In LA

How many cups of (insert favorite beverage here) would it take to kill you? This simple form serves to answer that chilling question.

My brother-in-law sent me a link to an amazing open-source project that promises to change the way we answer the phone, when telemarketers call The Telecrapper 2000!

“The Telecrapper 2000 (TC2K) is a computerized system designed to both intercept incoming Telemarketing calls on the first ring, and then carry on a virtual conversation with the telemarketer.”

It also records the conversations so you can listen to them later and laugh… Here’s a great one someone worked into a flash animation.

There are other example recordings on the Telecrapper 2000 web page, example 3 is pretty funny, reminds me of that wassup beer commercial (it is also an mp3 file named with ‘.wav’ at the end — why would anyone do that?).

Things that matter

Hurricane Relief Efforts

• Threadless.com will donate $10 to the red cross for every purchase of this pretty $10 shirt.
• The NAACP Disaster Relief Fund. Politics and race shouldn’t matter at all in a time of crisis, but this is an imperfect world (and government) we’re talking about. The NAACP promises “to ensure the equitable distribution of money and resources from Federal, state and local government and other relief agencies”, a goal they list after “1) provide immediate assistance to the worst affected victims” and “2) mobilize resources to feed, cloth and shelter displaced victims”. All 3 goals are important, but after what I’ve seen (amazing footage, quicktime format) on TV and read about the initial disaster relief efforts I think goal #3 cannot be overstated right now.
• The Red Cross is doing a lot of great work in areas hit hard by the hurricane and its aftermath. They’re putting FEMA’s response to shame, which is great except that FEMA is really supposed to be able to respond to emergencies, it’s kind of that organization’s whole purpose. In any case, Red Cross, please keep up the good work, and we’re all donating to you. Wish I could take back the portion of my taxes that went into the FEMA director’s salary and divert them straight into the Red Cross coffers.
• One of the things I’ve always found most appealing about modern-day Judaism is the importance placed on tikkun olam, which means “heal the world”. This concept may have begun its life as a metaphysical kabbalistic notion, but it has since been expounded upon by the mainstream Jewish community to become a strong progressive social imperative. So I’m happy to note that many large Jewish organizations have set up hurricane relief funds and are sending volunteers and supplies to help Jewish and non-Jewish communities in “Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, the Western Florida panhandle and other affected areas”. Las Vegas is also helping out — OK so that city is not itself a Jewish organization, but Jewish gangster Bugsy Siegel (unfortunate middle name ommitted) is credited in that cities mythology with turning it into a gambling mecca, and its current mayor is Oscar Goodman, so I’m going to lump it into this paragraph.
• Here’s a more comprehensive list of Hurrican Katrina charities. I’m guessing it’s the FEMA approved list. However, before you give money to ‘Operation Blessing, be sure to read this article, entitled “FEMA-Recommended Charity ‘Operation Blessing’ Gives Half Its Cash to Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network…”. Depending on where you want your money to go that one may or may not be the charity for you.

Democracy

• The ability to perform an accurate recount is an important part of the political process, a way to attempt to verify that a close call was decided correctly. California is one of the 25 states that requires “voter-verifiable paper audit trails in all its electronic voting machines”. This means that when you vote, the machine prints out a receipt, you then check the receipt to see whether it accurately lists your vote, and I’d guess you place that receipt in a box for later use if the vote is close enough to require a manual recount. This sounds great, the voter can see the receipt to make sure it accurately lists their vote, and it also can serve as a backup in case the machine vote is corrupted.The problem is that some jurisdictions with electronic voting machines are going about recounts a different way — in the case of a recount they’re just having the machine print out all these receipts at once, and they then count them. This is stupid. The voter can’t verify that these receipts actually show their vote, and if the machine has been tampered with or has malfunctioned the problem will go undetected. This is not a recount, and should not be considered a valid recount. Enter State Bill 370, put forth by Senator Debra Bowen. This bill “makes clear that a manual recount of voting machines is a manual recount of ballots that the voter has personally verified”. The bill has already passed the State legislature, but Governor Schwarzenegger might not sign it — his Secretary of State is pushing for a veto because he says it will cost time and money to do a recount in the proper manner, and instead we should go with the nonsensical recount of non-voter-verified-ballots method. What price is democracy worth? The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published an informational web page on the bill and if you fill out the simple web form they’ll send an email to the Governor for you. It is worth doing. We may never hear the end of disputes over the results of the 2000 Florida recount, let’s not let that happen here in California.

I took a look at an iPod nano yesterday. It’s a stunning piece of hardware. Very tempting — I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts lately, and this would be a nice step up from my iPod Shuffle. I wish I could find good info on whether it works with the iPod Camera Connector or AV cable. That would make the decision easier.

Someone out there runs an online poker site and keeps attempting to post comments to this blog that feature inane content and many links to their poker site. The number of attempts to post these ’spam’ advertising links has increased dramatically in the last couple of days. Luckily I’ve been able to block all the comment spam so far (thank you mookitty), but it just bugs the crap out of me that someone out there believes the following:

• that there’s nothing wrong with using up my bandwidth and filling my disk space with unsolicited advertisements for a service completely unrelated to my site
• that anyone is actually going to click the stupid poker links in the comments
• that when my comment spam blocking software fails and my site fills up with comments advertising their poker site that I won’t just take other measures to remove the comments. These measures could include manual deletion (boy do I look forward to that waste of time), the disabling of commenting altogether, or restricting the ability to post comments to registered users with working email addresses. I’d hate to have to waste my time manually deleting spam or to have to disable anonymous commenting (I like to leave things as open as possible), but I did not set up this site in order to serve free advertising for spammers and will take whatever measures are necessary.

Note to Mr. or Ms. Poker: Your advertising is not welcome here. I consider it to be an abuse of my server and site, and am upset just as I’d be if you were to paste posters to my car that advertise your poker site. If you want to pay me to run your ads, maybe we can come to an arrangement not involving ads masquerading as comments (there happens to be a lot of available space on my car). Otherwise, please find a better venue for your advertisements.

A couple of years ago Apple ran a highly visible, entertaining, and widely parodied series of advertisements, directed by Errol Morris, featuring the experiences of people who had switched from using Windows PCs to Macs. Some of the ads were quite funny, such as the ads featuring Ellen Feiss, a teenage student (rumored to be) under the influence of mind-altering allergy medication as she described what a bummer it was that her PC had eaten “a really good paper”.

Creative geeks immediately created many parodies of the ads and posted them to the net, some of the parodies were very funny. Parodies made fun of the content, or made fun of Apple Computer, but the main target quickly became the form of the ads.

Here’s the part I find most amusing. Rather than let net users have all the fun, Apple made parodies of its own ad campaign (link goes to a google search, I don’t know if these ads are available on any official site), starring Will Ferrell. The first ad surfaced at an Apple convention, and later the ads were available for viewing on Apple’s website. What I find most amusing about these ad parodies is that even though they were made by Apple, they really don’t contain any persuasive content but instead simply have fun playing within the format of the Switch ads.