Peter Gabriel releases iTunes plug-in

It sounds interesting, I'm going to have to play with it. You upload your library list, it analyzes it, then you say "I want songs like Popsicle of Love" and it makes a playlist for you that you can upload to your iPod. I don't know how good it is because it does this through the ID3 tags, still, it's worth a shot. The only problem is that the article writer has some pretty obscure stuff and of 16 bands named, I recognized two.

http://blog.wired.com/music/2006/11/peter_gabrielba.html

An interesting article on stock scam spam

http://blog.wired.com/business/2006/11/when_youre_an_o.html

Spammers as scammers
Topic: Stocks,Web/Tech

Wexe When you're an over-the-counter stock not traded on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, there's a presumption among many that your business isn't on the up and up.

That perception is doubly difficult to overcome when you're one of the dozens of penny stocks being touted in spam messages that regularly get blasted across the globe.

Just ask executives at Vemics, a River Edge, NJ-based provider of video conferencing and data services. Since March, it has been the subject of more emails than they can count, and each wave draws a rash of calls to the company from outraged recipients who want to know why their inboxes are littered with spam claiming Vemics is the next big thing.

"We have no clue who is dong this, and we have tried to figure it out," says Craig Stout, the company's chief operating officer. "We just hit a dead end at every turn."

Vemics is by no means alone. Other companies being targeted include Bralorne Mining, Advanced Powerline Technologies and West Excelsior Enterprises. "Grab BLMN first thing Tuesday morning and turn some serious profits," a spam message that circulated this week raved about Bralorne Mining. "Buy it on Tuesday, become rich on Friday."

Stout speculates that the person or people responsible buy the stock, send the mass emails and then wait for the shares to rise so they can be sold at a tidy profit. Once the share price goes back down, the cycle starts all over again.

I'm wondering about the forensic remedies available to companies like Vemics. Is it really impossible to track these spammers down? If you have more info about these scams, please email me at epicenter@mindspring.com.

Annoying Afternoon

On Friday's I work 1-8pm, today I had a couple of things to do so I left the house around 10:30. First thing to take care of: car registration. I paid it online on 11/7, still hadn't received the new tags in the mail. So I stopped in The Village, walked to the post office, no tags. Walked to the Village Office, which is also a State DMV office (I had forgotten that: even though I'd gotten my driver's license there last year, it never occurred to me to pay for my registration there). I sat there for over half an hour, at least the slush that my shoes tracked in had full time to melt. Finally I get waited upon, turns out they couldn't deliver it because I had our street address without the additional -XXXX on the zip code to point them directly to our PO Box.

*sigh* A post card saying that the tags could not be delivered would have been nice. And I have no clue why the post office couldn't put it in our box, they put stuff in it all the time that only has our street address.

Now here's the really cool part -- they were able to print my registration INCLUDING the sticker right in front of me! I walked out with my freshly-printed registration and sticker in hand, only to see a Sysco food deliver truck parked in the street. An ominous feeling developed as I realized it was directly behind my car.

Yep, not enough room for me to back out. I might have been able to drive up onto the sidewalk and then onto the street, but I'm usually not quite that much of an asshole. I happen to catch the deliveryman coming out, he's got at least another ten minutes, so I decide that walking over to Jamocha Bean and having lunch is better than standing there being pissed off for an unknown amount of time.

Jamocha Bean is a superior coffee/sandwich shop, but it's also a bit pricey. I was planning on lunch in Alamogordo and working on some game/database work on my laptop, instead I read the latest issue of 2600 and paid $5 more for comestibles. *sigh* But I had a good time talking with the owner and a worker about restaurants in Alamogordo (basically there are no good ones, though Memories is decent) and sucked down lots of good iced lemonade.

Next stop: three miles down the mountain to our doggie doctor to pick up poodle oil, made from genuine poodles. Actually, it's fish oil that we give Celeste to allegedly help with her scratching. Russet told me to grab her bank card and hit the ATM for money for the oil, I had too much crap to schlep out to the car in 30 degree weather and I forgot it. Jane was gone when I arrived, but she has a sort of inner hallway where she can lock the door to the house but leave the door outside open, she leaves oil & meds (when needed) there for us when she's away. When I pulled up there was a gorgeous big black dog prancing about, very eager to please. I played with him a bit when I got out of my car as Jane's two dogs barked at me. I went into the hallway and started writing my check for the oil and the dogs came to the glass door to continue their barking. The funny part was that one of the dogs, the one that will NEVER stop barking, had one of those inverted cones on his neck.

My first thought was "I'm being barked at by a speaker cone."

Got the oil, played with the big black doggie a bit more, then started down the mountain again.


I've been planning on getting some thermal underwear for a while for use when standing on the catwalk in front of the telescope while my wife blasts the moon with Sagans* of photons, and I was quite surprised to find that Walmart didn't have them. I told Russet about this, she said I'd have to drive up to Ruidoso to find them, I made plans to check K-Mart and Penney's. Today I had about 30-40 minutes once I was in town before I needed to get to work, so I hit K-Mart. No dice, but there's a Big 5 Sporting Goods store across the street, so I gave them a shot. Got a pair of Columbia long johns along with a thingie to put around my neck that I can pull up and cover my nose and mouth with, so that should be good.


My main frustration was with the truck blocking my car, but what can you do. At least now I won't freeze my cajones off late Saturday night, assuming the weather permits the telescope to open. And I learned some things about hacking Sears and Pep Boys POS systems.


(* = 1 Sagan = Billions & Billions)

First thoughts/experience on The Filter

They've got a bit of a way to go. I have almost 6,600 songs in my iTunes library, most are my CDs but also include Russet's collection. I installed the software (the installation verification took longer than the download), registered, let it upload my library list, then told it to go for Dire Strait's So Far Away. Here's what it came up with:

So Far Away (Dire Straits/Brothers In Arms)
Vic And Ray (Mark Knopfler/Golden Heart)
Nothing But Time (Jackson Browne/Running On Empty)
Rain Is Falling (Electric Light Orchestra/Time)
Between Sun & Moon (Rush/Counterparts)
Breakfast in America (Supertramp/Breakfast in America)
The Best of Times (Styx/Greatest Hits)
Jezebel (10,000 Maniacs/Our Time in Eden)
Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Neil Young/Greatest Hits)
Mother's Daughter (Santana/Abraxas)
Bones (Joe Walsh/There Goes The Neighborhood)
Bitter Tears (INXS/X)
Fil de fer (Cirque du Soleil/Cirque du Soleil)
We Work The Black Seam (Sting/The Dream Of The Blue Turtles)
Day After Day (Pretenders/The Singles)

It also added Frank Zappa's Yellow Snow, I deleted it from the list.

I can't say that I'm too impressed. So Far Away is a low-key, bluesy song. I don't think anything else on that list is a very good companion for it. At least it had the sense to grab a Mark Knopfler song to go with it.

Next up: let's see what it does with the Devo Corporate Anthem! I'm hoping that some Emmerson, Lake & Palmer and some Kraftwerk will make the list.

Second thoughts/experience on The Filter

It's very buggy, but my laptop is also not very healthy at the moment, so that could be greatly affecting things.

Well, I got Kraftwerk, but I didn't get ELP. I find something interesting: in both lists it has chosen INXS, The Pretenders, and Rush. I only have one disc for the first two.

Devo Corporate Anthem (Devo/Greatest Misses)
No One Lives Forever (Oingo Boingo/Dead Man's Party)
She Blinded Me With Science (Thomas Dolby/The Golden Age Of Wireless)
Hiawatha (Laurie Anderson/Strange Angels)
Don't Look Back (Fine Young Cannibals/The Raw & The Cooked)
Message Of Love (Pretenders/The Singles)
Hear That Sound (INXS/X)
Remind Me To Smile (Gary Numan/The Collection)
Half The World (Rush/Test For Echo)
Jean Genie (David Bowie/ChangesBowie)
X-Offender (Blondie/Blondie 2)
Sweetest Perfection (Depeche Mode/Violator)
Thorn In My Side (Eurythmics/Revenge)
Promises In The Dark (Pat Benatar/Precious Time)
Ohm Sweet Ohm (Kraftwerk/Radio-Activity)
Yahoo! (Erasure/The Innocents)


Net test -- BEETHOVEN! Maybe also some Chopin. But I'll probably do that some other time, I've got to get some stuff done tonight.