I'm watching this Charlie Rose interview with Laurie Anderson --pretty interesting. Couple things she said struck me enough to record them here:

"In a way the whole idea of avantgarde might be impossible now... maybe. Just because as soon as you put something out, wow, it's really out now!"

"Get me out into the world... cause you know... you have this illusion when you're doing stuff on your computer or on the net or something that you're out there. You're really looking at like these rickety crummy graphics... I was getting really isolated so everything I've done since then has been like outside."

Reminds me of a passage from Frederick Barthelme's novel "Two Against One". It kind of stuck with me:

Roscoe joined Edward at the window, standing beside him, staring out at the kids. "My thinking is, you know, we're in here, in this dark little room, behind this shaded glass here, behind these blinds, and we're standing here, the two of us. They're out there. I mean, look how much space they've got and look how much space we've got. It's as if we can't handle it. We start out in the open, and as we get older, we find smaller and smaller spaces, smaller houses, smaller rooms, until we get to the pine room."

"A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read." --Mark Twain

Bored lately with what I have been reading. Mostly open source software manuals, web pages, how-tos. Not finding any fiction that pulls me off the chair. I remember a friend of mine talking about this happening for him with music. Going through phases where he's burnt out, everything sounding the same, nothing fresh. He told me that when this happens he returns to jazz and classical music.

Recently I watched that Crispin Glover movie "Bartleby". It's based on a novel by Herman Melville, the guy who wrote "Moby Dick". He wrote a bunch of books, among them: "Bartleby The Scrivener --A Story of Wall Street". The movie was strange, cryptic and interesting enough to make me want to read the book. A quick read, more of a novella really. The movie a faithful adaptation. About a guy that works in a legal office in the age before copy machines. He spends his days copying documents longhand. Then one day his boss asks him to do something and he replies: "I would prefer not to." (wouldn't we all...) The book has a flavor somewhere between Kafka and Dickens.

Good movie, good book. And it reminded me of my friend and what he had said about music. Sometimes when you're burnt out on contemporary things it's good to remember that life is a continuum of experience. We have a tendency to think (at least I do) that only contemporary things are of value, or at least to get caught up in them. Marketing has a good deal to do with this. We live in a world where we are constantly off balance. Be. Consume. Live. Nothing without this. Nothing without that.

Project Gutenberg (it's 3:20 am, do you know where your classic book is?)

Experimenting with a lot of different things right now. Studying the "z shell". A new version of blosxom has come out. Made my own openbsd 3.5 cd, etc.

Mostly I'm working on setting up a spam filtering system for my email. Everybody I know seems to get a lot of spam. I've been lucky so far, I maybe get 1 or 2 a week. Nothing like what my friend's complain about. Enough to make me wonder when the deluge is coming though. Enough to make me think it's time to setup some kind of defense mechanism for it.

When I was first looking into it I thought I might setup something like an ISP would have. Now though I'm looking at a more personal style solution. It started with my buddy Michael wanting to experiment with this PGP software that he got. I setup Gnupg (an open source encryption software that would allow me to communicate with PGP), but then found that it wouldn't quite work right with PGP. The reason from what I can gather is that PGP doesn't adhere to the open pgp standard. I found something that explained that I could rewrite the email headers as the mail was received --using Procmail. I set that up, worked pretty well. Now I can receive encrypted email and when I get the encrypted message my mail client just asks me for the password when I got to open the email. Pretty cool stuff. This started me thinking about Procmail... what else could I do with an email processor like that?

So now I'm experimenting with tying various spam filtering components into my email system. A piece at a time. The first one I setup was dcc. I provides various checksums of the different headers and the body of each email as it arrives. These checksums are then sent to a dcc server where they are compared to a database that is maintained which houses the checksums of spam messages. A header gets added to my email message before I even open it with these checksums displayed. For example:

Here's one from an email I sent myself:

X-DCC-sonic.net-Metrics: gandalf.kacked.com 1156; Body=1 Fuz1=1

And here's one from some definate spam:

X-DCC-neonova-Metrics: gandalf.kacked.com 1127; Body=1 Fuz1=1 Fuz2=14

Notice that the fuzzy checksum pegs out at 14. This means that this message has been seen by 14 other people, or rather that 14 other people that use this distributed checksum clearinghouse system recieved similar email messages.

That's all it does right now. Add that header. I plan to add spamassassin and razor as well. How I'm going to actually filter the results isn't clear to me yet. And on top of that I don't actually get enough spam to calibrate my email filters.

I got a little impatient so I signed up for a hotmail account. The last time I did that I had spam in there the next day. I think it was about 30 messages, and I hadn't given the address to ANYBODY. I setup this program gotmail that works like fetchmail --logging into hotmail, grabbing any messages then pouring them into my spam tester. But now there isn't any spam in my hotmail account. I guess maybe microsoft has fixed that problem. What do I have to do to get some juicy spam going?

Watched a bit of television last night. Didn't have a lot of time so I skipped through the stuff I was watching. 60 minutes had a bit about eugenics that looked interesting but I wanted to see the segment about the muslim womam comedian --so I just skipped through and watched that. Then I watched the Dave Chappelle interview on Charlie Rose.

Later it occurred to me that my tv viewing habits have changed (imagine that eh.) Like most people I have the habit of just putting on the television and kind of half watching it while engaged in something else. Thinking about it later I thought that what I had done was more like "empowered television" or "active viewing", I didn't and don't need to be passively engaged when consuming television.

One feature I wouldn't mind having on my mythtv box would be a means to save little clips as I'm watching a show. Every now and then I'll be watching (this happens mostly when watching Charlie Rose) and I'll go "what did he just say?" It's as if a chink in the corporate media fell away briefly and something real slipped through.

It would be nice to be able to feature a little clip of something I had seen on tv --embedding it right into this web page. People do this all the time with books and magazines. What is it that's different about television that would make this not ok?