bohnsack.com

I listened to a lot of music today. Memorable moments included:

Miles Davis - Dark Magus: Live at Carnegie Hall
Propellerheads - Decksanddrumsandrockandroll
David Murry Octet - Dark Star: The Music Of The Grateful Dead
Herbie Handcock - Empyrean Isles

It has to be easy, with a tiny bit of hacking via my squeezebox, to get a listing of what I've been listening to automatically posted to the website. I'll look into it.

I'm ending the day with the ever popular Miles Davis - The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions.

My neighbor has apricot trees. Their fruit hangs over the fence into my yard:

Scaled Composites, a privately funded organization, has sent a man 62.5 miles (100 km) above the earth and back.

After the Ansari X Prize is won, I'll have to make the trip to the Southwest Regional Spaceport for the 'X Prize' Spaceflight Race.

This stuff seems like science fiction. It's not.

I finished reading Relevation Space by Alastair Reynolds a few weeks ago. It's got to be the best space opera I've read in a while. Although I would have liked to see better characterization along with dialog from an alien point of view, the the story, its scale, and the two most fantasticly named space ships in the history of science fiction make these issues go away. I liked it enough to put the sequel at the head of my queue:

1. Redemption Ark by Alastair Reynolds
2. The Golden Age by John C. Wright
3. Illium by Dan Simmons
4. Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
5. The Confusion by Neal Stephenson

Traveling to Minnesota and back this month via "the friendly skies" reminded me of where all the time I used to have for reading came from.

In other news, boingboing's new guest blogger, Christopher Coppola, seems to be a resident of Albuquerque and is involved with DigiFest SouthWest.

Oh, and I'm money, because I have a Gmail account (my last name at gmail.com) courtesy of O'Rourke

And: Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute and Ben Goertzel's Encouraging a Positive Transcension

Also: We had the first monsoon rain of the season this evening.

Slashdot has a
story about wireless Internet in Albuquerque and Rio Rancho. It's mildly
exciting to have the community you live in mentioned on Slashdot, but I'm
totally embarrassed by Rio Rancho Wireless' inability to use the International System of Units
(SI) properly. They're trying to say that their network will operate at a
data rate of one million bits per second. They choose to convey this as
follows:

alt="misuse of SI units" border="1"/>

The correct way to specify a data rate of one million bits per second is
"1 Mb/s".
"1mbs" is wrong for a number of reasons:

1. A lower case "m" is the
   milli prefix. It means 10^-3. "1 mb/s" is therefore equivalent to 0.001 bits per second. On the other
   hand, a uppercase "M" is the
   mega prefix. It means 10⁶
   and it's what you have to use if you mean one million. M = one million, m = one thousandth.

2. The concept of x units per y is expressed properly with a forward slash
   or division symbol (/). Failing to use the "/" or the use of "p" as an abbreviation for
   "per" is incorrect. "1 xpy" is wrong. "1  x/y" is correct. Rio Rancho Wireless' units (mbs) are meaningless. What's a millibit-second?

3. There's always a space between the number and its units: "1 Mb/s" good, "1Mb/s" bad.
4. I admit this is a bit of a stretch for anything but textbooks or academic papers, but...
   Variables and quantity symbols are in italic type. Unit symbols are in roman
   type. Numbers should generally be written in roman type. These rules apply
   irrespective of the typeface used in the surrounding text.

This is just one example of the continuing torrent of crap emitted by people and
organizations that are supposedly technical. They're butchering their units to
the point that meanings are ambiguous and, as in this unfortunate example,
possibly off by nine orders of magnitude!

For the record, I'm also a huge advocate of using the new (1998) SI prefixes for binary
multiples. One Gigabyte of RAM should be "1 GiB", because when you buy a one Gig stick of RAM,
you're getting a device capable of storing 2³⁰ bytes. There isn't just a minor difference here.
1 GiB (2³⁰) is 73,741,824 more than 1 GB (10⁹).

This guide to electronic music is amazing.

My grandmother died on June 4th at 17:07 CDT. None of my grandparents remain. Velma H. Bohnsack nee Tietz was the last.

I took time off from work last week to attend the funeral service. On Sunday, I flew into Minneapolis and then drove down to visit my mom in Mason City. I spent seven formative years in Mason City Iowa. There was a bit of middle school (John Adams), all of high school, and two years of Community College.

Among Mason City's many claims to fame are a number of standouts:

• In 1912, Mason City shipped the largest freight tonnage in the state of Iowa and produced more brick and tile and more Portland cement than any city in the world.
• The only remaining hotel in the world designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, known as The Park Inn Hotel, is in Mason City. See WrightinIowa.com.
• Mason City is home to the largest group of Prairie School designed homes on a unified site and the location of the first and only Prairie School house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Iowa.
• Kraft - the only place in the world where ready-to-serve Jell-O and Jell-O pudding snacks are made.
• Mason City is the hometown of Meredith Willson, well-known musician and composer who is best remembered for his long running stage and screen musical, The Music Man. Mason City is the "River City" featured in that musical.

It's a pretty nice place there in northern Iowa. Green, quiet, and friendly, Mason City keeps an incredible number of older homes that bleed a kind of Midwest character that says order and correctness. This pseudo Prairie School home two down from where we used to live on 504 North Washington is an excellent example. You won't find it in Architectural Digest, but to me it's an example of something that I love very much. It's hard to explain.

In high school, we would hang out at a Burger King many evenings. This Burger King has become a Happy Wok Chinese restaurant:

I only had half of a day in Mason City. I spent most of that time driving around with Mother. We drove by the homes of people I used to know and I remembered.

After visiting Mom and Mason City, I drove up to New Prague Minnesota for the funeral. There are (or were) enough Bohnsacks around rural New Prague for them to justify this sign:

At the church:

My brother cooked pork chops with Hy's of Canada on Tuesday night.

Everything was beautiful. I miss it now.

I just added some Spamhaus Realtime
Blackhole Lists to my qmail configuration.

/var/qmail/supervise/mqail-smtpd/run:
	
#!/bin/sh
QMAILDUID=`id -u qmaild`
NOFILESGID=`id -g qmaild`
MAXSMTPD=`cat /var/qmail/control/concurrencyincoming`
exec /usr/local/bin/softlimit -m 2000000
     /usr/local/bin/tcpserver -v -p -x /etc/tcp.smtp.cdb -c \"$MAXSMTPD\"
     -u \"$QMAILDUID\" -g \"$NOFILESGID\" 0 smtp rblsmtpd -r sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org
     /var/qmail/bin/qmail-smtpd 2>&1

Does it help? I'm I getting less spam? In the time it took to make the
configuration change and write this entry, around ten minutes,
sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org tagged the following IP addresses / netblocks as spammers, and dropped their bits on the floor:

http://www.spamhaus.org/SBL/sbl.lasso?query=SBL230
http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=69.241.207.229
http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=24.58.104.165
http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=67.164.244.253
http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=168.226.90.15
http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=68.62.25.188
http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=81.152.249.216
http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=24.27.208.48
http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=68.125.39.121
http://www.spamhaus.org/SBL/sbl.lasso?query=SBL14875
http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=210.18.5.76
http://www.spamhaus.org/SBL/sbl.lasso?query=SBL15315
http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=68.34.255.194

This looks pretty good to me. I'm trying to catch more of the tricky stuff
that SpamAssassin is missing. This
seems to be around 10-20 messages a day, which is a lot better than the hundreds I'd
be viewing without SapamAssassin, but I'd like perfection. I still think CRM114 is worth trying, if only for
its clever name.

I hate you spammers.

Update at 9:40 PM:
121 new spammers sent to the bit bucket in the less than 5 hours since this post was made.