Looking out my window

Trying to erase from my memory the sounds of today.

Filling the stairwell of my apartment building, Annie cried "DON'T DIE ON ME I NEED YOU OH NO!"

Annie's father died today.

While some of us puttered around doing nothing, thinking we were doing something, the old man on the third floor dropped dead of a heart attack.

The fire trucks and ambulances appeared outside my window. The firefighters and medics filed in to the building. I opened the front door of my apartment to see a grim parade of uniformed young men headed upstairs.

Annie yelled "YOU CAN'T BE DEAD IS HE DEAD?"

The medics, perfunctoraly, assured her "We're working on him."

10 minutes later I looked out the window again and saw Annie standing in front of the building, her face raped by tears, joking about her (and her dad's) illegally parked car. "Look at that! Our car is there! Haha!"

The body lies where it expired until a detective arrives to investigate and rule out foul play. Natural deaths receive lowest priority over murders and drug-related circumstances. Sometimes the family stares at the corpse until blood and pus burst from their father's eyes. Police assistants clean the blood from the body's face so the daughter or son can give their father or mother a good-bye kiss.

The old man's body could be lying there now, exploding, 10 hours on, and Annie could be forced to sit there with him.

She is with family somewhere else.

I looked out the window expecting to see the body hauled to the ambulance.

I saw youngsters walking past, gossiping, as the empty ambulances disappeared.

Fun with artificial intelligence

Werder is a fun Perl module that produces gibberish. These words look close enough to being real words that they could fool people.

Sometimes Werder actually produces words that are either real, or which could conceivably be legitimately coined. In today's example the words "multiple" and "unties" appear, but so do possible real or invented words "debative" and "clingies," neither of which I will attempt to define or research. Instead I will savor the joy of saying nonsense words like "spoollaughser," "scallished," "swallsmanitie," and "pronsformo." I shall further endeavor to use these words in casual conversation as my day progresses.

Here is today's Werderblast of poetry to cleanse the mental pallette, punctuation and linebreaks added for readability.

Multiple anellying latinguiltssi 
fanciationsi sssmicani onistratess 
attedily toy lebeecheapoff 
     publicititutor.

Bestuffisti unties everging 
audingly stemaing emouser 
deternally chinger eassionopt 
     spoollaughser.

Trusiresmotives sonanceseni coarsencels 
ssmaspansi basmorations jayceeding 
nonunciaticians debative clingies 
     asheratutious.

Scallished admity aliticedacy 
barterlea surauggleam kestounds 
poisenatopola gingly swallsmanitie 
     pronsformo.

Chew your food

The quest for pinball filled my day. And my yesterday. Wandering into pool halls and bowling allies looking for pinball machines is a stupid way to waste a day, but of late I have had no capacity to concentrate. I consider it time well wandered.

Last week I bit the inside of my mouth. It did not seem to hurt so much when it happened but the cut seemed to grow. I have bit into the inside of my cheek before. It is hard to tell exactly what is happening in there, as it starts to hurt so bad you'd think the whole tooth was knocked off, but in fact it's just a little cut.

That has improved greatly, but for a few days I did not chew all my food quite so thoroughly. As obvious as it seems to me now I did not know that this would aggravate my esophagitis problem. That was less and less of a problem of late, but I guess sending half-chewed food into the esophagal sphincter (love that term) is not so smart when the lining there is scratched and not primed for double duty.

So I've been feeling like a bucket of fuck again. Boo-hoo.

Today's pinball search sent me to Queens Boulevard, where I stepped in to a few billiards halls. No pinball there, but I found a table at a place on 48th Street in Sunnyside. Joy.

I had a strange thought today. I was in a bathroom at a diner on Queens Boulevard when it occured to me that nobody could see me. Nobody. It is hard to think of very many places where *nobody* can see you at all.

I imagine motel rooms as anonymous passageways, not for the present occupant but for the disconnected mysteries of the paths that cross through at room out of sequence.

It sounds like Arthur Miller: "The Motel Room." Each night a new occupant, each night a new drama from the world of transience.

One night a businessman, the next night an up-and-coming starlet, the next night a wife who just left her husband. In sequence they make their desperate and not-so-desperate phone calls from the motel room bed.

I thought of these sort of things when I drove from Florida to New York in 2005. In Norfolk, Virginia, the pouring rain and dark of night forced me to get a room at the first motel in sight. This happened to be a Motel 6, a chain I have always avoided in any of my travels.

The stay was miserable and uncomfortable in that uniquely Motel 6 way, but what overcame me as I swiped the key through the motel room door was how, as a child, I believed that some doors were magic. I believed that opening a door at my grade school would send me not to the school cafeteria but to another country. I further believed that some keys were magic, and that using a magic key on the lock of any door in the world would turn that door into a magic door, granting passage to another planet or at least another world.

I wanted that motel room door to be a magic door. I was driving my father's car 2 months after his death, and as I got closer to New York the meaning of that trip piled up in my mind. Through Georgia and the Carolinas I simply drove the car and tried to think about anything but my father, whose hands so proudly clutched the very steering wheel I now controlled.

I can still feel that motel room door opening. Like many things in my life, I remember the sound. It made a thrush of a sound, the insulation around the door frame creating what sounded like a large refrigerator or freezer door opening.

The walls of the room were barren where my mind was not. My thoughts splattered onto the walls like a disaster. I wished that I had just walked through a magic door, and maybe I had. As I pushed the door open I recalled that child hood memory and clearly said to myself "I believe that some doors are magic." But the blank, dismal interior of that motel room was a sour alert that magic was dead.

Why do I not feel like finishing this story. I am tired, sad and depressed and might need to shutup soon.

Chew your food, You and your esophagal sphincter will be glad you did.

Caffè

ESB

Strange WHOIS from Lithuania's registrar

Here's an odd WHOIS record from Lithuania:

$ whois -h whois.domreg.lt nic.lt
[Querying whois.domreg.lt]
[whois.domreg.lt]
% Hello, this is the DOMREG whois service.
...
%
Domain:                 nic.lt
Status:                 registered
Registered:             2002-01-08

Everything looks normal enough until we get to the "Contact organization" field:


Contact organization: <script>alert('Cia galetu buti nepageidaujama programa \n This could be dangerous program');</script>


Someone put a line of Javascript where the name of the contact organization is supposed to be. Thus, when you do a web-based whois lookup for this domain you are greeted with a scary looking message suggesting there may be danger is your WHOIS lookup.

There appears to be no danger, and perhaps this "warning" was placed as a gag of some sort. But it makes me wonder if WHOIS records are filtered for malware or other bad content. I can imagine rogue domain name owners putting a Javascript src link in their contact info and waiting for someone to bite.

UPDATE:
I changed the code under my WHOIS lookup to prevent script execution. So you will see no scary popup message. To see the problem in action, check this domain name at uwhois

My Response to Shoeboxed.com

Someone at Shoeboxed.com has written the strangest review of My Receipts.

I attempted to respond to the Shoeboxed article on their site using the "Comments" feature on their blog, but I guess my comment was not approved.

Shoeboxed is one of many companies offering receipt management solutions. NeatReceipts is probably the best known maker of this type of product, though it differs from Shoeboxed in many ways.

With no disrespect to either NeatReceipts of Shoeboxed, I have no use for such a service. This is why the Shoeboxed article about My Receipts is so strange. It seems to portray me as a competitor or unworthy participant in the world of receipts management.

I would think that even a casual glance at My Receipts would reveal that the project is not an effort to organize or catalog my expenses. For lack of a less pretentious description I guess we could call it an art project.

My reasons for continuing the receipts project all these years are mine and mine alone. I feel no need to explain myself. I have avoided any public explanation partly because people do "get it," but also because I believe artists' attempts to voluntarily explain themselves is usually self-serving.

At any rate, if a casual glance at My Receipts does not convey the spirit of the project then a not-so-casual glance at the rest of my web sites might reveal a few clues: Randomness, as I have said many time and in many places, is everything to me. Without randomness and without chaos of ideas there is nothing.

I take issue with Shoeboxed.com's assertion that My Receipts site makes "a strong case for the existence of a site such as Shoeboxed."

This statement lacks merit as my site exists for reasons entirely different from those of Shoeboxed. Using me as an example does not validate their business plan or accomplish anything productive, and I can not help but be a little piqued at being laid out to dry in this preposterously misguided manner.

Someone at Shoeboxed claims:

"... the security and organization are lacking with Thomas’ method."

This is, simply, like comparing apples to oranges. "Security" has a different meaning in the context of my project, and is a marginal priority. "Organization" was, is, and never will be part of the spirit of this project.

"At the same time, with a personal and secure account, Thomas would not have to put all his receipts on display to everyone."

I do not "have to put all [my] receipts on display to everyone." There is no compromise occurring here. In fact that statement in particular is so puzzling to me that I will not attempt a meaningful comment.

"Shoeboxed can work for him ..."

No. It can not.

Read the whole review here and make up your own mind about My Receipts.