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Express yourself!
Have you always wanted to let Team Rockwood know just what you were thinking? Do you wonder why the panels of the strip are laid out horizontally instead of vertically? Or do you have sensitive documents that will bring down the government? In any case, we want to know! Just fill out your name and e-mail address, then let 'er rip! No question or comment is too bizarre for Team Rockwood to take a stab at, and if we can get enough mail coming in, this page will be updated weekly! (Unlike the old mailbag page, which got updated about four times in two years.)
So consider this an experiment in web interactivity. Or, consider it a way to artificially inflate our hit count. Either way, just write in!
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Updated on January 10, 2006
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January 3, 2006,
Ok Brian, now Carolyn (fifth letter down) is trying to get you to do T-shirts too. I never have been really big on calendars, but I would really like a Rockwood T-shirt, or a few, so I could give them to all the Rockwoods around here. So when you find some spare time that you have nothing to do, how about it?
--Jim Rockwood
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Spare time? What's that? Actually, Jim, we do have some spare time coming up soon, so we might just act on your little idea. After all, we could always use more money here at Team Rockwood, and if it's going to take t-shirts to get to yours, then maybe that's what we'll have to do. Keep watching!
As for the rest of you, the 2006 Rockwood Calendar looks great on any wall!
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January 6, 2006,
Okay, I never saw Transporter 2, but isn't it possible that there is a computer that can call up minute details on random citizens? I mean, isn't it just a question of storage capacity and the efficiency of the search engines? Isn't there supposed to be this huge supercomputer built for excatly that reason in Switzerland? I think it's called "The Beast" (like the antichrist).
--Tony J. Moyer
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January 6, 2006,
Sorry, I should have looked it up myself.
--Tony
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Although you figured out the Beast for yourself, Tony, the fact is an all-inclusive supercomputer would involve a lot more than storage space and efficiency.
For instance, while it's pretty easy to find, say, Brian Lundmark in a computer search, what if your name was more common? In tiny Norman, Oklahoma, the residential white pages are less than a quarter of an inch thick, yet the phone book contains six listings for "John Smith" and twelve more entries for "J Smith." Movie police computers easily call up newspaper articles on their suspects, but the ability to do that in real life would require either a human operator to enter each of these articles into said police computer or a computer smart enough to figure out which of the potential 18 "J Smiths" in the phone book was the subject of the article.
Would such a programming feat be possible? Well, we'd never say never, but we would say "not now." The NSA has supposedly been operating a program called ECHELON since 1999 that is rumored to listen to all phone calls and internet transmissions for keywords that the NSA might consider dangerous. However, if this program actually exists, it missed a pretty big event back in 2001.
The fact is, making an efficient search engine is hard work. Google has over 4,000 employees, has tons of cash because it's been so successful, and can afford to hire anyone they think they need to build a better search engine. Despite all of this, if you search for Rockwood, we come up eighth in the search. And poor Rockwood.com, which you would think should be number one given the search word, doesn't appear until page two.
If the highest paid engineers on the planet can't even get a search engine straight, we're not too worried about unmanned government computers spying on our phone calls.
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Previous week's mail
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© Copyright 2006 Brian Lundmark, all images and text on this page.
All rights reserved. Tell me about it!
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