Fake money

One day I took my niece, Guadalupe, to another child's birthday party. This is an email exchange between her father and me.

From: Aaron Priven
To: Dan Priven
Date:  January 16, 1999

Hi, Dan.
     
One of the many things Guadalupe got in her "loot bag" last night was $99 
in fake money. While I suppose you might allow Guadalupe to simply spend 
this money on fake things, it might be better in the long run to use it to 
teach her more about money.
     
For example, I would be happy to open an account for her at the California 
Fake Bank. The bank offers both bankbook savings as well as checking 
accounts, both of which bear interest -- 2% for bankbook savings and 1% for 
interest checking. Certificates of deposit are also available at 
competitive rates for a wide variety of terms, from 60 days to 5 years.
Deposits are fully insured by the Fake Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
     
Alternatively, I would be happy to purchase some shares for her on the Fake 
Investment Exchange. A number of companies' stock is traded there, from 
stable dividend-bearing companies like Fake Gas and Electric (FIX:FGE) to 
volatile Internet stocks which might go up in value.
     
I have not, at the present time, set up a fake options exchange or 
derivative trading floor, but if Guadalupe seeks to put her money in these 
kinds of instruments, I'd be happy to oblige.
     
Let me know,
     
 =Aaron=

From: Dan Priven
To: Aaron Priven
Date: January 19, 1999

     I already sold her 99 fake lotto tickets, but thanks, 
     anyway.

        -Dan

Some of my interests

(This was written in 1995 or so, except for the last section on things I enjoy, and some minor editing. It's still more or less accurate, although a lot of computer-based communication seems pretty mundane to me these days. It certainly has progressed past Neat Programming Tricks. Now it's gone too far in the other direction, into Neat Marketing Tricks.)

---

I am one of those people who, it seems, has trouble specializing I have several long-standing areas of interest that I have followed through my life. I could imagine working very hard in any one of these areas.

The structure, geography, and social processes of cities.

I have been interested in cities and their geography I think since I was a very young boy; as a four year old I studied maps and drew street maps of imaginary places. (I still doodle street maps.) And I recall being fascinated with a book on city structure when I was nine, one of few books I specifically recall reading at that age. But it wasn't until I was nineteen that I took a class at U.C. Santa Cruz called "The Quality of Urban Life" and there read Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The vision of a diverse pedestrian urbanity resonated with me and I have held on to it. This has led me to read today's "new urbanists": Peter Calthorpe, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Peter Katz. I wrote my senior thesis on this topic. However, I still know far too little about all this.

Public transportation and transit.

My interest in transit stemmed out of my interest in maps and cities, as I started by collecting timetables and was always most interested in the maps in the timetables. But my interest continues as the fruit of my own experiences. I lived in San Francisco from the ages of ten to fourteen; at that age I returned to the suburbs. This gave me a very different take on our automobile-centered culture than most of my peers. I didn't, and don't, see the car as an instrument of freedom. In San Francisco, a block north of a major streetcar line and east of a crosstown bus line, I had freedom in the transit system. Going back to San Mateo, where transit was infrequent and often nonexistent, made it clear that the car was not necessary. It took me years to understand that it was the patterns of building that made decent bus service possible in San Francisco.

Bay Area history, geography, and ecology

Since I was born and have lived almost all my life in the Bay Area, I have a special interest in its history and geography. I've lived in five different Bay Area counties, and I see the area very much as a single region that needs to work together to solve its transportation and planning problems. I am concerned about the area's ecology as well, although I find myself with the human impact on it -- sprawl, pollution -- than I am in the specifics of how the ecosystems work.

Journalism and media

My interest in journalism stems from the editing side, not the reporting side. Being the person to go out there and chase down sources and do all the supposedly high-glamour stuff that made Woodward and Bernstein famous never interested me much. My favorite character in Lou Grant was the bald copy editor (whose name I can't remember) -- that was what I wanted to do: stay in the office, polish the prose, and write opinion pieces, not be out on the street searching for stories.

In high school our journalism class was taught for two years by a ranking editor at the local newspaper. Most people learn little in high school journalism; I learned a lot. Not enough to make the regular column I wrote worth reading at this late date, but a lot nonetheless. (Thanks, Micki, if you're out there.) In college I worked on the business side of one of the college papers for a very short time, and I was one of many undergraduate section leaders for a media-criticism course. I also helped edit the Course Review Book, the student guide to classes at U.C. Santa Cruz.

Until March, 1998, I was Senior Editor for ClariNet Communications Corp., publishers of ClariNews, an "electronic newspaper" on the Internet. I was responsible for the classification of wire service copy into our hundreds of "clari." newsgroups. I also moderated the Usenet newsgroup alt.journalism.moderated for a time.

Computers and computer-based publishing and conversations

My interest in computers has almost always been an interest in using their potential for communication. (I've done a little programming, but my interest in this peaked when I was about 15.) My family's first IBM PC, in 1984, was followed quite quickly by our first modem. I used bulletin boards from November 1984, but my favorite BBS was the one where we discussed politics and government, not hardware and software. I started a FidoNet BBS in 1987 and subscribed to all the political echomail conferences and none of the technical ones. As an Internet user since 1988 I have always been more interested in using the Internet to follow my other interests (I have subscribed to ba.transportation for years) than about the Internet itself. ClariNet is the epitome of this for me: ClariNet is a very early use of the Internet to distribute news chiefly about the outside world, not about the Internet itself (although this is changing as the Internet becomes more important).

I strongly believe that the Internet is a tool for communication, and that it is the result of using this tool that is interesting, not the details of the tool itself. Too much of the material on the Internet, and on the WWW for that matter, consists of Neat Programming Tricks, and not of real uses that will matter to people. My favorite Internet site, because it symbolizes this as well as involving my other interests, is the Transit Information Page maintained by a couple of U.C. Berkeley students (in their spare time, yet). These pages are truly useful in a way that very few World Wide Web sites are. They bring information unavailable anywhere else and difficult to provide in earlier media, the entire schedules of most Bay Area transit systems, to thousands of people on the Internet. It's not perfect yet, mainly because of the lack of maps, but there's no reason now for anyone with Internet access to collect the paper schedules still handed out on Bay Area buses.

(This was written long enough ago that the link to the Transit Information Project was originally to the server.berkeley.edu site. How times change -- one of my professional responsibilities now is making sure AC Transit information gets to transitinfo.org)

Typefaces and graphic design

I learned how to read fairly early, and I learned to recognize type faces and styles from an early age. Since my father worked (and works) in the printing industry, he was able to indulge my interest by bringing home type catalogs. (I remember issues of U&lc from the very early eighties, when phototype was still king.)

But it was in 1985 that I really became interested in the subject. Mine was one of the first, if not the first, high school newspaper in the country to be desktop published; it was first produced in September, 1985. (We used Aldus PageMaker version 1, on 512K Macintoshes with 800K floppy disks, and a LaserWriter -- not a LaserWriter Plus.) I was Production Manager for 1986-87. Later I typeset two annual Course Review Books and numerous newsletters for UCSC school papers and assorted non-profit groups. I have only a little formal training in design, but I try to read about it as much as I can. I am to the point where I know what I don't know -- which is quite a lot!

Governmental systems, constitutions and constitutional law

When I was nine, I read Miracle at Philadelphia by Catherine Drinker Bowen, a history of the U.S. Constitutional Convention in 1787. I liked it. I liked it so much I reread it seven times before I was ten.

I've been interested in constitutions and political systems since that time. When I was a sophomore in college I took a course on the British political system that really excited me about other constitutions. The British constitution was so very different, so interesting to me, that I wanted to spend time studying a foreign political system up close. I spent my third year in college at the University of British Columbia in Canada as an exchange student. Although English Canada's general culture isn't very different from the U.S., the political system is quite different. It was very interesting to study it up close, at least for a while. I did eventually get burned out on the intricacies of Canadian federalism and the party system. But I still am interested in Canadian politics.

Medieval history

I'm not really sure why I'm interested in medieval history. I think I am most interested in learning about the institutions of medieval history that have mutated into institutions still with us. English constitutional history fascinates me -- the slow mutation of feudal monarchy into constitutional monarchy and then to representative democracy, yet each new power source retaining almost all of the structure of what came before. I also find interesting the history of the university and the way it has changed so little in its structure while adapting that structure to very different goals imposed from outside. None of this explains why I named the bulletin board system I ran in high school "The Angevin Empire." I think I was just interested in the drama of it.

These are all things that are important to me, that I could imagine making a career in. There are, of course, other things that interest me -- diversions, entertainments. Here are some notable ones.

• Music, especially folk music. I have many albums by the Weavers; Pete Seeger; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary; Gordon Lightfoot; Arlo Guthrie; the Indigo Girls; and Dar Williams, among many others. I attend the Berkeley and San Francisco Free Folk Festivals every year. I also like other kinds of music, especially Dixieland and Big Band jazz, instrumental classical music, and brass ensemble music. I can usually get into anything if I hear it enough, although you can pretty much assume that if it's on MTV, I won't like it, and I haven't done a lot of musical exploration.
• Escapist novels. Except for Tony Hillerman mysteries, I read mostly science fiction. I know there's a lot of serious literature in science fiction these days, but I have to admit, that's not what I read -- normally, if I want to read something serious, I'll pick up something that's non-fiction. I call it "mind candy" -- sweet but empty. And much of the "mind candy" out there comes from...

• Star Trek and Star Wars. Sigh. I feel like such a nerd, writing about Star Trek on my web page. For what it's worth, for me it's a family thing -- my mom and my brother and I would watch reruns together when I was a kid. Ever since then I've liked the show. What can I say? I've never read a Star Trek fan magazine (although I read the newsgroup rec.arts.startrek for a few months, when Usenet was much smaller). I've never been to a Star Trek convention (although my mother has). I didn't skip school to see "Return of the Jedi" the day it opened (although my brother did -- and I did go with the rest of ClariNet's staff to see the Special Edition openings). I kill time reading junk novels and my VCR is set to record the two current Star Trek shows. (I don't keep them -- I record over the same tape every week.) If that makes me an irredeemable geek, so be it.

And, of course, there are a lot of other things I like, but which aren't coming to mind right now.

About my writings

The writings department generally consists of older material I have written through the years. These are the few things I have written that I think may still be interesting or amusing. I don't expect people will really be interested in my 11th grade history homework or most of my academic papers ("The Future of the Canadian Senate," "The Concept of Patriarchy and Marxist-Feminist Critique of Radical and Revolutionary Feminism," "Economic Results of the Mythology of Southern California"), and even if they were, frankly I think such items as the silly lyrics I wrote to spirituals and my favorite answering machine message have not only more general interest but more intrinsic value.

(High school and first-year university students -- don't bother writing me, saying that of course you don't intend to simply copy them for your classes but you'd really like to see the fascinating material I must have written on these subjects. If you're going to cheat, pay the guy down the hall to write it for you. At least that way you'll support the local economy.)

About my lyrics

For some reason I've never really been able to figure out, I occasionally rewrite song lyrics. Science-fiction fans call them "filk songs," a term that supposedly arose from a typographical error. Although it does lend one ideas (perhaps an article on "The Filk Process" by Alan Limax?) I've never liked the term very much. It strikes me as self-indulgent.

Or maybe it's just the filk songs themselves that are self-indulgent. Just changing the background of a song from contemporary to futuristic isn't particuarly interesting or amusing. That's not to say one couldn't write an amusing science-fiction parody, but I would hope it would have some point beyond that.

Of course, if the song isn't funny at all, it's not really parody, is it? "Bob Dylan's Dream" was inspired by "Lady Franklin's Lament" and many phrases are the same, but nobody could really call it a parody. [Unlike "Ikea Lament", which was written years after I originally wrote this.]

Song fragments

These are unfinished bits or bits that don't show enough promise to be a real song. Many of them come from an attempt I did at writing "high-tech folk songs," few of which actually worked. The idea seems too contrived, now. Oh well. Hooray for the art of punmanship.

---

Didn't pay the bills on my Cellular One
I fought McCaw and McCaw won
I fought McCaw and McCaw won
Didn't have the money to pay none
I fought McCaw and McCaw won
I fought McCaw and McCaw won

I lost my cell phone and I feel so bad
My phone number's gone
Don't tell me cellular's just some fad
I fought McCaw and McCaw won
I fought McCaw and McCaw won

---

I took (and later helped teach) a class in university about the art and practice of desktop publishing. I did a project to evaluate textbooks for the class. One of the books about how to use PageMaker was so badly designed that I couldn't recommend it even though the content was in fact very good. It was set entirely in Lubalin Graph, with keywords set in scaled small caps (that is, small caps that are simply scaled-down versions of the big caps). This looks bad anyway and looks absolutely horrible in a face where all the lines appear to be the same thickness, as in Lubalin Graph. I learned to really hate Lubalin Graph after that. (And later I bought a laser printer that had it built in. Ugh.)

Anyway, when I realized that "Cumberland Gap" had the same meter as "Lubalin Graph" I couldn't help trying to write a parody. It never really worked. I find longer verses make parodies much easier to write.

I cried so hard it made me laugh;
I read a book set in Lubalin Graph.

CHORUS:
Lubalin Graph, Lubalin Graph:
Just can't stand that Lubalin Graph.

Typographic arts and crafts
are demeaned by Lubalin Graph.

Of the faces Egyptian
None are worse than Lubalin's.

My eyes squint with Avant Garde;
Lubalin Graph is twice as hard.

Small caps scaled from full size
Show imbalance to the eyes.

---

CHORUS: (sing twice)
Weave, weave, weave me a web site
Out on the internet.
Weave me the hope of a new IPO,
And fill up my wallet.

Well I've seen the Apple and the Commodore crumble
Shine on me again.
Even Microsoft has stumbled,
Shine on me again.

If only I could money borrow
Shine on me again.
I'd help you to fund your new IPO
Shine on me again.

---

Come all of you webmasters,
Good news to you I'll tell
About that new ISP
Who's come in here to dwell.

CHORUS:
Which site are you on?
Which site are you on?
Which site are you on?
Which site are you on?

---

This has been running through my mind forever. I never could think of a verse though (to take the place of "I got a mule and her name is Sal," and so forth).

We've hauled some music in our day,
Mozart, Chopin, and Bizet,
And we've run every inch of the way
From the outer ear to the cochlea.

CHORUS:
Low note, everybody down,
Low note, for we're haulin' down a sound.
And you'll always know your Elgar, you'll know your Pachelbel
If you've ever navigated on the Ear Canal.

Paved With Gold

"I don't know, but I been told
The streets of heaven are paved with gold."

From: Ethereal Press International
Subject: Protesters argue for keeping gold streets
Slugword: GOLD-STREETS

NEW JERUSALEM (EPI) -- Citizens spoke out against a plan by the New Jerusalem Department of Transportation to replace the traditional gold used to pave the city's streets with a titanium- based alloy.

"Tourists and new immigrants are attracted to Heaven by its gold streets," said Lewis Mumford of the Association to Maintain Edifices of Note (AMEN), a historical preservation society.

Traffic engineers maintain that the soft nature of gold requires a considerable amount of extra maintenance. "We spend three times as much on filling potholes and repairing breaks in the streets because the gold wears away so fast," said Robert Moses, NJDOT chair.

However, AMEN claims that in the long run it will be more expensive, not less. "The extensive underground utility network means that workers have to cut through the city's streets often. This is simplified with gold. With titanium, it will be expensive and take longer, tying up traffic."

AMEN, fresh from its victory preserving the twelve gates of the city from an NJDOT plan to widen the roadways, plans a major campaign to preserve the city's historic street paving.

This came from when I was thinking about the blues and how they were originally written by people without much education. Intellectuals get depressed, but instead of writing songs they've turned to psychology. Maybe if the blues used more hi-falutin' words?

---

The Intellectual's Azures

My manuscript was shredded
My articles were returned
My tenure was rejected
My résumés were spurned
I've got the azures - the intellectual's azures. Uh-huh.
I must bemoan my fate:
Adjunct at Chico State
I've got the azures. Oh yeah.

Got a BA from Berkeley
A PhD from Yale
But when I try to get a job
I seem to always fail
I've got the azures - the intellectual's azures. Uh-huh.
UMass says I'm a clown
Nine UCs turned me down
I've got the azures. Oh yeah.

I wrote on deconstruction
Of Huckleberry Finn
But I found out just yesterday
Meaning's no longer 'in!'
I've got the azures - the intellectual's azures. Uh-huh.
The journal sent it back;
So much for tenure track
I've got the azures. Oh yeah.

They're cutting my whole department
To cut back all the chaff
I guess it could be somewhat worse
I could be on the staff
I've got the azures - the intellectual's azures. Uh-huh.
The provost got a raise
While laying off TAs
I've got the azures. Oh yeah.

I worked for years to get both of
The robe and cornered hat
But in my new job I now say
"Would you like fries with that?"
I've got the azures - the intellectual's azures. Uh-huh.
At least they call me "Doc".
Down at Jack in the Box
I've got the azures. Oh yeah.

But even if I had a job
At university
I'd make close to the same amount
I'd make at Mickey D's
I've got the azures - the intellectual's azures. Uh-huh.
Money I'll never see
From my 403(b)
This trend could mean the death
Of TIAA-CREF.
I'll never get to be
Part of AAUP
I've got the azures. Oh yeah.

ClariNet News and Time

ClariNet was the first commerical content provider on the Internet, starting way back in 1989. It took wire service news (at various times, from the AP, UPI, Agence France-Presse, and Reuters), classified them into Usenet newsgroups, and allowed sites to subscribe to those newsgroups for a fee.

For a considerable time I was primarily responsible for article classification. I had written a proposal suggesting a finer-grained classification system than the newsgroups allowed, which was not accepted by ClariNet's management. At one point I realized I was being a bit overzealous in advocating my proposal. This was my attempt to poke fun at myself.

---

ClariNet News and Time

By Aaron Priven, 1 April 1997

Time, Usenet, and Newspapers

ClariNet's news has been, and is still, chiefly delivered in Usenet format. One of the features of Usenet is that it is divided by subject, and not by time. (Most other conferencing systems work this way as well.) The first story on January 1 directly follows the last story from December 31, with nothing to mark the change. Indeed, it can be that stories on different dates are mixed in together, due to embargoes and the delays caused by editing.

Newspapers, and even most online news services, do not work this way. A newspaper is primarily classified by date. Today's newspaper contains today's news, and the strongest of divisions separates it from yesterday's news.

It is possible that since most people are used to having today's news separate from yesterday's, that ClariNet news is counterintuitive and less usable for that reason. It may be desirable to separate news by day, rather than by subject.

Implementation

Possibly, this could be done by modifying the web extraction program, providing clear delimitation between days in only that form of the news. However, that plan is for another day than this. Here I will discuss potential implementation proposals within the Usenet form.

To implement this within Usenet, it will be necessary to create new newsgroups associated with the days. There are two basic questions to be answered. The first is whether one chooses relative or absolute dating. The second is whether one chooses to crosspost the news to a new set of date-specific groups, or to incorporate the date into the existing group names themselves. These questions will need to be answered before an implementation plan is produced.

Relative or absolute dating. With relative dating, one creates groups such as clari.news.today, clari.news.yesterday, and the clari.news.days-ago hierarchy (c.n.days-ago.two, c.n.days-ago.three, and so on, up to c.n.days-ago.twenty-one). With absolute dating, one creates a separate group for each date: clari.news.y1997.april.d1, clari.news.y1997.april.d2, and so on. (Unfortunately Usenet group components cannot consist solely of numbers.)

Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Relative dating requires no regular change in group names. The groups themselves would stay the same from day to day. However, the news in those groups must change regularly. This would require canceling every article at midnight every day and sending out a replacement in the previous day's group. (So that, for example, at midnight all the contents of clari.news.today would be canceled and reissued in clari.news.yesterday.) One unanswered question is which midnight to use. Most of our customers are North American, so midnight ET might be most appropriate. However, as we expand into world markets it may be necessary to use midnight GMT. Or perhaps it will be necessary to have several editions, each with a separate midnight: European time, Japanese time, and so on. The mechanism for doing this last would be difficult.

Absolute dating does not require the repeated cancelation and reissuance of articles. It does, however, require the issuance of new newsgroups each day. This would require more cooperation on the part of news administrators than we have had previously. It would, of course, be possible to specify the newsgroup names ahead of time, so that an administrator would only have to create the new groups once every few months. This would result in a lot of empty groups; however, unlike some of our currently empty groups, this would at least be intuitive (it should not be surprising that a group dated three weeks from now should be empty). It would still be preferable to have the groups created automatically each day, if news administrators will allow it.

Crossposting or incorporation into current groups. Essentially, this is the question whether these new date groups are to be an adjunct to the current system, or are to be incorporated into the existing system itself. Crossposting would imply that all news stays in the current group set, but is simply added to a new set of groups chosen by date. This would be relatively simple, but would not yield results for most of the readers, who will certainly not want only to have date-oriented selection. (Even newspapers have sections for particular kinds of stories.)

The other alternative is to create a separate hierarchy for each day: clari.today.biz.briefs, clari.today.biz.earnings, and so on, up to clari.days-ago.twenty-one.world.terrorism and clari.days-ago.twenty-one.world.top. This would provide the maximum benefit for those readers who want to find news by date as well as by subject. However, this would require a substantial number of new groups. For the relative dating system, it would be necessary to create 9,780 new groups, plus rename the current 489 groups to include the "today" marker. For the absolute system, it would be necessary to create 489 new groups each day (although it may be possible to only send out newgroup messages for those groups that are actually used; this could mean a significant reduction on weekends). This is not a minor undertaking.

It may be possible to have some compromise between the two sets. For example, there could be only a few categories marked with dates, perhaps something like the one-star set: clari.today.biz, clari.today.usa, and so on. However, these are still likely to have great volume. Creating a set with reasonable volume is likely to be rather detailed; not so much so as the full set, but close to it.

Conclusion

These questions of which groups to use must be answered before any implementation plans begin, as the implications are serious. However, attracting readership is very important, and we must do what we can to do this. This may be a first step.

I Was Awarded a Medal by NASA

A picture of the medal I was awarded by NASA.

OK, I admit it. I was one of hundreds of high school students who participated in NASA's "put an experiment aboard the Space Shuttle" contest. Each of us got a cheap plastic medal, a certificate, a copy of the group photo and an all-expenses-paid trip to a regional NASA conference for ourselves and our science teacher. Most of us in the West went to NASA Ames Research Center (in Mountain View, California).

Since NASA Ames Research Center is about fifteen miles from the high school I attended, the free hotel room and the "mileage expenses" seemed kind of silly, but the people there from North Dakota seemed to appreciate it. It was a lot warmer in California.

My experiment came right out of a Carl Sagan book I had read: it was basically to take some aluminium and lead and try to heat them up and make alloy out of them. In fact, the whole thing was pretty silly. I was taking biology at the time, and I didn't like biology, so when I was given a choice -- to do some regular biology assignment or to do a Shuttle contest entry on any area of science -- well, I decided a shuttle contest entry on metallurgy was a lot less boring. It was, as it turned out.

So I went to Ames, got advice on redoing the project for the Next Level of Competition, resubmitted it, and was told I didn't make the next cut. Oh well. I got an A in biology that semester. And I get to tell people I was awarded a medal by NASA.

When I was a sophomore in high school, one of my fellow students wrote several different letters to the school newspaper, and they would get printed even though everybody on the newspaper staff thought they were less than valuable. As I recall he was the only one who had any letters printed over a period of several months.

This is the first parody I remember writing. I thought I had lost it but it turned up in a box of mementos. It's not really very good (the meter is awful) but I think if one is defaming someone named Roger Sage one could hardly pick a better song to do it with.

---

Roger Sage and the New York Times

Are you going to print that letter?
Roger Sage and the New York Times
Sage's ideas: Our readers will scare
Drop our circulation to nine.

Please don't print old Sage's letter.
Roger Sage and the New York Times
For sanity don't you have a care?
This will lose us zillions of dimes.

Don't ask me again, Sage, about that letter.
Roger Sage and the New York Times
Sage, your ideas will open our wounds bare.
Save the riots for another time.

Oh, no, they printed Sage's letter.
Roger Sage and the New York Times
I'm getting out, right now while I still dare.
My reputation: can I save it in time?