Correspondent John Dee forwarded a spam he received earlier this week, concerning the need of a time traveler for certain necessary pieces of equipment to whisk him away to his temporal point of origin.

I’d seen a similar spam some time ago, and I must admit I rather relished it, although I took it to be the work of a genuinely schizophrenic individual. Many years ago, I lived with a man who had very extreme schizophrenia, and he had a very well-developed suite of theories concerning the disconnects between his perceptions of reality and the perceptions of reality that most of those around him had.

For example, he was a physically healthy male who was attracted to females; yet, for obvious reasons, he was never able to enter into either a loving long-term partnership or even into a casual, physical expression of sexuality. His obvious insanity creeped the ladies right out, lemme tell ya. His interpretation of this undeniable, consistent, frustrating fact?

God (or Yahweh) and Jesus, working together, had given him a disease which made it impossible for him to have sex with a female. How can you argue with an interpretation like that? He was clearly correct.

At any rate, recognizing the Time Traveler’s spam as the output of a similarly distressed mind, I had filed it away and more or less forgotten it, when Mr. Dee reminded me of it. I googled a bit to see what I could see.

The always-alert N!kke has a roundup of posts on the topic, including a long correspondence with the apparently-Massachusetts-based temponaut.

Here’s Sean’s creepy account of actually waiting at a Time Traveler specified teleportation coordinate and time. Hard looks from a man in a minivan! Cell-phone toting, laptop-using men in a car that leaves when observed! A man in the woods! Pretty good for a ten-minute lunch break.

One futher point I found intriguing. Several of the websites that post experiences or research about the poor Time Traveler identify him by name. At Sean’s post, someone signing “todios” claims that the Time Traveler has been sent home. “Todios” bears a high degree of phonemic similarity to the last name of the person identified as the Time Traveler here. Of course, it also can be understod to mean “to God”. Multiply-layered meanings and coinages such as this are extremely characteristic of the writings of schizophrenics that I have read.

In the same comments section, “Octavian” posts:

Please do not assist this person. I am from about 200 years further into the future than he is (That’s about how long his DWG has been obsolete)and have been hunting him acoss most of human history. Now that he’s trapped in your era, he must be subdued by whatever means necessary. He knows I am after him, so it’s very important that he be stopped before he can kill my great-great-great-great-great Grandf

Ha ha ha, right?

Check this out. The post is dated July, 2002. Scroll through the comments (including a Chat log with TT). Look! There’s the same comment, also from “Octavian,” dated August, 2003. And look, todios is back too.

It seems odd, also, that the Time Traveler has not set up a website, as he seems conversant with domain acquisition and management.

In fact, googling for “time travel spam” yeilds quite a few results. One wonders – could the Time Traveler and the Time Cube Guy be brought together?

Marc Liyanage: Mac hero.

Mac users of a certain level of technical curiosity may well recognize the name. About a year ago, perhaps a bit more, all the major US-market Mac publications both online and in print included tutorials on installing MySQL; all the articles turned to Mr. Liyanage’s pre-compiled binaries in the tutorials rather than explaining the intricacies of compilation from source, a wise call for a Mac audience.

(Non-Mac people – stick with me here: I think that Liyanage’s site is a model for presenting information about and access to personal development and technical projects, especially his minimal, exemplary and crystal clear installation instructions, such as these, for his MySQL package.)

He offers continually updated and evolving installation packaes and instructions for both MySQL (his package becoming the basis of the Mac OS X official release) and PHP, as well as certain other less widespread tools. This much is widely known. But look again!

• A comprehensive support bulletin board. (For those keeping score at home, Marc’s responded personally with in 24 hours each time I’ve had a question).
• Miscellaneous other software.
• A useful Applescript, “Open Terminal Here;” one adds an alias of the script to one’s windowbar. When run, it opens a new Terminal session in the current working directory represented by the open window. Being Marc, he’s configured the session such that the titlebar presents the full path to the directory. Useful! Elegant!
• And finally, a roundup of other people’s software that Mr. Liyanage appreciates:
  • AutoPair, a text-entry widget that automatically inserts opening and closing quotes, parens, and so foth, positioning your cursor between them – something that makes coding noticeably smoother.
  • MacSFTP, which provides a GUI for FTP-like file transfers over SSH.
  • and hometown heroes The Omni Group. I remain an idiot, based on the evidence of my failure to develop some sort of journalistic pitch about this outfit.

If only all software sites were as comprehensive, clean, and reliable.

My referrer logs are going crazy – apparently Paul’s guest-posting is one of the must-link blackout stories for bloggers; I’ll be keeping a sharp eye on Bellerophon to see if she can take it. The biggest day we’ve had in the past was in the wake of the passing of Bill Mauldin in January, as I recall…

So far today’s traffic won’t quite get that big, if the pattern holds true, but it’s plenty big to make me concerned about heat-related freezes on the poor dear. So: if you can’t read this, you know why!

UPDATE: Wonder what the blackout was like in NC for a survivor of the WTC disaster on 9-11? Look no further: Jahna D’Lish has the scoop, and acknowledges some post-traumatic stress while at the same time expressing herself in her usual, assertive way! You go, girl!

Ken had encouraged me to give the girl a jingle for on-the-spot reporting but afer his thrilling updates I felt like I’d done my job.

(In the MeFi thread I cited earlier, there’s a passing reference to people being trapped in elevators in the city during the blackout… Stop and think about such an experience for a moment, and be thankful that you were not one of that unfortunate number.)

UPDATE II: Well, just as this was posted: KERRANG! Bellerophon went down like a poorly-masoned brick wall. All’s well and here’s hopin’ there won’t be more crashes. At least I have a recent backup now.

New York power outage | Metafilter.

Great coverage all the way through mixed with the usual MeFi mirth.

Note this link to sat photos.

Ah some funny stuff in here, lots from beyond NYC…

the Evansville Courier & Press website carries an article by fellow Vulgar Boatmen listee Mark Wilson on the band and the musical career of Dale Lawrence:

Dale Lawrence doesn’t seem to do or think about anything the usual way. It’s an attitude that permeates everything about the semi-legendary Indianapolis band Lawrence has fronted for well over a decade now.

Nothing about the Vulgar Boatmen is what it seems, at least to the uninitiated. Despite a name that on first hearing sounds more fitting for an industrial heavy-metal band, the Vulgar Boatmen play heartbreakingly gorgeous pop-rock.

Bells and Whistles: In Between Stations

When we got to the doorway, people were jumping across a short distance to a narrow ledge running along the side of the tunnel. Some people fell between the wall and the train and had to be pulled back up. Although I didn’t worry about getting across the gap, I did wonder which way I should go from there. I hadn’t seen any flames, but there was a lot of smoke. It occurred to me–still quiet, still calm, not screaming–that I might not get out of the subway. I hadn’t told E. I was going downtown, and how long would it take him to figure out what had happened? And then I was out of the car and onto the ledge.

But going where? There was enough room to stand and a small handrail to hold on to, but there wasn’t enough room to walk forward; you had to face the wall and shuffle sideways. Some people were shuffling to my left, but since the smoke was coming from that direction, I opted to shuffle to the right.

Anne shows us why she makes the big bucks with this harrowing recollection of what it’s like to be caught in a burning subway tunnel.

Whoo.

Ping pong: words fail me. This is brilliant. I believe it is enhanced by the flash-video presentation. Hurry before the bandwidth issue arises.

Via April Winchell.

Goliard Dream: Music and Memory is Felicity’s contribution to Brian Sobolak’s requested round of essays on this topic.

Felicity is a classical musician who has performed professionally and she discusses how this changes her experience of music and in particular how it changes the experience of listening to it.

Fixing the MT bookmarklet for Safari :: The Daily Journey :: JayAllen.org

If you want to use the MT Bookmarklet and have auto-inserted selected text, follow these easy steps…

Hoorah! Allen found this at Mac OS X Hints, whose book is now out.