Well, I Certainly Don't Feel Secure

You absolutely cannot trust anyone that says "This is for security purposes" anymore. I certainly don't. So imagine my chagrin Thursday night when I received a phone call during the middle of my dinner from someone supposedly from my bank with information regarding one of my cards, but refusing to actually give me said information unless I yielded some personal security data "for security purposes". Color me spooked.

So, paranoia kicking in I immediately check my accounts online. Come to find out that I do have a late charge applied to my card. So I'm pissed about that, because this April charge I believe that I paid in April. I had it on a TODO list and the item is crossed out. But it would have been an online payment and I can't seem to find the evidence I'm looking for in my online account. I'm still working on that because I'm angry that a stupidly small charge on a card that has seen maybe three or four charges total might look bad on my credit report... Apparently I need to be more vigilant that payments actually go through from here on out. But that's beside the point for this particular rant. The important part is that I paid the full amount (original charge + late fee + an absurd amount of interest) as soon as I saw that there was any balance at all on the card.

So I visit it my local branch and bring with me a copy of the number that my cellphone showed for the call and to see if they have any information on my account that I should no about. The teller/manager I talked to mentioned that three reports of fraudulent seeming phone calls had been previously ...

Culture of the Moment: Steampunk and Beyond

I haven't done an "of the Moment" post in a short while, but I've been bubbling over with fascinating things to talk about. So I'll just lump them together...

I finished When the People Fell, an anthology of Cordwainer Smith stories. It's an interesting collection of bits of early world building, most of which is still fascinating decades later. It certainly has been an interesting counterpoint to the other anthology that I've been swapping between, The John Varley Reader. John Varley has some beautiful prose. The Reader has introductions from him that tell intriquing anecdotes. John Varley is most thought provoking with regard to gender differences, as most of his short stories take place in a world where gender swaps are cheap and easy, and his characters can and will swap genders on a whim.

Amongst the interesting world building of When the People Fell I was somewhat irritated by Cordwainer Smith's romantic (in both senses of the word) return of Xianity towards the latter part of his timeline of the Instrumentality. Reading that was one of the threads that led to my intentionally weird/goofy romp The Sign of the Pasta.

I've been in a bit of a Steampunk kick lately. I've always been a big fan of retro-futurism, having a love of the fairly wide spectrum of Steampunk and later "Decopunk" for lack of a better name. (Bioshock and Crimson Skies would be more "decopunk" than true steampunk.) It started when I finally added Brass Goggles to my feed reader. I've picked up and started into the YA novel Larklight, which is so far really cool. I downloaded some music from Vernian Process and am debating purchasing Abney Park's latest album, with its great steampunk cover. I'm ...

Blogs of the Round Table: I Want to be a Mighty Pirate

To be honest, I've been quite intrigued by posts so far in this round table. There's something of a early lament that so many characters in gaming are of the nameless hero sort, immortal dimensionless shells, created as disguises for a player to crawl into and eke out fantasies of heroism that don't seem to involve any real character building (story-wise or otherwise, perhaps). I think that there is a deep tie between a protagonist and the interface to a game, and a character's flaws are a meaningful part of that relationship.

I'm an primarily an Old School Graphic Adventure fan and to me, most of my favorite characters to play have been anti-heroes and characters with flaws. There's certainly a wealth of them, for me. There's Larry, whose attempts to get laid are so laughable and whose flaws redeem the character from the precipice of insensitivity and bad soft porn. There's Roger Wilco, space janitor and accidental saviour of the galaxy. What about Freddy Pharkas, the gunslinger who retired to become a pharmacist?

I've spent several replays with Ben, born rebel biker that can lead an entire gang of fellow bikers but doesn't know ...

Doing Crazy Things for the Science of it: The Great Wikipedia Project of Ought Eight

So I'm working with a partner on an already belated project for our Web Mining class and we decide, why not mine the textual data of Wikipedia? I mean, a dump of current revisions of Wikipedia pages as of March this year is just 3.5 GBs in one massive compressed XML file. It's supposed to be a learning project, right? Why not go whole hog and do some massively distributed programming and see if we can pull of something that seems like a real project, huh?

Yes, I certainly do think that I'm insane, but I have indeed been learning things. For instance, I've been learning how I might deal with huge compressed bundles of XML 'joy'. Right now I'm streaming that file in RAM and splitting it into individual articles that I'm storing in a bucket under my S3 account. First of all, I'm a little bit surprised that no one has bothered to keep a public Wikipedia bucket. I would think that it would be quite useful for academic projects running on EC2. (Considering that S3 bandwidth is free between EC2 and S3 and that with Wikipedia's strict robots policy S3 is the best place to host a distributed computing-accessible mirror.) Like what we're crazy enough to be trying... If anyone wants to take over ownership of this bucket that I'm building I'd be happy to chown it to some other group interested in using it for research or for making it publicly available. I'll probably just delete it if no one seems interested, but considering that I seem to have already spent $5 or $6 on PUT requests alone, I wouldn't mind seeing someone make good use of it.

Below I'm including ...