Meme trace: kmusser

What Privileges Do You Have?, based on an exercise about class and privilege developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

Bold the true statements.

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college

Interestingly, most of this was around the time I entered elementary school. My father had previously started college right out of highschool but dropped out after a year or so.


5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
9. Were read children's books by a parent

During my childhood my family often didn't have a lot of money (ie, times below the poverty line), but my parent's always valued education, reading, intellectualism a great deal. We used our local library heavily. By the time I was in high school we were in the same economic bracket as my high school teachers by and large.

10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18<
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs

I'm not exactly sure what "lessons" are. I mean, one could say school is a set of lessons, but obviously that's not what they mean. And if they meant "college courses" you'd think they'd say. Is this some class-specific term or something? I didn't have a credit card till my 20s. I didn't go to college so I can't really pay those parts, though I know my parents would have helped as much as they were able with paying for my college costs had I gone.

16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels

Very rarely did we stay at a hotel on a vacation... typically one night out of a two or three week vacation. The closest I ever came to a traditional summer camp was something my elementary school did in sixth grade. I did, however, go to much geekier summer camps. (ie, computer camp, space academy)

20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them

I was an only child so hand-me-downs weren't an option. As for buying second-hand, I don't know if that ever happened. The clothing I remember being purchased was from department stores.

22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
23. You and your family lived in a single family house
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
25. You had your own room as a child.

Everything here has caveats. My parents owned the first house I lived in (they built it themselves). But then, we didn't have electrical power or a phone for many years and never had running water or flush toilets. At times my family lived in a single family house, other times we had an apartment in an apartment complex. I had my own room (again, only child), though in our first house we didn't have any doors on any of the rooms so I'm not sure how much that counts. There was original art, but, I think, not of the kind this is asking about. There was some from sources I'm not too clear on, but not, I think, anything of great value. More of the craft fair variety.

Home ownership is a clearly class divide in areas around cities, but in very rural areas (ie backwoods Maine) I don't believe it's much of one. Home ownership is more common if only because there's hardly anyone to rent from.

26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
27. Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
28. Had your own TV in your room in High School
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16

I didn't have a phone in my room, but I did have my own phone line. It was hooked up to the family computer.

31. Went on a cruise with your family
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.

Museums and art galleries were a standard part of family vacations.

34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

Kind of... I was never aware of dollar amounts, but then, my parent's never discussed finances with me while I was a child. I do recall being one of those homes where you wore a sweater in the winter. I didn't learn just how tight finances had been until I was an adult.

My advantages seem to have come mostly from what things my parent's valued rather then anything material. That said, by the time I'd reached adulthood my parent's had achieved a good deal of material success, and that's undoubtedly helped me as an adult. One of these days I'll have to talk to them about how they got their values.

Let us consider the following code to loop over the keys from a dictionary in Python:

  for key in a_dict.keys():

This would be nearly the same in Perl:

  for my $key in (keys %a_dict) {

And Perl 6*:

  for %a_dict.k -> my $key {

But now you say: I want to have in a sorted rather then arbitrary order!

In Python you have to allocate a temporary variable, sort it, then loop over the result:

  the_keys = a_dict.keys()
  the_keys.sort()
  for key in the_keys:

Where as Perl takes a functional approach that is, in my opinion, a lot clearer:

  for my $key in (sort keys %a_dict) {

And Perl 6*:

  for sort %a_dict.k -> my $key {

* I vaguely recall something about the temporary variables used in loops not requiring an explicit "my" but I can't seem to find something saying that explicitly now.

[Edit] So as many people pointed out to me, this was fixed for Python as of 2.4 (my laptop and work machines all use 2.3) with: for key in sorted(a_dict.keys()): What's more, the .keys() is assumed so you can actually just do for key in a_dict: or for key in sorted(a_dict):

Programming well is act of balance between arrogance and humility. If tilt too far toward one you'll fall and your creations will crumble to dust, too far to the other and you won't do anything at all.

So imomus posted a review of Pan's Labyrinth. I didn't come out of feeling as actively negative about the movie, but that was in large part because I came out feeling stunned by it's brutality. As he says, it truly brutalizes its audience. It was a movie that I would have been happier not having seen.

I'm pleased to say my personal RSS aggregator is working again, so I'm actually reading blogs again for the first time in months. Stupid POE::Component::Client::HTTP doesn't allow you to repost HTTP::Requests the way LWP does. This caused many problems for me.

For some reason, I just really like "postvernal" in a rhyme:

How often, in months postvernal,
When bright and sparkling glowed the sky
Above the Neva's waves nocturnal,
We watched its glassy waters try
But fail to give the moon's reflection,
And gushing to our recollection
Came summer tales from yesteryear,
Along with ancient loves so dear
That, swooning o'er the night's sweet breathing,
We drank in silence on a spree,
Just like some sleepy refugee
From jail awak'ning to a seething
Green jungle scene, and thus through dreams
We two reswam our lives' first streams.

Visited my parent's this past weekend to celebrate my birthday. Got a ride from kyroraz. On the way up we met jtroutman in Portland for Sushi— it was good, though the restaurant was a little strange. The decor was very nice, very classy, all blacks and dark reds. But at 11 they turned on a disco ball and started projecting music videos on the wall... seriously. Anyway, it was good to visit with jtroutman again, it's been too long.

Saturday my family and I all went to Communicating Doors at the Penobscot Theatre. This is what they say about it:

This intricate, time-traveling, comic thriller by the British master of farcical comedy delighted London and New York audiences. A London sex specialist from the future stumbles into a murder plot that sends her, compliments of a unique set of hotel doors, traveling back in time. She and two women who were murdered in 1998 and 1978 race back and forth in time trying to rewrite history and prevent their own violent ends. "A real knockout.... A vastly entertaining blend of the West End drawing room thriller with one of Priestley's old time plays, where characters go whirling throughout time. Of course, Ayckbourn has added innumerable piquant and bizarre details of his own... This is a show to see." N.Y. Post.

It was entertaining if not a perfect piece as I felt its sexual politics left something to be desired. (For instance, I found the "omg, a dominatrix! how risque, *wink* *wink* oh, she's actually submissive before a truely dominant man" bits a little offensive in a variety of ways, not the least of which, the common ignorance and objectification of the exotic kind of way.) Putting that aside, I thought it was a fine play and an excellent production. It's worth seeing.

Later that evening we watched This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which is all about the MPAA ratings process and their secret board of raters. Worth seeing... it was entertaining and very interesting.

... when I read a post and go "hmm, I wonder what people had to say about this" or "oh, I've gotta make a comment on this" and click through to find that it no longer exists. The post has been erased from history (but not from my news reader). And then I feel kind of guilty about having read it, since clearly the author changed their mind about having had it public in the first place...

(And somehow it's always one of two or three people... what is it with you and your post-and-delete habits?)

FirstLife the 3d analog world.

I just wish I could read the FAQ... I wanna know "Why can't I build a dirigible with my mind?"

Don't believe anything meerkitty says. Especially if it has to do with furries. She's obsessed and is now randomly harrassing people on IM.

I think it says something about me that I never believed in Santa as a child. My parents relate to me a story of when I was about four and some adult was asking me if I was excited about Santa coming and afterward I whispered to them incredulously, "I think they really believe." I've always been both skeptical and credulous... that is, it basically never occurs to me that someone might be lying to me, but at the same time I'm quick to believe that they might be lying to themselves (or just wrong).

As a child Santa was just another imagination game. I played a lot of imagination games but I didn't have any trouble telling them apart from reality. (I had a very vivid imagination as a child and could place almost anything I wanted directly into my experience... something that's a lot harder for me to do as an adult. I think it takes practice, really, and it isn't something we practice when we stop playing in the way children play. To the parents out there: When you play with your kids, is this something you relearn, or is what you do but a poor imitation of what your children do?)

In the last seven days, SpamAssassin has placed 2975 messages in my personal spam folder. There was a definite upsurge in spam volume starting in October. As such, I've added additional filters to my mail server. Here are yesterday's stats:

First, I block anyone coming to me from an IP on a wide variety of black lists:

   2027 Client host rejected: On DNSBL cbl.abuseat.org
     72 Client host rejected: On DNSBL list.dsbl.org
     38 Client host rejected: On DNSBL dnsbl.njabl.org
     15 Client host rejected: On DNSBL sbl.spamhaus.org
    541 Client host rejected: On DNSBL dnsbl.sorbs.net
      2 Client host rejected: On DNSBL multihop.dsbl.org
      3 Client host rejected: On DNSBL dnsbl.antispam.or.id
      0 Client host rejected: On DNSBL relays.ordb.org
      0 Client host rejected: On RHSBL rhsbl.antispam.or.id
      3 Client host rejected: On RHSBL ex.dnsbl.org

Previously the messages above would've been refused 'cause most of them are to addresses that don't exist on my system. Still, some get through:

    611 Recipient address rejected: Access denied

Do that three times and you get a 24 hour ban:

    399 Client host rejected: bounce

And I block anyone who has sent me spam in the last 24 hours:

     51 Client host rejected: spam

I've started blocking any message who's sender address's domain doesn't resolve:

    153 Sender address rejected: Domain not found

One attempt to relay through me... these probes are very rare now, showing just how rare open relays actually are now.

      1 Relay access denied

This one requires the most explanation, though I think it's had a real impact on my spam volume and server load. One of my users has all of his mail forwarded to a Yahoo mail account. Yahoo does something clever, sender address based bounce throttling. If a sender address has too many bounces then they start defering the messages. They'll let them through eventually, but that'll only happen if they aren't talking directly to a spammer (spammers don't defer and retry). So I look for these warnings in my logs, purge the queue entries if they're still active and add them to one of my 24 hour black lists. I'm gonna start doing what Yahoo does soon, myself. (The lists are pretty small, considering the number of blocks. I currently have 4 IPs listed and 22 email addresses. All of these blocks came from the email address blocking.)

    209 Sender address rejected: Yahoo

Of the messages that made it through the above filters, I run some of them through SpamAssassin:

    107 Identified as Ham
    472 Identified as Spam

The rest are being forwarded to remote systems, which hopefully have spam filtering of their own:

    836 Unfiltered

These have been clogging up my tabs for a while now so I figured it was time to post them. Mostly collected from Wonderland.

( Big images here... )

A bacon moment for kyroraz...
prog recently linked to Slashfood saying it was like Slashdot except it didn't have headlines that made him want to throw his monitor out his window. It did, however, have headlines that made me wish I hadn't looked at it.

And so the bacon:

• Bacon Martini
• Bacon Caramel
• Bacon Cereal
• Bacon Sandwich (not just a little bacon though)
• Bacon Bak'nlava
• Bacon Ice Cream

All the bacon, however, is cooked.

This post to We Make Money Not Art talking about a documentary on Hikikomori. They remind me a great deal of Asimov's Solarians, with their physical isolation and electronically mediated communication.

After some investigation I found a DSL user was spidering my anime review site and wasn't thottling back at all, really. I added their IP to my iptables blackhole and the problems magically went away.
The munin mysql and load average graphs sum it up pretty well.

High on my pet peeve list has got to be bad science reporting. And nearly nothing is as poorly reported as "sex differences". Lots of astounding claims are made and by and large there is no science to back them up. Where there is science, the reporting seems to consistently view small percentage differences in mean as being so important as to inform policy debate. Today's annoyance:

Recently Dr. Moira Gunn of Tech Nation* did an interview with the author of The Female Brain. This book claims to summarize the differences between male and female brains. One of it's much touted statistics is that "men have sexual thoughts once every 52 seconds" and "women have sexual thoughts once a day". Mark Liberman of the Language Log recently took this apart by actually looking at the cited sources-- none of them make this claim. The book seems to be making up numbers from whole cloth. Indeed, in the Language Log post Mark finds lots of things that supposedly happen every 52 seconds. (And even more that happen every 53.)

* I generally enjoy Tech Nation a great deal but whenever they cover sex and gender they come off as ill-informed, backward and non-scientific to me. The impression I get from these interviews is almost one of "hey, obviously my and my friend's experiences are representative, right?"

Following kyroraz's lead:
( My Interests Collage )