Yekrats.com: Scotto’s Seafud Shanty

I recently discovered that the International Brotherhood of Magicians (”IBM”) has a local “ring”  here in Lafayette. Further, I found out they meet about 5 miles from my house! So, last night was the first meeting I was able to attend.

It’s a small, casual, fun group. They asked me to perform something, so I managed to do a couple of rubber band effects (one of which they seemed to have not seen before). They do a round where everyone gets to show a trick or two to the rest of the group, and get pointers and such. (Although none of them seemed to need any pointers.) The group has a couple of professional magicians who regularly attend.

Since I have a lot going on right now, I’m not sure how much I can do with them. But it’s fun to know that such a resource is so local to me!

I found the following video about the Inform programming language, and it made me want to get back into programming IF again. The “natural language” thing I could probably do without (and I can imaging things getting needlessly complicated by making the interface “natural”) but the IDE seemed to be brilliant. I wish TADS had debugging tools like the transcript control and Skein!

Inform 7 screencast

Yesterday, I had to alter my normal lunchtime walking route, because I didn’t want to wade through a few dozen people on the pedestrian bridge. They were having a “tea party” event, dumping tea bags into the Wabash river to protest high taxes and Barack Obama.

(continue reading…)

This past week I helped a friend get rid of a nasty trojan/virus on her computer that I thought I’d warn you about. It’s called “Antivirus 360″.

The beast is a nasty, nasty thing. If you click on a bad weblink (”Your computer is infected… do you want to remove the infection?” or somesuch.) the nasty bugger will dig its claws into your Windows system and never let go. Here’s some of the things it does.

• It redirects all web traffic away from sites that might be used to eradicate it. So if you find a handy Google reference, you will not be able to access it. It will forward you to its own advertising site.
• You won’t be able to install tools downloaded from the aforementioned sites (downloaded from another computer, that is) that could help cure your computer.
• It removes the tabs from the top of the Task Manager, so you can’t look at the processes, so you can cancel it. (I was never able to find it.)
• It stops Windows System Restore from working, making it so you can’t roll your computer back to before the infection happened.
• After I *reinstalled* Windows (albeit with a “Quick format”) Windows told me it couldn’t install to that partition because it had errors. A deletion of the partition and full format cured it, though.
• None of the virus scanners I use seemed to notice that anything was wrong. :-/
• And the kicker: It pops up “alerts” every 30 seconds telling you your computer is infected and advertises that you need to lay down $30 to get this special scanner to disinfect it. (ie: Criminal extortion.)

I had to format the stupid computer (twice) to kill it. Bleh.

An ounce of prevention for this thing would be to use a beefed-up HOSTS file. I’ve been using one for a couple of years, and it seems to help a lot. (It also has the side benefit of making annoying ads come up blank.) I found this site which gives aHOSTS file I use, and the latest version blocks this Antivirus 360 thing. You simply copy an ordinary text file into C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\ changing the name HOSTS.txt to just HOSTS (without the file extension).

However, one downside to a beefy HOSTS file is, it *really* blocks advertisers, even if you happen to be interested in something. For example, occasionally there’s a text-ad in Google that I’d really like to see. Well, you can’t really get there by clicking on the ad. If you really want some kind of ad, you can delete its listing in the HOSTS file, or you can copy the URL from the link and cut out the parts going to the advertiser, leaving the parts going to the advertisee.

So, do yourself a favor, if you run Windows: get yourself a HOSTS file.

I saw this on Facebook and thought I’d pass it along. It’s certainly not safe for work, or children, but I laughed out loud anyway…

When Your Credit Card Signature Fun Backfires

(or… “Advice: Don’t Draw Genitalia As Your Signature When Paying Via Credit Card”.)

Well, today is the last day for Change.org, a social networking site which promises to present ten ideas to the new Barack Obama administration and lobby for them. Today is the last day of voting.

First, the website had a open call for ideas, and those ideas were voted on. The top vote-getters in each category went on to the second round. Among those ideas was a proposal in the Education category to offer Esperanto as a language in American schools. This caused a furor through Esperanto-land, and the proposal passed to the second round.

Despite voting for it, I’m of two minds about this proposal. Anyone that knows me well knows that I think Esperanto is a great tool. I’ve been using it for a little over 10 years now, and have achieved friendships and understanding that would have not been possible before. It has changed my world-view.

That being said, I’m not sure I want this proposal to be among the 10 chosen (despite me voting for it!) Firstly, this is a political site. I don’t want Esperanto thrown into the middle of politics. I can imagine the howls of derision if the Esperanto proposal would be chosen. If it was pushed as in agenda item, I know there would be push-back. Yes, even Esperanto being offered would raise folks’ hackles. America is ruled by English, and I see xenophobia here. Fact is, I don’t want to see Esperanto picked apart by critics, as politics tends to do.

Also, if you look at the list, there’s some important issues there. This is a really messed up world right now. Can I honestly say that lack of Esperanto is among the 10 biggest problems facing this country right now? Absolutely not! Obama is walking into a hornet nest of problems. I honestly think Esperanto is down the list a bit.

A little more background into the proposal for you non-Esperantists. Generally there are two schools of thought in the Esperanto community, though as always things are not quite so black and white. Firstly, there’s finvenkismo, the ideology that look towards the fina venko (”final victory”). The final victory would be everyone has sufficient knowledge of Esperanto so that everyone could do the most basic of communication, for example, asking for a cup of coffee. (”Mi volus kafon, mi petas.”)

On the other side is ra?mismo. Ra?mistoj just enjoy Esperanto for its own sake, and think that finvenkistoj are wasting their time trying to convince other people. Esperanto has already got original literature, music, and culture… so why not just enjoy the language and enrich it for our own pleasure.

So, this proposal is very finvenkist. Getting the backing of a major government would be a finvenkist’s dream! Me, I’m somewhat in the middle between the finvenkist and raumist agendas. While I think Esperanto would indeed help foster communication for the world, I’m pragmatic enough to know that some people just don’t and would never care. To push it would bring other problems which we don’t even see right now. So, straddling the two ideologies, I voted for it, but I think it winning might be worse than the alternative.

I found this really good (long!) article about Magic: the Gathering by someone who has thought a lot more about M:tG strategy than I ever have. The principles he talks about carry over into other deck-construction games as well.

What I Know About Magic: The Gathering

Well, folks… I finally made the plunge. I am now “officially” an Esperantist. I just joined Esperanto-USA, which is the national Esperanto club. I did it mostly because this year’s national Esperanto convention will be within driving distance: St. Louis. I’ve been wanting to go to an E-o convention for - well - the last 10 years since I’ve started doing Esperanto.

I’m a bit nervous about it. I’ll probably do just fine, but I’ve never had the chance to speak the language before. Most of my interactions in the language are eyeball-to-keyboard. I can express myself now without going to a dictionary. However, when I listen to verbal Esperanto, I listen with difficulty because I haven’t yet trained that part of my brain much. (Sometimes I hear a word in a podcast and think, “Oh, that’s how that word is pronounced!” which is really stupid, because the pronunciation in Esperanto is exactly how the word looks. I’ve just never spoken or heard the word being pronounced, so the hearing/translating part of my brain is encountering it for the first time.

I’ve been fiddling around with Google’s Gmail swanky features.

Firstly, I added a Ninja theme. I thought it was weird that it asked me my city where I lived (not my state). It made me wonder that there was some law against ninja themes or something.

I am now importing my emails from yekrats.com into gmail, and letting it deal with the spam. My Yekrats account gets a LOT of spam, and I was filtering it out with a whitelist and a Boxspammer program which sent an email to people that were not on the whitelist, inviting them to respond to get on the whitelist. The problem is, not everyone responded to that, and ended up being filtered out. With my business, that was bad. Gmail’s spam filtering is as good as Spamcop, which I paid for a few years ago.

C had been using Gmail’s colored labelling system for many months now, and I had her show me how to do it. Now I have bright colorful categories for many of my emails. I did one better, though. I found Gmail’s “filtering” system, which allows me to tag emails as they come in based on certain criteria. So everything Dogtown-related gets a special tag, and so on.

Since going to Vegas last month, I’ve kinda got a renewed interest in magic. (Illusion, sleight-of-hand, etc.) Vegas is a Mecca of magic, and I visited a real magic store. (I didn’t get a chance to see a magic show I was planning to see because I was strung out and a little sickly.)

Since then I’ve (re)tought myself the “Twisting the Aces” trick knowing a few sleights from my “Purdue Magic Club” days. I’m also working on a “Three Fly” routine (also called “Coins Across”) which makes coins magically travel from one hand to another. It requires some tricky finger gyrations that my hands are not used to doing. So that’s taking a lot of practice to learn a new motor skill.