señor taco’s travels

So I went to lunch yesterday with Chris (no, not that one, the other one, yes,
him) at the Atlas
Cafe. While were there a group of three very cute women were seated behind
Chris. One of them had an aquamarine t-shirt on with lime green stenciled
letters (as in a hand made t-shirt) on the front saying Matt and on the back Skiba. Kind
of like this:

Not that those names would be odd or anything, but that’s one of the
singer/songwriters for Alkaline Trio. I don’t know many people that would recognize his
name, except for maybe my best friend Matt [not the same guy, btw]. Anyway, it
was an odd moment when I saw that.

She was really cute too, I should have said something about Alkaline Trio to
her. Oh well, I’m a dork and I’ve proved it once again.

So, I was sitting at work on Friday afternoon, working as usual, when Nina
came up and asked me if I wanted some tickets to the href="http://www.sfgiants.com/" title="San Francisco Giants">San Francisco
Giants game that night against the Arizona Diamondbacks. I said sure and
they were mine. So, the first person I could think of that would go with me
is Jan. He of course said yes.

Come the end of work we drove over to the href="http://www.ballparks.com/baseball/national/pacbel.htm"
title="Pac Bell Park">ballpark, got in, found our seats on the Club Level
(which was very nice by the way) and discovered we were sitting with two other
people from Wild Brain (Andrea and a visiting director). Many a beer was had,
some food was consumed, and fun was had.

As for the game, the poor Giants. They just lost all momentum in the top of
the 7th when a caught out was called not an out. From that there were 6 runs
against them in that inning that never should have been scored (for a total of
7). After that the Giants just didn’t play that strong and ended up loosing.
Such is life. No matter the turn out of the game, Pac Bell is a great (if not
the greatest) ballpark to go to.

Hehe, that title sounds like a kids toy: My First Earthquake(tm), now with
more death and destruction!

At any rate, here’s the info
title="Event: nc40146204">from the USGS. It was a 3.9 so apparently not
that strong. The center was less than a mile from my place. Basically it
went like this: First I thought there was either a really large truck
outside or someone was moving furniture upstairs (which shouldn’t happen as
the folks up there are out of town and I’m watching their place). That lasted
for a couple of seconds and then there was a jolt. It felt like it moved
East to West through the house. Polly (cat) got freaked out and ran. Joe
(other cat) was just laying there.

It was interesting, and now I’ve lost my earthquake cherry.

(update @ Thu Sep 4 20:05:28 PDT 2003)
Apparently there was a href="http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/nc40146208.html"
title=" Event: nc40146208">second quake about 1 hour 15 minutes after
the first one. I didn’t feel that one.

Last night was the September meeting for the SFOBUG and the speaker was none other than
Vipul Ved Prakash of
Vipul’s Razor
fame and now the Chief Scientist at
title=”Cloudmark, Inc.”>Cloudmark.

Vipul came in and gave us an excellent overview of Razor and
href=”http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/” title=”SpamNet”>SpamNet
and how they work with the Cloudmark servers. The overall structure of the
process is fascinating (hopefully Vipul’s sketch will be available online
soon and I’ll link to it then). He also went into a little bit of the way the
spam email is analyzed and what is stored and what is thrown away.

Since the Razor/SpamNet system is based on trust and community there are
definitely benefits to blocking spam in this way. For instance, Vipul related
the fact that when the Sobig virus started up they got a few reports from
Denmark at first, then, with the trust in place the users of Razor and SpamNet
had those emails blocked before Sobig got really going. Simply amazing.

If online notes become available I’ll post a link to them or the notes
themselves.