So my new policy is to keep spam ‘on file’ for three days. It’s filed away as spam so no one sees it, but it’s good for analysis and such, to protect against future spam. Several times a day, I run a little script to delete spam older than three days and optimize the tables, to keep things running fast.
So this table is particularly telling of the spam problem. Akismet is catching just about all of it, so it’s not a big problem for me per se, but the fact remains that, with three days of spam and something like nine months of legitimate comments, spam accounts for right around two-thirds of all comments on my blog. Wow-a-wee-wow!
One thing I ran into in the Obama campaign was persistent rumors that he was a Muslim. I always thought it was pretty dumb that people were actually convinced of this, but it took me a while to realize that the real problem is what they don’t say, but surely think: they think that he’s Muslim and therefore a bad person.
I wish more people were at least marginally familiar with Islam. It’s a peaceful religion with a few fundamentalist nutjobs who interpret their scriptures in bizarre ways. Really not unlike Christianity.
There are two major sects, the Sunnis, with 85% of the Muslim population, and the Shi’a, accounting for around 15%.
Jihad itself is an interesting term. Thought to refer to “holy war,” it’s actually an ambiguous term referring to anything from holy war to a “struggle to improve one’s self and/or society” (per Wikipedia). And even when it does refer to holy war, there are lots of restrictions: it’s not supposed to include non-combatants, for example.
I don’t know half as much as I’d like to about Islam, giving its increasing importance in the world. But I do wish that more people would at least stop labeling all Muslims as terrorists.
One of the things that rocks about New Hampshire is the so-called “retail politics,” where politicians have to get out and work to convince us that we should vote for them. Running TV ads and blowing Iowa and New Hampshire off doesn’t work, as Giuliani proved.
Last weekend, we went to a house party in Merrimack (hosted by a fellow ham, actually), where a few dozen people came to hear Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick speak about Obama. If you look at the US as a whole, this is a terrible proposition: the governor of Massachusetts takes an hour out of his day (well, probably more like three, if you account of travel time and all) to talk to thirty or so people? And yet this is what it takes.
Governor Patrick, by the way, is an awesome guy. He came around and talked to each person in the room. I told him I was going to school in Massachusetts, and he thanked my mom for “loaning” him to them. He seemed to genuinely care.
He has this incredible way of, when talking to you, making it seem like you’re the only person in the room. Here’s the governor of Massachusetts, coming up to someone’s house in New Hampshire, and talking to my mom and I as if he’s an old friend.
He spent a good deal of time just mingling, before he finally addressed us as a crowd and talked about Obama. He kept that brief, and then asked us a lot of questions. At one point, he was talking, and happened to say something along the lines of, “And I’ll tell you why I–” right as the home phone rang. Being the awesome person he is, he added, “And I’ll tell whoever’s calling,” and then picked up their phone.
“Hello, this is Governor Patrick.” I don’t really know what the person on the other end said, but I can only imagine they were somewhat confused. “We’ve got quite an enthusiastic crowd here for Obama,” he said, before asking the caller if they supported Obama. “No? Well then I’m afraid whoever you’re calling for isn’t home,” he joked before handing the phone over to the home’s residents.
It’s time! I’m going to go grab some lunch, but then I’m going out to cast my vote, run a couple errands, and then spend the rest of the day on Get Out The Vote activities. When the polls close at 8, I’ll breath a sigh of relief that I can sit down, but I think my nerves will be shot, too, as I go somewhere with my fellow supporters to watch the results come in.
I decided the other day that I ought to try to start my own TeamFortress 2 server. (Actually, I tried long ago, but hoped the problem had been fixed. But it hasn’t.) I want to share the cause of the problem in the hopes of helping others, since Google usually picks these things up.
You spend forever downloading the Half-Life Dedicated Server (HLDS), and excitedly fire it up. It runs through some stuff and seems to be working, but then you get a whole bunch of bizarre errors scrolling by:
Bad data found in model "dispenser_toolbox.dmx" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib1.smd" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib2.smd" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib3.smd" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib4.smd" (bad bone weights)
Bad data found in model "dispenser_gib5.smd" (bad bone weights)
What’s been surmised is that it’s because your processor doesn’t support SSE2. Bah! There’s no fix, either, other than pleading with Steam to write a version that doesn’t require SSE2, or upgrading your CPU.
It’s clearly time to build a new server and colocate it. 😉
For whatever reason, we’ve been getting a lot of calls asking us to donate money to various causes all of a sudden. My mom did some research and unearthed some interesting information. Most of the calls come from “paid fundraising” companies. They take a percentage of what you donate–usually around 40%, it seems. We had the same person call us today on behalf of two separate charities. Both from the same company.
Should you find yourself in the same position, don’t fall for the irritating, “Can the {starving children, disabled veterans, cute kittens, abused children} count on you for support?” line. Respond by asking where they’re calling from, if it’s a paid fundraiser, and how much they get. If you’re feeling charitable when they call, thank them, and tell them you’ll make a donation directly to the charity.
You could make an argument that it’s simple economics, and that there’s even “good” being done–most charities don’t cold-call people, so they may be bringing in incremental donations. But, in my mind, it’s extremely sleazy to not fully disclose your own fiduciary interests when taking donations.
There was a whole round of new polls yesterday. Notice anything different? Polls are notoriously inaccurate, but Obama, just a week ago 10 points behind Hillary, is suddenly on top. As is pointed out on the site, we can’t rely too heavily on polls. But if a candidate is trailing pretty far in the polls and, in a week’s time, ends up as the front-runner, it’s a promising sign.
As an aside, they don’t show Richardson in the polls, but I’d be very interested to see how he’s done in the past week. He did great in last night’s debate: if I was an undecided I may well have latched onto him.
The work you do as a volunteer for a campaign, quite frankly, sucks. You call hundreds of people, most of whom hang up as soon as they learn why you’re calling. You hear the same stuff over and over. Those that are more involved than I am rarely sleep. It’s just horrible work. I treasure every minute of it.
We’ve been working out of the basement of a wonderful local family, as the official regional campaign headquarters got too crowded and too hectic. All the national people have apparently come in (for obvious reasons), leaving little room for volunteers. With heaps of papers strewn across the table in someone’s basement, one of the organizers asked me, “Is this grassroots or what?” as I walked in.
You meet a lot of people. I mean that in multiple ways. Today I met Deval Patrick (MA governor) in person and he talked to my mom and I for a moment, seeming to genuinely care. I’ve met so many volunteers for the Obama campaign, and they’re all over the place. At dinner last night we sat with a guy and his two young children, and with several adults. Several of the volunteers I work with are younger than I am, many still in high school. And today we worked side-by-side with a woman in her 60s. This is exciting.
And you somehow get access to The Grapevine. We were talking today about how Romney pays his volunteers. This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me: I’m doing my work for Obama because I feel so strongly that he’s the right man for the job. My point isn’t that he saves costs by having volunteers who are, well, volunteers. My point is that since I’m not being paid a dime for my work, there’s no incentive to do it but for the obvious one: to elect him. Some of my new partners have apparently come across a few Romney “employees” who don’t even support him. They do their work, but at the end of the day on Tuesday, their vote won’t be cast for Romney.
Not many people pick up when I call. I’m either calling from a phone whose caller ID shows a candidate’s name, or I’m calling from my own phone, in which case I block caller ID data out of paranoia. (I don’t need some nut who’s had one too many calls coming after me.) And I really don’t blame them–I don’t pick up the phone unless I know who’s calling, either. But the one thing that excites me is that the people who pick up aren’t stupid by any means. You can’t just read some stats to them and swing their vote. They’ve either made up their mind and can articulate exactly why, or they’re undecided and ask tough questions.
This is what politics needs to be about. In New Hampshire, politicians can’t get away with reading us a prepared speech about what they want to talk about. We control the conversation, and we talk about the things that affect us. And the candidates who won’t do that don’t make it out of our state with ratings intact.
My mind works in strange ways sometimes. Read and think about each of the following statements:
I was cooking a pizza in the oven at 250 degrees, but I was in a big hurry, so I doubled the temperature to 500 degrees.
I miss the summer days when it was 80 degrees, and, over night, the temperature would be halved to 40 degrees.
It was ten degrees the other morning, and tripled to thirty by noon.
It was 0.1 the morning before that, and had risen three-hundred times to 30 degrees by noon.
It was -1 before I woke up that morning, so it was -30 times as warm by noon.
To me, it makes progressively less and less sense. But I’m trying to think of why. It’s clearly asymptotic at 0 degrees: if it’s exactly 0 degrees and grows to 0.1 degrees, it’s “infinitely warmer.” Of course, most people wouldn’t notice the tenth of a degree increase, and my concept of “infinitely warmer” is something significantly warmer than 0.1. And it doesn’t make any sense when you go into negatives. I think another part of the problem is that “zero” degrees doesn’t mean “zero warmth,” since it doesn’t make sense to have a negative amount of warmth. (Assuming that “no warmth” isn’t neutral, but is absolute zero.) Of course, Fahrenheit and Celsius don’t even grow at the same rate, compounding things further.
