In this place, most people speak more than one language. Almost no one owns a car, even the millionaires. Many people don't even knowsomeone who owns a car. There's no Wal-Mart, no Target, no Home Depot.

There's also a deep ethic of civic-mindedness. Average citizens are not just aware of, but actively engaged in efforts such as city planning and zoning laws and the design and preservation of public spaces. Architecture is valued and protected by well-organized, well-financed groups, often consisting of canny partnerships between public, private, and corporate concerns. New urbanism is an understood goal, not just a theoretical ideal.

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Marcus McLaurin was waiting in line to go to recess on November 11 at Ernest Gallet Elementary School when a classmate asked him about his mother and father. He responded that he didn't have a mother and father; instead he has two mothers. When the other child asked why, Marcus told him that it was because his mother is gay. The other child then asked what that meant, and Marcus explained, "Gay is when a girl likes another girl."

Upon hearing this, Marcus's teacher scolded him in front of his classmates, telling him that "gay" is a bad word and he should never say it at school, then sent him to the principal's office instead of letting him go to recess. The following week the school required Marcus to attend a special behavioral clinic at 6:45 in the morning, where he was forced to repeatedly write "I will never use the word 'gay' in school again."

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• The T68i (or OS X) can't figure out to have both AddressBook.app and the PPP connection connected to the phone at the same time.
• I get a 10.x IP address, having a public address would be slightly more convenient.
• The latency is about a billion years. Alright, that's not true but it's around or more than a second. Not fun for interactive connections (understatement meaning: that really fucking sucks).
• I haven't tested the transfer speed, but it seems better than normal GSM data (9600). I was mostly going to use it for interactive connections I don't really mind whatever it is.

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I didn't expect much when I resorted to asking, in so many words, whether he thinks consciously about innovation.

''No,'' [Steve Jobs] said, peevishly. ''We consciously think about making great products. We don't think, 'Let's be innovative!''' He waved his hands for effect. '''Let's take a class! Here are the five rules of innovation, let's put them up all over the company!'''

Well, I said defensively, there are people who do just that.

''Of course they do.'' I felt his annoyance shift elsewhere. ''And it's like . . . somebody who's not cool trying to be cool. It's painful to watch. You know what I mean?'' He looked at me for a while, and I started to think he was trying to tell me something. Then he said, ''It's like . . . watching Michael Dell try to dance.'' The P.R. minder guffawed. ''Painful,'' Jobs summarized.

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I was able to write a new, working plugin within a few hours of downloading qpsmtpd, despite the lack of good documentation, and I'm sure that many other readers will have similar experiences. The fact that qpsmtpd is written in Perl means you have fast, easy access to everything that a usual Perl program would, as well as any CPAN modules that could make development easier.

I have been using qpsmtpd for about a month, and the amount of spam in my mailbox has declined rather impressively, even from the low amount that SpamAssassin was letting through. If you run your own machine, I strongly encourage you to look at qpsmtpd. It is an excellent example of how to write software to take arbitrary plugins, and as a bonus, you will receive only the mail that you should receive.

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Then I came back from where I'd been.
My room, it looked the same -
But there was nothing left between
The Nameless and the Name.

All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance,
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance.

-- Leonard Cohen, Ten New Songs

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• No to proposition 53 (which will tie money to construction projects and thus make the politicians unable to juggle the budget from year to year -- no wonder they can't balance it with stuff like this). In my ignorance I didn't know about this, but Viridiana just explained it to me, of course it's entirely likely I got it wrong... mmnn).
• No to proposition 54 (Racial Privacy Initiative). At first it might sound like this would give less discrimination, but it's the other way around. Please say no.
• No to the recall. It's just wrong that anyone with a couple of million dollars can make this kind of chaos.
• Vote on someone. With the current polls I'd probably put a not very enthusiastic vote for Bustamante. If the Arnold-Risk™ wasn't looming over us I'd suggest voting for Camejo as his values fits much better with mine.
  

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The Direct Marketing Association acknowledged that the court ruling did not solve its public relations problem.

"We're pleased the court has agreed with us. On the other hand we're concerned about consumers who think we want to make calls when they don't want to receive them," said Bob Wientzen, chief executive of the association.

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