you will, and it never came.
- There are a couple scenes, especially towards the end, that don’t reallllly make sense if you think through what everyone’s doing from their point of view, and that didn’t stop me from reading, but it did detract from the plausibility the book had earned up to those points.
- It is at times a little too obviously exploratory, to the point where a character could in the middle of dialogue, say “And if you want to know more about this and other great topics, head to your local library!” and it wouldn’t be jarring. That… I love my dialogue, and this kind of pained me.

To circle back around, though:

I’m a choosy sci-fi reader, and I read it straight through, enjoyed it immensely. “Rollicking” would be a fine adjective to use. I would want to buy it for my kids, were they teens. I love this kind of openly social, political sci-fi, where we can talk about how technology affects us for the better and worse, how it can free and constrain us, and I loved the book.

I’d say if you’re an adult and you haven’t gotten into Doctorow’s stuff, I might recommend “Eastern Standard Tribe” for the same kind of really-fast-paced excellent writing with a higher reading level, but even that doesn’t have the politics I hunger for. “Little Brother” rocks out.