I Really Don’t Know

Assymetric Love

I need to start this entry by stating clearly that I love my parents very much and have throughout my life.

But…

There is an enormous difference to the love I feel for my children. I would die for them without a second thought if that were required. That’s what makes work, poo, hobbies etc seem unimportant in comparison.

When you come to realize this, the sense of Richard’s post on “Ask Your Parents” becomes even more apparent. For most of us, there are two people in this world who love us far more than we love them; who worked tirelessly for years to support you; who want to see you succeed at everything you try and above all else want to see you happy.

You love your kids more than you love your parents. Now think about how much your parents love you.

Poo

Alan Francis has started a wonderful Grid Blog about Fatherhood and I thought I’d add some thoughts in the vain of “things nobody will tell you”.

Poo.

There are various things people won’t tell you about children’s poo. Firstly, when you get your baby home, the poo is thick, dark stuff called merconium. It doesn’t smell, it’s a bit like spinach that’s been boiled a bit too long.

Then it turns into baby poo. It’s the texture of pebbledash and usually smelss of sick. It’s not nice, but the interesting thing is that it doesn’t seem to upset you. It upsets other people, and other people’s childrens’ poo will upset you, but in this regard your children are an extension of you. You can usually tell what your little one’s been eating too. Often questions like “What the **** did you feed her?” will follow a day when Daddy’s been in charge of food.

Then, somewhere betwen 18 months old and 2 years something very disconcerting happens. You open a nappy to find something different. The baby and toddler poo give way to a small but perfectly formed log. A little adult turd. Get used to this, you’ll still be seeing these, albeit in the potty and then the loo, for a few years yet.

As Alan says, sacrifice is everything. Who else would expect you to wipe their bum for them?

not so luuuuurvely

thinking about this here screensaver a bit more I’ve decided this is a seriously flawed piece of kit.

Firstly, the idea is flawed. Spamer economics is based on very small, sometimes infinitesimally small margins, this applies to their mailings and is likely to apply to their hosting also. Even at its peak this screensaver is not likely to really impact them.

Secondly, the implementation is flawed. It clearly sends junk. Not only does this make it more likely to infringe regulation of some kind or another by being a deliberate attack, it also means that it’s content will be easy to filter - trivial in fact.

Thirdly, the implementation doesn’t send any kind of legitimate HTTP request. As most ISPs host many web sites on each machine they rely on a HTTP Host header in each request to identify whose site you’re asking for. As Make Love Not Spam doesn’t identify which site it’s asking for, and clearly identifies itself as a non-legitimate requestor it is unlikely that costs will ever be attrributed to the spammer. Not to mention the fact that the degradation in service will be affecting all the poor sites who, through no fault of their own, happen to be hosted alongside one of the targeted sites.

Finally - aren’t the spammers pissing away enough of the internet’s bandwidth without us pissing it away too? This isn’t the way.