This post is by request from a reader. Never let it be said that Signifying Nothing is indifferent to its audience.

Interesting: it seems that at least some of the documents that are raising questions about George W. Bush’s service (or lack thereof) in the National Guard are forgeries (☣ Little Green Footballs).

Incidentally, I duplicated the experiment here with my copy of Word 2002 SP 3 at work, and also came up with an identically laid-out memo. (The date is indented four inches, if you want to try it yourself.) What may be most interesting about this experiment is not the typeface*—although the “smart ordinal” feature is something of a giveaway—but the default margins, which are 1.25 inches on each side in Word, a size that is relatively atypical.

Does this mean the whole story is fake? Probably not. But it does mean that Democratic operatives need to catch up in the forgery department to the French intelligence services.

I have five Gmail invites up for grabs, and I can’t think of anyone offhand who’d want one (that probably doesn’t have one already). Drop me an email (lordsutch@gmail.com) if you want one.

Digital Camera Shopper magazine reports that most digital camera memory cards are virtually indestructible:

They were dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child's toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy.

Perhaps surprisingly, all the cards survived these six tests.

Obviously they can only be destroyed by casting them into the volcanic furnace in Mordor in which they were forged.

Brian J. Noggle explains the physics behind getting “free” stuff (well, it’s not free—usually, someone else paid for it and got screwed over) from vending machines, an art mastered by many a college student over the years.

My advice: although “tipping” the vending machine may not vend free product (as the labels say), it usually manages to dislodge any loosely-hanging items that failed to vend properly. Just don’t do it when anyone else is around.

Apparently the use of cell phones, like everything else it seems (except khat), leads to reduced sperm counts in men.

Meanwhile, I can’t tell if Amber Taylor is upset that these inanimate objects are sexist in their effects or just interested in obtaining an inexpensive form of contraception.

Matt Stinson has a list of Gmail deficiencies. There are a few more I’d add:

• No (obvious) way to search or filter on arbitrary headers, à la procmail.
• No way to mark messages as “to” you (e.g. with ») that are addressed to other addresses than your Gmail account (useful if you’re using a procmail recipe to Bcc all your incoming mail to Gmail).
• No way to automatically Bcc all your outgoing mail elsewhere.
• Nonexistent handling of mailing list headers (Mail-Followup-To, etc.). Ideally, Gmail should automatically create tags based on X-Mailing-List.

Still, it’s managing to win over this devoted mutt user quite quickly.

Apparently, Dick Cheney was ahead of the curve and speaking on behalf of fans of P2P networks when he told Patrick Leahy what he thought of him:

According to this News.com article, Senator Hatch’s “INDUCE” act has been renamed the “Inducing Infringements of Copyrights Act,” but has not otherwise been changed. ”Foes of the IICA, including civil liberties groups and file-swapping network operators, are alarmed that the measure enjoys strong support from prominent politicians of both major parties. Its supporters include Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.; Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.; Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.; Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.; and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.”

I have two Gmail invites to spare. Email me if you’re interested. All gone!

Jeff Licquia has a pretty insightful look at the news that the rapid improvement of Mozilla Firefox has shamed Microsoft into start developing Internet Explorer again.

Of course, the fact that IE’s pathological problems with modern CSS are being fixed by one guy using JavaScript ought to be pretty embarrassing to begin with.

Thanks to Mark Turnage, I’ve got a Gmail account now (sorry, they haven’t given me any invites yet…).

Just for kicks, I’ve added a procmail rule that forwards a copy of all my email (except detected viruses) to my Gmail account, and it seems to cope pretty well with spam--almost as well as my SpamAssassin 3.0 config does (thus I strongly suspect Gmail uses SpamAssassin under the hood). Overall it seems to be a pretty capable email tool, and I’ll probably use it quite a bit when I’m away from home, although I find non-graphical clients (like mutt) more efficient for day-to-day use, and the lack of true folders takes some getting used to.

By the way, for a more comprehensive look at Gmail, see Eric Janssen’s review at Plug In.

The Texas Department of Transportation plans to install free WiFi hotspots at all of its highway rest areas, after a pilot project at 4 rest stops along U.S. 287 found them to be a hit with the motoring public.

Will Collier notes that the ILECs won a Pyrrhic victory at the Supreme Court that will let them raise the fees they charge wireline competitors… not that it will help them in the long run.

I have BellSouth at present, like Will did; I’m trying to figure out a way to ditch wireline service when I move to Jackson next month. BellSouth’s nominal $16.55 local unlimited calling service actually is around $30, once all the bogus fees and taxes are piled on—including the absurd $1.87 a month fee I’m charged so they won’t give out my phone number in the directory. Vonage is looking awfully appealing, although I’m still not sure if my TiVos will play nicely with it or not.

I’ve been generally happy with BellSouth’s DSL, even though their occasional hardware screw-ups are annoying, but Earthlink has a great deal on cable Internet in Jackson which I can’t pass up ($29.95 per month the first six months, then $41.95 per month, with no equipment to buy). Now just to figure out how I can get my DirecTV hooked up with all the trees around and it being a rental property. Hopefully the DirecTV movers’ deal will cover that.

Only a few hours left to buy BlogMatrix Jäger at the low introductory price of $10 US, versus the still-low new price of $15 US. I’d probably buy it myself if I lived more than 1% of my life in Windows…

Now, this is an interesting (if somewhat scary) hack:

nstx allows you to pass IP packets via DNS queries. This allows you to use standard network protocols when otherwise only DNS would be available.

Color me impressed.

The cause of our 48-hour outage earlier this week: a borderline failing DSLAM card at the telephone exchange about a half-mile down the street. Just in case you were curious…

Steven Taylor notes that WordPerfect 12 has just been released, even though it last gained a new feature, by my estimation, circa WordPerfect 9.

These days, if I have to use a word processor (which usually means, “I have to read someone else’s Word file”), I’ll use either OpenOffice.org or StarOffice; now that they have native PDF export, they do pretty much everything I need a word processor to do. But pretty much anything I write myself (from letters to my vita to conference papers) I end up doing in LaTeX these days.

Has anyone else been getting unsolicited bulk emails from an outfit called RatherBiased.com, which appears to be some sort of anti-Dan Rather site?

Just curious. They’re about to be introduced to my procmail filter…

Being at the ass-end of a CDMA 1X wireless link is even worse than dialup (about the same throughput, but around 400 ms latency on pings). But at least it’s (cough) free and easy, at least until my phone battery drains and I need to recharge it…

I’m off for an interview in two hours. But, in the meantime, check out Dan Drezner’s post on the impending takeover of Newsworld International by Al Gore. Because what CBC’s “National” needed to be a rip-roaring success south of the border was the one-two excitement punch of Peter Mansbridge and Al Gore. (Of course, it might also help if they didn’t talk about Canada for 90% of the show…)

Also, a data point for you: on the way here (a state capital within a leisurely drive of Memphis, Tenn.), I passed not one, but two, hotels prominently featuring high-speed Internet access on their billboards—at the same exit. Pretty amazing considering almost nobody would have thought high-speed Internet was a needed hotel amenity even three years ago (and I still visit major hotels that have no high-speed access in most rooms—or, rather, pass them up in favor of other hotels, as the case may be).

First it was Movable Type doing it… now, WordPress generates differently but equally-broken XML for its inline trackback RDF discovery. Here’s an example:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" 
    xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
    xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">
<rdf:Description
    rdf:about="http://xrlq.com/archives/2004/04/30/1475/hat-of-the-day-chip-frederick/"
    dc:identifier="http://xrlq.com/archives/2004/04/30/1475/hat-of-the-day-chip-frederick/"
    dc:title="\'Hat of the Day:  Chip Frederick"
    trackback:ping="http://xrlq.com/wp-trackback.php/1475" />
</rdf:RDF>

Backslashes don’t escape anything in XML…

Update: Per the trackback below, WordPress fixed it! So, the current score is: WP 1, MT 0. (So, my message to all you WordPress bloggers over there on the sidebar: get thee to an update.)

Alex Knapp is not at all impressed with the spread of touchscreen voting and thinks it will ultimately create more problems than it solves; I generally agree, especially given the less expensive and superior alternative: optical mark recognition (OMR) machines, which are essentially glorified Scantron machines that read ink circles instead of pencil marks. Put an OMR scanner or two in each precinct, and the only other equipment you need are some pens and the proper machine-readable paper ballots. Not to mention that the audit trail is trivial: all you need to do is hang on to the ballots after they’re scanned.

I still owe David Janes some feedback on his new feedreader (David: I’ll get to it in my Copious Free Time later this week!). In the meantime, download version 1.0.0 for your Windows box and take it for a spin; Jäger takes a different approach than most feed readers, letting your preferred browser handle displaying entries (instead of using an IE or Gecko component internally), but it gets the job done very well.

Anyone who tells you that email propogation is instantaneous should consider this Received trace:

Received: from X.Y.edu
        by sunset.backbone.olemiss.edu (8.12.10+Sun/8.12.9) with ESMTP id i38G1LAf017356
        for <cnlawren@olemiss.edu>; Thu, 8 Apr 2004 11:01:21 -0500 (CDT)
Received: from a.b.c.d
        by X.Y.edu (8.12.9-20030924/8.12.9) with ESMTP id i36JvaK3027962
        for <cnlawren@olemiss.edu>; Tue, 6 Apr 2004 14:57:37 -0500 (CDT)

In other words, the email took 44 hours, 4 minutes to get here (well, 44:08 if you count the 5 minute fetchmail cycle on my inbox). I probably could have gotten a paper letter sent first class from X.edu (within a day’s drive in a neighboring state) in less time.

I finally got David Janes’ new feedreader working under Windows XP (the previous 0.4.something release just seemed to hang, but 0.5.01 works fine). It’s a pretty slick tool, although there are a few minor quibbles I’d make:

• It doesn’t seem to discover Atom feeds, which seems odd. (I’m not sure if it supports Atom or not—that may explain why it doesn’t discover Atom feeds.)
• The “Political Righties” blogroll (InstaPundit, Lileks, Marginal Revolution, Samizdata, Volokh) seems, well, not to have any real righties in it, at least when compared with the “Lefties” blogroll (Calpundit, Crooked Timber, Eschaton/Atrios, Matt Welch, TalkLeft, and This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow). Maybe that’s a Canuck thing.
• Signifying Nothing isn’t included in the default blogroll anywhere. (Just kidding on that one.)

Anyway, I probably won’t be using it myself, at least not until the promised Linux port happens (and, even then, I think Straw has it beat in the features department, although Jäger does have some neat built-in heuristics for dealing with blogs that don’t have syndication feeds), but if you live in Windows it’s probably worth taking for a spin.

Michael Jennings ponders who pays who to include the trial versions of Norton AntiVirus on laptops. My guess is Norton supplies the software either gratis or at a low, lump-sum price.

I’m most unlikely to pay for an anti-virus subscription on my new laptop, as I have a virus scanner that processes all my mail anyway, and I really don’t download much software for Windows (except essential stuff like Adobe Reader and the like); I do most of my real work in Linux, and have done for going on a decade. If I see a Norton Utilities 2004 bundle (which includes an annual Norton Anti-Virus subscription) especially cheap at Costco, however, I might reconsider.