Cavortis

Well, if The New York Times can give a list of people it likes for office, then so can I. Of course, my list is very different from theirs.

Here are my "picks":

U. S. Senate

Jeffrey T. Russell

U. S. House of Representatives

Michael J. Sylvia

New York State Governor

John Clifton

New York State Lieutenant Governor

Donald Silberger (I voted for him when he ran for the Senate against Schumer in the last election)

New York State Comptroller

John J. Cain

New York State Attorney General

Christopher B. Garvey

You may have noticed a pattern...

Some dude who has way too much time on his hands says he has "scientifically proven" that vampires cannot exist.

Legend has it that vampires feed on human blood and once bitten a person turns into a vampire and starts feasting on the blood of others.

Efthimiou's debunking logic: On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was 536,870,911. If the first vampire came into existence that day and bit one person a month, there would have been two vampires by Feb. 1, 1600. A month later there would have been four, and so on. In just two-and-a-half years the original human population would all have become vampires with nobody left to feed on.

I can throw a whole fistful of monkeywrenches into his "scientific" analysis with a few bits of lore.

• Vampires don't have to suck human blood only – they can suck the blood of non-humans as well (including other vampires).
• Depending on which legend you read, vampires don't suck your blood (solely) for nourishment, and therefore are not necessarily required to do so.
• Having your blood sucked by a vampire does not necessarily turn you into a vampire (again, depending on the source).
• Some vampires are killed, thus reducing the rate at which normal people are converted.
  
  N.B. Certainly there must be an amount of internal warfare among the vampire community, not to mention those killed by non-vampires people.
• Vampires are generally smart: If they like sucking the blood of non-vampires, why would they obliterate their entire supply?
  
  • This sort of logic is used all the time by environmentalist-statists: "If we don't regulate, then people will use up all the resources..." This is a doubtful premise with an unproven result.

Whatever happened to researching your subject before spouting off about it?

So, given that I've gotten my $25 from GE Money, I'm thinking of doing another bank deal as outlined on the Bank Deals blog. Here are the two I'm looking at; unfortunately, they are mutually exclusive.

1. $200 from Citi Bank: Open a checking account and maintain it with $1,500 for 60 days for a $100 bonus. Plus, make a one direct deposit per month for 6 months to get another $100.
   
   • Pro:
     • After 60 days, I could reduce the amount in the account (i.e., transfer it back to AmTrust Direct for the higher interest rate) without penalty, since it's free with direct deposit.
     • $100 on $1,500 equates to approximately 6.89% APY, which is better than any savings rates out there.
     • APY increases significantly for the second $100, as I can move most of my money to a higher yield savings and keep only a token amount in the account (plus direct deposits)
   • Con:
     • It ties up a significant amount of money for 60 days (plus transaction time).
     • Significant time investment to receive full bonus (up to nine months, since it can take up to 90 days to receive the second bonus after the six monthly direct deposits are completed).
     • I have to set up and monitor direct deposits.
     • People have had trouble getting bonuses from Citi in the past.
     • Must be opened at a branch or by phone.
2. $25 from Citi Bank: Open new e-Savings account with free EZ Checking and receive a $25 bonus within 90 days.
   
   • Pros:
     • Quick and easy $25 – only 3-month time investment, vs. 9 months
     • Much less money needs to be tied up.
     • Can be opened online.
   • Cons:
     • Only $25, instead of $200.
     • Same concern about not receiving the bonus.

Not sure which one I'm gonna go for yet. I may call Citi today.

In September I signed up for a GE Money Savings account to get a $25 bonus that I had read about on the Bank Deals blog. Today, I got my bonus, but it wasn't without its share of excitement.

The promotion I got was that I had to keep $500 in the account for at least 30 days to receive the bonus, which would be paid 30 days after meeting eligibility. I opened the account on Aug. 21 and it was funded by Aug. 25. Apparently, on Aug. 28, they upped the amount required for the promotion to $4,000. Close call #1.

Near the end of September, I had to withdraw some money to make an emergency $200 payment. Because I was in the process of transferring most of our other savings from ING Direct to AmTrust Direct (for a nearly 1% increase in interest rate!), and it was during the "you can't withdraw without major penalty" portion of the transfer, I had to take the money from the GE Savings account. I knew it would take a day or two for the transaction to process, so I did as much as I could to finagle the transactions so it wouldn't spoil my bonus. The transfer went through on Sept. 27. Close call #2.

So, you'd think at that point that I would've been sitting easy, knowing that I just had to wait for my bonus to come through. But I was fairly nervous until I got my statement notice today. Now, I see that I've gotten the $25 (along with a measly $1.12 in interest).

Now, I just need to transfer the money over to my AmTrust Direct account, where I'm earning 5.3% APY. I gotta tell you: Bank Deals blog rules. Props to Dave for pointing it out.

A link to a paper at First Monday was recently posted to the Distributed Proofreaders discussion forums as a bit of "bad press" for Project Gutenberg (and, therefore, DP as a closely related project). The paper's author, Paul Duguid, addresses the quality of "peer-production" projects, such as PG, Wikipedia and Gracenote (which is actually a commercial effort that uses user-submitted information for its CD database) using what he calls the "laws of quality." These laws are as follows.

• Linus's Law: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” (attributed to Linus Torvalds)
• Graham's Law: "The method of ensuring quality” in peer production is “Darwinian ... People just produce whatever they want; the good stuff spreads, and the bad gets ignored" (attributed to Paul Graham).

This paper interested me because I have long been a contributor to PG (mostly through Distributed Proofreaders as well as individually). As such, I have to respond to a couple of critiques mentioned by Mr. Duguid.

In looking at the quality of PG texts, Mr. Duguid outlines the problems of two etexts specifically, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, and Pan by Knut Hamsen.

According to Mr. Duguid, the problems of Tristam Shandy are numerous. Being "very much a book about making a book" creates many problems for the electronic version due to various typographical devices used in the physical book. Mr. Duiguid cites many errors, including lack of edition information, missing Greek text, unidentified inline footnotes, and (significant) blank pages missing within the text. These are all valid complaints.

But while Mr. Duguid points out these valid faults, he also points out items that are not faults. About the PG edition of Tristram Shandy he says, "The novel was originally published as nine volumes with two– to three–dozen chapters numbered sequentially within each volume. The Project Gutenberg version appears to come from a four–volume edition that ignored the original volume divisions and chapter numbering." He goes on to complain about possible confusion, or at least the absence of certain jokes intended by the author, due to this renumbering. But this is hardly something that can be assessed as a PG deficiency. Although we can't say for sure what the original edition was like (since there is no edition information in the text), neither can we say for sure that etext does not faithfully represent the original edition. The same confusions and joke-mangling may be present in the edition used for transcription.

Of course, this brings up one of my own criticisms of PG, namely that for a long time it did not publish, and even actively discouraged adding, edition information to its texts. Fortunately, that sentiment has changed.

Oddly enough, where Mr. Duguid points out PG's flaws in not faithfully representing the print editions of Tristram Shandy, he seems to make the exact opposite argument in regards to Pan. Namely, he doesn't like the fact that the 1921 edition used as the source for the PG etext was allegedly "bowdlerized" (a weighted term if I ever saw one!) by the printer – according to the most recent Penguin edition of the same book. While this might be true, again this is not a fault. In fact, there is nothing preventing an "unbowdlerized" edition of Pan from being submitted to PG, so long as its copyright can be cleared.

However, Mr. Duguid sees a lack of a note at the beginning of the PG etext, identifying its bowdlerized state, as a negative. He claims that readers are "cheated" by the lack of such a note. In what way? In this case the edition is clearly identified, and if readers want they can look up historical information about it. It is not PG's responsibility, nor goal, to warn its readers that X edition has 10% fewer sex scenes than Y edition. It merely provides the books, as does any modern library.

In sum, I think Mr. Duguid does raise some good points about the quality of PG texts. None of them are necessarily new – many of these points have been raised on various PG mailing lists and discussion boards for years – though the examples themselves might be ones that haven't been brought up before. However, I disagree with the assessment of all of his examples as "faults." The goal of PG has not ever been to provide authoritative or critical editions. Overall, the quality of PG texts is very good, near the level of commercial publishers, and in many cases (especially more recently posted texts) it may be better, as books are produced using better tools and processes, such as those provided by Distributed Proofreaders. Certainly Mr. Duguid's point is valid, though, that PG volunteers need to continue assessing both the quality of currently produced books and previously produced books.

Oh, and by the way, if you ever happen to spot an error in a book, you can always submit a fix request to errata@pglaf.org.

The destructive mindset of various people never ceases to amaze me. For example, take things like tariffs. Some people argue that they protect jobs and give American businesses "a fighting change." Bull. They just cause prices to rise at the expense of millions of taxpayers.

More at Prolefeed.

In working on a new site, I'm creating a new Drupal module for a custom node type. However, because of the complexity of the node, I'm keeping the details in a database separate from the drupal installation. Initially, I thought I would have to come up with some hack or custom functions (is there a difference?) to handle calls to the new database.

However, it seems I won't have to do anything special. Last night while scouring the Drupal API, I discovered a nifty little routine called db_set_active(). As the name implies, this function will let you temporarily set the active database, giving you a nice, simple way to access information in other places.

To use this function, you only need to modify your site's settings.php file to create an associative array of database URLs. The main database, where your Drupal CMS information is stored, should be called "default", but otherwise you can use whatever descriptive keys you want. For example:

$db_url = array(
    'default' => 'pgsql://user:pass@localhost/drupal_db',
    'custom_node' => 'pgsql://user:pass@localhost/custom_node_db',
    ...
);

Pass the database's key to db_set_active(), and you're off and running. When you're done with the database, you can just call db_set_active('default') to restore the current link to the default database. (Non-ironically, it defaults to 'default', so you could just call db_set_active() with no argument to restore the default database link; however, that's not very self-descriptive code.)

I've updated my sweepstakes page with a few new links. One good find is the Shakefire Contests page. Shakefire has frequent sweepstakes for all kinds of pop-culture tchotchkes, like DVD movies and TV series, music, "prize packs" and more. I also added a link to the Fatwallet Conests & Sweepstakes forum.

Also, I've found a cool new tool to save time on filling out sweepstakes forms. AI RoboForm is a nifty app that lets you enter in personal data and then will fill in – and optionally submit for you – online forms with a single click. Of course, there are other form fillers out there, but this one has several plusses:

• Personal data is encrypted.
• It's smart – it seems to be able to recognize what data needs to go in which field among a wide variety of forms, even when the field names don't correspond exactly.
• You can set up various profiles.
• It has a supported Firefox plugin.
• You get to choose how much info you want to share.
• You can add custom fields to its already vast array of supported data.

The only thing that's slightly annoying is that you still have to remember to uncheck those boxes or radio buttons to avoid getting e-mails from sweepstakes sites. But then, you would have to remember to do that anyway.

P.S. If you're wondering why I added this under my finance category, I do consider it a valid investment of time to sign up for sweepstakes. The more sweeps you sign up for (and the more frequently you do so), the higher the potential ROI. Or so I like to tell myself.

From FMNN:

A recent drug raid by police in Albany, New York, resulted in a minor confiscation of a small amount of marijuana – but only after the shooting of the family dog and the handcuffing of several young children, according to a report by the Marijuana Policy Project, and its Executive Director Rob Kampia.

Police reports say that the 18-year-old son of Anita Woodward had indeed sold a little marijuana, which justified not only the raid but the tactics on the dog and the children, ages 11 and 12. The story notes that the pot sales amounted to a total of $60, representing three small bags vended to adult customers, and two others a few weeks earlier.

The bust occurred at about 6:00 a.m., with police tactical squad officers bashing in the door of the family's apartment. Anita was not armed herself, but was surrounded by drawn firearms by the invading officers before she could react. The police shot at the dog several times, before killing it in the bathroom. A local spokesman for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was quoted as saying, "That seems like an awful lot of firepower for marijuana. That's like spending $125,000 for $5." - ST

I currently own 10 shares of Coca-Cola and 3.2544 shares of PowerShares Water Resource ETF. As of today, they are profitable – woohoo! I just checked my Yahoo! Finance portfolio and see that, after commissions, I have earned more than $2.

Of course, if I sell them now, I will have lost money, since its not enough to cover the sale commission. But its encouraging to know that I might get there some day. :)