It's Just this Little Chromium Switch Here

I moved to Austin sixteen years ago because of Jesse "Guitar" Taylor. Jesse passed away this week.

When people ask how I came to Austin, I usually explain how back then most engineering computing was done on expensive special purpose workstations. I, instead, was doing my work on low-cost PCs running Unix. I forsaw those applications moving from the engineering workstation to commodity PCs, and I had valuable expertise in that area. I saw an opportunity to start a consulting business, and Austin's strong technology sector made it seem like a good place to hang my shingle.

(Turns out I was half right about my technology forcast. Those applications did move to PCs, but they ran Windows, not Unix. PC-based Unix ended up a niche for vertical multi-user applications.)

That story is totally true, but it isn't the full picture.

Back around 1988, I was living in Dallas. I joined some friends for a weekend trip to Austin—my first time there. We visited Sixth Street our first night in town. My friend, a living room guitar player, took us out to hear some music.

My memory of that night was of hearing some of the most smoldering guitar playing I'd ever heard in my life. I learned later that the guitarist's name was Jesse Taylor.

It was such an amazing, electric night. Yet, the people around me treated it as just another night in town. I knew then that Austin was the place I needed to be. So when the opportunity arose, I packed my bags and headed here.

Much of what I loved so much about Austin back then is gone. I do miss Liberty Lunch.

But there is still a lot to like about this town. I'm glad I'm still here. And I've got Jesse Taylor to thank for that.

The Bob Gammage for Governor campaign has started spamming me. Sorry, Bob, I vote for politicians that want to end spam, not ones who do it.

Political spam is ugly and annoying, but it's not illegal. That's because the politicans exempt themselves whenever they write laws to outlaw spam. Nonetheless, just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right. Spam is abusive and politicians shouldn't do it.

The exemption for politicians isn't necessarily a bad thing. Political speech deserves a much higher level of first amendment protection than commercial speech. Spam laws tend to focus on just the latter. That may be one reason why they've survived all court challenges to date. But it does create a huge loophole for sleazy campaigns to crawl through.

The Gammage campaign spam is some of the worst I've seen. First, the periodic mailings are annoying, ankle-biting screeds that just attack his primary opponent. Worst of all, there is no way to stop them. The campaign does not put an "opt out" link in the emails. If you try to respond to the email to ask them to stop, your message just bounces. This goes beyond annoying into the realm of incompetent, which is not a quality I want in my Governor. (By the way, I hadn't a position of any kind in this race until Gammage started spamming me.)

The reason why politicians spam is that it's a cheap and easy way to reach people. Traditional mechanisms, such as covering a neighborhood in door hangers, take significant money, effort, and volunteers. Those factors are built-in inhibitors: there is only so much a campaign can do, and they have to work hard to make sure what they do is most effective. Spam, on the other hand, requires few of these resources, so candidates can, if allowed, send you as much crap as they want.

The best way to end spam is to make it ineffective, so here is my plan: from now on whenever a politician spams me I will make a nominal donation to their opponent. If enough people do this then politicians would be harmed more than they are helped by campaign spam. Then maybe they will stop. Or, at least, maybe we'll elect fewer spammers to office.

My vinyl LPs—all 156 of them—were packed for over a decade. I unpacked them last year, when I moved in with my girlfriend. I had grand plans of setting up the turntable and ripping all my albums to digital files.

Ha! That was wishful thinking. I've come to realize that's just not going to happen.

I'm teaching myself the Ruby programming language this weekend. I came across a Linux Journal column that discussed learning Python using the Coconuts Problem. (It has to do with dividing a pile of coconuts among desert island castaways, and calculating the initial size of the pile. The programming challenge is to develop a brute force solution to the problem.)