Today, I'm going to answer some of the fan mail I receive for this site that has been backing up. I figure, why write something to one person when you can write it to everyone at once? Cuts some effort out of the repetition. But I get so many fan mails (1,500 in the last ten days!) that I can really only answer a sampling, and to keep things short, I can only really respond to the titles. Here we go:

• gain your financial freedom today: Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose... and as I'm unemployed, I don't think I can get much more free.
• To the 10 of you who said "Hello!", I say, "Hello!" to you, too. But would you please take your five viruses back?
• deceptive antaeus: Interesting vocabulary you have there; learning about Antaeus was fun, but I don't really think he was deceptive. Could you provide a reference for that, preferably in the original Greek?
• Did you know that 2/3's of your website visitors leave without engaging you?: My wife thinks that 1/3 is about 1/3 too many... and what do you do with several hundred engagement rings, anyhow? I'm in contact with Fox for a reality show based on this.
• do you like killing yourself?: Do you really think this is an appropriate way to open a conversation about Viagra? Surely something a little more tasteful would be in order. Why not post something to your blog and send me a link?
• Dreamweaver MX 2004 clearance yapping: Sorry, I prefer the non-yapping software. Even my wife, the zoologist, wasn't a big fan of Dogz.
• For info@jerf.org! URGENT!: No no, hun, that's the subject line.
• Gotham Alerts: Monthly stock tips: I prefer my stock tips to come from Metropolis; Superman can travel through time, which is valuable for a stock broker.
• Have a nice day! //instruction to me; and, therefore, it would me ungrateful in: Comments don't work in SMTP, so your social faux pas has not gone un-noticed. Please consider your impolite self blacklisted.
• i'm bored with this life: Kill yourself.
• I just need a friend: Look in your private mail; I've sent you the email address of the previous emailer.
• I love you too... ive been waiting for this to happen degenerate: I love it when you insult me.
• Jerf cream puffs gonad around 5: Look, I'll pay anything for those tapes, but my replies keep bouncing! I need a real email address!
• Jerf, how do they f@k.k with snakes?: I keep trying to send you a picture but your ISP is rejecting the email as obscene. Sorry.
• Microsoft security training. Your pace. Your schedule.: Thank you for this informative email, but it was horribly overblown. You don't need twenty-one kilobytes to say, "Don't".
• pheobe: Best Friend.
• real vi*agra protest: I've sent you the email of the "killing yourself" guy above, he's got some info you need.
• Receive big discounts on MS Win 2000, XP, Office, Adobe, Corel software from Dennis's Softwrae Store: I got your discount right here.
• scam We guarentee you're be blown away by the results! bedlam: Where can I get a copy of your honest email program? And would it be OK to distribute it freely to the rest of my fans?
• Show me some love: I have sent you my snake f@k.k pictures.
• slavery: is bad, mm'kay?
• There's no place like hofq: Where?
• What makes a sock a diabetic sock: I'm going to take a shot and guess, diabetes?
• When imaginations become real: ... you have an off-the-shelf Star Trek episode.
• Your Account #%RND_DIGIT[15-20] has been charged: Whether you spell it string& replace, "".replace, or this god-awful monstrosity, it's like the second freakin' thing anyone ever learns to do in a programming language. Here, let me write it for you in Python:

  
  import random
  def accountreplace(s):
      account = ''.join([str(random.randint(0,9)) 
                          for x in range(random.randint(15,20))])
      return s.replace("#%RND_DIGIT[15-20]", account)
  
  

  I've seen this sort of stupidity from you several times. Don't you think you should stop embarassing yourself?
• hitler: And with that invokation of Godwin's Law, that ends this post.

Frontier will apparently be open source in the near future. I've actually spent a significant time with the product, and I have an interesting perspective on this issue as I have a project started in no small part because of the closed nature of the Frontier code. (A project, I might add, that I really, really, really wish I could get back to, but a guy's gotta eat.)

So I ask myself, as someone who might be interested in developing the product, what does an Open Source Frontier bring to the table?

In response to Amritas post on scientific theories, referenced in this Den Beste post, after thinking about it I realized I would go one step further. Amritas quotes Stanley Starosta:

The easiest way to construct a powerful theory is simply to state that everything is possible, and the result, mirabile dictu, will be a theory which can never be disproved. If I have a theory of gravity which states that a falling object can fall in any direction, who can prove me wrong? Any way it falls will be OK with my theory, and falling down instead of up will just be a special instance of the range of phenomena allowed by my theory.

Google has been increasingly spotty for me the past few days, and now I can't get through to it at all. It's been nearly a week since I could get through to Google Groups (where I'm trying to retreive a post I made to comp.lang.python with some code in it a while back), and the main search engine has been coming and going for a while. Now I can't even get to the home page at all.

A fellow weblogger recently challenged me in a series of emails we were sending to defend my thesis that the news is leftward biased. It was a fair question, and I am still content with the answer I sent him: Yes, I believe the news is left-biased right now, but it is only partially intentional. I thought it would be worth expanding on that point in a 'blog post.

Since "Left" and "Right" need to be defined nearly every time you use them, for this post I am using the broadest and most general definition of "Left" and "Right" that we are used to. Left: Liberal, welfare, no war, etc. Right: Conservative, much less social spending, war in Iraq. A nebulous concept of "Left" to match the nebulous concept of "media".

This is a whimsy post. See this slashdot post for why, and be sure to read the whole story.

Den Beste has a post up I have to point to, because as near as I can tell without somehow reaching into his mind, we share to a high degree the rare form of thinking he refers to.

It is peculiarly well-suited to software engineering (which I believe he has done some of, though I can't find a link quickly). You can never, ever, ever quash all bugs in advance, but this sort of thinking allows you to spot the fundamental architectural failings far enough in advance to be able to do something about it, and those are the hardest bugs to fix after the fact. Many is the time I would appear to be zoning out, or drawing random, barely-labelled squiggles on paper, and then pop out with something very near The Answer.

I didn't see all of the first part, so we confine this to the second part.

5. Oh, the clichés were out in full force today, but I think I'm going to pick the two contradictory clichés thrust together by the same character, no less: First, the President says, in response to an aide saying "Sir, there are some things we just must accept we have no control over.", "I don't accept that!". Later, the President gives us a nice stereotypical "This is Mother Earth and she shall do to us as she pleases" speech, with no indication that this is the result of learning or a new-found respect or anything... he's just preaching. (Hollywood, considering you just fell into the ocean, I don't think you're in a position to be preaching.)

This is not news.

If you want to see some a crappy movie with outstanding special effects, set your TiVo for NBC at 9:02p.m. tommorow. Then you can catch 10.5, a movie about California falling into the ocean. No, I'm not kidding, somebody actually bought that line of tripe.

But do not, under any circumstances, watch it live. The camera operators are drunk and the director wouldn't know subtlety if it, err, politely coughed in front of him. (Somehow, "subtlety" doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would bite someone in the bum...) What skill the actors have is squandered in pursuit of cheap schmaltz. It would have to stretch itself to reach merely "trite and formulaic".