I wanted to see George Carlin when he came through Boston a few months ago, but I couldn’t round up any friends willing to go. In retrospect, I wish I had just gone alone. I remember the first time I heard the Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television, and I felt it was the work of a genius. I still think it is.

But I didn’t appreciate, until today, how truly insightful George Carlin could be. NPR’s Fresh Air had a piece, Remembering George Carlin, where they played clips from older interviews of his. I was floored by how well-spoken, insightful, and thought-provoking he could be talking about his own intellectual development in the decades following the 1960s. In his discussions on religion, morality, humor, pain, trust and humanity, there is a lot of truth. He’s worth listening to.

As with so much in this world, I didn’t really appreciate the man until he was gone.

I got a curious comment to my last post about the potential harm Hillary would do on Obama’s ticket. At first blush this comment looks like one of those rambling half-drunk comments that you are inclined to mark as spam but decide to allow only because you don’t get enough hits to be selective about your readership.

Then I clicked on the link to his page, found more of the same, and saw… more links. To more blogs, all in the same layout, all written in the same manner. Each one looks like a regurgitated melange of Clinton pamphlets and regional-newspaper Obama news clips. They’re all signed the same way, and none of them really make any sense.

So I’m wondering: is this a person at all? Is this some new form of spam bot that I haven’t seen before, which grabs a topic (like “Hillary Clinton vs Barack Obama”), plagiarizes enough web content to fill a few blogs, and goes on a comment-spamming, cross-linking rampage? It’s starting to seem plausible, except that these blog sites don’t have any ads. It’s a conundrum.

Of course Hillary didn’t concede. How could she? Anyone who’s invested this much time, energy and cash is not going to walk away quietly. Well, hang on. Mitt Romney did just that–he conceded almost prematurely, and the common wisdom was that he was gunning for the VP spot with McCain. Thankfully, we’ve moved past that.

Hillary is doing the same. Her husband has been going on for a couple weeks about how she should be VP, and now the news media is gushing about a “unifying ticket” that would bring Democrats together. It sounds nice, but Barack, don’t do it.

The first Clinton administration was notoriously divisive. Not in a partisan sense; I mean it was rife with internecine power struggles. The common wisdom is that an Obama/Clinton ticket would unify the Democrats, and maybe that’s true. But it would divide the administration between two camps that have fought a razor-sharp campaign against each other, and still see each other as rivals across a generational gap.

Obama won’t have much problem unifying Democrats. Sure, there may be some who are still willing to tell exit pollers that “race was a factor in the decision to vote for Hillary” (read: “I don’t trust black men”). And some of those voters might not mobilize, or even (gasp!) vote Republican. But he doesn’t need them anyways.

Obama has enough clout with young voters (who have already shown they can mobilize very well) and with centrists (as long as he steps back from this anti-trade stuff) that if West Virgina wants to walk, they can walk. He doesn’t need Hillary Clinton in the White House for the next four years, nipping at his heels and playing as active a role in shaping policy as Dick Cheney has done for the last eight.

Don’t do it, man. You can do better. If the Dems really want a “unifying ticket”, how about unifying Hispanic voters? They’re fuming at the Republican party over the nativists’ victory in the immigration battle. Does anyone have Bill Richardson’s phone number?

It’s been a busy weekend for the home server. After I installed a fourth drive, the motherboard failed to post anymore. The CPU fan would spin, network LEDs would light up, but not a damn thing coming out the video card. Take all the memory out and it’s still dead silent. Fried.

I’m still stumped on what I did to kill it, but life is short and I need to watch the last season of The IT Crowd right now! The board was an old Socket 754 with a single-core Sempron, so Micro Center damn well isn’t stocking any replacements. Fast forward to me burning my cash on a new board, CPU, and memory stick.

Having spent more of this weekend than I’d really like to admit installing the new dual-core mobo and CPU, rewiring all the drives (since I’m now short by one IDE connector), searching for how to get my RAID5 partition to eat up the fourth drive, wasting my time on out-of-date Internet howtos, desperately cursing the man page for not having step-by-step instructions, and finally settling on something that might work (but might also nuke my data if it’s feeling pernicious), it dawns on me I haven’t yet searched Google for “mdadm grow raid5“.

Well. There it is. I quit.

I got caught a while ago sending spam. A veritable flood of Cialis solicitations and Nigerian phone scams bursted from my domain. Thankfully, the registrar I used (GoDaddy) sprang into action and shut down my account. To ensure I would not return to my dastardly ways, they asked me to pay the $80 fee before they would reinstate my account. I declined. Another evil spammer shut out from the web by the Knights of Self-Governance.

Thing is, I wasn’t sending spam. Someone else was. From one of my domains.

As it turns out, the DNS service I was using (FreeDNS) has a very interesting business model. It’s a subscription platform, like many other things on the Internet. But how do you hook people to pay money? Well, you do that by giving away their domains.

The default behavior for FreeDNS is to allow anyone else who uses their system (free or otherwise) to register subdomains of your domain names. That means if you use them to manage DNS for, say, ying.li, I can create a subdomain called 0wned.ying.li. It’s so easy!

To their credit, FreeDNS lets you put your domains into “private” mode, which ostensibly means you have the ability to shut off any subdomains that other people register. To their discredit, Glyph never received an email that I’d registered a subdomain of his. Also, once he did put his own domain into public mode, we could not figure out where the hell to delete my spammer subdomain.

This is what happened to me a long time ago. Because the default behavior of FreeDNS is an open-door policy, like a bakery that uses the honor system, anybody can come take what they want. Glyph had 44 unauthorized subdomains (just off the one domain). When mine got shut down, there were hundreds.

As I post this, 0wned.ying.li is still cached in DNS (somewhere) to point to my server.

Are we having fun yet?

I complained a while ago about WaMuWhooHoo, which (at the time) seemed another spurious webineering attempt by a corporation that thinks it can spam Twitter the way it spams my Gmail account. I was wrong.

Here is a sampling of some twittering I’ve seen from their account:

• A good consumer stays in debt! WhooHoo!
• We always share customer data . . . for optimal marketing saturation.
• Our overdraft fees are now $33.00!
• We suck the least!

So, clearly, this is not some asinine marketing ploy by a half-clueless corporation that takes its communication cues from Robert Scoble (or from their 16-year-old kids). Instead, it’s the quasi-legal emotional core dump of a man who’s either been screwed on overdraft fees or really likes Wachovia. Power to you, sir.

Cheryl just pointed me towards Kiva, one of the best web sites I’ve ever laid eyes on. Microfinance firms around the world sign up and create profiles for each of their entrepreneurs who are seeking funds. You, the fat-cat Westerner who makes more than $1 a day, can make loans to these folks through the website in a matter of minutes.

The idea is that these entrepreneurs can email you with updates on how they’re using your money, and eventually they start paying you back through the same process. It’s not really going to supplant any of the charitable giving I already make (especially since it’s not tax-deductible). But I’m still really excited about it.

I didn’t think it would be this soon that Google would feature direct-to-cortex integration.

Last week, Karl told me about a site that could show housing prices on an interactive map, with some neat effects (like a heat map of a metro or regional area). But I couldn’t remember the name. Wasn’t it something like “zooloo“?

Nope. But Google still figured it out for me. “Related searches: zillow, home value”

That’s it, Zillow. Sort of like “zooloo”, except not at all.

The only logical conclusion is that, without telling me, Google has signed me up for its beta service that somehow uses WiFi antennas to directly infer search terms from my brain. I wouldn’t put it past them. Smart guys.