I’ve always thought I was pretty good at reading a piece of text and knowing who wrote it. Obviously it doesn’t apply to everything I’ve ever read (I can’t pick up a book blindly and think, “Ahh, vintage Chaucer!”). But for people I know well, or people’s writing I read often, I can often tell who it is without seeing them named. We all have our own little idiosyncrasies that make our writing a little different from others. On the main page here, I can often tell whose post I’m reading before I get to their name.

I used to use “n1zyy” as my username everywhere, but eventually got creeped out by the fact that Googling it turned up basically everything I’ve ever done. Not that I have anything to hide, but it was a little creepy. I now have a handful of names (short and predictable, but I’m not nursing any major secrets online) that I use, which were deliberately chosen to be devoid of any real meaning and common enough to blend in.

Kyle eventually joined Metafilter after catching my obsession with Ask MetaFilter. I believe he knew my username, though there was never any great outing ceremony of my true identity. One day he was reading an answer and asked if the user that posted it was me. It was.

Metafilter’s a site composed largely of people who write well. I think good writing helps ‘hide’ people, as there are fewer “quirks” in the way people write. Still, Kyle had read enough of my writing to pick up on subtle cues and figure out who I was. (Even though I still maintain he already knew!) Really bad writing does the same—wen u right like dis its hard bcz evry1 duz it now.

I’m now posting a bit on a forum where a lot of people (including me) post anonymously, but there are some obvious trolls. I was talking with another member tonight about the suspected identities of a few of them, and he said he had reason to believe that two users were the same person. After about 60 seconds of reading the writing style in the two posts, I was convinced. The user(s) had a fairly peculiar writing style.

For fun once, I tried taking on an alternative identity somewhere I was fairly well-known as a member. The hardest part for me was the simple act of writing, because I worried that my use of a different IP and username linked to a different e-mail would all be undone when people noticed that I wrote the same way. So I spent an indordinate amount of time working on writing differently, which is somewhat like trying to walk differently. The inclination is to do it weirdly, which is the only easy “different” we can do. It was actually a pretty challenging exercise.

And created a Tumblr blog.

(Actually, I revived my year-old one that I never used.)

You might be a geek if…

• You have a hard drive hanging out of your computer, and, since you couldn’t find the needed jumper, you have a screw jammed in just the right place. And it works beautifully.
• The system with the screw for a jumper in the hard drive hanging out the side… Is an improvised SAN to back up a corrupted hard drive to.

(Any savvy Internet user should be thinking, “Well, duh!” right now)

I keep getting e-mails to my GMail account… They’re caught by the spam filter 100% of the time, but always catch my eye. They used to read, “What a stupid face you have mwaggy,” but I just got one saying “mwaggy is a moron.”

The text is always something short, linking to a file called video.exe. The latest one just reads:

this is the proof, watch: http://{REDACTED}/video1.exe

That alone makes it pretty certain that it’s some sort of malware. You don’t download attachments from random strangers (just like “You don’t take candy from random strangers”), but you most certainly don’t download executable attachments from random strangers (just like, “You don’t take obviously-poisoned candy from random strangers”).

But I’m a curious fellow. Why did I keep getting this file, and what was it? I was pretty confident that I could download it with impunity from Firefox (which doesn’t automatically run programs, though IE doesn’t anymore either), save it to my desktop, and then virus-scan it. But I figured I’d err on the side of safety, and instead downloaded it to my Linux server (via wget), and then I compressed it. Compression isn’t normally meant as a safety mechanism, but with a .exe, I could accidentally run it. If I accidentally double-clicked on video1.exe.gz, all I’d get would be an error that Windows didn’t know what to do with a .gz file. I figured I could download it, decompress it into a directory but not open the directory, and virus scan it to see what it was.

But I was never able to download the file from my server! I entered the url for video1.exe.gz on my server, but Firefox popped up an error that the transfer was interrupted. I kind of paused for a minute, trying to figure out what had just happened.

And then I noticed that NOD32 had just popped up a red box. It had noticed that the gzipped file I was downloading contained a virus and aborted the transfer, moving the file into a quarantine directory.

NOD32 suggests that it’s a likely variant of the Nuwar worm. It makes it sound as if the infected machine will begin mailing itself to people in the address book on the computer, but the IP of the latest one comes back to a system in Florida, where I’m pretty sure I haven’t e-mailed anyone.

All the little blurbs I’ve heard about the new iPhone 3G made me want it badly. The “old” iPhone rocked, and the new one adds GPS, upgrades to 3G, and… something else, I think. And it’s supposed to be sold for $199.

The problem is that AT&T’s page has this little asterisk saying “For qualified customers,” which Ars Technica suggests may refer only to those who already own iPhones, and the rest of us start at $399. They don’t tell us that, though.

It’s also been widely reported that they raised the plans $10, but what I hadn’t seen before is that they also removed text messaging from the plan, so you have to pay extra for that.

This really aggravates me, to the point that I think I might just refuse to go along with it. The old iPhone plan was expensive but worth it. But now they’re jacking the price up and removing features?

And does anyone else think it’s preposterous that I could call someone and talk for quite a while, tying up a “whole” channel (or time slice) on them, or download hundreds of megs, for free, but to send a 160-byte message will cost something like 20 cents? They’re charging the most for the thing that costs them the least.

It’s really no different than on the Internet, really: imagine using Skype for VoIP, e-mail and web-browsing, and IM. And your ISP allows you 450 minutes on Skype, unlimited web-browsing and e-mail, but charges you 20 cents for every IM you send or receive. It uses the least bandwidth, but gets prohibitively expensive.

That alone annoys me, but the fact that they dropped the included text messages from the plan at the same time that they hiked the price seems like pouring salt in an open wound. I’ve been eying the Blackberry Curve [WARNING: Site makes sound.] anyway. Not nearly as good as the iPhone, but maybe the company won’t spit in my face when I’m interested in buying it.

With the christening of my newest static page, the tabs have become misaligned. It’s time to either find a new theme that doesn’t break with a large number of static pages, or to find an organizational structure restricting the number of root entries.

I saw a CNN article just now about fake speed bumps, the use of ‘optical illusions’ to paint 3D-looking objects on the road to slow people down. People are praising them as great things to get people to slow down.

The problem I see is that they look nothing like speed bumps, but rather like gigantic obstacles in the road. I would probably slam on my brakes and swerve around them.

The people who praised them are also saying that they expect them to result in decreasing the number of pedestrians struck every year. (By getting people to slow down.) I humbly submit that they might just increase the number of pedestrians struck each year, as people swerve suddenly to miss the gigantic box they think is in the road, not taking the time to notice that they’re swerving into a pedestrian.

My problem isn’t necessarily with slowing people down, and I think fake speed bumps might be a good idea: if they looked like speed bumps. (Although after getting tricked the first time, I probably wouldn’t slow down on subsequent trips over them, greatly reducing their effectiveness in the long-run.) So fake speed bumps? Not a bad idea. Fake giant things in the road? An awful idea, even though people seem to be singing their praises right now.

During my super-brief time at the police department range, if there was one key message, it was this—always treat the gun like it’s loaded, and never point the gun at people unless you’re intending to shoot them. Even as the instructor demonstrated a gun that he’d already showed us was unloaded (by removing the clip and showing us the empty chamber), and then disassembled and reassembled to show how it was done while demonstrating various things, he always kept the gun pointed at a cinder block wall to an empty room, and would lower the gun to the floor if he needed to turn, such that the absolutely-positively empty gun was never pointed at anyone.

This advice is apparently not universal, though. A soldier in France shot 16 people during some sort of demonstration, believing this his gun was loaded with blanks. It seems to me, though, that this was deplorably preventable: one might check that the gun contained blanks before shooting at people, for example, or one might simply avoid firing a gun at people at all. And even if one did insist on firing a gun into a crowd without verifying that the blanks weren’t actually live rounds, one might stop after the first few people fell over bleeding.

And good old CBS News’ comments section brings us an argument over the French military and their merits and value to the United States, including whether they helped or hurt us during the Revolutionary War, apparently.

If I ever become an Economics teacher or professor (rather unlikely), I’m going to go back to DC and take a picture of the scene I saw there with gas stations.

Gas in most parts of DC was $3.99 to $4.09, about the same as it was here in New Hampshire. But then we drove by a gas station inexplicably charging something like $4.59 a gallon, directly across the street from a place charging something like $4.39 a gallon. My gracious hosts told me that the price discrepancy was long-running: these places have arbitrarily* charged significantly more for quite some, and remain in business.

The reason I’d begin with this is threefold:

• It’s a good way to demonstrate my “problem” with Economics as a subject: it describes perfect scenarios. In real life, things are rarely perfect, so economic models don’t always match up all that nicely with reality.
• Studying those discrepancies between economic theory and reality, I think, is where you really learn about the subject. If rational people seek to minimize loss, why the heck are people paying $4.59 a gallon when they could cross the street and save 20 cents a gallon, or drive less than a mile and save 59 cents a gallon?
• It’s also a good lead-in to a discussion about how cost isn’t everything, and how people value things differently.

It turns out that a few things are going on allowing them to charge this much, as I learned from the driver of our shuttle back to the airport.

The first is the simple fact that it’s located in the middle of a bunch of millionaires’ homes and apartments. If you’re driving your Mercedes from your $6 million condo to your country club in the suburbs, do you really care if gas is $4.59 or $3.99? (I would: I’m convinced that people who stay rich are the frugal ones.)

Further, it’s apparently a full-service station. You pull in and they fill up your tank for you. They probably wash your windows and say, “Good afternoon, Dr. Barlow” to you with a bit of a bow. (Assuming your name was Dr. Barlow, although I’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone by that name.)

But perhaps most interestingly of all? The shuttle driver mentioned that a lot of the customers are people driving company cars, or on business trips. In other words, they’re not paying. If your company is paying for your gas, do you care if it’s $4.59 or $3.99? If the line at the $4.59 place is shorter, you’re going there—the benefit to you is greater (a shorter wait), whereas the cost to you is the same (free!).

How many other people do you think had the same thoughts upon seeing these gas prices?

When we toured the Capitol the other day, we sat in on Senate and House sessions for a few minutes. There were maybe five Congresspeople in each chamber. This is actually very common. They just go and read a statement to someone who transcribes it. And every now and then people convene to take votes.

And, as is well-known, the Democrats sit on the left, and the Republicans sit on the right.

Today’s newspaper had an oddly comical bit about a senator who insisted on reading the full text of a 490-page bill to “punish” Democrats for some past action; I don’t even remember what.

All of these things combine to confirm something I’ve thought for a long time: Congress is fundamentally broken. One of the great things about having a two-party system is that they keep each other in check. Republicans and Democrats come up with bad ideas, but the other party is watchful and keeps those bad ideas from coming to fruition. That much is good.

The problem is that the whole thing is set up as an “us against them” system. A Democrat idea is a bad idea to the Republicans, and a Republican bill is a bad bill to the Democrats. When the Democrats introduced an expanded GI Bill, the Republicans opposed it until recently, over petty squabbles with one of its provisions. (This happens with Democrats opposing good Republican bills too, I just don’t have any examples fresh in my mind right now.)

The problem is that one side comes up with a bill and puts it up for the other side to shoot down. I’d much rather that both sides met to collective work towards something. And that everyone showed up in Congress. Have a Democrat get up and say, “Returning veterans aren’t getting the care they deserve as our heros,” and have both sides work to outline a proposal. Because both sides want that legislation on the books. Each side can put forth its concerns about the implementation—we don’t want to give “new” members of the military incentive to leave right away, for example. And then, instead of it looking like Republicans are trying to block the bill, the Democrats would say, “Oh, good point,” and we’d collectively work on it.

Of course this is a Utopian view, and the system would never work that way. But I really don’t think having the two parties opposing each other’s moves 100% of the time is the way to do things, and I really don’t think having Senators and Representatives miss 90% of Capitol proceedings is the way to go, either.