Who ordered the scrambled brains?

OK, we’ve all used SMS. That’s the technology that enables cell phones to send 160-character “text messages” to each other. And we all know that the major phone carriers provide email gateways to the SMS relays. For example, T-Mobile delivers emails sent to the address 3105551234@tmomail.net to that cell phone via SMS. Other providers have different email domains for their SMS gateways. Anyway, we all know that’s cool because it’s easier to type out a message on your computer than with your thumb on a cell phone. Well, we all know the problem with this is that you have to know what phone carrier each person is on to know what to put after the @ sign in the email address.

So now what we don’t all know. Some dude set up a service at teleflip.com that will determine the correct email address and send it accordingly. Of course don’t expect any privacy but why are you sending your debit-card PIN, nuclear-bomb activation codes, or recipes for your family’s secret sauce over SMS anyway? To use the service, type up a short text-only (not HTML-formatted) message and send it to <cell_phone_number>@teleflip.com. As you can see, no knowledge of the recipient’s provider is necessary. Remember the catchy ol’ tenet, “KISS - Keep it simple, stupid.” Well, this service does just that. It keeps SMS simple, because you’re so freakin’ stupid.

Hi again! How’ve you been?

So I’ve kind of been eating better lately. Kind of. Smaller, more frequent, more natural, higher fiber snacks throughout the day. Keeps the energy level up and limits conversion of calories to fat. Of course at the end of the day even though I’m full, I’m not satiated, and my natural compulsion to eat at the end of the day takes over. And I’m out the cost of another order of chili cheese fries from the venerable Big Tomy’s. Today I ended up with a headache. Granted it might have been caused by the 3 hours of non-stop WarCraft III after a four month hiatus.

[”What’s with today today?” Prescient words, weren’t they. I’m glad I rented this movie, but I don’t remember it being so corny. It’s Friday and Nat’s having a girl’s night out (Girl Talk board game, anyone?), so I’m doing what I always do: something Nat has done that I haven’t. And although I’ve seen parts of Empire Records I never actually saw it from title to credits. Happy Rex Manning Day ya’ll!]

So a lot of those healthier snacks I’ve been eating lately are grown on farms, and probably picked by undocumented laborers. Which is a little coincidenctal because recently I also came across some really close-minded comments about undocumented immigrants lately and it really chapped my hide. When people start saying things like “illegal immigrants are criminals” they are intentionally closing their minds in order to mask their –

[Oh I think I just saw the first black actor in this movie!]

– to mask their more sinister feelings. Undocumented immigrants are rallying to change the law. This type of action occurs when they feel the law is unjust, which is a moral and philosophical issue. The issue should be discussed on those terms. Is the current documentation process fair? Is the scope of documentation fair? What is the nature of citizenship? I mean to me it sucks that government instability (in undeveloped and developing nations) can have such a detrimental effect on those who are born there. As if they deserved it. And further, who’s to argue that there is any rationale behind where a person is born. It angers me that some Americans take such an elitist attitude about their nationality, that they deserve the privileges they have not because they are documented and pay taxes and obey laws, but because they were born here and identify with American culture. And then you have the folks that bring language into it, and is just blows their cover wide open. Now it’s clearly not just legality/criminality that they claim to protest, but the culture itself. Just admit your racist and then go blow your brains out. Please? In conclusion, forcing the issue to be discussed strictly on what the law is at the moment misses the point and just provides a thin social veil for racism.

[Oh I love this song “A Girl Like You” by Edwin Collins.]

This brings me to something I was thinking in the shower. Republicans have a field day with the fact that they are the more “American” party. What manipulative semantics! I don’t deny that I reject identification with “America,” but that’s only because of the bastardization the conservative movement has had on the definition. That’s frustrating because I feel that they took something unfairly that I am powerless to take back. The entire left just let their identification with America go. Which is one of the bigger image problems the left has. Argh.

[Hrm, the bald girl’s remarkably cute. ]

Been reading TechCrunch lately in addition to my morning news lineup. They pointed me to three intersting music services. 1) Last.fm: tracks the music you and others listen to and makes music recommendations based on that data, 2) Pandora: Flash-based music player that makes recommendations based on their “genetic” song tag database, 3) PandoraFM: combines Last.fm with Pandora (requires a Last.fm account).

[I think the time has come for me to lie back, relax and enjoy the golden 90’s and the happy-ending of the rest of this movie.]

One last thing: it wouldn’t hurt to take a few minutes and learn how to use a defibrillatorcourtesy of LAFD (you know, that thing doctors use to start your heart when they yell “Clear!”)

Money: relief 5 years away
Work: great at 6.5 weeks
Spanish 2: grueling at 5.5 weeks
El salir a bailar: demasiado
Sleep: too much
Diet: slowly getting better
Lost: now starting on season 2
Anticipating: Coachella
Regretting: not blogging
Cherishing: stability
Attitude: optimistic

Just one more day remains until my first real paycheck and financial independence*! Wahoo yahooooo!

[* Financial independence, as defined by not needing to borrow money to pay for necessities.]

God, I’m quite disappointed in the absolutely boring nature of the majority of my recent posts. Just hard to find the time to be really creative and inspired. And I’m doing all this work on my computers that I just want to document somewhere. Blah. Must restore my honor!

Finally got around to setting up SpamAssassin on my email server (postfix). Currently, I’ve been relying on relaying my email through my ‘mikemcg@ucla.edu’ account (notice how I boldly plaster my email address on my website, easy pickin’s for the automated email address scrapers used by spammers) so that UCLA will flag the spam. But soon I plan on giving out ‘mike at scrambledbrains.net’ as my primary personal email address (and ‘michael.mcgranahan at ucla.edu’ as my professional email address — nice and clean, and effective separation of work and private, if I do say so myself, but I want to get No-IP’s Backup MX service first), so email will be going straight to my personal mail server. That means no more UCLA spam-scanning. Hence I set up SpamAssassin.

Anyway, in testing SpamAssassin, I found that by including a certain string in the body of your email, it will trigger the spam detector to score it 997 (normal spam scores around 10, and non-spam scores around 2). So I got to thinking, I wonder how many email readers honor the spam score (it’s stored in the message header by SpamAssassin before being delivered to your mailbox). If a lot of them do, then you could intentionally include that string to ensure that your email get’s marked as spam and might go unnoticed by the recipient. I can’t think of a specific example to take advantage of this, but you could probably use it to get out of binds. You send an email to get out of a hairy situation, and later on you can say, “What do you mean you didn’t know?! I emailed you! Maybe it’s in your junk mail folder, but that’s not my fault, I notified you in good faith!” [Grin — all the way to the bank.] Of course I’m being totally facetious but it’s interesting nonetheless. And now that string:

XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-UBE-TEST-EMAIL*C.34X

Just paste that into an email and if their email client honors spam scores, the message will end up in their junk folder. Send it as HTML and format the text color white so as not to arouse suspicion. And then take over the world!

Now to get that OpenLDAP server up and running so I can have a personal address book accessible from anywhere.

How do we identify ourselves? I don’t mean personally, but to others. In the real world, we identify ourselves by name. Depending on the circumstances, we must use names of varying detail. If someone in the room has the same first name as you, using first and last name to identify yourself might be necessary. If someone has the same first and last name, we need to qualify it with a distinguishing characteristic. “Fat Steve Tejada” versus “Slim Steve Tejada.” The problem is coming up with a unique identifier given the context.

So that’s in the context of “real” world social situtations. What about more abstract or general contexts, such as the context of the Internet, or the entire world overall? How do you uniquely identify yourself from everyone on the planet? Considering the dramatic increase in interconnectivity around the world, this may certainly be an issue in the future.

For example, I’m sure there’s another “Michael Patrick Brian McGranahan” out there, so how would you distinguish between us? There may even be another “intelligent Michael Patrick Brian McGranahan.” It’s not until we refer to “handsome intelligent Michael Patrick Brian McGranahan” do we have a unique identifier. There are also things like driver’s licenses and bank account numbers, credit card numbers, social security numbers, employee ID’s, computer login names, etc. I guess I’m most interested in contact identifiers, that you give to others, that they can then use when contacting you.

Some examples of contact identifiers, such as an email address or a phone number. Other contact identifiers include personal website URLs, public IP addresses (not unique if NAT’d), OpenID’s, and instant messenger names (within the context of a particular instant messenging system), etc. Each has to be unique within it’s contextual realm (no two phone numbers are alike, . Which is best? And are these aesthetically satisfactory? “Hi, my email address is ‘happystar1989@hotmail.com’.” Gross.

I think one step in the right direction would be to frame the identifer as a URL, that way you’re identifier can reference some resource that can contain more information about how to contact you, such as email address, work and personal phone numbers, mailing address, instant messenger name, etc. This informational document would be in a standardized format, for example in RDF. RDF, being XML, is perfect because it is extensible, so as new technologies and methods of contact come along, the RDF file could be ammended accordingly. Then all you’d need to do is give someone that URL, and they can use it with any communication technology, and the device would reference the document for device-specific contact information. So phone numbers, email addresses, mailing addresses, instant messenger names, etc, as we know them today, would all be a single URL in the future. “Hi (in social situations) I go by ‘Michael McGranahan,’ and my contact RDF is at ’scrambledbrains.net/contact’.”

Still we have the problem where more than one person could have that name. And I’m at a loss as to how to rectify that. No one wants an ID number. That would be akin to a global social security number. OHHHH!!! (I love stream of consciousness writing.) It could be a cryptographic hash of your digitally-encoded DNA sequence! That would be unique (do identical twins actually have identical DNA?) and would also protect your privacy! BAM! Now the problem would become having to say “Hi my name is 8E943533F52781001BEC09028F1BEC09028F014AC4D385E0EFD754….” Of course this can’t realistically be spoken, so you’d have new ways of conveying this information. Perhaps you can hand a card or microchip to the person you’re greeting, or send it over Bluetooth. In the future, maybe you can give them your fingerprint and they can access a public database that matches fingerprints to DNA hash ID’s. Or you could have a chip implanted in your hand that allows an exchange of information through the conductivity of your skin when you shake someone’s hand. Gotta be careful how you touch though!

OK, I’m not sure what the best way to reconcile the DNA hash ID with a personal informational URL. Perhaps a new networking protocol. IPv10? Where everyone gets internet namespace based on their DNA hash. I’m not sure, I guess that’s for you to decide.

Does anyone else hate wsdl.exe as much as I? Who does? Let’s have a show of hands! Thank you! Exactly what I thought.

.NET basically provides no support for custom SOAP fault message details. So freakin’ lame. That means you have to manually parse the XML stream, or manually create an appropriate class and deserialize into it. Incredibly lame. Although it’s entirely possible I don’t know enough about WSDL/SOAP to know that the code generation can’t be automated any further. Spent all day trying to figure this out.

Regardless, I say “Grrrrrrrr!” If I ever find the person responsible for this…

OMG I need to post another entry soon! But here’s a quick one. All I can say for now is that work is great, but getting here by 9:30am is almost impossible. Having a parking spot on campus is great. The drive to work is great. The people are really nice. Campus of course is lovely; I think I hate it less and less with each passing day. But the fact that I won’t be getting my first paycheck till March 1 is not great.

Any of you have any experience or recommendations about good gyms? I have a spare tire, some junk in the trunk, love-handles, and a loose caboose I need to get rid of — basically all the basics of a good A-Team junkyard vehicle. With no rocket launcher.

OK, I’m gonna close the poll about Alexis de Tocqueville. I read in a New York Times opinion column last month, someone saying he felt Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was something like the greatest historical book about America ever published, so I went to Wikipedia to look more up about the man. Anyway, the article was short, highlighting his philosophical views that to me seemed could conflict. For example, socially he championed equality and liberty, but economically felt government intervention was oppressive (we don’t have such political parties in the U.S.). So basically I was unable to evaluate whether I liked him or not. Well, I think after writing this paragraph I understand him better, and I think I like him. However, that’s not the feeling the rest of ya’ll had. INTERESTING. We’ll see if we have any more polls for a while, until you learn to agree with me.

Welcome to Wild Creatures of the Universe! In our last episode, we followed the pipsqueak Earthling who was named Lunalot Beeblebrox by researches, but who goes by “Michael McGranahan” by the natives. Lunalot spent the last three years trying to dig himself out of a big hole, a hole he had stumbled upon and accidentally began expanding three years prior. But things are starting to turn around for this young whipper-snapper. The long winter of despair and ramen is finally retreating to torment other Earth-critters. Yes, it has been quite the week of discovery and adventure in the concrete jungles of North America, as mother nature rewards those she tested, neglected, or flat-out screwed over as of late.

To understand where young Lunalot’s adventures have taken him, we must take a moment to examine the strange culture of Earth. Unlike in our own culture, where we strive to enjoy the finer things existence has to offer, like sipping nectar from stars and colliding dispensable planets into wormholes, in Earth culture, a complex, often brutal social system severely imposes restraints and obligations upon the individual. The minimum of these expectations is for the individual to be able to sustain his own existence in this hostile, competitive environment. To do so, he is forced to sell his own labor, toiling tirelessly and tediously for others! In return, he receives quantities of their generic form of social exchange media, called “money.”

It all started back in October 2005 local time, with the announcement that there was a job opening in Murphy Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles. Yes, the one and only Los Angeles, the city in which our ancient, mighty, fallen brethren lay encased in bubbling tar pits. If only the Space-Ark could have taken them all.

Anyway, Murphy Hall is a tiny, primitive dwelling that houses many administrative functions of the university. Among those is the development of the rudimentary system of conjoined clock-based digital electronics that comprise the peak of Earth communication technology. These fickle, finicky instruments form an abstract algorithmic construction yard, upon which “computer programs” can be built. It was for this type of construction that the job opening was made available. In the ensuing months, Lunalot tread deep career and financial waters, until February 1, 2006, when he struck a deal with the powers that be and accepted an offer for full-time employment! Whoohoo! Time to break out the sham-PAN-ya! Ahem, back to our show. Lunalot has finally joined the ranks of countless Earth automatons, and he has never been more optimistic or satisfied.

And we’d like to take a moment to direct our viewers to the new blog of one of our sponsors, a one Nat-Selection, who has helped make Lunalot’s story a much more interesting and enjoyable one. Nat-Selection, the natural selection for blog-readers everywhere.