Day: June 15, 2001

My Three Year Old Mystery Solved

For the last three years I’ve had a mysterious visitor to my web site whom I’ll call Chris (not his real name, but an alias he uses occasionally). Chris started posting to several of my web sites back when I was just using a simple scrolling CGI guestbook script, and posted vociferously when I was using the Ultimate Bulletin Board. When I switched to Conversant he disappeared for awhile, but after several months he was back.

It wasn’t hard to tell that Chris was a troubled man. He posted in a very ranting style. He used to repeatedly post these very long arguments in favor of pedophilia on all of my sites. He constantly sent me e-mail — I probably get 25 to 30 e-mails from this person every day, all from free e-mail accounts like Hotmail. And he did it all from one or two public libraries, almost always in Ohio, but recently occasionally traveling to Canada. But I had no idea who this man really was or what his story was.

Until tonight. Somebody sent me an e-mail out of the blue a couple hours ago saying he had a way to get Chris to stop e-mailing me. I said that was great, but did he know anything about Chris because I’ve been wondering what his deal was for three years. And then he told me everything I was curious about and more.

Except, of course, it was kind of a let down finally learning the truth about my mystery guest. The person who e-mailed me knew his real name and met him in the early 1980s when he seemed like a pretty normal person, even if a barely employable one with few future employment prospects. Somewhere along the line, though, something snapped. I heard about the friend of my correspondents who had to get a restraining order against Chris, and about how with no employment prospects, Chris apparently sits around public libraries all day.

Like me, the person who e-mailed is very angry at Chris but at the same time can’t help but feel sorry for such a troubled individual. Its obvious that Chris is very intelligent, but very, very unbalanced.

Unfortunately my e-mail correspondent seems prepared to take a course of action that’s probably not very safe — a personal confrontation. Like I said Chris always posts from one of two libraries, with 90 percent of his posts coming from what are clearly a bank of public terminals on a specific floor of a university library. He’ll probably be there tonight e-mailing and posting his rants.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to confront Chris, so I hope this person knows what he’s doing.

Ego Trippin’

I love it when people send me e-mail like this, which kind of reminds me why I spend all my time working on my web site in the first place,

We would like to provide a link on our site to yours. This link would be on our home page as we feel your site is the best we have ever seen for factual information and analysis.

A few months ago an executive at a big company sent me an e-mail complimenting me on the same site and saying how helpful it had been.

At least it helps offset the hate mail (though if you ask my wife, she thinks I get off on the hate mail even more than the compliments, which is true sometimes).

I’ll Miss Salon, But as for David Talbot: Good Riddance

With Automatic Media apparently all but dead, Salon.Com is the next major content site that is teeting on the edge of self-destruction. I have to confess that I’m a regular Salon reader, and while I’ll miss the site when it dies (and it is going to die), I’ve only got two words for David Talbot: good riddance.

A Wired story captures Talbot’s meglamaniacal hubris with a quote from Talbot saying, “The Salons of the world are saying the things that nobody else is saying. So if the Salons of the world disappear, woe to American democracy.”

Like the larger media outlets who are using the impending demise as Salon as proof that the Internet simply isn’t a viable media alternative, Talbot has never really understood the Internet. This is obvious from reading Salon — its simply an attempt at an online version of a magazine like The New Yorker. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t spending money at a stunning pace. This is a company that lost $8 million in the first half of its current fiscal year.

And the idea that Salon.Com is saying things that simply aren’t being said anywhere else is absurd. In fact the main reason that Salon is about to crash and burn is that its content is homogenized and designed to appeal to a broad range of people. Not necessarily a bad idea in principle, but in Salon’s case it very much as a lowest common denominator feel to it.

As Justin Raimondo put it in an anti-Salon rant back in March,

Talbot is furious. “Where are the independent news voices on the Internet?” he asks. “Where’s the great, flourishing media democracy?” An article by Paul Farhi in the American Journalism Review, breathlessly titled “Can Salon Make It?” is a sounding board for his self-pitying lament: “He clicks on his list of bookmarked sites, turning up, among others, CNN.com, Matt Drudge, Slate, NPR.org. ‘Most of these are extensions of bigger media organizations,’ he says somewhat dismissively, adding, ‘There’s got to be room for a few independent voices.'”
…

What really bothers Talbot is that there are, indeed, independent voices on the Internet — all of them on the Right. It’s no wonder his bookmarks are so, uh, boring — NPR.org? Slate? Zzzzzzzzzzzzz. But of course the only really interesting and successful sites all have a rightish tinge, and Talbot either doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know that a whole genre of online magazines and news organizations has grown up on the Internet. All have a mostly conservative or libertarian orientation: WorldNetDaily, CNS, Capitol Hill Blue, FreeRepublic.com, Newsmax, LewRockwell.com, and, yes, Antiwar.com, to name just a few. Joe Farah’s WND has a million-plus visitors on a daily basis, Free Republic has tens of thousands of registered users, and we ain’t doing so bad, either. But within the narrow confines of the world as seen through Talbot’s eyes, none of this matters, because his well-funded but ill-conceived venture is going down the tubes.

The one thing I disagree with Raimondo about is the claim that all of the interesting independent voices on the Internet are all on the Right. The real problem for Salon is that there are independent Internet sites on the liberal and Left spectrum that are both a) more interesting than Salon, and b) cover territory that Salon is apparently uninterested in.

If I want to read an independent liberal/Left view of the world, I turn to Independent Media Center, Common Dreams, or the always excellent Progressive Review.

In Talbot’s world, these sites simply don’t count because the total budget for each site is probably less than Talbot’s six figure salary.

‘Today the hammer comes down’

We’re moving out of our house in early August and into a slightly nicer house (smaller, but better maintained) about 5 or 6 blocks away from where we live now. One of the main reasons for moving is to get away from our neighbors. Among the biggest troublemakers are the college students who live in a small apartment complex behind us.

It is bad enough that they begin partying on Wednesday’s, but lately they’ve been setting off firecrackers as well. We usually call the police, but noise violations are hardly high on their priority list.

Today I called the manager of the apartment complex to complain. He was extremely receptive to my tale of woe, especially how described observing drunken college students lighting fireworks on their wooden balcony. He told me that he’d take care of it, saying that he’d given them warnings about the fireworks, but “today, the hammer comes down.”

Excellent.

Atheros Communications

I’d never heard of Atheros Communications until running across a brief but intriguing mention in the July issue of Wired.

Atheros has apparently beaten everyone to market with the first 802.11a chip, which will go into mass production sometime this summer. Whereas 802.11b operates on the 2 ghz range, 802.11a is designed for the 5ghz range (which like 900mhz and 2 ghz doesn’t require a license) and achieves potential throughputs of up to 72Mbps, although the current IEEE standards limit the maximum potential throughput to “just” 54Mbps.

Atheros has a press release explaining the technology. Given how long it took 802.11b to begin showing up at the consumer level in volume, this will probably take 3 to 5 years to become affordable for casual users, but is nice to see where these things are headed.

There are already 802.11b cards showing up that add proprietary features to speed things like streaming DVD video over a wireless LAN. Imagine what could be done with five times that bandwidth.

South Africa Cholera Outbreak Kills More than 200

An outbreak of cholera that began 10 months ago in South Africa has so far killed more than 200 people and infected more than 100,000.

The outbreak occurred in the eastern part of South Africa among a rural population that relies on rivers and streams for their water, since tap water and toilet facilities are nonexistent from decades of neglect by the former apartheid government.

Source:

Death toll from cholera outbreak in South Africa tops 200. Agence France-Presse, June 4, 2001.