It's all about where you draw the line

I reprint this article every year around Halloween, so enjoy. Happy Halloween!

I’ve got a lot of music in my ol’ iTunes Library — well over 3,000 songs — and in the spirit of Halloween, I have assembled a short playlist of the very, very best creepy songs I’ve ever come across (but you probably haven’t).

First off we have “Lover’s Last Chance”, by a little-known Celtic group from New Orleans called The Poor Clares. It starts off sounding just a bit cheesy, as the singer goes on about Halloween night and “werewolves a-howlin’”, but it quickly takes a turn for the dark, moving to a haunting ghost story and… well, give it a listen and tell me if it doesn’t give you the creeps.

The album is called Resurrected Lover, and though it may be a bit hard to find, it seems they pop up on eBay and the like from time to time. Get going in time for next year! If you like good Celtic music, one of the singers, Beth Patterson, has released some other albums that are available as well.

Note: The Poor Clares’ rendition isn’t available online that I could find, but another singer’s version is on iTunes. I like the Clares’ version much better, as the haunting background vocals really make the song.

Next we have I Am Stretched On Your Grave, as performed by Kate Rusby.

Creepiest. Song. Evar.

No, really. If Edgar Allan Poe had been a songwriter, this would have topped his greatest hits. It’s a traditional Celtic song (what is it with those Irish makin’ wit’ the creepy, anyway?), and it has been performed by others before, but this rendition really takes the cake, with a minimal rhythmic drive carrying you along down a very dark road. The only thing a bit odd about this song is that it is a woman singing what is lyrically clearly a man’s “role” in the story, but that’s easily ignored. it’s from her album Hourglass. Go get it! (link is above)

Third in the list is yet another Celtic tune (funny, when I started this post I hadn’t realized the common source of these three songs — the sound of them is different enough that they are far from sounding alike!) called “She Moved Thro The Fair”. This one is performed by Finbar Wright (former member of Irish Tenors) on his album A Tribute to John McCormack. There are several versions of this song out there, but again, rendition means a lot when looking for the truly creepy song. The interesting thing about this one is that it can sneak up on you. It’s entirely possible to hear this one several times before it suddenly hits you what happens in it — the lyrics are clear but subtle, in a way sure to appeal to fans of ghost stories.

New for 2008 I present a song by “the Geeks’ Weird Al”^*, Jonathan Coulton. A couple years ago he underwent a project he called “Thing a Week”, in which he created a new song every week for an entire year, and put them up on his web site. Some are hits, and some are misses; but when he’s good, he’s great. One of these productions was a song called “Creepy Doll“, and tells the story of a house, and a locked door, and (naturally) a doll. Heck, you can listen to it on his site, so rather than me describing it, head on over there and listen.

Let us not forget Sting’s “Moon Over Bourbon Street“. A song written by Sting, inspired by Interview With The Vampire. ‘Nuff Said.

Okay, okay, okay I’ve got a bonus song for you. You’ve all heard this one, you just didn’t realize how creepy it is.

First, it’s story time:

A man comes home late one night to find his wife murdered, lying in a spreading pool of her own blood. He actually catches the killer in the act! There is a struggle, during which he clearly sees the man’s face, but the man overpowers him and escapes into the night. The police never catch him.

Years pass. The man never really recovers from his wife’s horrible death, or the thought that he was so close to catching the bastard who did it. That face — those eyes — are seared into his memory.

Late one cold winter evening he is walking at night when he hears faint cries for help in the distance. He follows the voice, and comes to a frozen lake, where someone has broken through a thin patch in the ice. The man runs toward the lake, grabbing a fallen branch along the way that he can use to help the man trapped in the icy waters. He gets to the edge of the ice, and slowly starts to work his way out closer to the man struggling desperately for purchase on the slippery edge of the hole. Suddenly he stops.

He knows that face.

He knows intimately the face of the man in the water. He has seen it exactly once before and will never forget it. After standing there for a moment, watching the man reach out to him from the freezing water, he turns and makes his way back to the shore and drops the branch, then turns and sits down.

..and watches.

Now go listen to Phil Collin’s In the Air Tonight. It will never be the same song again.

Happy Halloween.

This guy gets my vote for Best Use of Webcams:

Hit & Run > Gotcha! – Reason Magazine.

Nicely played.

This is hysterical — a real-life tribute to perhaps the greatest comic strip of all time….

Calvin and Hobbes Snowman Tribute

I love the one with the shovel, and the sharks are nice, too…

I reprint this article every year around Halloween. As I did last year, I’ve added a song to the list — so check out what’s new, and revisit what’s old, and most of all, enjoy. Happy Halloween!

I’ve got a lot of music in my ol’ iTunes Library — well approaching 3,000 songs — and in the spirit of Halloween, I have assembled a short playlist of the very, very best creepy songs I’ve ever come across (but you probably haven’t).

Next, we have “Lover’s Last Chance”, by a little-known Celtic group from New Orleans called The Poor Clares. It starts off sounding just a bit cheesy, as the singer goes on about Halloween night and “werewolves a-howlin’”, but it quickly takes a turn for the dark, moving to a haunting ghost story and… well, give it a listen and tell me if it doesn’t give you the creeps.

The album is called Resurrected Lover, and though it may be a bit hard to find, it seems they pop up on eBay and the like from time to time. Get going in time for next year! If you like good Celtic music, one of the singers, Beth Patterson, has released some other albums that are available as well.

Note: The Poor Clares’ rendition isn’t available online that I could find, but another singer’s version is on iTunes. I like the Clares’ version much better, as the haunting background vocals really make the song.

Next off is I Am Stretched On Your Grave, as performed by Kate Rusby.

Creepiest. Song. Evar.

No, really. If Edgar Allan Poe had been a songwriter, this would have topped his greatest hits. It’s a traditional Celtic song (what is it with those Irish makin’ wit’ the creepy, anyway?), and it has been performed by others before, but this rendition really takes the cake, with a minimal rhythmic drive carrying you along down a very dark road. The only thing a bit odd about this song is that it is a woman singing what is lyrically clearly a man’s “role” in the story, but that’s easily ignored. it’s from her album Hourglass. Go get it! (link is above)

Third in the list is yet another Celtic tune (funny, when I started this post I hadn’t realized the common source of these three songs — the sound of them is different enough that they are far from sounding alike!) called “She Moved Thro The Fair”. This one is performed by Finbar Wright (former member of Irish Tenors) on his album A Tribute to John McCormack. There are several versions of this song out there, but again, rendition means a lot when looking for the truly creepy song. The interesting thing about this one is that it can sneak up on you. It’s entirely possible to hear this one several times before it suddenly hits you what happens in it — the lyrics are clear but subtle, in a way sure to appeal to fans of ghost stories.

New for 2008 I present a song by “the Geeks’ Weird Al”^*, Jonathan Coulton. A couple years ago he underwent a project he called “Thing a Week”, in which he created a new song every week for an entire year, and put them up on his web site. Some are hits, and some are misses; but when he’s good, he’s great. One of these productions was a song called “Creepy Doll“, and tells the story of a house, and a locked door, and (naturally) a doll. Heck, you can listen to it on his site, so rather than me describing it, head on over there and listen.

Let us not forget Sting’s “Moon Over Bourbon Street“. A song written by Sting, inspired by Interview With The Vampire. ‘Nuff Said.

Okay, okay, okay I’ve got a bonus song for you. You’ve all heard this one, you just didn’t realize how creepy it is.

First, it’s story time:

A man comes home late one night to find his wife murdered, lying in a spreading pool of her own blood. He actually catches the killer in the act! There is a struggle, during which he clearly sees the man’s face, but the man overpowers him and escapes into the night. The police never catch him.

Years pass. The man never really recovers from his wife’s horrible death, or the thought that he was so close to catching the bastard who did it. That face — those eyes — are seared into his memory.

Late one cold winter evening he is walking at night when he hears faint cries for help in the distance. He follows the voice, and comes to a frozen lake, where someone has broken through a thin patch in the ice. The man runs toward the lake, grabbing a fallen branch along the way that he can use to help the man trapped in the icy waters. He gets to the edge of the ice, and slowly starts to work his way out closer to the man struggling desperately for purchase on the slippery edge of the hole. Suddenly he stops.

He knows that face.

He knows intimately the face of the man in the water. He has seen it exactly once before and will never forget it. After standing there for a moment, watching the man reach out to him from the freezing water, he turns and makes his way back to the shore and drops the branch, then turns and sits down.

..and watches.

Now go listen to Phil Collin’s In the Air Tonight. It will never be the same song again.

Happy Halloween.

It’s unsolicited¹ advertisement time her at Striderweb. First up: an amazing free program called Dropbox.

I downloaded Dropbox a few weeks ago, and I absolutely love it. What it does is creates a single folder on multiple computers that is kept synchronized. Working on your laptop? Put a document in the Dropbox folder and when you’re back at your desktop computer, that file will be in the desktop’s Dropbox folder. Update it there, and later when you’re back on the laptop you’ll have the updated file.

You can also share folders between accounts. I set up an account for my Dad, and now any time I want to give him a file, I just drop it into the folder I’ve shared with him, and it shows up in his folder on his computer. Email ain’t that hard, true, but emailing large files can be problematic, and Zip files get him every time. Beyond the syncing, the Dropbox folder is just like any other folder on his (and my) computer — there is nothing at all different about how you work with files.

I’ve also taken to depositing preference files for certain programs in my Dropbox. I use the excellent outstanding 1Password program to track my passwords and online accounts, and I keep the preference file in my Dropbox. Any time I open the program on any of my computers I have the same data. Cool!

Note that this trick doesn’t work for all cases. I tried putting my Firefox (web browser) profile in my Dropbox, and quickly discovered that when I was actually on the web, my computer’s processor and bandwidth were churning like crazy! Turns out Firefox is pretty constantly making changes when you browse — which makes sense, considering it’s writing cache files and such every time you pull up a page. So for every page I viewed, I was uploading that same page (in cache form) at the same time! I changed that back pretty quickly.

Another nice thing is the “Public” folder inside your Dropbox. Put something in there, and you can then get a public URL that will allow anyone to download that file. (Though I am curious how Dropbox will respond if someone put up something hugely popular — the bandwidth does cost them money somewhere along the line.)

The program is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and works across platforms. That is, you can sync a Windows Dropbox with a Mac Dropbox. I personally use it between two Macs, with a shared folder to a separate account on my Windows machine at work.

Best part? Dropbox is free, up to 2GB¹. You can also pay for a Dropbox that will sync up to 50GB if you find you’re a heavy user. Personally, I’ve made pretty good use of it so far, and have only used up about 15% of my 2GB limit.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, as I said, and there are only a couple things I would like to see added. First off, I think they would be wise to offer a smaller account somewhere between the free 2GB and the 50GB options. The 50GB account is $10 a month — but how about a 10GB version for, say, $2.50 or $3? I think they would get a lot of paying customers in that range.

Secondly, they should strongly consider some sort of self-hosted variation of this. It would be great in a corporate environment, but I bet a lot of companies would not be comfortable storing sensitive files on a shared semi-public server. License the program to companies so they can run their own private systems on company servers.

Thirdly, the program could stand to allow a bit more control over certain things. The problem I had with Firefox could be handled if I could tell Dropbox “don’t sync this one folder”, for example. Turning off syncing my cache files, but syncing the rest of the profile folder, would be very cool. As an alternate, they could allow you to set certain folders so they sync, say, every ten minutes, instead of continuously.

These are just quibbles though. This is a great program, and I hope they’re successful with it. I look forward to whatever improvements they come up with down the road. Check it out. Here’s that link again.

[Update: I've noticed something in the program that could stand improvement. I had a large folder in my Dropbox that I moved into another folder, also in the Dropbox. Rather than figuring out that it was all the same files, it re-uploaded the entire folder -- hundreds of megabytes; which means that a sync that should have taken seconds took over an hour. I would guess that a fix for this is in the works, as again, bandwidth costs them money, and fixing this would thus directly affect their profits.] It was a bug, and is fixed.

1: Though this article was originally written without them, the links to Dropbox in this article are now “affiliate” links. I receive no money, but if you start an account though this link, both you and I get a bit of extra space for free. Win/Win!

We’ve all played the game where you sit back and answer the question — “If you found a genie in a bottle, and were granted one wish — what would it be?” Well, here’s my variation on the game. Would you like to play?

The Question:

If you could be President for five minutes, and had the power and authority to pass a single law — any law — what law would you pass?

The Rules:

1. The law can only do one thing. It can perhaps be a far-reaching thing, but no “I would pass a law that bans/affirms abortion and ends/increases welfare and ends/wins the Iraq War and….” — that’s cheating. You can take one idea and make it the law of the land.
2. Be specific. Don’t say “I would end poverty”. What one law would you pass to try to end poverty? A $100/hr. minimum wage? Government-provided jobs? What?
3. Be realistic. No laws saying “Nobody will get sick ever again.” You’re President, not God. No magic.
4. Assume your law will last. Unless you explicitly put in and end date or sunset provisions of some sort, assume your law will not be negated or overturned for.. say… ten years at least.

Got all that? Okay, with the rules being laid out, here is my law:

The Charity Identification Act of 2008

Henceforth all federal government handouts — that is, any federal program that transfers money, service, or assets in any form to people or organizations that have not explicitly earned said transfer, or any such transfers by extra-governmental organizations (e.g. private companies) if such transfers are required by law or mandate — shall have the word “Charity” appended to the beginning of the name of the program, and to the name of all such transfers. E.g. — “Charity Welfare”, “Charity Emergency Room Care”, “Charity housing subsidies”.

Reductions in fees or taxes actually paid are not counted as “transfers” under this law^* — e.g. reduction in the amount of taxes due by individuals or organizations is not a “transfer” for the purposes of this law. However, “refund” payments greater than the receiver’s actual tax burden shall be included — e.g. “Charity Tax Rebates” to those who pay no taxes but receive a rebate.

Such transfers that are given in exchange for, or in consideration of, military service are exempted, e.g. the “G.I. Bill” or veterans’ health care.

Okay, that’s mine. What’s yours?

(You can play along in comments below or post at your own blog. If the latter, please link back to this original post. Thanks.)

This is very neat: Frozen in Grand Central

That is all.

Mike Elgan has written an excellent article regarding Microsoft’s so-called “Mojave Experiment”.

This is not simple Microsoft-bashing (of which I am not fond). It’s a well-thought out article, and a good discussion of how companies and marketers should relate to customers, and how not to.

Microsoft held a series of videotaped focus groups and told attendees — all non-Vista users — they would be shown a future version of Windows called “Mojave.”

First, they were asked what they thought of Windows Vista, and many comments were negative. A Microsoft representative showed them a variety of specific features of “Mojave,” and comments were positive. Then, Microsoft told them “Mojave” was in fact Vista, and some attendees said the Experiment had changed their thinking about Vista.

Microsoft gathered the most favorable comments and placed them on a site called The Mohave Experiment.

…

Since Microsoft cast this marketing push as an “Experiment” — i.e., science — I would like to hereby publicly challenge Microsoft to answer the following questions:

• The Mojave Experiment involved 120 people. But the Web site shows 55 people saying nice things about Vista. What did the other 65 people think?

• Most or all Mojave Experiment videos posted to date feature an expert or marketing person showing neato features to someone. If Vista is so great, why didn’t you let people touch the computers?

Go read the whole thing — it’s not that long…

I’ve observed over the years that most people don’t quite know the difference between a fact an an opinion. They don’t quite grasp the sometimes-subtle distinction between a fact and a theory. A fact and a meme. A fact and a judgment.

First off, a fact is — by definition — neutral. A fact cannot be mean spirited or rude, nor can it be kind. A fact cannot be racist, nor sexist. A fact cannot be fair, nor can it be unfair. A fact is not influenced by your perceptions, though hopefully the inverse is true. A fact is not truth.

Black people in America, proportionately, commit more violent crime than white people. This is not a racist statement — it cannot be racist; it is a fact. There are hard numbers to back it up, and unlike many statistics, the math is straightforward. If I take that fact and use it as a basis for judging individual blacks about whom I otherwise know nothing, that is racism; but it’s racist theory and opinion — the underlying fact does not change.

If I say a person is ugly (or beautiful), that is an opinion. If I say premeditated murder is illegal, that is a fact. If I say murder is wrong, that is an opinion (albeit a widely held one.)

There are situations wherein one group will claim a fact is a judgment, by claiming that the use of a word is, by definition bad. “Retarded” is a good example — it is a perfectly, factually accurate word to describe the mental state of certain people. The word itself means that something has been held back, or impeded; so “mentally retarded” simply means that in that particular person, normal human mental development has somehow been held back or impeded. It is a factual, neutral term. (To make the point further — anyone can be “mentally challenged”. Einstein was mentally challenged when he came up with relativity.)

You frequently hear statements that purport to be the “truth”. I tend to ignore any such argument. Why? The difficulty there is that “truth” can mean many things — it is a flexible term that can be used to mean just about anything you want it to. Philosophers talk about “truth”. Preachers talk about “truth”. Politicians often talk about “truth”. Many reporters (unfortunately) look for “truth”. “Truth” is what you believe to be true, or what you want to be true. If you look for “truth” you are likely to fall into the trap of coming to a conclusion and then cherry-picking only that which supports the idea. Science looks at facts.

I always liked the bit in the old Dragnet television show where Sgt. Friday wanted “just the facts”. He was good because his thought process wasn’t clouded in his search for “the truth” — he only wanted to talk about facts. Not opinions, not what the person thought about the situation. This point is also stressed in the TV show CSI, in the character Gil Grissom’s mantra, “The evidence never lies”. Witnesses can mislead you with opinions, lies, or simply errors, but the physical evidence is fact. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Sherlock Holmes puts it:

From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.”

Logic and facts are a powerful combination. Doyle’s statement is true because, simply put, that drop of water is a fact. If that same hypothetical logician had bad information that he believes to be fact, that same logic could lead him it a completely different place.

There is a place in common discourse for opinions, and judgment, and theory; but if you do not want to be misled, look for that distinction. In news reporting, opinion and theory are frequently reported as news. This is a mistake. “Hard News” reporting should be based on fact, and nothing more. There is room in such outlets for editorial pieces (opinion again), but it must remain distinct. If a politician tells you to believe in something because everybody else already agrees with it, beware. Facts are not dictated by popularity; facts are often decidedly unpopular (just ask Galileo). Besides that, if a politician is trying to convince you that everybody believes something, he wouldn’t be wasting his time unless he knew that a whole lot of people do not believe it — it’s a self-fulfilling falsehood.

Facts are not influenced by belief, nor convenience, nor popularity. They are not warm and fuzzy; they are hard and cold. They are reality — unvarnished, and raw.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
John Adams
‘Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials’
December 1770

Allan Mertner has put out a cool new Firefox plugin: Spam Control. It allows you to create variable email addresses on the fly so that you can avoid getting spammed when you have to fill in an email address for various sites.

Basically it gives you a toolbar and/or shortcut menu item with various email addresses — your standard personal one, your work address and (here’s the interesting part) addresses customized for the particular site you’re on. It works with various temporary forwarding sites, so you can give an address that will only work for an hour or so, so you can register with a site but not leave a permanent address.

It has a bug or two, being just released, but hopefully those will be squished in due time. I’ve been looking for something just like this — and here it is.

Overall, very neat.