Web Fed News Yearbooks - May 2002

ARE YOU RECORDING?

Folks, it's time I reminded you of the importance of taking captures of stuff that happens in Fed.

Several different people in the past few weeks have been mailing me with complaints of harassment. Now, harassment is a nasty thing, and I know how upsetting it can be, so I always want to help. But in order to do that, I need a capture. Without a capture, any harassment complaint comes down to "he said..." "no I didn't!"

Whereas a capture shows exactly what happened - who said what to whom, under what circumstances. It's the literal evidence, rather than the events filtered through perception and memory.

There are other reasons to take a capture, of course. If you are trying to solve a puzzle, capturing what you do lets you look back over it later. You may see a clue that you missed in the heat of the moment.

A capture can preserve the memory of something special - a Fed wedding, a party, a tender moment - or something funny, or exciting. Reading over an old capture can bring back all kinds of things you had forgotten about.

So, how do you go about making sure you preserve the special stuff, record the important stuff, have the evidence to back up a complaint?

The easiest way is to simply make a habit of recording everything. Every time set foot in Fed DataSpace, turn on the logging facility of your front-end. If nothing exciting happens, you'll end up with an endless of log of you hauling or whatever, but you can always delete old logs later to save space on your hard disk. FedTerm32 has an option to automatically turn on a log. To activate the auto-log, select the "Log All Sessions" option from the "File" menu.

Other front-ends such as ZMud probably have similar features. If your front-end doesn't, then it's just something you will have to remember to do when you first log onto Fed. Just as you type WHO 9 to see who's online, and GL to see if someone is in the room with you, and check your digest to see your planet's doing... you should also just start that log recording.

But, not everyone is that organised (or has the spare hard disk space) to log everything, just on the off-chance that something worth preserving will happen. So what then?

Obviously, you need to start the log going as soon as anything interesting looks like happening. But if stuff has already happened, you can salvage a capture from your scroll-back buffer, using that handy cut-n-paste feature that most computers have. Scroll back till you find whatever you want to save, highlight it, copy it (in Windows, Ctrl-C does that). Then find somewhere to paste it: a blank document in your word processor, a blank email, whatever... and paste it (Ctrl-V).

All you have to do then is save the document, email or whatever so you can look at it later, or mail it to whoever needs to see it.

SNARCOT ELECTED AS MARTIAN MAYOR

In a shock result to last week's mayoral election on Mars, the voters decided that their preferred candidate was a snarcot called Simon! Better known as the mascot for the Martian space billiards team, Simon stood on a ticket promising free pizza for all haulers. The man inside the snarcot costume, real name Marcus Pecksniff, beat off opposition from mainstream parties such as the Sol Progressive Party, the Martian Social Democratic Capitalists, and the Martian Independence Party.

Simon the Snarcot's victory comes on the planet whose residents are famous for having hanged a snarcot in the early days of planetary colonisation, because they thought it was a spy for the long-vanished Martians.

Footnote: I often write news stories for the Chronicle that are based on real life stories, but I generally pick subjects where Fedders are likely to have read the original story - such as the recent Enron scandal. The real-life story behind this article is unlikely to have been read by people outside the UK, but it's such a great story I wanted to use it anyway. You can read the real story of the monkey elected as mayor at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_1965000/1965569.stm

PRACTICAL JOKE

Speaking of monkeys, there's a practical joke going round the Internet. The suggestion is that when space tourist Mark Shuttleworth returns to Earth, everybody should dress in ape suits!

STALKING THE STALKER

The Guardian newspaper has a fascinating article about how someone who was being stalked on the net tracked down the stalker, and brought him to justice.

The victim was Gobion Rowlands. The stalker started by sending abusive and threatening emails, then moved on to creating a web site dedicated to attacking Mr Rowlands.

The emails were sent from a hotmail email address, so the stalker obviously thought that he was untraceable, but Mr Rowlands examined the email headers and figured out where the stalker was actually logging on from; then with the aid of the ISP, was able to positively identify him, and turn him over to the police.

You can read the article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,711979,00.html. It is worth reading to see how you should proceed if you are ever the unfortunate victim of stalking.

There are two morals to this story. The first is that the net is not as anonymous as you think it is. With just a little technical savvy, and the cooperation of the ISP, it is possible to trace the person behind the bits and bytes.

We occasionally get people in Fed using throwaway alts to harass other players, secure in the believe that they cannot be identified. They have found that they are wrong, too!

And the other moral is that you should think before you do something you think is just a joke. The stalker in Mr Rowlands' case said that he viewed the whole thing as a prank, but to receive anonymous threats out of the blue is tremendously unsettling. Practical jokes are never funny to the victim.

In Fed, people sometimes use the excuse, when accused of harassment, that they were only joking. Well, sometimes jokes backfire, but if someone tells you to stop doing something because they are upset, then clearly they are not finding the joke funny - so that's the time to stop, and to apologize, and to leave the person alone.

REAL LIFE NEWS: STAR WARS SICKNESS

On May 16, the US economy could lose more than $300 million in lost productivity... thanks to the opening of the new Star Wars film, Attack of the Clones. More than 2.6 million fans are expected to take a day off or phone in sick so they can see the movie. That's the prediction of Chicago-based recruitment experts Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

They make this astonishing prediction based on the fact that 5.7 million people turned up to see The Phantom Menace on the first day. Assuming that viewers come from a random cross-section of the population, 46 per cent would be in full-time employment. Hence the prediction of 2.6 million skiving off work to see the new film.

Faced with massive skiving this summer due to football fans staying off work to watch England's World Cup matches, many British firms have installed televisions in their offices. Shame companies can't do the same with Attack of the Clones!

Wait a minute, though. Let's look at the reasoning of these so-called experts. What did they say? "Assuming that viewers come from a random cross-section of the population..." Surely not. We're talking about Star Wars fans here!

REAL LIFE NEWS: TAX THE FANS

Speaking of science fiction fans, some barmy wannabe congress-critter has proposed a levy on science fiction as a way to solve NASA's budget crisis. Michael Williams, a Republican running for a Congress seat in Huntsville, Alabama, wants a 1 per cent tax on all merchandise relating to sci-fi or space, such as books, comics, toys and games.

I would be in favour of this only if the running of NASA was turned over to sci-fi fans too. I predict we'd be landing a crewed mission on Mars within five years!

REAL LIFE NEWS: EMAIL SAVES EXPLORER

At last, a story where email really was a matter of life and death. A British explorer trying to reach the North Pole had been trying to make history by walking without any backup. He became stranded on an ice floe, miles from land, and within a week the tidal pull of the full moon would have torn the flat ice expanse into a treacherous stretch of mini ice mountains. This would have made it impossible for a rescue plane to land, and he would have certainly died.

So the explorer, Dave Mill, used his sledge to mark out a 400-yard runway in the ice floe where he was marooned. He took a photo of the runway with a digital camera, and emailed the picture to a rescue team in Canada.

This made it possible for the rescue team in a ski-plane to find and land on the makeshift runway, without having to first do a surveillance flight.

A triumph for technology!