Scott Bush

We all know the earth is warming up, much like a bug under a magnifying glass held by a cruel little boy. Few things are written about the positive aspects of such dire news, so I take it upon myself to point out the wonders of discovering new species in the Antartic.

However, it’s not all roses and sea cucumbers. Remember The Abyss, James Cameron’s underwater masterpiece (yes, I know it was 1989 but if you try, you can recall the decade before last)? It used to be the definitive word on what was crawling (or flying) around on the sea floor. Now, with the recent discoveries of ice fish, giant amphipod crustaceans, and Antartic barnacles (not to mention the particularly freaky spider cousin shown here), that movie is out of date. I guess Cameron’ll have to continue his underwater film work (Aliens of the Deep, Ghosts of the Abyss, etc.) and head out to the Antartic. Possible title: “Flippin’ Freezing Abyss”?

One of the many duties I have as an IT manager is setting up and mainting listserves. Mailman is an open-source tool (quite a good one, actually) for managing lists. Normally, it works fine and cause me no trouble (other than its functional-yet-intimidating interface).

However, Triversal recently conducted a server move and this apparently threw Mailman for a loop. For two weeks none of our lists worked: no notfications of pending messages, no deliveries, etc. Yet the web-based management pages worked great. This discovery set off days of intense troubleshooting, encompassing everything from DNS and MX records to server config files. Nothing helped.

What I overlooked, and my resourceful colleague did not, was the simple restart. I asked him for help, and a bit later my inbox was flooded with pent-up Mailman messages. “What’d you do?!” I cried (virtually, over IM of course). “Restarted Mailman,” was all he had to say. Duh. I’d violated the second cardinal rule of solving technology problems: restart it and see if the problem persists. (Rule one, of course, is checking whether its plugged in. And yes, I have a true story about rule one).

Here’s the command, either for myself in the future or search engines:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/mailman restart

Corollary: listserv or listserve?

Apparently, some geek fifteen or twenty years ago either couldn’t spell listserve or was limited by some 8.3 naming convention, thus bringing the misspelling “listserv” to life. Damn him/her/it to the third circle of language hell, the one reserved for those who create misspellings that become unkillable bastard words (squooch over a bit, creator of the word “thru,” you’ve got some new company).

It’s official. You can now not only see what I look like, but actually hear me reading something. Specifically, those somethings are The Japanned Box by Sir Author Conan Doyle and Mother and the Dead Child by Hans Christian Anderson. That’s right, my first Librivox contributions are available! They’re part of the first horror short story collection, which seemed like a fun place to start.

Librivox, for the uninitiated, is an open-source project that pairs willing readers with works—fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—that are in the public domain. I stumbled across the site a few months ago looking for some new audiobooks. Not only have I enjoyed Call of the Wild, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Treasure Island, I’ve decided that this project deserved my help. So I read their forums on how to start, fired up my Mac and a microphone, and boom—I’m contributing.

Anyone can contribute a reading, but they do ask that new readers start with short stories as part of a collection before signing on for chapters in a book. Each project has a leader who answers questions, assigns stories/chapters, and reviews each submission for audio quality and the more subjective measure of “listenability.” My interactions have been very positive and the forums are alive with tips and helpful critiques.

One of the features that some people find distracting compared to a professionally-read audio book is the multiple readers per book. Some chapters are read by a man in London with an accent; the next few by a woman in the Midwest; yet others by someone with a monotonous voice. It’s a grab bag, but after a few chapters you begin to look forward to the fresh approach by a new voice. And when you hear the introduction from a familiar reader you enjoy, you’re extra excited.

Librivox is an example of how the web can be a wonderful tool (besides song lyrics and software drivers). It’s great to be a part of it. I’ll update you when I’ve contributed other readings.

Google’s Adsense program, which places “relevant” ads on subscribers web pages based on a page’s content, is pretty clever. The idea being if someone’s reading a blog about fishing, seeing ads on that page for reels, rods, and flies would generate a vastly superior click-through rate than the same ad on some car site. Nothing too new there, except Google’s algorithm is what determines what ads should appear—not a human.

Such a setup can lead to odd pairings of content and ads (thanks, ambiguity of the English language!). I had reason to dig through the trash in my Gmail account recently (Gmail, of course, is Google’s mail client and also displays targeted text-based ads) and I saw the following:

Hmmmm… probably not what they intended!

As my wife and I continue to pursue our real estate investments, we often hear terms that are either unfamiliar or only vaguely understood. To ensure I’ve actually learned these terms, I’m going to post each term and its definition. And since the concept behind a term is usually more important than simply its definition, I’ll come up with a brief scenario or example to help put it into context.

I’ll start this series with the term wrap-around mortgage.

Wrap-around mortgages are a kind of seller financing. It is so named because it’s a new mortgage the covers (or “wraps around”) an existing mortgage, plus an additional amount. Typically, the wrap-around mortgagee would make a payment and out of that amount, the first mortgage would be paid with the difference being income to the seller offering the financing.

An example: My house is now worth $100,000 and I owe $65,000 on a mortgage. I sell the house for $100,000 with $10,000 cash down and I offer to carry the buyer’s mortgage for $90,000. The buyer’s payment covers my original mortgage’s payment and leaves additional amount. This is beneficial to me because of the differences in the interest rates. Suppose my $65,000 loan was at 6.5%, but the new $90,000 loan I offer is at 9%. I earn not only the 9% on the $25,000 residual between my original mortgage and the new amount, but also on the 2.5% interest rate differential on my $65,000 mortgage.

There is a lot more to this topic, and I’m not sure I fully understand how I’d put it into practice. There’s the whole issue of mortgages not being assumable (though I’ve heard this often isn’t enforced as long as the bills are being paid), among others. Read more at Wikipedia or Google’s definitions.

Well, my wife and I were cleaning our office this weekend. This task should only take a few hours, but we never completed it because we ran across old high school stuff. I saw this photo and simply had to scan it so I could share it.

Ladies, from left to right: Starr, Jill, Jennifer, Melanie, Sarah, Heather, Stacey, and Kim. Gentlemen, left to right: Murray, Paul, Scott (yours truly), Mike, Ray, and Jeff. (Sorry for the white splotches: the photo is glossy and the scanner’s light reflects against it.)

It was a fun time. We’d all had our photos taken, then decided to do a group shot. As you an see, the stage wasn’t big enough to accommodate all of us, but we didn’t care. I have other photos that might be fun to post, but since we never finished cleaning the office I can’t find them.