Yahoo Personals Test

Test Results

"He's his own man - imaginative, curious, shrewd, introspective, and filled with surprises. Like the pioneers, he has the potential to chart a new course and break new ground in his career and community. Not everyone appreciates it, but he's a true original."

Well, it does seem accurate, but too positive.

But here's the funny one -

"Passionate - He has the freedom to love intensely and completely, focusing only on the here and now."

Oh, yeah.
That should scare the pants right off of these women.

Well, it seems much more accurate than I'd have thought.
Better than a PF Chang's fortune cookie.

Breitbart In Overdrive

The original Breitbart.com memegraph and conjecture of deliberate memetic manipulation.

The expanded Breitbart.com conjecture.

And for today's magic act, the latest Breitbart memegraph, followed by the model of a deliberately overdriven meme.

I like the occasional validation of my predictions.
How did I know that Breitbart would stall out?

Because I've made the same mistake!

I overdrove the original meme propagation of this site (realmeme.com) with the same results.
Now I let realmeme.com flow at its own rate, and I give it a little push now and then.

A meme can only be pushed so fast through the IdeoSphere.
There are impedance constraints due to bandwidth, context, language... a host of unpredictable factors.

I'd still like to know if that original vertical spike was a deliberate Internet marketing campaign dreamed up by someone with slightly less experience and knowledge than me.

For the marketing people - what you really want is an impedance-matched propagation. With an exact impedance match of push to flow, there should be a smooth S-curve of growth. Drive the meme too slowly and there's lost mindshare potential, but driving it too hard results in over-exposure and wasted time, effot and resources. I'm still working over a more detailed description of an impedance-matching scheme that is loosely based on this entry.

I Was Blind

So.
We'll see what comes out of the Vogue tonight.

Tonight's personals contact was pretty fun, though.

"What's this about leather and handcuffs in your ad?", she asked.

Well, if you need to ask, you should probably move on to the next ad, baby.
I coded it specifically for a certain audience.

Saturday Night Plan

What do you call a Saturday that was so busy that you're running late for tonight's adventure?

"A positive change".

Okay. Defcon is submitted and it's a good presentation, I think. Last year I estimated that I had less than a 50/50 chance of acceptance, but I easily qualified.

I've spent the last two years burning down a bunch of irrational fears.
I am going to become who I always wanted to be.

I made two on-line contacts tonight and there's the in-person deal with the English chick last night, so I'm definitely ahead of previous weeks. And months...

And years.

Decades? Egad!

Defcon Submission

No!
It's not a kinky sex act!

It's the premiere hacker conference each year in Vegas!

I just finished up my submission

My presentation from last year.

Come on, baby, just give me an opening.

Vector and Frequency

Suppose I went a bar.
Yes, that bar, damn you!

If it was early, or a slow night, perhaps early on a slow Friday night, there might be a table. There might be a chair. Perhaps there many chairs and I took one at random. But maybe it wasn't random choice.

Is there a skill in choosing the right chair, the right place at the right time?
How do you choose the real estate that's prime?

That place would have singles.
It surely has couples.
And even perhaps a tuple or two...
A polymorphic sequence for a few.

Some couples are stable, others are new, but some of them lack that glue. Mismatched in sex or temperament or even height. There's something about them that's just not right. If I saw this problem, a misty cloud of tension, not a word about it would I mention. If I sit right here, a mismatch is clear, but if I sat in another chair, the shorter one might dare, to walk by, and pause, for no apparent cause.

If she took a seat next to him, then glanced askew, and then glanced again, I might take heed and ponder about her unmet need. And as they talked, as her posture balked, he spun around her like a clock. But this time she avoided a full-frontal attack, I gazed at her profile and leered down her back.

As time went by, the disjoint was clear, I was sad when it ended, I admired her hair!

Was there a skill to choosing that chair?

Virtualization Meme, Ver 3.0

I reran the graph for "Virtualization and Microsoft", but added "VMWare" to compensate for possible bias -

And this graph does paint a brighter picture for Microsoft, although the gradient for VMWare is accelerating faster than Microsoft. But that acceleration is only a couple of months old, so I wouldn't put much emphasis on it yet.

The Sex Puzzle Finale

Let's revisit the Sex Puzzle.

I know who sent the fourth message ("Prostitute").
She was demanding (and accepting) Amazon gifts right up until she deleted her journals.
And I have the receipts to prove it.

Will she ever tell the truth?
I don't think so.

Who sent the first message ("Let's have sex") to me, Lena?
Who sent it again, two weeks later?
A good detective might parse through Lena's words, searching for the "goodtwin" and "badtwin" entry, examine the timestamp and then read this entry in my blog. And an excellent detective would find the other instances.

Will Lena ever tell the truth?
I don't think so.

And then there's my wife.

A Triad of Prevarication.

I met a woman from London last night. She didn't over-react, scream or pass out so I may be getting better at this. But then again, maybe it's because she was English. Her interest in me waned after she met Chris (he is a charmer), so I left them alone together. But she didn't manipulate my emotions for money and we had an interesting, guilt-free conversation.

Interesting fact of the day - the Anonymouse IP addresses have racked up an impressive 25 mbs of traffic this month. Avid readers, they must be!

Tonight's PF Chang's Fortune

" Nothing can stop you from reaching your goals "

Interesting.

In that case, we may be headed for Conflict City.

Off to the Vogue, leather outfit and all!

Virtualization Meme & Microsoft

Five-year Dejanews memegraph of virtualization trend -

Five-year trend of Microsoft stock -

I don't see how this accelerating virtualization trend is good for Microsoft. It could have happened ten years ago, but for whatever reason, TCP/IP standardization is now making operating systems into a commodity item. The value of virtualization is encapsulation and reduction of total transaction costs in IT management, based on my own brief experience so far. The virtualization vendors are arbitraging the difference between the cost of Windows and the cost of alternative operating systems, which is likely to increase pricing pressure on Microsoft. No doubt my pseudo-enemies at No Treason would see this as a triumph of the free market over monopolies. Perhaps they're right this time.

If the concept of social bandwidth is correct, i.e. that people will only spend a finite amount of their time on computers and that point is close at hand, then Microsoft's advantage of "user interface" will decrease in importance. A possible measurement of this trend - what is the makeup of all virtual machines? Does Windows make up an increasing or decreasing share of VMs?

I might run a couple of comparison graphs to see if a trend is already in place.

VMWare shows a trend change towards faster growth while Microsoft's growth trend slowed down. But it's only two months of data so there is still doubt about Microsoft's long-term position.

Virtualization Meme

I've been using virtualization technology for a few weeks now. It's clearly useful from my limited niche experience (quick restoration and manipulation of development environments under different operating systems), but it seems to be a general technology trend, too.

Dejanews shows a sharp increase in virtualization at the end of 2005 -

Also interesting... Google's Trends page shows virtualization trend change several months after it appears in the Dejanews data.

Me... In Cycle Leather

O-kay.

I'll have to replace these later with better lighting.

Yeah.
Let's who flinches at the Vogue tonight.

-----

Update -

All.
Right.

I've never been lusted after as a sex object before.

It's kinda cool.

Meme Injection Map

(rough draft for Defcon presentation)

Patient Zero identifies the origin of a disease vector, the first infection which then spreads to other patients. If memes are similar to diseases, then it should be possible to trace their vectors. If vectors can be predicted from empirical measurements, then it should be possible to optimize meme propagation by optimizing the entry point of patient zero, the meme injection point.

Injection maps are my crude attempt to optimize meme propagation. We can measure the date and rate of change of unique keywords as they pass through major Internet sites like Slashdot.org, CNews, Digg.com, etc and use them as proxies for meme flow. There is a strong association of certain keywords to information domains, so some sets of keywords can be grouped into coarse categories like "technology memes", "business memes", "political memes".

Websites favor different information domains, but there is crossover (contextual intersection) between many sites. Articles and ideas that appear on Slashdot.org tend to appear on Cnews within hours of original publication, and vice versa. Empirical measurement of keywords and domains are used to build a vector map which shows the affinity (contextual intersection) of domains between websites.

I know that if I post certain information on Slashdot.org, there's a good chance it will be reach a set of readers. Some of these readers are also CNews readers, and they may forward the original information to others or append it to an existing CNews article.

The trick of the thing is monitoring unique keywords - when they appear on a site, how much their frequency changes over time - to build a predictive map of how future keywords will propagate.

Technology memes may tend to flow from CNews to Slashdot, while business memes may tend to flow from Slashdot to CNews, and these flow tendencies can be visually displayed as a map of affinities.

We can deduce certain properties of these affinity relationships -

a) Cross flows are not additive. The flow from Slashdot to CNews has little to do with the same domain flow from CNews to Slashdot.

b) Flows do not respective Kirchoff's law, i.e. the sum of all inflows and outflows is meaningless.

c) Flows in the same vector, but between different information domains, are not additive.

d) We can define "integrity" as a measure of "veracity" or how well a website (or that website's readers) accepts factual information and ferrets out fraud or rumor. Integrity should have a positive correlation to diffraction, the ability of a meme to spawn related memes.

e) Each website (or the contextual domain of its readers) has a finite ability to re-transmit memes.
That ability is a curve of diminishing returns.

Conclusion - A meme injection map can be created through the automated measurement of unique keywords as they flow from website to website. Grouping keywords into information domains lets us identify and optimize the entry point of each type of meme. For instance, a technology meme injected onto the Slashdot website may travel faster and further than that same meme injected onto the CNews website.

The Empire Strikes Back

In our prologue, Kook Netstalker revealed his identity to the Amazonian princess.

"I am your father, Dom!
Search your feelings,
you know it to be true."

Click, whuzzzzzzzzzz, and Kook's lightsaber leaps out fully erect, ready for battle!

But the Princess flees to a beach in California where nudity is prohibited!

Tune in next week when the Princess investigates date rape drugs for her own nefarioius purposes!

--

A-HA!
I knew it!
You're still reading!

Today's goals - Virtualization memegraph and initial injection map entry.

As I walked up to the Vogue, Freakout Rejection Woman was standing to one side of the door.
I ducked and dodged to the left, narrowly avoiding her razor-sharp claws as she tried to tear my face off again.

And I hit strike #4 on my Vogue interest, damn me, my phobia was too strong or the drinks were too weak.

One personal and one Google pal sent me this Trends link.
I think I'm flattered. And while I was at it, I tried to foist the data analysis of the cultural diffusion off on my Google contact. I just don't have the time or resources to run 50K to 100k queries and parse out the results.

A long-time coding fanatic friend finally threw in the towel and bought into my Year 2000 prediction that there's no future in coding.

One of my prior projects is going well, I'm surprised that everyone was so happy to see me. At lunch, I laid out a strategic initiative that noone has the risk perception or career incentive to pursue, but I was gratified by their reaction to my prediction of systemic failure -

"So, we aren't crazy then? We think so, too."

Groovy Broadband Card

Man, I dig this groovy Verizon broadband card.

Last year I sat in hotel rooms, tied to the cable or dial out connections. Now I can walk around, go almost anywhere, and still get a connection. Yesterday I sat at the library for several hours, today I've been to Kinkos, Starbucks and Cheesecake Factory.

It does have some drawbacks.
It wasn't adequate for my 6 gig download yesterday.
The coverage isn't 100% and varies quite a bit.

But overall, it's definitely worth $70 per month, especially since I don't pay for any other access.