The Flowing Candy Bees

So far I’ve shoveled for four hours, cumulative: a half hour late last night, 2 hours this morning, 45 minutes at lunch, and 45 minutes in the afternoon. This is the first time I had to shovel the driveway so we could get out, and again in the afternoon so we could get back in.

It’s a lot of time and trouble to shovel because firstly, my entire back lot is paved. This house is divided into two apartments, and the whole backyard is off-street parking in anticipation of the big Binghamton population boom of 2159. So imagine shoveling out your entire backyard (if you live in Silicon Valley, imagine a lot about twice the size of your backyard.) Secondly, the driveway squeezes between two houses, so there’s no place to move the snow. I spent most of the time carrying the snow out of the alleyway one shovelful at a time.

I’m guessing maybe two more hours will be needed before tomorrow morning, when classes resume. Maybe then I’ll finally see the dude on the ATV. There’s this dude, see, and he has an ATV with a mini-plow, and he’ll clear your driveway in minutes for something like 10 bucks. Except he shows up only when you are done shoveling. I have no idea where he lives; he just materializes on the streets of town after the snow is down, like the spark in Qix. Maybe after a few levels he’ll get here faster.

I cleaned my apartment today, which means dealing with a mountain of junk mail—half of which presents a glaring opportunity for identity thieves.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear credit card companies were engineering their junk mail to break paper shredders: extra fat envelopes with a demo credit card in them, either plastic or cardboard, held with rubber cement. Just to let you know what a credit card might in theory look like if you had one. Coincidentally, this can’t be shredded without opening the envelope.

I got a shredder as a present, and I am always testing its limits by shredding credit card offers, even as I offer them partially digested by tearing them open. Today it gave up the ghost on a Citibank offer. KHAAAAAAAAAN!!!!! This sucker used to go all pro ice on a single envelope; it was ten ninjas and I was master Splinter, offering sage advice while it flipped out and killed people, its brandished steel smoking with bloody execution. Now it chokes to death on one extra-thick credit card offer on extra-heavy paper.

I guess it’s time to buy a stronger one, after which junk mail will include metal shims for some barely justifiable reason. I want one of those NSA shredders that just coughs up dust when you drop a calculus textbook into it. Or maybe a house with a fireplace. Either way, we will see spammers advance the state of the art in indestructable materials as a result of this arms race.

I just received a mass of spam comments that passed the Akismet filter. Most of them gave URLs for various seedy web sites, but then one of them was a comment that just read:

So much spam (

This was also spam, as multiple comments came from the same URL. It was a few minutes too early, arriving on my site just before the avalanche of spam from elsewhere. Otherwise it could have passed as meaningful commentary.

There is a class of spam comments that fake real comments (“cool site!”) with a URL to a link farm or some such. Right now they are relatively unsophisticated, but I think they could easily cross the gray line into meaningful content. For example, you can take a blog post’s text and feed it through ELIZA; post a comment to the effect of “How do you know you just received a mass of spam comments?”

And then one day, bam: you have SkyNet.