I love Suzanne Vega. And whoever took those photos. Outstanding. (New York Times link—I think I got past the registration, but I’m not sure.)

On the other side of the coin, this San Francisco Chronicle column by Laurel Wellman shows a remarkable lack of knowledge and insight. Case in point: “Let’s all disconnect from the Internet! It’s nothing but a well-known source of contagion, and frankly, the whole thing is starting to get a bit old anyway.”So many false assumptions: that the internet was supposed to be a medium solely for entertainment and commerce; that the internet has failed in both those respects; that all internet users are as clueless as he is when it comes to properly using it. The internet has fostered countless subcultures that would never have reached critical mass otherwise. It’s become a platform for organizing political movements, for fostering scientific discussion, for forming new social groups.”Does anyone still think the Internet is exciting?” I don’t find books exciting. That doesn’t mean literature is dead. I find television frustrating at the best of times, but that doesn’t mean television has used up its potential as a medium.And as for email, I’m sorry to say that in some respects, he’s right. Worms are annoying. But for fuck’s sake, if you dive into a vat of rotting meat and expect to come out squeak clean, I’ll expect everyone to call you crazy. If you’ve got an inbox filled with messages containing viruses and worms, then I have an abandoned slaughterhouse you might want to visit. Take some precautions and you’ll see maybe one spam message a week, if that. It goes without saying that my system’s been virus-free for as long as I can remember.

1. Stop using Hotmail, Yahoo, or any other major free email service. Not only will you free yourself from the vestiges of horrible webmail applications, you’ll also eliminate 95% of the spam that comes your way.Why? Many spammers generate random strings and attach “@hotmail.com” to them. Even if “re093jfg@hotmail.com” doesn’t exist, eventually they’ll hit a random string that does. Like your email address.If you’re with a major ISP like AOL or Earthlink, think about avoiding their email accounts as well, if you’re especially paranoid.
2. Don’t publish or give out your primary email address to websites. Give that one only to trusted individuals. If you need another account to sign up for things or get email confirmations for online orders, set up another account. Most ISPs offer more than one if they’re worth their salt. If you go with a website hosting provider (and they’re really cheap these days) many will give you more accounts than you’ll ever need in a lifetime.
3. Stop using Outlook Express. Unless you want to keep up with every security patch released for it, and I’m sure you won’t, forget you ever knew about Outlook Express. The reason why so many worms can infect your system without you even having to open an attachment—and you never open an attachment you don’t trust, right?—is because of Outlook security problems. Easier to use another mail client, like Eudora, The Bat! or the Mozilla-based Thunderbird client.
4. Never open an attachment you don’t trust. Just in case you missed it before. This should be required learning for everyone on the internet, kind of like the Golden Rule.
5. Get some anti-virus software, stat! Anti-virus software like Symantec Anti-Virus or AVG is your last line of protection against any viral/worm-based threats to your system. And once you’ve got them, keep them updated regularly. Most products will even update themselves every time new anti-viral definitions come out so you’ll always be up to date.
6. For extra protection, get a firewall. That’ll keep nearly every other threat out of your system, having followed all of the above. Many people already own a firewall and don’t even know it—if you’re using a router to share your internet connection with other computers, you’re already set. If you don’t, it’s worth it to just buy one, even if you’re only using it with one computer. They’re so cheap these days as to be practically ubiquitous. You can literally buy one for $15 CAN after rebate.If you want a cheaper solution, get a software firewall like ZoneAlarm. It’s more of a hassle to set up and maintain but it’s workable.
7. Stay on top of Windows security updates. Because Internet Explorer has become increasingly integral to the operating system, many of its vulnerabilities can affect your entire computer. Windows itself has a number of vulnerabilities, one of which was exploited by the Blaster and Welchia worms that hit recently. Keep on top of them. Use Windows Update, if you’ve got it. If you’re more tech-savvy, don’t bother and keep listening to the grapevine for security issues.

Take all of those precautions and you’ll probably never worry about viruses, hackers or spam ever again. In fact, your biggest worry will then be having to deal with the likes of Laurel Wellman.

I found Moving Units from someone’s site while looking for blackout photos. “X and Y” is the biggest rip-off of early Rapture I’ve ever heard, and strangely, I don’t care.

Now I’ve done it—I’ve gone ubergeek and started using LiteStep. I spent the better part of my “weekend” playing around with configs and Photoshop to create a stripped-down Simplicity-style theme and some Wip3out wallpaper.Warning: If you are easily overwhelmed by tech talk (Hi, my name is Mike, and I own a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz machine with half a gig of RAM and some sweet Serial ATA hard drives!) please skip ahead to… well, next week, probably.If you’re familiar at all with LiteStep, then you’ll know that while the currently existing taskbar modules are pretty good, there are still a lot of features left to add to bring it up to spec with Explorer and beyond. In fact, aside from the apparent inability of desktop modules to let me place icons where I want (easily solved; I just stopped using desktop icons!) it’s the taskbar modules that bother me the most. What’s missing?Drag-and-drop support. It’s funny how you don’t notice something until it’s gone, but I sorely miss the ability to drag and hold a file over a task in the taskbar to get the application to open said file. Merely adding this ability to taskbar3.dll would be awesome, but going one step further and allowing me to drag and drop a file on the task without waiting for it to maximize? Killer.Task reordering. From time to time I wish I could organize the taskbar, just like I wish I could reorder the tabs in Mozilla Firebird. Dragging tasks is an option in the tasks.dll module, but it’s not very helpful because once you grab a task, you can drop it anywhere on the desktop, which is not what I want. I want tasks to stay in the bar, and I want the bar to reflow once I’ve dropped a task in the right place.Tooltips, titles, or nothing. I’d love to find a way to connect taskbar3.dll into label.dll so I can use a label to show the title of whatever task I hover over, instead of waiting for the tooltip to appear. This, of course, is a nitpick.Quicklaunch bar! This isn’t really a taskbar problem, but if drag-and-drop support eventually works for tasks, I’d like my quicklaunch functionality back, please. Right now I’ve hacked in a fake quicklaunch but I certainly can’t add icons to it or anything of the sort.

So. How was your day? Good, good.Me? Oh, no big deal, I just lived through the most peaceful state of emergency ever experienced.Exactly when the power outage hit is questionable, of course, but every agrees it was only a couple of minutes after 4 p.m. yesterday. The computer went down, of course, and at the time I figured it was the heat—a temperature of 80 degrees celsius can’t be too healthy. Everything was down, though, and it didn’t appear to be coming back up any time soon.About an hour later it’s obvious that the entire city of Kingston is down. Calling the newspaper where I’ve been working for the summer fails to bring up the automated phone directory, and a friend returning from campus hadn’t seen any power either there or at home. A call to a friend who lives quite a ways out from the city is also without hydro.What do we decide to do? What any rational individual would at that point, of course—go to the ice cream shop and see if they’re giving anything away. (They weren’t—why bother when there’s still a huge line in the store?) Just before we leave, though, my housemate’s father calls to inform us that Toronto has no juice, and much of the eastern seaboard is in a similar state.I have to dig up an old walkman to find CBC Radio One on the dial, which is thankfully on the air. The three of us discover the full extent of the outage: most of Ontario and down the coast to New York City and most of New Jersey. Many Great Lakes cities were apparently out too—Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, etc. We took the walkman with us as we headed down the main strip for ice cream.By 5 p.m. most places had already shut their doors for the day. Many restaurants had signs in the windows saying they were closed for the blackout. It dawned on us that there would be no way to make dinner tonight, and questions about what to do about frozen food were left unanswered. As we came back we saw people with Pizza Pizza boxes, and so we did what many others undoubtedly did when they saw the same.Thanks to their gas-powered ovens—or so we assumed—Pizza Pizza was not only open, but going full steam ahead to keep up with demand. The line went out into the parking lot, and orders for large pizzas took up to half an hour. Similar scenes were playing out anywhere there was a restaurant or store open. Convenience stores and supermarkets had closed their doors, serving their customers in a queue for fear of looting during the panic.As street reporters from the CBC noted in Toronto, however, the general response was to sit back and enjoy the evening. Patios were filling up as people decided to treat the outage as an impromptu holiday. Downtown looked like it did any other weekend evening, except for the signs in the windows and the fact that it was Thursday. About the worst problem the three of us had was the interruption in our daily lives—my friend a seminar he had to prepare, my housemate a concert she needed to get to today in Montreal.

The sun began to set, and slowly people were incorporating the knowledge of the outage’s extent. Warnings about water usage were going out, and there were reports of raw sewage being dumped into the Cataraqui river to keep the strain off the city’s antiquated sewage systems, which couldn’t pump material across the river due to the complete lack of power. The president of Utilities Kingston, when asked why the pumping station didn’t have an alternate electricity source, said they never anticipated having the whole city without power.Street lights remained off, and the patios were slowly starting to close as the kitchens shut down for the night. I guess there were only so many candles to go around. People were toting around flashlights as evening turned into night, but the number of people still walking about was much higher than one would expect on a Thursday.The improv show at Princess Court Theatre had been cancelled, but as we arrived at Confederation Park to watch the night skies it seemed the players had decided to host the show there. They were amateurish but loud and enthusiastic, and they went at it for hours.Meanwhile, at Country 96, a local FM radio station, reporters and personnel from local television station CKWS had set up shop. Slowly but surely, the power began creeping across the province: Niagara-On-The-Lake, then parts of Belleville, then Prince Edward County and Napanee, and then finally parts of Kingston. The first report of electricity in Kingston came at about 9:45 p.m..From that point on, parts of the city began to come back online, with a number of areas in Kingston reporting service at 10 p.m.. At City Hall, you could see traffic lights and street lamps in the distance, but only headlights in the immediate area. As we hit Brock and King, however, more parts of the city began to see power, including the whole intersection. Walking up Princess Street, there were a number of dark spots, some of which lit up as we walked through them. We managed to spot reporters from the newspaper heading back to the office, including my partner in crime. It was 10:45 p.m., and it was her last day on the job.My friend had long since gone home to sleep. We returned expecting to find power, only to see a pitch black street. Undaunted, my housemate and I visited campus to see what state the university was in. The verdict: most buildings were up, but the street lights and blue lights were down. Much of the student ghetto was still missing power as well.
Both of us went to sleep around 1 a.m., and the power came back in our area at about 3:20 p.m., a half-hour ago. Presumably there are still pockets of the city without electricity even now, though, and it will likely stay that way until morning if not later. Kingston is still in a state of emergency, which was declared at about 7 p.m. yesterday and won’t be lifted until at least morning. We also have no clue at the moment if we can use our water now, or if the no-flush rule is still in effect.It doesn’t matter, though. We got through the worst blackout in 40 years without too much trouble, and now we can say we’ve been through a state of emergency. Today and for the near future, there will be recriminations levelled at many people: Con Edison, the Ontario utilities, the Eves government. But right now, it’s time to sleep under the reassuring glow of the alarm clock.

I’ve been searching for Threads for a long time, thinking I should get the full brunt of what people imagined a nuclear horror might have been at the peak of the Cold War. Instead, I found a copy of a United States equivalent, The Day After.If Threads makes The Day After “look like a Sunday luncheon at a rest home for old ladies,” then it must be true that Threads is the most horrendous and depressing film ever made. Certainly The Day After is plenty bleak. There is no happy ending, although the final few scenes offer a glint of hope that one day, in the far-flung future, the U.S. might get back on its collective feet.I suppose, then, if you removed those slight bits of hope (including one scene that reminded me of the end of The Grapes Of Wrath) and made explicit some trends The Day After only hints at, you might have Threads.

Today’s Stupid Guinness World Record: Two brothers set a new record of 16 candies for the “ear flip and catch.” What is the ear flip and catch? One guy bends his ear forward, sticks a candy on top, and then flips the candy backwards into his or her partner’s mouth using only his ear.One day, massively powerful aliens will come to our planet and decide to blast us into oblivion because we apparently have nothing better to do than to flip candies to one another using our ears.
New Dressy Bessy track, Just Once More, from the next self-titled album. It’s funny how a year ago, everyone thought Sound Go Round was so much louder and raucous than the last album. Turns out that was just a lead-in to a sound that apparently reflects the energy of their live shows a lot better than Pink Hearts Yellow Moons.