State Of Affairs

I lost my car last night.
The police found it for me.
My first thought was that they'd towed it.

I did an interview yesterday, too.

Those two events sparked a realization.
My faith in authority and management figures has declined.

It started with the deceit at Boise State University, my good Mormons friends engaged in their conspiracies to promote and protect their peers at everyone else's expense. Then I worked for Third Wave on a project which was defrauding the City of Las Vegas, exposed by the LV Review Journal in this article and this article. At Saleslogix, we hired the CFO of iNBC, itself notorious for fraud, and our balance sheets started looking strange and there were dubious statements to the Board of Directors (remember "Tsunami"?! ). At Avnet I was caught between the self-serving old guard and self-serving ex-Motorola newcomers, both engaged in short-sighted political trickery.

The last two employers promised but didn't deliver. Then I learned my lesson and discarded this Portland job offer as soon as it turned strange. That job reopened a few days ago so I probably made a good decision.

And now I've found myself some search engine fraud.

I have seen so much fraud, deceit and spite over the past ten years. Yokels, paranoid kids, promotions for liars, disquieting silences from leadership.

When will the trend reverse?

Why doesn't anybody else notice it?

Or talk about it?

The Traffic Generator Vivisected

The Traffic Generator Identified
The Traffic Generator Detection Strategy

"Why did the [traffic generator] hit my site twice?"

My theory? Because it is automated and recursive.

It has to generate bleedover traffic in "innocent" crosslinked sites to maintain the illusion that the fraud site is experiencing a surge of traffic.

I originally thought that the traffic generator used crosslinks directly from the primary fraud site. No. It's more sophisticated than that. It indexes the website of the crosslink and stores the references in a database. It recurses through all links on the fraud site and then generates randomized IP hits against the secondary crosslinked sites. It probably only recurses one level deep. High traffic sites wouldn't notice the discrepencies of the engine and low traffic sites may not check or care.

I understand the scheme.
I'll update this later with visual diagrams.

Update: My traffic suggests that Texas (Houston & Dallas) is a likely geographical location for the Owners of the Traffic Generator.

Defcon 2007 Submission

I have my Defcon 2007 submission figured out!!!!

Detecting Search Engine Advertising Fraud

Tactical Fraud Analysis
Strategic Analysis

It's perfect. It uses the Meme theory from my previous presentations and evolves it into a real-world security application. I'll have to rework it a little. The odds are good that third-party documentation and confirmations will be available by July, too.

I'm close to breaking out.
I've been in this sucky trading range for 3 1/2 fricking years.

But I have a goal now.
August, 2007.
Defcon.

Thank you, Casey!

---

You are magical to me.

Valentine's Day, 2007

Perhaps Casey Serin is right. Maybe I need a "retreat day" to review the recent past and contemplate the near future. Valentine's Day is a good choice. It's far out enough for good planning, but not so far it may devolve into a "possible" plan.

I like that. It's an appropriate day for me, considering my luck with women. I might take that day off and sit out at a lake somewhere with my laptop, do a rambling stream of consciousness weblog.

That's a Tuesday.

I'll have to find an area that won't be crowded a on a Tuesday, hopefully out here by a secluded lake. I might take pictures.

Yup.
We definitely need a plan that we can stick to.

Online Dating Paranoia Addendum

Previous update

I did cancel all personal ads in August but I succumbed to weakness and tried Yahoo Personals again several days ago. The results were even suckier, seeing as I'm in Idaho and my possible matches are 10% the size of Seattle's.

Cancelled it again.

There's a ItsJustLunch.com in Boise.
I'll reactivate my account if I decide that I'm staying here.

Bars - Last night I met Kristin, a twenty-two year old coed from North Carolina, dirty blonde, 5'3", under 100 lbs, probably. I beat her two of three games. Then I played Cat, a goth about my size, she beat me but (oh, I wish!) ... it was close. And lost to Jenny and her boyfriend. But I did win 5 of 6 against the club staff!

So. Technically I met three women, and Kristin seemed oddly oblique but she circumvented the regular playing rotation to play me three times. Maybe it's her standard operating procedure for anyone, though.

And... twenty-two... Oh, man.
I'm not sure I could do it.

New Hit Count High! Ho!

Well, okay, it's mostly Chinese search engines indexing the site (I assume) but it's still kewl to people that don't know better. And I picked up two new search engines, one Swedish, the other Spanish.

Take me wandering through these streets
where bright lights and angels meet
Stone to stone they take me on
I'm walking till the break of dawn.

Off to play pool or something.

Online Dating Paranoia Update

Original Dating Strategy
Last update

Wow, how fast the time passes.
It's been five months since I did an update. So...

1) I gave up on the personal ads in August and cancelled them all.

2) ItJustLunch.com was surprisingly aggressive, arranging a new date every two weeks until end of Oct, on average. I met one possible match, but I didn't pursue it. I wasn't sure if I'd be staying in Seattle. (7)

3) Bars. Let me think. I met Audrey, Jaimee wanted to have sex but I didn't think of renting a hotel room. I did play a game of pool with Elissa. I met at least two other women that I could have pursued. I danced with Rose, pool with Trish, I've met two Ericas, one Renee, one Teresa, one Sandra. (12)

4) EventsAndAdventures.com: I attended two events, zero results, nothing else because I suspected I'd be leaving Seattle.

So.
Nineteen women in five months.
Three or four others I've forgotten.
Call it twenty-five.

I'm fairly depressed over career and women but I guess this update cheered me up a little. I accomplished more than I'd thought. Idaho appears to have a vacuum of women in the 35-45 age range and I'm having a hard time picturing me with a twenty-year old.

I've met more women in the past six months than in my entire pre-marriage life. But it often seems pointless. Now it's compounded by a lack of desire. I've met quite a few women in Idaho but all in their twenties. They don't draw me. I never feel drawn to anyone.

I'd have to say that the four-part dating strategy seems to be a failure.

IAmFacingForeclosure.com Update

Original Prediction

Update: The first graph shows a comparison of StevePavlina.com and IAmFacingForeclosure.com network traffic. StevePavlina.com estimates $4700 Adsense revenue for Jan 2006 and Casey's traffic almost half as large. I estimate that Casey's site will earn around $20-25K during its projected lifespan.

Update: Casey's Design Pattern is similar to a horse racing scheme from the postal days designed to exploit decentralized information. See fourth graph for visual details! Read it!

Alexa.com says that the "national broadcast event" for IAmFacingForeclosure.com didn't generate much traffic as shown in second graph. A downward trend is confirmed by the pattern of lower highs. The odds are good that Casey's site has peaked in traffic.

The last graph is my prediction of future traffic. Traffic will rise steadily at the end of the IAmFacingForeclosure.com drama and then drop dramatically after the finale. Yes, I know it's obvious, but what the heck, I get another claim of "successful prediction" out of it!

I Left My Heart In San Francisco

And I left my cellphone in Kansas City!

Dang it.

The Limo

When I began flying, I'd see limo drivers in the baggage area holding signs with a name. I'd wonder about the clients. I thought they must be rich or important.

Now I know who they are. I've been one of them three times this year. So perhaps I did accomplish something over the past three years.

I checked on my last project before I left Seattle and the client seemed happy enough. It's one of the few projects where I felt pride in the technical side. My first project is still my best success, though, a $100K grant which became a $15 million deployment to forty States and I was proud of the achievement but not the code. It was clumsy and crude and the Windows version was worse.

Muses and Memes
And Internet schemes.
I wonder why
And where
And what should I do?

Should I aim for big money
Or chase a twenty-year old honey?
Move here, perhaps there
Or stay where I'm at
Take the easy path,
Get a government job with a future that's flat?

Or be brave
And stay on the wave
Put women aside
For the dregs of the Technology ride?

What should I do
With my remaining time?
Wait for the reluctant Muse
Who likes Dr. Seuss
to answer a poorly written rhyme?

Why are you here?
Why do you care?
What should I do?
Where should I go?

I honestly
Do not know.

Casey At Bat

Thanks to the IAmFacingForeclosure.com analysis, my site is currently in the top 10 Google results for:

"IAmFacingForeclosure"
"IAmFacingForeclosure.com"

so I'm getting a slice of Casey's clickstream from Google as well as from links posted on his site. Today's IAmFacingForeclosure.com hype, television broadcast and incoming addresses are additional indicators that his site traffic has peaked out. The traffic spike was less than I'd expected.

There's a lot of interesting things going on with net traffic, search engine traffic, personal ads traffic that I might post up later. Essentially, they point to site saturation, just like the social networking and MySpace memes indicate.

The destruction of your currency in progress...
Silver matched its previous high from earlier in 2006 (currently at $14.10/oz). The dichotomy of ever-increasing inflation and deflation indicators is amazing to watch. This is history in action, folks!

And I'm off to Kansas City.

The Art Of The Unique : Decorator

Tonight the balcony was colder, winter a little older but the trees on the street still had christmas lights glowing red, blue, green and yellow. I mulled over my favoite tree. Last time I'd made it Unique with a trick of context. Was there another technique?

Luckily I had a string of monocolor lights and a stepladder in my car. After twenty minutes of work, my favorite tree glowed only with cobalt blue lights. I stepped back and applied the test of Uniqueness:

Was this tree different? Oh, yes.
Was it unusual? Sure.
Was it unrepeated? Definitely.
Was it rare?

Was it? I wasn't sure. Within a few city blocks and for the winter, perhaps it was. Now my notion of "context" included timeframe as well as location. I'd transformed the tree to Unique without altering context, but by altering its external facade. Then I realized that this was an instance of the Decorator design pattern.

It still felt wrong.
The change was too transient, too temporary.
Too modern.

Uniqueness from organic properties should be different than Uniqueness from a facade. Don't you think? In any event, the facade forced my realization that Uniqueness is also time-based. An object may not have it, then it might, then it may not again. Think of a baseball player, an actor, or a politician. They are unknown, then famous, then forgotten.

The Decorator pattern is often used to create the illusion of Uniqueness in today's world. A Honda Accord with a special paint job. A ghost writer. A tattoo.

The Art Of The Unique : Uniqueness

The Art Of The Unique (TAOTU) : Understanding the gestation, composition and value of Uniqueness in the Information Age. This may lead to theories which identify, foster, assay or suppress potential Uniqueness, and how Uniqueness may transform during the Information Age.

In GeekSpeak, a "unique" object is explicitly identifiable by a set of attributes. Every Honda Accord has a unique Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) so in GeekSpeak, each car is unique. Do you feel that any Honda Accord you see is unique?

This is not a useful definition. A broader scope is needed; a context-driven, social definition, a definition for The Mind's Eye.

Let's build the definition of a unique object using terms from Thesaurus.com:

Is the object "different"?
Is the object "unusual"?
Is the object "unrepeated"?
Is the object "rare"?

but excluding terms of GeekSpeak or with connnotations of "good" or "bad", such as:

exclusive
solitary
lone
exceptional
best
unimaginable

This is a first draft, subject to revision, it should be more quantifiable. We'll test this definition in The Art Of The Unique : The Artificial. I chose this starting point because of aspects of the Information Age, to be identified later.

These Damn Leather Pants

I walked down the street in my leather biker pants, black Japanese hacker t-shirt and new black shoes. Three women stopped to ask about the pants and I explained that they were for Goth Night at the Balcony Club.

"Why don't you have eyeliner and black fingernails?", the blonde asked.
"Too much work. Wearing pants is easier."

They kept eyeing those pants.

"Would you like to touch them?", I finally asked.
"Oh, yes, yes"

All three stepped forward to finger my pants legs.

"Oh, they're so soft", cooed the blonde and I put my hands up in surrender.

"Okay, okay, you can touch them in other places if you want!"

They tittered at my audacity, stepping back, jabbering in excitement. As I turned to walked away, they giggled out suggestive comments and half-hearted attempts to get me back into conversation.

Later, I owned the pool table at a downtown bar, beating four regulars in succession. A young co-ed watching from the sidelines. She plunked down her quarters to challenge, flashing me a big smile but a fifth regular stepped in, anxious for revenge. She gave me another big smile, apparently hopeful about playing me in the next round, but this fifth guy beat me! He didn't get a big smile.

Chicks are schemers.

---

Hey, I put some new shoes on
And suddenly everything is right!

The Art Of The Unique : Rough Outline

1) Determine a quantifiable definition of "Unique"
2) Create "free market" argument about differentiation
3) Why should anyone care about "uniqueness" as an abstract quality
4) Uniqueness as a pricing issue, both higher and lower
5) Uniqueness as a function of organic properties with 3-sigma values
6) Uniqueness as a decorator pattern, today's artificial uniqueness
7) Expand the dichotomy of the common versus the differentiated
8) How to determine the optimum "choke" point for differentiation
9) Limits on uniqueness in the Industrial Revolution versus limits in the Information Age
10) The folly of extreme differentiation
11) Strategy for identifying uniqueness in a pre-inflection state
12) The Geek Definition of "Unique" versus "The Mind's Eye".

That's a good start for the moment.