Eli Hodapp

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Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:23:22 -0500

PotluckBot has become sentient.

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 11:55:00 -0500

I loaded all of Joe’s posts from the Naperville Potluck in to a training file for MegaHAL, a conversation simulator. I had to talk to it for 15 minutes or so before it started responding with coherent answers… but now it is pretty eerie. These are the actual question and answers, with the grammar and punctuation fixed since MegaHAL doesn’t like to capitalize and uses punctuation poorly (although its use of quotation marks are hilarious, I didn’t modify any of those).

Q: What should the Napergate Man do next?
A: Moderator Ted, Have you called and asked the NPD to file formal complaints against the customers who were trying to outblog other groups around town that are posting here? It shouldn’t take too too long to get the napergate man involved.

Q: Why do you care so much?
A: I am living here. I care. Back then, I wasn’t here, so I didn’t. The decent thing to do is work for property tax increases.

Q: So you’re saying you support increased property taxes?
A: Yes and I posted a reference to the city/county/state, etc. In the example above, assuming Napergate was a victim of circumstances, but I do know how to file the FOIA.

Q: Napergate FOIA? What ever happened with that?
A: You misunderstand. You are in cuffs, you are now deemed a suspect who is less dangerous. Officers understand Moderator has the results.

Q: Why would you be arrested for a Napergate FOIA request?
A: Then again, I may not.

Q: You can’t seem to make up your mind.
A: Make the police seem non existent and you will be mad because he failed to answer.

Q: Who failed to answer?
A: I readjusted my math to make sure they are about to do bad things.

Q: Who? The NPD?
A: The NPD was not ‘out to get the Napergate Man’ that evening.

Q: Well what should we do about Napergate?
A: I think you are about to do burnouts with so many in the community due to their lack of action or initiative.

Q: But the police don’t like it when you do burnouts.
A: Only if the people to post their own real estate tax bills and a picture ID.

PotluckBot is speaking in pretty good sentences now, time to feed him some recent questions from the Potluck-

Q: What do you think of the salaries paid to public servants in Naperville? What would you change, if you could?
A: Please, continue to cry us a river about how you think people just hate police officers.

Q: Should Naperville revisit the question of council districts, and, if so, what form should it take?
A: You’ve obviously mistaken me for someone who has a financial analysis that shows x subdivision generated y taxes.

Q: In what ways is the financial crisis affecting you?
A: You people are complaining hand over fist about it. I don’t care.

Q: How come Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate, is faced with questions about whether she could juggle the demands of the position on top of raising five children? Would a male candidate in a similar situation face the same questions?
A: I call BS when I see it.

Q: Today’s question is: Should the city have apologized to Furstenau and ponied up the $130,000 a year ago?
A: He was treated in accordance with the normal paranoia / conspiracy mindset so at least prior to the presumed ‘fact’ that others rarely leave their cities to come here to shop here if they didn’t work weekends and were not in their infancy. What kills it is consistent with the front of the officer’s instructions and there are nothing like the ‘police state oppression’ posters here want us to believe. *That* is my tie in, that I frequent the same IP Address and voted for Dick Furstenau. That either makes you a liar or me not an establishment person. Which is it?

Q: So pretend you’re talking to the mayor and city council, and say what you’d like to see done to get Naperville back in the black.
A: I agree. Are you black?

Q: Did you receive one of the ads? What do you think? Do you go too far? Do you think they are fair? How well do you think the negative campaign strategy will work? Could it backfire, and end up doing more damage to McGuire than good? Which candidate do you support in the 96th District race, and why?
A: I admit, I did not like. The police are very approachable. What i have read on here have tried for months now people have been saturated w/ Napergate to the police statement and filed complaints about things i wish to point out because of previous activity by them elsewhere in the 3rd or 4th grade.

Q: Should the Warrenville Road, Butterfield Road and Williams Street bridges be replaced with higher structures? How could city and county authorities better communicate with residents during emergencies like this?
A: We can all figure out just what your ‘fair share’ of property taxes make to Napergate the point when they left the scene, then scan his establishments to only those customers legally old enough to actually do something like file a FOIA. Exercise your right. You can’t spend 15 minutes filing a FOIA request?

Q: Will you do it? Will you bother to call or write your legislative leaders and governor? Would it make any difference in the long run? Would you do it if you knew their e-mail addresses?
A: Make the police department respond.

There you have it, I have completed automated the Naperville Potluck comments. It’s kind of sad that basic AI can fit in with the people who post there.

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Fri, 26 Sep 2008 14:35:04 -0500

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Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:45:40 -0500

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Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:41:23 -0500

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Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:40:27 -0500

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Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:45:24 -0500

THIS is truly remarkable.

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:39:58 -0500

So while waiting for the project I’ve been working on to slowly upload I decided I’d send my thoughts regarding the proposed financial bailouts following my discovery of the Marcy Kaptur video and the email I sent to her office. Along the way I stumbled across congress.org, a spinoff of Capitol Advantage and Knowlegis.

OK, so it’s run by lobbyists, I can overlook that since it’s just a conduit to contact the people you elected… Until you get to the pages where you actually contact your state senators and representatives. The form includes an “impact meter”, encouraging you to write shorter letters, as they have a greater “impact”. They even cite a study that seems to prove how lazy our elected officials and their office staff truly are.

Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but it seems to me that if someone writes you a well written letter, regardless of length, it’s polite to read it. Personally, a longer more heartfelt letter would have a greater impact on me, instead of the apparent “too long; didn’t read” response lawmakers are giving people who actually spend the time to contribute their thoughts according to the study.

I would have hoped that our elected officials would feel the same way. When you email them, shouldn’t you be putting together a persuasive argument for them to consider and either agree or disagree with? I absolutely refuse to believe that an email which amounts to nothing more than “I agree with Paris Hilton’s energy plan in her video mocking John McCain and a ‘all of the above’ approach to energy independence.” is more effective than a well written argument citing facts along side personal opinion in a comprehensive argument on the issue.

Right?

…right?

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

Show’s over folks, pack your bags. Setting standards to...

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:48:00 -0500

Show’s over folks, pack your bags. Setting standards to debate Dragonball Z power levels is the end of the internet, there’s nowhere else to go from here.

An email to Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:15:00 -0500

Regarding her recent five minute speech on 9/17-

Mrs. Kaptur,

A friend of mine just linked me to your five minute speech regarding the bailout that you gave on 9/17, I’m not from Ohio, I’m an Illinois resident… but I just wanted to say KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK! It is absolutely unbelievable to me that Washington is even entertaining these bailouts!

This really hits home for me as my father is currently in the middle of a fairly intensive chemotherapy treatment plan to treat his second battle with colon cancer. Once you get cancer once, health insurance is absolutely impossible to get. After the first time around my parents and I did everything in our power to get my Dad on any kind of program for preventative care… except none exist! The best the county health services were willing to do was a reduced cost blood test to screen for cancer. No CT scans, no colonoscopies, just blood tests. By the time the reoccurrence of cancer showed up on the test results, the tumor was already large enough to be completely inoperable.

Now my parents drive down to Stroger Hospital in Chicago from their home in Naperville, which is about a 120 mile round trip for Chemotherapy… For something which had a good chance of being largely preventable if any kind of program existed for free or reduced cost CT scans outside of paying thousands upon thousands of dollars on insurance premiums, deductibles, or paying for regular CT scans out of pocket. (Find me one middle class family that has that kind of money!)

It is absolutely unbelievable to me that we can drag our heels on things like energy independence, we tell the sick people in our country to take a hike until they’re dying, no one has money for college, public schools are failing… THE LIST GOES ON AND ON! BUT! We have billions of dollars to bail out these fat cats who have done nothing but fight as hard as they can and employing countless lobbyists to keep everything they do deregulated while they make more money than almost any American will see in their entire life in a single year in executive bonuses. They created this situation with their own greed, and now they expect American tax payers to bail them out? Not only that, but this legislation is (According to the news I’ve been reading) is going to take less than a week to get passed?!?!?!?

It makes me sick how REAL problems of REAL people, REAL problems that effect not only quality of life but also STAYING ALIVE will simmer on the back burner for year after year after year… and Washington doesn’t care. Rich billionaire bankers having hard times? Oh my! Sound the alarm! Lock the doors and order pizza, congress isn’t leaving until we help them out!

I DO NOT support these bailouts… but I fear for the future of our economy if these powerful financial groups are allowed to fail. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t I suppose. Either way, something needs to change.

Thanks for your time, again I’m not an Ohio resident but I deeply appreciate everything you’re doing and would vote for you in a heartbeat if I could.

Eli Hodapp

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Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:01:09 -0500

After!

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:24:23 -0500

After!

Before!

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:24:05 -0500

Before!

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Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:59:38 -0500

9/11 ramblings.

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 13:09:00 -0500

Reposted from The Naperville Potluck

I have the utmost respect for everyone who lost their lives in the attack, from the people working in the building to the firefighters and police officers who sacrificed everything in the line of duty. I still clearly remember my reaction the morning of September 11th, 2001. I was getting ready to go to work, and flipped on the TV while I sat there quickly scarfing down some frosted mini wheats with a measly sprinkling of milk, having gotten the last of the gallon.

My reaction was confusion, not confusion of what would drive someone to do something like this… but confusion as to why the TV station I was watching was playing a movie so early in the morning. I watched for a few minutes, trying to figure out if what I was watching was Die Hard, or some similar attack on New York City action movie I’d never seen. I remember thinking how realistic the special effects were and how interesting the cinematography was, using the news anchors to progress the plot of this mysterious movie I’d never seen before.

Looking at the clock and realizing I was on the verge of running late, I figured I’d look up the TV listings when I got to work if I still at all cared what movie it was, assuming I didn’t forget about it on the way. Being pressed for time and originally turning on the TV to check the weather to see if I needed to bring a coat with me or not I grabbed the remote and flipped channels hoping the catch the end of some morning news show. Then it hit me.

This “movie” was playing on every channel. It wasn’t a movie, it was real. I ended up not going to work, along with nearly everyone else at my company and instead watching the live news coverage with my family. To this day, remembering the feeling of confusion trying to figure out what “movie” I was watching changing instantly to complete horror when I realized what was happening when I changed channels still creeps me out.

Having grown up in this country, living my whole life without any major threat, (I mean, I guess I grew up during Desert Storm, but I don’t think anyone ever had any reason to feel at all threatened for their immediate safety or lifestyle.) I’ve always naively felt immune to this sort of thing. Terrorism? That’s the kind of stuff you hear about when you watch the world news and they talk about the Middle East. As cliche as the phrase “in a post 9/11 world” is, I think very few people, myself included would appreciate the things we have in this country as much as I do now without this eye opening experience. Previous to the attacks, I never had any reason to ever consider how much is hanging by a thread that could all be taken away in the blink of an eye by a small band of insane people willing to stop at nothing to destroy America.

I suppose it was a semi-justified sense of false security. After all, who would be dumb enough to mess with the greatest country on the planet? Who would be powerful enough to destroy not one, but two vital skyscrapers in the New York skyline? Before all this transpired, why would you ever worry about something like this happening?

Since then, I’ve found the reaction of our government as a whole to be somewhat embarrassing. I don’t think the Patriot Act makes anyone feel safer. Our retaliation to the attacks by just carpet bombing any area that could possibly be harboring any terrorists was ridiculous, the “war on terror” has been about as effective as the “war on drugs”. Dragging Saddam Hussein in to this fiasco further complicated things. So far we’ve spent over half a trillion dollars on military action resulting in a response from the September 11th attacks.

Are we any safer? It seems to me our senseless aggression in the Middle East has accomplished nothing but giving even more reason for these extremists to hate us and in turn seek whatever retaliation they can.

I hate you, Covad.

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:40:00 -0500

I’ve been having problems with my DSL lately, I keep losing sync randomly, ping times are all over the place, and my transfer speed vary wildly. I called Speakeasy about this, they were extremely helpful in doing everything they could possibly do on their end and recommended dispatching a technician to see if there is any problems with something on site. They were supposed to show up sometime between 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM.

Around 2:00 PM this was posted to my trouble ticket on my account page-

“FST 6401 Brian d reports; I arrived at the client prem-while parking I called the client to find out the restaurant name. The district manager-Peter answered. He told me he didn’t know of any DSL trouble and unless he called me back in 15 minutes not to stop by. I waited, he did not call back. The client Peter said his DSL is working-no problem and did not want me to work on it today.”

So basically, I have trouble with my DSL over a holiday weekend, their arms are kind of tied because there’s like one Covad tech working the area, they squeeze me in as soon as they can today. The idiot parks his car, calls Noodles, they say their DSL is working fine and he’s like “Well my job is done here!”

So I email this to Speakeasy-

“It’s pretty unbelievable to me that a technician can get dispatched to fix what seems to me to be a pretty well documented problem with my DSL, talk to someone whose name isn’t on the account as the billing or technical contact OR anywhere on the trouble ticket who quite obviously has no idea what they’re talking about and just decide “Well, that’s that! Nothing to see here!”

I mean, at bare minimum wouldn’t the technician want to get out of their truck and give things a once over since they drove all the way out anyway? I seriously can’t even begin to understand the logic, especially with the price of gas these days, why a tech wouldn’t at least want to be a little proactive especially given the intermittent nature of this problem. As previously noted in this ticket, the line tested poorly enough to get a tech dispatched. Who fixed it in the meantime? A kind old traveling wise wizard with a magical wand that has a knack for fixing line errors and low bitrates?

My mind is just kind of blown with the continual problems I seem to have with Covad for anything to do with my personal account, business account, as well as accounts of customers of mine who I’ve recommended to Speakeasy. Speakeasy’s service and support is absolutely outstanding, and I honestly don’t do business with a company in my personal or professional life that I am more satisfied with… until something needs to be handed off to Covad.

It’s kind of like when you go to the grocery store and you have a sweet old lady who scans every item with care and precision, the whole time smiling ear to ear and asking you about your day only to have your groceries slide down the conveyer belt to their doom, bagged by some green haired pimply high school kid with a dozen facial piercings who quite literally could only do a worse job bagging your things if they had some type of hydraulic ram rod to further stuff and break everything you just bought.

I wait with baited breath and fingers crossed that the loaner modem arrives tomorrow and fixes my problem, either that, or whatever magical incantation the traveling wizard was kind enough to cast on my DSL continues enchanting my line.”

We’ll see how much free stuff I get.

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Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:53:48 -0500

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Mon, 25 Aug 2008 07:45:16 -0500

Time travellers from the future 'could be here in weeks'

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:44:40 -0500

Time travellers from the future 'could be here in weeks': Hopefully they’ll bring news of Wyld Stallyns.

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Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:45:58 -0500