All hat, no cattle

My friend and colleague Henry Happel has given me a present of this wonderful hat. It’s a Stetson, and came with a really useful phoenetic guide (by Sam Huddleston) to Texan pronounciation. For example:

Bob Warr Fants = barbed wire fence
Rat Naow = immediately
Amulants = a thang thet takes yew to the hospital when yore lag is broke
Far Angine = somethin yew call when yore house is burnin’ down
Merkan Cissen = someone born in the US of A

I’m already very fond of this hat. In fact, I think I might buy me a ranch to go with it. In the meantime, it reminds me of what Governor John Connally (a native Texan) once observed about the Bush family (who are only ersatz Texans): “All hat, no cattle”. At last, I find something that Dubya and I have in common!

John Walker’s ‘Digital Imprimatur’ paper

Extraordinary, pessimistic exegesis of the architectural changes to the Net which may turn it into an Orwellian nightmare. In a way, this paper puts flesh on the skeleton of Lawrence Lessig’s nightmares on this subject.

Gadget wars

Quentin wonders why I haven’t got one of these. Simple: I’ve got one of these instead!

So did Microsoft approach Google?

From Dan Gillmor:

“On October 31, the New York Times reported that Microsoft had discussed a buyout with Google: “According to company executives and others briefed on the discussions, Microsoft – desperate to capture a slice of the popular and ad-generating search business – approached Google within the last two months to discuss options, including the possibility of a takeover.”

Today, USA Today quotes Bill Gates as saying it never happened: “We’ve never been in any talks with Google about any acquisition thing in any way, shape or form,” Gates told USA TODAY last week.

Someone is lying.

Could it be Gates? His occasional unfamiliarity with truth is well-known. But if he was lying this time, he was doing so about something material to his company’s future, and securities laws frown on such stuff from senior corporate officers. So I’m guessing he’s telling the truth.”

Hmmm… curiouser and curiouser…

Spam Rage strikes

Wired story.

“A Silicon Valley computer programmer has been arrested for threatening to torture and kill employees of the company he blames for bombarding his computer with Web ads promising to enlarge his penis.

In one of the first prosecutions of its kind in the state that made “road rage” famous, Charles Booker, 44, was arrested on Thursday and released on a $75,000 bond for making repeated threats to staff of an unnamed Canadian company between May and July, the U.S. Attorney’s office for Northern California said on Friday.”

One new weblog every 11 seconds!

From Dave Sifri, the guy who founded Technorati.

“Allow me to give you some growth statistics: One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day, not counting the people who were updating sites we were already tracking. In March of this year, when we switched over to a 5 server cluster, we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we’re adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We’re also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds. ”

A red-letter day?

This is the day that we finally got broadband at home. Given that we live in a village and British Telecom once poo-poohed the idea that we would ever get ADSL, it seems like a minor miracle. I’ve been accustomed to T1 lines at work for years, but had to put up with the 56k trickle at home. Bliss…

Forty years on

JFK was shot dead forty years ago today. Media are full of it. First thing I heard upon waking was John Connolly’s window remembering the ghastly moment when the President and her husband were struck, followed by an interview on BBC Radio 4 with Robert Macnamara, JFK’s slickly-haired Secretary of Defense. I am old enough to remember vividly where I was the moment it happened. I was in my bedroom, sitting at a sloping desk my parents had bought in an auction, doing my homework. Nothing special in that. But there was an edge to my feelings, because I had actually seen the President, in the flesh, close-to, a few months earlier, on his visit to Ireland. Years later, I wrote about it.

Keynes on English church music

I’m reading the third volume of Robert Skidelsky’s wonderful biography of John Maynard Keynes. Here’s an extract from a letter Keynes wrote to his doctor, Janos Plesch, inviting him to a chapel service in King’s College chapel:

“You would hear English church music in its most exquisite form and in the grandest possible environment. To my thinking, though exquisite, it is lifeless and even moribund… But if you have never been to one of these highly respectable, quasi-aesthetic Victorian performances, where deathly moderation and pseudo-good taste have drowned all genuine emotions, you might find it an interesting experience”.

The depressing economics of spam

The Register reports that spammers can make a good living with a response rate of 50 in a million recipients. Eh? This is based on a paper by Andrew Leung who works for a Canadian telco.