As a favor to my dearest friend, I went today to the Federal Building in San Francisco to drop off a piece of paper.

I cleverly left my pocket-knife behind (and missed it twice) but, addled by a lifetime of drug abuse and masturbation, neglected to bring along an annotated wallet-size portrait of myself. (In the normal course of life, I may go weeks without needing to back up my claim to a name.)

Hurry home. Get the stupid piece of laminated paper. Hurry back. ($16 for the round trip.) Nine minutes too late for my errand, though the building was still open. The U.S.Marshal at the gate compared my face to the even surlier smaller version, but did not take a note of my name or check it against a list.

Picking a quarrel with an underling might have been entertaining at first, but it would bring me no satisfaction (I’m learning!), so I asked him instead to identify someone in a position to explain to me why such a policy was not a pointless waste of his time and mine. He was sympathetic and helpful on that point; perhaps relieved that I did not make more of a scene? The party I want is the head of the Marshals Service.

The trip was not a total loss: I had a satisfying Vietnamese lunch at Golden House, which would be in the shadow of the Fed Bldg if the sun were in the northwest.

The Geek Hierarchy. Referred orally(!) by John Grigsby.

This weekend’s activities included sitting on a tree stump by the shore of Lake Tahoe. Lesson learned: Sap can be sticky for quite a long time.

At some angles, the water looked strangely metallic to me; unlike the dark green sea-water around San Francisco. One of my companions remarked that those of us without polarized glasses missed seeing down into the water.

In the past eight days I’ve received nine spams from CustomOffers, identical in form but varying in content. I have relayed each to its provider Exodus, but got no response (other than from the bot); perhaps everyone there is too busy being acquired by CW. I therefore resolve never to do business with either of them.

It especially honks me off when spammers use bugs, of the form <img height=”1″ width=”1″ src=”http://shameless.parasite.com/whitepixel.gif?email=target.address”>. This shows up as a dot, but its real purpose is to appear in the sender’s web-traffic log as a sign that your address is valid.

Oh well. This came to my JPS address (rather than through Pobox), and I mean to find another dialup provider anyway.

In 1999 Earthlink acquired Mindspring, which had previously acquired Netcom. Netcom’s list-servers were transferred to Earthlink, but a couple of blunders were made, with the result that the next time a message went through the dormant list digital-anarchy@netcom.com all subscribers got a recursive cascade of thousands of bounces — and I could not unsub. (The list owner was a ghost.) After a couple of days of non-response from support@earthlink, I redirected my mail to that address. A few months later I no longer needed a shell account anyway, so I became an ex-customer.

My other (PPP) provider, JPS, was also eventually swallowed by Earthlink, which proceeded to lose my website. Again, no help, so I sought a new and better webhost (serve-you.net), but kept my dialup account for the time being since it was prepaid for several months. Now that has run out, and I notice that Earthlink’s rate ($21.95) is rather high, particularly for a feed that sometimes crashes every few minutes.

If you’re in Alameda County and happy with your dialup provider, please let me know. I don’t need mail or webspace.

Pretty things: hyperbolic planar tesselations by Don Hatch. Presented in the conformal Poincaré disc mapping, which is the most common; it’s analogous to stereographic projection of a sphere. Another favorite mapping is the half-plane, which has no analogue that I can think of.

But I’ve never seen a conformal ‘Mercator’ mapping, preserving one line. Instead of a circle, the infinite hyperbolic plane would become an infintely long but finitely wide strip; Escher’s Circle Limit, transformed through such a projection, would make a nifty frieze (or runner rug).

Sadly I’ve yet to find enough information (clear enough for my lazy mind) on doing stuff in hyperbolic space.

People say a lot of unkind things about John Glenn, and I won’t rule out the possibility that there might be good reasons for that. But I’d like to record that he did one good thing that I’ll never forget.

Seven years ago, a Republican majority had just taken power in Congress, threatening a number of reforms, including a rule that all legislation must carry a preamble specifying its Constitutional authority. If I am not misinformed, it was the Senator from Low Earth Orbit who naïvely blurted, “But that would make most of what we do illegal!”

Last night I mentioned linguists and misguided egalitarians in the same breath, and it occurs to me that some might take that somehow as a swipe at a certain public figure. Let me assure both my readers that I was thinking of no commie in particular; it’s merely that language is a perennial interest of mine and the jargon was handy.