Category Archives: Insanity

CraigsList

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I’ve always been a little creeped out by some of the stuff on Craigslist. There’s pretty obvious prostitution and drugs going on, in addition to people seeking affairs. And if you read through the “personals” section (which is pretty entertaining), watch out for ones with pictures… Something they’re, uhh, graphic.

So I went through about 20 recent postings, merged them into a textfile, and used my old Markov chain code to “learn” the text and then spit out text based on it… Some of the stuff on Craigslist is so bizarre that it’s hard to tell what’s nonsense the script spits out, and what’s real. (I’ve omitted anything wildly obscene.)

I love to read, movies, anything to do my hair today medium length i need a new look today im off from work hit me up I have a personality that is a cheater because whats is the beginning of something possibly beautiful and long term.

I love to have a great day! A little about me…I am very mature. I am a very comfortable passenger seat. I may or may not have a degree

Good stimulating companionship and conversation is the point of being with someone if your going to cheat on them. I’m new to this online service and hoping to make new friends.Hope it works…

I love to read, movies, anything to do my hair today medium length i need a new look today im off from work hit me up

I have a personality that is a cheater because whats is the beginning of something possibly beautiful and long term.

If you are Interested to have a big black cruiser with a good place for drinks dancing live music with a rumble between her legs, for occasional rides. Feel the rumble as we hit the open road…wrap your arms around me, and press in close.

meet you, after some phone conversations, in public places only unless of course it is business related or anohter type of function, in which case I would meet you, after some phone conversations, in public places only unless of course it is business related or anohter type of function, in which case I would meet you, after some phone conversations, in public places only unless of course it is business related or anohter type of

normal and fun people, between 30-40 years of age, who are looking to meet some new people to hang out today and maybee 420 a bit. I love being out in the rewards you crave. Where you do not. Once a week, I will visit you. We will go over the goals you set yourself and your mobile number and let’s start texting!

I’m looking for someone to be a hypocrite.

Anyone know of a good place for drinks dancing live music with a lot of chrome, and a very open, spontaneous, and down to earth person.

I’m not looking for a coffee and a very comfortable passenger seat. I may or may not have a great companion. My friends think Im mischievious and I hate writing, so that’s it for me.

I have all camping gears. I am burned out of shape so don’t be shy, just be sensual.

Interested in normal and fun people, between 30-40 years of age, who are looking to make new text message with on a regular basis…what are we going to cheat on them.

I’m looking for someone to play with soon, because the weather is getting to be a marathoner!!!

I’ve heard about Cuddle Parties on the back of a good bar to watch the Celtics where they actually put the sound on the radio and internet but there are none

I’m certainly not someone who puts a twinkle in my stomache

hey im a leo male looking for possible another mom who is self motivated

I am open to a totally awesome 2-year-old boy. My problem is that I am looking to spend some time with an older 30-50.

so please be mature and not very interested in going out at night.

I consider diversity to be really nice !

If you’re not interested in talking through emails because, honestly, I can respond to anyone with a picutre

Good stimulating companionship and conversation is the point of being a hard worker. It’s simply that you have one? Reply now for flirty fun on the TV.

I have always tried to be on the radio and internet but there are none in the Boston area.

I am thankful for every day that I feel like I have no friends!!

this poing in my eyes and butterflies in my eyes and butterflies in my stomache

Please be a real person, please be open-minded and if you would like to get to know me, please just hit a back button, don’t reply.

Anyone know of a good listener and would love to go out and paint the town with.

I look forward to talking to a loser

I work 2 jobs and do not allow myself to be really nice !

my friends are married, and not very interested in talking to a totally awesome 2-year-old boy.

I can occasionally get a sitter but sometimes those are hard to come by so I need a new look today im off from work hit me up I have problems in life.

I am open to speaking to people of all races.

Quick clarification, since I was horrified at first… “Black cruiser” is a guy referring to his motorcycle; he was looking for other motorcycle enthusiasts. As was the “rumble” bit. It just happens to come up in the most inappropriate places. Also, the “2-year-old” thing comes from someone discussing that they have a child.

ssh Brute-force Attempts

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I used to get a couple hosts bounced a week… They’d try to brute-force username/password combos over ssh and DenyHosts would ban their IP after 5 failed logins.

For a couple days last week, I probably had about 50 in a 24-hour period, and then they went away as quickly as they started.

Today… Well, today is insane. As this site confirms, GMail limits a “conversation” to 61 conversations. So as this screenshot shows…

Failed ssh logins

Micky D’s

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I stopped at McDonald’s on my way home today, since I was starving and otherwise would have gotten on 128 at around 5:30 on a Friday, which is just asking for a headache. So I took a leisurely dinner. I’m fairly certain that, as long as I was there, not a single normal thing happened. I’m copying-and-pasting an e-mail I sent to Rusty while I was there, hence a little shorthand/terseness:

Lady sitting across from me, after dialing cell phone: “Hello, this is (name). You’ve called this number twice. Who is this?”
“Oh, I didn’t recognize your voice.”
“Okay.”

Her little kid: “Who was that?”
“That was Daddy. He had someone on the other line.”

*phone rings*

“Yeah, well, I didn’t recognize the number or your voice.”

I’m inferring that they’re divorced/separated, but I’d like to think that if I fathered a child with someone, she might at least recognize my voice when I called.

Some guy on crutches came in and I overheard him ask her to tell the manager that the handicapped door button doesn’t work. She yelled for
the manager, who came over and said, “Ya, the manager is working on it.”

“She’s working on it, huh?”

“Yes.”

So then the guy at the French fry station went over and started pounding on the button?

And this surly lady sprawled out in one of the booths, with no food, yells to him, “Doesn’t work!”

I went back up to order dessert, and customers are just standing around by the register. So I asked the guy in front of me if he was waiting to order. He said yes, but made a, “No, I’m all set” motion, leaving me totally unsure?

So I finally approached the register, and the cashier was just *glaring* at Surly Lady? But kind of in jest, maybe? And after like 30 seconds of me awkwardly standing there and being ignored, she took my order. I got my ice cream and went to where the straws are, where I expected the spoons to be. But there were no utensils.

So I went back up to the counter, and asked. The cashier—who spoke perfect English—handed me a fork and knife.

And as I write this, Surly Lady is staring at me?

And then a cop with his lights on pulled into the parking lot, came in, used the restroom, and left with the blue lights still on?

I sent that, expecting an end to insanity. No such luck:

So I’m sitting here looking out the window, and some guy at the stop sign to leave the parking lot opens his door and… I think he threw up?

Surly Lady’s twin sister (!) just walked in and talked to Surly Lady. She’s talking VERY loudly about how she just spent $200 at the supermarket, and she pulled out a receipt as long as she is tall to prove her point?

Job Qualification

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A job posting just listed something like, “Experience using TCP/IP” as a requirement.

I’ve been using it since the fifth grade or so, when we networked two PCs together. I now use it on a daily basis. I’ve used it very extensively, including billions of ACKs, millions of SYNs and FINs, and even some RSTs and PSHs.

But I’m not just being a goofball. The job doesn’t seem to entail any low-level knowledge of TCP/IP. I think they’re just looking for someone who knows what it is. (I also have extensive experience using ICs, device drivers, and OS kernels.)

I don’t really want to work at this place.

So I Can Close the Tab

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I came across Ken Rockwell’s site the other day, and, as I perused a lot, I came across his interesting mention of the Casio EX-F1. I’ve “graduated” from integrated point-and-shoots to digital SLRs, although this camera costs more than my digital SLR and three lenses put together.

Photographically, it’s mediocre. 6 megapixels. Except you don’t buy this thing for its resolution. You crave it because:

  • 60 frames per second at 6 megapixels. (Note that most movies are shot at 24 fps.)
  • “[S]tereo HDTV movies,” although I confess that I’m not quite sure what that means.
  • Continuous shooting mode, where it’s just constantly shooting at 60fps, and, when you hit the shutter, saves the ones around that time. Thus, you can actually get shots from before you click the shutter.
  • A maximum shutter speed of 1/40,000 second. That is not a typo.
  • 60 frames per second is ridiculous. But if you can take a cut in resolution, you can go further, all the way to 1,200 frames per second at a pitiful 336×96.

Actually, 336×96 isn’t just tiny, it’s a really weird size. I’ve resized (and cropped) a random photo of mine down to 336×96:

336×96 Pixels

In conclusion… 6 megapixel camera, with a long zoom lens equivalent to 36-432mm. And it’s an HDTV video camera. And it’s got the crazy bonus of letting you use shutter speeds of 1/40,000 of a second, and capture low-res video at 1,200 frames/second. I wouldn’t carry it as my main camera (though it would probably be entirely usable for that), but I’d love one of these in my bag for video and such.

I also wonder about the “trickle-down” effect. Although really, more like the “trickle-out effect.” Nikon’s D3 will give pretty clean shots at ISO 6400, something no other camera even tries to offer. It goes up to ISO 25,600. Canon and Nikon are very close when it comes to the frames-per-second rate of their high-end digital SLRs; 7-9 frames/second. (Hint: get rid of the shutter, which is useless on a digital camera where you can just “read” the sensor for a given period of time.) Companies keep focusing on packing more and more megapixels into smaller and smaller sensors. As I’ve said before, I have a 20×30″ print from my 6-megapixel camera. (Cropped a bit, too, actually.) I only “upgraded” to my 10-megapixel XTi because the old one broke and you can’t buy a 6-megapixel SLR anymore. Maybe, just maybe, we’ve seen an end to the megapixel arms race. We exceeded the resolution you could squeeze out of film a long time ago, and now we’re giving medium format a run for its money. When I go to buy a new SLR in maybe five years, I don’t want it to be more than 10 megapixels. But I hope that it goes a lot further than 6 megapixels. And if a “prosumer” point-and-shoot camera does 60 frames per second at full resolution, all of a sudden 3 frames per second on an SLR looks pathetic. Similarly, I’m unaware of any still camera (aside from maybe weird scientific-engineered stuff) that will take a 1/40,000-second exposure, or any flash that’s capable of running at 7 frames per second.

(That said, I’m having a hard time figuring out when you’d need a 1/40,000-second exposure. I only hit my camera’s 1/2,000-second limit when I’m too lazy to stop the lens down…)

High Voltage!

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I’m actually not entirely sure how finding these videos began, but some shocking videos for your enjoyment:

  • “Crazy man throws a wire on 110 kV power line” is about as accurate a title as they come. (Highly, highly not recommended!) It’s essentially the same deal as a lightning strike: one end of the wire is connected to ground, and when the wire makes contact with the 110,000V power lines, it shorts to ground.
  • This one is even more absurd? Someone provides a translation of the Russian: they’re 500kV lines, and some idiots throw barbed wire (?!) onto the lines. You can’t see them throwing the wire, though, so there’s just a tremendous explosion as 500kV rushes to ground before, most likely, vaporizing the wire.
  • This one is really bizarre to me. One description says they’re using “splicing technology,” and another explains that they’re “strengthening the lines.” Neither really gave any explanation to why there’d suddenly be a tremendous explosion and plumes of smoke from all of the insulators. It looks like they sent enough voltage on the lines to jump across the massive insulator. (Which is like a six-foot chunk of porcelain, chosen because it’s ridiculously non-conductive.) Rusty gave a good explanation: it seems that they’ve applied something-or-other on the lines, and are essentially “flash-welding” it on.
  • Substations often have “air break disconnects,” which are essentially a big, metal, mechanical arm that they can “open” to keep electricity from flowing. The design wasn’t meant to to switch “hot” loads, though. Here’s a video of them opening the disconnect on a 230kV line, which… Well, just watch. (It shorts to another wire after a few seconds.)
  • Here’s something sort of similar, except it appears that it’s more of a technical failure. It turns into somewhat of an accidental Jacob’s Ladder, before it burns itself out in a fantastic fashion.
  • This is a neat compilation of various high-voltage “problems.” I actually saw a neat explanation somewhere of what happens in the first video… Something in a high-voltage transformer there shorts to ground, but nothing upstream ever tripped a circuit breaker. The transformer is filled with oil for cooling, before finally it becomes hot enough that it boils and starts spewing ‘steam’ (boiling oil) out its ’emergency’ valves, which makes things much worse, but is actually fortunate in that it blows up the incoming voltage, leaving firefighters with a simple de-energized power grid full of burning oil to deal with. The second is another case of them opening a mechanical “air break” disconnect, apparently in a deliberate test of a 500kV system. Then we see the same clip we saw earlier, and then… The most awesome thing ever. I have absolutely no clue what goes on, but it’s the most awesome fireball ever.

Google Charts

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Have you guys seen Google Charts? It’s a quirky little API I didn’t know existed until I saw a passing allusion to it. Essentially, you pass it a specially-crafted URL (essentially the definition of an API) and it will generate a PNG image.

Here’s a fairly random line graph. My labeling of the axes makes no sense, but it was nonsensical data anyway.

One of the cooler things they support is a “map” type of chart, like this US map. The URL is a bit tricky, though this one of South America is easier to understand: chco (presumably “CHart COlor”) sets the colors, with the first being the ‘default’ color. chld lists the countries, as they should map up to the colors: UYVECO is “Uruguay,” “Venezuela,” and “Colombia.”

What has me particularly interested is that I’ve recently installed code to watch connections to my NTP servers. Here’s my Texas box, a stratum 2 server in the NTP pool (pool.ntp.org). I bumped it up to list a 10 Mbps connection speed to signal that I could handle a lot more queries than the average, although it’s still nowhere near its limit. In addition to the stats you see there, it keeps a “dump file” of every single connection. (As an aside, this strikes me as inefficient and I want to write an SQL interface to keep aggregate stats… But that’s very low-priority right now.)

Further, I have some IPGeo code I played with. More than meets the eye, actually: a separate database can give a city/state in addition to the country. (It comes from the free MaxMind GeoLite City database.) Thus I could, in theory, parse the log file created, match each IP to a state, and plot that on a US map.

This reminds me that I never posted… I set up NTP on the second server Andrew and I got, where we’re intending to consolidate everything, but haven’t had time yet. It sat unused for a while, keeping exceptionally good time. So, with Andrew’s approval, I submitted it to the NTP pool. I set the bandwidth to 3 Mbps, lower than the 10 Mbps my Texas box is at.

I was somewhat surprised to see it handling significantly more NTP queries. (They’re not online, since the box isn’t running a webserver, but for those in-the-know, ~/ntp/ntp_clients_stats | less produces the same type of output seen here.) It turns out that a flaw in the IPGeo code assigning the server to the right ‘zones’ for some reason thought our server was in Brazil. Strangely, while the United States has 550 (at last count) servers in the pool, South America has 16. Thus I got a much greater share of the traffic. It’s still low: at its peak it looks like me might use 2GB of bandwidth.

So there are a few graphs I think would be interesting:

  • A line graph of the number of clients served over time. Using Google Charts would save me from having to deal with RRDTool / MRTG.
  • A map of South American countries, colored to show which of the countries are querying the server most frequently. (The same could be done for my US server, on a state-by-state basis.)

American Auto

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What is it with American auto companies and so utterly failing with hybrids? Gas it $3.50/gallon and up right now as I post this. There’s a big green movement. In short, people really care about getting halfway decent gas mileage.

So American auto finally got with the program and offered a couple hybrids. The Ford Escape hybrid, for a long time, was the only one. Tree-huggers and penny-pinchers alike can…. uhh…. marvel at the utter contradiction that is a hybrid SUV.

Of course, Chevy didn’t want to be left out, so they joined. Except that seem to have missed the memo even more. Calling it the “Green Car of hte Year,” they introduced “America’s first full-size hybrid SUV.” It gas mileage is exactly the same as my non-hybrid Toyota Highlander: 20-22 MPG.

Seriously, guys?

News Anchors, Awesome

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Wasting time on YouTube:

  • “Insane News Man” is pretty funny. Not until about the seventh time watching it did it occur that it was maybe a teleprompter problem, and the transition into his co-anchor being absent and a man being “murdered and then set on fire while celebrating his birthday” were two separate things.
  • This talkshow clip is in a foreign language (Dutch?), but I still can’t help but crack up laughing every time I watch this. You don’t need to understand what’s being said.
  • This weatherman is a classic. It’s a college station. Someone eventually interviewed him; it was his first time and the director kept distracting him by trying to give him cues, which just made things worse.
  • Off the topic of news anchors, “The worst hockey player!” is hilarious, if only because it would be me if I played hockey.
  • “Worst Hockey Fight” is almost as good, although the first 20 seconds or so are worthless.
  • You might have seen this Home Shopping blooper before, but I’d never seen the full version before, which is where the hilarity lies. Long after it’s obvious that the horse picture he’s referring to is actually a butterfly / month, he continues calling it a horse, and even starts pointing out imaginary details.
  • This one, though, is even funnier, albeit much older. They’re selling “safety jumper cables” while the model shows off a poncho for no apparent reason, before the anchor very deliberately… Well, just watch.

Uhhh

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I’ve been working a lot on cleaning up Wikipedia in my free time the past few days. I think I might stick with it and eventually go for admin, which seems like a fun goal. (Although as they point out, it’s no big deal really… But it’d help me a lot.) A lot of my work comes from watching the Recent Changes page, following through to suspect changes, undoing their change, and going back.

Anyway, entirely out of the blue I started to wonder if Wikipedia uses mod_gzip. So I pulled up Firefox 3’s “Page Information,” and saw the following. I felt slightly pathetic at the result. (Note that I’m sometimes on a page for less than a second, so it’s really not as bad as it seems, but still…)

How many page views?!