Kaz's Rants and Reviews

2:38am: More Windmill Tilting
I've been tilting at a couple more windmills this month. The big one is IPv6. I've gotten my home network back up, this time through a Hurricane Electric tunnel. I've poked the new IT company that my new megacorp parent company hired to do our IT and prodded them about planning our IPv6 transition again. I've also mentioned yet again to another person from my home internet provider that it would be really nice to have IPv6 natively.

I've also been trying to push people to actually start using my GPG key. I've added big notices to my signature for my email, I've added a big notice to the front of my homepage, but only 1 person has ever used my GPG public key to send me an email message. :(

I hope that people realize that it takes time to setup IPv6, and that it will become important here in the next 3 years... and that sending email without encrypting it is like putting the details of your private life on the back of a postcard and mailing it...

But people are SO lazy. They whine and whine about email privacy, but won't lift a finger to do anything about it... and they would rather wait until the last minute and throw some slipshod junky IPv6 equipment in without testing it instead of gradually doing the work up front...

7:43pm: Newscorp says that ad supported services are on their way out
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/05/hulu_may_adopt_subscription_service/

I agree, news corp. But let me be the first to point out that you already sell your services by a subscription based service. Show us a little honesty here and start pulling all your ads off our subscription service (Cable, Satellite...) and then we might consider paying yet another subscription for your content. ;)

5:56pm: Banning future technology weaponry...
http://www.slugsite.com/archives/1126

Huhwhat? Banning electromagnetic weaponry from hunting purposes?

What kind of backward state is this "Wisconsin" place...

8:04pm: The UK playstation site has this nice little badge to stick on websites...



I wonder if they'll ever get that on the US site...

1:45am: CDs that do not participate in the Loudness War.
Given that every darn CD out seems to be wound all the way to the top on the loudness meter, it's both surprising and annoying when I find ones that aren't. When I try to play them on shuffle, I have to turn the volume up, then back down again at the end for the next song, at least on Amarok. I have an automatic adjuster on Winamp at work...

In any case, the most recent one is Veruca Salt's cd IV. 2006 and it sounds very quiet unless using the booster. I only noticed it now that I've mixed it into my home playlist. Very good CD, and apparently at the proper volume.

The other two are older CDs that I picked up on Emusic. I [heart] Mekons and Retreat from Memphis, both from Mekons. I was on the verge of dropping these from my playlist until I found the leveler because of how annoying it was to change the volume up and down and before I had heard about the Loudness War in general.

It would be nice if all music would go back down to these levels just to save wear on my volume knob. Taking these up to the current normal volume would be counterproductive.

2:03pm: Multimedia Consumption
Not just for books anymore! I just looked back at my journal and found it's been 3 months since I posted anything about books and such... So here goes.

#5 Witches of Karres. Very amusing mix of magic and science fiction. Witches with a magic spacedrive basically force a guy to rescue them from slavery, then make him into a fugitive. Ultimately they travel all over the galaxy and end up fighting a race of transdimensional worms... This is the sort of thing Schmitz is known for, though even more magicy than his Telzey Amberdon series.

#6 Year 1 Issue 4 of Baen's Universe. Darn these things are long... Some good, some mediocre stuff. Nice to see the Ancient Ones series progress. The fish tales story is a bit tiresome so far. Murphy's Law was amusing...

#7 First Meetings in Ender's Universe, This is very good, but short. 5 short stories going from when Ender's father was a child, up until he first meets with Jane. Includes the original Ender's Game. I find the Ender's Game novel to be better though.

#8 Exiles of the Well of Souls, Interesting new characters, Obie, Mavra Chang... Fun until they got to the Well World, then it dragged on a bit.

#9 Quest for the Well of Souls, It actually starts interesting, drops off a bit in the middle, and then improves at the end.

#10 In the Event of My Untimely Demise, A fairly amusing book of advice originally written for the guy's kid.

#11 The Return of Nathan Brazil, My favorite wellworld book since the very first one because of the length of time it spends dealing with the universe outside the Wellworld.

Next up is probably The Dance of Time. It's another paper book, so it'll probably take me awhile.

On the TV front...

#1 The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. So bizarre, but exceeded my expectations. Worth a watch compared to most typical Japanese School series. Haruhi herself is a complete jerk though.

#2 I've watched the first 4 seasons of the new Doctor Who, and most of the first season of the original. If you haven't watched the new Doctor Who, you're really missing out.

#3, Xenosaga Animated series... Short and seems to follow the game story closely. Good if you don't want to slog through such a dull game for the story.

#4, Highlander Anime. Dreadful. Boring... I think I would have given it 3 stars if it wasn't so freaking preachy about the environment.

#5, Origin: Spirits of the Past. Same as the Highlander anime, but it is slightly better.

#6, Nausicaa and the Valley of Wind, 4 stars after the adjustment for environment preachiness.

#7, Deathnote. Geniuses battling it out with notebooks that can kill just by writing a name in it. Excellent series...

#8, Castle in the Sky. Pretty good Ghibli film. Not their best.

#9, Howl's Moving Castle. Like Castle in the Sky, it's decent. It does have an anti-war pacifist bent like Zaitcev says, so it deserves to get a star knocked off.

I discovered Netflix Instant queue watching... and ended up watching a few series that I might not otherwise finish...

#10, Red Dwarf. Not really Scifi, but comedy with a SF background setting. Quite amusing.

#11, PaniPoni Dash. I had high hopes for this one given the premise of a 10 year old genius teaching high school, but it disappointed me. It was amusing in spots, but they just completely bungled the main plotline. It went all the way over to surreal and had tons of inside jokes. Also... When your main characters are an 11 year old and a school full of 15 year olds, that's a pretty good indication that this isn't an anime series you should be doing excessive fan service in... Just saying...

#12, Air TV. After Paniponi, I had very low expectations for this one. It looked haremy and like it would start throwing the same fan service stuff in. This one really exceeded my expectations though. It turned out to be a very nice story with little to no bad content. Mostly a story about mothers and daughters...

#13, Best Student Council. I had low expectations of this given the cheesy setting (An all girls school owned and operated by the students), cheesy title (Best Student Council? Really?) and the Puppet that was prevalent in the title sequence. Even with the cheesy setting it was well done, and the first episode's absurdity didn't really spill out too much on the rest of the series. It's by no means a great show, but at least a solid one. Huge ensemble cast means that about half of the episodes just deal with one character or another's backstory though.

#14-16, The Cat Returns, Kiki's Delivery Service, Whisper of the Heart... All excellent, you should rent them now. What are you waiting for. Go on...

5:21pm: Another problem with Democracy
Last.fm... They pick their artist pictures via a democratic process where you can vote them up or down. The other major issue with last.fm is that they have no solution for disambiguation of artists, so when you get down into the small indie bands there's a great deal of overlap in names with different bands songs getting intermixed as well as the tags related to them.

In this case, both problems are cropping up at the same time. A band that I really enjoy, but has a very low profile is Goner. They've released 3 CDs thus far and I enjoy all of them. They share a name with a band that seems to have only released a single song and has been tagged as "grindcore," their only song is about 1 minute long and absolutely awful compared to the other band.

The problem is that the smaller band and their friends are aggressively promoting their pictures on the "goner" page and voting down the pictures from the other band. Because only a handful of the hundreds of listeners from the larger band even look at that page, they're getting away with it. This goes back to the concept that democracy is rule by those able to speak loudest and convince the most people to pay attention on their side.

Because of this, whenever I play a song from the great Goner band, I get that urgly picture from the horrible Goner band on my profile...

If anyone feels like helping me out on last.fm though, http://www.last.fm/music/Goner is the band, and http://www.last.fm/music/Goner/+images/21975209 is the only picture from the real band.

2:01pm: Only one US car maker worth considering..
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=al89RU9gWof8&refer=home
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a5326d50-332a-11de-9316-00144feabdc0.html

The government owns 50% of GM now. The UAW owns 39%. The UAW will own 55% of Chrysler, and the government gets 10%.

There's really no point in buying a GM or a Chrysler car anymore. The companies are going to go one of two ways. They'll either make crappy cars and go under, or they'll make crappy cars and be continuously propped up by the government. Either way, there's no possible way they're going to make good cars in the future. It's really too bad. Before the government started meddling, Chrysler made some of the best cars ever. Unfortunately they haven't managed to bring most of them to market due to a combination of the government and Daimler.

I'm looking into Ford now for the next time I pick up a new wheeled transport mode.

2:25pm: Geocities being shut down, spiritual successor in Myspace.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/24/geocities_bye/

One might think that because Geocities is shutting down, the era of teenagers making gaudy, amateurish, and plain old ugly webpages would be over and forgotten... But those who fail to learn from history or never studied it are doomed to repeat it. They've just all gone over to Myspace where it's not only easier to make gaudy webpages, but you can be even more amateurish while making webpages that look ever so slightly better, but still horribly ugly.

I suppose that you can never get rid of that stuff entirely though, so it is better to concentrate them in one location so that they are more easily avoided.

1:15am: Back on a portable computer again.
Back when I was still in high school, I lusted after a particular subnotebook computer that had just come onto the market. It had a 486BL2-50 processor, a 7.7 inch screen at 640x480, 200 Megabyte hard drive, and 4 megs of ram. $1800. It was a mere 10.1"x7.2"x1.7" and only 4 pounds back in 1994. Needless to say, I never managed to buy that system, but as a graduation present my parents bought me a $800 Thinkpad 755CE.

I loved that system, and especially enjoyed the TV card that I bought for it. In the time before PSone's came out with their little LCD screen, that was the best way to play console games. It ran OS/2 Warp 3.0 perfectly and I used it for the first 2 years I was in college. After that, I pretty much abandoned PC compatible systems as my portable units. I used Palm Pilot Pro's, Palm 3, Palm 3C, Tapwave Zodiac, and Garmin Ique3600, and even had a keyboard that worked with some of those systems.

I'm back to a PC compatible portable unit now though, and this one is even better than the 510c. This one is 8.9"x6.9"x1.5" (1.2"x0.3"x0.2" smaller than the 510C and even smaller than the P2000 at work), it has a 1024x600 screen, a full pound and a half lighter than the 510C, and the screen is significantly larger. 100x the storage capacity, a processor that is at least 320x as fast, and 256x as much memory... and this one clocked in at only $280!

Asus EEE 901, I've already replaced the OS with a version of Ubuntu and it's just a great system. Having this smaller unit though makes me realize that my goals with the 510C were unrealistic though. I doubt it would have ever fit in my inside coat pocket... I may need to build a custom coat pocket just for this unit though.

Trying to install Windows 2000 off a USB drive is a thorn in my side though. I suspect I'll just need to fork out the $70 for a USB cd drive... (Cutting it short here at 5 paragraphs for STRedwolf's benefit. ;)

6:21pm: What's with the handbasket, and where are we going again?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123879833094588163.html

They forced some banks to accept TARP funds, and now they're refusing to take them back. Then they start dictating to the banks what they can and can't do now that they have the funds. This is freaking totalitarianism in the flesh right here. It's almost like the controllers of the government want the whole thing to fail.

And not in a good way, the Demon Overlord Laharl taking control of our country would probably be better than what we have now.

1:35am: Netflix, blockbuster, and Bluray
Why is it that all of the online video rental places are doing the normal competition thing in reverse? Instead of competing with each other to add new features, they're competing in how many they can take away!

Back when I signed up for blockbuster (Primarily because they had Bluray,) they allowed you to get unlimited rentals in the store by trading in videos in envelopes. Unfortunately they first dropped this down to 5 in-store rentals per month, then started charging extra even for those 5! When they did that, along with slowing down the shipment of new DVDs, I reduced my account to a 2 per month $4 account and moved my entire queue short of a handful to Netflix. After all, Netflix had competitive prices and also had Bluray discs, and had more discs in stock...

Now a month or two ago, Netflix adds a $1 surcharge to Bluray rentals for your account. I went along with it, $1 isn't too much... But now they pushed this up to a *$5* charge per month. The first bluray disc in my queue was 90 places down! It simply wasn't worth $5 to get bluray discs in the distant future...

So now I put $5 extra into my blockbuster account and moved all my Bluray movies back to blockbuster... That way I'll actually GET bluray discs for my extra funds...

12:59am: Governmental lilliputians
Does anyone know how to set a post to be hidden until the date that it is listed as being posted?

This post started as a debate in my mind on the way home when I recalled the Gulliver's Travels stories about Big Endian and Little Endian lilliputians fighting a war over which end they should crack open the soft-boiled egg. I didn't imagine I'd have a story to attach it to when I got home.

In any case, the root causes of a lilliputian style conflict are as follows
( lilliputians! )

There are several ways that people resolve these kind of conflicts.
( preachiness about democracy vs freedom here )

Here's the story I found...

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=467812

Certain muslim countries have pushed through a ban in the UN on defamation of religion.

This fits nearly all of the qualifications of Democratic Totalitarianism. 23 countries voted with 11 opposed and 13 abstaining to force everyone (Happily not yet at the point of a gun, but the UN is clamoring for this power) to shut up about their religion. Free speech hurts nobody, and if people just had the maturity to live and let live on the issue like we tried to do with this country's founding, then the world would be freer and less violent. Unfortunately one group within one side of the issue has done the War thing, they've done the Totalitarian Dictator thing in many areas, and they've now done the Totalitarian Democracy thing.

And what would compromise accomplish? They're still upset over what you can say, and you're still being muzzled and aren't free to speak.

12:38am: Futurism, and hype
I've long been a fan of the idea of Futurism. It seems that Futurism and Modernism have started to fade away from the public consciousness and are often ridiculed and insulted by many Post-modern "thinkers." They claim that Modern society has failed to provide the gains that it promised and thus we should abandon the whole futurism concept.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0683.html

This article gives me another good reason why this isn't true. In particular,

There's this stupid myth out there that A.I. has failed, but A.I. is everywhere around you every second of the day. People just don't notice it. You've got A.I. systems in cars, tuning the parameters of the fuel injection systems. When you land in an airplane, your gate gets chosen by an A.I. scheduling system. Every time you use a piece of Microsoft software, you've got an A.I. system trying to figure out what you're doing, like writing a letter, and it does a pretty damned good job. Every time you see a movie with computer-generated characters, they're all little A.I. characters behaving as a group. Every time you play a video game, you're playing against an A.I. system. —Rodney Brooks, director of the MIT AI Lab5

I still run into people who claim that artificial intelligence withered in the 1980s, an argument that is comparable to insisting that the Internet died in the dot-com bust of the early 2000s.6 The bandwidth and price-performance of Internet technologies, the number of nodes (servers), and the dollar volume of e-commerce all accelerated smoothly through the boom as well as the bust and the period since. The same has been true for AI.

The technology hype cycle for a paradigm shift—railroads, AI, Internet, telecommunications, possibly now nanotechnology—typically starts with a period of unrealistic expectations based on a lack of understanding of all the enabling factors required. Although utilization of the new paradigm does increase exponentially, early growth is slow until the knee of the exponential-growth curve is realized. While the widespread expectations for revolutionary change are accurate, they are incorrectly timed. When the prospects do not quickly pan out, a period of disillusionment sets in. Nevertheless exponential growth continues unabated, and years later a more mature and more realistic transformation does occur.

The same is true of any number of futurist ideas. They were frequently overhyped and oversold, but in the background they've continued to march forward and give us realistic transformations.

10:58pm: Finished Breath of Fire, here's the review.
Retro Review: Breath of Fire
By just about any standard this is an old game. It first came out in 1993, and the version that I played for the GBA is from all the way back in 2001. It's age is definitely showing.

The storyline is fair, but not really above par on anything. Typical of late NES and early SNES rpgs. There are some brief mostly static cutscenes. Most of the storyline is told through text and setting.

There are 8 characters, but only about 5 of them are ones that you would really want to keep in your party. The rest tend to be back benchers as soon as you get someone better, and their only real redeeming quality is that some of those characters can merge into Karn to make him more powerful.

The game's one innovation over earlier RPGs would be its isometric battle screen and Autobattle feature, and if you want to play the game, you'll likely make heavy use of the autobattle feature. It's a member of the old school of RPGs where the skimpy content was spaced out by means of copious amounts of random battles. Unfortunately, unlike newer games like Grandia, and even newer games in the BoF series, the battles are almost always uninteresting. Most of the time Autobattle is the fastest way to bring the battle to a conclusion, and the "fight the enemy furthest left with basic attacks" strategy works as well as any. If you have fond memories of old games with random battles, this will cure you of those.

What's worse is that while most games build up to a very tough series of final bosses, this one has an all powerful transformation move that you find that essentially makes the last 3 boss fights trivial and uninteresting. Even worse than that, if you DON'T use these transformations in the last battles, you get the "bad ending" of the storyline. The easier bosses of the bad ending are actually tougher than the true form bosses in the good ending!

If you have never played a Breath of Fire game, start somewhere else, 3 and 5 (dragon quarter) both are highly recommended over this one. I bet that 4 is good as well, but I have sadly never finished this one.

That's not to say the game is entirely without merit though.

For fans of other BoF games, you get to see the first incarnation of Ryu and Nina, the real stars of the whole series. Both are excellent and you'll likely have them in your party constantly. Other than retro-nostalgia though, this isn't a great example of a BoF game...

For those with chronic insomnia, this is also a fine choice. It's portable, you can lay in bed with the GBA or DS, and play through 15-20 minutes of the game. Once you get sleepy, just save the game and set the gba down and it's off to dreamland...

11:45am: Nvidia trashed by Intel, in other news, Pot comments on lack of light reflected by kettle.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/24/intel-rips-into-nvidias-ion-platform/

Intel says Nvidia is reusing graphics chips and chipsets from laptop and desktop systems in their atom-style system...

Didn't intel sell their atom processor with the power hogging 945 chipset? Didn't the chipset need active cooling on those where the processor didn't? Give them time, their chipset will catch up.

Of course, I've been avoiding nvidia since my issues with their AMD motherboards...

11:23am: We Few
The whole prince roger series, beginning with March Upcountry, was fascinating. Ringo and Weber are two of my favorite authors. It's fairly obvious that the politics parts of the book came from Weber, while the marine ground actions are classic Ringo. The few (2?) space battles have a definite Weber/Honor Harrington feel to them. (Largely statistics about the numbers of missiles launched and how many of them got through, in great detail...)

They travel all around one planet in the first 3 books, then all the way home in the 4th. It seems to hold together better than the later books in most John Ringo series though. Mafia, imperial politics, money laundering, and government toppling...

Now which should I read... Exile in the well of souls, or should I try and chew through the last 9 issues of Baens Universe on my phone...

9:55pm: Back to reading books...
I'd pretty much stopped reading back when my palmtop died last. Since they gave me a blackberry at work though, I've been working through the backlog of books I bought from Baen but never actually read.

The first one was The Hero, in the Aldenata series with the posleen, darheel, and such. This is set about 1000 years after the rest of the series. I'd probably put it at between 3 and 3.5 stars. It's interesting, but ultimately a little flat compared to the main series. There's only two characters that really matter by the end of it, and only one is truly an interesting creature. He's also from the most reviled race of critters in the first set of books other than the posleen.

Then I read another John Ringo book, Into the Looking Glass. Interesting start to a series, instant transport between worlds using Higgs Boson generated wormholes. Lots of science, guns, etc.

Most recently, Midnight at the Well of Souls. It's not related to the first two really, other than some vague political similarities with The Hero's world, and some vague theology themes with Into the Looking Glass. A world created by a long dead race, with gateways to that world from all over the universe. People who stumble on a gateway gets transported to a world covered in hexagons, each with a different biosphere and a different intelligent race... and they are randomly converted to one race and stuck on that hex.

They can travel to the poles, from any hex, but only back to their hex from the poles. I think that would make an interesting travel mechanism for a game...

3/4ths done with the Witches of Karres... Will need to write something up on it later.

3:07pm: Odd financial observation...
The government can't find people to buy their debt anymore. China and sovereign funds around the world had been the main buyer since the spending orgy of the Bush administration. They no longer want to buy our debt however, since they think we won't pay it back...

Thus, the government has started playing gamese They are devaluing the currency. The Federal Reserve, a private company, is buying government bonds. The federal reserve gets all of its funds from the Treasury. The treasury... prints the money.

I have a thought about this though. I realized that the massive inflation that this caused is not the worst outcome that we can get from government, and it's actually better than one of the other likely outcomes from out of control spending in government. Inflation is basically a flat tax on everyone who has money. There are X dollars in the economy. If you print X more dollars, then you've taxed all of the existing dollars at a rate of 50% no matter what that person earns or owns.

Look at this graph, showing the supply of money in the system...

Much worse would be to make our tax even more "progressive" taxing those who create jobs while creating an ever growing percentage of people who not only don't pay taxes, but often get more money back from the IRS than they put in.

So while I hate that the government has been spending like drunken democrats for the last 8 years, at least they're funding part of it equitably.

3:38pm: Authors Guild does an insane attack against fair use...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/11/kindle_complaint/

So let me get this straight. You have a book. You can read it, but if you read it out loud then you're violating the copyright? There goes all those school programs and assignments that tell you to read books with your children. Gee, where will that leave you authors? Hmmm...

Here, let me paint this bullseye on your shoe, that way it'll save you a step when you go to blow your foot off.

Man, I'm grumpy today. :D

11:19am: Both parties are trying to take your freedoms away...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/11/feinstein_stimulus_amendment/

The Democrats just try to piggyback it on legislation that is so widely advertised as being UTTERLY MISSION CRITICAL OR THE COUNTRY MAY NEVER RECOVER so they can get every last thing they want through without any scrutiny. This amendment is nothing less than a government mandate for 100% widespread invasion of privacy on the internet. It just goes to show that internet and privacy are one area where the two parties flip sides on depending on who is in power. When Clinton was in office, Ashcroft was the EFF's go-to guy for all things privacy related. When Bush takes office, his stance flips 180 and he becomes enemy #1 to privacy. Now that Obama is in office, the Democrats have taken up the mantle of enemy #1 to privacy...

My only hope is that in 2 years the republicans gain back a majority in the house and senate. Not likely though, because the first 6 years of the Bush administration they backstabbed every last principle that they won with in 1994...

7:03am: !@#$ microsoft...
I don't know why, but Microsoft is always there for me... when I have problems with my computer, they're the first ones to step to the plate and make everything just that much worse.

I bought a retail copy of Vista awhile back, and had installed it to my old Sempron system, then that thing left a glowing crater... Then I installed it to my wife's computer. She bought a laptop, so I purged it off. Now I build my own computer a month ago, and it just won't activate automatically no matter what I do. They want me to buy another copy. So I call them up. They have some vague prompts that if you don't answer exactly right, kick you over to a random tech support person in India that you have to assure that you're only installing it on one computer. Of course, they barely understand what you're saying and it's hard to explain that it was on other computers, but it's a retail copy so you're allowed to move it from system to system...

Well, a month after I built my new system with vista the motherboard stopped booting, giving me a SMBIOS error. I just happened to have a board lying around that would work with it, but even though it's booted up, Vista is now whining that it needs to be activated again. Even though the processor is exactly the same, even though the hard drive is exactly the same. Even though the CD drive and Video card is exactly the same. Because I changed one part, it needs to be activated again. And I have to talk to a random person in India again to get it activated. Way to add insult to injury microsoft. I'm sure that when my $200 crossfire board gets back from Asus, I'm going to have to activate it yet a 3rd time with some random person in India!

Come on, Stardock. Write your stuff for another operating system. Please! You're about the only reason that I'm still using this bastard operating system...

9:37am: Quotes
Every once in awhile I find a good quote. One that I would probably cycle in on a signature or tagline if I had enough of either. I just ran into another one.

Three groups spend other people's money: children, thieves, politicians. All three need supervision.
- Dick Armey

There's probably other groups, but those would also need supervision, so... :)

10:18am: Which authority do you believe?
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/a-new-push-to-t.html

They want to turn off the lights for "health" reasons and so they can see the milky way.

I seem to recall a campaign at some point in the recent past telling inner city families that they should make sure their outside lights and street lights are well maintained so that they can prevent crime, because criminals are like cockroaches and run from the lights...

Which one should people believe?

Personally, when I want to see most of the stars, I go up to the mesa or behind the monument. If I want to see ALL the stars, I go to Paradox valley. All you have to do is get far enough away from the lights...

OTOH, I'm not sure if the lights really help with crime. It may be a correlation != causation thing, but isn't it odd that the population centers with the most lights also have the most crime?

6:29pm: A tad bit late...
( SUBJECT: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP )