lucas-photo.com

I have quite a few good rants built up, but I’m smack in the middle of redesigning and moving my Six Flags Atlantis Memorial page.

What brought that on was simple: Amazon.com didn’t send me a verification for my sister’s Christmas present.

Then I realized that Amazon was using my old Freenet address, which I rarely check anymore.

Then came the terrible realization that my Freenet account currently had no .forward file, and worse, hadn’t had one for some time.

So I logged in to the Freenet, and sure enough: Twenty-four thousand emails, 99% of them spam, 1% I that I really wanted to keep.

Well, normally this would be simple: use PINE mail to select on certain predictable (and usually naughty) words, and begin the mass deletion, right?*

Wrong.

I’m not sure if they have a governor that restricts cycles, or whether the machine is just so overworked that it’s not stable, or it’s just so slow that the threads are colliding.

But if you try to do any operation too big, it just kicks you out of PINE.

So over the course of performing a very large number of smaller batch deletes, I had time to consider whether it might be time to close up shop on the ol’ Freenet account and migrate the few remaining items (mostly the samples from the languishing but still progressing album Yellow Seven, the Atlantis Memorial, and maybe the Bad Poetry page) over to lucas-photo.com.

And that got me thinking that the Atlantis page is suffering from code rot anyway, and probably needs a complete overhaul in any case, lest someone see it and think I still write code like that (shudder).

So I’m rebuilding it.

So stay tuned.

* Now if you didn’t know PINE could do this, here’s the info:

1. Press ; (semicolon) to start selecting.
2. Choose a type of selection (I usually use T for text)
3. Choose where the text lives (usually S for subject)
4. Enter a snippet of the identifying text at the prompt (e.g. Prescripti or Cial)
5. PINE will select them and report how many it found.
6. Hit A for Apply, D for Delete, and X for eXpunge. Bye bye spam! Terminated with prejudice.

Wherever you are tonight, whatever you are doing, may the blessings of the season embrace you and yours.

Spammers, even you. Give it a rest for one night, willya?

First, GO GATORS for their record-breaking 11-0 start. This is the most unselfish team I’ve ever seen.

Watching the game, I saw crowd behavior that’s always puzzled me: going crazy behind the basket during a free throw, attempting to distract the shooter.

Think about it from the player’s standpoint for a minute.

He sees an ocean of movement, with one fixed point of reference: the hoop.

Brownian-motion crowds are actually quite helpful to a player’s ability to see, and focus on, the basket.

If you want to mess someone up at the charity stripe, tilt yourself to the side about five degrees and sit perfectly still.

Now you must go forth, and use this power for good, not evil.

So I’m driving to the local community college to get my teeth cleaned, and on their flashy billboard I see that they’re hosting a performance by a “Hand Percussion Ensemble”.

My most annoying bad habit is now taught for college credit.

Wottawoild.

:)

Well, another Sanction Saturday has gone by and it seems that the stories are always the same, just the faces are new.

The state NPC chairman dolloped praise on Ian (the now-Official NPC photographer) like whipped cream on pumpkin pie, including crediting him with providing “the best photos we’ve ever had” (that I can live with, it’s an opinion) and “bringing us into the new technology” (that one gets to me a bit– I’ve always tried to stay on the cutting edge).

This isn’t about Ian– I love him to death, we’re gear-heads to the core and spend 95% of our time at the shows talking tech. Apart from a Nikon fixation that I can’t seem to snap him out of, we get on like two peas in a pod– we in fact ate lunch together after the meeting, and have some other plots brewing that I can’t talk about yet (insert demonaical laugh).

But this was the same topping lavished on Doris back in the day, completely plausible and even partially true, right up to the point that it would have to acknowledge I exist.

I have to wonder if the NPC officials are aware of the outpouring of gratitude and support I get from the athletes themselves (and you know who you are: thank you. You’re the reason I do this).

Or that my site’s popularity helps make bodybuilding in Florida look so good to so many people (it’s coming up on 2/3 of a million hits soon– and that’s just the front page!) .

Or my contest search page, that presents in one place all the information a potential competitor or spectator needs to find a local show. (I have asked for this to be put on the NPC official site, but have had no interest– it belongs there, not on my site).

My guess would be, “no”.

I’m reminded of a scene from Die Hard:

Al: “How you feelin’, ‘Roy’?”
McClane: “Pretty f^(#in’ unappreciated, Al.”

So I’m going to think long and hard before I commit too much more to this. When I started, I saw a need. Now Ian pretty much fills that need, and moreover he does a great job at it.

Maybe it’s time to become Official, or just walk away from it.

At least if I became a judge, I’d get a room, a meal, and a couple of bucks for my effort.

Get this… apparently there is legislation before Congress to create a national Department of Peace, which will be tasked with mediating local issues of violence, rehabilitating prisoners, eliminating gangs, and so on.

In other words, it’s another scheme designed to separate hard-working taxpayers from their money, in order to support highly speculative, extremely costly pet projects of people who are having visions… er, sorry, people with vision.

Jumpin’ Jehosaphat, have these people never heard of George Orwell?

Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1984.

You want to deal with the rising prison population? There’s an easy way. No, really. And in my mind, it’s a far more humane solution than locking people up:

Deportation.

As bartenders are wont to quip at closing time, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

Start with the three-strikes laws (though any mandatory restrictions that handcuff our judges constitute a blatant violation of due process, but that’s another post).

There have been valid complaints drawn that someone with two strikes, who has been making an earnest effort to walk the straight-and-narrow, gets hauled in on some piddling traffic offense or minor parole violation and has to be sentenced to some unGodly multi-decade prison sentence. Insane.

Within the judge’s discretion, any offense lesser than strike one and/or two should not count towards the third strike– especially if it’s a reformed felon who bounces a check or some such.

But if someone does pull that third strike, there’s no reason the taxpayers should support them for the next few decades.

Revoke their citizenship. (The felon, not the taxpayers.)

Hand them a check for, say, $50,000. That’s about the cost of keeping them in prison for a year, and it’s more than enough to make a new start in lots of other countries.

Hand them a voucher for, say, another $50,000. That goes to whatever country they decide to relocate to, to soften the blow of accepting a known troublemaker.

Escort them onto the plane. Problem solved, at twenty percent of the cost.

If there was ever any possibility that the felon could rehabilitate, they have one final chance.

After the duration of whatever their prison sentence was, they can apply for citizenship like any other immigrant.

Our American citizenship is a precious gift, and for too long we’ve been taking it for granted. Those who demonstrate repeatedly that they are unable or unwilling to work within our society’s laws should not be allowed to remain. But the taxpayers shouldn’t have to subsidize their keep for years on end, either.

This seems a far more workable, far more concrete solution, than just creating another big Federal agency.

So yesterday’s front page news was that the housing market isn’t going to start dropping any time soon.

One had to read just a little further to find that the source of that bold headline was– surprise!– a Realtor.

What the spice else is a Realtor going to say? “Yeah, people will be losing their shorts soon. I sold everything I own two months ago.”

Actually, I would believe the original premise, except I think there are a tremendous number of people who have recently bought real estate strictly as an investment. They have no real intent to ever live in those homes. But the numbers that drive new home construction, tax revenue projections, urban planning, mortgage rates, and a number of other important factors– these numbers don’t take the investors into account.

To the outside world, the investors are new residents.

Those ghost residents, the investors, are the air inside the bubble. It’s not going to burst, though you’ll hear that inappropriate analogy a lot on the news. But it’s going to deflate, and deflate rapidly, the first time the investors get nervous. And a lot of them will lose their shorts. It’s the dot-com travesty all over again, where people who didn’t know a router from a radish were shoveling their savings into hideously dangerous tech stocks without a backwards thought.

By the way, buried on today’s financial page, was a much smaller article noting that the housing market is cooling.