Why I can't tell you all my secrets

There are a number of tricks I've discovered over the years to enable me to do things faster, cheaper and with more (or less, depending on the situation) control.

Most of those I post here but some must remain forever black.

Deepest black.

Because the nature of some of my hacks is that once they see the light of day, either 1) the loopholes will be instantly closed by the powers-that-be once a surge of users draw attention to the kludge or 2) they'll be declared illegal, as the IRS and Congress are wont to do whenever the New York Times runs a front page story about some loophole which enables billionaires to legally avoid paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes which the rest of us, being unfamiliar with the arcana of the tax code and unable to afford the services of $1,000/hour tax attorneys, are simply unable to do on our far smaller scale incomes.

I will throw you a bone of sorts, though: anyone with a modicum of persistence and patience can access any website from any location, even those that, like my little community hospital, block bookofjoe because of some perceived unacceptable content that gets caught up in their control filters.

Simply put "anonymous proxy" into the Google search box and then start trying various websites from the many that come up.

Last time I was at the hospital it took me about 25 minutes and 15 sites before I found one that worked.

Got that memorized, fer shur.

And no — I'm not going to tell you the site.

Get your own.

And while we're on the general subject of information control, consider these excerpts from Christopher Caldwell's rave August 22, 2008 Financial Times review of Tom Vanderbilt's surprise summer hit, "Traffic:"

Caught in the Human Traffic

The more technologically efficient a network becomes, the harder it is to tell people the whole truth about it.

Once everyone gets the same reliable, real-time information about traffic, everyone mobs the same routes.

Predictions about traffic become "self-destroying."

The scattering of traffic that used to result from imperfect information and personal idiosyncrasy is no longer the norm. It must be artificially recreated. How do you recreate it? Either by coercing drivers or by lying to them.

"You have to structure the information," the German physicist and traffic expert, Michael Schreckenberg, says.... "Telling them the whole truth is not the best way."

....................

That's enough for today.