Lots of links, lots of comments.

October 2nd, 2003 Normally I wouldn't care about this. I hadn't even heard about it till an NPR report last night. But now that I've heard the Hillary Clinton is calling for blood, I have to link the following Robert Novak Report. Just in case there was any question as to what really happened. Oh, and if you think that this guy is just a liar, then how can you even believe his own initail report, the one that sparked this whole thing?

October 3rd, 2003 I just added myself to the The Blog Ecosystem You can see my pathetic stats here.

I added this site to GeoURL. In the process I discovered Ztuff, which looks like it might be a like-minded blogger's site, although I'm fairly certian that we wouldn't quite mesh politically.

October 8th, 2003 Ever wonder why your 120GB hard drive has a 115GB capacity under Windows XP? In this article about hard drive capacity concerns[pdf] you can find out the causes of the discrepancies. Reading this white paper I was reminded of an article in Kiplinger's (available at Amazon), which talks about comparing dollars in say 1950 to dollars today. Due to inflation and the like, if we indexed the prices to a given level, we may actually be better off today with $2.00 gas than people were 20 years ago with $0.75 gas. Although apples to oranges can be a useful and interesting exercise, sometimes we need to compare apples with apples.

October 9th, 2003 Just when you thought it was safe to hold down your shift key... SunnComm sues grad student for holding down 'shift' key. This is an EXCELLENT example of what the DMCA does for you. I first read about this lame attempt at copyright (from Soze's Blog). I read about the lawsuit on My Ro-bot Life, which I saw had updated from the Weblogs site below.

I have been doing some things to try and increase my Google ranking. I have standardized the words that I use to link to myself internally, and asked that the external links to my site be named appropiately. Further I have changed the content of some pages, specifically the "Joshua E. Drake" to "Joshua Drake" and tried to add my site to as many of the directory sites as I can. I also try and hit Weblogs.com to be included in their Recently Changed Weblogs list. Maybe I'll be able to get more exposure.

October 10th, 2003 A while back (September 2002 Archive) I posted about overtime and exemption law in California. Today an aquaintence sent me this link on The tussle over overtime.

In case you did not know, October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. My company is supporting Lee National Denim Day, which happens to be today.

My father (in-law) sent me this link about, using sound to see. I find this very interesting, especially given my background in Cognitive Science. Maybe later I'll put up some other sound related links later today.

October 13th, 2003 Browsing through the archive at Ztuff, I came across Unintended Consequences - Five Years under the DMCA. I think he and I have more in common politically than previously believed. As I partially started this blog to chronicle the abuses of that very same act.

Wow! My first link from a non real life acquaintance! Dave, over at Ztuff linked to me, and the page may soon contain an interesting discussion on the implications of tying gis and other META information to personal sites.

October 15th, 2003 Dave from Ztuff (again) sent me an e-mail regarding a post I made in response to is post on Local Bloggers. I think that his question is a good one. "How can people remain anonymous while contributing meaningfully to the on-line comunity?"

I'm going to take a first stab at it. Proxy connections are a good first pass. A good basic article on the subject can be found at The Register. Do-it-yourself Internet anonymity, and a follow up Internet anonymity for Windows power users. Now this requires savy users, so lets try and make this something that the Morlocks do for the Eloi. Possibly a project such as Freenet could be generalized. Or software like IBM's YouServ could be adapted. My own idea now seems more complicated, but I'll throw it out anyway. What if we used proxy servers from the Server side almost. In this way the froum, let's say Ztuff's posts, would either only accept requests from known proxy servers or even just redirect the very first request from any ip to a known list of proxy servers. This would require some new fangled proxy server code, but I don't think it would be that difficult. But what about user ID's? How will I know whose comments are who's, how will I establish myself as a valueable voice in the conversation? What about masking the user names? Obviously this is not an "idea", just a practice. So when you sign up to use the forum and you fill in your name, it gets accosiated with a number, or a phrase, or some other token and your token is always displayed, and only the database knows the connection. So that's the basics.

I think what Dave was really asking was how do I put up things like my geo location on GeoURL, or publish content with Localfeeds and still retain my privacy? The first answer that comes to mind is lie. Well, really just mislead, or skew. Use your Zip Centroid. This way you get local information but it is unlikely that any one would be able to track you down. This however, is not a good solution to use with your Palm Pilot or cell phone when you are walking through a mall. You don't really need offers that are good in downtown LA when you are visiting a mall in Glendale. So how do we get local information with out telling everyone that we happen to be in the third floor men's room of Macy's? The second answer is that we strip all of our identifing information from our geographical output. The problem there is how do I filter the incoming information? I mean if the broadcasting system doesn't even know my gender how does it know that I am not interested in an offer for feminine hygiene products? I think that the answer is that the filtering could happen on the client side. I put out the single biggest factor in advertising, my location, and get the biggest pay off in bandwidth reduction, but in exchange for my privacy, at least in terms of information about me (not the location of a device), the software on my client has to throw extra processing to filter the incoming data.

Since I am now rambling, and still have no clue how to solve the problem, I'll turn it over to you, the reader. Any ideas?

Yes, I'm sorry sir, I did not come in today.
I got up, got dressed, got in my car.
I even drove to the lot.

But I could not find a parking spot.
I looked high, I looked low.
I drove fast, I drove slow.

I prayed to what gods there be:
"Hail Mary full of grace,
help me find a parking space."

But in this mire I could not prevail.
All my efforts they did fail.

And if I came in today,
I'd park across the street and pray.
Hoping against hope that in my woe,
my car they would not decided to tow.

October 17th, 2003 While talking with an aquaintence about Search Engine Placement (not quite up to snuff on Google tech, but solid basics), I noticed that my individual author pages, like Piers Anthony, did not show up for those search terms. I have made some minor modifications to those pages, so we will see what happens. Those changes may hurt my general blogging books page rank, but since I still have no strategy for that page, I'm not really worried.

October 23rd, 2003 Work has been busy, so I haven't had time to post. So if I spew today just bear with me.

Local Readers Mailinator has a great service for e-mail. You want to get something, like a freebie, but you don't want spam. You give your address at Mailinator, and it will give you anonymous access to that e-mail. So my question is, what about your address? What if there was a PO box that you could use, the same way? You could go pick-up that freebie and then forget about it. Now of course there would be a risk of someone else grabbing your freebie, but hey it was free anyway. Any interest?
Don't know if you're local? Go to GeoURL

October 28th, 2003 Still not enough time to post all my thoughts on Digital Rights and Game Design colliding with Academia, or in that case academia in general. But maybe I can be the first to show you the CHOCOLATE CASKET. "Nothing says 'I Love You' like a Chocolate Casket". After you've wooed her with that, take her to the Inflatable Church. (The site has many other interesting inflatables as well.) For those of you who think you're cool when was the last time you built a nuclear fusion reactor "from parts salvaged from junk yards and charity drops."?

October 31st, 2003 I've had this link to a new Mini Battery for a while. I'm glad to see battery technology taking any steps forward. As it is we seem to still be running on 50 year old technology. In fact battery technology single handedly caused the failure of electric vehicles. Portable Design has a good article on Battery Evolution (free login required)