First there was the guy who tried to compliment a woman on her good looks by asking her if she was a hooker. Now we have someone who applied for a job at the BBC and made an even worse faux pas (no small feat). This rejection letter says it all.
Never mind the War on Terrorism; we’ve got a War on Tact!
(This one came from bOINGbOING).
My friend Paul Baranowski (who often goes by his nickname, Drunken Master, for obvious reasons) is the leader, architect and lead programmer of the Peekabooty Project. On the evening I was sacked, he asked me to join the team to do some programming and accordion-powered developer relations work. Paul’s making the underlying engine, I’m making the user interface and graphics, and our friend Chris Cummer is maintaining Peekabooty’s Web site.
Paul and I will be speaking at CodeCon in San Francisco next weekend. We will deliver a presentation of Peekabooty and demonstrate the software in action. I also expect to be playing the accordion a lot. I’m looking forward to this trip for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is to catch up some friends who are also the bright lights of peer-to-peer computing: Jillzilla, Lisa, Bram, zooko, Jim, Coderman, Fawn, Luke, Ry4an and Fred, to name a few (if you’re going to be there and I’ve missed your name, drop me a line and give me hell).
I’ve been working on a little blurb that describes what Peekabooty is. While what’s being described is technical, the blurb is meant to be understood by the “average person” (keeping in mind the adage “the average person has one tit and one ball). Give it a look and tell me what you think.
The goal of the Peekabooty Project is to create a product that can bypass the nation-wide censorship of the World Wide Web practiced by many countries.
The free, easy and quick exchange of information possible on the Internet is seen as a threat by governments in countries where a free press and freedom of expression are not considered to the parts of their people’s rights. Such a government would have two options. The first would be to completely ban use of the Internet. This is an impractical measure, as it would close off that country to business opportunities and technological innovation. The preferred option is to make use of filtering computers and software – called firewalls in technological parlance – that make only those Web pages approved by the government available to their citizens.
In layperson’s terms, firewalls act as intermediaries between users and the rest of the Internet. In countries where the Web is censored, the only way to access the Internet is through the firewalls. A user enters a URL – the “address” of a Web page – into his or her browser. This URL gets passed to the firewall, which checks to see if it is one of those banned by the government. If the URL is not on the list, the firewall forwards the request for the Web page and the contents of the page are relayed back to the user, who can then read it. If the URL is on the “banned” list, the firewall refuses to forward the request and sends a page back to user indicating that the page he or she requested cannot be viewed by order of the government.
In addition to barring access to specified Web sites, firewalls can also monitor the data that passes through them. They can be configured to look for content that the government considers inappropriate or subversive and either make a note of who requested the content or simply break the connection.
21 countries currently censor the World Wide Web. These countries are populated by a hundreds of millions of people who have been denied access to information by their goverment. We want to create software that will give these people the free access to information on that Web that we enjoy.
Peekabooty is software that enables people inside countries where the Web is censored to bypass those censorship measures. The theory behind it is simple: bypass the firewalls by providing an alternate intermediary to the World Wide Web.
Peekabooty takes advantage of three things:
Peekabooty is software run by “global-thinking, local-acting” people in countries that do not censor the Internet. A user in a country that censors the Internet connects to the ad hoc network of computers running Peekabooty. A small number of randomly selected computers in the network retrieves the Web pages and relays them back to the user. As far the censoring firewall is concerned, the user is simply accessing some computer not on its “banned” list. The retrieved Web pages are encrypted using the de facto standard for secure transactions in order to prevent the firewall from examining the Web pages’ contents. Since the encryption used is a secure transaction standard, it will look like an ordinary e-business transaction to the firewall.
Users in countries where the Internet is censored do not necessarily need to install any software. They merely need to make a simple change to their Internet settings so that their access to the World Wide Web is mediated by the Peekabooty network. Installing the software makes the process of connecting to the Internet simpler and allows users to take fuller advantage of the Peekabooty network.
“Global-thinking, local-acting” people in countries that do not censor the Internet install Peekabooty, which can run “in the background” while they use their computer for their day-to-day work. It doubles as a screen saver that displays its status as well as information about human rights and censortship.
Peekabooty can be classified as a distributed or peer-to-peer application. This means that its actions are the result of several computers working collectively rather than a single computer doing all the work. The distributed nature of Peekabooty makes it harder for a hostile government or group to shut it down. Given enough users, it would be almost impossible to block access to or otherwise disable all the computers in the Peekabooty network. Each computer in the Peekabooty network “knows” of only a few other computers in the network. This makes it more difficult for a hostile government to discover the Internet addresses of Peekabooty machines and add them to their “banned” lists or target them for “cracking”.
This personal ad appeared on craigslist (a community news/bulletin board/on-line classified ads site started in the Bay Area) not too long ago:
I was just thinking about this afternoon and think we may have had some miscommunication.
When I asked if you were a hooker I didn’t mean it like it might have sounded or how I think you may have taken it. I didn’t mean that you LOOK like a hooker just that if you wanted to be one that I’m sure you could do very well at it because I think you are gorgeous. I meant it as a compliment but somehow I don’t think you took it that way.
Now that I think about it maybe I should have used the term “call girl.”
Wanna try this again? I promise the next time we see each other I won’t be so goddamn drunk.
Yeah. “Call girl” is soooo much better. There’s a reason why the sonnet starts with “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” and not “Shall I compare thee to a skanky ho?”
(Thanks to Dan, who in turn got it from Jamie Zawinski.)
Before Methods of Mayhem, before making all those charming home movies with Pamela Anderson and even before playing with the Crüe, Tommy Lee was an accordion player. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Guitar.com:
Guitar.com: You’re one of the world’s most respected rock drummers. Did you ever think you’d be doing an interview about your guitar playing?
Tommy Lee: I didn’t! But I’ve been playing guitar in the closet, so to speak, forever. My first instrument was guitar… no, accordion, actually! The funny thing is, it was an electric accordion; you could plug it into an amp. And I was like, “Oh, the accordion is so gay, but I can plug it into this amp and get distortion.” I plugged it in and would play the guitar line from “Smoke on the Water.” I would crank it up!
Raaaaaawk!
Today (Friday, February 8th) is last day you can vote in the Anti-Bloggies. I’m asking you to vote for these blogs:
The voting page is here. Remember, you can vote once an hour, so vote early and vote often!
…the next installment of Snow Job will be posted later today. If you haven’t read it yet, check out part 1 and part 2.
Former kiddie-pop star Tiffany is posing nude in Playboy. She’s 30 now and has a personal relationship with Jesus.
(Mind you, Jesus hung out with a woman said to be a ho and longshoremen, so the Tiffster — socially speaking — is a step up.)
I’m more of a Debbie “Call me Deborah” Gibson kind of guy myself.
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Damn skippy it was. So show your love for The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century and vote for this site as Best Heterosexual Weblog (and Blog of the Millennium) in the Anti-Bloggies right now (and yes, you can vote more than once)!
The fourteen of us who had passed the difficult “do you know how to calculate change” test were split into teams of two and assigned a truck each. Barry’s lieutenant Kevin (who actually oversaw the day-to-day operations) and his roomate/sometime-girlfriend Annie were assigned the remaining truck. I was paired with a first-year university student named Samantha, whom we always called “Sam”, just like on the TV show Bewitched. Sam was assigned the role of “driver” — the person in charge of the truck, cart and machinery — and I was designated the “runner”, the driver’s assistant. The runner’s job involved a lot of running between the truck and cart to fetch more blocks of ice and gas for the generator. While I was disappointed that I didn’t get to be in charge of a truck, I didn’t mind my role. I was still getting paid better than most of my friends and got to work outdoors. Being one who lived in the ‘burbs, the opportunity to spend most of my time downtown was very welcome.
The day started with Sam picking me up at my house and then driving across town to the warehouse to be there by 10 a.m.. At the warehouse, we’d see Kevin tending to the terriyaki hot dogs on a large charcoal barbecue (we often had some of them for breakfast). Once the ‘dogs were done, he’d divide them into 8 equal portions, put them in ziploc bags and hand them to each team. I would go to the large freezer in the warehouse and load the truck’s cooler with a day’s supply of ice while Sam got our syrups, hot dog buns and other supplies. We used our proven ability to make change to check out a float for the cash box, hand in any receipts for gas and parking expenses, check which street corner we were assigned, load the truck and be on our way.
Setting up and tearing down took about a half hour. Sam would stop the truck right be the street corner where we were to set up, while I climbed into the pickup’s trailer to start unloading. First the cart, then the generator, then shaver and microwave, followed by smaller supplies. I’d set up the cart while Sam parked the truck. When Sam returned, she’d continue setting up the cart whil I dragged the generator as far away as the power cord would let me. While the shop was “open” I ran back and forth between cart and truck, fetching supplies or refueling the generator.
At night, we tore everything down. I’d retrieve the generator while Sam cleaned up, then continue cleaning up while she got the truck. We loaded the truck and go to some place downtown to meet our co-workers and unwind, after which I’d get dropped off at home.
One of the reasons I liked the job so much was that I got to meet interesting and often freaky people.
The first of these was Zach, a born-again Christian who “witnessed” around the corner of Bloor and Yonge, the intersection of Toronto’s main east-west and north-south streets, where Sam and I were first assigned. Zach always had a pocket full of Jack Chick comic book tracts that he was always handing out at the corner. Sam and I loved reading them; we thought they were hilarious. We’d read them out loud and go into giggling fits, which Zach seemed to take in stride.
“Laugh all you want, God can take it,” Zach would always say. The apple pie-faced teenager who always wore a t-shirt saying something like “Jesus is Lord” or “In the beginning” in cheap iron-on letters. Zach made a special effort to save Sam and me. Sam and I always gave free shaved ice to street kids, which in his eyes made us “good unsaved people”. Even though we were both Catholics — me being a rather laid back one — we were still unsaved, as Zach believed that the Catholic Church and its corrupted version of the Bible were tools of Satan.
“If you want a real tool of Satan,” I said, “there’s this guy at a swimming pool you should meet.” I told him about how the Satanist Antonio and I met made it rain.
“The Prince of Lies often gives his servants powers,” Zach replied, “I witness with a girl who used to worship the Devil; she could move objects with her mind.”
Riiiiiight. It turned out that Zach’s church often had testimonials given by people who claimed to once be into devil-worship, Santeria and voodoo. Many of them claimed to have been given fantastic powers by the Devil in exchange for their souls, but Jesus had cleansed them of their sins. They often came to the corner where Sam and I worked with their portable public address system; the sidewalk was wide and had plenty of room for them to stage their “revivals”. We always gave them free shaved ice and hot dogs; we found it more entertaining than TV.
The best testimonial we ever saw took place one evening when Zach’s full congregation gathered outside the Eaton Centre. It wasn’t our usual corner, but Sam and I switched corners with another team just so we could watch the show. It started with gospel singers in purple robes sang beautiful three-part harmonies; I recognized Mahalia Jackson’s Move On Up A Little Higher and some old number from Aretha Franklin’s earlier years. While the music was beautiful, the fun didn’t really start until the minister started the testimonials.
The best testimonial was delivered by a young black girl from the Carolinas dressed in her Sunday best. She talked about how she’d come to be in league with the Devil and how he’d given her the power of telekinesis, which she pronounced as “tuh-luh-ku-NEEE-sis!” with great gusto. Sam squealed when she heard this.
“This is the ‘Carrie-girl’ Zach was talking about!” she whispered, barely able to contain her excitement.
Carrie-girl, as we now called her, told us a story of how her powers nearly got the better of her. “One night, I was very mad at my Daddy. I was seein’ red. I got so mad that I subconsciously used my powers to throw at kitchen knife staright at his head. It was only at the last split-second I realized what I was doing and made the knife his him by only a couple of inches. He would’a been DAY-ED!”
“Day-am!” whispered Sam.
I had to keep nudging Sam; she seemed on the edge of bursting into laughter. “You’ll upset the Bible-thumpers,” I said. I wasn’t as big a smart-ass back then.
Sam began to silently mime Sissy Spacek’s actions in the opening scene of Carrie: gingerly touching her crotch with a bug-eyed expression, lifting her hand up so that she could see the blood on her fingers, and then screaming silently while curling into the fetal position against the cart. I completely lost my composure. I wasn’t able to stop laughing now, and I thought the Bible-thumpers were going to give us a lot of static.
They didn’t. Some angry teenage girl with the AC/DC logo drawn on her denim jacket blue ink had already got their attention. One of the congregation had tried to tell her that “AC/DC” was short for “Anti-Christ/Devil’s Crusade” or “After Christ the Devil Comes” and that she was a sinner.n She didn’t take too kindly to this, and an argument had ensued. The argument had turned into a shoving match between her and one of the members of the congragation. She clearly had the upper hand and knoced him to the ground with a hard shove.
He sat up, pointed a finger at her and yelled, “Cheesus loves chu, chu stupid bitch!”
Sam and I completely lost it. This was just too funny, and the crowd that gathered around thought so too. The cops broke up the scuffle and sent the congregation home for the day.
Next: Why you shouldn’t try to convert bikers or date the boss’ girlfriend’s sister.
In the past two days, this site has had over 16,000 hits! I can understand yesterday’s hits — they came from an article I’d submitted to Slashdot. But I have no idea why I got over 8,500 hits the day before.
Anyhow, I’m certain that this means I might have some new readers. Welcome!
How to run a successful shaved ice business. If only Barry knew…
Telekinesis World. Your one-stop Web site for information about telekinesis. They even have reviews of Carrie and Carrie 2!
History of and little-known facts about AC/DC. Did you know that guitarist Angus Young worked as a typesetter, or that they got the band’s name from the back of a vaccuum cleaner?
In my February 3rd posting, I mentioned that I spent the summer of 1985 driving a snow cone truck. This prompted my friend Leesh to send me the following e-mail message:
Subject: Even not still waters run deep
Joey, you are a man of eternal mystery. I had no idea that you drove a sno-cone truck in ‘85! George suggests that some “slight illegality and a lesbian” might have been involved.
— Leesh
In order to satisfy my dear friend’s curiosity and as a ploy to garner more votes for the Anti-Bloggies competition, I’ve decided to tell the story of that lovely summer.
Please note that I’ve changed all the names save mine to protect the innocent. Actually, that not true: I’ve changed the names save mine to protect my sorry ass.
When you’re a spiky-haired seventeen-year-old with a driver’s license, summer seems so full of promise. That’s the way it seemed to me back in 1985, literally half a lifetime ago. It was less than a week into summer vacation when I was sitting by a pool where my classmate Antonio was a lifeguard. It was only just past the middle of June and the humidity made it feel like the dog days of August.
“Please,” Antonio said, looking at the sky, which couldn’t seem to settle on being sunny or cloudy, “rain, willya?”
Aside from the creepy guy doing laps in the pool, Antonio and I were the only people there. If it rained, Antonio would be able to close the pool and call it an early afternoon. I remember that we were planning to go to Club Z, an all ages alternative music dance club on St. Joseph Street that evening and that Antonio wanted the afternoon off so that he could do something — I don’t recall what — prior to clubbing.
We sat and watched the clouds start to dissipate.
“C’mon, God! A little rain here!” he yelled at the sky.
Creepy Guy saw this and emerged from the pool. He was a good head taller than I was, with a very lanky build and long black hair. I’d say he looked like Trent Reznor, but at that time Trent was just an unknown musician working at a keyboard store in Cleveland.
“That’s not how it’s done.” said Creepy in a basso prundo voice.
“How’s it done then?” asked Antonio.
“Like this.” He raised his arms at an angle to the sky, his fists clenched. “Oh mighty Satan…”
Mighty Satan?
“Oh Prince of Darkness, I, your humble servant implore you to make it rain!”
Oh great, I thought, Creepy Guy’s probably going to offer us as a sacrifice to his dark lord.
He saw the looks on our faces and merely smiled. “Just wait and see,” he said, as he left the pool.
“He probably peed in the pool. Devil worshippers treat pee like holy water.” I said.
Less than half an hour later, I grabbed a newspaper to shield myself from the sudden downpour. Antonio quickly locked up the pool and we made a made dash for his car.
“That…was…weird”, said Antonio once we were inside the car, shaking the water from his afro.
“You should find another job.” I said. “Speaking of jobs…”
I still had the newspaper — The Toronto Sun — in my hands. The outer pages were soaked, but the inside pages were still relatively dry. I turned to the help wanted section. The only ad that seemed even remotely interesting read something like this:
HAWAIIAN SNOW
Make money selling frozen treats – bonuses!
Must have drivers license
Vehicle provided
High school students welcome
Orientation session tomorrow
I thought it would be worth checking out.
The orientation session was held in a warehouse clear across town, in Scarborough, or as we like to call it, Scarberia. The warehouse was full of clothing racks from which evening dresses were hanging. I thought that perhaps I’d gone to the wrong address when I saw a man in a Hawaiian shirt and Jams (a brand of very loud Hawaiian shorts popular in the 80’s) giving a lecture to people who looked about my age.
“Remember,” he said, “it’s not a snow cone. That’s a trademarked term. This is shaved ice. We are Hawaiian Snow. There’s a difference. Snow cones are granular; you make them by crushing ice. Shaved ice you make by shaving ice very finely, so it’s just like snow.”
He took a block the size of a large shoebox and placed it into a large compartment inside a large white machine. He turned a crank and then stepped on a foot pedal. The machine made loud whirring sounds as it spun the block of ice in place. Shavings came out the bottom of the machine; he caught them with a cup. He stopped when the cup was full, took a bottle of blue liquid, squirted some into the cup and passed it around. It was like snow, and the blue stuff tasted like pineapple.
“I poured the wrong food colouring in that bottle. All the flavourings are clear. The colour’s just for effect.”
While we we passed the cup of shaved ice among ourselves, Barry — the guy giving the lecture — told us the story of Hawaiian Snow. Barry was originally from Montreal and had moved to Toronto a couple of years prior to help his uncle run a store that sold overstocked or discontinued designer dresses in a chi-chi Toronto neighbourhood called Yorkville. That explained the dresses in the warehouse. He went on to tell a story about how he’d seen street vendors in Califonia selling shaved ice, tried some, got hooked and became convinced that he could start a lucrative business selling shaved ice in Toronto.
“These machines cost almost a thousand dollars each and they came all the way from Japan,” he bragged, as if it were some land of mystical appliances and not the same country that my Walkman came from.
“If you have a valid drivers license with a clean driving record and if you pass the test, you can have a job selling Hawaiian Snow this summer! We pay seven bucks an hour, and you get all the shaved ice you can eat!”
Seven bucks an hour. That was almost three bucks above minimum wage back then. Fifty-six bucks a day. To my seventeen-year-old mind, that was serious money.
I waited for a while to be tested, since I was near the end of the line to Barry’s office, where he was administering the test. Most of the people coming out of the office at the end of their tests went straight out the warehouse’s main door; only a few returned to the area where Barry was delivering the orientation lecture. I assumed they had passed. What kind of test was he giving?
My turn came up. I entered Gary’s office and sat in a chair opposite him and a tall blonde woman who was obviously his girlfriend or wife. He looked at the form I’d filled out earlier.
“Seventeen. A little young…” he said.
“I have a driver’s license,” I said, in a tone of voice that tried to suggest that I was mature for my age.
“Here’s your test,” said the blonde woman. “I buy something from you. It costs $1.67 with tax. I give you a two dollar bill.” (This was back when we still had two-dollar bills.) “How much change should you give me?”
“Thirty-three cents,” I replied quickly. Duh.
“Congratulations,” said Barry, reaching to shake my hand. “You passed.”
The ice shaving machine was a large white machine a little large than one of those restaurant-grade KitchenAid mixers and had a shape similar to an espresso machine. Its upper half was a compartment into which you placed the ice. To load the machine, I would slide open the compartment’s transparent door and place a shoeboxed-sized block of ice into the compartment. Using a handle on the side of the machine, I would lower the shaver’s drive axle until its spikes penetrated the ice block. I would then slide the compartment door shut. At that point, the shaver was ready for operation.
The machine was operated by a foot pedal. Stepping on it would start the shaver’s motor, which would spin the ice block counterclockwise within the compartment. The bottom of the compartment had a blade which would shave the ice; the shavings fell from the bottom of the compartment into the open area beneath it, just as coffee comes from the upper compartment of an espresso machine.
I would catch the shaved ice in a paper cone as it fell from the bottom of the ice compartment, packing it gently with gloved hands. When the cone was filled to its rim, I’d continue to shave more ice and pack it into a ball on top of the cone. This would continue until a baseball-sized snowball sat on top of the cone.
After the snowball was complete, it was time to pour unnaturally-coloured, unnaturally flavoured syrups onto the snowball. Unlike snow cones (which, as you may recall are made of crushed ice), the syrup didn’t rush to the bottom of the cone and collect in a pool. The snow-like shaved ice did a good job of holding the syrup like a sponge. There were about a dozen different flavours to choose from and there wasn’t any arbitrary limit to the number of flavours customers could ask to have put on their shaved ice. If I was feeling artistic and had the time, I’d paint the customer’s cone with some kind of design. I’d make Pac-Man, Batman and Superman cones for the kids, and I once impressed a couple of art students visiting from Connecticut by making them Mondrian and Seurat cones.
The other machine that we were provided was a microwave. The other item we sold were teriyaki hot dogs, which someone would barbecue every morning. The hot dogs and buns would be stored in the ice
The problem with our machines was that they needed electricity to run. This is a problem for a street vendor; the streets of Toronto don’t have convenient power outlets at every corner. The solution was to provide each vendor with a Honda portable gas generator. Essentially a lawnmower engine attached to an electrical dynamo with two standard three-prong power outlets at the end, it weighed over a hundred pounds and sounded like an idling moped when little demand was being placed on it. When we stepped on the footswitches of our ice shavers, the generator’s sound became much louder, sounding more like a lawn tractor at maximum speed. Needless to say, it didn’t endear us to the shopkeepers around our stands.
All our equipment fit into our carts, which were custom-built kitchen counters on wheels. The carts had nooks specially designed to hold the microwave oven, cash box, a cooler for the ice blocks, the syrup bottles and some personal stuff. The shaver was put on top of the counter so that customers could see the shaved ice being made. It was believed that making shaved ice would draw a lot of spectators, and hopefully, customers.
In oder to cart all this stuff about, we were each provided with a bottom-of-the-line white Toyota pickup truck. All our equipment and a large cooler that could hold 50 or so blocks of ice fit in the back. The truck had a piddly little 1-point-something-small litre engine, so it was a struggle to climb steep hills when it was fully loaded. We were allowed to take the trucks home at night and since gas was covered by the company, they became our personal vehicles for the entire summer.
I’m still amazed that he trusted so much stuff to a seventeen year-old.
Next: The fun begins!
