Today I got like a couple dozen blog spam messages. Nothing new there. What is interesting when I dug deeper, however, is that this didn’t look like a commercial attempt to get traffic. Yes, the same three URLs were in all the messages, but what this appeared to be is a means of being annoying. But not to annoy me. This spam was meant to be annoying to the linked sites.

Bloggers are in an ongoing war with blog spammers, trying to find any means of making the process simple and automated. One method is to develop a blacklist of sites and terms. By having a lot of bloggers report on spam messages, an automatic database of spam-related messages can be generated, off which keywords can be determined and a blacklist can be generated. What results is a handy filter for those who don’t want to be bothered with blog spam. Simple enough.

Except in this case. By seeding these three legitimate blogs, what this person was trying to do was to get these blogs blacklisted. It was reverse warfare: turn the tools of defense against the defenders. But why just these three blogs? No idea.

However, this is the most annoying sort of blog spam, even more annoying than the commercial posts. This is simply malicious, with no benefit to anyone. No one is building traffic, just ill will. Thanks a lot, jerk.

From where did the term soccer originate? I was puzzling this at a bar in the UK recently while watching a match on the telly, wondering why the rest of the world referred to this game as “football”, while we Americans referred to it as “soccer”. Logically, the rest of the world is right; in American football, the foot only connects with the ball for punts, kickoffs, and extra points — for most of the game, it’s carried or passed, both involving the hand, not the foot. Was the term “soccer” an American creation? How did we get to this name? As it turns out, it’s not an American term, but to understand it, you have to learn a little bit of soccer’s history.

Soccer traces its origins to Roman times in the first century AD. For the most part, it did not involve carrying the ball, hence the rather appropriate name. That split happened at Rugby School in England, where carrying the ball, as opposed to kicking it, came into vogue in the 1800′s, giving rise to the game of rugby. This same century saw the creation of the Football Association, the ruling body for English football. Rugby and soccer went their separate ways, with football under FA rules being called properly “Association Football”.

From here, you have to understand British abbreviations. They would often drop the end of a word, ending it with an -er, e.g. “rugger” for rugby. Hence, Association Football would get shortened to “asoccer football”, eventually being dropped to just “soccer”. In UK media, the term “soccer” is frequently used to refer to the sport, apparently. It’s just in common parlance that it’s not. (Americans would later bring rugby and soccer to Yale and modify the rules, giving birth to modern American football, hence its rather inauspicious name.)

So the term “soccer” isn’t wrong, per se. In fact, it’s of English origin, created around the same time as the game itself, though it is slang. The term has just fallen out of general use outside of the US. If you want to keep from getting beat up at rowdy UK bars, though, you’d do well to refer to soccer as football. Even calling it by its proper name, ‘association football’, might get you an odd word or two. When in Rome, do as Romans do, right?

WEP must die. Really. I convinced a friend of mine recently to upgrade his router, because it only supported WEP. (In fact, he had a wireless router that was wide open, meaning anyone nearby could have popped on with no effort previously.) I suggested he pick up the Linksys WRT54G, as it supported WPA, which while not uncrackable, is not as easily cracked as WEP.

WEP stands for “Wired Encryption Privacy”, which, sadly, is a misnomer. While initially considered a secure protocol, it became clear that in fact, it’s not. The first search in Google for WEP turns up an article on WEP’s insecurities. This is unfortunate, because WEP was rolled out as the standard form of encryption for wireless networks, meaning that if something is 802.11b, chances are, it’s insecure. Even the Feds pubically noted that WEP isn’t considered effective security, demonstrating by cracking a 128-bit WEP key in three minutes.

Unfortunately, my friend had issues setting up the router, so spent forty minutes on the phone with Linksys tech support. What did they recommend? Yup, using WEP. Okay, so he’s slightly better off than he was before, but at that rate, he might as well have stuck with old equipment. He’s also under the illusion of security.

So, death to WEP! People need to be aware that WEP is far from secure, with easy point-and-click hacking tools coming out all the time. It’s had its time, but quite clearly, WEP is now doing more harm than good. People are going to enable it, thinking they’re getting decent protection when they’re not. The only possible benefit is that enabling WEP will make it more difficult to break into your network than your neighbor’s. That is, unless your neighbor happens to be using WPA.

For all those thinking that disabling SSID broadcasts or using MAC filtering offers any protection, I present this article on the six dumbest ways to secure a wireless LAN. Time to upgrade that wireless equipment!

Imagine taking a cross country trip, visiting places where rock and roll legends died. Combine this with a liberal dosage of girlfriend woes and pop references galore, and you’ll have something resembling Chuck Klosterman’s latest book, Killing Yourself To Live.

Chuck’s story begins in a sort of real-time monologue, that takes you on his twenty-one day journey across the country. At times, you feel like you’re with him each step of the way, in agonizing detail. Such is the peril of this stream of consciousness style.

The idea sounds simple: visit places where death and rock and roll met, then gather these thoughts together into a cohesive article for Spin. Only, as Chuck finds out, doing so is pretty pointless as far as inspiration goes. From the memorial to Great White’s Rhode Island disaster to the greenhouse where Kurt Cobain took his life, Chuck finds each succeeding destination less and less inspirational. Far from finding a link between death and music, he finds that each new locale doesn’t present him with any great insight.

However, also carrying through the tale is the story of Chuck’s love life. It’s this humanism that really makes the book start getting interesting. When you get beyond the pop culture references and start delving into relations with people, you start getting a story. Only, you don’t get one story. You get four. There’s Diane, his current infatuation; there’s Lenore, the hot chick; Quincy, the old flame; and Dee Dee, the older woman. Layered into there are other women, but in essence, it’s a story of Chuck agonizing in various ways over all four.

The only problem is, it never ties together. The explorations of death aren’t tied together neatly, in a way to make the journey meaningful. Nothing draws them together. The same with his relationships. Each problem is laid out, but at the end, you don’t feel that Chuck has really grown at all in that aspect. It’s hard to like what he’s saying, because he comes across as immature. You feel him at the end to be exactly the same as at the beginning: a boy who can’t really figure out how to have a truly meaningful relationship. In that sense, the whole exercise feels pointless.

However, if you’re reading this book, you probably aren’t reading it for plot structures and overriding themes. It’s the writing style that’s at stake. At times, I felt like I was reading some pages ripped out of his journal. As I first started reading, the pop culture references were overwhelming. Nebulous references to this or that particular album make Chuck come off as pretentious, but then you realize that you expect no less from a writer for Spin. Anyone who can relate the women in his life to each of the solo album efforts of KISS is creative, to say the least. To wit, he noted, “Has it really come to this? Have I become so reliant on popular culture that it’s the only way I can understand anything?” Yes, Chuck, you have.

Sure, the pop culture style of writing is interesting, but the obscure references will only carry you so far. However, magically, good lines of writing will suddenly appear. Consider the following, written regarding the ruins of the night club in Warwick, Rhode Island: “Small towns usually make their places of doom disappear. But that’s not the case here: In West Warwick, what used to be a tavern is now an ad hoc cemetery — which is the same role taverns play in most small towns, but not as obviously as this.”

He’ll suddenly make a poignant, thoughtful statement, which in the midst of so many superficial pop culture references stands out even more. These introspective moments are little surprises in the text: little pieces of meaningful thought and insight into his psyche, in an otherwise cluttered landscape.

While mildly entertaining, I found this book overall to be a little bit of a disappointment. Chuck has the potential to be a good writer, if he’d take the time to really settle into his style, tone down the pop culture, and think about what he wants to write before pounding out the pages. A meaningful piece of literature this is not (nor was it intended to be); however, a little bit of organization might have brought this all together into a wonderful work. It’s worth a read, but not if you have to put off that really good book.

Amsterdam. To the uninitiated, the name conjures up images of John Travolta riding in a car with Samuel Jackson, discussing the “little differences”. Images of people getting high in coffeeshops and prostitutes dancing in windows in the Red Light District are the primary highlights. Yet, it’s so much more.

Three words of advice to the visiting tourist: be very aware. If you only see traffic stateside, you might be surprised. The initial ride into town is a brief introduction to the rules of the road: just do what you can. Lanes are more of a suggestion here than a rule, and bicyclists are everywhere. If you’re not paying attention crossing the street, you could quite easily get clobbered. But somehow, it all works out. In the US this would be chaos.

The first thing you may notice when you hit the streets is the smell, unfortunately. Urine and feces are the cologne of the streets, which combined with the occasional whiff of marijuana, become a quite familiar scent during your stay. It’s not a constant smell, so much as an occasional reminder. You get used to it, or you stick to cleaner streets.

Three more words of advice: rent a bike. Rent early, rent often. We didn’t, and may have built more character that way, but screw character and save your feet. Bicyclists trump all. Right of way is a suggestion for them, even with traffic lights. Bike path, sidewalk, street — it’s almost as if they say, “What are you going to do? I’m on a bike.”

Perhaps the most notable feature of Amsterdam is the canal system. Call me a romantic, but I love canals. They just make the streets feel more European somehow. Plus, they make a great navigational aid. When you get to Amsterdam, learn to start picking directions based on canals. You might be amazed at what they term a street.

Trivia on the name Amsterdam: they built a dam on the river Amstel, hence the original name Amsteldamme. The canal system made it ideal for trade, and most foreign shipments were routed through there, making it one of the most important cities for trade in the old world. This perhaps explains its ranging diversity and tolerance for all people: the European melting pot, so to speak. I only wish tolerance worked as well in all parts of the world. I dreaded returning to the hack and slash partisan politics and subtle bigotry of the States. (Don’t get me wrong: I love the United States of America. It’s still a land of great opportunity and culture. We just could still learn a thing or two about true tolerance of others.)

Most people are content with visiting two locales on the trip, before hitting the coffee houses: the Anne Frank House, and the Van Gogh Museum. It’s like doing pennance to being a cultured person, before getting seriously wasted. If that’s your thing, that’s fine, but realize this: there’s a lot more to Amsterdam than that. More than just coffeeshops and hookers, even. Some other places you may or may not visit:

• Amsterdam’s Historich Museum: a great city history, but a little long winded.
• Vondelpark: nice park in the city near the shopping district, with a young and hippyish crowd.
• Deck of NEMO: probably not worth the 2.50 euros to enter, but best view of the city.
• Stelelijk Museum CS: if modern art is your thing, this is the place to be. If you hate po-mo, run away!
• Oosterpark: another nice park, but more for older folk and families.
• Tropenmuseum: see how the Dutch plundered the world back in the day!

"Cafès" are bars. "Coffeeshops" are places that sell marijuana. So where do you get a cup of coffee? As it turns out, almost anywhere. Not just any coffee, mind you: good coffee. I wish the US would pick up the Dutch’s knack for good java in almost every location. We’d found bad coffee, but it tended to be the exception, not the rule. Even the crappy in-room coffee maker was a capuccino / espresso machine. I hadn’t found a place that wouldn’t serve me up a capuccino. Try doing that at a bar in Boston.

The dining is exquisite. The shopping is intense. Oh yeah, there’s something about people getting high and such and loose women in Red Light, but that misses the point.

So what’s the big deal? What’s so great about Amsterdam, if you’re not a stoner or looking for a 50 euro “suck and f*ck”?

“The little differences.” It goes back to that car with John Travolta and Samuel Jackson, discussing what’s so great about Amsterdam: “They got the same sh*t we got over here, it’s just different.”

It starts with the people. They’re nice. They’re nice almost to a fault. It’s like they’ve taken the whole notion of tolerance, ingrained it in a few generations, and really made it a way of live. They’re polite, they speak good English (in addition to their Dutch, of course), and are totally non-judgemental. Frankly, it’s a bit unnerving at first, like these folks are too good to be true. They’re not all idealistic liberals; they have liberals, they have conservatives, they have moderates. Just like over here. Unlike over here, they all get along just fine.

Did I mention the tipping? I hate tipping. In Amsterdam, it’s fairly painless. If you don’t want to tip, don’t. Most prices have a gratuity built into the price (though they don’t list it separately anywhere). How do you tip? Simple. When they tell you the price, say, 8.50 euros, just round up to the next euro, and say “make it nine” and hand them your money. Or, if you have large bills, round it up to the next five, e.g. hand them a fifty and say “make it ten”. That’s it. Or, don’t do it at all. It doesn’t matter. That’s really nice. Much nicer than the sliding scale weird unspoken rule we have over here.

Plus, the whole experience is like an introduction to European culture. A nice one, being that the people are very pleasant, and they all speak English (and don’t care that you don’t speak Dutch). You walk thin, canal-lined streets, dodge a whole mess of bike riders, and generally just relax.

There too many reasons to list on why I love Amsterdam, some of them intangible. Visiting there makes me want to travel more. I had a lot of fun this trip, and hope to some day visit again.