“Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.”

— Alan Turing

 

The Babysitter’s Network is a wonderful thing. We’ve known for about a week that this has been going on, because babysitters talk to each other.

An EDP (emotionally disturbed person) has been running around my neighborhood  for the last week or so, offering to relieve mothers/babysitters of their babies. In at least four cases, apparently, she did more than offer; she made physical attempts to take the kids.

 Last week, the cops took her off the street and had her remanded for psychiatric evaluation. She apparently was OK enough to be released from the hospital; she was arrested on Tuesday. Turns out she has a record of 10 arrests, five of them for child snatching in Manhattan between 1994 and 1997.

The NYTimes had only a brief on it (second item) and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s web site is a piece of crap. The Daily News had a good full story.

 

Why is it that when you tune in to a rerun of a show you saw only once during the previous season, they’re inevitably showing the exact episode you saw last time?

 

From the NYTimes:

OUTH HUNTINGTON, N.Y., July 17 ÷ It was the classic news story: man bites dog.

 

I was poking around the Fond du Lac Reporter for the Quad Graphics story, and found this:

Ricky R. Bridges, of 379 N. Peters Ave., Apt. G-8, was charged with operating a vehicle without the owner龝 consent after he allegedly stole an Old Dutch Potato Chip truck, and ate some of its contents.

<snip>

A witness said she saw the suspect stumble out of the truck, apparently intoxicated, clutching a bag of chips.

Bridges told police he was at the Walleye Weekend festival during the weekend, and doesn穰 recall stealing a potato chip truck, but he did find a key in his pocket when he woke up the next morning.

 

When Microsoft announced its “trustworthy computing” initiative, I foolishly thought it meant that the company would concentrate on shipping software that didn’t crash and that didn’t create critical security vunerablities for its clients. Turns out they had in mind something like Palladium.

Mitch Wagner has been doing a stellar job in unspooling what Microsoft has said about Palladium, what it hasn’t said, what it meant to say, and what it most assuredly didn’t mean to say. You need to read his stuff — which can get dense, because it’s a dense subject — if you want to understand how you may be forced to use your computer in five years.

Essentially, if I understand it correctly, Microsoft says that the best way to assure software quality is to control the entire computing ecosystem — hardware and software; server, client and network. Even the data.

There are a lot of obvious problems with that, and more that are more subtle than obvious. If you care, and you should, bookmark Mitch’s site; he’s on the hunt.

 

It’s noon Saturday, and tickets to the E Street Band’s Summer/Fall tour are imminently going on sale. I’m sitting in bed, laptop propped up, Ticketmaster loaded, mouse finger twitching, waiting for the stroke of 12. My wife, Olivia, brings in the twins (who turned seven months today) to play on the bed. M is still slithering, but J is undoubtedly crawling. And curious.

The clock ticks over to noon, and I’m reloading pages. Instead of the 25 shows that Springsteen played in the New York Area last time, he’s doing just two, so feel a degree of urgency. Against the odds, the Ticketmaster ordering page loads. I quickly punch in the information it wants, and click Order Tickets. I’m going to Jersey, I think, when, the computer beeps and the previous page loads.

Whaaa? J has crawled over and in an excess of enthusiams for mimicing his Dad, stumbled on the key combination for Back. I gently (really!) shoo him away, and reload. The Order Ticket pages comes up again, and I’m about to click Order when this time the screen goes black. J has somehow put the laptop into sleep mode — a neat trick because I myself don’t know the key combination to do that.

I know when I’m beat.

 

From Ananova, but too good to not quote in its entirety.

An Italian professor says it takes 15 minutes of oral sex to burn off the calories consumed in a long sip of wine.

Dietician Bruno Fabbri has been looking into the exercise value of sexual activities.

He found a 26-minute sex session which ends with an orgasm gets rid of half a pizza.

French-kissing for 53 minutes can help you lose the fat found in a burger and chips meal.

News2000 website reports that even undoing a bra can help you lose fat.

He said: “That’s not of course if you unclasp the bra with two hands, which will cost you just eight calories, but unclasping it with only one hand statistically takes the count to 18.

“Trying to unclasp a bra with one’s mouth instead takes an average 87 calories.”

 

Peggy reads Good Housekeeping, bless her.

If you can believe it, Good Housekeeping has some cutting edge content in the current August 2002 issue. Of course, it’s all in the ads, but what a shift it reflects:

……

So what do we have here? Pages that advertise the internet embedded in your main kitchen appliance, credit card protection for online shopping, and the new mini-Discover Card that you can carry around on your keychain. They’re all selling modern convenience the same way they sell dishwasher detergent and diapers. I did a double-take when I saw the ad for the LG refrigerator because it’s the first time I’ve seen it mentioned in a mainstream magazine aimed at women, implying that it’s actually ready for prime-time and available for sale.

I think it would be interesting to go back and trace the evolution of ads for internet-based products, along with the curve for adding URLs to general ads. I think the first one I ever saw with a URL was a TV commercial for a car company, and I did a double-take then, too. Now we’ve got the internet refrigerator ad in Good Housekeeping. They don’t have to sell the internet anymore – they can sell the convenience it offers because we’ve accepted its ubiquitous nature.

Exactly right. The Net isn’t an application, it’s a platform, and it’s a platform that’s approaching what may be indistinguishible from ubiquity.
A bunch of years ago, Yahoo ran its first TV ads. I was very proud until I noticed that they did not include a URL. Unbeliveable.

Big fire at the Quad/Graphics printing plant in Lomira, Wisconsin.

Quad, if you don’t know, is one of the world’s largest printers. The Lomira plant is the biggest printing complex in the Western Hemisphere; this story says the 46-acre campus employs 2000 people and includes an apartment complex. From CNN:

The area where the fire broke out was a new part of the printing plant that had only been in operation for a month, Feiereisen said. The 10-story building was used for paper storage and contained 25,000 palettes of paper with 1 ton of paper on each palette, he said.

[Later: Here’s the report from the local newspaper, the Fond du Lac Reporter.]