The Richter Scale^®

Last year I made an on-line donation to the American Cancer Society in honor of a dearly departed friend. As I typically do, I created a unique e-mail address at one of my domains to register with the American Cancer Society. These address have some sort of descriptive text component followed by a number and sometimes some more random letters to the left of the ubiquitous “@” sign. They are quite unique and very unlikely to be guessed by traditional dictionary attacks.

So, imagine my surprise when, a few hours ago, I get an e-mail addressed to the unique address provided only to the American Cancer Society (ACS), which has nothing to do with ACS activities.

The mail message had a subject of “Just to her...” and was offering “Soft V__gra” (two letters blanked to avoid poorly designed spam filters), with a link to a web site presumably selling the offered goods.

The implication is that the American Cancer Society, a reputable organization, has had some part of all of its mailing lists hijacked by a spammer.

This could have happened in several different ways:

1) A PC which had my unique address on it at the ACS or an outside mailing house contracted by ACS, got infected with spyware which stole all the e-mail addresses and forwarded them to spammers (a vast majority of spyware and viruses are used for data collection these days).

2) Someone hacked into said PC(s) and outright stole the mailing list(s).

3) Someone with access to said PC(s) took the data and sold/gave it to someone else.

Regardless of which of the above methods caused my address (and thus very likely many others) to leak out to a spammer’s database.

Worse yet, I have just gone and done a search on my filtered spam archives, and find that I have been regularly receiving similar spam to that unique address as of July 17, 2005, so the theft of addresses likely occurred before then.

I count six spams - three for medication and three for pirated software.

Just goes to show that companies need to take the security of their mailing lists extremely seriously. I have reported this to the ACS, and urge anyone else who can trace the source of spam to an ACS list leakage please contact them.

Back at the end of March, my family and I took a one week vacation aboard the S/V Polynesia, one of the ships of the Windjammer fleet. These four masted schooners are small cruise ships in their own right, holding around 100 passengers (capacity varies based on which ship you’re on), and are pretty campy and persona(ble). Definitely not as formal, rigid, stuffy, or impersonal as the big cities-on-the-sea from cruise lines such as Carnival. No black tie nights on a Windjammer cruise. Windjammer cruising is also called “Bare Foot Cruising”.

Anyhow, we had a great time with Capt. Casey and his crew, seeing Sint Maarten, Anguilla, Nevis, St. Kitts, and St. Barths. Highly recommended.

But, the point of this blog post is that on that trip, we took some pictures, and my ever talented painting wife recently finished paintings based loosely on those photos.

You can find these paintings under the titles “Windjammer” (how apropos!) and “O Sunset” on her web site at www.LindaRichter.com (I won’t repost the pictures here because they are too large).

An interesting footnote is that the S/V Polynesia is now calling on Bonaire every week for a couple of days. We’ll have to hook up with Captain Casey once we’re all back on island at the same time and show him the paintings.

I had over two weeks in July where I vacationed in New England, visiting with my in-laws, checking out an inn in Vermont where Linda and I took some cooking classes, heading out to the coast for lobsters, and visiting with a couple of friends. I’ll cover some of these in future blog entries.

However for now, let me share one of the highlights of my time away from most work and from this blog - trying out a Segway Human Transporter.

Turns out one of the friends we visited has an “in” with Segway, based in nearby (to them and us at the time) Manchester, New Hampshire, and managed to bring home a couple of loaner Segway HTs for us to try out.

What a blast! Segways have been out long enough so that the idea of being able to balance on two wheels doesn’t seem so outlandish any more, but actually trying one is still a thing of new found joy - I felt like a big kid playing around on one. After our hosts felt I had shown enough aptitude, I even managed to graduate to “fast” mode (peak of 12.5 miles per hour) from training mode (5 mph max).  That’s done by using a different magnetic key to “start” the Segway HT.

Driving one of these requires a bit of practice. You move forward by leaning forward, and slow down or even go back by leaning back. Turning is accomplished by turning the left handle on the handle bar. Turning gave me the most trouble - I kept twisting the handle in the wrong direction - that’s problematic when moving at a good clip, as I discovered. Once you get in the groove it’s pretty easy to operate. I only wish there were an even faster mode available.

Linda and both the kids tried out the Segway HT as well. Linda was okay with it, Bas (age 8) loved it until he collided with a park car at a low velocity (turns out he was also a bit too lightweight for the unit and it couldn’t easily detect his weight shifts), and Krystyana (age 10) took to it as well as I did.

I am contemplating one of these for back home on Bonaire, but am concerned if I had one, I’d just get lazy - I should be riding my bike instead of using powered transport. For folks in urban areas, I would think the Segway HT would be a great thing though - you can use it on the sidewalk in some cities even.

On The Richter Scale, I give the Segway HT an 8.5 out of 10.0, especially for being fun and cool (never mind practical).

I’m in Washington DC at the present, and as I was wandering back to my hotel about 30 minutes ago, a motorcade with about a half dozen motorcycle cops, a couple of limos, and several Suburbans with lots of antennae and a bullet-proof-vested military guy in one open window, drive by. One of the limos looks like it has the Presidential Seal flying on one of its flags (the other being an American flag). All vehicles that had flashing lights and sirens had them going.

Here’s the odd thing - second to last in the entourage was an ambulance, also with lights flashing.

Anyone know if this is normal?

On a footnote to the previous blog entry, my camera was tucked away too deep in my backpack, and I couldn’t get it out in time to snap pictures - but I did get intensly stared at by the military-type person looking out of one of the giant SUVs. I fear he might have yelled at me that photos were not allowed due to heightened security concerns, although I doubt they would have stopped the motorcade just for that.

So here I was today, at the McPherson Square Metro station (the Metro being the Washington, DC subway system), awed by the cavernous hall of the station.

I pull out my camera with wide angle lens, intent on capturing the scene for posterity, planning a long exposure to capture all the subtle lighting, when a uniformed official comes up to me and (politely) explains that as the Metro is under heightened security, no photography
is permitted.

I grumbled a bit and put my camera away, and as I stewed about not being able to take my picture, the situation struck me as more and more ludicrous. I realized I was only approached because I had a real camera in hand.

After all, with multi-megapixel cell phone cameras now on sale everywhere, it would be very easy for a determined doer of no good to take all the detailed pictures they wanted.

Heck, if they wanted to be truly thorough, a pocket video recorder with a tiny low lux security camera would do the trick. You could even have one person carry the tiny recorder and another handle the small camera transmitting the image wirelessly. Anyone remember the annoying pop-up advertisements for the X-10 cameras? Those thing were wireless and
worked okay at short range.

And what about those darned sketch artists? You don’t need a camera to capture imagery - a notebook and pencil work just fine and add the ability to annotate in real time.

So, as with much of the “official security” I see during my travels, this enforcement in the Metro stations is feel-good from a PR and self-congratulatory perspective, but truly shallow and ineffective when it comes to protecting against truly determined people.

I wonder if anyone will get incensed enough by all this false security and the related ill-conceived and executed policies to start creating photo flash mobs as a form of mass civil disobedience, with all images posted to Flickr for widest distribution.

Imagine a single security guard dealing with hundreds of people simultaneously whipping out their photo cell phones, camcorders, and digital cameras and taking pictures in public places where someone has bizarrely determined photography could be a security risk.

--------------
Update 1 - July 31, 2005 - 17:29 EDT

My experience above reminded me of a similar experience related on BoingBoing a couple of months ago about a photographer in Pittsburgh who was asked to stop taking pictures of a building (non-governement at that) for security reasons. Here’s the link to the blog entry.

--------------
Update 2 - July 31, 2005 - 19:18 EDT

Okay. There must have been some sort of vibe in the air today.

As I read through the last couple of days of BoingBoing postings a few minutes ago, lo and behold, there’s a report of a photography flashmob in San Francisco yesterday, as the result of a photographer harrassed by a security guard for taking pictures in a public place a few days ago.

Photos of the event have even been posted to Flickr here and also here too.

Weird coincidence (mind you I submitted the initial commentary in this entry via my Sidekick II cellphone (moblog) completely unaware of the event in San Francisco - I would have also included a pic from the Sidekick to prove my point but the camera is the Sidekick is pretty crappy and doesn’t deal well at all with low light conditions such as those in man made caverns).

Yay for the concept of photography flashmobs and the first successful implementation! Photographers everwhere should rejoice that their First Amendment rights are being defended.

Okay - I know it’s been a while since my last blog entry. I’ve been traveling and on vacation, and then just overwhelmed with work. But I think I’m back for now. Expect to see some entries on some of the vacation things I did.

In the meantime, I’ve been catching up on some of the blogs I haven’t read in a month, and found the following at the Business2 Blog.

It’s a faucet with LEDs which shows blue for when cold water is running and red for hot water.

Boy, I need one of those. My wife always runs hot water in our master bath at night to wash her face, and if I’m not paying attention, I end up scalding my gums with the hot water I have used to dampen my toothbrush.

Most gadget blogs and reviews rave about first look reviews of new tech toys, but it’s rare that I’ve seen anyone look at the tech toys of yester-months after months of use (or non-use, as the case may be) to see how well they have fared.

So, over the next few days I will be reviewing some of the tech toys I have been using for the last few months, starting with the Creative Labs Zen Micro.

The Zen Micro is Creative’s effort to unseat the Apple iPod Mini. Based on market numbers they have not been particularly successful. Using man-on-the-street surveying and eavesdropping techniques I have counted exactly zero Zen Micros (or any other type of Creative MP3 player) on my travels since I acquired mine in the middle of January 2005. With one no-name exception every other MP3 player I have seen (and it’s well over a hundred at this point) it’s been Apple iPods of some flavor all the time.

My Zen Micro is a 5GB model, and while it comes in all sorts of colors, I chose white when I paid for it at the Consumer Electronics Show (along with a blue one for my wife). It plays MP3s just fine, has a built in radio (reception hasn’t been great in my experience though), records voice (haven’t had need to try that yet), and tells time (surprisingly useful when you don’t wear a wrist watch and when you’re in mid-flight and can’t check your cell phone for the current time).

The Zen Micro has two firmware choices as well - pure MP3/WMA playback, or DRM support in the form of Microsoft’s Plays For Sure. For those not familiar with DRM, it stands for Digital Rights Management and means that you are restricted in where you can play DRM-protected music - typically 3 to 5 systems, and a portable player, such as the Zen Micro.

The Plays For Sure thing works pretty well - a couple of weeks ago I signed up for a trial of Yahoo! Music Unlimited, and proceeded to download about 800 songs from artists Yahoo! Music recommended based on my music tastes to my notebook and then to my Zen Micro. Of course, I was on a high-speed U.S. DSL connection where I had a 2.5Mbps connection. Would have been impossible here on Bonaire.

In my nearly half year of using the Zen Micro, most of which has been on planes (and I have been on a lot of planes in that time!), I’m very pleased with the unit’s size, capacity, and battery life. My trips from Bonaire to the U.S. usually involve anywhere from 6 to 10 hours in flight, and the battery has lasted for the duration when I had charged it fully the night before. I’ve probably logged over 200 hours on my Zen Micro so far.

I paid $249 for it, and got as a show special, a set of Creative’s TravelSound 300 speakers (which sound tinny and flat to my ears). The same 5GB unit goes for $199.99 now. The Zen Micro also came with a belt clip - a flimsy clip which broke off about two months ago.

The controls take a bit to get used to - sliding one’s fingers up and down a non-moving control pad takes a bit of finesse when that same pad can be tapped quickly as well to perform a specific function (separate from the one from sliding one’s finger, that is).

Other than the belt clip, I have discovered only two real negatives with the Zen Micro.

First is that the 1/8” jack where I plug in my headphones in has started getting flaky. I have to position the headphone plug just right so that I don’t lose most of the sound. I’ve confirmed it’s not the connector on the head phones as those work fine on my notebook computer. And, not comfortingly, this problem appears to be getting worse, so I may have to send it in for service soon, and then who knows what will happen to my DRM’d music on the drive in the unit?

The second problem I have is that the Zen Micro seems to drain the battery even when I have turned it off. That means that if I don’t charge it right before I leave on a trip, I end up with drained batteries. It’s not a showstopper like the headphone jack problem, but it is annoying. I’d like to be able to have the thing shut off to a much lower power state (like off?) when I want, instead of being in this power-consuming, fast boot “sleep” mode that it seems to go into.

Would I recommend a Zen Micro to someone else? Probably, and only assuming that the head phone jack problem is a rarity instead of something common.

While I think all the various iPod accessories out there are cool, I don’t like the idea of being tied to a particular software program like iTunes for doing all my music synchronization. The Zen Micro looks just like a hard disk when I plug it in, making it very easy to copy music to it. I can also store data on it if I wish. The Zen Micro also comes with several applications, including a simple file manager which is not bound into a player that wants to take over my system.

So, after 5.5 months of use, I give the Creative Labs Zen Micro a 6.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

Being on a low-carb diet has some drawbacks in terms of foods you may have been used to eating for pure gastronomic pleasure, but can no longer enjoy because of their high carb counts. For me that includes french fries, tortillas and tortilla chips, bread, and ice cream.

However, in the freezer section of the Super Wal-Mart in Marshall, Texas, I came across low-carb Blue Bunny brand ice cream bars. The one that seemed particularly appealing was that the Butter Pecan Carb Freedom “frozen dairy dessert”.

The package describes these as “Butter Pecan frozen dairy desset dipped in white chocolate and pecan pieces”. At 2g net carbs for each bar, that’s within the limit I of daily treats I allow myself (when not having a pack of Atkin’s Peanut Butter Cups instead - also 2g of net carbs for one package).

Having previously tried a Ben & Jerry’s low-carb ice cream (flavorless - yuck! - 2.0 out of 10.0 on the The Richter Scale) and ice cream bars from Atkins (chocolate covered peanut butter ice “cream” - good chocolate covering but the ice “cream” left a lot to be desired 3.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale), I wasn’t sure I would like these Butter Pecan bars, especially from a company that names itself “Blue Bunny”.

So imagine my surprise when it turns out these Butter Pecan Carb Freedom “frozen dairy desserts” are actually very good (at least as far as low carb sweet things go. I’ve not tried the other flavors from Blue Bunny yet, but the Butter Pecan flavor gets an 8.0 out of 10.0 on the The Richter Scale.

After I got my new Nikon D2x digital SLR a couple of weeks ago I needed to go and put it into play. (It is a very nice camera, and my credit card company is very happy with me for buying it, no doubt.)

The results of my initial experimentation with the Nikon D2x produced four new prints in my digital painting series, shown below:

The text which descibes these images can be found on my digitally painted art site.

I’ll try and post more direct results from the D2x here in the coming weeks.

An annual Dutch tradition is the catch of the season’s first herring, a small fish which some consider a delicacy. The first herring harvest, something which typically occurs in May, is called “Hollandse Nieuwe” (means “Dutch New"), and the Dutch celebrate this by event by gorging themselves on the raw (or nearly so) herring, along with liberal amount of Genever (a Dutch gin), and perhaps raw onions and pickles.

Living, as I do, on an island which is part of the Dutch Kingdom, and thus has a lot of Dutchmen (and women) living on it, I’ve been privileged to join in the celebration of Hollandse Nieuwe, and am usually the only American present. This year, the first “haaring” showed up on June 1st at the Mai-Mai restaurant on Bonaire, accompanies by load Dutch music:

Pictured above is a plate of fresh Dutch herring right off the KLM flight from Amsterdam, served with pickles, raw onions, and bread.

To eat the herring, you pick it up by the tail (it has been scaled and deboned, incidentally), optionally rubs it up against the finely chopped onions on the plate (so as to have some adhere to the herring), then tilts your head back, open your mouth and lower the herring into it, taking as big a bite as you can. See my demonstration below:

The more timid will cut their herring into smaller bite size pieces and eat it with a fork.

It’s not nearly as fishy as one might think, and I am sure the fish oils are very good for you. If you eat sushi or sashimi, this is not far removed from that.

More on this tradition can be found here.