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and Antar­tic bar­na­cles (not to men­tion the par­tic­u­larly freaky spi­der cousin shown here), that movie is out of date.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 excel­lent 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.