Last December, I visited my family in Lynchburg, Virginia for Christmas. Thanks to the warm weather we got to spend time outdoors exploring the city. At a nearby park in the historical district, I was introduced to this:

It kind of looks like a bare garden now, but what it used to be is a swimming pool. My stepfather told me that sometime during desegregation, the city filled in the pool with concrete to prevent blacks (and presumably any other non-whites) from using it.

To say that such a situation seems unreal is an understatement. I contacted the Legacy Museum of African American History in Lynchburg for more information, and this is what the museum’s administrator Cheryl R. Stallings had to say:

This information is correct.

Early in the afternoon on Independence Day, July 4, 1961, a black gentleman named Olivet C. Thaxton, with six young boys, came to the segregated Miller Park swimming pool and attempted to purchase tickets for entrance into the dressing room. It is said that the City Manager, Recreation Department Supervisor, and the Chief of Police were present, because they had been forwarned. Also, additional law enforcement was present. Mr. Thaxton was told at this time that all city pools, the white Miller Park and Riverside Park pools and the black Jefferson Park pool would be closed if the group entered. Mr. Thaxton insisted that he be let in. The pools were closed, and soon after filled in. I beleive that Miller Park pool did not open until 1986.

There are two great books that you can purchased (1) Lynchburg: A City Set On Seven Hills by Clifton & Dorothy Potter; (2) Lynchburg, Virginia: The First Two Hundred Years 1786-1986 by James M. Elson.

What surprises me, besides the fact that the pools were filled in at all, is that in this park with several sites of interest there isn’t a single plaque to inform visitors of the important history that they might just be walking on.

More photos:

Links

Legacy Museum of African American History
Lynchburg, Virginia by Clifton Potter, Dorothy Potter (Barnes & Noble)
Lynchburg, Virginia: The First Two Hundred Years, 1786-1986 by James M. Elson (Barnes & Noble)
Official City of Lynchburg, Virginia site

According to this article at Reuters, a simple recommendation from Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez took Noam Chomsky‘s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance from obscurity to 3rd place on Amazon’s best seller list.

Hoping to take advantage of his marketing potential, I have ordered a copy of my book, One Hundred Pages Of Zeros, sent to Mr. Chavez:

Kimveer Gill, 25, walked into Montreal’s Dawson College yesterday and started shooting people. So far the count is one dead and twenty injured.

The Toronto Star found his profile on VampireFreaks.com and published some pictures from it today. They did not link to his actual profile, but a Google search for “kimveer site:vampirefreaks.com” reveals that his screen name was fatality666.

Google cache links: (These won’t last forever, as Kimveer’s profile has been removed from the live site)

VampireFreaks.com user page for Kimveer Gill / fatality666
VampireFreaks.com profile page for Kimveer Gill / fatality666

It’s all fairly standard stuff for an angsty goth, but some highlights include surveys like “Which gun are you?” (an assault rifle, which he used in the shooting spree) and a tombstone image predicting his horrible death.

I used ACA Capture Pro to get image captures of the two cached pages (click for large):

My cat Zero

A duck

Toronto Harbour

In science fiction and gaming there is a long history of protagonists visiting electronic terminals to accept and perform jobs on demand. Now it can finally happen for real!

Amazon search engine A9 has spent a long time taking pictures of every storefront in select US cities. Why? Well, when you search for a business on A9, you are given a chance to see the actual storefront of the building.

The problem is that tying address data to automated snapshots of GPS co-ordinates is not terribly accurate when performed electronically. Glancing at an image to determine anything useful is practically impossible for computers. But not for people…

Enter the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Now the millions of idle humans online can earn pennies for a few seconds of work that a machine can’t do!

For just under an hour, I identified the picture in a series of images that best represented the business name and address given to me. Most often, my choice was “None of the above”. The tasks took a few seconds to complete, paying 3 US cents each.

The tasks aren’t limited to A9 though. Amazon is providing an API for working with the Mechanical Turk system so that anyone with any task that needs human decisions can benefit. To keep the results accurate there is a rating system for users that gives scores based on their actions. A few of my own tasks were even rejected, possibly where I matched a street address that did not show the actual storefront very well. (This is a big problem with strip malls that have parking lots in front.)

Now, the system is effectively limited to the US at the moment because actual cash payouts go only to US bank accounts. Everyone else can only apply the money earned to Amazon.com purchases.

But when more banking systems are supported, there will be some important questions to consider. Questions like “Why pay Americans 3 cents per task when we can pay Chinese workers half a cent per task?”. A Chinese citizen doing illicit gold farming for massive multiplayer games is without a doubt earning less than the USD$7/hr rate I was able to achieve on MT.

For now though, we can earn a few dollars towards a book we want without guilt.

Today is a very special day. Midnight this morning marked the end of two years worth of spam counting!

That’s right – on October 16, 2003 I decided to keep track of how much spam I was getting every day.

As of today, it’s finally too much. My average per day for this month has shot up into the 70s, so I’m going to turn on SpamAssassin and white-list everyone in my address book.

Statistics

Total spam emails: 16,751
Average spam emails per day: 22.88387978
High: 92
Low: 6

Charts

Small:

Large:

At a conference last week, the mother of a couple of friends of mine knitted me this awesome Pac-Man scarf:

Winter is only five months away!

I was running late, so I took a cab to work yesterday.

Although he confined most of his reading to when we were stopped, I can’t help but wonder how someone could develop such a bad habit:

On Saturday I found out that I live near Riverdale Farm. My neighbour Lisa and I hit up a greasy spoon for brunch then and headed over to check out some nature.

From 1894 to 1974, the site existed as the Riverdale Zoo. On closing, the animals were moved to the new Toronto Zoo and in 1978 the Riverdale Farm opened.

The farm has cows, chickens, sheep, pigs, ducks, geese, donkey, horses, and turkeys.

Here are some pictures I took while we were there: