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The TSA Has Determined That My Cheese Is Not Explosive

Before leaving San Francisco for home in Cambridge, I stopped at the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero to pick up a few gifts for home. Among them was a small muffin-sized package of delicious, creamy Mount Tam cheese from Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes, CA, a favorite of my wife’s. I stashed it in my shoulder bag before catching the BART train to the airport.

Arriving at SFO I pleasantly breezed through the metal detector on my way to the gate and waited for my bag and laptop to come through the X-ray machine. The pleasant breezing sensation then came to an abrupt halt, as did the X-ray conveyor belt. My bag went back and forth through the machine several times.

“Can I please open your bag, sir?” a TSA contractor asked me. Her shoulder insignia read “Centurion Security Services, S.A.F.E.S.K.I.E.S.” emblazoned on a ferocious eagle-and-flag backdrop. I wondered what on earth the super-sized acronym could possibly stand for.

“No problem.” I’m not inclined to be overly protective of my bags’ privacy in these sad police-state times we live in. I assumed that the shape or size of something in my bag reminded someone of a sample X-ray they remember from the TSA X-ray Analysis training seminar. I didn’t want my behavior to remind someone of something they saw in some other TSA seminar, such as that fascinating Strip-Search Profiling Criteria class they took. I put my shoes back on and waited while, after several rummages, the cheese emerged. Much examination and discussion took place as the cheese was passed around and looked at from many angles. It received several prods and squeezes.

“We’ll run your bag through again, sir.”

[Continued…]

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Connected to: Jesus. Signal Strength: Excellent.

Anyone could be forgiven for not knowing Jesus’s MAC address (00:14:6c:a6:23:4a), and for not knowing Jesus’s approximate location (somewhere near Norwalk, CT). It’s hardly common knowledge, after all. I only found out because I was on the Amtrak Acela Express from New York City to Boston yesterday, and decided to run Network Stumbler on my laptop for the entire journey. (Network Stumbler is a free program that logs the names and details of every wireless network that it encounters.)

Altogether I logged 1,660 access points during the train journey, one of which was named “Jesus”. The naming of wireless routers should rightly occupy an odd little niche in social anthropology. When you look at this many access point names, a couple of points become clear. People name these things with an awareness that the names are publicly visible. At the same time, these names belong to private spaces, and a lot of the names have private significance. A wireless name is a little like a button with a personalized slogan, only you can’t see the person wearing it.

As a rough jump-start to this discipline, here’s an organized digest of some of the access points that I rolled past:

Home Sweet Home

• Jimmy’s Place
• Kobes-Castle
• rejectbarn
• rockpile
• HoMe
• homey
• DAWGHOUSE

Shout-outs

• CATS_bklyn
• Harrison Represent Yo (near Harrison, NY)
• OakHill_Boomerang

Network Sweet Network

• Mi Gente Network
• YupNet
• Ken’s Extreme Network

Screen Names/Handles

• lillamb
• Fruity
• kittyup
• katburki
• spoiledone
• toughguy
• SirKnight
• Sweetness
• Geek06583_Clark

Cultural References

• Hogwarts Quidditch Pitch
• Napoleon Dyno
• Night Rider
• Me van a Matar por las Mujeres

Cryptic

• ManTown
• Sitivity
• apSSIDiointerpol
• Deshmukh (I had thought this could be Klingon, but a reader pointed out that it’s a common Hindi surname. Possibly the network owner is bilingual in Klingon and Hindi.)
• Numbers

I miss…

• Texas
• Florida
• Sonoma
• phoenixarizona
• dakotaboy1
• riven (some people spent a lot of time there)

We Want Your Business

• Pay3$@javajoes
• H@rv3yguns (why the hacker orthography?)
• Holiday inn Bridgeport (also could be read as the very unlikely concept, “Holiday in Bridgeport”)

We Don’t Want Your Business

• Dont Touch This Router
• Mine
• Not For You
• BuyYourOwn (amazingly, this network was not encrypted)
• fuck you

Islands In The Crowd

• redsox (at the western end of Connecticut)
• yankees (at the eastern end of Rhode Island)

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Wii be rollin’…

I’ve just emerged from my thrice-weekly morning session with the bike trainer. It’s gotten a lot easier to deal with the boredom of stationary pedaling thanks to the Wii that we bought “for the kids”.

No, dear reader, I am not in fact coordinated enough to play Zelda or Wii Sports while pedaling furiously. (OK… make that semi-furiously.) What I am able to do is surf the web using the Wii’s built-in web browser, pointing and clicking the Wii Remote in one hand while maintaining pace and position on the bike. And this, from my point of view, is one very good reason to get hold of one of these gadgets. Now I can read a wide variety of stuff while doing my workout, and exercise free choice over it. That’s progress!

There are plenty of other reasons to check out the Wii. The remote (which has 6 degrees of free motion as well as buttons and internal accelerometers) is a really interesting input device, and it can interface via Bluetooth with a PC or Mac, and folks are coming out with some great homebrew hardware and software to provide connectivity for developers. Combine the remote with Flex, WiiFlash and Papervision3D, and suddenly you’re looking at an impressive 3D visualization platform. Hmmm…

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Trip to Lubec, Maine and Halifax, Nova Scotia

I just returned from a 2-week vacation to Lubec, Maine, with a side trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was a truly relaxing time away from everything. This means, among other things, that it was a trip with zero connectivity. No cell reception (except in Halifax), no Internet, no TV, no nothin’.

I’m not going to attempt the usual lengthy writeup. It somehow feels as though it would retroactively disturb the quiet that pervaded the trip. Instead, I encourage you to
view the photo album.

I will say that Lubec, Maine is an extremum in a state that is itself an extremity. It contains the easternmost point in the U.S, a rocky headland looking out into the Bay of Fundy. This is a calm place, several hours’ drive past Acadia, a world beyond the high water mark of the tourist tide that sluices through the Maine Coast every summer. As a visitor, one feels foreign, not catered to, an observer in a place and a culture where observers thankfully do not seem to have much influence. It’s a privilege to experience, and I suppose it cannot last. I am grateful to have seen it a few times.

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The True Stories Behind The Spam

bill.bagley <przdyujixfi@hotmail.com>: Bill Bagley is the most unusual of direct online marketers, in that he is a true clairvoyant. He actually senses his prospects’ sexual problems from thousands of miles away, and sends them helpful suggestions on products that are ready to assist them. Naturally, this approach is liable to shock the recipient — who would expect an email from a perfect stranger to be so completely and perfectly dead-on in its accuracy? Without special powers, how else could some unknown Mr. Bagley be aware that one’s girlfriend thinks one is perfect and a wonderful choice for her, but that all the time one has been hiding the problems with one’s erections? And that one has been trying to postpone sex as long as possible? And that there is simply no way to hide the truth anymore? And that having sex can make one look up to 12 years younger? Of course, this would all be quite ridiculous and unbelievable in its presumptuousness, if it weren’t the absolute truth, down to every last detail. That’s where being a clairvoyant can get you the edge in direct marketing — knowing the absolute truth, from a distance. Despite his severe difficulties in typing “Viagra” without accidentally hitting a lot of punctuation keys, Bill’s unique talents have enabled him to make it in a tough, competitive sales environment. He may be able to help you out, too.

Locoweed K. Patrolman <dave923@gothicinnbi.com>: “Loco” was the only child of a state trooper and a whorehouse madam in the desolate high plains of West Texas. He acquired his unusual last name due to a mixup on his birth certificate; his father, never a detail man, accidentally wrote his occupation where the child’s intended last name (Smith) should have been. Young Locoweed’s isolated environment led him early to computers and the Internet as a means of connecting with other people and feeding his hunger for information about the outside world. An almost obsessive fascination with chemistry and biology overtook him; he spent hours in the basement, perfecting complex organic syntheses. One fateful morning, one of his mother’s regular customers joined the family for a hearty pancake breakfast. When this gentleman, one Wrongly Q. Arctic by name, mentioned that he was a traveling representative of a major pharmaceutical company, Loco instantly struck up a conversation, and out there in the arid Texan wilderness an online business was born. Loco would synthesize cheap but effective knockoffs of prescription drugs and handle all the email, and Wrongly would write the clever, unique advertising copy, handcrafting it for each customer with folksy spellings and turns of phrase. In under one year, Locoweed earned enough to help his folks not only pay off the mortgage, but refurbish their establishment’s somewhat somber decor in a more traditional and welcoming style.

belajio5 <ylubikanmiu@yahoo.com>: Ylubikanmiu Bellagio, Jr. was born in the slums of Naples in 1975, the youngest son in a troubled family. His mother, an Albanian, left home when he was only 3 years old; his father was a hopeless drug addict. Left to fend for himself much of the time, young Ylubi (as he was called by his friends) sold candy and spumoni on the tough Neapolitan streets, a canny urchin barely scratching out a living. When he was 20, his father died, his ice cream business collapsed, and his girlfriend left him for another man who was using Advanced Gain Pro Penis Enlargement Pills. It was there, at the bottom of the bottom, that Ylubi heard about an obscure traditional herbal distillate peddled by his Albanian half-uncle that had the power to change lives. After only a single dose, not only was he suddenly awash in hot dates, but he realized he had a hell of a product on his hands. Branding the herbal concoction “Ultra Allure Pheromones”, he made it his life goal to share his good fortune with others through the miracle of direct online marketing. Thanks to his passionate emails that he personally composes for each and every sales prospect, Ylubi has prospered. He now lives in Key West, Florida, a successful and happy entrepreneur whose chief satisfaction is helping others experience their sex lives to the fullest extent possible.

Oksana <admin@mydatingrussiaweb.info>: Oksana Karushchenko, to be perfectly plain, is just a lonely 25 year old Russian woman with a human heart like yours or mine. As if being lonely wasn’t bad enough, she suffers terribly from the stereotyped responses of most people who receive her emails: they assume she is a brassy, mobbed-up gold-digger who’s only looking for a wealthy American mark with a credit card account to drain. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ms. Karushchenko is not only a delicate, sensitive and frail beauty, but is also a woman of considerable and independent means. She was the only daughter of a corrupt party functionary who for years ran Komkatlit, the state kitty litter monopoly, with an iron fist. After the fall of communism he made billions of rubles from kickbacks and bribes before he died, leaving Oksana with the delicate problem of how to move this ill-gotten fortune out of Russia. All she seeks is a thoughtful, selfless man who wants to share life and love with her, while living out the rest of his days in unimaginable wealth and luxury. Nonetheless, people assume the worst of her when they discover she needs a mere $10,000 advance to pay for an Ill-Gotten Gains Export Permit from the Russian government. Sometimes her quest feels doubtful, but in the meantime, Oksana sits and studies her English, hoping against hope that there is one man left in the West who has not yet lost the simple ability to believe.

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InBloguration

Well, I’ve finally reached that point. I finally gave in and decided to create my own website, because there are various things — thoughts, techniques, creations — that I want to share with other people, and this is the simplest way to do it.

I resisted the idea for a long time, because figured I was spending enough minutes of my day in front of a computer as it is. Despite the very technical nature of my work, I don’t really use computers a whole lot outside of my job, except for occasional routine household tasks. But, in the end, I have to admit that this is just the best way of getting certain kinds of information out to the world!

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