Currently reading David Neiwert's Strawberry Days. It's about the WWII internment camps the US set up to hold Japanese-Americans. Well, it will be, I just haven't gotten that far. I'm only a few dozen pages in, and am learning all about the protectionist and xenophobic hysteria the country, especially the west coast, was going through in the late 1800's. [For some reason, they didn't teach kids this stuff in upstate NY "social studies" (ie History Plus!) classes in the 80's. Actually, maybe they did - I don't remember anything from those classes.]

So, I'm reading about how lawmakers of the time played up the immigration protectionism issue: make trade agreements with Japan, but only if they promise to stop people from coming here to work; try to make it illegal for Japanese and Chinese to ever become American citizens, etc.; and how some polticians took the low road and encouraged vigliantes to take matters into their own hands (burning houses, shooting people, etc.). All of it was caried out with the same rhetoric we hear today about immigrants from other parts of the world: they're too different from real Americans and will never assimilate; they'll work for nothing and are taking jobs from real Americans; they send home for their friends and relatives and bring them all here to take even more jobs; they're going to mix with white people and dilute the race; they're [insert negative personality trait], etc.. Why, it's almost as if there's a set of stock arguments that get reused whenever some new immigrant group arrives on the scene and the old timers feel uneasy. But, I'm sure that'll all go away once I get into the part about the internment camps...

On another note, I just finished Jonathan Lethem's Men And Cartoons, which is a slim collection of short stories. They're all about superheroes or comics or detectives, in some way, and they all seem to be cut from the same cloth as his most recent novels - especially Fortress of Solitude. Some of the stories are set in the same neighborhoods as FoS, or feature the same characters or situations, with slightly different, usually fantastic, twists. But these fantasy/sci-fi twists recall his eariler gritty sci-fi stuff (my favorite of all his styles), and that saves a lot of them them from being simply short remixes of scenes from of Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn.

Now, I need to get through Strawberry Days in time for the next Harry Potter (so I don't have to plug my ears when everyone around me starts talking about the plot). And then I wait for the next from Jeff VanderMeer. Busy book summer.

The making of a fake U2 rooftop concert.

To commemorate Deep Throat's unveiling, I'd like to share the lyrics to a song about Richard Nixon:

Richard Nixon

God, in his infinite wisdom
Put Richard Nixon on this earth
To bring to us his heritage
One of priceless worth

A courageous leader
And a blessed man
Surely in God's plan

His heritage is from Heaven
And the magic from above
The rapture of music and melody
Of culture and of love

Yes, God, in his infinite wisdom
Put Richard Nixon on this earth
To bring to us his heritage
One of priceless worth

A leader with endless courage
A miracle you might say
And all who have met Nixon love him so
The genius of his way

God, in his infinite wisdom
Put Richard Nixon on this earth
To bring to us his heritage
One of priceless worth

This is from the "Makers of Smooth Music" compilation, a CD of songs recorded in the 60's and 70's by companies who, for a fee, put your lyrics (no matter how awful) to music, with a live band !

[A partial repost from Last April 14th]

Pharyngula gets good and bad with a stone-cold discussion of red-hot spider sex.

The registration scheme for one of the products my company^* sells uses a license file - made uniquely for each customer. The license creator, a little Windows program, takes the user's name, email address, etc., puts that through a rather complicated cryptographic process and spits out a license file.

The credit card processing company we use has a copy of our license creator. When they get an order on-line, they send the user info to our license creator which creates the license file; then they attach the license to an email message and send it to the customer. It's seamless.

Well, it was until today. Today, after years of relatively trouble-free operation, the credit card processor told us they can't handle the license creation any longer (no explanation), and that we'll have to find another way. Umm... ?

So how to fix this?

The place we use to host our web site run on some flavor of Linux / Unix, so we can't put our license generator on those servers (because it's a Windows app). They also don't let you compile executables on their machines, so we can't build a Linux/Unix version of our license creator. They let you write your own apps in scripting languages (PHP, Perl, etc), but there's no way to handle the cryptographic tasks in any of those languages (at least not with the packages our hosting service provides), so we can't write a PHP version of our license creator.

We could change hosts, and move our site to a place that does .Net hosting so we could write a .Net version of our license creator (assuming we can find a way to do the crypto stuff in .Net), but changing hosts is always a gigantic nightmare. That's really not an option.

We could change the application license scheme into something we could handle in a scripting language like PHP or Perl. But generating 10,000 new licenses for existing users is less appealing than changing hosts, and we just changed license schemes a few months ago.

So, we're stuck.

It looks like we're going to have to generate these licenses manually. This will cause much anger among customers, who, for some reason, seem to expect that everything on the internet is instantaneous. We've had to handle licenses manually in the past, when servers are down, or for special cases, and some people absolutely freak the fuck out when they don't get an immediate response. Having to wait until one of us gets around to checking our email means someone might have to wait 12 hours or more (depending on how late I sleep).

But, I see no choice, so let the bitching begin.

* - of which I am an employee, and do not speak on behalf of.

Now here's a list...

Wingnuts Online proudly presents The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries!

They've got books about commies, by commies and for commies. Books for Nazis and books for Feminazis. Books for environmentalists, economists, psychologists, and of course, books for biologists. Need to know who ruined everything? Here's your list. (Don't) buy them all, today!

The best part of it, for me, is the little ad down the right side advertising books by "kill liberals with baseball bats and truck bombs" Coulter, "liberals are yucky" Hannity, and a whole slew of Clinton conspiracy books. Three for a dollar!