News and Views

I must be either in the Twilight Zone, or I’m asleep and will wake soon. I just imagined that the Arizona Cardinals are going to the Super Bowl. What a ridiculous idea!

I posted previously how Apollo can run beside the bike, using the special “Springer” attachment. As he gets older and stronger, he is taking on his hereditary role and has started to pull the bike.

As we leave the driveway, he is running as fast as he can — up to 15 MPH with my feet resting on the pedals. When we first started, a year or so ago, he would run for maybe 100 meters before he slowed down and I had to pedal. Then he would run beside the bike, but not pull it.

Little by little he has pulled the bike further and further. He runs best when there’s someone else along on another bike to ride out in front and encourage him.

Best run so far: A couple of days ago he pulled Derek for 2.8 miles, with me on another bike encouraging him along. Derek pedaled a total of maybe 5 revolutions that whole time; once when Apollo saw in interesting tree and had to be discouraged, and once going around a sharp corner where he had to slow down too much. Otherwise, the husky puppy provided all the power.

After the first quarter of a mile or so the pace was slow — a trot of maybe 7-8 miles per hour, but he just kept going. We were amazed.

When we got back home (after Derek pedaled another mile or so with Apollo running alongside), he took a big drink, then collapsed for a few hours with a satisfied look in his eyes.

Gisele and I are going away for a week or so. First to Las Vegas for two nights, then San Francisco to visit Gisele’s sister Angela, then finally down to Pasadena to visit Devon.
Leaving tomorrow (Monday) morning, back early the next week.

Derek is still on winter break, but decided to stay home and take care of Apollo.

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year.

On the equator the day is 12 hours long, any day of the year.
In Tempe, Dallas and Pasadena, today is about 10 hours long.
In Boise, Idaho it’s about 9 hours long.
In Anchorage it’s 5 1/2 hours long.
In Fairbanks it’s a little less than 4 hours (from about 11:00am to about 2:40pm).
At the north pole, there is only one day and it’s 6 months long, but today the day is zero hours long.

Thanks to the US Navy for the data.

Derek had a checking account with Chase a few weeks ago that he decided to close out. He had just $5.59 in the account, and by accident he withdrew $5.60.

For that one cent overdraft, Chase charged him a $25 fee. Jocelyn may argue that this is justified, but you can’t convince me that it costs the bank $25 to process this. I went in and talked to the branch manager about it, but she was adamant and unsympathetic. She told me “Other teenagers have checking accounts without overdrawing them”. Nice attitude.

Maybe Chase should set up a virtual “Take a penny, leave a penny” dish on their website for situations like this. Their current policy surely doesn’t breed good will.

“It sure does”, you must be thinking. Viruses, trojans, spyware, adware, rootkits, all this malicious software sneaking on to your computer really bites.

My current favorite malware remover is “Malwarebytes“. It finds and removes things that other programs have trouble with. I’ve even used it to remove the Vundo trojan, which is one of the most difficult.

Where I used to recommend that people install and frequently run Spybot or AdAware, I am now recommending that they run Malwarebytes instead. The free version is all I’ve used. They have a version you can buy that runs continually in the background scanning files, just like AVG, McAfee or Norton do, but I haven’t tried it and so cannot recommend it.

Go to their web site and click on the ‘Download Now” link on the left side of the screen.

This quiz of basic American Civic Literacy is a sobering test of how much US citizens know about their government.

71% of Americans failed the test (less than 60% right). Less than 1% of the test takers scored above 90. How well do you know how our government was established and functions?

I’m proud to say that I missed only one question (32/33, or about 97%), but I’m sure I wouldn’t have done nearly as well if I hadn’t been teaching a US Citizenship class for the past 5 years.

The statistics show pretty similar grades among liberals and conservatives, men and women. The biggest difference is between low and high income. People making over $75,000/year averaged 55%, while those making less than $30,000/year averaged 40%. However, both those grades are failing. Whites averaged a little better than other races, men a little better than women, Republicans a little better than Democrats. But every group failed the test.

What does this mean for our country? How can we trust voters to make reasonable choices? And politicians didn’t do even as well as the average American. How can we trust them to run our government?

How well do you understand our government? Are you “civically literate”?

This is pretty good. You can waste a lot of time with it.

Suddenly this morning I started receiving “Undeliverable” messages from email servers all around the world, many of them complaining that I’m sending spam, or sending to expired email addresses. The messages were coming in at several per minute, flooding my inbox. In a half hour I had a few hundred.

One’s first thought when this happens might be that perhaps your own computer has been compromised with a trojan, and is sending out spam at a huge rate. But that’s almost never the case. Spammers do compromise innocent computers with trojans, and they do force them to send out spam, but they never use the correct return address.

When email was invented it was primarily for University and Defense Department inter-office communication. It was naively assumed that someone was who they really said they were, and so there were no safeguards against “spoofing”. The spammers and con-artists have taken advantage of this, and send out their messages with bogus return addresses. The return addresses are harvested from various sources; it’s very hard to keep your email address off these lists.

Typically they will use one return address for a day or so on one or a few computers, and then as the spam filters adjust they will move on to another. So I know that if I just sit tight this flood should be over by tomorrow.

But fortunately the compromised email address is one of my “throw-away” addresses that I don’t really need. I create these and use them in cases where the address is likely to be made public.

I disabled that address and like magic the emails stopped.

The computer/internet world is a jungle, with parasites and predators lurking everywhere. Compromised computers can be made to send out millions of spam messages at little or no cost, and if one in a million recipients fall for the scam it is worth it.

I got another phone yesterday, the new BlackBerry Flip.

It’s a full-featured BlackBerry phone in a flip (clamshell) format — the first flip BlackBerry on the market.

I used to have a Kyocera 7135 flip Palm phone. It seemed small when I bought it, but this one is much smaller, and very light.

I think the iPhone is probably a better all-around toy and gadget, but this one flips, and is much lighter and smaller than the iPhone, all features that are important to me.

I think I’m going to like this, and probably keep it, but I’ve got 14 days to be sure.