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This week’s edition of “Lives of People Living In Madison” brings thrills, spills, and chills aplenty.

Read about:

• Harrowing encounters with The Law.
• Harrowing encounters with Dentistry.
• Harrowing encounters with Plumbing.
• Not Quite Harrowing encounters with greenery.
• And much more certain to leave you near the edge of your seat!

Today saw the near conclusion of our brush with The Law that started in February. As some of our loyal readers may remember, Sarah and I were served with a court summons after we went away to Florida in February and it snowed while we were gone. That’s not to imply that we were summoned because it snowed in February (even our god-like powers have limits), but rather because we didn’t have anyone lined up to shovel our walk after it snowed.

This morning, I dug a shirt, tie, and slacks from the dank depths of my closet, ate a quick breakfast, and departed for the courthouse before dawn. OK, I departed at 08:00, but that’s damn near dawn for us freelancers. Anyway, I got down there, checked in with the three(!) Madison PD officers manning the Municipal court, and waited about an hour for my two minutes with the judge.

When I finally got in front of the judge, he asked me how I plead.

I had spent the better part of an hour pondering that very question. If I plead “Not guilty” I would be sent to the back of the courtroom to bargain with one of the City Attorneys present. If I plead “No contest” or “Guilty” I could bargain with the judge who could assign any sort of penalty from the minimum to the maximum.

Originally, my thought was to plead “Not guilty” and try my luck with the two City Attorneys. However, as more and more people tried to pull a fast one on the City Attorneys, it became obvious that they were not in a collective good mood. The judge, by comparison, seemed to be in a fair and sensible mood.

Since there was no question about the fact that we had, in fact, violated the Madison Municipal Ordinance in question, I decided to plead “No Contest.”

The judge decided that since we had never been charged with this violation before, he would dismiss the charge on March 26, 2006 if we weren’t charged with the violation again between now and then.

So, we got off relatively easy.

Interestingly enough, the city always summons the man in a couple down to answer for the lack of shoveling. Sarah wasn’t summoned, it was “David Bogen” who was summoned to appear. When I was in the courtroom, all the other people answering for a lack of shoveling were all men, except for one woman who was there even though it was her husband’s name on the summons.

While I was sitting there for the better part of an hour, I had plenty of time to observe the people coming before the judge, mostly for traffic violations. I came up with a quick tip-sheet for anyone who has to appear in small-time, city court:

• Dress appropriately. I don’t care how shiny and new your sneakers are. If you show up dressed in sneakers and a sports jersey, you start out with negative credibility. If you dress like a gang-banger, it is hard to come off as a pillar of the community.
• Skip the bullshit. If you think that the judge or the City Attorney hasn’t heard your clever excuse for driving 50 in a school zone, you’re wrong. Most likely, trying to snow the judge will just annoy him or her.
• Don’t try to game the system. If cases are called in a particular order, they are called in a particular order. You can spend all the time in the world lobbying the bailiff but he’s not going to tell the judge how to run his or her courtroom.
• Show up ten or fifteen minutes early for your appearance. If I had shown up ten or so minutes before I did, my case would most likely have been one of the first to be called instead of one of the last.
• Bring something to read. Sitting around watching traffic case after traffic case gets boring after a while.

As if sitting around in a court room wasn’t exciting enough, this afternoon I went to the dentist for a few more fillings. That’s six down, only two more to go!

At one point, I had a very lucid image of what Hell is like. I was sitting in the dentist’s chair with half of my face numb from the
anesthetic, staring out at a slate gray sky, while Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville” played over the office sound system.

Last weekend, Sarah and I were very busy. She spent Saturday making rain barrels to capture some of the rain water that runs off the roof of our house. So, last night when it rained, we caught something like 40-50 gallons of fresh water that we can use to water our gardens.

While she was doing that, I was wrestling with the plumbing in our basement. I replaced some copper pipe with some CPVC to get rid of a leaky sill cock on the side of the house. When I started looking at the job, I was dreading it because it looked like I was going to be forced to sweat several copper joints in a very confined location. However, when I was at the hardware store to get supplies, I found some “push-on” (“push-fit,” if you’re in Europe) bits that allow one to bridge CPVC and copper pipe through a simple push-on adapter. That simplified the project by several orders of magnitude. I was able to use solvent welds on CPVC pipe and then simply use the push-on adapter to bridge the whole mess over to the legacy copper
pipe.

The weather here has been so warm that we had to mow the lawn for the first time last weekend. Unlike many of those folks who take their mowers out of the garage and change the oil, massage the spark plug, sacrifice a cat in the general direction of Briggs and Stratton, and then curse profusely while futilely pulling the starting cord for their air and noise pollution belching gas mowers, we simply pulled our reel mower off a hook in the garage, put it on the ground, slipped a CD in the Walkman, and started walking.

These pictures speak for themselves.

James Bamford’s book, Body of Secrets, is marketed as an inside look inside at of the nation’s most secretive intelligence gathering bodies, the National Security Agency.And, while the NSA does play a key role in the book, it is far from the only character in the book.

In fact, most of Bamford’s most potent dirt has little to nothing to do with the NSA. His revelations about Eisenhower’s duplicity, and the treasonable actions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at various times in the fifties and sixties have essentially nothing to do with the NSA. In many other instances, some of the most compelling stories in the book have little to no NSA involvement.

That’s not to say that the NSA is a very small character in this book. There are hundreds and hundreds of pages devoted to covering the NSA. However, some of those pages are also among the book’s dullest.

The stories of “moon bounce” communication networks, code-breaking, “black bag” operations, and the like make for interesting and compelling reading. Long lists of amenities available to NSA workers inside Crypto City are nothing more than that, long lists. Most people just don’t get excited reading long lists of mundane items.

While I learned plenty about decisions the government made, or didn’t make, with regards to a variety of geopolitical situations in the middle part of the Twentieth Century, I don’t feel much more knowledgeable about the NSA itself. Much of the “inside” information presented by the book felt like the kinds of information one could get simply by talking to NSA employees about generally non-classified, daily activities inside Crypto City. One good way to summarize that feeling is that I felt like I had a better chance of predicting the NSA’s cafeteria menu than I did the motives and goals of the agency and its employees.

So, while I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the USA’s covert intelligence agencies and/or the history of government actions during the fifties, sixties, and seventies, those seeking a truly inside look at the NSA should simply apply to work there.

The final installment in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series generally lives down to the standards set in the penultimate book, Song of Susannah.After reading Wizard and Glass it was clear to me that King was going to have a very difficult time maintaining the standards he had set. While Wolves of the Calla was a worthy attempt, all subsequent books are nothing but dim shadows of those preceding them.

In the final installment of the series, the Dark Tower is finally within the reach of our gallant, yet flawed, heroes. Now all that remains is moving over the final few miles, opening the door, and climbing the stairs to reveals what lies at the top of the Tower.

Without revealing too much about the book’s twists and turns, it is difficult to fully analyze the book here. However, much of the book feels contrived with characters taking actions and stances simply because it was convenient for King. Rather than acting as we might expect the fully developed characters would, the characters often abruptly about-face and do things that don’t fit their personalities.

The method King uses to overcome the character’s final obstacle is lame and contrived. It is as though King was looking for a clever way out of the problems he had created, rather than letting his characters work their way out using their own methods and means.

All in all, I almost wish I had stopped reading the series after Wolves of the Calla. Much like the third Matrix movie somewhat tarnished the reputation of the first two, the last books of the Dark Tower series have tarnished the reputation of those that have gone before them.

My high school apparently has contracted with some highly motivated bozos to produce an alumni directory. The bozos in question seem to be in the business of collecting information about alumni from high schools and the like, formatting it, slapping it in a book, selling it to alumni and others, and then returning some small portion of the profits back to the alumni foundation.Well, I’m not in the business of just giving away information about me. If someone is motivated enough to try and find information about me by talking to family, friends, and relatives, there isn’t much I can do about that. If they want to get online, or use public records to glean information about me, there isn’t much I can do about that either.

However, that does not mean that I’m going to take time out of my life to sit around and fill out on-line surveys and chat with telemarketers just because someone wants to know if I’m married, to whom, where I live, what I do, if I have kids, etc.

Anyway, the alumni organization from my high school apparently felt that all of us alumni were living lives that were too quiet and not nearly filled with enough grief. So, they unleased Bozos, Inc. upon us.

Today, Bozos, Inc. called my house for at least the fifth time in the last couple of months. After this last call, I wrote the following e-mail to the alumni foundation:

From: David Bogen
To: kathy@arrowfoundation.org
Subject: Call Off Your Dogs

Ms. Bierscheid:

Other than being an alumni of Watertown's school system, it's not
clear what I did to deserve the endless badgering that your foundation
has unleashed upon me.

I've been called no less than five times by an agency trying to
collect information about me for some sort of alumni directory.  No
less than five times, I have asked them to take me off their lists and
never call me again.  I fully expect to receive a sixth, a seventh,
and an eighth call.

Postcard after postcard arrives in my mailbox, all of them asking for
information about me to be included in an alumni directory.  Each
postcard joins its brethren in my trash bin.

The operating theory seems to be that if alumni aren't immediately
compliant with your demands for money or information, they should be
called and called and called again until they finally get so tired of
the hassle that they cave in to your demands.  The reality of the
matter is that the more your organization pesters me, the *less*
likely I am to give you money, information, or even the time of day.

Shouldn't it be obvious at this point that if I haven't responded to
your numerous postcards and telephone calls, chances are reasonably
good that I probably won't?  Whose bright idea was it to endlessly
pester alumni with direct mail and telemarketing like some sort of
desperate credit card company?  What, exactly, do I have to do to get
the message across that I'd prefer to be left alone?

Sincerely,

David Bogen

When I graduated from high school, I thought all I got was a diploma and a pat on the back. Now, I know that I got a diploma and lifetime supply of telemarketing calls and direct mail advertisements.

Delightful.

Today, I got a letter from my alma mater, Tufts University. The letter was a warning that information about 106,000 alumni has probably been stolen off a computer.My first thought was, “WTF?!?”

My next thought was, “That is so Tufts.”

Let me expand those obviously highly condensed thoughts for those scoring the game at home.

Identity theft by electronic means has been prominently reported in the news for the last year or more. Almost every single week, one organization or another reveals that information about tens or hundreds of thousands of people has been stolen. Does the word “ChoicePoint” mean anything to anyone?!?

And yet, here are the nitwits at Tufts, motoring along in their business as usual mindset. Most likely, they thought that no one would ever target a small liberal arts college for computer crime.

One part of the letter reads:

Recently, Tufts detected abnormal activity on a server managed by an external vendor which supports the University's Advancement telefund operation. We immediately took steps to strengthen security for electronic records containing credit car and/or social security numbers.

Hey, nice work folks. I like how they strengthened security after someone had already cracked the system. How’s that for shutting the barn door after the cows have already gotten out? That’s like watching every house on your street suffer burglaries but doing nothing to increase the security of your home. Then, when your home is robbed, you express shock, and immediately run out and install a series of deadbolt locks on all the doors to your now empty house.

Did the dim bulbs in the Tufts IT department ever think about strengthening security before one of their systems got cracked? Did the thought that perhaps they should audit their security systems and protocols in light of the theft of information from Boston College, ChoicePoint, and others ever cross their little minds? Does Tufts offer a remedial course in network security and what will it take to get the Tufts IT department enrolled?

Learning from the experiences of others and assessing your own vulnerabilities are such utterly basic principles of security that I question exactly what the folks in Tufts IT do know. Clearly, they’re not terribly familiar with network security.

Of course, no one will pay for their simpleton IT work with their jobs because the high muckety mucks (who don’t know the difference between CAT5 and “Cats: The Musical”) will be fed some stupid whitewash story by the IT head honcho. There will be some disappointed mumbling, a few pointed fingers, and the whole thing will disappear into the morass of college bureaucracy.

That leads me to my second thought.

Tufts could be a great university. It won’t be, but it could. What ultimately holds it back is a general attitude among the students and faculty that nothing exciting or interesting ever happens there. Students leave campus to party at BC, BU, Harvard or MIT. Faculty run the gamut from great to University of Northern Antarctica rejects. For every competant staff member, there are four members of the bureaucracy that are so awful, I would gladly drop live weasels in my underpants if I could avoid dealing with those staff members ever again (hello, Bursar’s Office).

Even while we were there, the IT department was struggling. This was back in the early, early days of the Internet when you pretty much had to be at a University to get online. All students got their e-mail through one mainframe and yet, you never saw such trouble getting one mainframe working. They had complete control of the computing environment and yet they just couldn’t get things to work consistently and well.

There was never any real campus uprising about the problems. You never heard anyone complain. It was always just, “Oh, bummer. The mainframe is down again.” There was no pressure put on the IT department to improve. There was no incentive for them to fix the problems once and for all. In short, it was as though no one cared.

That is what I mean when I say that this incident is so Tufts.

The Tufts IT department clearly didn’t care enough to audit their systems and protocols. They clearly didn’t care enough to reinforce their network security. They clearly didn’t expend enough effort educating their user base about what they, as users, could do to ensure the security of the network.

In addition, it is clear that the University’s administration didn’t care enough to question the University’s IT department after reading about information theft from other organizations. Competant administrators would ask questions, offer to clear roadblocks, and in general, do their part to make sure that the network is secure. My guess is that the Tufts Regents and the University President don’t have a clue what was done in light of the obvious threat to shore up the network.

So, Tufts paid for their malaise and incompetance. They spent $41,000 sending letters to thousands of alumni. They got written up in newspapers as yet another victim. And, they virtually ensured that every time they ask for an alumni’s credit card number, the alumni will say, “Why don’t I just post it on a billboard over a busy highway and save you the trouble.”

Some things that have gotten under my skin of late.Great.

For the longest time, whenever a retail clerk would say, “Thank you” while handing me a receipt, I would mindlessly respond, “Thank you.”

One day, this struck me as rather pointless. For what, exactly, am I thanking them? Thanks for not insulting me? Thanks for taking my money? Thanks for selling me things I either need or want?

So, I tried “You’re welcome” a few times. After all, that is the natural response to “Thank you.” That bombed badly. As a general rule, the clerks for some reason thought I was being snotty.

I don’t like to just take my receipt and walk away without saying something back, to give the conversation some closure, so I experimented with some other canned responses. “Have a good one” either resonated with the clerk or bombed badly. “You bet” was just a bit too sterotypical Midwesterner.

After a time I settled on, “Great.”

“Great” is positive, without being chipper. It is friendly without being overly friendly. It implies nothing about the clerk’s attitude or abilities. It doesn’t need any sort of verbal response. It makes just enough sense that no one thinks I’m a wacko, yet it is just dissonant enough that it short circuits further conversation. In short, I find it a great way to give closure to any sort of customer/clerk interaction.

X11 and Font Handling

For all the great strides that Free and Open Source software has made in the last ten years, the font handling of software like XFree and X.org is pathetic.

MacOS figured out font handling years ago. To add a font to the system, one simply dropped the font suitcase on the System Folder and the system took care of the rest of the work.

In X11, adding a font is only slightly less work than rewriting the OS kernel from scratch. Apparently it just hasn’t gotten through to the X11 developers yet that I don’t particularly want to take advanced classes in typography to use a couple more fonts on my system. I might know an awful lot about computers, but I struggle every single time with adding fonts to X11.

In the olden days, the X server simply mucked around inside the font directories that were listed in the XF86Config file. Then, we were graced with the X Font Server (xfs). Oh yeah, that was an improvement. That moved some of the complexity outside of the primary X server, but also left in all the original direct directory font munging code to confuse and muddle users’ minds.

Debian tried to address this with their defoma system. That was a mistake. Defoma is simply the same complexity masked with a layer of poorly documented obscurity.

The first person or group of people to simplify font handling under X11 ought to get some sort of award.

I’m poped.

Let’s bury the man and get on with our lives already. Twenty plus pages of Pope coverage in just one section of the Sunday paper? Does that seem excessive to anyone else?

Justice, Wisconsin style

What’s it going to take to end the Michael Jackson trial? I am tired of seeing his ugly mug every morning as I read the paper. The man shows up for court in pajamas and this is newsworthy?!? Were there people on the planet who were unaware that the man is loony?

I will say this about Wisconsin’s court system: it sometimes takes a little while for a trial to start, but once it gets rolling, we like ‘em short and sweet. Wisconsin convicted Jeffrey Dahmer in three weeks; does anybody think a Wisconsin jury wouldn’t make short work of Michael Jackson?

Nice Tights. Where were you in January?

Now that Spring is back from its vacation in Florida, many of my fellow bikers are on the road again. Of course, many of the two-wheeled hoard are the kind that the bicycle companies love.

These folks can be easily identified by their really expensive bikes and their full-body bicycling attire. Usually, I get a good look at these folks as I pass them on my twenty year-old, steel-framed, single speed. Riding through the winter gives me a definite advantage over these folks when it comes to Spring riding.

Spring has finally reached Wisconsin and we’ve been taking full advantage of that fact. Last weekend, temperatures in Madison were in the sixties and lower seventies with plenty of sun and light to moderate breezes. Sarah and I spent plenty of time outdoors as a result.
Saturday morning, we took Dalla for a hike in one of the local state parks. Strangely enough, almost no one uses the park early on weekend morning, so when we get there it almost seems like our own private park.

We spent Saturday afternoon working in the yard. Sarah pruned some of the brushy trees in our front yard. She thinks that they might have some sort of rust or other disease. I took out the hedge timmer and had a go at the yews below the picture window. Sarah’s father trimmed the yews the first summer we owned the house, but we neglected to do so last year. So, I really had to take a fair amount off each bush to not only shape them, but also to get them back off the sidewalk. Dalla spent most of her time on a tie-out in the front yard menacing dogs that walked by with their people.

Saturday night, we walked over to our friends’ (Sheri and Bryan) house where they cooked us dinner. We brought some granola bars that I made Friday night for dessert. It was delightful to walk there and back without needing gloves, boots, and a stocking cap.

Sunday, I worked in the yard some more. I racked part of the front yard and hauled fallen sticks and whatnot to the curb where the city will pick them up. Sarah spent part of the day working at a local bike store’s sale as part of her bicycle club membership duties.

Sarah joined the Capitol Velo Club in the relatively recent past. CVC is a women’s bicycling club here in Madison that does a variety of things, but Sarah joined because she was looking for riding partners for some training rides. Last night, Monday, she went on her first ride as part of the club. They rode somewhere in the range of 15-20 miles before the ride ended. She had a great time and is looking forward to her next ride with the club.

Sunday afternoon, we took Dalla hiking for a couple of hours on a segment of the Ice Age Trail near Belleville, WI. While we were hiking, there was unmistakable signs of life. Trees were budding; birds were singing; grass was greening up; people were out on the trail. We saw more people on that trail in a couple of hours on Sunday than we did on numerous hikes last fall and over the winter.

Tonight, we’re going to plant seeds in pots for our garden. Hopefully, we have a better lighting system this year for our seedlings. Last year, our seedlings were spindly and nearly worthless because we didn’t bother to use any grow lights. This year, we have a pair of grow lights setup to nurture the seedlings and we hope to have a better crop of veggies as a result.

We probably spoke something like twenty words to our neighbors over the winter as everyone has different schedules and the weather doesn’t often permit much outdoors interaction. In the last two days, we’ve had conversations with the neighbors on both sides of our house. It’s amazing how people just come out of the woodwork once winter recedes.

Sarah and I stopped in to one of the local Hispanic groceries the other day. While browsing the aisles, I saw this sauce from El Yucateco on the shelves.
The label on the bottle reads, “Original Mayan Recipe.” The Mayans, depending on who you ask, had a variety of interesting uses for habanero peppers.

Some claim that they ate plates of habanero peppers, with just salt. I will buy that they ate the peppers, but the idea of using salt as a condiment seems to be too much of a modern idea for that to be believable.

Still others claim that the Mayans threw hot peppers at their enemies in battle. That is completely outside the realm of reason. It would be far more effective to hurl bricks and stones than produce. After all, simply making contact with a habanero pepper’s unbroken skin isn’t likely to make your skin burn.

Others claim that the Mayans burned peppers in large fires and that the smoke confused and disabled their enemies. That I completely believe. If you’ve ever had hot pepper smoke in your eyes, nose, and throat, you have no choice but to believe that’s true.

If the Mayans truly did contact this sauce, they certainly knew what they were doing. Even for a hot pepper sauce veteran like myself, Kutbil-ik XXXtra is hot. Unlike many hot sauce frauds that claim to be extraordinarily hot, and quite frankly, aren’t, Kutbil-ik XXXtra Hot Sauce is the real deal.

Pepper Heads: This is the good stuff. Hot, hot, hot.

Pepper Novices: Are you crazy?!? Your mouth should be burning just reading this page.