I have activated Akismet. I have deactivated the math problems for now, to see how well Akismet works. It may be back.

Unfortunately, the most successful of the math plugins was the original one, which suddenly stopped working at some point but then started working again. I fear that if I go back to that one, it will stop working again.

Just a reminder, but my offer to give regular users an account still stands. A benefit of having it is being able to post if I put in a captcha that doesn’t work. And the ability to edit your own comments.

The math plug-in apparently broke on last update, so I’ve disabled it for the time being.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: Using a new plugin. Should work.

Web took down hitcoffee.net somewhat unexpectedly (possibly my fault), so there is presently no forwarding. I have tried to get it to forward through the settings at GoDaddy, but it’s not happening yet. I’m not sure if this is because it takes time for the changes to implement, or whether I did something wrong.

Janet Kornblum is finding out more than she would like about a guy named Josh Kornblum:

When I picked out jkornblum on Gmail those many years ago, I was in a race. I also had jkornblum@aol.com (now used only by spammers) because I joined before AOL had hit a million customers. I have other jkornblums: Twitter, Amazon and sites that have gone the way of Kozmo. (Pretty sure my user name for Kozmo was jkornblum.) I was in a race to make all the jkornblums mine.

We did stupid things like that back in the early days, racing for user names. That was when we thought there would be limited user names and limited URLs (back when you couldn’t just find a company simply searching for it). […]

But the real fallout I never could have predicted: Years down the line, after my successful mad dash for jkornblums, I often get emails for other jkornblums. jkornblums I will never meet, with whom I obviously share some kind of a heritage but little else.

My (non-trumwill) email address is not prone to error. Ultimately, though, this is a variation of finding out a whole lot of interesting things about the last person to have your phone number.

Of course, this wouldn’t be an issue if they’d use more domain names.

A couple things…

Accounts

If you are a regular commenter and would like an account on HC, I can oblige. The only difference if you have an account is that you would have the ability to go in and edit your own comments. You would also get to skip the oh-so-tough math question. I will need an email address, if you do not typically provide one.

Gravatars

So, Hit Coffee now makes use of Gravatar. Right now, your gravatar is randomly assigned into an 8-bit form. If you would prefer to be able to place your own image, go to gravatar.com and pick one out. Note that the image you upload there will work in a lot of places, including Lion’s site. Basically, any site that links itself with Gravatar will look up your email address and, if it corresponds with one in their database, your image will pop up.

If you want to use a computer-generated avatar based on your personal or desired appearance, here are some tools you can use:

Face Only:

Portrait Illustrator: This one is the gold standard as far as flexibility goes. It’s also the source tool for how I created mine. They are kind of vanilla and rather digital-looking, which is why I ran mine through a vectorizer, but it’s still something. It’s the only tool where I could have created the kind of image I wanted to create.

Avatar Face Maker: I used to use this one here and there (mostly on Google-run sites. It’s very straightforward with manga-style art. It looks nicer than Portrait Illustrator, though there are fewer options in the overall.

FoxRichards Facemaker: This one has limited options, but produces some of the coolest faces.

Avatar Maker: Those who followed me on Twitter in my earlier days will recognize this one (and I’m not the only one who uses it).

Digibody’s Caricature Maker: No colors available. It is, more or less, exactly what it is called.

Cartoonify: A relatively basic, but pretty nice looking avatar maker.

Full Body:

Rasterboy Unique: Very cartoony and full-body. It has fewer options than Dream Avatar, but I like the end-result better.

Dream Avatar: A kind of omake-looking design. There are lots of options, though it’s look is so distinctive that it’s hard to really chart your own course. There are a lot of wardrobe options, though.

Doppleme: Another face one. Not too much variety (Mine ended up looking exactly like someone else’s, even though we don’t really look alike). But it’s capable.

Anime Character Maker: This is downloaded software rather than a simple online tool. It does have the advantage of being a more full-body shot. Limited selection of configurations, though.

Introducing, Trumanverse 2.1. Border-wise, it is very similar to 2.0 (why is why it doesn’t get its own integer). All of the states have been named, finally, and some of the states have been renamed. The main relevant one is Dixona/Delosa, which is now Deltona. This should be the last of the name changes for that state. I had to come up with a name on the fly last time and was never fully satisfied with “Delosa” (the only state name without some historical roots or rationale).

Some state lines were moved, a state was folded into two others, Long Island and the Delaware Peninsula were formally given their boundaries and state names. Plymouth was split into two, as was suggested. Future changes are possible, but I’m feeling pretty good about this map. Unless I decide to utilize John Wesley Powell’s watershed map, I don’t expect it to change much going forward.

Complete map
Overlay map

History:
Version 1.0
Version 2.0

The existing template made it difficult to respond on my phone, which made it difficult to respond more quickly.

That problem aside was a little too gadgety for my tastes at the expense of the basics (like showing how many comments were on a given post without having to click or hover over something. It was also really hard to tinker with the code. This one has fewer options, though, and will require more going into the code myself (but so far, seems easier to tinker). But before I do, thoughts? Better? Worse? Is the green-on-blue legible?

Bloomberg ran a piece about the inadequacies of the Internet in the United States, making the oft-mentioned point that we really don’t get much bang for our buck. She wonders why broadband isn’t more of a government venture, citing some municipal initiatives such as the one in Lafayette, Louisiana:

In 2004, the Lafayette utilities system decided to provide a fiber-to-the-home service. The new network, called LUS Fiber, would give everyone in Lafayette a very fast Internet connection, enabling them to lower their electricity costs by monitoring and adjusting their usage.

Push-back from the local telephone company, BellSouth Corp., and the local cable company, Cox Communications Inc., was immediate. They tried to get laws passed to stop the network, sued the city, even forced the town to hold a referendum on the project — in which the people voted 62 percent in favor. Finally, in February 2007, after five civil lawsuits, the Louisiana Supreme Court voted, 7-0, to allow the network.

From 2007 to mid-2011, people living in Lafayette saved $5.7 million on telecommunications services.

Since Lafayette went down this path, other communities have followed. According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group that advocates for municipal fiber networks, these community-owned networks are generally faster, more reliable and cheaper than those of the private carriers, and provide better customer service.

I have seen one of these municipal networks in action, and I have to say that they are a pretty great deal. Especially when the local utility companies are charging too much or dragging their feet on upgrading service. More generally, there is a strong argument to be made that utilities that lend themselves towards natural monopolies, like cable internet, cable TV, and phone service, ought to be government rather than private ventures. I mean, if you’re not going to have actual competition between suppliers, why not cut out the middle man?

Sometimes, it’s because the middle man has something to offer. Out here, broadband began as a co-op but eventually was sold on the private model in large part because the cable company had access to more and better resources for expansion and upgrading. The co-op more or less abandoned the city right about the time I was arriving, though they still cover the outlying part of the county. However you look at it, there’s no good reason that a private company shouldn’t have to prove itself to the people.

There were other aspects of the article I was less keen about, however. Where I felt like the article was misleading.

It’s true that in the past private industry had little interest in covering rural America and needed the pitchfork of the government to do so. Rural America and small towns owe a debt of gratitude to the FDR and the federal government in that regard. And, as is the case in Callie, a lot of it they had to do themselves because they were (and in some places still are) below the radar of corporate America. However, it has to be said that (as far as I can tell) this is a lot less true than it used to be. Proclamations that but for the government, national communications and entertainment companies would tell small towns and rural places to go to hell no longer seems to be true except for a relatively small sliver of what we would consider to be rural.

My current town, Callie, population 3,000 with nary another town of remotely comparable size (or larger) for 50 miles in any direction, has 3G from Verizon and (non-LTE) 4G from AT&T. Verizon’s LTE network extends to cover almost 90% of the country, which includes a lot of small towns. Places such as Butte, Montana, and Twin Falls, Idaho, are covered. You see something similar with local channels in satellite. Back when I used to work for a satellite carrier, they had all but said that there were some DMA’s that they would never bother to cover. Now, Dish Network covers everybody and DirecTV covers almost everybody. Twin Falls and Butte both have their local channels broadcast by satellite. And they aren’t actually charged any more than the big cities are for the privilege (a hat tip to arguments about the USPS being a giveaway to rural America because letters to the middle of nowhere cost the same as letters between population centers). There is, in fact, money to be made in rural America and small towns, and the same subsidies that the government has actually apply to private industry as well (ie Dish Network makes more per subscriber in Seattle than Twin Falls because of per-capita usage they get out of resources expended).l

Another issue I had with the article was any comparison whatsoever between the United States and South Korea and the like. You simply cannot compare the two in any meaningful sense. Not with Internet, and not with cell phone coverage. The US faces enormous challenges that smaller and more urban nations do not. The degree to which we are spread out makes coverage more difficult. This applies to rural areas, but also suburbs (and the fact that our urban cores themselves are not remarkably dense, in most places). This is one of the downsides to American settlement patterns, but it’s not going away any time soon. So coverage of such things is going to be weaker, and more expensive.

Which brings us, of course, to questions of how and where the federal government should promote service. I’ve written on this before. Now, as a rural-liver, I wouldn’t mind it one little bit if the federal government decided to lay broadband out here. I’d use it and happily so. The only downsides are the extent to which the same people who would champion a national broadband policy will turn around and complain about “rural subsidies” and, more substantively, I don’t think it’s actually the best allocation of resources.

While we do need to make sure that everybody has access to high speed Internet of one sort of another (I’m a commie that way, I suppose), I believe it only makes sense to approach each areas needs individually. Callie doesn’t need fiber. A lot of places don’t. As satellite internet gets better and more affordable, this may well be a problem that takes care of itself. So long as we keep expectations reasonable.

Which is why, ultimately, I think this should be mostly a local issue. More cities should either do what Lafayette has done or use the threat of doing so to leverage a equipment upgrades by the local suppliers. The primary role I see in the federal government is to use fiber for redevelopment zones. Take cities that have capacity outstripping their population or that are simply struggling to keep their population numbers stable, and start offering it to those areas. Places like Detroit or Redstone. That could be helpful in enticing employers to utilize these services and attract and retain local talent. But beyond that, different places are going to have different needs. The alternative starts to look like this.

We’ve taken to using Google Hangout for our family video conferencing. I was introduced to it at The League and found it was easy enough for all of our family members to use. The downside is that it requires Google+. It says it doesn’t, but it does. The other downside is that nobody uses Google+. I finally got around to getting my profile completely set up (places I’ve lived, jobs I’ve worked, schools I’ve attended, etc.) only to discover that it’s even more a ghosttown now than it was when I first created the account.

Google does a really good job of encouraging people like me, in the Googlesphere, of going ahead and setting up an account. I use Gmail in order to organize my contacts for the phone. Throw in the Google Calendar, and I’m relatively entrenched in a way that Microsoft never did with Windows Mobile. I’ve actually come to like the setup on G+ a little bit better than Facebook. Beyond that, there is some redundancy involved. It somehow annoys me, though, that G+ is useful for chatting but I can’t find much of any other use for it. I thought about making it a repository for cross-posts (things I put on Twitter, or Facebook), but it’s not good for even that (apparently they are stingy with giving developers the tools with which to do it).

One of the frustrating things about Google+, and the fact that nobody uses it, is that few people that have an account even have a profile picture. I’m extremely OCD about these things. I’ve gone in and added some picture or another to every person on my contact list. If I have a picture of them, I add it. If not, I add a picture of some relevance. I have an irrational hatred of default silhouettes. My sisters-in-law went about creating the G+ accounts and I had to implore them to add a picture so that I wouldn’t be setting up chats with a bunch of silhouettes.

Sometimes, I think I’m not normal.

Okay, so apparently almost all homemade porn ends up online:

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – The vast majority of homemade pornography and private images on personal computers ends up on public websites called “parasites.”

Eighty-eight percent of homemade pornography, including videos and still images, finds its way onto porn sites, often without the owners’ knowledge, a new study from Britain’s Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) has found.

The study analyzed more than 12,000 sexually explicit images uploaded by young people and found that the great majority of images had been stolen and published to what the organization calls, “parasite” websites.

I cannot for the life of me understand how they came up with that figure (with, or beyond, the explanation provided).