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Last night I saw Tweeg play live at Webster University. He was travelling across the country, and has a friend here, and they decided to play a set together.

What the music consists of is a Mac G3, a microphone, a small mixer, and custom software developed by Jim (Tweeg). Kate sings, or just makes sounds into the mic, smacking sounds, slurping, hooting, etc. Jim’s software samples the sounds into buffers, where he grabs snippets, sends them into delay loops and effects loops, and makes music out of it.

At first you just hear Kate, making soft single notes, and then you start to hear things she had already sung, and then sounds that you could scarcely imagine actually originated in her voice (though they did), until a pulsing soundfield emerges, haunting and hypnotizing. I bought his CD, and chatted with him quite a bit during the little intermission. It was a very intimate little performance, as there were only about 12-15 people there in the small recital hall, so everyone was close enough to see and hear everything. A very nice little performance indeed.

The sticker is the most time-honored method of dispensing wisdom and satire in small, bite sized chunks. Stickers can be put anywhere, in a minimum of time. While still technically vandalism, they aren’t as considered as bad as paint. If you have a pocket full of stickers, you are a lot less suspicious than a pocket full of spraypaint cans.

Some stickers mimic or blend into existing signage, disrupting people’s train of thought for a long time. Their lack of obvious features makes them hard to notice for the sticker cleaning establishment, but their presence is noticed by the thousands of everyday onlookers who read the sign. One prominent example is the “Driving” sticker, that is bright red, and placed under the word “STOP” on stop signs. The new sign reads, “STOP DRIVING!” with a subtle subscript “Walk, bike, use public transportation!” Some dilligent soul has utterly plastered my area of town in these stickers, hitting just about every stop sign between me and the Medical school. I get a grin whenever I see one.

In a similar act, Subvert has designed THIS sticker, which is one of the most clever I’ve seen in a long time. Its subtle, it mimics existing gas station signage, and it gets right to the point. Plus, the designer is selling them at cost (actually, at a defecit to himself, because of the time he has spent dealing with it). He is taking pre-orders at the moment, 10 stickers for 3 bucks. I bought 30.

Remember, they are still on ‘pre-order’ while he waits for the printing company to finish, but he seems like a nice legit fellow with a good cause, so I trusted him with my 9 bucks. I’ll be carrying these little buddies around with me for awhile!

If you know what a PGP public key is, then scroll down to the bottom of the page, grab it, import it, and lets rock and roll.

If you don’t know what a public key is, then read on.

When you send a letter to your friend, you sign the bottom of it so that they know that
it was you who wrote the letter. This system works because it is easy to tell if an envelope
has been tampered with, and its easy to recognize your friend’s signature. But with email, things
are more difficult. Email is easy to intercept. It is easy to forge. My name typed in letters is
not any different whether I typed it, or whether someone else typed it. So how are you to know that
any email you got from me actually came from me? How can you tell if it was intercepted and changed
on the way? The way is through a digital signature.

In the computer world, text being sent over the internet can either be ‘cleartext’ or ‘ciphertext’.
Cleartext means that there is no encryption. Anyone sniffing ports on the internet can read the
contents of the text. Many things are sent cleartext that you may not be aware of. Your email reading
software probably sends a cleartext password. The programs FTP and Telnet both send all information,
including account passwords, in cleartext. This is clearly (no pun intended) a security issue. Ciphertext
on the other hand, is text that has been encrypted. Ciphertext can still be intercepted, but the
person intercepting it will have no way to read the contents, it will just be gibberish! This is our goal.

Using software like GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) and PGP (Pretty Good Privacy)
we create two special ‘keys’ for ourself. The generation of this key involves gathering lots of
random numbers, and making an encryption key. The key includes a passphrase, similar to a password,
but is usually several words, even an entire passage of text. One key is public, I give it out to
anyone I want to be able to send me encrypted messages, and anyone I want to be able to verify my
email’s are actually from me. That is the key you see below. The other key is private. I keep my
private key secure, and I use it to decrypt mail you send me using my public key, and I use it to
sign mail that you will verify with my public key.

If you have a public key, you should give it to me. Once we have each other’s public keys, you will
use your private key to encrypt your public key, and email it to me. I will encrypt my public key with
my private key, and email it to you. If the keys we exchanged over plaintext email were correct, then
the message will decrypt properly. If the public keys we exchanged earlier were intercepted, faked,
or simply entered incorrectly, then we will not be able to decrypt, and we will know to exchange a new
set of public keys. This is how we verify that we have the correct public key for each other.

Once we have each other’s public keys, then we can send both signed and encrypted mail back and forth.
If you have my public key, but I don’t have yours, then I can still send you signed mail, but not
encrypted mail. The best situation is an exchange of keys. When we have each other’s public key, then
I will compose an email message, encrypt it with your public key (which requires your private key and your passphrase to decrypt)
and I will sign it with my private key (which requires your copy of my public key to verify). Thus,
you know that the email came from me, and that it is unreadable by people of questionable scruples out
on the internet.

There are many mail readers that support PGP and GPG (the two are compatible for the most part). Using
these mail programs, it can be very simple to send and receive encrypted and signed emails. Failing that,
you can always write an email in a text program, and encrypt the text file directly with the GPG or PGP
software, and then paste the resultant gibberish into the email program. But that is a hassle.

On the email end, I use Apple’s Mail program, version 1.2 under Jaguar.
It does not have GPG support natively, but it does through a combination of two programs. First,
install MacGPG, an OS X port of GnuPG. It comes with
a few GUI helper applications for helping you manage your keys, encrypting files, etc. Then, install
GPGMail which is a plugin
for Mail.app that serves as a front-end to the GPG program. Follow the instructions in GPG to generate
a key pair (your public and private keys), and submit the public key to a keyserver. Keyservers maintain large
databases of current public keys. The GPG application will assist you in this. Then make your public
key available to people you communicate with. Put it in your email signature. Put a link in your signature
like I have done, etc. When you get a public key, send it to me, and we’ll exchange keys! Then our communication
will be secure.

There are many other email programs that support this in various ways. Eudora, Outlook, Entourage, Mozilla mail,
and others. I don’t have any personal experience setting it up for these programs, but the internet is
filled with resources on this type of setup. I will be happy to assist over email as well, if you don’t
know how to proceed, or get stuck somewhere along the line.

Below is my public key block. You can copy and paste this into your key managing program
to add me to your keyring.

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (Darwin)

	
mQGiBD2BOtIRBADsFWcH8c9BwFQ1zOv+kssoMlieMb8WypHi/rtjg5uldQ1J4oxw

uiFloxlOIzusNEyGeb46ufdg45LUMpzJUKb5YHfcYzTLxre3TLghuIMHQOkDEVA+

7xdqxy73yD20cCtIbdrDU1tkvKer1+Zs4ivZYKrem2Z+y4qIBjTrEvJtiwCgjkki

oPZiHbCYT5bFqbmeSB7TiGMEAOpzpPZuLhZd7Ly8a93ucGvno+9qN5GmsaYhTpD2

+Pa0NlGOBN/Jlk5kWDKxxNdbGGPnq8veGNY5cOJzAZDwWzh7NrsbOSuf8n1UL15k

ZLjySHeC8dppujHdPsI+bNq+a6yjSymJjK3JCgs5vPJXwv5SOqv8ZLfPs7OmbCh6

OuKoA/wJKjEqPH19S4yp3UVPdUL1Q3Zlrft7DZI2tDz0VCVFPX3KKpIeZxK6vCOe

XLJRPRw2WEd9hmSFrD/euYedDnWdp807+uc9PpS1u51H3jX6AIy55LeHBAkm85P7

6xPsZIQ7vAqmCkUajMWw6QlLUhXyuPclh/or5UBZ/UOdXZYBh7QiU2FtIExleSA8

bGV5QGNvd2JveXNvZmp1c3RpY2UuY29tPohaBBMRAgAaBQI9gTrSBQsHAwIBAxUC

AwMWAgECHgECF4AACgkQD5WlHx6gpx7SngCfdPneaQWyLxBJoGSsD/B5b8ygxR8A

nimCelfyNeiiup1q5NeVY94Q6irfuQENBD2BOukQBAC3WPL1sA77L7UF94xqWvfD

1ZWURRyc13bBd3JEvr1i8+MV72QzdwAlrlIb/C+91E08/nqdREsoVBCouwN0bHT0

5u+e1bM2nKQnUc4v3zz9S34vx9Zxo022hdKJDPGWBeCOkWIWE0RvA9nj3t6o+dWg

YGvoF5cDNJQ5qExmep9MVwAECwP/X82M9teU1V4+EMtdzDlt+e1wkQtPwed3VkBF

crRJ494dhS7ovCy7ruofTRvkRQRxezZNSrc4Q1w3P3AapXoDq1igibLyedVFCu3a

F2Q/FbM/4eeL5S+kKaIAMHspNbfIKWuVfbSoP4L/Mvw1tlGZOnSLCHJclcQjLeTM

ZjMYRN6IRgQYEQIABgUCPYE66QAKCRAPlaUfHqCnHiB4AJ9anfPzr9jPhxjWXuqU

0z3aeHKlSQCeNoUqhvATCvblub42PBYzHmpfPLk=

=JKJ4

-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Ok, so I’m officially boycotting Jim Beam brand bourbon.

Here is why.

For those who don’t want to read the article, in a nutshell, Jim Beam management is requiring all assembly line workers to urinate only while on assigned breaks. Urination breaks during the day that aren’t taken during their official breaktime leads to discipline, and 6 offenses results in a firing. People with medical conditions can appeal for more lenient policies, and women who are mensturating must apply for additional bathroom time with Human Resources.

Basically, it has totally dehumanized the employees, treating them at best like children who are in need of potty training, and at worst, like dogs who need to be housebroken. The company even advised the employees to practice peeing at certain times of the day on weekends, so they would be used to it at work.

Its this sort of denial of basic human need that is a serious problem in many of our work environments. Having women report in when they are mensturating? Since when is that your boss’s business?

The original reason given for the policy is that they were worried people were taking smoke breaks, and calling it bathroom breaks, but I think there are better solutions to this than denying everyone the right to urinate when they need too.

The factory has been cited by the Kentucky Labor Cabinet, but the factory is appealing the citation, claiming that the policy is fair and appropriate.

So, does anyone know of any good labor-friendly bourbons? I could sure go for some environmentally safe, recycled bottle, labor friendly bourbon right about now.
—Link from Mefi—

Its amazing how much emotion can be transmitted through words. They don’t even ‘exist’ really. They are just a figment, in this case, a figment of data on some computer far away, being beamed to you and displayed in front of you. One little switch of the magnetic poles of the Earth and it would all be gone.

I guess I periodically get what could only be described as ‘communication awe’. I get hit with the implications of communication, and how much I love it. Both the topics of communication, and the very act itself. When the first telephone was invented, the feeling must have been similar.

“Wow.”

I think of it now because I realize a limitation in the communication methods I commonly employ. I think there is definately something to being physically near someone, and being able to do some simple gesture, like pat them on the back, or give them a cheerful grin. Words take very well to the internet, but despite the efforts of instant messanging applications, emoticons really don’t do it for gesturing.

Anyway, I’m amazed at how much I can feel like I know someone, and empathize with them, but still not be able to laugh along side them, or pat them on the back and say, “Cheer up! Gimme a grin, cuz everything’s gonna be all right.” Anyway, whenever you feel alone, just imagine me doing those things with you, cause believe me, I would if I could.

Just now, while slicing some watermelon, I narrowly avoided pulling a Josh.

I love watermelon. I have a game that I play, where whenever I say the same word as someone else while speaking, I say “Jinx, you owe me a watermelon!” and then I pester them endlessly until they pay up. Thats how I get my watermelon.

Dustin, long time friend of mine, and I, used to play the game frequently, meaning there was regularly watermelon available. One time we went to the beach with some friends, and got very wet and sandy, and then ate a watermelon by bashing it open and eating out the insides with our bare hands. Not many foods you can do that with, especially if you are vegetarian like us.

I have gotten back on the Educational Wagon. I’ve enrolled for classes at Washington University at St. Louis and begin classes on Monday. Tonight was the new student orientation. The program I’m in is part of the Continuing Education department, which handles evening classes and whatnot. The program is very good, and you can get entire degrees (the same degree as dayschool, not a ‘dumbed down’ degree) taking only evening courses. It was a bit strange, because the program usually caters to older people who are getting back into school after a long hiatus. I had a few year hiatus, but I’m still a lot younger than most of these people.

Its refreshing to be almost in school again. A degree isn’t particularly important to me, what I am after is the intellectual discourse, and the continued learning. If you aren’t learning, you are stagnating. Learning doesn’t have to be done in a formal setting, like a university, but even just reading books, talking with people, getting out there and doing things you haven’t done before, is terribly important.

This semester I will be taking Applied Statistics and Programming in C as my first two courses. So in a few weeks I’ll be helping write the next version of Linux, right? No? Oh… Well maybe I’ll write one of those “Hello world!” programs that everyone writes as their first program. That will be neat.

Work has been crazy busy. A thousand people at the desk. A million problems. And tape after tape of genital exams. Thats what you get for working in a Medical Library. Someone comes and asks you to dub all these tapes, and invariably, half of them are involving genital tumors or something equally horrific. I mean, its good that they are educating themselves on genital tumors, because in case I get one, I want an educated doctor, but man, it sure gets tiring dubbing them all the time.

Its also frustrating when our university’s webmail system requires IE 5.5 on Windows ONLY, and streams of people pour in wondering why it doesn’t work. I wish I could help them. Lotus Notes sucks.

The only thing I’ve thought about for the last several hours is getting Jaguar properly installed on my computer. In fact, thats about all I’ve thought about today. I woke up, drove to the FedEx location, and picked up my copy.

From the beginning, the installation wasn’t working. After much headache, it was determined to be the G4 upgrade processor. Went back to the stock processor, and installed Jaguar, then put the G4 back in. Ok, all’s good now.

I have to upgrade/reinstall a lot of software, but everything seems to be going smoothly. I’m very happy with the upgrade. Things are much snappier, and iChat is a cool function. In case you are wondering, my AIM id is ‘phidauex’. Feel free to add me to your buddy list!

Tonight I will be seeing the opera Tosca, and eating Indian food. Summarily, I will not have an opportunity to pick up my copy of Jaguar until tommorow. I am sorely dissappointed, but it means that I’ll be able to enjoy the opera without constant thoughts about the CDs lying at home.

Tommorow can be a fun filled day of Jaguar installing. Billy just got a 3-1/2” drive case with Firewire, USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 jacks on it! He is putting a 60gb harddrive in it. Its nice, because it will work on just about any computer built in the last 5 years. Firewire is the fastest, with USB 2.0 a close second, and USB 1.1 support for legacy devices. Very nice.

Ha ha! My email being down caused me to miss the email from Apple with the tracking number for my copy of Jaguar, but a quick check at the Apple store shows that not only did Jaguar ship, but they tried to deliver it today! I wasn’t home, but fortunately I can get home, and drive to the FedEx place to get it. That means that I got Jaguar a day early! I’m one lucky SOB!

My local Apple store, The Mac Store is going to be open from 10:30pm to midnight on the 24th, and while I wasn’t going to buy my copy then (they don’t honor educational discounts on software), I might go anyway, just for the heck of it. Thats just the kind of guy I am.

As you may have noticed, this site, and Cowboys of Justice were both down for a few days. That crippled anyone who was using Cowboy mail, and it hampered my ability to post here.

Then, everything came back up. But with one little problem. Cowboys of Justice was now displaying a SPAM advertisement!! Some folks advertising a book intended to teach you how to make millions with email marketing campaigns were now using my domain! I was pissed. A few bitter emails and phone calls later, Sterlet.net found the problem, and fixed it. Wasn’t anything malicious, just a broken IP address when they made some unscheduled server updates (which is why the server went down to begin with).

Then, the SQL database that drives this very site was broken. Thats no good! Finally they ironed that out too, some Perl modules were missing.

But now, the biggest and most annoying problem, is that all the cowboy mail users have lost all their email. The accounts are active again, but with everything gone. I’m terribly sorry people. I’m going to start poking my head around for a new hosting provider, but that will probably be awhile.

Before St. Louis, I’ve never lived in a place with cicadas. They make this LOUD chirping noise from their homes high in the trees. At dusk, it gets to the point where you have to shout to be heard by people over the din of these tiny insects.

My only previous exposure to them was through Anime. In Japan, these bugs are very common, and hence a ubiquious sound. Nearly all anime has the sounds of cicadas, especially at some tense moment where everything else is silent. So now, whenever I hear the cicadas outside, I get this strange feeling that something terrible is going to happen, like all the telephone poles will start wobbling because some huge monster is attacking the city, and a mysterious man in a cloak is going to have to pilot a giant robot in order to destroy it.

It certainly makes the neighborhood a lot more interesting.

Dennis and I made this into a T-shirt using inkjet printable T-shirt transfer paper. Its approriate, because, well, girls who wear glasses rock.
——
UPDATE: This shirt is now available at my little CafePress Store! Its 14.99$, and I’ve added no markup, so I don’t get squat if you buy it. But its a fun way to get custom shirts!

Today I registered what is about my favorite silly little OS X app ever. Desktastic by Panic Software is a program that lets you draw on your desktop. It presents a fully transparent whiteboard, that can either be behind your windows, or on top of them, and that lets you doodle. It has very basic controls, color, stroke thickness, eraser, a stamper for icon ‘stamping’, etc. Its a great activity for when I’m waiting for a download to finish up, or am just a bit bored. They have a good demo version, and the software is only 8.95$ to register. The only thing I wish it had was better integration with graphics tablets. I sent them an email suggesting it though. I don’t know if they’ll bother, since its only a 9$ app, but its always good to make suggestions.

I was informed about the software by Josh’s post. As he says, “I have been playing with the app I didn’t know I always wanted.”